On the Right: NET and Modern Conservatism

¹ See, for example, George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the American New Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); David Farber, The Rise and Fall of American Conservatism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

² See the contributions to "James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the American Dream: A Symposium," in American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture 6, no .4 (2012). While many of the contributors believe Baldwin won, Patrick Allitt makes the case in his contribution for Buckley as the winner. See his "Buckley, Baldwin, and the Decline of Conservative Racism" in this issue.

³ Direct cinema refers to a style of documentary filmmaking to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s facilitated by the development of small, lightweight film cameras. Direct cinema documentaries present viewers with a fly-on-the-wall perspective on events as they unfold. They typically eschew voice-over narration and direct-to-camera interviews. For a discussion, see Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chapter 5.

⁴ Individual Program Data Sheet, “The Radical Americans,” located in the WNET Collection, National Public Broadcasting Archives, University of Maryland-College Park, Box 13, Folder 3.

⁵ Memorandum to Station Managers and Program Managers from Field Services. “Program Evaluation Summary: ‘Regional Report: The John Birch Society,’” September 13, 1965. Located in the National Educational Television Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Series 2B, Box 7, Folder 1.

⁶ Letters can be found in the National Educational Television collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Series 2B, Box 6, Folder 14.

⁷ For a thorough discussion of this topic, see David M. Stone, Nixon and the Politics of Public Television (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985).

⁸ See Allison Perlman, Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles over U.S. Television (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 28-42, 55-57.

⁹ John White Interview with Jim Robertson, p21; Jim Roberston Papers, National Public Broadcasting Archives, University of Maryland-College Park, Box 3, Folder 14; James Day, The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 68-69; Donald N. Wood, "The First Fifteen Years of the 'Fourth Network,'" Journal of Broadcasting 13 (1968-1969), 133-35.

¹⁰ Carolyn N. Brooks, "Documentary Programming and the Emergence of the National Educational Television Center as a Network, 1958-1972” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1994), 129-34.

¹¹ Some NET Programs on these topics include: LSD: Lettvin vs. Leary; A Time for Burning; Black Natchez; NET Journal: Midsummer 1967; NET Journal: Report From Cuba; NET Journal: Fidel; NET Journal: North Vietnam.

¹² John White, Address to Affiliates, October 23, 1966. In the National Educational Television collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Series 2B, Box 5, Folder 3.

¹³ Letter to Gerald Appy from Patrick Callihan, February 12, 1964, James Day Collection, National Public Broadcasting Archives, University of Maryland-College Park, Box 13, Folder 1.

¹⁴ See for example letters to William Kobin, NET Vice President for Programming in the National Educational Television collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Series 8A, Box 1A, Folders 2, 4, 10, and 12.

¹⁵ John White, Statement for Affiliates, in the National Educational Television collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Series 2A, Box 11, Folder 2.

¹⁶ Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Sources of the ‘Radical Right’ (1955),” in The Radical Right: The New American Right, Expanded and Updated, edited by Daniel Bell (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1963), 259-312.

¹⁷ Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt (1955),” in The Radical Right: The New American Right, Expanded and Updated, edited by Daniel Bell (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1963), 63-80.

¹⁸ Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine (November 1964)

¹⁹ See for example, Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (Chicago, Regnery Co., 1962); and Meyer’s introductory essay, “Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism” in his edited collection, What Is Conservatism(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 7-20.

²⁰ See Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 33-38.

²¹ See D. J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and The Cold War (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014).

²² Frank S. Meyer, “Principles and Heresies: The Birch Malady,” National Review, October 19, 1965, 920.

²³ For a discussion of the break, see chapter 12 of Jeffrey Hart, The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006).

²⁴ Jerome L. Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 7-8.

²⁵ Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995).

²⁶ Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” The American Historical Review 99, no .2 (1994), 409.

²⁷ See, for example: Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Nation Books, 2009); Kim Phillps-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

²⁸ Donald L. Critchlow, “The Conservative Ascendancy,” in Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 9.

²⁹ Nancy MacLean, "Guardians of Privilege," in Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 123-70.

³⁰ Gregory L. Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).

³¹ The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had sought to keep the balance of power between free and slave states; it admitted Maine as a free state, Missouri as a slave state, and established a geographical boundary above which slavery would not be permitted. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, however, allowed residents of Kansas and Nebraska – territories that according to the Missouri Compromise could not allow slavery – to determine for themselves whether to permit slavery within their borders; the Act, in essence, nullified the Missouri Compromise. After the Act’s passage, thirty anti-slavery Whigs met to form a new political organization, the Republican Party.

³² See Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York: Basic Books, 2014), chapter 2.

³³ Lewis L. Gould, The Republicans: A History of the Grand Old Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 237-39; Richardson, To Make Men Free, 225-39.

³⁴ See Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 109-13.

³⁵ Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), chapter 2.

³⁶ See Jonathen M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 195-98; Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 66-69.

³⁷ See Robert Mann, Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds: LBJ, Barry Goldwater, and the Ad That Changed American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011).

³⁸ Quoted in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Introduction,” Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 1.

³⁹ Donald T. Critchlow, "The Rise of Conservative Republicanism: A History of Fits and Starts," in Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan, eds., Seeking a New Majority: The Republican Party and American Politics, 1960-1980 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013): 13-31.

⁴⁰ Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). See especially chapter 2.

⁴¹ “The Apologist,” Time, October 31, 1969, 77.

⁴² Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, first published by Victor Publishing Co., 1960). See especially chapter 4.

⁴³ William F. Buckley, Jr., "Why the South Must Prevail," National Review, August 24, 1957, 148-49.

⁴⁴ Joseph Lowndes, "William F. Buckley, Jr.: Anti-blackness as Anti-democracy," American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture 6, no. 4 (2017), 632-40.

⁴⁵ Ibid. See also William Hogeland, "William Buckley's Legacy in the Politics of Denial and the Denial of Politics," American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture 6, no. 4 (2017): 657-64; John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 191-93.

⁴⁶ D. J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014). See especially chapter 4. See also Benjamin R. Epstein and Arnold Foster, The Radical Right: Report on the John Birch Society (New York: Random House, 1967), 95-106.

⁴⁷ Timothy N. Thurber, "Race, Region, and the Shadow of the New Deal," in Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan, eds., Seeking a New Majority: The Republican Party and American Politics, 1960-1980 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013), 32-56.

⁴⁸ Leah Wright Rigeur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

⁴⁹ Ibid., 23.

⁵⁰ Heather Hendershot, What’s Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). On Hargis and sex education, see Janice M. Irvine, Talk about Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), chapter 2.

⁵¹ David Farber and Jeff Roche, "Introduction," in The Conservative Sixties (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 3.

⁵² Sam Lebovic, "When the 'Mainstream Media' Was Conservative: Media Criticism in the Age of Reform," in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E, Zelizer, eds. Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyvlania Press, 2017), 63-76; Nicole Hemmer, “From ‘Faith in Facts’ to ‘Fair and Balanced’: Conservative Media, Liberal Bias, and the Origins of Balance,” in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 126-43.

⁵³ Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

⁵⁴ Nicole Hemmer, "The Dealers and the Darling: Conservative Media and the Candidacy of Barry Goldwater," in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer ed., Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 114-43.

⁵⁵ Edith Efron, The News Twisters (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1971), 47.

⁵⁶ Heather Hendershot, Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).