The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War

by Leo P. Ribuffo

Daily Shipping-1983 Paper Cover-Contains owners stamp on front and back cover-fading on spine-Pages are crisp and unmarked-appears unread

Genres: History, Politics, Religion, The United States Of America, Nonfiction

388 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 1983

About the author

Leo Paul Ribuffo was Society of the Cincinnati George Washington Distinguished Professor at George Washington University, where he taught from 1973 until his retirement.

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Groundbreaking look at the far-right opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Ribuffo spends the balance of his book profiling three extremist leaders: William Dudley Pelley, the novelist-turned-messiah of the Silver Shirts, whose bizarre ideology resembled a cult more than a political movement; Gerald Winrod, the Kansas evangelist whose antisemitic, anti-FDR and pro-German rantings earned him the nickname "the Jayhawk Nazi"; and Gerald L.K. Smith, the Louisiana who evolved from Huey Long's right-hand man to America's premiere anti-Semite. Rejecting the standard depiction of these men as cranks, Ribuffo shows that they all spoke to very common resentments of '30s and '40s Americans. Resentment of social change and economic displacement, embrace of religion (whether mainstream or idiosyncratic), fear of Communism and foreign entanglements (often materializing as Jew-baiting) were common from rock-ribbed Republicans to Nazi Bundists. While Ribuffo's sympathy is often welcome, it seems to blind him to the genuine threat these men and their followers posed. He dismisses the well-documented Silver Shirt plots for terrorism and sabotage, ignores Winrod's funding by Nazi officials, soft-pedals Charles Lindbergh's bigotry, and dismisses the wartime prosecution of American fascists as a "Brown Scare" - all of which undermines much of his argument. Still, Ribuffo's correct that the same fears and issues which animated these men, in one form or another, occupy a permanent place in American politics - and are more mainstream than we'd like to think.

[Edward]

“Mainstream media articles and passages in our standard history textbooks frequently describe the ‘Red Scare’ of the early 1950s closely associated with the activities of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. But these accounts almost never mention the preceding “Brown Scare” of the late 1930s and early 1940s. This phrase was coined by historian Leo Ribuffo in his important 1983 book The Old Christian Right, with the author discussing the topic at length in a chapter of that title.”
-Ron Unz, “McCarthyism Part II”

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War' is an impressive study centered on three of the leading far right activists in America during the middle of the 20th twentieth century. Leo Ribuffo dedicates a chapter each to the writer and Silver Shirts leader William Dudley Pelley (whose mystical occultism would, in my mind, debar him from the ranks of the "Old Christian Right"), evangelist Gerald B. Winrod (this is the worst-edited chapter I have ever seen from an academic press, with many spelling mistakes including "Schofield Bible"), and clergyman and political aspirant Gerald L.K. Smith. Each of these figures left behind copious amounts of writings that Ribuffo extensively analyzes. Pelley, Winrod, and Smith (and the Protestant far right in general) were united in their virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Communism, opposition to the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, isolationist advocacy, and championing of Christianity (even if Pelley's tenets were heterodox) while opposing the social gospel religious left. Following the three chapters on Pelley, Winrod, and Smith, the next chapter is dedicated to the lengthy and uproarious United States v. McWilliams case in which leading American fascists were brought before the court and the last chapter offers conclusions to the lives of the book's three central figures as well as what became in their wake of the "far right, divided left, and vital center." An epilogue compares Pelley, Winrod, and Smith with the (at the time of this book's publication) new Religious Right and with Jerry Falwell Sr. in particular.

Given the subject matter, Ribuffo is remarkably objective towards the three men. He abhors their views but points out that they were also products of their time whose anti-Semitism and racism were prevalent among the American masses. Ribuffo also chides leftist for their intolerance towards conservatives whose sincerely-held beliefs appear retrograde to the cosmopolitan liberal mind (Ribuffo uses Young Earth Creationism as an example; he is not advocated tolerating racist views). Ribuffo rightly points out that those who demand that the Old Christian Right and the new Religious Right of the post-war era (exemplified by Falwell, Carl McIntire, and Billy James Hargis) abstain from politics because of the separation of church and state do not demand the same of Protestant liberals such as Martin Luther King Jr.

Reading 'The Old Christian Right' is also revealing for our own times. Like Pelley, Winrod, and Smith, the "national conservatives" and "postliberals" of today who want to put "America first" want the USA to avoid international entanglements and express openness to using the power of the state to help the working class (many leaders of the Old Christian Right advocated for economic redistribution that would pit them against Reaganite free-market fundamentalists). It is unlikely that any historian today would replicate Ribuffo's sensitive historical treatment of his far right subjects but the late Leo Ribuffo's objectivity and attitude is a model for us all.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really fascinating book of American religious history, capturing the origins of the modern conservative movement in the opposition to the New Deal, centering especially on its anti-Semitic roots. Focusing on three "villains," in his words, Ribuffo weds history, religious studies, and psychoanalysis to tell the story of conservatives and the liberals who opposed them in the early 20th century. His chapter on the "Brown Scare" – about how the tactics and structures developed by the anti-fascist left to root out far-right extremists ended up being used against the left during the post-war Red Scare – is truly masterful, and especially relevant for today's anti-fascists.

[Sam McLoughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really appreciated Ribuffo's balk against the typical historian's imperative of "objectivity" and referred to Pelley, Winrod, and Smith as his "three villains." The book gave me a lot to think about when it comes to the connections between far-right conservatism, antisemitism, and Protestant Christianity, and the need for a complex analysis of antisemitism because it often arises out of different political and religious commitments. I could take-or-leave the psychoanalysis embedded in Ribuffo's methodology, but I understand it is a result of the context in which he wrote the dissertation and, later, this book.

[Jacob]

Terrifying, exhilarating, and clarifying. Should be much more widely read.