Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Politics and Culture in Modern America)

by Nicole Hemmer

I found it both grating and captivating, a heady mix of personality and passion and politics.

circuitous

circuitous

usurious

usurious

Most newspapers in the nineteenth century were party papers, reliant on the patronage of a political party for support.

Most newspapers in the nineteenth century were party papers, reliant on the patronage of a political party for support.

Republican Party was founded in 1854,

“Mainstream newspapers viewed farmers as naïve, unsophisticated,

unintelligent troublemakers.”

Populists had to rely on their own media to circulate information about the movement, to reinforce farmers’ political identity, and to legitimate the movement

Even as conventional just-the-facts reporting began to yield to more interpretative analysis, a process well underway by the end of the 1930s, interpretative journalism retained objective reporting’s style: impersonal narration, an emphasis on fairness and accuracy, and deference to official sources and institutions.

Objectivity was always more a goal than a reality.

is better, far better,” he concluded, “that all law-made morality end than that all God-made liberty die.”22

Yet all this loyalty and effort failed to result in a spot on the Democratic slate.

auspicious

auspicious

John Maynard Keynes’s newly published General Theory of Economics, Interest and Money, which argued in favor of government intervention in the economy.

“My commitment to the New Deal, to the idea that the solution of the obvious economic and social ills of the country was to be found in Washington, was given its final blow by a summer spent there.”

He returned to Harvard a bit less idealistic, and when he left with his master’s degree he sought to help impoverished communities not through government agencies but through a private religious organization, the American Friends Service Committee.

He returned to Harvard a bit less idealistic, and when he left with his master’s degree he sought to help impoverished communities not through government agencies but through a private religious organization, the American Friends Service Committee.

John T. Flynn, a slight, hot-tempered journalist whose weekly column in the New Republic made him one of the leading political commentators of the 1930s,

But his political stance exacted a high price: his anti-Roosevelt turn cost him his column and access to most national publications.

In this critique were the seeds of Regnery’s revolt: his belief that an elite group molded public opinion, sublimating the will of the majority for its own selfish ends.

The attack, so devastating to the noninterventionist cause, would provoke skepticism from prominent conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s.

It was in this climate that Manion penned The Key to Peace (1950), a slender volume dedicated to “the perpetuation of real Americanism.”

“the finest politico-spiritual study of America,”

“Social justice, when it comes, will not proceed from legislative enactments aimed at the perimeter of society,” he said in a 1951 speech at Cornell University, “it will rather be diffused through the community as a healthy contagion radiated from the contrite hearts of individual men.” The message found so wide an audience that Manion tendered his resignation from Notre Dame in early 1952 and began to keep a full-time speaking schedule.46

“Social justice, when it comes, will not proceed from legislative enactments aimed at the perimeter of society,” he said in a 1951 speech at Cornell University, “it will rather be diffused through the community as a healthy contagion radiated from the contrite hearts of individual men.” The message found so wide an audience that Manion tendered his resignation from Notre Dame in early 1952 and began to keep a full-time speaking schedule.46

“We are told we can defeat this despotism in Moscow only by establishing despotism in Washington. Consciously or unconsciously, we are thus attempting to defeat Communism abroad by surrendering to it at home.”47

Insert discrimination for depotism

“You will have many heartaches,” he told Manion, “and, of course, you will not accomplish many of the things which you hope for; but you will plant many seeds of a sound philosophy, which will some day help to bring to fruition your ideology.”48

“You will have many heartaches,” he told Manion, “and, of course, you will not accomplish many of the things which you hope for; but you will plant many seeds of a sound philosophy, which will some day help to bring to fruition your ideology.”48

“The ideas and traditions we believe in are those which most Americans instinctively believe in also.” Why then was liberalism ascendant and conservatism relegated to the fringes? Because, Regnery argued, the left controlled institutions: the media, the universities, the foreign policy establishment.

And so, in a small apartment in Washington, postwar conservative media got its start.

respected among the Remnant

Great Books series was established as a sort of greatest hits of western civilization. It included works like Plato’s Republic, St. Augustine’s Confessions, René Descartes’s Discourse on Methods, David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism.

Regnery believed the series could provide the core

of his backlist, the steady sellers publishing houses rely on for t...

confirmed the need for right-wing publishing. The book landed on the best-seller list despite the forces arrayed against it;

“In America we lust after peace and prosperity indiscriminately, and we demand that both political parties promise us access to our neighbor’s goods. In a word, by our behavior we strengthen the impression that we are more closely related to the beasts than to the saints.”

twenty-five years of conservative broadcasting.45

But the real story would convince Hutchings and others that sinister forces were working to silence conservative voices. In

Roger Milliken. In 1947, the tall, bespectacled South Carolinian inherited his family’s Spartanburg-based textile company, a business that would make him one of the richest men in America. Milliken eagerly invested these monies in conservative causes. He sunk tens of thousands of dollars into Regnery Publishing and gave National Review a substantial amount to facilitate the magazine’s launch (and remained a major contributor, leading Buckley to label him National Review’s “most important asset”).

This support was a function of Milliken’s belief that in advancing conservatism, he helped create a political and economic environment in which his business could flourish.

Milliken noted that while he did not agree with everything the house published, he was convinced its perspective “deserves continuing exposure.”14

Their disagreement highlighted the two competing media philosophies with which conservatives would grapple well beyond the 1950s. On

He understood the

strong hold objectivity had on midcentury America: an author perceived as impartial would be more effective because his point of view would appear rational, factual, and disinterested.

Milliken’s eyes, however, Regnery misunderstood the fundamental nature of American media. Establishment media were arbiters of objectivity; conservat...

Richberg, for his part, took the offers in stride, sending outlines to both publishers, each of whom thought he was working exclusively with the author.