MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation We hereby approve the Dissertation of Jeffrey Christopher Bickerstaff Doctor of Philosophy ________________________________________ Timothy Melley, Director ________________________________________ C. Barry Chabot, Reader ________________________________________ Whitney Womack Smith, Reader ________________________________________ Marguerite S. Shaffer, Graduate School Representative ABSTRACT TALES FROM THE SILENT MAJORITY: CONSERVATIVE POPULISM AND THE INVENTION OF MIDDLE AMERICA by Jeffrey Christopher Bickerstaff In this dissertation I show how the conservative movement lured the white working class out of the Democratic New Deal Coalition and into the Republican Majority. I argue that this political transformation was accomplished in part by what I call the "invention" of Middle America. Using such cultural representations as mainstream print media, literature, and film, conservatives successfully exploited what came to be known as the Social Issue and constructed "Liberalism" as effeminate, impractical, and elitist. Chapter One charts the rise of conservative populism and Middle America against the backdrop of 1960s social upheaval. I stress the importance of backlash and resentment to Richard Nixon's ascendancy to the Presidency, describe strategies employed by the conservative movement to win majority status for the GOP, and explore the conflict between this goal and the will to ideological purity. In Chapter Two I read Rabbit Redux as John Updike's attempt to model the racial education of a conservative Middle American, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, in "teach-in" scenes that reflect the conflict between the social conservative and Eastern Liberal within the author's psyche. I conclude that this conflict undermines the project and, despite laudable intentions, Updike perpetuates caricatures of the Left and hastens Middle America's rejection of Liberalism. Chapter Three illustrates how conservative rhetoric and much of popular culture had merged into a unified message of conservative populism. I argue that the first two Dirty Harry movies and the novel and film adaptation of Death Wish dramatize the Right's talking points on crime and the judiciary, and I describe how they reinforce the conservative movement's construction of Liberalism as effete and out of touch. In Chapter Four I detail the Hardhat Riots of May 1970 to establish the context for my reading of the film Joe, which depicts the resentment-based alliance between white collar economic conservatives and blue collar social conservatives. I argue that Joe illustrates the conservative movement's ability to win over a majority of voters, without modifying an economic system that perpetuates entrenched wealth and privilege, by forging coalitions built on fear and anger. TALES FROM THE SILENT MAJORITY: CONSERVATIVE POPULISM AND THE INVENTION OF MIDDLE AMERICA A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English by Jeffrey Christopher Bickerstaff Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2011 Dissertation Director: Timothy Melley Jeffrey Christopher Bickerstaff 2011 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: Postwar Resentment and the Invention of Middle America 10 Chapter Two: The Education of Harry Angstrom—Rabbit Redux and the 91 Charge of the Kerner Commission Chapter Three: Rough Justice 139 Chapter Four: The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend 173 Works Cited 197 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank each of my committee members for taking the time to read and offer their thoughts on my work. To my Chair, Tim Melley, I will never be able to express adequately my gratitude to you for your generosity with your time and energy. Over the years we've worked together, you've been my advisor, counselor, collaborator, editor, and friend. You've been a font of encouragement and patience: you believed in the process and let me work in my own way toward a realization of my project. And the talk you gave a few Springs ago continues to inspire me. Your words clarified for me what we do and why it's important; they centered me and gave me perspective; they were, as I've said to others, "like church." Thank you, Tim. Thank you to Barry Chabot for your friendship and encouragement, for many books, and for the use of the word "work" instead of "text." You have modeled a scholarship based on respect for the writer's labor, which I have tried to live by and pass on to my own students. Thank you also for coming out of retirement to read my work and come to my defense. I'm grateful for your time, energy, and insights, and I feel lucky to have met you. I would also like to thank Whitney Womack Smith for teaching one of the best classes that I've ever taken in my life, a class that drastically expanded my conception of American Literature. Thanks also to Peggy Shaffer, whose recommendations for my reading list enabled me to recognize "culture as history." Love and thanks to my wife Meg, ally and sharer of values, who truly understands time. Once I learned the lesson you taught by example, that is to say, once I learned to think of words as stitches, I finally realized the truth about time and really got down to work. Meg, you're far and away the best person I've ever met in my life. My acknowledgments page would be incomplete without my brothers. Joe turned me on to George Carlin, who taught me that "words are all we have, really." Joe also made me question the point of everything and search for some kind of meaning, a process I eventually learned is given form by literature. I'll spend my life learning the lessons you've taught to me. I thank Jamie for his kindness to me, and for always finding ways to help me move forward. I love and miss you both. Thank you to Matt for all of the time in the cinderblock room. Love and thanks to Janie for the breaks and to Louie for the miles. You two have carved out your rightful place at the center of my universe. iv INTRODUCTION This dissertation charts the ascendancy of the conservative movement in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s. I argue that the American Right's narrative on crime, Liberalism, youth, and race was articulated through a new concept of "Middle America" in a range of cultural representations, including mainstream print media, literary fiction, popular literature, and film. These different strands of cultural output combined with the rhetoric of the conservative movement to alienate the white working class from the Democratic Party and realign "middleness" with conservative social values and the Republican Party, a phenomenon that forever transformed the discourse and landscape of American politics. The conservative movement's goal of winning over the white working class reflects a core conflict that continues to define it. Movements, after all, consist of human beings, and it follows that they tend to be messy and intrinsically contentious; for like human beings, movements tend to be defined by their internal contradictions. The conservative movement in the postwar United States is no different. If recent tributes to William F. Buckley contain any degree of truth, then the man and his magazine, National Review, form the movement's intellectual cornerstone. Jeffrey Hart, who became senior editor of the magazine in 1969, asserts in The Making of the American Conservative Mind that Buckley had in his own makeup such irreconcilable strains of conservatism as libertarianism and traditionalism (2). Obviously, the dynamic force of the former clashes with the yearning for stasis inherent in the latter, and this conflict indicates an internal dispute at the core of the man, the philosophy, and the movement. Hart describes another set of antithetical inclinations at the heart of Buckley's politics, his "aristocratic conservatism" versus his "intermittent populism" (5). Buckley expressed the former strain, for example, by contemplating the publication of a book that was to be entitled Revolt Against the Masses. His expressions of the latter are less plentiful but indicative of the concerns of this dissertation. Buckley once insisted he would rather be governed by the first two thousand people listed in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard, a claim that reflects American anti-intellectualism and its ingrained mistrust of academia and Northeastern liberal elites. Another example of Buckley's mix of sporadic populism and refined sensibility was the book he penned in 1954 with L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies, which defended the coarse, drunken demagogue in what was described as "an elegantly academic style replete with nice discriminations and pedantic hair-splittings" (8). This description encapsulates the tenuous balance the conservative movement sought to establish and maintain. Buckley and Bozell's tome defends a demagogue in a style that would be repugnant to him and his audience; their work makes precise distinctions in defense of a lout who traded in vague equivocations. For if the mission of the conservative movement was to establish a conservative majority, then aristocrats such as Buckley and Bozell needed demagogues such as McCarthy to serve as ambassadors to the masses. Such emissaries suggest the aforementioned challenge facing the wealthy conservatives who wished to foster a movement: they needed to garner support from the majority of the voting public without any serious modifications of the economic system that might jeopardize their positions of wealth and privilege. In other words, how does a movement maintain its elite status while purporting to give voice to the commoners? The answer is to facilitate a change in the public perception of what it means to be an elite, to alter the connotations of the term in the popular mind's eye. Buckley founded The National Review in 1955, and in 1957 he brought in William Rusher to serve as publisher and senior editor.