Wow! eBook
The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right
Author(s): Jeff Roche (Author)
- Publisher: University of Texas Press
- Publication Date: October 7, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 512 pages
- ISBN-10: 1477332642
- ISBN-13: 9781477332641
Book Description
2026 Al Lowman Memorial Prize, Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)
Shortlisted, CSAW Bonney MacDonald Outstanding Book Award
How West Texas business and culture molded the rise of conservatism in the United States.
Much of what we understand as modern American political conservatism was born in West Texas, where today it predominates. How did the people of such a vast region―larger than New England and encompassing big cities like Lubbock and Amarillo, as well as tiny towns from Anson to Dalhart―develop such a uniform political culture? And why and how did it go national?
Jeff Roche finds answers in the history of what he calls cowboy conservatism. Political power players matter in this story, but so do football coaches, newspaper editors, and a breakfast cereal tycoon who founded a capitalist utopia. The Conservative Frontier follows these and other figures as they promoted an ideology grounded in the entrepreneurial and proto-libertarian attitudes of nineteenth-century Texas ranchers, including a fierce devotion to both individualism and small-town notions of community responsibility. This political sensibility was in turn popularized by its association with the mythology and iconography of the cowboy as imagined in twentieth-century mass media. By the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan, Roche shows, it was clear that the cowboy conservatism of West Texas had set the stage for the emergence of the New Right―the more professionalized and tech-savvy operation that dominated national conservative politics for the next quarter century.
Editorial Reviews
Review
I didn’t think I cared about how cattle drives worked in nineteenth-century West Texas. I had no inkling of how that might explain why Amarillo is presently the most right-wing city in the nation. But now I do. What this splendid book demonstrates is how, in the hands of a practitioner of style and erudition, narrative history can bridge centuries, making the connections between Then and Now feel both natural and fresh. — Rick Perlstein, historian and journalist, author of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
Jeff Roche convincingly argues that the origins and strength of West Texas’s deeply conservative politics lie in the distinctive history of the region’s settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His evocative portrayal of West Texas shows that this vast but only lightly studied region has been at the center of national developments for more than a century. — Benjamin Heber Johnson, Loyola University Chicago, author of Texas: An American History
A quietly convincing account of how the ‘cowboy conservatism’ of West Texas, with its evangelical anti-intellectualism and white nationalist leanings, was refined into the New Right…[This book is as] informative as it is exhaustive. ―
The Dallas Morning News Published On: 2025-10-02[This book is] an engaging and thorough political chronicle of West Texas…As Roche tells it, the remorseless plains of West Texas contain the headwaters of a mighty current that runs from the John Birch Society to Barry Goldwater and up through Ronald Reagan to the country beyond. ―
The New York Times Published On: 2025-10-07By reconstructing the West Texas region’s history starting in 1876, Roche helps readers understand the rise of the modern right and the relationships between history, place, and politics. ―
The College of Wooster Published On: 2025-10-09[This is] a mostly affectionate account of West Texas’s distinct political traditions…Roche is a well-read and discursive storyteller who is drawn to interesting characters..and [the book is] highly readable and engaging. He tells familiar stories well and has a keen eye for the informative but little-known detail. ―
Texas Monthly Published On: 2025-11-01[An] expansive chronicle of West Texas politics…Roche’s well-informed narrative abounds with fascinating detours, like an exploration of the role West Texas A&M football coach Joe Kerbel played in making the university’s campus more diverse in the 1960s. It makes for a terrific window onto an influential but little regarded corner of the American political landscape. ―
Publishers Weekly Published On: 2025-10-24[This book] blew me away. The history is fascinating, but even more, Jeff’s writing is lively, smart, and often funny.
― Drafting the Past Podcast Published On: 2026-01-09
In-depth and incisive.
― Houston Press Published On: 2026-04-28
About the Author
Jeff Roche is a professor of American history at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. He is the author and editor of several books and essays on American politics and the conservative movement, including Restructured Resistance, The Conservative Sixties, and The Political Culture of the New West.
