Heed the Grassroots: Re-examining the Birth of the New Right

In January 1970, William Rusher, the Publisher of the National Review, wrote a letter to his fellow conservative, Roger Milliken explaining that the internal divisions within the South Carolina branch of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) were just “the tip of the iceberg.” Rusher was alluding to YAF’s nationwide problem of retaining support among many grassroots members, specifically libertarian members. However, he believed that the organization would ultimately survive and that this was only a temporary problem, brought on by the “immense pressure” on college students from the Vietnam War. Still, he expected the organization would undergo some major changes because of the growing alienation many libertarians felt.

While completing my dissertation on the conservative movement and the Vietnam War, I noticed that the historiography did not fully account for the divisions within the grassroots. This presentation is an attempt to bring the grassroots into the conversation regarding the birth of the New Right. Specifically, it questions whether grassroots disputes over the Vietnam War helped to force the conservative movement to evolve and form the New Right. This paper argues that many of the internal disputes within YAF and the grassroots in the late-1960s and early-1970s helps explain the movement’s ideological shift in the late-1970s with the rise of the New Right.

The shift within YAF during the Vietnam War is important is because of the role YAF, and grassroots youth activists played in Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Many historians have noted the role youths played in Goldwater’s nomination and presidential campaign, but many of those youths were libertarians who would later oppose the Vietnam War. This presentation seeks to blend that narrative with the greater historiography of the birth of modern conservatism and the New Right.

By giving the grassroots agency, this presentation will help integrate an important group into the movement. Much of the literature currently focuses on the role of new campaign techniques and methods. While conceding those changes, I seek to incorporate the grassroots into the greater historiography of the birth of the New Right.