CONSERVATISM AND ITS COUSINS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA

Abstract

The conservative tradition in America. By Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1996. Pp. ix+199. ISBN 0-8476-8167-X. $14.95.

Hoods and shirts: the extreme right in Pennsylvania, 1925–1950. By Philip Jenkins. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. 343. ISBN 0-8078-2316-3. $29.95.

From demagogue to Dixiecrat: Horace Wilkinson and the politics of race. By Glenn Feldman. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1995. Pp. xviii+311. ISBN 0-8191-9783-1. $32.50.

From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: race in the conservative counterrevolution, 1963–1994. By Dan T. Carter. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xv+134. ISBN 0-8071-2118-5. £21.95.

According to political scientists Charles W. Dunn and David Woodward in The conservative tradition in America, the dramatic Republican gains in the 1994 elections exemplified the eclilse of New Deal liberalism by a resurgent conservatism, a politcal shift that began in the late 1960s and which Ronald Reagan's victory in the 1980 fortified. In their short survey the authors investigate the intellectual roots of modern conservatism and attempt to define and explain the recent manifestation of this heritage. The three other recent works reviewed here provide a larger historical context, which Dunn and Woodward ignore, for understanding conservatism and right extremism in America.