This Land is God’s Land

General Edwin Walker became a problem for the U.S. military starting in World War II, when he launched an anti-communist training program he called Pro-Blue. He was not the only decorated officer to use his authority for political reasons, but he only grew more vociferous and controversial as his career extended into the Cold War era. After a Senate subcommittee started investigating his attacks on Democratic politicians and interest groups in 1961, Walker resigned, which ignited a firestorm of protest by conservatives who charged that the government was “muzzling” him. Among Walker’s most ardent defenders was a new generation of evangelical ministers preaching on radio stations across the country. “Walker might have been just a disgraced former general,” writes author Paul Matzko in The Radio Right, “were it not for the right-wing broadcasters who turned him into a conservative cause célèbre” (p. 70). Matzko’s recently published monograph, and those of scholars Catherine McNichol Stock and Lauren Kerby, explore this convergence of religious and nationalist fervor from different vantage points in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These three books parse the fusion of Christian evangelical and patriotic expression that became conservative America’s song of itself. Matzko’s history of evangelical broadcast media, Stock’s study of movement politics on the Northern Plains, and Kerby’s ethnography of Christian Heritage tourism in Washington D.C. represent the latest contributions in the rich and expansive literature on conservative political culture in the United States.

In Nuclear Country: The Origins of the Rural New Right, Catherine Stock takes a regional approach to the history of American conservatism, offering a welcome turn away from the already deeply studied South and Sun Belt. North and South Dakota enjoy stronger representation per resident in the United States Senate since they elect two Senators, as much as every other state, despite their low population. Their rural history, moreover, offers a valuable opportunity to apply spatial analysis to study the dynamics of agrarian politics at the state and local level. Stock is the person to do this, since Nuclear Country appears on the heels of her prior book Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain (2018). Stock’s previous work launches her study of the postwar Right by asking how communities that seeded and nourished the left-wing populist tradition of the early twentieth century could then become hotbeds of conservatism. Her explanation is militarization and nuclearization. The analysis of Nuclear Country reaches outward from an ironic heart—that this wellspring of popular democracy, agrarian socialism that resisted “‘bigness’ in all its forms” ultimately welcomed an aggressive expansion of military bases and nuclear arsenals into their communities (p. 4).

Chapter 1 locates the origins of the agrarian conservative movement both and outside the radical groups that lit the early “political prairie fires.” The story begins here, with a somewhat familiar march of populism from the Left to the Right of the political spectrum as documented in Kathryn Law Olmsted’s Right Out of California, Darren Dochuk’s From Bible Belt to Sunbelt and others. The pro-business Dakota Republicans who opposed agrarian leftists promoted laissez-faire economic policies and Protestant religion that “set the stage for the national movement of businesspeople against the New Deal and, subsequently, the rise of the new conservatism” (p. 31). The evangelical Protestantism that thrived among the leftists, however, grew increasingly illiberal after the Great Depression took hold in the 1930s. The opposition to “bigness” did not abate, but struggling workers, farmers, and businesspeople...