Notes
207 The following source abbreviations are used in the notes. ASP Arthur Summerfield Papers, DDEL ASPII Arthur Summerfield Papers, Second Acquisition, DDEL BCRP B. Carroll Reece Papers, Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City CBP Clarence Brown Papers, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus Confidential File Confidential File, Papers of the President of the United States, DDEL DDEL Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas EOHC Eisenhower Oral History Collection, DDEL General File General File, Papers of the President of the United States, DDEL HBP Herbert Brownell Papers, DDEL HSP Harold Stassen Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul JSAP Joseph and Stewart Alsop Collection, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. KKB Katharine Kennedy Brown Papers, Department of Special Collections and Archives, Paul Laurence Dunbar Library, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio Knowland Papers William F. Knowland Papers, University of California, Bancroft Library, Berkeley LHP Papers of the Chairman of the Republican National Committee (Leonard Hall), DDEL Official File Official File, Papers of the President of the United States, DDEL RPP Paul L. Kesaris, ed., Papers of the Republican Party (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1987) RTP Robert A. Taft Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. TDP Thomas E. Dewey Papers, University of Rochester, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Rochester, New York YRP Papers of Young and Rubicam, Inc., DDEL introduction 1. Robert A. Taft, speech delivered in Pittsburgh, Pa., 15 April 1952, folder Speeches and Notes—1952, box 1331, RTP. 2. The last party to lose five consecutive elections had been the Federalist Party from 1800 through 1816. See Buel, Securing the Revolution, and Fischer, Revolution of American Conservatism. 3. Though the standard narrative of the 1950s is under revision, this book is writNotes 208 : notes to pages 6–11 ten under the assumption that the early part of the decade saw a rising tide of cultural conservatism. For more on this debate, see Boyer, By Bomb’s Early Light; Diggins, Proud Decades; Graebner, Age of Doubt; Hajdu, Ten-Cent Plague; Halberstam, The Fifties; Halliwell , American Culture in the 1950s; Whaley, Blows Like a Horn; and Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War. 4. George Nash contends that anti-Communism was broad enough to unite two distinct schools of conservative thought, traditionalism and liberalism, into a somewhat coherent intellectual movement. Taft’s ideology, though, was not based on anti-Communism but, rather, on a traditionalist view of Republicanism. See Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement, 118–40. 5. Foreign policy and collective security were the most pronounced areas of distinction between Taft and Dewey and, by many accounts, the most important. Scholars of American diplomacy have fully explored the positions of the Republican elites and the tensions they created. Michael Hogan and Clarence Wunderlin have described in full Taft’s post–World War II philosophy and his turn from isolationism. Dewey’s association with the foreign policy establishment is also well known. By focusing exclusively on international relations, however, historians have missed the discord over domestic questions, a conflict that proved more lasting and important over time. This does not mean that foreign policy and collective security are not important. They clearly were, but the conflict over more local matters drove the wedge between the factions much deeper and helped to shape the identity of the modern Republican Party. See Wunderlin , Robert A. Taft, and Hogan, Cross of Iron. 6. Both suburban populism and the racial dynamics of housing and education have generated an enormous amount of good scholarship in recent years. For more on this phenomenon and its importance to modern conservatism, see Countryman, Up South; Dallek, Right Moment; Kruse, White Flight; Lassiter, Silent Majority; Self, American Babylon ; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; and Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided. 7. See Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement. Regarding the business community’s involvement, Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands is so far the best work in this new area of scholarship. 8. The historiography of the postwar American Right is largely a recent phenomenon . Aside from the Nash book on the intellectual movement, which was published in 1976, very few scholars gave postwar conservatism serious consideration. Alan Brinkley ’s 1994 article “The Problem of American Conservatism” pointed out the glaring lack of scholarship on the modern Right and advocated giving a voice to this understudied population. In the ensuing decade and a half, scholars have responded with a renewed emphasis on two broad subject areas. The first, the rise...
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