This book is a collection of primary source documents from leading constitutional conservatives during the period 1900-1930, many reproduced for the first time. The readings address the main political issues of the Progressive Era, such as economic regulation, federalism, executive power, and foreign policy.

Presents forty essays, speeches, and other documents on conservatism or by conservatives, spanning 1930 to the turn of the century, including works by Seward Collins, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Jr., Irving Kristol, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and others.

During the Progressive Era (1880-1920), leading thinkers and politicians transformed American politics. Historians and political scientists have given a great deal of attention to the progressives who effected this transformation. Yet relatively little is known about the conservatives who opposed these progressive innovations, despite the fact that they played a major role in the debates and outcomes of this period of American history. These early conservatives represent a now-forgotten source of inspiration for modern American conservatism. This volume gives these constitutional conservatives their first full explanation and demonstrates their ongoing relevance to contemporary American conservatism.

As the nation stands at a crossroads, this “valuable collection” urges us to reexamine the ideas and values of the American conservative tradition—offering “a bracing tonic for the present chaos” (The Washington Post). A groundbreaking collection of mainstream conservative writings since 1900, featuring pieces by Ronald Reagan, Antonin Scalia, Joan Didion, and more What is American conservatism? What are its core beliefs and values? What answers can it offer to the fundamental questions we face in the twenty-first century about the common good and the meaning of freedom, the responsibilities of citizenship, and America’s proper role in the world? As libertarians, neoconservatives, Never Trump-ers, and others battle over the label, this landmark collection offers an essential survey of conservative thought in the United States since 1900, highlighting the centrality of four key themes: the importance of tradition and the local, resistance to an ever-expanding state, opposition to the threat of tyranny at home and abroad, and free markets as the key to sustaining individual liberty. Andrew J. Bacevich’s incisive selections reveal that American conservatism—in his words “more akin to an ethos or a disposition than a fixed ideology”—has hardly been a monolithic entity over the last 120 years, but rather has developed through fierce internal debate about basic political and social propositions. Well-known figures such as Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley are complemented here by important but less familiar thinkers such as Richard Weaver and Robert Nisbet, as well as writers not of the political right, like Randolph Bourne, Joan Didion, and Reinhold Niebuhr, who have been important influences on conservative thinking. More relevant than ever, this rich, too often overlooked vein of writing provides essential insights into who Americans are as a people and offers surprising hope, in a time of extreme polarization, for finding common ground. It deserves to be rediscovered by readers of all political persuasions.

The dissertation makes an argument about the roots of important strains of modern American conservatism. While most of the relevant historiography argues that their origins lay in a reaction - especially among Republicans - to the New Deal and the further growth of government power in the wake of World War II, this study counters that we can trace the roots of modern American conservatism to developments in the Republican Party in the two decades before the New Deal. This is a story of how the turn-of-the-century Republican Party - one that emphasized government activism and cultural pluralism - became the Republican Party of the late 1910s and 1920s, one increasingly hostile to government activism in economic matters and receptive to nativist critiques of American society. Put perhaps most simply, it is the story of how the Republican Party of Theodore Roosevelt became the party of Calvin Coolidge. This study will examine the party platforms, Republican campaign textbooks, campaign speeches, correspondence of influential political figures, and contemporary political reporting, among other sources, that helped inform changes in the party's electoral rhetoric and policy preferences at the state and national levels. It will look chiefly at how state and national issues in the first three decades of the twentieth century played out in four states - New York, Ohio, California, and Tennessee - of particular interest to the party, one from each of the four major regions of the United States. As state and national parties began to develop a new electoral rhetoric, they transformed how the Republicans appealed to voters and what those voters came to expect from the party. This new Republican electoral rhetoric appealed to a different mix voters. While turn-of-the-century Republican emphasis on the virtues of government activism and cultural pluralism attracted many new ethnic voters to the Republican Party, the development of economic anti-statism and nativism in the party's appeals in the 1910 and 1920s alienated many of these same voters. The party's appeals to southern whites in the 1920s also began to alienate black voters just as many of them were moving North and voting in numbers. In this period, then, the Republican Party's coalition grew more dependent on a coalition of business interests and native born white Protestants that was narrower yet deeper than the broader turn-of-the-century coalition of William McKinley. To digest that the origins of modern conservatism trace to the Republican Party in the decades before the advent of the New Deal will enhance our understanding of twentieth-century political history. It may also afford us a deeper appreciation about the nature of political opposition to both the growth of federal power - especially in its regulatory and welfare functions - and to a more ethnically and culturally pluralistic Unites States. Early modern conservatives in the Republican Party had identified these trends in the 1910s and stirred to resist them. In their resistance - in the rhetoric and policies informing it - we see the roots of modern America conservatism.

This book argues that the American conservative movement, as it now exists, does not have deep roots. It began in the 1950s as the invention of journalists and men of letters reacting to the early Cold War and trying to construct a rallying point for likeminded opponents of international Communism. The resulting movement has exaggerated the permanence of its values; while its militant anti-Communism, instilled in its followers, and periodic suppression of dissent have weakened its capacity for internal debate. Their movement came to power at least partly by burying an older anti-welfare state Right, one that in fact had enjoyed a social following that was concentrated in a small-town America. The newcomers played down the merits of those they had replaced; and in the 1980's the neoconservatives, who took over the postwar conservative movement from an earlier generation, belittled their predecessors in a similar way. Among the movement's major accomplishments has been to recreate its own past. The success of this revised history lies in the fact that even the movement's critics are now inclined to accept it.