Tech history professor seeks origins of New Right in heartland labor strife - jroberts

The relationship between post-World War II labor strikes and the rise of the New Right is the subject of a recent study by Louisiana Tech assistant professor of history David M. Anderson.

Anderson’s article, “‘Things Are Different Down Here’: The 1955 Perfect Circle Strike, Conservative Civic Identity and the Roots of the New Right in the 1950s Industrial Heartland,” appears in the latest number of International Labor and Working-Class History, the leading peer-reviewed international scholarly journal in the field of labor history.

Examining the history leading up to a violent 1955 strike at an east-central Indiana automotive parts company, Anderson shows that, despite the innocent “Happy Days” image of the 1950s, in the small towns of the industrial heartland, that decade actually witnessed the kind of violent management-labor conflict usually associated with earlier periods in American history.

Anderson explains how, during the 1950s, company managers fought against unions with the support of a network of anti-New Deal politicians and right-wing intellectuals. This network helped inspire the conservative New Right political movement that first emerged in suburban Orange County, Calif., and culminated with the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency in 1980.

The “New Right may have first emerged as a mass movement in the sunny suburbs of California,” Anderson concludes, but “its roots lay in the much grimmer labor history of the industrial heartland.”

Anderson specializes in the social and cultural history of the United States.