Organizing the right

Abstract

Generations of scholars have attributed the development of the Republican Party in the American South during the post-World War II era to a ―white backlash‖ against African Americans and Democratic-sponsored civil rights legislation. Rejecting this overly-reductive explanation, I use service organizations in suburban Cobb County, Georgia as a lens with which to view the growth of a conservative of politics dedicated to anticommunism, individual freedom, and free enterprise between 1942 and 1968. Utilizing organization publications, newspapers, and oral history transcripts, this thesis argues that service clubs and fellow members of the county's white, commercial-civic elite espoused a brand of conservatism that stressed respectability and responsibility as the surest guarantee of sustained growth in affluence, population, and power. Cobb County service organizations‘ attraction to the Republican Party, therefore, was rooted not simply in race and reaction but in economic self-interest.