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The Party Of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement
Why, for two hundred years, have some American citizens seen this country as an endangered Eden, to be purged of corrupting peoples or ideas by any means necessary?
To the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, the enemy was Irish immigrants. To the Ku Klux Klan, it was Jews, blacks, and socialists. To groups like the Michigan Militia, the enemy is the government itself -- and some of them are willing to take arms against it. The Party of Fear -- which has now been updated to examine the right-wing resurgence of the 1990s -- is the first book to reveal the common values and anxieties that lie beneath the seeming diversity of the far right. From the anti-Catholic riots that convulsed Philadelphia in 1845 to the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, it casts a brilliant, cautionary light not only on our political fringes but on the ways in which ordinary Americans define themselves and demonize outsiders.
To the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, the enemy was Irish immigrants. To the Ku Klux Klan, it was Jews, blacks, and socialists. To groups like the Michigan Militia, the enemy is the government itself -- and some of them are willing to take arms against it. The Party of Fear -- which has now been updated to examine the right-wing resurgence of the 1990s -- is the first book to reveal the common values and anxieties that lie beneath the seeming diversity of the far right. From the anti-Catholic riots that convulsed Philadelphia in 1845 to the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, it casts a brilliant, cautionary light not only on our political fringes but on the ways in which ordinary Americans define themselves and demonize outsiders.
587 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
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February 22, 2014
I must admit to somewhat mixed feelings about this book. During the course of reading it, I have written almost three pages of highly critical, frankly nit-picky notes on problems with the sources, structure, methodology, and the factual errors I caught. If I just uploaded those notes to this review, the reader would come away with the idea that I hated this book. And, there really are some problems with it, so I will use those notes to some degree to address those. However, I really didn’t want to limit this review to that, because I actually enjoyed reading it a great deal. Therefore I’m going to try to start out the review by focusing on the positive, and only get into the criticisms once I get past what makes the book worthwhile.
This book was one of the first attempts by an American historian to make a comprehensive survey of the far right in America, tying together movements as diverse as anti-Masonry, traditional nativism, the KKK, McCarthyism, neo-Nazis, and televangelists in a single narrative thread. What is really interesting and useful, in this approach is having all of this history, which clearly is related, in one place. Although there is considerably more in-depth scholarship on any one of these subjects than Bennett can offer in a single volume, what he has created is a go-to source for the broad sweep of “outsider” conservatism throughout the history of the USA. It’s sort of like a The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film of right wing movements. Bennett’s writing is lively and interesting; he’s clearly having fun with the subject matter, even though it is equally clear he’s approaching it from a comfortably moderate-liberal-academic standpoint.
The strongest (and longest) chapter of Part I deals with the “Know-Nothing” Party (or American Party) of the mid-19th century. This was something I didn’t previously know about, so this was especially interesting to me. Apparently, the Know-Nothings arose during a period when the traditional US two-party system was in a moment of instability, with the Whig Party in decline, and the Republicans not yet strong enough to replace them. What is more interesting is the linking of the anti-Masonic movement earlier in the nineteenth century to an organization largely patterned on Masonic traditions, including degrees, initiations, and oaths of secrecy. Also of interest is the curious involvement of relatively mainstream politicians, such as Millard Fillmore, in a movement that appears “extremist” to modern eyes. I did note some problems with sources here, particularly a propensity for very outdated secondary sources, but this section was definitely very informative for me.
So far as I can tell, this book represented the last large-scale work of scholarship in Bennett’s career (he’s listed as “Emeritus” at Syracuse now). Professors often like to end their career with a “big” work of synthesis that ties all the little specialized pieces they’ve focused on in the past into a kind of unified theoretical structure, often tying it in to contemporary events to demonstrate relevance. This gives them a chance to say, “this is why I spent my life doing what I’ve been doing all this time.” Unfortunately, this often comes at a point in life when the professor is past being able to do the kind of rigorous archives-sifting they managed in their grad student days, or what is worse, when their memory and intellectual sharpness is beginning to be impaired. I think Bennett may have been able to hear the clock ticking, and may have rushed this book into print.
The reason I say that has to do with the book’s structure, and its reissue in a new edition. The first edition came out in 1988, and really only covers events through 1986 or so. The new edition came out in 1995, and Bennett is at pains to make it as “current” as possible, including information that addresses the environment after the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19 in that year. The problem is that the “revised” edition doesn’t seem to have been revised at all, it simply includes a new chapter to cover the intervening decade, with any corrections to the previous chapter being added as text in the final one. This gives the final part of the book a somewhat schizophrenic feeling, as well as being unbalanced. The book is divided into two “parts,” the first of which covers the nineteenth century and is broken into short, discreet chapters. The second part covers the twentieth century, which includes a huge transition-stage in the middle, and which is broken into much longer chapters, each of which contains short, discreet sections. This part is over 300 pages long, when the new chapter is included, or twice the length of Part I, but with the same number of chapters. It seems to me that the book would have been better organized in three parts, with the final chapters being broken apart into three or more chapters each.
The unified theory Bennett presents also seems lacking in analytical value as well. Bennett tries to connect the history of the American far-right in a single paradigm based on the reactions of Americans afraid of losing what is unique about the United States to threats beyond their immediate control. He refers to this tendency as “the party of fear,” a term which probably does make the idea more accessible to a lay audience than would be the case in a more theoretically sophisticated approach. However, this use of terminology has the tendency to reify rather than explain the connections Bennett is attempting to make; no one has ever described themselves as a part of the (or a) “party of fear,” and their continuity is largely assumed rather than demonstrated.
Within this paradigm, it seems to me that there are blind spots as well as areas that are over-emphasized. I was particularly disappointed, given his interest in American nativism and its impact on the political scene, that there is no attempt to theorize race in America, or to engage with questions of “whiteness.” Because of this, Bennett is largely blind to institutionalized racism, and so he often seems to write off racism as a kind of fringe movement outside the mainstream. Thus, we hear nothing about the treatment of native Americans (ironic, in a book on “nativism”), nothing about the Jim Crow south or Dixiecrats, very little about slavery, and what we do hear about the 1924 Immigration Restriction Acts is almost completely upside-down. Instead of this being an example of a triumph of American racialism (which coincides with the height of the second Klan in America), Bennett presents this as something benevolent, which ultimately resulted in a decrease in nativist extremism.
The chapter on the KKK represents the somewhat bifurcated nature of Klan scholarship at the time of the original edition. Bennett’s two main sources are at odds with one another: Hooded Americanism preaches the familiar line that Klansmen were rural, Southern, uneducated, and motivated by racial prejudice, while The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 pioneered the “revisionist” position that the Klan had its greatest successes among the lower-middle class in Midwestern urban areas, and was largely a movement for social and governmental reform. Bennett doesn’t quite know what to make of this, and he starts by hewing to Chalmers’s line, then suddenly swinging over to Jackson’s mid-way through the chapter without warning. If this chapter had been revised in 1995, he would at least have had a greater array of Klan-revisionist material at his disposal.
Because the first part of the book dealt with nativism, Bennett seems to have a hard time letting go of that as definitive of the “party of fear.” He tries to argue that McCarthyism can be seen as a kind of “ideological nativism,” based on a fear not so much of foreign peoples as foreign ideas flooding the country. Much of the chapter on the 1980s (the original final chapter to the first edition) is spent trying to demonstrate that the New Right is not nativist. OK, so far as I know nobody ever said it was. It seems like a lot of words are wasted here trying to prove something that doesn’t need proving, and that ultimately muddies the waters of his “party of fear” analytical device. Where I also find both the later chapters problematic is his heavy reliance on media sources over primary documents. I think his tendency to rely on the media, which was fairly hysterical about the militia phenomenon in the wake of OK City, tends to make him overestimate the militias in the new revision, just as he overestimated the power of Jerry Falwell in the previous chapter.
I’ll briefly mention just a couple of my most nit-picky observations before concluding. In the chapter on the 1950s, he mentions the “Christian Anti-Communist Crusade,” which is actually the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. That’s a very common error, but it’s worse that no connection between it and future-President Ronald Reagan is mentioned, nor is there any coverage of Reagan’s purging of the Screen Actors’ Guild of known or suspected Communists during his period as its chief. In the chapter on the 1980s, he mentions an up-and-coming leader named “David Dukes.” David Dukes was a TV actor, he meant David Duke, the KKK leader and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People. In the chapter on the 1990s, David Duke is mentioned, and spelled correctly, but if you check the index, you find that he is indexed separately from “David Dukes,” the “Louisianan imperial wizard” mentioned in the previous chapter. That, incidentally, is an error that should have been caught by the indexer of the second edition, if he or she was on the ball. I note that it had been pointed out in one of the reviews of the first edition as well, so there was really no excuse for preserving this mistake.
In all, though, I really did enjoy this book and I think it will serve as a useful reference. I recommend it primarily for non-specialists looking for a resource on the far right
This book was one of the first attempts by an American historian to make a comprehensive survey of the far right in America, tying together movements as diverse as anti-Masonry, traditional nativism, the KKK, McCarthyism, neo-Nazis, and televangelists in a single narrative thread. What is really interesting and useful, in this approach is having all of this history, which clearly is related, in one place. Although there is considerably more in-depth scholarship on any one of these subjects than Bennett can offer in a single volume, what he has created is a go-to source for the broad sweep of “outsider” conservatism throughout the history of the USA. It’s sort of like a The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film of right wing movements. Bennett’s writing is lively and interesting; he’s clearly having fun with the subject matter, even though it is equally clear he’s approaching it from a comfortably moderate-liberal-academic standpoint.
The strongest (and longest) chapter of Part I deals with the “Know-Nothing” Party (or American Party) of the mid-19th century. This was something I didn’t previously know about, so this was especially interesting to me. Apparently, the Know-Nothings arose during a period when the traditional US two-party system was in a moment of instability, with the Whig Party in decline, and the Republicans not yet strong enough to replace them. What is more interesting is the linking of the anti-Masonic movement earlier in the nineteenth century to an organization largely patterned on Masonic traditions, including degrees, initiations, and oaths of secrecy. Also of interest is the curious involvement of relatively mainstream politicians, such as Millard Fillmore, in a movement that appears “extremist” to modern eyes. I did note some problems with sources here, particularly a propensity for very outdated secondary sources, but this section was definitely very informative for me.
So far as I can tell, this book represented the last large-scale work of scholarship in Bennett’s career (he’s listed as “Emeritus” at Syracuse now). Professors often like to end their career with a “big” work of synthesis that ties all the little specialized pieces they’ve focused on in the past into a kind of unified theoretical structure, often tying it in to contemporary events to demonstrate relevance. This gives them a chance to say, “this is why I spent my life doing what I’ve been doing all this time.” Unfortunately, this often comes at a point in life when the professor is past being able to do the kind of rigorous archives-sifting they managed in their grad student days, or what is worse, when their memory and intellectual sharpness is beginning to be impaired. I think Bennett may have been able to hear the clock ticking, and may have rushed this book into print.
The reason I say that has to do with the book’s structure, and its reissue in a new edition. The first edition came out in 1988, and really only covers events through 1986 or so. The new edition came out in 1995, and Bennett is at pains to make it as “current” as possible, including information that addresses the environment after the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19 in that year. The problem is that the “revised” edition doesn’t seem to have been revised at all, it simply includes a new chapter to cover the intervening decade, with any corrections to the previous chapter being added as text in the final one. This gives the final part of the book a somewhat schizophrenic feeling, as well as being unbalanced. The book is divided into two “parts,” the first of which covers the nineteenth century and is broken into short, discreet chapters. The second part covers the twentieth century, which includes a huge transition-stage in the middle, and which is broken into much longer chapters, each of which contains short, discreet sections. This part is over 300 pages long, when the new chapter is included, or twice the length of Part I, but with the same number of chapters. It seems to me that the book would have been better organized in three parts, with the final chapters being broken apart into three or more chapters each.
The unified theory Bennett presents also seems lacking in analytical value as well. Bennett tries to connect the history of the American far-right in a single paradigm based on the reactions of Americans afraid of losing what is unique about the United States to threats beyond their immediate control. He refers to this tendency as “the party of fear,” a term which probably does make the idea more accessible to a lay audience than would be the case in a more theoretically sophisticated approach. However, this use of terminology has the tendency to reify rather than explain the connections Bennett is attempting to make; no one has ever described themselves as a part of the (or a) “party of fear,” and their continuity is largely assumed rather than demonstrated.
Within this paradigm, it seems to me that there are blind spots as well as areas that are over-emphasized. I was particularly disappointed, given his interest in American nativism and its impact on the political scene, that there is no attempt to theorize race in America, or to engage with questions of “whiteness.” Because of this, Bennett is largely blind to institutionalized racism, and so he often seems to write off racism as a kind of fringe movement outside the mainstream. Thus, we hear nothing about the treatment of native Americans (ironic, in a book on “nativism”), nothing about the Jim Crow south or Dixiecrats, very little about slavery, and what we do hear about the 1924 Immigration Restriction Acts is almost completely upside-down. Instead of this being an example of a triumph of American racialism (which coincides with the height of the second Klan in America), Bennett presents this as something benevolent, which ultimately resulted in a decrease in nativist extremism.
The chapter on the KKK represents the somewhat bifurcated nature of Klan scholarship at the time of the original edition. Bennett’s two main sources are at odds with one another: Hooded Americanism preaches the familiar line that Klansmen were rural, Southern, uneducated, and motivated by racial prejudice, while The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 pioneered the “revisionist” position that the Klan had its greatest successes among the lower-middle class in Midwestern urban areas, and was largely a movement for social and governmental reform. Bennett doesn’t quite know what to make of this, and he starts by hewing to Chalmers’s line, then suddenly swinging over to Jackson’s mid-way through the chapter without warning. If this chapter had been revised in 1995, he would at least have had a greater array of Klan-revisionist material at his disposal.
Because the first part of the book dealt with nativism, Bennett seems to have a hard time letting go of that as definitive of the “party of fear.” He tries to argue that McCarthyism can be seen as a kind of “ideological nativism,” based on a fear not so much of foreign peoples as foreign ideas flooding the country. Much of the chapter on the 1980s (the original final chapter to the first edition) is spent trying to demonstrate that the New Right is not nativist. OK, so far as I know nobody ever said it was. It seems like a lot of words are wasted here trying to prove something that doesn’t need proving, and that ultimately muddies the waters of his “party of fear” analytical device. Where I also find both the later chapters problematic is his heavy reliance on media sources over primary documents. I think his tendency to rely on the media, which was fairly hysterical about the militia phenomenon in the wake of OK City, tends to make him overestimate the militias in the new revision, just as he overestimated the power of Jerry Falwell in the previous chapter.
I’ll briefly mention just a couple of my most nit-picky observations before concluding. In the chapter on the 1950s, he mentions the “Christian Anti-Communist Crusade,” which is actually the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. That’s a very common error, but it’s worse that no connection between it and future-President Ronald Reagan is mentioned, nor is there any coverage of Reagan’s purging of the Screen Actors’ Guild of known or suspected Communists during his period as its chief. In the chapter on the 1980s, he mentions an up-and-coming leader named “David Dukes.” David Dukes was a TV actor, he meant David Duke, the KKK leader and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People. In the chapter on the 1990s, David Duke is mentioned, and spelled correctly, but if you check the index, you find that he is indexed separately from “David Dukes,” the “Louisianan imperial wizard” mentioned in the previous chapter. That, incidentally, is an error that should have been caught by the indexer of the second edition, if he or she was on the ball. I note that it had been pointed out in one of the reviews of the first edition as well, so there was really no excuse for preserving this mistake.
In all, though, I really did enjoy this book and I think it will serve as a useful reference. I recommend it primarily for non-specialists looking for a resource on the far right
March 20, 2017
I'm not sure all the parts of this one quite add up to a whole.
The chapters covering antebellum nativism and the Know-Nothing Party are excellent, providing summary and analysis of a political movement that is all to often reduced to a few choice paragraphs in the standard American History textbook, a topic mentioned and then quickly forgotten by all but the most fastidious students. This section is by far the meatiest part of the book and highly recommended.
From there....I'm not sure. The text claims to provide a history of the Far Right throughout American History but I'm not convinced there is actually a history there to be told. Certainly, there are similarities and connections that can be made but I'm not entirely certain that the Left-Right spectrum applies.
For instance, Bennett himself points out that in some cases, nativist parties actually evolved into movements of reform in the Northeast - attaching themselves to causes we would generally consider non-conservative. Where, exactly, is the continuity between the mid-19th century Anglo-Protestant voter who wished to restrict Irish immigration, was an abolitionist, supported women's suffrage and supported temperance, and the late-20th century militia member who fears that a hidden cabal of globalist bankers are plotting to use the United Nations to destroy American sovereignty?
If there is such a lineage there, I find it a tenuous one.
In any case, The Party of Fear reads less as a cohesive history of a single movement and more like a series of lengthy essays documenting periods of American history when some of the worst aspects of the American character were exacerbated and found outlets in mass movements that enjoyed broad support throughout the public: Know-Nothingism, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, the Coughlinites, McCarthyism, the Moral Majority.
This is unsanitized American history and whatever shortcomings of thesis the book suffers, it remains worthwhile reading in the present era, an era when the Far-Right seems no longer that far off at all.
The chapters covering antebellum nativism and the Know-Nothing Party are excellent, providing summary and analysis of a political movement that is all to often reduced to a few choice paragraphs in the standard American History textbook, a topic mentioned and then quickly forgotten by all but the most fastidious students. This section is by far the meatiest part of the book and highly recommended.
From there....I'm not sure. The text claims to provide a history of the Far Right throughout American History but I'm not convinced there is actually a history there to be told. Certainly, there are similarities and connections that can be made but I'm not entirely certain that the Left-Right spectrum applies.
For instance, Bennett himself points out that in some cases, nativist parties actually evolved into movements of reform in the Northeast - attaching themselves to causes we would generally consider non-conservative. Where, exactly, is the continuity between the mid-19th century Anglo-Protestant voter who wished to restrict Irish immigration, was an abolitionist, supported women's suffrage and supported temperance, and the late-20th century militia member who fears that a hidden cabal of globalist bankers are plotting to use the United Nations to destroy American sovereignty?
If there is such a lineage there, I find it a tenuous one.
In any case, The Party of Fear reads less as a cohesive history of a single movement and more like a series of lengthy essays documenting periods of American history when some of the worst aspects of the American character were exacerbated and found outlets in mass movements that enjoyed broad support throughout the public: Know-Nothingism, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, the Coughlinites, McCarthyism, the Moral Majority.
This is unsanitized American history and whatever shortcomings of thesis the book suffers, it remains worthwhile reading in the present era, an era when the Far-Right seems no longer that far off at all.
June 27, 2013
This was a really good book that was ridiculously informative. Bennett gets how the far right thinks, and has interesting insights. It's also a weirdly funny book. Bennett's biggest flaw is the attempt to place nativism at the center of the far-right America he traces back to colonial times, but it's not convincing and he strains trying to connect nativism to later reactionary movements, before abandoning the attempt when discussing the 90s militia movement. The real subject of this book isn't nativism; it's fear and loathing, and it's terrific discussing those feelings. And to Bennett's credit, on the last page, he appears to predict the rise of the Tea Party.
September 6, 2017
Author seems a little delusional. He wrote two editions one published in 1988 and the second after the Oklahoma bombing, including a new chapter on militia movements. Generally he is a liberal but tends to dismiss right wing hate groups as aberrations and no real force in American politics or a limited one at best. Very hopeful guy with eyes shut tight to reality, especially as we are experiencing it in 2017. Still worth a read and has lots of information on the roots of racist and nativist organizations in America. That he seems so blind to the right wing resurgence of them we are seeing now is almost comical, but I guess he meant well. As I said worth a read, lots of info.
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February 21, 2025This was nothing if not informative, though it sometimes becomes a spray of figures and loses the narrative thread for a while. I don't know if the sections all convincingly cohere around the "party of fear" thesis, but I nonetheless enjoyed each section on its own. How about that anti-Catholic smut?
It feels jarring reading this particular analysis thirty years later, and it means we readers unfairly get to be the all-knowing ones, supplanting the authority of the learned Dr. Bennett with present-day knowledge. The threads that will lead to the far right of 2025 practically scream out in the later chapters.
Two funny mistakes: David Duke is referred to as "David Dukes" (Daisy Dukes?) and Wayne LaPierre is referred to as "Walter LaPierre." I had to look up each to make sure there wasn't a similarly named wacko.
It feels jarring reading this particular analysis thirty years later, and it means we readers unfairly get to be the all-knowing ones, supplanting the authority of the learned Dr. Bennett with present-day knowledge. The threads that will lead to the far right of 2025 practically scream out in the later chapters.
Two funny mistakes: David Duke is referred to as "David Dukes" (Daisy Dukes?) and Wayne LaPierre is referred to as "Walter LaPierre." I had to look up each to make sure there wasn't a similarly named wacko.
July 26, 2010
Has some of the drawbacks of an academic book from the perspective of a casual reader (sort of plodding; unassimilated data to wade through) but smart and fascinating and ultimately not very encouraging. Apparently, we've always been like this.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews