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The wild road trip that launched the populist conservative movement (travel)

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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/w...180970033/

EXCERPT: . . . While a wave of recent books have explored right-wing activity in the years leading to Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, Operation Midnight Ride—and the response it provoked—has gone largely overlooked. This reconstruction of that galvanizing political journey, based on [Billy] Hargis’ and [Edwin] Walker’s personal papers and on recordings made of their speeches on tour, offers an inside look at the conservative movement at a crucially formative point.

[...] By 1963, Billy James Hargis had come a long way as a “bawl and jump” preacher. His evangelical speeches aired on hundreds of radio stations. He published scores of books and pamphlets. Hargis claimed that his nonprofit organization, the Christian Crusade, was “America’s largest anti-Communist group,” taking in $1 million in donations, with members in every state. [...]

But Hargis still had to slash his staff and salary because he found it hard to keep major donors. “These wealthy people are scared to be associated with a bunch of crackpots and Nazis—if you want to know the truth of the matter, that’s it,” he grumbled. “I think the capitalists of this country ought to be ashamed of themselves for the little they have done to protect freedom.”

To expand his donor base and awaken Americans to the threat communism posed to their way of life, he decided to marry his fortunes to a rising star on the far right edge of political discourse. [...] former Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker.

Walker was among the most accomplished Army officers of his generation, decorated for his service in World War II and the Korean War. More recently, in 1957, he won acclaim after troops he led kept the peace during the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School, though, truth be told, he privately believed states should be free to segregate. [...]

While commanding troops in West Germany, he had implemented a training program based in part on literature from the John Birch Society, whose leader, Robert Welch, suspected that President Dwight Eisenhower was a secret communist. After an Army inquiry found that Walker’s program improperly combined political activity with military duty, he resigned his commission and forfeited his pension. “It will be my purpose now, as a civilian, to attempt to do what I have found it no longer possible to do in uniform,” he told Time.

A native of the Texas Hill Country, he settled in Dallas, the center of ultra-right-wing advocacy, much of it funded by H.L. Hunt, the billionaire oil tycoon. Hunt, who believed that he belonged to a genetically superior strain of humanity and that voting rights should be apportioned by wealth, told Walker there was a “legion of potential followers who would welcome you as a new type of Commander in Chief.”

Hargis, for his part, considered Walker a symbol “of freedom and liberty and resistance against the would-be liberal dictatorship in the United States.” He invited the general to embark on “a coast-to-coast midnight ride with me to alert the American public to the enemy within and without.”

Walker accepted, and they geared up for Operation Midnight Ride, a six-week, 29-stop bus tour from Florida to California. “I believe our trip will not only show the public demand for true representation,” he told the Dallas Morning News, “but will carry a message from city to city and create a psychological force that cannot be ignored.”

Before Hargis and Walker headed out, in February 1963, no one knew whether this kind of tour would achieve its purpose, because no one had tried it before. The constituency they sought was fragmented, dispersed, bound largely by the ethereal threads of radio and the pamphlets that came to their mailboxes. Hargis called them “lonely patriots.” But by the time he and Walker were done, that constituency was visible and gathering, and would soon shape American politics for generations.

Hargis and Walker did not ride off into a vacuum. Elements of conservative thought had been swirling through American culture ever since FDR’s New Deal sparked opposition from people wary of government intrusion into the free market. [...] The John F. Kennedy years gave urgency to their anger. [...] Operation Midnight Ride catered to all those anxieties. “This is one of these key moments when you see these different strains working together out of hatred for JFK,” Matzko says. “The rallies bring together people who are united by what they are angry about. They’re united by what they’re against.”

MORE: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/w...180970033/
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