Geneva Williams: What made you become interested in being an historian?

Perlstein: When I grew up as an adolescent teenager in the 1980s, I was fascinated by the 1960s and especially the radical social movements and the cultural conflicts around them.

Williams: One of the founders of the WAPUSH campaign, AP history Serene Williams, told me she has been reading your work for a quarter of a century. Your analysis of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan has been foundational to the WAPUSH course proposal she wrote. Can you tell us how you became interested in writing about the political history of the American right?

Perlstein: Yes, so it comes out of that 60s fascination. When I was a teenager I spent a lot of time in this particular used bookstore in Milwaukee. I loved collecting crazy 60s books. Milwaukee was kind of a conservative place where people were getting rid of their books and it kind of tilted more towards the right than other places, I think I developed an early appreciation that the main story of the 60s was not quite the way it was told, through these fascinating social movements, but through a cultural and political civil war. As I became a professional writer and a journalist, very specifically and as a citizen I became very interested in the right and how the Republican Party was becoming increasingly extreme by experiencing the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 led by Newt Gingrich. Also, the rise of the far right militia movement after Oklahoma City. The specific spur for making it a professional pursuit of mine was going to a conference on the 1960s when I was a magazine editor covering academia at Lingua Franca Magazine. The most interesting presentations were by younger scholars who hadn’t participated in sixties social movements like most of the previous generation of 1960s scholars who were particularly attracted to the story of the right and the representation of the 1960s as a conflict between right and left that the right, in a lot of ways, ended up winning because of Nixon winning the presidency and Reagan rises from governor to president. That was right around the time that I thought about making a change in my career to writing a popular history and I was looking for a subject and I was immediately drawn towards the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign as a gathering place for a lot of energies that ended up cashing out with Ronald Reagan. So it really kind of merged from my fascination with the 1960s and it became an inquiry into the backlash into the social movements of the 1960s. You know, all along being a progressive and following the politics of the day and being fascinated by how the Republican party was a centrist party that was kind of taken over by its ideological wing at a time in which the Democrats were very much a centrist political party. The people I identify with politically and were interested in, which became a big project during the Bush era, becoming more influential in the Democratic party and making it a more progressive party. In another way, it was almost like a political role model. 

Williams: In your book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, you tell the very important but little known story of the direct mail organizing efforts of Clarence Manion of South Bend, Indiana. What do you think high school students interested in political history should know about his impact on American politics? 

Perlstein: Clarence Manion’s impact, interesting. I mean, ideally! But there is only so much time, right? If I had to choose a particular figure that would be the most important person for high school level students to understand, it wouldn’t necessarily be Clarence Manion, but it would be a guy called Richard Viguerie who also got his start during the Goldwater campaign, but became much more influential in the 70s and the 80s. He was the person who more than anyone else, was responsible for using direct mail for the ideological takeover of the Republican party. 

Williams: Which woman who influenced Goldwater, Nixon or Reagan do you think high school students should know about?

Perlstein: You know, I’ll mention two. It is an easy first place and second place. First place is unquestionably Phyllis Schlafly. Are you familiar with her? 

Williams: Yes.

Perlstein: There is a tv-show about her, a famous one. First of all, she is a very useful figure for people to study because she spans the McCarthy era to the Trump era. She became an activist in the 1950s and became very influential in coming up with arguments about the idea that the Republican party had been subverted and taken over by liberals. Very similar arguments that are still alive to ones about the deep state and left wingers as subversives. She died in 2016 and her last political work was advocating for Donald Trump. So if you see the broad story of the American right from the post-war era to the present as a story about the rise of the forces associated with Donald Trump, she is a key figure in that. Second of all, she is most famous for in the 1970s when she turned her attention to opposing feminism and specifically the Equal Rights Amendment. In so doing, she was probably the most influential political organizer of her era. She is a brilliant organizer who exemplifies a lot of conspiratorial imagination that would take over the right. In second place would be a figure named Anita Bryant who is famous for her organizing against gay rights. These kinds of so called house wife organizers were a big phenomenon, they would represent themselves as reluctantly getting involved in politics because their families were being stolen from them by these mainline forces of liberalism and the left. But, I think Phyllis Schlafly should be in any pretty much American history curriculum that deals with that era.

Williams: Is there a lesser-known figure that would be important to mention in our campaign and our course curriculum? 

Perlstein: Yeah, I would mention three more figures who would follow this pattern of house-wife activists. It’s a very influential pattern that includes Moms for Liberty, and Sarah Palin. It is a political type that has been very influential and important. One is named Norma Gabler. She is also known as Mrs. Mel Gabler because women were often referred to by their husband’s names. Gabler was an activist against the left wing subversion of textbooks and who became very influential in organizing book banning campaigns and making sure that American education was consistent with right wing values as she understood them. There was another woman named Connie Marshner who was a part of the “pro-family movement” who was involved with the Heritage Foundation. She was very influential against organizing a federal day-care law that Nixon probably would have signed if it weren’t for this kind of grassroots organization. There was another woman named, who I wrote about in my book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Alice Moore who in 1974 in Virginia who was very important in textbook organizing there. The final person is a Catholic woman named Louise Day Hicks who was very influential in fighting school integration in Boston in the 1970s. There was a very violent clash that culminated between these movements in 1974. All of this pattern of anti-feminist and anti-liberal activists who rooted their activism in Christian conservatism. 

Williams: The next question that I have for you is about Nixonland. In your book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, you write about the concept of “psychobiographies” in your chapter “The Orthogonian”. One of the interesting observations you make is “…the recipe for a successfully driven politician should include a doting mother to convince the son he can accomplish anything, and an emotionally distant father to convince the son that no accomplishment can ever be enough” (pg. 25). Do you think this is a topic worthy of analysis in a high school classroom? 

Perlstein: Interesting, I think that general psychology in the study of leadership is important. That could certainly be a component of it. What makes people decide to think that they could become the most powerful person on earth? It’s interesting why people run for president. The job is very taxing, traumatizing I almost want to say. When you study presidents, as any student of a history course will do, you want to understand where they are coming from as people. I think that it would be a really good way to study changes in families. What do presidents’ families look like? Just to give one example, Barack Obama, in his memoir Dreams from My Father, puts the questions of his relationship with his father who left the family when he was two and his mother who raised him alone at the center of his entire political life. That’s something that we all should be interested in too. So, yes I think that this could be a component of a general understanding of political biography.

Williams: That was a very thoughtful answer, thank you. Finally, do you support the creation of an AP Women’s History course? If so could you share why you support it?

Perlstein: Well, it’s interesting. I feel like for the answer to this question I need a bit more background of how many AP history courses are there and how scarce of a resource is this, shall we say? Do you have any sense of that?

Williams: So off of the top of my head, there is AP U.S. History, there is AP Comparative Government, there is AP U.S. Government, there is AP World History, and there is AP European History. Those are the ones I could name off the top of my head.

Perlstein: Is there a sort of AP Ethnic Studies or AP African American History?

Williams: There is an AP African American Studies course. 

Perlstein: In that case, absolutely. Those are all six or seven big areas of historical inquiry and I think that women’s history rises to that level of importance. I think that an AP Women’s History curriculum would be very valuable for a college bound student because it has the potential to get at one of the most important values of studying history which is change over time. If you can understand something as big and basic as what it means to be a man or a woman, how society is organized according to assumptions about gender, and also the basic plot of history in the increasing struggle for freedom and equality. Women’s history or gender history, an interesting question of what would be preferable, would be a really valuable addition to the choices that students have of AP courses. And it would also be valuable because it would be getting advanced placement for college and would allow people to take advanced courses in women’s history. People who are interested in that as a subject of study, would be smack dab in the most dynamic and important part of the history profession.