Browsing by Author "McCann, Samuel G."
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Item Fighting a New Deal: Intellectual origins of the Reagan Revolution, 1932--1952(2007) Eow, Gregory Teddy; Haskell, Thomas L.; McCann, Samuel G.; Matusow, Allen J.; Twyman, William Gaines; Sher, George; Autrey, Herbert S.This dissertation locates the origins of the modern conservative movement in the intellectual history of the 1930s and 1940s. I argue that it was during the years of the Great Depression, when laissez-faire capitalism was most discredited, that a group of conservative academics and intellectuals began to lay the foundations for its postwar resurgence. Angered by the New Deal, those intellectual activists honed their free market ideology and began to develop a network through which to distribute it. As a result, they began to lay the intellectual and institutional foundation for the conservative movement. This dissertation recovers a number of narratives that reveal the rudimentary makings of a movement. It was during the 1930s and 1940s that economist Henry Simons worked to turn the University of Chicago's economics department into a bastion of free market sentiment; Leonard Read, after a decade of free market advocacy, created the first libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education, in 1946; legal scholar Roscoe Pound, worried by the spread of legal realism in the academy and growth of government in Washington, dramatically moved to the political right to make common cause with conservatives; Albert Jay Nock, his protégé Frank Chodorov and Felix Morley created a network of conservative writers and publications that paved the way for William F. Buckley's National Review ; and writers such as Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson made the case for laissez-faire in the pages of popular publications such as the Saturday Evening Post and the New York Herald Tribune . Historians have generally attributed the rise of the modern right to the conservative political mobilization in response to the civil rights movement, campus agitation of the 1960s, and the campaign for women's rights. As a result, historians tend to view the modern conservative movement as a distinctly postwar social and political phenomenon. This dissertation enriches that account by revealing the ties the modern conservative movement has to the years of the Great Depression and the debate over the government's role in the economy.Item When Worlds Collide: Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810(1995) Lyerly, Cynthia Lynn; Boles, John B.; Cline, Allyn R.; Cline, Gladys M.; Haskell, Thomas L.; McCann, Samuel G.; McKenny, GeraldWhen Methodists first arrived in the South, they were critics of the social order. They preached in public against slavery and counselled in private against slaveholding. They condemned the code of honor and supported pious women and children who defied irreligious patriarchs. In Methodist churches white women played vocal and leading roles, and in service of their religion, they often defied southern gender conventions. African Americans were also prominent and vocal in early Methodist services, and through Methodism they contested racist assumptions and critiqued their masters. Many free black and slave men exhorted, preached, and led classes and congregations. Methodists condemned the lifestyles and mores of southern elites and promoted an ethic that prized piety over property. By advocating virtues traditionally deemed feminine, opposing slavery, and preaching against wealth, Methodists challenged southern secular values. In their churches, Methodists created a public space where secular rankings of class, gender and, to a lesser extent, race, were set aside and where southerners who were considered by secular society inferior advanced an oppositional world view. Opponents of the church, especially elite white men, believed their values, ways, and ideals were under assault by the Methodists. Opposition, including denunciations of Methodist doctrine and enthusiasm, patriarchs' physical assaults of Methodist women and children, and mob violence against slave and free black Methodists, bound Methodists more closely to one another. The church's beliefs that suffering was salutary and that persecution was evidence of true faith sustained its members in a hostile world. As Methodism evolved from an outcast sect to a respectable denomination, its opposition to gentry custom, gender conventions, and slavery weakened. Because of the church's intensely individualistic focus, its naive optimism about the ability to change hearts and minds, and its failure to see social evils in other than religious terms, Methodists could not sustain their critique of southern society. Nonetheless, for a few brief decades, Methodists promoted a genuinely alternative world view, and their experience illustrates the possibilities and limits of dissent in the Revolutionary and early national South.