The Politics of the Personal: Growing Up Idahoan
by David Neiwert
First of a five-part series, appearing Mondays.
There's one thing about growing up in a place like Idaho: If you can't make friends with conservatives, you won't have many friends.
And as my oldest friends can tell you, once upon a time I was myself fairly conservative politically. I come from a working-class Republican family -- my mother's side of the family was in road construction, and my dad's was mostly a farming family, though his father actually was an auto mechanic. Dad himself worked at the local airport for the FAA, and I remember well the Goldwater bumper sticker on the red ’59 Ford Fairlane that was our family car in 1964.
My dad, who was born and raised in southern Idaho and is still an accomplished marksman and woodsman, was a gunsmith in his spare time, and so we often hung out in gun shops. This meant I was exposed to the NRA worldview at an early age, not to mention the John Birch Society, which was everywhere in Idaho Falls. Certainly I had it drilled into my head to be on the lookout for commies, gun-grabbers, and other loathsome forms of humanity. Most of these, I learned, were Democrats, and so even through high school I identified with all things Republican.
When our junior high school held a mock presidential debate in 1968, I eagerly took the Nixon side. In high school I worked on the congressional campaigns of local Republicans, and I continued doing GOP campaign work in college. I paid for my first couple of years of college by doing farm work, mostly hauling irrigation pipe, later moving up to higher-paying road construction jobs. I knew well the value of hard work. My belief in blue-collar virtues -- like integrity, decency, honesty, common sense, and fair play -- was imbedded like the work lines in my hands. And until I got out of college, I really believed that conservatism best embodied those values.
Over the years, like most people, my views morphed, especially as, after college, I began working as a newspaperman (this was about 1976, when I was just turning 20) in Idaho and Montana. I was confronted innumerable times with realities that challenged my old preconceptions. I came to know hard-working Democrats who had the highest integrity and greatest decency (people like Senator Frank Church and Governor Cecil Andrus). I got to know Republicans who were prolific liars of the lowest integrity (like Reps. George Hansen, Steve Symms and Helen Chenoweth). Along the way, of course, I also encountered dishonest Democrats and honest Republicans alike, people who jibed with my old worldview. But it was obvious that the former construct, while not exactly turned on its head, was not really valid.
The right in Idaho, in fact, had a long history of being a fertile place for extremism to take root. From the mid-1950s onward, anti-communist paranoia, embodied by the John Birch Society, was a dominant political force in southern Idaho. The first time I saw Gen. Jack D. Ripper, the cigar-chewing paranoid who blows up the world in Dr. Strangelove, on TV, I thought it was depicting our neighbor down the street, the one who had the bomb shelter. He also worked at the local nuclear engineering laboratory.
The Birch Society was everywhere at the time; I think I saw copies of Gary Allen’s eminently digestible Bircherite opus, None Dare Call it Conspiracy, in the homes of just about all my parents' friends. My grandmother dated an ardent Bircherite for many years and I used to thumb through his conspiracist library in his farmhouse just outside Twin Falls. Southern Idaho generally was also quite dominated by the Mormon Church (about two-thirds of my graduating class was LDS), and the "Church-Birch connection" was well known and oft-remarked. When I was in high school in the early ‘70s, the local Birch unit became ardently involved in the fight over our school district’s dress code; we were told that letting boys grow their hair long was part of the communist conspiracy to feminize our men. Fortunately, the district ignored them and let us grow our hair...[Open in new window]
by David Neiwert
First of a five-part series, appearing Mondays.
There's one thing about growing up in a place like Idaho: If you can't make friends with conservatives, you won't have many friends.
And as my oldest friends can tell you, once upon a time I was myself fairly conservative politically. I come from a working-class Republican family -- my mother's side of the family was in road construction, and my dad's was mostly a farming family, though his father actually was an auto mechanic. Dad himself worked at the local airport for the FAA, and I remember well the Goldwater bumper sticker on the red ’59 Ford Fairlane that was our family car in 1964.
My dad, who was born and raised in southern Idaho and is still an accomplished marksman and woodsman, was a gunsmith in his spare time, and so we often hung out in gun shops. This meant I was exposed to the NRA worldview at an early age, not to mention the John Birch Society, which was everywhere in Idaho Falls. Certainly I had it drilled into my head to be on the lookout for commies, gun-grabbers, and other loathsome forms of humanity. Most of these, I learned, were Democrats, and so even through high school I identified with all things Republican.
When our junior high school held a mock presidential debate in 1968, I eagerly took the Nixon side. In high school I worked on the congressional campaigns of local Republicans, and I continued doing GOP campaign work in college. I paid for my first couple of years of college by doing farm work, mostly hauling irrigation pipe, later moving up to higher-paying road construction jobs. I knew well the value of hard work. My belief in blue-collar virtues -- like integrity, decency, honesty, common sense, and fair play -- was imbedded like the work lines in my hands. And until I got out of college, I really believed that conservatism best embodied those values.
Over the years, like most people, my views morphed, especially as, after college, I began working as a newspaperman (this was about 1976, when I was just turning 20) in Idaho and Montana. I was confronted innumerable times with realities that challenged my old preconceptions. I came to know hard-working Democrats who had the highest integrity and greatest decency (people like Senator Frank Church and Governor Cecil Andrus). I got to know Republicans who were prolific liars of the lowest integrity (like Reps. George Hansen, Steve Symms and Helen Chenoweth). Along the way, of course, I also encountered dishonest Democrats and honest Republicans alike, people who jibed with my old worldview. But it was obvious that the former construct, while not exactly turned on its head, was not really valid.
The right in Idaho, in fact, had a long history of being a fertile place for extremism to take root. From the mid-1950s onward, anti-communist paranoia, embodied by the John Birch Society, was a dominant political force in southern Idaho. The first time I saw Gen. Jack D. Ripper, the cigar-chewing paranoid who blows up the world in Dr. Strangelove, on TV, I thought it was depicting our neighbor down the street, the one who had the bomb shelter. He also worked at the local nuclear engineering laboratory.
The Birch Society was everywhere at the time; I think I saw copies of Gary Allen’s eminently digestible Bircherite opus, None Dare Call it Conspiracy, in the homes of just about all my parents' friends. My grandmother dated an ardent Bircherite for many years and I used to thumb through his conspiracist library in his farmhouse just outside Twin Falls. Southern Idaho generally was also quite dominated by the Mormon Church (about two-thirds of my graduating class was LDS), and the "Church-Birch connection" was well known and oft-remarked. When I was in high school in the early ‘70s, the local Birch unit became ardently involved in the fight over our school district’s dress code; we were told that letting boys grow their hair long was part of the communist conspiracy to feminize our men. Fortunately, the district ignored them and let us grow our hair...[Open in new window]
posted by Dan at 11:46 AM
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