The right stuff.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics - Book review

Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 368 pp., $34.95.

In December 1953, Henry Regnery convened a meeting in Room 2233 in New York City's Lincoln Building. Regnery, a former Democrat and head of Regnery Publishing, had moved sharply to the Right after he became disillusioned with the New Deal. His guests included William F. Buckley Jr.; Frank Hanighen, a cofounder of Human Events-, Raymond Moley, a former FDR adviser who wrote a book called After Seven Years that denounced the New Deal; and John Chamberlain, a lapsed liberal and an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. Regnery had not called these men together merely to discuss current events. He wanted to reshape them. "The side we represent controls most of the wealth in this country," he said. "The ideas and traditions we believe in are those which most Americans instinctively believe in also." So why was liberalism in the ascendant? Regnery explained that media bias was the problem. Anywhere you looked, the Left controlled the commanding heights--television, newspapers and universities. It was imperative, Regnery said, to establish a "counterintelligence unit" that could fight back.

In her superb Messengers of the Right, Nicole Hemmer examines the origins of conservative media. Hemmer, who is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, has performed extensive archival research to illuminate the furthest recesses of the Right, complementing earlier works like Geoffrey Kabaservice's Rule and Ruin. She provides much new information and penetrating observations about figures such as Clarence Manion, William Rusher and Henry Regnery. Above all, she shows that there has been a remarkable consistency to the grievances and positions, which were often one and the same, of the conservative movement over the decades.

According to Hemmer, the modern Right first took shape in the form of the America First Committee. A number of leading conservatives saw little difference between Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Regnery recollected that "both Hitler and Roosevelt--each in his own way--were masters of the art of manipulating the masses." Indeed, in an October 1991 letter to Patrick J. Buchanan, Regnery claimed that Americans had been hornswoggled into supporting the war by "the President and those who form public opinion." Others such as the gifted orator...