Episode 20: The Conservative Frontier

In 1980, when he was a high-school freshman in Canyon, Texas, Jeff Roche opened up his school newspaper and saw he was one of only seven students out of about 500 who voted for Carter rather than Reagan in that year’s mock Presidential election.

This was the moment that Roche – now a history professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio – first began to realize that the Texas Panhandle is truly different, with a conservative political culture that distinguishes it even from the rural areas in New Mexico and Oklahoma where he also spent time as a child.

That political culture is the subject of Roche’s new book, The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right, published in 2025 by the University of Texas Press. Roche joins the podcast for a conversation with WT’s Tim Bowman, who notes that the book is not just a political history but an “all-encompassing, sweeping narrative” of the region since permanent settlement began in the late 19th century.

Roche and Bowman discuss how this early, frontier period shaped the region’s eventual “anti-statist, highly individualized” political commitments; how Roche was able to achieve the incredible level of historical detail in his text; and how Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous “frontier thesis” was not only used to explain life in the Southern Plains, one of the last places to be settled in the U.S. (and therefore, according to the thesis, home to the most American of all Americans), but also internalized by generations of local educators, who used the thesis to promote a specific vision of West Texas identity itself.

The conversation also touches on the influence and backstory of figures like J. Evetts Haley and “Pappy” O’ Daniel (who suggested in 1941 that labor unions were more dangerous to the United States than the Nazis); the role of West Texas State (now West Texas A&M) in shaping the region’s culture; and the past, present, and future of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, the state’s largest historical museum, which has been closed to the public since early 2025. Roche has been involved in grassroots efforts to re-open the museum, and his own work, as Bowman puts it, is a “clear testament” to the importance of the institution as a resource for those looking to preserve and understand West Texas history.