Prairie Ruth
| 👵 | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 55-70 |
| Home | Topeka, KS |
| Demographic | rural, white, farm wife |
| Lean | small_govt_conservative |
| Race | white |
A Kansas wheat farmer's wife in her sixties, a Lutheran churchgoer and a Republican precinct worker. She represents the old Taft-wing conservatism of the Plains states, the party's organised conservative base before the Goldwater movement gave it a national candidate.
Who they stand for
The Plains and Mountain West were the most Republican region of the decade. Kansas voted for every Republican presidential nominee from 1940 onward except in Goldwater's year, and Wyoming, Idaho and the Dakotas followed the same pattern. Its politics were small-town and agrarian, organised through the Farm Bureau, county Republican committees and Protestant churches, and it never accepted the New Deal's premise that Washington should manage the economy. Its position on farm policy was contradictory. It accepted price supports while voting against production controls, and in the 1963 wheat referendum the Farm Bureau led farmers to reject the Kennedy administration's proposed supply-management programme outright.
During the 1960s, this bloc supplied the Goldwater movement with many of its volunteers and its women, including Phyllis Schlafly, and supplied the John Birch Society with many of its subscribers. Ranch Hand Clyde represents this bloc's connection to the land. Ruth represents its church life and its party organisation. Goldwater Barry Jr represents a younger, less patient generation within the same movement that raised him.
Playing to them
She responds well to a balanced budget, lower income tax, no new federal programmes, a president who speaks of the Constitution and treats farming as a business, and price supports paid without any accompanying limit on how much land she can plant. A Republican president who governs as Eisenhower did keeps her support out of habit. A Democratic president keeps her support only through restraint, and Kennedy's tax cut is the one Democratic measure she approves of.
She does not forgive the Great Society, federal school aid that comes with conditions attached, deference to the United Nations, foreign aid spending, the Warren Court's rulings, or a riot that goes unpunished. She interprets civil rights enforcement as federal overreach rather than as justice. Winning her support loses the support of Faculty Eleanor, Campus David, Harlem James and South Side Dorothy, and the spending cuts she wants would take away funding that Union Hall Frank and Appalachian Earl vote for. Country Club Richard tolerates her but fears her movement's Birch Society wing. Ranch Hand Clyde, Goldwater Barry Jr and Texas Oil Jack support a president alongside her.
Where they live
The five states where Prairie Ruth makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- Wyoming
- Montana
- Idaho
- Utah
- North Dakota