This book is based on a kind of research sociologists describe as “exploratory” and “hypothesis generating.” The goal of it is not to see how common or rare something is, or where one does and doesn’t find it, or to study how the something comes and goes through time—although I draw on the research of others who address such questions. My goal has been to discover what that something actually is. I’ve long been fascinated by the emotional draw of right-wing politics; that’s my “something.” It took getting close and that determined my choice of method.
As with my other books based on this method—The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home; The Time Bind: When Home Becomes Work and Work Becomes Home; The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling—I adapted my approach to the subject at hand. Decisions about sample selection, interviewing method, participant-observation profile selection, statistical analysis—all were the best ways I could think of to get close to the “something.”
My first step was to conduct four focus groups, two of Tea Party supporters and two of Democrats, all composed of middle-class white women from Lake Charles, Louisiana. I then did follow-up interviews with nearly all of the conservative women and sometimes, in a method social scientists call “snowball sampling,” with their husbands, parents, and neighbors. A member of one of the right-wing focus groups invited me to join the monthly luncheons of Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana, and this gave me the opportunity to talk to those around the luncheon table and do follow-up interviews. One was with the Pentecostal minister’s wife whom you meet in chapter 8. She, in turn, introduced me to many members of her church, invited me to a church social, and opened a window into that community.
Following another path, I followed two rival congressional candidates on their campaign trails. The differences between their positions seemed very small to my Berkeley eyes but loomed large to many in Louisiana. At every campaign event, I tried to talk to the person next to me, who sometimes introduced me to still others. At a union hall meet-and-greet for a Tea Party candidate in Rayne, for example, a kind man took it upon himself to introduce me around a large picnic table to mainly retired white male workers: “Y’all, this lady is from California, and she’s writing a book.”
A Lake Charles–born environmental activist, Mike Tritico, who appears throughout this book, had many deeply conservative Tea Party, antienvironmentalist friends with whom he kept in close touch. I asked him if I could tag along as he visited with them. It was in this way that I came to attend a number of Sunday after-church luncheons at the home of Brother Cappy and Sister Fay Brantley (chapter 12) and to listen in on some of Mike’s arguments with Donny McCorquodale.
Recognizing the importance of their debate for this book, I began attending public rallies on the environment. It was at such a rally that I met two people—Mike Schaff, a Tea Party advocate, and General Russel Honoré. To learn more about Honoré’s capacity to talk effectively to those normally hostile to the environmentalist outlook, I followed him around for a day, listening to him speak to both businessmen and victims of extreme pollution. He also took me on a tour of the strip of oil and petrochemical plants along the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, known as Cancer Alley, which I describe in chapter 4.
Altogether, I talked with sixty people and accumulated over four thousand pages of transcribed interviews. Forty of these were people who embraced the principles of the Tea Party. An additional twenty helped me understand the core group; they included scientists, academics, two former members of the Louisiana legislature, ministers, a newspaper reporter, a librarian and volunteer River Watcher, two professors, a former director of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, a former assistant attorney general of Louisiana, an environmental chemist, a marine biologist, and a mayor. Eight of this latter group were black. I spent a day, for instance, with a black, male, disabled plant operator living in a trailer surrounded by land rezoned as “heavy industrial” and owned by Sasol, a large petrochemical company. His water and electricity had been cut off, and the mailman would no longer deliver his mail, but at the time I saw him, he was determined never to leave his home.
When I met my interviewees, I gave them my consent form, set up my tape recorder, and offered to turn it off any time they asked. A number of times they did, and those discussions are either reported in a way that completely separates the event from the person who told me of it, or not reported at all.
From among my forty core interviews, I chose six to profile as they most clearly and richly exemplified patterns of thinking and feeling that I’d noticed in many others among the forty. With these six people, I also did what sociologists call participant observation—visiting places of birth, churches, and burial plots, sharing meals, driving places together, attending events, and more.
Of the core group, roughly half were women and half were men. All were white and between the ages of forty and eighty-five. Their occupations placed them in the middle, lower-middle, and working class. Roughly one-third worked or had worked for oil directly (e.g., as pipefitters) or indirectly (e.g., as suppliers) and two-thirds were in lines of work unrelated to oil—teachers, secretaries, a flight attendant, and a trailer park owner, for example. Interestingly, attitudes across these groups varied very little.
Back in Berkeley, with the great help of two research assistants, both PhD candidates in the U.C. Berkeley Sociology Department, I set about studying Gallup, General Social Survey, and Pew opinion polls. I paid special attention to the degree to which my respondents seemed to reflect, exaggerate, or buck national patterns.
Midway through this research, I returned to the General Social Survey with an important new question. What was the link, I became curious to know, between an American’s description of him or herself as a “strong Republican” or “strong Democrat,” attitudes about regulating pollution, and actual exposure to it. For that research and finding, see Appendix B.
Finally, I explored Louisiana. I visited Angola Prison, the largest maximum security prison in the United States, and chatted with a trusty, a lifer in for murder. I attended a reenactment of a Civil War militia skirmish and talked with the reenactors. I attended the Junior Miss Black Pride Contest and interviewed the father of the winner, a petrochemical plant worker. I listened to the tour guide at the Oak Alley Plantation (“the slaves showed industry and skill”). I looked through bookstores and libraries, and walked all over Lake Charles, noticing mostly whites in the day, blacks in the evening at the public plaza by the edge of the lake. I studied tourist brochures and wedding photographs staged in plantation settings. I ate lunch at a restaurant with a white homeless man, a Republican. I even danced with a stranger at an all-day-dancing café in Breaux Bridge, where my liberal and Tea Party twosome, Sally Cappel and Shirley Slack, had mischievously taken me, to catch the Cajun spirit of laissez les bon temps rouler.
It helped, I think, that I was white, female, gray-haired, and writing a book about a divide that also troubled those I came to know. But what most eased my way was their great personal warmth and famous Southern hospitality, for which I remain deeply grateful.