Reunion 008: Family, Power, and American Conservatism with Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young
In the fall of 1949, a young evangelist named Billy Graham pitched a tent in Los Angeles for what he hoped would be a modest three-week revival. Attendance was sparse, and Graham was discouraged. Then, seemingly overnight, everything changed. William Randolph Hearst, the powerful newspaper magnate, sent a two-word telegram to his editors: “Puff Graham.” The next morning, headlines blazed with his name. The tent filled. The revival stretched for weeks and Billy Graham became a national figure.
That moment wasn’t just about media savvy. It was about the convergence of faith, family values, and political ambition, a convergence that would shape the rise of the Religious Right. In We Gather Together, Neil J. Young traces how evangelical leaders like Graham helped build a movement that reached from the pulpit to the ballot box. In Partisans, Nicole Hemmer explores how those media, religion, and family fueled the conservative revolution of the 1990s. Today, Nicole and Neil join us to talk about how political movements are born not just in campaigns, but in living rooms, churches, and family trees and how the personal and the political have always been intertwined in the making of American conservatism.
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TODAY'S GUESTS
Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University. Her work explores how right-wing media has shaped American political life from the mid-twentieth century to today. She is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics and Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. Nicole is also a past co-host of the podcast Past Present and current co-host of This Day in Esoteric Political History, and A12, the best journalistic account of the white supremacist attacks on Charlottesville in August 2017.
Neil J. Young is a historian, writer, and podcaster whose work explores the intersections of religion, politics, and culture in modern America. He is the author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics and Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right, a groundbreaking study of LGBTQ conservatives in American politics. Neil’s commentary appears regularly in leading publications, including the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He previously co-hosted the history podcast Past Present with Nicole and currently co-hosts the Political Junkie Podcast with the historian Claire Potter. He also helped create the award-winning series Welcome to Your Fantasy. Neil holds degrees from Duke University and Columbia University and has taught at Princeton University.
SHOW NOTES
- Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
- Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (Basic Books, 2022).
- Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country (Random House, 2021).
- Bridget Read, Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America (Crown, 2025).
- Neil J. Young, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
- Neil J. Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015).
