Convinced that the media tilts sharply to the left, conservative entrepreneurs developed their own dedicated news outlets across multiple platforms. These venues offered many new products with content designed to both attract audiences and push Republican officeholders further to the right. The business model was built around barbed commentary designed to generate controversy, which, in turn, yields attention. Part of the strategy was for commentators never to back down from what they said, claim the high ground of principle, and ridicule Republicans who might dare to compromise. Does this sound familiar?

Yet Nicole Hemmer’s new book, Messengers of the Right, is not about today’s outrage industry but, rather, covers a much earlier period of media history. Hemmer goes back more than half a century to tell her tale. Her primary focus is the emergence of new conservative media outlets, but wisely, she places her story squarely within the broader internal conflicts of the Republican Party. Against this tableau, the book intertwines biographies of three conservative media entrepreneurs, Clarence Manion, Henry Regnery, and William Rusher.

Manion was a lawyer by trade and rose to become dean of Notre Dame’s law school. He was a trenchant critic of the New Deal, and in August of 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him as chair of the Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. Manion somehow did not get the memo on not contradicting your new boss, and he openly opposed Eisenhower on a number of important issues. Within six months, Eisenhower fired him. Manion then thought about how he could continue to be part of the national conversation and, soon thereafter, he began the Manion Forum of Opinion, a talk radio show. By today’s standards, the program seems quaint. It was only 15 minutes once a week, and at first each episode consisted of a formal speech by Manion, a rather different approach than the conversational tone of today’s talk radio. (Shows now are typically three hours a day, five days a week.)

Henry Regnery studied economics under the tutelage of Joseph Schumpeter, then went to Washington to work in the Franklin Roosevelt administration. His disillusionment there led him down a path to hard-right conservatism. Believing that books matter, he launched Regnery Publishing in 1947, and he commissioned works by passionate ideologues whose writing stood outside the political mainstream. Over the years, the publishing house has gone through many convulsions and owners but remains in operation today.

Hemmer’s third subject is William Rusher, who began his adult life as a mainstream Republican working on Wall Street. But Rusher was a fierce anticommunist and, inspired by Joseph McCarthy, he moved to Washington to work as a Senate aide. National Review was founded by William F. Buckley in 1955 but was less than a roaring success at the outset. After McCarthy’s death in 1957, Rusher became the magazine’s publisher and began work to lift it off life support. National Review continues to publish, but in this era of conservative media, it seems anachronistic, something you would find on grandad’s nightstand.

The conservatism of Manion, Regnery, and Rusher was principled and idealistic. These men were well read, but they were as passionate as they were intellectual. This did not necessarily make for the best business practices, and none of them managed to create a profitable enterprise. Since they never attracted enough sales or advertising, all three entities were dependent on conservative patrons to subsidize their ongoing operations.

Hemmer was able to draw on archival collections of each of their papers. She meticulously mined this material, and it serves as the foundation of the book. The three linked biographies move forward chronologically, and Hemmer, a fluid writer, pushes the narrative forward in an engaging manner. She is successful at moving back and forth among the lives of these men, their businesses, the political dramas within the Republican Party, and real-world events that challenged the nation.

One of the most interesting threads of Hemmer’s story is the tortuous effort by these new media to keep the John Birch Society from defining conservatism. It was, in short, a matter of keeping the Far Far Right from infiltrating the Far Right. This secretive society spun bizarre conspiracy theories, most prominently that President Eisenhower was a communist, and by the 1960s, the Birch Society was drawing a lot of attention from the mainstream press, none of it positive. The conservative media wanted to somehow finesse disagreements with the Birchers, hoping to redirect the energy of far-right activists toward common goals. A successful strategy to do so never emerged, and the Barry Goldwater debacle in 1964 reflected a disastrous belief that this extreme faction could coexist with more mainstream conservatism.

Hemmer is admiring of Manion, Regnery, and Rusher without making them heroic, Ayn Rand–like figures swimming against the impossible tide of liberal media bias. Still, judgments are soft in spots. Most noticeably, she makes only passing reference to their tacit or overt support of segregation. Manion was openly sympathetic to George Wallace and had him as a guest on his radio show during the 1968 presidential campaign. National Review published a piece by Buckley that argued that it is best if “the White community” ruled the South because “it is the advanced race” (p. 117). The moral blindness of these men on race merited a more critical analysis.

The one central parallel to the contemporary conservative outrage industry is that these three media pioneers understood that the only way they were going to get their message out, in the form they wanted, was to own their own companies. But there is little else that the media properties of Manion, Regnery, and Rusher have in common with what we have today. They ran mom-and-pop stores while ownership now is in the hands of enormous corporate entities, such as Comcast, 21st Century Fox, and iHeartMedia. Even Breitbart is a sprawling empire. These properties are profit driven and use audience-measuring instruments to fine-tune their messaging. The content is crafted to be provocative, with the goal of portraying “villains” in the most repulsive light possible, while “heroes” can do no wrong, regardless of the evidence. There is nothing intellectual at all about the hosts of today’s programming. Rusher once called Richard Nixon a “tergiversating tramp.” You just do not hear that kind of talk from Sean Hannity.

Hemmer is cautious in drawing connections to what we have now, and she offers only a brief overview of what has happened in the media world since the death of her three subjects. There was no need for her to have done so since Messengers of the Right stands as it is as a first-rate history of the origins of conservative media.