Richard Nixon and his Madison Avenue handlers invented the modern political culture war. Running for office in 1968, Nixon drew on his grudges against the East Coast elites and the liberal media, finding that such resentment resonated with many Americans. He exploited racism and fueled white fears about crime and chaos, a playbook that defines Republican politics to this day. As president, he exploited mainstream America’s suspicion of hippies, calling drug legalization crusader Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America.” Three days before National Guard members killed student protesters at Kent State University, Nixon described antiwar demonstrators as “bums blowing up the campuses.” He fueled rumors about homosexuality in the press corps. He created and fanned a panic about drug use to vilify Black people and antiwar protesters, leaving a legacy of punitive and ineffective drug policy that is also, tragically, still with us. His administration helped coordinate construction workers’ violent riots against those protesting the Vietnam War and invited the rioters to the White House, promulgating the now-discredited idea that the Vietnam War represented a cultural divide between “hard hats” and “hippies.”
Why didn’t he do the same with the environmental movement? You’d think it would have been a goldmine for him: Imagine the potentially polarizing imagery of the long-haired tree huggers coming for the silent majority’s two-car-garage way of life.
But although these days climate policy has joined Drag Queen Story Hour as a hot trigger for right-wing obsession, Nixon didn’t give environmentalism the culture-war treatment. In fact, he was the most environmentalist U.S. president ever.
Nixon declared the first-ever Earth Day, on April 22, 1972. That year he also created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Water Act. In 1973, he signed the Endangered Species Act, or ESA, legislation which he had requested from Congress and of which he was the major champion. “Nothing is more precious and worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed,” he said, announcing the bill.
Perhaps even more jarring to our modern political expectations, Nixon’s support for Earth Day and for the planet was not iconoclastic among Republicans. While the original congressional resolution to create Earth Day came from Wisconsin Democrat Gaylord Nelson, the resolution was co-sponsored by California Republican Pete McCloskey.* The 1968 Republican Party platform called for an expansion of urban green spaces and of our natural parks, declaring that “our nation must pursue its activities in harmony with the environment.… We must be mindful of our priceless heritage of natural beauty.”