Dr. Caroline Johnston, 'Rocky Mountain Extractivism in Washington'

This episode explores ‘carbon cowboys,’ the creation of A Blueprint for Conservative Government (1980), and an emerging historical concept: ‘extractive-statism.’

Dr Caroline Johnston is a political, environmental, and economic historian of the modern United States, and, since September 2025, the Paul Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in American History at Cambridge University.

At the seminar, she presented chapter five of her prospective manuscript, which examines the intersection of fossil fuel extraction in the Rocky Mountain West during the 1970s and 1980s and the rise of the modern American Right.

She explains how fossil fuel executives in this milieu developed a paradoxical ideology: demanding extensive federal subsidies and intervention while simultaneously invoking the imagery of the rugged individualist ‘frontier cowboy’ to denounce government regulation.

“And their rhetoric is explicitly anti-statist—they never acknowledge that they have historically and contemporarily benefited from enormous subsidies and structural aid from the government.”

Central to her research is the influence of figures such as Joseph Coors, descendant of the founder of the Coors Brewing Company, who leveraged wealth generated from the regional oil boom and established the influential conservative institution: The Heritage Foundation.

In 1980, the Heritage Foundation published Mandate for Leadership: A Blueprint for Conservative Government, whose policy recommendations were later adopted in significant part by the Reagan administration.

Keep an eye out for Dr Caroline Johnston’s (first) book, tentatively titled Carbon Cowboys. We’re excited!

Referenced in this discussion:

[24:21] Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011)

[31:10] Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Caroline Johnston presented at the seminar and spoke with us in Michaelmas term, on 17 November 2025.

Co-hosts

Shea Hendry — History PhD Candidate, Hughes Hall

Shea’s research examines the children of Loyalist refugees who embodied both American citizenship and British subjecthood—concurrently and consecutively—throughout the Early National period.

Megan Renoir — History PhD Candidate, Homerton College

Megan’s research examines the history of U.S. land institutions, nineteenth- and twentieth-century federal Indian policy, and violence against the NCRNT. Her work expands our understanding of the relationships between federalism, Western property institutions, and intractable land conflicts.

Production by Daisy Semmler, US History MPhil, Fitzwilliam College (2025).