by Andrew J. Cerise 

A New Orleans native and Tulane University alumnus, Andrew Cerise is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of South Carolina. His doctoral research examines how perceptions of the Cold War shaped modern American conservatism. 

When I first heard in Summer 2024 that Tulane had Gingrich’s papers, my jaw hit the floor. I was in the middle of conducting research at Tulane University Special Collections on Congressman Dave Treen, one of Louisiana’s first conservative Republican representatives, when Agnieszka Czeblakow, the head of Research Services, offhandedly mentioned the new Gingrich acquisition. It was an incredible stroke of luck, as I desperately needed a conservative politician whose career included the 1980s and 1990s. To find out that Gingrich, who served in Congress from 1979 to 1999, was now immediately accessible induced something of an archival euphoria. I requested my first batch of boxes that same day. By the end of that summer, I had surveyed twenty years of Gingrich’s legislative history to find all references to the congressman’s conception of foreign policy. 

Yes. Foreign policy. I did not expect many musings on foreign affairs from a man who was a creature of domestic political ambitions. After all, Gingrich’s name and the “Contract with America” have become metonymies for conservatism in the 1990s, and most treatments of the Georgia transplant have dealt with his effect on domestic politics (recent examples being Zelizer’s Burning Down the House and Green and Crouch’s Newt Gingrich: The Rise and Fall of a Party Entrepreneur). However, his papers were riddled with references to foreign policy, beginning with his unsuccessful bid for Congress in the mid-1970s. 

It turns out, Gingrich had always considered foreign policy and national security to be pillars of his conservative philosophy. I was particularly enthused with his 1990 speech “Is There Conservatism After Communism?,” which became a critical part of my analysis of the post-Cold War moment. In this document, Gingrich asserted that the glue which held the conservative movement together was not anticommunism but “the issue of strength versus weakness.” If strength begot anticommunism and not the other way around, then conservatives saw no reason to change strategy after the Cold War. Gingrich’s claim thus provides a solid ideological link between the war hawks of the Vietnam Era and the neoconservatives of the War on Terror. 

However, this was one of the easier documents to locate. Archivists try to maintain the order in which materials were filed in the congressional office to preserve a sense of how it was organized and functioned (archivists call this “original order”). In this case, the 3,500 box collection is divided into twelve major parts with documents often grouped by the name of the congressional staffer who handled them, making tracking subjects across the collection sometimes challenging.  

An example from personal experience: I was looking for any Gingrich reference to the fall of the Soviet Union, an important milestone for a man who celebrated Grenada as America’s first victory over communism. But collection eight (POL-1000-08), which is supposed to cover 1991 to 1993, is pretty much exclusively office files and miscellany—heck, most of that isn’t even from the early ‘90s! As a result, the collection can be hit-or-miss and will require close study from researchers of the online guide in advance of any planned visit. 

Although Tulane may be tempted to declare Gingrich’s papers the crowning jewel of its extensive political collections, I believe that would be folly. Gingrich complements an already rich history of conservative thought and politics from South Louisiana preserved at Special Collections. I have already mentioned the papers of Louisiana governor and member of Congress Dave Treen, but TUSC also preserves the papers of member of Congress Robert Livingston (the other conservative Republican defector) and Congressman Felix Edward Hébert, the university’s controversial non-graduate and one of the best archival collections available for studying southern conservative Democrats. And I haven’t even mentioned the Boggs Papers (Hale and Lindy), which covers almost fifty years of political history specific to Louisiana’s 2nd District—an incredible opportunity for historians to assess change over time in Orleans and Jefferson Parish. 

I may be biased from my four years of churning through archival boxes as fast as the staff could provide (sorry, Lori and Kevin), but I believe TUSC is a gem of political history, an archive packed with potential for any historian interested in twentieth-century southern congressional politics.