Let Them Have the Cities: Inflation, Collapse, and Retreat in the Postwar Survivalist West

Abstract Before our contemporary label of “prepper,” and preceding the widespread adoption of “survivalist” in the late 1970s, those who sought self-sufficiency and security in remote locales of the American continent were known as “retreaters.” Anticipating catastrophes—chiefly hyperinflation, nuclear war, and urban chaos—violent enough to rend the social fabric of an increasingly decadent United States, these retreaters fled the swelling cities for the imagined security of the rural West to ride out the impending apocalypse. This article argues that one of the most salient and overlooked prime movers of the survivalist movement was a pervasive economic anxiety, metastasizing with the rampant stagflation of the 1970s. Drawing, for the first time, on twenty-five years of survivalist books, pamphlets, and newsletters, this paper shows that the secular eschatology of survivalism demands study if historians are to attain a clearer picture of the intellectual heritage of radical right millenarian visions from the late twentieth century up to the present day.