Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right 0691121842, 9780691121840

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations
I. Patriotic Daughters and Isolationist Mothers: Conservative Women in the Early Twentieth Century
II. All Politics Was Local: Grassroots Conservatism in Postwar Los Angeles
III. Education or Indoctrination?: Conservative Female Activism in the Los Angeles Public Schools
IV. “Siberia, U.S.A.”: Psychological Experts and the State
V. the “Conservative sex”: Women and the Building of a Movement
Conclusion
Appendix: Conservative Bookstores operating in southern California in the 1960s
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Mothers of Conservatism

POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA

Series Editors William Chafe, Gary Gerstle, Linda Gordon, and Julian Zelizer

A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book

Mothers of Conservatism Women and the Postwar Right

Michelle M. Nickerson

p  r  i  n  c  e  t  o  n  u  n  i  v  e  r  s  i  t  y  p  r  e  s  s p  r  i  n  c  e  t  o  n 

a n d  o  x  f o  r  d

Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nickerson, Michelle M. Mothers of conservatism : women and the postwar right / Michelle M. Nickerson.   p. cm.— (Politics and society in twentieth-century America) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-12184-0 (hardback : acid-free paper) 1. Women—Political activity—United States—History—20th century. 2. Conservatism—United States—History—20th century. 3. United States—Politics and government—20th century. 4. Feminism—United States—History. I. Title. HQ1236.5.U6N53 2012 320.082—dc23  2011021793 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in ITC Berkeley Oldstyle Std Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Ben and Tobias

Contents

List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgments 

ix

Introduction

xiii

Abbreviations

xxv

Chapter I Patriotic Daughters and Isolationist Mothers   Conservative Women in the Early Twentieth Century 

1

Chapter II All Politics Was Local   Grassroots Conservatism in Postwar Los Angeles  32 Chapter III Education or Indoctrination?   Conservative Female Activism in the Los Angeles Public Schools 

69

Chapter IV “Siberia, U.S.A.”   Psychological Experts and the State 

103

Chapter V The “Conservative Sex”   Women and the Building of a Movement 

136

Conclusion

169

Appendix Conservative Bookstores Operating in Southern California in the 1960s 175 Notes

179

Index

217

Illustrations

Figure 2.1 Map of Los Angeles County, 1963 Figure 2.2 The First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, ca. 1935 Figure 2.3 Woodland Hills, San Fernando Valley, California, 1959 Figure 2.4 Valley Hunt Club, Pasadena, California, 1941 Figure 2.5 Marie Koenig and James Ingebretsen at Spiritual Mobilization, ca. 1950–56 Figure 2.6 Florence (Niehls) Ranuzzi, Showgirl Figure 2.7 Marion Miller, Housewife Spy Figure 3.1 Mary Allen, 1956 Figure 3.2 Houston Chapter, Minute Women of the U.S.A., 1953 Figure 3.3 Florence Fowler Lyons, 1952 Figure 4.1 American Public Relations Forum, Speaker’s Kit on Mental Health, ca. 1962 Figure 4.2 “Siberia U.S.A” Cartoon, National Review, 1956 Figure 5.1 Poor Richard’s Book Shop, ca. 1961–63 Figure 5.2 South Pasadena Americanism Center, ca. 1964 Figure 5.3 Map of Conservative Bookstores, 1960s  Figure 5.4 Janet Greene, Anticommunist Folk Singer, ca. 1966 Figure 5.5 Goldwater Girls, 1964

33 39 43 46 58 61 63 83 89 92 124 132 144 146 149 153 159

Acknowledgments

I would never have completed this book without the support of numerous friends, colleagues, and institutions who saw this project through to the very end. Clara Platter, Brigitta van Rheinberg, Sara Wolf, and Karen Carter at Prince­-­ ton University Press have worked patiently with me to bring this manuscript to print. The Graduate School, American Studies Program, and Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale University provided the initial dissertation fellowships that launched the project, and the University of Texas at Dallas, the Historical Society of Southern California, the Haynes Foundation, and the Autry Center for Western History also funded this work. The History Department and Fondren Library at Southern Methodist University furnished me with the borrowing privileges and comfortable study carrel that enabled me to execute the initial revision stages during a year of unemployment in Dallas. I would especially like to thank the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, for the generous fellowships and for the supportive community of scholars and staff in residence that have sustained me all these years. I have benefited enormously from the expertise of generous archivists, librarians, and collectors who helped me access amazing historical materials. Robert Marshall and the staff at Calstate Northridge’s Urban Archives Center dazzled me with the rich and deep collections they have amassed in Los Angeles organizational history. Bill Frank and Alan Jutzi, at the Huntington helped sustain this project with their unflagging assistance and enthusiasm. Bill Geerhart, mastermind behind the Cold War and atomic culture website www. conelrad.com has shared valuable resources from his media, document, and oral history collections over the years. The staff at the Arizona History Foundation, especially Susan Irwin, Rebekah Tabah, and Linda Whitaker, has been incredibly generous in helping me expand my research on the Goldwater campaign, as has David Roepke at the Ashland University Archives. I am indebted also to the Southern Methodist University Library system, especially to Russell Martin and Anne Peterson at the DeGolyer Library and Cindy Boeke in Digital Collections. Thank you, Roy Bullock in Pasadena, for sharing your personal collection of John Birch Society materials. Research would have been far more difficult if I had not been able to access the superb collection of electronic resources at UT Dallas through its fabulous staff, especially Linda Snow and the anonymous interlibrary loan staff who deliver documents at lightning speed. I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists who helped me at the

­x  •  Acknowledgments Seaver Center for Western History Research at the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles, the Special Collections archives at UCLA, librarian Kristine Kasianovich at UCLA, and the Special Collections and University archives at the University of Oregon. Gracious colleagues, friends, and students have read and commented on drafts of this book. Nancy Cott, John Faragher, Robert Johnston, and Steven Pitti gave the first round of valuable criticism on the manuscript in the form of dissertation readers’ reports. My first manuscript writers’ group—Suzanne Bost, Deborah Cohen, and Alexis McCrossen—gave the next round of comments and much needed support in those early years. In my year on the Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington I acquired more precious readers, including Stephen Aron, Bill Deverell, Joe Hall, Cheryl Koos, Virginia Scharf, Robert Self, and participants in the Autry Center’s Western History workshop. Thank you, David Farber, for letting me continue to adopt you as a political history mentor and for reading the introduction. Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, you helped me with great advice right at the end. Thank you Nancy Cott, for looking at anything I sent you and turning it over so quickly. I made the right move by assigning part of my manuscript to my graduate seminar, New Directions in U.S. Political History. Thank you so much, 7399, for your questions, comments, and ongoing support: Lilian Barger, Lisa Federer, Michael Harding, Kristin Hoppe, Megan Malone, Donald McLaughlin, Michael Noble, Kimberly Pettigrew, Martin Russell, Shirley Terrell, Kenneth Vaughn, and Kevin Walters. The Arts and Humanities Works-InProgress group at UT Dallas gave me valuable edits on the first chapter; thank you, Sean Cotter, Meg Cotter-Lynch, and Natalie Ring. Thanks also to the historians who participated in the Johns Hopkins Seminar, which contributed invaluable criticism on this chapter as well. I am fortunate to live with one of the profession’s toughest editors, Benjamin Johnson, who brought his scrutiny to bear on as much of this project as my fragile ego could take. I am especially indebted to two readers for the work they put into this manuscript: my series editor at Princeton University Press, Linda Gordon, who scoured chapter drafts at various stages and gave pages of valuable comments, detailed line edits, and ample encouragement along the way; and my friend and collaborator Darren Dochuk, who read just about every chapter in various stages and cheered me on in the toughest moments of the revision process. Crucial to this book have been a number of conservative and moderate Republican activists and family members who allowed me to interview them and in some instances also shared photos or opened their personal archival collections to me. I would especially like to thank Mary Cunningham and Gianna Ranuzzi, for granting me full access to the political materials of their late

Acknowledgments  •  xi

parents, Florence and F. X. (Frank) Ranuzzi after Florence endured a marathon two-day interview with me. Activist Jane Crosby, originally of South Pasadena, generously shared her personal papers, sat for an interview, and continues to answer my questions. After the late Marie Koenig generously opened her enormous private archive to me, her daughters, Margaret and Susan, gave it to the Huntington Library, where I and other scholars continue to mine it. I am especially grateful to Lucy Hilands of San Marino, who connected me to numerous activists in her friendship circles and has kept me connected to that community over many years. I have been so fortunate to have found these women. Countless people deserve credit for helping me complete this book. It took a village to clean up this manuscript for publication. I am so grateful to my copyeditor, Margery Tippie, indexer, Jan Williams, and readers, Lisa Carr, Catherine Korda, and Brenda Nickerson. I had the most competent of student research assistants: Julie Borges and Lilian Barger at UT Dallas, Jennifer Holland at the University of Wisconsin, and Jenna Valadez at SMU. Erin Chase, Dixie Lane, Susie Krasnoo, Carolyn Powell, Roy Ritchie, Mona Schulman, and Jenny Watts have extended themselves over and over again at the Huntington Library. At my back always were my incredibly supportive faculty and staff colleagues at UT Dallas, especially Charles Bambach, Rick Brettel, Susan Briante, Matthew Brown, David Channell, Sherry Clarkson, Sean Cotter, Dave Edmunds, Tiffany Fellers, Jonathan Frome, Charles Hatfield, Janet Johnson, Dean Dennis Kratz, Pierette LaCour, Michelle Lemon, Michelle Long, Lisa Lyles, Christa McIntyre, Candice Mills, Stephen Rabe, Monica Rankin, Mary Jo Rex, Natalie Ring, Nils Roehmer, Mark Rosen, Eric Schlereth, Jeff Schultz, Morgan Shockey, Erin Smith, Sabrina Starnaman, Charissa Terranova, Dan Wickberg, Michael Wilson, Beth Young, and MaryAnn Young. The late Peggy Pascoe and her partner, Linda Long, hosted me on a research trip. The Clements Center for Southwest Studies supported me with all the wonderful privileges of affiliation through their fellows in the community: thank you, Andrea Boardman, Ruth Ann Elmore, Ben Johnson, Sherry Smith, and the late David Weber. Numerous other scholars have contributed to this project with their advice, encouragement, hospitality, friendship, or some combination of the above: Carl Abbott, June Benowitz, Shana Bernstein, Carla Bittel, Jennifer Burns, Cathleen Cahill, Robert Chase, Nathan Connolly, Joseph Crespino, Donald Critchlow, Kirsten Delegard, Michael Engh, Jared Farmer, Janet Fireman, Natalie Fousekis, Robert Alan Goldberg, Elliott Gorn, Daniel HoSang, Linda Janke, Volker Janssen, Laresh Jayasanker, Matthew Lassiter, Sylvia Manzano, Andrew Needham, Kim Riley, Jeff Roche, Elizabeth Shermer, Sam Truett, Hubert Villevenue, and David Wrobel.

­xii  •  Acknowledgments I am most indebted to my family for seeing me through this book from beginning to end (a fact reinforced by the sound of my toddler and his father, playing on the other side of this wall while I continue to type away in the home office). They deserve medals for enduring this process with me. My motherin-law, Pamela Walker, father-in-law, Stephen Johnson, and late father-in-law, Walter Isle, kept me alive with hearty meals, restful vacations, and stacks of nonhistorical reading materials. How many Ph.D.s have in-laws that read and comment on their dissertations? The extended Johnson, Korda, Isle, and Rubin clan cheered for me throughout the process. I want to thaink my parents, Allen and Brenda Nickerson, sister, Jennifer Rosenberg, and brother, Eric Nickerson, for putting up with this project, my steady companion over the years on holiday and summer visits. Thank you especially for helping with child care! Lastly, I want to thank my husband, Benjamin Johnson, for sacrifices of time, sleep, and so much more that were made to complete this book. Mothers of Conservatism is dedicated to Ben and our son, Tobias, for making this final stage of the book so joyful.

Introduction

Weary of war and relieved to be free of the Great Depression, Americans embraced family life with zeal in the 1950s. Women occupied a revered place in this revived domesticity that valorized homemaking and motherhood through television programming, film, and advertisements for appliances. Although the iconic 1950s housewife offers an abundance of insight into the ideals of the postwar generation, she obscures the countless ways that actual women attempted to live out those ideals. Operating among the legions of self-identified housewives who did not stay home in those years flourished a grassroots subculture of women that emerged mostly behind the scenes of the nascent conservative movement. These female activists on the right made the domestic ideology guiding their family, social, and civic lives into political careers by translating widespread cultural assumptions about female intuition into a basis for asserting authority in local affairs. Indeed, the imprints on the historical imagination left by Leave It to Beaver and I Love Lucy reruns have hidden the animated, combative, and perfumed world of metropolitan politics developing at that time.1 Important origins of the postwar right took root in such settings, where women shaped the conservative ascendancy with concerns, ideas, and issues that were drawn from the fabric of their everyday lives. Capitalizing upon cultural assumptions about women and motherhood, they put themselves forward as representatives of local interests who battled bureaucrats for the sake of family, community, and God. Armed with a strong collective sense of where they and their local crusades fit into the global struggles against communism, they successfully overpowered school administrators, boards of education, and teachers in the name of local control and protection of parental authority. Female activists forced their priorities onto the larger agenda of the movement by anointing themselves spokespeople for parents, children, and local communities against the predatory interventionist state. The gender ideology that proved most formative to the conservatism of women Cold Warriors originated in the early twentieth century and reverberated into the 2008 presidential election. A relatively privileged class position, lifestyle, and set of familial duties located women activists in that familiar social category known as “housewives.” Hundreds of years old, and found in several languages by the twentieth century, that seemingly timeless designation of female domestic labor acquired political capital in the mid-twentieth century by virtue of its associations not just with motherhood, spirituality, and the home but with ordinariness, anonymity, and community. The resurgence of populist

­xiv  •  Introduction fervor during the Great Depression, moreover, created a new female political sensibility, one that might usefully be called “housewife populism.” Historians have documented how changing ideals of womanhood shaped American politics from the nation’s founding. Revived but reformulated numerous times over throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the virtues associated with “Republican motherhood,” hewn from Whig philosophy and revolutionary zeal, valorized women’s work of raising morally righteous, informed citizens. Industrialization and the market revolution gave rise to an ideological formation alternately called the “cult of true womanhood” or “cult of domesticity” by scholars to describe the middle-class emphasis on female morality, spirituality, nurturance, and sexual purity in the nineteenth century.2 Though “Republican motherhood” and the cult of true womanhood ideals underscored female duties to the home and family, both served as the basis for women’s participation in the nation’s political parties, motivation for social reform work, and the inspiration for women’s club formation.3 Developments at the turn of the twentieth century proved transformative enough to justify naming another version of this ideology “maternalism,” to describe women’s “natural” role in politics as reformers who would uplift society.4 Maternalism, according to Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “exalted women’s capacity to mother and extended to society as a whole the values of care, nurturance and morality.”5 Indeed, historians have established that the abolitionist, progressive, and feminist movements cannot be understood without consideration of how these gender ideologies informed the outlook of participants. The mid-twentieth century gave rise to a gendered political formation that also demands interrogation. Housewife populism spanned the political spectrum, encompassing the attitudes and activism of women on the left and the right. Historian Annelise Orleck’s study of Depression-era wives and mothers who boycotted against rising food prices, demonstrated against evictions, bartered with each other, and lobbied government officials captures a dialectic between the women’s self-portrayals and contemporary media representations of their political work, which she calls “housewife activism.” 6 The militant style exhibited by Orleck’s subjects drew from long-standing, but unstable, conceptions of femininity, the family, and antielitism in the United States that circumstances of the Depression brought into alignment. The Depression-era housewives inverted class attitudes typically assumed by middle-class female activists, emphasizing women’s lack of status rather than their middle class superiority. They relied upon assumptions about women to express dissent, demanding to be heard as representatives of the economically marginal. Although their “maternal” role proved no less formative to their political subjectivity, these women were not maternalists; they introduced a new politics of

Introduction  •  xv

motherhood that positioned themselves, as mothers, in relationship to centers of power. Unlike maternalist activists of the progressive era, they did not intervene in their battles as outside agents of reform or act as mediating agents between the welfare state and the poor. They were not middle-class professionals working through charitable organizations to uplift society. Quite to the contrary, housewife activists based their political claims on women’s position within the community and characterized their enemies as outsider elitists who aimed to exploit that community for the purposes of fortifying the power of their own office. Housewife activists introduced a new populist outlook to female politics that endured into the twenty-first century. Maternalism, as a middle-class social reform tradition, lost cultural power over the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s for several reasons.7 Historians of the suffrage and early feminist movement have demonstrated that passage of the Nineteenth Amendment never realized the “woman’s bloc” that maternalist discourse promised would redeem American politics from the corrupt and selfish impulses of men.8 The prosperity and consumer culture of the 1920s, moreover, invited the newer generation to reject the public frigidity they associated with Victorianism in favor of freer heterosexual self-expression by kissing, smoking, and drinking with the boys.9 A convergence of social scientific, therapeutic, and liberal individualist discourses subverted Victorian notions of an all-powerful “mother love.” The “‘silver cords’ of love” binding mothers to offspring, glorified in the nineteenth century, came to be regarded as a potentially sinister, pathological danger to children and society.10 The post–World War I red scare further undermined maternalism. “Patriotic” women’s groups took the lead in anticommunist attacks against reformers, their institutions, and welfare legislation in the 1910s and 1920s, crippling female progressivism.11 This study of American conservatism suggests that the Great Depression also exerted a profound impact upon maternalism, that it radically reconfigured female political ideology by devaluing maternal uplift and reform while elevating the importance of maternal protection and community-building. The severe economic crisis invigorated the nation’s appreciation for no-nonsense women with the wits to carry their families through the hard times. The new political woman of the 1930s was not the “angel of her home” housewife who volunteered to Americanize immigrants, rescue prostitutes, or save the nation from demon alcohol. She was an everywoman housewife who worked to keep her family and neighborhood intact—to maintain as much normalcy and security as possible. Orleck’s “housewife activist” forged her feminine antielitist expressions of solidarity within a distinctly working-class political milieu. In fact, historian Temma Kaplan has argued that working-class women are more likely to act communally because their shared work and daily proximity to each

­xvi  •  Introduction other nurture solidarity, while the many different activities enjoyed by middleclass women inhibit communal behavior. Kaplan sees “female consciousness,” which relies upon assumptions about the “maternal duty to preserve life,” as distinct from “feminist consciousness,” which demands that women be given rights based on basic principles of equality. Kaplan’s conceptualization of female consciousness, adopted by many scholars who study women and politics, has proven useful for appreciating the global scope and impact of popular maternal outrage.12 The importance of populism in American history, however, justifies a more sustained examination of antielitism in the United States. As the Depression wore on and World War II engulfed Europe and threatened to involve the United States, rage against Wall Street and landlords turned toward Washington as if financial and government leaders operated as one, centralized cabal. Indignation against economic elites shaded into anticommunist and antiSemitic protest, attributing the nation’s woes to New Deal bureaucrats as well as international Jewish bankers, eventually inflecting protests against U.S. entry into World War II with isolationist overtones. Feminine ideals contributed to a conservative political consciousness in formation. To be a “moral guardian” of society, in the minds of many women, meant to protect the nation from aliens, internationalism, and power-hungry bureaucrats in Washington. As with the working-class “housewife activists” politicizing their ethnic neighborhoods, isolationist women found common cause in shared feelings of marginality, along with a sense of duty to family and community. Postwar women then updated its political styles and culture for the conservatism of a new era. e Not until the early 1960s did American conservatism become a recognizable and self-conscious “movement,” though its major ideological components, institutions, and political actors had been aligning since the end of World War II. While the Cold War and red scare of the 1950s revived anticommunism, critics of the New Deal welfare state located mainly in the nation’s universities articulated corresponding economic arguments against centralized government. As the word “liberal,” once associated with laissez-faire economic principles and small government as the means of realizing American egalitarianism, became linked during the Depression to federal growth and intervention on behalf of economic equality, proponents of small government formerly known as liberals claimed the designation “libertarian.” A second group of scholars seeking to confront the “relativism” they perceived as so corrosive to Western values forged another intellectual tradition on the right referred to alternately as “traditionalism” or “Christian traditionalism.” Also called the “new conservatives,”

Introduction  •  xvii

Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, and other (mostly) men of academe argued for a revival of faith and moral absolutes as the necessary antidotes for confronting recent scourges on the Western world, like genocide and totalitarianism. Anticommunism, which infused both libertarian and traditionalist thought, gave conservatism the characteristics of a crusade around which adherents who disagreed about some things could rally.13 Conservatives gradually seized control of the GOP through important state battles, nominated conservative Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, and launched the political career of Ronald Reagan, who would complete the conservative revolution as president in the 1980s. Right-wing women drew inspiration from the emerging intellectuals by reading their books and articles in periodicals like Human Events, the Freeman, and the National Review. Intense personal and group study aided by a flurry of clipping, reprinting, and the sharing of literature through neighbors or the U.S. Postal Service taught them to see the events of their everyday worlds in a broader political landscape. In the process, they became a formidable political force locally before becoming a force within the conservative movement when it finally coalesced. Through their reading, group discussion, and activist projects, women developed common self-perceptions of their own political relevance that incorporated ideas from the new conservative thought and from American culture at large. Though housewives and mothers did not launch the first attacks against progressive education, they invigorated and transformed that opposition, insisting that policy decisions made by their local school boards held national importance that should engage the interest of anticommunists.14 Indeed, the collapse of the progressive education movement in the 1950s resulted directly from conservative protest, mounted in large part by women, linked through newsletters, who undermined the zeal of school reformers one district at a time. Such a victory raises questions about how women shaped political history through the minds of schoolchildren, since the social reform agenda of the progressive education movement might have become a liberal force in postwar history had conservatives not killed it. Antielitist critiques of progressive educators soon led to scrutiny of anyone with the authority to brainwash, including psychologists. Their attacks against mental health “experts” reverberated in the larger movement, even in the National Review, which initially chided the “hysterical” housewives for spinning wild conspiracy theories.15 e This study of women and conservatism examines how the anticommunist protest that scorched Southern California politics in the 1950s fueled a local

­xviii  •  Introduction conservative movement with broad national importance. In 1962 the recently elected governor, Edmund “Pat” Brown, asked state attorney general Stanley Mosk to lead an investigation of the conservative John Birch Society. Mosk declined, disdaining the society as a bunch of “wealthy businessmen, retired military officers, and little old ladies in tennis shoes.”16 The latter part of Mosk’s dismissal lived on as a caricature of right-wing women in California and beyond who blanketed the nation’s metropolitan corridors with anticommunist leaflets. The rock duo Jan and Dean solidified associations between the old lady and Pasadena with their popular 1964 hit, “Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” about a speedster granny who raced around Colorado Boulevard in her little red car. Little old lady cartoons soon became regular features of Frontier magazine, California’s equivalent of the liberal Nation. 1964 subscription forms exhibited a scowling old woman hunched in a black dress and dowdy shawl that patriotically displayed the stars and stripes. “There are more things dear little old lady,” proclaimed the advertisement, “than are dreamt of in your untainted philosophy.”17 Female and old, the little old lady symbol stood for attributes that opponents of the emerging right wanted to believe, that the movement represented the views of a befuddled, impotent, waning generation of crackpots. The iconic granny also provoked laughter, however, because real live women—some old, some middle-aged, some young—had indeed imprinted activist culture with their own distinct style, becoming a nuisance to many. When the city of Pasadena celebrated its sixth annual Festival of the Arts in the fall of 1968, organizers entertained the community with a funeral procession for the “little old lady in tennis shoes,” since the iconic grassroots activist had brought unwanted notoriety to the community. The festival’s forty-four days of concerts, poetry readings, and art exhibits inaugurated the transition into another era, as symbolized by the “new” Pasadena’s three-pointed crown, meant to represent education, cultural enterprise, and economic development. After a eulogy for the right-wing female political culture that had made Pasadena known for its conservatism in recent years, a Superior Court judge presented a will bequeathing prize possessions to well-known comic celebrities. Jack Benny received the tennis shoes; Dean Martin inherited a collection of old bottles; and Johnny Carson won possession of the little old lady’s favorite books. At the final reception, city officials laid the right-wing effigy to rest as they raised the crown.18 The parody of conservative women, staged to mark Pasadena’s embrace of freshness and modernity, highlights the widespread awareness of—and discomfort with—female right-wing activists in the region. Orange County tends to win recognition as the epicenter of California conservatism. Indeed Lisa McGirr’s outstanding study of the county’s grassroots right, Suburban Warriors,

Introduction  •  xix

reveals the constellation of historical factors that indeed bred a robust rightwing political culture that earned the southern suburbs their reputation. The historical forces that made Orange County conservative, however, actually flourished within a much broader metropolitan context that stretched from the northwestern parts of the San Fernando Valley east to the San Gabriel Valley and south into the O.C. Though more politically, racially, ethnically, and economically diverse than Orange County, Los Angeles County figured as centrally in this movement as its notoriously homogenous neighbor. The growth of the defense industries, influx of migrants, rapidly changing demographics, expanded highway system, proliferation of suburbs, industrialization of those suburbs, and court rulings that chipped away at segregation fueled the metropolitan-based conservative movement. The sense of political community that made conservatism feel like a crusade in Southern California enveloped activists across greater Los Angeles. Southland activists built a movement that took advantage of their multinodal cityscape. Housewives who lived in Pasadena drove cars over the hills to meetings in Encino and speaking engagements downtown. While living rooms in the newer suburbs proved comfortable for study groups, old Los Angeles venues like the First Congregational Church and Ambassador Hotel provided room, grandeur, and centralized locations appropriate for prominent lecturers. The new freeways made it easy for activists to attend each other’s events and haul the cartons of the mimeographed literature they printed in their garages. The thirty-six different right-wing bookstores that opened across Southern California in the 1960s assisted each other like branches of the same regional bank, rather than competitors. Tracking the size of this movement in number of participants proves difficult, since organizations left few membership records. If we use scholarly, government, and contemporary reports to estimate, a core group of at least 2,100 diligent women across the greater Los Angeles metropolitan region had contributed significant hours to the movement by the early 1960s. The same reports would figure 8,600–10,750 less active participants. Rather than publishing newsletters, starting organizations, opening bookstores, and driving around the Southland to give lectures, less active participants subscribed to those newsletters, joined and attended occasional meetings, shopped in the bookstores, and sat in the week-long Schools of Anti-Communism at hotels and stadiums.19 Women activists first asserted themselves effectively in postwar Southern California politics with the 1950 “Pasadena affair,” a battle waged by parents against the city’s school superintendent, whom they deemed too progressive. Recently hired for his stellar Ivy League credentials and performance as an administrator in Minneapolis, Superintendant Willard Goslin angered conservatives in his district by introducing progressive pedagogy, desegregating part

­xx  •  Introduction of the district, and expanding the budget. The women who became deeply involved in the campaign to oust Goslin not only discovered their effectiveness in local politics, they also developed a sense of purpose and importance from shared ideals as mothers and housewives, from the larger universe of conservative thought generated by intellectuals on the right, and from populist notions of women’s inherent legitimacy as nonelite political actors—notions that acquired discursive power during the Great Depression and World War II. The Pasadena affair unfolded, moreover, on a national stage of anticommunist education battles that turned parents against administrators and teachers in communities as far flung as Scarsdale, New York, and Houston, Texas. Southern California women not only read about these other school districts in newspapers but developed camaraderie and activist networks with the distant community members involved. The momentum and political culture that emerged out of the Pasadena affair cascaded into other successes. In 1952 anticommunists in Los Angeles forced public school administrators to eliminate all teaching materials published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and three years later they compelled the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to suspend a popular adult enrichment reading program deemed by them as too liberal. Such local victories proved fleeting, concentrated as they were in the few years when anticommunist anxiety gripped the nation most forcefully. Red purging waned in the late 1950s. However, the power enjoyed by women on the right in the early and mid-1950s stimulated activist fervor for years to come by forging community, intellectual bonds, and enthusiasm among them. As this examination of the Pasadena affair will illustrate, Southern Californians mounted early opposition to desegregation in concert with conservatives in the South and other parts of the country. While the massive resistance of the early 1960s and antibusing demonstrations of the 1970s dominate most historical accounts of segregationist resistance, community battles against school integration actually preceded the Brown v. Board of Education decision that mandated desegregation nationwide in 1954. California had been experimenting with integration and parents had been expressing their defiance of it for several years before the Warren Court handed down Brown. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California upheld the Mendez v. Westminster ruling of 1946 that “segregation of Mexican youngsters found no justification in the laws of California,” the Anderson bill repealed segregationist statutes.20 School administrators then slowly crafted policies to bring their districts in line with the new mandates. Examination of the Southern California right contributes to the growing literature on race and the American right after World War II by examining the

Introduction  •  xxi

formation of racial attitudes transregionally. To productive scholarly effect, recent historians have been calling attention to structural forces embedded over time into commercial, residential, and leisure spaces, as well as legal, education, and financing systems that perpetuate racial inequality.21 I hope to expand upon this literature by examining how conservative activists in greater Los Angeles helped to forge a transregional approach to protecting segregation in the public education system, an institution that they recognized for its importance in maintaining racial order. Californians worked in concert with activists all over the country, many in the South, to forge a common anticommunist discourse of protest against the civil rights movement. The literature that circulated among them cultivated a language of states’ rights, internationalism, nationalization, and other terms that expressed shared interpretations of the forces shaping racial transformation in America. Dissecting the relationship between anticommunist and anti-integration protest demands gender analysis. As the red scare and civil rights movement charged the otherwise mundane business of public school education with new significance, activities once “civic” became political. Claiming a stake in these battles as representatives of the family—mothers and housewives protecting children, home life, and neighborhoods—women drew power from their class position and from red scare anxiety to exert their political will over local administrators who had more official power than they. These female activists, in dialectic with conservative men, also cultivated an essentialist interpretation of women’s political talents and duties, asserting that housewives and mothers were better suited than men to the work of anticommunist vigilance. Emphasizing that their flexible schedules gave them time to study communism, they argued that women were more politically aware than men, since husbands necessarily focused on the economic well-being of the family. Relying on long-held notions of women’s inherent spiritual nature, right-wing literature published by men also encouraged women by naturalizing the relationship between conservatism and femininity. Conservative women fought desegregation with the belief that their communities were under siege by political elites inciting turmoil that they, as women, needed to repel as housewives—the humblest, most self-sacrificial, and least pretentious members of American society. Women activists thus cultivated a gender consciousness, already in formation on the right, that valorized the local community as the fountainhead of American democracy. The links they made between feminine powerlessness and community powerlessness in the age of federal welfare and intervention isolated an amorphously defined centralized state as the most dangerous threat to freedom. Convinced that progressive educators, civil rights activists, UNESCO, and the Supreme

­xxii  •  Introduction Court constituted a unified assault on community sovereignty that they were duty bound as mothers/housewives/citizens to confront, they conflated the problems of racial and bureaucratic outsiders. The anticommunist campaigns against government intervention, moreover, buried unspoken —well, usually unspoken—assumptions about the consequences that would result from racial mixing. Although the conservative movement did not coalesce until the early 1960s, I alternately refer to women activists on the right as “conservative,” “anticommunist,” and “right-wing” to underscore the ideological contribution their work made to the ascendance of the American right. By no means audacious, this decision mimics the practice of women’s historians who describe Mary Wollstonecraft or Charlotte Perkins Gilman as “feminists,” though Wollstonecraft left her intellectual mark before the term came into usage and Gilman chose not to adopt the term as a description of her political outlook. Although anticommunist fervor united women activists more than any other factor, libertarianism and Christianity also shaped their political outlook. I wish to emphasize that their political activism represented conservatism in formation. e Mothers of Conservatism examines conservative women’s history in five chapters organized roughly by chronology, starting with a preliminary background study of activist thought and practice leading up to the Cold War. The first chapter starts with female “patriotic” groups of the World War I era that promoted national loyalty, attacked communism, and curtailed expansion of the progressive state. Speaking up on behalf of their families, these predecessors of Cold Warrior activists established ideological connections between the growth of centralized government in the United States and the expansion of communist regimes abroad. The first chapter also charts the changing relationship between class attitudes and antistatism during the Depression era, when housewife populism came to mark the political discourse of conservative women. Chapter 2 documents the formation of conservative activist culture in Los Angeles after World War II. Starting in the early 1950s, the grassroots right started meeting in study groups, publishing newsletters, giving speeches, forming letter-writing clubs, volunteering at GOP headquarters, and agitating in local politics. Activism thrived in tandem with the movement’s intellectual development, not subsequently. After outlining the historic recipe of political, economic, religious, and ethnic factors that made conservatism so powerful in metropolitan Los Angeles, this chapter examines the formation of conservative female political culture and consciousness.

Introduction  •  xxiii

Chapter 3 focuses on a series of educational battles in the early 1950s that reveal the step-by-step process of how political ideas germinated in the fabric of women’s everyday lives. Starting with the “Pasadena affair” of 1950, this investigation shows how new ideas about “mind control” and “brainwashing” inspired political epiphanies among women otherwise busy with their children’s homework and PTA duties. Parents, especially mothers, started to think they saw communism in action. For a few years, conservative women asserted themselves in school politics as activists and school board members in Southern California, forcing teachers to resign and blocking policies they deemed subversive. Chapter 4 documents how activism in education politics turned the attention of conservative women to professional psychology as a logical next target. Fears of “brainwashing” segued into fears of mental health professionals and the policy making they promoted in Washington, D.C., resulting in conservative protest of an amorphous “mental health establishment.” Anticommunist activists characterized psychology as a dangerous medicine that could be used to manipulate thought and, by extension, political will. Although conservative intellectuals scoffed at the conspiracy theories circulated by the “hysterical” housewives, the women’s arguments nevertheless found their way into criticism articulated by scholars and politicians by the mid-1960s. Chapter 5 studies women’s influence of conservatism as it entered the movement phase in the early 1960s. Even as they denounced the mass politics they feared, conservatives came to recognize the necessity of stimulating a popular consciousness on the right to thwart momentum growing on the left, especially among youths. The anticommunist crusade that had been building among activists over the 1950s became a natural source from which to draw the necessary vigor to generate a movement, which leaders explicitly recognized. Women activists, already a central part of this crusade, became an essential part of the coalescing conservative movement. They formed chapters of the John Birch Society, a national organization that self-consciously sought to replicate leftist tactics to thwart “communism,” which it conflated with all liberal movements. Women opened “patriotic” bookstores in their neighborhoods that featured their favorite conservative authors. One talented transplant from Ohio composed anticommunist music to lend the movement its own soundtrack as competition for the guitar-wielding folk singers on the left. The chapter ends with the Presidential election of 1964, when the campaign of Barry Goldwater, which incorporated conservative women in new ways, came to be known as a movement. The conclusion examines how housewife populist ideology influenced a new generation of conservative female activists, and questions how the history

­xxiv  •  Introduction of women on the right might bring useful scrutiny to the categories and assumptions that frame U.S. feminist and political history. I argue that the endurance of housewife populist ideology demands that scholars pay closer attention to the ambiguities and paradoxes that conservative women have managed to reconcile and marshal to their own interests, in much the way that suffragists and other skillful political actors in American history achieved their goals.

Abbreviations

AAPS Association of American Physicians and Surgeons AFC America First Committee AHP American Heritage Project ALA American Legion Auxilary ALA American Library Association AVC American Veterans Committee BAF Better America Federation CACC Christian Anti-Communism Crusade CCCW National Committee on the Cause and Cure for War CIO Committee for Industrial Organization CMA California Medical Association CPUSA Communist Party of the USA CRA California Republican Assembly CWA Concerned Women for America DAR Daughters of the American Revolution EPC Educational Policies Commission ERA Equal Rights Amendment FAE Fund for the Advancement of Education FEE Foundation for Economic Education HUAC House Un-American Activities Committee ISI Intercollegiate Society of Individualists JBS John Birch Society MFMA Mothers for Moral America MFSA Methodist Federation for Social Action NAOWS National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage NAWSA National American Woman Suffrage Association NIMH National Institute for Mental Health NLMA National Legion of Mothers of America NMHA National Mental Health Act NPLW Network of Patriotic Letter Writers NWP National Woman’s Party PTA Parent Teachers Association SDC School Development Council SM Spiritual Mobilization SPSSI Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues TMSC Tuesday Morning Study Club

­xxvi  • 

Abbreviations

UN United Nations UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization UNSC United States National Commission for UNESCO UROC United Republicans of California WITCH Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell WHO World Health Organization WMHF World Mental Health Foundation WORC Watchdogs of the Republican Party WPPC Women’s Patriotic Publishing Company YAF Young Americans for Freedom YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association

Mothers of Conservatism

C H A P T E R   1

Patriotic Daughters and Isolationist Mothers Conservative Women in the Early Twentieth Century

“Remove it at your peril,” announced Lucinda Benge to anyone who dared touch the American flag she and other members of Women for America had draped over a balcony at Los Angeles City Hall. “We’ll horsewhip every one of you if you take it down.” Benge’s team of middle-class housewives staged demonstrations that December of 1950 against display of United Nations flags in Los Angeles government buildings. The UN flag represented disrespect for U.S. sovereignty, in their eyes, as an icon that privileged internationalism over patriotism. The protests had started back in August, when several women appeared at a meeting of county supervisors to express their indignation. “I oppose definitely the raising of the United Nations flag in any way,” asserted Benge, “for the reason that it stands for an organization which was conceived in treason.  .  .  .”1 Unsuccessful that summer, the twenty or so activists then assembled in the rotunda four months later, where they recited the Pledge of Allegiance and the Gettysburg Address before moving on to the county’s Hall of Records to try and remove the UN flag from a meeting room. The group almost succeeded, as one lady ventured a lunge before a quick-footed sheriff’s deputy thwarted the snatch.2 The organization Women for America made almost no impact on politics in and of itself, but the folksy, nationalist, and maternal style on display at Los Angeles City Hall contributed to a formative gender ideology on the right. Conservatives had long imagined an inverse relationship between women and centralized state power by virtue of a mother’s position in the family. As one man wrote to the Los Angeles Examiner about the UN flag protestors, “They all have nature’s instinct of motherhood . . . that mother’s fidelity to protect their young.”3 The mother-versus-the-state dichotomy represented one of many frameworks through which conservatives understood and reasoned out the inherently problematic relationship they perceived between the interests of government and the interests of the people. By 1950, decades of activism by women had established an important place for familial privacy in the antistatist discourse as it evolved over the twentieth century. Conservatism became a movement after World War II, but its basic components as a thought tradition came into formation in the 1910s and 1920s.

­2  •  Chapter I Historians have examined cohering nationalist, libertarian, traditionalist, and other ideals taking shape, but without considering how gender ideology imbued antistatism with meaning, clarity, and force. Until the 1920s, champions of small government stated their case mainly in economic terms. Described as “classical liberalism” and “laissez-faire” conservatism by historians, noninterventionists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concerned themselves with the relationship between the government and personal property.4 That focus expanded in the 1920s as women elaborated upon articulations of antistatism in their opposition to the progressive state. Conservative female activists attacked maternal and infant health legislation and the Children’s Bureau, a federal agency established to research and develop policy for childhood welfare. These successful campaigns shaped the construction of antistatism as a political concept central to the formation of twentieth-century conservatism. Relying substantially on the research and analysis of other scholars, this chapter examines how women developed forms of antistatist protest in the first half of the twentieth century that posed an oppositional relationship between the family and government. By using gender assumptions to naturalize this dichotomy, women established a place for themselves in conservative politics for decades to come while elevating the “state” as the greatest enemy to freedom in conservative thought, much the way that leftists elevated “capitalism” to that position. The post–World War I wave of anticommunism inspired the formation of female nationalist organizations that inhibited progressivism by launching red purges against new welfare institutions within government. Conservative women claimed authority to speak on behalf of the family based on feminine instincts of morality and selflessness, which they counterpoised directly against the tendencies of the centralized state to accumulate and abuse power. Their activism contributed to the decline of progressivism in the 1920s. Depression-era populist resentment then radically reshaped female political consciousness on the right. As antielitism came to permeate American political culture, women developed a conservative political identity that drew upon collective understandings of their own marginality, as wives and mothers, in relation to state power. This new sensibility, housewife populism, ratcheted down expressions of “middle class” femininity in favor of lower-brow, antiintellectual, folksy styles that contrasted starkly with the displays of class superiority characteristic of progressives. These earlier generations laid the organizational and ideological groundwork for post–World War II activists. By the 1950s, anticommunism and antistatism became widespread mechanisms of political protest for women on the right,

Patriotic Daughters  •  3

much as peace activism and welfare work came to seem natural for women on the left. But unlike the later generation of Cold Warrior women who exerted themselves most forcefully through local politics, conservative women of the early twentieth century made their strongest impact by attacking that national progressive state. They also demonized “internationalism” as the handmaiden to communism, discovering another foe that women’s position in the family obliged them to oppose. Consequently, the earliest generation of conservative organizations adopted the habit of calling themselves “patriotic” groups to contrast their own nationalist sentiment with the internationalism of progressives, which they equated with communism. This pattern continued into the post– World War II era. Anti-internationalism surged especially with isolationist and anti-Semitic protest during World War II, when extremist opponents of the administration attacked Roosevelt, the “Jew” Deal, and global banking conglomerates for embroiling the United States in a war on behalf of foreigners. Although anti-Semitism declined precipitously after World War II and extremists thus found themselves unwelcome in the conservative movement, their antiinternationalist protest proved resilient. Conservatives establishing common ground with each other in the 1950s and 1960s found that they could collapse many of the social ills they opposed into “internationalism”—a concept that gained flexibility in evolving right-wing discourse. By 1950 it could mean multilateral foreign policy measures, efforts to promote peaceful relations between nations, programs for intercultural understanding, or race mixing. e Women on the right first came together as a group in support of military preparedness after World War I. Their patriotic discourse framed nationalism and antiradicalism as the natural outgrowths of women’s innate tendencies to protect, inspiring a wave of female-sponsored countersubversive activity. In 1918 the state of Massachusetts operated the highly secretive Women’s Auxiliary Intelligence Bureau, headed by the former maternalist reformer Elizabeth Putnam. From its offices in the State House the bureau recruited volunteers to spy on disloyal citizens in their communities. 5 Meanwhile, a patriotic organization called the American Defense Society had created a not-so-secret women’s auxiliary that advertised in Vogue magazine. The ad encouraged women to spy on Germans as a way to complement the efforts of American soldiers fighting overseas.6 The Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Legion Auxiliary, and several other groups formed special national defense committees that functioned very much like the wartime intelligence agencies by training women to become experts on the American left.7

­4  •  Chapter I As nationalist sentiment during World War I rendered political dissent increasingly unpopular and absolute loyalty more obligatory, conservative women made muscle out of anticommunist fervor. Patriotic zeal then spilled into peacetime, spawning an anticommunist movement involving grassroots “patriotic” groups, business organizations, and law enforcement agencies. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia and rise of communism incited fears of radicalism and centralized government at home. Conservatives tended to relate these threats to each other and rely on an elaborate guilt-by-association logic to prove their interconnectedness. The American Legion, which formed at the end of the war, popularized the concept of “one hundred percent Americanism,” an expression it included in the preamble of its constitution to mean anticommunism, national loyalty, commitment to military preparedness, and support for corporate capitalism. Numerous other organizations adopted the phrase to show opposition toward everything “alien” to pure Americanism, which often meant everything “alien” to white Anglo-Saxonism. Many of these groups referred to themselves as “patriotic” societies, implying that their opponents in the labor, progressive, and peace movements were unpatriotic or “un-American.” One hundred percent Americanism sentiment grew stronger in 1918 and 1919 as unions, having waited patiently during the war, resumed organizing. Several violent episodes in 1919, especially the Seattle general strike and the bombing of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s house, convinced many Americans that a revolution was underfoot.8 Conservative female organizing was concentrated mainly in the Northeast and upper Midwest. Formed as a hereditary society in 1890, the Daughters of the American Revolution developed many of the radical-watching techniques and institutions that came to characterize female political culture on the right. Strict membership requirements guaranteed racial and class exclusivity.9 Less elite but also influential, the American Legion Auxiliary was formed in 1921. The ALA attracted civic-minded sisters, daughters, and wives of American veterans who raised money and lobbied Congress on behalf of military families. Auxiliary women also pledged to uphold the Legion’s “one hundred percent Americanism” principles by fighting radicalism.10 Former antisuffrage organizations also became important. A network of conservative women’s organizations called the Massachusetts Public Interest League tried to prevent passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, but sustained their antistatist and antifeminist campaigns after women won the vote.11 Though much smaller than any of these groups, the Women’s Patriotic Publishing Company, based in Washington, D.C., proved formidable. Its Woman Patriot started as the organ of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage.12 Three of the five affluent northeastern white women who comprised the WPPC had been active in the

Patriotic Daughters  •  5

vigorous Massachusetts antisuffragist movement.13 “Private property and the private family,” it argued, “began together and must stand or fall together.”14 By making themselves into anticommunist activists on behalf of the family, women in patriotic societies also participated in the formation of antistatism as a political construction that would develop coherence, meaning, and import over the course of the twentieth century. Embracing the founders’—especially Thomas Jefferson’s—rejection of centralized government, “classical liberals” regarded expansion of federal authority in the realm of economic affairs as authoritarian. In the progressive era, the antistatism that bound conservatives (who did not yet call themselves conservatives) expanded to include opposition to government intervention into other “private” realms beyond property, including infant and maternal health in the 1920s and education in the 1950s. As conservatives cultivated this central organizing principle of antistatism, however, the sanctity of the “private” came to privilege property over political rights, even those rights of citizenship protected by the Constitution. Antistatism always made room for a strong, assertive centralized national security state that could interfere with anyone’s private rights to political organization and expression as long as that intervention favored conservative definitions of freedom. “Freedom”—like antistatism and patriotism—assumed particular meaning and importance on the right. Championing capitalism as a fountainhead of freedom, antistatists have supported authoritarian government measures to thwart anyone or any institution that interferes with the market economy. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” this logic dictates, can level the playing field for Americans far more effectively than interventionist legislation or court decisions. Antistatism thus, in reality, represents a conservative conceptualization of state power that favors strong federal intervention on behalf of capitalism. A Senate report on the Bolshevik revolution provided lines of reasoning for why women on the right should forge their own distinctive movement. In 1919 Senator Lee Slater Overman led an investigation into the Russian Revolution and its atrocities that devoted considerable attention to the sufferings of women and families. Witnesses for the committee claimed that the new communist regime allegedly legalized abortion, promoted divorce, and dissolved families to bring women and children under the control of the state. The Bolsheviks, this testimony also alleged, forced women to register with a “Bureau of Free Love” that made them available to all men.15 Though spurious, evidence for the “bureau’s” existence nevertheless made it into the Congressional Record. The Overman Committee thus fueled myths linking popular notions of Russian social degeneracy common among native-born Americans with communist projects of nationalization. Although other witnesses testified

­6  •  Chapter I that such outrages perpetrated upon women were the acts of a few men and not the policies of the new government, the final committee determined that a number of decrees and pronouncements showed intent by the Bolsheviks to institute a “state of free love.”16 The Overman Committee also brought scrutiny to gender and class relations in American politics by hearing testimony on the role of women in spreading radical ideas within the United States. When the famous radical Harry Reed testified that wealthy female benefactors funded his propaganda operations, he opened the door for an all-out assault on the “woman movement.”17 J. Edgar Hoover, then in charge of the Justice Department’s radical division, considered bringing the powers of his own office to bear on the problem of the so-called “parlor” radicals. The scorn directed at female progressives as a result of the Overman Committee hearings focused on their social status and their relationship with immigrants. Boredom born of wealth and idleness, implied such attacks, combined with weaknesses of the female intellect and mental instability to make upper-class women more vulnerable to communist indoctrination. Drawing on turn-of-the-century medical terminology, critics cited “nervous derangements” and “hysterical hyperesthesia” as conditions that made women with means susceptible to the lure of danger, thrill, and false idealism promised by radicalism.18 Conservative women mastered the art of guilt by association, honing their skills of political research as female political weapons that could be done in the comfort of clubhouses or private homes. Pursuit of the truth, they believed, set them apart from their middle-class cohorts on the left: it was what made them sharp-witted and impervious to the deception of radicals. The DAR, the American Legion Auxiliary, and Massachusetts Public Interest League encouraged their members not only to spy, but to keep extensive files of meetings notes and literature from their opponents.19 More affluent members commissioned reprints of communist newspapers, speeches, posters, and pamphlets for circulation, discussion, and inclusion in antiradical archives. The DAR and the ALA—convinced as they were, according to Kirsten Delegard, that leftists would “hang themselves with their own words—created exhibits of these items that toured the country.”20 With its ever-growing collection of left-wing propaganda, the DAR aimed to make its national headquarters in Washington, D.C. a clearinghouse of information that government and private radical-watchers could access.21 With this information, right-wing women came to regard themselves as experts on subversion, further reinforcing their belief that they represented a more enlightened example of middle-class female citizenship. The flurry of information gathering fueled self-perceptions among conservative women that they were particularly attuned to the dangers of subversion.

Patriotic Daughters  •  7

Fears of communists “nationalizing” the family with the assistance of naive “parlor” Bolsheviks prompted conservative women to launch an intraclass assault on their progressive counterparts. Conservative women’s groups attacked peace advocacy, reform politics, and radicalism as a monolithic threat that menaced the nation from the outside in, through aliens who took advantage of the status of progressive women. While condemning “parlor radicals” for letting their feminine vulnerabilities be exploited, women on the right portrayed themselves as smarter, more informed examples of middle-class female citizens—wiser by virtue of the intense study that dominated their activities. Their literature equated sexual purity with ideological purity, posing two different versions of female politics struggling against each other. It contrasted the left-wing parlor dupe who was easily seduced by the intrigue of subversives with the knowledgeable conservative critic who used her education as well as her social and political connections to expose the chicanery. Borrowing from the conclusions of the Overman Committee, they argued that the United States threatened to collapse into chaos through the breakdown of civilization’s most basic unit: the family. In their minds shined the vision of a middle-class nuclear family headed by the bread-winning patriarch and supported by a nurturing mother. The free-wheeling lifestyles of radicals—which undermined middleclass moral standards—and intervention by the welfare state—which undermined the authority of male patriarchs—threatened to undo the stability of that family. By cooperating with government efforts to surveil and thwart the woman movement, right-wing female activists established what they deemed an appropriate female relationship with an appropriate use of state power. They enhanced the power of the national security state to pry into people’s lives, which they saw as acceptable, but diminished the power of the welfare state, which they judged to be dangerous. Women thus gendered definitions of freedom that were becoming so central to the evolving concept of antistatism. Equating property rights with familial rights, they drew on ideals of classical liberalism to draw a boundary around the middle-class household, which they designated as sanctified space. Just as a free market operated according to its own superior logic that drew upon the best instincts of mankind, the household functioned as a sphere of love, nurturing, and tradition that promoted freedom by working its own invisible hands on the family. Introducing government welfare institutions into this vision of the family, like introducing government regulation into the marketplace, corrupted it. Antistatism thus promoted a very hands-on approach to government control of leftist political expression in the interests of protecting a hands-off approach to the nuclear family.

­8  •  Chapter I The model of female activism that spurred conservative women to defiant action was that of reformers like Jane Addams. As one of the most important turn-of-the century progressives, Addams became a regular target of right-wing blacklists and “spider web charts,” which sought to expose subversives by linking columns of people and institutions in a tangled weave of overlapping associations. Founder of Chicago’s Hull House, she joined other progressive women in advancing what historians refer to as “maternalism,” a reform agenda that focused strongly on mother, child, and infant welfare while cultivating a symbiotic relationship between the welfare state and women. For most of her career, the reformer worked steadily on behalf of immigrant, labor, and women’s rights. Addams also founded the Women’s Peace Party, which became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.22 Though she was not a socialist or anarchist, her criticism of immigration restrictions and police abuse of radicals made her the target of red baits.23 While Hull House received condemnation from the left for being “bourgeois,” it drew fire from anticommunists for giving a forum to dissidents.24 Jane Addams was part of a large network of maternalists and feminists who inspired outrage in conservative women because of the role it played in the expansion of the welfare state. As a group, female reformers proved more effective in politics than women ever had before. Many of these women came from prominent, affluent families with a tradition in politics and deep connections in government. Three of the most influential female reformers to be associated with Hull House—Addams, Florence Kelley, and Julia Lathrop— were the daughters of men who had been elected to state or national offices.25 Indeed, their status and links to men in power helped them execute their reform agenda. A distinguishing characteristic of white female progressivism— what set these reformers apart from their African-American cohorts—was their focus on and faith in government programs and regulatory structures.26 The celebrated progressive Florence Kelley led efforts to place women in factory inspector positions, eventually becoming chief factory inspector for the state of Illinois herself.27 She was among many progressive women who landed jobs as government administrators. The first two chiefs of the Children’s Bureau, formed in 1912, were former Hull House residents Julia Lathrop and Grace Abbott.28 Appointed to the New Deal administration were Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor and Rose Schneiderman, who served in the National Recovery Administration.29 Progressive women drew fire from the right also because of their involvement in the peace movement.30 Jane Addams wrote extensively about peace and war for many years, arguing that peaceful coexistence among nations

Patriotic Daughters  •  9

represented a natural outcome of social evolution. She believed that immigration fostered cosmopolitan community as well as international understanding and cooperation that could have the power to end wars.31 Unlike many other progressives who backed Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter the conflagration raging in Europe, Addams campaigned fiercely to keep the United States out of World War I. Among several settlement house leaders who issued statements in condemnation of the war, she gave a rousing protest speech at Carnegie Hall in New York.32 Many feminists came to the peace movement later than Addams. Suffragist leaders, who had supported the war effort to show that women were prepared for citizenship, took a stronger stance against male military traditions after the vote was won. Included in that group was Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, who founded the National Committee on the Cause and Cure for War, which became the largest women’s peace organization in the 1920s. The CCCW represented the centrist mainstream of the women’s peace movement, while the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, though not radical, forwarded a further-reaching critique of war that linked militarism to racial oppression and colonialism.33 A memoir by the New York reformer turned antiradical Hermine Schwed betrays the sense of superiority with which right-wing women compared their own judgment to the gullibility they attributed to their middle-class counterparts on the left. Laced with sexual tension, Confessions of a Parlor Radical details Schwed’s friendship with two educated Jewish men, Graefsky and Braun, who competed for her affections while trying unsuccessfully to seduce her leftward.34 Schwed portrays herself as a critical observer of socialism, genuinely open to its ideals until proponents revealed its weakness through their hypocrisy. The moment of enlightenment arrived when Schwed and her companions found themselves in the company of a well-known Yiddish actor and his mistress. Having long touted the virtues of free love, Schwed’s two socialist friends nevertheless disdained the mistress for letting herself become a concubine. In their exchange of disapproving glances, Schwed discovered her friends to be mere “poseurs.”35 The lifestyles each man adopted later in life further validated her judgment of their insincerity. After mocking bourgeois marriage for so long, Braun wed conventionally, and Graefsky became a very wealthy businessman—a bona fide capitalist. In the final pages of the memoir, Schwed recounts a chance encounter with Graefsky several years after their friendship ended. She confronted him with her knowledge of his scheming ways. Mustering the calmness and manners that would befit a middle-class lady, she smiled politely while cleverly describing how he and Braun had attempted, but failed, to fool her with flirtation. She

­10  •  Chapter I announced that she was now teaching others how to critically study the leftwing propaganda that she had come to know so well as their protégé. Laughing scornfully, Graefsky asked, “And does the wise lady really imagine she can persuade the average American woman to study?” Indeed, she replied. “That’s why I am determined to spare other women of my kind the unhappiness of having helped a bad cause merely through a little mental laziness.”36 Her kind, we are left to assume from her morality tale, would be women with the time and means to significantly help or hurt society, depending on how steadfastly they adhered to principles. Schwed stands as just one example of convert zeal on the female right. Indeed, the vigor and skill with which conservative women’s groups assailed the woman movement drew in large part from progressivism itself, which had trained many of the activists who eventually turned against it. Reform, ironically but logically, steered many women into conservative politics by fostering the sense of class and maternal obligation that fueled right-wing female activism as well. Although many changed course in the midst of their political careers, the move from left to right owed in part to factors transforming the political landscape beneath them. Political camps on both sides of the spectrum consolidated in such a way that a slight shift in attitude could suddenly land one in an entirely different ideological category. Long-standing associations made between immigrants and radicalism, for example, bridged the progressive-antiradical divide. The woman movement thus fed into the anticommunist movement because it adhered to a white, Christian model of progressivism while expending minimal political capital on racial justice reform. When the red scare introduced the expression “one hundred percent Americanism,” many clubwomen found that the phrase best captured their appreciation of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant traditions. While fears of foreign radicalism could be channeled into Americanization and uplift projects at the turn of the century, many conservative women later found countersubversive activities better suited to addressing their anti-immigrant concerns. Both the suffrage and antisuffrage movements fueled female antiradicalism, though opponents of female enfranchisement fanned the flames of antiradicalism with greater vigor. “Antis,” as they were called, equated feminism with free love and warned that women’s economic and political independence would ruin American family life.37 Antiradical arguments thus dovetailed seamlessly with antifeminist arguments. In 1915 the president of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS) announced “with deep regret” that women would have to engage in the unladylike work of politics to battle suffragists, socialists, Mormons and other “sinister influences” that would undo the social order.38 Antisuffragists extolled the virtues of hierarchy and

Patriotic Daughters  •  11

order as building blocks of civilization that radicalism and the woman movement threatened. Massachusetts antisuffragist Margaret Robinson argued that feminism reversed the forward march of civilization by eroding the private family, marriage, and Christianity. As the wife of a Harvard professor, the welleducated Robinson drew inspiration for her antifeminism from eugenicists in the university community, particularly the psychologist William McDougal, who asserted that social class was naturally determined by the mental stability that one generation passes on to the next.39 The campaign for women’s voting rights bred conservatism by accommodating a broad range of attitudes on labor radicalism, feminism, and peace.40 On the one hand, activists like Mary Ritter Beard staunchly supported trade unionism and women’s suffrage; both causes appealed to their understandings of democracy and social justice. On the other hand, leader Carrie Chapman Catt fought against socialist comrades to keep the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), in her words a “bourgeois movement with nothing radical about it.”41 Indeed, the success of the suffrage movement is partially due to the willingness of NAWSA and the National Woman’s Party (NWP), its more militant counterpart, to respect the southern race hierarchy, even at the cost of equal rights. As the ratification process was underway across the states in 1919, NWP leader Alice Paul went out of her way to mollify white supremacist legislators in the South by assuring them that the Nineteenth Amendment would not interfere with their right to regulate voting procedures. The National Woman’s Party, Paul made clear, would not stop the South from discriminating against black voters.42 Suffragists relied as much on elitist class and racial sensibilities as they did female moral superiority to realize success. Converts from the woman movement thus ranked among its most belligerent assailants. The affluent Massachusetts clubwoman Elizabeth Lowell Putnam embodied what historians Sonya Michel and Robyn Rosen call the “paradox of maternalism.” Putnam’s career as a reformer turned antiradical zealot reveals how arguments on behalf of mothers, infants, and children could be turned against each other. Having started out an antisuffragist, Putnam remained steadfastly tied to the social elite conservative wing of the Republican Party throughout her career. The death of her daughter by milk poisoning, however, made her an outspoken and influential advocate for pure milk, infant mortality, and prenatal care improvements. Putnam adjusted the pro-family arguments she had cultivated as an antisuffragist to forward the cause of pure milk. The red scare turned her against progressives, though. Over the 1920s, Putnam’s support for the Children’s Bureau and maternalist legislation eroded precipitously. She denounced the bureau for inviting the federal government to intrude where it did not belong, in the sanctity of the home. She worked

­12  •  Chapter I through two organizations to bring down the bureau: the Women’s National League to Protect our Homes and Children, and the Boston-based, mixed-sex Committee of the Sentinels of the Republic. 43 The metamorphoses of Hermine Schwed and Helen Stuart, two settlement house workers who became antiradicals, proved yet more dramatic. Schwed acquired the real life experience that inspired Confessions of a Parlor Radical in the 1890s and early 1900s. As a career progressive with a reputation for immigrant education projects, she came of age with the female reform generation. Schwed established herself as a reformer at the Louis Downtown School, an Americanization project operated by Jewish women who wanted to uplift young immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe. In addition to learning English from Schwed, the students were bathed, fed, schooled in domestic arts, and taught clerical skills.44 The energetic progressive also published reviews of books for children in the New York Times.45 While engaged in Americanization activities, Schwed became a government bureaucrat, accepting the position of secretary for the Volunteer Service Committee on Aliens, which operated within the mayor’s Committee on National Defense.46 By then, however, she was on her way to the other side. The extent to which transformations in Schwed’s outlook turned her versus the changing political climate prove difficult to determine. Her Americanization projects reflected optimism regarding immigrant advancement, yet she served a city intelligence bureau that hunted enemy aliens. The National Defense Committee recruited women volunteers to help collect and analyze records meant to intern foreign-born enemy suspects.47 Helen Stuart started her career as a radical feminist. She made a name for herself in the women’s and labor movements through the economic analysis she pioneered, the settlement house she founded in Chicago, and her close association with The Yellow Wallpaper author Charlotte Perkins Gilman. During a trip to Europe, she even used her ties with reformer Florence Kelley to finagle a meeting with Friedrich Engels. Stuart’s research, which focused on the disparity between male and female wages, earned her monograph Women WageEarners a prize from the American Economic Association in 1891. Though relegated to home economics curricula, she enjoyed success in academe known by few women. Stuart’s interest in female labor issues led to studies at the University of Wisconsin, where she gave lectures that eventually found publication in a textbook. She started her first job as a professor on the faculty of Kansas State Agricultural College in 1897, but by 1930 her career had taken a completely different direction. Reversing course, Stuart became a volunteer spy for the government and Americanization chairman for the Wisconsin American Legion Auxiliary.48 After she and an associate spied on children and counselors

Patriotic Daughters  •  13

at a summer camp run by radicals in 1929, she told a federal investigative committee that communists had infiltrated the town of Kenosha, Wisconsin.49 Helen Stuart, Hermine Schwed, and Elizabeth Putnam found themselves on the opposite side of the woman movement they had helped to create, yet still firmly embedded within it. One female network emerged out of—and in defiance of—the other without completely severing from its progenitor. The social status and geographical turf that conservative and progressive women shared kept them bound to each other throughout the 1920s. At the heart of their disputes simmered class and gender obligations. Both camps believed that it was their womanly duty and social obligation to influence a political system straining under the weight of massive economic disparities, but disagreed on how to confront pressures exerted from below the poverty line and outside the native-born population. Progressive women advocated government intervention and international cooperation, while conservative women pushed for a stricter management of the immigrant population and military preparedness. Beliefs about female moral authority and the maternal instinct to preserve life informed both approaches. The growing contingent of antifeminist women who came to recognize themselves as “patriotic” by virtue of their antiradicalism had helped turn the tide against maternalist reforms that many of them helped to initiate. Their first victory came with the defeat of the Child Labor Amendment, which failed to pass when it came up for renewal. Opposition forces launched the first attacks in Massachusetts. The Sentinels of the Republic argued that the amendment sought to “. . . substitute national control, directed from Washington, for local and parental control, to bring about the nationalization of children, and to make the child the ward of the Nation.”50 After Massachusetts voted down the amendment three to one in November 1924, opposition leaders assisted with similar drives around the country. Only six states passed the amendment before it died.51 Capitalizing on the momentum they had gathered from the Child Labor Amendment conquest, conservative women turned to the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act. In 1921 Sheppard-Towner, which funded prenatal and child health services, marked a high point for the maternalist lobby. However, five years later antiradical forces used Sheppard-Towner’s review as an opportunity to expand the antireform movement. One group, the American War Mothers, passed a resolution condemning Sheppard-Towner, warning that “the next logical step after communizing the child is to communize the mother.”52 The American Medical Association, it must be noted, also played a key role in Sheppard-Towner’s demise by convincing Congress that nonmedical professionals did not belong in the public health business.53 The

­14  •  Chapter I antiradical outcry proved instrumental nevertheless. Anticommunist activists, according to Robyn Muncy, debunked the myth of a female voting block, helping to defuse the threat of election-time payback if women’s political demands were not met.54 Congress voted only to extend the infant and maternal health act three more years. e National economic collapse modified the political styles of conservative women. Opposition to the New Deal at first inspired a more pronounced assertion of class superiority as Roosevelt’s victory and the resuscitated left convinced female activists that politics, more than ever before, needed the guiding hand of respectable middle-class women. They equated the New Deal with communism and likened government bureaucracy with corruption. Conservative women executed a two-pronged approach to the problem of the New Deal. While charging the Roosevelt administration with tyranny, they also characterized New Dealers as inept, misguided idealists dismantling a superior political system with spurious, heavy-handed economic experiments. Over the 1940s, however, a new generation of far-right women opponents of Roosevelt struck a more strident, populist, and anti-Semitic tone of nationalism. The emerging group of extremists did not, by any means, represent the views of all women who opposed Roosevelt, but their populist maternal outrage cemented itself in female political consciousness on the right for decades to come. The elitists of the early 1930s and populist anti-Semites of the 1940s criticized, from the margins, a growing liberal mainstream. To advocate for small government during the Depression was to cry out in a howling wilderness. The worst economic crisis in American history expanded the power of the federal government and the American left while President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration developed the welfare and regulatory state to unprecedented proportions. New Deal agencies provided economic relief, created jobs, and funded massive public works programs. Banking on the theories of England’s John Maynard Keynes, who argued that pumping federal dollars into the national economy stimulated spending and growth, Congress passed a $5 billion allocation for new projects. In response to growing social unrest and militancy, Roosevelt also pushed through a series of reforms that benefited the labor movement and funded a new tax-supported economic safety net. The Social Security Act created insurance for many unemployed and aging Americans while the Wagner Act enhanced the rights of unions to represent some categories of workers. Union membership soared, especially with the formation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), which represented workers in the mass production industries. The CIO mustered

Patriotic Daughters  •  15

the collective strength of longshoremen, automakers, textile workers, and other laborers by waging massive general strikes that halted the operations of major cities.55 Steel workers in Michigan, meanwhile, introduced a new style of militancy with their highly successful sit-down strikes. Radical fervor elevated the influence of the American Communist Party (CPUSA). 56 The CIO and CPUSA also participated in a broader leftist movement of the Depression era known as the Popular Front, comprised of labor and community activists, socialists, feminists, and émigrés who opposed fascism, lynching, and industrial oppression.57 The Republican Party flailed under these circumstances as staggering electoral losses demoted the GOP to minority status after twelve years in the White House. The coalition of capitalists, middle-class professionals, and western farmers that delivered elections in the 1920s dissolved as the ranks of lawyers and doctors, as well as the banking, railroad, and publishing industries, threw their support behind the Democrats. 58 Schisms formed as a liberal western wing led by Alfred Landon aimed to soften criticism of the New Deal, while an old-guard eastern establishment stood resolutely against any and all reforms that expanded the powers of the federal government.59 New conserving organizations that formed in the mid-1930s thundered unapologetic class disdain against New Dealers and fear of the mass movements that had gained traction. Conservative men formed a pro-business organization called the American Liberty League in 1934. Though it avoided direct attacks on the president, the league aimed to reinvigorate enthusiasm for rugged individualism and upward mobility. The group portrayed itself as the best of American men who stood up for the founding principles of self-reliance and respect for private property. Recruiting from both parties, it aimed to show that the men ranked principles above base partisan squabbles. Unabashedly antiegalitarian, the Liberty League championed the “uncommon” over the “common” man, arguing that men of great fortunes, talent, and prestige should be running the country. As one member argued, “The only way to obviate the disastrous predominance of the weak is to develop the strong. . . . Today the weak should not be artificially maintained in wealth and power.”60 Complementing the Darwinian best-men approach of the American Liberty League were female opponents of the New Deal, most notably Pro-America. Based in Seattle, the conservative women’s group started out as a garden club. Like the American Liberty League, the group attracted a wealthy crowd that similarly relied on nonpartisanship to boost its arguments on behalf of principle.61 Pro-America understood its contribution in terms of the female virtues that it believed women could restore to politics. Founded in 1932, National Association Pro-America, National Organization of Republican Women, Inc.,

­16  •  Chapter I grew into a national conglomeration of state and local clubs that still exists today but reached its high point during the Cold War era. Pro-America operated on the assumption that by remaining unconnected to the official party apparatus it remained above corruption. The organization devoted itself to building a patriotic, pious, and sexually pure citizenry. Although it supported the GOP, the women named their organization Pro-America to show that they put their patriotic objectives before the interests of the party. To achieve national recognition, the group enlisted Theodore Roosevelt’s widow, Edith, to be the “co-founder.”62 Pro-America established its strongest concentration of units in the western and northwestern part of the country, including California, and in some states represented the only available Republican organization for women.63 In Oregon, Pro-America lobbied the Republican Party to grant women equal representation.64 The group’s main objective, however, was to make the GOP more anti–New Deal and more committed to a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Toward that end it welcomed women Democrats opposed to the New Deal. Pro-America attracted women who saw themselves as more conservative than the party, more anti-Roosevelt than Republican, and more anticommunist than partisan.65 Republican women’s clubs, organized within the GOP’s official “federation” assumed the same mantle of “principles” in their attacks against the Roosevelt administration, even though they had no choice when it came to partisanship. The federation did its best to avoid associations with cigar-filled rooms by prohibiting its clubs from endorsing candidates. Federated organizations thus aimed to keep their hands clean of dirty power struggles by limiting their work to educating woman in politcs, promoting loyalty to the party, and organizing volunteers for candidates already nominated at election time. During the 1930s, writes historian Catherine Rymph, GOP women deployed catastrophic rhetoric in their attacks against the New Deal, portraying their work as campaigns of “good against evil.”66 They described the New Deal as a dire national crisis that could drag country into chaos and communism, unless female crusaders intervened.67 The American Liberty League, Pro-America, and Republican women’s clubs voiced elitist critiques of the left that betrayed longstanding perceptions of middle-class virtue in relation to the baser instincts associated with the poor and working classes—attitudes that had once inspired progressive welfare work and Americanization projects. The Republican club leader Louise Ward Watkins of Southern California developed her attacks against the welfare state from progressive traditions she learned as a suffragist and reformer. Frustration with her own Republican club for not offering “really militant opposition to the Socialist New Deal” prompted her to form an entirely new organization,

Patriotic Daughters  •  17

Southern California Republican Women, in 1935. Watkins also started a female radical-watching group in the tradition of the DAR’s National Defense Committee, American Legion Auxiliary, and Sentinels of the Republic. Echoing the domestic rhetoric honed by female reformers, Watkins argued that national abuse of power perpetrated by the Roosevelt administration demanded that women step forward to bring their national house in order. Likening the New Deal federal bureaucracy to the crooked urban machines that dominated city politics at the turn of the century, Watkins retooled the moral “housekeeping” crusade launched by female reformers to assail what she believed to be a new criminal regime in the White House. Watkins argued that the nation needed a higher class of men and women to assume leadership. “Our national housekeeping is in a fearful disorder,” she declared in 1936.68 Motivated as much by a sense of noblesse oblige as patriotic fervor, the mother of seven often raged over what she believed to be an inferior class of men running the country. Roosevelt and his administration were dangerous, she reasoned, because they introduced radically new and untested forms of governance instead of drawing from the historical lessons provided by the nation’s esteemed forefathers. In one speech she asserted that the Roosevelt administration had acted rash and thus devised only crude, simplistic solutions to the nation’s ills. Instead, she continued, the nation needed “. . . patient, laborious thought. . .” to reckon with its current economic crises. “The best men of the country haven’t been willing to go to Congress,” she asserted. The problem of poor leadership was endemic to political offices at every level, she continued, and “. . . it will not be solved until the women take hold of it—especially the women who have the most time and resources—and the women of education and refinement.”69 Revealing the nativist attitudes that informed her nationalist fervor, she also argued that the United States needed to take care of its own. Watkins decried the export of U.S. charity “to the far corners of the earth . . . when our own people of Anglo-Saxon stock dwelling in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas were without schools or the commonest necessities of life. . . .”70 The American Liberty League, Pro-America, and Republican Club Women expressed fading gasps of an elitist attitude once prevalent in conservative and progressive politics. The libertarian intellectual Albert Jay Nock reached out to the conservative minority with an inspiring essay in the June 1936 issue of the Atlantic Monthly that both acknowledged and celebrated the marginality of an elite class. “Isaiah’s Job” equated the “masses” represented in the era’s social movements with the people of Judea represented in the Bible’s book of Isaiah. After briefly dissecting problems associated with the “mass-man” and “masswoman” of American society, Nock borrowed the Biblical term “Remnant” to

­18  •  Chapter I describe a small group of intelligent citizens who could be moved by the force of powerful and virtuous ideas while recognizing the bluster of a demagogic imposter appealing to the masses. He wrote for conservatives who felt not only marginalized by the left but frustrated that weaker intellects and moral standards, as embodied in Nock’s conceptualization of the masses, were winning the day. Interestingly, “Liberty Leaguers” occupied the same category of troublemakers as New Dealers, Dr. Francis Townsend, and Father Charles Coughlin, who crafted messages aimed at the masses.71 The League’s movement aspirations, it seems, rendered it incompatible with his vision of the Remnant. Darwinian expressions of self-superiority, however, lost vigor by the end of the decade. Mass politics shaped the attitudes of emerging intellectuals even while they found inspiration in Nock’s conceptualization of the Remnant. On the one hand, these well-educated conservatives could find hope in the possibility that they, acting as a Remnant, might bring light into the political darkness. On the other hand, they also absorbed much of the antielitism that dominated American popular culture, as much as it revolted them. They joined other conservatives in constructing an alternative class structure that had nothing to do with economic status—a class structure in which they saw themselves and other patriots threatened by a dangerous elite that operated within the nation’s universities and official government buildings. The popular movements of the Depression era dramatically influenced female activism on the right, toning down expressions of class obligation and superiority. Mass outrage directed against economic elites channeled by charismatic figures like Huey Long, who launched his popular “Share Our Wealth” program in 1934, ultimately found expression in conservative discourse but targeted government bureaucrats and professors, believed to manipulate policy in the interest of concentrating their own power. Once calling upon “women of education and refinement” to become more politically involved, Louise Ward Watkins proclaimed in1952 that “the little people have found their voice” in General Douglas MacArthur, whom she was drafting for president. Watkins never let go of her class attitudes, but by the 1950s she also embraced a new antielitist view of her political subjectivity that drew attention to threats posed from above rather than below. Conservative antistatism, influenced by Depressionera populist sentiment, fused protest against centralized government with protest against economic and intellectual elites. e Numerous women voiced protest against the New Deal that blended maternal outrage with the populist anti-Semitism that gained traction among Roosevelt’s most vehement critics. Though the eccentric women of the far right generally

Patriotic Daughters  •  19

worked as independent agents in the 1930s, many would become influential in the isolationist mothers’ movement that attracted tens of thousands of American women in the 1940s. Taking the antistatist gender ideology of the post–World War I era to its most extremist interpretive ends, they used the guilt-by-association tactics pioneered by the first patriotic groups to spin conspiracy theories linking Roosevelt to powerful Jews. As historian June Benowitz has noted, several of the most prominent right-wing women entered adulthood during the progressive era, which showed them “what female activism could accomplish.”72 The gravity and danger they perceived before them provoked far more aggressive, outlandish, and characteristically unladylike responses, ones that became acceptable as appropriate forms of political behavior over the 1930s and 1940s. Elizabeth Dilling of Chicago became one of the leading figures of the far right. The attractive, affluent engineer’s wife first gained notoriety by writing the popular The Red Network: A Who’s Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots, which sold 2,000 copies in its first ten days when it was published in 1934. By 1941 the book had sustained eight printings.73 The Roosevelt Red Record and Its Background, released just before the 1936 election, features a softly smiling portrait of Dilling on its first page. The loose curls and kind brown eyes hint at none of the ferocity contained in the pages that follow. In the 1940s she toured the country praising Nazi Germany for its willingness to fight Soviet communism. She called the New Deal the “Jew” Deal and wrote, “The person who does not know that Marxism and Jewry are synonymous is uninformed.”74 Her most widely read tract, The Octopus, accused the AntiDefamation League of B’nai B’rith of plotting a communist coup to undermine Christianity and overthrow the nation.75 Other women developed critiques of the New Deal that echoed those of Dilling, but not in concert with the Chicagoan. The New York businesswoman and radio broadcaster Catherine Curtis urged the female investors who tuned into her program Women and Money and joined her organization Women Investors In America to oppose Roosevelt. Curtis, who maintained a “Jewry” file, grew more fascist in the 1940s and outspoken in the mothers’ movement.76 Agnes Waters, the first woman to receive a law degree in the state of New York, retired from a career in real estate in the mid-1930s to become a fulltime anticommunist crusader. The Washington, D.C., resident testified before Congress against legislation she judged to be communist and started to acquire a following among other women. In her self-published writing and government testimony, Waters charged various world leaders with instigating World War II to augment their own power—Hitler, a Bolshevik, conspired with Neville Chamberlain of England.77 Waters, according to historian Glen Jeansonne,

­20  •  Chapter I became known for her intensity, temper, and erratic behavior. The daughter of a prosperous real estate investor “swore compulsively,” according to Jeansonne, and “heckled” congressmen, once threatening to lynch any she found guilty of conspiring to draw the United States into World War II.78 The populist rhetoric and styles developed by Roosevelt’s critics originated in social movements not the least bit conservative. Huey Long’s Share the Wealth campaign, Francis Townsend’s Old-Age Revolving Pension Plan, and similar movements revived antihierarchical protests that had been part of the nation’s political fabric since the founding. Indeed, American national identity had long hinged on the rejection of Old World aristocracy by the revolutionary generation. In defiance of the monarchy, egalitarianism, democracy, independence, and self-sufficiency became marks of American national distinctiveness. This antielitist formulation of American exceptionalism has availed itself more forcefully in some episodes of American history than in others, but found its full expression in the populist movement of the 1880s and early 1890s. Coalitions of farmers and laborers, reacting to the cycles of economic collapse that dispossessed them of their land and savings, launched the agrarian-based insurgency to gain control of the markets in which they operated. Along with the labor movement surging in urban centers and mining camps, populists turned to the government for help with curtailing the power of corporate oligarchs. So deeply has the antielitist tradition embedded itself in American political culture that it has come to function as a way for citizens to relate to power of all kinds—especially after the rise and fall of the populist movement. As a familiar discourse that celebrates the virtues of ordinary people, Americans revive populist discourse to challenge any form of hegemony. During the Depression era in particular, charismatic figures used populist-inflected oratory to great effect, tapping the widespread sense of bitterness that disadvantaged Americans felt toward the privileged. Populist elements influenced protest on both the left and the right. Starting in the mid-1930s, leftists began addressing the “proletariat” as “the people.” Activists adopted the expression “Popular Front” to describe the broad social movement established to advance the interests of labor, combat fascism, and stop lynching.79 Conservatives never aimed to revive the late-nineteenth-century populist movement—which did not square with their small government values—but nevertheless came to see themselves and their enemies through the class hierarchy it critiqued. The far right adjusted the criteria of elite and oppressed to accommodate their beliefs regarding who tyrannized whom. Union leaders, international bankers, and New Deal administrators replaced corporate oligarchs as the autocrats, while the middle-class replaced farmers and the proletariat as the “people.” Conservative populism embraced an expansive definition of the

Patriotic Daughters  •  21

middle class to include anyone who valued individualism, upward mobility, organized religion, and the Protestant work ethic.80 An assembly-line worker, small-town dentist, or CEO of a multinational corporation could be middle class as long as he lived by its simple code. Depression-era populist fervor tapped into long-standing assumptions about Jews, wealth, and power. Resentful Americans revived conspiracy theories about a global but highly secretive network of Jewish bankers that aimed to control the world. Henry Ford propagated these ideas in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, through a series of articles called the “International Jew” that ran for almost two years. Ford culled much of the materials for his series from the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fictitious manifesto allegedly written by Jews outlining how they would take over the world.81 According to Agnes Waters, the Jew Benjamin Disraeli authored the Protocols and invented the concept of “world government” that would ultimately undermine the sovereignty of the United States.82 Roosevelt’s appointment of Jewish advisers and cabinet members reinforced beliefs that a small, elite group developed the welfare state to amass power for itself. The president’s reliance on economic adviser Bernard Baruch confirmed the existence of this vast conspiracy, as far as some were concerned.83 Also fueling anti-Semitism was the overrepresentation of Jews on the left, which led many to make connections between the global aspirations of the Comintern and the imagined cabal of international Jewish bankers—even though no love was lost between Jews and Soviets, not to mention communists and financiers.84 Roosevelt’s “brain trust” also sustained scrutiny from isolationist conservatives for embroiling the U.S. ever more deeply in the Second World War. A small but vocal campaign for nonintervention took shape at the end of the 1930s, eventually finding its strongest representation in the America First Committee (AFC). Founded in September of 1940, America First urged U.S. policy makers to focus attention on fortifying national defense instead of becoming involved in the war, or aiding foreign powers engaged in the war. AFC spokespeople often associated Roosevelt’s aid to the Allies with the aid dispensed by the welfare state during the Depression, conflating internationalism with New Dealism and totalitarianism. As the American Firster senator Burton Wheeler of Montana declared, “The lend-lease-give program is the New Deal’s triple-A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy. Never before have the American people been asked or compelled to give so bounteously and so completely of their tax dollars to any foreign nation.”85 The AFC also developed a reputation for anti-Semitism due to comments made by several of its prominent members, including the famous aviator Charles Lindberg and the radio priest Charles Coughlin. Lindberg, who accepted a medal

­22  •  Chapter I of honor from the Nazi Party, once declared that Jews, Great Britain, and the Roosevelt administration were most responsible for pushing the United States toward war.86 The populist protest emerging on the far right thus changed antistatism by fusing critiques of financial elites with government elites. The Roosevelt administration’s creation of the New Deal and pursuit of an internationalist foreign policy led critics to interpret both developments as fruits of the president’s authoritarianism. Though nationalist fervor remained as high as ever on the far right, the earlier era of citizen-government cooperation in antiradical counterespionage efforts disintegrated. In fact, government-sponsored antisubversive activity in the Roosevelt years targeted the far right as well as the far left, resulting in high-profile investigations of isolationist Dilling and other opponents. Women activists started their own isolationist movement, which cultivated a uniquely feminine style of antielitism and capitalized upon their marginality in politics. A conglomeration of women’s organizations that protested U.S. entry into World War II came to be known as the “mothers’ movement,” or America First movement. Elizabeth Dilling became a leading spokesperson. Though their interests overlapped with the America First Committee, the mothers’ organizations operated independently of the AFC and relied on pro-family and maternal arguments to make their case against war. Borrowing from the traditions of female pacifism established during World War I, isolationist women asserted that it was their duty, as mothers, to break the cycle of violence that war perpetuated. Anti-internationalism figured centrally in their protest. Isolationist mothers united in their refusal to sacrifice sons to a war being fought on behalf of non-Americans. Like many other isolationists, activist mothers saw entry into World War II as a foreign policy move that would benefit elites— Jewish international bankers and the Roosevelt administration—while exploiting ordinary Americans. Unlike other isolationists, however, they articulated their vision of what ordinary Americans valued by talking about the family. The pro-family rhetoric of mothers’ organizations introduced a new blend of female pacifist and patriotic protest. The links they made between internationalist foreign policy, totalitarianism, and state intervention into the family reverberated into the Cold War era, and while the mothers’ movement’s overt anti-Semitism and critical stance against the U.S. military faded, its populist articulation of the model female citizen lasted for decades. The isolationist mothers’ movement started in Los Angeles, where three mothers of draft-age sons—Frances Sherrill, Mary M. Sheldon, and Mary Ireland—formed the National Legion of Mothers of America (NLMA) in 1939. The NLMA packaged itself as a conservative, patriotic version of the earlier peace movement. Some of the organization’s pins displayed the American flag

Patriotic Daughters  •  23

and others the white dove of peace. Its publication, American Mothers National, conflated anticommunism with isolationism. It argued that only Christianity could save the nation from communism—that European refugees posed a subversive threat while communists in the U.S. helped fund the Bolshevik revolution. The conservative newspaperman William Randolph Hearst, a critic of President Roosevelt, used his newspaper syndicate to champion nonintervention in World War II and promote the NLMA. Hearst dailies praised the mothers and printed the organization’s registration forms. The Herald Express in Los Angeles described its members as “the commonplace mothers, the type familiar in story and song . . . but grimly determined to fight any attempt to send their sons to fight on foreign soil.”87 In its first six days, the group signed up approximately 10,000 members. The NLMA invited women of all races, political parties, and religions to join, but made U.S. citizenship mandatory. 88 Despite this policy, members were mostly white and middle or upper class.89 Mothers argued that President Roosevelt and his Democratic regime were leading the nation into a war that would sacrifice American soldiers and American interests to an ill-gotten internationalist foreign policy agenda. The members of NLMA viewed domestic communism as a greater threat than Nazi Germany. By 1940 NLMA chapters existed in thirty-nine states and the Los Angeles chapter claimed a membership of 75,000 women.90 Joining the NLMA were other large mothers’ organizations in Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and New York. Glenn Jeansonne estimates that 5 to 6 million women across the nation ultimately joined, with its greatest areas of strength on the coasts and in the Midwest.91 Many women in mothers’ organizations also belonged to the America First Committee, including Kathleen Norris, author of sentimental novels and longtime peace activist who joined as a charter member of the AFC and became president of the National Legion Mothers of America in 1940. Norris, one of the highest-paid writers of her time, became an ardent anticommunist and anti–New Dealer. She simultaneously campaigned for presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie and against the Burke-Wadsworth Selective Service bill.92 Unfortunately for Norris, who wished to forge a popular, mainstream crusade through the NLMA, anti-Semites and fascist sympathizers gained control of the mothers’ movement starting in 1941.93 The minster Gerald L. K. Smith linked many of the extremist elements of the movement together. The former evangelical preacher made a name for himself in politics as a promoter of Huey Long’s Share our Wealth movement. Known for his charismatic speaking style, Smith’s attacks on the Roosevelts and reds elevated his profile as a master of populist oratory.94 The Nazi sympathizer eventually launched his own organizations and projects in the late 1930s

­24  •  Chapter I and early 1940s. His Christian Nationalist Crusade propagated isolationism, white supremacy, and anticommunism mainly through its magazine, The Cross and the Flag.95 Smith’s groups and the mothers’ organizations cross-fertilized.96 The evangelist underscored mothers’ authority to protest the war based on the sacrifices that they made, or might have to make, to it. He urged Christian women to form small mothers’ groups in their communities and invited some, including Elizabeth Dilling, to share the stage with him at political rallies. He also sold copies of Dilling’s books as well as Women’s Voice, the organ of the Midwestern branch of the movement. Female volunteers carried out most of the work of the Gerald L. K. Smith organization, including publicity, accounting, mail, and speaking arrangements. Indeed, the preacher liked to surround himself and honor women, but from a position of unchallenged authority. He was a dictator. According to Jeansonne, he never allowed his own wife to speak publicly about her opinions and would not share leadership. Smith targeted Eleanor Roosevelt for attacks because she represented women who could not be controlled by their husbands—an indicator, in his eyes, of FDR’s weakness as a man.97 The activities of mothers’ organizations mirrored the political organizing and lobbying techniques of traditional women’s clubs. Members met in each other’s homes, planned events, delegated responsibilities, studied, debated, and staged public demonstrations. According to historian Laura McEnaney, the Chicago group We, the Mothers Mobilize for America hosted “get together parties” where women sang, read, and prayed together. Mothers’ groups also arranged dramatic productions, not unlike guerrilla theater. We, the Mothers, according to McEnaney, staged a pageant called My Country ’Tis of Thee, which reenacted the history of the first Christian mothers who came to America.98 In August of 1940 nine women representing the Congress of American Mothers, a loose coalition of groups, traveled to Washington, D.C., to protest peacetime conscription. Elizabeth Dilling rose to prominence in the mothers’ movement by organizing a campaign against the lend-lease program. When in 1941 the House passed the Lend Lease Act, which authorized sales and loans of arms to Great Britain during the war, she coordinated a march on Washington. “We want to start a cavalcade to Washington that will flood the Capitol with petticoats and cause all Congressmen who are supporting this bill to reconsider.”99 As the reference to “petticoats” suggests, Elizabeth Dilling was aware of her class status and willing to marshal the values traditionally attributed to it: dignity, intellect, morality. On the other hand, Dilling also taught her followers to act as if they were an oppressed class. To be middle-class and patriotic, in Dilling’s mind, was to be a victim—constantly beleaguered. Dilling took pride in her economic status. She dressed nicely, took her family on frequent trips

Patriotic Daughters  •  25

to Europe, and enjoyed her comfortable home in the affluent Chicago suburb of Kenilworth. A trip to the Soviet Union, however, made her uncomfortable with the vast economic disparity that distinguished her life from that of Russians. Upon her return, she grew increasingly frustrated with well-heeled residents of tony North Shore communities who praised the bold initiatives of the Soviets. Dilling reckoned with these frustrations, not by spearheading antipoverty programs, but by becoming a zealous anticommunist and mocking elitist class gestures. She characterized her middle-class female critics as too precious while adopting populist rhetoric and styles, some from the workingclass radicals she loathed. In 1941 female critics of Dilling within the isolationist movement even denounced her protests for bringing the movement bad publicity. She responded by calling them “pussycat ‘ladies’.”100 That same year she organized a sit-down strike of about thirty mothers outside the office of a lend-lease supporter in the Senate, who described their demonstration as unbecoming to “any self-respecting fishwife.”101 Acting unladylike roused and delighted Dilling’s audiences. Combining burlesque humor and narratives of combat atrocity, she cultivated a performance routine that many described as entertaining. In one moment listeners might gasp out loud in response to her stories of battlefront horrors, but a few minutes later they might laugh at her imitation of Eleanor Roosevelt. Also a crowd pleaser, Dilling’s parody of “God Bless America” by the Jewish composer Irving Berlin sarcastically referred to World War II as the “[w]ar for the kikes.”102 Although Dilling’s lack of decorum irritated many mainstream isolationist mothers, her vulgar methods became common among far-right women. Middle-class mothers acting uncouth attracted attention. Chanting, “We’ll hang Claude Pepper from an apple tree,” a Detroit group called Mothers of the U.S.A. hung an effigy of the Florida senator, who supported aid to Britain and the draft.103 They had come to Washington with a coalition of mothers’ groups in August of 1940. The next day nine mothers treated congressmen to a “death watch” staged by dressing in black and standing solemnly outside of the Senate Chamber.104 Indeed, many activist mothers seemed to operate under the assumption that the further they went with the morbidity of their demonstrations, the more they underscored their own earnestness and the gravity of the situation. A “sympathy letter” mailed to the parents of dead sailors who sank with an American destroyer torpedoed by Germans in November 1941 showed no class. Written by members of We, the Mothers of America in Chicago, the letters blamed U.S. government officials, so-called “murderers,” for sending the men to their deaths.105 More than show tactics, the demonstrations reflected a genuine belief among right-wingers in their own victimization by the government. Elizabeth Dilling’s

­26  •  Chapter I conspiracy theories offer a disturbing portrait of the emerging siege mentality. On the one hand, Dilling observed correctly that the government was out to get her. Between 1941 and 1944, the FBI subjected her and other rightwing extremists to an investigation that led to charges of sedition, though lack of evidence prevented convictions.106 On the other hand, Dilling developed a deeply irrational belief that she had become the target of a Jewish-sponsored conspiracy to eliminate her. She named B’nai B’rith and New Dealers as the architects of her third indictment. Dilling construed the FBI investigation as an attempt to fleece her as well as her supporters, whom she called “poor people.” Standing by her, she claimed, were mainly domestic and clerical workers who contributed what little money they could to her legal defense but never enough to cover the damage inflicted by the government.107 Dilling’s rude and outlandish behavior exhibits how middle-class women on the right made the antielitist outrage expressed by radicals into a compelling model of female dissent adaptable across the spectrum. Indeed, the economic turmoil of the 1930s had been transforming the class dynamics of women’s politics. As workers lost jobs, families faced eviction from homes, and households struggled with deprivations, women developed a collective political consciousness from the suffering they felt duty bound to alleviate. Annalise Orleck notes the celebration of Dorothea Lange’s famous migrant woman photograph, or the Grapes of Wrath movie, as evidence of how Americans viewed the role of poor women: “guardians of the beleaguered home.” She also quotes Eleanor Roosevelt’s It’s Up to the Women, published in 1933, which outlined how motherly virtues of unselfishness and resourcefulness could save the family from the worst hardships of the Depression.108 Orleck’s research shows that poor women indeed privileged the needs of their families, but not by working alone in their private households. Working mostly in urban ethnic neighborhoods, they instead forged a common political identity around their status as housewives and mothers of suffering families. Since most of the key leaders had been prominent in the labor movement before the Depression, they were seasoned activists united by community solidarity and working-class consciousness. Together they resisted evictions, organized food boycotts, and lobbied for public services. These uprisings involved women in the city and countryside alike, according to Orleck: “Polish and native-born housewives in Detroit, Finnish and Scandinavian women in Washington state, and Scandinavian farm wives in Minnesota.” Black and Jewish women in New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco were especially militant.109 Housewife populism, the new ideology born of hard times, proved adaptable to any siege mentality. Isolationist mothers, mostly middle-class, acted out the sense of oppression they felt by behaving down-class. If meat boycotters

Patriotic Daughters  •  27

picketing butcher shops could slap the faces and pull the hair of men who tried to cross the lines, opponents of the war could hang Claude Pepper in effigy. The public had become responsive to unladylike behavior; acting beleaguered and unpolished evoked a sense of community that audiences located in shared oppression. Elizabeth Dilling also added her voice to a growing chorus of conservative attacks on academe. Young college students manipulated by radical Marxist professors joined the ranks of the oppressed middle class. Though university faculties had historically represented a bourgeois, apolitical, and moderateto-conservative professional class up to the 1930s, as the decade progressed many academics found themselves attracted to the Popular Front. Some joined the Communist Party; many did not. In 1935 the drugstore tycoon Charles Walgreen enlisted Elisabeth Dilling’s help in efforts to purge radical professors from the University of Chicago, where he had become convinced that professors had tried to indoctrinate his niece. The team succeeded in convincing the legislature to investigate three university faculty members named by them, though none were ultimately prosecuted.110 Eight years later, Dilling’s attacks on ivory tower leftists turned to sex talk in the classroom when she denounced the works of Sigmund Freud that her son was reading at Cornell as “nauseating sex books.”111 The mothers’ movement entered a new phase upon U.S. entry into the war. Since isolationism suddenly became unpatriotic, the mothers’ movement stopped protesting U.S. involvement. But unlike the America First Committee, which disbanded, mothers’ organizations retooled and pressed on. International military and diplomatic collaboration now drew their scrutiny. Recipients of their venom included Great Britain and the Soviet Union, but the United Nations drew the sharpest and most sustained condemnation. We, the Mothers Mobilize for America demonstrated an early passion for the issue when the group attempted to break into the San Francisco organizing meeting of the United Nations in 1945. Jews, Masons, and Communists created the UN, according to We, the Mothers.112 The Mothers of Sons Forum in Cincinnati echoed the denunciations. Forum leader Lucinda Benge had been a member of the America First Committee and mother of a U.S. Marine. Allied with Gerald L. K. Smith, she stood on the platform with the preacher when he formed the America First Party in 1943.113 Her organization had a membership list of 1,800 and a 50,000-person mailing list.114 In 1945 Benge tried, but failed, to convince the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to reject the UN Charter. Opposition to the United Nations became the mothers’ most significant legacy. For the next few decades, conservative women would become bonded together in the belief that the UN represented the antithesis of family. They believed that

­28  •  Chapter I the international organization aimed to realize a communist vision of global egalitarianism by eliminating national distinctiveness, which necessitated a weakening of parental authority. The United Nations thus joined the federal government and the Soviet Union as the greatest threats to family privacy and community self-determination. Conservative women activists of the Cold War era would, in the name of home rule and parental authority, devote much of their energy to fighting the influence of the United Nations in their local schools. Referring to the UN as a “world government,” they fused antistatist and anti-internationalist discourse into a collective critique of authoritarianism. Their protests implied that the United Nations and mothers worked at cross-purposes. While the former cultivated uniformity and cold technocratic group think, so their rhetoric suggested, mothers cultivated warmth, individualism, and personal character. This contrast valorized the private household as a nurturing place that fostered personal independence while demonizing the UN as a mechanistic institution that fostered homogeneity. Although the anti-Semitism and fascism of the isolationist mothers’ movement diminished, the dangers posed to “Americanism” by “internationalism” continued to be understood in racial terms after World War II. Many conservative women of the Cold War generation perceived the United Nations and federal civil rights agencies as twin threats that worked in tandem to force mixing across racial lines and international boundaries. Since the liberals who promoted international cooperation often promoted interracial cooperation, conservatives wary of integration viewed UN education programs in their communities as furtive attempts to simultaneously dissolve racial and national identity. As the parent most entrenched in the daily affairs of the family and community, conservative women made themselves the spokespeople for racial and national distinctiveness as well as individuality, spirituality, and morality— values best inculcated in the home with welcomed help from clergy. e When Lucinda Benge, now in Los Angeles, threatened to “horsewhip” city and county officials there for flying the United Nations flag, she introduced a new generation of conservative women to female antistatist protest. She was not the only right-wing extremist to leave the Midwest for greener pastures in the booming metropolis. Among the transplants, Gerald L. K. Smith relocated his home and headquarters close to the outskirts of downtown in 1953. Smith liked the politically charged atmosphere of Los Angeles, where he provoked fanatical responses—both positive and negative, but mostly negative. Smith seemed to revel in the ferocity of attacks mounted against him by Hollywood liberals, as if the passion of his enemies further confirmed the necessity of his

Patriotic Daughters  •  29

presence.115 Despite the virulence of his opposition, Smith’s organization managed to raise thousands of dollars in the Southland from sympathizers who greeted him with open arms. As had always been the case, women constituted most of his supporters. Los Angeles was home also to Adele Cox and Helen Courtois, two rightwingers closely allied with Smith and the other heartland isolationists. Cox headed the California chapter of We, the Mothers Mobilize for America and published a column for Women’s Voice. She joined the isolationist mothers who stormed the UN organizing conference in San Francisco.116 Helen Courtois headed a secretive organization called the Keep America Committee. The sixtysomething activist first joined the America First Committee and Californiabased National Legion of Mothers of America in the 1940s, then started attending Gerald L. K. Smith rallies and meetings of the German Bund.117 Courtois’s Keep America Committee produced literature propagandizing the Christian nationalist ideas popularized by Smith. A 1951 leaflet asked, “Are You an AntiSemite?” Among criteria that (unfairly, she suggested) earned one the antiSemite label were “If you oppose and expose the Internationalism of the ideologies of world government, United Nations, World Federalism, Atlantic Union, [and] all destroyers of patriotism, through wars, revolutions, and slavery.”118 One could not be internationalist and patriotic at the same time, she implied. This notion, asserted ad nauseum by the isolationist mothers, became a guiding principle of conservative female opposition to the UN during the Cold War. Courtois, Benge, and Smith gradually lost credibility in the coming years, however. The horrors of Hitler’s final solution, revealed to the world, marginalized the anti-Semites as they seemed to grow meaner with age. When Benge convened her first meeting in Los Angeles, seven women attended. She would have been outraged (or perhaps thrilled) to learn that one participant was a spy from the Community Relations Committee, a division of the local Jewish Federation Council that monitored right-wing activity. Benge called her organization the Daytime group, but informed all present that its name would change with each gathering for the sake of secrecy. She also instructed the mostly senior crowd how to dress: wear dark, inconspicuous clothing, no glasses, no jewelry, and no make-up. The group’s purpose was to surveil Jewish organizations. While the women perused the eight different Jewish newspapers passed among them, Benge announced with pleasure that she possessed documents potentially damaging to the career of Jewish political radio personality Walter Winchell. In the meantime, the women needed to organize a welcome party for Gerald L. K. Smith, who was planning his relocation.119 Within a few years the group formerly known as Daytime, but now under the name Women for America, were staging protests against displays of the United Nations flag.

­30  •  Chapter I The pre-Christmas downtown demonstration may have represented the last gasps of an extremist “old” right, but the gulf between the prewar far right and Cold War conservative movement should not be overdrawn. Distinctions between different camps on the right must be respected, but reciprocal influences warrant analysis. The conservative female activists of the Cold War era—the heart of this study—did not sympathize with Hitler. Although many harbored anti-Semitic and racist attitudes, the fears of international Jewish bankers did not figure centrally in their movement. The new generation nevertheless adopted the populist and anti-internationalist critiques forged by right-wing extremists. They continued to see themselves as spokespeople for a beleaguered class and the last line of defense—drawn at the family’s doorstep— against UN and communist attempts to annihilate individualism, patriotism, and racial identity. Like the isolationist mothers, they portrayed the United Nations as much more than a foreign policy threat. The isolationist mothers gendered anti-internationalism in ways that became meaningful for Cold Warriors. Female activists of the post–World War II era modified the class-based critiques of the far right to attack a new cadre of elites, most notably educators but also mental and public health professionals who, they believed, “brainwashed” Americans. By the 1950s three and a half decades of conservative female activism had naturalized anticommunist protest as an appropriate form of political expression for women on the right. The earliest “patriotic” groups devised political methods and styles adapted by the post–World-War-II era, from counterespionage activities and guilt-by-association webs to collaboration with national security officials and newsletter publishing. Women of the early twentieth century also contributed to the construction of antistatism, a gendered and familial as well as economic concept that would have a tremendous impact on the post–World-War II conservative movement. Conservatives developed a shared political consciousness of their own antiauthoritarianism that associated overassertive state power with progressive welfare agencies, but not with the national security apparatus of the federal government. Early twentiethcentury conservative women contributed to antistatism, the core of conservative self-identity, by emphasizing that familial privacy, just like private property, propagated virtues like individuality, self-sufficiency, and affection. By the end of World War II, conservative women had also contributed to a new ideological formation, housewife populism, which valorized mothers and wives for virtues imparted by their political marginality, especially selflessness, anonymity, and militancy on behalf of their families. The next generation of conservative women adapted housewife populism to campaigns against education, mental

Patriotic Daughters  •  31

health, and welfare bureaucrats. Attacks against the United Nations and civil rights movement, moreover, conflated internationalism, communism, and race mixing into a monolithic evil.

C H A P T E R   I I

All Politics Was Local Grassroots Conservatism in Postwar Los Angeles

What’s in a name? The word “conservative” gradually acquired traction as a badge of political identity over the 1950s. In books and journals, intellectuals had been using the term since the late 1940s. The activist right, less interested in debates over philosophy than battles over policy, did not immediately embrace “conservative” when Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, and others first published their path-breaking books on the subject. They nevertheless thought, acted, talked, and saw as conservatives before they self-consciously adopted the phrase to identify themselves as a political community at the end of the 1950s. The grassroots right, already in formation at the beginning of the decade, was actively contributing to the beliefs, practices, and institutions that would, by 1960, become known as the “conservative movement.” American conservatism was produced through discourse—political rituals, rhetoric, and performances—before it became a movement with a recognizable name. The activist right toiled locally, not only by concentrating their energy in metropolitan venues, but by generating and continually emphasizing ideals about local community decision-making in an age of government centralization at the federal level. Women not only participated in the grassroots conservative movement, they contributed ways of seeing, protesting, and writing that we can study through the discursive imprints they left. The progressive school administrator, the guileless bridge-playing housewife, and the duped liberal PTA member all emerge from the 1950s as representatives of political danger that taught conservatives not only about the so-called “enemy,” but about themselves—their ideals, principles, and duties. By configuring the left through these and other categories of threatening people, activist women developed their own political subjectivity in relation to what they came to see as an elusive but real danger to freedom; they cultivated a niche for themselves as defenders of fused family, community, and national interests in the emerging right; and they made local institutions the site of geopolitical struggle. Los Angeles quaked with conservative activism as early as 1950, with female Cold Warriors replicating the ideological and associational patterns of

All Politics Was Local  •  33

LO S A N G E L E S CO U N T Y

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Wilshire Los Angeles District S A NTA MONICA M T N S Santa Monica

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Figure 2.1 Map of Los Angeles County, 1963.

their conservative foremothers. World War II and the early Cold War transformed the political-economic landscape, however, by rearranging relationships among living communities, commercial centers, and industrial corridors, all of which influenced how activists related to their government and to each other. The region’s expanding freeway system and sprouting residential centers enabled middle-class women—owners of cars—to shuttle between political duties in the suburbs and events downtown. Economic growth, the diffusion of manufacturing into outlying communities, and the influx of ethnic, nonwhite, and Anglo working-class migrants into these communities created political, racial, and class tensions. Conservative women continued to oppose federal welfare, communism, and internationalism, but now adapted earlier styles of protest to a new environment where threats of federal intervention, communist subversion, and internationalist indoctrination now seemed dangerously close.

­34  •  Chapter II They also came to see themselves as vigilant housewives, uniquely poised to defend the family, community, and nation against those threats. Women, along with men, reformulated conservative gender ideology in this period. Housewife populism as an antiauthoritarian feminine ideology assumed new meanings in the 1950s, when the American housewife became iconic. The economic status of female activists remained vitally important, since a higher family income translated into political connections, an automobile, and funds for events, travel, or child care. However, the symbolic importance of class changed as a conservative discourse affirming simplicity, ordinariness, and pious humility as patriotic values gained currency after World War II. Women shaped housewife populism by marrying postwar domestic ideology to postwar conservative antistatism in newsletters, speeches, and organizations. Female activists wrote and spoke in such a way that naturalized ideas about women’s innate tendencies to protect, nurture, and humbly cede the limelight to men. e The grassroots right of post–World War II Los Angeles grew partially out of the conservative Anglo economic establishment that had dominated downtown politics since the early twentieth century. A pro-growth machine, led by the Los Angeles Times, set lasting political-economic trends by keeping taxes low, reeling in federal dollars for public projects, and fighting to keep the labor movement weak. The conservatism of city elites acquired a sharper nationalist edge in the post–World War I era when Los Angeles businessmen formed the Better America Federation (BAF) in 1920. With a roster of the city’s most influential people on its letterhead, the BAF attacked the state’s new initiative, referendum, and recall—historic progressive-era legislation reforms—as communistic. It also continued the business community’s ongoing assault against unions. The Better America Federation opposed minimum wage laws, restrictions against night work for women and children, and collective bargaining rights. It sponsored street-corner soapbox speakers, distributed literature, and briefly succeeded in pressuring libraries to display their literature while banning the Nation and New Republic.1 Benefitting from this aggressive corporate activism, the emerging aerospace industry planted itself amid the shrinking orange groves and expanding streetcar suburbs during the interwar years.2 Local capitalists, who viewed airports and airplanes as lucrative investments that would bring people and commerce into the city, financed the development of aircraft production plants across the metropolitan region. Technical innovations cultivated in these scrappy, makeshift warehouses and loft buildings eventually attracted the attention of the

All Politics Was Local  •  35

federal government when officials sought to establish defense plants during the Second World War.3 Rubber, furniture, and automobile producers, food processing companies, and oil refineries also contributed to the economic expansion that made Los Angeles a major American city.4 Many of these industries converted facilities into defense plants during the war, further entrenching national security interests in Southern California’s economic future.5 Los Angeles established a new paradigm of urban growth in the post–World War II era that facilitated transmission of conservative thought and activist culture. The region thrived over the 1950s from the billions of dollars of Pentagon defense contracts, which employed hundreds of thousands of workers in aircraft or missile manufacturing. Northrup, Lockheed, Douglas, and other companies did not, however, cluster themselves rust belt style in smoky industrial corridors, instead dispersing their plants within and outside Los Angeles city limits. Manufacturers also built acres of single-family home communities for workers close to facilities. Long Beach to the south, Lakewood to the west, and the San Fernando Valley to the north bled urban and industrial sectors of the city into each other, creating new metropolitan economic and community relationships. Migrants, meanwhile, streamed in to fill jobs. Japanese and Mexican Americans arrived, but southerners represented the largest percentage of newcomers. The second great migration that brought millions of African Americans to Los Angeles from the South during and after World War II, notes Josh Sides, actually expanded the Southern California black population in far greater numbers than the first wave of resettlement after World War I. A profound “exodus,” as Darren Dochuk describes the movement of white workers mainly from Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma starting in the 1940s, infused the region with its own brand of religious culture and conservative politics. Mid-century Los Angeles also became a thought center for a Christianinflected form of libertarianism. At the heart of these developments stood Spiritual Mobilization (SM), a nonprofit religious organization that endeavored to rescue God’s relationship with the individual. SM intercepted ideas and money streaming between East Coast and West Coast libertarians. Launched by a cadre of economic thinkers in Europe and the United States, libertarianism advocated minimal or no government intervention in economic affairs. Though its core ideals dated back to Enlightenment principles articulated by Adam Smith and John Locke, the intellectual movement gained new power after World War II as its proponents linked government economic planning with totalitarianism. A spate of books published between 1943 and 1944 revived conservatives, wearied by the New Deal consensus, with fresh inspiration.6 The Road to Serfdom by London School of Economics professor Friedrich Hayek became the signature tome of the libertarian revival. The Austrian’s

­36  •  Chapter II powerfully articulated polemic against governmental planning in 1944 placed Nazism in the history of twentieth-century European socialist movements.7 Hayek warned his fellow countrymen in England to beware of similar values shared by the contemporary left and German fascists: “. . . veneration of the state, the admiration of power, and of bigness for bigness’ sake, the enthusiasm for ‘organization’ of everything (we now call it ‘planning’). . . .”8 More popular than Hayek, however, Russian Jewish immigrant Ayn Rand published her ground-breaking utopian capitalist novel, The Fountainhead, in 1943.9 Spiritual Mobilization offered a Christian interpretation of the individualism popularized by secular libertarianism dominating the New York intellectual circles. Leader James W. Fifield became a national political figure known for the anticommunist, antigovernment, Bible-laced message he sent across the radio and television airways. The transplanted midwesterner established a name for himself in Los Angeles as a well-spoken, charismatic religious man and shrewd financial manager. In the midst of the Depression, the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles he rescued from ruin became a thriving downtown ministry that operated successful anticommunist and libertarian political organizations. Fifield preached capitalist orthodoxy rather than religious orthodoxy; he was not a Christian fundamentalist or evangelist. The six-foot-four son of a prominent Chicago clergyman preached positive themes about the power of Christ and the power of the individual. “I believe Christian man must remain free to accept God voluntarily,” he wrote in 1949, “to control his own destiny; to perfect himself before God.”10 “The state, or monarchy, or democracy, or family, or communal group is not created in God’s image. There is no divinity in any organization of people—just in the individual persons.”11 Generously supported by corporate contributors, Spiritual Mobilization attacked interventionist government and liberal clergy while associating smaller government with Christian principles.12 The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, a powerful economic and political institution since the early twentieth century, also promoted the transcontinental flow of libertarian thought. Leonard Read, manager of the Chamber of Commerce’s western division in Los Angeles, eventually resigned his post to relocate to New York so he could battle the economic planners in nearby Washington, D.C., from a closer distance.13 A member of Fifield’s congregation while he lived in Los Angeles and contributor to Spritiual Mobilization’s magazine Faith and Freedom, Read established the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Irvington on the Hudson. The FEE sponsored lectures and distributed literature, eventually buying and publishing in 1954 the Freeman magazine, which Albert Jay Nock had established.14 By 1952 the periodical’s mailing list included 28,712, circulating amid the growing contingent of libertarians in

All Politics Was Local  •  37

Los Angeles and other cities.15 The transplanted Californian also organized the Pamphleteers, a small group that included influential Los Angeles businessmen like W. C. Mullendore, former executive vice president of the Southern California Edison and Chamber of Commerce member. Though the 3,000-person Pamphleteer mailing list proved modest and its life between the end of World War II and 1950 short, the organization also solidified ties between East Coast and West Coast libertarians.16 A political “right” grew more recognizable in the greater Los Angeles area by the 1950s, becoming a vast subculture with its own literature, radio broadcasts, workshops, home-based study groups, speaking circuits, and, by 1961, bookstores. Anybody with enough time and money could rent a P.O. box, publish a newsletter, and circulate self-made leaflets, thus disseminating whatever literature they wished. A mother with two school-age children could do this as easily as a dentist or a clothing salesman, as long as she had the means. A mishmash discourse combining anticommunist, libertarian, and Christian ideas erupted on the local political scene bearing accents of Fifield, Hayek, populist evangelicals, and isolationist mothers. Activist discourse proliferated nationally through newsletters published far and wide. The Philadelphia-based bulletin American Flag Committee and the Washington, D.C., and Chicago– based Educational Reviewer reached subscribers from coast to coast. Thirty miles away from each other, former FBI man Dan Smoot published the Dan Smoot Report in Dallas while former antisuffragist Ida Darden rolled out the Southern Conservative in Fort Worth. Conservatives in Los Angeles read all of these publications. Wealthy backers assisted with the proliferation of the materials, and not uncommon were partnerships between corporate leaders—men with money—and housewives—middle-class women with the time. A group of conservative businessmen in Chicago called the Conference of American Small Business Organizations formed the financial backbone of the Educational Reviewer, edited by Lucille Cardin Crain.17 e Incubated not only by the political and economic conditions of the postwar era, conservative female activism thrived in a flurry of organizational enthusiasm that gripped American women across the political spectrum over the 1950s. Legions of doers and joiners adapted political culture from the patterns of their everyday lives—their routines, priorities, itineraries, and living arrangements. If it was 1955 and you were walking a dog on the freshly dried pavement of a new San Fernando Valley neighborhood, you might pass women in automobiles on their way to meetings. Suburban communities of the postwar era bustled with volunteerism. Civic groups discussed strategies for getting

­38  •  Chapter II sidewalks built in their neighborhood; junior leagues installed officers; and Democratic women’s clubs hosted meet-the-candidate coffees. As the County of Los Angeles sprawled steadily outward with families taking advantage of the economic boom, interest in community building bred zeal for meetings, including political meetings. Men liked to participate, but the metropolis teemed with volunteer activity because middle-class women had the flexible hours, mandate, and fervor to coordinate such gatherings. Indeed, a growing body of literature about women involved in peace, labor, and other progressive movements significantly undermines the typical periodization of feminist history that marks the 1950s as a political “doldrums” for female activism. Women on the right, similarly possessed of organizational skills, time, and political urgency, shaped conservatism from the grassroots upward. Men participated in many of these activities, but grassroots political culture in the 1950s conformed to women’s lives. Some female activists congregated at the Immaculate Conception Hall of the Los Angeles Archdiocese for the midday meetings of the American Public Relations Forum, where they discussed the evils of progressive education as well as communist uprisings in Africa. One evening a month, many drove into the Wilshire District downtown with their husbands to the monthly Freedom Club meetings at the First Congregational Church. As conservative magazines, books, and speaking events proliferated in the mid-1950s, the ranks of conservative female activists grew. While ink dried on the first issues of the National Review, mimeograph machines across Los Angeles County spat out newsletters, many of them composed and printed by teams of housewives. When not clipping newspapers or poring over the political literature stacked on their credenzas, women attended lectures or gave their own prepared talks to audiences. They squeezed meetings, study, writing, and printing into daytime and nighttime hours between trips to the grocery store, meal preparation, and help with homework. Conservative women approached political work like other forms of civic work—as an extension of their household duties that fulfilled feminine responsibilities to the family and community. Many activists developed their earliest feelings of political community and identity in Republican women’s clubs. Since the 1920s, the GOP had been recruiting female voters to the party by appealing to popular beliefs about the inherent differences between men and women—an approach described by historians as the “politics of difference.”18 After the female suffrage amendment passed in 1920, party leaders fashioned what historian Catherine Rymph describes as an “outsider” political style that emphasized women’s moral superiority.19 Officers framed involvement with the Republican Party in moralistic terms and conducted party work in settings familiar to women—homes, churches,

All Politics Was Local  •  39

Figure 2.2 The First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, ca. 1935. The First Congregational Church, located in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles, served as a popular meeting ground for Southern California conservatives throughout the Cold War era. Presided over by the influential libertarian James Fifield, the church hosted meetings of the Freedom Club, where audiences gathered for monthly dinners and political lectures. Courtesy of the Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

and libraries. GOP women’s clubs thus functioned as a feminine outlet to the traditionally masculine world of partisan politics. Democratic women’s clubs offered the same menu of activities and relied on the similar politics of difference, but did not adhere to sex-segregated institutions in the party nearly as long. By the 1950s, women Democrats were pushing more vehemently than their Republican cohorts for integration into the party’s male-dominated power structure. The model Republican woman nevertheless changed over time. Still distinguished by her virtuous motivations, club rhetoric of the post–World War II era shifted focus to emphasize women’s influence in the community. Republican women’s club literature stressed the importance of the warmth,

­40  •  Chapter II sparkling personality, and overall positive attitude that it believed women could contribute to politics. Reflecting the broader culture’s celebration of domesticity, Republican clubwomen discourse of the 1950s and early 1960s also celebrated the American housewife. Literature, rituals, and speeches exhibited an optimistic view of how the nation’s wives and mothers could harness their compassion, warmth, and femininity for the good of the party. The so-called “natural” political virtues of women, like moral superiority and mothering instincts, still found their way into the rhetoric of Republican leaders, yet its emphasis shifted to other attributes, namely feminine cheeriness and hospitality. “Organize your enthusiasm,” commanded the president of the National Federation of Republican Women, “if you want to elect the nominee of the Republican national convention. . . .” Catherine Gibson assumed the office in the late fifties, stressing “neighbor-to-neighbor contacts.”20 Club leaders added new symbols to their campaign slogans, like the Republican “saleswomen,” which invoked both the growing importance of women to the retail industry as well as traits assumed to be intrinsically feminine, namely good manners and friendliness. Events designed for fun and sociability—teas, bridge games, fashion shows, and garden parties—became especially popular in this period. Club leaders extolled graciousness and affability as natural female qualities that could be marshaled for the benefit of the party.21 Though the ideal American housewife, so ubiquitous in Republican clubwomen rhetoric of the 1950s, ventured forth as a social and charitable community-builder, she also remained symbolically and spatially linked to the home. Activists opted increasingly to utilize their Formica kitchen tables, polyester living-room sectionals, and outdoor patio furniture for organizingentertaining. These domestic settings provided a warm and nonintimidating atmosphere meant to promote the overlapping goals of political discussion and sociability. The National Federation of Republican Women encouraged women to use their homes through a variety of campaigns, including “Operation Coffee Cup.” Launched during the 1956 Presidential campaign, the television broadcast presented Eisenhower and Nixon in conversation with different women’s groups. The NFRW encouraged club leaders to watch alongside women guests to initiate discussion.22 Indeed, study groups thrived in the home-centered atmosphere of postwar Republican women’s clubs, especially as leaders took greater interest in promoting community relations skills among volunteers. One Republican women’s study group that met near the San Fernando Valley house of Jean Ward Fuller, who became president of the California Federation of Republican Women, proved formative to her political career. “We’d have a little circle meeting in a home,” she remembered, “and anybody was welcome

All Politics Was Local  •  41

to come.”23 Fuller’s own success in the federation can be attributed, in part, to how she made use of her own house. Her spacious abode, with housekeeper, in Encino helped to accommodate the sizeable number of clubwomen who hauled their bridge tables over to do mailings for political candidates. Her group, claimed Fuller, could turn out 60,000 pieces of mail within three days. “Everybody would bring their sandwiches,” she recalled later, “and I’d have coffee for them and everybody would just work like beavers.”24 Southern California became a hub of Republican clubwomen activism in the 1950s. Indeed, GOP women’s clubs in California experienced their highest rate of growth in these years.25 In 1949, at 12,000, the California Federation of Republican Women became the sixth largest state federation in the nation, and by 1957 its ranks had swelled to 50,000 women.26 The Southern Division, always the strongest, included 123 clubs, more than the Central and Northern divisions combined.27 By 1958 the Los Angeles County Federation alone counted 74 different clubs.28 The San Fernando Valley, Glendale, San Marino, and Long Beach clubs represented its largest units.29 And in 1958 the National Federation of Republican Women boasted half a million members, while the Democratic National Committee counted only 100,000 women in female clubs.30 While the Republican women’s clubs that met throughout Southern California’s valleys politicized women, the Freedom Club, located in downtown Los Angeles, further encouraged militancy on the right. James Fifield’s Freedom Club became a gathering place for conservatives, where like-minded suburbanites connected with each other as they eagerly imbibed the orations of speakers they admired. Established in 1950, the monthly series offered dinner, lectures, and discussion. With their hands busy with plates of jellied cranberry salad or turkey with gravy, participants listened and chatted about the evils of the income tax or mental health legislation.31 While Fifield’s Spiritual Mobilization politicized clergymen, his Freedom Club politicized activists, especially female activists. Fifield attracted women to his ministry by appealing to both their sense of patriotism and their piety. Reared in a preacher’s family, he acted on his familiarity with the ways that churches had historically relied on women to show spiritual devotion, inculcate religious values in children, and arrange church functions. Forceful women speakers like activist Phyllis Schlafly and foreign correspondent Freda Utley inspired housewives in the audience to shake off their timidity and push the boundaries of politeness on behalf of their families and the nation.32 A female right became visible and militant starting in 1950, as conservative women discovered and connected with each other in Republican women’s clubs, the Freedom Club, and school board meetings. Indeed, debates about

­42  •  Chapter II public education especially animated mothers after conservative parents successfully pressured school board members to fire the superintendent in one of the nation’s finest school districts, Pasadena. Anticommunist attacks against the progressive education agenda of Superintendent Willard Goslin caused many mothers to look with new skepticism at the pedagogy employed by schoolteachers, making them wonder if leftist educators were trying to indoctrinate their children. A concerted campaign against UNESCO fueled such concerns, as critics of “internationalism” fought to ban educational materials published by the agency from Los Angeles schools. The controversies surrounding Pasadena’s superintendent and UNESCO inspired the formation of numerous organizations by women who came to see communist subversion as a grave problem and themselves and values they associated with femininity—vigilance, selflessness, carefulness, patience, and spirituality—as the solution. American Public Relations Forum, Pro-America, the Tuesday Morning Study Club, and Minute Women of the U.S.A., Incorporated, became the most active groups in the region. A housewife in Burbank by the name of Stephanie Williams founded American Public Relations Forum. Williams, a devout and fervent Catholic, joined a swelling number of parishioners who expanded the Los Angeles Catholic community after World War II with scores of churches that added hundreds of thousands of new members. As the church prospered and grew, the archdiocese exerted a conservative force on the political landscape mainly through Archbishop James McIntyre and its newspaper organ, The Tidings. Ordained the first Catholic cardinal from the American West in 1953, McIntyre sent priests to attend conservative political meetings, barred the sisters of the Immaculate Heart from teaching in the archdiocese after they stopped wearing the habit, and reformed other rules of discipline.33 As parishes and parochial schools flourished in the San Fernando Valley under his leadership, so did conservative fervor among Catholic mothers. Home to young families and sparkling new subdivisions, the “Valley” boasted large shopping centers and expansive yards—a mixture of suburban and rural lifestyles. Though not so highbrow as the bungalow home dwellers of Pasadena and Beverly Hills, Valley residents nevertheless enjoyed more comfort and privacy than the semiskilled occupants of ticky-tack tract housing built near bomber plants in Lakewood.34 Optimistic about the Valley’s promise for ranch-style living, middle-class parents worked to make their communities safe, wholesome, and prosperous. With the blessing of McIntyre, Williams formed the American Public Relations Forum, which gathered monthly in a few different locations. Forum meetings opened with a prayer, often featured a guest lecturer, and followed with a discussion. The organization coordinated correspondence campaigns by mailing its members

All Politics Was Local  •  43

Figure 2.3  Woodcrest Section of Woodland Hills, San Fernando Valley, California, 1959. The still relatively new San Fernando Valley communities of the 1950s, dominated by affordable ranch home subdivisions, beckoned young middle-class couples in the midst of establishing their families. Courtesy of the Hollywood Citizen News/ Valley Times Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

bulletins regarding bills before Congress and by making cards available at gatherings so those present could write to their representatives together.35 Underscoring that “prominent women of the San Fernando Valley have joined,” a Tidings announcement of the Forum’s first luncheon declared that the organization aimed to help “local women gain an intelligent understanding of current legislation.” Buried not so deep within the text of the announcement reside insights into the group’s class aspirations. By calling its women “prominent,” the Forum betrayed a new middle-class desire for status. More elite clubs of the mid-century tended to rely on subtle codes to communicate respectability. Meeting locations like the “Shakespeare Club” or high-profile hostess names accomplished that task. The Forum announcement assumed, moreover, that

­44  •  Chapter II “intelligent understanding of current legislation” should be of interest, seeming to reach out to women seeking intelligent political discussion, perhaps a friendly nonjudgmental atmosphere for political education. With this announcement, the Forum did not seek highly educated, radicalized iconoclasts. It wanted upwardly mobile housewives, keen on sharpening their minds— women whose lifestyles made them available for long luncheon meetings. Minute Women of the U.S.A., which also operated from the San Fernando Valley, represented another popular choice for women who felt somewhat shy but wanted to do something about communism. The Southern California unit worked in concert with the national organization, founded in 1949 by Suzanne Silvercruys Stevenson, the daughter of a Belgian baron. Investigative reports from the 1950s indicate that the Minute Women were white, middleand upper-class, between the ages of thirty and sixty, with school-age or grown children.36 In 1952 the organization boasted 50,000 members in forty-seven states. One chapter in Texas had its own men’s auxiliary, but those were few.37 Southern California claimed some of the strongest units, though the Minute Women’s secrecy policy has kept their exact numbers unknown. Stevenson instructed members to act as individual citizens and never reveal their organizational status.38 The appearance of spontaneity, she reasoned, made their political action more effective. Newsletters represented the organization’s lifeblood. Members rarely met but received mailings from the California chapter chairman and from the national leadership, whose headquarters eventually moved to Wheeling, West Virginia. It was outrage over UNESCO’s influence in public schools that prompted Gene Birkeland, the Minute Women newsletter editor, to first join the organization. After hearing about UNESCO at the Freedom Club and attending a school board meeting, where she met Minute Woman leader Charlane Kircher, Birkeland became a Minute Woman and eventually started attending American Public Relations Forum meetings, which convened near her home in Van Nuys. The Minute Women’s anonymity might also have provided members with a sense of security or power at a time when secrecy yielded rewards. This was the McCarthy era; your cat could have been spying on you. The literature published by the Minute Women, Forum, and other groups saw opponents as spies and infiltrators rather than social reformers. Enemies, first and foremost, had to be identified. Although they misidentified their enemies as uniformly subversives, anticommunists knew that leftist opponents were infiltrating their ranks. The Community Relations Committee (CRC), a moderate civil rights organization affiliated with the Jewish National Committee, spied on conservatives. When a CRC representative attended a 1952 Freedom Club event, the Reverend Fifield extended a special welcome to spies in the audience, inviting

All Politics Was Local  •  45

them to take notes, and thanking them for their attention. 39 Concerned about the threat posed by groups on the right like the Forum, the CRC regularly monitored their meetings and labeled typed manuscripts of minutes what they were: “spy reports.” The anticommunist CRC primarily focused its efforts on promoting civil rights and race relations, but continued the intelligence gathering that defined its early work as a Jewish defense organization when its leaders founded it in 1933.40 The culture of fear, mistrust, and secrecy touched activists across the political spectrum. The Tuesday Morning Study Club (TMSC) was formed a few years after the Forum and Minute Women in the rolling Linda Vista neighborhood of Pasadena. Still encumbered by political turmoil in its school system, Pasadena nevertheless retained a strong reputation for its culture, intellectual life, and affluence. As old as old wealth could be in California, Pasadena had long served as the bedroom community to the conservative financial establishment of Los Angeles, where Chamber of Commerce members brought their families to the Valley Hunt Club for relaxing afternoons by the pool. Some Pasadena mothers, not content to play bridge, gathered instead in a backyard recreational space behind the lovely home of activist Marjorie Jensen. One Tuesday a month, in the Jensen “playhouse,” as they called the small, simply crafted structure, TMSC meetings started with a guest speaker and ended with discussion. Early on, the gatherings tended to be small, sometimes including only seven women, but at the height of TMSC popularity in the late 1950s, attendance regularly reached 50 women or more. When 130 people arrived one day, filling the playhouse, yard, and back room of Jensen’s house, the club began renting larger spaces.41 On those occasions when the TMSC invited prominent speakers to Pasadena, they reserved a conference room at the Huntington Hotel, where they could accommodate larger mixed-sex crowds for evening events. Almost all of the Tuesday Morning Study Club programs focused on education. Topics ranged from UNESCO to “State Curriculum and the ‘New’ Education,” from “Civic Groups, Educating Toward World Citizenship,” to “Indoctrination Through Literature.”42 A mix of international, national, and local affairs filled the meeting agendas of the different conservative women’s organizations. It was never necessary for any of these groups to announce that they were for women; the format, presentations, and rituals made that announcement. Men, in fact, attended meetings sometimes—they were generally welcome—but only rarely. The topic of God made these groups female also. To be more precise: it was the ways in which group members talked about God that made these organizations female. Indeed many of the group members understood their own significance to politics in religious terms.

­46  •  Chapter II

Figure 2.4  Valley Hunt Club, Pasadena, California, 1941. In contrast with the San Fernando Valley and other newly inhabited parts of metropolitan Los Angeles, the older city of Pasadena maintained a more traditional aesthetic at mid-century. Even as world-class architects introduced bold new modern designs into many of its neighborhoods, manicured lawns, trim hedges, and sprays of roses under green awnings continued to define Pasadena’s signature style. The historic Valley Hunt Club catered to local elites, many of whom joined the ranks of the burgeoning postwar conservative movement. Courtesy of the Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

Most conservative women were Christian, though organizations did not tend to identify with particular churches or intensity of religious devotion. In Los Angeles, Catholic and Protestant women mixed quite comfortably in the conservative movement while antagonism characterized relations between the groups in the rest of the country. According to Robert Wuthnow, Protestants of the immediate postwar period often associated Catholic Latin culture and loyalty to the pope with totalitarianism. The Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. criticized the “cultic worship of Mary” by Catholics. Other Protestant critics

All Politics Was Local  •  47

charged that Catholicism’s hierarchical structure and associations with urban political machines revealed the church to be inherently undemocratic in nature. Catholic-Protestant tensions began to ease, according to Wuthnow, over the late 1960s and into the 1970s as Catholics became more educated, as Vatican II modernized the church, and as interfaith activities sponsored by leaders in both traditions fostered better relations.43 In Southern California, however, Catholic and Protestant women had been sitting side by side in meetings since the mid-1950s. They cultivated political camaraderie not only from the fight against atheistic communism, but also from their common need to develop spiritual interpretations of the changing world around them. Activists from both faiths lamented the secularization of American society as well as numerous social problems that they attributed to that trend, from rising crime rates to juvenile delinquency to loosening sexual norms. Conservative women contributed to the developing unity between Catholics and Protestants, not only by making all Christian women welcome in their meetings, but by cultivating a cross-denominational political style and culture. The American Public Relations Forum officially started its institutional life as a Catholic women’s organization, but by the late 1950s the group listed two officers who were Protestant: Gene Birkeland and Marie Koenig. The Minute Women’s membership policy welcomed women of all “faiths.” The language of its literature suggests, though, that non-Christian women need not apply. From the rhetoric and practices of both groups emerged pan-Christian ideals of political femininity. The American Public Relations Forum and Minute Women of the U.S.A. especially promulgated the idea that women had a divinely mandated role to fulfill in the defense of freedom. The Forum encouraged its members, first and foremost, to think about God with every political action they undertook, whether it involved the stroke of a pen or an uncomfortable confrontation with local school administrators. For God you could and should act unladylike. Though it was “nonsectarian” and included non-Catholic members, the group operated under the auspices of the Catholic Church, and leaders frequently relied on Catholic symbolism to explain the significance of its activity. Forum president Stephanie Williams reminded her members that while they toiled at their political tasks they must submit to God and pray. “We must place God as the senior of the family,” she explained one morning in August of 1952 when members asked what they should do to prepare for the presidential elections in November. The most important action they could take was to be faithful to their “. . . vocations in life.”44 The American Public Relations Forum also emphasized the connection between its members, mostly housewives and mothers, and the Virgin Mary. The

­48  •  Chapter II organization appointed a special Fatima chairman, who made sure that the Forum carried out the wishes of the Virgin Mary—wishes revealed to three children, cousins, in Portugal who claimed to have seen her apparition in 1917, 1920, and 1925. “Our Lady of Fatima,” as she was called by believers in the vision, declared three secrets to the cousins regarding the obligation of Catholics to pray for penance and do the rosary. The sighting also promised breathtaking political transformations, especially for anticommunists. One of the cousins, Sister Lucia dos Santos, had declared that an era of peace would ensue and that Russia would convert upon its consecration by church leaders. The Forum’s Fatima chairman, Mrs. Wolf, told the membership that in addition to sanctifying their lives and honestly working to be faithful to their vocation, they must “. . . get out and work.” Members must go to meetings and speak out, even if they did not “. . . know all of the answers.”45 They should not let timidity prevent them from fulfilling their appointed duties. The devil and good old-fashioned Catholic guilt came in handy as well. “Can He count on You to do everything in your power to impede the progress Satan is making while we sleep, and remain in apathetic indifference?.  .  .”46 Forum leaders never explicitly said that it was women’s duty to assume the arduous, nuts-and-bolts work of identifying subversives, but leaders relied on deeply embedded Christian notions of female piety, female self-sacrifice, and mother love to craft their motivational rhetoric. “We are not called on to be great ladies, or to do great things,” declared Stephanie Williams, implying that they must work without glory for the sake of others. While conservative men certainly understood their own political choices in religious terms, Christians have historically recognized piety as a female virtue. From the early Puritan goodwife and Republican motherhood ideals through the turn-of-the-century progressive reform movement, historians have documented the ongoing importance of spirituality to popular understandings of femininity. Forum members did not have to speak explicitly of women’s obligations to the church because volunteerism on behalf of God had been recognized as an appropriate form of female activity in the public sphere for more than a century.47 Longentrenched notions of female moral authority made religious appeals especially effective when directed at female audiences.48 The appearances of Lucifer and the Virgin Mother in Forum literature call attention, once again, to gender assumptions. The text recognizes no contradiction between the duties of women to acquiesce and assert themselves. Indeed, Our Lady of Fatima served as a conduit of power, power to be derived from submission. The text implies, moreover, that the submission of women to God elevates and purifies their political motivations. The secrecy and nonpartisanship policies of the Minute Women relied upon a similar set of gender

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assumptions. President Stevenson suggested that secrecy made political action appear unorganized, or “spontaneous,” rendering it more effective. She did not say outright that spontaneity would look better for women in particular, but her policy aligned with the political style and behavior of groups like the American Public Relations Forum. Hellfire and damnation worked with spontaneous expressions of maternal outrage to further legitimize passionate, alarmist outbursts as appropriately feminine forms of conservative demonstration. Though Minute Women rhetoric referred less to martyrdom and sacrifice than that of the Forum, the anonymous action it emphasized required the relinquishment of ego—a sacrifice for which society routinely rewarded women. Almost as important to the group as its anonymity stood the purity of purpose derived from nonpartisanship. The Minute Women exerted pressure by being “. . . alert, informed,” rather than endorsing candidates and descending into the “ballyhoo” of politics as usual. Like the American Public Relations Forum, Minute Women of the U.S.A. was “nonsectarian” but religious—“all united simply by their belief” according to its statement of principles. First and foremost, the organization stood for “God and country.” Splayed across the top of its newsletters was the entreaty, “If I can be an instrument of your will, Oh Lord.”49 When a Minute Woman sat down to read her literature from the organization, she perused a mix of scripture and political news packaged to affirm her integrated commitments to family, church, and nation. A 1956 bulletin issued from the California State Chapter opened with a quote from Mark 12:15–17 followed by criticism of a recently published book that, according to editor Gene Birkeland, misquoted the scriptural passage to imply that Jesus approved of taxation. The subtle manipulation of a few words, emphasized Birkeland, showed how easily the general public could be indoctrinated. “Is it the half truths . . . from the lips of commentators, politicians, authors, men of cloth, teachers and the press,” she asked, “that have made Mr. and Mrs. Average Citizen so docile?” Birkeland’s critique reflected the Forum’s and Minute Women’s fixation on a scripturally-defined understanding of the “truth.” “. . .[S]peak the truth and shame the devil,” declared the Minute Woman national president.50 Her organization recognized, as one of its duties, protection of God’s pronouncements—as well as those made by founding fathers—from the treachery of artful wordsmiths. Subversion, in their minds, stood for cunning. One Minute Woman who rose “. . . early in the morning [and] caught the worm” earned praise from the California bulletin because she gathered useful intelligence. Alert right from the crack of dawn, she demonstrated a level of vigilance that should be emulated by other members. Although “principles” and “morality,” so ubiquitous in the language of Depression-era activists, remained important,

­50  •  Chapter II the new generation articulated its own sense of patriotism more often in terms of the “truth” it was obligated to elevate. Clipping newspapers and writing letters did not win glory, but did rescue facts from the chicanery of subversives. The American Public Relations Forum and Minute Women of the U.S.A plugged Southern California women into a national conversation raging through conservative newsletters. Tucked among the stacks of Minute Women bulletins on the coffee table of an activist might be the monthly Dan Smoot Speaks out of Dallas. The ex-FBI man who worked for oilman H. L. Hunt printed his opinions on everything from the crime of Yalta to parent-teacher associations.51 On nightstands across Los Angeles County sat a novel by the English best-selling writer Taylor Caldwell—perhaps The Devil’s Advocate, a dystopian thriller about communist world domination. Caldwell, who would soon write for the John Birch Society after it was formed a few years later, became famous for plots about the triumph of the human spirit, free will, and individual responsibility over collectivism.52 Echoing Dan Smoot’s criticism of U.S. appeasement policy, a publication based in St. Louis called The Mindszenty Report found its way into the hands of Southern Californians also. Named after a Hungarian, Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty, who sat in prison, the Mindzenty Foundation was established in 1958 to promote anticommunist education. Not only did its literature offer yet another Christian-inflected outlook on totalitarianism, it provided conservative women with a model for action. The up-and-coming activist Phyllis Schlafly published the foundation’s educational materials, including the Report. Schlafly also designed study group programs centered on the scrutiny of congressional documents. Although the American Public Relations Forum had been engaged in that form of group study for six years already, Schlafly’s growing national profile nevertheless affirmed its commitment.53 Like the Minute Women’s beliefs about what “Mr. and Mrs. Average Citizen” should be doing to stop communism, Schlafly devoted her energies to mobilizing “little people,” as she described ordinary Americans.54 e So how did “Mrs. Average Citizen” become Mrs. Cold Warrior? What events, relationships, or institutions paved the path into conservative politics? Women entered conservative politics for a variety of reasons that we can explore through an examination of individual histories. Although personal accounts fail to provide a statistically significant sampling, they offer the opportunity to ponder the questions of why and how. As a cherished social history staple, such reports have long served scholars as a means of integrating female voices and experiences into larger established narratives. Though a handful of women in metropolitan Los Angeles cannot stand for all activists, their personal histories

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offer insight into how conservative ideas took shape out of women’s daily lives. But we capture more than voices here. What follows represents a study in selfinterpretation, since these renderings rely mainly on oral history interviews and one memoir. By calling attention to what women filtered out and accentuated in their own recollections while assessing themes that emerge as central to their stories, we see the importance that they placed on seeing—as in spotting, detecting, noticing, and naming political danger. The memories of five conservative women sustain analysis below: Marjorie Jensen, Jane Crosby, and Marie Koenig all lived and crossed each other’s paths in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles.55 Florence Ranuzzi and Marion Miller worked more independently—Ranuzzi in Hollywood and Miller in West Los Angeles. All became politically active as mothers in upwardly mobile middle-class nuclear families with two to three children, and each made a unique impact on local politics. Marjorie Jensen published a newsletter, the Network of Patriotic Letter Writers, which reached subscribers nationally, and hosted the influential Tuesday Morning Study Club at her home. Jane Crosby started one of the earliest John Birch Society chapters in Southern California and opened a conservative bookstore, the South Pasadena Americanism Center. Marie Koenig worked as an employee for Spiritual Mobilization, then joined several conservative groups before touring Southern California as a textbook censorship crusader. Florence Ranuzzi also operated a bookstore, the first in Southern California, called Poor Richard’s Book Shop. Marion Miller spied for five years as a volunteer informant for the FBI. While subsequent chapters of this book study the work performed by these women in greater detail, the following section examines how each described this work. Its patterns raise questions about the extent to which conservatism, or any movement, is spoken into existence. Conservative women came to know who they were as political subjects—as conservatives—in relation to the leftist enemy that they brought into form through writing, lecturing, and discussion. A common theme emphasized in the five women’s descriptions of their political history was the awakening. Female activists tend to emphasize distinct moments when someone or a series of events made them alert, as they often put it, to how communism menaced their freedom. The process of becoming aware, in recollections, frequently followed a something-not-feeling-right period. Awakenings discourse thus presupposed that the political subjects lived for some time in the dark, and that most other Americans at the time continued to be oblivious. Elaborations on how they came to see show the extent to which women activists equated the acquisition of vision with political transformation. Indeed, this power of sight—to conquer one’s enemy by shining light on his or her activities—became a powerful way for women to understand their own

­52  •  Chapter II unique political effectiveness. What others would describe as red-baiting, they interpreted as exposure of the truth. When Minute Woman Bulletin editor Gene Birkeland lauded one member for catching the “worm” by rising early, she praised not only her diligence, but her gifts of perception and identification. Marjorie Jensen’s awakening arrived in the early 1950s, shortly after she and her husband, Vernon, moved their young family to Pasadena. The transplanted midwesterners came west for a position offered to Vernon by the engineering firm C. F. Braun. Jensen grew up in a small Iowa town, the daughter of a smalltown banker and full-time housewife-mother.56 When Jensen first became involved in politics, the family lived on Linda Vista Boulevard in the western hills of Pasadena, one of the city’s most affluent enclaves.57 As the family settled into Pasadena while Vernon was in the midst of establishing his career, Marjorie was too busy chasing after young children to think much beyond the demands of the family. She became involved in politics only after her son and daughter were fully settled into school. A case of measles in her home, said Jensen, drew her into politics. The illness prompted an encounter with the elementary school principle, her first something’s-just-not-feeling-right moment. Upon asking what she should do to keep her son, Peter, from getting behind the other students, she remembers him saying, “Don’t quote me, but why don’t you just teach your own son how to read?”58 Jensen remembered how uncomfortable the administrator made her by disparaging one of his own teachers to a parent. When Peter returned to school, the learning atmosphere then came to seem “more than casual,” which caused her to become increasingly attentive to the learning methods employed by Peter’s teachers and compare them disapprovingly to her own basic subjectlearning educational background. Jensen described Peter’s classroom as “casual” in a 2002 interview, after having worked with other conservatives to associate words like “casual” with progressive education, thus undermining pedagogical reforms instituted in the public school system over the 1940s and 1950s. Jensen’s narration of her experiences credited Pro-America, a conservative women’s organization she joined soon after the measles episode, with helping her to see how the progressive education movement diminished curricular standards. Especially influential in this regard was Pro-America leader Frances Bartlett, who published her own newsletter, called FACTS in Education. Bartlett became a mentor. In Jensen’s words, Bartlett “educated” her to see threats that would otherwise have remained invisible to her. She saw herself as a housewife-mother minding her own business until people who knew better opened her eyes. Jensen equated her former lack of awareness with guilelessness, implying that her housewife

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focus created tunnel vision that had prevented her from seeing what needed to be seen for some time. Activist Jane Crosby similarly described the stimulation of her political consciousness as an awakening, but described that process in stages. The first arrived when she and her husband, Joe, lived in Deming, Arizona, while he flew bombers during World War II. She wanted to vote for Roosevelt and Joe protested. Crosby characterized herself as ignorantly unaware at the time—a new young bride who never bothered to study the facts like her more serious husband. “I said well, why, I like his fireside chats, and I didn’t straighten up about anything. And he said honey, when you study the platforms of these two parties, you don’t belong in the Democratic Party.” Although Crosby admired her husband, who also became deeply involved in conservative politics alongside his wife, she emphasizes the facts over Joe’s influence as the game changer. “[R]ight after that election I began to look into it more, and see what they really stood for. And when I really realized that the Republican Party stood for free enterprise and individual responsibility and limited government, those were things that appealed to me. And I could see that the Democrats were just running everybody’s lives and I didn’t want that. So my husband was right.”59 The act of paying attention and availing herself of the facts, according to Jane, brought her to conservatism. Like Jensen, she portrayed herself as naive until the right circumstances and people plugged her into the truth. Crosby credits a printing business she started with opening her eyes further. The native of the San Gabriel Valley worked out of the house, not far from where her Canadian immigrant parents had settled. After her father died when she was five, Jane’s mother drew income from a few properties owned by the couple, by bringing boarders in their home, and by serving dinner for a dollar. Jane and Joe, high school sweethearts, married shortly after their graduation in 1938. Neither spouse had attended college, partly, according to Jane, because of their decision to marry so early and partly because Joe went off to war. After the couple returned to Southern California and settled in South Pasadena, Joe soon entered into his father’s business, the California Liquid Fertilizer Company.55 Jane worked for several years in the Pasadena school system, but it became more convenient once her sons were born to print literature from a mimeograph machine in the family’s home for income.60 Crosby identified a regular client, the League of Women Voters, with producing the something-just-doesn’t-feel-right sensation for her. “I really didn’t read the content very much,” she remembers, “but when I finally one day started reading the content of it I thought, wow, I don’t like what they stand for.”61 By contrast, she remembered the excitement she felt when another female

­54  •  Chapter II client put in her hand a piece of political literature called Packaged Thinking for Women, published in 1948. Authors Lucille Cardin Crain and Anne Burrows Hamilton argued that feminists and the national media had been spoon-feeding American women their political ideology since the 1920s. Packaged Thinking characterized the women who participated in reform and peace movements as dupes of the left. “You must see that this political structure of organized women is a seed bed perfectly suited to the propagation of doctrine—any doctrine.”62 The Parent Teacher Association, according to Crosby, also pushed her into conservative politics. “They had a lot of real shady, to me, at that time, left-wing Communist-type speakers. . . . It just seemed like there was a lot going on, it just smelled to me and I wanted to find out more about it.”63 A somethingjust-isn’t-right event that Jane recalled as formative to her attitude about the PTA occurred in March of 1956, the Seventh Annual Biennial Conference on Childhood and Youth, sponsored by the thirty different organizations led by the Los Angeles region Welfare Planning Council, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.64 The social scientists who lectured about mental health made her especially uncomfortable. “[T]hey were promoting mental health. They were going to get everybody going on that. And I started to look into that.”65 Jane and other conservatives associated “mental health” programs with brainwashing. She also found the discussion groups to be undemocratic. As she asked in a letter to the South Pasadena Review, “Are we going to trade our traditional parliamentary procedure and individual thinking for consensus of opinion where we are used merely as stooges while the minority group twists our thinking around, almost like hypnosis?. . . 66 The Crosby and Jensen interviews belie the guilt by association that conservatives perceived between all things progressive. Both talked as if they had to expose the “left” as if there was no other choice. They did not always say “left”; their words instead delineated an inchoate political force on the left that demanded focused and sustained study to pin down. The imprecise language, indeed, reflects the sweeping scope of the left, as conservative activists imagined and integrated beliefs about that category into understandings of their own political mandate in this period. Activist discourse on the right grouped communist front organizations, liberal civil rights groups, Soviet spies, progressive educators, and numerous others into a left not loosely related by common interests, but actually working together to undermine American freedom. The modifiers “communist-type,” “pro-communist,” or “anti-anticommunist” collapsed distinctions between many different organizations and movements that often struggled to distance themselves from each other. Political actors within this “left” of the conservative imagination were sinister or unwitting weapons of the sinister. Conservative protest often gendered the left as a masculine

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predatory force that exploited the trusting, unguarded nature of communitylevel relationships to, borrowing Gene Birkeland’s language, “worm” their ideology into the minds of innocents. The emphasis on awakenings resonated with the ways in which women talked about the political work that came to fill their days. Never referring to conservatism as a “movement,” activists instead remembered “patriotic” Americans rousing each other from a stupor and devoting themselves to saving the country. Subjects describe their involvement as if they had no serious interest in politics until the light had been turned on for them. Once their consciousness became aroused, the work and the community of other awakened patriots seemed to sweep into their lives without them asking for it. Although activists betrayed a shared love for the movement’s labor in their oral histories, they almost never said outright that they joined organizations for any fulfillment of a personal need. Narrations of that experience instead privileged the gravity of dangers that created the political work for them. Activists, in other words, liked to talk about work—hard work—without calling it “work.” The extent to which they might or might not enjoy the work or feel the need to work for their own gratification lay outside the realm of importance to them. Indeed, the vigor of the conservative movement owes much to this labor of middle- and upper-class women who might have enjoyed professional “careers” given their backgrounds, but would not likely legitimize professional “career” enjoyment as a choice for women. Marjorie Jensen’s newsletter, the Network of Patriotic Letter Writers, so consumed her life that she described it as a “business.” “We didn’t want it to especially. We just wanted to get some things going.”67 She had not planned at the outset to build a national network that would last twenty-two years, but remembered feeling compelled by the political exigencies that confronted her and her cohorts in the mid-1950s. Interview questions meant to establish Jensen’s background, however, provoked answers about a work and educational history that she proudly claimed. Back in Iowa, Jensen had assisted food researcher Belle Lowe at McCall’s magazine after graduating from Iowa State College with a BA.68 Once the children had settled into school, she could have chosen to go back to paid employment, perhaps part-time to pay for extras like vacations or piano lessons as other self-identified housewives did in the 1950s. Roughly one out of eight female inhabitants in her section of Pasadena worked out of the home.69 Instead, Jensen became a conservative activist engrossed in research, meetings, and newsletter publishing. Activism became a full-time career. Like many of her cohorts, Marjorie Jensen lived in a world that bombarded her daily with mixed messages about the definitions of and value of work.

­56  •  Chapter II Vernon’s boss, Carl F. Braun, for example, wrote and published numerous books on management and leadership while building a multimillion-dollar empire from the infrastructure he helped to build for the military-industrial complex in Southern California. A strong believer in motivational techniques, Braun also encouraged his engineers to read broadly in classical literature as a means of understanding their personal role, as innovators, in the advancement of human progress. Vernon Jensen thus received a good dose of pro-industrial boosterism in addition to an office and paycheck from his employer—boosterism so enmeshed with the daily operations at Braun that Marjorie as well as Vernon could not have avoided its reach.70 Few could escape, moreover, the contradictory mix of messages broadcast from the mass media. While popular depictions of women valorized feminine contributions to the private world of the home, Cold War culture also celebrated affluence and capitalism, which invited women as well as men to fantasize about personal success and notoriety. Examining cultural representations of the American “containment” strategy for mitigating the global spread of communism, Elaine Tyler May has equated the intense interest in home life after World War II with the U.S. approach to restraining Soviet power abroad. More than military strategy, the containment approach to securing stability in the nuclear age transferred to homelife. Containment shored up gender norms, lowered the average age of marriage, and fueled the baby boom.71 Women, however, regularly encountered messages that equated achievement with happiness and the American dream. While participating in a consumer culture that promised fulfillment through a well-kept and well-equipped home, they imbibed chatter about free will, free enterprise, and individualism on the airwaves and at corporate cocktail parties. Although many middle-class women joined in the workforce at various points in their lives, professional career tracks remained a near-exclusive male domain. Grassroots activism in the conservative movement thus provided an alternative means by which women could promote a conjoining system of economic, social, and religious values taking shape in their political consciousness while nurturing their own ambition and creativity. Jensen could have responded to these messages by going to work for a company like Braun, even though she would have bumped her head on the eye-level glass ceiling of the fifties and sixties. Female employment surged during and after World War II, presenting women with choices, even while homemaking and motherhood rose in popularity as feminine vocations. Middleclass housewives consumed the accoutrements of domesticity, but also felt an inevitable restlessness as they watched the female teachers, real estate brokers, and salesladies in their neighborhoods drive off to work. Betty Friedan’s 1962

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feminist text, The Feminine Mystique, catalyzed the women’s movement by capturing the postwar longings of financially secure women who wanted an identity beyond that of housewife. Based largely on interviews she conducted with her Smith College classmates, Friedan described women’s desire for more as the “problem that has no name.”72 Women on the right were part of the same socioeconomic demographic category that received the Feminine Mystique so enthusiastically, but chose conservative activism instead of feminist solutions as a means of leaving a wider impact on the world. Pasadena activist Marie Koenig was no feminist, but she spoke bluntly about how political work filled a personal need to make an impact. Born in New Orleans, Koenig grew up in a Democratic household of Huey Long supporters. After completing two years at Louisiana State University, she left school to work in the offices of the state attorney general until his term ended. During World War II, she moved to California to live with her sister while her brotherin-law, a doctor, served overseas.73 The transplanted southerner took her secretarial skills to work in the legal affairs offices at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. At the sprawling MGM industrial campus on National Boulevard, Koenig wrote contracts, enjoyed good wages, a reasonable nine-to-six schedule, and a filing crew that relieved her of the most menial pink-collar duties.74 She loved the job, but did not love the union. After quitting amid one of the explosive wartime studio strikes, Koenig became assistant to the president at Spiritual Mobilization, an institution that led her into the conservative movement. Paid work ended for Koenig when she married Walter Koenig in 1956, but political activity intensified, even after her girls were born. Koenig remembered “practically every minute that didn’t take up the laundry and the cooking and the shopping, you know, was involved in all these organizations.” Unlike Jensen, she bluntly admitted the need for outside stimulation. No fan of housework, Marie recalled that she joined organizations because she “had to get out of the house.”75 Koenig divided her time between different conservative groups, as well as cultural organizations and women’s professional associations. In the late 1950s she served as public relations director for the American Public Relations Forum while also attending the meetings of the Tuesday Morning Study Club and the Pasadena Republican Women’s Club, where she discussed the volumes of conservative literature she consumed regularly. Up until her death in 2004, she maintained a professional resume that itemized all of her paid jobs and volunteer commitments together into a diverse career history.76 The detailed cataloguing of work experience by Koenig calls attention to the numerous positions that she thought its readers ought to take seriously, but the interview reveals more in its emphasis on the centrality of her husband and daughters in these years. She could not commit full-time hours to

­58  •  Chapter II

Figure 2.5 Marie Koenig (left) and James Ingebretsen (right), ca. 1950–56. Koenig worked for five years at the Christian libertarian nonprofit organization Spiritual Mobilization (SM) as assistant to its president, James C. Ingebretsen, who succeeded founder James W. Fifield. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

political or paid work in the fifties or sixties, she explained, because she “. . . had a family to take care of.” Her distaste for housework, moreover, did not apply to daily tasks associated with tending to her family; her narration simply assumed that she could take care of them without loving house chores. In her 2001 interview, Koenig expressed no nostalgia for postwar domesticity. She, in fact, praised equally Republicans Phyllis Schlafly and Elizabeth Dole along with Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer for the political paths they blazed. With respect to Feinstein and Boxer, she reflected, “I don’t go along with their ideology, but I certainly wouldn’t want to stop them because they’re forces to be reckoned with.”77 In the next sentence, however, she

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recalled Hillary Clinton’s well-known misstatement “Just because I’m not at home baking cookies” as an attack on women. In 2001 Koenig still perceived a left that menaced America through the family. She could admit that housework gave her no personal joy, yet interpret the “baking cookies” remark as a broad attack on women’s particular gifts to society that she clearly seemed to honor. Koenig’s description of her political work also affirms society’s doers. “I guess some people are joiners.  .  .  . I’m not sure, but I guess I just felt that certain things had to be done.” Praising industriousness, which she associated with conservatives, she declared, “. . . that this nation was founded by people who were very knowledgeable about world affairs. They were educated. They were religious. They believed in God. They believed in work and responsibility. And just like Governor Bradford said, no work, no food.”78 Koenig not only linked her instinct to join, do, and take responsibility to her patriotism, but to her plain-folk southern origins. She explained, in fact, that becoming a conservative after starting out a staunch Huey Long supporter in a Democratic New Orleans required no major ideological leap. “I didn’t move from anything to anything,” she said, “because I was just a plain, ordinary patriotic American.”79 Koenig used the word “ordinary” twice, by which she seemed to mean normal. She described herself as “an ordinary patriotic American” within a larger representative middle from which, in her words, she never budged. Koenig saw herself as plain folk, even as she moved up the socioeconomic ladder. She, along with other conservatives, embraced simplicity and humility as their political styles while critically regarding ostentation and agitation as the left’s modus operandi—in Marie’s word’s, “all those hippies that were active in the sixties running around.”80 She might not have baked cookies herself, but she was a housewife populist who honored the simplicity of women at home baking cookies. Florence Ranuzzi, operator of the first conservative bookstore in Los Angeles, could barely separate family and work spheres in her oral history. Born Florence Niehls, the showgirl-turned-activist started life in a bootlegger’s family. While her father operated an illegal saloon during Prohibition, Florence’s mother took steps to become an independent businesswoman, eventually bringing the entire family to Beverly Hills. In a letter written to her own daughter, Florence wrote fondly and proudly of her mother, describing the success of Marie Niehls as the inspiration behind many of her own life choices. She remembered becoming more independent as Marie, busy establishing a career in real estate, left much of the housework to the two daughters while charging them board.81 Florence Niehls went to work in show business after turning seventeen and graduating from high school. She became a dancer-actress in movies and

­60  •  Chapter II traveling music revues, entering glamorous movie sets in glittering, sumptuous costumes and working side by side with Hollywood’s most popular celebrities. Her showbiz career ended, however, when she acquired klieg eye, a condition named after the ubiquitous klieg lights that illuminated film producations, damaging the eyes of some performers.82 Despite the tragic end of her film career, Florence made her first real investment shortly thereafter when she bought a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house on a large lot for $5,500. She also used some of the money she had earned to take a secretarial course, which eventually brought her work in an office. Florence described the conservative bookstore that she and her husband, the former navy lieutenant Francis X. Ranuzzi, opened in 1961, as a political partnership. The two decided together to become involved in conservative politics after they heard a speech by a Hungarian freedom fighter in the late fifties. Like Jensen and Koenig, Ranuzzi remembers feeling compelled by the need to do something. “And he [the freedom fighter] told about a woman and her teenage daughter who was in this prison camp with him, and he said the girl turned on the mother and she said, ‘Why didn’t you do something, oh no, you were too busy playing bridge.’ And that hit home.”83 In Florence’s memory she associated female leisure with a dangerous stupor that led to communism. She thus had to work to save her country and save her family. Contrary to status-anxiety interpretations of conservative behavior developed by consensus scholars of the 1950s, Florence saw herself in the company of the alert—those no longer lulled by leisure, property, and other tranquilizers of consumption. Florence hosted a John Birch Society chapter in her home and ran the nonprofit bookstore, Poor Richard’s, they opened in 1961 while Frank ran the family’s income-generating insurance agency. She and eldest daughter, Mary, who participated in the 2001 interview, agreed on how the separation of labor unfolded but disagreed on the reasons why. Replicating the patterns of her own childhood, Florence left much of the housework to Mary, so that she could spend more time in the bookstore. Poor Richard’s became a monumental labor of love, a project that drew Florence in deeper with each piece of hate and fan mail she received. Mary remembered, “. . . in many respects, [the bookstore] was a joint, was my father’s idea, oh let’s do it. But it’s my mother that took an idea and did it. She was the one that did the printing, did the ordering. In other words, it was her store. And back in that time . . . the mind set was that you didn’t put yourself forward.” Florence responded, “I never thought of putting myself [forward]. I wasn’t interested in that. What I wanted, I thought the country was in very bad shape. And I was worried about creeping socialism . . . I wanted to do anything I could.”84

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Figure 2.6  Florence Ranuzzi, ca. 1925. Decades before Florence Ranuzzi became a fulltime conservative bookstore operator, she worked as a showgirl in silent films. Ranuzzi recognized her years on stage and in the back offices of the entertainment industry as formative to her activist political career. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

­62  •  Chapter II The concern about “creeping socialism” remained so poignant in Florence’s mind that she expressed no regret about placing demands on her daughters for the sake of the store. Florence spent up to six days a week at Poor Richard’s. “Once I got my car I would,” remembers Mary, “. . . pick up my sister, do the grocery shopping, I’d cook the meals . . . My mother literally went to work.”85 Both mother and daughter talked repeatedly about slashed tires, crank calls, and broken store windows.86 The Ranuzzis—family and bookstore—eventually moved to Montana to escape harassment in the heat of the Watts riot. “[O] ur phone would ring and we’d get threats and one of them was we’ll get that daughter of yours and slash her up good,” remembered Florence. “And we would have the phone changed and in a couple of days they’d get our number again, unlisted number. And that was the reason why I went up to Montana.” During the riots, when calls came in—“we’re going to burn you out,” she continued—they packed a van within twenty-four-hours and started the move. As Mary pointed out, they “. . . never thought that any of the black population caused any trouble during the Watts riots, [but] felt that people who didn’t like the bookstore would use that as an excuse to have something else go up in smoke.” Ranuzzi’s narration framed the priorities of family and the priorities of the bookstore as one and the same. The thuggish left that used rather than represented black people needed to be stood down. Her description of the danger indicates that she and Frank felt fear for the family, but put responsibility for that fear on the radicals who called, slashed their tires, and broke their windows. Florence portrays the move as a refusal to retreat—a determination to remain standing on principle. The story of Marion Miller, volunteer spy for the FBI, represents a similar though far more dramatic account of maternal patriotic commitment. Miller’s espionage comes to us not as an interview, but as a published memoir from the early 1960s. I Was a Spy: The Story of a Brave Housewife celebrated maternal patriotic duty fusing the family and nation as the focus of Miller’s protection. Miller, who would eventually run for Los Angeles School Board and share the stage with Ronald Reagan at an anticommunism rally, became a local conservative celebrity from the publication of I Was a Spy. Animated narration of her counterespionage exploits, along with vivid description of physical side effects suffered from stress and the dangers she faced, gives the impression that the five years of spy work meant a great deal to Miller personally. The provocative spy story indeed underscored the laborious, secretive —and unpaid—nature of Miller’s work but emphasized its importance to the nation-family. By reading Reader’s Digest or watching This is Your Life, national audiences could celebrate the author’s daring maternal sacrifice as well.

All Politics Was Local  •  63

Figure 2.7   I Was a Spy: The Story of a Brave Housewife (1960). Marion Miller of West Los Angeles, who called herself a “poor man’s Mata Hari,” documented the volunteer espionage work she performed for the FBI in her memoir, I Was a Spy. Miller also became known to the nation through the memoir’s serial in Reader’s Digest and her appearance on the popular television show This Is Your Life. Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

­64  •  Chapter II Raised in Miami, Marion Miller grew up in a comfortable middle-class Jewish home. She was the daughter of a haberdasher and his wife whose household felt the financial instability of the Depression but did not suffer.87 Always a good student, Marion attended a local university on scholarship, eventually becoming a primary school teacher. She flirted with radicalism as a student, joining a Zionist organization at one point, but eventually became stridently anticommunist upon getting to know her future husband, Paul. The two met at a USO party, fell in love, and married in 1943.88 Paul revealed his history of countersubversive activity to his new wife, but after the wedding. Marion’s new husband had been a merchant marine who also worked undercover as a counterspy for the FBI. After he moved to Jacksonville in 1939, a member of the National Maritime Union talked to him about joining the Communist Party. Restraining what Marion describes as his “go-to-hell reflex,” Paul went to the local FBI office and proposed that he join the party in order to monitor its activities for the bureau. The Jacksonville office was pleased to have his assistance, though they never paid him.89 Within weeks of dancing with his future wife at the USO event, Paul became secretary of the Jacksonville Communist Party.90 Though Marion’s memoir fails to cover the moment she learned of Paul’s espionage work, the news—especially after the more life-threatening instances of his counterespionage—might have been unsettling to her. Instead of dismissing Paul as a wild-eyed, cavalier red-hunter looking for danger, the memoir rallies behind him. She admitted that Paul was “. . . a romantic and his fantasies were swashbucklers.” But she also added that he was “. . . a patriot and more fiercely than that a free man.”91 She decided to become part of his world. Her own spy activities started six years after the couple moved to Los Angeles, in 1950, when Paul had established his business as a commercial artist, son Paul Jr. was a small boy, and daughter Betsy was two months old. A suspicious mass mailing arrived for Marion from the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of Foreign Born. The “intemperate” tone rang of subversion, according to the memoir, with words like “fascists” and “concentration camps” putting both wife and husband on guard. The letter summoned Marion to a conference on the recently passed McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act. 92 She balked, relenting only after Paul volunteered to help with the children and pressing on her the importance of volunteer agents, “There’s never enough [military intelligence]. The Bureau will tell you that.”93 I Was a Spy jokes lightly about the difficulties of juggling counterintelligence work and mothering. “What about Paul and Betsy?” she recalls asking her husband, “Do we let them forage for left-over salami while I’m out saving the world? My first duty is to you and the children. And to myself. If that’s selfish,

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I’m selfish.” Miller equates the desire to stay home and focus on family with sticking her head in the sand. While indirectly affirming the pull she felt from maternal instinct (her selfishness wasn’t really all that selfish), she credits Paul with mustering her courage and proving the necessary support at home. “. . . I can look after the children,” he responded. “You have a duty to civilization, too. I’m not impugning your patriotism. I just know what I know.”94 Marion Miller spied on the Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born for five years. The FBI aimed to gather proof of ties between the local committee and the national organization, known to be a communist front. Miller eventually joined the Communist Party and became secretary at the committee’s local office. By that time, Paul had started attending meetings and registered as a Communist again also.95 She worked simultaneously for the Communist Party, the Foreign Born Committee, and the FBI. When alone in the committee’s office, she generated a fourth carbon copy of the documents she typed as intelligence for the bureau.96 In April of 1955 she finally testified at a hearing in Washington, D.C,. representing the main link between the national Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born, the Communist Party, and the Los Angeles committee.97 I Was a Spy depicts the five years of undercover work as costly but worth the sacrifice. Miller missed meals, lost weight, and developed ulcers. “. . . I will always know they were five years I gave to my country.”98 The testimony lost her, Paul, and the children numerous friends after the Foreign Born Committee blanketed the Millers’ West Los Angeles community with a letter describing Marion’s activities. Schoolyard playmates began harassing the children and clubs dropped Marion as a member. Hate mail flooded the home, denouncing her as an “informer” and “stool pigeon.” After a period of isolation, Miller recalled, “We’ve found our America all over again and we like to think it’s found us.” Good friends returned and new ones entered their lives, mainly through the anticommunist lectures she and Paul gave. Indeed, Miller became a minor celebrity in other circles when she published her experiences, first as the Reader’s Digest serial and then the memoir.99 The hit television program This Is Your Life featured Marion on one of its programs. Many members of the Jewish community forgave her, including the local B’nai B’rith organization, which made her president, and local Jewish anticommunist organizations made her their spokesperson.100 Marion also made new conservative friends in a West Los Angeles group called Women for America.101 Miller leveraged the costs and sacrifices described in I Was a Spy to reach— no, smack, like a mother bringing a child to attention—readers with messages about communism. With the five years of dangerous close calls, weight loss, and ulcers she demands that attention be paid to the intimacy she acquired

­66  •  Chapter II with the enemy. “Listen to me please!,” she demands in the chapter “Credo.” “This is the new Communism in the United States,” her expression for the left as it was imagined by conservatives. “You see it all around you every day if only you will see it. . . . And do not think of Communism that it can’t happen here. It can—and if 180,000 of us don’t snap out of it one of these days soon, it will.” She chastises Americans not for their lack of patriotism, but for their indifference, much like Ranuzzi’s memory of the Hungarian bridge-playing mother. “Apathy and a full stomach, this combination is not good when someone is circling you with his eye on the jugular.”102 Prosperity would lull Americans into a dangerous stupor that invited subversives to infiltrate. The “new Communist” does not think that it is communism, but she reminds her readers repeatedly of the old analogy, “if it quacks like a duck . . .” Marion Miller thus flexed her former spy credentials to collapse what she called “anti-anticommunists” into the general category of traitor. One chapter recounts an excursion into Boyle Heights to recruit a known liberal who had expressed adamant opposition to communism. “Sounds insurmountable, doesn’t it? It isn’t—not by a long way. Ask a communist some time. Scratch a ‘liberal’ and you have a prospect.” Miller, in other words, could see through the eyes of a communist because she was trained to be one.103 By collapsing all varieties of liberal and progressive reform into a singular agent of destruction, conservatives erased not only a diversity of legitimate political movements but a diversity of people. Conservatives constructed a “left” with a fractured racial identity, at once colorless but ambiguously dark. The interviews, letters, and memoirs studied here never denigrated racial minority groups or blamed them for political problems. In fact, given that many of these activists fought against desegregation, fair employment practices legislation, and housing reform, the relative paucity of explicit racial discourse would seem to be a glaring omission. Conservatives tended to dismiss appeals for racial justice as smokescreen tactics devised by the amorphously defined “left” for fomenting social and political upheaval. The colorless left of the right-wing imagination thus ignited racial animosity for the sake of stealing from hard-working Americans economic rewards that the so-called agitators had not earned—a problem that, in theory, had nothing to do with race. Conservative discourse nevertheless shaded the left a murky brown with the unspoken assumption that racial mixing would necessarily create political chaos. Since everyone who contributed to this discourse possessed the same racial fears, the words simply did not need to cross any lips unless to reassert occasionally the certainty that subversives—not people of color as a group—pushed for race reform. African Americans appear in Marion Miller’s I Was a Spy as recruitment targets for communists. She recalls an audience member who talked to her and

All Politics Was Local  •  67

Paul after one of their lectures, relating a story about how communists sought him out because he was a leader in his predominantly black ward of the city. Quoting him from her memory, Miller writes, “‘A few of us . . . they’ll get it. They [the communists] make a big to-do about our grievances. What’s the use to chew over the grievances when you could use the energy trying to right them. . . . Legislation’ll do it some day,’” continued Miller’s black speaker. “ ‘Not today, not tomorrow. It’s going to take time. These fools, they want their revolution. . . .” The gentlemanly figure also delivered the narrative’s message about racial mixing. After conceding that they, the Millers, probably would not want their sister to marry a black man, he said, “I wouldn’t want my sister to marry one of you either. There’s the children to think of, the whole society structure the way it is.” Paul Miller then hugged the man as both confessed to each other than neither had a sister. I Was a Spy thus marshals the tools of recollection to delegitimize the civil rights movement by recounting this encounter in vivid description with talking parts. The narrative surely could not replicate exactly what the audience member or any speaker said in five years, word for word. Yet the quotation marks that designated speech give the impression that words belonged to their users. Memoir-delivered dialogue, as Miller arranged it, from the mouth of a black speaker was recognized by readers to be true to life. “Legislation’ll do it,” she chose to write, emphasizing a folksy turn of phrase that seemed to say: this black man put on no airs—he wanted peace just like every other American not bent on revolution. Paul’s hug makes clear the absence of race revulsion; he was an equal opportunity hugger: “Paul’s heart is quick. He embraced the man. He does that to a lot of people but it’s not a stage trick. He means it.”104 e Only by considering the meaning that women activists ascribe to their political choices can we even begin to truly fathom what it was that they beheld—what they saw—when they believed they were witnessing communism in action. Involvement in politics at the local level intensified the belief that subversives posed threats that were invisible yet immediate. Communism became at once, in their minds, a global and community problem. While intellectuals, politicians, and religious leaders on the right made sweeping connections between subversion and totalitarianism—linking domestic unrest and far-flung revolutions—reforms implemented by school officials provided what seemed like concrete evidence of these connections. Local signs of communism’s influence proved instrumental to the sense of alarm and urgency that drove activists to militancy. Government officials, including J. Edgar Hoover, further encouraged women to look hard for communists in their midst by arguing that the

­68  •  Chapter II government was ill equipped to do so. Without enough agents in the FBI to find and thwart the red menace, Hoover asserted, private citizens needed to be eternally watchful.105 Who better than housewives? Though he never specifically named women as a group well suited to this task, female activists took it upon themselves to adopt vigilance as their job, one they could do better than anyone else. While husbands were too distracted and occupied by work to confront the political dangers all around, wives recognized themselves as well positioned in the community and well equipped organizationally to assume that responsibility. The red-hunting housewife takes center stage in the following chapter. The American right continued to champion individualism and small government as it had for decades, but how conservatives defined the “individual” and conceived of dangers posed by federal intervention changed perceptibly in the 1950s. Cold Warriors directed populist outrage against a new breed of elites: educational, medical, and government bureaucrats usurping the authority of parents, clergy, and local law enforcement officials. Conservative women played an active role in profiling and confronting the new enemies. Using anticommunism as a weapon made strong by men like J. Edgar Hoover, conservative women brought the international battles of the Cold War into their communities.

C H A P T E R   I I I

Education or Indoctrination? Conservative Female Activism in the Los Angeles   Public Schools

In October of 1955, Los Angeles radio listeners tuned into CBS-KNX heard housewife Jo Hindman in the throes of a raucous debate over library discussion groups. “The most revolutionary and radical thing about the American Heritage Project,” declared Hindman, “is that it takes the library from its traditional role as custodian of books and puts it on the lecture circuit.” Among her adversaries, the station featured Henry Steele Commager, distinguished historian from Columbia University. Through a montage of taped interviews, CBS-KNX pitted comments from Hindman against those of Commager, editor of the common reading used in the American Heritage Project, a national adult enrichment program initiated by the National Library Association and implemented in libraries around the country. 1 Between 1952 and 1955, fourteen libraries in Los Angeles County offered the popular bimonthly discussion groups on U.S. history, government, and citizenship. 2 Participants talked about historical documents and commentary in Commager’s Living Ideas in America.3 Hindman, who fought to get the program suspended, argued that Living Ideas had a socialist slant. As she proclaimed on the radio, the Inglewood mother felt that it was her duty as “a citizen, a taxpayer and the parent of children going into a world” to prevent such material from being propagated. Commager responded that while the fears of Hindman and thousands like her were sincerely felt and based on a degree of reality, opponents of educational programs like the American Heritage Project wanted their own narrow point of view exclusively represented. “And all these people [anticommunists] do not want discussion, or want a one-sided discussion,” declared Commager.4 On the day that Henry Steele Commager and Jo Hindman faced off, the Cold War red scare had embroiled them in two very different careers. The adversaries were as confident in their own commitment to freedom as they were in the profundity of the other’s disillusionment. Commager was a public intellectual and outspoken critic of Joseph McCarthy. Evincing no fear of loyalty boards, he had become known for his adamant refusal to let anticommunists intimidate him. Commager openly attacked the most powerful red

­70  •  Chapter III hunters of the era, including the House Un-American Activities Committee.5 His debate opponent was a housewife and mother on the brink of becoming a conservative writer-activist. Soon after the library controversy was over, she placed articles in nationally circulated conservative periodicals, including Human Events and the Freeman. By 1960, Hindman was serving as west coast editor of the American Mercury. Though lacking the professional résumé or institutional affiliations of her fellow writers, she had established a reputation as a researcher—a housewife who exposed brainwashers. In this respect, she became the Cold War version of the 1920s female countersubversive prototype—the woman patriot for a new era. The local scope and impact of right-wing women’s activism opened a new chapter in the history of American conservatism during the Cold War. Though female influence in community affairs was by no means new, rightwing women of the 1950s and 1960s injected powerfully localistic, antiexpert, home-rule dimensions to conservatism that complemented its traditional antistatism. Between the twenties and the fifties, the orientation of conservative women shifted from national to metropolitan politics. Unlike their predecessors, who fought nationalization of the family primarily at the national level, Cold War women challenged federal authority primarily through local institutions. Where early twentieth-century activists mustered vigor against the federal Sheppard-Towner Act, mid-twentieth-century counterparts found success in community education battles. They aimed to convince the public of the immediacy of the communist threat. With tremendous passion and skill they strove to convey their belief that subversives worked hard and nefariously to create a welcoming environment for authoritarianism, right underneath everyone’s noses. They also saw themselves in the midst of a revolt against a cadre of social scientific “experts” who amassed a body of theories, practices, and policies that aimed to curtail the scope of parents’ duties. While remaining deeply engaged in national and international affairs at every turn, they nevertheless made their strongest impact within an hour’s driving distance of their homes. The post–Korean War discourse of “brainwashing” invigorated educational issues for the emerging right. For decades, conservative critics had been attacking progressive education as a socialist experiment while pressuring universities to fire suspected Marxists on their faculty. As a philosophy, set of pedagogical practices, and policy recommendations, the progressive education movement started by reformer John Dewey in the early twentieth century revolted traditionalists. Long-standing fears of radical intellectuals using their brainpower to manipulate innocent minds also fueled the emerging “brainwashing” discourse.6 However, stories of American GIs “reprogrammed” in North Korea by Chinese communists escalated and modified these fears of indoctrination,

Education or Indoctrination?  •  71

making a significant imprint on American political culture of the 1950s. Journalist Edward Hunter horrified readers with reports of captured U.S. soldiers who were psychologically manipulated to defect to the enemy camp in his popular book Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds, which sustained numerous republications after it first appeared in 1951. After Hunter introduced “brainwashing” into the American vernacular, the psychologist Joost A. M. Meerloo created a social scientific niche for mind control. Hollywood, moreover, dramatized reprogramming in Korean War captivity films.7 Chinese-style reeducation camps brought ideological wars traditionally fought on intellectual ground into mental realms that were harder to fathom. The psychological turn in the 1950s represented a significant shift in belief about how communists propagated their ideas. Conservative activists came to think that leftists subverted society as much through devious mind games as they did through speeches in union and lecture halls. Also fueling such suspicions were the Communist Party USA ’ s secrecy, authoritarianism, and loyalty to Moscow, which conservatives tended to associate with liberals as well.8 Consensus seemed to emerge among activists that leftists were getting dirtier and sneakier, which meant that red hunting required more detective work. Women stepped forward with the conviction that they were especially poised to do this detective work. Placing a high value on their moral and spiritual contributions to society, women anticommunists saw a special role for themselves in the affairs of the mind as well as the heart. They came to recognize that psychological warfare was their business. Educators and psychologists, moreover, gave conservative women real incentives to assume a defensive posture. As psychology gained greater authority as a field during and after World War II and progressive educators continued to rely on the social sciences to develop their pedagogy, experts in these areas increasingly scrutinized parents and aimed to reform the family as a means of promoting racially progressive and internationalist ideals.9 In response, female activists found a collective voice in their common identity as beleaguered housewives, defending their communities against elites and authoritarians. Although mostly middleclass to quite wealthy, all could be united in a shared sense of marginality with respect to outside “experts” who aimed to manipulate their community. While developing an awareness of their political importance in opposition to remote ivory-tower interlopers, conservative women came to see their community as a local setting in the global struggle against communism. They believed that dangerous social and political forces—forces that required serious research, study, and public relations efforts to expose—were operating in their midst. In contrast to men, who were trapped in offices all day and distracted by work,

­72  •  Chapter III middle- and upper-class women with eyes and ears in the community could have confidence that they were well suited to these efforts. Starting with the Pasadena controversy of 1950, battles in the area of education began galvanizing conservative women activists. The campaign to oust the city’s progressive superintendent, Willard Goslin, had been engineered largely by a conservative women’s group, and the national publicity sparked by his removal further politicized female activists in the region and beyond. To combat administrators, women emphasized the value of their own place in the community as a basis of knowledge that trumped the expertise of professional bureaucrats. By attacking progressive education and Goslin’s desegregation efforts, local women writers asserted an activist niche and voice for women on the right—that of community insiders assailing outsiders who aimed to disrupt social and racial tranquility. The middle- to upper-class conservatives of Los Angeles who saw themselves as modern and freedom-loving rarely spoke openly about race politics, but they generally regarded desegregation campaigns as attempts to foment upheaval. They were not rednecks, their words implied, but they would not stand for race mixing. Since conservative women saw themselves as promoters of community peace, they intertwined their protests against progressive education, desegregation, and communism. So closely related were these threats to each other, in the minds of many conservatives, that one issue could often speak implicitly for the others. Reverberating quickly through news magazines, the expulsion of Willard Goslin inspired political activism by conservative women well beyond the borders of Southern California.10 Opposition to internationalism and progressive education overlapped as women spearheaded campaigns against UNESCO. In 1951 the Los Angeles School Board banned all teaching materials published by the United Nations agency.11 And conservative activists nationwide argued that UNESCO polluted the minds of America’s school children with “worldmindedness,” an ideology at odds, they believed, with patriotism. The 1955 attacks on the American Heritage Project by Jo Hindman and fellow women activists expanded conservative women’s activism into new realms. By the mid-1950s, women’s participation in red-scare debates about public education bolstered their sense of importance with respect to where and how they could fight communism—right in their neighborhoods by studying, researching, and writing. Convinced that communists invaded the body politic one mind at a time, they saw themselves as well equipped and well placed to stop brainwashing by virtue of their flexible hours, relationship to the family, and daily proximity to the community. Schools and libraries were stepping-stones that led into other avenues of activism against brainwashing. Shortly thereafter, women would begin attacking

Education or Indoctrination?  •  73

the mental health field, psychiatric professionals, and legislators who promoted mental health bills. Criticism of educational policy would, thus, grow into a more global campaign against abuse of the mind. Between 1950 and 1955, women developed a political subjectivity in harmony with the nascent conservative movement by protesting on behalf of parental and community interests, thus bolstering long-entrenched conservative associations made between antiauthoritarianism, familial privacy, and local self-determination. e A 1951 incident in the Pasadena school system gave the city known best for lush beauty, Caltech, and the annual Rose Bowl yet another distinction—its conservative politics. That year, the local board of education fired its superintendent for being too progressive when it came to pedagogical and racial issues. News writers seemed to recognize in the events of 1950 and 1951 a provocative community-interest story, one that would attract the attention of postwar battle-weary American readers who were getting serious about family and civic life. The articles that appeared in Time, Newsweek, Life, Collier’s, the New Republic, and McCall’s portrayed Pasadena as an otherwise tranquil, prosperous community that had suddenly found itself in sudden and deep distress.12 For the emerging conservative movement that engineered his demise, the discussions that followed in the aftermath of Goslin’s expulsion were as important as the actual campaign waged against the progressive. Critics of the superintendent succeeded in driving him from office, but then battled with journalists for control of the story in subsequent years. Willard Goslin attracted scrutiny in Pasadena by advocating progressive education methods, by attempting to eliminate segregationist policies, and by proposing a substantial tax hike. The criticism leveled against him was somewhat unexpected, given the fanfare that greeted his arrival in 1948. Hired away from the city of Minneapolis, where he had also served as superintendent, Goslin arrived in Southern California with a formidable list of credentials. He was a graduate of Columbia’s Teachers College and recently elected president of the American Association of School Administrators. In Pasadena he encountered an exceptional education system still on the rise, and eager to implement his own vision, he introduced new personnel, plans, and programs with the zeal of a reformer.13 Goslin, moreover, seemed well poised to address the rapid changes facing the city. Since aerospace and other light industries had infused its neighborhoods with new residents, many of them nonwhite, schools had to be built and racial tensions needed to be confronted.14 But Goslin’s fervor, coupled with his educational background, became his undoing because they earned him his reputation as a meddling, elitist, eastern-trained progressive.

­74  •  Chapter III Goslin antagonized conservatives in town by inviting the eminent educator William Heard Kilpatrick, father of the Project Method, to lecture and participate in group discussions with teachers as part of a summer workshop in 1949. As a protégé of John Dewey, Kilpatrick was a leading progressive educator in the United States who developed pedagogical methods that favored students’ own goals and experiences as the basis for their learning.15 Critical parents bristled at the news of Kilpatrick’s proposed appearance.16 They regarded the nontraditional learning advocated by the Columbia professor as a dumbeddown and subversive pedagogical style that numbed minds and accounted for the lack of discipline in modern classroom settings, thereby setting the stage for rebellious ideas to take hold.17 Goslin’s opponents favored traditional subjects and grade scales. Many Pasadenans, especially mothers, were steeped in the back-to-basics education movement that had become an aspect of American conservatism by then. Traditionalists had been attacking the progressive education movement for decades, mainly by equating its methods with lower standards. In the 1930s a conservative at Columbia’s Teachers College by the name of William Chandler Bagley had founded the Essentialists, a small group that charged progressives with making U.S. education “effeminate.” American children, argued Bagley, had become inferior spellers and readers because they lacked the “essentials,” or “3 Rs,” of learning.18 Throughout the 1940s, educational traditionalism merged with anticommunism and libertarianism as critics of centralized government contended that universal access to state-sponsored schools had become a recipe for mediocrity and political collapse. Albert Jay Nock, who inspired a generation of libertarian intellectuals, warned in 1943 that public education “made Homo sapiens an easy mark for whatever deleterious nonsense may be presented to him under the appearance of authority.”19 Bagley’s handful of Essentialists thus launched a campaign against progressive education that came to address a much larger set of concerns regarding the nexus of the liberal state, a liberal educational philosophy, and a liberal social scientific profession. Demands for a “3 Rs” revival expressed mistrust of their influence in shaping the nation’s values, priorities, future workforce, and emerging leaders through the minds of its youngest citizens. The race progressivism in Goslin’s administration vexed his critics as well. Staff member Jane Hood made conservative Pasadenans uncomfortable because she had directed the Human Relations workshop at USC before joining the district. Since “human relations” meant “race relations” in the 1950s, the addition of Hood spawned chatter about race mixing around town.20 Compounding the racial anxieties inflamed by her hire, Gosling introduced a policy to abolish “neutral zones,” sections of the city carved out and marked for their

Education or Indoctrination?  •  75

distinctive racial mixture. Neutral zones were areas of the city where children were exempt from assignment to neighborhood schools. In other words, white students underrepresented racially in their own neighborhood could be transported to another school on the taxpayer’s dime.21 The system facilitated reversed busing for white students. Most anti-Goslin advocates of neutral zones were white families in the predominantly black East Arroyo neighborhood. Buses had been transporting their children from the west Pasadena enclave out to white La Cañada, part of Pasadena’s sprawling multitown school district. The East Arroyo Association protested that property values would fall substantially if their children were moved to the nearby Washington Junior High School in Altadena.22 The final category of grievances surrounding Willard Goslin’s administration focused on policies that, in the eyes of many parents, removed children from the orbit of their authority. Conservatives associated progressive education with social reform and manipulation.23 Many critics on the right interpreted the movement’s emphasis on cooperation over discipline, introduced by John Dewey in the 1920s, as education for socialism. They saw a concerted leftwing effort, involving progressive teachers and administrators, to diminish the influence of parents—especially “problematic” parents—who did not inculcate socially, racially, or internationally progressive values at home. A popular topic of discussion among his critics was Goslin’s summer camps. Recognizing the home as a protected sphere where parents, primarily mothers, promoted individualism and democracy, Goslin’s critics complained that the state-sponsored camps would replace parental influence and that of “wholesome” camps, like those sponsored by the YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) and the Boy Scouts.24 Goslin’s institutions were dangerous, according to his opponents, because they privileged groupthink and suppressed development of the individual, thereby promoting socialism.25 The Pasadena story is noteworthy for how effectively conservative women reconciled ambiguities and contradictions in their political arguments. While participating in, witnessing, and interpreting the course of events, activists resolved the political paradoxes that were necessary for them to develop a broadly shared political subjectivity. Female activists attracted notice when they spoke up as community insiders on behalf of fellow Pasadenans while attacking their opponents as outsiders. For white, middle-, and upper-class women, crafting such a political voice involved reckoning with three sets of tensions. On the one hand, many needed to downplay their affluence to claim a populist insider status. But on the other hand, they needed to utilize their class credentials—their wealth and connections—to organize effectively. While criticizing expertise, moreover, they needed to prove that they were knowledgeable and intelligent in order to be taken seriously. The letters and published accounts they left

­76  •  Chapter III behind show how Goslin’s opponents relied on gender assumptions to manage these tensions. Operating in an era that celebrated domesticity, the mantle of “housewife” established a connection between them and other women who identified their role in the home as most important. Housewives, however, also had flexible schedules that allowed them to study, research, and build libraries of information on subversives, all of which stood as their expertise. Lastly, many of these housewives migrated from and earned their college degrees from other parts of the country. They qualified as “outsiders” by the same measure that they judged their opponents. To be a mother of children, however, introduced other criteria for measure. Willard Goslin’s primary female opponents belonged to the conservative organization Pro-America. The Seattle-based anti–New Deal women’s group that started back in 1932 had sprouted units in Southern California, including a vigorous band of anticommunists in Pasadena. Members Louise Hawkes Padelford and Frances Bartlett proved especially influential in Goslin’s demise. The sharp and witty Padelford knew that she and her organization would operate best in this campaign from the sidelines. Her fellow members had to dance around the hysterical right-wing woman stereotype, which they did by conducting their research and tapping into their national network, but without mentioning their affiliation to Pro-America publicly. Padelford’s impressive home in the western hills of Pasadena nevertheless accommodated many antiGoslin strategy meetings.26 Perhaps her guests meandered, on their way in, through Padelford’s distinctive portrait gallery of wonderful women, stopping for a minute to admire the image of writer-activist Lucille Cardin Crain, editor of the Educational Reviewer. Eventually, all would sit down to an intimate lunch to work out the details of their next move. 27 Often at the table sat the harder-edged Frances Bartlett, the wife of a physician, who lived down the hill in the tony Orange Grove neighborhood, just a stone’s throw from the Valley Hunt Club.28 Though not as affluent as Padelford and not a parent, the retired teacher was accustomed to working long hours, an experience that she happily directed toward her new organizational activities. Bartlett was the research engine of Pro-America. Even though the Pro-America network proved vital to the anti-Goslin campaign, this core group of women operated from within a parents’ organization called the School Development Council (SDC), which formed in 1949. With fathers—representatives of the local business, professional, and managerial class—serving as its spokespeople, the School Development Council took the lead in the attacks against Willard Goslin.29 Pro-America and the SDC urged Pasadenans to vote against Goslin’s budget. In the spring of 1950, around the same time it announced that the neutral

Education or Indoctrination?  •  77

zones would be abolished with the opening of two new junior high schools, the administration had proposed an increase in the budget of $387,000. 30 Before the budget vote, anti-Goslin rhetoric combined attacks on his tax proposal with attacks on his teaching philosophy. “Progressive education means progressive taxation,” railed SDC president Frank Wells. “Those camps and the revolutionary teaching,” he added “would add hundreds of thousands to your tax bill.” In oversize newspaper ads the Property Owner’s Division of Pasadena’s Realty Board urged Pasadenans: “Vote no on the school tax increase: watch your pocketbook.” Turnout at the polls was unprecedented that year. More than twice as many voters, 22,210, rejected the budget than those who voted for it, 10,032.31 Meanwhile, Frances Bartlett leaned on the national Pro-America network to help the California Senate Committee on Education launch an official inquiry into the superintendent’s case. Headed by Senator Nelson Dilworth, the committee had formed in the early 1950s, along with a wave of state investigative bodies. The recently passed Levering Act in California required all public employees to sign a loyalty oath, including public school teachers and professors at public universities. Indeed, Bartlett’s work on Goslin involved her in a surge of government fact-finding activity. By December of 1950, less than two months after Levering became the law, an estimated 890 public employees faced dismissal, most of them employed by the University of California.32 Bartlett sought information on Goslin from Padelford’s friend, Lucille Cardin Crain, who lived in Washington, D.C. In addition to editing the Educational Reviewer, Crain was the publisher of Packaged Thinking for Women, which Bartlett, a voracious consumer of right-wing political literature, had probably read. The thirty-page condemnation of progressive women revived early twentiethcentury warnings about soft-minded female “parlor radicals” who became easy prey for deceitful reds.33 In Bartlett’s letters to Crain, she shared with her political confidant across the country the sense of excitement and importance she derived from her participation in the flurry of research. “. . . I simply am unable to keep up with the rush of events,” she declared. “Everyday someone calls me telling me of something more I should investigate. . . .”34 The correspondence revealed that Bartlett worked regularly for Senator Dilworth’s office as the Goslin investigation proceeded. She also brokered an informal contract between Dilworth and Crain for the newsletter editor to do a research project for his office.35 Bartlett contacted Crain in an effort to track Goslin’s desegregation efforts, which struck her as suspicious. She asked Crain if the superintendent, his assistant, or the local organizer of a human relations workshop were members of the John Dewey Society, which, according to Bartlett, had recently been

­78  •  Chapter III declared subversive by a state un-American activities committee. 36 To the ears of activists like Bartlett and Crain, “human relations” meant not just “race relations,” but race mixing, social chaos, and political subversion. Bartlett’s query to Crain states implicitly what many conservatives believed—that progressives like Goslin incited danger that opened doors for communist insurrection by forcing together communities that were meant to remain apart. Indeed, Bartlett joined many grassroots activists in devoting significant hours to exposing what she believed to be associations between civil rights and communist activists. For much of the 1950s she published a newsletter called FACTS in Education. FACTS stood for “Fundamental issues, Americanism, Constitutional government, Truth, and Spiritual values.” One of her 1957 FACTS newsletters, echoing the assumptions presented in her letter to Crain, similarly took for granted that racial justice campaigns were necessarily communistic. The issue condemned a local citizens’ action committee because its local organizer was a “Pasadena Negro” who worked on behalf of “so-called ‘civil rights’.”37 Before the California Senate Committee on Education had the chance to use any of Bartlett’s information against Goslin, however, he quit.38 The Board of Education had asked the superintendent to quietly resign. A telegram sent in November to Goslin while he attended a meeting back East asserted that the turmoil surrounding his policies was causing the school system to deteriorate. The board also blamed his lack of popularity in the community for preventing the bigger budget it so desperately needed from passing. Goslin settled for the balance of his contract and resigned, but not quietly. He arranged for the telegram to be published in order to create a forum for public discussion, especially since he believed that teachers deserved to be heard as citizens and because the school system was in the midst of an audit. He also hoped to expose the ways his profession and office had been mistreated.39 Goslin’s wishes were granted. The end of 1950 marked the end of his career in Pasadena, but the debates surrounding his administration intensified. News magazines reported vividly on the disputes that pitted neighbor against neighbor and parent against parent. McCall’s published an article called “Who’s Trying to Ruin Our Schools” that probed the Pasadena incident along with similar clashes over progressive education erupting in cities and towns across the nation. The piece generated so much mail that the magazine named it “the year’s most discussed article.”40 California journalist David Hulburd, formerly with Time magazine, published a critical exposé of the affair with Macmillan called This Happened in Pasadena, which won high praise in, and widespread attention because of, a glowing review in the New York Times by the president of Harvard University, James Conant. “[T]his book,” wrote Conant, “is highly revealing of the reactionary temper of our times. . . . For this reason,” he

Education or Indoctrination?  •  79

advised, “what happened in Pasadena should be of interest to every thoughtful citizen quite apart from his or her concern with the free schools of the nation.”41 Most of this coverage highlighted Pasadena as a lesson in how red-scare attacks waged by small groups could decimate prize school systems. Louise Hawkes Padelford and another Pro-America member, Catherine Halberg, launched one of the earliest counterattacks against David Hulburd in the pages of Fortnight magazine, a glossy Southern California weekly that covered political, cultural, and social events in the region.42 Attacking him as an elitist, the two women implied that they knew more and were better equipped to judge the Pasadena affair by virtue of their status as community members. An ardent defense of Pasadena’s decision to defy the superintendent, “The Case Against Progressive Education” illustrates how women came to appreciate their own importance within the global struggle against communism through the campaign against Goslin. Writing complemented research, study, and organizational activity in the construction of women’s political subjectivity on the right, becoming a tool with which activists taught themselves where they stood in relation to their enemies and how to combat them. On the one hand, the authors strove to frame their dispute in Pasadena as a struggle between upright, commonsensical, community folk versus intrusive, East Coast elites. Referring to themselves as “laymen,” Padelford and Halberg contrasted their localized, homespun, traditional educational values with that of liberal outsiders on several occasions in the piece. “. . .[W]e do not hold the Pasadena voter in such contempt,” they declared, contrasting their attitude with that of David Hulburd in This Happened in Pasadena.43 In another instance, they invite Fortnight readers to share their outrage and confusion over William Heard Kilpatrick, Goslin’s invited guest from Columbia, whom they characterized as aloof and out of touch. They point out that Kilpatrick used “many terms heretofore unknown to us laymen.” “Listen for yourself,” they encourage good parent-citizens, “to some of the vocabulary in your schools and inquire into its meaning and ramifications: experience curriculum. . . core program. . . mass promotion . . .” At the end of the article, the writers further underscore their status as “laymen” by criticizing James Conant’s review of the book.44 Padelford and Halberg assert that Conant lacked credibility when it came to Goslin’s ouster because he had not been present to witness the events surrounding his dismissal. “Certainly,” they wrote, “. . . the Harvard president’s review and the New York Times space didn’t [their emphasis] “happen in Pasadena.”45 On the other hand, Padelford and Halberg also make their “case” against progressive education by striving to demonstrate their own expertise. They wanted to be recognized as “laymen,” but at the same time they also wanted to display their knowledge and credentials. Halberg listed a bachelor’s degree

­80  •  Chapter III from the University of Minnesota, while Padelford identified herself as a Vassar BA and Columbia PhD in sociology. What they did not recognize was that their origins in the Midwest and East gave them “outsider” or elite status. The impulse to display proficiency by assembling facts and figures was not unique to conservative women but common to female activists across the political spectrum. As historian Sylvie Murray has demonstrated in her study of civic and Democratic Party volunteers in mid-century Queens, New York, progressive housewives of the 1950s campaigning for Adlai Stevenson or demanding streetlights, sidewalks, and playgrounds for their neighborhoods tended to downplay their “feminine specificity” and rely on research and study to make male government officials take them seriously.46 In fact, it was only “[w]hen ‘facts and figures’ failed to sway their audience,” she writes, that women on the left abandoned their gender-neutral position to make maternal appeals, as the organization Women Strike for Peace did in the early 1960s.47 Padelford and Halberg, exhibiting their immersion in the literature, devoted much of their article to a discussion of educational philosophy. Progressive education’s attention to emotions, group living, and contemporary social issues, they asserted, diverted resources away from the basic requirements of a strong liberal arts foundation. They quoted an essay by University of Chicago president Robert Huchins, “The Idea of a College,” pointing out that educators underestimated the ability of the masses to acquire a liberal arts education without giving them the opportunity to achieve it.48 Padelford and Halberg blamed the “indolence and inattention” of educators for this problem rather than the “incapacity of students.”49 The women had done their homework. Hutchins was a respected liberal critic of progressive education from within the profession, a highly regarded educational leader whose unrelenting attacks on the movement seriously undermined its credibility.50 The University of Chicago president, a champion of the liberal arts and academic freedom, had earned broad respect in academe for his steadfast refusal to impose loyalty oaths. Hutchins was no Cold Warrior, in fact he would go on to lead the Ford Foundation’s red-baited Fund for the Republic. His critique of progressive education stemmed from his skepticism of John Dewey’s pragmatism. Arguing that democracy demanded universal principles, he warned that pragmatism and progressive education allowed for destructive relativism and disorder. In line with this philosophy, Hutchins created his signature “Great Books” curriculum at the University of Chicago, eventually adopted by St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe.51 Padelford and Halberg also wove a guilt-by-association web that tenuously linked Goslin and his supporters to communists through their desegregation efforts, unleashing their harshest attacks against opponents of the neutral

Education or Indoctrination?  •  81

zones. “There were many fervent and impassioned speeches pleading for the rezoning on the basis of democracy, for the abolition of Jim Crowism.” The intent of the race progressives could not have been more contrary to their word, suggested the women. Most damning for the rezoning opponents, they pointed out, was an article in the communist People’s World that reported with suspicious accuracy the speakers who later appeared and arguments later made at a meeting about neutral zones. If People’s World already knew of the speakers the day before they appeared at the meeting, surmised Padelford and Halberg, then the opponents of the neutral zones must be communists or communist sympathizers.52 The women made a wild leap of interpretation, assuming that because People’s World reported advance notice of the meeting, the communists and segregation opponents were somehow thick as thieves. Padelford and Halberg thus awkwardly red-baited the desegregationists who had, in their opinion, unfairly race-baited them. A mother and former schoolteacher by the name of Mary Allen appreciated “The Case against Progressive Education.” Allen felt as besieged by progressive educators as she did by the federal government and leftists. In 1955 she elaborated upon the arguments made by Padelford and Halberg in a book called Education or Indoctrination.53 Its publication further advanced the collective conservative consciousness forming—especially among female activists—around the Pasadena affair. Diligent, politically eager women in and beyond California found themselves fastening on to the controversy, which held out numerous possibilities for comprehending their own political significance as citizen housewives. For intelligent, conservative mothers feeling an acute but hard-toidentify discomfort with their children’s educational experiences, the Pasadena affair offered answers—answers with sweeping political implications—to questions that they had been struggling to articulate: Why don’t my children receive traditional grades on their report cards? Why does the learning experience of my children seem more relaxed than my generation’s, and why am I uncomfortable with that? Will these changes make them less competitive in the world? One of Allen’s political cohorts, Network of Patriotic Letter-Writers founder Marjorie Jensen, joined Pro-America and became a conservative activist after Louise Padelford convinced her to seek political explanations for the “more than casual” learning atmosphere that was making her ill at ease.54 Like consciousness-raising sessions that feminists would pioneer in the next decade, education study groups became intellectually transformative settings for conservative women. The hegemon that came into view, however, was not the patriarchy that feminists saw, but communism. The outcome of the Goslin controversy suggested, moreover, that tendencies traditionally associated with women—intuition, warmth, moral fortitude, and nurturing instincts—held

­82  •  Chapter III political potential as tools for fortifying communities against threats posed by subversives and the strong arm of the state. Allen, a native of Oakland and South Pasadena resident, was the wife of a civil engineer and mother of three children. She attended UCLA, where she majored in philosophy and economics. Education or Indoctrination reproduced the substance of the pamphlet The Case Against Progressive Education, but her book-length treatment allowed Allen to further contextualize the controversy in a broader national framework. Like Padelford and Halberg, Allen emphasized her insider-expert perspective on the events that took place in her backyard, billing her account as local and unpretentious, yet rigorously examined. “As a P.T.A. member and mother of school children,” read the back cover, “she was an eyewitness to what happened in Pasadena during the controversy over Willard Goslin.”55 “Written by a layman,” promised the dust jacket, “it is the result of a layman’s actual experience as well as of her research and study.”56 As the community insider-author, Allen promised to expose outsiders, the “planners” who introduced dangerous ideology in the public schools through various “channel[s] for indoctrination.”57 A small libertarian publishing house in Idaho, Caxton Press, printed and distributed Education or Indoctrination. It must have pleased Allen to be signed by a company that also published noted conservative intellectuals like Ayn Rand, Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, and Rose Wilder Lane, as well as the Freeman.58 On the one hand, Allen postured a hard academic edge by copiously quoting professors from elite universities and making claims to cold verifiable truths based on footnoted research. Her meticulous approach, as the book jacket promised, “ma[d]e it possible for the reader to trace the facts to their source.”59 The author, moreover, adopted the style of an investigative journalist or polemicist. She wanted readers to take her seriously as much for the facts as for her local perspective. Her words and tone implied that she and her compatriots were all truth and no frills: “You didn’t need a cross-eyed lens,” she wrote, “to understand what the [School Development] Council meant. There was no double talk. The Council was not afraid to declare its position.”60 Her photo on the back cover communicated the same message. Defying the portrait’s one element of feminine softness, her necklace, were Allen’s pursed lips, tightly coiffed hair, and stern gaze. This was a straight shooter, one might fathom, not a bleeding heart.61 The picture, in fact, exudes less warmth than stability— a solidity that might invite contrast with “friendly” female HUAC witnesses. Indeed, contemporary readers might have recalled Sylvia Richards, who had recently appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify against leftists in the film industry, claiming with her tear-stained face that she was “mentally adrift” when she joined the party.62 Mary Allen, on the other

Education or Indoctrination?  •  83

Figure 3.1 Mary Allen, 1956. In Education or Indoctrination Mary Allen of Pasadena defends conservative forces in her city that expelled a controversial school superintendant who implemented reforms they deemed subversive. The book characterizes the incident and the larger progressive education movement as a “Trojan horse” to allow communists to infiltrate the American public school system. Taken from Mary L. Allen's Education or Indoctrination (Caxton Printers, 1955), by permission of Hugh O. Allen.

hand, looked as solid as a rock. Projecting competence meant striking a balance between masculine coolness and feminine maternal instincts. She showed as much devotion to hard cold facts as she did to children.63 Education or Indoctrination presented the Pasadena affair as a case for home rule—an entreaty for parents to stop bureaucrats and subversives from inserting themselves into children’s lives where parents, the community, and the church

­84  •  Chapter III belonged. As she explained in her protests against Goslin’s summer education camps, “Socialism was to be lived in the mountains, away from home influence, under the guise of camp experience. . . .”64 Hours spent away from home were not so much the problem as the ideological wedge that leftists aimed to drive between children and more wholesome institutions. “Boy Scout, YMCA, and other independent summer camps,” she predicted, “would be replaced by school-ruled camps.” Allen wrote approvingly of the School Development Council’s “clear cut statement of beliefs,” including its pronouncement insisting that the community share power with administrators in decisions made over their children. “. . . [W]e believe ourselves capable as a community of debating education methods on an even footing with the school administration. We accept no inferior status for parents in counseling with school authorities on the education of our children. . . .”65 Repulsed by the “aura of superiority around the Goslin program,” Allen applauded the SDC’s campaign to win back parents’ authority over children’s education.66 Education or Indoctrination also aimed to recover Pasadena’s reputation from the smear of racism by insisting that race relations in the city had been “harmonious” until Willard Goslin arrived. African Americans had been the dominant minority group in Pasadena since the early part of the twentieth century, when black migrants from the South arrived to work in the mansions of citrus growers, health seekers, and other white transplants along Orange Grove Avenue.67 Although white residents did not burn crosses or force blacks to sit in the back of buses, Allen overstated her case. The record shows that the city’s establishment asserted its own restrictions against racial mixing at least as far back as 1914, when it limited minority access to the public pool, Brookside Plunge. Restrictive housing covenants proceeded to draw the color line sharper over the years, and by the early 1940s 60 percent of Pasadena’s real estate was prohibited to black ownership.68 According to Mary Allen, however, racial problems only started in Pasadena when Superintendent Goslin began to classify people as “. . . minority, majority, white, Negro, rich, poor, and privileged or underprivileged.” Adding fuel to the fire, he forced student to “mingle,” through mixed group settings like “intercultural dances” where “. . . children of different backgrounds were made to feel uncomfortable unless they danced together.”69 “Intercultural education,” a curricular program for promoting positive race relations developed by the New Jersey Quaker Rachel DuBois in the late 1920s and early 1930s, became popular in progressive school districts after DuBois became head of the Bureau of Intercultural Education in 1932.70 Conservatives interpreted “intercultural” to mean forced racial mixing. Allen insisted that evidence of Pasadena’s former racial harmony was also to be found in the work of its own homegrown human relations committee,

Education or Indoctrination?  •  85

which had been making progress at the right pace. “For many years,” she wrote proudly of this institution, “the Pasadena schools had actively sponsored a human relations workshop, the purpose of which was to promote better race relations and appreciation of various cultures.”71 Goslin, however, was impatient, and “. . . attempted to enforce radical changes.” 72 Allen, like Padelford and Halberg, took offense at the charges of “Jim Crowism” in Pasadena schools. The city’s own human relations workshop sufficed as evidence, in her mind, that Pasadena was different from the South. Bigotry, she implied, was beneath her city—a community that was moving forward and knew better than outsiders how racial equality could be realized among its inhabitants. Allen’s attitudes about the speed of desegregation were characteristic of the emerging right, especially after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Allen contributed to an argument for gradual desegregation circulating in conservative periodicals at the time. New Englander Robert Welch, who founded the John Birch Society a few years later, published a widely circulated pamphlet in 1956 called A Letter to the South on Segregation, which argued that the black population had for a time been making significant advances toward equality, but that the situation changed in 1954 when communism asserted itself in the Brown decision. The reliance on psychological and sociological theories by the Warren Court, Welch asserted, represented “the most brazen and flagrant usurpation of power that has been seen in three hundred years.” Southerners had made it clear that they would not be “forced” into “immediate” desegregation, and he reasoned that communists took advantage of Southern intransigence on the desegregation front to incite racial turmoil, thereby creating the revolution they needed to seize power. Two years later, Human Events featured a similar perspective on the color line by writer Alice Furland in a piece that blamed “integrationists-in-a-hurry” for inciting racial strife in the New York City schools.73 “Will New York’s Melting Pot Boil Over?” carefully noted that white students in the city were not attacking black students “as in Little Rock.” Furland distinguished between “exceptional Negro children,” who could close the gap between themselves and whites, and the “average Negro children,” who had become disciplinary problems for their teachers.74 White hoods, burning crosses, and late-night lynchings might have made conservatives like Allen, Welch, and Furland uncomfortable, but so did “intercultural dances” and other forms of intergroup mingling that accelerated the desegregation process. e While conservatives north of the Mason-Dixon line were busy fighting race progressives in the name of anticommunism, southerners were actually doing the same thing. In fact, a battle in the Houston public education system

­86  •  Chapter III suggests that conservative women across the anticommunist network developed common critiques and methods for organizing against enemies in school administration. Within six months of Goslin’s resignation, Texas counterparts of Louise Padelford and Frances Bartlett spearheaded a campaign to oust the Houston deputy superintendent, George Ebey. Though it took them about two years to accomplish their goal, the school board eventually voted 4 to 3 not to renew Ebey’s contract in 1953. Opponents argued that Ebey had to go because he was an outsider, an advocate of desegregation, and a radical. By the time the deputy superintendent found himself on the hot seat, moreover, the word “Goslin” had already come to mean “be alert for the possible invasion of these forces in the form of an educator.” The first pamphlet that attacked Ebey charged that he was known to “out-Goslin Goslin.”75 Within months, then, Pasadena had become shorthand for a mix of racial and political fears. The arguments leveled against Goslin, then Ebey, resonated also because of the ways education discourse had become gendered. In the minds of their opponents, Ebey and Goslin represented unwanted aggressors who used the muscles of their credentials to wedge the state and communist left—two intimately related evils—into the community. Women dominated the opposition against Ebey in Houston, as in Pasadena, similarly emphasizing the importance of feminine virtues as critical inoculations against communism. The women of Houston’s grassroots right established their political footing in the same mix of economic, political, and spatial transformations confronted by their counterparts in Los Angeles. Houston grew from the nation’s twentyfirst to fourth largest city due to the influx of migrants during World War II. The region’s oil producers, responding to the war industry’s sudden and massive demand for petrochemicals, launched a decade of unprecedented growth. New chemical and metal industries developed along with the oil boom. Steady opposition to zoning restrictions, which were regarded as an impediment to expansion by a core segment of the city’s business establishment, resulted in a haphazard pattern of development that allowed business proprietors to open stores, gas stations, and medical practices next to private homes. Congested streets and carpenter’s scaffolding became part of the everyday scenery while the shipping channel, an outdoor factory soaring out of the coastal flats, stood as a working monument to the new prosperity. The Texas Medical Center, between 1946 and 1956, became a leading national research institution. Houston generated a wild mix of cultural institutions from this new wealth, which produced world-class art galleries and theaters as well as the famous Shamrock Hotel. The steel and brick structure, painted sixty-seven shades of green on the inside, attracted socialites seeking opulence and refuge from the city. The Shamrock came to symbolize what historian Don Carleton describes as a

Education or Indoctrination?  •  87

new urbanity in Texas.76 Houston’s growth, suburbanization, upward mobility, reach toward modernization, and political conservatism followed the pattern of other Sunbelt cities like Atlanta and Phoenix that shifted economic dominance South and West after World War II.77 A formidable anticommunist movement developed among three local groups: business leaders, Methodists, and clubwomen. Concerned about the Texas labor movement and centralized government, the city’s economic elites, operating mainly through the Chamber of Commerce, started to circulate anticommunist literature in the 1940s. The Houston Chronicle, Post, and Press newspapers, moreover, provided readers with steady diets of antisubversive sensationalism, from an investigative report of communist indoctrination at the University of Texas to editorials of helpful advice on how to help the FBI hunt reds. Anticommunist activity percolated out of Houston’s Methodist Church in response to the New York–based Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA), a progressive organization formed in the social gospel tradition. Second only to the Baptists in percentage of the population, Methodists dominated much of Houston's cultural and economic life, especially since many of the city’s most influential citizens belonged to the church. Conservative members formed the Committee for the Preservation of Methodism to combat the MFSA, which it and other critics denounced for advocating what they perceived as communistic, un-Christian activity like government-sponsored economic and industrial reform.78 The third contingent of anticommunists, grassroots women, operated mainly through the Houston Chapter of Minute Women of the U.S.A., Inc. This 500-member local unit was among the strongest in the national organization.79 Although wealthy residents of the exclusive River Oaks neighborhood dominated the rolls, its membership also included many members of Houston’s middle-class: dressmakers, boarding house keepers, and managers of small specialty shops, as well as wives of physicians and lawyers. 80 While educational institutions as conduits for “brainwashing” drew the interest of all these groups, this was the concern that Minute Women—like ProAmerica in Pasadena—used to cultivate political power locally in Houston. For much of the 1950s, the Minute Women exercised significant control of the city’s schools by seating its own candidates on the board, vetting textbooks, and appearing unannounced to monitor classrooms.81 Shortly before George Ebey arrived in August of 1952, several women appeared before the school board to protest his hire. Members Norma Barnett and Anne Harrison came to the board meeting with their research materials in hand, prepared to document Ebey’s history of subversive activity.82 The deputy superintendent had come under suspicion thanks to a pamphlet released shortly after the board

­88  •  Chapter III selected him for the post. We’ve Got Your Number, Dr. Ebey accused the new administrator of belonging to communist front groups, including the American Veterans Committee (AVC), a liberal organization of ex-servicemen that was formed in 1944.83 Unlike the stridently anticommunist Veterans of Foreign Wars or American Legion, the AVC focused on peace, reform, and social justice. It supported the United Nations. 84 Ebey’s progressive racial attitudes also found mention in the pamphlet. We’ve Got Your Number declared that Ebey forced “the training of children in non-discriminatory behavior” and asked, “[w]ill those communities which cherish their prejudices allow the introduction of intergroup education?”85 The reason for their appearance at the school board meeting, the women announced, was to “protect” their children from communism.86 As in Pasadena, the Houston activists expected to be taken seriously on the basis of heartfelt maternal concern as well as their documentation. Though the women initially failed to block Ebey’s hire because they lacked proof sufficient to satisfy the board, success came three years later when the deputy superintendent’s contract came up for renewal. The use of a male spokesperson and heightened virulence of the red scare probably boosted their efforts as well. The Minute Women persuaded a member of the American Legion, John Rogge, to stand for them. Working closely with members Virginia Biggers, Virginia Hedrick, and Fay Weitinger, Rogge filed formal charges against Ebey in 1953. Biggers and Hedrick, members of the Minute Women and Pro-America, represented important links between the Pasadena and Houston controversies.87 As industrious researchers, all three formed a nucleus of the Houston Minute Women’s inner circle. Standing before the school board at a regular meeting, Rogge declared that he had proof that Ebey had been a member of communist front organizations, worked with communists, and articulated subversive ideas. He elaborated in a closed-door session that followed the open meeting, showing evidence of Ebey’s support for civil rights reform, intercultural programs, and integration. A photo revealed white pupils under instruction by a black teacher in one of Ebey’s classrooms. After a formal investigation, the school board dismissed George Ebey.88 Whether George Ebey’s stance on integration swayed the Board of Education or not, the Minute Women were part of a larger conservative trend that sharpened attacks against desegregation by making its advocacy a marker of foreignness. Right-wing activists across the country insisted that their opposition to race mixing had less to do with racism than it had to do with home rule. Middle- and upper-class conservatives in metropolitan as well as rural areas throughout the country characterized desegregation as an “alien” concept

Education or Indoctrination?  •  89

Figure 3.2  Members of the Houston Chapter of Minute Women of the U.S.A. sitting in the Board of Education hearings for George Ebey, Houston, Texas, 1953. The Minute Women led anticommunist attacks against Deputy Superintendent of Schools Ebey. As members of one of the organization’s strongest chapters, the Houston women were known to exert their influence in the city’s schools, seating their own candidates on the board, vetting textbooks, and appearing unannounced to monitor classrooms. Courtesy of the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library, Houston, Texas, Ralph S. O’Leary Collection, MSS 400.

forced upon their communities by interlopers from somewhere else. By choosing to see “outsiders” fomenting racial strife, conservatives refused to see the people among them, parents in their community, bringing attention to the internal structure of American laws, property relations, and educational institutions that caused racial inequality. e Grassroots conservatives grew more powerful in 1952 when they expelled UNESCO programs from Los Angeles. Although opposition against UNESCO grew out of isolationist opposition to the United Nations, the new campaign reflected the concerns of a more child-centered and education-focused generation of activists. Critics mistrusted the social scientists quoted in UNESCO’s

­90  •  Chapter III teacher-training materials, especially in booklets that seemed hostile to parents. UNESCO thus represented, in the minds of conservative activists, another mechanism through which leftists were infiltrating American classrooms. The UN agency also posed a racial threat. “Internationalism” held many negative connotations for critics of the UN and UNESCO. The expression stood for communism, loss of sovereignty, and the renunciation of national identity. For many, internationalism also meant miscegenation. Positioning themselves on the front lines of the fight against UNESCO, women further wedged their way into politics by speaking out on behalf of local and parental authority. Teachers, administrators, and civic leaders in Los Angeles had been promoting internationalist and peace education for years before the United Nations formed UNESCO in 1946. The superintendent who implemented the UNESCO program, Alexander J. Stoddard, had served on the United States National Commission for UNESCO (UNSC), formed by the U.S. Senate to realize UNESCO’s education mission at the school district level. Before Stoddard, who started his career in his home state of Nebraska, arrived in Los Angeles, he chaired the Educational Policies Commission (EPC), a unit formed within the National Education Association to formulate policy recommendations.89 Under his leadership, the EPC published a proposal in 1944 called Education and the People’s Peace, which argued that political and economic tools could not work alone to achieve peace; such a project required “proper” education, carried out globally.90 Progressives in Los Angeles joined in the efforts to promote UNESCO. Indeed, 525 of the 2,000 delegates who attended the UNSC’s 1948 Pacific Regional Conference on UNESCO in San Francisco came from Southern California. They represented high school, elementary school, and university faculty and administrators as well as social workers, a police department, a hospital, and several churches. When Stoddard became superintendant in 1948, he quickly made the Los Angeles schools a leader in internationalist education by implementing a broad UNESCO program that included development of printed materials, teaching workshops, and student activities.91 Opponents in Los Angeles centered their attacks mainly on two UNESCO teaching manuals, The “E” in UNESCO and Towards World Understanding. The “E” in UNESCO, a ninety-six-page teaching manual developed by Stoddard’s administration, came under fire for portraying the United Nations too positively. Towards World Understanding, a series of pamphlets published by UNESCO, drew even more criticism because the booklets instructed teachers on how to promote internationalism and combat nationalism in the classroom. Particularly troubling to critics was one volume devoted to children under thirteen. “As long as the child breaths the poisoned air of nationalism,” it warned, “education in worldmindedness can produce only precarious results  .  .  . it

Education or Indoctrination?  •  91

is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism.”92 Conservatives disapproved of the way Toward World Understanding portrayed parents, namely conservative parents, as the enemy against which the school system needed to organize. The pressure against UNESCO grew intense, so much so that Stoddard withdrew The “E” in UNESCO for review and dropped a UNESCO-sponsored essay contest in January of 1952. One year later the board of education voted to eliminate all official and unofficial UNESCO programs from the local schools.93 Florence Fowler Lyons, a middle-aged freelance writer and activist, led the campaign against UNESCO. In her early forties, unmarried, and without children, she operated out of her home in the west Los Angeles neighborhood of Fairfax. The Colorado transplant had arrived in the city with an associate’s degree from the University of Denver and professional experience in journalism and radio. Once relocated to the west coast, she wrote scripts for the program Fletcher Wiley’s Housewives’ Protective League, sponsored by the Campbell’s Soup Company, but soon became a full-time anticommunist crusader after investigating textbooks for California senator Jack Tenney’s investigative committee in the 1940s.94 Recognizing a niche for her investigative and writing skills in the burgeoning genre of conservative political literature, Lyons developed a reputation as an expert on communist infiltration in the public schools. She was a “dynamo . . . a real fighter,” remembered one of her admirers.95 Another member of this political cohort, Marjorie Jensen, recalled a more eccentric and erratic Lyons, never ready when picked up for meetings. “She was rather flighty,” noted Jensen, “and we worried so because we knew she didn’t have very much money on which to live . . . some of the girls helped her with her sweaters and different things to wear.”96 Though peculiar, she discovered that her studies of UNESCO interested conservatives. Lyons cultivated her reputation as a “real fighter” through distinctive takeno-prisoners anticommunist rhetoric accented with hellfire-and-brimstone cadences. Her anti-UNESCO crusade started with a lecture to the conservative Southern California Republican Women’s Club in October of 1951.97 “Children,” she warned listeners, “are daily being fed doses of Communism, Socialism, New Dealism and other isms  . . .” through UNESCO teaching materials.98 UNESCO quickly and thoroughly consumed her life. One month later she gave a dark but rousing speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Encinitas, near San Diego. “Stalking through every phase of American life today,” she declared, “is a stark, grinning, crimson-clad Pied Piper called UNESCO.” “He’s piping a tune he calls ‘peace’ and the children and some of the adults are following him, dancing in the streets and singing—dancing and singing on their way to total destruction of both themselves and this nation.”99

­92  •  Chapter III

Figure 3.3   Florence Fowler Lyons, 1952. Florence Fowler Lyons led conservative women across Los Angeles in a crusade to eliminate educational materials and programs sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Courtesy of University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Libraries Special Collections.

Florence Fowler Lyons put the fear of the devil and Stalin in her audiences. Visions of racial mayhem also attracted attention, if the multiple printings of the Encinitas speech are any indication. Lyons attacked UNESCO’s Statements on Race, referring to two documents published by the agency in 1950 and 1951 that boldly challenged traditional racial classifications and denounced racially discriminatory laws. A collaborative project initiated in 1949, the Statements on Race called upon anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and biologists to devise a scholarly rebuke of Nazi-style race science.100 The 1951 statement asserted that racial categories, having emerged out of different “biological histories,” are not static—that “. . . there is every reason to believe that they will change in the future.”101 It called race a “social myth” that had inflicted tremendous harm. The statement also noted the general recognition that intelligence tests had been unable to demonstrate the extent to which “innate” ability or environment accounted for differences in performance according to race.

Education or Indoctrination?  •  93

Humans had always practiced racial mixing, it further noted, with no scientific evidence proving “biologically bad effects.” On that basis, the statement argued that bans against interracial marriage had no basis in science.102 Although the 1951 statement stepped backward from the first, revalidating biological definitions of race, it would by no means change the minds of conservative UNESCO critics about the agency.103 In her speech to the Encinitas VFW, Lyons warned that UNESCO “. . . states there is but one race in the world—the human race— and implies the sooner it is bred and bended back to its original color the sooner the world will have peace.”104 News magazines sensationalized the UNESCO controversy in Los Angeles, describing opponents with both amusement and horror. The “storminess of the meetings . . . ,” according to the New Republic, was caused primarily by the “booing, hissing, [and] jeering  . . .” of conservative groups.105 The public hearings held by the school board before the UNESCO decision represented “the bitterest meetings in its history,” reported Life.106 Lyons’s picture appeared in a 1952 McCall’s magazine feature on dangers posed to free speech in education. Probably unaware that her face would represent the “danger” described in the title, “Dangers Ahead in the Public Schools,” she settled into a serious pose for the photo. Surrounded by a clutter of books, the crusader was intently studying the “E” in UNESCO training manual for teachers. Lyons’s gaze invited readers to focus on the book as well as the messy display she had created. She squinted faintly either from something sinister on the pages between her fingers or from the cigarette smoke curling up in front of her eyes.107 Since Lyons was, in fact, a chain smoker with a reputation for being disorganized, she probably looked much like her photo when immersed in her work.108 On the other hand, her pose also evoked a familiar masculine trope that might have been on her mind—that of a steely-eyed, cigarette-smoking male investigator embodied by such iconic figures as the award-winning journalist Edward R. Murrow (people smoked on both sides of the political spectrum in the fifties). By slipping into such a recognizable posture, Lyons projected the earnestness and intensity that she applied to her research. Sloppy, casual, and somewhat slouched in her loose-fitting blouse, Fowler’s furrowed brow communicated a nicotine-fueled intensity. Florence Fowler Lyons led an onslaught of women’s and mixed-sex patriotic groups against UNESCO. The Los Angeles Women’s Breakfast Club, the Small Property Owners League, the Women’s Republican Study Club, and the Junior League all joined the opposition. Church-affiliated anticommunist groups, Protestant and Catholic, rallied behind her as well. The libertarian James Fifield at the First Congregational Church downtown blasted the “pagan, antiGod UNESCO” on his nationally broadcast Christian-libertarian radio show.109

­94  •  Chapter III The church’s Freedom Club and Meetinghouse organizations, moreover, invited UNESCO foes to address audiences at monthly dinner meetings.110 In the San Fernando Valley, the newly formed Catholic women’s anticommunist organization, the American Public Relations Forum, added their voices to the attacks. 111 The Forum’s president, Stephanie Williams of Van Nuys, appeared on television and radio shows, where she denounced UNESCO for promoting world government and for opposing parochial education.112 So fierce was the outrage against UNESCO that advocates entered the debate at some risk. Life reported that “boos, hisses and bursts of applause” interrupted a raucous eight-hour marathon hearing on UNESCO in Los Angeles.113 Collier’s printed an emotional and hair-raising testimonial of one pro-UNESCO parent, Dorothy Frank, who endured harassment and persecution for standing up to attacks from the right.114 Frank wrote that the air was so “thick with hate” at one meeting that she was afraid to walk to her car alone.115 “I Was Called a Subversive” elicited a flood of both positive and negative responses from Collier’s readers, enough of them negative to lose one of the magazine’s editors his job.116 Letters accusing Frank of “Pro-Communism” brought scrutiny to the entire Collier’s writing staff, including associate fiction editor Bucklin Moon. Moon had won critical acclaim for books about African Americans, but praise from the communist Daily Worker came at a price. Positive attention from the leftist press attracted negative attention from the House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated Moon. Its report, which accused the editor of belonging to a subversive arts organization, surfaced after the Dorothy Frank article appeared in the magazine.117 Although Moon flatly denied ever being a communist, Collier’s fired him nevertheless.118 Momentum against UNESCO escalated steadily over the next several months. Animated by related discussions about progressive education and “subversive” textbooks, the anticommunist network hummed with chatter about the UN agency. The October Bulletin of the Philadelphia-based American Flag Committee claimed that UNESCO’s “Toward World Understanding” instructed teachers to stifle feelings of patriotism in their students. Newspapers in Nashville, Detroit, Tampa, Buffalo and other cities soon printed editorials condemning UNESCO.119 In Houston, a group of Minute Women, businessmen, and professionals formed an organization to support anti-UNESCO school board candidates called the Committee for Sound American Education.120 Staffing headquarters every weekday from nine to five in the fall of 1952, the committee successfully placed two of its candidates on the board, unseating one member who had served for twenty-two years.121 Groups in Dallas also began pressuring education officials to ban UNESCO teaching materials. The Christian Science Monitor described one of these groups as a “flying

Education or Indoctrination?  •  95

squadron” that swoops down on any public discussion of UNESCO to heckle and berate its advocates.122 Though the hysterical right-wing housewife distinction followed UNESCO’s opponents wherever they appeared, the women did not lack validation. In August of 1953, Florence Fowler Lyons won praise from Joseph McCarthy himself when she appeared as a friendly witness before a Senate subcommittee investigating security leaks in the Government Printing Office (GPO).123 McCarthy flew to Los Angeles with Roy Cohn, his chief counsel, and G. David Schine, his chief consultant, hoping to gather evidence on a bookbinder in the State Department named by several informants as a communist and possible Soviet spy. Lyons had nothing to offer on Edward Rothschild, but much to say on how the GPO and State Department disseminated UNESCO propaganda, making American taxpayers foot the bill for internationalist education. The Committee readily accepted all of Lyons’s testimony. Not only did McCarthy applaud her “analysis,” declaring it “of tremendous importance,” but expressed his intent to pay her for a report. After inquiring how she earned her living, the Committee agreed that Lyons should produce a document in ten days, working for nine dollars an hour. “Obviously,” declared McCarthy, “this witness has done a tremendous amount of research. If she wanted to give her testimony in a written form, boiled down as much as possible, to analyze this, the committee would have the authority to pay her witness fees for the days she worked getting her testimony in writing.” Lyons seemed pleased with the terms, though she originally assessed it would take her two years’ time to investigate the “nest of communism” surrounding UNESCO in the GPO and State Department.124 As UNESCO protest cleared a path for women in right-wing politics, two conservative mothers came to power on the Los Angeles school board in the early 1950s. The Los Angeles Examiner and Los Angeles Herald-Express, published by the Hearst syndicate, championed Edith Stafford and Ruth Cole as the protectors of local, family, parental, and tax-payer interests. By covering the duo’s crusade and temporary victory over UNESCO in heroic detail, the newspapers reinforced right-wing gender ideology that underscored the links between antistatism and femininity.125 Edith Stafford was a middle-aged mother of two grown children, a former school teacher, and former president of the PTA. She grew up in Orange County and graduated from nearby Pomona College in Claremont. First elected to the board in 1951, she became board president in 1956. 126 Ruth Cole was younger, with a daughter still in school. A former dancer who managed some of her husband’s business and real estate holdings, she caught the attention of the Small Property Owners League, which urged her to run for the board when a vacancy opened in 1952. With the league’s sponsorship and that of other organizations, she won election and later became

­96  •  Chapter III president as well.127 The women built their reputations by standing up for local self-determination in public school affairs. They were the moms for home rule. After eliminating UNESCO literature, the women turned their attention to the Ford Foundation. Superintendent Stoddard had applied for a teachertraining grant from the foundation in the hopes of securing emergency credentials for much-needed instructors. However, Stafford and Cole persuaded the board to rescind the $335,000 award in 1953, forcing the district to return the check.128 Stafford told reporters that she mistrusted Dr. Stoddard and the other advocates of the grant because she believed that it meant UNESCO’s revival and “the infiltration of our schools with ‘one world’ propaganda and the death of patriotism.”129 Conservatives mistrusted the organization because it promoted internationalism.130 UNESCO foes would certainly have noted that number one on the foundation’s list of five major “areas for action” in 1950 was “activities that promise significant contributions to world peace and to the establishment of a world order of law and justice.”131 The Los Angeles Herald-Express praised the women’s motherly instincts while denouncing the aggressive tactics of their counterparts. “These women were seeking to protect our children . . . it is plain to see that the male majority of the board is determined to ram it down the taxpayers’ throats.”132 Another article similarly framed the dispute as a battle of the sexes: “The decision . . . was a smashing victory for the two women members of the board. . . . They fought the plan,” it continued, “from the minute its leftwing head loomed over the educational horizon here until they persuaded three of the four men on the board to unite with them. . . .”133 Ruth Cole also used her position on the school board to fire and blacklist teachers. She targeted educators who refused to answer questions regarding membership in communist organizations during the tumultuous “red quiz” hearings. The California Senate Committee on Un-American Activities conducted the investigations in 1951, grilling suspects on their membership in communist and allegedly subversive organizations.134 The committee collaborated with public officials in the creation of a state security apparatus called the “California Plan.” The operation depended on local authorities to monitor subversive activity and invite state investigative bodies to intervene when circumstances necessitated. Although public furor over the announcement of the California Plan prohibited any systematic surveillance, some public officials were more than willing to cooperate with the “red quizzes.”135 Ruth Cole was one of those officials. The Los Angeles City Housing Authority also cooperated with the California Plan. In fact, the duel efforts of the school board and housing authority helped the state double-team a well-known leftist couple, the Wilkinsons: Frank, the former deputy housing director under Mayor Fletcher Bowron, and Jean, a

Education or Indoctrination?  •  97

public school teacher, who had been members of the Communist Party. The Housing Authority invited the committee to investigate Frank, who was then serving the Housing Authority as an information officer.136 Wilkinson lost his job after refusing to answer questions at the red quiz hearings about his membership in the party.137 Cole and her sponsors in the Small Property Owners League probably cheered when Frank was fired; he had advocated a housing project designed by the celebrated architect Richard Neutra in the Latino neighborhood of Chavez Ravine, which ultimately failed in 1952 amidst protest from conservatives in the city, especially from real estate interests.138 Jean Wilkinson, who taught at the East Los Angeles Girls Vocational High School, also refused to testify. Shortly after the hearings in October of 1951, the School Board assembled a loyalty committee to interview her and forty-five other employees who had been accused of subversive activity.139 By the end of 1953, she and five other teachers had been dismissed.140 Stafford and Cole also took a strong stance against federal intervention in educational affairs. In 1955, they traveled to Washington, D.C., for the White House Conference on Education in order to defend the authority of parents and communities in local school decision-making. Their trip became a platform for them, as well for the Herald-Express, to decry the unwanted influence of government bureaucrats in America’s classrooms. Federal aid to education equaled “federal control,” decried Cole from the capital. Since parental and community authority were ultimately at stake, she asked the people of Los Angeles who was going to control the minds of their children, “Will it be the parents in local school districts or a national commission acting with the authority of the Federal Government?”141 She ultimately dismissed the set of recommendations produced by the conference, implying that its organizers pushed through ideas in an authoritarian top-down fashion rather than working to generate new ideas from participants. “We were given questions prepared in advance by a committee in Washington,” she reported, “. . . and we were not allowed to go beyond those questions.”142 In concert with the Herald-Express reporter who followed them, Stafford and Cole reinforced the conservative dichotomy that contrasted the democratizing power of the community with the autocratic power of the state. The two-year process of creating their political personae as watchdog housewives had laid the groundwork. At the conference, they were now mothers in the trenches. In the belly of the beast, Washington, D.C., they observed firsthand how federal education officials ran roughshod over the interests of local authorities, parents, and children. e

­98  •  Chapter III The year 1955 was also the year that Henry Steele Commager failed to help county library officials save the American Heritage Project. The popular adult education program came to Los Angeles in 1953 as part of a national initiative started by the American Library Association (ALA) two years earlier. The project was both a product of and a response to Cold War patriotic fervor. On the one hand, the ALA acted out of concern about the red scare, especially the loyalty oath that employers forced librarians to sign. The time seemed right to talk about democracy and free speech. Patriotic zeal, on the other hand, also primed the nation to talk about its origins, traditions, and history. The New York Public Library had recently established a Great Books program like that at Columbia University, which attracted the ALA as a model for the American Heritage Project. To celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary in 1951, the ALA published a list of primary source documents, Living Ideas in America, contracting the celebrated public intellectual Henry Steele Commager to edit the volume. Living Ideas included classic texts by founding fathers, but also the voices of New Deal reformers, labor activists, feminists, and progressives, including W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Commager’s commentary introduced each piece.143 Financing the project was the Fund for the Advancement of Education (FAE), an institution that operated within the Ford Foundation to promote adult education. Created that year, the FAE started with a $3 million budget to fulfill its mission.144 In July, the fund’s directors approved a $150,000 grant to the ALA for promoting community discussion of American heritage in continuing education programs to be held at public libraries. The ALA then chose the Los Angeles County Library, among four other sites in the country, as host.145 The American Heritage Project attracted scrutiny from conservative women for two reasons: the discussions centered on Commager’s Living Ideas and the program found mention in the Reece Committee Report on Tax Exempt Foundations. Henry Steele Commager’s condemnations of Joseph McCarthy had made him a lightning rod for anticommunist censorship campaigns. The day after Joseph McCarthy gave his famous speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, Commager told 130 high school leaders that loyalty oaths demonstrated American insecurity.146 Commager, who had written often about American democracy during the Depression and World War II in the New York Times Magazine, warned that excessive anticommunism interfered with free speech.147 The liberal also wrote about American democracy and the New Deal in ways that disturbed Jo Hindman and other conservative critics. In a New York Times publication called Current History, Commager developed a defense for the New Deal against conservative critiques of its regimentation. “As he would continue to shape this theme throughout his career,” notes biographer Neil Jumonville,

Education or Indoctrination?  •  99

“Commager advanced the idea that, if framed and handled properly, there was no necessary conflict between the demands of freedom and order.”148 For several years the American Heritage Project hummed along without any disturbances in Los Angeles, supported financially by the FAE and the American Library Association. The evening discussions met two hours every other week in fourteen different public libraries across the county, from San Fernando down to Inglewood and Compton, from Santa Monica east to Pasadena.149 Even in the most conservative part of Los Angeles County, San Marino, the Huntington Library displayed books and manuscripts celebrating American heritage to complement the theme of the county library’s project.150 Circumstances changed in 1955 as a result of the Reece Committee Report on tax exempt foundations. In 1954 B. Carroll Reece, representative from Tennessee, led a congressional investigation of educational and philanthropic organizations mainly to identify “un-American and subversive activities.”151 The committee targeted the American Heritage Project because of its “tremendous possibilities for use as a propaganda medium.”152 The Ford Foundation found mention as one of several granting institutions that sowed subversion, according to the committee, by funding projects critical of American institutions and values. Though Reece’s report proved quite weak, coming as it did after the McCarthy censure, his committee and similar investigating bodies frightened many foundations into rejecting social science projects in the 1950s. “During the height of the McCarthy era,” notes Ellen Schrecker, “. . . the National Science Foundation not only restricted its grants to research that converged with hard science, but explicitly warned prospective applicants to steer clear of ‘social reform movements and welfare activities.’ ”153 Pressure from the Reece Committee Report exerted itself on the Los Angeles County Library system through conservative women activists. On March 15, 1955, the Los Angeles Times printed a letter from Inglewood housewife Jo Hindman. The reading materials used in the AHP discussions, charged Hindman, included Living Ideas in America, edited by “propagandist” Henry Steele Commager. She observed that Commager editorialized throughout his volume of primary-source documents and offered “the ‘other side’ a thin sprinkle of representation.”154 Hindman also wrote to County Supervisor John Anson Ford, a liberal progressive, and Nelson Dilworth, the conservative chairman of the California Senate Investigating Committee on Education in California, who had investigated Willard Goslin. Hindman requested that Dilworth’s staff send Ford a copy of the senator’s speech, “A Freedom Manifesto,” to bring home the gravity of the American Heritage Project. To Ford, she complained about books and films used in the discussion groups and alerted him to the mail coming his way from red-hunter Dilworth.155

­100  •  Chapter III Tensions brewing around the American Heritage Project escalated in June, when the board met to approve $3,500 for the next year’s program. By then, the Fund for Adult Education no longer sponsored the American Heritage Project, so the county had to foot the bill, which involved taxpayers in the program. A group of female anticommunist crusaders used the opportunity to argue at the supervisors’ meeting that the AHP was subversive. Wielding a copy of the 1954 Reece Committee Report, Jo Hindman told the supervisors that she hoped they would “be conscience bound to read it,” since it characterized the American Heritage Project as “unfit.” Before her opponents accused her of stifling “free speech,” however, she wanted to add that people like her just wanted a fair chance. “There are enough propagandists out there,” she concluded. “Let’s keep our libraries off the soapbox.”156 Hindman and her cohorts would not back down. As a result, the supervisors voted to freeze the $3,500 until the issue of discussion leaders could be resolved at a later time.157 Jo Hindman insisted that, based on the research hours she had clocked into subversive activities and based on the authority of the Reece Committee, the County Board of Supervisors take her arguments against the American Heritage Project seriously. Emphasizing the amount of time and effort she expended investigating, Hindman claimed deep knowledge of leftist scholars, knowledge gained through immersion. As a housewife with the time, she threw herself into the study of communism the way a busy county supervisor could not. “I have read a stack of books higher than this table,” Hindman told the board. “I’m not going to give you a report on them all, but I am going to tell you about one [Commager’s Living Ideas in America].” 158 The American Heritage Project debate ultimately came down to a dispute over how the “truth” of history could be known and revealed. Jo Hindman, Henry Steele Commager, and several county administrators debated the issue on CBS-KNX radio in October 1955.159 “Frozen Funds and Heated Words” combined taped footage of the county supervisors’ meeting with recorded comments from Commager and library administrators and with some audience participation from Hindman. Commager dismissed the charges of bias. “Our system depends on free discussion,” he declared, “. . . because free discussion is the only way we know for avoiding errors and arriving at truth.”160 But Commager and his opponents talked across each other. Both wanted truth. As John Henderson recounted an exchange with one protestor who confronted him in his office, “. . . [S]he is interested in facts; she wants to bring facts to light. She feels that the truth and activities of the individuals who are endeavoring to bring us under domination is [sic] not known, and she feels that she should do her utmost to bring out the evidence.”161 Jo Hindman and the other opponents did not convince County Librarian John Henderson or Supervisor

Education or Indoctrination?  •  101

John Anson Ford that they were duped by communists, but they did incite enough upheaval to prevent the county from funding the American Heritage Project. The supervisors voted to convene public hearings on the American Heritage Project, but then never resumed the discussions groups in libraries.162 The Downey Branch Library hosted two Great Books Discussion Groups funded by the FAE in 1956, legacies of the original ALA Project, but no other branch participated.163 e Conservatism acquired deeper associations with community self-determination, mistrust of academic elites, and respect for parental authority, due, in part, to the activist work of women. These principles blended seamlessly with the traditional small government, free market, and anticommunist values that had been guiding the American right for decades. An abiding belief in their shared communitarian principles would bind conservatives well into the 1960s and beyond. Right-wing women played a crucial role in nurturing these ideological linkages by spearheading Cold War battles over mind control in their suburban enclaves. Challenging progressive education, UNESCO, the American Heritage Project, and related educational initiatives like desegregation and federal aid to education, they contributed a localistic, antibureaucratic, pro-family edge to the movement that complemented its libertarianism. By taking their anticommunist crusades into local schools, they portrayed their opponents as outside interlopers whose schemes would—intentionally or otherwise—harm the community and nation one vulnerable young mind at a time. Women, for better or worse, made communism feel immediate and tangible. Attracting national media attention, female activists took the opportunity to insist that larger political implications were to be drawn from their local campaigns. Conservative women simultaneously played down and played up their class and racial advantages. On the one hand, depression era populism and post– Nazi era antiracism had been making class pretensions and racial slurs ever more uncouth. Conservatives sincerely believed racial and social justice campaigns only sowed animosities, inviting the government to intervene as a leveling agent in affairs where it did not belong. Firmly convinced that Superintendent Willard Goslin, UNESCO, teacher Jean Wilkinson, and the American Heritage Project were agents of the left, conservative women stepped forward to protect local interests from dangerous outsiders. To assume an antielitist and antiauthoritarian political stance, they claimed the mantle of housewife, eliding the power they wielded through their class position. On the other hand, they also knew that the best way to vanquish their adversaries was to utilize these advantages—the affluence, connections, and the education they enjoyed

­102  •  Chapter III as middle- and upper-class women who lived in sheltered white neighborhoods around Los Angeles. Middle- and upper-class housewives were able to harness the power of their class and gender position in the 1950s because of the red scare. The fear of communism in the general public amplified their political might. As the old adage tells us, however, “just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” Anticommunists used the word “subversive” so prolifically during the Cold War as to make it meaningless. Although they misidentified the problem as communism, conservatives—especially conservative women— did have grounds to feel defensive. The emerging cadre of social scientists, psychologists, and government bureaucrats had indeed been challenging their parental authority. Over the course of two decades, race theorists had been formulating a body of literature, pedagogy, and policy around the consensus that nationalism and racism were social diseases, placing responsibility for its proliferation in the hands of parents, especially women. By the mid-1950s a group of scholars had adopted many of these ideas to develop a new “consensus” history, which characterized moderation as a distinctly American tradition while depicting social movement politics as extremist expressions of nostalgia for an older order.164 Patriotism and racial distinctiveness, which many conservatives valued as central to American identity, were not only being criticized by these theorists, but pathologized. Some race progressives of this generation characterized conservative attitudes on race and nationalism not only as wrong, but as sick. They drew, in fact, from emerging race science that contributed to the UNESCO Statements on Race to develop that characterization. Conservative women would not accept the diagnosis. Right-wing female activists in Los Angeles, in fact, launched an activist campaign against mental health professionals in 1956 that would further develop the conservative movement’s collective sense of how experts, bureaucrats, and leftists colluded to centralize power.

C H A P T E R   I V

“Siberia, U.S.A.” Psychological Experts and the State

After traveling 1,500 miles and waiting patiently, Stephanie Williams took her seat before the Senate Subcommittee on Territories and Insular Affairs on Monday, February 20, 1956. As the last to be heard on that mild and clear winter day at the Capitol, she concluded the afternoon’s hearings. The committee would conduct two more in Washington for the Alaska mental health bill, HR 6376, a measure that would enable the territory to hospitalize its own mentally ill residents. The San Fernando Valley mother and activist introduced herself as president of the American Public Relations Forum, an organization that “consists of housewives who study legislation.” The awkward phrases that stumbled from her lips betrayed nervousness, not to mention the professional disparities dividing Williams and her esteemed listeners. The committee, probably weary from the day’s work and baffled by her oration, offered no response when she declared that “. . .[M]any of your young people in school are told that they are mentally ill if they do not agree with many of the things that we feel pertain to pure Americanism.”1 Although the legislation had nothing to do with schools, communism, or the United Nations, Williams was among several of its opponents who decried internationalism, brainwashing, and totalitarianism. Also from Southern California appeared Minute Woman Gene Birkeland, who addressed the committee on Tuesday. Birkeland informed the senators that acclaimed Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport “.  .  .  states that persons who fight communism are mentally deranged. . . . Is this the meaning of ‘psychiatric or other disease,’” she asked, “as it is used in 6376?”2 Protests articulated by the bill opponents might have flummoxed the subcommittee but by February would not have surprised them. The Alaska mental health bill, which appropriated land and money to fund psychiatric facilities and programs in the territory, had unleashed a wave of opposition starting in January. Housewives in Los Angeles were the first to act. By February activists all over the country had written to legislators. The furor started shortly after the House of Representatives passed the legislation, when Gene Birkeland published an article in Orange County’s Santa Ana Register called “Now—Siberia, U.S.A.”3 Birkeland was a member of the American Public Relations Forum and

­104  •  Chapter IV Minute Women of the U.S.A. Both groups had been attacking mental health legislation for several months before legislators proposed H.R. 6376. “Based on close study of the bill,” warned Birkeland, “it is entirely within the realm of possibility that we may be establishing in Alaska our own version of the Siberian slave camps. . . .”4 The alleged danger lay in dubious circumstances under which authorities could commit so-called mentally ill persons. Any police officer or health care professional, she wrote, had the power to incarcerate individuals they deemed psychologically unfit. Birkeland argued that the Alaska mental health bill provided both the physical structures and legal mechanisms for a Soviet-style police state in America. The conspiracy theory known as “Siberia, U.S.A.” spread faster than winter ice in the Bering Strait, fomenting enough opposition to hold up passage of the bill for months. “Siberia, U.S.A.” protests took Congress and political observers aback. The bill should have pleased critics of big government since its aim was to decentralize power. Alaska, not yet a state, had been trying for almost two decades to secure its own mental health care facility. Territorial representative Bob Bartlett crafted the measure himself to give constituents control over the care of their own psychiatric patients. The bill also divested the federal government of one million acres of Alaska lands, authorizing the territorial government to lease out those holdings for payment of construction, maintenance, and service costs. Local control and self-sufficiency were at the heart of the Alaska mental health bill. Conservative senator Barry Goldwater, defender of property rights and small government values, ultimately stepped in to rescue the measure for these reasons. Believing that the territory of Alaska should have the power to treat its patients, Goldwater adjusted the language of the legislation regarding commitment procedures, removing the obstacles for HR 6376 to become law later that summer.5 Understanding the origins, events, and wider impact of “Siberia, U.S.A.” entails pursuit of conservative women along their research trail in the mid-1950s. The opposition campaign against the Alaska mental health bill is a narrative of ideas taking shape in grassroots organizations, though not completely in isolation. Physicians, medical groups, and a legislator from Mississippi also joined in the attacks against psychological expertise. However, the antielitist, home rule, and parental rights critiques of psychological intervention derive from the female-dominated grassroots campaigns against mental health reform. The attacks on psychological experts starts where Chapter 3 left off, in local education wars. Research, study, and discussion of progressive education, UNESCO, and the American Heritage Project drew conservative women’s attention to psychological and social scientists who advocated internationalism, racial integration, and progressive pedagogy. This discovery led activists to take interest

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in the field of mental health. They became especially distressed by the work of highly credentialed social scientists who studied the home as a site to realize antiracist and internationalist ideals. Political historians, furthermore, drew from this body of scholarship to characterize conservatism as a mental disorder rather than a legitimate political tradition. In 1955 the American Public Relations Forum and Minute Women of the U.S.A. spearheaded conservative attacks against professional psychology by campaigning against a series of community mental health bills before the California legislature, helping to squelch them. Encouraged by this success, housewife researchers began to scour federal legislation. Gene Birkeland wrote “Now—Siberia, U.S.A.!” after her group, the Minute Women, encountered HR 6376. Before long, the Santa Ana Register article circulated throughout Southern California and beyond, as the national anticommunist network put their typewriters and mimeograph machines to work. Protests against the legislation echoed the populist tone that had become characteristic of this literature. Opposition against progressive education, UNESCO, and racial integration reverberated in attacks against psychology. Conservative print culture developed a new political construction, “the mental health establishment,” to describe research psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists, community mental health workers, guidance counselors, government bureaucrats, and anyone else who advocated a progressive interventionist vision for psychological expertise in society. Upholders of segregation seized upon the Alaska mental health bill as proof of how “headshrinkers” abused the authority of their medical expertise to push a race amalgamation ideal.6 Over the late fifties and into the 1960s, writers, educators, and legislators on the right gradually integrated activist critiques of the “mental health establishment” into their own attacks on the liberal state, further entrenching familial interpretations of antistatism into the ideology of the larger conservative movement. e Progressive education drew the first activist attacks on psychology in Southern California. Critics argued that liberal educators borrowed psychological tools from their social scientist comrades to execute their brainwashing strategy. Willard Goslin’s critics in Pasadena, Louise Padelford and Catherine Hallberg, charged in their Fortnight article that his administration deployed “group dynamics” in meetings with teachers and parents to promote their subversive pedagogical agenda.7 As an area of study developed by social psychologists, group dynamics became a basis for therapy and facilitation of productive meetings. The technique made conservative critics suspicious. In “The Case Against Pasadena,” Padelford and Hallberg accuse the Goslin administration of using

­106  •  Chapter IV group dynamics for sinister purposes in their teacher-training sessions with the well-known progressive educator William Heard Kilpatrick. The women argued that progressives deployed group dynamics to push adoption of a “whole child” teaching philosophy, a holistic pedagogy that addressed the social, mental, and physical well-being of the child. “There are other well-qualified institutions, such as churches, Scouts and similar character-building groups, not to mention the family, which are vitally concerned with helping to develop the complete man.”8 Padelford and Hallberg might have correctly perceived why group dynamics appealed to Willard Goslin, though misassigned menace to his motivations. Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist at MIT, first coined the term “group dynamics” when drawing from industrial workplace studies of the interwar years to prepare American soldiers for their transition to peacetime.9 Out of Lewin’s work grew a body of literature that shaped the thinking of race progressives, attracted to its rigorous investigations of “intercultural” and “intergroup relations.” As Mary Allen’s attacks on “intercultural” dances in Education or Indoctrination revealed, such language put conservatives on guard. Education historian Diane Ravitch also notes that progressive educators used group dynamics techniques to cope with resistance to curricular revisions. Reformers found it effective to organize teachers into small groups that would debate proposed changes, but ultimately reach a consensus to which all participants in the meeting would have to abide. Often, however, leaders had worked out those decisions before the groups even convened. According to Ravitch, group dynamics thus served as a means for “engineering consent” in many instances, adding that some teachers who refused to go along with the consensus of their curriculum revision group found themselves without a job.10 Many conservative activists, thus, came to see “group dynamics” as something more than a technique abused by administrators and desegregationists. Women, in particular, perceived a deeply sinister process in operation that demanded the skills, time, and organizations that they, as housewives, could commit to exposing— especially when it meant protecting the family. The Los Angeles School Board members Edith Stafford and Ruth Cole charged organizers of the White House Conference on Education of using group dynamics to manipulate its participants in 1955. They contended that the government invited delegates at the taxpayers’ expense to force a show of consensus on behalf of the Eisenhower administration to push Congressional support for educational subsidies. They argued that 2,000 people meeting in 180 groups could hardly “solve” problems on each of the subjects in two hours, or produce results adequately representing the majority or minority opinion.



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“Why,” asked Edith Stafford in November of 1955, “should the good old democratic custom of a showing of hands suddenly become disreputable?”11 The perception of being psychologically manipulated by authorities further invigorated the activism of conservative women while expanding the scope of their agenda. For those who had already received warnings about group dynamics from their girlfriends, sitting in a meeting where a group leader told them consensus was the objective gave them the sensation that they were witnessing larger political forces at work, possibly communism. By resisting the group, they felt defiant and politically empowered. A Parent Teacher Association conference jolted activist Jane Crosby into just such a political awakening. Crosby, the South Pasadena housewife who would eventually establish one of the first right-wing bookstores and start one of the first John Birch Society chapters, remembers her confrontations with the PTA as a formative moment in her political career.12 Crosby’s Republican husband and Lucille Cardin Crain’s Packaged Thinking for Women were already moving the former Roosevelt Democrat rightward, laying the ideological groundwork for her outrage. In March of 1956 she attended the Seventh Annual Biennial Conference on Childhood and Youth, sponsored by the thirty different organizations led by the Los Angeles region Welfare Planning Council, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.13 The speakers she heard made her uncomfortable, especially the social scientists who lectured about mental health. She also found the discussion groups to be undemocratic. As she asked in a letter to the South Pasadena Review, “Are we going to trade our traditional parliamentary procedure and individual thinking for consensus of opinion where we are used merely as stooges while the minority group twists our thinking around, almost like hypnosis?  . . .” 14 Battles in public schools also brought conservative scrutiny to the expanding relationship between psychiatric professionals and the federal government. In 1955 the Minute Women of the U.S.A. and American Public Relations Forum began attacking community mental health legislation because they mistrusted the power it would give medical authorities and the government. In a March 15 Minute Women bulletin, editor Gene Birkeland urged members to contact their representatives in Sacramento and inquire about three community mental health measures: assembly bills 1158, 1159, and 3300. Bill 1158 added $233,000 to the Department of Mental Hygiene budget for salaries, equipment, and services; 1159 laid out provisions for the state to give local governments assistance with mental health care through clinics; and 3300 created a ninety-day “observation period” for patients who were involuntarily institutionalized, which alarmed critics because it meant that hospitals could hold patients against their will without a court appearance.15 The March 1 bulletin

­108  •  Chapter IV had charged that “[t]hese bills would establish a state mental hygiene bureaucracy with clinics in every city or county of 50,000 population.”16 Conservatives inflated dangers posed by psychologists but correctly observed stronger ties between psychiatric professionals and the welfare state. The relationship arose out of new scholarly approaches, practices, and demands upon the field from society. The expression “mental health” came into wider usage among psychiatric professionals in the 1940s, marking a major shift in focus from the study of abnormality to the study of normality. The emphasis on encouraging mental health, rather than merely treating mental illness, signaled a new relationship between psychological experts and society. “In ascendance,” notes Ellen Herman, “was the view that psychology demanded aggressive social intervention, not by experts acting merely as citizens, but by experts acting as an organized constituency.”17 Mental health became a matter of public health, and prominent psychologists became key players in the formulation of federal and state social welfare policy. World War II, more than any other factor, prompted psychology’s postwar growth spurt. The mental damage wrought by war and the destructive capacity of the human psyche, as revealed by the Holocaust, invigorated widespread interest in the life of the mind. Starting in 1943, the army had started sending psychiatrists to combat areas. The strong presence of psychiatric professionals in military life, according to Herman, made fighting men more comfortable with clinicians and more willing to ask for help with their emotional problems. When they returned as veterans to the United States, they and their families sought assistance with the very difficult transition to peacetime and called upon the federal government to help subsidize their therapy.18 Congress discovered that treating mental illness would balloon quickly into an expensive proposition. By the mid-1950s, psychiatric patients occupied 50 percent of all VA hospital beds. Coincidentally, however, a fleet of psychologists and psychiatrists stood mobilized and well prepared to help the government confront this challenge, since the military had employed them in droves during the war to screen recruits, boost morale, and treat mental disorders. “As a result of our experience in the Army,” declared William Menninger, one of the most influential wartime psychiatrists, “it is vividly apparent that psychiatry can and must play a much more important role in the solution of health problems of the civilian.” Mental health programs seemed the obvious solution. “Preventive,” community-based initiatives, argued Menninger and his cohorts, would reduce need for institutions, medicine, and other costs associated with the treatment of mental illness. The National Mental Health Act (NMHA) thus passed in 1946, signaling the widespread acceptance of this view. This legislation directed federal funding toward research, training, and grants for facilities



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and established the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH). Over the next two decades, mental health programs proliferated with hefty federal funding. Between 1950 and 1957, the NIMH budget jumped from $8.7 million to $315 million. 19 Many conservatives viewed the NIMH as yet another bloated federal bureaucracy that further centralized power and decision-making in Washington—more evidence, in their view, of President Eisenhower’s failure to roll back the New Deal welfare state. Indeed, the psychological community pressed the federal government to intervene in areas like race relations, family services, educational affairs, and employment problems. In 1958, for example, the National Defense Education Act funded into existence a new breed of clinicians: school guidance counselors. The Act created 60,000 of those positions nationwide.20 Just as disturbing to the conservatives who seized upon “Siberia, U.S.A.,” however, was the outrage of being classified among the ranks of the abnormal. The March 15, 1956, Minute Women newsletter reminded members that their own sanity had come into question on several occasions in recent years. “You probably realize,” warned Birkeland, “that anti-UN people have been consistently referred to as ‘crackpots,’ or ‘lunatic fringe’ or any other term of opprobrium which carries with it the stigma of mental illness.”21 She also noted that psychologist Gordon Allport had invented a category, “the compulsive scapegoater,” which portrayed anticommunists as psychopathic. The bulletin quoted The ABC’s of Scapegoating, a pamphlet published by Allport in 1948: Not all people who are mentally deranged in this manner are recognized to be insane. Some, of course, are in hospitals where they belong. But occasionally a paranoiac of this order escapes psychiatric attention, and is loose in the community spreading widely the poison from his delusions. Such a paranoiac is aggressive and tries to take revenge on his ‘persecutors.’ He is not going to sit back and let the blankety-blank Irish, or Jews, or Communists take over. He will fight them. He distributes slanderous literature, or he becomes a leader who organizes crackpot groups, incites to violence, and shoots to kill.22 Birkeland added her view that it was offensive to Jews and Irish to place them in the same category as communists.23 Readers did not have to recognize themselves as racist to become alarmed by this quote. Fervent anticommunism qualified one as delusional under such a description, which was all a reader needed to see in the mirror Allport held before them. Birkeland’s newsletter drew attention to a body of literature that did, in fact, characterize right-wing movements as expressions of psychological and

­110  •  Chapter IV social distress. Starting in the 1930s, social scientists turned with increasing frequency to the analytic tools and theories of psychology to understand and confront the problems of racism. Among the most prominent of these scholars, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and other European scholars exiled in the United States solicited research funds from Christian and Jewish foundations, as well as private individuals, for a historic project on anti-Semitism. The “Frankfurt school,” as they became known, collaborated through the Institute of Social Research, starting out in Frankfurt am Main, then moving to New York, then Los Angeles, then back to Frankfurt in 1950. The institute’s scholars joined forces to devise a new critical theory of social relations by combining ideas from philosophy, social science, and psychoanalysis. The rise of National Socialism in Germany and the Holocaust inspired them to concentrate much of their attention on the study of fascism and racism.24 In 1950, Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford published The Authoritarian Personality, the final product of many years’ research in these areas.25 Adorno’s major contribution was his personality types—patterns of behavior that characterized racially prejudiced people. “The crank,” for example, represented a feminine prototype, a category that included “organized war mothers” whose “continuous repression of the id” manifested “frustration in the widest sense of the term.”26 As American psychology moved into the 1950s, researchers applied Adorno’s models to their own theories about race prejudice in the United States. In 1955 Robert Lindler published a collection of psychoanalytic case studies, which characterized race prejudice as a psychological condition. The Fifty-Minute Hour quickly became a best seller, while Lindler’s arguments found their way into numerous other investigations, many of them scientific, many of them academic, many of them polemic.27 In 1956, for example, a Los Angeles psychiatrist named Isidore Ziferstein published “Race Prejudice and Mental Health” in the liberal Los Angeles news magazine Frontier. Ziferstein concluded that racism was “a social and psychological disease . . . a symptom of a disordered society and of a disordered individual.” He made no attempt to hide the social-political mission of his study. “Every day that segregation continues,” he wrote, “our children’s feeling and thinking are contaminated with the germs of this profoundly anti-democratic and anti-human ‘fact of life.’”28 Borrowing from Adorno, Ziferstein sketched personality traits exhibited by prejudiced people in America: He [the “prejudiced individual”] is full of fears and distrust . . . He suffers from an inability to love. . . . He is afraid of feeling, and is therefore out of touch with his inner self. . . . The self-hate and the repressed hate of the



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powerful authority produce strong, destructive drives which may at times result in delinquent behavior.29 Racism, in other words, was wholly antithetical to mental health. Gene Birkeland probably attacked Gordon Allport because of the Harvard scientist’s broad national influence.30 The public intellectual and pioneer of personality studies popularized psychological understandings of prejudice in the United States.31 Indeed, the body of scientific thought he helped to establish in the 1920s and 1930s proved foundational to the antifascist work of Adorno, et al. Allport gave Los Angeles audiences the opportunity to know him more intimately when he served as visiting professor at Occidential College during a summer session in 1952. He offered two public programs while in residence, a lecture called “The Nature of Prejudice” and a demonstration-lecture on rumor. During the war, he had founded the Boston Rumor Clinic, which uncovered enemy propaganda masked as rumor.32 Allport’s subsequently published book, The Nature of Prejudice, then brought social science to a mainstream audience in 1954. So popular had the volume grown that an Anchor book edition, 40 percent thinner, appeared four years later in airports and drugstores. In 1955 the Los Angeles Times also published a personality quiz in its Sunday This Week magazine section, quoting Allport, to help readers determine if he or she (mainly she, if the questions, illustration of two women chatting over a fence, and overall content of the magazine was any indication) was a gossip. “Could you easily find time to introduce a new hobby or sport into your life?” “If you had to go on a very strict diet, could you carry it out successfully?”33 Postwar race psychology also disturbed conservatives by focusing the scientific gaze upon the family—especially the nationalist, racist family. Researchers studied bonds mainly between parents and children, but also between husbands and wives. Mothers, according to historian Ruth Feldstein, assumed the most responsibility for determining whether the next generation would be authoritarian, racist, or democratically healthy in their outlook. More important than whether or not parents passed down their own racist attitudes became the extent to which they, especially mothers, dominated and doted upon their children. The scholarly literature perpetuated a tendency among psychologists, psychiatrists, and social commentators, common since the early forties, to examine relationships between mothers and sons for answers to explain the nation’s social ills. In 1942 journalist Philip Wylie published Generation of Vipers, in which he drew from Freud and Jung to develop the concept of “momism.” Wylie blamed American “megaloid mom worship” for creating a class of overprivileged and overbearing mothers. The patriotic woman especially repulsed

­112  •  Chapter IV him: “Daughter of this historic war or that who . . . fills the coffers of her ego with the prestige that has accrued to the doings of others.”34 Generation reached a popular audience, as did Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, by psychiatrist Marynia Farnham and journalist-sociologist Ferdinand Lundberg. Chastising working mothers and feminists for rejecting their “natural” role in society, Farnham and Lundberg denounced such examples of “neurotic” women for sacrificing their children and causing social disorder.35 Modern Woman: The Lost Sex and Generation of Vipers echoed in the race science of the 1950s, notes Feldstein. The Authoritarian Personality ranked personality types on an F scale (F for fascist), which linked interpersonal family dynamics to the likelihood that one would submit to a dictatorial leader and develop racial prejudice. High scorers tended to glorify parents, submit to their authority, and need approval of mothers and fathers. While the fathers of high scorers tended to be “remote,” “stern,” and “ethical,” subjects described mothers as self-sacrificing, “submissive,” and devoted. 36 Building on this work, Allport attributed the prejudice of children to strict mothers who punished masturbation.37 Conservatives attacked race science, but rarely noted the “mother” part in this “mother-blaming” literature. Consistent with antistatist ideology, opponents of mental health legislation, most notably women, spoke out to defend the family and the home. “With Whom Do You Sleep?” asked an American Public Relations Forum bulletin, in February of 1956. “Alone? Brother, Sister, Mother . . . ?” That was what mental health counselors would be asking your children with the power of the law on their side. “Who helps you with your personal problems?” continued the warning. “Parents . . . Counselor, Teacher, Priest . . . ?” Outrage mixed with alarm as the writer accused colluding schoolteachers and mental health professionals of invading the home with prying questionnaires, sex talk, and taxpayer dollars. “By planting these thoughts in a young mind the student naturally becomes more dissatisfied with his surroundings. He is a natural prey for the self-appointed investigators who are looking avidly for mental institution bait, and when these strings are pulled they not only have the child but the parents also.”38 The recent Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 influenced conservative opinions about psychology, though the Southern California activists never mention the famous case. When the Supreme Court ruled school desegregation unconstitutional, it not only footnoted social scientific scholarship but based its verdict on the psychological damage suffered by black school children as a result of segregation.39 For fifteen years, Kenneth and Mamie Clark had been studying the low self-esteem among children in the black community, work developed from the master’s thesis Mamie Clark had written at Howard University, “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-school



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Children.”40 The Warren Court argued that racial segregation inflicted damage to the psychological development of black children, in addition to violating their civil rights. “Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson,” the opinion read, “this finding is amply supported by modern authority.”41 Brown put the rule of law behind cuttingedge psychological theory. In 1955 Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi sponsored a resolution asking for an investigation of the “alleged scientific authorities upon which the Supreme Court relied” in the Brown decision. Eastland argued that Brown proved how social scientists brainwashed the Supreme Court. The justices, he claimed, abused their authority to foment internal strife and implement Marxism with the help of “modern scientific authority.” The remainder of the document, which he delivered as a speech, denounced various scholars listed in the famous “footnote” to Brown, whom HUAC investigations linked to the “worldwide Communist conspiracy.” He was outraged that the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted full citizenship rights to former slaves, should be left to these “so-called modern authorities on psychology” to interpret, especially the “negro” Clark. His final comments alluded eerily to the violence of massive resistance to desegregation that was soon to follow in the South. “Mr. President, the question is asked, Will the South obey this decision of the Supreme Court? . . . Any person is incredulous indeed to believe that southern people will permit all this to be swept aside by a Court who relies for its authority not upon the law but upon pro-Communist agitators and enemies of our system of government.”42 Minute Women and Forum newsletters tended most often to situate race psychology within the one big conspiracy they had been in the process of exposing for a few years by then. “Mental Hygiene = Human Relations = U.N.E.S.C.O.,” wrote Gene Birkeland in the spring of 1955.”43 The spirit of internationalism, an inherent part of the collaborations among antiracist psychologists, further convinced conservative critics that mental health initiatives aimed to subvert society. They loathed Brock Chisholm, director general of the World Heath Organization, like he was the Antichrist. Chisholm played an active role in making mental health part of the organization’s agenda. In 1948, in London, the WHO and UNESCO sponsored the Third International Congress on Mental Health, from which the World Mental Health Foundation (WMHF) was born.44 So often did newsletters quote two lines from the WMHF’s founding statement, “Mental Health and World Citizenship,” that right-wing women must have been reciting them in their sleep. “Principles of mental health,” it declared, “cannot be furthered in any society unless there is progressive acceptance of the concept of world citizenship. World citizenship

­114  •  Chapter IV can be widely extended among all peoples through the applications of the principles of mental health.”45 The clinics and funding proposed by the community mental health bills would, in the minds of opponents, build institutions for brainwashing in their towns and cities. Protests against the 1955 community mental health bills in California also focused on threats perceived by opponents to Christianity. The Minute Women discovered, for example, that authoritative sources defined “mental health” in overtly antireligious terms. Webster’s dictionary described a “psychopathic personality” as one marked by “abnormal sensitiveness to spiritual phenomena . . . characterized by extreme susceptibility to religious emotion, conscientious doubts and fears.”46 “What individual has not,” asked the newsletter, “been subject to a greater or lesser degree to some of the above symptoms?”47 The bulletin also quoted a recent article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science praising the mental heath movement for rendering ideas like original sin, corporal punishment, and men’s superiority over women “unfashionable.”48 Such scholarship demonstrated, argued editor Birkeland, that “acceptance of the mental hygiene beliefs” corresponded precisely to the “discard of Christian ethics.” The bulletin charged that the mental health movement “freely and with malice set out to destroy the structure of Christianity.” It also concluded with a bibliography citing twenty-two pieces of literature.49 The sources included a blatantly anti-Catholic UNESCO pamphlet called Mental Hygiene in the Nursery Schools. Implying that nuns posed a psychological threat to school children, UNESCO warned that “[t]he question of selection and guidance of intending nursery school teachers is of the essence of the whole problem of the mental hygiene of young children. Where women in the teaching service are sexually inhibited or are debarred from marriage, neuroses are common, with disastrous results for the children in school.”50 Though dismissed as fanatical by liberal, mainstream, and some conservative intellectual critics, the housewife activists gradually acquired respected allies in their fight against the mental health establishment. Their campaign received a boost when a major medical authority in the community came out against the state mental health legislation. The Freedom Club of the First Congregational Church circulated a handbill called “Your Freedom May Be at Stake!,” the reprint of a letter written by a prominent Los Angeles physician to California governor Goodwin Knight. Dr. Lewis A. Alesen denounced assembly bills 1158, 1159, and 3300 as “a most serious threat,” part of a larger “sinister pattern” of mass indoctrination aimed at stifling individualism and belief in God.51 As a vocal proponent of privatized medicine, Alesen was past president of both the Los Angeles County Medical Association and California Medical Association (CMA). Both organizations represented particularly conservative,



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anticommunist, and antistatist branches of the American Medical Association, which had its own long track record of opposing public health care.52 As leader of the CMA, Alesen had delivered lectures to community groups about “creeping socialism” and “the meaning of private enterprise.”53 In 1952 he urged the Health Division of the Welfare Council of Los Angeles to “not let our government pauperize and paternalize the American people.”54 Two years later the conservative surgeon participated in a mini-HUAC investigation of communists in the medical profession, which drew on evidence gathered by the L.A. County Medical Association’s “indoctrination committee,” a division that infiltrated a suspected communist-front organization.55 Alesen, Los Angeles County Hospital’s chief of staff, was also convinced of the mental health conspiracy. A section of AB 3300 that held patients for an observation period concerned him most. “. . . [T]here is no limit to what a skillful hyponotist [sic] might do were he given repeated opportunities to ply his trade on the mind of an individual incarcerated under Section 5054 of A.B. 3300 without benefit of legal hearing, and without the protective requirement that he be at all times represented by legal counsel.”56 Using psychology, including “sex education and practices,” he warned, leftists would reduce the nation to “bare subsistence.” Poverty represented the “result of the collectivist philosophy when in full bloom.” Voluntary medicine and respect for the individual, he concluded, would keep mankind free.57 Two years later, Alesen became director of the Freedom Club at James Fifield’s First Congregational Church, where he was a member.58 Breathing life into the mental health conspiracy theories were the emerging real-life stories that activists circulated through the anticommunist network, stories of federal authorities using their power to squelch dissent among “patriots.” Lucille Miller of Vermont became the first of these political prisoners as activists campaigned against the state mental health bills in California. The mother of three found herself on the wrong side of the law for advising young men to dodge the Selective Service, which put her in violation of the Military Services Act and in trouble with the feds. She also edited an anticommunist newsletter called the Green Mountain Rifleman, which often expressed her virulent white supremacist and anti-Semitic opinions. “Egged on by their Jewish Masters,” she had recently written, “Negroes [were] venturing into all kinds of field experiments,” experiments like refusing to enter the back door if they were servants.59 In May a U.S. Marshal came to take Lucille Miller into custody, but husband Manuel turned the officer away at gunpoint. After a twelve-hour siege, state troopers teargassed their home in Bethel. Law enforcement officials took Manuel into custody, where a court tried and convicted him for resisting arrest. Lucille, on the other hand, landed in a mental hospital in Washington,

­116  •  Chapter IV D.C., until June 20, when doctors determined that she was competent to stand trial.60 A federal jury convicted her as well.61 “This could very well be our last bulletin,” warned the next American Public Relations Forum newsletter, “. . . freedom of speech may be a thing of the past” before the next.62 Conservative newspaper columnists spread the alarm also, with stalwart McCarthy supporters Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky at the forefront of Miller’s defense.63 Pegler wrote that Lucille was “‘insane’ by the scratch of a judge’s pen.”64 Sokolsky argued that even though Mrs. Miller did not like him [Sokolsky] because he was a Jew, she deserved due process before the law.65 The flurry of right-wing literature on Miller alternately projected two contradictory images of Lucille that would have appealed to the sympathies of conservative readers: helpless victim and brave patriot. She appeared in the American Public Relations Forum bulletin as a courageous mother, but powerless against the forces before her. It quoted Lucille’s son pleading with her over the telephone from school, “Please let them arrest you or they will do terrible things to you.”66 The libertarian journal Faith and Freedom, published by Spiritual Mobilization, swiftly dispatched a correspondent from their headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles to Bethel, Vermont, to cover the story. “Do the children miss her?” asked interviewer Bill Johnson. Suppressing tears, Manuel told him, “Terribly.” “When is Mama coming home?” the son and twin daughters asked, causing him distress at his failure to produce an answer.67 On the other hand, Westbrook Pegler valorized Miller for exposing a circle of communists who were eventually investigated by HUAC. Manuel similarly expressed respect for his wife’s patriotism, as well her fortitude. He was “proud of mom” and suggested that, perhaps, the judge Lucille called a “half-baked Marxist” resented her lack of feminine deference.68 “Very likely,” he told Bill Johnson, “. . . [ Judge ] Gibson’s ideal of American womanhood is one who would be reduced to whining subservience.”69 The siege at Bethel coincided with the legislative showdown in California. With the help of contributions, the American Public Relations Forum sent Stephanie Williams and other members to lobby legislators in Sacramento that May of 1955 to persuade them against passing the three mental health bills. Sympathetic physicians joined them. To their great excitement, the legislation failed. After the assembly passed the bills, the senate sent them back to the rules committee, where they would not be considered again for two years. The Forum’s June bulletin reported triumphantly that Williams spoke for a full hour against 3300 and “brought out every weak point in the bill.” Though it is difficult to assess the efficacy of Williams’s testimony, an article published in the American Journal of Psychiatry eight years later credited the American Public Relations Forum with defeating the bill and inciting the “first significant



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public denunciation against the mental health movement.”70 That attribution, however, might have offended some Minute Women. “No one person may accept rightfully the honor of defeating the bill, . . .” wrote Minute Women state chairman Charlane Kirchner, who “. . . for three long grim months sought to alert others to their dangers.”71 Two brothers with their own stories of arrest, psychological abuse, and hunger strikes further aggravated the furor over mental health. After a series of political stunts that landed them in court, jail, and the pages of the Los Angeles Times, the “flying Finn twins,” George and Charles, found themselves diagnosed as mentally ill and subjected, they claim, to forced feedings.72 The showman siblings joined Lucille Miller as true-life victims of government persecution. Conservatives told their story to show how the United States was becoming a political state with the help of “Mental Health.” Always “nattily” dressed, usually in matching suits and bow ties, the blue-eyed identical twins first caught attention in 1953, when they refused to relinquish a plane they purchased from government surplus after a court ordered them to give it up for failure to make payments on the aircraft and its maintenance.73 The former air force officers removed the plane to a remote hiding place in Death Valley, where Charles camped out with a makeshift fireplace and pistols to protect their property.74 After arrests and bail, the Finns escalated their battle against the feds by performing a citizen’s arrest of a U.S. attorney, handcuffing Laughlin E. Waters during a Los Angeles Bar Association meeting at the Biltmore Hotel.75 Prison sentences, hungers strikes by the brothers, and jail visits by a concerned television actress ensued.76 George and Charles eventually landed in the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, where they sat in isolation and endured interrogations and force feedings.77 The “Fabulous Finns” left the asylum directly for the lecture circuit, vigorously promoting their story of what “could happen here.”78 In January and February they spoke to both the American Public Relations Forum and the Freedom Club about “Government Intervention in Private Enterprise.” The brothers seemed to relish talking about their confrontations with law enforcement, which they saw as forms of libertarian direct action rather than crimes. They related incidents of trading places to confuse authorities, making it extremely difficult to pin charges on the right twin. Pledging undying commitment to their cause and willing to starve for it, they declared, “We would either come out of there with our constitutional rights in our hands or in a box and we didn’t care which.”79 Supporters excused the lawbreaking. “When their small minded jailors could not subdue them,” declared the Forum bulletin, “they confined them to a mental institution so they could force-feed them and the public not know how they were tortured.” Thaddeaus Ashby, associate

­118  •  Chapter IV editor of Spiritual Mobilization’s Faith and Freedom, reflected that, “It’s easy for a conservative like me to dismiss the Finns as troublemakers. . . . And yet, it is hard for me to dismiss any man who will die for an ideal.”80 e The defeat of community mental health bills proposed in Sacramento led opponents to “Siberia, U.S.A.” The American Public Relations Forum first discovered the Alaska mental health bill in December of 1955, reporting in their bulletin that they had their hands on a very important piece of legislation, “one that tops all of them.” HR 6376 caught their eye because it allocated land and funds for a psychiatric facility in Alaska. “We could not help remembering,” noted the bulletin, “that Siberia is very near Alaska and since it is obvious no one needs such a large land grant, we were wondering if it could be an American Siberia.” 81 The stated purpose of the bill, “to transfer from the Federal Government to the Territory of Alaska basic responsibility and authority for the hospitalization, care, and treatment of the mentally ill of Alaska,” seemed worthy and harmless enough.82 The Alaska mental health bill vested the territory of Alaska with the power to write its own laws regarding commitment procedures as well as the responsibility to pay for psychiatric care, which the Department of Interior had formerly funded. For decades, Alaska had been trying to persuade Congress to pass such a law because an archaic federal civil code of procedure, dating back to 1900, dictated how authorities should deal with the territory’s mentally ill. Under its terms, the governor would contract with a facility west of the Rocky Mountains, where patients would be hospitalized at the government’s cost. Since then, those in need of psychiatric care left Alaska, sometimes on an eight-day trip, in a straitjacket, by boat to Seattle. They then boarded a train to Morningside Hospital in Portland, Oregon.83 Territorial representatives of the 1930s and 1940s proposed legislation to secure funding for a hospital, but none of their efforts found much traction in Congress, especially once World War II commenced.84 The postwar surge in concern and funding for mental health finally brought interest to Alaska’s patients, moving HR 6376 swiftly through committee. The House of Representatives voted unanimously by voice vote to pass the measure. The Senate had not even planned on holding hearings—until “Siberia, U.S.A.”85 Three sections of the bill provoked suspicion. Section 108 specified that “an individual may be admitted for care and treatment in a hospital upon written application by an interested party, by a health or welfare officer, by the Governor [of Alaska], or by the head of any institution.”86 “Interested party,”



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according to the bill’s definition, meant legal guardian, spouse, parent, adult children, close relative, or “an interested, responsible adult friend,” but conservative critics believed that a “greedy relative” could use that provision to gain control over a family’s wealth. Second, section 101 defined mental illness as a “psychiatric or other disease which substantially impairs [one’s] mental health.”87 “Other disease,” argued the American Public Relations Forum bulletin, was ambiguously phrased; such a definition might be flexed to include troublesome political behavior. Third, section 202 granted the territory “one million acres from the public lands of the United States in Alaska . . . to lease and make conditional sales of such selected lands.” Despite the expressed intent of this land allocation, and despite the long history of states selling federal lands to pay for government institutions such as schools, the Forum thought those one million acres looked frighteningly like a gulag. The Alaska mental health bill controversy took on a life of its own, however, when Minute Woman Gene Birkeland published “Now—Siberia, U.S.A.” in a January issue of the Santa Ana Register. Birkeland lived in the San Fernando Valley, not in Orange County, but the Register offered a large right-wing readership, since it had been providing the historically conservative county with its main source of news every day for two decades.88 “. . .[D]on’t get the idea,” she cautioned, “that, simply because this was designed for Alaska that you, right here in Orange County, couldn’t be sent there.”89 In addition to the problems outlined in the American Public Relations Forum bulletin, Birkeland alerted readers to yet another provision of the bill that concerned her. Section 119 authorized the governor of Alaska to “enter into a reciprocal agreement with any State providing for the prompt transfer . . . of residents of such State or Alaska who are mentally ill.”90 “It doesn’t take a giant mentality,” she pointed out, “to see that under this set up it can be brought home right here to Orange County.”91 A flurry of newsletters issued by various organizations regarding “Siberia, U.S.A.” followed. Minute Woman Anna Mary Gann even wrote a poem about the mental health conspiracy. As the third stanza warned: If you respect your flag and love your Maker, And pray that He will guide you to do right, And do not let the first high-sounding faker, Convince you white is black and black is white . . . If you stand up and say you love Old Glory, And show you’re an American with guts, Baby, you’d better get yourself a lawyer, For “Mental Health” is out to prove you’re nuts . . . !92

­120  •  Chapter IV Others liked to joke about their crackpot image. Marie Koenig received a newsletter asking “Are you mentally ill?” Belief that communism was a conspiracy, claimed the unnamed writer, would earn you a diagnosis of mental illness. “Your parents didn’t bring you up with the proper attitudes,” it teased. “To prevent this psychological causation of mental illness, the states of New York and California have established a burning desire to investigate the possibilities of ‘maternal separation.’”93 Anticommunists promulgated conspiracy theory for a host of reasons. “Siberia, U.S.A.” presented a misguided but cohesive explanation for real problems that behavioral and social scientists had created for conservatives. The conspiracy was mostly, but not merely, a figment of their imagination. Psychologists, indeed, diagnosed racism and nationalism as diseases; historians used these diagnostic models to pathologize right-wing political behavior; and the mental health movement, in fact, fueled the growth of the social welfare state. As other scholars have noted, conspiracy theories flourish because these theories address a host of unknowns while accommodating a sizable range of beliefs and concerns.94 Provoking hatred of the monarchy among the founding generation of Americans, for example, a conspiracy theory circulated among that generation that the crown aimed to enslave the colonies. The movement culture of late-nineteenth-century populism, meanwhile, thrived on the theory that cabals of moneyed elites, especially merchants and bankers, conspired to rob the producers of wealth—mainly farmers—of their independence. Conspiracy theories of the Cold War era similarly helped make conservatism a mass movement by offering a sweeping and flexible framework for understanding remote and obscure relationships of power.95 Conspiracy theories also functioned as rhetorical bullhorns for right-wing women, amplifying female voices that did not ordinarily project the same volume as men’s into political debates. Nightmares of a prison camp in Alaska invited the Cold War imagination to run loose on a dark, frigid, windy, isolated tundra. “Siberia, U.S.A.” thus expressed fears about medical expertise and power by deploying an alarmist vision that would get attention, albeit negative attention. Still, conspiracy theories do not involve a total or stable commitment of belief from everyone who embraces them. Nor does everyone who participates in their perpetuation believe them in the same way. In an interview years later, activist Marie Koenig remembered being concerned about mental health legislation. Less convincing to her, however, was “Siberia, U.S.A.” Decades will surely change a person’s relationship to memories, but it is worth noting her laugh and the remark, “I don’t know if I thought of it as that.”96 “Siberia, U.S.A.” found legs because it offered numerous “might haves,” allowing conservatives to express and emote frustrations, fears, and grievances. By 1956, conspiracy



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theories had become a salient feature of the American political vernacular. By tapping into this tradition, the California housewives made themselves heard, and made connections between totalitarianism and problems they perceived locally. The extent to which they believed the actual conspiracy theory behind “Siberia, U.S.A.” mattered less than the power it gave them to attack the social and political forces they sought to annihilate. Within two months, conservatives in Illinois, Tennessee, Alabama, New York, Minnesota, Texas, Florida, and Michigan had sounded the alarm about “Siberia, U.S.A.” The speed by which word spread illustrates how tight the connections between anticommunists had become before the controversy erupted. When asked about the amount of mail received regarding the legislation, the chief clerk of the Senate Interior Committee told the Los Angeles Times in April, “I’ve never seen anything like it . . . [w]e have had about 1,000 letters and telegrams.” He indicated that Californians were responsible for most of the correspondence, but that much of the protest mail came from Texas and Florida as well.97 The campaign’s migration from Los Angeles to Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston exposes the links cultivated between conservatives in these cities, especially among women. Texas, like California, became an important growth center for American conservatism after World War II.98 Becoming the sixth most populous state by the mid-1950s, Texas prospered and gained political clout.99 As in Los Angeles, the conservative political energy in Texas became palpable. Barry Goldwater’s popularity earned him his reputation as Texas’s third senator. Television reporter Wes Wise described the political atmosphere in Dallas as “electric.”100 Lawrence Wright, a writer for Texas Monthly, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone, similarly observed the era to be “superheated.” “It was hysterical, . . . ” he reflected, “but after a point there seems to be little difference between hysteria and festivity. . . .We had the giddy feeling that we were careening toward some majestic crack-up, but it was a thrilling ride. . . .”101 Women mixed themselves into the political maelstrom as they did in California. Dallas writer Warren Leslie penned a less than flattering essay about female activists in 1964 called “The Compulsive Right Wing Woman.” “In Dallas I know a number of men who do not discuss politics with their wives,” wrote Leslie. “The men themselves are conservative, but they are far outmatched by their women in absolutist thinking and in the projection of anger to cover up fears and anxieties.”102 The Fort Worth–based Southern Conservative printed the earliest attacks on mental health legislation.103 Publisher Ida Darden had been active in Texas politics for several decades by the 1950s. She started her career in the 1910s as an antisuffragist activist, but managed to get beyond her aversion to women

­122  •  Chapter IV in politics and become a full-time lobbyist, politician, and journalist.104 As a political writer, Darden’s style combined militant anticommunism, white supremacy, and folksy humor. The Southern Conservative bore all these trademarks. “Mongrelization of the white race,” wrote Darden in 1956, “is one of the first requisites in setting up a one-world Communist government and the racial violence existing in the South right now is the result of action taken on orders from Moscow.”105 Letters to the editor indicate that Darden attracted readers well beyond the South. “The messages in your outstanding newspaper,” wrote one woman in Pomona, California, “are like atomic bombs; reading it is like getting a transfusion of rich red American blood.”106 Marie Koenig in Pasadena received the Southern Conservative as well. Darden’s March of 1955 warnings about mental health seemed cut and pasted directly out of the California Minute Women bulletin. She described a pamphlet published by the Quaker’s Friends Service Committee that painted a very derogatory picture of right-wing anticommunists. It suggested that “super patriots,” people who feel threatened by the United Nations and UNESCO, “suffered from poor ‘mental health’ . . . [and] ‘paranoid delusion.’”107 Minute Woman Gene Birkeland in Los Angeles had recently printed that same quote in her chapter’s newsletter.108 Not in the California bulletin, however, was Darden’s warning that citizens should be aware that a “[n]igger in the woodpile” was often to be found in public welfare legislation.109 The June issue’s “‘Mental Health’ Plan and Foundation Money Could Be Dangerous Combination” argued that psychiatric medicine in the United States seriously compromised its integrity by soliciting funds from the internationalist Ford Foundation. “Psychiatry,” declared Darden, “is one of the most essential branches of the medical profession, but, unfortunately, it is also one of the most dangerous callings when engaged in by unscrupulous persons.  .  .  .”110 The article concluded by congratulating the vigilant citizens in California who successfully “swarmed into Sacramento” and exposed the dangers of the community mental health bills to the legislature. Darden probably first learned of the anti–mental health campaigns in California through the Minute Women of the U.S.A. network. Though not a member, her daughter Helen Darden Thomas was a founder and officer of the Houston chapter that had run Deputy Superintendent George Ebey out of town.111 Thomas’s husband, Rosser, was a manager at the Houston Natural Gas Company, and the family lived in the wealthy neighborhood of River Oaks. Although Darden and Thomas lived in separate cities, they remained very close and worked as a team. In April of 1956, Darden commended the organization for uncovering the dangers of the Alaska mental health bill, “an effort of



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sinister forces to set up an ‘Alaskan Siberia.’”112 Helen Thomas’s death eventually brought the Southern Conservative to its end in 1961. Darden claimed that she could no longer print the newspaper because Helen, “the most wonderful person, the most dedicated patriot and most devout Christian” she had ever known—her “inspiration”—was gone.113 The “Siberia, U.S.A.” conspiracy theory also made its way to Dallas, where former FBI man Dan Smoot broadcast his opinions of the dangerous bill in his widely read newsletter. Smoot, who once hunted communists in the labor movement for the bureau and worked as an assistant to J. Edgar Hoover, had relocated to Dallas in 1952 to help with the political projects of conservative oilman H. L. Hunt. He decided to launch his own newsletter in the mid-1950s, and by October of 1955 Smoot was reporting that thousands of readers and listeners were contacting him each week, many ordering reprints.114 The Minute Women, American Public Relations Forum, and conservatives the nation over read Smoot for news and opinion.115 On February 17, 1956, Smoot featured a six-page article in his newsletter called “Mental Health.” Echoing the Minute Women and American Public Relations Forum, Smoot warned that the bill posed serious threats to political freedom in the United States. “Suppose that some outspoken, uncompromising anti-new dealer should run afoul of [United Auto Workers president] Walter Reuther,  . . .” he wrote. “Quarrelling [sic] with Walter Reuther and being an anti-new dealer would be quite enough to convince Michigan’s present governor that the man is insane.” He argued that under the terms of the bill, such an enemy of Walter Reuther and Governor G. Mennen Williams could be sent to a mental institution in Alaska.116 Smoot also reported that the California legislature had come frightfully close to passing three similar mental health bills. “They were defeated,” he was happy to add, “after a group of patriotic women and medical doctors kicked up a furor about them. . . .”117 After Smoot attacked the Alaska mental health bill, the Public Affairs Luncheon Club of Dallas immediately wrote to Congress declaring its opposition. The club, formed in the early 1940s, described itself as “nonpartisan and educational,” and pledged to preserving the “principles of democratic and constitutional government.”118 Though similar to the Minute Women and Los Angeles’ American Public Relations Forum, the luncheon club was elite—part and parcel of the city’s establishment.119 Its membership overlapped with other rightwing organizations, like Pro-America, but when the club came out against the Alaska mental health bill, 450 women belonged and numerous others waited on a lengthy list to join. The leadership of the Public Affairs Luncheon Club tended to be wealthy and descended from a distinguished line.120 Members

­124  •  Chapter IV

Figure 4.1 “Speaker’s Kit On Mental Health,” Cover (a) and Table of Contents (b), ca. 1962. The conservative women’s organization American Public Relations Forum prepared the “Speaker’s Kit” to help anticommunist crusaders give public lectures about how mental health programs served as conduits for communist indoctrination. Courtesy of the Radical Rights Collection, Box 45, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, California.



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­126  •  Chapter IV probably learned about “Siberia, U.S.A” through Dan Smoot, who attended their luncheons.121 At their February meeting, the club adopted a resolution urging senators to vote against the bill.122 Alarm over the bill peaked in late February and early March of 1956, as the Senate subcommittee heard testimony. Exclamation points, capital letters, and long-stretches of underlined passages cluttered bulletins circulating from coast to coast. Letters poured into Washington. By then, conservatives had spread the alert from New York to Philadelphia, Chicago, Vermont, Memphis, Minneapolis, and Nebraska.123 The Catholic weekly Brooklyn Tablet announced that the proposed “insane asylum is not for Alaskans alone, or even for American residents in Alaska. It could be for any one of us.”124 The Philadephia-based American Flag Committee devoted its entire March newsletter to an analysis of the bill. The committee’s chairman, Henry MacFarland, urged his members to rally behind California’s American Public Relations Forum, which, he claimed, had been “waging an almost lone battle. . . .”125 The Chicago-based Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), an anti–socialized medicine organization that claimed 10,000 members, issued an emergency bulletin warning against all its “horrendous provisions”126 Lucille Miller, back to work on the Green Mountain Rifleman in Vermont, instructed her readers to study the bill and contact senators.127 A group in Houston called Texas Women for Constitutional Government wrote to Henry Jackson, urging a speedy defeat of the bill.128 “Remember,” warned the Houston group, “the frightful experimentation with human beings and their extermination in Germany under Hitler was legal. They had seen to it that the necessary laws were enacted first.”129 Helen Courtois’s Keep America Committee in Los Angeles suggested to Senator Murray that the bill’s sponsors were a “conspiratorial gang” that ought to be “investigated, impeached, or at least removed from office.”130 Congress held several hearings for the Alaska mental health bill. It seemed, at first, that the House Subcommittee on Territories and Insular Affairs would do all the heavy lifting for HR 6376. Between April and July of 1955, the subcommittee questioned witnesses from various executive departments at sporadically scheduled sessions. In September, representatives traveled into the territory as winter was well under way in many of the nineteen communities they visited to hear testimony. From frozen Barrow at the northern tip to the verdant island outpost of Ketchikan, Congressmen heard Alaskans make their case. Witnesses seized the opportunity to convince lawmakers that they were able to assume the costs of care.131 After the unanimous House vote of approval and the outcry of opposition, the Senate Subcommittee on Territories and Insular Affairs scheduled its hearings for February and March of 1956.132



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“Is an ‘other disease,’” Gene Birkeland asked in her testimony, “that which is described by Professor Richard Hofstadter, of Columbia University, in his . . . attack on the ‘pseudoconservative revolt’?  .  .  .  ”133 The Minute Woman expressed concern about Hofstadter because the historian had recently published “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” in the 1955 book The New American Right, edited by Daniel Bell. The volume set out to establish a new framework for understanding political extremism on both ends of the political spectrum. A politically moderate group of thinkers, its contributors characterized unity, pluralism, and tranquility—what Arthur Schlesinger called the “vital center”— as uniquely American political traditions.134 Their work, which became known as “consensus history,” dominated U.S. history of the Cold War era, largely because it resonated with national mistrust of political excess and mass movements.135 Though the consensus historians criticized both the far left and far right, they seemed most interested in studying right-wing conservatism and drew heavily from Hofstadter’s work on “status anxiety,” which he characterized as irrational class fears that manifested themselves in times of prosperity.136 Hofstadter relied on The Authoritarian Personality for his personality sketch of the “pseudo-conservative,” someone who “tends to be more than ordinarily incoherent about politics.” Birkeland knew that she could put herself in that category. “The lady who,” wrote Hofstadter, “when General Eisenhower’s victory over Senator Taft had finally become official, stalked out of the Hilton Hotel declaiming, ‘This means eight more years of socialism,’ was probably a fairly good representative of the pseudo-conservative mentality.”137 After the Southern California delegation spoke, the committee heard Mrs. Ernest W. Howard, chairman of the Women’s Patriotic Conference on National Defense, which claimed 3 million members nationwide. Howard echoed Birkeland’s concerns about Hofstadter. She also suggested to the subcommittee that her women were better equipped than congressmen to read legislation. “Those of us who have been in the study and research work of the United Nations,” she declared, “we feel that we are experts in this . . . you as Senators with all the many commitments and the many requirements, are not able to go into all these things.”138 Howard gave words to the convictions that drove many women to comb through legislation, meet in study groups, subscribe to newsletters, write to congressmen, and give speeches. They believed that the nation’s leaders—men—were too busy to do the work necessary to detect subversion. Women had the time and were “experts” on communism. The Women’s Patriotic Conference on National Defense had been hunting reds for decades. John Kaspar of New Jersey attacked psychologists in terms that harkened back to Nazi condemnations of the “Jewish science.”139 “I think it is important

­128  •  Chapter IV to realize,” declared Kaspar, “that almost one hundred percent of all psychiatric therapy is Jewish and that about eighty percent of psychiatrists are Jewish.” He charged that Jews were nationalists of another country and announced that he did not appreciate their attempts to “usurp American nationality.”140 Orange County’s Robert Williams, another outspoken opponent of Jewish nationalism, appeared in Washington that day. Williams’s newsletter, the Williams Intelligence Summary, boasted a nationwide circulation of eight to ten thousand. Its stated mission was to oppose communism and Zionism, though Williams did not attack Jews in his testimony. Indeed, anti-Semitic rage provoked by the “Siberia, U.S.A.” controversy revealed that persistence of resentment toward Jews. One anonymous opponent expressed his or her thoughts about Jewish involvement in the conspiracy through a woodcut illustration titled “Christian Patriot’s Reward,” which depicted a slouched patriot trudging along a landscape marked “Alaska.” At his back was pointed the tip of a sword labeled “Mental Health.” The weapon’s carrier remained invisible, save for an enormous boot and the Star of David on his pant leg.141 The Senate subcommittee grew frustrated with the opponents to the Alaska mental health bill. “I do not think,” Senator Bible told John Kaspar, “the committee will be particularly concerned with this trend of your dissertation.” After Birkeland’s testimony, George Malone, also of Nevada, asked, “When did it become so complex and so controversial? All we want to do is to take care of anyone who is mentally incompetent in a way that he might be less dangerous to himself or others . . . but when did it become necessary to include so many controversial and apparently extraneous provisions?”142 Barry Goldwater finally intervened to move the bill beyond the March 1956 impasse. After appearing at the hearings and asking a few questions about the definition of “mentally ill individual,” Goldwater helped adjust the language of the bill to placate some of the opposition. Goldwater’s version simply removed all of the provisions that altered commitment procedures.143 That summer the bill passed without dissent, after only a ten-minute debate.144 e The Alaska Mental Health Act came as the first of several setbacks for opponents of state-sponsored psychiatric medicine. The California community mental health services bill won easy passage when it reappeared in 1957, while further right-wing attempts to block mental health legislation at state and federal levels met with continued failure.145 The furor raised by “Siberia, U.S.A.” did not disappear, however. For many conservatives—activists, intellectuals, and party leaders alike—psychology remained a suspect science. In speeches, news magazines, and opinion pieces, many conservatives attacked mental



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health professionals for brainwashing the nation and threatening civil liberties. Others blamed psychology for declining religiosity, crime, and weakening moral standards. The lasting impact of the California housewife activists is, therefore, to be found not in immediate legislative victories, but in how their critiques of psychological and government intervention into the sacred home space contributed to the conservative movement’s pro-family assault against the state. With a stridency that lived up to his name, John Stormer of Florissant, Missouri, hammered on psychologists and the government for corrupting the nation’s spiritual and moral values in his 1964 paperback about the “communist-socialist conspiracy,” None Dare Call It Treason. The thirty-sixyear-old had quit his job as editor of an electronics trade magazine to write his exposé. Goldwater’s presidential bid added urgency. Published in 1964 by the former Young Republican’s own Liberty Bell Press, 6.8 millions of copies of the paperback sold in the first year, thanks largely to conservative millionaires and the grassroots network that sold the paperback at patriotic bookstores and gave it away at political rallies.146 The Republican Party in Dade County, Florida, distributed 172,000 copies of None Dare Call It Treason “door-to-door.”147 Stormer introduces communism as a product of science and the inverse of religion. He described Marx as a “self-proclaimed scientist” who “. . . taught that man was entirely an evolutionary animal . . . without significant individual value or eternal life.”148 Chapter IX of None Dare Call It Treason is called “Mental Health.” Stormer charges that psychologists joined other leftists in blurring the nation’s sense of “right and wrong.”149 Reviving the Brock Chisholm quote about “principles of mental health” and “world citizenship,” he noted how psychologists would abolish freedom in the guise of psychiatric help. Patients treated by doctors like Chisholm, Stormer asserted, when dealing with problems like extramarital or homosexual affairs, would be told that they were normal, no guilt should be felt, and the urge should be indulged, “regardless of moral principles.”150 Mental health professionals were “a new breed of amoral men” brandishing commitment procedures as a political weapon.151 General Edwin Walker’s institutionalization stood as his proof. Edwin Walker had become another rightwing lockup story. Admired among many conservatives for his anticommunist activities in the military, the general landed in the federal medical center in Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric evaluation. Supporters had unleashed an outpouring of sympathy on Walker back in 1961, when he resigned in indignation after the Defense Department admonished him for indoctrinating troops. Walker and a lieutenant colonel had devised a “Pro-Blue” military strategy for holding off communists in West Germany, but their plan also entailed

­130  •  Chapter IV a propaganda campaign for troops that included a reading list, lecturers, and a slate of candidates for whom they should vote.152 That reading list included the Blue Book of the John Birch Society, the organization’s founding document of principles. 153 The admonishment of Walker launched the spurned general on an anticommunist speaking tour and prompted conservative outcries against the “muzzling of the military.”154 Trouble found him again in 1962, though, when officials arrested him in Oxford, Mississippi, for leading a group of white segregationists against U.S. marshals at the University of Mississippi when the school admitted its first black student, James Meredith.155 A border patrol plane flew him that night from Mississippi to the federal mental health facility in Missouri.156 The American Civil Liberties Union intervened, charging that law enforcement officials should have respected Walker’s rights to due process by first holding him overnight in Mississippi, then allowing Walker to appear in court for personal observation, with an attorney, before sending him off to the hospital in Springfield. Newspapers reported that authorities intended to evaluate Walker over sixty to ninety days, though he was released on bail within a week. John Stormer called Walker a “political prisoner” and warned readers that the rights of all patriots could similarly be denied. That the general was probably mentally disturbed was beside the point. The National Review attacked the government for violating his habeas corpus rights, but admitted that a psychiatrist might very well find him crazy. The John Birch Society stood behind Walker at first. In a 1964 issue of its magazine, American Opinion, Revilo P. Oliver cited Walker’s case as an example of how liberals had imported Soviet and Chinese reeducation methods to the United States. “[M]ental health prisons,” charged the University of Illinois classics professor, “are being increasingly used for the kidnapping and mental, if not physical, murder of patriotic Americans.”157 As Walker’s grip on reality weakened further over the next couple of years, however, the Birch Society quietly stopped mentioning him.158 Conspiracy theories preyed on some disturbed minds; the slippery truth cannot be denied. Yet respected conservative intellectuals scrutinized psychologists also, albeit in less conspiratorial tones. In the National Review, Russell Kirk published a book review called “Those School Psychological Tests.”159 The Branded Child by journalist and court reporter Edward J. Van Allen won high praise from Kirk. Van Allen, who successfully won the right in court to see his son’s school records in East Meadow, New York, indicts psychological testing as an invasion of family privacy and parental rights.160 He called the testers “psyche-snoops” who used schools as “mental health laboratories.”161 Careful to demonstrate at the review’s outset that he is not a conspiracy theorist or enemy of psychologists, Kirk passes on advice from Karl Menninger and other



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psychologists to avoid taking psychoanalysis into one’s own hands. He nevertheless advised parents to heed Edward Van Allen’s warnings to examine their children’s school records, to look “into the results and the frequently curious interpretation of results by counselors, teachers, and school administrators who lack adequate psychiatric training.”162 Anticommunist activists must have been pleased to see critical attention devoted to professional psychology in the National Review, especially after the magazine scorned them so ferociously. In the summer of 1956, Priscilla Buckley reported that “Congressmen were blissfully unaware that they were touching off the biggest panic since Orson Welles landed his Martian invaders almost twenty years ago.”163 She chided mental health bill opponents for fretfully passing, from hand to hand, alarming pamphlets that warned of late-night arrests. Chuckling almost audibly, Buckley described the “hard-working band of dedicated housewives” who wrote letter after letter alerting congressmen to a possible communist plot to establish gulags in Alaska.164 Accenting the text’s satiric tone was an illustration stretching lengthwise across the top of one page. At the right, outlined in barbed wire, appeared the cartoonish USSR, with a “Siberia, U.S.A.” sign pointing east across the Bering Strait toward a gulag filled with Americans. Figures leaped across patches of ice or swam in the frigid waters between the two prison states while uniformed characters huddled around a copy of “H.R. 6376.” The message was clear: this paranoid fantasy is not ours—we are reasonable conservatives. The subjects of this article are hysterical housewives, unlike us. The National Review seized upon “Siberia, U.S.A.” to define itself against the lunatic-fringe label that had become so burdensome in the 1950s. But by the 1960s the National Review had started reproducing the attacks it had once derided, mainly through articles it published by Dr. Thomas S. Szasz. A practicing and research psychiatrist, Szasz also brought deep interest in philosophy and medical theory to the expansive body of scientific and political literature he published. In 1961, while serving as professor of psychiatry at the Upstate Medical Center of the State University of New York in Syracuse, Szasz published his first of several controversial books, The Myth of Mental Illness, which rejected the notion that twentieth-century psychiatry was practiced as a true medicine or that the disease/illness model was appropriate for classifying and treating mental problems. With The Myth of Mental Illness and other writings, the anti-Freudian developed a reputation in his profession for lucid prose and conservative, thought-provoking, criticism he leveled from within. Eventually Szasz dropped “Dr.” and “MD” from his name to underscore his rebellion from psychiatry’s mainstream. For the right, he served as a public

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Figure 4.2 “Siberia U.S.A” cartoon, National Review magazine, 1956. The conservative National Review mocked the Alaska mental health bill as a “panic” started by housewives. The illustration that accompanied the article further ridiculed the bill’s opponents with its comic rendering of benign, doughy figures cast out on the icy tundra and straddling the Bering Strait. ©1956 by National Review, Inc., 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Reprinted by permission. Reproduction courtesy of William A. Blakley Library, University of Dallas, Irving, Texas.

doctor-intellectual by writing for the National Review. He had much to say, it seems, after the release of his book Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry: An Inquiry into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices in 1963. Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry explored the legal, social, and political application of psychiatry, as well as what Szasz describes as a coercive “psychiatric liberalism.” The book, along with Myth, would provoke decades of debate within his profession about psychiatric constructions of illness, the state, and power. Szasz argued that psychiatry redefined “moral and political values” as “health values.” He asserted that involuntary commitment procedures, state funding, and laws granting citizens “rights” to mental health treatment made psychiatrists into social engineers.165 He warned that the United States was adopting the Soviet model of the “therapeutic state,” where government leaders and doctors worked to created a better life for the people by infantilizing citizens: “If . . . the state assumes the roles of parent and therapist, the citizens will be forced to assume the complementary roles of child and patient. . . . The resulting political system might resemble the unhappy family: a submissive but greedy people, the spoiled children, faced by an indulgent but irresponsible and despotic government, the spoiling parent.”166 The introduction to Law, Liberty and Psychology attacks the internationalist mental health advocate so loathed by the California housewives, Brock Chisholm. When the WHO director general declared, “The necessity to fight wars . . . is as much a pathological psychiatric symptom as is a phobia or the antisocial behavior of a criminal  .  .  .  ,” Szasz accused the World Federation



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of Mental Health leader of cloaking pacifism in scientific jargon. Typical of a “naïve moralist,” Chisholm mistook morality for rationality.167 The National Review subsequently published Szasz’s articles on the relationship between psychology, the state, civil liberties, and society conformity. In “Psychiatry’s Threat to Civil Liberties,” Szasz reminded readers of Edwin Walker, whom a judge ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation at the Federal Medical Prison based on a recommendation sent by telegram from a doctor who never examined the general in person. How would “John Doe,” lacking high-paid attorneys, have defended himself under such circumstances?168 In 1966 another writer, Theodore E. Schulz, related the story of old Robert Simpson’s losing battle to dodge the insane asylum. “The Mental Health Trap” tells how the Santa Cruz, California, octogenarian demanded a full hearing and presented friendly witnesses, yet based on the testimony of professionals lost his case and his freedom. “Libel = Insanity?” asked Schulz. Simpson had apparently been distributing handbills, mailing postcards, and waving placards that falsely accused public officials of wrongdoing. Was the court, along with its team of psychologists, punishing Simpson for his politics?169 A month later, Szasz published “The Mental Health Ethic,” suggesting that preventive psychology promoted social conformity. In the article he attacks a lack of critical perspective among his peers with respect to their own power over patients and in society. He dissects a monograph published by the World Federation of Mental Health: “The term brainwashing has . . . been applied with unfortunate connotations to psychotherapeutic practice by those who are hostile to it. We consider that the lesson of this needs to be taken to heart by all who are responsible for securing psychiatric treatment of non-volitional patients.” Szasz asks his readers to study the second sentence, to observe how the authors take for granted that “involuntary mental patients exist in nature,” rather than acknowledging that “in fact, they are created, partly by psychiatrists.” Instead of confronting the brainwashing problem head on, he notes, the monograph casts aspersions on the “emotional state and moral intentions of those who would dare to look at the problem critically.”170 Szasz’s books and articles became seminal texts of a powerful backlash against involuntary institutionalization and mental health treatment known as the antipsychiatry movement. This post-1960 expression of medical populism also found articulation in philosopher Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961), which critically examined the social and cultural construction of insanity in Western thought, and sociologist Erving Goffman’s Asylums (1961), which described mental institutions as “totalistic” and criticized psychiatrists for “infantilizing patients.”171 Law professor Ralph Slovenko credits Szasz and Goffman with inspiring the “mental patient as political dissenter” figure that

­134  •  Chapter IV emerged in American popular culture of the sixties and seventies, as depicted by Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1960).172 Indeed, Kesey wrote to the quarterly periodical Madness Network News, which he consulted while adapting the novel to the screenplay: “Long Live Thomas Szasz!”173 Kesey’s letter tapped into the literature of a formidable ex-patient movement that also inflamed antipsychiatry protest. By 1989 seventy to a hundred ex-patient groups had organized in the United States, Europe, Canada, and South America.174 Szasz no doubt inspired the antipsychiatry movement. He also provoked conservative debate about community mental health, social engineering, and the power of the state. However, conservative activists had been fiercely promoting these battles before Szasz published books that reverberated with their critiques. Szasz attacked Brock Chisholm for masking moral arguments in medical jargon; the California housewives accused him of masking internationalism in the same language. Although Szasz did not condemn progressive educators for handing the “whole child” over to the state as conservative parents had, his condemnation of the “therapeutic state” similarly warned that psychiatric medicine would make the government parents of its citizens. The most important connection between the activists and Szasz, however, was their view that involuntary hospitalization represented a threat to civil liberties. Conservatives argued that the law gave mental health professionals too much authority to determine the conditions of illness, which disadvantaged them legally and politically. By addressing the case of General Edwin Walker in the National Review, Szasz agreed. Psychiatrists of the early 1960s became concerned about the populist dissent against mental health programs. California housewives and fellow activists were the problem to address until Szasz, Goffman, and others appeared on the scene. In 1963 Dr. Alfred Auerback, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California Medical School, San Francisco, published an article and lectured about opposition to mental health programs.175 He claimed that the movement originated in Southern California with attacks against the community mental health bills in 1955 and was now threatening programs all over the country. “It is somewhat dismaying,” he wrote, “to find psychiatrists being vilified by other physicians as amoral, fools, knaves, quacks and traitors.”176 To help his readers understand the movement, he offered a diagnosis that three fellow psychiatrists had presented a few years back. In 1960 Judd Marmor, Viola Bernard, and Perry Ottenberg consulted The Authoritarian Personality to explain the behavior of oppositional health activists, including architects of the “Siberia, U.S.A.” conspiracy theory. In the Journal of Orthopsychiatry, they argued that “[t]o such individuals purity is equated with security, and health with wholeness.” Anxieties about mental health professionals

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derived, they surmised, from “a fear that any psychiatric insights may expose their own underlying mental instability. . . .”177 e Thomas Szasz’s critical study of community psychiatry appeared in the National Review ten years after Priscilla Buckley had mocked the Alaska mental health bill “ripple of terror” in the same magazine. Although Szasz never mentioned “Siberia, U.S.A.,” the earlier decade’s populist-style revolt against psychology had imbued the expression “mental health” with authoritarian overtones before he did so with greater elegance and professional authority. With gifts of eloquence, medical training, and clinical experience Szasz grappled with his own profession’s impact on society. And Szasz’s broader interest in philosophy, ethics, politics, and medical theory lent force to his arguments about morality, government intervention, and mental illness. Szasz was not a conspiracy theorist. Rather than warn of nefarious cabals and plots, he challenged the public to scrutinize medical language as a “political vocabulary” and consider that mental health might be a “social performance.”178 No wonder Ken Kesey and the National Review liked Szasz. He was the “anti-expert expert,” artfully critiquing his own profession from within, below, and above. Szasz’s ideas found traction on the right, however, because of the ways antistatist, antielitist, and anti-intellectual ideology had already converged. By the mid-1960s the conservative movement in California and much of the nation had coalesced around a shared sensed of outrage over a perceived breakdown in national order—social, political, cultural, religious, and moral. A 1962 Supreme Court ruling banned prayer and bible readings in institutions of public education; university students, black and white, disrupted their campuses with civil rights and antiwar demonstrations; teenage boys slicked their hair back into ducktails or, even worse, grew it long like girls; and a race riot set Watts ablaze. Activists, party leaders, and intellectuals on the right interpreted these developments as fruits of manipulation and overindulgence. Agitators, they continued to argue, fomented the racial and social discord. The enforcement of school integration by federal officials, moreover, stood as clear evidence in their eyes that the government was not just becoming too powerful, but was also carrying out the agenda of social engineers. State bureaucrats and medical professionals imagined as a monolithic political threat called “the mental health establishment” contributed, many conservatives believed, to the mass disintegration of “order” in the 1960s. This critical attitude colored the antistatism of the movement as it gained force and coherence in the early 1960s.

C H A P T E R   V

The “Conservative Sex” Women and the Building of a Movement

Conservatism became something different at the end of the fifties; it became a self-conscious movement. The right acquired coherence, momentum, and eventually power as different constituencies embraced “conservative” as a political identity. Activists, clergymen, captains of industry, and Republican Party leaders came to recognize themselves as part of a larger political community that aimed to contain government. That community did not emerge spontaneously but coalesced as the concepts articulated by intellectuals, the populism expressed by activists, and the religious fervor sparked by evangelical leaders settled with each other. Activists faithfully read the National Review, the Freeman, and Human Events, flocking when they could to the prayerful anticommunism programs hosted by popular preachers at fairgrounds across the country. Small businessmen and corporate CEOs, for their part, stepped forward with abundant financial backing. All rallied around the common goal of shrinking the welfare state, fighting communism, and redeeming a spiritual core that America seemed to have lost. Women figured centrally in this project of forging a mass movement, as observed by some key figures at its forefront. “. . . Most of our voluntary organizations which support our established society of justice and order and liberty,” wrote Professor Russell Kirk in 1958, “are kept vigorous by American women.” And “. . . of all those who devoted themselves unstintingly to [Goldwater],” wrote F. Clifton White, adviser to the senator’s 1964 presidential campaign, “ . . . no other single group was as dedicated and hardworking as the women of this country.”1 Kirk and White also claimed to know why women rallied to the right: female instinct. “. . . [A]ttachment to hard realities,” elaborated Kirk, “has something to do with their social principles, and their realization of the need to genuine security has something to do with it; and so has their practical understanding of the worth of the family and community; and so has their instinctive knowledge that society is not a ‘machine for living,’ but rather a spiritual thing, founded upon love.” Quoting Victor Hugo, White declared that “Men have sight, women have insight.”2

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If Russell Kirk saw “practical understanding” and Clifton White saw “insight,” what did women see, and how did that image reflecting back at them impact conservatism? What compelled these particular men, moreover, to write about the conservatism of women, and in such terms, when few other conservatives noted their presence as a distinct group? “Farmers” and “workers” earned their own chapters in the best-selling Conscience of a Conservative that National Review editor L. Brent Bozell ghostwrote for Barry Goldwater by putting together material from the senator’s speeches, but not “housewives” or any other female category.3 The book nevertheless captured the attention of housewives in a powerful way, housewives who heard the message spoken to the farmers and workers as if it were addressed to them as well. While leading lights of the right focused on businessmen, professionals, farmers, and workers, women established their place in the movement through their own speeches, writing, and action with some help from the likes of Kirk and White. The vociferous coteries of activist women could not be ignored, forcing the conservative movement to reckon with its gender identity. If you walked into a conservative study group or speaking event, you would know it by the sight of neatly coiffed white women in skirt-suits, pantyhose, and pumps, scribbling notes. Leaders did not target women as a core national constituency that warranted special solicitation but had to develop a larger vision of the movement that accommodated significant female involvement because the intervention of these women represented an established reality. America’s budding sexual revolution, moreover, elevated the “conservative sex” as a feminine ideal that could serve the movement. Social transformations that heightened awareness of gender norms, sexual behavior, and familial relationships encouraged conservatives, engaged as they were with the work of building a political movement and community, to endow femininity with new significance. Men thus sought to cultivate those “natural” instincts identified by Russell Kirk’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Conservatism in 1958. Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign boldly reached for the “conservative sex” by manufacturing a women’s organization, called Mothers for Moral America, in 1964. Mothers for Moral America, a group whose failure, of epic proportions, is explored in the final part of this chapter, offers insights into the expansion of gender consciousness on the right and the consequences of that new awareness. Female activists contributed to the emerging gender self-consciousness by speaking, writing, canvassing, and mimeographing the “conservative sex” into existence. Hosting meetings in their homes, opening bookstores in their towns, staffing political headquarters, and making all of these political spaces warm, inviting, and efficient contributed to the middle-class maternal ideal central

­138  •  Chapter V to the conservative movement’s social reform goals. Women sought to balance feminine modesty with maternal warmth and activist zeal. Outrage over shorter skirts, longer hair, and campus demonstrators inspired political style as counterdemonstration—a cult of wholesomeness that introduced nuclear family–style suburban domesticity into political performance. Conservative women sought to instill the conservative ideals they were learning to articulate rhetorically by also embodying those ideals physically—representing them in their bodily appearance, in their cheerful demeanor, and in the homey settings they created for politicization. e The birth of the John Birch Society (JBS) in 1958 represented an important moment for conservatism because the society directly addressed the value of movement culture. Leaders, in fact, saw their organization as its own movement. The JBS set out to defeat communism by turning the enemy’s poison back on itself. Initiates learned right away that communist techniques “cut both ways.” The society could form front groups, infiltrate the PTA, and launch anticommunist speakers into the public arena. “It’s another game at which we ought to beat them hands down,” declared founder Robert Welch when he formed the organization in December of 1958.4 The Massachusetts candy manufacturer started the society with the expressed intent of becoming a movement powerful enough to thwart the vast communist conspiracy he saw overwhelming freedom across the globe. His strategy, which he outlined in the Blue Book—the society’s manifesto—explicitly replicated leftist tactics, cleansed of the dirty subversive intent he perceived, in order to advance mankind forward with a positive outlook on the free market. “[W]e are not a copy of any movement of the past,” he wrote. “We are unique. We are ourselves. We are something new, as befits a moving force for a new age.”5 Welch spoke these words before he wrote them, though not to women—at least not intentionally. The society’s Blue Book represents a printed version of the lectures delivered by the founder at the first John Birch Society meeting, where eleven wealthy businessmen gathered to hear him speak for two full days in Indianapolis, breaking only for coffee, luncheons, and brief discussion.6 Indeed, the setting and gender dynamic of that first get-together reflected the masculine and feminine balance that Welch sought to maintain in the society: the only woman present that day, Marguerite Dice, served coffee to the men gathered in a semicircle around their leader in her cozy living room.7 Nevertheless, women read the Blue Book enthusiastically and busied themselves carrying out its mandate. Welch wanted women to be involved in the John Birch Society, but always intended for men to be in charge. The conservative visionary imagined a

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patriarchy of corporate and professional elites who would guide America and the world back on the right course with their expertise and ideals. The organization abided by a leadership hierarchy determined by occupation, wealth, and gender. As the founder explained upon christening the society, he hoped to mobilize the “dedicated advice, council, help, organizing ability, and executive know-how offered by the ablest men in America.” Together they would create a massive, monolithic national organization, according to Welch, “under completely authoritative control at all levels . . . subject to smoothly functioning direction from the top.”8 He believed that the JBS needed to mold the thinking of men who were themselves “opinion-molders.” He also asserted at the outset that the men would need to raise a million dollars in the society’s first year of operation and find sponsors to expand conservative radio programming.9 Though aware of the dedication and abundance of grassroots anticommunist crusaders who were already organized, Welch regarded them as “ineffectual ‘freedom’ groups.”10 He aimed to centralize their activity, applying structure and leadership to make a movement. The response of activists in California indicates that many heartily agreed and accepted his offer to be their “man on the white horse.” Of the society’s membership, 25 to 34 percent lived in the Golden State, most of them in the southern region.11 Although Orange County produced slightly greater numbers of JBS chapters per resident (one chapter for every 18,039 residents versus one chapter for every 21,102 in Los Angeles County), Los Angeles County’s size, denser population, and political volatility produced significantly more JBS chapters.12 Los Angeles had more than eight times the inhabitants of Orange County. For Orange County’s 39 chapters, the Society reported 144 in Los Angeles County. The largest cluster was concentrated in the San Gabriel Valley, around Pasadena.13 When the Society opened a western headquarters to serve California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho, it opened the office on Mission Street in San Marino, down the street from Pasadena.14 There was simply more happening in Los Angeles—more activists, institutions, and battles. The county’s political heterogeneity masks the narrative of politicization by which Los Angeles conservatives, already active in the early 1950s, led their cohorts on the other side of the Orange curtain into the movement. Although Welch criticized anticommunist activists of the 1950s, he nevertheless built the Society upon the organizational infrastructure established by those “freedom groups” that had already been gathering routinely in Los Angeles and beyond. JBS chapters replicated but modified those patterns. In short, this movement of the “ablest men” rested upon a grassroots networking pattern that was already expansive because women had been devoting hours of their unpaid labor to its development for several years. Birchers generally met

­140  •  Chapter V once a month, opening with a prayer and a salute to the American flag. Meetings often included presentations, discussions, and letter-writing activities. The format would be familiar to female members because on those same days the American Public Relations Forum, Pro-America, or the Tuesday Morning Study Club carried out many of the same activities. Reflecting the Society’s centralized structure, however, JBS chapters usually adhered to the outline presented in the organization’s monthly bulletins, and local leaders also were selective in admitting members into meetings, limiting who could attend. Welch wanted control from the top. Groups rarely grew larger than thirty people. If meetings attracted bigger crowds, leaders encouraged members to split off and start new chapters. The society relied on members to expand the organization through their own friendship networks.15 Since men and women often joined as couples, most gatherings were mixed; however, many leaders organized allwomen and all-men chapters. Though men did most of the leading at every level, women facilitated many chapter meetings in their homes. Some provided light refreshments, but others, like the former “talkie” actress Florence Ranuzzi, provided a full dinner at her house in Los Feliz.16 The John Birch Society typically enters the history of American conservatism as a significant but troublesome institution. Scholarly and journalistic accounts document Robert Welch’s outlandish conspiracy theories, from which other conservatives, notably intellectuals and candidates running for office, sought to distance themselves. A few years before he founded the Society, Welch published a book called The Politician that accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower of serving as an agent of the communists. The Society’s Truth about Civil Turmoil (anti–civil rights) campaign, and campaigns to impeach Earl Warren and withdraw the United States from the UN, among others, earned it a reputation for extremism that dragged like an anvil on the movement, but politicians had to court the organization that galvanized thousands in California. When Ronald Reagan ran for governor in 1966, he issued a carefully worded statement that denounced Robert Welch and urged Birchers to repudiate the leader’s conspiracy theories while welcoming them to join his campaign as individuals rather than representatives of an organization.17 Less caustic accounts of the Society seek to explain how the organization brought the Republican Party further right rather than how it brought the party down by documenting the mass grassroots mobilization accomplished by the JBS in a few short years.18 The catch-22 narrative that frames the John Birch Society in conservative movement history distorts the relationship between the JBS rank and file and the already established conservative grassroots, especially its women. Members who revered Welch and helped him to make the society a formidable political

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force tended to integrate the organization into a significant list of organizational activities they had already developed, a list that incorporated and grew beyond the Society. Female members submitted enthusiastically to his gender hierarchy, hostessing and serving food at chapter meetings because Welch and others involved with the Society inspired them. But then they came home and got back to work on the political tasks they juggled for the two, three, or five other organizations. How could it not be enthralling to see Welch bring leadership and national organization to anticommunist activities, work that women had been doing at the grassroots level without much recognition for some time? For conservative women, the John Birch Society may have favored men, but it still directed attention, membership, and money to political projects that women had dominated for years. It must have been easy for female members to sit back at chapter meetings, after serving some coffee perhaps, and let the dentist who lived around the corner lead the discussion for a change. Though Marjorie Jensen became a committed Bircher, the busy Pasadena activist was content to let others do more of the JBS work. When Welch came to California one year after the JBS started, Jensen hosted a big meeting for him and area Birchers to mark the occasion. Jensen and her co-editor, Gertrude Bale, who committed significant hours to the Network of Patriotic Letter Writers and the publication of its searing anticommunist newsletter, each cleaned the ink off their fingers to play the gracious hostess. The evening started in the Bale home, as fifty guests enjoyed a sit-down dinner party in Welch’s honor that spread from the inside of Bale’s house out to her garden. After the meal, guests piled into their cars and drove up into the hills over the Rose Bowl to reconvene for a meeting at the Jensens’, the monthly gathering place of the Tuesday Morning Study Club.19 Jensen graciously received the crowd and served punch—to everyone except the nondrinker Welch. After that initial meeting at the Jensen home, a chapter regularly gathered there with Marjorie as the hostess, but not the leader. A retired colonel assumed that role. “He was just a wonderful man,” remembered Jensen, “and he was very well informed and he had a great sense of humor so he could just get up and entertain and it was just an interesting evening always.”20 She explained that the male leader and female hostess arrangement accommodated the mixed-gender composition of their chapter, implying that members might be less interested in meetings completely dominated by the opposite sex. As much as Jensen admired the Birch Society leader, she also valued the independence of the newsletter that she and Bale published, which Welch wanted her to integrate into the organization after he visited its headquarters during that first visit to Los Angeles. Not an organization that met face to face like the Tuesday Morning Study Club, the Network of Patriotic Letter Writers

­142  •  Chapter V linked members through the regular newsletter published by Jensen and Bale. With a designated aim to “shape trends through letter writing,” the NPLW coordinated correspondence campaigns.21 Within two or three years of its origins, the NPLW newsletter reached subscribers all over the country, two-thirds of whom were women and half of whom lived outside of California.22 Mostly reprints from other newspapers and magazines, the newsletter covered a huge range of issues for its audience of right-wing activists: readers who wanted to monitor the left and take action from their living rooms. NPLW bulletins routinely praised FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee while calling for U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations.23 Jensen and Bale also used the newsletters to encourage conservatives to form their own groups. “We will be happy to help you get started,” wrote Bale to reader Della Root, of nearby Alhambra.24 Eventually, the NPLW’s files outgrew Bale’s home, so the women rented cheap office space wherever they could find it. So tight was the budget that the NPLW had to move eleven times, always “one step ahead of the bulldozer,” recalled Jensen in her 2002 interview. Her memory of the NPLW reflects the scrappy, shoestring image that conservative activists had of themselves and their movement. “I would be out looking for another place,  . . .” she remembered, “something that maybe had half burned down but the front was still okay. . . . We got so that we could move and fill orders the next day. . . . We had about ninety-nine boxes.”25 By declining to merge with the John Birch Society, Jensen and Bale worked under the influence of Welch and his ideas, but not under his direction. JBS women also pioneered an institution in Los Angeles that embodied conservatism’s new phase. Conservative bookstores represented the fruits of women’s activism on the right, fuel injected with movement zeal and cash. Robert Welch proposed in the 1958 Blue Book that the society open “reading rooms” like the Christian Scientists, “manned, utilized, and promoted in every feasible way by volunteers who were local members of our organization.”26 Birchers did eventually open JBS reading rooms, but in the meantime activists opened their own establishments, calling them “patriotic” bookstores to reflect the self-perception among founders that they inculcated core American principles into the community rather than political ideology. Although the Blue Book surely inspired many of these bookstores, proprietors founded their own independent establishments that reflected ideas, experiences, and relationships that went beyond their involvement in the JBS. In these settings, spread across metropolitan Los Angeles, women further anchored the movement into local affairs while synchronizing conservatism’s familial ideals and respect for gender hierarchy with perceptions of their own patriotic duty and can-do spirit.

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Poor Richard’s Book Shop, the first in Los Angeles, opened its doors on Hollywood and Vine in May of 1960. Operating out of a family-run insurance agency, owners Frank and Florence Ranuzzi built a thriving walk-in and mail-order business that served national and international customers.27 Frank ran the agency and Florence, a Bircher, became the full-time operator of the bookstore, which blossomed under her management.28 The Ranuzzis decided that “education not agitation” would be the bookstore’s motto, a message that reflected Robert Welch’s determination that education would be critical to the defeat of communism. In keeping with this philosophy, Poor Richard’s stocked the old-time McGuffey children’s readers for patrons who advocated “back to basics” education methods. Shelves also displayed anticommunist essentials, including Dr. Fred Schwarz’s You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists), a thin paperback guide to communist history, philosophy, and tactics that walked readers through Marx, Hegel, Lenin, Chinese “brainwashing” techniques, and front groups.29 Ex-spy memoirs proved so popular as to constitute their own genre. Shoppers could choose from Witness by the famous Alger Hiss antagonist Whittaker Chambers, The Big Decision by Matt Cvetic, who infiltrated a Pittsburgh unit of the Communist Party for the FBI, or others.30 To outfit the numerous study clubs in Los Angeles, the store kept copies of pending bills and legislative hearings on hand. Poor Richard’s also offered an array of instruction manuals, including how-to guides for building nuclear fallout shelters. The Ranuzzis responded excitedly to the high demand for their merchandise, happily supplying other bookstores and developing a mail-order business within a few years.31 Famous customers included Gloria Swanson and John Wayne. Corinne Griffith, film star turned anti–income tax lecturer, shopped at Poor Richard’s for her speech material.32 Poor Richard’s eventually became a political headquarters for the conservative movement, where the Ranuzzis and their friends produced bumper stickers, printed leaflets, and organized protests. During the 1962 gubernatorial race between Pat Brown and Richard Nixon, Florence’s popular “Brown Is Pink” bumper sticker raised a furor, and Birchers perusing the JBS American Opinion magazine could tear out the Poor Richards order form and send away for other favorites like “Go to College and Learn to Riot,” “Don’t Blame Me . . . I voted for Barry,” and “Do Politics Pay? Ask LBJ.” When the draft-Goldwater efforts commenced, Poor Richard’s was alight with activity.33 Ranuzzi also presided over lively discussions, which, according to her daughter, Mary, gave Poor Richard’s the feeling of a conservative “salon.” Men, women, and teenagers would drop in on Saturdays to sit around a big captain’s table and hear Ranuzzi give talks about communism. “If somebody started an argument . . .

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Figure 5.1  Poor Richard’s Book Shop, Los Angeles, ca. 1961–63; Frank Ranuzzi (background right) and Florence Ranuzzi (background left). When Poor Richard’s opened behind the Ranuzzi family’s Hollywood insurance agency in 1961, it was the first of at least thirty-six conservative bookstores to serve metropolitan Los Angeles over the 1960s. Courtesy of Mary Ranuzzi Cunningham.

she’d grab this book [and] that book,” remembers Mary, “[and] she’d say read it for yourself.”34 The Ranuzzis gave away numerous books and other materials at their own expense. Their politics alarmed State Farm, the insurance agency’s national carrier, who almost forced the Ranuzzis to choose between them and Poor Richard’s. Florence, however, managed to allay their concerns by pointing out that other successful Los Angeles businesses openly supported the anticommunist movement without suffering losses.35 Mother and daughter thus remembered the bookstore reverently as an institution that Florence developed intellectually and administratively, but always as helpmate to Frank. Remembering out loud, Florence placed emphasis on saving the country while downplaying recognition, implying that the spotlight would un-woman her.36

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Jane Crosby’s South Pasadena Americanism Center opened shortly after Poor Richard’s in 1961 with patriotic fanfare. Embodying the conservative movement in numerous ways, the center drew upon the recent eruption of excitement, activism, and infusion of cash. As new as right-wing bookstores were, they nevertheless represented longer developing trends, namely women’s ongoing efforts to make children and their larger communities aware of communism—to stop the brainwashing they perceived happening all around them. Crosby envisioned the bookstore serving as an outlet for the knowledge and materials that she and her friends had been acquiring through their studies of communism over the years. Instead of merely opening each other’s minds, she saw the bookstore as an opportunity for them to reach out to the wider public. “We have been lending books back and forth between ourselves so we can become informed,” she explained to the Los Angeles Herald-Express, “now we want to come out from behind the bushes and get right out on the main street.”37 Though surely influenced by the Blue Book, Crosby remembered her Americanism Center as a unique, independent predecessor to the JBS reading rooms: “It was not a Birch bookstore at all. It was just a patriotic bookstore.”38 As a JBS chapter leader herself, Crosby had become recognized as a local leader in the burgeoning right. Her relationship to the movement might be equated with that of a Redstocking radical to the women’s liberation movement. Other conservatives noticed, respected, and rallied to Jane, even if they were too timid to join the Society themselves. But while some critics in the conservative movement came to regard Crosby as part of a vanguard, others, mainly liberals, pegged her as an extremist. A March 1961 five-part exposé of the John Birch Society in the Los Angeles Times proved especially harmful to the organization and Jane.39 Written mainly by staff writer Gene Blake, the series condemned the Society to lows from which it never fully recovered. Weighing in personally at the end with a column titled “Peril to Conservatives,” editor Otis Chandler officially ended the Times’s long career as organ of the city’s conservative establishment, as well as his relationship with cousins Philip and Alberta Chandler, Birchers in Jane Crosby’s chapter. “What is happening to us,” asked Otis, “when all loyal Americans are accused of being Communist dupes unless they subscribe to the radical and dictatorial direction of one self-chosen man?” “Subversion,” he concluded, “whether of the left or the right, is still subversion.”40 One of the articles that mentioned Crosby dogged her the rest of her political career. “Every time I tried to do anything,” she recalled with frustration, “they always dig up all those files and say she’s a Bircher.”41 On the other hand, conservative Virginia Trowbridge remembered Jane as “quite a leader, an organizer.”42 Even though Trowbridge opted not to join the Society because she thought they were a little “wild-eyed,” Jane impressed her.43

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Figure 5.2  South Pasadena Americanism Center, South Pasadena, California, ca. 1964. Located on Mission Street in the heart of South Pasadena, the Americanism Center served the local conservative movement as a bookstore, meeting center, and hotline. Courtesy of Jane Crosby.

Crosby and her team of housewives developed the atmosphere of the South Pasadena Americanism Center with care. Shelves of books stood amidst a robust patriotic décor of gold-toned walls and curtains dotted with liberty bells. The visitor could scan literature by category—Education, American Principles, Economics, United Nations, Communist Techniques—making it easy to locate Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit, or Verna M. Hall’s Christian History of the Constitution.44 The John Birch Society’s American Opinion Magazine could be purchased as well.45 The furniture encouraged customers to do more than buy. With its big round oak table and comfortable seating, shoppers could sit, read, and talk with salespeople about the materials.46 Jane remembered the South Pasadena Americanism Center as “cozy . . . so pretty, and so patriotic looking.”47

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Just as coffeehouses and student unions served as the public spaces of the new left, patriotic bookstores became nerve centers of the emerging Los Angeles right, where conservatives sought literature, schedules of events, postings of volunteer opportunities, and stimulating conversation. The handful of establishments that left behind enough documentation suggest that women ran most of these shops, though Steve Foot’s Heritage bookstore in Van Nuys stood as an exception.48 Customers relied on these women behind the counter for guidance. To curious Southern Californians who wandered in, the volunteer salesladies represented their most direct human encounters with the conservative movement. The women not only stocked the shelves and worked the register, but also made reading suggestions and answered questions both in person and over the phone. Quite friendly, their demeanor contrasted sharply with the tone represented in much of the material they sold. The Americanism Center functioned as a political community center much like Poor Richard’s. The events calendar announced lectures, luncheons, workshops, and meetings. On the counter sat petitions for patrons to sign and postings of groups and political candidates in need of phone-callers and envelopestuffers. Conservatives in Los Angeles also came to rely on the South Pasadena store as a support center and hotline. Workers handled many different issues when people dialed through to the red, white, and blue phone at SY9-1776.49 In 1962 one concerned woman called because she realized that a tennis ball she had purchased at Bullock’s was made in Czechoslovakia. The Americanism Center volunteer she spoke with assisted her by sending along a copy of the Shopper’s Guide to Communist Imports.50 Another caller reported that her conservative views had recently cost her a job she had held for seventeen years. She was desperate for work and hoping that someone at the center might help find an employer friendlier to her political outlook.51 In 1963 UNESCO foe Florence Fowler Lyons called from Presbyterian Hospital, where an ambulance had taken her. She just needed to talk . . . after collapsing with grief upon the death of her cat.52 Others called the center for Jane Crosby in particular, hoping to be connected to potential benefactors who might help finance new bookstores.53 The Center also registered voters.54 Before long, Americanism Centers opened in downtown Los Angeles, Altadena, Long Beach, Eagle Rock, Downey, and Monterey Park.55 Similar establishments, called “Freedom Forum” bookstores, opened in Orange County. At least thirty-six opened in the greater Los Angeles regions over the 1960s. As activist institutions, the centers generally operated in solidarity rather than in competition with each other. When the Altadena center ran out of copies of John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason, the South Pasadena Americanism Center scrambled to get them copies from their own sources.56 When the

­148  •  Chapter V Downy and Monterey Park centers opened, they called on the South Pasadena store volunteers to show their support at the grand openings.57 In 1965 a South Pasadena Americanism Center volunteer wrote a note in the logbook: “Jane— order “I Fight Poverty, I Work” sticker from Poor Richards.”58 When the U.S. Treasury Department denied the Eagle Rock Americanism Center tax-exempt status in 1965, Jane met with one of their leaders and an attorney to discuss how area Americanism Centers could coordinate efforts to protect that status.59 Indeed, the logbooks of the South Pasadena Americanism Center show a small part of the movement fusing just within the community of conservative bookstore proprietors that relied upon each other. e The bookstores’ ambience and stock reflected another important cultural trend that prompted the ascendance of conservatism into its movement phase: widespread concerns about “youth.” Fears about the brainwashing of children fed into related debates at the time about juvenile delinquency, the urban crisis, public education, campus radicalism, the beat generation, and changing sexual norms.60 Conservatives had long been pressing the importance of parental authority as an important stabilizing force in a society undermined by the liberal welfare state. Rebellious adolescents corrupted by the entertainment industry, street gangs, and beat poetry joined progressive educators and psychiatrists as potential hazards to the family. Conservative respect for tradition clashed with a postwar youth culture of experimentation. Though he would not sing “Are There Any More Squares Out There?” until 1981, Pat Boone’s deliberately hokey anthem to wholesomeness borrowed from a conservative movement tradition that had been in formation for over two decades.61 Not only did women participate significantly in developing the cult of wholesomeness, but they contributed discursively to conservative notions of “youth,” imagined as white, middle-class, innocent, male or female, and smart but guileless. Youth’s inverse, “juvenile,” which appeared with or without the word “delinquent,” typically described a more dangerous element in society that was often nonwhite. Conservative bookstores contributed to white middle-class notions of youth, though not self-consciously, by cultivating students mainly within their home territory, or targeting young populations in friendly, familiar territory. Proprietors sought to fortify the patriotism of their own children, rather than propagating those virtues outside of their communities. Their objective could be described as in-reach rather than outreach. Teachers at the local schools rented out audiovisual materials made available to them by the South Pasadena Americanism Center. Students, sent by these teachers, shopped in the store for books.62 Youth groups often held meetings there.63 After commencement, the

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SA N

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The Good Word Book Stop (Santa Monica) Anti-Communist Information Center (Degnan Blvd, Los Angeles) Betsy Ross Book Shop (Van Nuys) Heritage Bookshop (Van Nuys) House of Betram (Playa del Rey) Pro-Blue Book Shop (Torrance) Americanism Center of Long Beach Tree of Liberty (Long Beach) Orange Freedom Forum (Costa Mesa) Marriner’s Book Store (Laguna Beach) Con-del Books (Garden Grove) Orange County Freedom Forum (Garden Grove) Orange County Freedom Forum (Anaheim)

Santa Ana

25 Laguna Beach

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

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All American Books (Pasadena) Dayton Seiler’s All-American Books (Pasadena) Minuteman (Pasadena) South Pasadena Americanism Center Altadena Americanism Center The Patriot (Arcadia) Temple City Letter Shop Eagle Rock Americanism Center American Freedom Center (Glendale) The Patriot (Glendale) Valley Book Store (Montrose) Poor Richard’s Bookshop (Hollywood) Patrick Henry Bookstore (North Hollywood) Wilshire Americanism Center (Wilshire District, Los Angeles) Fowler Brothers Books (6th Street, Los Angeles)

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Burbank 11 Pasadena 18 19 San 5 lley Marino o VaHollywood 9 10 1 d n a 3 n 2 6 13 West San Fer 8 7 Los 12 14 15 4 Wilshire Angeles SAN NS TA MONICA M T 36 District 35 I-10 Santa 16 Los 17 Monica Angeles 32 Whittier Inglewood PA C 33 34 31 20 IF 30 IC OC 29 Fullerton EA 28 I-40 21

Woodland Hills

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Orange County Freedom Forum (Fullerton) Downy Americanism Center The Patriot (Downy) Citizens Information Center (Whittier) Freedom Forum Bookstore (Whittier) M&E Stationers (Whittier) Citrus Americanism Center (Covina) Liberty Bell Book Shop (Pomona)

Figure 5.3  Map of Conservative Bookstores in Southern California, 1960s.

­150  •  Chapter V Americanism Center mailed copies of John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason to all of South Pasadena’s graduating high school seniors.64 Though Poor Richard’s Book Shop broke with this pattern of localism, they gave materials to youth organizations and schools that sent requests rather than developing plans to extend the “education not agitation” mandate outward. Bookstore volunteers also took it upon themselves to convince the young patrons who wandered into their stores that they would become the targets of nefarious, often dark-hued, leftists. When a recent high school graduate visited the South Pasadena Americanism Center and revealed to the clerks that he was off to Harvard and—even worse—a liberal (!), the student provoked two of the women into a lengthy discussion. Probably feeling it was their duty to educate the youth about the dangers posed by campus indoctrinators, the volunteers engaged him for two and a half hours, making sure he left with a copy of Keynes at Harvard.65 The anti-Ivy polemic bled the university crimson with the ferocity of its red-baiting, asserting that socialists had penetrated its campus long before the Bolshevik revolution. And it warned readers to be wary of blacks like “W. E. B. DuBois, the current Negro favorite of the Kremlin who emerged as a full-fledged socialist from Harvard in 1890.”66 Even as the conservative movement grew ever more convinced of its own antiracism, adherents continued to approach the mandate to protect the young, maintain peace, and preserve virtue by opposing civil rights reform. The message sent home with this student, as sweetly as the book might have been handed to him, was not sweet: demands for black rights equaled communism, don’t let “justice” rhetoric fool you. Nonwhite people, young and old alike, would justifiably feel uncomfortable in these bookstores. Numerous “schools of anticommunism” proliferating in Los Angeles and beyond joined the bookstores in making conservatism a movement for the entire family by designing special programs for youths. Typically held in hotel ballrooms, sports arenas, or stadiums, the “schools” enrolled men, women, teenagers, and children in five-day courses to hear experts lecture about the red menace. The Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (CACC) led the earliest, most successful, and most sustained programs. Headed by the Australian doctor and lay preacher turned evangelical missionary Fred Schwarz, the CACC operated out of the port community of Long Beach. Schwarz’s schools reached audiences in cities across the country—St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Miami, New Orleans, and Indianapolis. The Los Angeles schools proved the most popular, however. Schwarz put spectacle and star power to work, bringing a mix of celebration and gravity to his events. His schools often lasted from 8:30 in the morning to 9:30 in the evening. Over the 1960s, tens of thousands of Southern Californians attended these programs

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in popular downtown venues from Patriotic Hall to the Biltmore Hotel to the Hollywood Bowl. One of the largest filled the Los Angeles Sports Arena during the last week of August in 1961. The CACC launched a massive public relations campaign to generate excitement. The region’s major newspapers and smaller neighborhood bulletins published announcements. Schwarz spoke before church groups. Mayors in surrounding communities showed their support by declaring “Anti-Communism Week,” with administrators in several school districts pledging to reward teachers who attended.67 The celebrity faculty included John Wayne, Pat Boone, Dale Evans, and Ronald Reagan.68 The Youth Days and Youth Nights that became a staple of anticommunism schools further reinforced conservatism’s cult of wholesomeness. The all-white “faculty” of military officers, ex-spies, and ministers often spoke as fathers or mothers, especially in programs directed at younger audiences. An August 1961 CACC youth dedication night featured speakers cut from the 1950s sitcom mold. Former mom spy Marion Miller introduced Ronald Reagan. That week celebrities made their appearance on Wednesday, after a youth choir and orchestra warmed up the crowd. Former double agent and father of six children Herbert Philbrick, well known to the audience for his book I Led Three Lives and the I Led Three Lives television series inspired by it, headlined the evening’s program.69 The rousing speeches of Pat Boone and Ronald Reagan underscored the centrality of youthful innocence in the fight against communism. With wild applause, the crowd cheered when singer Pat Boone melodramatically declared that he would rather sacrifice his daughters to their ideological purity before allowing communists to corrupt them. “I don’t want to live in a Communist United States,” he proclaimed, “I would rather see my four girls shot and die as little girls who have faith in God than leave them to die some years later as godless, faithless, soulless Communists.”70 That evening’s faculty delivered assorted versions of the 1960s “just say no” to communism speech. Crowds cheered after Reagan warned youths that they were a “target.” “Communism will appeal to your rebellious nature,” he cautioned. “They will make you feel your patriotism is hollow. Then they will fill up the vacuum with their philosophy.” Sixteen thousand people attended Youth Dedication night, according to an observer from the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish National Council who had been dispatched to monitor events.71 He might have been willing to sacrifice his daughters, but Pat Boone could not out-wholesome the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade’s Janet Greene. When the Free Speech, antiwar, and free-love demonstrators challenged sexual double standards, the CACC fought back with its own anticommunist folk singer. The all-American female vocalist Janet Greenroos adopted the

­152  •  Chapter V less-ethnic “Janet Greene” when she embarked on her anticommunist career. The former children’s show host from Columbus, Ohio, represented the Crusade’s antidote to angry, long-haired hippie musicians. Greenroos first encountered the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade with her husband when it offered schools in Ohio. Becoming a fast admirer of Fred Schwarz, David Greenroos eventually spoke with Schwarz, who had already been interested in developing a musical program, about Janet’s performing talents. In 1964 both husband and wife accepted positions with the organization for $500 a week and moved the family into a house they rented from the Crusade in Long Beach.72 David assumed legwork and public relations tasks while Janet became musical director, songwriter, and performer of her own compositions. The mother of two listened to recordings of Schwarz’s speeches and transformed them into lyrics. She also performed at all the schools and sometimes joined Schwarz in meetings at peoples’ homes to talk with women about the “movement,” as she later described the Crusade.73 Greene’s melodies, always light, were kept on the surface deliberately. Her songs rested on the assumption that communism seduced youths with sophisticated thought that represented sophistry rather than authentic scholarly rigor. The lyrics counterpoised the trusting innocence of youth with the deceptive cunning of intellectuals. “Poor Left Winger” documents the coming to awareness of a female college demonstrator to the sad misguided political path she’d taken with her “ragged shirt tail[ed]” hippie boyfriend. “Duped by a bearded singer,” who wore sandals, the “poor left winger” follows her beloved to college, where she learns to demonstrate. She participates in a march on the White House and kicks a policeman in the shins. It is “all so intellectual,” until the “poor left winger” realizes that her scruffy boyfriend could only spell the small words on the signs he waved at marches.74 From the Long Beach office, parents could order vinyl 45s of Greene’s songs for their kids. Tunes like “Be Careful of the Commie Lies” could be purchased for $.98, or three for $2.00.75 Janet Greene embodied a gender ideal for the Crusade and the conservative movement. Billed as “a new and effective anti-Communist weapon,” the neatly attractive, guitar-wielding mom fit a central organizing strategy of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade—to fight fire with fire, to turn leftist movement tactics back on itself. “The communists have been using folk-singing for years,” advertised the CACC, sounding a lot like the John Birch Society. “Now the tables have been turned.”76 The Crusade promoted Greene as the “Joan Baez” of the right. Its literature promised that she was “ideal for young people.”77 In a formal dress or suit, the pretty, short-haired soprano modeled a polite, sweet, and friendly version of political womanhood that sharply contrasted with female protesters. Not only did she mock young women who were “all so

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Figure 5.4  Fred Schwarz (left), Janet Greene (center back), and Nathanial Philbrick (right), ca. 1966. Singer Janet Greene, Joan Baez of the right, entertained crowds at the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade’s Schools of Anti-Communism in hotel ballrooms, arenas, stadiums, and performance halls with her original folksongs. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

intellectual,” she showed girls that they could be politically tuned in without being intellectual. Greene often performed with daughters Joan and Marilyn at her side.78 Together they would sing “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, a song that cut against the grain of 1960s popular culture by celebrating instead of denigrating the military.79 Its original recording sold 9 million singles as the number one song in the country for five weeks.80 Decades later, Janet Greene recalled feeling provoked to perform Sadler’s hit by her anger at the antiwar movement, even though she actually opposed the war. “. . . I felt very, very sad for our boys who were fighting. . . .” she explained in an oral history.81 Antipathy toward demonstrators, however, did not prevent her from appreciating her supposed nemesis, Joan Baez. Greene attended a Baez concert and emulated the folk diva’s singing style, it seems, both for strategy and effect. Greene described their voices as “similar,” letting herself be inspired by Baez’s high ultra-feminine vibrato.82 Further reinforcing the associations between juvenile delinquency, nonwhites, and the left was the charismatic Dr. Maxwell “Max” Rafferty. The

­154  •  Chapter V educator, writer, speaker and superintendent of the wealthy LaCañada school district championed a “3 Rs” and “back to basics” platform for school reform.83 With the help of a statewide conservative campaign, he won election to the office of state superintendent of public instruction in 1964. Rafferty electrified the right in Los Angeles and beyond with his analysis of and strategies for reckoning with the problems of modern youths. Indeed, The Passing of the Patriot, a pamphlet based on a speech Rafferty delivered in 1961, moved many conservatives by offering a powerful explanation and solution for the education crisis—one completely in line with their view of how progressive educational practices and juvenile delinquency eroded national character one rebellious teen at a time. Rafferty argued that American educators, voters, and taxpayers had made a grave mistake by allowing the “American patriot” to become a “vanishing species” in the nation’s classrooms. Children’s interest in school flagged, according to Rafferty, because they had lost heroes to inspire them. Without explicitly saying that children needed classically drawn white idols, he gave examples. “In my right hand,” he declared, “I hold one of our California third-grade readers.” He then called attention to two of the main characters, “Paddyfoot the Indian Boy, and Uncle Will the Cotton-Picker . . . harmless  .  .  . and gentle—and as dull as dishwater.” For this, he lamented, children missed out on the “wonderful pantheon of youthful gods and goddesses” like Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland, and Robin Hood. He attacked recent pedagogical trends like “studies in ‘social living,’” “language arts,” and the myriad “insufferable nonentities who clutter up the pages of our elementary textbooks with their vapid ditherings about humdrum affairs.” Without heroes, he argued, “ . . . the worst of our youngsters [are] growing up to become booted, sideburned, ducktailed, unwashed, leatherjacketed Slobs.” He warned that boredom rendered impressionable minds vacuous and open “to the crafty cunning of Red psychological warfare.”84 Though roundly criticized for the racial undertones of his rhetoric, Rafferty’s theories resonated with Californians who were anxious about rebellious youths and afraid of subversives. The connections he made between adolescent defiance, the demise of patriotism, academic radicalism, and communism made perfect sense to them, as did his condemnation of “sex, drugs, and treason” at Berkeley a few years later.85 Conservative women played a significant part in cultivating Max Rafferty’s celebrity status on the right and electing him to statewide office. He spoke their language from institutional experience that mattered to them. Patricia Gilbert of Newport Beach became one of his most important champions, though Rafferty barely knew the young mother. In a 2000 interview Gilbert remembered how The Passing of the Patriot had moved her as someone who took great interest in children’s education. The document attached words to problems that

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she had sensed for some time. Like the Pasadena activists who felt a common something-is-just-not-right sensation before coming to their own political awareness, Gilbert had been noticing “that often perfectly bright children went off to school and . . . then just had trouble learning. . . .”86 Rafferty brought welcomed clarity and solutions to the unidentifiable educational difficulties that she had struggled to name until she read The Passing of the Patriot. When a “draft Rafferty” campaign formed in Orange County to put the conservative in state office, Gilbert threw herself into it and in the process became a savvy political organizer. With modest expectations she formed her own organization, inviting ten women over to discuss how they could aid the draft-Rafferty effort. “We sat around the table,” she remembers, “just like we were planning a senior prom or something.” The women merged their Christmas card lists into a mailing roster and organized a letter-writing campaign. She remembers the organization as a truly “homespun effort.” When Rafferty finally decided to run, Gilbert’s team gave themselves a name, Parents for Rafferty, and adopted the little red schoolhouse as their symbol. The group, which grew exponentially over the next several months, distributed over three million pieces of literature, most of it printed by a mimeograph machine in the Gilberts’ garage.87 Parents for Rafferty eventually compiled an 8,000-person mailing list and opened 260 chapters around the state.88 In addition to their Christmas card network, they called places like the South Pasadena Americanism Center to recruit volunteers.89 Parents for Rafferty welcomed all volunteers, but according to Gilbert, most of their workers were women. Having trailed in most public opinion polls before the election, Rafferty was not expected to beat his more liberal opponent, Dr. Ralph Richardson. He won by a slim margin of 4 percent. The reelection that same year of liberal governor Pat Brown suggests that the efforts of Rafferty’s voter-getters probably factored into his victory.90 How did Los Angeles youths feel about all the attention they received from conservatives? Some felt manipulated by conservative efforts to save them from leftists, in some cases rebelling against programs that seemed to infantilize their intellect. Tom Pedersen of South Pasadena objected to the “piece of political fanaticism” he received in the mail from the Americanism Center upon graduating from high school. Though he acknowledged the “sincere” and “strong conviction of good purpose” that possessed the donors who sent him John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason, he wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times, which the newspaper printed, that asked if the book only served “to stir up blind prejudice and hate in our marvelous land where there is already too much of both?”91 One high school junior who attended a Schwarz school in 1961 remembered chafing against its folksy atmosphere, which he later described as “hickish.” The event seemed to John Mack Faragher, as he recalled

­156  •  Chapter V in an interview decades later, like a “football game, but there was a stage in the field.” Attending as part of a school field trip to the San Bernardino County Fairgrounds, Faragher remembered a lot of “goof[ing] off and “flirting” instead of paying much attention.92 The cult of wholesomeness, in hindsight, seems like a finger in the dike trying to hold back major social transformations that the sexual revolution, new left, and feminist movement would render. Campus conservatives had, however, been developing their own political culture that benefited from, mingled with, and absorbed some of the features of its elder institutions. Over the 1950s, conservative clubs were formed at colleges and universities across the country. They worked through national organizations like the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), which distributed literature to students and offered summer journalism fellowships, and the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), which favored direct-action styles of protest similar to campus radicals. The new generation looked toward the intellectual right for leadership; indeed, both the ISI and YAF relied upon the conservative literati for support. Though they tended to style themselves as National Review or Washington, D.C., conservatives, the young right happily accepted the attention of the grassroots, particularly the bookstore proprietors who wanted to give them literature. In 1966 Carl Saltzman of the Corsair Young Republican Club at Santa Monica College wrote to Poor Richard’s requesting material to distribute at a September “Club Row” event. He said that he was thrilled by Florence Ranuzzi’s response, which included samples of free literature she would be happy to send, plus stickers he could buy wholesale for fund-raising purposes. Also helpful, according to Salzman, were the people and organizations she referred him to: Walter Knott, YAF, and Flick-Reedy Leadership Training in Bensenville, Illinois.93 Youths, intellectuals, activists, and other conservatives brought the movement to its first apex with the 1964 presidential election. The excitement surrounding the candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater seemed, for a brief moment, like it might render differences between constituencies insignificant enough to land him in the White House. Goldwater rallies showcased a melting pot of conservative culture: the cult of wholesomeness, exuberant youthful hopefulness, assertive tough-on-communist saber rattling, bible waving, and traditional suit-and-tie professionalism. The enthusiasm unleashed upon the campaign by grassroots conservatives daunted the official organizing apparatus, which struggled to manage both Goldwater and his followers. Women represented one such challenge of vote-getting strength that campaign officials recognized too late. e

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Barry Goldwater’s campaign of 1964, often described as a movement in itself, incorporated the “conservative sex” into its strategy for capturing the White House. The senator and his staffers actively and consciously sought to soften Goldwater’s rugged, tough-on-communism, law-and-order image by integrating feminine conservative ideals into his own public persona through female supporters. The candidate did not appeal to women voters by addressing women’s issues like workplace gender discrimination, reproductive rights, or violence against women. His team instead highlighted what it identified as natural maternal instincts that it believed made women able to perceive the need for his conservative leadership.94 F. Clifton’s White’s 1967 memoir of the campaign reflected many decades of gender ideology inflected with the recent accents of conservative traditionalism so emblematic to the new movement. White noted that his candidate stirred “deeper responses” from his women admirers, who “. . . saw in Goldwater a man who would preserve the civilization and society they felt slipping out from under them.” “The women of America,” insisted White, “have labored valiantly to help build this society, a society which, if preserved, promises an even brighter future for their children.”95 Staffers deliberately encouraged and, to a certain extent, invented a maternal pro-Goldwater discourse. More than campaign stunts, however, these groups took advantage of enthusiasm and sentiments that women expressed on their own. Barry Goldwater appealed to women for the same reasons he appealed to men. He had made a name for himself in politics as a small-government, antilabor, anticommunist Republican. The conservative’s career as a politician started during the New Deal, when he wrote a letter to the Phoenix Gazette complaining about taxes, the expansion of government agencies, and the power of unions. Even before he ran for office, Goldwater led a life in the public eye that shaped his image as a rugged outdoorsman and self-sufficient businessman who could speak authoritatively about the evils of government paternalism. Flying around the state in his airplane, notes Rick Perlstein, Goldwater gave lectures about Native American handicrafts and the “natural wonders” of Arizona. His talents as a nature photographer distinguished him as well.96 Posing in cowboy boots and Stetsons for photos, Goldwater liked to marshal western imagery to underscore the individualist, antistatist political philosophy with which he hoped to reform Washington. He attacked the welfare state for breeding dependency and attributed urban violence and unemployment to the tensions between labor and employers created by New Deal policies. In a 1959 speech, after railing against government agencies for depleting Americans of “moral and physical strength,” he declared that, “Life was not meant to be easy. The American people are adult—eager to hear the bold, blunt truth, weary of being kept in a state of perpetual adolescence.”97

­158  •  Chapter V Campaign officials developed a way to capitalize on the charm and excitement of Goldwater’s female supporters by creating the Goldwater Gals and Goldwater Girls. Smiles, skirts, and saddle shoes softened the candidate’s gruffness. In cowgirl uniforms with gold hats that cost each Gal $12.75, the women performed essential hostess duties of greeting people at events, serving refreshments, and accommodating guests generally.98 More than one thousand from around the country appeared at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, some serving “Gold Water . . . the right drink for the conservative taste” in the senator’s hospitality suite.99 The younger Goldwater Girls appeared at party functions as quasi-cheerleading or color guard squads. In their early and late teens, some wore long gold skirts, gold bandanas, and bright blue collars embroidered, predictably in gold (more like yellow), with “Goldwater” imprinted across the front. Others wore blue skirts and red sashes emblazoned with “Goldwater” in white. All sported white cowboy hats, crisp white shirts, Goldwater campaign signs, bright white smiles, cheers, and a fresh-faced look of innocence.100 The daughter of Poor Richard’s Book Shop owners Florence and Frank Ranuzzi, Mary, participated in the campaign as a Goldwater Girl. Hilary Rodham Clinton did as well.101 Like a cheerleader, Mary waved pompoms and shook bottles of the Gold Water at political rallies.102 By volunteering their time and carrying out necessary chores, Goldwater Gals and Girls carried on partisan female political traditions dating back to the 1920s. Adorned in matching uniforms, however, they fulfilled more than the typical duties. The Gals and Girls acted out the parts of the “conservative sex.” Nicely groomed and always congenial, they presented a striking contrast to the civil rights protesters who picketed outside the Cow Palace all week long, CORE activists who stood vigil wielding picket signs warning “Hitler Was Sincere, Too—Defoliate Goldwater.”103 Independently of—and sometimes at odds with—the campaign, other female supporters of Goldwater worked through their own institutions to put the Arizonan into the White House. Not the Goldwater Girl or Gal types, these organization women focused intently on policing orthodoxy. Before the Republican convention of 1964, a group called Watchdogs of the Republican Party (WORC) formed on its own in South Pasadena to help Goldwater secure the nomination. Though WORC left no membership records behind, the list of board members and directors suggests that the “watchdogs” were mostly or all women. Officers included Jane Crosby and Marjorie Jensen.104 The word “front group” never appears in any of its literature; however, WORC maintained ties to the John Birch Society, which wanted front groups. Chair Bea Ziegler, a volunteer at the South Pasadena Americanism Center, kept the Birch headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, and San Marino up to date

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Figure 5.5  Goldwater Girls, 1964. In crisp white blouses, cowgirl hats, sashes, and white gloves, the troops of girls who cheered at campaign events complemented Barry Goldwater’s vows to redeem the nation from lawlessness, moral decline, and juvenile delinquency. Courtesy of the Arizona Historical Foundation/The Personal and Political Papers of Senator Barry M. Goldwater/Series VI, Media: Photographs, Box 731, Folder 6.

on the organization’s activities, forwarding them copies of the group’s literature.105 WORC’s first stated purpose was to “preserve [the] Constitution by . . . [s]afeguarding the grassroots mandate for Senator Barry Goldwater’s nomination at the Republican Convention.” The organization wanted a candidate, running mate, and platform that emphasized “principles—not issues.” It committed itself to several tasks on behalf of these stated goals, including distribution of literature, letter-writing to Republican leaders, correspondence with delegates to affirm their support for Goldwater, and a massive public relations campaign in the form of literature, stickers, pins, banners, speakers,

­160  •  Chapter V and coffee hours.106 For the $1.00 membership fee, conservatives received one hundred copies of the group’s statement of purpose for distribution. “Get out your Christmas card list,” suggested the officers, “and start addressing.”107 The women expressed excitement about the convention in their home state, urging conservatives to attend at the Cow Palace, greet out-of-staters, and “impress them with the tremendous grassroots loyalty and enthusiasm for Goldwater.”108 The fervor of conservative women for Goldwater also directed itself through the United Republicans of California (UROC). Formed in 1962 by Southern California conservatives, UROC aimed to steer control of the state party away from moderates and into the hands of “grassroots” conservatives.109 The founders included Jane Crosby and her husband Joe, Bruce and Muriel Reagan, gubernatorial candidate Joseph Shell, and Shell’s campaign manager, Rus Walton, before he became the public relations director of the Goldwater-Miller campaign. Walton described UROC as “democracy in action.”110 By the time the organization threw itself into the Goldwater campaign of 1964, it counted about 20,000 members across the state. UROC saw itself as a conservative vanguard—an activist core within the party that would redeem the GOP with its purity of principles. The group’s statement of purpose denounced centralized power and declared its commitment to fighting communism.111 Summoning the upbeat, optimistic language that had come to define the emerging right, UROC described itself as “the positive active Republican volunteer group.”112 Birchers abounded in the organization, eventually, by 1966, taking control. UROC’s major purpose was to elevate conservative candidates and principles, but it took positions on major issues, such as its endorsement of Proposition 14, a ballot measure to overturn the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963.113 UROC’s tight ship and zeal undoubtedly contributed to the success of the Cow Palace convention. The organization welcomed Goldwater with two billboards on the freeway between the airport and city, reading, “Hello, Barry, Welcome to San Francisco.” The Californians also supplied seven cars, twelve drivers, and a dispatch operation for the Goldwater staff. Members placed signs in apartment and store windows downtown while thousands of UROC volunteers joined other Republicans to greet the senator. Seventy-five of the “floor demonstrators” who cheered for Goldwater after his nomination were members of UROC. The group made a special effort, moreover, to accommodate the Southern delegation by furnishing them with a mobile communications network. The delegates from Dixie, compliments of UROC, enjoyed the use of seven radio cars, a central broadcasting station, eighty-three regular cars, and drivers for those cars.114 WORC and UROC certainly contributed to the “Goldwater movement,” but Citizens for Goldwater-Miller also struggled with the factionalism wrought by

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ardent conservatives who had taken over the California Republican Party— those who delivered California to their candidate. After Goldwater won the endorsement of the California Republican Assembly (CRA) in March of 1964, internal campaign memos reported that the “pyrrhic” victory could have hurt the candidate “badly” since it caused terrible acrimony between moderates and conservatives in the state party. Indeed, successive updates from an unnamed California correspondent working on behalf of Citizens for GoldwaterMiller betray a growing concern about escalating hostilities and “radicalism” among the Birchers. A May report lamented that while Goldwater behaved with courtesy, supporters often did not. The document shined harsh criticism, in particular, on “rather vociferous persons” who had taken over Republican volunteer organizations, namely the CRA, the California Young Republicans, and the United Republicans of California. “Actually, it is the GOP’s inability in California to discontinue this internecine strife that is costing this party a golden opportunity for a win.”115 By August, the reports from California argued that the expression “conservative” meant no such thing in the state—that it had taken on the connotation “radical” among the public. The movement that made Goldwater, implied the report, had spun hopelessly out of control. As November approached, poll numbers forced the campaign to think more creatively about how to reach women. By mid-September, F. Clifton White, the national director of Citizens for Goldwater-Miller, acknowledged that the Republican nominee lagged behind his opponent by a significant margin. The media consultant proposed a bold solution: produce a shocking campaign documentary that would tarnish Lyndon Johnson’s image by flashing visual representations of the crime, violence, rape, juvenile delinquency, and corruption that abounded in America due to weak law enforcement and lax moral standards. Such a project would require the campaign, he noted, to be severe yet soft. The attack on Johnson, asserted White in a memo to Goldwater, “should not be done by you, but it must be done . . . by a team of rough, tough hatchet men.” To balance the aggressive stance of the film, the campaign would strike a “positive” tone by developing a new theme to “ride and build for the duration of the campaign . . . morality.” Campaign publicity would link the problems of crime and juvenile delinquency to “breakdown of the fabric of the family.” Release of the documentary, right before the election, would mark the crescendo of Goldwater’s crusade against immorality. In keeping with their efforts to soften the candidate’s image, White’s team did what they could to hide their aggressive tactics from the public by inventing, from scratch, a women’s group to front Goldwater’s morality campaign: Mothers for Moral America (MFMA). It was a bold move of political drag: self-proclaimed “hachet men” posturing as the “conservative sex” by dressing themselves in the accoutrements of a

­162  •  Chapter V female organization and calling themselves Mothers for Moral America. Such a gender strategy would have entered into the plans of the campaign for several reasons beyond its obvious desperation. Calling on mothers to restore moral order reformulated nineteenth-century social-uplift discourse that sanctioned the presence of religious middle-class women in the public sphere. Post–World War II concerns about pornography, changing sexual norms, crime rates, and juvenile delinquency revived female sexual purity as a political virtue. The 1950s might have been an era of suburbanization and the exuberant embrace of nuclear family life, but it was also the decade that launched an abundance of “girlie” magazines, rock ’n’ roll, and curve-hugging clothing fashions. The new Playboy empire stood as an embodiment of the nation’s moral unraveling that disconcerted the right. Hugh Hefner launched the magazine in 1953 with full awareness that the overlapping trends of domesticity and hedonism stood as no mere coincidence. His magazine targeted male readers in need of urbanity, sexual exploits, and the good life, which, notes Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Heffner defined as the direct inverse of the family-centered suburban ideal of postwar America. He declared that Playboy was a “family magazine” and directed women who picked up the issue to give it to a man in their life and move on to the “Ladies Home Companion.”116 Men were not the only troublemakers. Helen Gurley Brown’s controversial but popular Sex and the Single Girl, published in 1961, encouraged women to enjoy careers, leisure, and lovemaking before they settled down into marriages.117 Two years later Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique rekindled feminist protest by naming the sense of isolation, loss, and limitation felt by many middle-class housewives of her generation. Citizens for Goldwater-Miller also sought to harness an outrage that political women, liberal and conservative, had recently inflected with more explicitly maternal intonations. In 1961, an organization called Mothers Strike for Peace organized a national movement that marched against nuclear proliferation armed with placards, strollers, and babies. The strikers’ maternal, protectionist stance not only underscored the harmful implications of America’s hawkish foreign policy for future generations, but also protected them from red-baiting opponents. The presence of the strikers’ children at demonstrations caught the attention of President John F. Kennedy and made the HUAC hearings appear farcical.118 That same year a group of well-known Los Angeles civic leaders from the Friday Morning Club formed “Operation Moral Upgrade” to unite women in a fight against “sick entertainment.” “We have sat through downgrade plays, read offbeat books, wallowed in sex-swamped films and listened to pessimistic politicians long enough,” said founder Marion Newkirk.119 Though Operation Moral Upgrade and Mothers Strike for Peace

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did not, by any means, work as allies, the groups did aim to protect families from a common but unnamed enemy: the perceived reckless nature of men.120 Mothers for Moral America represented a feminine component to the Goldwater “law and order” program for fighting crime and national decline. While liberals tended to address root problems such as poverty, unemployment, and local living conditions, notes historian Michael Flamm, conservatives focused on the erosion of police power and decline of moral values. Starting with the Goldwater campaign, conservatives reversed their traditional support for federalism and local control to push for stronger executive authority in criminal matters. The right wanted a Supreme Court that would overturn recent rulings, like Miranda, that curtailed the power of police, a Supreme Court that would also make sentences harsher. 121 In March of 1964, Goldwater equated the reduced lighting in the White House, as mandated by Lyndon Johnson’s new fiscal responsibility campaign, with an overall darkness spreading across the country. He urged the president to turn on the “lights of moral leadership” and the “lights of law and order.” Although many Americans, regardless of their racial or economic status, recognized crime as a national problem, conservatives blamed the civil rights movement for urban violence. “Law and order,” writes Flamm, “identified a clear cast of violent villains (protesters, rioters, and criminals).”122 Mothers for Moral America put a gentler face on “law and order.” Rus Walton, public relations director of Citizens for Goldwater-Miller, believed that the senator needed to show some “compassion.” The Democrats had made Goldwater look insensitive, argued Walton, by “distorting” his stance on Medicare and Social Security. Goldwater was also developing a reputation for “standoffishness” with the press and the people by failing to smile, engage with crowds, and inquire about “the crops” enough. He needed to show “sympathy and empathy” by making a point to chat with people “in heart-warming situations,” and appear in photos with the Goldwater family “in natural, homey warm situations.”123 In short, Goldwater needed to make an emotional connection with voters. Mothers for Moral America presented a way for Goldwater’s men to drop a bomb (or missile, rather) on Johnson, but make it look like women were projecting outrage from inside the family outward. White believed that the Moral Mothers could make Goldwater look more spiritual, emotional, and connected to the grassroots. He proposed the mothers’ group to Goldwater as part of a larger morality campaign, which he claimed could be the “missile gap” issue of the 1964 election, a campaign issue that would “focus the anxieties and animosities of the voting public against the opposition.” But White never talked

­164  •  Chapter V much about actual women in his proposal. Wanting to ignite a “precinct-drive for spiritual regeneration,” White took for granted that merely calling the group “Mothers for Moral America” would perform the public relations work he intended. Of paramount importance was invocation of the “conservative sex;” involvement of actual women stood as a secondary consideration. “[T]his organization,” he proposed, “will be an entity in itself, a spontaneous, public movement—carefully coordinated with and through the Citizens committee.” Somehow—“spontaneous” yet controlled from inside the campaign—White assumed that the Moral Mothers would enhance Goldwater’s grassroots credentials, bringing him closer to the people by channeling the “emotional (gut) issue” of morality into the election.”124 “Moral Mothers” meant gut, emotions, and spontaneity, like a crusade . . . even if just on the surface. Goldwater wholeheartedly approved the plan for the formation of a mothers’ organization and production of a film, which launched White, Walton, and the remaining public relations team to execute the project immediately. They recruited women. Prominent Republican women, including Nancy Reagan and Aloise Steiner Buckley—mother of William F.—joined MFMA ’ s national committee. Writing from the group’s headquarters in Michigan, national coordinator Carol Arth Waters sent a letter and brochure to community leaders across the country in October, urging them to join the mothers’ “moral crusade.” With no mention of Goldwater appearing anywhere, the letter asserted that the nation needed moral leaders and renewed “. . . respect for law and order so that our children may be reared in a proper environment.” Without explaining what, exactly, the Moral Mothers would do to combat these problems, the brochure underscored how rampant crime harmed children: “Young people are the major targets of the $500 million yearly pornography business in the U.S.” 125 In the meantime, the Goldwater-Miller team worked diligently on the film that would ultimately stand as the work of Mothers for Moral America, whoever they were. Choice became the documentary’s title, underscoring an important theme of the campaign—that Goldwater represented a bona fide alternative to politics as usual. The title resonated with Phyllis Schlafly’s book A Choice Not an Echo, as well as with the speech actor Ronald Reagan would soon give, “A Time for Choosing.” Raymond Morgan, best known for the television show Queen For a Day, worked closely with Rus Walton to produce the twenty-eightminute montage of newsreel clips meant to shock and disturb viewers. Walton stated forthrightly in an early planning session for Choice that Goldwater needed to seize the opportunity to correct his image problem with women. “[T] he Senator’s national image, rightly or wrongly, has become that of a warmonger. This has scared a lot of women.” To reckon with the predicament, Walton

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asserted that the public’s anger, fear, and “raw naked emotions” had to be appropriately directly against Johnson—fear of crime, juvenile delinquency, rape, and riots. “We find this fear in the minds of almost everyone, and particularly in the minds of women.”126 For his part, Goldwater made no references to the film or the Moral Mothers, but ramped up talk of moral order in his speeches. In mid-October he declared in a televised speech at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City that the nation’s “moral fiber” was decaying and called on America to notice the lack of any reference to God in the Democrats’ campaign platform.127 Taking a page from the San Fernando housewives who launched the “Siberia, U.S.A.” controversy, he invoked the evils of “mental health” to explain why liberalism had weakened the moral fortitude of the nation. Rebuking the quintessential liberal who “frowns on the policeman and fawns on the social psychologist,” Goldwater equated disrespect for the law with misplaced faith in mental health experts and social welfare programs.128 Championing law and order, school prayer, and the free-enterprise system, he vowed to redeem the nation from “thirty years of an unhealthy social climate.”129 To the sound of brass instruments screeching in the background, Choice shifted between footage of black city-dwellers breaking windows to college-age white men collecting a crowd as they toss a park bench into an empty street. Were the fair-skinned troublemakers campus demonstrators or Ft. Lauderdale spring-breakers? The distinctions were unclear—that was the point. The producers even dared to be especially provocative by flashing some naked breasts in a dizzying scene that evoked out-of-control sex, drugs, and revelry. The producers aimed to represent a horrific and disintegrating social order, which they portrayed jarringly as the fruits of American liberalism. Even in the closed-door planning session for Choice, with no cameras or microphones present, Walton insisted that the explicitly incited fear campaign they plotted had nothing to do with race: “This is not particularly a situation involving race.” Reflecting the widespread conservative refusal to recognize the authenticity of civil rights campaigns—that they truly originated from within minority communities that had legitimate claims against white society—he argued that “[a]lthough what they call civil rights may be a part of it, this is not a racial thing.” He wanted Choice to pair footage from race riots with that of political demonstrations from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, like the recent sit-in by students at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.130 Lyndon Johnson never appeared in Choice, but a Lincoln similar to the one at his Texas ranch stood in for the President, swerving menacingly on a dirt road between scenes. LBJ loved to race around the open landscape of his Hill Country property, beer in hand, as journalist passengers glanced nervously at the speedometer. Choice implied that the Texan’s wild side made him dark,

­166  •  Chapter V corrupt, and dangerous. Joining the array of images that appeared repeatedly throughout the film was Johnson aide Bobby Baker, who stank of scandal. Baker parlayed money and favor between lobbyists, Democratic senators, and himself. In January, a Senate subcommittee had investigated “Little Lyndon,” as he was known, for laundering kickbacks to the President through the television station owned by the first lady in Austin. Though the case led nowhere, Goldwater’s team used Bobby Baker to represent the corrupt, dirty, machinestyle Democratic politics they promised to sweep out of Washington. Unleashing Mothers for Moral America would seem especially appropriate, since Baker also had a reputation for arranging liaisons of a less political nature between senators and women.131 Pure motherly indignation would appear to flow upward, out of the hearts of women across America toward the crooked world of Democratic insider politicians. The nation needed leadership, order, patriotism, and morality, asserted the Choice narrator, actor Raymond Massey. Visual representations of these values eventually faded into view, mixing images of Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, marching soldiers, a waving U.S. flag, and rosy-cheeked white school children. Mothers for Moral America issued a press release announcing the film’s airing in late October, claiming that Choice was “conceived by” MFMA (no pun intended by author). The entire project, explained national project director Mrs. Hiram Houghton of Iowa City, “was made possible by the contributions of mothers throughout the nation who are concerned with the moral decay infesting all parts of our land and our society.”132 The name “Goldwater” appeared nowhere, which, reported the Los Angeles Times, represented a deliberate omission. The Times exposed a memo from the campaign advising all Mothers groups to avoid mentioning their formal ties to Citizens for Goldwater-Miller.133 Choice counted as one of the biggest blunders of the campaign. Early showings to the press, which described the film as sick and profane, forced the candidate to cancel the project and denounce it as “racist.” Choice left the campaign in disarray, with some supporters disappointed by the vulgarity of the film and others angered by Goldwater’s decision to back down from the moral statement he put forward.134 Mrs. Richard Coveney of New York wrote to the Moral Mothers that she had been following the Goldwater campaign, “hoping to find in it, for myself, some respect for his platform and adherents.” While she “deplored corruption in our government,” she expressed disgust with the fearmongering she saw in Choice: “A dirty film disqualifies its distributors from ‘moral leadership.’”135 Others sought to revive the project after the election. Two conservative groups, the Liberty Lobby and newly formed United Republicans of America sold Choice, claiming that Democrats were responsible for burying a legitimate political project by unfairly crying “smut.” The Liberty Lobby

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advertised Choice as the campaign film “your campaign contributions paid for but you never saw. . . .”136 e Mothers for Moral America may have been a faulty invention, but the Goldwater public relations men had their pulse on the conservative movement. MFMA reflected a political reality: women activists indeed represented a major grassroots force within the conservative movement, one tripping over itself to help the Arizonan. By the mid-1960s, not only were conservatives perfectly comfortable with that word, “movement,” but realized that to build one required women.137 Goldwater galvanized female volunteers, but his campaign became recognized as a “movement” in ways that Hoover’s and Eisenhower’s did not because of the well-established grassroots political edifice that Citizens for Goldwater-Miller proved able to exploit. Women not only did the volunteer work that created this edifice, but shaped the movement’s culture as well. Building upon activist projects of the 1950s, women joined the John Birch Society, led its chapter meetings, opened and staffed conservative bookstores, and wrote music. Since conservative men regarded women as more spiritual, moral, and communitarian, they welcomed female activism that blended maternal outrage and feminine graciousness. Concerns about youth involvement in subversive campus subcultures demanded maternal influence in the movement. The support of women affirmed the purity and goodness of a cause, from the perspective of conservatives, because women were intuitive—a virtue that extended into the realm of political judgment. The morality campaign did not become Goldwater’s “missile gap,” as Cliff White had hoped, but its mix of spiritual, emotional, and patriotic overtones would soon guide conservatism into a more triumphant phase. The “religious right” or “pro-family movement” gradually replaced anticommunism, with Christianity as the core organizing principle of the American right. Goldwater generated enthusiasm among conservatives for federal and state enforcement of “morality.” Over the 1970s and 1980s, Catholics and Protestants organized through their churches to fight against the Equal Rights Amendment, Roe vs. Wade, secular education, and gay rights. Women would also come to play a more prominent role in American conservatism with each passing decade, thanks mainly to feminism. Not only did the women’s movement bring greater attention to female activists on the right who fought to prevent “women libbers” from representing them, but by confronting gender discrimination in American society, it also opened doors to conservative women in education, politics, business, and professional worlds that have given them the necessary stature to advance themselves to higher

­168  •  Chapter V political office on the right. Those opportunities have also allowed conservative women to attack the feminist movement that worked diligently to remove the barriers of sexism in front of them. The work of contemporary conservative women might seem self-defeating if evaluated merely on the basis of a feminist versus antifeminist fault line dividing women in American politics, but conservative women find it easy to ignore that line to focus on the bonds of motherhood that unite them instead.

Conclusion

What happened to the Cold War conservative female activist? Did the 1968 burial of the “Little Old Lady in Tennis Shoes” effigy in Pasadena produce its intended effect, to shuffle a generation of petition-wielding housewives off the political landscape? Right-wing women who earned their flag pins writing newsletters, making phone calls, organizing study groups, and running conservative bookstores have become an endangered species, indeed, but the political ideology they created not only endured, it has grown more powerful. Conservative bookstores have disappeared, membership in the Federation of Republican Women has significantly declined, and few Americans know what the John Birch Society is, but conservative women have for decades been repackaging housewife populism to meet the political exigencies of their times. Reconfigured to confront unwelcome changes wrought by globalism, post-industrialization, multiculturalism, feminism, and the sexual revolution, the iconic “conservative sex” of the 1950s has survived into the twenty-first century. Reflecting on the long durée of housewife populism not only offers insight into the evolution of American conservatism, but brings an awareness to historiographic problems created by relying on feminism as the main, if not only, female intellectual tradition driving the progressive trajectory of U.S. women’s history. As a force that has changed the modern world, indeed partly defining the very meaning of “modern,” feminism demands the larger share of attention from political scholars. But could it be that feminism has become more than that? Has it become a central logic for determining the value of female political identity well beyond the scope of its own historical influence, in ways that possibly distort our understanding of women’s history by simplifying representations of human action? Mothers of Conservatism brings an awareness to feminism’s role as the spine of U.S. women’s historiography by rejecting “false consciousness,” the Marxist concept elaborated upon by feminist critiques of patriarchy to describe the inability of subjects to recognize the true combination of political, social, and economic forces determining the circumstances of their lives. While accepting that my conservative subjects were ignorant and in denial of circumstances I identify as fact (i.e., how they made the federal government more powerful and how they misidentified communists), I am more interested in what they came to recognize as fact. This work, in other words, does not deny the existence of false consciousness but argues against its value as a conceptual tool for political historians.1 False consciousness, I argue, fails

­170  •  Conclusion to serve scholars interested in the analysis of political change over time because the process of becoming political, in all instances, necessarily involves accepting, refusing, and making ideology. It is far less useful for our understanding of conservatism to evaluate the true or false combination of political, social, and economic forces shaping the consciousness of its adherents than examining how those subjects came to see the world as they actually saw it—how they made their reality—and how that reality shaped the material lives of everyone else around them. Conservative women of the Cold War era created the political reality they knew through a variety of discursive practices at the center of this investigation, from newsletters and speech making to study groups and bookstores. They world they inhabited hung in the balance between concentrated and localized power structures, where freedom depended on their ability to wrestle the former on behalf of the latter. In collaboration with other conservatives, they championed churches, parents’ groups, real estate boards, and taxpayer associations as representative institutions of a local community ideal against perceived authoritarian threats from outsider government elites. Within the cosmic struggle they imagined between the forces of centralization and home rule, conservative women cultivated an activist role for themselves as the defenders of the community. Housewife populism thus developed in dialectic with the political subjectivity of grassroots women on the right, shaping how domesticity, femininity, and the state related to each other in the conservative mind. The idealization of local community also sustained ideas about political abilities innate to women. Heightened fears of an invisible enemy within that subverted society through seemingly innocent people, institutions, and policies elevated the importance of communist detection as a skill. Adapting longstanding ideas about women’s natural gifts of patience, intuition, and common sense to McCarthy-era necessities, female activists undertook red hunting as a political contribution that they saw themselves well suited to make to the nation. The new “brainwashing” discourse unleashed in the post–World-War II era also deepened the involvement of women, who felt it was their maternal duty to protect the delicate minds of children from those who would use their position in the education or psychology fields to politically program youngsters. Conservative women, overwhelmingly white and middle to upper class, believed that the flexibility of their schedules, relationships to children, and daily involvement in community life made them ideal anticommunists. Such advantages, they reasoned, tuned them into nefarious activities that men were too busy at work to see.

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In their relentless defense of community-level decision making, women on the right also stoked populist outrage that grew more pronounced in conservative protest after World War II. In campaigns against progressive educators, programs, and federal funding, they denounced administrators as elitist outsiders who aimed to use children for social experiments designed at far-away Ivy League institutions. To stem the problems they associated with social decline in the United States, they advocated for stronger parental and clerical influence in the lives of children. Although many of the women involved in these battles were born, raised, and college-educated in other parts of the country, they developed an insider-outsider dichotomy—a sharp community boundary line between them on the inside and their opponents on the outside. This housewife populism contributed to the conservative movement’s identification with the everyman, real people, and middle America. Women on the right also spoke out as taxpayers, discursively linking the interests of property holders and families in an alliance against state intervention. Among the most important lessons to be drawn from this history of conservative women concerns their ability to manage ideological ambiguity. Feminist historians have taught us that the right to vote was won in the 1910s with a careful balance between seemingly contradictory arguments for sameness and difference. Women demanded the ballot on the basis of universal, democratic, egalitarian ideals stemming from the Enlightenment—on the principle that they should have the same rights as men. Yet they also argued that womanly virtues made them worthy of the vote, that their feminine instincts for morality, spirituality, and purity would uplift the corrupt world of politics. To understand the history of suffrage is to banish negative associations with contradiction and make room for apprehension of its strategic value as a tool in political consciousness formation, what Nancy Cott describes as “functional ambiguity.” “The nineteenth-century woman movement,” she concludes, “thus deeded to its successors a Janus face.”2 Perhaps we would see a long and politically diverse line of successors to the woman movement if we also applied Cott’s concept of “functional ambiguity” to women on the right. Equal Rights Amendment opponents who valorized full-time motherhood, yet worked as full-time activists, and religious conservatives who decry every form of state intervention except those that serve to enforce their Christian ideals exhibit what critics unsympathetically describe as “cognitive dissonance.” Our understanding of these political actors would be better served, however, with an analytic approach that starts rather than ends at that determination. Such an approach, like that applied to the wise “Janus face” of feminists, would seek to ascertain how women resolved and deployed such dissonance for their own political purposes.

­172  •  Conclusion The endurance of housewife populism stands as a testament to the power of this ambiguity. A distinguishing characteristic of the post-1970 “new right” was the vehemence of its attacks against the feminist movement. Make no mistake: this “backlash” was real. Resentment of “women libbers” by new-right women has been well documented, but the starting point of backlash narratives, always the feminist movement, ignore other ideological currents that contributed to the powerful political momentum behind the social and cultural agenda of the new right, including housewife populism. Like the feminists they attacked, conservative women participated in an organic process of reviving, reformulating, and building upon traditions started by political foremothers. The “pro-family” agenda of the late twentieth century included familiar advocacy on behalf of parental authority over the state. Bridging multiple generations of women, housewife populism coursed through the defensive, maternal, communitarian rhetoric of these new-right women. In campaigns against abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment, activists represented themselves as champions of real, ordinary people battling a rarified class of secular elites so entombed in the trappings of their privilege that they lost touch with the most basic principles of morality. They also introduced stronger Christian elements into the feminine political styles of earlier generations. A driving theme of the anti-ERA campaign, according to historians John Mathews and Jane DeHart, was the danger of “losing of one’s children” to educators and government officials who meddled in the relationships between parents, sons, and daughters. Critiques of “forced equality” adapted female traditions of antistatist protest for the new battles, equating the ERA with other unwanted state interventions into the family, including government-sponsored desegregation. One woman accused ERA ratificationists of trying to “desexegrate” society.3 The organization Concerned Women for America (CWA) characterized threats posed by feminists to the family in antistatist and anti-internationalist terms. In Who But a Woman, CWA founder Bevery LeHaye devoted an entire chapter to “Exposing the Children’s Rights Movement,” which argued that internationalist organizations like UNESCO and UNICEF promoted state control of the family. “The UN believes that it is the government’s responsibility to take care of children, from the cradle to the grave.”4 With “National Sovereignty” ranking as a core commitment that CWA still vows to maintain today, the organization has updated its policy agenda to address circumstances of the twenty-first century by supporting legislation for “strong borders” in the interest of curtailing “illegal immigration.” Phyllis Schlafly, whose Eagle Forum established a long and continuing pattern of attacking the United Nations, World Health Organization, and other international organizations for threatening U.S. sovereignty, now targets “globalism,” described by Schlafly as

Conclusion  •  173

socialism enforced through global regulatory structures like the World Trade Organization.5 Housewife populism marshals women against globalism today much as it did to mobilize them against communism in the 1950s and 1960s. Opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment also assumed the populist inflections that Cold War conservatives added to political discourse. Antiratificationists represented themselves as “the people in arms,” according to John Mathews and Jane DeHart.6 The fearsome and deeply entrenched antielitism in conservative political culture of the Cold War era endured, fueling the popular notion that feminist demands for “rights” and “equality” would improve the lives of privileged women only. Regular wives and mothers, on the other hand, needed the armor of patriarchy and sex-based protectionist legislation that, opponents believed, the Equal Rights Amendment would undo. The former feminist and ERA ratificationist Sylvia Ann Hewlitt published A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America in 1986 when she became convinced that the amendment would undermine the interests of “blue-collar” women. Historian and Schlafly biographer Don Critchlow writes that opposition to the ERA fueled sentiment among Republicans that the GOP was the party of the “little guy, the regular American Joe and his wife.”7 Housewife populism continues to shape conservative beliefs about women’s importance to society and American politics, as the career of Alaska’s former governor, Sarah Palin, illustrates.8 The self-professed “hockey mom” who attracted widespread support from the conservative base of the GOP when she ran for vice president in 2008 spoke in a thick provincial accent on behalf of “Joe Six Pack.”9 Palin wielded her familiarity to attack Presidential candidate Barack Obama as a dangerous elitist-outsider. Dressed impeccably, with a captivating smile, she called him a socialist and warned that he was “palling around with terrorists.”10 Though this strategy failed among the general electorate, Palin succeeded in raising a new criticism about her opponent, the African-American son of a Kenyan father and white American mother—that he was a mysterious candidate who appeared too quickly on the national political scene for voters to really know him well enough to make him commander in chief. In contrast to the years that Obama attracted the public’s attention as senator, “Sarah!” became a known quantity to her admirers overnight. Palin could attack Obama aggressively, wearing hunting credentials as a badge of honor, and joke about lipstick on a pig without compromising her femininity because gender ideology on the right had long been reinforcing displays of folksiness and antielitist tough talk as appropriate female political behavior, especially on behalf of the family and community, since the 1940s. After Barack Obama won election in 2008, Palin’s populist style carried over into the conservative Tea Party movement, an alliance of organizations

­174  •  Conclusion and bloggers that emerged in opposition to government-sponsored economic stimulus, health-care reform, and numerous other grievances directed against the Democratic administration and Congress. The movement has served as a conduit for housewife populist outrage that spiked when liberals seized power in 2009 and 2010 after eight years of the conservative George Bush administration. As journalist Hanna Rosin noted in 2010, women dominate the Tea Party. Polls indicated that women represent 45 to 55 percent of the membership and an even greater share of the leadership positions. Six of the eight Tea Party Patriots board members, who also serve as national coordinators for the movement, are women; so are fifteen of the twenty-five state coordinators. At a summer 2010 gathering of the abortion-opposing organization Susan B. Anthony List, Palin identified the women’s empowerment trend on the right as a “conservative feminist identity.”11 Conservative feminists? Would Susan B. Anthony, as political writer Katha Pollitt has suggested, “roll in her grave” if she discovered a legacy that included Sarah Palin and the audience cheering the Alaska ex-governor’s words?12 Probably, but then again, who knows how she would have reacted to the 1970s feminist group Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.). As oxymoronic as the expression “conservative feminist” appears, its logic lies in the tribute that conservative women should properly pay, not just to Susan B. Anthony, but to her more radical counterparts as well—to the Alice Pauls, bell hookses, and Kate Milletts. Conservative women have been able to hold public office because of feminist pressure for antidiscrimination legislation that opened doors for women in education, the professions, the business world, and politics—legislation that antifeminist women opposed vigorously. The Susan B. Anthony List illustrates how the process of creating a conservative feminist consciousness is, indeed, a project of cognitive dissonance, selective memory, and mythmaking. Such a project invites attack by attention to its fault lines. But the political effectiveness of such attacks has a statute of limitations because they draw our attention from the analysis of how internal ambiguity and contradiction gets resolved over time to the advantage of political actors.

Appendix Conservative Bookstores Operating in Southern California in the 1960’s

The conservative bookstores featured in figure 5.3 have come to light mainly through research in historical newspapers, archived political literature, and personal papers.  All thirty-six establishments plotted on the Southern California map appear below in alphabetical order, with a full record of the sources that document their emergence in the early 1960s. All American Books (Pasadena). Robert Pears, “Dr. Poling Tells Why He Broke,” Evening American (Phoenix), 16 Mar. 1964, Radical Right Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford. Altadena Americanism Center. Marie Koenig, “Altadena Americanism Center, Press Release,” 1964, Marie Koenig Collection, Huntington Library, San Marin Marino. Americanism Center of Long Beach. Mrs. Sam Woolington, “Dear Fellow Americans,” [letter to prospective Americanism Center of Long Beach contributors], 1965, Community Relations Committee, Urban Archives, California State University, Northridge (hereinafter cited as CRC). American Freedom Center (Glendale). Patriotic Program Log, Coast Federal Savings Free Enterprise Department, [ca. 1962–64], Ogden Scoville Collection, Seaver Center for Western Research, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (hereinafter cited as Patriotic Program Log). Anti-Communist Information Center (Degnan Blvd, Los Angeles). Patriotic Program Log. Betsy Ross Book Shop (Van Nuys). Dee Dickson, “They’ll Fight Reds Through Books,” Los Angeles Herald Express, 20 July 1961, CRC. Citizens Information Center (Whittier). Patriotic Program Log.

­176  •  Appendix Citrus Americanism Center (Covina). “Citrus Americanism Center,” [newsletter and booklist], Aug. 1964, CRC. Con-del Books (Garden Grove). “Dealer Puzzled by Ouster,” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 26 Sept. 1962, A-3, CRC. Dayton Seiler’s All-American Books (Pasadena). Patriotic Program Log. Downy Americanism Center. Main Street Americanism Center, Standard Daily Journal, 21 Feb. 1962, Jane Crosby Personal Collection, San Juan Capistrano. Eagle Rock Americanism Center. Main Street Americanism Center, Standard Daily Journal, July 28, 1962, Jane Crosby Personal Collection, San Juan Capistrano. Fowler Brothers Books (6th Street, Los Angeles). Patriotic Program Log. Freedom Forum Bookstore (Whittier). U.S. Congress, Senate, Special Preparedness Subcommittee, Committee on Armed Services, Hearings on Military Cold War Education and Speech Review Politics, 87th Cong., 2nd Sess., 16, 24 May, 4, 7, 8 June 1962, 3042, Knox Mellon Collection, UCLA Special Collections, Los Angeles (hereinafter cited as Hearings on Military Cold War Education). The Good Word Book Stop (Santa Monica). Patriotic Program Log. Heritage Bookshop (Van Nuys). Project Alert, “Visit the Bookstore in Your Area,” Dec. 1961, CRC. House of Betram (Playa del Rey). Patriotic Program Log. Liberty Bell Book Shop (Pomona). Patriotic Program Log. Marriner’s Book Store (Laguna Beach). Patriotic Program Log. Minuteman (Pasadena). Hearings on Military Cold War. M&E Stationers (Whittier). Patriotic Program Log.

Conservative Bookstores  •  177

Orange County Freedom Forum (Anaheim, Costa Mesa, Fullerton, Garden Grove). Patriotic Program Log. Patrick Henry Bookstore (North Hollywood). Patriotic Program Log. The Patriot (Arcadia, Downy, Glendale). Patriotic Program Log. Poor Richard’s Book Shop (Hollywood). “Right-Wingers Hit on ‘Quote’ by Khrushchev,” Los Angeles Times, 9 Mar. 1952, CRC. Pro-Blue Book Shop (Torrance). Community Relations Committee, “Republican Communications Corporation,” [report], 14 July 1965, CRC. South Pasadena Americanism Center. Dee Dickson, “Americanism Center Sets Up Shop,” Los Angeles Herald Express, 18 Dec. 1961, CRC. Temple City Letter Shop. Patriotic Program Log. Tree of Liberty (Long Beach). Project Alert, “Visit the Bookstore in Your Area,” Dec. 1961, CRC. Valley Book Store (Montrose). Patriotic Program Log. Wilshire Americanism Center (632 S. Westmoreland Ave, Los Angeles). “Americanism Center to Hold Open House,” Valley Times, 12 Mar. 1964, CRC.

Notes

Introduction 1.  This study of conservative women in Southern California joins a body of literature on female political activism in the 1950s that, collectively, demands a reconsideration of the iconic 1950s housewife. As these histories accumulate they further challenge popular understandings about women’s engagement with domesticity, community, child-rearing, politics, and wage work while illuminating the complexity of women’s personal, intellectual, and sexual relationships. See Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945–1964 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminist Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ:: Princeton University Press, 2004); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 2.  See Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 21–41. 3.  For more on Republican Motherhood see Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Ruth Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 11 (Autumn 1987), 37–57; and Rosemarie Zagarri, “Morals, Manners and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44, no. 2 (June 1992), 192–216. For a related discussion of “Republican Wives” see Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Oct. 1987), 689–721. For more on how notions of female patriotism were invoked and reconstituted over the nineteenth century, see Elizabeth R. Varon, “Tippecanoe and the Ladies, Too: White Women and Party Politics in Antebellum Virginia,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (Sept. 1995), 494–521; and Rosemarie Zagarri, “Gender and the First Party System,” in Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg, eds., Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 135–56. 4.  For more on maternalism, see Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Womanly Duties and the Origins of the Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (1990), 1076–108; Molly LaddTaylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World:

­180  •  Notes to Introduction Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); Sonya Michel and Robyn Rosen, “The Paradox of Maternalism: Elizabeth Lowell Putnam and the American Welfare State,” Gender & History 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1992); and Richard Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 5.  Koven and Michel, “Womanly Duties,” 1179. 6.  Annalise Orleck, “‘We Are That Mythical Thing Called the Public:’ Militant Housewives during the Great Depression,” in Vicki Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History (New York: Routledge, 2000), 376. 7.  Koven and Michel, “Womanly Duties,” 1179. 8. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 109. 9. Cott, Grounding, 150. 10. Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 2, 12. 11.  Chapter 1 of this book offers a lengthier treatment of these attacks on progressivism by right-wing women. For more on women and the first red scare, see Kirsten Delegard, “Women Patriots: Female Activism and the Politics of American Anti-Radicalism, 1919–1935” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1999); Francesca Morgan, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood (Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 2001). 12. Temma Kaplan, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910–1918,” Signs 7, no. 3, Spring 1982, 545–66. 13.  For more on the evolution of conservatism as a movement in the 1950s and 1960s, see Donald Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5–7; George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996); Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4–13; Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy: Barry Goldwater’s Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor,” Journal of American History 95, no. 3 (Dec. 2008), 678–709; Russell Kirk, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Conservatism (New York: Devin-Adair Company, 1957), 8. 14.  For more on anticommunist women and postwar conservatism, see Michelle Nickerson, “Domestic Threat: Women, Gender, and Conservatism in Postwar Los Angeles,” (PhD diss, Yale University, 2003), 11–12; Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6. 15.  For more on women and postwar conservatism, see McGirr, Suburban Warriors; Critchlow, Phyllis Schafly; Mary C. Brennan, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade Against Communism (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2008).

Notes to Introduction  •  181 16.  Though Stanley Mosk claims to have first identified the “little old ladies,” the Yolo County, California, Winters Express, 12 Aug. 1999, credits Howard Jewel with coining the phrase; Robert Jablon, “California Supreme Court justice remembered as ‘legal giant,’ ” Associated Press, 27 June 2001, http://cagenweb.com/yolo/yolobits/ja-jh.htm. 17.  Frontier, Aug. 1964; for an angry reader response to the “vicious cartoon,” see “Letters,” Frontier, Sept. 1964. 18.  “Crown Festival,” Los Angeles Times, 1 Dec. 1968, M9. 19.  The Senate Fact-Finding Report on Un-American Activities that investigated the John Birch Society estimated 5,000–6,000 members across the state in 1963. Scholars estimate that JBS membership in Orange County alone climbed to about 6,000 in the mid-1960s. Political scientist Barbara Shell Stone’s study of the John Birch Society in Orange County determined that 42.9 percent of Birch recruits in 1961 were housewives. If we conservatively assume that housewives = women and other categories = men, and if we take 5,000 as the Southern California figure for John Birch Society members, 43 percent of the 5,000 would be conservatively rounded down to 2,100 housewives. The Fact-Finding Committee also estimated that as many as 60,000 Californians were “oriented toward the Birch program.” Orientation “toward the Birch program” can be read as conservative anticommunist. If we place 50,000 of those conservatives in Southern California, then 43 percent of the 50,000 would be conservatively rounded down to 21,000 housewives. Fact-finding committees are historically wrong. As the mistakes of the House Un-American Activities Committee of the 1950s and the state level “mini-HUACS” demonstrated, they typically ran loose with numbers to exaggerate threats. If we also take into account attendance records at conservative rallies, reported by monitors for the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish National Council in Los Angeles, the number of less-activist participants in the conservative movement is probably closer to 20,000–25,000. I extrapolate those numbers from attendance reports at regular sports arenas of 4,000–17,000 that conservative Fred Schwarz filled for his Schools of Anti-Communism in the early to mid-1960s. If we settle on 20,000–25,000 less-activist participants in Southern California as a figure between inflated government estimates and attendance at Schwarz rallies, 43 percent would mean that 8,600–10,750 were “housewives.” California Legislature, Twelfth Report of the Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities (Sacramento, 1963), 20; Kurt Schuparra, Triumph of the Right: The Rise of the California Conservative Movement, 1945–1966 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 50, 81; Barbara Shell Stone, “The John Birch Society of California” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, Department of Political Science, 1963), 64; Community Relations Committee, “A Report on the Southern California School of Anti-Communism, Aug. 28–Sept. 1, 1961,” 6, Community Relations Committee Collection, Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge. 20.  Vicki Ruiz, “Nuestra América: Latino History as American History,” Journal of American History 93, no. 3 (Dec. 2006), 670. 21.  See Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

­182  •  Notes to Chapter I University Press, 2005); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Chapter I : Patriotic Daughters and Isolationist Mothers: Conservative Women in the Early Twentieth Century 1.  Transcript from 22 Aug. 1950 County Supervisors Meeting, John Anson Ford Collection, Huntington Library, 1. 2.  “Crowd Protests U.N. Flag Use, Plants U.S. Emblem,” Los Angeles Examiner 20 Dec. 1950, Regional History Collection, University of Southern California; “Irate Women Demand U.N. Flag Removal,” Los Angeles Times, 20 Dec. 1950, A1. 3.  Arthur E. Case to Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, 24 Aug. 1950, John Anson Ford Collection, Huntington Library, 1. 4.  Gregory L. Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 3–4. 5.  Kirsten Delegard, “Women Patriots: Female Activism and the Politics of American Anti-Radicalism, 1919–1935” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1999), 446–47. 6.  Ibid., 439. 7.  Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood (Columbia: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2001), 87–88. 8.  Robert Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers, 1955), 58–59. 9.  Francesca Morgan, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 43–45. 10.  Delegard, “Women Patriots,” 83–84. 11. Nielson, Un-American Womanhood, 50. 12.  Ibid., 43; Delegard, “Women Patriots,” 177–87. 13.  Delegard, “Women Patriots,” 192. 14.  Ibid., 186–87. 15.  Ibid., 38; Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood, 29–30. 16.  Delegard, “Women Patriots,” 39. 17.  Women’s rights activists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries referenced the movement with the singular “woman,” a modifier that captured, notes Nancy Cott, “the unity of the female sex.” Beginning with the 1910s, however, the word “Feminism” (at first capitalized) came into greater usage with its revolutionary implications, gradually replacing the more “archaic” “woman movement.” See Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 3. 18. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood, 35–36. 19.  Delegard, “Women Patriots,” 433. 20.  Ibid., 463–64.

Notes to Chapter I  •  183 21.  Ibid., 465–68. 22.  Jean Bethke Elshtian, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 16–17. 23.  Ibid., 194–95, 197–99, 188, 200. 24.  Ibid., 188, 194. 25.  Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs 10, no. 4 (Summer 1985), 658–77. 26.  Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism,” Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (Sept. 1991), 560. 27.  Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 142; Sklar, “Hull House,” 671. 28.  Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 74. 29.  Gordon, “Black and White Visions,” 574, 576. 30.  Susan Zeiger, “Finding a Cure for War: Women’s Politics and the Peace Movement in the 1920s,” Journal of Social History 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1990), 72. 31. Elshtain, Jane Addams, 219–20. 32.  Ibid., 223, 227. 33.  Zeiger, “Finding a Cure for War,” 69–70. 34.  Delegard, “Women Patriots,” 458–59. 35.  Hermine Schwed, Confessions of a Parlor Radical: Told by Herself (Washington, DC: National Association for Constitutional Government, 1922), 11. 36. Ibid., 14–15. 37. Cott, Grounding, p. 44; Susan Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 4. 38. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, 195. Several women’s historians have called attention to a great irony of the antisuffrage movement—that for all its insistence upon women’s natural place being the home, the campaign groomed female activists who remained in politics long after the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. See Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 216–17; Elna C. Green, “From Antisuffragism to Anti-Communism: The Conservative Career of Ida M. Darden,” Journal of Southern History 65, no. 2 (May 1999): 313. 39. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood, 65. 40. Cott, Grounding, 30. 41.  Ibid., 37, 60. 42.  Ibid., 68–69. 43.  Michel and Rosen, “Paradox of Maternalism, 378–81. 44.  “Louis Downtown School,” New York Times, 16 June 1895, 21. 45.  Hermine Schwed, “Tales for Very Little People,” ibid., 5 Dec. 1909, LS41; Hermine Schwed, “Childhood Books for Various Ages,” ibid., 10 Apr. 1910, LI28.

­184  •  Notes to Chapter I 46.  “Making Good Citizens of the Foreign-Born,” ibid., 28 Oct. 1917, SM5. 47.  “Hunting for Enemy Aliens,” ibid., 22 July 1918, 7. 48.  Robert W. Dimand, “Nineteenth-Century American Feminist Economics: From Caroline Dall to Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” The American Economic Review 90, no. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the One Hundred Twelfth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May, 2000), 481–82. 49.  Delegard, “Women Patriots,” 431. 50. Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 220. 51.  Ibid. , 239. 52.  Delegard, “Women Patriots,” 268. 53. Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work, 170–71. 54.  Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 126. 55.  Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (New York: Verso, 1997), xiv. 56.  Ibid., 6. 57.  Ibid., 4. 58.  Clyde P. Weed, The Nemesis of Reform: The Republican Party During the New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 27–28. 59.  Ibid., 38–41. 60.  Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2009), 10–13; Frederick Rudolph, “The American Liberty League, 1934–1940,” American Historical Review 56, no. 1 (Oct., 1950), 19–21, 28. 61.  June Melby Benowitz, Days of Discontent: American Women and Right-Wing Politics, 1933–1945 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 16–17; Catherine Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 62. 62. Benowitz, Days of Discontent, 16. 63. Rymph, Republican Women, 62. 64. Benowitz, Days of Discontent, 17. 65. Rymph, Republican Women, 62, 72. 66.  Ibid., 57–60. 67.  Ibid., 61. 68.  Louise Ward Watkins and Mary Gentry Cornett, interview, ca. 1936, Louise Ward Watkins Collection, Huntington Library, 1; Watkins’s autobiography indicates that she resigned as president of Southern California Republican Women to campaign for Alfred Landon in 1936. Louise Ward Watkins, “Autobiography” (unpublished MS), Book III, 31. 69.  Watkins and Cornett, interview, 2. 70.  “Americanism,” speech by Louise Ward Watkins to Canoga Park Women’s Club, Canoga Park Club News, ca. 1935, Louise Ward Watkins Collection, Huntington Library. 71.  Albert Jay Nock, “Isaiah’s Job,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1936, 641. 72. Benowitz, Days of Discontent, 21.

Notes to Chapter I  •  185 73. Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right: The Mothers’ Movement and World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 20–21. 74.  Ibid., 26. 75.  Ibid., 25. 76. Benowitz, Days of Discontent, 118–19, 18–20; Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 57–58. 77. Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 140–41. 78.  Ibid., 138. 79.  Michael Denning has noted, however, that the leftist populist turn was rhetorical rather than ideological. Although the new “Popular Front” instituted a more expansive approach to activism, it nevertheless remained a “class-based” labor movement even as it reached out with its message beyond the working classes. Denning, Cultural Front, xviii , 124–25. 80. For more on populism and the conservative movement, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 165–94; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 187–216. 81. Kazin, Populist Persuasion, 131–32; Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 32. 82. Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 141. 83.  Ibid., 104. 84. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29–30. 85.  U.S. Congress, Senate, Senator Burton K. Wheeler speaking against Lend-Lease, 77th Cong., 1st Sess., Congressional Record 87 (12 Jan. 1941), Appendix, 178–79. 86.  “Lindbergh Sees a ‘Plot’ for War,” New York Times, 12 Sept. 1941, 2. 87. Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 45. 88. Ibid. 89.  Laura McEnaney, “He-Men and Christian Mothers: The America First Movement and the Gendered Meanings of Patriotism and Isolationism,” Diplomatic History 18 (Winter, 1994), 49. 90. Ibid. 91. Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 1. 92.  Ibid., 47–48. 93.  Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 6–7; Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 58. 94.  Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate (Baton Rouge and London: University of Louisiana Press, 1988), 33–35, 39–40, 46–47, 65. 95.  Ibid., 140–44. 96. Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 36. 97.  Ibid., 36–37. 98.  McEnaney, “He-Men and Christian Mothers,” 51. 99. Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 77. 100. Benowitz, Days of Discontent, 35. 101.  McEnaney, “He-Men and Christian Mothers,” 52.

­186  •  Notes to Chapter II 102. Benowitz, Days of Discontent, 46. 103.  McEnaney, “He-Men and Christian Mothers,” 51. 104.  Ibid., 52. 105. Ibid. 106. Benowitz, Days of Discontent, 41. 107. Ibid. 108.  Annalise Orleck, “‘We Are That Mythical Thing Called the Public’: Militant Housewives during the Great Depression,” in Vicki Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History (New York: Routledge, 2000), 376. 109.  Ibid., 379–86. 110.  Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 70. 111. Benowitz, Days of Discontent, 43–44. 112. Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 98. 113.  Ibid., 101–5. 114.  Ibid., 101. 115. Jeansonne, Minister of Hate, 99–100. 116. Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 92, 98. 117.  Cumulative Report Re: Helen Courtois (22 Jan. 1951), Community Relations Committee Collection, Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge (hereinafter cited as CRC). Paul Coates, “Here’s a Tip for the Mail Haters,” Los Angeles Times, 11 July 1965, CRC; Paul Coates, “New Vein of Extremist Poison,” ibid., 27 June 1965, CRC. 118.  Keep America Committee, “Are You an Anti-Semite?,” Dec. 1951, reprinted May 1954, Radical Right Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA. 119.  Jocki Whiteman to Arthur B. Berman, Regarding Mrs. L. E. Benge’s New Club, 17 Sept. 1947, CRC. Chapter II: All Politics Was Local: Grassroots Conservatism in Postwar Los Angeles 1.  William Deverell, “My America or Yours: Americanization and the Battle for the Youth of Los Angeles,” in Tom Sitton and William Deverell, eds., Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 280–83. 2.  Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 122. 3.  Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 117–18, 127. See also Roger W. Lotchkin, Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 4.  Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 58; Becky M. Nicolaides,

Notes to Chapter II  •  187 My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 188. 5. Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles, 129–30. 6.  Jennifer Louise Burns, “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, 1930–1980” (PhD diss, University of California, Berkeley, 2005), 75; Darren Dochuk, From Biblebelt to Sunbelt: Plainfolk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), XI–XXIV; Sides, 36–56. 7. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (1975; reprint, Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), 3. 8.  F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 200. 9.  Burns, “Goddess of the Market,” 2, 81, 96–97. 10.  Royal Davis, Light on a Gothic Tower: First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, 1867–1967 (Los Angeles: First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, 1967), 140; John Thomas, “Freedom Under Fifield,” The Nation, 22 May 1954. 11. Davis, Light on a Gothic Tower, 140. 12.  Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2009), 73–75. 13. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement, 17–18. 14.  Ibid., 134. 15.  Ibid., 18. 16.  Burns, “Goddess of the Market,” 81; Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement, 17. 17.  The first issue of the Educational Reviewer describes the periodical as “the cooperative project of the business and academic worlds, initiated by a business group.” “The Educational Reviewer,” wrote editor Lucille Cardin Crain,“grew out of the concern of Americans as businessmen and fathers who, conscious of their responsibility in both capacities, became aware of the propaganda for collectivitism. . . .” Lucille Cardin Crain, Educational Reviewer, 15 July 1949, Lucille Cardin Crain Collection, University of Oregon Special Collections and University Archives. 18.  For more on the politics of difference see Michael McGerr, “Political Style and Women’s Power, 1830–1930,”Journal of American History 77, no. 3 (Dec. 1990), 864–85; Paula Baker, “The Domestication of American Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” The American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (June, 1984), 620–47; Estelle Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” Feminist Studies 5, no. 3 (Autumn, 1979), 512–29; Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 19. Catherine Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 5–6. 20.  Jean Ward, “Organize Your Enthusiasm   .  .  .” Los Angeles Examiner, 14 Nov. 1959, Regional History Collection, University of Southern California. 21.  Mrs. Vernon W. Janney, Report of the Los Angeles County Federation of Republican Women’s Clubs: Annual Convention (25 Jan. 1956), National Federation of Republican Women records, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, 1; “New GOP Fashion Set by Women,” Los Angeles Times, 5 Mar. 1956, 2; “Fashion Lunch Planned by GOP in Long Beach,” ibid., 6 Mar. 1956, B3; Letter to Mrs. Peter Gibson, 16 Sept.

­188  •  Notes to Chapter II 1957, National Federation of Republican Women records, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS. 22. Rymph, Republican Women, 138–39. 23.  Jean Ward Fuller, “Organizing Women: Careers in Volunteer Politics and Government Administration,” an oral history conducted Oct. 1977 by Miriam Stein, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 49. 24.  Ibid., 35–37. 25.  Jacqueline R. Braitman, “Legislated Parity: Mandating Integration of Women into California Political Parties, 1930s–1950s,” in Melanie Gustafson, Kristie Miller, and Elisabeth Israels Perry, eds., We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880–1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 180. 26. National Federation of Republican Women, Membership Growth of Statewide Federations, ca. 1943, National Federation of Republican Women records; Mrs. Robert W. Malcauley to Mrs. Paul Jasper, 1949, National Federation of Republican Women records; Program, California Federation of Republican Women, Tenth Biennial Convention (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1957). 27. California Federation of Republican Women, The Federation, Sept. 1954, Scrapbook. 28.  Jean Ward, “Garden Party for Candidates,” Los Angeles Examiner, 14 Aug. 1958, Regional History Collection, University of Southern California. 29.  Fuller, “Organizing Women,” 101–102. 30.  Jo Freeman, A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 158. 31.  “Dinner, Tuesday, Nov. 20, 6:30 p.m. Stuart Hall, Menu   .  .  .” Freedom Club Bulletin, 20 Nov. 1956, Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 32.  “Freedom Club Presents Miss Freda Utley,” Freedom Club Bulletin 8, no. 5 (1 Apr. 1958), 1, Marie Koenig Personal Collection; “Freedom Club Presents Phyllis Schlafly,” Freedom Club Bulletin 18, no. 2 (7 Nov. 1967), 1, Social Protest Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. According to an internal memo circulated by the Community Relations Committee, a civil rights organization affiliated with the Jewish Federation Council that monitored right-wing activities in Los Angeles, women and the elderly dominated the 1952 Freedom Club meeting he or she monitored that evening. “They were all well dressed,” read the report, “and might represent a middle class group.” Aware that he was being watched, Fifield extended a special welcome to spies in the audience, invited them to take notes, and thanked them for their attention. Community Relations Committee, “Report on Reverend Fifield Dinner Meeting—Freedom Clubs—First Congregational Church, April 15, 1952,” Community Relations Committee Collection, hereinafter cited as CRC. The Community Relations Committee was a Jewish defense organization in Los Angeles that monitored right-wing and antiSemitic activity. Their voluminous spy reports are housed in the Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge. 33.  Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 107; “Religion: The Immaculate Heart Rebels,”

Notes to Chapter II  •  189 Time 16 Feb. 1970, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,904171,00.html (last accessed 15 June 2010). 34.  “Public Relations Forum Purpose Described,” The Tidings (13 June 1952), CRC. 35.  Community Relations Committee, American Public Relations Forum Meeting [spy report], 2 May 1952, CRC. 36.  “Minute Women Band to Fight Reds and Pink,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 May 1950, 4F, Personal Collection of Marie Koenig; Don Carlton, Red Scare!: Right-wing Hysteria, Fifties Fascism and Their Legacy in Texas (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1985), 113. 37.  Timothy G. Turner, “Minute Women Leader Begins L.A. Campaign,” Los Angeles Times, 7 Feb. 1952, CRC. 38.  Don Carlton, Red Scare, 111–134. 39.  Community Relations Committee, “Report on Reverend Fifield Dinner Meeting.” 40.  Shana Berstein, “Building Bridges at Home in a Time of Global Conflict: Interracial Cooperation and the Fight for Civil Rights in Los Angeles, 1933–1954,” (PhD diss., Stanford University, Department of History, 2003), 7. 41.  Marjorie Jensen, taped interview with author, Pasadena, CA 15 July 2002, 6–7. 42.  Tuesday Morning Study Club, Program and Directory, 4–5. 43.  Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 72–75, 93. 44. Community Relations Committee, “American Public Relations Forum, Inc.” [report of Aug. 15, 1952 meeting], 1, CRC. 45. Ibid. 46.  American Public Relations Forum, Inc., Bulletin, no. 33 (Aug. 1954), 2, Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 47.  For more on the spiritual dimensions of historical feminine ideals in the United States, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991); Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). For more on the historical relationship between female church activities and female political work, see Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 48.  For more on female moral authority in American politics, see Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Female Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the NineteenthCentury United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 49.  Minute Women of the U.S.A., Inc., newsletter, Apr. 1954, 1, Personal Collection of Marie Koenig. 50. Ibid. 51.  “The Double Standard,” Dan Smoot Speaks, 8 Dec. 1955; “Yalta and MacArthur,” ibid., 28 Oct. 1955. 52.  Charles Lee, “Minute Men of 1970,” New York Times, 4 May 1972, BR 24.

­190  •  Notes to Chapter II 53.  Donald Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 80–83. 54. Ibid, 82. 55.  Analysis of oral history and memoir in this section relies on the work of scholars who scrutinize memory-making processes and assess their epistemological value for historians. See Joan Scott, “Experience as Evidence,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991), 773–797; Allan Megill, “History with Memory, History without Memory,” chap. 1 in Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 17–40. 56.  Jensen, interview, 2. 57.  Census records indicate that households in the Jensens’ neighborhood reported the highest median income for most of Pasadena. Bureau of the Census, Los Angeles and Adjacent Areas: Characteristics of the Population, by Census Tracts, 1950 (Washington, DC, 1950), 40. 58.  Jensen, interview, 2. 59.  Jane Crosby, taped interview with author, San Juan Capistrano, CA, 26 Feb. 2001, 10–11. 60.  Ibid., 9. 61.  Ibid., 8, 9, 10–11. 62.  Lucille Cardin Crain and Anne Burrows Hamilton, Packaged Thinking for Women (New York: American Affairs Pamphlets, 1948), 8, 25; Crosby, interview, 11. 63.  Crosby, interview, 13–14. 64.  “Parley Due March 6–7 on Childhood and Youth,” Los Angeles Times, 9 Jan. 1956, 42; Crosby, interview, 13. 65.  Crosby, interview, 12–13. 66.  Jane Crosby, “To the Editor,” South Pasadena Review, 22 Mar. 1956. 67.  Jensen, interview, 16. 68.  Ibid., 2. 69.  U.S. census records for 1950 indicate that 166 of the 770 women in Jensen’s neighborhood answered that they were “working” most of last week rather than “keeping house” on the questionnaire. The author acknowledges that any of the 71 of those 166 who identified as “private household workers” or “service workers” might have been live-in staff. These statistics therefore suggest that 12 percent or more of the middle and upper class wives and mothers in Jensen’s neighborhood worked in the paid labor force. However, when domestic and service workers are included as part of the neighborhood, 22 percent of women living in the Linda Vista section of Pasadena worked as paid employees. Ten years later, in 1960, 30 percent of all Linda Vista neighborhood women worked in the labor force. If private household and service workers are excluded, that number falls to 25 percent. Forty percent of women in Pasadena that year identified as employed. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census of the United States, Census of the Population: 1950: Census Tract Statistics, Los Angeles, California and Adjacent Area (Washington, DC: GPO, 1952), 115; U.S. Census Bureau, History, 1950

Notes to Chapter II  •  191 (Population), questionnaire, http://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/ index_of_questions/1950_population.html (last accessed 25 Mar. 2011); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Eighteenth Census of the United States, Census of the Population and Housing: 1960: Census Tracts Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1961), 514; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Eighteenth Census of the United States: 1960: Census of Population, vol. 1, Characteristics of Population, pt. 6: California (Washington, DC: GPO, 1961), 224. 70.  Carl F. Braun wrote at least nine books. Maurice L. Rider, “Engineers are Writers Too,” College English 15, no. 5 (Feb. 1954), 292. 71.  Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), ix–xiv, xxiv–xxv. 72.  Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 15–32. 73.  Marie Koenig, taped interview with author, Pasadena, CA., 5 Apr. 2001, 1–2. 74.  Marie Koenig, “Attempt by Communists to Control California’s Movie Industry,” unpublished essay (1985), 1–2, Marie Koenig Personal Collection ; Koenig, interview, 12. 75.  Koenig, interview, 16. 76.  Marie Koenig, “Curriculum Vitae,” 1–4. 77.  Koenig, interview, 18. 78.  Ibid., 16. 79.  Ibid., 12. 80.  Ibid., 18. 81.  Florence Ranuzzi to Gianna Ranuzzi, n.d., Florence Ranuzzi Collection, Huntington Library. 82.  Florence Ranuzzi to Gianna Ranuzzi, n.d., Florence Ranuzzi Collection, Huntington Library. 83. Florence Ranuzzi and Mary Cunningham, taped interview with author, Tehachapi, CA, 11 Feb. 2001, 12. 84.  Ibid., 14. 85.  Ibid., 24. 86.  Ibid., 17, 24, 56, 77, 79. 87.  Marion Miller, I Was a Spy: The Story of a Brave Housewife (New York: BobbsMerrill Co., 1960), 30, 32. 88.  Ibid., 33. 89. Ibid., 38. 90.  Ibid., 35–37. 91.  Ibid., 36. 92.  Ibid., 52. 93.  Ibid., 55–56. 94.  Ibid., 56. 95.  Ibid., 63. 96. Ibid., 78. 97.  Ibid., 193, 199–200.

­192  •  Notes to Chapter III 98.  Ibid., 57. 99.  Marion Miller, “My Dark Days as a Counterspy,” Readers Digest (Nov. 1959), reprint, University of Southern California, 46–50. 100. Miller, I Was a Spy, 223; “Patriotic Group to Hold Meet,” The Beverly Hills Citizen, 12 Nov 1957, 11, CRC. 101.  Community Relations Committee, “Marion Miller’s ‘Jewish’ Radio Program on KTYM” [report], 1966, 1, CRC. 102. Miller, I Was a Spy, 176. 103. Ibid., 146. 104.  Ibid., 221. 105.  J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight it (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1958), 310. Chapter III: Education or Indoctrination? Conservative Female Activism in the Los Angeles Public Schools 1.  CBS-KNX Radio, “Frozen Funds and Heated Words” (Los Angeles, 22 Oct. 1955, transcribed), John Anson Ford Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 7. 2.  “Freedom Study Program to Start,” Los Angeles Times, 4 Jan. 1953, 40. 3.  Jean Preer, “The American Heritage Project: Librarians and the Democratic Tradition in the Early Cold War,” Library and Culture 28: no. 2 (Spring 1993), 176. See Henry Steele Commager, Living Ideas In America (New York: Harper, 1951). 4.  CBS-KNX, “Frozen Funds,” 26. 5.  Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 102–103. 6.  For a history of legislative inquiries, loyalty oaths, and firings at the university level before World War II, see Chapter 1, “‘In the Camp of the People’: Academic Communists in the 1930s and 1940s,” and Chapter 2, “‘Conduct Unbecoming’: The Political Repression of Academic Radicals, 1932–1942,” in Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 63–83. 7.  Thomas Doherty, “A More Sinister ‘Manchurian Candidate,’” Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 47 (2004), B13–B14. See Edward Hunter, Brain-Washing in Red China: the Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951), and Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (New York: Norton, 1963). 8.  Ellen Schrecker notes that the Communist Party had “institutional characteristics” that made the organization vulnerable to the red scare. Since the initial red scare of 1919–1920 that resulted in firings and deportations, the CPUSA tended to act conspiratorially, even when such gestures were unnecessary during the Popular Front era. Also damaging was the “Bolshevik-style command structure,” as well as the initial acceptance of Stalin’s purges. Ellen W. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown , 1998), 20–26. 9.  See Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); See also Ruth Feldstein,

Notes to Chapter III  •  193 Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 40–53. 10.  Education historian Michael E. James published a comparative study of education reform and race relations that examines Pasadena’s battles alongside those of Charlottesville, Virginia. See Michael E. James, Conspiracy of the Good: Civil Rights and the Struggle for Community in Two American Cities, 1875–2000 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005). 11.  Glen Warren Adams, “The UNESCO Controversy in Los Angeles, 1951–1953: A Case Study of the Influence of Right-Wing Groups on Urban Affairs,” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1970), 61–62. 12.  Arthur D. Morse, “Who’s Trying to Ruin our Schools,” McCall’s, Sept. 1951, and “Who’s Trying to Ruin Our Schools? A Variety of Viewpoints on the Year’s Most Discussed Article,” McCall’s, Oct. 1952, Verne LaMotte Collection, Pasadena Historical Museum, Pasadena, CA.; “From Citizens to School Board: Los Angeles Argues about UNESCO,” Life, 15 Sept. 1952, 125–26; “Man Out of a Job,” Life, 11 Dec. 1950, 95–96; “Quandary in Pasadena,” Time, 27 Nov. 1950, 85–87; “The Press,” Time 27 Apr. 1953, 50–51; “Pressures in Los Angeles,” The New Republic, 22 Sept. 1952, 7; “Pasadena Freefor-All,” Newsweek, 27 Nov. 1950, 75; Howard Whitman, “Speak Out, Silent People,” Collier’s, 5 Feb. 1954, 25–28. 13.  David Hulburd, This Happened in Pasadena (New York: Macmillan Co.: 1951), 1, 44–53. 14.  National Commission for the Defense of Democracy through Education of the National Education Association, The Pasadena Story (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1951), 8; Clyde M. Hill and Lloyd N. Morrisett, Pasadena Faces the Future: Abridged Report of the Cooperative Study of the Pasadena City Schools (Pasadena: Geddes Press, 1952), 28–29; Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 140–41. For more on desegregation efforts in Pasadena, see Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 160. 15. Lawrence A. Cremin, Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 216, 279; Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 50. For more on the links between the social sciences and progressive education, see Cremin, Chapter 4 “Science, Darwinism, and Education,” in Transformation, 90–126, and Carlos Kevin Blanton, “They Cannot Master Abstractions, but They Can Be Made Efficient Workers, Race and Class in the Intelligence Testing of Mexican Americans in Texas During the 1920s,” Social Science Quarterly 81, no. 4 (Dec. 2000), 1015. 16. Hulburd, This Happened in Pasadena, 53. 17. Mary Allen, Education or Indoctrination? (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press, 1956); 12–21; Louise H. Padelford and Catherine C. Halberg, “The Case Against Progressive Education,” Fortnight, 28 May 1961, 15–18. 18.  “’Progressives’ Progress,” Time, 31 Oct. 1938, 31; J. Wesley Null, “Education and Knowledge, Not ‘Standards of Accountability’: A Critique of Reform Rhetoric Through

­194  •  Notes to Chapter III the Ideas of Dewey, Bagley, and Schwab,” Educational Studies 34, no. 4 (Winter 2003), 403–406. 19.  Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1943), 262. 20. Hulburd, This Happened in Pasadena, 114–15. 21.  Hill and Morrisett, Pasadena Faces the Future, 151; Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed, 140; Hulburd, This Happened in Pasadena, 79–80. 22.  “What’s Wrong with Our California Schools? Take a Look at Pasadena!” Fortnight 14 (May 1951), 9. 23. Allen, Education or Indoctrination?, 2–53. 24.  Ibid., 74. 25.  Ibid., 73–74. 26.  Letters to Lucille Cardin Crain indicate that Louise Padelford lived on North San Rafael Drive. Census records that the median income in Padelford’s neighborhood was close to $6,000 and that the largest category of residents was in the $10,000 or more income range. Louise Hawkes Padelford to Lucille Cardin Crain, 30 Jan. 1951, Lucille Cardin Crain Collection, University of Oregon Special Collections and University Archives (hereinafter cited as Crain Collection); U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Table 1—Characteristics of the Population by Census Tracts: 1950,” in Los Angeles and Adjacent Area Statistics for Census Tracts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), 40. 27. Hulburd, This Happened in Pasadena, 59, 97; Padelford to Crain, 30 Jan. 1951, Crain Collection. 28.  Letters to Lucille Cardin Crain indicate that Frances Bartlett lived at 328 Palmetto Drive. Contemporary Directory confirms Bartlett’s address, as well as that of the Valley Hunt Club at 520 South Orange Grove Boulevard. Padelford to Crain, 30 Jan. 1951, Crain Collection; Bertha K. Shaw, compiler, Sixteenth Annual Register of the Organizations of Pasadena and Vicinity, revised to 15 Aug. 1950 (Pasadena: Turner & Stevens Co., 1950), 35; U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Table 1—Characteristics of the Population by Census Tracts: 1950, 40; Frances Bartlett to Lucille Cardin Crain, 4 Jan. 1950, Crain Collection; Joan Walker Bennett, interview with author, San Marino, CA, 22 July 2002, 4. 29. Hulburd, This Happened in Pasadena, 55–56, 67, 108–109. 30. Ibid., 63, 70. 31.  Ibid., 95–98. 32.  M. J. Heale, “Red Scare Politics: California’s Campaign Against Un-American Activities, 1940–1970,” Journal of American Studies 20, no. 1 (Apr. 1986), 26. 33.  Lucille Cardin Crain and Anne Burrows Hamilton, Packaged Thinking for Women (New York: American Affairs Pamphlets, 1948), 9. 34.  Bartlett to Crain, 17 July 1950, Crain Collection. 35.  Ibid., 8 Dec. 1950. 36.  Ibid., 3 Mar. 1950. 37.  Frances Bartlett, FACTS in Education July–Aug. 1957, Radical Right Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA (hereinafter cited as Radical Right Collection), 7.

Notes to Chapter III  •  195 38.  National Education Association, Pasadena Story, 18–19. 39. Ibid. 40.  Morse, “Who’s Trying to Ruin Our Schools,” McCall’s, Sept. 1951, Oct. 1952. 41.  James B. Conant, “The Superintendent Was the Target,” Nieman Reports, July 1951, 32–33. First published in New York Times Book Review, 29 Apr. 1951, Ralph O’Leary Collection, Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library (hereinafter referred to as O’Leary Collection). 42.  Padelford and Halberg, “Case Against Progressive Education,” 15–18; Hulburd, This Happened in Pasadena, 58–59. 43.  Padelford and Halberg, “Case Against Progressive Education,” 15. 44.  Ibid., 18. 45.  Padelford and Halberg, “Case Against Progressive Education,” 18. 46. Murray, Progressive Housewife, 118. 47.  Ibid., 119. 48.  Robert M. Hutchins, “The Idea of a College,” in Philippe Dean, ed., Engaging the Humanities at the University of Chicago (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1997), 91. 49.  Padelford and Halberg, “Case Against Progressive Education,” 16. 50. Cremin, Transformation, 343. 51.  Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 117–20. 52.  Padelford and Halberg, “Case Against Progressive Education,” 18. 53. Allen, Education or Indoctrination. 54.  Marjorie Jensen, taped interview with author, Pasadena, CA 15 July 2002, 2. 55. Allen, Education or Indoctrination, back cover. 56.  Ibid., dust jacket. 57.  Ibid., 54, 98–129. 58.  Ibid., inside front and back covers. 59.  Ibid., dust jacket. 60.  Ibid., 159. 61.  Ibid., back cover. 62.  Susan Johnson-Roehr, “HUAC’s Happy Housewives: The Female Witness and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Los Angeles, 1953” (master’s thesis, University of Oregon, 1997), 22–29. 63.  According to historian K. A. Cuordileone, the Cold War “. . . put a premium on hard masculine toughness and rendered anything less than that soft, timid, feminine and as such a real or potential threat to the security of the nation.” Conservative anticommunists characterized liberals as “soft” by accusing them of “twenty years of treason” and targeting homosexual and effeminate men in the Democratic administrations. Liberals responded to these attacks by hardening their image. John F. Kennedy’s “masculine virility” combined with the ambitions of the “New Frontier” to evoke the vigor of earlier Roosevelt presidencies. K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2004), viii. 64. Allen, Education or Indoctrination, 74.

­196  •  Notes to Chapter III 65. Ibid.,159. 66.  Ibid., 83. 67.  Ann Scheid, Pasadena: Crown of the Valley, an Illustrated History (Northridge, CA: Windsor Publications, 1986), 96–98. 68. Scheid, Pasadena, 98, 177–79. 69. Allen, Education or Indoctrination, 149. 70.  Suzanne Croizat Borghai, “Internationalism at the Grassroots: Los Angeles and Its City Schools, 1916–1953,” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, Department of History, 1995), 107 71. Allen, Education or Indoctrination, 148. 72. Ibid. 73.  Robert Welch, “A Letter to the South on Segregation,” One Man’s Opinion, Jan 1, 1958, (reprint, May 1965); Alice Furland, “Will New York’s Melting Pot Boil Over? Racial Strife Increases in the Metropolis of the North,” Human Events, 14 July 1958, Article 4. 74.  Ibid., Article 3. 75.  Don Carleton, Red Scare! Right-wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism and Their Legacy in Texas (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1985), 186; Dean Reed, “Trouble Had Begun Before He Took Job,” Houston Post, 19 July 1953, O’Leary Collection. 76. Carleton, Red Scare, 16. 77.  See Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk, eds., Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 2–18. 78. Carleton, Red Scare, 103. 79.  Ibid., 116, 124. 80.  Ralph O’Leary, “Daughters of Vigilantism,” The Nation 178, no. 2 (9 Jan. 1951), 27. 81.  Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 64–68. 82. Carleton, Red Scare, 188. 83.  Ibid., 191; Robert L. Tyler, “The American Veterans Committee: Out of a Hot War and Into the Cold,” American Quarterly 18, no. 3 (Aug. 1966), 420. 84. Although the AVC initially attracted communists, red-scare pressures led to anticommunist purges and factionalism by the end of the decade. Tyler, “The American Veterans Committee,” 422–36. 85.  Ibid., 186. 86.  Reed, “Trouble Had Begun.” 87. Carleton, Red Scare, 126–27, 128–31, 222. 88.  Ibid., 201–202. 89.  James E. Russell, “Spotlight on the NEA: The Educational Policies Commission,” Art Education 14, no. 2 (May 1961), 22. 90.  Suzanne Croizat Borghai, “Internationalism at the Grassroots,” 132–33. 91.  Ibid., 147. 92.  Ibid., 151; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Towards World Understanding: In the Classroom with Children Under Thirteen Years of Age

Notes to Chapter III  •  197 (Paris: UNESCO, [ca. 1951]), 58; Aubrey B. Haines, “Hubbub Over UNESCO,” Nation, 20 Sept. 1952, 220. 93.  Glen Warren Adams, “The UNESCO Controversy in Los Angeles, 1951–1953: A Case Study of the Influence of Right-Wing Groups on Urban Affairs,” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1970), 64. 94.  Borghai, “Internationalism at the Grassroots,” 162; “The Menace in UNESCO [Nov. 15, 1952],” Veterans of Foreign Wars Program, Radical Right Collection. 95.  Bennett, interview, 13. 96.  Jensen, interview, 7–8. 97.  Adams, “UNESCO Controversy,” 47. 98.  Ibid., 8. 99.  “The Menace in UNESCO [Nov. 15, 1952].” 100.  Michelle Brattain, “Race, Racism, and Antiracism,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (Dec. 2007),” 1386–88; Ashley Montagu, ed., Statement on Race: An Annotated Elaborated and Exposition of the Four Statements on Race Issued by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1–6. 101. Montagu, Statement on Race, 8–9. 102. Ibid. 103.  Ibid., 140; Brattain, “Race, Racism, and Antiracism,” 1387–88. 104.  “The Menace in UNESCO [Nov. 15, 1952],” 12–14. 105.  “Pressures in Los Angeles,” The New Republic, 22 Sept. 1952, 7. 106.  “From Citizens to School Board: Los Angeles Argues about UNESCO,” Life, 15 Sept. 1952, 125. 107.  John Bainbridge,“Dangers Ahead in the Public Schools,” McCall’s, Oct. 1952, 56. 108.  Jensen, interview, 9. 109.  John Thomas, “Around the U.S.A.: Freedom Under Fifield,” The Nation, 22 May 1954, 432. 110. A 1956 Meetinghouse bulletin indicates that Edith Stafford, Los Angeles School Board president, would speak at the upcoming “assembly day” of the Women’s Association. “Women’s Association,” The Meetinghouse, 6 Jan. 1957, Community Relations Committee Papers, Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge (hereinafter cited as CRC). A 1956 Freedom Club bulletin announces that Ruth Cole, Los Angeles School Board president, would be speaking about the White House Conference on Education and Federal Aid to Education. “The $1,600,000 Question!,” Freedom Club Bulletin, 10 Jan. 1956, Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 111.  “Public Relations Forum Purpose Described,” The Tidings (June 13, 1952), CRC. 112.  “Pressures in Los Angeles,” 7. 113.  “From Citizens to School Board,” 125–26. 114.  Dorothy Frank, “I Was Called Subversive,” Collier’s, 28 Mar. 1953, 68–73. 115.  Ibid., 71–72. 116.  “I Was Called a Subversive” so angered anticommunist readers that many wrote

­198  •  Notes to Chapter III the magazine demanding that the associate fiction editor, Bucklin Moon, be fired. Moon had nothing to do with the Dorothy Frank article, but letter writers charged he had “a long record of Red-front affiliations.” Collier’s dismissed Moon within a month. “The Press,” Time, 27 Apr. 27, 1953, 50–51. 117.  “To Take the Pressure Off,” Time, 27 Apr. 1953, http://www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,818305,00.html (last accessed 23 Mar. 2011). 118.  “The Press,” 50–51. 119.  Bainbridge, ”Dangers Ahead,” 2. 120. “UNESCO Foes Start Campaign,” The Houston Post, 7 Oct. 1952, O’Leary Collection. 121. “UNESCO Pamphlets and Teaching Methods Draw Heavy Fire in Texas,” Christian Science Monitor, 21 Mar. 1953, C3, O’Leary Collection. 122. Ibid. 123.  David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 326–27; “McCarthy to Open Red Inquiry Here,” Los Angeles Times, 21 Aug. 1953; Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, Hearing, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., 21 Aug., 1953, Los Angeles, CA, 1599–1603. 124.  Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Hearing, 1599. 125.  Robert Leicester Wagner, Red Ink White Lies: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles Newspapers 1920–1962 (Upland, CA: Dragonfly Press, 2000), 9–10. 126.  “Tuesday Morning Study Club, Program and Directory, 1957–58,” Personal Collection of Joan Walker Bennett, San Marino, CA; “School Board Members Backed,” Los Angeles Examiner, 26 Mar. 1958, Regional History Collection, University of Southern California (hereinafter cited as Regional History Collection). “Single Change Reorganizes School Board Committees,” Los Angeles Examiner, 6 July 1956, Regional History Collection. 127.  Louise Duntley, “The Inspiring Story of Mrs. Ruth Cole,” Los Angeles Examiner, 1 Apr. 1957, Regional History Collection; “School Foes of UNESCO Applauded,” Los Angeles Times, 27 Nov. 1956. 128. “Board Reversal on Ford’s $335,000,” Los Angeles Examiner, 14 July 1953, Regional History Collection. 129.  “Speaking of Crackpots,” Los Angeles Herald-Express, 23 July 1953, reprinted by the Keep America Committee, Los Angeles, CA, Radical Right Collection. 130.  Alice O’Connor, “The Politics of Rich and Rich: Postwar Investigations of Foundations and the Rise of the Philanthropic Right,” in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennslyvania Press, 2006), 234. 131.  Richard Magat, The Ford Foundation at Work: Philanthropic Choices, Methods, and Styles (New York: Plenum Press, 1979), 18–19. 132.  “Warning—Let’s Keep UNESCO Out!” Los Angeles Herald-Express, 3 July 1953, reprinted by the Keep America Committee, Los Angeles, CA, Radical Right Collection.

Notes to Chapter III  •  199 133.  “School Board Throws Out Ford Fund Plan,” Los Angeles Herald-Express, 14 July 1953, reprint, Radical Right Collection. 134.  “Teachers Facing Red Quiz; Councilman Facing New Probe,” Los Angeles Times, 30 Oct. 1951, A1; Bruce A. Findlay to Frances Robman Eisenberg, 23 Feb. 1954, Eisenberg Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles (hereinafter cited as Eisenberg Collection); William B. Esterman to Bruce Findlay, 16 Mar. 1953, Eisenberg Collection. 135.  Heale, “Red Scare Politics,” 27. 136. Ibid. 137.  Carlton E. Williams, “Public Housing Official Fired Over Red Issue,” Los Angeles Times, 29 Oct. 1952. 138.  Robert Gottlieb, Mark Vallianatos, Regina M. Freer, and Peter Dreier, The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 26, 138. 139.  “Teachers Facing Red Quiz,” A1. 140.  “250 Letters Protest School Ouster Moves,” Los Angeles Times, 9 Jan. 1953, 11; “Dismissal Upheld,” ibid., 11 Nov. 1953, A4. 141.  “Mrs. Cole Flies to Washington with Edith Stafford,” Los Angeles Examiner, 27 Nov. 1955, Regional History Collection. 142.  “Mrs. Cole Asks Home Rule Fight,” ibid., 2 Dec. 1955. 143.  Jean Preer, “The American Heritage Project: Librarians and the Democratic Tradition in the Early Cold War,” Libraries and Culture 28, no. 2 (Spring 1993), 176. 144.  Ibid., 174. 145.  Ibid., 174–76. 146. Neil Jumonville, Henry Steele Commager (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 102–103. 147.  Ibid., 81, 83, 100. 148.  Ibid., 34. 149.  “Library Seeks Volunteers for Program,” Los Angeles Times, 19 Oct. 1952, A7; “Heritage Group Ends Second Year,” ibid., 21 June 1953, 28; “Freedom Study Program to Start,” ibid., 4 Jan 1953, 40; Elinor Gene Hoffman, “Food for Thought,” ibid., 18 May 1954, A2. 150.  Preer, “American Heritage Project,” 181. 151.  Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Tex-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, House of Representatives, 83rd Cong., 2nd sess., H. Res. 217., 16 Dec. 1954, House Report No. 2681, p. 1; Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 407; O’Connor, “Politics of Rich and Rich,” 228–42. 152.  Report of the Special Committee, 164. 153. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 407; O’Connor, “Politics of Rich and Rich,” 229. 154.  Jo Hindman, “Cracker Barrel Discussions,” Los Angeles Times, 14 Mar. 1955, A4. 155.  Jo Hindman to John Anson Ford, 13 June, 1955, John Anson Ford Papers, Huntington Library. 156.  CBS-KNX, “Frozen Funds,” 7.

­200  •  Notes to Chapter IV 157.  Ibid., 5. 158.  Ibid., 10. 159.  Ibid., 26. 160. Ibid. 161.  John Henderson, Report of Discussion in Mr. Will’s Office [16 June 1955], 2, John Anson Ford Papers, Huntington Library; Henderson to Supervisors 20 Dec. 1956, John Anson Ford Papers, Huntington Library. 162. Hindman to County Supervisors, 3 Dec. 1956, John Anson Ford Papers, Huntington Library; Henderson to Supervisors, 20 Dec. 1956. 163.  Henderson to Supervisors, 20 Dec. 1956. 164.  Mark H. Leff, “Revisioning U.S. Political History,” American Historical Review, June 1995, 845; John Higham, “ ‘The Cult of American Consensus,’ Homogenizing our History,” Commentary 27 (1959), 94–95. Chapter IV: “Siberia, U.S.A.”: Psychological Experts and the State 1.  Senate Subcommittee on Territories and Insular Affairs, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, An Act to Provide for the Hospitalization and Care of the Mentally Ill of Alaska, and for Other Purposes: Hearings on HR 6376, S. 2518, S. 2973, 84th Cong., 2nd sess., 1956, 119, 123, 124. 2.  Ibid., 136–37. 3.  Clause-M. Naske, “Bob Bartlett and the Alaska Mental Health Act,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 71, no. 1 (Jan. 1980), 37. 4.  “Now—Siberia U.S.A,” The Register (Santa Ana, CA), 24 Jan. 1956, B4. 5.  Naske, “Bob Bartlett,” 39. 6.  The Elmore County White Citizens Council sponsored an advertisement in the Wetumpka Herald newspaper, Wetumpka, Alabama, featuring a term paper, “The Mental Health Racket,” by an unnamed sophomore high school student. The student reported that a “‘psychiatric elite,’ vulgarly called ‘headshrinkers,’ have been successful in procuring the passage of enabling legislation that has brought their goals almost within reach.” “The Mental Health Racket,” Wetumpka Herald, 26 Oct. 1961, Radical Right Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA. 7.  Louise H. Padelford and Catherine C. Hallberg, “The Case Against Progressive Education,” Fortnight, May 28, 1951, 16. 8.  Ibid. For more on child-centered learning and the progressive education movement, see Lawerence Cremin, Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 183–224. 9.  Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 71–72. 10.  Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 53–54. 11.  “Mrs. Cole Flies to Washington with Edith Stafford,” Los Angeles Examiner, 27 Nov. 1955, Regional History Collection, University of Southern California.

Notes to Chapter IV  •  201 12.  Jane Crosby, interview with author, 26 Feb. 2001, 12–13. 13.  “Parley Dur March 6–7 on Childhood and Youth,” Los Angeles Times 9 Jan. 1956, 42; Crosby, interview, 13. 14.  Jane Crosby, “To the Editor,” South Pasadena Review, 22 Mar. 1956. 15.  California State Bulletin of Minute Women of the United States of America, Inc. [15 Mar. 1955], 3, Marie Koenig Personal Collection; California Legislature, Committee on Public Health, AB 1158, 1955 reg. sess. (Sacramento, 1955); ibid., AB 1159; ibid., AB 3300; “Senate Committee Kills Bill on Mental Clinics,” Los Angeles Times, 27 May 1955, 8. 16.  California State Bulletin, [1 Mar. 1955], 4. 17. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 9. 18.  Ibid., 111–13, 241–44. 19.  Ibid., 119, 127, 243–49. 20.  Ibid., 246, 259. 21.  California State Bulletin, [15 Mar. 1955], 1. 22. Gene Birkeland, California State Bulletin, [15 Mar. 1958] 4; Gordon Allport, ABC’s of Scapegoating (1948; reprint, New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1983), 23. 23.  California State Bulletin, [15 Mar. 1955], 4. 24.  Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 1–2, 273–75, 410–12. 25. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 59. 26.  T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 765–66. 27. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 200. 28. Isidore Ziferstein, “Race Prejudice and Mental Health,” Frontier, Aug. 1956. For other psychological profiles of right-wing conservatism, see R. C. Murphy Jr. MD, “McCarthyism: A Psychiatric Diagnosis,” The Nation, 27 Mar. 1954, 258–60; Haig A. Bosmajian,“The Unconscious of a Conservative,” Frontier, Jan. 1962, 4, 13–14. Judd Marmor, Viola W. Bernard, and Perry Ottenberg, “Psychodynamics of Group Opposition to Health Programs,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 30 (1960), 339; and “Analyst Says Birchers May Feel Paranoia,” Dallas Morning News, 1 May 1972, Texas/Dallas History and Archives, Dallas Public Library. 29.  Ziferstein, “Race Prejudice,” 1. 30.  California State Bulletin, [15 Mar. 1955], 1. 31.  Ian Nicholson, Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003), 4. 32.  “Oxy to Offer Rumor Lecture,” Los Angeles Times, 13 July 1952; “Psychologist will Lecture on Prejudice,” ibid., 23 July 1952. 33.  Jacqueline Berke, “Are You a Gossip?” (This Week magazine section) ibid., 30 Oct. 1955, M12. 34.  Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1946, orig. 1942), 187, 193.

­202  •  Notes to Chapter IV 35.  Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 41. See also Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1947); Wylie, Generation of Vipers. 36. Feldstein, Motherhood, 48. Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality, 222–41, 348–67. 37. Feldstein, Motherhood, 47. 38.  American Public Relations Forum Bulletin, no. 50 (Feb. 1956), Marie Koenig Personal Collection, 2–3. 39.  When the NAACP readied its case for Brown, it called upon the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) to prepare a statement summarizing supportive testimony from leading social scientists and psychologists. “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation: A Social Science Statement” was signed by Mamie Clark, Kenneth Clark, Gordon Allport, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Otto Klineberg, Alfred McClung Lee, R. Nevitt Sanford, and others. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 197. 40.  Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 90. 41. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 198. 42.  “Speech of James O. Eastland of Mississippi in the Senate of the United States,” Congressional Record, 22 May 22 1955 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1955 (reprint), Lucille Cardin Crain Collection, University of Oregon Special Collections and University Archives; U.S. Constitution, amend. 14, sec. 1. 43.  California State Bulletin, [ca. 1955], 5. 44. Eugene R. Brody, “The World Federation of Mental Health: Its Origins and Contemporary Relevance to WHO and WPA Politics,” World Psychiatry 3, no. 1 (Feb. 2004), 54. 45.  Mental Health and World Citizenship: A Statement Prepared for the International Congress on Mental Health (London: 1948, reprint 1951), distrib. by National Association for Mental Health Inc., New York, Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 46.  The author confirmed this definition was correctly quoted. Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v. “psychopathic.” 47.  California State Bulletin, [ca. 1955], 5. 48.  The author confirmed that this interpretation of the article is correct. John R. Seeley, “Social Values, the Mental Health Movement, and Mental Health,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 286 (Mar. 1953), 20. 49.  California State Bulletin, [ca. 1955], 5. 50. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, “Mental Hygiene in the Nursery School: Report of a Joint WHO-UNESCO Expert Meeting held in Paris, 17–22, Sept.1951,” (Paris: UNESCO [1953]), 22, Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 51.  Freedom Club, “Your Freedom May Be At Stake!” (Los Angeles [17 May 1955]), Marie Koenig Personal Collection.

Notes to Chapter IV  •  203 52.  “Wider Social Security Plan Protested,” Los Angeles Times, 11 May 1949, A8. For history of American Medical Association’s opposition to public health measures, see Stanley Lemon, “The Sheppard-Towner Act: Progressivism in the 1920s,” Journal of American History 55, no. 5 (Mar. 1969), 780–81; Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 147–48, 175, 207. 53.  Norma Goodhue, “CMA Leader Vows Fight for Freedom,” Los Angeles Times, 28 Nov. 1951, B1. 54.  “Dental Disease Held Enemy of School Children,” ibid., 2 Oct. 1952, 9. 55.  “Doped Girl, 12, Found Dazed on Beach Road: Red Effort to Move In on L.A. Doctors Charged,” ibid., 7 Dec. 1954, 1. 56.  Freedom Club, “Your Freedom May Be At Stake!,” 4. 57.  Ibid., 4–5. 58.  Dr. James Fifield, “The Present Outlook,” Freedom Club Bulletin, 8 Jan. 1957, 3. 59.  Lucille Miller, “Black Supremacy, Eisenhower’s Gift to the South,” Green Mountain Rifleman, 30 Oct. 1954, Marjorie Shearon Papers, Conservative and Libertarian Materials, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon. 60.  “Court Frees Patient,” New York Times, 21 June 1955; “Draft-Hater’s Mate Guilty of Assault,” ibid., 22 July 1955, 9; “Court Frees Patient,” ibid., 21 June 1955, L20. 61.  “Woman Convicted in Draft Law Case,” ibid., 14 July 1955, 3L. 62.  American Public Relations Forum Bulletin, no. 41 (May 1955). 63.  David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 182. 64.  Westbrook Pegler, “Fair Enough,” Santa Ana Register, 13 May 1958 (reprint), Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 65.  George Sokolsky, “These Days,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), 21 May 1955, American Civil Liberties Union Records, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. 66.  American Public Relations Forum Bulletin, no. 41. 67. William Johnson and Thaddeus Ashby, “The Lucille Miller Story,” Faith and Freedom, Sept. 1955, 7–8. 68.  Ibid., 6. 69.  Ibid., 7. 70.  Alfred Auerback, MD, “The Anti-Mental Health Movement,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 120 (Aug. 1963), 106. 71.  Charlane Kircher, “Personal Letter from Your State Chairman,” California State Bulletin, [15 Oct. 1955], 1, Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 72.  “Finn Twins Recite Battle for Rights,” Los Angeles Times, 21 Jan.1956, 12. 73.  “Finn Twins Lose Grip on ‘Missing’ Airplane,” ibid., 24 Jan. 1953, A5; Dorothy Townsend, “Finn Twins Recite Battle for Rights,” ibid., 21 Jan. 1956, 12. 74.  “Stand in Desert: Twin Prepares to Defend Plane,” ibid., 27 Jan. 1953, 2. 75.  “Finn Twin Handcuffs Amazed U.S. Attorney, ibid., 22 Jan. 1954, 1. 76.  “Finns Sentenced to Year in Prison,” ibid., 2; “Actress Friend Visits Fasting Finn

­204  •  Notes to Chapter IV Brothers,” ibid., 7 July 1954, 5; “Fasting Shaves 10 Pounds from Jailed Twins,” ibid., 26 June 1954, A5; “Hunger-Striking Finn Twins’ Appeal Delayed,” ibid., 13 July 1954, 1. 77.  “Finn Twins Recite Battle for Rights,” ibid., 21 Jan. 1956, p. 12. 78.  American Public Relations Forum Bulletin, no. 49 (Jan. 1956), Marie Koenig Personal Collection, 1; “The Fabulous Finns,” Freedom Club Bulletin, 7 Feb. 7, 1956, 1, Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 79.  Townsend, “Finn Twins Recite Battle for Rights,” 12. 80.  “The Fabulous Finns.” 81.  American Public Relations Forum Bulletin, no. 47 (Dec. 1955), 1, Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 82.  Senate Subcommittee, Hearings on HR 6376, 2. 83.  Naske, “Bob Bartlett,” 32–34. 84.  Ibid., 32–33. 85.  Ibid., 37. 86.  Senate Subcommittee, Hearings on HR 6376, 143. 87.  American Public Relations Forum Bulletin, no. 47, 2. 88.  Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 36. 89.  “Now—Siberia, U.S.A.,” Santa Ana Register, 24 Jan. 1956, B4. 90.  Senate Subcommittee, Hearings on HR 6376, 141; “Now—Siberia, U.S.A.,” B4. 91.  “Now—Siberia, U.S.A.,” B4. 92.  Anna Mary Gann, unnamed poem, California State Bulletin [15 Feb. 1956], 1. 93.  “Siberia, U.S.A. And How It Grew Through Mental Health and World Citizenship,” n.d. [ca. Jan.–Mar. 1956], Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 94.  For more on the political and cultural work performed by conspiracy theories, see Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Fenster argues that characterizing conspiracy theories as a “pathological Other” is shortsighted and misses their importance as a framework of interpretation for people who lack access to power. Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, xiii. 95. For more on the role of conspiracy theory and the Populist movement, see Jeffrey Ostler, “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism,” Agricultural History 69, no. 1 (Winter 1995), 1–19. For more on conspiracy theories and the American Revolution, see Ed White, “The Value of Conspiracy Theory,” American Literary History 14, no. 1 (2002), 1–28; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). For a “paranoid style” interpretation of Revolution-era conspiracies, see Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982), 401–41. 96.  Marie Koenig, taped interview with author, Pasadena, CA, 5 Apr. 2001, 21. 97.  Don Shannon, “Alaska Mental Health Bill Vote Slated Today,” Los Angeles Times, 23 Apr. 1956, pt. I, 7, Community Relations Committee Collection, Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge. 98.  George Norris Green, “Some Aspects of the Far Right Wing in Texas Politics,”

Notes to Chapter IV  •  205 in E. C. Barksdale, George Norris Green, and Harold M. Hollingsworth, eds., Essays on Recent Southern Politic (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), 58–59. 99.  Texas Almanac: 1956–1957 (Dallas: A. H. Belo Corporation, 1955), 111. 100.  Steve Blow and Sam Attlesey, “The Tenor of the Times: Nov. 22: Twenty-Five Years Later,” suppl. to the Dallas Morning News, 20 Nov. 1988, 4–5. 101.  Lawrence Wright, In the New World: Growing Up with America, 1960–1984 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 16; See also Lawrence Wright, “Growing Up with Dallas,” Dallas Morning News, 17 Jan. 1988, 15. 102.  Warren Leslie, Dallas Public and Private: Aspects of an American City (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1964; reprint, Dallas: Southern Methodist University, 1998), 103. 103.  Ida Darden, “‘Mental Health’ Plan and Foundation Money Could be Dangerous Combination,” The Southern Conservative 6, no. 6 (June 1955), 1, Ida Darden Collection, Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library. 104.  Darden began working after the death of her husband in 1908, when she took a job as a stenographer with the conservative Texas Businessmen’s Association to support her young daughter. Darden eventually became a lobbyist for the organization, which brought her to Austin as an opponent of women’s suffrage, protective labor legislation, and Prohibition. Her contacts with Texas businessmen and politicians helped her win an appointment in the Texas Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage in 1916. As the publicity director for the group, Darden’s manner was aggressive and misogynistic. She warned that suffrage, “in the hands of a bunch of hysterical women,” would have disastrous consequences. Over the twenties, thirties, and forties she became more outspoken against the labor movement, the New Deal, and Roosevelt. In 1932 she ran for Congress on an anti-Prohibition platform but lost. Elna C. Green, “From Antisuffragism to Anti-Communism: The Conservative Career of Ida M. Darden,” Journal of Southern History 65, no. 2 (May 1999), 293, 301–2. 105.  Ida Darden, “The First Point of Attack is the Brain of American Youth,” The Southern Conservative (Fort Worth), Mar. 1956, Ida Darden Collection. 106.  Ibid., 5. 107. Ibid. 108.  California State Bulletin [15 Mar. 15, 1955], 4 109.  Darden, “‘Mental Health’ Plan,” 5. 110. Ibid. 111.  See Ralph S. O’Leary, “Daughters of Vigilantism,” The Nation 178, no. 2 ( 9 Jan. 1954), 26–28. 112. Ida Darden, “Minute Women Not Afraid of ‘Controversies,’” The Southern Conservative, Apr. 1956, 1, Ida Darden Collection. 113.  Ida Darden, “Prologue,” The Best of the Southern Conservative (Fort Worth: self published, 1963), 1, Ida Darden Collection. 114.  “The Dan Smoot Radio Program, Dan Smoot Speaks 1, no. 16 (28 Oct. 28, 1955); “Correspondences,” Dan Smoot Speaks 1, no. 16 (28 Oct. 1955). 115.  Marie Koenig, who belonged to all of these organizations, relied on Smoot for much of her news information. Her files include the Dan Smoot Report issue on the

­206  •  Notes to Chapter IV Alaska mental health bill. “Mental Health,” Dan Smoot Report 2, no. 11a (30 Mar. 1956), Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 116.  “Mental Health,” Dan Smoot Speaks 2, no. 7 (17 Feb. 1956), 2–3. 117.  Ibid., 3. 118.  Ruby Clayton McKee, Dallas Morning News, 2 Mar. 1947, Texas/Dallas History and Archives. 119.  The Public Affairs Luncheon Club formed when the Dallas Democratic Women’s Luncheon Club and the Nonpartisan Legislative Forum merged. Ruby Clayton McKee, Dallas Morning News, 2 Mar. 1947. 120. Wright, In the New World, 17. 121. Scrapbooks of the Public Affairs Luncheon Club, Texas/Dallas History and Archives. 122.  Senate Subcommittee, Hearings on HR 6376, 269. 123.  Robert Smith, “Siberia, U.S.A.,” 28; “Siberia-U.S.A.?” The Greater Nebraskan (Feb. 1956), Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 124.  Senate Subcommittee, Hearings on HR 6376, 285. 125.  “A Report to the American People on the Alaska Mental Health Act,” American Flag Committee, Newsletter no. 41 (Mar. 1956), 1, Radical Right Collection. 126.  American Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, “Mental Health Bill Is Incredible, Inane Legislation,” Emergency Bulletin (25 Feb. 1956), 1, Radical Right Collection. 127.  Lucille Miller, “H.R. 6376—Siberia, U.S.A.?” Green Mountain Rifleman [Mar. 1956]. 128.  Senate Subcommittee, Hearings on HR 6376, 262, 269. 129.  Ibid., 264. 130.  Ibid., 269–70. 131.  Naske, “Bob Bartlett,” 37. 132.  Ibid., 37–38. 133.  Senate Subcommittee, Hearings on HR 6376, 136. 134.  Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Center; The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949). 135.  For an extensive critique of consensus history, see Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, 1–10. 136.  See Daniel Bell, Radical Right, 3d ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). 137.  Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” in Bell, ibid., 77. 138.  Alaska Mental Health Bill Hearings, 164. 139.  Hannah Decker, “The Reception of Psychoanalysis in Germany,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24, no. 4 (Oct. 1982), 590. 140.  Alaska Mental Health Bill Hearings, 169. 141.  “Christian Patriot’s Reward,” illustration, ca. 1956, Radical Right Collection; Marmor et al., “Psychodynamics of Group Opposition,” 340. 142.  Alaska Mental Health Bill Hearings, 145, 169.

Notes to Chapter IV  •  207 143.  Ibid., 211; Smith, “Siberia, U.S.A.,” 29. 144.  Smith, “Siberia, U.S.A.,” 29; “Mental Care for Alaska Voted;” “Alaska Mental Health Bill Signed,” 20. 145.  Smith, “Siberia, U.S.A.,” 29; “Mental Care for Alaska Voted;” “Alaska Mental Health Bill Signed,” 20; “Free Rise in Mental Health Services Seen,” Los Angeles Times, 21 June 1957, 26; “Mental Health Clinics OK’d on 3–2 Vote,” Pasadena Star News, 25 Nov. 1958, Marie Koenig Personal Collection; Kate Sexton, “Short-Doyle Act’s Advantages Told by State Chief,” Pasadena Star News, 23 Jan.1959, 7; “Sides Taken in Debate on Mental Health Plan,” Los Angeles Times, 10 Mar. 1962, B4; Associated Press, “Day in Sacramento,” ibid., 6 Apr. 1968, A12. 146.  Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 477–78. 147.  Ibid., 479. 148.  John Stormer, None Dare Call It Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964), 19. 149.  Ibid., 155. 150.  Ibid., 163. 151.  Ibid., 155. 152.  For an anticommunist attack on the military’s decision to dismiss Walker, see Kent and Phoebe Courtney, The Case of General Edwin A. Walker (New Orleans: Conservative Society of American Publications, 1961). 153.  Jonathan Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 105–106. 154.  Ibid., 106; Courtney, Walker, cover. 155. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, 106. 156.  Alan Reitman, Associate Director, American Civil Liberties Union, to Editor, Progress-Index (Petersburg, VA), 1 Nov. 1962, American Civil Liberties Union Records, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. 157.  Revilo P. Oliver, “Brainwashing: Better Than a Detergent,” American Opinion Magazine, Nov. 1964, 29–40. 158. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, 109. 159.  Russell Kirk, “From the Academy: Those School Psychological Tests,” National Review, 20 June 1964, 539. 160.  In response to Van Allen’s suit and a similar case in Levittown, the Education Department of New York formed a committee to study and form policy regarding the confidentiality of children’s files. Limitations on parental access were eventually imposed, by September of 1961. “Right to Seek Data on Pupils Curbed,” New York Times, 19 Sept. 1961, 37. “L.I. Father Sues School for a Look at Son’s Record,” ibid., 17 Nov. 1960, 39; “‘I.Q.’ Suit is Joined by Psychologists,” ibid., 19 Nov. 1960, 23; Dorothy Barclay, “Have Parents a Right to Know?” ibid., 12 Feb. 1961, SM 58. 161.  Edward J. Van Allen, The Branded Child (New York: Reportorial Press, 1970), 64. 162.  Kirk, “Psychological Tests,” 539.

­208  •  Notes to Chapter V 163.  Priscilla Buckley, “‘Siberia, U.S.A.’: The Rocky Road of H.R. 6376,” The National Review, 25 July 1956, 9. 164.  Ibid., 9–10. 165.  Thomas S. Szasz, Law, Liberty, and Psychology: An Inquiry into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 81, 216. 166.  Ibid., 222 167.  Ibid., 3. 168.  Thomas S. Szasz, “Psychiatry’s Threat to Civil Liberties,” The National Review, 12 Mar. 1963, 192–93. 169.  Theodore E. Schulz, “The Mental Health Trap,” ibid., 31 May 1966, 510–11. 170.  Thomas S. Szasz, “The Mental Health Ethic,” ibid., 14 June 1965, 572. 171.  Norman Dain, “Critics and Dissenters: Reflections on ‘Anti-Psychiatry’ in the United States,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 25 (Jan. 1989), 8. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1988, c. 1965). See Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1961). 172.  Ralph Slovenko, “On Thomas Szasz,” Journal of Psychiatry and Law 30 (Spring 2002), 130. 173.  Thomas Szasz, Coercion and Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry (New Brunswick, NJ: Traction Publishers, 2007), 133; Dain, “Critics and Dissenters, 11. 174.  Dain, “Critics and Dissenters,” 11. 175.  Alfred Auerback, “The Anti-Mental Health Movement,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 120 (Aug. 1963); Harry Nelson, “More Opposition Seen to Mental Health Plans,” Los Angeles Times, 10 May 1963, 18. 176.  Auerback, “The Anti-Mental Health Movement,” 109. 177.  Marmor et al., “Psychodynamics of Group Opposition,” 339–40. 178.  Szasz, “Mental Health Ethic,” 571, 572. Chapter V: The “Conservative Sex”: Women and the Building of a Movement 1.  Russell Kirk, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Conservatism (New York: The DevinAdair Company, 1957), 8; F. Clifton White, Suite 3505: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1967), 136–37. 2.  Ibid., 136. 3.  Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 51–53, 61–68.; Schneider, Conservative Century, 99. 4.  Robert Welch, Blue Book of the John Birch Society (1959; reprint, Appleton, WI: Western Islands Publishers, 1999), 76, 92. 5.  Ibid., 156. 6. Ibid., xix; Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 62. 7. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, 62–63.

Notes to Chapter V  •  209 8. Welch, Blue Book, 64–96, 147. 9.  Ibid., 68–69, 70, 154. 10.  Ibid., 64. 11.  Kurt Schuparra, Triumph of the Right: The Rise of the California Conservative Movement, 1945–1966 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 49. 12.  For a list of John Birch Society chapters in the greater Los Angeles, see Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, Un-American Activities in California, Twelfth Report, 1963 (Senate of the State of California), 58–59. 13.  See Figure 5.1. Map of John Birch Society Chapters in Southern California, 1963. 14.  “Birch Society Has New Office,” Los Angeles Times, 16 Mar. 1964, 18. 15.  California Legislature, Twelfth Report of the Senate Fact-finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities (Sacramento, 1963), 19–20. 16.  Florence Ranuzzi, taped interview with author, Tehachapi, CA, 11 Feb. 2001, 52. 17.  Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (New York: Free Press, 2000), 101–27; Jeffrey Hart, American Conservative Mind: The Making of the National Review and Its Times (Wilmington, DE.: ISI Books, 2007), 161–68. 18.  Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 71–87; Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, 62–99. 19.  Marjorie Jensen, taped interview with author, Pasadena, CA, 15 July 2002, 13. 20.  Ibid., 12. 21.  Network of Patriotic Letter-Writers, “How to Write Effective Letters,” n.d., Knox Mellon Collection, UCLA Special Collections, Los Angeles, CA. 22.  The breakdown of the Network’s members is based on a file of surveys collected by Gertrude Bale from subscribers in 1959, all of which are located in the Knox Mellon collection at UCLA ’ s Special Collections Library. 23.  Network of Patriotic Letter-Writers, Newsletter, [ca. 1962], Box 20, Knox Mellon Collection, UCLA Special Collections; Group Research, Inc., Group Research Report 5, no. 2 (15 June 1966), 3, Community Relations Committee Collection, Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge (hereinafter cited as CRC). Gertrude Bale to Della Root, Pasadena, CA, 18 Nov. 1959, Knox Mellon Collection, UCLA Special Collections. 24. Ibid. 25.  Jensen, interview, 14. 26. Welch, Blue Book, 64. 27.  Florence Ranuzzi, “Greetings from Poor Richard’s Book Shop” [letter to friends and patrons of Poor Richard’s Book Shop], ca. 1971–1973, Florence Ranuzzi Personal Collection. 28.  Ranuzzi, interview, 60–61. 29.  Fred Schwarz, You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists) (Long Beach, CA: Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, 1962), 2–9, 129. 30.  Poor Richard’s Book Shop [order brochure], 1962, CRC; Matt Cvetic, The Big Decision, self-printed (Hollywood, 1959).

­210  •  Notes to Chapter V 31.  South Pasadena Americanism Center, Standard Daily Journal, 2 Mar. 1962, Jane Crosby Personal Collection. 32. Ranuzzi, interview, 34–35; “Former Screen Siren Wars on Income Tax,” Los Angeles Times, 23 Sept. 1962, CRC. 33.  Ranuzzi, interview, 6, 14. 34.  Ibid., 12. 35.  Ibid., 11. 36.  Ibid., 14. 37.  Dee Dickson, “Americanism Center Sets Up Shop,” Los Angeles Herald-Express, 18 Dec. 1961, CRC. 38.  Jane Crosby, taped interview with author, San Juan Capistrano, CA, 26 Feb. 2001, 14. 39.  Gene Blake, “The John Birch Society: What Are Its Purposes?” Los Angeles Times, 5 Mar. 1961, B1–3; Gene Blake, “Blue Book Guides Anti-Red Society,” ibid., 6 Mar. 1961, 2, 28; Gene Blake, “Birch Society’s Program Outlined,” ibid., 7 Mar. 1961, 2, 23; Gene Blake, “Birch Program in Southland Told,” ibid., 8 Mar. 1961, 2, 27; Gene Blake, “Birch Members Reply to Critics,” ibid., 9 Mar. 1961, 2, 21. 40.  Otis Chandler, “Peril to Conservatism,” ibid., 12 Mar. 1961, G1. 41.  Crosby, interview, 7–8. 42.  Virginia Trowbridge, taped interview with author, Pasadena, CA, 15 Feb. 2001, 6. 43.  Ibid., 10. 44.  South Pasadena Americanism Center, Standard Daily Journal, 20 July 1962, 17 Feb. 1962, 21 June 1962, Jane Crosby Personal Collection; Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (New York: MacFadden Books, 1960); Verna M. Hall, Christian History of the Constitution of the United States of America (San Francisco: American Christian Constitution Press, 1960), J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit; the Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (New York: Holt, 1958). 45. South Pasadena Americanism Center, Standard Daily Journal, 12 Feb. 1962, Jane Crosby Personal Collection; Dee Dickson, “Americanism Center Sets Up Shop,” Los Angeles Herald-Express, 18 Dec. 1961, CRC; “Americanism Center to Open Here Monday,” South Pasadena Review, 16 Dec. 1961, 1, Jane Crosby Personal Collection. 46.  Crosby, interview, 15. 47.  Dickson, “Americanism Center;” Crosby, interview, 15. 48.  See Appendix: “Conservative Book Stores.” 49.  Dickson, “Americanism Center;” “Americanism Center to Open Here Monday.” 50.  Committee Against the Sale of Communist Slave Labor Products in America, Shoppers Guide to Communist Imports (Little Rock, AR.: Independent Voters of Arkansas, [ca. 1960s]). 51.  South Pasadena Americanism Center, Standard Daily Journal, 10 Feb. 1962, 17 Dec. 1962. 52.  Ibid., 6 Apr. 1963. 53.  Ibid., 12 Mar.1962. 54.  South Pasadena Americanism Center, “Minutes, Board of Directors Meeting,” 10

Notes to Chapter V  •  211 Feb. 1966, 1, Jane Crosby Personal Collection; South Pasadena Americanism Center, Standard Daily Journal, 2 Feb. 1964. 55.  “Americanism Center to Hold Open House,” Valley Times, 12 Mar. 1964, CRC; Mrs. Sam Woolington, “Dear Fellow Americans” [letter to prospective Americanism Center of Long Beach contributors], 1965, CRC. See Appendix: “Conservative Book Stores.” 56.  South Pasadena Americanism Center, Standard Daily Journal, 2 May, 1964. 57.  Ibid., 4 Oct. 1963, 24 Apr. 1962, 2 May 1964, 8 June 1964. 58.  Ibid., 5 Aug. 1965. 59.  South Pasadena Americanism Center, “Minutes, Board of Directors Meeting,” 2. 60.  For more on postwar debates over juvenile delinquency and the sexuality of youths, see Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 45–51. 61.  Pat Boone, “Are There Any More Squares Out There,” Spoon Music Corporation, 1981. 62.  South Pasadena Americanism Center, Standard Daily Journal, 12 Feb. 1962, 15 Feb. 1962. 63.  Ibid., 14 Feb. 1962. 64.  Tom Pedersen, “Letters to the Times: Graduate Objects to Receiving ‘Americanism’ Book as Present,” Los Angeles Times, 24 June 1965, A4. 65. South Pasadana Americanism Center, Standard Daily Journal, 23 Aug. 1962; Zygmund Dobbs, Keynes at Harvard: Economic Deception as a Political Credo (New York: Veritas Foundation, 1960). 66. Dobbs, Keynes at Harvard, 11. 67.  Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, “The Southern California School of AntiCommunism” [program and registration form], Aug. 1961, Jane Crosby Personal Collection; Community Relations Committee, “A Report on the Southern California School of Anti-Communism, Aug. 28–Sept. 1, 1961,” 2, CRC. 68.  Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, “Southern California School;” Community Relations Committee, “Report on the Southern California School,” 6. 69.  See Herbert Philbrick, I Led 3 Lives (New York: McGraw Hill, 1952); “Herbert Philbrick, 78, F.B.I. Spy Who Inspired TV Series in the 50’s,” New York Times, 18 Aug. 1993, D18. 70.  Community Relations Committee, “Report on the Southern California School,” 6. 71. Ibid. 72.  Janet Greene, telephone interview with Bill Geerhart, 4 Apr. and 2 May 2004, http://www.conelrad.com/greene/interview.php (last accessed 14 Apr. 2011). 73.  Greene, interview, 6. 74.  Janet Greene, “Poor Left Winger,” from Chantico LP What is Communism?, http:// www.atomicplatters.com (last accessed 14 Apr. 2011). 75. Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, “A New and Effective Anti-Communist Weapon: Janet Greene Sings Fascist Threat and Commie Lies” [order form], n.d., Freedom Center, California State University, Fullerton. 76. Ibid.

­212  •  Notes to Chapter V 77. Ibid. 78.  Fred Schwarz to CACC Supporters, 1 Mar. 1966, CRC. 79.  Greene, interview, 7. 80.  “Barry Sadler, 49, Balladeer, Dies,” New York Times, 7 Nov. 1989, D23. 81.  Greene, interview, 9–10. 82.  Ibid., 10–11. 83.  Stuart Dean Graybill, “Bending the Twig: Conservative Educational Criticism and the Revival of the Right, 1900–1966” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 1999), 433; David W. Swift, “Who Voted For Rafferty?: A Profile of Voters in the 1962 Election for California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction,” California Social Science Review 5, no. 3 (1966), 24–29. 84.  Dr. Maxwell Rafferty, “The Passing of the Patriot,” 20 June 1961, reprinted in The Ledger, 6 July 1961, Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 85. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 203. 86.  Patricia Cullinane (former Gilbert), taped interview with author, Pasadena, CA, 16 Feb. 2001, 3. 87.  Ibid., 5; Patricia (Gilbert) Cullinane to Parents for Rafferty Supporters, 1962, Marie Koenig Personal Collection. 88.  Cullinane, interview; “Education Policy up to Whole State,” Los Angeles Examiner 29 Feb. 1963, A2, CRC. 89.  South Pasadena Americanism Center, Standard Daily Journal, 18 Sept. 1962. 90.  Graybill, “Bending the Twig,” 433. 91.  Pedersen, “Graduate Objects,” A4. 92.  John Mack Faragher, telephone interview with author, 2 Nov. 2008, 1–3. 93.  Carl Howard Saltzman to Poor Richard’s Book Shop, 4 Aug. 1966, Florence Ranuzzi Personal Papers. 94. For more on Goldwater’s recruitment of women supporters, see Catherine Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 170–76. 95. White, 3505: The Story, 136. 96. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 21–22. 97.  Barry Goldwater, “Wanted: A More Conservative GOP,” Human Events, Feb. 18, 1960; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 58. 98.  Marie Koenig, taped interview with author, Pasadena, CA., 5 Apr. 2001, 20; Herbert E. Alexander, Financing the 1964 Election (Princeton, NJ: Citizens’ Research Foundation, 1966), 30. 99.  David W. Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983), 192; Alexander, Financing the 1964 Election, 30. 100.  Art Rickerby, “Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater campaigning during his bid for Republican presidential nomination surrounded by ‘Goldwater for President’ signs and ‘Goldwater Girls’ in blue collars and white hats” [photograph for Life magazine], Santa Barbara, CA, 1964, Life: Your World in Pictures, http://www.life.com/image/50369194 (last accessed 25 Mar. 2011); John Dominis, “Goldwater Girls wearing sashes and waving

Notes to Chapter V  •  213 signs prior to Republican National Convention” [photograph for Life magazine], San Francisco, CA, 1964, Life: Your World in Pictures, http://www.life.com/image/50370307 (last accessed 25 Mar. 2011). 101.  “Poor Richards Says . . .” American Opinion, Sept. 1965, 98; Mark Leibovich, “In the ’60s, a Future Candidate Poured Her Heart Out in Letters,” New York Times, 29 July 2007, A1. 102. Mary Cunningham, taped interview with author, Tehachapi, CA, 12 Feb. 2001, 56. 103. Reinhard, Republican Right, 192; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 379. 104.  “Our purpose  .  .  . ” [flyer], Watchdogs of the Republican Convention, [ca. May–July 1964], Roy Bullock Private Collection. 105.  Bea Ziegler to John Birch Society Headquarters, San Marino, CA, 19 July 1964, Roy Bullock Private Collection. 106.  “Our purpose  . . .” 107.  “WORC” [flyer], Watchdogs of the Republican Convention, 15 June 1964, Roy Bullock Private Collection. 108.  “Our purpose . . . .” 109. Schuparra, Triumph of the Right, 80–82. 110.  Ibid., 80. 111.  Ibid., 80–81. 112.  “Special Progress Report on UROC” [United Republicans of California], n.d., Jane Crosby Personal Collection. 113. Schuparra, Triumph of the Right, 105. 114.  United Republicans of California, “Special Report: UROCERS at GOP National Convention,” [ca. July 1964], Jane Crosby Private Collection. 115.  “Memo for Period Ending 10 May 1964” [Citizens for Goldwater Miller], 13 May 1964, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs Archival Collections, Ashland University (hereinafter cited as Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection), 2. 116.  Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21–22, 32, 38–39. 117.  Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1962). 118.  Amy Swerdlow, “Ladies’ Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace versus HUAC,” Journal of Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1982), 493, 496–97. 119.  Jean Ward, “Women Join to Fight for ‘Moral Upgrade,’” Los Angeles Examiner, 30 July 1961, Regional History Collection, University of Southern California. 120.  Betty Friedan, Feminine Mystique (1963; reprint, New York: W.W. Norton, 1983). 121.  Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crimes, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 33. 122. Ibid., 4. 123.  Rus Walton to Ed McCabe [memo], [ca. Sept. 1964], Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection.

­214  •  Notes to Conclusion 124.  F. Clifton White to Barry Goldwater [memo], 22 Oct. 1964, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection, 2. 125. Carol Arth Waters to “Community Leader,” [ca. Oct. 1964] [Mothers for Moral America], Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection. For more on Mothers for Moral America, see Rymph, Republican Women, 171–72. 126.  “Transcript of Informal Conference held at the Beverly Carlton Hotel,” Noon and Pratt Certified Shorthand Reporters, 22 Sept. 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater Folder, Box 325, DNC Series I, LBJ-PL, 2, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX. 127. Middendorf, Glorious Disaster, 201. 128. Flamm, Law and Order, 42. 129. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965; reprint 1979, 117). Citations are to the 1979 edition. 130.  “Transcript of Informal Conference,” 3. 131. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 308. 132.  “Mothers for Moral America, “Mothers for Moral America Group Buys Network Time for Dynamic Documentary,” [ca. Oct. 1964], Jane Crosby Private Collection. 133.  “Carl Greenberg, “Goldwater Ban on Film Defied by Young GOP,” Los Angeles Times, 23 Oct. 1964, 2. 134.  Ibid., 496. 135.  Mrs. Richard J Coveney to Carol Arth Waters, 6 Nov. 1964, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection. 136.  Jack Wilson, “Right-Wing Group to Sell Movie Goldwater Banned,” Minneapolis Tribune, 20 May 1965, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection. 137. White, Suite 3505, 136–37. Conclusion 1.  By rejecting false consciousness as a tool of political anaysis, I am merely adding some volume to a respectable body of criticism established by other scholars. Karl Marx and Joseph Engels introduced the concept of false consciousness to describe how ideology enabled oppressors to dominate subjugated people through culture, education, the media, etc. Late twentieth-century social, cultural, political, and feminist theorists brought greater precision to false consciousness as a means of exploring analytic questions and practical problems like sexism and domestic violence. A “false consciousness” assumes that oppressed people “assume the norms” of their oppressors, thereby unknowingly reinforcing their subordination. A major problem inherent in feminist applications of false consciousness as a means of understanding antifeminism or misogyny, according to Catherine MacKinnon, is the way feminism assumes “[a]uthority of interpretation.” Feminism assumes itself to be freer of outside determinants than antifeminism to clearly “see the world through women’s eyes” (MacKinnon, 637, fn5). Joan Wallach Scott argues in a similar vein that false consciousness cannot explain “political differences among women”: “This outlook renders feminist politics more self-conscious and self-critical and

Notes to Conclusion  •  215 links it inextricably to analyses of gender as the production of knowledge about sexual difference.” By studying how conservative activists came to see the truth of themselves and the world in relationship with each other, I am building on Scott’s assertion: “For political identity, like social institutions and cultural symbols, is a form of knowledge production” (Scott, 6). John Jost, “Negative Illusions: Conceptual Clarification and Psychological Evidence Concerning False Consciousness,” Political Psychology 16, no. 2 (1995), 397–398, 400). Catherine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence,” Signs 8, no. 4 (Summer 1983), 637, fn5; Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 6. 2.  Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 20. 3.  Donald G. Mathews and Jane Sherron DeHart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 156–57, 172. 4.  Beverly LaHaye, Who But a Woman? (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers), 35. 5.  “Globalism: Enemy of the Middle Class,” The Phyllis Schlafly Report (Feb. 2007), http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2007/feb07/psrfeb07.html (last accessed 25 Mar. 2011). 6.  Mathews and DeHart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA, 173. 7.  Donald Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 214. 8. Timothy Egan, “Palin’s True North, New York Times, 4 Sept. 2008, http:// egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/palins-true-north (last accessed 13 Apr. 2011). 9.  Michael Cooper and Elizabeth Bumiller, “McCain Chooses Palin as Running Mate,” New York Times, 29 Aug. 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/us/politics/30veep .html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=hockey%20mom%20convention&st=cse (last accessed 13 Apr. 2011); Dana Milbank, “Joe, and Sarah Six-Pack,” Washington Post, 3 Oct. 2008, A3. 10.  Kate Phillips, “Palin: Obama is ‘Palling Around With Terrorists,’” New York Times, 4 Oct. 2008, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/palin-obama-is-pallingaround-with-terrorists/?scp=1&sq=Palling%20Around%20With%20Terrorists&st=cse (last accessed 13 Apr. 2011). 11.  Amy Gardner, “Palin Pushes Abortion Foes to Form ‘Conservative Feminist Identity,’” Washington Post, 15 May 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2010/05/15/AR2010051500002.html (last accessed 15 July 20). 12.  Katha Pollitt, “Grisly Mamas,” The Nation, 2–9 Aug. 2010, http://www.thenation .com/article/37477/grisly-mamas (last accessed 14 Aug., 2010).

Index

Abbott, Grace, 8 The ABC’s of Scapegoating (Allport), 109 abortion rights, 172 activism. See housewife populism Addams, Jane, 8–9 adolescents. See youth Adorno, Theodor, 110–11 aerospace industry, 34–35, 73 African Americans: migration to L.A. of, 35, 84; racial unrest among, 62. See also civil rights movement Alaska Mental Health Act of 1956, 128 Alaska mental health bill (HR 6376), 103–5, 118–28, 131, 132f Alesen, Lewis A., 114–15 Allen, Mary, 81–85, 106 Allport, Gordon, 103, 109, 111 Ambassador Hotel, L.A., xix ambiguity and contradiction, 75–76, 79–80, 101–2, 171–74 America First Committee (AFC), 21–23, 27, 29 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 130 American Communist Party (CPUSA), 15, 27; Miller’s spying on, 65; secrecy and authoritarianism of, 71, 192n8 American Conference of Small Business Organizations, 37 American Defense Society, 3 American exceptionalism, 20 American Flag Committee bulletin, 37, 94, 126 American Heritage Project, 69–70, 72, 98–101 Americanism Centers, 51, 145–50, 155, 175–77 American Legion, 4, 88 American Legion Auxiliary (ALA), 3, 4, 6, 17 American Liberty League, 15–18 American Library Association (ALA), 98 American Medical Association (AMA), 13–14, 115 American Mercury, 70 American Mothers National, 23

American Opinion magazine, 130, 146 American Public Relations Forum, 38, 42–44, 49–50; anti-mental health campaigns of, 105, 107–18; anti-UNESCO campaign of, 94; Koenig’s work for, 57; on Lucille Miller, 116; religious culture of, 47–49; “Siberia, U.S.A.” protests of, 103–4, 126; “Speaker’s Kit on Mental Health” of, 124–25f American Veterans Committee (AVC), 88, 196n84 American War Mothers, 13 Anderson bill, xx Anthony, Susan B., 98, 174 antiauthoritariansim, 30–31 antibusing campaigns. See desegregation campaigns anticommunism, xvi–xvii, xxiii; anti-Semitism associated with, 18–29; CACC’s schools of, 150–54, 156; Cold-War-era organizing for, 50–68; of Dilling, 25; of FBI volunteers, 62–67; language of, 102; links to femininity of, xxi–xxii; links to racial attitudes of, xx–xxi, 66–67, 78, 85–89, 122, 150; mental health descriptions of, 109–10; in Southern California, xviii, xx, 28–31; of World War I era, 4–7. See also Cold War era; John Birch Society; red scares Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 19 antielitism, xvi–xvii, 2, 172–74; focus on economic elites of, xvi, 18–22; populist movement of the 1880s–90s, 20, 185n79 anti-ERA campaign, 167, 171–72 antifeminism, 214n1 anti-integration movements, xix–xxii anti-internationalism, 3, 22 anti-Semitism, xvi, 3; in anti-mental health campaigns, 127–28; in critiques of Roosevelt, 14, 18–29; psychological studies of, 110–11 antistatism, xxii, 1–3, 5, 30–31, 170; of the Cold War era, 34, 35; of the Great Depression era, xxii, 7, 14–18

­218  •  Index antisuffrage movement, 4, 10–11, 183n38, 205n104 antiwar movement, 135 “Are There Any More Squares Out There?”, 148 Ashby, Thaddeaus, 117–18 Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), 126 Asylums (Goffman), 133–34 Auerback, Alfred, 134 The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, FrenkelBrunswick, Levinson, and Sanford), 110–12, 127, 134 awakenings discourses, 51–55 back-to-basics education movement, 74, 80, 143, 154 Baez, Joan, 154 Bagley, William Chandler, 74 Baker, Bobby, 166 Bale, Gertrude, 141–42 “The Ballad of the Green Berets” (Sadler), 153–54 Barnett, Norma, 87–88 Bartlett, Bob, 104 Bartlett, Frances, 52, 76–78, 194n28 Baruch, Bernard, 21 Beard, Mary Ritter, 11 “Be Careful of the Commie Lies” (Greene), 152 Bell, Daniel, 127 Benge, Lucinda, 1, 27, 28, 29 Benny, Jack, xviii Benowitz, June, 19 Berkeley Free Speech Movement, 165 Berlin, Irving, 25 Bernard, Viola, 134 Better America Federation (BAF), 34 Bible, Alan, 128 The Big Decision (Cvetic), 143 Biggers, Virginia, 88 Birch Society. See John Birch Society Birkeland, Gene, 44, 47, 49, 55; anti-mental health campaigns of, 107–8, 109–11, 113–14, 122; on awakenings, 52; “Siberia, U.S.A.” campaign of, 103–5, 119, 127 black Americans. See African Americans Blake, Gene, 145–46

Blue Book (JBS), 51, 130, 138, 142 B’nai B’rith, 19, 65 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, 4, 5–6 bookstores, xix, xxiii, 51, 142–48, 149f, 169, 175–77; Americanism Centers as, 51, 145–48, 150, 156; community center roles of, 147–48; mail-order operations of, 143; Ranuzzi’s Poor Richard’s as, 59–62, 143–45, 150, 156; tax-exempt status of, 148; youth activities and materials of, 150–51, 156 Boone, Pat, 148, 151–52 Boston Rumor Clinic, 111 Boxer, Barbara, 58 Bozell, L. Brent, 137 brainwashing, xxiii, 54, 103, 133, 148, 170; association with group dynamics of, 105–6; Korean war discourses on, 70–73 Brain-Washing in Red China (Hunter), 71 The Branded Child (Van Allen), 130, 207n160 Braun, Carl F., 56 Brown, Edmund “Pat,” xviii, 143 Brown, Helen Gurley, 162 Brown v. Board of Education decision, xx, 85, 112–13, 202n39 Buckley, Aloise Steiner, 164 Buckley, Priscilla, 131, 135 Burke-Wadsworth Selective Service bill, 23 Bush, George W., 174 Caldwell, Taylor, 50 California. See Los Angeles County California Federation of Republican Women, 41 California Medical Association (CMA), 114–15 California Plan, 96–97 California Republican Assembly (CRA), 161 California Republican Party, 161 California Senate Committee on Education, 77–78, 99 California Senate Committee on Un-American Activities, 96 California Young Republicans, 161 capitalism and market economies, 5, 36, 56–62 Carleton, Don, 86–87 Carson, Johnny, xviii

Index  •  219 “The Case Against Progressive Education,” 79, 82 Catholics/Catholicism, 168; American Public Relations Forum of, 38, 42–44, 47–49; “Siberia, U.S.A.” campaign of, 126; UNESCO’s attack on, 114; Vatican II of, 47 Catt, Carrie Chapman, 9, 11 Caxton Press, 82 centralized government, 170; antistatist movements against, xxii, 1–3, 5, 7, 13–14, 30–31; educational policies of, 74, 97; national security in, 5; of the New Deal, xvi, 3, 14–18; progressive movement advocacy of, 8, 13; purported links with communism of, xxii, 2, 4; purported links with Nazism and fascism of, 35–36. See also civil rights movement; progressive era Chamberlain, Neville, 19 Chambers, Whittaker, 143 Chambers of Commerce, 36–37, 87 Chandler, Alberta, 145 Chandler, Otis, 145–46 Chandler, Philip, 145 Child Labor Amendments, 13 Children’s Bureau, 8, 11–12 Children’s Rights Movement, 172 Chisholm, Brock, 113–14, 129, 132–33, 134 Choice, 164–67 Choice Not an Echo (Schafly), 164 Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (CACC), 151–54, 156 Christian History of the Constitution (Hall), 147 Christianity, xvi–xvii, 167–68. See also religious contexts Christian Nationalist Crusade, 24 Citizens for Goldwater-Miller, 160–67 civil rights movement, xxi–xxii, 135; antiGoldwater protests of, 158; Brown v. Board of Education decision of, xx, 85, 112–13, 202n39; conservative animosity towards, 66–67, 78, 84–89, 102, 104–5, 150, 154–55, 163, 165–66; purported links to communism of, xx–xxi, 66–67, 78, 85–89, 122, 150; southern battles over, 85–89. See also desegregation campaigns Clark, Kenneth, 112–13 Clark, Mamie, 112–13

class considerations: of the Cold War era, 34–37; of the elite, 17–18; of the Great Depression era, xxii, 26; in opposition to the New Deal, 14–15, 17–18 classical liberalism, xvi Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 59, 158 cognitive dissonance. See ambiguity and contradiction Cohn, Roy, 95 Cold War era, xxii, 2–3; animosity towards civil rights movement in, 66–67, 78, 84– 89, 102, 104–5, 122, 150, 154–55, 163, 165–66; anti-internationalist campaigns of, 42, 44–45, 72, 103–5, 113–14; antimental health campaigns of, 103–35; configuration of the dangerous left in, xx, 2, 32–34, 59, 62, 66–68; conspiracy theories of, 120–21, 129–35, 140; educational activism of, 41–42, 52–54, 73–89; grassroots activism of, 37–50, 70–74, 139–40; guilt-by-association logic of, 54–55; McCarthyism of, 44–45, 69–70, 77–78, 98, 99, 116; opposition to the UN in, 1, 27–30; personal histories of, 50–67, 190n55; privileging of the domestic sphere in, 34, 40, 76; red scares of, xxi, 69–73, 102, 192n8; religious culture of, 45–50; spying/FBI informant work of, 51, 62–68; spying of, 44–45, 51, 62–68, 189n32; women’s clubs of, 40–50, 188n32; women’s work of, 55–67, 190n70 Cole, Ruth, 95–97, 106–7, 197n110 Colliers, 94, 197n116 Commager, Henry Steele, 69–70, 98–101 Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), 14–15 Committee for the Preservation of Methodism, 87 Committee of the Sentinels of the Republic, 12, 13, 17 communism: Bolshevik revolution in Russia, 4, 5–6; charges of association with Jews of, 127–28; charges of brainwashing of, xxiii, 54, 70–73, 103, 133, 148; charges of civil rights movement links of, xx–xxi, 66–67, 78, 85–89, 122, 150;

­220  •  Index communism (cont.) Cold-War-era configurations of, xx, 2, 32–34, 59, 62, 66–68; containment policies towards, 56; guilt-by-association charges of, 54–55, 66–67, 80–81; Jews associated with, 18–28; nationalization projects of, 5. See also American Communist Party; anticommunism Communist Party USA. See American Communist Party community activism, xxi–xxii, 37–50, 139–40, 147–48, 170–71 Community Relations Committee (CFC), 44–45, 189n32 “The Compulsive Right Wing Woman” (Leslie), 121 Conant, James, 78–79 Concerned Women for America (CWA), 172 Confessions of a Parlor Radical (Schwed), 9–10, 12 Congress of American Mothers, 24 Conscience of a Conservative (Goldwater with Bozell), 137, 146 consensus history, 102, 127 conservatism, xvi–xvii, xxii; emergence as mass movement of, 32, 136–38; national security priorities of, 5, 30; origins of, 1–2, 30–34; use as term of, 32, 136 conservative feminism, 174 conspiracy theories, 120–21, 129–35, 140, 204n94 Constitution. See U.S. Constitution Cott, Nancy, 171, 182n17 Coughlin, Charles, 21–22 County of Los Angeles. See Los Angeles County Courtois, Helen, 29, 126 Covey, Mrs. Richard, 166 Cox, Adele, 29 CPUSA. See American Communist Party Crain, Lucille Cardin: Educational Reviewer of, 37, 76–78, 187n17; Packaged Thinking for Women of, 54, 77, 107 Critchlow, Don, 173 Crosby, Jane, 51, 53–54, 107, 145–48, 158–60 Crosby, Joe, 160

The Cross and the Flag magazine, 24 Cunningham, Mary Ranuzzi, 60, 62, 143–45, 158 Current History (Commager), 98–99 Curtis, Catherine, 19 Cvetic, Matt, 143 Dallas, Texas, 121, 123, 126, 206n119 Dan Smoot Report, 37, 50, 123, 205n115 Darden, Ida, 37, 121–23, 205n104 Daughters of the American Revolution, 3, 4, 6, 17 Daytime group, 29 Dearborn Independent newspaper, 21 DeHart, Jane, 172, 173 Delegard, Kirsten, 6 desegregation campaigns, xix–xxii, 104–5, 154–55; Brown v. Board of Education decision in, xx, 85, 112–13, 202n39; in Pasadena, 72–75, 78, 80–81, 84–85; red-baiting of, 80–81; southern battles over, 85–89, 130, 135; studies of racial prejudice in, 110–13; violent responses to, 113 The Devil’s Advocate (Caldwell), 50 Dewey, John, 70, 74, 75, 80 Dice, Marguerite, 138 Dickson, Dee, 175 Dilling, Elizabeth, 19, 22; affluence of, 24–25; America First movement of, 22–25, 27; anticommunism of, 25; paranoia of, 26 Dilworth, Nelson, 77, 99 Disraeli, Benjamin, 21 Dochuk, Darren, 35 Dole, Elizabeth, 58 the domestic sphere: Cold-War-era privileging of, 34, 40, 76; conflicts over working women in, 56; development of racial prejudice in, 111–13; emergence of the pro-family movement from, 167–68, 172; momism in, 111–12; parental authority in, 148; property rights of, 5, 7; as protected independent spaces, 7, 28, 30; sexual revolution in, 137–38, 152, 162; as a site for organizing, 40–41, 45; youth concerns in, 148–57. See also gender ideology; housewife populism

Index  •  221 DuBois, Rachel, 84 Du Bois, W. E. B., 98, 150 Eagle Forum, 172 Eastland, James O., 113 Ebey, George, 86–89, 122 economic elites, xvi, 18–22 education, xxiii, 69–102; adult enrichment programs in, xx, 69–70, 98–101; back-to-basics movement in, 74, 80, 143, 154; Brown v. Board of Education decision in, xx, 85, 112–13, 202n39; conservative materials for, 150; discipline debates in, 75; Ford Foundation grants in, 96, 98–101; guidance counselors in, 109; intercultural programs in, 84; Pasadena affair in, xix–xx, xxiii, 42, 72; psychological testing in, 130–31, 207n160; racial tension and desegregation in, xx–xxi, 72–75, 80–81, 154–55; schools of anticommunism in, 150–54, 156; as site for organizing, 41–42, 52–54, 70–74, 170–71, 187n17; southern battles over, 85–89; textbook censorship in, 51, 91; UNESCO programs in, xx, 42, 44–45, 72, 89–97, 197n110, 197n116; women’s claims of expertise in, 79–84, 88, 96. See also bookstores; intellectual development; progressive education movement Educational Policies Commission (EPC), 90 Educational Reviewer bulletin, 37, 187n17 Education and the People’s Peace (EPC), 90 Education or Indoctrination (Allen), 81–85, 106 The “E” in UNESCO, 90–91 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 40, 140, 167; failure to halt New Deal programs by, 109; White House Conference on Education of, 97, 106–7 election of 1964. See presidential election of 1964 elitism: in critiques of the left, 9–10, 16–18; in reactions to the New Deal, 14–15, 17–18, 26. See also antielitism Engels, Friedrich, 12, 214n1 equal rights amendment, 167, 171–73 essentialist readings of women’s contributions, xxi–xxiii

the Essentialists, 74 eugenics, 11 Evans, Dale, 151 ex-patient movements, 134 FACTS in Education newsletter, 52, 78 Faith and Freedom journal, 116 false consciousness, 169–70, 214n1 families. See the domestic sphere Faragher, John Mack, 155–156 Farnham, Arynia, 112 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 51, 62–67 Federation of Republican Women, 41, 169 Feinstein, Dianne, 58 Feldstein, Ruth, 111 female consciousness, xvi female intuition and instinct, xiii, 2, 38–40, 48, 136–37, 157, 167–68 female patriotic groups, xxii, 3–14, 30–31; conversion from the left to, 9–13; defeat of Child Labor Amendments by, 13; defeat of Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act by, 13–14; in mothers’ movements for isolationism, 19–28; opposition to the UN in, 1, 27–30 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 56–57, 162 femininity: ideals of the conservative sex in, 137, 158, 162; powerlessness of, xxi–xxii; role of spirituality in, 48 feminism (as term), 182n17 feminist movement, xvi, 56–57, 156, 162, 169–74, 214n1 Fenster, Mark, 204n94 Fifield, James W.: anti-UNESCO statements of, 93; Freedom Club of, 41, 44–45, 115, 189n32; Spiritual Mobilization of, 36, 37, 39f The Fifty-Minute Hour (Lindler), 110 financing of conservatism, 29, 136 Finn twins (George and Charles), 117–18 First Congregational Church, L.A., xix, 36, 38, 39f; anti-mental health campaign of, 114; anti-UNESCO campaign of, 93–94; Freedom Club of, 41, 44–45, 115, 189n32 Flamm, Michael, 163 Flick-Reedy Leadership Training, 156

­222  •  Index Foot, Steve, 147 Ford, Henry, 21 Ford, John Anson, 99–101 Ford Foundation, 96, 98–101, 122 Fortnight magazine, 79 Fort Worth, Texas, 121–23 Foucault, Michel, 133 Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), 36–37 The Fountainhead (Rand), 36 Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, 113 Frank, Dorothy, 94, 197n116 Frankfurt school of social science, 110–11 Fraterrigo, Elizabeth, 162 Freedom Club, 38, 39f, 41–42, 44, 114, 188n32, 197n110 Freedom Forum bookstores, 147, 176 Freeman, xvii, 36–37, 136 Free Speech Movement, 165 Frenkel-Brunswik, Else, 110–11 Freud, Sigmund, 27 Friday Morning Club, 162 Friedan, Betty, 56–57, 162 Frontier magazine, xviii Fuller, Jean Ward, 40–41 functional ambiguity, 171–74 Fund for the Advancement of Education (FAE), 98–101 Furland, Alice, 85 Gann, Anna Mary, 119–20 gay rights, 168 gender ideology, xiii–xvi, xxi–xxii, 1–3; of the Cold War period, 34; of the effeminate left, 195n63; equation of sexual with political purity in, 7, 162; of the Goldwater campaign, 157–68; of the masculine left, 54–55; of tough masculinity, 83, 195n63; of women as the conservative sex, 137–38, 158, 162; of women’s expertise on issues, 127; of women’s moral superiority and insight, xiii, 2, 38–40, 48, 136–37, 157, 167–68; of women’s spiritual role, 48–49 Generation of Vipers (Wylie), 111–12 German Bund, 29 Gibson, Catherine, 40

Gilbert, Patricia, 154–155 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, xxii, 12 globalism, 172 “God Bless America” (Berlin), 25 Goffman, Erving, 133–34 Goldwater, Barry: appeal to women of, 157–61; Conscience of a Conservative of, 137, 147; gender-based morality campaign of, 161–68; law-and-order policies of, 163–64; presidential bid of, 129, 136, 137, 143–44, 156–68; as Senator, xvii, xxiii, 104, 121, 128 Goldwater Gals, 158 Goldwater Girls, 158, 159f Goslin, Willard, xix–xx, 42, 72–85, 101; educational methods of, 73; group dynamics charges against, 105–6 The Grapes of Wrath movie, 26 grassroots activism. See community activism Great Books curriculum, 80, 98, 101 Great Depression era, xv–xvi, xx; antistatism in, xxii, 7, 14–18; populist activism in, xiv–xv, 18–28; working class reactions to, 26. See also New Deal Greene, Janet, 151–54 Green Mountain Rifleman, 115–16, 126 Greenroos, David, 152 Griffith, Corinne, 143 group dynamics practices, 105–7 guidance counselors, 109 guilt by association logic, 4, 6, 54–55; in antiSemitism, 19; in charges of communism, 66–67, 80–81 Halberg, Catherine, 79–81, 105–6 Hall, Verna M., 147 Hamilton, Anne Burrows, 54 Harrison, Anne, 87–88 Hayek, Friedrich, 35–36, 37 Hearst, William Randolph, 23 Hearst syndicate, 95 Hedrick, Virginia, 88 Hefner, Hugh, 162 Henderson, John, 100–101 Heritage Bookstore, 147, 149f, 176 Herman, Ellen, 108 Hewlitt, Sylvia Ann, 173

Index  •  223 Hindman, Jo, 69–70, 72, 98–101 Hitler, Adolf, 19 Hofstadter, Richard, 127 home life. See the domestic sphere Hood, Jane, 74 hooks, bell, 174 Hoover, Herbert, 167 Hoover, J. Edgar, 6, 67–68, 123, 142, 146 Horkheimer, Max, 110 Houghton, Mrs. Hiram, 166 House Subcommittee on Territories and Insular Affairs, 126 House Un-American Activities Committee, 69–70, 116, 142, 162; on Brown decision, 113; female witnesses at, 82; investigations of medical professions by, 115; state-level imitators of, 181n19 housewife populism, xiii–xxiv, 2–3, 26–27, 30, 169–74; of the Cold War era, 34–37, 101–2; community-based activism of, xxi–xxii, 37–40, 139–40, 147–48, 170–71; emergence in the new right in, 171–74; numbers of, xix, 41, 44, 181n19; reconciliation of ambiguity and contradiction in, 75–76, 79–80, 101–2, 171–74; role of women’s moral superiority and insight in, xiii, 2, 38–40, 48, 136–37, 157, 167–68. See also the domestic sphere; gender ideology Houston, Texas, 85–89, 122; anti-UNESCO campaign in, 94; “Siberia, U.S.A.” protests in, 121, 126 Howard, Mrs. Ernest W., 127 HR 6376 (Alaska mental health bill), 103–5, 118–28 Huchins, Robert, 80 Hugo, Victor, 136 Hulburd, David, 78–79 Hull House, 8 Human Events, xvii, 85, 136 Hunt, H. L., 123 Hunter, Edward, 71 I Led Three Lives (Philbrick), 151 I Love Lucy, xiii immigration, 6, 8; association with radicalism of, 10, 23, 64; formation of cosmopolitan

community through, 9; to Los Angeles, 35; progressive uplift projects for, 12; during World War II, 23 Ingebretsen, James, 58f Institute for Social Research, 110–11 integration, 130, 135. See also desegregation campaigns intellectual development, xxii; awakenings discourses of, 51–55; bookstores and reading groups for, xvii, xix, 7, 137–38, 142–50, 169, 175–77; elitist critiques of the left and, 9–10, 16–18; of L.A. conservative women, 43–45, 100 The Intelligent Women’s Guide to Conservatism (Kirk), 137 Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), 156 intercultural education, 84 internationalism, 3, 22, 172; Cold-War-era campaigns against, 42, 72, 103–4, 113–14; isolationist movements against, 1, 27–28, 29, 90 Ireland, Mary, 22 “Isaiah’s Job” (Nock), 17–18 isolationism, xvi, 3; anti-UNESCO campaigns in, 42, 44–45, 72, 89–97; mothers’ movements for, 22–31; opposition to the UN in, 1, 27–30; World War II movements for, 19–28 It’s Up to the Women (Roosevelt), 26 “I Was Called a Subversive” (Frank), 94, 197n116 I Was A Spy: The Story of a Brave Housewife (Miller), 62–67 Jackson, Henry, 126 Jan and Dean duo, xviii JBS. See John Birch Society Jeansonne, Glen, 19, 23, 24 Jefferson, Thomas, 5 Jensen, Marjorie, 51–56; on Florence Lyons, 91; Network of Patriotic Letter Writers of, 141–42; Pro-America work of, 81; Tuesday Morning Study Club of, 45; WORC work of, 159 Jensen, Vernon, 52, 56 Jewel, 181n16

­224  •  Index Jewish Federation Council, 29, 189n32 Jewish National Committee, 44–45 Jews. See anti-Semitism John Birch Society (JBS), xviii, xxiii, 138–48, 169, 181n19; American Opinion magazine of, 130, 147; Blue Book of, 51, 130, 138, 142; campaigns of, 140; female activism in, 140–42; front groups of, 159–60; in Goldwater’s presidential campaign, 159–62; grassroots networking of, 139–40; male leadership hierarchy of, 138–41; media exposés of, 145–46; on mental health policies, 130; origins of, 85; Ranuzzi’s branch of, 59; reading rooms of, 142; Southern California chapters of, 51, 139; tactics of, 138; writers for, 50 John Dewey Society, 77–78 Johnson, Bill, 116 Johnson, Lyndon B., 161–66 Jumonville, Neil, 98–99 juvenile delinquency, 148–50. See also youth Kaplan, Temma, xv–xvi Kaspar, John, 127–28 Keep America Committee, 29, 126 Kelley, Florence, 8, 12 Kennedy, John F., 162, 195n63 Kesey, Ken, 134, 135 Keynes, John Maynard, 14 Keynes at Harvard (Dobbs), 150 Kilpatrick, William Heard, 74, 79, 106 Kircher, Charlane, 44, 117 Kirk, Russell, xvii, 32, 130–31, 136–37 Knight, Goodwin, 114 Knott, Walter, 156 Koenig, Marie, 47, 51, 57–59, 120, 122, 175, 205n115 Korean War, 70–73 Koven, Seth, xiv labor movements, 4, 26; alliance with populist movements of, 20, 185n79; business assaults on, 34; militancy of, 15; in Texas, 87; Wagner Act rights of, 14 Landon, Alfred, 15, 184n68 Lange, Dorothea, 26 Lathrop, Julia, 8

Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry (Szasz), 132–33 League of Women Voters, 53 Leave It to Beaver, xiii LeHaye, Betty, 172 Lend-Lease Program, 21, 24 Leslie, Warren, 121 A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America (Hewlitt), 173 A Letter to the South on Segregation (Welch), 85 Levering Act, 77 Levinson, Daniel, 110–11 Lewin, Kurt, 106 liberalism, xvi, 2, 5, 7, 28 libertarianism, xvi–xvii, 35–37, 74 Liberty Lobby, 166–67 Lindberg, Charles, 21–22 Lindler, Robert, 110 “Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” xviii little old lady parodies, xviii, 169, 181n16 Living Ideas in America (Commager), 69, 98, 99 local communities. See community activism Locke, John, 35 Long, Huey, 18, 20, 23, 57 Los Angeles Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, 65 Los Angeles County, xix, 28–31; American Heritage Project in, 69–70, 72, 98–101; black population of, 35, 62, 72, 84–85; Catholic community of, 38, 42–44, 47–49; Christian-inflected libertarianism in, 35–36; conservative bookstores of, 142–48, 149f; defense industry in, 34–35, 73; desegregation campaigns in, 72, 73, 80–81; emergence of conservatism in, 34–37; financial support of conservatism in, 29, 136; Hollywood liberalism in, 28; John Birch Society in, 139; migration to, 35; post-World War II growth of, 32–37, 42–43, 73; school board of, 95–97, 197n110; Watts riots of, 62, 135; women’s grassroots activism in, 37–50, 70–74 Los Angeles County Medical Association, 114–15 Los Angeles Federation of Republican Women, 41 Louis Downtown School, 12

Index  •  225 Lowe, Belle, 55 loyalty oaths, 77, 80, 98 Sister Lucia dos Santos, 47 Lundberg, Ferdinand, 112 Lyons, Florence Fowler, 91–93, 95, 147 MacArthur, Douglas, 18 MacFarland, Henry, 126 MacKinnon, Catherine, 214n1 Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 133 Madness Network News periodical, 134 Malone, George, 128 Marmor, Judd, 134 Martin, Dean, xviii Marx, Karl, 129, 214n1 Marxism, 27, 169–70, 214n1 Massachusetts Public Interest League, 4 Massey, Raymond, 166 Masters of Deceit (Hoover), 146 maternalism, xiv–xv, 8, 11–13 Mathews, John, 172, 173 May, Elaine Tyler, 56 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, 64 McCarthy, Joseph, 69–70, 95, 98, 99 McCarthyism, 44–45, 77–78, 116 McDougal, William, 11 McEnaney, Laura, 24 McGirr, Lisa, xviii–xix McIntyre, Cardinal James, 42 medical populism, 133–34 Meerloo, Joost A. M., 71 Mendez v. Westminster decision, xx Menninger, Karl, 130–31 Menninger, William, 108 “The Mental Health Ethic” (Szasz), 133 mental health movement, xxiii, 54, 71–72, 102–35, 170; campaigns against reforms of, 107–18; conspiracy theories regarding, 120–21, 129–35, 204n94; ex-patient movements in, 134; Goldwater’s attacks on, 165; group dynamics practices of, 105–7; hospitalization stories in, 115–16, 126, 129–30, 133, 134; pathologizing of right wing behavior in, 120, 127, 134–35, 204n94; purported links with brainwashing of, 54, 70–73, 103,

105–6, 133, 148; purported links with internationalism of, 113–14; purported links with Jews of, 127–28; on race prejudice, 110–13; on religious practice, 114–16; in schools-based psychological testing, 130–31, 207n160; “Siberia, U.S.A.” campaigns against, 103–5, 118–28, 131, 132f, 200n6; Szasz’s attacks on, 131–35 “The Mental Health Trap” (Schulz), 133 Meredith, James, 130 Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA), 87 Michel, Sonya, xiv, 11–12 middle class, xvi, 7, 9–10; desire for status in, 43–44; home life of, 7; populist definitions of, 20–21. See also the domestic sphere Miller, Lucille, 115–16, 126 Miller, Manuel, 115–16 Miller, Marion, 51, 62–67 Miller, Paul, 64–65, 67 Millett, Kate, 174 mind control. See mental health movement Mindszenty, Joseph Cardinal, 50 Mindszenty Foundation, 50 The Mindszenty Report, 50 Minute Women of the U.S.A., Inc., 42; antimental health campaigns of, 105, 107–18, 122–23; Houston Chapter of, 87–89, 94; “Siberia, U.S.A.” protests of, 103–4, 119– 20, 122, 127–28; in Southern California, 44–45, 47, 48–50 Miranda v. Arizona decision, 163 Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (Farnham and Lundberg), 112 momism, 111–12 Moon, Bucklin, 94, 197n116 Morgan, Raymond, 165 Mosk, Stanley, xviii, 181n16 mothers. See the domestic sphere Mothers for Moral America (MFMA), 137, 161–67 mothers’ movements for isolationism, 22–28; Dilling’s leadership of, 22–25, 27; opposition to the UN by, 27–28; organizing tactics of, 24–27 Mothers of Sons Forum, 27

­226  •  Index Mothers of the U.S.A., 25 Mothers Strike for Peace, 162–63 Mullendore, W. C., 37 Muncy, Robyn, 14 Murray, Sylvie, 80 The Myth of Mental Illness (Szasz), 131–32 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 202n39 Nation, xviii, 34 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 9, 11 National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, 4–5, 10–11 National Association Pro-America, 15–18 National Committee on the Cause and Cure for War (CCCW), 9 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), 109 National Education Association (NEA), 90 National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), 109 National Legion of Mothers of America (NLMA), 22–23, 29 National Library Association, 69 National Mental Health Act (HMHA), 108–9 National Organization of Republican Women, Inc., 15–18, 38–41 National Review, xvii, 38, 130–35, 136, 156 national security, 5, 30. See also anticommunism National Woman’s Party (NWP), 11 nativism: of anti-New Deal elitists, 17–18; anti-Semitism of, 29; of one hundred percent Americanism, 4, 10; opposition to the UN in, 1, 27–28 The Nature of Prejudice (Allport), 111 Network of Patriotic Letter Writers, 51, 55–56, 141–42, 209n22 Neutra, Richard, 95, 97 The New American Right (ed. Bell), 127 new conservatism, xvi–xvii, 171–74 New Deal, xvi, 3, 14–18; anti-Semitism of, 14, 18–28; Commager’s defense of, 98–99; elitist reactions to, 14–15, 17–18, 26; female administrators of, 8; Lend-Lease Program of, 21, 24; working class reactions to, 26

Newkirk, Marion, 163 the new left, 156 New Republic, 34 new right, xvi–xvii, 171–74 newsletters, 38 Niehls, Marie, 59 Nineteenth Amendment, xv, 4, 11, 171, 183n38 Nixon, Richard, 40, 143 Nobel Peace Prize, 8 Nock, Albert Jay, 17–18, 36, 74 None Dare Call It Treason (Stormer), 129, 147, 150, 155 Norris, Kathleen, 23 “Now—Siberia, U.S.A.” (Birkeland), 103–4, 119 numbers of activist women, xix, 41, 44, 181n19 Obama, Barack, 173–74 Occidental College, 111 The Octopus (Dilling), 19 Old-Age Revolving Pension Plan, 20 Oliver, Revilo P., 130 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 134 one hundred percent Americanism, 4, 10 Operation Moral Upgrade, 163 Orange County, California, xviii–xix, 33f, 181n19; conservative bookstores of, 148, 149f; draft Rafferty campaign in, 155; John Birch Society in, 139, 181n19 Orleck, Annelise, xiv, xv, 26 Ottenberg, Perry, 134 Our Lady of Fatima, 48–49 Overman, Lee Slater, 5 Overman Committee, 5–6, 7 Packaged Thinking for Women (Crain), 54, 77, 107 Padelford, Louise Hawkes, 76, 79–81, 105–6 Palin, Sarah, 173 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 4 the Pamphleteers, 37 parents. See the domestic sphere Parent Teacher Association (PTA), 54, 107 Pasadena: affluent neighborhoods of, 52, 190n57, 190n70; conservative bookstores

Index  •  227 of, 51, 145–50, 156, 177; conservative reputation of, 45, 46f, 74–75; education battles in, xix–xx, xxiii, 42, 52–54, 73–85, 105–6; Festival of the Arts of 1968, xviii; John Birch Society in, 139; neutral zones of, 74–75, 77, 80–81; racial tension in, 73, 74–75, 78, 84–85 Pasadena affair, xix–xx, xxiii, 42, 72, 73–85; Goslin’s resignation in, 78; issues involved in, 73–76, 105–6; national debates over, 78–85; organizations involved in, 76–78; state investigation of, 77–78 Pasadena Republican Women’s Club, 57 The Passing of the Patriot (Rafferty), 154–55 patriotic bookstores. See bookstores Paul, Alice, 11, 174 peace movement, 8–9 Pears, Robert, 175 Pedersen, Tom, 155 Pegler, Westbrook, 116 Pepper, Claude, 25, 27 Perkins, Frances, 8 Perlstein, Rick, 157 Philbrick, Herbert, 151, 153f Playboy, 162 Plessy v. Ferguson, 113 political rights, 5 The Politician (Welch), 140 Pollitt, Katha, 174 “Poor Left Winger” (Greene), 152 Poor Richard’s Book Shop, 51, 59–62, 143–45, 149f, 150, 156, 177 Popular Front, 20, 185n79, 192n8 populism, xv–xvi; antielitist discourses of, 20–22, 172–74; in anti-FDR and New Deal movements, xiv–xv, 14, 18–28; in the antipsychiatry movement, 134–35; conspiracy theories of, 120; of the 1880s–90s, 20. See also housewife populism post-World War II era. See Cold War era Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A., 46–47 presidential election of 1964, 129, 136, 137, 143–44, 156–67; Goldwater’s appeal to women in, 157–61; Mothers for Moral America in, 161–67; youthful supporters of Goldwater in, 156–57

the private, 5. See also the domestic sphere Pro-America, 15–18, 42, 52–53, 76–78, 88 pro-family rhetoric: of the new right, 167–68, 172; in WWII’s America First movement, 22. See also the domestic sphere progressive education movement, xvii, 5, 38, 104; group dynamics practices of, 105–7; methods of, 74, 80; national debates over, 78–85; as organizing target, 41–42, 52–54, 70–74, 170–71, 187n17; origins of, 70; Pasadena attacks on, xix–xx, 42, 52–53, 73–85, 105–6; Rafferty’s views on, 154–55; “whole child” philosophy of, 106 progressive era, 1–2; conservative attacks on, 7, 9–14; decline of, 1–3; female reformers of, 6, 8–9; infant and maternal health programs of, 2, 5, 11–14; internationalism of, 3; maternalism of, xiv–xv, 8, 11–13; political conversions of, 9–13; role of government in, 8, 13; woman movement of, 6, 10–14, 182n17. See also centralized government; female patriotic groups Project Method, 74 property rights, 5, 7 Proposition 14, 160 Protestant activism. See religious contexts Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, 21 The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” (Hofstadter), 127 psychiatry. See mental health movement “Psychiatry’s Threat to Civil Liberties” (Szasz), 133 psychology. See mental health movement Public Affairs Luncheon Club, Dallas, 123, 126, 206n119 Putnam, Elizabeth Lowell, 3, 11–12, 13 “Race Prejudice and Mental Health” (Ziferstein), 110–11 race science, 92–93, 112 racial attitudes, xx–xxii; animosity of conservatives towards civil rights, 66–67, 78, 84–89, 102, 104–5, 122, 150, 154–55, 163, 165–66; conflation of race with internationalism in, 28; of one hundred percent Americanism, 4, 10; psychological studies of, 102, 110–13;

­228  •  Index racial attitudes (cont.) in southern education battles, 85–89; of the suffrage movement, 11; UNESCO’s Statements on, 92–93, 102; in Watts riots, 62, 135. See also civil rights movement; nativism Rafferty, Maxwell, 153–55 Rand, Ayn, 36 Ranuzzi, Florence, 51, 59–62, 140, 143–45, 156 Ranuzzi, Frank, 143–45 Ravitch, Diane, 106 Read, Leonard, 36 Reader’s Digest, 62, 63f, 65 Reagan, Bruce, 160 Reagan, Muriel, 160 Reagan, Nancy, 164 Reagan, Ronald, xvii, 62, 140, 151–52, 164 reconciliation of ambiguity and contradiction, 75–76, 79–80, 101–2, 171–74 The Red Network: A Who’s Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots (Dilling), 19 red scares: of the Cold War era, xvi–xvii, xxi, 69–73, 102, 192n8; loyalty oaths during, 77, 80, 98; of the post-World War I era, xv, 2, 8, 10, 11. See also anticommunism Reece, B. Carroll, 99 Reece Committee Report, 99–100 Reed, Harry, 6 reformers. See progressive era religious contexts, 136; of anti-mental health campaigns, 114–16; of Cold-War-era women’s clubs, 45–50; emergence of the Christian religious right in, 167–68; Supreme Court policies on, 135. See also Catholics/Catholicism Republican motherhood, xiv. See also housewife populism Republican Party: antielitism in, 173–74; of California, 160–61; Cold-War-era women’s clubs of, 38–41; conservative identification with, xvii, 136–38, 140; New-Deal era women’s clubs of, 15–18 research. See intellectual development Reuther, Walter, 123 Richards, Sylvia, 82 Richardson, Ralph, 155 The Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 35–36 Robinson, Margaret, 11

Roe v. Wade decision, 167 Rogge, John, 88 Roosevelt, Edith, 16 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 24, 25 Roosevelt (Franklin) administration: antiinternationalism during, 3; anti-Semitic critiques of, 14, 18–29; anti-subversive activities of, 22; World War II policies of, 21–22. See also New Deal The Roosevelt Red Record and Its Background (Dilling), 19 Root, Della, 142 Rosen, Robyn, 11–12 Rosin, Hanna, 174 Rothschild, Edward, 95 Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963, 160 Russian Revolution, 4, 5–6 Rymph, Catherine, 16, 38–39 Sadler, Barry, 153–54 Saltzman, Carl, 156 San Fernando Valley, California, 42–44 Sanford, R. Nevitt, 110–11 San Gabriel Valley, California. See Pasadena Schine, G. David, 95 Schlafly, Phyllis, 41, 58, 164, 172–73 Schlesinger, Arthur, 127 Schneiderman, Rose, 8 school boards, xvii, 41–42, 95–97, 197n110. See also education School Development Council (SDC), 76–77, 84 schools of anticommunism, 150–54 Schrecker, Ellen, 99, 192n8 Schulz, Theodore, 133 Schwartz, Fred, 153f, 181n19; Christian Anti-Communism Crusade of, 151–54, 156; You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists) of, 143 Schwed, Hermine, 9–10, 12–13 Scott, Joan Wallach, 214n1 Seattle general strike, 4 secularism, 167, 172 Senate Fact-Finding Report on Un-American Activities, 126–28, 181n19 Senate Subcommittee on Territories and Insular Affairs, 103

Index  •  229 Seventh Annual Biennial Conference on Childhood and Youth, 107 Sex and the Single Girl (Brown), 162 sexuality: equation with purity of, 7, 162; of the sexual revolution, 137–38, 152, 156, 162 Share the Wealth Campaign, 18, 20, 23 Sheldon, Mary M., 22 Shell, Joseph, 160 Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, 13–14, 70 Sherrill, Frances, 22 Shopper’s Guide to Communist Imports, 147 “Siberia, U.S.A.” protests, 103–5, 118–28, 131, 132f, 200n6 Sides, Josh, 35 Simpson, Robert, 133 Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, 42 Slovenko, Ralph, 133–34 Small Property Owners League, 95, 97 Smith, Adam, 5, 35 Smith, Gerald L. K., 23–24, 27, 28–29 Smoot, Dan, 37, 50, 123, 126, 205n115 Social Security Act, 14 Sokolsky, George, 116 Southern California, xvii–xxiii, 160–61, 181n19. See also Los Angeles County Southern California Republican Women, 17, 91, 184n68 Southern Conservative, 37, 121–22, 123 South Pasadena Americanism Center, 51, 145–50, 156, 177 “Speaker’s Kit on Mental Health,” 124–25f Spiritual Mobilization (SM), 35–36, 41, 51, 57, 58f spying, 6, 12–13, 17, 44–45; Cold-War-era volunteers in, 51, 62–68, 189n32; guilt by association logic of, 4, 6, 66–67; on Jewish organizations, 29; memoirs of, 51, 62–67, 143 Stafford, Edith, 95–97, 106–7, 197n110 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 98 Stevenson, Adlai, 80 Stevenson, Suzanne Silvercruys, 44 Stoddard, Alexander, J., 90, 96 Stone, Barbara Shell, 181n19 Stormer, John, 129–30, 147, 150, 155

Stuart, Helen, 12–13 study. See intellectual development study clubs, xvii, xix, 7, 37–38, 40, 42, 45, 137–38 Suburban Warriors (McGirr), xviii–xix suffrage movement, xv, 10–11, 171; antisuffrage organizations against, 4–5, 183n38, 205n104; peace movement of, 9 Supreme Court. See U.S. Supreme Court Susan B. Anthony List, 174 Swanson, Gloria, 143 Szasz, Thomas S., 131–35 Tea Party movement, 173–74 Tenney, Jack, 91–93 Texas, 85–89, 94, 121–22, 126 Texas Women for Constitutional Government, 126 Third International Congress on Mental Health, 113–14 This Happened in Pasadena (Hulburd), 78–79 This is Your Life, 62, 63f, 65 Thomas, Helen Darden, 122–23 “Those School Psychological Tests” (Kirk), 130–31 The Tidings newspaper, 42 Towards World Understanding (UNESCO), 90–91 Townsend, Francis, 20 Trowbridge, Virginia, 145 Tuesday Morning Study Club, 42, 45, 51, 57 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), xx, 101; campaigns against, 42, 44–45, 72, 172; educational materials of, 90–91; expulsion from LA schools of, 89–97, 197n110, 197n116; mental health work of, 113–14; nursery school pamphlet of, 114; Statements on Race of, 92–93, 102 UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), 172 unions. See labor movements United Nations, xx, 1, 27–30, 88, 90, 142, 172 United Republicans of America, 166 United Republicans of California (UROC), 160–61

­230  •  Index United States National Commission for UNESCO (UNSC), 90 University of Chicago, 27 University of Mississippi, 130 U.S. Constitution: citizenship protections of, 5; Fourteenth Amendment of, 113; Nineteenth Amendment of, xv, 4, 11, 171, 183n38; proposed equal rights amendment to, 168, 171–73 U.S. Supreme Court: banning of religion from the public sphere by, 135; Brown v. Board of Education decision of, xx, 85, 112–13, 202n39; charges of communism in, 85; Goldwater’s campaign goals for, 163; Miranda v. Arizona decision of, 163; Plessy v. Ferguson decision of, 113; Roe v. Wade decision of, 167 Utley, Freda, 41 Valley Hunt Club, 45, 46f Van Allen, Edward J., 130–31, 207n160 Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), 88 Viereck, Peter, xvii, 32 Volunteer Service Committee on Aliens, 12 Wagner Act, 14 Walgreen, Charles, 27 Walker, Edwin, 129–30, 133 Walton, Rus, 160, 163–66 Warren, Earl, xx, 85, 113, 140 Washington, Booker T., 98 Watchdogs of the Republican Party (WORC), 158–61 Waters, Agnes, 19–20, 21 Waters, Carol Arth, 164 Waters, Laughlin E., 117–18 Watkins, Louise Ward, 16–17, 18, 184n68 Watts riots, 62, 135 Wayne, John, 143, 151 We, the Mothers Mobilize for America, 24, 25, 27, 29 Weitinger, Fay, 88 Welch, Robert, 85, 138–42 Wells, Frank, 77 We’ve Got Your Number, Dr. Ebey, 88 Wheeler, Burton, 21

White, F. Clifton, 136–37, 157, 161–62, 163, 167 White House Conference on Education of 1955, 97, 106–7 Who But a Woman (LeHaye), 172 Wilkie, Wendell, 23 Wilkinson, Frank, 96–97 Wilkinson, Jean, 96–97, 101 Williams, G. Mennen, 123 Williams, Robert, 128 Williams, Stephanie: American Public Relations Forum of, 42, 47, 48–49; antimental health campaign of, 103, 116–17; anti-UNESCO campaign of, 94 Williams Intelligence Summary newsletter, 128 Wilson, Woodrow, 9 Winchell, Walter, 29 Wise, Wes, 121 Witness (Chambers), 143 Wolf, Mrs., 47 Wollstonecraft, Mary, xxii woman movement, 6, 10–14, 171, 182n17 Woman Patriot, 4–5 Women and Money program, 19 Women for America, 1 Women Investors in America, 19 Women’s Auxiliary Intelligence Bureau, 3 women’s clubs, xiv; anticommunism of, xv; Cold-War-era expansion of, 38–50, 189n32; male participation in, 45; membership numbers of, 41, 44; New-Deal era Pro-America clubs of, 15–18; religious culture of, 45–50; spying activities of, 44–45 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 8–9 Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), 174 women’s movement. See feminist movement Women’s National League to Protect our Homes and Children, 12 Women’s Patriotic Conference on National Defense, 127 Women’s Patriotic Publishing Company (WPPC), 4–5 Women’s Peace Party, 8

Index  •  231 Women’s Voice newsletter, 24, 29 Women Wage-Earners (Stuart), 12 working class, xv–xvi World Federation of Mental Health, 132–33 World Health Organization (WHO), 113–14, 172 World Mental Health Foundation (WMHF), 113–14 World Trade Organization (WTO), 172 World War I: anticommunism of, 4–7; female patriotic groups of, xxii, 3–14, 22 World War II, xvi, xx; anti-internationalism during, 3, 21; anti-Semitic responses to, 19–29; Holocaust of, 108, 110–11; isola­tionist movements of, 19–28; mental health practices of, 108–9, 118; mothers’ movements against, 22–28; studio strikes of, 57

Wright, Lawrence, 121 Wuthnow, Robert, 46 Wylie, Philip, 111–12 The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman), 12 You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists) (Schwarz), 143 Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), 156 youth, 148–57; bookstore materials and activities for, 150–51; college organizations for, 156; parental authority over, 148; Rafferty’s campaign on, 154–55; schools of anticommunism for, 150–54, 156. See also education Ziegler, Bea, 160 Ziferstein, Isidore, 110–11

POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA

Series Editors William Chafe, Gary Gerstle, Linda Gordon, and Julian Zelizer Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties by Laura McEnaney The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South by Michelle Brattain Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy by Mary L. Dudziak Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality by Bruce Nelson Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History by Alice O’Connor State of the Union: A Century of American Labor by Nelson Lichtenstein Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right by Lisa McGirr American Babylon Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland by Robert O. Self Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution by Alan Dawley Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America by Colin Gordon For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State by Jennifer Klein Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America by Mae M. Ngai The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America by Dorothy Sue Cobble

The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon by Robert D. Johnston Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley by Margaret Pugh O`Mara Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America by Zaragosa Vargas More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century by Godfrey Hodgson Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America by Meg Jacobs Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam by David Farber Defending America Military Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s by Gil Troy Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade by Donald T. Critchlow The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South by Matthew D. Lassiter White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism by Kevin M. Kruse Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution by Joseph Crespino The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles by Scott Kurashige School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program by Susan Levine Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy by Shane Hamilton

Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War by Carl J. Bon Tempo The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America by Margot Canaday Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School by Karen Anderson Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink by Louis Hyman No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportation by Cindy Hahamovitch Philanthropy: In the American Century by Olivier Zunz Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century by Christopher P. Loss Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right by Michelle M. Nickerson