by Chris Staron | Jan 21, 2025 | Episodes, Season 6 - Rise of the Religious Right
Candy magnate Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society
Robert Welch was a candy magnate who invented the Sugar Daddy and sold favorites like Junior Mints and Milk Duds. He was also very anti-communist. His dubious research led him to found the John Birch Society, a group whose mission was to spread conspiracy theories worldwide. They had major support from wealthy men like Fred Koch, father of the Koch brothers (who financed opposition to Obamacare and climate change legislation).
The John Birch Society spread conspiracy theories in the United States
Some of their most notable campaigns were those against Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren and President Dwight Eisenhower. They claimed that these men were communist sympathizers working behind the scenes to put the communist agenda. Bogus stuff, but they gained thousands of followers across the country. They also fought the income tax, said that black people would not have wanted equality if the communists hadn’t taught them to, and argued that the US is a republic and not a democratic republic.
Some famous leaders of the Religious Right had ties to the John Birch Society
Phyllis Schlafly, RJ Rushdoony, Tim LaHaye, and many others had ties to the birchers. This group had a huge influence on the Religious Right! Not to mention shifting the GOP to accept extremists.
Our special guest for this episode is Dr. Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. His book is Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.
Sources:
- Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right by Matthew Dallek
- Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein
- Divided We Stand by Marjorie Spruill
- Helpful Guardian article about the Koch brothers and Americans for Prosperity
- Christian Reconstruction: RJ Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism by Michael McVicar
- NY Times article about J. Howard Pew’s connections to Robert Welch
- Dark Money by Jane Mayer
Discussion Questions
- What is the John Birch Society?
- Was communism a threat to the country in the mid-1900s?
- What would have been the proper way to respond to communism?
- What is the impact of conspiracy theories on American Christianity?
- There are real conspiracies in the US, like those by Donald Trump and his allies to steal the 2020 election. But a lot of Christians don’t believe these real conspiracies. How has an abundance of false conspiracies numbed our ability to recognize reality?
- Are you surprised Tim LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly, and RJ Rushdoony were affiliated with the JBS?
- How can believers maintain their faith even when evangelical culture has been corrupted?
TRANSCRIPT – NOTE: this transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate.
Chris Staron: [00:00:00] This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s. It can stand on its own, but when you’re done, go back and start at the beginning of Season 6, because all of this ties together. This is the John Birch Society.
Darby, Montana is located on the western border of the state, not far from Idaho. The downtown looks like a mixture of Old West and tourist attraction. And in the 1960s, they found themselves with a stack of old Bibles in the school district. They were going to get new ones, but had a question. What is the proper way to dispose of the good book?
A local minister, maybe thinking about how we decommission old flags in this country, maybe? suggested burning them. Again, this was the 1960s, a time of upheaval in the United States. Civil rights marches and protests, Vietnam, drills where school kids ducked under desks in [00:01:00] anticipation of atomic weapons.
The idea of Bibles burning for any reason, to some, was offensive. Perhaps they didn’t hear the part about them being old and needing to be replaced. They just heard Bible burning and got angry.
What followed was a battle that lasted for years, led by the John Birch Society. The John Birch Society is a group of radicals on the far right. They oppose communism, or what they think is communism, and demand pro American messages in public schools. According to Senator Mike Mansfield’s office at the time, these conspiracy theorists were determined to take over school boards across the country.
They wanted approval of textbooks. And in Darby, the school board denied their requests. And then came the thing with the Bibles. Radicals trashed the home of [00:02:00] the superintendent, stalked him, called with threats and then called again. They harassed him until he resigned. Within just a few years, Darby School District lost 16 of its 23 teachers.
using what one historian called scorched earth tactics. Birchers could be anywhere in the 1960s, and their influence reached some of the biggest names in what became the religious right. They picked up existing fears about communism and amplified them. They were a minority, That made a lot of noise and along the way, regrettably influenced modern evangelicalism.
They’re burning anger going far beyond the boundaries of the Bible. You are listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church. We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Sta and this is Truce.[00:03:00]
This season, we’re bouncing around a lot in time. Because, really, there’s no one way to talk about how some evangelicals tied themselves to the GOP and do it in a straight line. Previously, we covered the roles that schools and women played. We also investigated some of the guys who provided the theological backbone for ties to the GOP.
And now, we’re dipping into a few ideas that will help us grasp what’s coming. In the last episode, we discussed how libertarianism shaped economic ideas of the religious right. In the next two episodes, we’ll reference this one. Today, a minor but powerful influence on the ways that evangelicals with large followings Sure, my name is Matt
Matthew Dallek: Dalek, and I’m a professor of political management at George Washington University and a [00:04:00] political historian.
Chris Staron: His book is Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. He’s also written on Reagan’s first political campaign and efforts to hold down the home front during World War II. Let’s turn back the clock a little to see how this kind of stuff is kind of in the American DNA.
Matthew Dallek: So the country was founded in a revolution to overthrow centralized power in the form of the British king. Americans harbored deep suspicions of a concentration of power in a distant place. I think that that has lent itself. to this hyper-individualistic ethic in the country and this deep suspicion of federal authority, of elites trampling on individual rights
Chris Staron: The late 1700s were also an era of conspiracies in Europe, many of which were harnessed by the rich and powerful To stay in power. You can read [00:05:00] more about that in the book, Phantom Terror by Adam Zamoyski.
Matthew Dallek: A second element though, and this is obviously true in other countries as well, but it, but it’s especially true in the United States because the country has grown so much through immigration.
There, I think has long been, especially among native. white populations, conspiracy theories that target immigrants, that target Catholics, Jews, foreign ideas.
Chris Staron: For example, some Americans were afraid of new Catholic immigrants, that their growing numbers would make them into a voting bloc that would then take orders from the Pope.
Or that the Illuminati was going to seize the government.
Matthew Dallek: And they’re bringing left wing ideas. Socialism, anarchism, right, communism. They’re bringing foreign religions.
Chris Staron: One of the early purposes of public school was to homogenize the country so that ideas like this wouldn’t take hold. [00:06:00] Our unfortunate love of conspiracies was already in place before the John Birch Society.
In fact, this episode may make it sound like the JBS was the only thing going. It wasn’t. It was one of hundreds of fringe groups in the country by the late 1950s. It just happened to be both influential and well known.
Matthew Dallek: Yeah, so Robert Welch was a candy manufacturer. He was actually a highly successful salesman. He would go around the country and hawking junior mints. He was the vice president of the company. So he was an executive and he was very well off. I actually wrote a book at one point about the art of the sale.
Chris Staron: This was in the 1930s and forties.
Matthew Dallek: He became a fairly prominent business leader. through the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the largest, most influential industrial lobbying groups [00:07:00] in the United States in the mid 20th century.
Chris Staron: You may remember them from Season 3. They advocated for free market capitalism and actively marketed economic ideas to pastors, a perfect breeding ground for what Welch was about to launch.
Its members were rich industrialists anxious about the New Deal and protections for labor. So some of them tried to market God and country as a way to establish order in the United States. Like, actually market it. In publications, ads, campaigns, sponsoring certain candidates. And one of those wealthy industrialists was Robert Welch.
Matthew Dallek: He, in the 1940s and 50s, became something of a proselytizer on the side. Meaning that, especially by the late 40s and early 50s, he would use his position of authority, of, of wealth, and, and just by dint of his authority as a leading businessman, to, uh, write articles and give speeches and, and [00:08:00] publish books discussing the threat that he saw of a communist takeover of the United States.
Chris Staron: Okay, so, cards on the table, there was an actual communist threat in the United States at the time. The Soviets had stolen plans for the nuclear bomb, and the government did turn up legitimate communist spies. And of course, we were spying on them, too. China and Russia saw tens of millions of deaths of their own people through starvations, gulags, labor camps, and straight up disappearances.
Communism was a threat, as were spies, but there are right ways to combat stuff like this, and there are lots and lots of wrong ways. Which do you think Welch chose?
Matthew Dallek: He was a businessman turned hardline anti communist who, in the 1950s in particular, he wrote a series of books, including a book about how the U.
S. was basically selling out its [00:09:00] foreign policy to the communists. As part of his anti communist fervor, he promulgated a number of conspiracy theories. about the alleged communist threat, the communist conspiracy as he saw it within the United States that had explained in his view why the country was losing the struggle against communist evil.
Chris Staron: He was inspired by guys like Joseph McCarthy, the senator who publicly and wrongfully accused people in the government and military of being spies. Look,
Matthew Dallek: he was not operating alone, but also had allied himself with people like, uh, William Noland, who was a hardline anti communist senator, Republican senator from California.
Robert Taft, a conservative, uh, Republican senator. Ohio Senator was one of Robert Welch’s heroes.
Chris Staron: We’ll talk about Robert Taft soon. He was Mr. Conservative in the 1940s and [00:10:00] super duper anti communist. In that era, the government was going through labor pains. Pains with labor. Unions. In the last months of 1946 alone, There were 4, 985 strikes in the United States, which some of these guys saw as proof that socialism had arrived.
To be clear, it hadn’t. But that didn’t stop them from equating labor unrest Rather than, I don’t know, cleaning up their factories, providing a living wage, or improving safety, the industrialists decided to fight back. One way Welch did this was by serving on the board of the Foundation for Economic Education, a libertarian group, that disseminated scary literature to factory workers on things like taxes and the French Revolution.
They also gave free conservative textbooks to poor schools. Walsh became a popular speaker. He was billed as someone who understood the [00:11:00] wicked ways of communism, and his target audience was well connected businessmen, men of influence who could then change their communities. This led to the founding of the John Birch Society, leading to the question, who was John Birch?
Matthew Dallek: Bill Nolan, the senator from California, who was an ally of Welch, helped Welch get access to files about John Birch. And Birch was an evangelist from Georgia, turned army intelligence officer, who served in China in World War II.
Chris Staron: Birch was murdered by Mao’s Communist army 10 days after the war.
Matthew Dallek: In these files, Welch believed that he had discovered not only that Birch was the first victim of World War iii, of, of communist plot to to take over the world, but he also, his murder had been covered up.
by communists and their sympathizers within the American government. [00:12:00]
Chris Staron: Which played right into the narrative he and McCarthy had already constructed, that the Reds had invaded the American bureaucracy.
Matthew Dallek: But conspiracy theories often take a shard, right, of reality, and they build that into something that’s almost unrecognized.
There’s the illusion that it is, at least in Welch’s telling, that it is based on his extensive research. But the conspiracy theory about the John Birch coverup or even Welch’s later charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy, which really became quite infamous in, in the early sixties, that allegation.
And you know, some of these books are heavily footnoted, but not based on, on real sources, right? Like not based on Or what Welch claims that they, the sources say, don’t really say that. And so no, there was no government cover up, intentional cover up of John Birch’s death.
Chris Staron: [00:13:00] It’s like how people today say they’re going to do their own research on a topic and then read suspicious websites instead of looking for original documents or credible sources.
His research was the 1950s version of that. So there were people who believed that Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Even though, that made no sense. There was an even kookier belief about Senator Taft.
Matthew Dallek: That his death was caused by a radium tube implanted in the upholstery of his senate seat that caused the cancer that had killed him.
Chris Staron: Which is nutty, and based on nothing. And what was Welch’s source?
Matthew Dallek: As has been so widely rumored.
Chris Staron: As has been so widely rumored. He flat out admitted that it was based on rumor, not documented proof. But that really didn’t matter to his fans, who were already hooked. Of course there are genuine conspiracies.
There were. Like [00:14:00] communist spies stealing nuclear secrets from Los Alamos. But this was not one of them. Welch portrayed Birch as a martyr to the cause. Let’s be clear. He was a soldier at the time, not a civilian.
Matthew Dallek: Many movements, especially extreme movements, need martyrs. They need their narratives, and within those narratives, there are often heroes placed at the center of them, many of whom have sacrificed, given the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.
And Welch really appropriated and elevated this person who, of course, was not alive to protect his identity or his legacy.
Chris Staron: Welch spread the word through a biography of Birch and named his organization after him. Speaking of the organization, It was time to found it. Welch sent out letters, cryptic letters.
Get on a train, but not all together. Pretend you’re someone else, just some [00:15:00] normal businessman on a sales trip. Maybe in December 1958, 11 people, all white, almost all industrial leaders, showed up to a clandestine meeting.
Matthew Dallek: To the home of Marguerite Dice, who was a A member of, she was a minute woman.
Chris Staron: Another anti communist organization. She was already in the far right
Matthew Dallek: world. And Welch sent a letter to these folks saying, I need you for two days in Indianapolis to attend a meeting, but I can’t tell you the subject of it. I want you to stay. At different places. I don’t want you to all congregate at the same hotel.
And if anyone asks, just say you’re in Indianapolis on business.
Chris Staron: And they came. For two days, Welch laid out his plans for the John Birch Society, addressing rumors of a worldwide communist conspiracy. His goal was to take the fight to the communists in the United States.
Matthew Dallek: It would serve as [00:16:00] a kind of shock force.
force or shock troops to go after the alleged conspiracy, whether that was in the public libraries or the local school system or federal and state and local officials, that this movement would be a way to circumvent the parties, the political parties, to try to reach the public directly.
Chris Staron: They were afraid of mainstream media and institutions.
Like any of these groups, They needed to create an echo chamber. Walsh had a lot of ideas that went far beyond the fear of communism. For one, he didn’t like democracy, which he saw as leading to mob rule. The JBS actually handed out stickers claiming,
JBS: This is a republic, not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way.
Chris Staron: shard of truth there, right? Because the U. S. is a republic. We have people who represent us. But it’s a shard of truth that [00:17:00] goes haywire. Our elected officials don’t do everything. We directly vote on stuff like tax levies and whether or not to expand the rec center. Therefore, this is a democracy. So, which is it?
Is the United States a democracy or a republic? As it turns out, the It’s both. The U. S. is a democratic republic, but the Birchers decided to focus on only half of that equation, taking a shard of truth and running with it. See how they did that? This is something we’ll soon encounter with William F.
Buckley Jr., both a distrust of elites in government and the desire to put elites in power to keep the everyday rabble from influencing the country. Okay, so settle in, here’s just a few of the other things that Robert Welch taught. He denounced the civil rights movement and sit ins as a communist conspiracy, instead of, you know, people fighting for their rights.
He led the [00:18:00] charge in anti fluoride campaigns, didn’t like sex education in schools, and advised his members to scour textbooks, believed pro American ideas should be taught in classrooms, He slammed the New Deal and Roosevelt, said that Black people in the South wouldn’t have wanted civil rights if commies hadn’t convinced them of it.
Birchers tried to save the House Un American Activities Committee after it was rife with scandal. He sought to abolish the income tax, and ban products made in communist countries. By now, a lot of that probably sounds familiar to you. You could say that the John Birch Society was libertarian, but as you know by now, Libertarianism is a giant umbrella.
Matthew Dallek: They were libertarian in the sense that they believed in a radical devolution of federal power, right? They, they wanted to really roll back the federal government to a pre New Deal, even frankly pre progressive era [00:19:00] state condition.
Chris Staron: Like so many people we’ve talked about already, to Robert Welch, the New Deal was a no no.
Birchers didn’t like that the federal government was getting bigger and bigger and more involved in the lives of everyday people. That included how federal courts of the time shaped the country. One of their major campaigns called for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Matthew Dallek: The question is, what did they not have against, uh, Earl Warren and the Warren Corps? To the Birchers, Earl Warren was the, one of the architects of the communist takeover of the United States through a series of liberal decisions, starting most famously, of course, with Bush. Brown versus Board of Education, ordering the desegregation of the schools, but extending to establishing rights for criminal defendants, banning, uh, prayer in public schools.
They were [00:20:00] affronts to local individual control. And this actually became, iconic social campaigns or social movements. of the early 60s. I mean, people remember billboards saying impeach Earl Warren. To Robert Welch and to many birchers, that, that campaign had a kind of shock value that, you know, as Welch once put it, you know, we may not win this battle, but by the time we’re finished, the enemy will know we have been there.
Chris Staron: They used harsh tactics against people they didn’t like, including Justice Warren. That’s why I included the story of Darby, Montana at the top of the show, where they drove most of the teachers and the superintendent out of the district. This wasn’t about just getting their voices heard. They could be nasty.
Matthew Dallek: I opened the book with the story of Patricia Hitt, who was a Richard Nixon loyalist, a California Republican, who was running for a seat on a Republican committee in Southern [00:21:00] California. And the Birchers, who hated Nixon, they also did not like Patricia Hitt. And they targeted her by Calling her at home at all hours of the day, calling her a communist, and they called a number of Republicans, of voters in the district, denouncing her as a pinko, using all kinds of epithets,
Chris Staron: harassing people on the phone.
Applying economic pressure. They showed up at all sorts of big events, like the National Women’s Conference of 1977.
Matthew Dallek: Sometimes the Birchers would picket. Earl Warren would, let’s say, give a speech at a commencement speech. And the Birchers would be out front, you know, basically accusing Earl Warren, the Chief Justice, who had been basically a moderate Republican from California.
accusing him of being a communist. They threw eggs at integrated school buses in Boston. At times they ran phone trees where they would basically call people in their homes, [00:22:00] obviously, with a recorded message about the communist conspiracy.
Chris Staron: Since they were secretive, your friends, co workers, and relatives could be members.
And you wouldn’t know. The Burgers had several key texts, many of them deriving from Welch’s writings and speeches. Like his two day talk that he gave over and over and over. He had
Matthew Dallek: written a long letter to a number of his friends, ultimately called the Politician, in which he charged that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy.
Chris Staron: And FYI, he wasn’t. A second resource came from Welch’s two-day recruiting monologue. It was published as The Blue Book. The guys at the first meeting took tools like these and became apostles of Robert Welch.
Matthew Dallek: These 12 men, including Robert Welch, Went back to their communities, people like Bill Grady from Wisconsin or Fred Koch, who is the father of [00:23:00] the Koch brothers.
Chris Staron: Two of the main donors to the Tea Party in the far right in the last few years. They’re Rothbardian libertarians who put a lot of money into fighting unions. Koch was at that first meeting and became an evangelist for the Birch Society.
Matthew Dallek: They started to put their Their money, and their organizational muscle, and their contacts, their extensive network behind the John Birch Society.
Chris Staron: Spreading these half-truths and all-out lies. They did it through meetings, which were limited to 20 people to maintain secrecy. At first, they targeted people like them. Rich, white industrialists, mostly Christian, and people with high standing in their communities. Mayors, Governors, Doctors, Lawyers Welch didn’t want dissidents, just people who agreed with him.
One catalyzing event happened in 1959, when President Eisenhower hosted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. It was [00:24:00] billed as an attempt to bring peace during the Cold War, but conservatives viewed the state visit as proof that Ike was soft on communism. They didn’t want peace with Russia, So the Birch Society did what they often did, they started a front group to protest.
It was called the Committee Against Summit Entanglements, or CASE. The Daughters of the American Revolution offered their support, and a petition was circulated to stop this event. Signed by people Jr., founder of National Review. Future GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, libertarian Ludwig von Mises, Pierre DuPont from, you know, DuPont, and of course, Fred Koch.
By now, the Birchers were a known quantity. When Eisenhower discovered that one of his appointees was a Bircher, he had him fired. That’s how renowned this movement was. The sitting president ousted a staffer just for being a member.
Matthew Dallek: And one of the things that [00:25:00] appealed to them is that, as one member wrote, the John Birch Society gives you a chance to fight the communists everywhere that they appear.
I mean, I’m paraphrasing. What I think they meant is that they got to fight the communists at the local level. They got to take the fight to the enemy within their community. And it was a group. As they saw that it was not just about talk and rhetoric, but about action.
Chris Staron: Action, like gaining small offices on school boards and business committees.
They put pressure on people they didn’t like or found suspicious. They placed ads in newspapers, handed out buttons, passed out information at events. Then there were the sneaky tactics. For example, take where I live, Wyoming. Birchers produced a variety of broadcasts that could be syndicated. And in the big cities, they had lots of competition.
But in rural places like Wyoming, they could capture their audience by monopolizing the only radio or TV station in [00:26:00] the region, radicalizing people who had few media options. So people like the pro Birch Reverend Carl McIntyre paid to saturate these rural markets. He gave 1, 000 to the effort. Which probably says a lot about why Wyoming remains so far to the right.
The John Birch Society had the membership. They had money and influence. Soon, they turned their attention to the big show, the presidency. Throwing their weight behind the nomination of one of the most influential people who didn’t become president, but who demonstrated that appealing to the extremes could win the nomination.
The John Birch Society was chasing the highest office in the land. I’ll continue the story after these messages. Why not leave a comment on your favorite podcasting app? It really helps people find the show. Okay, here come the ads.
Welcome back. So far, we’ve [00:27:00] mostly talked about the contributions of men, but they weren’t the only ones involved.
Matthew Dallek: The movement was founded by and run by, in headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, almost all by men.
Chris Staron: All the sectional leaders, many of the big donors, men, men, men.
Matthew Dallek: But the women, especially by I think the early 60s, were in many respects the most powerful force, especially on the ground.
Many were upper class and white. As they said, right, they had the time. They, uh, were often well off enough. So, right, they weren’t necessarily working.
Chris Staron: It gave them more agency. Both waves of feminism led women to write letters, petition, protest, and engage in civil society.
Matthew Dallek: Women who viewed themselves as educators, because again, the Birch Society had pitched itself as an education movement above all.
Chris Staron: So the women educated people. Distributing flyers, leading [00:28:00] discussions, and more. By doing this they could literally play an active role in shaping society. See themselves as part of a movement. They gained agency. While also Fighting their own equality.
Matthew Dallek: The idea that we’re policing morals in the community, I think that also appealed to a number of women as well.
Chris Staron: Within the JBS, women worked as secretaries. No surprise there. But many conservative bookstores that doubled as Berkshire distribution sites were operated, if not owned, by women. Sometimes several stores in one city. Los Angeles alone had 36.
Matthew Dallek: One historian likened them to coffee houses for the left.
Chris Staron: Where women led classes and connected people, which made them a powerful political tool.
Men and women alike wanted to change the country, make it in their image. What better way to do that than through politics? There was a major problem, though. Neither of the [00:29:00] political parties really fit the John Birch Society.
Matthew Dallek: But because Robert Welch had run for lieutenant governor as a Republican, he had attended the Republican convention in 1952, was a big supporter of Ohio Senator Robert Taft.
When Eisenhower won the nomination, he called it the dirtiest deal in American political history. And other founders as well. People like Bill Grady from Wisconsin had actually been both a supporter of Joe McCarthy, but also of Dwight Eisenhower.
Chris Staron: But Eisenhower and Earl Warren were Republicans. And according to the Birchers, they were commies.
Could they really belong to the party of Earl Warren? They would try. So they backed a number of Republican candidates in the 1962 midterms.
Matthew Dallek: And then in 1964, they flocked behind Barry Goldwater.
Chris Staron: Barry Goldwater. Someone we’ll cover soon in more depth. He’s credited by historians as pushing Republicans further to the [00:30:00] right and expanding the party to include extremists.
Like, you know, birchers. Even though he lost by the greatest margin of any U. S. presidential election. Lock that away for the future. Most of their successes were in lower offices. Though they sometimes gained prominent positions. Vice President Dan Quayle’s parents were Birchers. But as far as the far right was concerned, neither Bush nor Reagan met their standards.
They certainly did not like Nixon, despite his hardline anti communist stances. The Birchers were suspicious of Republican leaders. They didn’t really have another option.
Matthew Dallek: By 1968, though, they were very strongly behind George Wallace. The segregationist governor of Alabama.
Chris Staron: The third party candidate who said, segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
And thankfully, Wallace lost. So the Birchers failed to win the big office, [00:31:00] but they did manage to push the GOP. Goldwater, whose first Senate campaign was funded, in part, by Welch, famously demonstrated to Nixon that Southern racists were a demographic that could be targeted by Republicans, nudging him in the direction of his long Southern strategy that I talked about earlier this season.
While they never made it to the big chair, Birchers made waves in other places. Notably, in Christian circles, including some of the names we’ve already mentioned this season. Take a deep breath because some of this might give you a headache. One Bircher sympathizer was R. J. Rush Dooney, the father of modern homeschooling and architect of Christian reconstruction.
His base of operations for a time was in Southern California, where some of his financiers read books by the John Birch Society. This is from a letter Rush Dooney wrote to Robert Welch.
RJ Rushdoony: Let me express my great respect for your work [00:32:00] and for you personally. I regard you as the clearest and most courageous public figure of our day.
Chris Staron: Rush Dooney gave money to the society but didn’t sign on as a member, knowing, of course, that a direct affiliation with them might harm his other work. What about Phyllis Schlafly, the Catholic woman behind the Stop B. R. A. battle in 1977? Her book, A Choice, Not an Echo, was a bestseller among birchers, and was instrumental in the nomination of Barry Goldwater.
She was a member of the JBS, but revoked her membership in 1964. Notably, she also canceled her subscription to National Review Magazine when it criticized Robert Welch. Her connection makes sense when you consider how she ran her organizations. They had a lot in common with the JBS from the way they subverted traditional media to the use of front groups that appeared interested in a single issue, and her [00:33:00] organized grassroots efforts.
Then there is Tim LaHaye, a hugely influential author in evangelical circles, including the wildly popular Left Behind book series. According to Matthew Dalek, LeHay regularly lectured and ran training seminars for the John Birch Society in the 1960s and 70s. He didn’t remain a Bircher, but his later work paralleled Welch’s.
As we’ll hopefully see later this season, LeHay formed the Council for National Policy, whose goal was to fight secular humanism. It’s a shadowy political powerhouse tying religious leaders to big money. One critic described it as
Journalist: A slick, updated, repackaging, birch society philosophy.
Chris Staron: They continue to operate in secret.
One of their members was the late Foster Frese. Now, if you lived in Wyoming, You’d know who I’m talking about. I literally [00:34:00] used to live next door to his investment business, and he funded a classical Christian school in my town. Speaking of deep pockets, there was Joseph Coors, the beer magnate who funded the Heritage Society.
He was pro Birch. And J. Howard Pugh, a wealthy oilman and co founder of the Pugh Charitable Trusts. He was a Presbyterian layman and a major backer of Christianity Today. Which, by the way, feeds ads to this show. His money helped finance Barry Goldwater, Nixon, and Billy Graham. He funded spiritual mobilization, the Foundation for Economic Education, and the Christian Freedom Foundation.
He supported the John Birch Society, though he denied that he was a member. membership. But he was on the editorial advisory board of a Bircher magazine, American Opinion, and was a stockholder in Robert Welch, Inc. So, I’m guessing J. Howard Pugh was okay with Robert Welch. Not only were [00:35:00] some Christians with large followings Birchers or Bircher adjacent, a lot of money that funded evangelicalism in the 20th century came from Birchers.
Okay, so let’s check in. Who here’s still breathing normally? Does it lighten the mood if I tell you that Mad Magazine did a riff on the Birchers? I’ll put up a link for patrons who want to see it for themselves. This brings us to a big question. Why did some religious right leaders dabble in bircherism
Matthew Dallek: They sympathize with a lot of the birch worldview, especially on moral questions, right? The idea that the major institutions in American life were corrupting traditional family values, trampling on the Christian character.
Chris Staron: After all, the Warren Court did end required Bible reading and prayer in the schools.
Matthew Dallek: You remember. Sexual revolution, gender [00:36:00] relations, 60s and 70s, women’s rights, it’s a civil rights struggle, the gay liberation movement. progressive education, right? And this is, I think, a worldview that the Birchers held and that attracted people like Phyllis Schlafly, for example, or Tim LaHaye. They wanted to reimpose or restore what they saw as the lost Christian character of the country.
I don’t know that the Birch Society necessarily defined their trajectory. And then I think the Birch Society also inspired some of their organizing. tactics and their strategies.
Chris Staron: strategies. This is not to say that all evangelicals were or are racists or are against the civil rights movement. There was strong pushback against how fast the world was changing, how big the government was getting, and how involved it was in the lives of everyday people.
And yes, there was a lot of pushback against it. Though they hated the government telling people what to do with their lives, they wanted the government [00:37:00] to tell people what to do with their lives, just in their own way. The John Birch Society saw a deep decline in the 1970s, as it was taken over by people further and further from the mainstream.
It lost some of its influence, but is still going today, spreading propaganda, and we hear echoes of it every time a prominent conservative accuses somebody of being a communist, when they’re probably not. We may never understand the full impact that the JBS had on even juggles in that era, but we do know that Lahaye, Schlafly, Rashtooni, and others shared their negative view of America’s trajectory.
They started powerful organizations of their own that went around traditional forms of media. So they couldn’t get fact checked. Sure, a number of birchers in the 1960s considered themselves Christians. Remember the first episode of the season? When someone calls themselves or a movement Christian, we have to ask ourselves, [00:38:00] what did they mean?
Let’s go back to the beginning of the episode, back to the small town of Darby, Montana. Do Christians run teachers and superintendents out of a school district for replacing old Bibles? Who knows? Would Jesus harass someone over the telephone? Do true followers of Christ terrorize their neighbors? No.
Instead, we should be on the lookout for secret societies that claim to have all the answers. And then, expose them. Finally, Should Christians delight in gossip and rumors? Can we participate in spreading conspiracies as the Birchers did? It’s often done today on social media and around the water cooler and seen as harmless, but it’s not.
Listen, we need to reconcile with the fact that when we spread lies, we are liars. Conspiracy theories are not cute. And they’re not fun. They besmirch the name [00:39:00] and witness of God’s church. And yes, there are actual conspiracies in the world. But can we achieve our outcomes by hitching our wagon to dubious organizations?
To lies. When we partner with extremist groups, we do something far worse than looking silly. Or spreading lies. We tarnish the name of God.
Special thanks to Matthew Dallek. I first heard about his book, Birchers, on NPR’s Fresh Air back when I was driving a school bus. And the book is quite good. Other sources can be found on the website or in your show notes, including Before the Storm by Matthew Dallek. by Rick Perlstein. If you want to keep me working on this program instead of driving a school bus like I used to, consider giving a little money each month to help me out.
One other Christian podcast is exploring the [00:40:00] legacy of the John Birch Society. I mean, really? This is important stuff, and the reason I can cover this kind of thing is because I’m an independent, for profit company. If I were running a non profit, I’d be too scared to call out the shenanigans of wealthy financiers I’d be chasing their money.
I want to run this show with 10 to 20 a month coming from a lot of individual donors, instead of by the grace of a few major backers. This gives me journalistic independence that other ministries don’t have. If you want to be a part of this crazy and original project, visit truespodcast. com slash donate.
There you can also learn about bonus materials, like more of my conversation with Matthew Dalek, including how the John Birch Society. laid the groundwork for the Trump era. That’s trucepodcast. com slash donate. Thanks to everyone who gave me their voices for this story, including Jackie Hart and Bob Stevenson.
As usual, I’m indebted to my brother, Nick, and my small group for helping me process this information. Truce is a [00:41:00] production of Truce Media, LLC. God willing, we’ll talk again soon. I’m Chris Starin, and this is Truce.
by Chris Staron | Jul 30, 2024 | Episodes, Season 6 - Rise of the Religious Right, Women's History
The shocking true story of how a school board meeting in West Virginia embodied a debate over textbooks
In 1974, Alice Moore was a member of the school board in Kanawha County, West Virginia. The board met to hear the recommendations of the textbook committee and approve them. But Alice protested when she read a portion from the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which thanked Allah for preventing Malcolm X from being a black Christian. From there they uncovered a number of potentially offensive texts, some because of language, others because of discussions of rape. Race was likely a factor as well, though Moore denied it.
A disagreement about textbooks becomes a war
Local pastors decried what they saw as secularism and humanism creeping into public schools. Parents blocked school buses, and others kept their children at home. Soon, there were fights, and dynamite was used to blow up school buildings. What started as a disagreement over books erupted into an all-out war. One that echoed in other parts of the country at the same time as families wrestled with changes in education.
Sources:
Discussion Questions:
- Have you heard of the textbook war?
- What did you think of the passage from “Soul on Ice”? Should it be read by senior students headed for college? What about other students?
- Who should decide what gets taught in local school districts? How about nationally?
- How did Alice Moore and others act appropriately? How about inappropriately?
- The KKK and John Birch Society show up a few times this season, often opportunistically. Does their appearance automatically smear all participants as racist?
- What else was going on in 1974 that could have escalated the panic of the era?
Transcript (Note: Transcripts may not be accurate)
This episode is part of a long series exploring how some Christians in the US tied themselves to the Republican Party. It can stand on its own, but when you’re done, go back to the beginning of season six for more context. Also, in a few minutes I’ll be discussing a book that contains violence toward women. It won’t be graphic, but it may not be appropriate for the little ones. We will also mention public school education about reproduction. Hint hint. Okay, here goes.
What could be more banal than a school board meeting?
On April 11, 1974, the school board assembled in Kanawha County, West Virginia. That day, their goal was to approve a slate of new textbooks and supplementary materials for the 125 public schools in the county. Four members of the board were men, one was a woman. That was Alice Moore.
She ran for a seat on the school board after, according to her, she discovered that the district’s comprehensive sexual education course wasn’t just about sex ed. It discussed how to think, feel, and act, and questioned kids about their relationship with their parents. Despite her complaints, the superintendent didn’t make any changes. So she ran for the job and won.
Here she was. At a hearing about books. A group of experts had been established with the goal of bringing in more diverse ideas and opinions. Alice looked over their recommendation… and something stood out. A call for “dialectology”, encouraging students to speak naturally and in their own dialect in the classroom. Alice found this objectionable, saying she would not tolerate “dem” and “dat” being used in place of “them” and “that”. Kanawha had a combination of towns and rural areas, places where people may not speak proper English. In her mind, “dialectology” was another way to bring liberalism into the schools.
Still, when the vote came around, she agreed to approve the books.
The timeline is a bit fuzzy, but according to Moore, at the meeting, her husband approached her to show what kind of books she had just approved. One, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, contained this phrase:
MALCOLM X: “All praise is due to Allah that I moved to Boston when I did. If I hadn’t, I’d be a brainwashed black Christian.”
Moore was shocked. What had she just approved? That short quote packs a real punch. First, praise to a god different than the one worshipped by the religious people of the area. It also referred to black Christians as brainwashed. It both denigrated Christianity and African Americans who believe in Jesus. Alice objected, saying she wanted all of the approved texts delivered to her house. Something like 300 books.
What followed went far beyond a disagreement. Within months, the county was in an uproar. People boycotted the schools, snipers fired on school busses, and buildings were dynamited. This battle over words on paper touched something deep in the American psyche, something that had been building for years. Posing big questions. When, if ever, should students be exposed to objectionable material discussing rape? Murder? Moral relativism? Or differing opinions about religion or the founding of the United States?
This was Kanawha County. And it was about to go to war.
You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church. We press “pause” on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.
This season we’re taking a look at how some evangelical Christians in the United States tied themselves to the Republican Party. One thing I’ve noticed over the last year or so reading about this topic is that people tend to look for a silver bullet. That one moment or topic that catalyzed Christians around the Republican Party. It’s about race, or backlash against feminism and gay rights, reliance on conspiracy theories, societal tumult, fear of the end times, tax breaks, who gets to educate our children or economics. The only problem is… there isn’t one easy answer. In truth, each of those things contributed, often at the same exact time. Each of them warrants exploration. So for the next several episodes, we’re going to pull apart these different forces. Because they are all important. You’ll notice that it will be hard for me to go in chronological order because many of these movements happened in the same decade – the 1970s. So we’re going to go through them topically and then tie it all together.
Okay, so let’s begin with a little brain exercise. What is the purpose of public schools? Seems easy, right? To teach kids how to read, write, learn history, do math. But what are our greater goals as a society? One thing is that an educated populace creates jobs and allows us to compete with other nations. As I covered earlier this season, that’s why we invested so heavily in colleges, universities, and community colleges in the 1950s and 60s. To beat the communists. But there are other advantages, right? In a democratic republic like the US, we want our citizens to have a basic understanding of how their government functions. What we are as a country. Those kids are going to grow up and vote someday.
Others would argue that it prepares young people for adulthood. It lifts poor people out of poverty, thereby decreasing the number of people seeking government aid. It also teaches us to be citizens of a nation. Maybe even to learn our founding myths, which builds patriotism. That patriotism leads some to serve their country in the military or by holding political office. There are all kinds of reasons why we do what we do. If you think of more, find the show on social media and let’s discuss.
Public schools in the US were advocated for by the early Puritans. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington all called for them. But by the 1840s there were only a handful open, and only in communities that could afford them. That doesn’t exactly work with the American ethos of equality, where anyone from any background can rise to do great things. Advocates pushed for decades to establish free schooling to every child, but it wasn’t until 1918 that schooling was mandated for all children through elementary grades, though they were still allowed to be segregated. Imagine that! Kids in the US have only been required to get an education for just over a hundred years. I think the timing is integral. It was right at the end of the progressive era in the United States, where women would get the right to vote, prohibition was in the air, the pure foods movement, labor laws. The country in the nineteen-teens was caught up in this desire to make our world better through legislation.
But as we covered last season, there were other forces at work as well. Premillennialism and dispensationalism took off, telling certain Christians that history trends toward destruction, but so does the church. Instead of, “we can make the world better through good laws”, this interpretation of the Bible predicts some pretty heinous persecution for Christians. To boot, their interpretation of Revelation 13 predicts that an evil being is going to rule over a one-world government in the end times. That person will persecute Christians.
REVELATION 13:7: “It was also given to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them, and authority was given to him over every tribe, people, language, and nation.”
That may seem tangential, but remember that premillennialist dispensationalists at this time are on the lookout for a one-world government, which makes some of them distrustful of government in general. It might be worth noting once more that this does not go for all Christians. Not even all evangelicals take this interpretation. But it was spreading. Two years after the law for all kids to attend school, the League of Nations was created, the precursor to the United Nations13. You know…a united body bringing together lots of world powers. To some Christians, not all, this looked like a one-world government. And the American government was expecting more and more of its people now that it required them to educate their children. The government was entering the household and impacting children.
It wasn’t until the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of 1954 that all public schools were supposed to be integrated. Though, this turned out to be difficult to enforce, especially in racist areas. Then in 1962, the US Supreme Court made it illegal to offer a prescribed prayer in public schools (we covered that last episode) and one year later it did the same for Bible reading15. Among some evangelical Christians, including Alice Moore, it seemed that the United States was trying to push God out of the public square. This just two decades after God was added to the money, our pledge of allegiance, the founding of the National Day of Prayer, the National Prayer Breakfast, and the erection of monuments to the Ten Commandments. It seemed like public Christianity was on the outs.
Mix that with the tumult of 1974. When the school board reconvened to hear objections to the book chosen in Kanawha County. It was the middle of the Watergate scandal. Two months before Nixon’s resignation. The aftermath of an oil crisis. The Troubles in Ireland. Airline hijackings. Rising crime.
That’s important to understanding what’s about to happen at this school board meeting. Sometimes all of these changes, these pressures, build up. Waiting for a moment of catharsis.
On June 27, 1974, when they reconvened during a heavy downpour, the world was going through a lot of major changes. About 2,000 people tried to squeeze into the building, but many stood outside in the rain. Two thousand people for a school board meeting! A preacher friendly to Alice Moore spoke against a book that was chosen for high school seniors, Soul on Ice, by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. By the way, this next section discusses the topic of rape.
I want to read a section of the text to you. Because out of context it will seem like Alice Moore and her supporters are racist hicks wound too tightly. By getting a little taste of this, it may deepen your understanding of what they were working with. Okay, so, early in the book, Cleaver writes about Voltaire and learning to hate capitalism thanks to the writings of Karl Marx. Already a red flag for conservative people engaged in the Cold War. One page later, he writes about his past of sexual violence.
ELDRIDGE: “Somehow I arrived at the conclusion that, as a matter of principle, it was of paramount importance for me to have an antagonistic, ruthless attitude toward white women.”
CHRIS: He continues a few lines later…
ELDRIDGE: “I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus Operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto– in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey.”
CHRIS: A little further down…
ELDRIDGE: “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women.”
CHRIS: Okay, how do you feel about this? To be clear, Cleaver goes on to repent for what he did. It’s a meditation on unchecked hatred, for which he seeks forgiveness. But… do you want your high school senior reading about a man purposefully going out and raping women because of their race? Saying that its easier to rape black women? This depends on the stuff we talked about earlier. What is your idea of the purpose of public education?
Let’s look at a more liberal viewpoint: For a lot of Americans, high school is the last formal education they get. Where else can they have frank conversations about race, anger, violence, and redemption? Or how a person can be so angry at an oppressor that they want to lash out and do something terrible? But you can see how parents, conservative or liberal, might want to limit the degree to which their kids learn about violence and this kind of animosity toward another race. Alice Moore objected because she thought this was not a fair representation of the black experience. A public radio documentary on this battle included an interview with a local pastor named Ron English, who agreed that some black people in that area saw it as anti-Christian and anti-American.
Another pastor in Kanawha denounced Soul on Ice. While he did that, Alice Moore kind of cross-examined him. What about a textbook that featured the story of Androcles and the Lion? This is the story of a slave who runs away into the woods. There he encounters a lion, but the lion doesn’t chase him because the beast has a thorn in his paw. Androcles takes the thorn out and the two part ways. The slave is caught and sentenced to be thrown to the lions. But, guess what? The lion he encounters is the one he saved and all is well. It doesn’t hurt him, and the slave is set free.
It’s one of Aesop’s fables. How could anyone object to Aesop? One textbook urged students to compare and contrast that story with Daniel in the lion’s den from the Bible. The pastor’s objection? Comparing a myth by Aesop with Scripture makes Scripture look like it didn’t happen. Like it too is just a moral fable. Maybe you can kind of see that, right? Remember, daily Bible readings and school prayer had been outlawed in schools just a decade earlier. So it became much harder to make the case for the Bible because of the law, but one could still offer a critique of the text or present it as a myth. Nothing particularly illegal about that.
Alice Moore said that liberal school bureaucrats intended to attack religious conviction…
ALICE MOORE: “…by compelling their children by law, to be in that classroom, and then undermining everything they believed in.”
She also cited a text that described Freud’s Oedipus complex where young girls are sexually attracted to fathers and boys to mothers. Alice knew she was going to be accused of being narrow-minded because of her religion, and seemed to resent that, as well as the content of these books that encouraged kids to explore moral relativism. Or the idea that one person can have a different moral compass or truth for everyone else. That’s relativism.
A parent named Mike Winger defended the books, arguing:
WINGER: “To summarize, this is the only world in which we live. We cannot hide it from our children. We can only determine when they will find it and where they will find it. Let them find it today rather than tomorrow and let them find it here in our schools rather than on some street corner in New York or some rice patty in Vietnam.”
The points were put forth. The crowd packed in. Once again, the board voted. This time, Moore was the only person who did not vote in favor of the adoption of the textbooks. As she stepped out of the room and into the downpour, she was greeted by her supporters as a sort of Christian hero. She stood up against moral relativism and gritty violence. What followed would be weeks of protest, danger, and violence as coal miners and the national media joined the fray. Could the people of Kanawha County come to a peaceful decision? Or would this struggle over who gets to teach children explode even further?
I’ll continue the story after this short break.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
Alice Moore, or “Sweet Alice” as she was known locally, was not the only person pouncing on textbooks. She was in touch with two people well-known in conservative circles for reviewing textbooks. Mel and Norma Gabler. Last season we discussed an interesting phenomenon that took off in the 1800s in Christian circles – the rise of parachurch organizations. This is when an organization that is not a church comes alongside the church in order to serve a church-adjacent function.
Think about the youth movements we discussed earlier. They were driven in part by organizations like Youth for Christ or Campus Crusade. They are para-church organizations. The same is true for organizations like Focus on the Family, Christianity Today, or… really… this show. But its important to note that anyone can start one and there is no real oversight, which is where parachurch organizations can get tricky. Because an organization that is wacky or behaving poorly can be seen as “the church” doing something, when it may just be a few people in an office or someone’s basement. Or in my case, recording in the VBS storage room in my church.
Got it? Okay. Mel and Norma Gabler had their own para-church organization to study textbooks. They said they were helping Christians, but, again, no real accountability.
According to the Gablers, they became interested in the subject when their son came home confused by what the founding fathers of the country stood for. This clip is from the show “Firing Line”.
MEL GABLER: Then he asked if he could bring his textbook home, and I said “of course” and before he handed it to me he had his finger in a certain place. And he said to me, “Dad, tell me what the framers of the constitution had in mind when they wrote the constitution, and I told him…
Simple enough, right? Honest question from his sixteen-year-old son. Listen closely to what Mel told him because it’ll give you a pretty good idea of what he and Norma believed in.
MEL GABLER: I told him they wanted a limited government with power enough to keep the states together for common defense, but to leave the rights, the privileges, and powers as much as possible up to the individuals, the local governments, and the states. And he said, “not according to my book. My book’s teaching me we have a dictatorship in Washington.”
This incident, combined with a later one where they discovered that an encyclopedia had left God out of the Gettysburg Address, encouraged the Gablers to get involved.
MEL GABLER: So then he asked us the question: “Dad and mom, if a young person’s textbooks are slanted, and his reference materials is slanted, where can a young person go to find he truth?” And this is what we’ve been doing ever since.
They formed Educational Resource Analysts out of their home and raised money to champion their cause. The Gablers, as maybe you inferred, had a decidedly specific view of government. They favored small government and decried any textbooks that showed warmth to the United Nations or the New Deal. You may remember, some conservatives were afraid of the New Deal because they considered it a stepping stone to socialism31, something that is hard to substantiate now that we’re 80 years removed and still not a socialist country. They were uneasy about the UN for reasons we already discussed – thinking it was a nudge toward one world government. They were also set that the US be depicted as God’s chosen nation, a popular notion today despite the US not being mentioned the the Bible, and in the text Israel being called God’s chosen people. They did not like it when Confederate generals were disparaged in books, or the founding fathers shown to be deists32. By the way, you can hear an episode about the real and imagined faith of the Founding Fathers in season three. The Gablers won a requirement in Texas that textbooks discuss evolution as one of many theories. Texas was vitally important to textbook publishers because it was the largest purchaser of textbooks and other states followed its lead. The Gablers had a big impact right from their home.
When Alice Moore, the school board member in West Virginia, reached out, they told her that liberal secularists used “morbid” “negative” or “depressing” tones to communicate their ideas, citing Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”, in which a man murders another without showing remorse or facing consequences. They cited the Ten Commandments and the Bible as the ultimate judge of morality. Another book they didn’t like was called Communicating. In it, students were asked to break into small groups and discuss “Jack and the Beanstalk”. You remember, Jack goes up the beanstalk and takes stuff from the giants in the sky. The discussion questions asked: Is it okay for a person to steal? Asked them to consider “What difference there is between a rich man and a poor man stealing?” That clashes pretty clearly with the Ten Commandments, which says “thou shalt not steal”. There are not qualifications there that its okay for some and not for others. The Gablers gathered their materials and headed to West Virginia.
Alice Moore’s battle was far from the only one. There were other notable disruptions in Boston, Virginia, and Connecticut. Things were heating up in Kanawha. Mis-information stated coming out, including a flyer that claimed to be a copy of textbook demonstrating how men should put on a condom, complete with a graphic image. The picture was not from any of the approved textbooks. It was a copy of an image from the public library, not one in schools, a forgery meant to stir trouble. A young preacher with a dimpled chin named Marvin Horan called for a boycott of the schools. There were calls to burn books. Rarely a good look, by the way.
Parents were faced with a serious question of whether or not to send their children to school. Was it even safe with this many hostile people in the region? On September 3, the first day of class, about 20% of the children stayed home.
A protest was on. Kanawha County was coal mining country, and they were used to going on strike. Women went to the mines to convince men to join the boycott. Solidarity was big there. If one group protested, they all did. Soon, people from the chemical plant and municipal bus drivers joined in. Parents in Dickinson blocked the buses from leaving the bus yard, so students didn’t have access to transportation. Those who drove their children to school had to cross a picket line, avoiding eye contact with their neighbors. Schools were closed for three days to conduct another review.
The superintendent was quoted in the New York Times:
SUPERINTENDENT: “Considering the fact that the county is bordering on lawlessness, I feel it is best to curtail all school activities for the weekend.”
Things continued to spiral out of control as the Reverend Ezra Graley spoke to a crowd with demands that no school board could agree to, like reinstatement of coal miners who had been dismissed for wildcat picketing. The school board was not in charge of coal miners, but that was what he demanded.
Bomb threats were telephoned in. Parents in a neighboring county joined in and blocked their school buses as well. On October 12, a car exploded outside of a woman’s home. She’d been jailed for blocking school buses. Nobody was hurt.
Reporters from as far away as London settled into the hollers of West Virginia. One was stomped almost to death, though his crew managed to get away from the angry mob. On November 13th, a state police car was fired upon with a sniper rifle while escorting a school bus full of children. Three other police cars had already been shot. On October 6th, two preachers set up an illegal rally in front of the school board offices. They were then represented by the Heritage Foundation, a New Right organization that we’ll cover more in-depth later this season.
Reverand Horan said:
HORAN: If we don’t protect our children we’ll have to account for it on the day of judgment.”
The next day he was arrested along with 20 militants who sabotaged school buses. Twelve hours later, two elementary schools were firebombed53. A first-grade classroom was destroyed by a dynamite explosion. Soon the school board offices were dynamited as well54. And an all-out fistfight broke out during a board meeting, complete with a woman discharging mace,.
Another common theme we’ll see this season is that certain groups of extremists loved to show up and cause a stink. Not the least of which was the KKK. Alice Moore had been adamant that this was not an issue about race, but other argued that it certainly was. The area had long been racist, though, according to one source, it no longer is today to the same extent. Still, despite the money spent to denounce the racist groups by the protestors, many black people felt that the whole purpose of the event was race. Having the KKK show up likely didn’t help.
A second group of opportunists was the John Birch Society. They are a somewhat secretive group that was started in 1958 by a candy manufacturer famous for making products like Junior Mints. They are known for their conspiracy theories, seeing communist plots in everything from the UN to adding fluoride to water. They want to add patriotic texts to schools and libraries and ban sex education. They and the Klan kind of operate in the background of several episodes this season, from this one about school books to a future pro-family rally. They seem to me almost opportunistic in these moments – waiting until there is blood in the water and then showing up when they weren’t invited in order to grab media attention.
The theatrics continued. A man named Delbert Rose confessed to throwing the dynamite into the school. During his interrogation, he revealed a plot to hook a blasting cap to the gas tank of a car. They would then wire it to the brake pedal. The goal was that when the driver tapped the brakes, it would blow up the whole car. Thankfully, the plot wasn’t carried out. But 6 people were indicted for conspiracy including the Reverend Marvin Horen, the guy who called for the school boycott.
Horen had given the crowd what he considered to be justification for their violent actions. Proverbs 3, which tells us that there is a time for peace and a time for war. He was convicted and sent to prison for 3 years.
The controversies subsided after his trial. But it took years for the intermittent protests to end. The school board eventually came to an agreement that parents could be involved in choosing which books were used in the schools. Now, Kanawha County is closely associated with this moment. If you search it online, this story pops up. It’s a long shadow for them to get out from under.
The textbook war demonstrates the kind of madness in the air in the 1970s. The pent-up anger and frustration. Change was everywhere as people reeled from the effects of the ’60s and folks of different backgrounds obtained more attention from society. It turns out that change is really hard for humans to deal with, especially those of us who have a fixed way of thinking about the world, or those who pine for some bygone age where life was simpler.
The Kanawha County Textbook War, as it’s called, left a mark on the nation. It demonstrated the deep feelings, resentments, hurts, and fears of people who felt left behind in the public square. Again, two decades earlier public expression of the Judeo-Christian worldview was everywhere. School prayer, Bible reading in the classroom, the National Prayer Breakfast was started, God was added to the money and the Pledge of Allegiance. Sure it’s good to represent other cultures and ideas… but what about the old majoritarian ideas? What happens to them?
Which, again, brings up an interesting question from the beginning of the episode. What is the function of public education and who gets to decide what is taught? It turns out that there really isn’t a simple answer to that question. Or who gets to teach kids about scary or complex ideas? Because you’d have to imagine that the children of those schools learned some hard lessons while riding in a school bus that was under fire.
For a lot of Americans, high school is the last formal education they get. What are the things we want to leave them with? Should it be a broad understanding of different cultures, or a strong grasp on tradition and what made them what they are today? Or both? A sense of patriotism, to honor the fallen soldiers who gave their lives for the country, or an understanding that the United States like so many countries has an ugly history of racism and oppression? Or both? Should children leave the classroom with an understanding of morals, respect for others, and right an wrong? Or should we account for past injustices and social norms?
I started out by saying there is nothing more boring that a school board meeting. But is that the case? The truth is that education is tricky. Doing anything for society is tricky. At this point, the forces of Evangelical Christianity were still dispersed, driven in large part by disconnected para-church organizations, each with their own goals. Soon those special interests would coalesce, not around a bunch of fragmented goals, but around an almost party platform. Education, fighting feminism, love of the traditional family, and conservative visions of economics. But its important to remember that these things happened to real people and real people had to suss it out on the ground.
When we ourselves are confronted with change, what will we choose? To disagree, sure. But hopefully, we agree that the textbook war was the wrong way to go. Dynamite, conspiratorial preaching, threatening children who just want to go to class. How will we react to changing times? Will it be with grace and dignity, or will we search through the Bible until we twist something together to justify our actions?
CREDITS
I used a lot of different sources for this story today. You can find a complete list on the website at trucepodcast.com. While you’re there, consider giving a little bit each month to help me make this show. It takes so so many hours to produce and I also have a full-time job as a school bus driver. I’d like to do this show full time and you can bring me one step closer to doing just that. Help via Patreon, Paypal, check, Venmo… however you can. Www.trucepodcast.com/donate. Also, be good to your school bus drivers!
If you want to know more about this battle in West Virginia, I recommend “The Great Textbook War”, an audio story from Us and Them that won a Peabody award. It’s excellent and you can hear the voices of the people who were involved, including Alice Moore. I’ll have links in your show notes and on the site.
Thanks to everyone who gave me their voices for this episode, my friends Chris Sloan and Jackie Hart, and Markus Watson of the Spiritual Life and Leadership podcast.
I have five other seasons worth of episodes for you to enjoy! Feel free to go through the archives. Like and subscribe the show and follow me on social media so you get every new episode as its released. Thanks as always to my brother Nick for listening to me go on and on about this. He’s a big help.
Truce is a production of Truce Media LLC.
God willing, we’ll talk again soon.
I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (4:10)
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (3:50)
The Invisible Bridge – 293
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (5:10)
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (5:40)
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (7:15)
The Invisible Bridge 293
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (8:56)
https://people.howstuffworks.com/public-schools1.htm
https://people.howstuffworks.com/public-schools1.htm
https://people.howstuffworks.com/public-schools1.htm
NIV – Revelation 13:7
https://www.britannica.com/topic/League-of-Nations
https://people.howstuffworks.com/public-schools1.htm
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1962/142
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (10:30
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (10:30)
https://archive.org/details/soulonicebyeldridgecleaver/page/n25/mode/2up page 12
https://archive.org/details/soulonicebyeldridgecleaver/page/n27/mode/2up page 14
The Invisible Bridge 292
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (between 13 and 14:30)
https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type0156.html
The Invisible Bridge 292
The Invisible Bridge 292-3
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (about 16 min)
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (about 16:45 min)
The Invisible Bridge 296
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZBop6_r_R4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZBop6_r_R4
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/the-guardians-who-slumbereth-not/
The Invisible Bride 294
The Invisible Bride 294
The Invisible Bride 294
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/the-guardians-who-slumbereth-not/
The Invisible Bride 295
The Invisible Bridge 297
The Invisible Bride 295
The Invisible Bride 298
The Invisible Bride 298
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (about 24 min)
The Invisible Bride 298
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/13/archives/classes-are-suspended-in-textbook-dispute.html?searchResultPosition=3
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/18/archives/textbook-crisis-flares-up-anew-500-parents-keep-pressure-on.html?searchResultPosition=9
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/18/archives/textbook-crisis-flares-up-anew-500-parents-keep-pressure-on.html?searchResultPosition=9
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/18/archives/textbook-crisis-flares-up-anew-500-parents-keep-pressure-on.html?searchResultPosition=9
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/10/13/archives/blast-ruins-car-of-woman-held-in-textbook-protest.html?searchResultPosition=5
The Invisible Bridge 299
The Invisible Bridge 300
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/11/14/archives/police-escorting-a-school-bus-fired-upon-in-textbook-dispute-school.html?searchResultPosition=4
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (about 34:30 min)
The Invisible Bridge 307
The Invisible Bridge 307
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (about 35:30)
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (about 35:30
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (about 32)
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/17/1176662608/a-historian-details-how-a-secretive-extremist-group-radicalized-the-american-rig
Us and Them radio episode “The Great Textbook War” (about 43)
https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1105
