Wrapped in the Flag (7 page)

Make no mistake: Welch predicted a grim future for education. “In my honest opinion,” he wrote in 1952, “when the Federal Government controls our schools—as control them it must if it supports our schools—we shall have taken the most dangerous possible step toward a tyrannical totalitarianism.”
⁶

This threat of tyranny had jolted my parents into action. In the process, they met and worked with several of the most influential textbook critics of the day, including Mel and Norma Gabler, founders of the Educational Research Analysts, based in Longview, Texas. The Gablers prepared long lists of objections to textbooks.

In her book
As Texas Goes
. . . , Gail Collins describes the Gablers’ “
scroll of shame
, which listed objections they had to the content of the current reading material. At times, the scroll was 54 feet long.”
⁷

I chuckle at this image of the endless scroll, but I can’t laugh at the Gablers. Those two folks changed the landscape for the adoption of textbooks, not only in Texas but in much of the country.
⁸

Mother couldn’t heap enough praise on the Gablers. “I just love Norma,” she said. “She knows more about textbooks than anyone in the country, and Mel’s a saint.”

The Gablers identified specific errors in the books they attacked. Any criticism of our constitution or the Founding Fathers was unacceptable. Support for one-world government or the United Nations was unforgivable. Gun control was a major no-no, as was any suggestion of limits on ammunition. Our nation, they believed, was first and foremost Christian. Thus, any suggestion that the founders were deists was intolerable. There could be no discussion of other nations as equal to the United States. After all, our country was exceptional and a perfect embodiment of what government ought to be.

Good books also had specific characteristics. They always emphasized states’ rights over federal authority. Good books trumpeted small government and the idea that we ought to spread our wonderful system all over the world. Good books taught that the Confederate generals were great patriots. Good books showed the weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Good books respected Judeo-Christian morals, emphasized abstinence in sex education, and
described the principles and benefits of free enterprise.
⁹

Not everyone appreciated the Gablers. As
Time
said in 1979, “Though the Gablers claim only to seek ‘balance,’ their criticism seems to spring from a hell-for-leather conservatism in politics and Bible belt fundamentalism.”
¹⁰

Along with the Gablers, Mother also met Phyllis Schlafly in the textbook trenches. Both women had a love affair with the nineteenth-century school primers the McGuffey Readers, and both put considerable effort into “selling” McGuffey as the answer to lagging reading skills among America’s children.
¹¹

Mother later partnered with Schlafly on other projects, including fighting the Equal Rights Amendment and lobbying Catholic bishops to oppose the growing social justice movement centered in Latin America. I have photos of Mother and Phyllis together on their 1965 trip to Rome as part of a delegation to discuss the implications of the encyclical
Pacem in Terris
(Peace on Earth), written by Pope John XXIII two years earlier.

Mother and Schlafly never became close personal friends, and my mother was critical of Phyllis, calling her a “self-promoter.” I attributed the animosity to jealousy—Phyllis became a nationally known conservative in the 1960s while Mother remained behind the scenes. I later discovered, however, that Mother’s beef with Phyllis was about loyalty, not jealousy.

According to my mother, Phyllis and her husband, Fred, insisted they’d never been members of the John Birch Society, but Mother knew they’d actually joined ten months after my parents did. Robert Welch must have known Phyllis was a Bircher in 1960 when he called her “one of our most loyal members.”
¹²

Mother also knew that in 1962 Fred Schlafly had been invited to join the Birch National Council because my father, already a council member, told her. Mother’s information (this wasn’t a contention; it was a fact) proved correct. In his 2005 book about Schlafly, Donald Critchlow quotes Fred’s letter declining Welch’s invitation. “I know of no other more patriotic or dedicated group than your council,” Fred wrote.
¹³

The more that Phyllis insisted she was not a Bircher, the less Mother liked her. “Phyllis sold out to the Republican establishment,” she said.

Forty-plus years after Mother dove into the textbook wars, I sat on a five-gallon bucket in my parents’ basement, sorting a mountain of old papers. “They saved everything,” I complained to the silverfish scurrying along the damp floor. “I’ll be here for a month of Sundays.”

Black-metal file cabinets lined three of the walls. Books, magazines, and
pamphlets littered rows of shelves. In the corner, a tall stack of hard-cover books leaned against the wall. The jumble spilled over into piles on the floor. All around me was the debris of my parents’ long fight against all things liberal. My brother Jay R. had already made arrangements for our parents’ extensive library of conservative books, personal correspondence, and writings to be donated to a Catholic library in Virginia. I was left with the stuff no one wanted.

All afternoon I filled boxes. I found index cards, covered with Mother’s nearly illegible scrawl, stuck out of the pages of old textbooks—remnants of her crusade.

I took a moment to remember my mother as she marched down the hall to confront the authorities about the errors in the books. How I wished she’d just go home and bake cookies like other mothers did. Of course, my mother never did. She moved from project to project and issue to issue for almost fifty years. Right to the end, she was a formidable crusader for everything right-wing.

I dragged boxes to the corner and stuffed books inside. The next day was trash pickup; all of this stuff was headed to the dump.

While those books went to the trash compactor, Mother’s ideas were being rescued from the dustbin of history. In 2010, the Texas Board of Education adopted curriculum standards that were as far to the right as anything ever imagined for public schools. My mother, Phyllis Schlafly, and Mel and Norma Gabler—along with two generations of John Birchers and religious fundamentalists—were reemerging on the winning side of the textbook battles.

Some of the curriculum changes to Texas’s books defy fact; others delete important historical figures and erase events from the timeline of American history. Still others diminish the importance of the civil rights movement while praising states’ rights ad infinitum.
¹⁴
Today’s students in public schools across the country are in danger of learning Creationism alongside evolution. Sex education is relegated to abstinence-only instruction, and contemporary history is a right-wing romp praising the likes of Joe McCarthy and Phyllis Schlafly herself.

Everything in the textbook controversies points to one conclusion: Mother’s personal battles ended with her passing, but the textbook wars never die.

The John Birch Society embodied a militant anti-Communist fervor. Members pledged that the battle against Communism would continue until the last American patriot had died with a sword in hand
.

—D
ONALD
T. C
RITCHLOW
¹

In the summer of 1958, the Conner family left our crowded, second-floor apartment for a new home in the desirable Edgebrook neighborhood in the northwest tip of Chicago. The first time I saw our house, a brown English Tudor–style cottage on tree-lined Sioux Avenue—three whole blocks from the closest “busy” street—I knew we’d arrived. My dad had achieved his American dream: a house in the suburbs, well, almost the suburbs; five kids; a beautiful, smart wife; and a successful business. Life was good.

For me, life would be perfect if my mother and dad gave up their politics and embraced the suburban life of bridge clubs and cocktail parties. I fell asleep that first night in my new pink room dreaming about my new, improved parents.

A few days later, my pipe dream burst when Mother announced she had no more time for unpacking. “I have pressing work that must be done,” she said. “I’ll be in the dining room. Don’t disturb me until lunch.” Mother arranged her papers on the table, seated herself on a straight-back chair, and lit a Viceroy. In no time, she was absorbed.

Mother maintained a strict daily regimen. She read her correspondence, looked over the latest newspapers and magazines, and determined what material she would keep. Important articles were clipped and stuffed into manila folders. After she’d finished her reading, she started writing. Almost every day, she churned out a stack of letters to newspapers, senators, and congressmen. Sometimes, she critiqued textbooks for school administrators, principals, and pastors.

One day, two fellows arrived with new filing cabinets that landed in the corner of the breakfast room. Before long, those gray-metal contraptions bulged with Mother’s precious documentation. In no time, the dining room
and breakfast room were littered with boxes of filmstrips and reel-to-reel tapes. Textbooks from school districts around the country sat in stacks on the floor. Books, magazines, and newspapers crowded the top of the credenza. Mother didn’t seem to notice the jumble, nor did Dad. Their focus was squarely on the dangers threatening the country, dangers they’d become more and more aware of over the last few years. They did everything they could as individuals to stop some of the damage, but they were convinced that only concerted group action would give real Americans a fighting chance.

According to my father, the existing anti-Communist groups scattered around the country were useless. “Debating societies,” he called them. He longed for a national movement headed by a serious, wise leader, a man who would rouse Americans before it was too late. A man like Robert Welch.

I realize that the name Robert Welch means nothing to most people today. But in the 1960s, he built the largest, most effective, and most controversial right-wing organization in the country.
²
He was able to gather an impressive array of successful business leaders and retired military officers to join him, including my own father. Welch planned to build (and control) a million-man (and -woman) army to find and destroy the enemies of our country. The stakes were high. According to Welch, the United States was a few short years from being absorbed into the Soviet Union or into a one-world government under another name.

In
The Blue Book of the John Birch Society
, Welch wrote a brief version of his life story. He was born December 1, 1899, on a farm in Chowan County, North Carolina.
³
His ancestry included farmers and Baptist preachers. For four years, he attended the University of North Carolina, though he doesn’t mention that he enrolled at the age of twelve. He does acknowledge a two-year stint at the Naval Academy and two years at Harvard Law. But most of his education he attributes to forty years in the school of hard knocks.

Welch went on to highlight his career in the candy business and his extensive activities in the National Association of Manufacturers. After his retirement, Welch claims that he gave up most of his income to devote all of his time and energy to the anti-Communist cause. He described himself as someone who “will climb on a soapbox to argue against the evils of socialism whenever anybody will listen.”

Apparently, a lot of people listened. According to historian Jonathan Schoenwald, by the mid-1950s, “Welch was undeniably one of the best known—and well-respected—conservatives in the United States.”
⁴