Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (21 page)

Other Americans who joined the loose but growing coalition behind conservatism in the 1970s included once-liberal intellectuals and public policy experts who concluded that the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson—notably the War on Poverty—had been oversold and had led to unintended and unhappy consequences. Some of these “neo-conservatives,” or neo-cons as they were often called, contributed to journals such as
The Public Interest
, which developed a considerable readership among influential policy-makers. In the 1970s, they sought common ground with Republicans and conservative Democrats who had always been leery about liberal social welfare policies, high taxes, and Keynesian economic ideas. (Some of them, however, demanded that government expand its reach in certain policy areas—so as to build up the military, outlaw abortion, or restore “law and order.”)
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Editorialists for the
Wall Street Journal
, normally libertarian in their emphasis on the preservation of individual freedom and the virtues of the market, were generally consistent foes of the intrusiveness of the federal government.

The rise of the New Right, as many observers called it in the late 1970s, derived special strength from the zeal and skill of political activists who were determined to revive conservative ideas—and/or the GOP—in the aftermath of the drubbing they had received from the Democrats in 1964. One of these activists was Paul Weyrich, a son of German immigrants who had settled in Wisconsin. A strongly pro-life Catholic—and an admirer of former senator Joe McCarthy—Weyrich established advantageous relationships with wealthy conservatives such as Joseph Coors, of the Coors beer empire, and Richard Mellon-Scaife, heir to the Carnegie-Mellon fortune. Drawing on their funding, he established the Heritage Foundation in 1973, which became a leading conservative think tank. Other conservative think tanks—the Cato, Manhattan, and American Enterprise institutes—added intellectual firepower to the Right. In 1974, Weyrich founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, yet another conservative interest group.

An equally effective organizer was Richard Viguerie, a staunchly anti-abortion Catholic who had grown up in a working-class Louisiana family. Skilled at directing massive direct mail appeals, Viguerie attracted more than 4 million contributors to the GOP by the late 1970s. Like Weyrich, he worked hard to spread the gospel of Republican conservatism beyond the confines of country clubs and upper-middle-class suburbs and to reach Catholics and blue-collar workers who had previously voted Democratic. Conservatives, he declared, must adopt the values of “Main Street, not Wall Street.”
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By 1980, political operatives like Weyrich and Viguerie had given the GOP a more populist image, restored its infrastructure, and built up substantial grass-roots power. Liberals were becoming defensive. As Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York warned at the time, “Of a sudden the GOP has become a party of ideas.”
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Though some of these conservatives had doubts in 1980 about Reagan’s call for tax cuts—what was “conservative” about a proposal that threatened to enlarge already sizeable federal budget deficits?—others were angry about high taxes, “bracket creep,” and “waste” in government. Many of these people had already joined the drive for California’s anti-tax Proposition 13, which in 1978 had unleashed a surge of tax cuts throughout the American states. Howard Jarvis, the crusty seventy-five-year-old who helped to lead the fight for Prop 13, told followers, “You are the people, and you will have to take control of the government again, or else it is going to control you.” As Jarvis emphasized, the combination of federal, state, and local taxes had in fact taken a bigger bite out of personal income since the 1950s, riling not only the wealthy but also millions of relatively young people—the boomers—who by the late 1970s were getting married, buying homes, and trying to get ahead in a highly inflationary economy. To Americans such as these, and to the wealthy, crusades to slash taxes—in 1980 as in later years—had very broad appeal.
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M
ANY CONSERVATIVES IN THE 1970S
did not focus their fire on foreign policies, big government, or taxes. Instead, they targeted social and cultural evils—as they perceived them—such as abortion, “women’s lib,” gay rights, and pornography. The
Roe v. Wade
decision of 1973 aroused special outrage among conservative Catholics, who swelled the membership of a National Right to Life Committee—and in short order, the voting power of Republican political candidates. Phyllis Schlafly, “Sweetheart of the Silent Majority,” was an especially effective organizer of these forces. A lawyer, two-time congressional candidate from Illinois, and Catholic mother of six, Schlafly assailed the
Roe
decision. She insisted that the Equal Rights Amendment was an “anti-family” effort that would wipe out protective legislation enacted to insulate women workers from exploitation in the workplace.

Socially conservative Protestants, though slow to cooperate with Catholics like Schlafly, further strengthened the forces of the American Right in the late 1970s. In 1979, Beverly LaHaye, a San Diego housewife and bestselling author whose husband, the Reverend Tim LaHaye, was a Baptist minister known for his writings opposing pornography and homosexuality, formed Concerned Women for America (CWA).
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An excellent organizer and promoter, LaHaye shaped CWA into a formidable force against the ERA, abortion, and no-fault divorce laws. CWA soon had a far larger membership—estimated at 500,000 by the mid-1980s—than the much more liberal National Organization for Women.
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Like LaHaye, most crusaders of this persuasion were traditionalists. They emphasized that they were “pro-family,” by which they meant the patriarchal family of the past. They maintained that many women who left home to join the labor force upset family harmony and prevented men from finding work.
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Hosts of socially conservative, religiously motivated Americans began to join activists such as Schlafly and LaHaye in the late 1970s, thereby advancing what became known, variously, as the New Christian or Religious Right. Many of these religious activists backed a rapidly growing lobby, Focus on the Family, which was founded in 1977 by James Dobson, a devoutly evangelical child psychologist. Focus on the Family aired a popular radio show, which crusaded for yet another set of rights—of parents, who were urged to war against sex education in the schools. Other conservatives, relying on constitutional guarantees of free speech, began mounting lawsuits—some of them successful in the 1980s and 1990s—that asserted the right of religious groups to meet on school grounds and on school time, and the right of religious schools to receive public funding.
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The majority of these activists, like a great many Protestant believers earlier in American history, were evangelical in their approach to religion—that is, they generally claimed to be born again via some form of crisis conversion, often in enthusiastic revivals, and they were eager proselytizers. Most accepted the literal truth of the Bible, and many looked ahead to the Second Coming of Christ, which would be followed in time by a millennium and a final judgment.
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The Reverend Billy Graham, the most acclaimed of the many revivalists who had been promoting a postwar growth of evangelicalism, had whipped up considerable popular enthusiasm for beliefs similar to these. Well before the 1970s, he had been hailed as the “most admired man in America.”
⁶⁵

By 1980, members of the Religious Right were well on their way to forming what was soon to become the strongest grass-roots, community-based movement of late twentieth-century American life. Developing a growing following, especially among whites in the South, they organized a host of discussion groups, Bible study classes, Sunday schools, and self-help programs and founded a large number of conservatively oriented Christian schools, seminaries, and colleges. “Mega churches” began to spring up, especially in suburbs, where they served as vital centers of social and spiritual activity. More than most other interest groups—which had come to rely heavily on wealthy donors, computerized mailing lists, and professional managers—many of these religiously motivated people recruited relatively poor as well as middle-class Americans in order to establish organizations that featured large face-to-face gatherings of members and that cut across class lines.
⁶⁶

The rise of the Religious Right in the late 1970s came as a surprise to many people in America. Though some Protestant churchmen had strenuously opposed Kennedy, a Catholic, in 1960, most Americans who were labeled “fundamentalist” because they believed in the literal truth of the Bible had even then remained quiet politically. Many had consistently refused to vote. To engage in political activity, they had believed, was to depart from the realm of the spirit and to soil themselves—and their churches—with the corruption of the secular world. Some of these devout Americans continued in the 1960s and 1970s to abjure political activity.

But a series of events brought a wave of evangelical Protestants into organizations like the CWA and into the mainstream of American political life by the late 1970s, by which time they were beginning to cross once rigid denominational lines, to form ecumenical alliances with Catholics who opposed abortion, and to brand “secular humanism” as a special evil.
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Among their special targets was the liberal Supreme Court, which in the early 1960s had ruled on First Amendment grounds against officially sponsored prayer and Bible readings in the public schools. These decisions, which a majority of Americans opposed, deeply offended many religious people, who believed that prayers and readings of scripture were keys to the development of moral values and to the sustenance of what they emphasized was the Christian heritage of the United States. Undeterred, the Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, continued to aggravate religious conservatives and others. It even charted a more liberal course concerning obscenity. In 1964, it ruled that materials that could be judged as obscene must be “utterly without redeeming social significance.”
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Roe v. Wade
especially aroused religious conservatives. The decision, some of them exclaimed, amounted to “child murder” and the “slaughter of the innocent.” Others saw the ruling as a sinister step toward state control of personal beliefs. As
Christianity Today
, a leading evangelical journal, editorialized in 1973, “Christians should accustom themselves to the thought that the American state no longer supports, in any meaningful sense, the laws of God, and prepare themselves spiritually for the prospect that it [the state] may one day formally repudiate them and turn against those who seek to live by them.”
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Statements such this revealed a key fact about cultural conflict in the United States for the remainder of the century and beyond: Abortion, more irreconcilable than any other social issue, incited all manner of fears among conservatives.

In 1979, Francis Schaeffer, a leading conservative thinker, and Dr. C. Everett Koop (who later because surgeon general in the Reagan administration) combined to produce a film against abortion and euthanasia. Titled
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
, it was a $1 million, four-hour production that toured twenty American cities and that urged viewers to fight against
Roe v. Wade
. Otherwise, Americans would become desensitized to the horrors of killing, to the extent of accepting infanticide. A memorable scene depicted Koop inveighing against abortion while standing amid hundreds of abandoned dolls strewn across the banks of the Dead Sea.
⁷⁰

The liberalism of the Court, however, was but one of a number of developments that alarmed religiously devout Americans in the 1970s. Many teachers were advancing Darwinian theories of evolution—and courses of sex education—in public school classrooms. Sexually graphic material, displayed openly at magazine stands, seemed ubiquitous. Gay people were slowly mobilizing with a view to influencing politics.
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And the Carter administration supported a decision rendered by the Internal Revenue Service in 1975 that had denied tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Protestant institution in South Carolina that at that time banned interracial dating or marriage. In 1978, the IRS, believing Carter would support its efforts, proposed to deny tax-exempt status to private schools, including many Christian academies, which failed to meet the IRS’s standards of racial integration. All these developments alarmed conservative Christians, who perceived them as driving a rise in pornography, sexual license, family tension, social unrest, and “secular humanism.”

The activism of the IRS especially distressed Protestants within the newly self-conscious Religious Right of the late 1970s. Many of these Protestants had long opposed abortion. Using the language of rights, they asserted that abortion violated the constitutional rights of the fetus, which they believed was fully human. Still, they were not at first as angry about the
Roe
decision as conservative Catholics had been. The Bible, after all, offered no clear guidance on the matter. Evangelical Protestants who did not like the teaching of sex education or Darwinian evolution in public schools could send their children to Christian academies or instruct them at home. The decision of the IRS, however, struck many of these folk as a threat to their rights as parents and as a frightening extension of governmental intrusion into the private lives of people. Within a few weeks of the IRS’s announcement that it planned to move against such Christian academies, religiously inspired opponents sent at least a half million pieces of mail to the IRS, the White House, and congressional offices.
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Backing off, the IRS rescinded its plans in 1979.