The Big Sort (17 page)

The New Right was starting to coalesce. Religious traditionalists melded with anticommunists. Advocates of traditional morality and personal responsibility found themselves in sympathy with laissez-faire capitalists and Private Protestants. They all had a common enemy in government.
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Free markets, small government, anticommunism, and traditional values, Martin Marty wrote, were all deemed by Private Protestants to be part of "the mission of Christ to the world."
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The "enemy of my enemy" connections could be bizarre. Intellectual conservatives and religious conservatives, for example, found common cause in their distrust of international law and the United Nations. The hardheaded neoconservatives who emerged from New York University thought that the UN was a "charade kept alive by liberal piety about international cooperation and world peace."
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Similarly, in Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's Left Behind series of "end of time" novels, the Antichrist takes power in the world by first gaining control of the UN. Nicolae Carpathia (the Antichrist) becomes secretary-general of the UN, promoting disarmament and "global community."
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(In the early 1960s, the Magnolia School District in Orange County banned the UN as an "unfit" topic for the schools.
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) Intellectuals who opposed the supremacy of international law would gradually join those who had millennialist fears of world government—and fundamentalist Christians living in West Virginia coal camps would eventually find common ground with neoconservative urban Jews and suburban Californians.

The Social Gospel, meanwhile, became the equivalent of a state religion, its policies enacted by Progressives, New Dealers, and purveyors of the New Frontier and Great Society.
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Public Protestantism dominated most of the mainline churches, denominations that all grew at a steady clip through the 1950s. There was a surge of interest in ecumenicism.
Time
magazine placed Eugene Carson Blake on its cover after he gave a sermon in 1960 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco proposing to merge four major Protestant denominations. (Blake was later named the head of the World Council of Churches.) Mainline denominations were prominent in the early civil rights movement. Blake was arrested along with other religious leaders when they tried to integrate a Baltimore amusement park on July 4, 1963.
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The National Council of Churches (formerly the Federal Council of Churches) called for a "mass meeting of this country's religious leaders to demonstrate their concern over racial tensions in Selma" in 1965.
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There was talk of a "new reformation" in the mid-1960s, and it was a religious movement designed by Public Protestants. The future lay with the "servant church," announced a
Time
cover story in 1964.
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Theologians found in the Bible ample teachings that Christianity was a life in service, that the "purpose of the church is mission," not worship or revival.
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Time
reported that "modern church thinkers" questioned the need for an organized church at all, believing that "God may well be more apparent in a purely nonreligious organization or movement—such as the civil rights revolution or the fight against poverty and hunger in the world—than in the actions of the churches."
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In May 1966,
Time
asked what was a very reasonable question in a country dominated—or so it seemed—by Public Protestantism. In large red letters against a pitch-black background, the magazine invited Americans to consider "Is God Dead?"
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Kanawha County was contemplating new textbooks in the spring of 1974 because it had been ordered to. The West Virginia Board of Education had passed a resolution directing local districts to adopt books that "accurately portray minority and ethnic group contributions" to American history and culture.
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The Kanawha County school superintendent recommended 325 books and then put the volumes on shelves in the county's main public library. The board didn't comment on the books; the local press didn't report that new books were on the way. For nearly a month in March and April, the books sat and few people bothered to crack a cover. In mid-April, however, Kanawha County school board member Alice Moore—"Sweet Alice," as she would come to be known—piped up.

Moore was the wife of a fundamentalist preacher in St. Albans, West Virginia. She had run for a seat on the Kanawha County school board in 1970, beating an incumbent in a campaign that was dominated by debate about the propriety of including sex education as a classroom subject. In 1969, the school board had adopted a sex education curriculum recommended by the state and written under a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. In good Social Gospel style, the school board announced that the "public school system should assume responsibility for instruction in any important area of community or family living which is not being adequately assumed by home or other agency or institution."
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Moore disagreed. She considered sex education a descent into moral relativism, a "denial of absolutes." Moore argued that the classes represented "the humanistic approach of reasoning out right and wrong on the basis of circumstances," which was "a denial of God." And to Moore, "God's law is absolute!" Her opponent, Dr. Carl Tully, didn't curl up in his confrontation with Sweet Alice. He charged that the John Birch Society supported Moore's campaign. ("Lies Inspired by Birchers Hit Campaign, Tully Says," blared one headline in the
Charleston Gazette.)
Moore and her supporters wouldn't be happy simply to scrub the schools clean of sex education, Tully warned; they intended to "gain control of the school board and in turn dictate what textbooks will be used, what books to have in the library, and what subjects can be taught and who will teach them."
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Rumor spread around Kanawha County that Texas oilman H. L. Hunt had given $100,000 to Moore's 1970 school board campaign. Moore denied it. She also denied a connection with any "Birchers." Moore obviously didn't need much outside help. A week before the election, she appeared on television holding two Bibles she claimed a janitor had retrieved from a school incinerator. "And they [Tully's supporters] have the nerve to call me a book burner," Moore said, holding the crispy sacred texts, fresh from the fiery furnace.
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Moore defeated Tully in May 1970, and sex education classes were soon banished from Kanawha County schools.
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Moore's initial questions about the 1974 books concerned the use of an African American dialect in some of the language arts texts. "My main objection is that they simply attack traditional philosophy of good grammar and English," Moore said at a May meeting. A week later, Moore's objections were more strenuous. She told the board she represented "a wide constituency of people who don't want this trash." The books presented a view of America from the black perspective, she argued, but they didn't convey the point of view of middle-class whites. "I'm not asking for something anti-black, but we have got to have something from both sides," Moore said. "I want to see something patriotic in those books."
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In the summer of 1974, Marvin Horan was hauling rock used to construct the interstate highway running through Charleston. One of the road job superintendents gave the minister a pamphlet and asked him to read it. Horan said that he glanced at the pamphlet and saw that it was about books in the county schools, "and then I forgot about it." But in August, Horan came home one evening to find a crowd gathered at his neighborhood church, the Point Lick Gospel Tabernacle. His wife told him that the group was examining a set of textbooks, and she suggested that they take a look, too. Alice Moore was there. So were the books. The crowd grew, overflowing the building, so Horan recommended that the group move to a nearby park. Horan mounted the stage. He said a prayer to open the meeting. "And I never did get off that stage because people were insistent that I speak for them," Horan said. "It just happened. Nothing was preplanned. There were no meetings. Nobody talked it over and said this was the way to do it and this would be our approach. None of that was done. It all happened just instantly."

Parents were meeting all over rural Kanawha County. At one rally, protesters passed empty Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets, collecting $719.75, enough to purchase a full-page newspaper ad in the Charleston newspaper criticizing the textbooks. The next meeting on Campbells Creek was larger, Horan recalled more than thirty years later. Thousands came. Police had to close the road entering the park. Horan led that meeting and another at a school gym. Meetings at the park on Campbells Creek ripened into mass marches in Charleston. Horan urged parents to keep their children out of school, and they did, at least in the rural areas of Kanawha County where the movement was centered. "The common man don't know what to do except what he's done, and that's to go home and sit down," Horan said, explaining his strategy. On the first day of school after Labor Day, attendance in Kanawha County schools was off by 20 percent. Protesters appeared in front of school buildings, one carrying a sign saying
EVEN HILLBILLIES HAVE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS.
United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) members honored pickets thrown up by parents, and soon every coal mine in Kanawha County and several in neighboring counties closed.
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There was a rural/urban divide in the textbook strike. The
Charleston Daily Mail
surveyed parents in thirty elementary schools on the use of one group of health textbooks. Only six schools had a majority of parents who would allow their children to use the books. Four of those six were in the city of Charleston. In one rural school that November, only 9 of 922 students attended classes.
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Also divided were the independent churches in rural Kanawha County and the mainline denominations in Charleston. And underlying that divide was an increasingly popular belief among Private Protestants in the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Carol Mason, a women's studies professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, interviewed participants in the controversy. Several told her that one of the most read books in the region in 1974 was Hal Lindsey's
The Late Great Planet Earth.
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Lindsey's book was a precursor of the Left Behind publishing phenomenon. It presented a meticulously detailed prediction that the world was approaching the end of time and that the Second Coming of Christ would take place in 1988.
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(Carol Mason observed that the book sold more than 10 million copies and, unintentionally perhaps, served as the religious right's equivalent of the Port Huron Statement, Tom Hayden's 1962 manifesto founding Students for a Democratic Society.)
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The religious milieu of Kanawha County was a volatile one, where a good number of people were reading about the decline of American civilization and the end of the world, a descent that could be forestalled only by what Lindsey described as a "widespread spiritual awakening."
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To political leftists of the early 1970s, the Kanawha County textbook dispute was a clear case of "class warfare," the description Calvin Trillin used in
The New Yorker.
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It was a fight pitting the rich folks on "the hill" in Charleston against those up the creeks out in the county. When UMWA miners joined the strike, the class credentials of the protesters were complete. These were the same coal miners, after all, who had just led a union revolution, deposing a corrupt president and electing rank-and-file miners to high office. The story had a neat, working-class symmetry. The new president of the UMWA, Arnold Miller, was a miner with black lung from Cabin Creek in Kanawha County.
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It was a compelling story (and one that explained away radically conservative behavior by the white working class), but it missed another change that had taken place. Since the end of World War II, class had been diminishing as a marker of political division. Actually, the traditional order of class voting was being inverted. Under the familiar New Deal alignment, working-class voters had supported Democrats and liberal government. (In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt had won 73 percent of voters Gallup identified as of "low socioeconomic standing.") Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, white working-class Americans had begun voting Republican.
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This is a disputed area of research, but the academic arguments over class voting have more to do with definition than fact. Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels has correctly reported that the poorest whites, those in the lowest third of the income strata, are still reliable Democratic voters, a pattern that has remained unchanged for the past thirty years. Others also have found that low-income whites have an increasing allegiance to Democrats and that Republicans have gained most of their new votes from middle- and upper-class Americans.
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If "working class" were defined strictly by income, the discussion would be over. But what about Horan? He drove a truck during the week and often worked a second job pouring concrete at night or on Saturday. He lived in a nice home on a large lot; he wasn't poor, but his labor was manual. Other scholars have defined "working class" to include people like Horan. They consider not only income but also occupation and education. When "working class" is defined using all of those measures, we see a dramatic shift in voting patterns, one that began after the mid-1960s' unraveling.

In the late 1970s, polling expert Everett Carll Ladd Jr. compared white voters of high, medium, and low socioeconomic status (SES). High-SES voters were managers or white-collar workers with some college training. Low-SES voters worked as farm laborers, in service jobs, or in other semiskilled occupations. In 1960, Ladd found, 38 percent of high-SES white workers voted for John F. Kennedy, but 61 percent of low-SES white workers did so. The configuration was straight out of the New Deal handbook. Bosses, managers, and white-collar workers voted Republican. Laborers, field hands, and truck drivers voted Democratic. When Ladd looked at the behavior of white voters by occupation and education from 1948 to 1972, he saw that the New Deal coalition was flipping. Low-SES workers—the white working class in his definition—were voting Republican at increasingly higher rates. High-SES workers, however, were voting more Democratic. In particular, whites who had graduated from college or graduate school were becoming more Democratic. A 1974 Gallup poll found "among graduate students, an almost unbelievably low proportion of 9 percent identified with the GOP."
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