The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  Senator Edward Moore Kennedy walked alone to the mall. Someone shouted, “There he is! There he is! There he is!” and the mob joined in.

  He approached the microphones, and a man intercepted him: “What do you want to do, speak? You’re not going to speak! You’ve taken away our rights! We’re going to take away your rights! How do you like that?”

  The crowd turned their backs on him and sang “God Bless America.”

  He approached the microphone once more. Someone spoke of twelve-year-old Edward Kennedy Jr., a recent amputee from cancer: “Your one-legged son! Send him over here!” Tomatoes and eggs started flying. A woman punched him; a man tried to kick him.

  “You’re a disgrace to the Irish!”

  “Let your daughter get bused there so she can be raped!”

  “Why don’t you let them shoot you like they shot your brothers!”

  He finally made it back inside the federal building named for his brother. The crowd pressed so hard against the glass doors that one door shattered. “It was great,” one of Hicks’s aides reflected. “It’s ’bout time the politicians felt the anger of the people. We’ve been good for too long.”

  Three days before school was set to begin, Mayor Kevin White gave a speech on all four Boston TV stations. Judge Garrity’s ruling, he said, was now the law. He didn’t like it. But “the traumatic events of the past several months in Washington have shown all of us we are a government of laws, and not men. No man, not even a president, stands above the law”—an argument lacking moral force, given that Ford’s pardon of Nixon had just placed a former president above the law.

  White went on to speak resentfully of “suburban liberals . . . who view busing as the solution to racial balance—as long as it stays inside the city.” That referenced a landmark 5–4 Supreme Court decision a month and a half earlier, Milliken v. Bradley, which ruled that desegregation plans could not cross municipal lines. Justice Potter Stewart had reasoned that the emerging pattern of white suburbs and black inner cities was “caused by unknown and perhaps unknowable factors.” Actually nothing could be more easily known: during the postwar years, federal subsidies flew in a torrent toward suburbs, in the form of interstate highways, mortgage deductions, and subsidies to banks that openly defied the letter and spirit of federal law by engaging in discriminatory lending patterns. That was why the suburbs in the Boston metropolitan area were 99 percent white. Now, however, the burden of rectifying the region’s segregation was solely Boston’s cross to bear. In the Globe, Harvard psychologist Robert Coles shocked liberals by calling Judge Garrity’s decision “a scandal” for imposing integration “on working class people exclusively.” But Milliken meant there was nothing anyone could do about that.

  The mayor staffed a twenty-four-hour emergency communications center, planned more than a hundred coffee klatches between white and black citizens, and arranged for TV to be blanketed by sports heroes like Bobby Orr and Carl Yastrzemski smiling their way through commercials that ended with the tagline, “It won’t be easy, but that never stopped Boston.”

  CAME THE FIRST DAY OF school. In Southie, helicopters swoffed overhead. Police squads swarmed, breaking up a mob, at which another mob took revenge, ripping out public phones, uprooting benches, terrorizing blacks at a nearby commuter train station. At Jamaica Plain High School, shots were fired through the door. Street toughs stoned buses. Thugs enforced a white school boycott with fists and chains. That went on for weeks. So did the protest motorcades, blaring down the boulevards, with Irish matrons raised to be nothing but decorous in their public demeanor blasting their horns so aggressively that casings were separated from steering wheels. Marchers carried swastikas and KKK slogans, and—when they passed by unfortunate black bystanders—cries like “Bus the niggers back to Africa!” The third week ended with a menacing mob of three hundred in front of Garrity’s house in bucolic Wellesley; for hours, a line of white-helmeted riot police was the only thing keeping them from storming his parlor. That was October 4, “National Boycott Day”—when a mob rushed from a bar to keep cops from arresting a stone thrower; the next night, a posse of tactical police crashed in and beat patrons at random.

  THEY CALLED THEIR MAIN ORGANIZATION “ROAR”: “Restore Our Alienated Rights.” Their grievances were rooted, in part, in class. ROAR leader Elvira “Pixie” Palladino memorably attested to that one afternoon when she heckled Ted Kennedy at a hearing on one of his signature issues, deregulation of airline fares: “We never took a plane in our lives. We’re poor people. Why don’t you talk about forced busing?” (Senator Kennedy, like Judge Garrity, sent his kids to private schools.) The people throwing rocks at school buses intersected with the vigilantes showing up at construction yards to harass the black activists seeking to close them down for not honoring the city’s affirmative action settlement—“two groups of people,” columnist Jimmy Breslin lamented, “who are poor and doomed and who have been thrown in the ring with each other.”

  Racialized fears of crime were a contributing factor. The previous fall, a white twenty-four-year-old Roxbury woman ran out of gas near her apartment and was set upon by six black kids who dragged her into a vacant lot, doused her with the fuel in the can she was carrying, and left her to die from her burns. Two days later, a white sixty-five-year-old man, fishing behind a black housing project, was stabbed to death with his own knife.

  And the panic, finally, was not unrelated to sex—never far from fears about race. Forced busing: the very words suggested rape. One policeman guarding Southie was taunted by an old man who shouted he hoped the cop would find his wife “in bed with a nigger” when he got home. A flier distributed by the white “South Boston Liberation Army” instructed, “We do not expect you to hate blacks. We do not ask you to fight blacks.” What was unacceptable, however, was dating blacks. “We seek revenge on anyone that violates this rule. Because of Forced Busing. Blacks are the enemy. . . . Don’t be a white nigger.”

  Some days there were more police in schools than students. Rumors spread that armed black marauders would ride through their neighborhoods shooting whites at random; that blacks were carrying knives and razors to school to turn girls’ rooms into rape rooms. So whites started carrying them first.

  SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES to the southwest, the right-wing populists’ weapon of choice was literally dynamite.

  On June 27 in Charleston, West Virginia, three weeks after Joseph Kraft’s column, the five members of the Kanawha County School Board heard arguments about whether to adopt a set of new language arts textbooks. The meeting room was packed to the rafters. More than a thousand protesters waited outside in a heavy rain. They were convinced the textbooks that education bureaucrats were forcing down their children’s throats were satanic.

  Inside, a preacher singled out a book on the curriculum’s supplementary list for college-bound seniors, Soul on Ice. He made it sound as if the notorious memoir, in which the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver called raping a white woman an “insurrectionary act” (then later in the book, no one mentioned, repented in shame), would have to be memorized by every kid in Kanawha County. “This is a people’s battle!” he concluded, and the audience applauded ecstatically.

  A school board member named Alice Moore, the Louise Day Hicks of Kanawha County, questioned her ally insistently. What did the minister think, she asked, about the textbook that featured the story of Androcles and the Lion? The one that, in the teacher’s edition, suggested asking the children: “Do you think a real lion, if he hadn’t eaten for three days, would remember Androcles and not eat him?” And which suggested, as an activity, discussing the similarities between “Androcles and the Lion” and the biblical story of Daniel in the lions’ den?

  The preacher responded that the equation of a fable by Aesop and the facts in Holy Scripture was the foulest sacrilege. The book of Daniel, he said, is “a true story. . . . I don’t think many people would want to tear down those things and consider them as myths!”

  “Yes,�
�� Moore responded. “In the Bible, the lions didn’t kill Daniel because he was under the protection of the Lord.” Liberal school bureaucrats’ “intent was obvious . . . attacking their religious convictions by compelling their children, by law, to be in that classrooms, and then undermining everything they believe in.”

  The board voted. Moore was the only member against adopting the textbooks. She emerged into the pouring rain, and was greeted by her throngs of admirers as a conquering hero and a Christian martyr. The Great Kanawha County Textbook War had begun.

  THE STORY BEGAN A YEAR earlier, when a textbook selection committee began reviewing books pursuant to a new state mandate requiring “multi-ethnic, multicultural balance” in local curricula. Four of the school board members applied themselves assiduously to whether the books the nation’s biggest textbook companies tried to sell them satisfied that new standard. Moore, the board’s only woman, applied herself contrariwise.

  Moore was a transplant from Mississippi, and before that North Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee, a beautiful woman with a regal Southern accent and impeccably curled hair—until the movement she captained took off, and she only had time to fix her hair into a fierce bun. It was her minister husband, she later said, who first turned her on to the moral catastrophe they had on their hands. He pointed to a line from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, one of the recommended textbooks: “All praise is due to Allah that I moved to Boston when I did. If I hadn’t, I’d still be a brainwashed black Christian.” She said her husband exclaimed, “Look what you just approved!”

  That story as Moore told it did not quite add up; the chronology was all wrong. But then, Moore and her husband were deeply ensconced within an evangelical culture that prized above all else dramatic narratives of redemption—narratives that, for the sake of God’s glory, might sometimes skirt the precise truth. Another of her redemption narratives was not quite right, either: in 1970, as she described it, a couple of years after her arrival in Kanawha, she was startled to discover that the district’s comprehensive sexual education course, developed with the help of a grant from the U.S. Office of Education, “wasn’t just a sexual education course. It dealt with every aspect of a child’s life . . . how to think, how to feel, and to act . . . their relationship with their parents.” The school superintendent told her there was nothing he could do about it. So, she always said, she decided to run for school board—entirely spontaneously, and with no help from anyone at all.

  Regardless, Moore’s campaign for the school board reflected the influence of the John Birch Society’s anti–sex education front group the Movement to Restore Decency (MOTOREDE). It was also fueled by the first campaign billboards a county school board race had ever seen, featuring the strikingly compelling slogan “Put a mother on the school board.” Moore could soon claim her first political scalp: the superintendent who had offended her. This figure of the humble housewife, drafted against her will into public life by the awful, inexorable tides of liberal extremism, a reluctant lone prophet in the service of simple commonsense decency, would become a standard right-wing trope in the years to come in battles across the country.

  Moore was already plugged into a national conservative network—the same network that began knitting itself together for the 1964 crusade to make Barry Goldwater president, which was supposed to have folded tent permanently after the electorate’s landslide embrace of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society proved America was a liberal nation once and for all. And when the textbook question came down the pike, Moore knew just whom to call: the “Mel Gablers,” as Norma Gabler insisted reporters refer to her and her husband, a conservative couple who ran a right-wing textbook evaluation shop out of their hometown—Hawkins, Texas, population 761—doing so, they always told reporters, from their modest kitchen table.

  The Gablers were already infamous among the blindsided liberals of Texas—where their supporters would pack the public comment segments of State Board of Education meetings to unfurl their fifty-four-foot-long “scroll of shame” of unacceptable textbooks: any, that is, that exhibited warmth toward the United Nations or the New Deal, depicted the United States as anything less than God’s chosen nation, disparaged Confederate generals as anything less than patriots, or identified the Founding Fathers as deists. They first won attention nationwide for their discovery that a high school history text from Macmillan, Search for Freedom: America and Its People, gave seven pages to Marilyn Monroe but only a few paragraphs to George Washington. “We’re not quite ready for Marilyn Monroe as the mother of our country,” Norma Gabler was quoted in papers around the country. “TEXAS COUPLE REVEAL FINDINGS—TEXTBOOKS DOMINATED BY FILTH,” ran one 1973 headline.

  By 1974, they won a requirement in their home state that any mention of evolution in biology books “should identify it as only one of several explanations of the origins of humankind,” and “shall be edited, if necessary, to clarify that the treatment is theoretical rather than factually verifiable.” They were spearheading a veritable textbook censorship movement—aided, unintentionally, by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent pornography decision in Miller v. California that municipalities had the right to ban expression that violated “contemporary community standards.” In Richlands, Virginia, a hundred miles to Kanawha’s south, the target was John Steinbeck’s “pornographic, filthy, and dirty” The Grapes of Wrath. In the upscale bedroom community of Ridgefield, Connecticut, it was Mike Royko’s lacerating biography of Richard J. Daley, Boss, because it “portrays politics in an un-American way and we don’t want our kids to know about such things as corrupt politics.” Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s satire on the firebombing of Dresden, a particular Gabler bête noir, was being banned everywhere—and in a North Dakota town it was publicly incinerated, along with James Dickey’s Deliverance and a short story anthology that included selections by Faulkner and Hemingway. The English teacher who had assigned them was thrown into jail.

  The Gablers advised Alice Moore that liberal secularists’ most dangerous weapon was books with a “morbid,” “negative,” or “depressing” tone. “Relativism” was another red flag. For instance Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”: one Gabler report said the story’s “gruesome, murderous, bizarre content,” and the fact that “the murderer shows no signs of regret,” made it unfit for schools. “To the vast majority of Americans,” they argued, “the terms ‘values’ and ‘morals’ mean one thing, and one thing only; and that is the Christian-Judeo morals, values and standards as given to us by God through HIS Word written in the Ten Commandments and the Bible. . . . After all, according to history these ethics have prescribed the only code by which civilizations can effectively remain in existence!”

  Thus armed, Alice Moore got to work to keep civilization in existence.

  The six texts required for elementary school kids, the twenty-four required for secondary schools, and the more than three hundred optional supplementary texts, looked precisely how state-of-the-art language arts textbooks were supposed to look in 1974. An anthology intended for eleventh graders was called The Human Condition. Another was called Monologue and Dialogue. A huge, ungraded collection of 172 books from Houghton Mifflin, called Interaction, was edited by a rhetoric scholar from the Harvard School of Education named James Moffett, revered in his field, who wrote things like “For too long our schools have neglected the importance of oral language” and called for educators to attend to “the social and psychological forces which affect” how students learned. For members of the cosmopolitan professional classes of a capital city like Charleston, West Virginia, who hoped to get their children into schools like Harvard themselves, experts like Dr. Moffett were to be deferred to.

  Alice Moore and her allies were informed by a different set of intellectual assumptions. They found just the title of a book like The Human Condition suspect: it suggested an affiliation with “secular humanism,” what evangelical Christians described as the ideology that held up man as a higher authority than God, wher
e human beings had the perfect power to determine their own fate. “Secular humanism,” in turn, implied “situational ethics,” which held that the only ground for moral judgment was experience—just like all that “experiential learning” of which liberal educators were so enamored.

  It thus came as quite a shock to the four members of the board who fit just that cosmopolitan description, at their first meeting to rubber-stamp the books, to hear their colleague Alice Moore worry, with passively ladylike aggression, that in some of the volumes they were called on to approve “everything in America is denigrated.”

  An awkward silence followed. She broke through the unpleasantness with a charming apology. Then she launched into an objection to lessons on “dialectology” she had found in one of the books (“For too long our schools have neglected the importance of oral language”): she didn’t want to see English being “watered down” by “ghetto dialect” and the “sloppy and vulgar” language of the streets.

  The moment came and went. No one knew history was being made. The state required a decision by April 15. So the majority quickly voted the books through.

  And in the hollers surrounding Charleston, West Virginia, the Joan of Arc they called “Sweet Alice” started girding for war.

  Her troops called themselves “Creekers”: rural folk, like the Reverend Avis Hill, who ran a combined church, school, and mission out of an abandoned rural store and service station—and who, like most fundamentalist preachers of the day, had only recently wanted nothing to do with worldly politics. That was Caesar’s realm, inherently fallen. Then, according to his conversion narrative, somewhere on the road to Damascus he connected the foul textbooks to the failing grade his daughter had recently received for writing about how the Lord had created the heaven and the earth in six days. “Then it dawned on me . . . packing Johnny’s lunch bucket, combing his hair, patting him on the head and saying, ‘Honey, you go to school now. You mind what your teacher says’ ”—that no longer was possible. Teachers teaching evolution were agents of perdition. It was time get out from behind the pulpit. It was time to go to political war.