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

by Rick Perlstein

  The teachers’ adversaries, locally, were known as Hillers. One spokesman for the teachers was an Episcopalian rector, the Reverend James Lewis. He thought at one point that he might be killed. He wrote a newspaper article that was syndicated nationally: “The anti-textbook people of Kanawha County are confused and angry about everything from marijuana to Watergate. Feeling helpless and left out, they are looking for a scapegoat. They are eager to exorcise all that is evil and foul, cleanse or burn all that is strange and foreign. In this religious war, spiced with overtones of race and class, the books are an accessible target.”

  One such target was Communicating, a text published by D. C. Heath (whose founder, according to the Gablers, had supposedly said, “Let me publish the textbooks of a nation and I care not who writes its songs or makes its laws,” though no one could ever quite point to when or where he had said it). One of its units taught “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Teachers were encouraged to have “two or three students on a team debate such questions as whether Jack has a right to steal from the giant,” and ask, “What difference there is between a rich man and a poor man stealing?” It thus put the Ten Commandments up for debate. Could a Christian stand for something like that?

  Another argument concerned that book’s cover. It pictured a little girl giving a bouquet to a little boy. The girl was white. The boy was black. “This is what it is all about,” a protester patiently explained to a board member. Graffiti began showing up on Charleston walls reading, for instance, “GET THE NIGGER BOOKS OUT.”

  At the June 27 meeting, a black pastor took to the podium to testify in favor of adopting the textbooks. “Is it your feeling,” Sweet Alice asked him, “that in order to represent minorities, specifically blacks, that we should present them with the Edridge Cleavers and George Jacksons”—George Jackson was a Black Panther who killed a prison guard, and published a bestselling book of prison letters, Soledad Brother—“and people of this type?”

  “When you say ‘people of this type,’ it assumes that ‘that type’ is not representative or that there is some kind of defect in ‘that type,’ and—”

  Sweet Alice interrupted: “You don’t think that.”

  “I think they have a message from the other side of the American experience that ought be told,” the black pastor returned. You could hardly hear him for the gasps from the Creekers in the gallery.

  Through summer, in Kanawha as in Boston, passions intensified—for instance by means of a flyer purporting to reproduce a page of one of the textbooks featuring a giant erect penis and a demonstration of how to use a condom. (Board of education officials pointed out that the flyer’s author, a self-ordained preacher named Ezra Graley, had actually made it all up, photocopying the pictures from an entirely unrelated book in the library.) On Labor Day eight thousand angry citizens heard an intense young preacher with a dimpled chin named Marvin Horan urge every family to boycott school when it opened in September. Another prayed aloud for God to smite down offending school board members.

  The next day, the opening of school, about a fifth of the district’s children stayed home—four-fifths of the county’s Creekers. And in an extraordinary development, 3,500 coal miners walked out on the job. As did some Charleston city bus drivers. Honoring a picket line was a sacred principle in coal country—it was how, the previous year, miners in neighboring Brookside, Kentucky, forced their governor to back down from rationing gasoline. And so on September 11, the same day school opened in Boston, the Kanawha County school board backed down, officially closing the schools for three days while the books were removed for a thirty-day review—presuming that would make the irreconcilables stop. Instead, smelling the blood of a wounded opponent, they moved in for the kill.

  At a rally that night, Alice Moore announced that the partial capitulation was “the best we can expect.” She was jeered. Marvin Horan followed her and said it was time to double the boycott until the books were banned outright, forever. The next day a man was shot crossing a picket line at a trucking terminal, the crowd roughed up the Charleston Daily Mail photographer recording the violence, and mines shut across the three surrounding counties. The school superintendent said that “the county is bordering on lawlessness.”

  Monday, September 16, was a busy news day in Washington. Seymour Hersh of the New York Times reported the Nixon administration had spent $8 million to “destabilize” Salvador Allende of Chile; a senator recommended CIA chief Richard Helms and three other retired officials be cited for contempt for misleading Congress about the agency’s role. President Ford announced the details of his program for military evaders: they would be granted clemency in return for at least eighteen months of alternative national service—and then at the press conference that followed, reporters badgered him about whether he’d been awarded the presidency in exchange for pardoning Nixon. “If your intention was to heal the wounds of nation, sir,” he was asked accusingly, “why did you grant only a conditional amnesty to the Vietnam War draft evaders while granting a full pardon to President Nixon?” He was hammered, too, from the right, by the commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who said Ford’s mild feint toward conciliation of Vietnam War critics “does a gross injustice to those who served honorably, those who died and received wounds, and those who were so long imprisoned.” Then the organization for draft resisters in exile told its members to boycott the deal because it was “too much to ask that we accept punishment for justified resistance to the illegal and immoral U.S. war in Indochina.”

  The president had received Alice Moore’s lesson: conciliation often just whets opponents’ appetite for blood.

  Charleston schools reopened on Tuesday—except one junior high, which had received telephoned bomb threats. The “Vigilante Committee for Decency in Our Schools” circulated a letter lamenting that “as recently as 50 years ago” school board members “would have been lynched for less than their present activities”—though the vigilante committee did not actually “advocate anyone doing this, since these creeps are not worth going to jail for.”

  The hollers were now a mecca for reporters from as far away as London. Some handled the story with extraordinary sensitivity. Paul Cowan of the Village Voice became the protesters’ most empathetic liberal chronicler. He won the trust of thoughtful interlocutors like Emmett Thompson, a fifty-nine-year-old riverboat engineer from Nitro, West Virginia, who explained, “You are making an insidious attempt to replace our periods with your question marks.” Thompson, who sent his son to Lynchburg Bible College, a fundamentalist school founded and operated by the Virginia preacher and TV entrepreneur Jerry Fal-well, longed for what he called a “return to the spirit of the Boston Tea Party,” and explained to the Jewish, New Left veteran Cowan why he considered the books “moral genocide.” For his part, Cowan, who did not entirely disagree, flushed out a 1970 document from the office of West Virginia’s superintendent of schools promising to “induce changes . . . in the culturally lost of Appalachia. . . . The setting of the public school should be the testing ground, the diagnostic basis, the experimental center, and the core of this design.” He read the conflict as, in part, a class war, between educated professionals eager to get their kids into the Ivy League, and plain folk who saw a traditional basic education as a route to upward mobility.

  Other reporters were not so sensitive to the class nuances.

  They just laughed—at claims that Admiral Farragut’s line “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” in a textbook taught children “cursing”; at the preachers waving in their faces a book called The Late, Great Planet Earth, which none of the reporters had heard of even though it had sold some five million copies since its publication in 1970; at people who argued that Israel’s founding in 1948 foretold Christ’s imminent second coming; and at their faux-learned disquisitions that “since humanism is now considered by the Court to be a religion” (the result of an ill-considered footnote in the 1961 case Torcaso v. Watkins, in which Justice Hugo Black innocently listed secular
humanism among religions “which do not teach what would generally considered belief in the existence of God”) they were being persecuted by an unofficial state religion. The protesters’ best hope for banning the books was the U.S. Supreme Court, some decided, which could rule that they represented an illegal establishment of religion in public schools.

  The media, meanwhile, became the enemy—like the CBS newsman who introduced himself at a protesters’ meeting as a reporter for Walter Cronkite. His crew fortunately managed to flee ahead of the advancing mob. He, though, was stomped within an inch of his life by thugs as a crowd of hundreds looked on in approval.

  NATIONALLY, PROTESTERS WERE NOT OUTLIERS. Conservative-minded citizens everywhere felt ignored, patronized, dispossessed of the authority that was rightfully theirs. By the arrogant liberalism of unelected judges—like Arthur Garrity in Boston, or the judges in New York who unanimously raised the threshold for keeping juvenile delinquents in custody, after which a sixteen-year-old thereby released stabbed a kid to death on a Brooklyn subway platform. (A city official quoted in the New York Times blamed society: the stabbing was an example of our “failures to help troubled kids.”) A Brooklyn trucker told a sociologist about the time five black kids pressed a knife to his neck in a stopped elevator and relieved him of a gold watch and two hundred dollars: “The judge gave them a fucking two-year probation.”

  Then there were the Supreme Court justices who, two days after the re-inauguration of Richard Nixon in 1973, ruled that no state could restrict any abortion performed in the first three months of pregnancy, and severely limited states’ ability to regulate abortions performed after that. Here was a procedure so controversial that the archbishop of Los Angeles had pronounced in 1970, after California passed a law that let women terminate pregnancies with little more than a doctor’s note claiming childbirth would cause emotional distress, that Catholics “excommunicate themselves from the church by cooperating in any way in abortion, even counseling one.”

  At first the Roe v. Wade backlash was mostly limited to Catholics. The attorney who represented the pro-choice side was a member in good standing of the Southern Baptists, a denomination that, at its 1974 convention, tabled an antiabortion resolution and reaffirmed one approving abortion in cases including “evidence of likely of damage to the emotional . . . health of the mother.” The American Baptist Association, going further, endorsed what critics called “abortion on demand.” But more fundamentalist Protestants were soon raising their voices, too. At the American Baptist convention a minister’s wife from Arkansas thundered from the floor that abortion was “nothing less than legalized murder of masses of human lives.” Christianity Today, Billy Graham’s trade magazine for evangelical minsters, formerly ambivalent, even indifferent, on the issue, now editorialized that abortion “ought not to be regarded as a Catholic issue because Catholic leaders oppose it,” and that since the fetus was a “human person,” abortion was “manslaughter, if not murder.” When the National Right to Life Committee organized in Detroit, the members chose a Methodist, Marjory Mecklenburg, as their first chair. In April of 1974, fifteen thousand activists, bearing signs reading DON’T MAKE THE WOMB A TOMB and ABORTION—HITLER’S FINAL SOLUTION, many of them young parents with sign-toting children in tow (I’M ADOPTED. I’M GLAD I WASN’T ABORTED), gathered for a silent vigil in downtown Cincinnati, the only sound a slow, mournful snare cadence. Silent, that is, until the speeches began. Congressman Lawrence Hogan, cosponsor of the constitutional “Human Life Amendment” to override Roe, boomed, “We as a nation have denied the most basic right of all—the right to life.” Mecklenburg said that “seven arrogant and callous men”—the Supreme Court majority—had “brought America into the most destructive war in the history of mankind, . . . a war in which the toll of American lives will be many times greater than in World War II.” And some people didn’t even care!

  For many it was the very antidemocratic nature of the Supreme Court that made its decision so galling. “Abortion is the monumental sort of issue over which wars are fought,” a letter writer huffed angrily in the Hartford Courant that August, but it somehow had been disposed of once and for all in secret by unelected judges. “It is strange indeed that the major media and politicians have long tried to cover up discussion of this vital issue. I wonder why?”

  That unthinking arrogance of liberals when it came to intruding into the formerly private realms of the family was starting to rankle more and more. For instance, that spring, in hearings on liberal Indiana senator Birch Bayh’s proposed Runaway Youth Act, witness after witness from counterculture-rooted social service agencies spoke of “protecting minors’ liberty interest,” flatly opposed the idea of turning troubled kids over to police (avoiding involvement of police with runaways was indeed one of the stated principles of the bill), and believed in keeping parents out of the process as much as possible. These witnesses said things in the Senate hearing room like “Children represent the last vestige of slavery in this country.” Meanwhile no representative of parents’ interests was called to testify. That hadn’t kept the $30 million bill from passing the Senate unanimously, then being folded into a Juvenile Justice Act, signed into law by President Ford on September 7.

  It was just as Ronald Reagan had said in the greatest speech of his career, when he introduced himself to the nation as a political figure on October 27, 1964, speaking for the doomed presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, in a line that he repeated nearly verbatim in his gubernatorial inaugural speech in 1967: “This is the issue,” he said—“Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we . . . confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. . . . They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.”

  Hardly less eloquently, a Ford production worker outside Detroit named Dewey Burton told the New York Times much the same thing in October 1974. The Times had begun interviewing Burton for a regular series published just before every national election beginning in 1972—back when he identified himself as a committed Democrat. Now, he said sorrowfully, “More and more of us are sort of leaving all our hopes outside in the rain and coming into the house and just locking the door. . . .

  “You can’t blame it all on the politicians. But I wish just for once that one of them would say, ‘No folks, I swear to God, if you’ll elect me, I won’t do a damn thing.’ That’s the fellow I’d vote for. Somebody who’d just leave us alone.”

  THAT WEARY, REACTIONARY DESPAIR: IT was aimed, in part, at those liberal media gatekeepers who had made ordinary longings for simple order, tradition, and decorum suddenly seem so embarrassingly unfashionable. For instance, at CBS—which, once the furor died down, did eventually show Sticks and Bones, the scabrous satire in which the stand-in for the typical Ozzie-and-Harriet suburban family murders the blind-seer son for daring to demonstrate the evils of the Vietnam War. And, for instance, in the nation’s newspaper of record—which editorialized that August against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s plans to purchase subway cars that couldn’t be covered with graffiti, which the Times found “always striking, sometimes cheerful.” (But it wasn’t against censorship entirely; another editorial was quite disturbed, for example, by “child-focused televised messages touting vitamins or other non-prescription drugs,” which “should be legally impermissible.”)

  Patriotism—the old-fashioned kind—felt somehow forbidden. A liberal English teacher named Daniel Fader published a memoir about raising an adolescent in the 1970s, Paul and I Discover America. His son told him how he planned to sew a flag on the seat of his pants.

  “Why would you want to do that, to sew the flag on the seat of your pants?”

  “I don’t know. Because that’s where it belongs.”

  “Do what you like. If that’s what you have to do,
then do it. But if someone knocks you down because he doesn’t like it, I won’t be there to pick you up. And maybe I’ll think you got what was coming to you.”

  The violence of his own sentiment shocked the author, and, gingerly, almost apologetically, he felt his way through where it had come from. “For the first time in our life together I was moved to speak to my son of my country, my flag, the immense weight of goodwill and affection that I bore it. I was moved to tell him of his grandfather who blessed the day my immigrant grandfather had removed his family from medieval Russia to twentieth-century America; of my uncle, his great-uncle . . . who cherished for a quarter of a century the knowledge that he had fought for his country; of a small, bandy-legged Cockney American who knew and loved his adopted country’s flag so well that his devotion to it had cost him the clarity of his speech, the strength of his step, and too soon the full length of his life. I told him all this, as best I could . . . the reason why the crumpled flag in his hand and his intention to abuse it had aroused me to such violent denunciation.”

  You used to not have to explain this sort of thing. And to those of less liberal temperament than that memoirist, the new reality felt like it came out of nowhere—and they cast about for ways to make it all stop.

  Perhaps they could do it by getting rid of those textbooks their children were bringing home. Like that history text Search for Freedom, the one starring Marilyn Monroe. Clad in fashionable earth tones, the book began in the key of suspicion: “It is said that on October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America.” It ended, 418 pages later, with faint praise for Americans’ traditional faith in the future, which, the authors concluded, “helps explain why Mexican-Americans who work in the fields of California or blacks and Puerto Ricans on the streets of Harlem still have reason to hope.”