The Big Sort

by Bill Bishop

  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.44

  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.45 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.46 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.* (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.)47 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."48

  Class Warfare Inverted

  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.49 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.† 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.50

  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.51 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."52

  The perceptive southern writer John Egerton went to Kanawha County for the Progressive magazine to report on the "battle of the books." What he found was a conflict based on something more than income. The division was a clash between the "hillers" in Charleston and the "creekers" in rural Kanawha County: "Charleston is Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian; the churches in the narrow hollows are Free-Will Baptist, Pentecostal, Church of God in Prophesy. Charleston is double-knit suits, sports cars, cocktail parties; rural Kanawha is khakis, coal trucks, white lightning and abstention. Charleston aspires to a modern, affluent future; Cabin Creek struggles against heavy odds to preserve a hard but often heroic past."53

  The divide in West Virginia wasn't between Republicans and Democrats or rich and poor. While Ladd was finding a new division in the broad numbers of the electorate—a New Deal turned upside down—Egerton was seeing the same divide on the ground in West Virginia. That division—of rural and urban, college-educated and working-class, Public and Private Protestant—defines our politics today. In 2004, poor white people continued to vote Democratic. According to Bartels's figures, John Kerry won half his votes from white families earning less than $35,000 a year, a percentage that hasn't changed in thirty years.54 But when political analyst Ruy Teixeira looked at whites without a college education in families with a total income between $30,000 and $50,000 a year, George W. Bush beat Kerry by 23 percentage points. The important difference wasn't income, however, but education. Among white college graduates in the same income level ($30,000 to $50,000 per family), Bush and Kerry split the vote evenly. Teixeira found that in 2004, Democrats did worst among working-class whites.55

  The Organization of a "Political Revolution"

  As the Kanawha boycott continued, shots were fired, and one man was beaten. The Charleston Gazette castigated "religious fanatics who encouraged their venomous followers." A minister prayed for the deaths of the three school board members who had voted for the books. "I am asking Christian people to pray that God will kill the giants who have mocked and made fun of dumb fundamentalists," implored th
e Reverend Charles Quigley. An elementary school on Campbells Creek was firebombed; another on Cabin Creek was dynamited. Shotgun blasts raked school buses. In a strange episode, a constable from Witchers Creek arrested the county school superintendent and three school board members for contributing to the delinquency of minors, a charge brought by the Upper Kanawha Valley Mayors Association. (The officials were arrested at a Methodist church where they were talking with textbook opponents at a meeting arranged by the local bishop.) The charges were dismissed. Protesters attacked some board members at a meeting in early December. Eventually, the Ku Klux Klan marched in support of the textbook opponents.56

  The violence peaked, and then, as winter came, it ended. The Kanawha County textbook war just petered out. The school board promised to review the textbooks, and in December several men were arrested for the school bombings. The schools gradually refilled with students. In mid-January 1975, a federal grand jury indicted Marvin Horan for conspiring to blow up two elementary schools. According to the indictment, Horan had told a group that he had "paid enough taxes" to own one of the schools and that they "had his permission to do anything they wanted" with the building.57 Horan was eventually found guilty of one charge of conspiracy. He appealed the verdict and ran for the state senate, losing to the incumbent. (The political factions of the strike had yet to find a home in the two parties, so Horan ran as a Democrat.) After his appeals were denied, Horan took up residence at a federal prison in Pennsylvania. The warden allowed him to hold prayer services on Sunday evenings and to baptize convicts at a church in a nearby town. "You might find this strange," Horan said, "but if I had been a single man, I wouldn't have cared if they ever let me out. The ministry was so rewarding then."

  When Horan left prison after two years, just before Christmas 1978, he moved "right back to Campbells Creek, right back into the ministry." But Horan's life wasn't the same there after the strike and his time in prison. Churches across the Midwest asked him to speak, but in Kanawha County the ministers who had supported the strike now shunned the movement's leader. He stayed on Campbells Creek for fourteen years before moving to North Carolina in 1993, when he was fifty-three years old. Horan still drives a truck and preaches, and he is more convinced than ever that the 1974 textbook war was worth fighting. "The books were teaching our children to do things that went against everything we stood for," Horan told me in 2005. "I mean, it took ... the pride of the children away from them. It destroyed the children." Still fond of prophecy, the preacher envisioned the inevitable downfall of the United States, a victim of its moral failings. "Make a mental note of this," Horan said. "Within ten years or twenty years from this day, there'll be another country ruling this one. Another country will be running this one."

  In the fall of 1974, after the strike was well under way, the Heritage Foundation sent a lawyer to consult with some of the movement's stalwarts. The newly formed foundation brought leaders of the strike to Washington, D.C., to meet with education commissioner Terrel Bell and an aide to President Gerald Ford.58 Conservative activists in Washington hadn't created the movement in West Virginia; Horan and the people in the coal camps of Kanawha County had done that themselves. But the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups recognized within the uprising a potent and, as it turned out, enduring combination of Private Protestant values, distrust of an intrusive government, racial insecurity, and a millennialist belief that America was losing its moral authority and world standing. While liberals either romanticized the textbook strike as "class warfare" or labeled strikers "religious fanatics," conservatives got busy channeling Horan and others into the New Right coalition and the Republican Party. The New Right movement wasn't created as a result of a conspiracy. It was emerging from places like Campbells Creek. The ingredients of conservative ideology were scattered across the country. They just needed to be gathered, organized, and put together using the right recipe. In 1975, the Heritage Foundation formed a group to help coordinate some two hundred textbook protests that had cropped up nationwide.59 It asked donors to "help Heritage stop forcing pornography and other objectionable subjects into schools all over America."60

  The West Virginia textbook strike flipped a switch and illuminated the way the Republican Party could form a coalition of working-class voters; religious conservatives; and small-government, free-market capitalists. Emerging Republican leaders adopted the Kanawha County strikers. Robert Dornan traveled from California to West Virginia to speak at a few rallies.61 Two years later, he won his first term in Congress. Representative Philip Crane, an Illinois Republican and a founder of the new conservative movement, sent out letters in December 1974 charging that textbook protesters had been subjected to "police brutality."62 The Reverend Charles Secrest, a representative of Billy James Hargis's Church of the Christian Crusade, visited Alice Moore, and Moore went to Tulsa to speak to a Christian Crusade audience. The organization sold a tape of her speech for five dollars.63 "It would be a mistake to consider the textbooks the sole point of protest," said Elmer Fike, a businessman and supporter of the strike. "The textbooks were a last straw. Parents here as well as nationwide are calling for a return to fundamental and basic education." After the strike ended, more than seventy Kanawha County residents drove to Washington, D.C., to join Boston antibusing protesters in a rally against federal education policies. "This is the first time the two big struggles against busing and dirty textbooks have stood side by side," said the Reverend Avis Hill. "This is the beginning of a political revolution."64

  West Virginia—style protests spread, as this new conservative concoction found a purpose and a public voice. "Since the battle of the books in Kanawha County in 1974, incidents of censorship or attempts at censorship have increased markedly," wrote education professor Edward B. Jenkinson. "During the 1977–78 school year, more incidents of removing or censoring books occurred nationally than at any other time in the last twenty-five years."65 In 1979, Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail impresario of the conservative movement, complained that during "the 25 years that I've been active in politics, the major religious leaders in America have been liberals who were in bed politically with the Democratic Party."66 Viguerie led a group of conservative activists (including Paul Weyrich and Ed McAteer of the Conservative Caucus) away from the cities and the centers of Public Protestantism to Lynchburg, Virginia. They visited with a relatively unknown preacher by the name of Jerry Falwell, a man the conservatives thought had a message that ran counter to the mainline churches' tenets of the Social Gospel and ecumenicism. The New Right leaders urged Falwell to use his church, his weekly television broadcast, and his contacts among other conservative preachers as the foundation of a national political and religious network. Viguerie would help raise funds through direct mail. They said Falwell could call the new organization something like the "moral majority."67

  Kanawha County, USA: 1974–2004

  Political scientist Peter Francia and his coworkers at East Carolina University divided voters in the 2004 presidential election into three groups based on their beliefs about the Bible.68 Fundamentalists believed in biblical inerrancy. (Fundamentalists accounted for roughly half of the voters in Republican states, but only 28 percent of the voters in Democratic states.) Biblical Minimalists believed that the Bible was the work of men, not God. (They were 12 percent of the voters in red states, 18 percent in blue states.) Moderates believed that the Bible was the Word of God but shouldn't be taken literally. (This middling group accounted for 38 percent of voters in red states and 53 percent in blue states.)

  The geographic division of people by biblical belief and political leaning is further evidence of the Big Sort. But Francia's more interesting finding is that voters' assessment of the Bible could predict how they felt about a range of other issues. Nearly eight out of ten Fundamentalists in red states opposed any government spending for abortions. Three-quarters of the biblical Minimalists in blue states favored government spending for abortions. Nine out of ten Fundamentalists in both
blue and red states opposed gay marriage. Nearly three-quarters of the biblical Minimalists favored gay marriage.

  Abortion and gay marriage are issues affected by faith. But the divisions between the two religious camps reappeared even with questions that had no discernible connection with faith—and aligned neatly with Republican and Democratic Party positions. Fundamentalists favored increasing the budget deficit in order to cut taxes; biblical Minimalists did not. Fundamentalists supported issues such as a strong military, jobs over the environment, and George W. Bush. Biblical Minimalists were less inclined to believe that it was extremely important to have a strong military, favored the environment over jobs, and didn't support George W. Bush. "It is not a culture war between red states and blue states," Francia wrote, "but rather a war between Fundamentalists and biblical Minimalists within both the red and the blue states."69

  When graduate student Don Goode questioned West Virginia textbook warriors in the 1980s, he found two cultural tribes. When Goode asked them what they thought about government, the courts, salvation, and welfare, the two camps disagreed about all of these issues. People held remarkably coherent beliefs, so that what a person thought about the power of the courts predicted what he or she believed about school lunch programs. What someone believed about religion, national defense, and the importance of beauty lined up with what he or she thought about the content of school textbooks. Francia discovered that by the 2004 election, Kanawha County politics had gone national.

  Democrats tend to blame the division on Jerry Falwell, Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Karl Rove. Republicans tend to blame it on the 1960s, welfare, drugs, Jimmy Carter, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Looking back at the split between Public and Private Protestants and the Kanawha County textbook strike, one can see that the divide Francia uncovered wasn't foisted on Americans in a conspiracy of the right or the left. The conservative movement of the 1980s and 1990s was successful because it orchestrated—and then amplified—the politics emerging from communities as different as Orange County, California, and Kanawha County, West Virginia. Polarization did not come from politicians or the media. Indeed, according to Francia, "elites may be responding to the polarization that exists within the electorate rather than the other way around."*70 It's just that in the past three decades, Republicans responded better than Democrats.