I have not addressed another category—John Birchers in the suburbs—and a political connection that is old news to many but interesting to a straight white, oblivious boy like me.
Flyer anonymously printed and distributed in Dallas just before Kennedy's visit
We all remember Kennedy’s assassination and the worldwide incrimination of Dallas as a “city of hate” that somehow fostered the killing. When Kennedy began his morning at a Fort Worth hotel, he considered the hostile Dallas political environment, as shown in a Dallas Morning News advertisement published that morning.
In the aftermath, the Warren Commission found that both the DMN ad and the flyer were irrelevant; the ad was created and funded by Birchers and wealthy Dallas businessmen, including Bum Bright. The John Birch Society, which had a strong following in the fifties and sixties in the wealthy, white Dallas suburbs, claimed the assassination bolstered their conviction that a communist conspiracy existed in the U.S. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/birch.htm
I’ve never had much interest in JFK assassination theories or the history of the Equal Rights Amendment, but reading Barbara Ehrenbach's The Hearts of Men [which though published in 1983, stands credible and current today] has drawn for me a connection between the conservative businessmen and their bridge-playing, stay-at-home wives, on the one hand, and the defeat of the ERA in the early eighties.
. . . Phyllis Schafly was not one of those housewives who, as Betty Friedan observed, let homemaking “expand to fill the time available” and crowd out all youthful ambitions. Sheltered by Fred Schlafly’s more than ample income and assisted by a part-time housekeeper, she developed a new career as a one-woman propagandist for far-right concerns, publishing (and in some cases self-publishing) eight books on the twin menace of the Soviet Union and its domestic dupes. Politically, she kept one foot in the right-wing of the Republican Party and the other in the nether world of paranoid, evangelical organizations which made up what was then known complacently as the “lunatic fringe” of American conservatism. She ran for Congress as a Republican and wrote a best-selling book (A Choice Not an Echo) endorsing Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate in 1964. At the same time, she believed that the party had been taken over by a “small group of secret kingmakers using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques” to advance the interests of the “Red Empire.” If this sounds like a highly imaginative view of the Republican Party, it was by no means unique to Phyllis Schlafly. The John Birch Society, a semi-secret, right-wing organization that gained a sizable rural and suburban middle-class following the early 1960s, had consistently warned that the United States was already “50%-70% Communist-controlled.” Like Schlafly [a St. Louis, not a Dallas housewife], the Birch Society saw evidence of Red manipulation in any statesman or politician whose military aspirations fell short of nuclear Armageddon. In 1960, for example, the society’s founder and director, Robert Welch, made the surprising announcement that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was himself a Communist operative.
. . .
In 1972, both the Birch Society and Schlafly’s newsletter flagged the ERA—which at the time was solidly backed by the Republican Party—as a major new political target, and within a few months, Phyllis Schlafly emerged as the leader of a national campaign to stop the ERA. The most obvious reason for this sudden surge of right-wing interest in a feminist issue was that, by the early seventies, the old issues were not selling as well as they once had. Charges of communism in high places sounded quaint in an America that had had its own highly visible and hardly conspiratorial New Left. Détente was in progress, anticommunism was on the decline, and sheer opportunism would have impelled the right to exploit the new issues arising from social changes of the sixties—school busing, affirmative action, abortion and equal rights for women. For Schlafly, in addition, as her chronicler Lisa Wohl suggests, the ERA presented an opportunity to “enter the mainstream,” that is, to gain national attention around an issue that had no apparent connection to the tired themes of far-right paranoia. Others on the pro-ERA side made the same assessment of the right-wingers who were beginning to appear reborn as antifeminists. Pointing to the connection between anti-ERA activism and the far-right American Independent Party (which ran George Wallace for President in 1968 and Birch-affiliated John Schmitz in 1972), Congresswoman Martha Griffiths charged that the anti-ERA effort was really “a means of building a right-wing political organization among women.” But if this was opportunism, it was hardly unprincipled: The major themes of the right-wing assault on feminism were latent in far-right anti-communist ideology before feminism became a force in America.
www.phyllisschlafly.com/
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter071802.asp
These guilts by association--John Birch Society related to Phyllis Schaffly related to anti-ERA politics--have exact parallels in attacks against Betty Friedan, that in her early 20s in the late forties, she was a socialist. Both women had need to dissemble about their previous political associations as their new political careers developed. As we near the 2008 Presidential elections, one cannot ignore the vicious political divisions in our country--and as Hillary said this week, that politics and the nation may be on the edge of "spinning out of control." But in some ways, this is old news when one considers the hostile political environment I grew up in during the cold war fifties and early sixties. Let's elect a President who will work to put the ERA back on the table and/or encourage social programs for our distressed citizenship--hardly a frightful possibility compared to rocketing multimegaton nuclear warheads into North Korean or Russian cities.
YouTube has a couple of videos that focus on Dallas news footage of Birchers from the early sixties, including the exploits of Edwin A Walker:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKwalker.htm
Once I had a driver's license, in the late 1960s, I remember driving by the John Birch Society's headquarters, which I believe was at the intersection of Blackburn and Oak Lawn. Jack Ruby supposedly frequented Phil's Delicatessen down the street. After he was arrested, he was certain the Birchers were out to get him.
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/Issues_and_evidence/Jack_Ruby/Timeline_of_Ruby.html
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/ruby_j1.htm
More sixties Dallas trivia--about connections among right wingers, organized crime, and strippers such as Candy Barr and Chris Colt and her 45s can be found at
http://www.lotuseaters.net/jfkdad.shtml
http://www.jfklancerforum.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=3&topic_id=19378&mesg_id=19378&listing_type=
