ground zero<\/a> of Virginia\u2019s 2021 election battle.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s too early to know whether Republicans have found their galvanizing issue for next year\u2019s elections. But history shows us that schools have long served as a powerful organizing symbol and useful proxy for political contests. What\u2019s more, the politics of primary and secondary education are often an early warning sign and leading indicator of where the national debate is headed. From the very inception of public schools in the mid-19th century to present day, local debates over school curricula, sports and even bathrooms have presaged broader wrangling at the national level.<\/p>\n
Leave it to the number crunchers to determine what happened in Virginia this week. But for those Democrats and Republicans who believe school wars were at the center of the story, history suggests that Tuesday was just the opening salvo in what may prove a long and protracted cultural contest.<\/p>\n
Almost from the very inception of \u201ccommon\u201d or public schools in the United States,<\/span> education has served as a focal point for broader debates over culture and politics. In the mid-19th century, Catholic religious officials like New York\u2019s Bishop John Hughes \u2014 \u201cDagger John,\u201d as he was popularly known \u2014 called for a complete divorce between the city\u2019s Catholic population and the common school system, when it became clear in 1840 that the church would be barred from enjoying funds allotted by the state\u2019s public school act, and that the Protestant-leaning board administering common schools intended to use its influence to proselytize among Catholic youth (among other methods, it employed the Anglican King James Bible in schools). Tapping into a powerful reserve of ethnic resentment, Hughes told his flock that \u201c[w]e are in the same situation as they were in Ireland from the Kildare Street Society, where for years they tried the fidelity of those who never were recreant to their faith.\u201d Three decades later, in 1870, 68 percent of all city parishes operated their own parochial elementary schools, which were attended by 19 percent of New York\u2019s school aged population.<\/p>\nNew York\u2019s school wars presaged national debates over immigration and nativism in the 1850s, as Catholic immigrants sought to construct a sprawling array of parallel institutions \u2014 schools, fraternal organizations, hospitals, even sports leagues \u2014 in the face of condescension, discrimination and proselytization by native-born Protestants. Schools operated as a focal point in the debate over who was and who was not American.<\/p>\n
In much the same way, debates over segregation in American public schools served as a powerful proxy for broader arguments about race relations from the 1950s through the 1970s. The NAACP trained its sites on school desegregation in the late 1940s, knowing full well that the issue would excite the passions of white politicians and parents. W.E.B. DuBois mused that \u201ctheoretically the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is education.\u201d But schools represented an opportunity to break an entire generation of children, both black and white, of long-established patterns of racial thinking. White opponents certainly understood the stakes. In an article in 1956, Herbert Ravenel Sass, a prominent South Carolinian, called the South the \u201cgreat bulwark against intermarriage\u201d and conjectured that \u201ca very few years of thoroughly integrated schools would produce larger numbers of indoctrinated young Southerners free from all \u2018prejudice\u2019 against mixed matings.\u201d (This was, in his thinking, something to be feared.) <\/p>\n
In the same way, political wars over school busing in the 1970s were about much more than who attended which schools. In an era of economic stagnation, cultural liberalization and demographic change, busing came to represent competition over jobs, neighborhoods, religion, culture and local political power. <\/p>\n
Few people gave sharper expression to this range of social unrest than antibusing leader John Kerrigan, a former hospital orderly in Boston who worked his way through law school and joined the School Committee in 1967. Kerrigan complained that \u201cin these days of liberalization of civil rights, government has made continued concessions to convicted felons, homosexuals, abortionists, and others, yet persists in ignoring the pleas of parents who ask that they be accorded their rightful privilege of sending their children to their own neighborhood schools.\u201d It wasn\u2019t always clear whether Kerrigan\u2019s chief concerns were busing and school desegregation or the more general unraveling of long-held social mores.<\/p>\n
School wars haven\u2019t simply been representative of larger cultural and political unrest.<\/span> As was the case with debates about religion in the 1840s, they have sometimes been the tip of the spear\u2014 a local dispute that portends a shift in national politics. This was certainly the case in the development of the modern conservative movement after World War II.<\/p>\nIn late 1960, conservative activists in Orange County, California, began frequenting meetings of the Magnolia School District Board of Education, out of concern that Joel Dvorman, an elected board member and activist with the American Civil Liberties Union, was an \u201cidentified communist\u201d and bent on converting local students to a radical, revolutionary ideology. They disrupted public meetings, demanding to know whether Dvorman had \u201cever been a member of the Communist Party,\u201d and held a series of talks on \u201cGoals and Techniques of World Communism.\u201d One activist later remarked, \u201cHaving heard many derogatory things about the ACLU, and being mildly curious about what an identified communist might have to say, I was very upset to find this thing going on in our neighborhood.\u201d <\/p>\n
Conservative activists organized in church basements and at coffee klatches at each other\u2019s homes and, in 1961, successfully removed Dvorman and two other board members in a special recall election. The newly installed board members quickly adopted a new \u201cAmerican heritage program\u201d designed to \u201cpromote a deep devotion to the American Way of Life,\u201d and began sending students home with bulletins and flyers that brazenly promoted a fundamentalist Christian point of view. One piece of literature, titled \u201cThe Meaning of Christmas,\u201d argued that the \u201cworld is in a state of confusion, turmoil and crisis \u2026 divided between two ideologies striving to capture the mind, the heart, and the very soul of mankind.\u201d When schools adopted a \u201cphilosophy that is atheistic and denies the existence of a divine being,\u201d they exposed children to a dangerous ideology. \u201cThere is one \u2026 eternal truth,\u201d the pamphlet concluded. \u201c\u2018For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.\u201d <\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy, in hindsight, to dismiss such examples as fringe. But historians generally regard grassroots activism in postwar Orange County as the incubator for modern conservatism. It was where ardent anticommunists and free market advocates found common cause with Christian moralists in what became the prototype for the New Right. Within a few short years, what began in Southern California grew into a national movement that reshaped the Republican Party and, ultimately, American politics. Its first focus was schools. And that was not an isolated phenomenon.<\/p>\n
Fast forward to 1970. That year, in Kanawha County, West Virginia, Alice Moore, the wife of a fundamentalist preacher and mother of four young children, won election to the school board after waging a campaign against the Board of Education\u2019s new sex education program. After succeeding in her effort to water down the curriculum, in 1974 Moore trained her sites on the district\u2019s literature textbooks, after concluding that many items on the approved classroom reading list were licentious and anti-Christian. To prove her point, she staged public readings of one such work, e. e. cummings\u2019 poem, \u201cI Like My Body,\u201d which included such suggestive lines as, \u201ckissing this and that of you \u2026 slowly stroking the shocking fuzz of your electric fur.\u201d Moore also cited works by James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver as \u201cfull of negative references to Christianity and God,\u201d denouncing them as rife with \u201cprofanity and anti-American and racist anti-white stories.\u201d Taking particular exception to an elementary school textbook that likened the story of Daniel to Aesop\u2019s fables, she demanded that the Board of Education expunge the offending volumes from the curriculum. When her colleagues failed to oblige, Moore called for a school boycott. That she was borrowing a page from the civil rights movement\u2019s direct-action playbook apparently seemed to elude her entirely.<\/p>\n
With local preachers like the Rev. Marvin Horan warning parents that \u201cif we don\u2019t protect our children from evil we\u2019ll have to go to hell from it,\u201d some 20 percent of students skipped classes during the first week of the 1974-75 school year. Adults picketed the city\u2019s transportation depots in violation of court orders, vandalized yellow school buses and bombed two empty schools in unknowing imitation of the same urban violence they decried in the works of Baldwin and Cleaver. \u201cWe\u2019re going to close down all the schools until the un-American, un-Christian, vulgar, filthy, trashy books are banned,\u201d the Rev. Charles Quigley promised. Calling on his followers to \u201cpray that God will kill the giants who have mocked and made fun of the dumb fundamentalists,\u201d Quigley fanned the fames of religious rage. \u201cWe are going to continue picketing if they throw everyone into the county jail,\u201d he warned. \u201cThese are parents who love their children and will fight until death, if necessary.\u201d <\/p>\n
After the school board approved a compromise measure that permitted parents to excuse their children from reading specific texts they might find objectionable, hard-line protesters \u2014 with many beleaguered coal miners and truckers prominent among their ranks \u2014 stepped up their campaign. Some 2,000 Christian conservatives marched through Charleston in December, while renegade activists fired shots at classrooms and buses and threatened physical harm to parents did not comply with the boycott. The climate only cooled in April 1975 when Horan was sentenced to three years in prison for conspiring to firebomb a school building.<\/p>\n
In the aftermath of the Kanawha textbook wars, the conservative Heritage Foundation funded a new outlet, the National Congress for Educational Excellence, that brought over 200 local groups across the nation under one umbrella to force a return to traditionalism in school curricula. Importantly, the head of the Heritage Foundation, Paul Weyrich, was a Catholic, as were many of the organization\u2019s leading members. The willingness of Southern evangelicals to work closely with a devout Catholic in promoting Christian values signaled the start a new, ecumenical alliance of religious traditionalists.<\/p>\n
The brouhaha in Kanawha was not a case of national politics expressing itself at the local level. Instead, the county\u2019s school textbook wars were a first shot in a larger contest that would subsume national politics over the following two decades. America had changed a great deal over the prior decade. Where conservatives in Orange County in 1960 may not immediately have gained national traction, the liberalization of attitudes toward sex, women\u2019s and LGBTQ rights and race paved the way for a broader national discussion. The movement that grew out of Kanawha was a prototype for the Religious Right\u2019s exercise of political power.<\/p>\n
The jury is still out on the meaning of this week\u2019s election in Virginia. To be sure, concerns over transgender rights, critical race theory, masking and vaccine mandates and school governance didn\u2019t begin and won\u2019t end in Loudoun County. Some of these conversations began at the national level and have filtered their way down locally. But the symbolic resonance and expressive power of school policy \u2014 the way in which education wars have crystallized this particular array of diverse social issues and concerns \u2014 has powerful precedent. <\/p>\n
Much as the Kanawha school imbroglio of 1970 presaged the emergence of a potent political movement and helped establish the terms of debate for years to come, the Virginia election may introduce a new political landscape \u2014 one whose history has not yet been written.<\/p>\n
Read More<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Source: Politics This week\u2019s Republican sweep in Virginia\u2019s off-year gubernatorial and legislative elections is already inspiring plenty of postgame analysis, not least among Democrats, who will scramble to make sense… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":25972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25971"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}