The Greatest Subversive Plot in History? The American Radical Right and Anti-UNESCO Campaigning

Social Movement Campaigns, Micromobilization, and Path Dependency

Social movement campaigns are surprisingly under-analyzed. Movement scholars have examined tactics, social issue framing, recruitment, coalition formation, and resource attainment, but have not often focused on how and why these come to form historically specific campaigns. As Staggenborg and Lecomte (2009) note, while activists spend much time among themselves sharing ideas and strategies and assembling resources and mobilizing recruits, their activities remain largely invisible to outsiders. It is not until a campaign is initiated that a movement, its organizations, its activists, its grievances, and its proposed solutions become known broadly. Movement campaigns are a series of planned or improvisational (usually public) events with tactics aimed at achieving a specific objective. Campaigns may be geared toward recruitment or resource attainment, may promote an organization, or may address an opponent or counter-movement. Some campaigns are intended to ameliorate a grievance, others to publicize an issue. Some campaigns do all of these.

A movement campaign is assembled, in part, from extant ‘repertoires of contention’ (Tarrow, 1993; Tilly, 1977, 1993). Campaigns based largely on a traditional repertoire will be culturally salient because the tactics and ideologies will be meaningful to activists, by-stander publics, the state, and opponents. These campaigns are likely to be expected, have predictable tactics, and may result in conventional forms of opposition. Campaigns constructed from novel tactics and ideas, on the other hand, are likely to be unexpected, not have clear meaning, and may be more difficult to oppose (McAdam, 1982, 1983; McCammon, 2003; Taylor et al., 2009).

Campaigns help build solidarity and emotional attachment by providing opportunities for activists to practice movement culture and to develop shared experiences and memories of collective action (e.g. Armstrong and Crage, 2006; Polletta and Jasper, 2001). Campaigns can also bring diverse organizations and activists together (Carroll and Ratner, 1996; Della Porta and Rucht, 2002; Staggenborg and Lecomte, 2009). If perceived to be successful – or if it gains media exposure – a campaign can draw a movement out of latency or radically change an organization’s (or even a whole movement’s) fortunes.

The literature on collective action framing demonstrates that for an issue to induce a campaign, it must resonate with activists, potential recruits, and sympathizers. A campaign must also be seen to have a realistic chance of success (or some other positive outcome), and campaign tactics must entail some form of organized action that itself has some cultural meaning (Swidler, 1992). Finally, culpability must be framed persuasively and social actors or institutions that may be addressed to ameliorate the issue must be identified and made known (Benford and Snow, 2000; McAdam, 1994; Snow et al., 1986). Even when all these are present, however, not all viable issues result in campaigning.

A determination of why some issues result in campaigning while others do not requires historically specific analysis of the micromobilization context from which issues become (or fail to become) campaigns. A micromobilization context is ‘any small group setting in which processes of collective attribution are combined with rudimentary forms of organization to produce mobilization for collective action’ (McAdam et al., 1988: 709). While any small group setting holds the potential to inspire collective action, a group that has a history of contention will likely result in further collective mobilization given a relatively open political opportunity structure (McAdam, 1982), the availability and obtainability of resources (McCarthy and Zald, 1977), and the framing and promotion of grievances (Snow et al., 1986). This is especially likely in the presence of a ‘moral shock’ (Jasper and Poulsen, 1995) or a ‘suddenly imposed grievance’ (Walsh, 1981). Micromobilization contexts are themselves nested within broader historical contexts and unfold in unique ways. How and why some issues become campaigns while others do not can be a matter of path dependency, a unique and contingent sequencing of events that impacts how subsequent events unfold (Goldstone, 1998; Somers, 1998). In some cases, favorable initial micromobilization conditions may foster the movement of an issue to a campaign and, in the process, restrict other viable issues with less favorable initial conditions from becoming campaigns.

Method

This research is a comparative, extended case study which examines the micromobilization contexts of two contemporaneous issues that held potential to become right-wing movement campaigns. As Burawoy writes of the extended case study:

… the significance of a case relates to what it tells us about the world in which it is embedded. What must be true about the social context or historical past for our case to have assumed the character we have observed? … In constituting a social situation as unique, the extended case method pays attention to its complexity, its depth, its thickness. Causality then becomes multiplex, tying the social situation to its context of determination. (1991: 281)

By examining the historically specific micromobilization contexts from which campaigns may or may not develop, we gain a better understanding of how path dependency – if it is found to occur – facilitates one campaign and restricts others. The two issues are logically comparable: Radical Rightists were aware of both issues; each issue held the potential to be framed advantageously by right-wing activists; and both had the potential to be expressed as challenges to American cultural and political sovereignty.

Platt (1981) long ago noted that a challenge of presenting historical evidence involves constructing an account without presenting the reader with all the primary and secondary evidence. The solution is to present representative data that best exemplifies and supports the analytic claims. For the present study, primary sources consist largely of the texts of American conservative writers from UNESCO’s inception to through to the 1960s, since this was the primary source of information and collective action frames from which mobilization and campaigning arose. It was these writers’ framings of grievances and social issues that would be taken up by Radical Right leaders who, in turn, mobilized resources and activists – though, of course, leaders also framed and promoted their own understanding. Newspaper and magazine articles from the mid 1940s to the 1960s and other miscellanea are used to document the issues and campaigns. I use secondary sources extensively. As Skocpol (1984: 382) notes, the use of secondary sources in historical sociology is entirely appropriate if high quality histories are available. There is little point in revisiting primary sources for the sake of primary analysis if new sociological analyses can be proffered by re-examining and synthesizing historical knowledge.

The American Radical Right, Conspiratorial Anticommunism and Anti-intellectual Culture

With the growth of conspiratorial anticommunism in the United States after 1945, critics became alarmed by right-wing adherents’ growing popularity and radical claims about communist subversion. Rightists expressed strong authoritarianism and intolerance both ideologically and tactically, witnessed most notoriously during the McCarthy era’s anticommunist hunts and trials. One of the main concerns of the Radical Right was that the United States’ sacred religious and civil traditions were being undermined by a worldwide atheist and communist conspiracy (Adorno, 1950; Bell, 1963; Hofstadter, 1964, 1965; Lipset and Raab, 1978).

Conservative anti-intellectualism was accentuated by critical observers. Historian Richard Hofstadter (1964) argued that the American Radical Right exhibited a specific fusion of anti-intellectual and conspiratorial fundamentalism. Radical Rightists disavowed comprehensive and rational theories in favor of simplistic and convenient explanations and they understood history and political events allegorically, as a struggle between good and evil. According to Hofstadter, the ‘fundamentalist mind’:

… looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities … The issues of the actual world are hence transformed into a spiritual Armageddon, an ultimate reality, in which any reference to day-by-day actualities has the character of an allegorical illustration, and not of the empirical evidence that ordinary men offer for ordinary conclusions. (1964: 135)

For Radical Rightists, intellectuals were clearly on the side of evil, and there was a fear that they were ‘pretentious, conceited, effeminate, and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive’ and ‘institutions in which intellectuals tend to be influential, like universities and colleges, [were] rotten to the core’ (Hofstadter, 1964: 19). For these radical conservatives, ‘the old-fashioned principles of religion and morality, [were] more reliable guides’ for living (Hofstadter, 1964: 19).

Hofstadter speculated that the anti-intellectualism of the Radical Right was, at least in part, a reaction to the role of experts during Roosevelt’s New Deal, as politics and policy formation became increasingly technical. Since these experts helped implement social reforms and policies that the Radical Right took to be socialist, it was not surprising that radical conservatives identified intellectuals as traitors and communist conspirators. Indeed, McCarthy himself, as Hofstadter notes, often identified Ivy School educated ‘eggheads’ in government as a clear sign of government weakness, ‘effeminacy’, and communist infiltration.

The United Nations and UNESCO: ‘The Complete Destruction of the American Way of Life’

Any analysis of the American Radical Right’s perception of UNESCO must be tied to its understanding of, and reaction to, the United Nations. There was a remarkable consistency among Radical Rightists in the belief that the United Nations was a direct threat to American sovereignty. Though its purpose was to foster world peace, most right-wing adherents claimed the organization’s covert aim was the implementation of a communist world government. While some conservative organizations initially supported efforts to avoid another major war, by the early 1950s – and with the rise of McCarthyism – most of the country’s Radical Right had decided that the promise of world peace was simply a ploy for a world government. American officials’ support of the international organization – especially high-profile people like Milton Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Edward Stettinius, Dean Acheson, and Alger Hiss – was understood as a clear sign that the American government had been infiltrated and that Godless, communist agents had gained some control over America’s destiny. Since the United Nations was populated by experts, there was a common concern that intellectuals and their theories on world cooperation would subvert America’s political traditions and undermine the country’s social and moral fabric. Rightists feared that American Christianity and patriotism would be denigrated by the United Nations and that atheism and socialism would be favored (Hodgson, 1996; McGirr, 2001).

As a United Nations sub-organization, UNESCO was likewise problematic to the American Radical Right. In so far as it was educational and scientific, it provoked the right wing’s ardent anti-intellectualism. As it promoted multiculturalism and inter-cultural understandings, it was perceived to be an elaborate plan to dilute American cultural traditions. The Radical Right blamed UNESCO for everything from the rise of psychiatry (Birkeland, 1959) to propagandizing communism. In 1953, an editorial in a popular libertarian journal, The Freeman, stated that ‘those who disbelieve in the welfare state, who want as little government as possible consistent with the suppression of all those forces which would injure or pose a threat to the citizens, will … passionately oppose UNESCO’ (The Freeman, 1953: 875). In 1954, one American Mercury writer claimed that UNESCO experts operated a ‘vast international brainwashing apparatus to prepare the world mind for a UN future’ (Varney, 1954: 3–4). The Reverend Robert Schuler pronounced in 1961 that UNESCO ‘means the complete destruction of the American way of life and the dethronement of true democratic freedom’ (cited in McGirr, 2001: 177). Reflecting on 50 years of anti-UNESCO activism, one member of the Minute Women claimed that the organization:

… is the fountainhead of nearly every ailment plaguing America today, from unlimited immigration; so-called children’s rights; women’s rights, human rights (so-called) based, not on the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, but the Marxist model; environmental excesses; population control, and so on. (McClay, 2006: xv)

UNESCO’s Statements on Race and the Radical Right

For all practical purposes race is not so much a biological phenomenon, as a social myth. It is a myth which has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. (UNESCO, 1969[1950])

In the early 1950s, UNESCO released a series of pamphlets written by a team of international scholars expressing the idea that race was a social construction and that there was no biological exigency informing race-based inequities. The first Statement on Race was publicized on 18 July 1950. It proposed that since all humans belong to the same species, perceived racial differences in character, personality, and intelligence were cultural differences and not biological ones, and that all ethnic groups had innately equal capacities. The authors wrote that there were far more genetic similarities among racial groups, and that genetic differences were superficial and phenotypical ones that were not associated with behavior or intelligence:

… every investigation which has been carried out to discover whether mental and physical characters are linked has invariably failed to yield any evidence of genetic linkage … [G]iven similar degrees of cultural opportunity to realize their potentialities, the average achievement of the members of each ethnic group is about the same. (Montagu et al., 1949: 2–3)

Since all humans are of the same species, the scholars stated, there was no biological basis for prohibitions against intermarriage: ‘the evidence points unequivocally to the fact that race-mixture does not produce biologically bad effects … There is, therefore, no possible biological justification for prohibiting intermarriage between persons of different racial groups’ (Montagu et al., 1949: 4). ² Finally, and most controversially, the scholars suggested that anthropological, historical, and biological studies all seemed to suggest overwhelmingly that human beings were naturally cooperative:

Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood; for man is born with drives toward co-operation, and unless these drives are satisfied, man and nations alike fall ill. Every man is his brother’s keeper, for every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main, because he is involved in mankind. (Montagu et al., 1949: 5)

UNESCO publicized its anti-racist ideas and mission and the international press took notice. Time, for example, reported that ‘The idea of “race” and “racial superiority” has caused a lot of trouble in the world. Last week an international group of distinguished scientists working for UNESCO issued a report on what science knows about this emotional subject’ (1950: 34). Some American politicians not only accepted UNESCO’s views on race, but voiced their support. In September 1950, Senator Hubert Humphrey inserted (without opposition) the first Statement on Race into the Congressional Record (Hazard, 2011). In California, however, an educational exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum entitled ‘Man in Our Changing World’ sparked some concerns. While the curators included UNESCO’s Statement on Race in the catalog, they omitted the section on intermarriage and claims which questioned the association between race and skin color (Brattain, 2007; Shorr, 1990). Southern California was a hotbed of right-wing activism after the Second World War, and it is not surprising that some Californians would have been skeptical of UNESCO’s claims. What is surprising is the lack of organized campaigning from American Radical Right organizations in reaction to UNESCO’s Statements on Race. Radical Right organizations might have been alarmed that scholars were questioning racial differences and promoting international cooperation. Even if they did not rally around explicitly racist sentiments, the American Radical Right might have exploited UNESCO’s Statements on Race by drawing on its anti-intellectual and anticommunist traditions. Conservative activists in the immediate post-war years who opposed the United Nations might have tried to discredit the international organization and gain adherents by amplifying what would have been understood to be preposterous scientific claims about the social construction of racial differences. Why then did the UNESCO Statements not motivate Radical Right campaigning in the early 1950s?

At the time, the Radical Right consisted mostly of regional movement organizations and other social and political clubs, many of which were capable of articulating and mobilizing an anti-UNESCO campaign. In California and Texas, moreover, neighborhood groups and women’s Republican clubs were organizing Radical Right campaigns (McGirr, 2001; Nickerson, 2003; Rymph, 2006). Some national organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Minute Women, and less radical conservative groups like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, voiced concerns about the United Nations and UNESCO (Bagdikian, 1956) but none addressed the organization’s Statements on Race. Gerald L.K. Smith and his Christian Nationalist Crusade were among the most outspoken against the United Nations, and he could easily have criticized UNESCO’s Statements in his newsletter, The Cross and the Flag. The American Flag Committee, which was established to oppose America’s participation in the United Nations, produced and distributed an anti-UNESCO report in the early 1950s, and would have gained leverage by at least publicizing to its constituents UNESCO’s claims about the social construction of race. The micromobilization context for Radical Right campaigning against UNESCO’s anti-racist ideas, in other words, would not have acted as a barrier to the movement from issue to campaign.

In the conservative media, there were surprisingly few statements noting UNESCO’s position on race. A 1953 article in The Freeman presented ‘facts about UNESCO’ to its subscribers but did not mention UNESCO’s anti-racist ideas (The Freeman, 1953). The lead article in the February 1954 issue of American Mercury warned Americans to be cautious of UNESCO because the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution had publicized official condemnations of the organization, not for its Statements on Race, but because they believed it undermined American sovereignty by brainwashing schoolchildren with an internationalist (and likely communist) focus rather than a parochial, American one. The article did warn readers that ‘UNESCO promulgated an official “Statement on Race” on 18 July 1950, which came out flatly for miscegenation’ and that the UNESCO scientists were ‘trying to twist science to its purposes. In doing so it is committing a crime against intellectual integrity that even Hitler and Stalin would have envied’ (Varney, 1954: 7).

A 1954 UNESCO-sponsored study sought to assess how responsive American college students were to UNESCO’s position. While the researcher was optimistic that the pamphlets on race were readable and educative, he noted that in the Mid-West ‘resistance to learning [may be] caused by more negative feelings toward the UN’ (Staenger, 1955: 24). Since there was already a generally negative attitude toward the United Nations and its ancillary agencies, especially in regions of the country where right-wing activity was most pronounced, controversial claims about race from UNESCO might not have been seen to have had much movement currency, and thus might not have warranted serious concern, especially since many Radical Right adherents likely would have taken the UNESCO position on race as simply a weird statement articulated by (largely) foreign intellectuals and American traitors working for an international organization that was already successfully maligned.

UNESCO’s Statements on Race did not resonate widely among Radical Rightists as an issue because the idea that race was a social construction was considered highly controversial to a great many of the American population and because prominent scientists actively and publically opposed what they took to be UNESCO’s unfounded and exaggerated ideas (Brattain, 2007; Schaffer, 2007; Winston, 1998). The Radical Right, had they campaigned on this issue, would have been aligned with these scholars, something that would not have sat well with those who abhorred the intelligentsia and any association with it. Since some intellectuals had already opposed UNESCO’s Statements on Race, it is possible that the Radical Right wished to avoid the appearance of solidarity.

The Brown v. Board of Education decision had the potential to recontextualize UNESCO’s Statements on Race. However, even after 1954, the American Radical Right was relatively silent on the organization’s anti-racist ideas and programs. Desegregation was a moral shock for many Radical Rightists, and could have provided a new context for the Statements, especially since it might have appeared that the kinds of ideas publicized by the organization were having an immediate impact on American political and cultural life. Anti-racist ideas and programs could have been framed by Rightist writers and leaders as an attack on national and state sovereignty, especially since many conservative Americans mobilized and campaigned actively against the Civil Rights Movement, claiming the movement was directed by Moscow and the United Nations to undermine US political and cultural sovereignty. Even with these grievances, the Radical Right offered no direct campaigning against, or much concern about, UNESCO’s Statements on Race.

In part, this might have been because some school boards in the South challenged the Brown decision by attempting to refute Justice Warren’s use of science to justify desegregation. This created opportunities for conservative eugenicists to publicly oppose what they claimed was the politicization of race and the movement away from objective science. For instance, Henry E. Garrett (Chair of Psychology at Columbia University and President of the American Psychological Association) felt desegregation violated the ‘natural order of the races’ which led him and other members of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics in the early 1960s to establish a journal, Mankind Quarterly, to defend against the rising scientific popularity of the idea that race was a social construction. The founders of the journal were explicit that their purpose was to oppose UNESCO and the popularization of the organization’s ideas about race (Jackson, 2004; Schaffer, 2007; Winston, 1998).

Other important race-based issues arose throughout the 1950s that might have placed UNESCO’s Statements on Race into a broader context. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) explicitly disavowed racism and anti-Semitism and the Soviet Union often criticized racial segregation in the United States as evidence that the country was not fulfilling the spirit of the Declaration. Moreover, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Civil Rights Congress filed petitions and human rights abuse claims with the United Nations. White rule in South African and in Rhodesia were also major international issues within the context of the United Nations and racial equality and comparisons with American segregation were often made (Anderson, 2003; Hoffman, 1959; New York Times, 1951a; Skrentny, 1998). Each of these issues might have allowed the Radical Right to frame UNESCO’s Statements on Race as direct threats to the American way of life, especially since the Soviet Union was consistently highlighting UNESCO’s and the United Nations’ position on racism to criticize the United States and to deflect attention from their own domestic atrocities.

The micromobilization context was somewhat amenable to the facilitation of a campaign against UNESCO’s anti-racism program. UNESCO’s position might have been framed in various ways (using conspiratorial anticommunism and anti-intellectualism) and Radical Right organizations and writers might have easily publicized the race issue as one of foreign influence on domestic affairs – this type of framing was readily available, as Radical Right opposition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide framed those issues in that very way. However, organized scientific opposition to UNESCO’s claims would have made it difficult for the Radical Right to campaign against the Statements on Race without appearing to be aligned with intellectuals. This would have betrayed a main characteristic of Radical Right culture at the time, namely its anti-intellectualism. The presence of scientific activism was thus an important barrier to the initiation of campaigning against UNESCO on the race issue, but, as I demonstrate next, the presence of another UNESCO issue which had a more favorable initial micromobilization context also stymied campaign development.

UNESCO Textbooks in American Schools

While America’s Radical Right were relatively unconcerned about UNESCO’s anti-racism efforts, the issue of the organization’s textbooks being adopted by the country’s public schools and libraries sparked censorship campaigning across the country. On 10 October 1951, John T. Wood, a Republican Congressman from Idaho, warned that UNESCO had infiltrated America’s public school system. He stated:

… if we make the mistake of assuming that communism is our only enemy, we are lost. Communism is merely one of the instruments used by the real conspirators to frighten us into surrendering our national sovereignty to a world government in which we will be hopelessly outnumbered and outvoted, just as we are now in the United Nations … The United Nations, UNESCO, and the Bretton Woods monetary agreements are supplying the tools with which subversives work and the vehicles on which they are riding to power … The American people have been propagandized into believing that the sole objective of the United Nations is to prevent war and promote peace and harmony among nations; but that is merely window dressing to cover up the greatest subversive plot in history. (1951)

Wood quoted a report written and circulated by the American Flag Committee of Philadelphia which claimed that UNESCO was the main subversive agent in this conspiracy, and that the UN organization was ‘consciously furthering a campaign calculated to pervert the teaching profession in this country, and so destroy the worth and integrity of America’s first bulwark of freedom – our tax-supported public schools’. He claimed that this worldwide conspiracy was evidenced in UNESCO’s nine-volume textbook series, Toward a World Understanding, which sought to brainwash the country’s children into shifting loyalty to a one-world government which placed the state above the American family and ‘emasculated’ patriotism. Echoing Senator Wood’s alarm, Frank S. Meyer warned readers of The Freeman that:

The really dangerous activity of UNESCO arises from its … function as the propaganda arm of the United Nations, as the spearhead of the drive of the One Worlders to achieve the power to match their pretentions. This is the ‘E’ in UNESCO, that part of its program which UNESCO publications describe as ‘education for a world community.’ This is perhaps the most ambitious program in the whole gamut of United Nations activities. Its aim is to transform the thinking of the citizens of every country outside of the Iron Curtain … to soften them up for world government. (1955: 379)

UNESCO’s textbooks were meant to broaden national educational programs by instructing American children about other cultures and nationalities. It was hoped that this would promote multiculturalism and inter-cultural exchanges and, in turn, increase the likelihood of a lasting, world peace (New York Times, 1951b, 1952). By 1951, however, McCarthyism was becoming entrenched in American public life and anticommunist activism whirled with activity. For the country’s anticommunist radicals, UNESCO was part of a subversive plot that needed to be exposed and publicized. That the State Department and Department of Education supported UNESCO’s efforts was a clear sign to right-wing adherents of communist infiltration of the federal government.

The first anti-UNESCO textbook campaign was organized in southern California in the summer of 1952. On 21 August, 300 people attended a Los Angeles Board of Education meeting to campaign for, or against, the adoption of one particular textbook in the UNESCO curriculum, The E in UNESCO. Some of the activists were librarians and teachers who opposed censorship and were concerned about radical anticommunists limiting free speech. Many more were members of the Southern California Republican Women, the Minute Women, and the Daughters of the American Revolution who had, over the previous weeks, planned to disrupt the meeting and demand that UNESCO textbooks be removed from the curriculum and libraries. On 26 August 1952, over 500 people attended a subsequent meeting to voice their concerns. While some attendees again vocalized their support for UNESCO’s textbook, by far the predominant opinion was that the textbook was un-American, written by communist agents, and ought to be banned (Benemann, 1977; Jenkins, 2001; Mediavilla, 1997; Zimmerman, 2002).

One activist in particular took the lead in the fight against UNESCO textbooks in southern California. Florence Fowler Lyons drew on her experiences organizing a similar campaign in 1947 against the textbook series Building America. A radical anticommunist writer and activist, Lyons wrote and circulated a pamphlet, ‘The Menace of UNESCO’, in which she warned of the organization’s plot to brainwash the country’s children (Jenkins, 2001). When the 1953 Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations asked Lyons how she became interested in UNESCO, she stated:

The first interest became in preparing to do a book against world government, and I was looking through the library files under the United Nations, and came across a course of study designed for a course called the E and S course. I had been in the fight in the legislature in 1947 to bar the use in the State of California of a series called ‘Building America’ … The books were declared unfit for use in the schools of California, because of the long list of the Communist and pro-Communist writers. (Senate Permanent Subcommittee, 1953: 1595)

She told the committee that UNESCO, the State Department, and the Government Printing Office worked together to produce and disseminate communist propaganda, specifically concocting progressive education textbooks to brainwash America’s children in an effort to make them unpatriotic which would, in turn, make them unwilling to fight for their country. She stated further that:

The basic idea … throughout all of UNESCO is the teaching of the spirit of internationalism, which was one of Lenin’s major objectives; the distraction and contempt for one’s own country. You find throughout UNESCO the complete attack upon the family, the attack upon religion, the attack upon national sovereignty beyond all belief. It is a program to break down the child from an individual American citizen well-disciplined and equipped by the schools to make his living as an individual, which is the Communist program. (Senate Permanent Subcommittee, 1953: 1598)

The Los Angeles anti-UNESCO campaign was successful. The Los Angeles Board of Education decided that, while the city’s school children should learn about the United Nations and UNESCO, The E in UNESCO would be removed from school libraries and could not be taught. Soon after, other southern California school districts passed similar bans (Benemann, 1977). With success in California, anti-UNESCO censorship campaigns were organized throughout the nation, and similar instances of censorship occurred (Janson and Eismann, 1963; Olsen, 2006). Of course not all school boards, library associations, and individual librarians were persuaded that UNESCO was a domestic threat, and many refused to ban or to remove the organization’s books from their shelves (Jenkins, 2001). But even the smallest victory motivated anti-UNESCO textbook campaigns further and brought more publicity to, and interest in, the Radical Right, which allowed them to continue their campaigns with zeal. The Houston chapter of the Minute Women organized a successful campaign soon after the banning of The E in UNESCO in southern California. Not only did the Minute Women pressure school boards successfully to censor UNESCO materials, but they actively campaigned for (or ran) conservative candidates in local board elections and sought leadership positions in the Parent Teachers Association (Olsen, 2006). The Minute Women’s successful campaigning carried the Radical Right movement forward in Texas well into the 1960s, just as the Radical Right’s successes in California helped to establish that state as a stronghold of Radical Right-wing activity (McGirr, 2001; Nickerson, 2003; Rymph, 2006).

Throughout the 1950s and around the country Radical Right organizations opposed the incorporation of UNESCO textbooks – as well as any progressive education material they deemed radical or subversive – in America’s public school and library systems (Jenkins, 1999; Mason, 2009; Morris, 1968). They attended school board and PTA meetings, ran and supported radical candidates, and pressured state leaders to pass legislation which would require teachers and librarians to take a loyalty oath. In New Rochelle, New York, America’s Future, Inc. formed a Textbook Evaluation Committee to ‘give this country its only source of information as to which high school texts have been infused with un-American ideas intended to destroy our children’s confidence in their nation’s form of government and in its economic system’ (cited in Janson and Eismann, 1963: 160). The committee evaluated hundreds of texts for subversive content and sent their unsolicited lists of ‘dangerous’ books to schools through the country. The organization also distributed a checklist, ‘How “Progressive” is Your School?’ in 1954 which offered a clear definition of the Radical Right’s concerns about progressive education and the need to censor textbooks.

In 1958, Americanist writer E. Merrill Root released Brainwashing in the High Schools: An Examination of Eleven American History Textbooks, which would not have been interesting to Radical Right readers had anti-UNESCO textbook-censorship campaigns not become so popular and meaningful throughout the country. Root was called to testify for a Illinois textbook-censorship bill in 1959 and was hired soon after by Mississippi lawmakers to review textbooks for their school system – he suggested that about half were communist propaganda, upon which the lawmakers sought their removal (Zimmerman, 2002). In 1958, Paul Harvey implored parents in an American Mercury article to:

… attend PTA meetings, and take an active, intense, personal interest in what the school is teaching and what it’s not teaching … [because] the FBI has established that the Communists in the United States, under orders from Moscow, are making a concerted effort to work through respectable forums, including PTA groups. (1958: 84)

While the Los Angeles School Board’s banning of The E in UNESCO marked the first explicitly anti-UNESCO campaign, it was certainly not the first organized, anticommunist effort to censor school textbooks in America. Anticommunist, religious, and moralistic campaigns against progressive education, ‘secular humanism’, and ‘subversive’ books and ideas had been popular long before. The American Legion and Daughters of the American Revolution had been conducting anticommunist-textbook campaigns for over a decade. The Sons of the American Revolution had been surveying school and library books for ‘subversive’ material, engaging in censorship campaigns, insisting that teachers and librarians take loyalty oaths, and sending letters and reports to the California Un-American Activities Committee since 1946. As noted above, Florence Lyons had organized a Los Angeles campaign to ban Building America in 1947 and similar campaigns against that textbook series occurred throughout the country that year. In Pasadena, California right-wing activists had campaigned successfully in 1950 to ban another textbook, American Government, and succeeded in having the superintendent of schools fired (Heale, 1986; Jenkins, 2001; Mediavilla, 1997; Olsen, 2006; Zimmerman, 2002).

These censorship campaigns were regional efforts. Although national organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Minute Women publicized the issue of anticommunist subversion and propaganda to their members there was no coordination of, nor funding for, a nationally organized censorship campaign. As regional mobilizations, the projected efficacy of campaign planning was probably based on local political opportunity structures, especially the perceived responsiveness of the polity which would affect the chances of success. The first and most successful anti-UNESCO campaigns were in Los Angeles and Houston. Both Texas and California had grown dramatically during and immediately after the Second World War and each received millions of dollars of defense contract money. Both states had a financial stake in the Cold War. Elected officials and administrators in these states were also responsive to anticommunist campaigning. Historically, California witnessed intense anticommunist activity, had a very active and effective ‘little HUAC’ that activists could not only lobby but that welcomed activist support, and school boards had proven themselves willing to ban textbooks and demand loyalty oaths when faced with organized campaigns. In Houston, as in many Texan cities, local politicians had likewise shown a desire to not appear soft on communism (Heale, 1986; Morris, 1968; Olsen, 2006). Given the political climate and past success, censorship campaigning was likely to be effective in California and Texas. This efficacy would have reduced the perceived costs of further campaigning and provided opportunities for similar campaigns across the country.

The common tactics incorporated into the anticommunist censorship campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s demonstrate how tactics are sourced from conventional repertoires of contention and become transposable (Tarrow, 1993; Tilly, 2008). Because school boards were responsive to citizen protests – most school boards and administrators at least listened to grievances even if they did not act in favor of them – lobbying boards, administrators, and politicians, endorsing and running candidates, and perusing libraries for subversive material probably seemed like worthwhile activities, and ones that could be adopted into campaigns anywhere in the country.

Tactics do not arise spontaneously. They are learned, adapted, and often become expected and culturally salient. Many of the anti-UNESCO and other censorship campaign tactics were learned, at least in part, through national conservative media culture which created an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991) of right-wing activists at the national level which inspired local protest campaigns. Activists could consult Lucille Cain’s The Educational Reviewer for lists of ‘un-American’ textbooks (Benowitz, 2009), for instance. The Educational Reviewer had been established in 1949 with the financial help of William F. Buckley, Sr., father of radical conservative writer and personality, William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley and Cain had hoped that a national periodical focusing on educative material would help spark right-wing campaigning against progressive education throughout the country. The Hearst-owned Chicago Tribune published lists of subversive books culled largely from Cain’s magazine, and national conservative radio commentators like Fulton Lewis Jr. and John T. Flynn similarly publicized the issue in their radio broadcasts. The US Chamber of Commerce distributed anticommunist literature instructing patriotic Americans on how to organize and oppose communism in all its forms (Benowitz, 2009; Jenkins, 2001; Zimmerman, 2002). It was through this print and radio culture that Radical Right activists learned about threats and tactics, as well as campaign failures and successes around the country; and it was through this media that common meanings and culture were framed and disseminated.

The issue of UNESCO textbooks was transformed into sustained Radical Right campaigns, in part, because similar campaigns had been organized previously. The issue itself was easily connected to the movement’s most recent successes. This more or less locked the Radical Right into a consistent set of tactics and ideological claims about subversive ideas in public schools and libraries. That moral entrepreneurs and radical organizations were already mobilized – or could be mobilized easily – also meant that the cost of campaigning was lowered. In their study of feminist campaigning in Montreal, for instance, Staggenborg and Lecomte (2009) found that prior campaigning increased activists’ skills, which made further campaigning not only progressively more effective but also increased collective identification, built movement culture through shared experience, and thus motivated more campaigning. With the right-wing media reporting widely on censorship campaigns and the issue of domestic subversion, would-be activists could be alarmed into action and led into campaigns throughout the country. As censorship campaigns spread from California and Texas to other parts of the nation, the formal and informal mobilization contexts from which campaigns could arise also spread. This meant that conservative writers like E. Merrill Root had expanded audiences for their books and articles, which, in turn, further flamed the issue and increased the chances of even more campaigning.

Conclusion

While we know much about how activists frame issues to foster a campaign, little is known about why some issues spark campaigns while other viable ones do not. Of course, all activists must make strategic choices to amplify some issues over others, but the social historical and structural contexts of such decisions are important for robust analyses. The micromobilization context from which issues become campaigns can create conditions of path dependency whereby one campaign becomes ever more popular and successful and, in turn, restricts the development of other issues into campaigns. Initial micromobilizational conditions were not entirely favorable to campaign development with regard to UNESCO’s Statements on Race, but they were not completely prohibitive either. Though the Statements on Race could have been framed advantageously, a tactical predisposition toward issues that could be addressed effectively through censorship campaigning made it unlikely that the American Radical Right would campaign against the Statements on Race. The presence of activist eugenicists who opposed UNESCO also hindered the chances of the American Radical Right taking up this issue. While coalitions across movements do occur, especially when a broad ‘master frame’ can be articulated (Carroll and Ratner, 1996; Soule and King, 2008), the anti-intellectual culture of the American Radical Right restricted this possibility. In the case of UNESCO textbooks, local micromobilization contexts were more favorable for the initiation of concerted, right-wing campaigning: past censorship campaigns had been successful, skilled activists were available, local polities were open to receiving activists’ grievances, a conservative media publicized movement successes and collective action frames, and these collective action frames resonated easily and widely within the anticommunist culture of the McCarthy years. These favorable initial micromobilization contexts facilitated campaign success in southern California and Texas, which, in turn, created conditions of path dependency whereby activists in other locales were more likely to develop campaigns against UNESCO textbooks and less likely to take up UNESCO’s Statements on Race.

While understanding general social processes remains central to sociology, such accounts risk obfuscating important idiosyncratic historical processes. Path dependency is not ubiquitous (Goldstone, 1998), but when it is evident its analysis is important to a cohesive account of social movement trajectories. Future social movement scholarship would do well to combine analyses of both general and idiosyncratic phenomena in order to build more accurate accounts of social movement dynamics. While the present study is concerned with an instance where path dependency restricted a viable issue from becoming a campaign, future research could explore instances where a campaign developed from an issue that had initially been restricted by path dependency. Such analysis might reveal and explain the importance of changing micromobilization contexts in breaking the effects of path dependency on collective action dynamics.