Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) ("[H]ousewife activists based their political claims on women's position within the community and characterized their enemies as outsider elitists who aimed to exploit that community for the purposes of fortifying the power of their office. Housewife activists introduced a new populist outlook to female politics that endured into the twenty-first century." Id. at xv. "Florence Fowler Lyons, a middle-aged freelance writer and activist, led the campaign against UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization]. [] Lyons cultivated her reputation as a 'real fighter' through distinctive take-no-prisoners anticommunist rhetoric accented with hellfire-and-brimstone cadences. Her anti-UNESCO crusade started with a lecture to the conservative Southern California Republican Women's Club in October of 1951. 'Children,' she warned listeners, 'are daily being fed doses of Communism, Socialism, New Dealism and other isms . . .' though UNESCO teaching materials.' UNESCO quickly and thoroughly consumed her life. One month later she gave a dark but rousing speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Encinitas, near San Diego. 'Stalking through every phrase of American life today,' she declared, 'is a stark, grinning, crimson-clad Pied Piper called UNESCO.' 'He's piping a tune he calls 'peace' and the children and some of he adults are following him, dancing in the streets and singing--dancing and singing on their way to total destruction of both themselves and this nation.'" Id. at 91. "Housewife populism continues to shape conservative beliefs about women's importance to society and American politics, as the career of Alaska's former governor, Sarah Palin, illustrates. The self-professed 'hockey mom' ... spoke in a thick provincial accent on behalf of 'Joe Six Pack.' Palin wielded her familiarity to attack Presidential candidate Barack Obama as a dangerous elitist-outsider. Dressed impeccably, with a captivating smile, she called him a socialist and warned that he was 'palling around with terrorists.' [] Palin could attack Obama aggressively, wearing hunting credentials as a badge of honor, and joke bout lipstick on a pig without compromising her femininity because gender ideology on the right had long been reinforcing displays of folksiness and antielitist tough talk as appropriate female political behavior, especially on behalf of the family and community, since the 1940s." Id. at 173. "From the bookjacket: "Mothers of Conservatism tells the story of 1950s southern Californian housewives who shaped the grassroots right in the two decades following World War II. Michelle Nickerson describes how red-hunting homemakers mobilized activist networks, institutions, and political consciousness in local education battles, and she introduces a generation of women who developed political styles and practices around their domestic routines. From the conservative movement's origins in the early fifties through the presidential election of 1964, Nickerson documents how women shaped conservatism from the bottom up, out of the fabric of their daily lives and into the agenda of the Republican Party." "Female activists formed study groups, gave lecture, published newsletters, hosted public events, and opened conservative bookstores, bringing Cold War geopolitics into their local communities. Frightened that communism was infecting the minds of their children through the public education system, these women took it upon themselves to address potential threats. The sense of duty, ironically, removed many of them from the house for numerous hours of the week to perform political work, and their activities contributed to a feminine ideal that Nickerson calls the 'populist housewife'--a political model of womanhood that emphasized common sense, lack of pretension, and spirituality." A unique history of American conservative movement, Mother of Conservatism shows how housewives got out of the house and discovered their political capital.").
Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In the mid-1960s, the FBI was secretly involved with three iconic figures: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal university president Clark Kerr. Subversives traces these converging narratives, creating a dramatic and disturbing story of FBI surveillance, illegal break-ins, infiltration, planted news stories, poison-pen letters, and secret detention lists--all centered on the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley." "In this griping account, ... Seth Rosenfeld reveals how the FBI's covert operations--led by Reagan's ally J. Edgar Hoover--helped ignite an era of protest, undermine the Democrats, and benefit Reagan personally and politically. At the same time, he vividly evokes the Berkeley of that era--the rising counterculture animated by the civil rights movement; antiwar protests; literary lights such as Normal Mailer, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg; rock 'n' roll; and LSD. He shows how the nation's leading public university became a battleground in an epic struggle over politics and culture." "The FBI spent more than $1 million trying to block the release of the secret files on which Subversives is based, but Rosenfeld compelled the bureau to disclose more than 250,000 pages, providing an extraordinary view of what the government was up to during a turning point in our nation's history." "Part history, part biography, and part police procedural, Subversives reads like a true-crime mystery as it provides a fresh look at the legacy of the sixties, sheds new light on one of America's most popular president, and tells a cautionary tale about the dangers of secrecy and unchecked power.").
Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) ("Many decades ago the preeminent historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the 'real function' of the Second Red Scare was 'not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies . . . but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.' Hofstadter argued that nativism, religious fundamentalism, and hatred of the welfare state and the United Nations were the 'deeper historical sources of the Great inquisition.' In his view, these attitudes added up to an antimodern, reactionary populism. Regional and local studies built on Hofstadter's insight by showing that Red scares were most virulent where rapid change threatened old regimes. Political fundamentalists everywhere feared the trend toward a 'pluralistic order and a secular, bureaucratizing state.' In Detroit, though, they defended class prerogatives above all, whereas in Boston religious conflict was key, and in Atlanta maintenance of white supremacy was paramount. In other words, the intensity of Red scare politics was not simply a function of the strength of the Communist threat. Red scares erupted at various places and moments in defense of class, religious, and racial hierarchies." Id. at 6. From the bookjacket: "The loyalty investigations triggered by the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s marginalized many talented women and men who had entered government service during the Great Depression seeking to promote social democracy as a means to economic reform. The influence over New Deal policymaking and their alliances with progressive labor and consumer movements elicited a powerful reaction from conservatives, who accused them of being subversives. Landon Storrs draws on newly declassified records of the federal loyalty program--created in response to fears that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government--to reveal how disloyalty charges were used to silence these New Dealers and discredit their policies." "Because loyalty investigators rarely distinguished between Communists and other leftists, many noncommunist leftists were forced to leave government or deny their political views. Storrs finds that loyalty defendants were more numerous at higher ranks of the civil service than previously thought, and that many were women, or men with accomplished leftist wives. Uncovering a forceful left-feminist presence in the New Deal, she shows how opponents on the Right exploited popular hostility to powerful women and their 'effeminate' spouses. The loyalty program not only destroyed many promising careers, it prohibited discussion of social-democratic policy ideas in government circles, narrowing the scope of political discourse to this day." "Through a gripping narrative based on remarkable new sources, Storrs demonstrates how the Second Red Scare undermined the reform potential of the New Deal and crippled the American welfare state.").
Samuel Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties from Wilson to Obama: A Story of Poor Custodians (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2012) ("As this book makes clear, presidents have generally not played the leading role in defending the principles of freedom of speech and press, the right to due process, equal protection, and individual privacy. In several tragic episodes, in fact, presidents have authorized gross violations of those rights." Id. at 3. "Why has presidential performance been so poor in this area? Several themes emerge from this examination of the records of the seventeen presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama. The first is that in a democratic society, presidents inevitably shy away form unpopular issues that are likely to cost them votes. This melancholy fact is inherent in the very nature of democracy itself, and is why the generation that fashioned the Constitution added a Bill of Rights to remove certain issues from the passions of conventional politics." "A second theme is that the failure to defend American liberties has been decidedly bipartisan. Democratic presidents have as poor a record as do Republicans." "A third theme is that the record of may presidents on civil liberties is filled with contradictions, with a good or even outstanding record on one issue but a terrible one on another. Roosevelt order the evacuation of the Japanese Americans, but his Supreme Court appointments established the first significant body of civil liberties case law in American history in the 1930s and 1940s, laying the groundwork for the more famous Warren Court of the 1960s." "A fourth theme involves national security. Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt in the late 1930s, as the world headed for another global conflict, national security considerations repeatedly trumped constitutional considerations. From FDR to the present, national security has been a rationale for military adventure overseas, excessive government secrecy, illegal spying on Americans, and violations of law and human rights overseas. Democratic and Republican presidents alike have been guilty of these abuses." Id. at 4-5. "In the end, while this book examines in detail the performance of seventeen presidents with regard to civil liberties, it ultimately becomes a dialogue about American democracy." Id. at 6. "Wilson also had a character flaw that hurt him in other important moments in his career. The Wilson scholar Arthur Link found a 'temperamental inability to cooperate with men who were not willing to follow his lead completely,' compounded by a habit of 'making his political opponents also his personal enemies.' [] Most important, however, Wilson's vision of progressive reform did not include tolerance of dissent." Id. at 20-21. As a reminder that labels can be deceptive, consider the term "progressive" and the experience of the progress Roger Baldwin subsequently who went on to help found the American Civil Liberties Union. "Two events jarred Baldwin loose form his progressive moorings. The European war in 1914 shattered his faith in progress, as it did for many other people in the United States and around the world. Then, in 1916 St. Louis voters passed a referendum permitting racial segregation in residential housing. Baldwin fought it and was devastated when it passed, particularly because he had helped create the referendum process as an instrument of democracy. The experience shattered his easy optimism about progressive reform and forced him to reflect on the dangers of majoritarian democracy." Id. at 26. "It has long been a truism that democracy in America is the great enemy of civil liberties." Id. at 506.).
