DAR’s activism was powerful and lingered for decades, but their sprawling, angry organization always ranged beyond the control of the national leaders. In 1963, one DAR member in Mississippi humiliated the group with her violent opposition to a widely used children’s book. The book, The New Our New Friends (1956), had been read for years in Mississippi public schools. It told cheerful moral stories about cute baby animals, as when Bobby Squirrel discovered he could get a nut just by asking for one. One local DAR leader, though, accused the book of spreading subversive socialism by teaching children, like Bobby Squirrel, to expect a “collective welfare system.” DAR had worked hard to maintain their reputation as America’s maternal conscience. This kind of strident, frenzied activism, however, opened up the group to mockery from all sides, as when historian James Silver sarcastically praised the Mississippi DAR for keeping the state’s children safe from the dangerous “story of the squirrel storing nuts.”
By the 1970s, Alice Moore’s career repeated the pattern. Just like Norma Gabler and DAR, Moore attracted huge support, seemingly overnight. Her warnings about new textbooks led to a boycott of local public schools. The fledgling Heritage Foundation scrambled to send support. The White House, too, voiced its enthusiasm for Moore’s vision. President Ford’s commissioner of education, Terrel Bell, opposed any textbooks that “insult the values of most parents.”
As Alice Moore quickly found, however, her meteoric success came at great cost. Her inflammatory language about public schools and teachers led to a spate of bombings and shootings. The school board building was rocked by a dynamite bomb. Two elementary schools were firebombed. Nonconservative members of the school board were physically attacked and pummeled at a public meeting. The district’s superintendent went into hiding, moving from couch to couch every night to escape incessant death threats. Soon school buses came under hails of sniper fire. Along the turbulent picket lines, two people were shot; thankfully, both survived.
Moore disavowed the violence, but she couldn’t escape the fact that her rhetoric had directly caused it. Similarly, when the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town to support the boycott, Moore insisted she had nothing to do with their campaign. She also said she had nothing to do with the burning cross outside the school district’s headquarters in 1975, and it seems very likely she was telling the truth. Yet when the Klan’s local leader articulated his vision for public schools, his language was the same as Moore’s. Just like Alice Moore, the Klan promised to “return patriotism and Christianity to our schools.” They claimed to be joining the national campaign to stop “the breakdown of morals among our children.”