A hundred years ago, for example, it seemed to many Americans that the “flaming youth” were pushing the country in a dangerous direction. Young people were conspicuously flouting Prohibition; young women were challenging strict gender roles by smoking in public and cutting their hair short; White children were dancing to jazz music (a threatening development, in the eyes of white supremacists). The leader of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, Hiram Evans, minced no words about the alleged problem. For the past decade, Evans complained in 1926, the “traditional moral values” of White Protestants of the old “pioneer stock” had eroded — and worst of all, the “right to teach our own children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths were torn away from us.”
Then three major Klan efforts to take over education were all thwarted. Evans proposed creating a federal Department of Education, but White Southerners squelched the idea. In Oregon, the Klan helped pass a law banning Catholic schools, only to have the Supreme Court toss it. Klan members backed the publication of a new heroic American history textbook, one that might save schoolchildren from troubling questions about the nation’s epic past. In the end, the textbook’s sponsors in the American Legion yanked it off shelves for its low quality and rank bigotry.
The Ku Klux Klan thus turned to school board politics. In cities across the nation, from Indianapolis to La Grande, Ore., local groups ran for school board; they disrupted meetings with solemn processions of robed and hooded Klansmen; and they agitated to have progressive teachers — and Catholic teachers — fired. The Klan couldn’t achieve its grandest ambitions on a state or national scale. But it did force many local school boards to discuss the dangers of Catholicism and race-mixing instead of budgets and busses.
Fast forward to the turbulent 1960s, when the pattern continued. Alarmed by the images of young people agitating for change, conservatives immediately blamed schools. In Kanawha County, W.Va., for example, conservative activist Alice Moore was outraged by the behavior of children in her local community. As she told me years later, she was shocked at the way teenagers smoked, publicly kissed and generally disrespected their elders. Frustrated, Moore ran for a seat on her local school board. Once she was elected, she used her platform to disrupt the adoption of new textbooks that she claimed were anti-American, anti-Christian and anti-White. She rallied like-minded parents to protect their children from these new books.