January 18, 2023 • 29 mins
Bridget Ziegler is against the teaching of CRT and gender identity. She believes parents should have ultimate control over their children’s education. In chapter two of “The School Board Queen” we explore where these stances come from. We hear from a Republican woman who fought against communism in her kids’ schools in the 1950s. We hear some of the first instructional videos made for sex ed classes, including one on how to groom yourself and another on whether or not to go steady. Two historians, Michelle Nickerson and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela who studied the era, take us on a tour, drawing a through-line from the mothers of yesterday to Bridget Ziegler today.
“The School Board Queen” is reported, produced and hosted by Kathleen Quillian and Samantha Storey. For more information visit bloomberg.com/bedrock-usa. Have a suggestion or comment? We’d love to hear from you: kquillian@bloomberg.net or samanthastoreywrites@gmail.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Interesting. So welcome back to Bedrock, USA, where your hosts.
I'm Samantha Story and I'm Kathleen Couillian. This is chapter
two of the school Board Queen, a three part mini
series about Bridget Siegler, a conservative mom who's shaking up
America's school boards. In our first chapter, we met the
(00:24):
Queen in person. We learned why she became a school
board member. She wanted to make her local schools better
for her kids, who would one day attend them. But
that goal change. Her kids are now in private school
and her mission transformed. She believes parents don't have enough
control over their kids education, and she's hell bent on
(00:44):
changing that. California, Bridget reminded us of another group of moms.
Their fight was different, but they shared a common enemy,
government overreach. I want to ask you something. My my
cassette is kind of sensitive because of the distance, but
it be okay if you sat here, Okay, that way
(01:06):
I can hear you a little bit better. That's Michelle Nickerson.
Nowadays she's a professor of history at Leola University in Chicago,
but the tape you're hearing that's her. In the ninety nineties,
she was interviewing several women for her dissertation, How have
you described the role that when you claimed in the
Republican Party or in the conservative movement, if you were
(01:27):
reflect on that as we've discussed before, they had more
time to give to it and and got concerned about
our country. And at that time we were really anti communist,
right right, because we didn't want we didn't want to
see the world taken over. And think, as a mother,
(01:48):
you are concerned about your children's future. H yeah, we
care about your own. Who tradiould care more about? Your
family is coming along and we want them to have
a proven that we had and the constitution right, And
that's Jane Crosby. In the nineteen fifties, she was involved
in the anti communist movement. Today on Bedrock USA, we're
(02:12):
going back in time. We're going to meet the women
who came before Bridget, because Bridget is not the first
conservative mother to fight back against a changing American education.
And it all begins in the nineteen fifties in southern California.
A group of conservative mothers were taking action. They were
fighting what they believed was the infiltration of communism into
(02:32):
their kids schools. When people think about this era, McCarthy
is m might come to mind and the witch hunt
he led. McCarthy fanned the fear that there were spies
among us working for the Soviets. But Michelle Nickerson, she
discovered another chapter of the fight against communism. Mom's like
Jane Crosby were looking around their kids schools and they
(02:54):
didn't like what they were seeing. A cultural shift was
on the rise, and they feared for their kids. There
were these new guidance counselors and they kept referring to
this new thing called mental health. And then there was
a new class sex education. And then there was the
biggest shift of all the civil rights movement. And Jane
(03:15):
Crosby and these moms, they deemed it all communistic. Things
were changing fast, and this group of conservative mothers wanted
to stop it. We called up Michelle Nickerson because she
wrote her dissertation on the origins of this movement, and
she told us a story. It all began with a
(03:38):
new bill, a proposal to provide mental health services to
people in Alaska. This was during the nineteen fifties. Alaskans
who needed help had new resources where they lived. They
had to travel thousands of miles to clinics in places
like Oregon, the nearest spot with services, and somehow a
bunch of housewives in southern California caught wind of the bill,
(04:00):
including Jane Crosby. As a graduate student, Michelle moved to
Pasadena and spent a year combing through local archives. She
had to sift through thousands of pages of records left
behind by government officials. She also dove deep into the
files of conservative groups, of which there were dozens. Finally,
after all that research, several of the mothers agreed to
(04:21):
meet with her in person. Many still lived in the area.
Most of them were in their seventies and eighties. By
then their kids were all growing up. She taped each conversation,
and one of her interviews she asked Jane Crosby about
her activism. Had you been involved in a Republican volunteer
organizations before that? I've always been involved. But but one
(04:44):
thing also that godually going was I think p P
A oh about the schools and well like tr meeting
downtown loveall. So they had all this group dynamics, and
they had a lot of real shady joh uh to
me at that time, yes, Wayne communist type uh speakers,
(05:07):
and I got so upset about it that I wrote
a letter to the Times or to the paper. I
thought maybe it was the Star News, I'm not sure
which I wrote a letter and they were promoting mental health,
are going to get everybody going on that, and uh
I started to look into that, and we had a
(05:28):
meeting at the Junior High School and had had two
speakers come and we we starred up a real harness nest.
This around the time to remember the Alaska Mental Health bill. Yeah,
that was that was part of the whole thing we
were upset about, Okay time and uh so then I
(05:50):
got I got into a real controversy with my p
t A because I said, I don't want you speaking
for me, So what upset you about the mental health legislation?
What was I you know, I don't remember all that,
but it just seemed like there was there was just
a lot going on that didn't just smiled to me,
(06:10):
and I wanted to find out more about it. We'll
be back after the break A the smell of a
conspiracy theory. Jane Crosby was one of hundreds of Republican
women who fought against that Alaskan bill. Here's Michelle again.
We caught up with her over Zoom and asked her
(06:31):
about her research. I am author of the book Mothers
of Conservatism, Women in the Post War Right. The more
research I did into this one conspiracy theory, the more
that I learned that it had actually nothing to do
about Alaska or Alaskans, but everything to do with right
wing housewives in southern California who developed this idea that
(06:57):
the Alaska Mental Health Bill of six was not meant
to establish a mental health facility in Alaska as it
purported to be, but they were convinced that it was
an attempt to establish a gulag in Alaska, like a
Russian style prison camp. It's not like they thought it
(07:20):
would be a literal gulag, but more that it would
be a place where the government could brainwash local residents.
Brainwashing was something these women were especially concerned about, and
they were worried it was going to happen to their
kids in school, even though there was no evidence of
that happening. Jane reminded us of Bridget in one main way.
They were both alarmed by the long arm of government,
(07:43):
fearful for their kids, and politically driven for the cause.
And Michelle agreed with this comparison. We were curious about Jane.
Who was she? We asked Michelle to paint us a picture.
So she was a trim I would say, seventy something
year old woman, well dressed. She loved to wear red,
white and blue. She had blonde hair. I imagine she
(08:07):
got her hair set probably pretty often, very well put together, tidy.
She had two children, boys, and she became concerned about
communism infiltrating the South Pasadena school system. She was concerned
that progressives were trying to brainwash children, and so she
(08:30):
became involved in the Parent Teachers Association, which she came
to regard as being dubioust and themselves dangerous. She she
thought the p t A was too progressive and in
and of itself a sinister organization. Michelle told us about
how Jane was part of a large group of women
(08:51):
right wing activists who belonged to various Republican groups. They
did a lot of research and wrote tons of news letters.
Then they'd send a copy to every mom they knew,
and then those moms would pass them along and so on,
and soon information in Pasadena, California was making its way
to Scarsdale, New York, a solo form of Twitter and Facebook.
(09:12):
Really their goal, Michelle told us, they were trying to
root out superintendence, principles and teachers who they deemed communistic,
and once they found them, they tried to get them fired.
Sometimes they succeeded, and the crime for these superintendents, principles
and teachers. These are the educators who passed measures to
desegregate schools. These were the principles who held interracial school dances.
(09:37):
These are the teachers who taught progressive curricula like on
sex education. Basically, Michelle says, they were the progressives of
their time. Women thought that this was something they had
the time and the attention to do, and they thought
that men really didn't. That men were so busy that
(09:58):
they couldn't possible have enough patients to go through legislation
and find the things that they could find. Those husbands
they had no patients to research like their wives, and
those wives they believed they were performing an act of
public service. But there was one thing we were particularly
(10:19):
curious about. Why was even the concept of mental health
so threatening? Why stop a clinic in Alaska which was
thousands of miles away from being built. We asked Michelle
about it. So you get to the nineteen fifties and
mental health becomes a medical movement, like a public health movement.
(10:39):
So you're seeing the influence of psychiatrists and psychologists in
American society like never before, and all this talk of brainwashing,
and so you know, people put two and two together
and came to feel like, oh, that's what these psychologists
are trying to do. They're trying to brainwash us. At
(11:02):
that time, psychoanalysis was hugely popular, but it wasn't for everyone.
The idea that you could treat your mind, fix it
like a broken arm, it sounded like quackery to some,
like manipulation. But here's the thing. Mental health, first of all,
wasn't really even in schools. They were worried about a
(11:22):
nation drifting further to the left and government growing increasingly
powerful to the point where it instituted socialism. In the
United States. An example would be say the County of
Los Angeles taking more tax money to establish like leftist
curriculum in high schools or grade schools to further brainwash children.
(11:47):
So what Michelle is saying is that pushing back against
these progressive ideals was to push back against what they
saw as government overreach and the potential for educators to
turn their children into communists. So what one of the
things that they deemed communistic was the Pasadena school superintendent
(12:09):
eliminating segregationist measures that were in place. So any any
kind of mixing of races or civil rights reform, they
deemed that to be dangerous and communistic because it involved
what they would describe as the heavy hand of the
state legislation, like the Civil Rights Act to them, was
(12:33):
heavy handed. They saw the entire Civil rights movement as
being started fomented by communists. Okay, so yeah, that's a
lot to take in. It turns out that these conservative
moms believed the civil rights movement was originated by communists,
and this just isn't true. They did not see it
(12:56):
as having originated in the black community. They saw civil
rights activism and the various race riots that were happening
around them as being civil unrest that was fomented by communists.
And so when they criticized the civil rights movement, they
(13:18):
were very careful to say, and they truly believe this,
that they weren't racist, that this had nothing to do
with their racial beliefs. They saw themselves as color blind
and fervently believed that it was leftists, white leftists, who
started all of this activity, and so their opposition to
(13:42):
communism was in large part opposition to desegregation, to affirmative
action and similar policies. This kind of opposition sounded familiar,
Conservatives rising up against policies put in place by an
overreaching arm of government. That's why this group of women
(14:02):
reminded us of Bridget and many conservative parents today. And
to be very clear, we don't mean in the pushing
back against desegregation or the addition of guidance counselors and schools,
but rather the disdain for what they believed was the
government taking a step too far into their families lives.
We asked Michelle about this through line, Well, what strikes
(14:22):
me is, um, I see a similar defensiveness and a
huge reaction. Whenever you bring attention to structural racism or
racist either language to to the attention of people on
the right, there is this very swift rebuke like, how
(14:45):
dare you call me racist? I'm not racist. I don't
see color. To me, it's it's the same thing that
was happening in the ninetifties and sixties, where it's a
way for them to try and eliminate anti racist pedagogy
from their schools, the banning of certain books. I think
they truly believe that these books are dangerous or over sexualized,
(15:11):
or you know, they see it as overly violent, and
they are like deliberately missing the point about how this
literature and this curricula is meant to stop racism. It's
meant to call attention to racism in all aspects of
American life. Jane and the Army of conservative mothers said
(15:35):
they were fighting against communism, but in reality they were
pushing back against social change, and they lost because brown
versus the Board of Education happened. Desegregation happened, the Civil
Rights Act was passed, the sexual revolution happened. We'll be
back after the break. Michelle walked us through the anti
(16:03):
communism movement. But there was another group, again mostly mothers,
and they were fighting another fight, a fight against sex
education in the nineteen sixties. There are disadvantages going steady,
Going steady, yes, I guess I have been going steady
(16:25):
with Jeff. We never talked about it, but it's not serious, really.
It isn't why. I hope Jeff doesn't feel that he
has the right to take liberties. Mother. We decided to
learn more and we reached out to another historian. Samantha
went to meet her in person at the New School
in Manhattan. Maybe you could take this moment to say, um,
(16:48):
introduce yourself. Sure. My name is Natalia Melmon petro Zella.
I'm a historian and I'm the author of Classroom Wars, Language, Sex,
and the Making of Modern Political Culture. So Classroom War
Ours is a book about the development of and fights
over curriculum in the nineties, sixties and seventies, specifically about
(17:09):
sex education and about bilingual education. Oh Man sex ed.
It was controversial back in the day, and it's still
controversial these days. One of the biggest fights being put
up by Bridget and other conservative parents falls under the
umbrella of sex ed. Mostly it's to do with gender
identity in both cases, worries about government overreach or at
(17:33):
the root of it all. We asked an Italia to
walk us through her research. I'm so happy this is
good for any day. So I'm standing in front of
this big filing conbinet. It's like six files. It's like
six drawers deep. It's almost as tall as me, so
like almost five five. And these are all the files
that I use to write my dissertation and then my
first book. So yeah, a lot of letters to the
(17:55):
editor to see what people were thinking about, you know,
the original Twitter. It turns out the teaching of sex
education has been around since World War One. Back then
it was geared towards boys going off to war. It's
very much tied up with this thing called the social
hygiene movement. So social hygiene people are very invested in
a curriculum that teaches kids how to manage their bodies
(18:19):
and discipline their bodies. Where are you in my room? Done?
Joe call? He said he'd be a little late. Say
do you look smooth? Oh? I thank you, sir. You
look mighty elegant yourself, if I may say so. Yes. Indeed,
(18:39):
both Don and Sue look like the kind of people
you'd like to know, don't they. Of course, right now
they're dressed for their Friday dates. But don't you have
the feeling that they're always well groomed? Yes, and that's
no accident. For Don and Sue. The question how do
I look? Depends on good grooming habits, health posture, cleanliness,
(19:04):
and nickness, plus a daily routine of little finishing touches.
Does everything from like the physical education movement to um
you know, education about sexual continents, you know, not being promiscuous,
two things about like how to wash your hands appropriately
and like clean your teeth. It's really about managing your body.
(19:27):
The sexuality part of this becomes much more central as
World War One kicks up, because there's all of this
fear of venereal disease, and so the idea is that
you have to teach kids who might go off to
war boys um to you know, not have sex with
these loose women. And there's a lot of fearmongering around this.
I mean, some of it's real. You will get very
(19:48):
sick if you get simple ast. But you know they
show pictures of children born with syphilis, like with their
faces all deformed, and that it's very morally laid in
of like, you know, do you want children like this?
And what about the girls? For girls? The emphasis is
really like I'm not ruining your virginity, like telling you
(20:08):
enough so that you don't get carried away or do
heavy petting and you know, ruin your chances at having
a nice husband who never would want a girl who's
used up in the way that um, that that would
happen to you if you went too far with a boy.
But in the nineteen fifties there's this movement called the
life adjustment education movement, a real like mouthful, and the
(20:31):
idea there was that schools should be teaching kids of
all levels to like adjust to society and live in
the world. So there was a lot of non academic
instruction there like and it was really marriage education, I
mean that's what they called it. Like, it was preparing
boys and girls for marriage. I'll bet we could get
some advice from the marriage counselor over the church. He
(20:54):
teaches a course in marriage and family living at the college.
My folks don't understand the way I you all, do
you think you can help us get married? Mike, Well,
ask yourself some questions before you get too serious about marriage.
What do you mean what sort of questions? Well, questions
for Cupid, you might say, he should ask them before
he fires those arrows. We call this Cupid's checklist. First,
(21:20):
do you have similar backgrounds, similar basis for your ideals
and stin up until then? Everything was pretty vanilla, very
much about no sex outside of marriage. But then the
sixties happened. But this is a really big deal because
you have this openness to kind of have some non
academic concepts that are being taught in schools. But now
you have like the sexual revolution happening, in feminism happening,
(21:44):
in later gayliberation happening, and also the civil rights movement,
and all these things are happening, and um so a
new crop of sex educators thinks, well, what do we
do now? And what I think is so important? And
I can't say it loudly, I'm off And I think
is often overlook is that a lot of the sex
(22:05):
educators in this period who kind of revamped curriculum and
come up with new curriculum, they are fundamentally very moderate people.
So what does that mean to be moderate in the
teaching of sex said, Like, they teach homosexuality is a sickness, right,
They teach that heterosexual marriage is the appropriate culmination of
any relationship. They don't really depart at all from the
(22:27):
idea that girls who do too much petting are slutty
and undesirable. Like it really is pretty conservative. The kind
of choices that they're leading kids to make. So, according
to Natalia, even acknowledging homosexuality as an illness was considered
progressive because it was acknowledging its very existence. So it's
(22:47):
like one step forward but two steps back. And the
conservatives they didn't like it at all, But that gets
picked up by right wing opponents to this stuff, and
they're like, what they are teaching our kids to be
independent agents of our family, of our church, to just
choose and to do whatever they want. The sort of
(23:09):
permissiveness of you know, moral relativism is rampant in our
schools and it's called sex education. Sex education becomes the
new dirty term in schools. It handily sums up. But
they're fighting against studying this stuff. Historically, I think it's
pretty clear that in some ways there are these examples
of kind of conservatives winning right. They get the curriculum
(23:31):
stamped out, they like get the teacher who advanced um
sex said fired, Like, they're definitely examples of that. On
the other hand, what you do see, I think is
a more graduate, sort of forward march of progressive attitudes
into the classroom, Like America is only becoming more diverse
of a place, and with that, like the kind of
(23:52):
pedagogical projects which are on the table have kind of
evolved to reflect that, and that includes the introduction of
how home sexuality is taught in schools. And it didn't
start off in a good place. The Talius research turned
up some student evaluations, ones from a sex side class.
There's an example I often choose where studying this case
(24:13):
in Anaheim, where I got to look at the student
evaluations of a course, and this was Evaluations of the Courts,
which was seen to be like the most progressive in
the country. Really the course it was called Senior Problems,
but it was within this family life and sex education program,
so this was like senior year. So theoretically this should
be like the most open content that, you know, the
(24:34):
most sort of like unrestrained discussion of sexuality. And one
of the letters in there from or one of the
evaluations from a student said, you know, I'm so happy
we talked about homosexuality in this class, because if we didn't,
I wouldn't know it was an illness and I wouldn't
be able to help these people. Yeah, and that really
stuck with me because you can tell that it was
(24:57):
a new thing to talk about homosexuality and all this
was like this unspoken thing, and probably it was a
new thing to talk about it clinically, as opposed to
speaking about it purely and as a moral failure, like
you know, in a sin. On the other hand, can
you imagine a class today speaking in precisely those terms
(25:18):
and being seen as progressive and liberal? Absolutely not. That
was within a few years. I saw in tracking the
curricula in California that whereas that had been so so controversial,
a few years later the letters of complaint to the
state superintendent were like, well, you had a couple of
(25:38):
homosexual speakers this year, maybe we could also bring in
like a single woman. Like they were very much more
sort of accepting of a kind of you know, diversity
of kind of human experience standing here in That's kind
of crazy to think that teaching homosexuality as an illness
is considered progress or do imagine having a single woman
(26:01):
as a speaker represents the diversity of human experience. But
the research and Italia uncovered shows that progress. And though
it starts in a really dark place, it's the first
run of a long ladder, and I'm skipping over some things,
but to get us to where we are today, where
you have another moment of tremendous unrest around gender, around sexuality,
(26:24):
around race, and you have schools that actually are doing
some of the most progressive stuff in this regard and
again become for that reason a target of folks who
don't like that at all, and folks who feel like,
I'm seeing all this stuff and it's I see it online,
and I see it in the movies, and I see
(26:45):
it in Maybe no one reads magazines anymore, but I'm
seeing this, you know, like the social changes in the ethos,
whether it's people protesting or what I'm reading, etcetera. And
it feels so hard to pinpoint and so hard to fight.
But oh my god, they're reading how to be an
anti racist in school, and that's something I can grab
onto and so I'm going to fight against it. And now, um,
(27:08):
that very much echoes what we saw in the sixties
and seventies. But one thing that I would think is
I do think it's really different, is that a lot
of those calls come with like, let's shut it down completely.
Michelle and Natalia helped us understand a lot. Mostly they
taught us how the conservative women who came before Bridget
were like minded to mothers today. Both groups have a
(27:30):
fear of government overreach. When Bridget says she's fighting for
parental rights, she's using it as an umbrella term. What
she means is parents should have ultimate control, the ability
to reject anything that doesn't fall under their own conservative
value system, even if that means banning books or eliminating
support groups for lgbt Q youth. So, when it comes
(27:53):
down to these emotional topics, I know where I stand
as a human being. I know, I know what my
journey is. I know that there is no hate. There
is nothing about me that is seeking to vilify or
make any subpopulation feel less than anyone else, because that
is not my belief. I where I stand very strong
(28:17):
on is again we go back to the principles that
a government is overreaching and creating barriers for families, and
that unfortunately is very much targeted into the l g
b t Q and it's not And what I next
time on bed Rock USA for our final episode in
(28:37):
our mini series, We Dig In with Bridget. This episode
was reported, produced and hosted by US Samantha Story and
Kathleen Quillian. Original music and scoring by Zachary Walter and
audio engineering by Blake Maples. Bed Rock USA is edited
by Jennifer Sondag, head of Bloomberg City Lab. Additional editing
help by Nicole Flato in Victor evaas special thanks to
(29:01):
Michelle Nickerson and Italia Melman Petrella. If you want to
dig deeper, Michelle's book is The Mothers of Conservativism, Women
and the Post War Right, and Italia's book is Classroom Wars, Language, Sex,
and the Making of Modern Political Culture. We'd also like
to thank the Center for Oral and Public History at
the California State University at Fullerton for giving us access
(29:21):
to Michelle's original tapes. And if you like any of
the clips you've heard, there's a treasure trove of those
historical videos on YouTube. Just search Cornet videos that c
O R O n et. Bed Rock USA is a
production of Bloomberg City Lab and I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I Heeart Radio, visit the i Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(29:44):
favorite shows.
Interesting. So welcome back to Bedrock, USA, where your hosts.
I'm Samantha Story and I'm Kathleen Couillian. This is chapter
two of the school Board Queen, a three part mini
series about Bridget Siegler, a conservative mom who's shaking up
America's school boards. In our first chapter, we met the
(00:24):
Queen in person. We learned why she became a school
board member. She wanted to make her local schools better
for her kids, who would one day attend them. But
that goal change. Her kids are now in private school
and her mission transformed. She believes parents don't have enough
control over their kids education, and she's hell bent on
(00:44):
changing that. California, Bridget reminded us of another group of moms.
Their fight was different, but they shared a common enemy,
government overreach. I want to ask you something. My my
cassette is kind of sensitive because of the distance, but
it be okay if you sat here, Okay, that way
(01:06):
I can hear you a little bit better. That's Michelle Nickerson.
Nowadays she's a professor of history at Leola University in Chicago,
but the tape you're hearing that's her. In the ninety nineties,
she was interviewing several women for her dissertation, How have
you described the role that when you claimed in the
Republican Party or in the conservative movement, if you were
(01:27):
reflect on that as we've discussed before, they had more
time to give to it and and got concerned about
our country. And at that time we were really anti communist,
right right, because we didn't want we didn't want to
see the world taken over. And think, as a mother,
(01:48):
you are concerned about your children's future. H yeah, we
care about your own. Who tradiould care more about? Your
family is coming along and we want them to have
a proven that we had and the constitution right, And
that's Jane Crosby. In the nineteen fifties, she was involved
in the anti communist movement. Today on Bedrock USA, we're
(02:12):
going back in time. We're going to meet the women
who came before Bridget, because Bridget is not the first
conservative mother to fight back against a changing American education.
And it all begins in the nineteen fifties in southern California.
A group of conservative mothers were taking action. They were
fighting what they believed was the infiltration of communism into
(02:32):
their kids schools. When people think about this era, McCarthy
is m might come to mind and the witch hunt
he led. McCarthy fanned the fear that there were spies
among us working for the Soviets. But Michelle Nickerson, she
discovered another chapter of the fight against communism. Mom's like
Jane Crosby were looking around their kids schools and they
(02:54):
didn't like what they were seeing. A cultural shift was
on the rise, and they feared for their kids. There
were these new guidance counselors and they kept referring to
this new thing called mental health. And then there was
a new class sex education. And then there was the
biggest shift of all the civil rights movement. And Jane
(03:15):
Crosby and these moms, they deemed it all communistic. Things
were changing fast, and this group of conservative mothers wanted
to stop it. We called up Michelle Nickerson because she
wrote her dissertation on the origins of this movement, and
she told us a story. It all began with a
(03:38):
new bill, a proposal to provide mental health services to
people in Alaska. This was during the nineteen fifties. Alaskans
who needed help had new resources where they lived. They
had to travel thousands of miles to clinics in places
like Oregon, the nearest spot with services, and somehow a
bunch of housewives in southern California caught wind of the bill,
(04:00):
including Jane Crosby. As a graduate student, Michelle moved to
Pasadena and spent a year combing through local archives. She
had to sift through thousands of pages of records left
behind by government officials. She also dove deep into the
files of conservative groups, of which there were dozens. Finally,
after all that research, several of the mothers agreed to
(04:21):
meet with her in person. Many still lived in the area.
Most of them were in their seventies and eighties. By
then their kids were all growing up. She taped each conversation,
and one of her interviews she asked Jane Crosby about
her activism. Had you been involved in a Republican volunteer
organizations before that? I've always been involved. But but one
(04:44):
thing also that godually going was I think p P
A oh about the schools and well like tr meeting
downtown loveall. So they had all this group dynamics, and
they had a lot of real shady joh uh to
me at that time, yes, Wayne communist type uh speakers,
(05:07):
and I got so upset about it that I wrote
a letter to the Times or to the paper. I
thought maybe it was the Star News, I'm not sure
which I wrote a letter and they were promoting mental health,
are going to get everybody going on that, and uh
I started to look into that, and we had a
(05:28):
meeting at the Junior High School and had had two
speakers come and we we starred up a real harness nest.
This around the time to remember the Alaska Mental Health bill. Yeah,
that was that was part of the whole thing we
were upset about, Okay time and uh so then I
(05:50):
got I got into a real controversy with my p
t A because I said, I don't want you speaking
for me, So what upset you about the mental health legislation?
What was I you know, I don't remember all that,
but it just seemed like there was there was just
a lot going on that didn't just smiled to me,
(06:10):
and I wanted to find out more about it. We'll
be back after the break A the smell of a
conspiracy theory. Jane Crosby was one of hundreds of Republican
women who fought against that Alaskan bill. Here's Michelle again.
We caught up with her over Zoom and asked her
(06:31):
about her research. I am author of the book Mothers
of Conservatism, Women in the Post War Right. The more
research I did into this one conspiracy theory, the more
that I learned that it had actually nothing to do
about Alaska or Alaskans, but everything to do with right
wing housewives in southern California who developed this idea that
(06:57):
the Alaska Mental Health Bill of six was not meant
to establish a mental health facility in Alaska as it
purported to be, but they were convinced that it was
an attempt to establish a gulag in Alaska, like a
Russian style prison camp. It's not like they thought it
(07:20):
would be a literal gulag, but more that it would
be a place where the government could brainwash local residents.
Brainwashing was something these women were especially concerned about, and
they were worried it was going to happen to their
kids in school, even though there was no evidence of
that happening. Jane reminded us of Bridget in one main way.
They were both alarmed by the long arm of government,
(07:43):
fearful for their kids, and politically driven for the cause.
And Michelle agreed with this comparison. We were curious about Jane.
Who was she? We asked Michelle to paint us a picture.
So she was a trim I would say, seventy something
year old woman, well dressed. She loved to wear red,
white and blue. She had blonde hair. I imagine she
(08:07):
got her hair set probably pretty often, very well put together, tidy.
She had two children, boys, and she became concerned about
communism infiltrating the South Pasadena school system. She was concerned
that progressives were trying to brainwash children, and so she
(08:30):
became involved in the Parent Teachers Association, which she came
to regard as being dubioust and themselves dangerous. She she
thought the p t A was too progressive and in
and of itself a sinister organization. Michelle told us about
how Jane was part of a large group of women
(08:51):
right wing activists who belonged to various Republican groups. They
did a lot of research and wrote tons of news letters.
Then they'd send a copy to every mom they knew,
and then those moms would pass them along and so on,
and soon information in Pasadena, California was making its way
to Scarsdale, New York, a solo form of Twitter and Facebook.
(09:12):
Really their goal, Michelle told us, they were trying to
root out superintendence, principles and teachers who they deemed communistic,
and once they found them, they tried to get them fired.
Sometimes they succeeded, and the crime for these superintendents, principles
and teachers. These are the educators who passed measures to
desegregate schools. These were the principles who held interracial school dances.
(09:37):
These are the teachers who taught progressive curricula like on
sex education. Basically, Michelle says, they were the progressives of
their time. Women thought that this was something they had
the time and the attention to do, and they thought
that men really didn't. That men were so busy that
(09:58):
they couldn't possible have enough patients to go through legislation
and find the things that they could find. Those husbands
they had no patients to research like their wives, and
those wives they believed they were performing an act of
public service. But there was one thing we were particularly
(10:19):
curious about. Why was even the concept of mental health
so threatening? Why stop a clinic in Alaska which was
thousands of miles away from being built. We asked Michelle
about it. So you get to the nineteen fifties and
mental health becomes a medical movement, like a public health movement.
(10:39):
So you're seeing the influence of psychiatrists and psychologists in
American society like never before, and all this talk of brainwashing,
and so you know, people put two and two together
and came to feel like, oh, that's what these psychologists
are trying to do. They're trying to brainwash us. At
(11:02):
that time, psychoanalysis was hugely popular, but it wasn't for everyone.
The idea that you could treat your mind, fix it
like a broken arm, it sounded like quackery to some,
like manipulation. But here's the thing. Mental health, first of all,
wasn't really even in schools. They were worried about a
(11:22):
nation drifting further to the left and government growing increasingly
powerful to the point where it instituted socialism. In the
United States. An example would be say the County of
Los Angeles taking more tax money to establish like leftist
curriculum in high schools or grade schools to further brainwash children.
(11:47):
So what Michelle is saying is that pushing back against
these progressive ideals was to push back against what they
saw as government overreach and the potential for educators to
turn their children into communists. So what one of the
things that they deemed communistic was the Pasadena school superintendent
(12:09):
eliminating segregationist measures that were in place. So any any
kind of mixing of races or civil rights reform, they
deemed that to be dangerous and communistic because it involved
what they would describe as the heavy hand of the
state legislation, like the Civil Rights Act to them, was
(12:33):
heavy handed. They saw the entire Civil rights movement as
being started fomented by communists. Okay, so yeah, that's a
lot to take in. It turns out that these conservative
moms believed the civil rights movement was originated by communists,
and this just isn't true. They did not see it
(12:56):
as having originated in the black community. They saw civil
rights activism and the various race riots that were happening
around them as being civil unrest that was fomented by communists.
And so when they criticized the civil rights movement, they
(13:18):
were very careful to say, and they truly believe this,
that they weren't racist, that this had nothing to do
with their racial beliefs. They saw themselves as color blind
and fervently believed that it was leftists, white leftists, who
started all of this activity, and so their opposition to
(13:42):
communism was in large part opposition to desegregation, to affirmative
action and similar policies. This kind of opposition sounded familiar,
Conservatives rising up against policies put in place by an
overreaching arm of government. That's why this group of women
(14:02):
reminded us of Bridget and many conservative parents today. And
to be very clear, we don't mean in the pushing
back against desegregation or the addition of guidance counselors and schools,
but rather the disdain for what they believed was the
government taking a step too far into their families lives.
We asked Michelle about this through line, Well, what strikes
(14:22):
me is, um, I see a similar defensiveness and a
huge reaction. Whenever you bring attention to structural racism or
racist either language to to the attention of people on
the right, there is this very swift rebuke like, how
(14:45):
dare you call me racist? I'm not racist. I don't
see color. To me, it's it's the same thing that
was happening in the ninetifties and sixties, where it's a
way for them to try and eliminate anti racist pedagogy
from their schools, the banning of certain books. I think
they truly believe that these books are dangerous or over sexualized,
(15:11):
or you know, they see it as overly violent, and
they are like deliberately missing the point about how this
literature and this curricula is meant to stop racism. It's
meant to call attention to racism in all aspects of
American life. Jane and the Army of conservative mothers said
(15:35):
they were fighting against communism, but in reality they were
pushing back against social change, and they lost because brown
versus the Board of Education happened. Desegregation happened, the Civil
Rights Act was passed, the sexual revolution happened. We'll be
back after the break. Michelle walked us through the anti
(16:03):
communism movement. But there was another group, again mostly mothers,
and they were fighting another fight, a fight against sex
education in the nineteen sixties. There are disadvantages going steady,
Going steady, yes, I guess I have been going steady
(16:25):
with Jeff. We never talked about it, but it's not serious, really.
It isn't why. I hope Jeff doesn't feel that he
has the right to take liberties. Mother. We decided to
learn more and we reached out to another historian. Samantha
went to meet her in person at the New School
in Manhattan. Maybe you could take this moment to say, um,
(16:48):
introduce yourself. Sure. My name is Natalia Melmon petro Zella.
I'm a historian and I'm the author of Classroom Wars, Language, Sex,
and the Making of Modern Political Culture. So Classroom War
Ours is a book about the development of and fights
over curriculum in the nineties, sixties and seventies, specifically about
(17:09):
sex education and about bilingual education. Oh Man sex ed.
It was controversial back in the day, and it's still
controversial these days. One of the biggest fights being put
up by Bridget and other conservative parents falls under the
umbrella of sex ed. Mostly it's to do with gender
identity in both cases, worries about government overreach or at
(17:33):
the root of it all. We asked an Italia to
walk us through her research. I'm so happy this is
good for any day. So I'm standing in front of
this big filing conbinet. It's like six files. It's like
six drawers deep. It's almost as tall as me, so
like almost five five. And these are all the files
that I use to write my dissertation and then my
first book. So yeah, a lot of letters to the
(17:55):
editor to see what people were thinking about, you know,
the original Twitter. It turns out the teaching of sex
education has been around since World War One. Back then
it was geared towards boys going off to war. It's
very much tied up with this thing called the social
hygiene movement. So social hygiene people are very invested in
a curriculum that teaches kids how to manage their bodies
(18:19):
and discipline their bodies. Where are you in my room? Done?
Joe call? He said he'd be a little late. Say
do you look smooth? Oh? I thank you, sir. You
look mighty elegant yourself, if I may say so. Yes. Indeed,
(18:39):
both Don and Sue look like the kind of people
you'd like to know, don't they. Of course, right now
they're dressed for their Friday dates. But don't you have
the feeling that they're always well groomed? Yes, and that's
no accident. For Don and Sue. The question how do
I look? Depends on good grooming habits, health posture, cleanliness,
(19:04):
and nickness, plus a daily routine of little finishing touches.
Does everything from like the physical education movement to um
you know, education about sexual continents, you know, not being promiscuous,
two things about like how to wash your hands appropriately
and like clean your teeth. It's really about managing your body.
(19:27):
The sexuality part of this becomes much more central as
World War One kicks up, because there's all of this
fear of venereal disease, and so the idea is that
you have to teach kids who might go off to
war boys um to you know, not have sex with
these loose women. And there's a lot of fearmongering around this.
I mean, some of it's real. You will get very
(19:48):
sick if you get simple ast. But you know they
show pictures of children born with syphilis, like with their
faces all deformed, and that it's very morally laid in
of like, you know, do you want children like this?
And what about the girls? For girls? The emphasis is
really like I'm not ruining your virginity, like telling you
(20:08):
enough so that you don't get carried away or do
heavy petting and you know, ruin your chances at having
a nice husband who never would want a girl who's
used up in the way that um, that that would
happen to you if you went too far with a boy.
But in the nineteen fifties there's this movement called the
life adjustment education movement, a real like mouthful, and the
(20:31):
idea there was that schools should be teaching kids of
all levels to like adjust to society and live in
the world. So there was a lot of non academic
instruction there like and it was really marriage education, I
mean that's what they called it. Like, it was preparing
boys and girls for marriage. I'll bet we could get
some advice from the marriage counselor over the church. He
(20:54):
teaches a course in marriage and family living at the college.
My folks don't understand the way I you all, do
you think you can help us get married? Mike, Well,
ask yourself some questions before you get too serious about marriage.
What do you mean what sort of questions? Well, questions
for Cupid, you might say, he should ask them before
he fires those arrows. We call this Cupid's checklist. First,
(21:20):
do you have similar backgrounds, similar basis for your ideals
and stin up until then? Everything was pretty vanilla, very
much about no sex outside of marriage. But then the
sixties happened. But this is a really big deal because
you have this openness to kind of have some non
academic concepts that are being taught in schools. But now
you have like the sexual revolution happening, in feminism happening,
(21:44):
in later gayliberation happening, and also the civil rights movement,
and all these things are happening, and um so a
new crop of sex educators thinks, well, what do we
do now? And what I think is so important? And
I can't say it loudly, I'm off And I think
is often overlook is that a lot of the sex
(22:05):
educators in this period who kind of revamped curriculum and
come up with new curriculum, they are fundamentally very moderate people.
So what does that mean to be moderate in the
teaching of sex said, Like, they teach homosexuality is a sickness, right,
They teach that heterosexual marriage is the appropriate culmination of
any relationship. They don't really depart at all from the
(22:27):
idea that girls who do too much petting are slutty
and undesirable. Like it really is pretty conservative. The kind
of choices that they're leading kids to make. So, according
to Natalia, even acknowledging homosexuality as an illness was considered
progressive because it was acknowledging its very existence. So it's
(22:47):
like one step forward but two steps back. And the
conservatives they didn't like it at all, But that gets
picked up by right wing opponents to this stuff, and
they're like, what they are teaching our kids to be
independent agents of our family, of our church, to just
choose and to do whatever they want. The sort of
(23:09):
permissiveness of you know, moral relativism is rampant in our
schools and it's called sex education. Sex education becomes the
new dirty term in schools. It handily sums up. But
they're fighting against studying this stuff. Historically, I think it's
pretty clear that in some ways there are these examples
of kind of conservatives winning right. They get the curriculum
(23:31):
stamped out, they like get the teacher who advanced um
sex said fired, Like, they're definitely examples of that. On
the other hand, what you do see, I think is
a more graduate, sort of forward march of progressive attitudes
into the classroom, Like America is only becoming more diverse
of a place, and with that, like the kind of
(23:52):
pedagogical projects which are on the table have kind of
evolved to reflect that, and that includes the introduction of
how home sexuality is taught in schools. And it didn't
start off in a good place. The Talius research turned
up some student evaluations, ones from a sex side class.
There's an example I often choose where studying this case
(24:13):
in Anaheim, where I got to look at the student
evaluations of a course, and this was Evaluations of the Courts,
which was seen to be like the most progressive in
the country. Really the course it was called Senior Problems,
but it was within this family life and sex education program,
so this was like senior year. So theoretically this should
be like the most open content that, you know, the
(24:34):
most sort of like unrestrained discussion of sexuality. And one
of the letters in there from or one of the
evaluations from a student said, you know, I'm so happy
we talked about homosexuality in this class, because if we didn't,
I wouldn't know it was an illness and I wouldn't
be able to help these people. Yeah, and that really
stuck with me because you can tell that it was
(24:57):
a new thing to talk about homosexuality and all this
was like this unspoken thing, and probably it was a
new thing to talk about it clinically, as opposed to
speaking about it purely and as a moral failure, like
you know, in a sin. On the other hand, can
you imagine a class today speaking in precisely those terms
(25:18):
and being seen as progressive and liberal? Absolutely not. That
was within a few years. I saw in tracking the
curricula in California that whereas that had been so so controversial,
a few years later the letters of complaint to the
state superintendent were like, well, you had a couple of
(25:38):
homosexual speakers this year, maybe we could also bring in
like a single woman. Like they were very much more
sort of accepting of a kind of you know, diversity
of kind of human experience standing here in That's kind
of crazy to think that teaching homosexuality as an illness
is considered progress or do imagine having a single woman
(26:01):
as a speaker represents the diversity of human experience. But
the research and Italia uncovered shows that progress. And though
it starts in a really dark place, it's the first
run of a long ladder, and I'm skipping over some things,
but to get us to where we are today, where
you have another moment of tremendous unrest around gender, around sexuality,
(26:24):
around race, and you have schools that actually are doing
some of the most progressive stuff in this regard and
again become for that reason a target of folks who
don't like that at all, and folks who feel like,
I'm seeing all this stuff and it's I see it online,
and I see it in the movies, and I see
(26:45):
it in Maybe no one reads magazines anymore, but I'm
seeing this, you know, like the social changes in the ethos,
whether it's people protesting or what I'm reading, etcetera. And
it feels so hard to pinpoint and so hard to fight.
But oh my god, they're reading how to be an
anti racist in school, and that's something I can grab
onto and so I'm going to fight against it. And now, um,
(27:08):
that very much echoes what we saw in the sixties
and seventies. But one thing that I would think is
I do think it's really different, is that a lot
of those calls come with like, let's shut it down completely.
Michelle and Natalia helped us understand a lot. Mostly they
taught us how the conservative women who came before Bridget
were like minded to mothers today. Both groups have a
(27:30):
fear of government overreach. When Bridget says she's fighting for
parental rights, she's using it as an umbrella term. What
she means is parents should have ultimate control, the ability
to reject anything that doesn't fall under their own conservative
value system, even if that means banning books or eliminating
support groups for lgbt Q youth. So, when it comes
(27:53):
down to these emotional topics, I know where I stand
as a human being. I know, I know what my
journey is. I know that there is no hate. There
is nothing about me that is seeking to vilify or
make any subpopulation feel less than anyone else, because that
is not my belief. I where I stand very strong
(28:17):
on is again we go back to the principles that
a government is overreaching and creating barriers for families, and
that unfortunately is very much targeted into the l g
b t Q and it's not And what I next
time on bed Rock USA for our final episode in
(28:37):
our mini series, We Dig In with Bridget. This episode
was reported, produced and hosted by US Samantha Story and
Kathleen Quillian. Original music and scoring by Zachary Walter and
audio engineering by Blake Maples. Bed Rock USA is edited
by Jennifer Sondag, head of Bloomberg City Lab. Additional editing
help by Nicole Flato in Victor evaas special thanks to
(29:01):
Michelle Nickerson and Italia Melman Petrella. If you want to
dig deeper, Michelle's book is The Mothers of Conservativism, Women
and the Post War Right, and Italia's book is Classroom Wars, Language, Sex,
and the Making of Modern Political Culture. We'd also like
to thank the Center for Oral and Public History at
the California State University at Fullerton for giving us access
(29:21):
to Michelle's original tapes. And if you like any of
the clips you've heard, there's a treasure trove of those
historical videos on YouTube. Just search Cornet videos that c
O R O n et. Bed Rock USA is a
production of Bloomberg City Lab and I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I Heeart Radio, visit the i Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(29:44):
favorite shows.
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