6

ENTER STAGE RIGHT

Merrie England: Rivers of Blood

The ‘supreme function’ of statesmanship, argued Conservative MP Enoch Powell on 20 April 1968, ‘is to provide against preventable evils’. On this occasion, the ‘evil’ was immigration from non-white areas of the Commonwealth. ‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents . . . It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.’ There followed the most inflammatory statement made by a British politician in the twentieth century. ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’1

The ‘flood’ of immigrants, argued Powell, was making white people ‘strangers in their own country’. He told of a constituent who had been repeatedly threatened because she refused to accept black tenants in her boarding house. ‘She is . . . afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. “Racialist”, they chant.’ To Powell, the issue was freedom, not prejudice. The private citizen was being denied ‘his right to discriminate’.²

The ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was delivered on the anniversary of Hitler’s birth. That was mere coincidence, but it was nevertheless ominous that British neo-Nazis openly celebrated both the Führer’s birthday and Powell’s speech. Feeling decidedly uncomfortable with controversy of this sort, the Tory leader Edward Heath sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet. ‘I consider the speech he made in Birmingham . . . to be racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions,’ Heath explained. The word ‘tone’ is significant, for it was in tenor, rather than substance, that Powell differed most markedly from his Tory colleagues. They, too, sought to curb immigration, but most were afraid to raise the subject.3

Labour’s view was not altogether different. The party had officially opposed the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, which limited the intake from Asian, African and Caribbean countries, but breathed a sigh of relief when it passed. A short time later, the Labour leader Harold Wilson admitted that his party did ‘not contest the need for the control of Commonwealth immigration’. The official Labour strategy was to complain about the problem, while blaming it on the Tories. Thus, at the 1964 election, the Labour candidate in Wandsworth argued that, ‘Large-scale immigration has occurred only under this Tory government. The Tory Immigration Act has failed to control it – immigrants of all colours and races continue to arrive here.’⁴

At that election, the Tory candidate Peter Griffiths, campaigning on the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour’, took the safe Labour seat of Smethwick. Afterwards, the Tories calculated that the race issue made around twenty Labour constituencies winnable. Shaken by Smethwick, a Labour Cabinet committee concluded that ‘immigration can be the greatest potential vote-loser . . . if we are seen to be permitting a flood of immigrants to come in and blight . . . our cities’. Warming to the theme, Frank Soskice, the Labour Home Secretary, warned that, ‘If we do not have strict immigration rules our people will soon all be coffee-coloured.’⁵

Powell had, in other words, touched a raw nerve. In the wake of his sacking, he received more than 100,000 letters of support. Over 1,000 dockers marched on Westminster chanting ‘Enoch is right’, and 400 meat-packers presented Heath with a 92-page petition protesting his dismissal. A Gallup Poll at the end of April 1968 found 72 per cent of Britons in sympathy. Sacking Powell nevertheless allowed the Conservatives to have their cake while eating it too. He had trumpeted his party’s immigration policies, albeit rather too enthusiastically. By sacking him, Heath could claim that his party opposed racism, while at the same time benefiting from the exposure given to the issue.

Powell did not aspire to be a racist demagogue, but that is what he became. By voicing what he thought were consistent, logical principles, he provided validation to those inclined to hate. He had little in common with the workers who enthusiastically applauded his Birmingham speech, but that did not stop him from playing to their prejudices. While he saw complex problems of assimilation, they saw an alien invasion which threatened their neighbourhoods, jobs and culture. In Powell, they found a champion, an articulate man who put eloquent voice to raw emotion. As late as 1972, a Daily Express poll found him the most popular politician in Britain.

Meanwhile, on the fringes, an openly racist political party tried to capitalize on the furore. The National Front was founded on 7 February 1967, by A.K. Chesterton, cousin of the famous author. The NF was racist, anti-communist and isolationist, but not openly fascist. Affiliation with neo-Nazi groups was forbidden, though that did not stop prominent Nazis like John Tyndall from joining. Calculated avoidance of the fascist label allowed the NF to promote itself as ultra-nationalist and thus to broaden its appeal in a way that Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists had never managed. At first dismissed as a lunatic fringe group, the NF gained credibility because of Powell’s speech. The NF cast itself as the party willing to act upon Powell’s warnings.

NF leaders assumed they would attract Tories disillusioned with Heath’s immigration policy, particularly after Powell’s sacking. While some did jump ship, by far the greatest source of NF strength was the urban working class – natural Labour supporters. ‘It was a vote for Great Britain, the Union Jack,’ writes the skinhead spokesman George Marshall, ‘and a protest vote against the Conservative and Labour parties who had done little in real terms for the British working classes who were now facing longer dole queues, shit housing and a country going to the dogs.’ Brian Kelson recalled friends joining the NF: ‘they said they wanted to make a point. It’s all right for you, they’d say, living out in suburbia in a white community, but we live in the middle of Birmingham in a mixed race society. We didn’t invite them here, the government invited them here, not us, and we don’t want them here. They’re taking our jobs and everything, and this is the only way we can make our voices heard.’ Chris Brown, a skinhead, found the NF irresistibly attractive. ‘The immigrants, the communists, the IRA, the ineffectual Labour government . . . were all our enemies. And they were all being orchestrated and manipulated by a world-wide Zionist plot. The only answer was to unite and fight and join the National Front. Of course, it was all bollocks, but regrettably I, and thousands of other gullible young whites . . . took it all in.’ He eventually admitted that ‘my pride and patriotism had been overtaken by my ignorance’.6

Marshall feels that the tendency to dismiss NF supporters as fascist reveals how ignorant most people were about what was really happening. He insists that, for the urban working class, the NF’s appeal had little to do with fascism, since most supporters never read the party literature. They were instead

kids looking to play the hard man, wanting to hit out at society. Life’s a bastard, and kids will always cover up their own insecurities by hitting out at soft targets, whether that’s a fat boy, the school smellies, the new girl, or the kid in the corner with a turban on his head. Chants of ‘National Front!’ echoed around playgrounds because it gave you a sense of belonging, a sense of power, a sense of defiance, and not because you had read the NF’s manifesto and agreed with every word.

The main motivation, Marshall believes, was rebellion. ‘Part of the National Front’s attraction was the very fact that teachers, parents and other authority figures told you not to do it. Just like they told you not to smoke, drink bottles of cider . . . nick sweets from the corner shop, go looking for trouble at the football.’ Brown agrees: ‘Our involvement with the NF . . . was done purely to achieve maximum shock value. The political side of things was a secondary issue; the ability to dismay or even horrify our detractors was our main objective. If that meant saluting the air and paying lip-service to all things Nazi, then so be it.’7

While NF sympathizers fought Asians and blacks, the leaders fought one another. The party’s effectiveness was severely limited by its fondness for coups and conspiracies. Chesterton was ousted in 1970 by John O’Brien, a former Conservative and supporter of Powell, who in turn left when Tyndall and his deputy Martin Webster took control. For most of the 1970s, formal NF membership hovered around 20,000. The best it could manage was third place at three parliamentary by-elections, and some 200,000 votes gained at the 1977 local elections. On only one occasion did it manage to save its deposit. Its only electoral victory came in a 1975 Carrickfergus Town Council by-election when the other candidate dropped out.

Nevertheless, the NF was important not for votes won, but for the fear it inspired. Its strength lay in what it could do on the streets – the graffiti daubed on walls, the loathsome posters plastered on hoardings, the menace suggested by jackbooted thugs with crude NF tattoos scratched on biceps or foreheads. Its success can be measured by the fear felt within black and Asian communities, fear made worse because the largely white police force too often failed to provide protection. Between 1976 and 1981, thirty-one black people were killed in racist attacks in Britain. While not all these murders were the work of NF supporters, it is fair to say that the perpetrators sympathized with what the NF represented.

On 5 August 1976, in Birmingham, the guitarist Eric Clapton interrupted his concert to shout ‘I think Enoch’s right . . . we should send them all back. Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!’ He later explained that he was drunk, which was true, and that he was angry because an Asian man had ‘pinched my missus’s bum’. ‘I just don’t know what came over me that night,’ he told an interviewer. When sobriety returned, however, racial tolerance did not. ‘Enoch was . . . the only bloke . . . telling the truth, for the good of the country,’ he reflected in 1978. ‘I think Enoch is a prophet, see? . . . His ideas are right. You go to Heathrow any day, mate, and you’ll see thousands of Indian people sitting there waiting to know whether or not they can come into the country . . . Enoch said six years ago, stop it, give ’em a grand, and tell ’em to go home.’ Clapton was reassured by the fact that Powell was clearly ‘a very religious man. And you can’t be religious and racist at the same time. The two things are incompatible.’8

Meanwhile, David Bowie told German journalists that ‘Britain could benefit from a fascist leader’. On his return to Britain, he apparently thought it funny to greet his fans with a Nazi salute. ‘I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘I’d be an excellent dictator . . . I do want to rule the world.’ The sudden prominence of reactionary rock deeply annoyed those who assumed that rock’s rhythms were virtuously leftist. Shortly after the Birmingham incident, the rock photographer Red Saunders published an open letter in Socialist Worker, NME and Melody Maker, attacking Clapton. ‘Come on Eric – Own up. Half your music is black. You’re rock music’s biggest colonist.’ Saunders called for ‘a rank and file movement against the racist poison music’. Joining the crusade, the journalist David Widgery wrote: ‘We want Rebel music, street music. Music that breaks down people’s fear of one another. Crisis music. Now music. Music that knows who the real enemy is.’ What emerged was Rock Against Racism, a disparate group of musicians, radical politicos and rock fans whose aim, Widgery explained, was to ‘rescue . . . rock and roll from . . . the record companies and use . . . [it] to change reality, as always had been intended. And have a party in the process.’ Nostalgic for the Sixties, he imagined ‘a real progressive culture, not a packaged mail-order stick-on nightmare of mediocre garbage’. Rock Against Racism, he later reflected, ‘provided the creative energy and the focus in what became a battle for the soul of young working-class England’.9

Rock Against Racism was enthusiastically backed by the Socialist Workers Party and other leftists disillusioned with Labour’s flaccidity on the immigration issue. That did not, however, mean that all RAR supporters were socialists. Because punk bands played at RAR concerts the audience often consisted of a large number of otherwise apolitical punks interested only in the music. In addition, some supporters saw RAR as a way to confront the establishment, not unlike supporters of NF. ‘We naturally identified with other people getting harassed by the police,’ Caroline Harper confessed. ‘It was when the sus [stop and search] laws were at their heights. It didn’t matter if you had green hair or were black, you would be stopped by the police, for any reason . . . We felt like victims of an authoritarian state.’¹⁰

‘This ain’t no fucking Woodstock,’ Saunders shouted as he introduced a band at an RAR gig. ‘This is the Carnival against the Fucking Nazis.’ A central tenet of the anti-fascist front held that ‘Where the political and physical circumstances are right, it can be correct to enter into a physical clash with fascists, to attempt to drive them off the streets and disperse and demoralise them.’ In practice this meant that two anti-establishment mobs, each trumpeting a radical political platform but consisting of supporters whose political commitment was often weak, expressed their disillusionment with 1970s Britain by fighting in the streets. The worst violence occurred on 13 August 1977, when the NF attempted to march through Lewisham in order to ‘reclaim the area from immigrants and blacks’. Blocking their route were thousands of anti-fascists. The ‘Battle of Lewisham’ was important to the anti-fascist struggle for three reasons: first because the NF was prevented from marching, second because the police seemed to side with the fascists, and third because press and politicians lumped both sides in the same basket of thuggery. The Daily Mail carried a front-page photo of a bedraggled policeman over the caption ‘After the Battle of Lewisham, a question of vital importance: now who will defend him?’, while the Mirror argued that the SWP and NF were equally vile. Labour politicians accused the SWP of ‘red fascism’, and the left-wing MP Michael Foot protested that ‘You don’t stop the Nazis by throwing bottles or bashing the police. The most ineffective way of fighting the fascists is to behave like them.’ All this convinced anti-fascists that, if the NF was to be stopped, it was up to them. That realization inspired the formation in early 1978 of the Anti-Nazi League, effectively the political wing of RAR. The agreed purpose was to drive the NF from the streets.11

ANL ‘carnivals’ began with a march and ended with a concert. This mix of politics and music pleased the crowd, but often resulted in a confusion of purpose. At the second great carnival on 24 September 1978, some 100,000 people gathered. The NF, rather cleverly, mobilized a march in East London to coincide with the event – effectively presenting anti-fascists with a test of loyalty: were they committed to politics or to music? The ANL failed that test. While anti-fascists were busily grooving, the NF dominated the streets. ‘We collectively bungled it,’ one ANL leader, Paul Holborow, later admitted. Angry left-wingers accused carnival-goers of ‘scabbing’ on the struggle and questioned the effectiveness of rock as an agent of political change. ‘Potential action against racism’, the ANL sympathizer Andrew Calcutt concluded, ‘had been thwarted by the very organisers of Rock Against Racism, as we kids were invited to chill out and congratulate ourselves on our anti-racist feelings rather than do anything real to confront racism head-on. Thus were we demobilised, even depoliticised, by RAR.’ The RAR formula, he feels, was to ‘buy a badge, enjoy the carnival, stay with your right-on friends’.¹²

One-time activists in RAR and the ANL now pride themselves on having driven the NF from Britain’s streets. While it is true that they provided visible opposition to the fascists at a time when the Labour government was shamefully silent, in truth the NF was fully capable of engineering its own demise. It never managed to provide proof that it was actually a party, as opposed to a mob. Its few genuine ideologues spent most of their time arguing with, or organizing coups against, one another. Ultimate ruin came when Tyndall, in a fit of hubristic megalomania, decided to stand 303 candidates at the 1979 general election, in order to give the impression that the NF was a significant political force. Most of the candidates were simply names on a ballot – they did no campaigning whatsoever. Tyndall promised that ‘in some places we shall beat the Liberals’, but that proved hollow. The NF garnered just 1.3 per cent of the national vote and lost all 303 deposits, pushing the party to the brink of bankruptcy.13

The main reason for the NF demise was Margaret Thatcher, whose rise brought racism back into the mainstream. In March 1977, she reflected that concerns about the racial integrity of the British people could only be addressed ‘by holding out a clear prospect of an end to immigration’. For discontented Powellites, that seemed sufficient. They delighted when, the following year, Thatcher remarked: ‘I think people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’ That was essentially what Powell had said, minus the ‘rivers of blood’. Disillusioned Tories who had once flirted with the NF saw Thatcher’s election in 1979 as salvation. She offered the opportunity to turn anti-immigration sentiment into law, without the embarrassing spectacle of street violence. Her immediate introduction of stricter immigration controls demonstrated that she meant business. During the debate on these measures, the Tory MP Tony Marlow raised hardly a stir when he argued: ‘People have criticised these measures because they say they are racialist, as if racialist is a word of abuse. What does racialist mean? It means tribal. After all, man is a tribal animal. We have a feeling of kith and kin for people like ourselves, with our own background and culture.’¹⁴

‘What part of Africa do you come from?’ Mrs Thatcher asked a black woman while campaigning in South London. ‘Tooting,’ came the reply. As that encounter made clear, assimilation would not be promoted by the Tories. What had once seemed distasteful was now mainstream – a case of Powellism without Powell. The Monday Club, one-time flirters with fascism, duly provided policy documents on the previously taboo subject of repatriation. Meanwhile, the ANL, satisfied that the NF had been defeated, disbanded. Members shifted their attention to new causes like CND and opposition to Tebbit’s Law. As for the musicians who had once played at RAR gigs, their higher profile brought lucrative recording contracts.15

New York: Hardhats

On 4 May 1970, Sandy Scheuer was walking across the campus of Kent State University when she came within range of heavily armed National Guardsmen. They had been deployed on campus in response to the rising tide of student dissent following the invasion of Cambodia by US troops. Scheuer was not an anti-war activist, just an innocent student walking to class. Shot in the throat, she quickly bled to death. She was one of four students killed that day.

On the following day, another student was walking not far from Wall Street in New York. Unlike Scheuer, he was an anti-war protester, bound for a rally in protest against the Kent State killings. Quite suddenly, a construction worker from a nearby building site grabbed him. ‘I was in Vietnam and I love to kill gooks,’ the assailant shouted as he pummelled the protester.16

Similar incidents occurred the next day when medical students demonstrating in Battery Park were set upon by construction workers. On the 7th, with violence escalating, Mayor John Lindsay appealed for calm. ‘The country is virtually on the edge of a spiritual – and perhaps physical – breakdown,’ he lamented. He proposed that Friday, 8 May should be a ‘day of reflection’, when New York might mourn and then move on.¹⁷

Instead of reflection, Friday brought class war. As the radical attorney Charles Appel addressed a rally outside Federal Hall on Wall Street, a deafening cacophony of steel rose from an adjacent building site. Having roused themselves to a frenzy by banging girders, construction workers then went on a rampage, targeting anyone remotely resembling a student. ‘They attacked us with lead pipes wrapped in American Flags,’ one bloodied protester reported. Michael Belknap, a lawyer who stopped to help a bleeding youth, recalled hearing someone yell, ‘He’s a Commie bastard, we ought to kill him’, before being punched and kicked.18

‘These hippies are getting what they deserve,’ John Halloran, a construction worker (or ‘hardhat’ as they came to be known) told a reporter. George Tangel, his hardhat emblazoned with an American flag, explained that he was beating up students ‘because my brother got wounded in Vietnam, and I think this will help our boys over there by pulling this country together’. After making short work of the protesters, the mob marched on City Hall, where the flag had been placed at half-mast for the day of reflection. On the way, they shouted ‘Lindsay is a queer’. Hardhats, already angry because of the mayor’s apparent hostility toward the construction industry, could not stomach the way the Kent State dead were being honoured, while soldiers who had died in Vietnam received no similar ritual of mourning. On arriving at City Hall, they bullied a postal worker to raise the flag. The crowd cheered, some chanting ‘Lindsay is a Red’. ‘It was just like John Wayne taking Iwo Jima,’ a delighted hardhat observed. As the flag rose, construction workers sang the Star Spangled Banner. Hard-hats were removed and placed respectfully on hearts. ‘Get your helmets off,’ one worker shouted at policemen standing nearby. A few sheepishly complied.¹⁹

While the crowd sang, someone from City Hall rather bravely lowered the flag. Hardhats threatened to storm the building, causing Deputy Mayor Richard Aurelio to order the flag back up, so as to appease the mob. Meanwhile, fighting continued. Susan Harman, a Lindsay aide, witnessed hardhats randomly throwing punches, while yelling ‘Get the hippie!’ and ‘Get the traitor!’ When a construction worker armed with a large pair of pliers attacked a student near her, she tried to intervene. ‘Let go of my jacket, bitch,’ her assailant screamed, his fists flying. ‘If you want to be treated like an equal, we’ll treat you like one.’ Suddenly, three men were punching her. ‘My glasses were broken. I had trouble breathing, and I thought my ribs were cracked.’ One workman found his colleagues’ savagery perplexing. ‘These are people I know well,’ he said. ‘They were nice, quiet guys until Friday. But I had to drag one fellow away from attacking several women. They became storm troopers.’20

At Pace College, a short distance away, another group, armed with wrenches, hammers and crowbars, stormed the administration building in search of students to attack. After forcing their way in, they rampaged through the building, throwing punches, breaking windows and smashing furniture. ‘The whole thing was awfully fast and awfully brutal,’ Dr Ivan Rohr recalled. Professor Melvyn Oremland, trapped in the Admissions Office by a vicious mob, found it ‘the most frightening and horrible experience of my life’. ‘What upset me to the point of physical sickness was the fact that the police stood there and didn’t even attempt to help the students,’ an administration official later testified. ‘The . . . police on duty stood there like tin soldiers . . . While they were supposedly protecting City Hall, all the rioters were tearing up our campus and brutally beating the students.’²¹

Over subsequent days, complaints about police inaction poured into the mayor’s office. ‘[The police] were mingling amiably on the steps of City Hall with the construction workers while the students were brutally beaten’, a telegram from Deputy Manhattan Borough President Leonard Cohen complained. The New York Civil Liberties Union alleged that ‘police stood around passively and, in some instances, joined in the assaults’. Statistics reinforce that allegation: despite over seventy people being treated for injuries, just six arrests were made, only two for assault. Lindsay, absent from City Hall on the day, was furious at the complicity of the police in the riot. At a subsequent press conference he expressed his disgust at the way the public had ‘witnessed a breakdown of the police as the barrier between them and wanton violence’. The obvious went unmentioned: the police felt class solidarity with the hardhats and were disinclined to help students, the source of so much aggravation over the previous five years. This was payback for the riots at Columbia two years earlier.²²

Trade union leaders, while officially condemning the violence, cleverly tried to exploit it. Chief among them was Peter Brennan, head of the Greater New York Building and Construction Trades Council. Though he ridiculed allegations that employers had organized the riot, he made no secret of his support for hardhats, who were ‘fed up with the violence by anti-war demonstrators, by those who spat at the American flag and desecrated it’. He warned that ‘any child’ who disparaged the United States should not be surprised if patriotic workers objected. ‘Violence by [protesters] can bring violence by our people.’23

Brennan felt that ‘a few ruffians [had] opened the door to some sanity’. He hoped for a backlash against Lindsay who, in conjunction with business leaders, building contractors and civil rights activists, had tried to increase opportunities for minorities within the construction industry. In 1967, the six most highly skilled building trades had minority membership of just 2 per cent. ‘Why the hell should I work with spades’, one worker asked rhetorically, ‘when they are threatening to burn down my house?’ That attitude prompted Lindsay to push through Executive Order 1971, requiring companies competing for municipal contracts to adopt affirmative action policies. The Nixon administration followed suit with the Philadelphia Plan, a scheme to increase minority membership in the skilled building trades to 20 per cent within five years. Brennan, uncertain how to stop these measures, was delighted when hardhats showed him the way.²⁴

Brennan sensed that working-class political sympathies were shifting. The day after the riots the New York Times carried a photo of a construction worker and a stockbroker together chasing down a hippie – a neat encapsulation of that shift. Blue-collar workers, previously dedicated Democrats, had grown disenchanted with liberal politicians, who were blamed for civil rights legislation, welfare reforms and campus unrest. Workers felt marginalized by the alliance between poor blacks and liberal whites that had dominated politics in the 1960s. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had not seemed great to them. As one observer of the New York riots proclaimed, ordinary workers ‘are almost the only segment of the population the government hasn’t paid much attention to . . . they [are] in a kind of limbo’.²⁵

A chief complaint of the urban worker related to the money spent on welfare. At shipyards and construction sites, blue-collar workers listened in delight to Guy Drake’s ‘Welfare Cadillac’ (1970), a hit song satirizing a benefit scrounger who, as a result of the generosity of the ‘guvment’, has enough spare cash to buy himself a brand-new luxury car. ‘I’m working my ass off’, one blue-collar worker complained, ‘and I’m supposed to bleed for a bunch of people on relief?’ The same contempt was directed against students who enjoyed generous scholarships but seemed to spend their time in constant complaint against their world. ‘If I had a chance to get an education,’ a worker remarked, ‘I wouldn’t be wasting my time on the streets.’26

Vietnam also rankled. While hardhat rhetoric suggests unwavering support for the war, the reality was more complicated. Throughout the war, the wealthy and educated were more likely to be supportive than those of low income and limited education. ‘The whole goddamn country of South Vietnam is not worth the life of one American boy, no matter what the hell our politicians tell us,’ one construction worker complained in 1970. ‘I’m damn sick and tired of watching those funeral processions go by.’ But disagreement with the war’s purpose seldom extended to active protest. Most workers still adhered to the sacred tenet of ‘my country, right or wrong’. What they objected to was the way their class had endured the lion’s share of the fighting – and dying – without much recognition of their sacrifice. This explains their desperate desire to believe in Nixon’s promise of peace with honour, which they hoped would give their sacrifices meaning. It also explains their anger toward privileged middle-class students who avoided military service and protested against the war. ‘Here were these kids, rich kids,’ one tradesman remarked, ‘who didn’t have to fight, they are telling you your son died in vain. It makes you feel like your whole life is shit, just nothing.’²⁷

Blue-collar outrage was summarized in the ‘America: Love It or Leave It’ sticker pasted on bumpers and lunch pails. Displeasure was also manifested in the popularity of patriotic country music in outposts far beyond Nashville and the Southwest. Merle Haggard’s attack upon the counterculture in ‘Okie from Muskogee’ (1969) was partly tongue in cheek, but it still harmonized perfectly with blue-collar indignation. Haggard followed up the success of ‘Okie’ with ‘The Fightin’ Side of Me’, a suitably virile attack upon the ‘squir-relly guys’ who enjoy America’s riches but disparage the way of life soldiers had fought to preserve. The song, released four months before the incidents in New York, provided the perfect backing track to hardhat violence.

Ronald Reagan had capitalized on blue-collar alienation in his brilliantly successful gubernatorial campaign in California in 1966, the first real indication that working-class support for the Democrats was haemorrhaging. A further hint that times were changing came in the 1968 presidential election, when the third party candidate George Wallace polled a surprising 13.5 per cent of the vote. While Wallace’s support was concentrated in the Deep South, his bigoted conservatism had sufficient appeal among workers in the North and Midwest to scupper Hubert Humphrey’s presidential bid.

Though Nixon lacked Reagan’s populist charm, he was nevertheless determined to woo the ‘forgotten Americans’ who ‘died to keep us free . . . give drive to the spirit of America . . . [and] give life to the American dream’. He directed the party faithful to go after the ‘disaffected Democrats . . . blue-collar workers and . . . working-class white ethnics’. Courting the blue-collar vote, he understood, was time-consuming but not expensive. Workers who were already in stable jobs did not want costly federal programmes; they wanted economic stability instead and a reassurance that their taxes would not be wasted on welfare. They also wanted simple recognition of their sacrifices, particularly in Vietnam. Recognition of this sort came in Nixon’s ‘Silent Majority’ speech of 3 November 1969. Drawing reference to a huge anti-war rally that took place nineteen days earlier, he divided the nation into those he could trust and those he could not. ‘And so . . . to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans – I ask for your support,’ he concluded. The New York Times correctly sensed that the speech had been written for a ‘large and normally undemonstrative cross-section of the country that until last night refrained from articulating its opinions on the war’. In other words, Nixon had courted ordinary Americans simply by acknowledging their existence. After the speech, Gallup found that 75 per cent of those polled thought that the term ‘silent majority’ referred to those people who believed that ‘protesters have gone too far’.28

A second large anti-war demonstration occurred on 15 November. Warming to his populist role, Nixon claimed that he hadn’t noticed the protest because he was watching a football game. Toward the same end, he invited Haggard and Johnny Cash to the White House, though he insulted the latter by asking him to sing ‘Welfare Cadillac’. In his efforts to achieve the common touch, Nixon was helped immensely by his pit-bull vice-president, Spiro Agnew, a man never fearful of sounding bigoted or stupid. ‘The time has come’, the vice-president remarked, ‘for someone . . . to represent the workingmen of this country.’ ‘We must look to how we are raising our children,’ he remarked after Kent State. ‘They are, for the most part, the children of affluent, permissive, upper-middle-class parents who learned their Dr. Spock and threw discipline out the window – when they should have done the opposite.’ At university, Agnew claimed, these coddled children encountered ‘a smiling and benign faculty even less demanding than [their] parents’. Students inclined to violent protest, he concluded, belonged ‘not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary’.²⁹

While Nixon and Agnew courted hardhats, Brennan courted Nixon and Agnew. To this end, he organized a pro-war march of around 100,000 construction workers and their supporters in New York on 20 May, a reiteration of hardhat patriotism without the confusing subtext of violence. Marchers carried banners that read: ‘WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW’, ‘GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT’, and the more colourful ‘LINDSAY DROPS THE FLAG MORE TIMES THAN A WHORE DROPS HER PANTS’. A typical sentiment was voiced by John D’Anella, a RCA technician. ‘Maybe the students are smarter than we are,’ he told a reporter, ‘but they have no right to burn down buildings. We love our flag. We love our country. If they destroy the flag, they are destroying our way of life.’ Marching nearby was Mrs Allison Greaker and her two young children. ‘We’re part of the silent majority that’s finally speaking,’ she told a reporter. She thought the march provided the perfect reply ‘to the creeps and the bums that have been hollering and marching against the President’. So, too, did the mere presence of her infant son – little Richard Nixon Greaker.30

‘We’re supporting the President and the country,’ Brennan explained, ‘not because he’s for labor, because he isn’t, but because he’s our President, and we’re hoping that he’s right.’ That sentiment delighted Agnew, who congratulated Brennan on ‘a spirit of pride in country that seems to have become unfashionable’. Six days later, Brennan and his staff were guests at the White House, where they presented the president with a hardhat labelled ‘Commander in Chief’. Accepting the gift, Nixon said that the hardhat had become ‘a symbol, along with our great flag, for freedom and patriotism’. Nixon carefully explained to the group that the invasion of Cambodia had been necessary to protect ‘our boys’. One Brennan aide, who had lost a son in Vietnam, responded: ‘Mr. President, if someone would have had the courage to go into Cambodia sooner, they might have captured the bullet that took my son’s life.’ As Nixon aide Charles Colson recorded, ‘The President was visibly moved.’³¹

After the visit, Colson, who had been placed in charge of attracting trade union support, predicted that workers would flock to Nixon in 1972. Unlike those workers, however, Brennan could not be bought with simple rhetoric. Assistant Labor Secretary Arthur Fletcher suspected that behind the 25 May demonstration lurked Brennan’s cunning strategy to ‘get inside the White House and be a formidable opponent to the Philadelphia plan’. That suspicion proved warranted. On Labor Day (7 September), Brennan returned to the White House for a private meeting with Nixon. A short time later, the New York Plan was announced – Lindsay’s affirmative action goals for the construction industry were cut from 4,000 minority workers to just 800. In April 1972, Brennan offered another deal: he would mobilize hardhats in support of Nixon’s re-election in exchange for nationwide implementation of the New York Plan. Nixon welcomed the offer, in part because of the disappointing Republican results in the mid-term elections of November 1970, which suggested that worker loyalty to the Democrats remained strong. After Nixon’s landslide victory, Brennan was appointed Labor Secretary, a position he used to undermine affirmative action.32

The media had already sensed that a tectonic shift was occurring in American politics. A month before the ‘Silent Majority’ speech, Newsweek wrote:

All through the skittish 1960s, America has been almost obsessed with its alienated minorities – the incendiary black militant and the welfare mother, the hedonistic hippie and the campus revolutionary. But now the pendulum of public attention is in the midst of one of those great swings that profoundly change the way the nation thinks about itself. Suddenly, the focus is on the citizen who outnumbers, outvotes, and could, if he chose to, outgun the fringe rebel. After years of feeling himself a besieged minority, the man in the middle – representing America’s vast white middle class majority – is giving vent to his frustration, his disillusionment – and his anger.

On 5 January 1970, Time named the ‘Middle Americans’ its Men and Women of the Year. The magazine explained that ‘In a time of dissent and “confrontation”, the most striking new factor was the emergence of the so-called “Silent Majority” as a powerfully assertive force in U.S. society.’ It noted how this group was suddenly throwing its weight around, either by demanding harsh punishments for student protesters, by defying the Supreme Court ban on prayer in schools, or simply by displaying a ‘SPIRO IS MY HERO’ bumper sticker. ‘By their silent but newly felt presence, they influenced the mood of government and the course of legislation, and thus began to shape the course of the nation and the nation’s course in the world.’³³

‘Who precisely are the Middle Americans?’ Time asked. ‘They are defined as much by what they are not as by what they are . . . Above all, Middle America is a state of mind, a morality, a construct of values and prejudices and a complex of fears.’ In the weeks that followed the hardhat riots, an ordinary Joe – specifically the New York construction worker Joe Kelly – gave personality to the new ethos. The only thing unique about him was the fact that he courted attention. When asked whether most Americans supported hardhat violence, he replied that ‘the large majority of people, going as high as 85 to 90 per cent, are more than happy. Not so much for the violence but for the stand we took . . . The construction worker is only an image that’s being used. The hard hat is being used to represent all of the silent majority.’ The media delighted in paying homage to this paragon of American ordinariness. ‘Joe Kelly never thought the picture presented by his hardworking life would need any defense,’ the New York Times Magazine gushed. ‘There is his pretty blonde wife, Karen; two strawberry-blonde daughters, Robin Lynn . . . and Kerry Ann . . . and now a newborn son, James Patrick . . . There is also a collie named Missy and a newly bought brick-and-shingle, two-story, $40,000 house . . . tastefully furnished, with a modern kitchen, and a freshly sodded lawn on one of those breezy Staten Island streets.’ His neighbours were a steamfitter, a bus driver, a policeman and a TV technician, all of whom ‘have had too many peace protests, too many moratoriums, too many harsh laments and shouted obscenities against their country, too many rock throwings and strikes and fires on campuses . . . too many bombings and too many Vietcong flags . . . too many long haired youths and naked boys and girls, too many drugs, too much un-Americanism.’34

Nixon courted the Joe Kellys, and succeeded reasonably well, but it was always hard work. He had, after all, taken violin lessons as a young boy and had been encouraged to believe that he was special. Listening to Merle Haggard, or for that matter Spiro Agnew, was tough going. Not so Ronald Reagan, a more natural hero of middle America. For Reagan, ‘Aw Shucks’ was never artifice; bigotry was as comfortable as blue jeans. On 8 April 1970, Reagan had told reporters: ‘if it takes a bloodbath’ to silence student unrest, ‘let’s get it over with’. When, less than a month later, four students were killed at Kent State, Reagan explained that ‘bloodbath’ had been ‘a figure of speech’.35 In truth, he needn’t have bothered. The Joe Kellys were less inclined to sympathize with Sandy Scheuer than with those who shot her.³⁶

Miami: Anita Bryant and the Moral Majority

Anita Bryant was America’s sweetheart, a woman both sexy and pure. In 1958, she was crowned Miss Oklahoma and, the following year, was second runner-up in the Miss America pageant. Unlike most beauty queens, she possessed some talent, which she converted into a reasonably successful singing career. The big money, however, came from the Florida Citrus Commission. For most of the 1970s Bryant told Americans that, ‘A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.’ Then, quite suddenly, in 1977 Bryant came out – as a bigot.

Her bigotry was directed against gays, who were far too visible for her liking. The Stonewall riots of 1969 had encouraged a new confidence among gays, which had consequences both personal and political. Individually, they felt more confident to come out of the closet. Politically, their newfound solidarity inspired ever more strident demands for rights. Both these developments increased the unease felt among those uncomfortable with homosexuality. The greatest enemy of gay liberation was not the tiny group of extremists who considered homosexuality criminal, but the millions prepared to tolerate gays only if they remained invisible. ‘As long as homosexuals do what they do in private, no problem,’ remarked Shirley Speller-berg, a conservative radio and television commentator in South Florida in the 1970s. ‘But when they start marching in the streets . . . that is too much.’37

After Stonewall, pressure from gay coalitions resulted in many cities passing legislation to protect the civil rights of homosexuals. In 1977, Dade County in Florida joined this bandwagon by introducing an amendment to outlaw discrimination on the basis of ‘affectational or sexual preference’. The measure was sponsored by Ruth Shack, a county commissioner who had earlier achieved the impressive feat of gaining the endorsement of both Anita Bryant and the gay lobby. The former’s support came mainly because Shack’s husband was Bryant’s agent.

The Metro Commission unanimously agreed to move Shack’s amendment forward, which suggested that it would pass smoothly into law. Standing in the way, however, was Robert Brake, a retired legislator, who warned that schools would henceforth be obliged to hire openly homosexual teachers. He decided to force the amendment onto a ballot, a process which first required 10,000 names on a petition. A public meeting was called, at which hundreds of angry Miami residents gathered. Among those attending was Bryant, who felt betrayed by Shack. She delivered a short, rousing speech which convinced Brake that he had found the perfect person to front the campaign to kill the amendment.

Reverend William Chapman, pastor of the conservative Northwest Baptist Church, which Bryant attended, urged her to lead the fight. He publicly stated that he would burn down his parochial school ‘rather than permit a homosexual to teach here’. As Bryant recalls, Chapman warned that ‘special privileges’ would be given to homosexuals. ‘He noted the effect this ordinance would have on private and religious schools . . . The thought of known homosexuals teaching my children especially in a religious school bothered me.’ Chapman told Bryant that God was summoning her. ‘Our pastor said, “She’s God’s mother for America”,’ Bryant’s husband, Bob Green, recalled. ‘He firmly believed that Anita was sent by God, chosen, sent. He indicated to her that as a Christian mother and woman, this was her obligation.’ She concluded: ‘I couldn’t say no to God when His Word is so plain.’38

Encouraged by Chapman, Bryant came to the conclusion that homosexuality was evidence of godlessness. ‘Because he chooses to reject knowledge and suppress the truth and because he refuses to acknowledge that he is morally responsible to a holy God’, she wrote, ‘man falls into gross moral perversion, trampling upon the rights and welfare of others.’ In her first broadside, she attacked the ordinance for ‘infring[ing] upon my rights as a citizen and mother to teach my children and set examples of God’s moral code as stated in the Holy Scriptures’. She promised that ‘Before I yield to this insidious attack on God and his laws . . . I will lead a crusade to stop it as this country has never seen.’39

Within a few weeks, Bryant delivered a petition containing 64,304 signatures, forcing the amendment to a ballot. She had discovered a talent for rousing the rabble, and felt certain that she was indeed a soldier of the Lord. Audiences were repeatedly told that she felt a special duty because her twins, dangerously ill at birth, had been ‘saved by the grace of God’. It therefore seemed a betrayal of his grace to expose them to homosexual teachers. ‘This is not my battle,’ she proclaimed. ‘It’s God’s battle.’ Echoing the familiar refrain, she claimed she had nothing against homosexuals per se, having worked with them in the entertainment industry, but she could not condone the permissiveness implicit in the amendment, which suggested that homosexuality was an acceptable way of life. ‘If homosexuality were . . . normal’, she argued, ‘God would have made Adam and Bruce.’⁴⁰

The Bryant team called their campaign ‘Save Our Children’, intentionally merging homosexuality and paedophilia. A contest originally about civil rights quickly morphed into one about child protection. The Dade amendment ‘discriminates against my children’s rights to grow up in a healthy decent community’, Bryant argued. With intentionally overblown rhetoric, she played to irrational fears. ‘Some of the stories I could tell you of child recruitment and child abuse by homosexuals would turn your stomach.’ A newspaper ad read: ‘recruitment of our children is absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of homosexuality – for since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks . . . And who qualifies as a likely recruit: a 35-year-old father or mother of two . . . or a teenage boy or girl who is surging with sexual awareness?’ An ad in the Miami Herald included a montage of stories about paedophiles, under which ran the message: ‘THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HOMOSEXUAL COIN IS A HAIR-RAISING PATTERN OF RECRUITMENT AND OUTRIGHT SEDUCTION AND MOLESTATION, A GROWING PATTERN THAT PREDICTABLY WILL INTENSIFY IF SOCIETY APPROVES LAWS GRANTING LEGITIMACY TO THE SEXUALLY PERVERTED.’41

The ‘recruitment’ issue caused the campaign to focus particularly on the teaching profession. Sharing a podium with Bryant, a prominent Catholic argued that to allow homosexuals to become teachers was akin to letting ‘a fox in the chicken coop’. Gay teachers, Bryant maintained, posed a double threat. ‘First, . . . [they] could encourage more homosexuality by inducing pupils into looking upon it as an acceptable life-style. And second, a particularly deviant-minded teacher could sexually molest children.’⁴²

Bryant cleverly wove serious messages with flippant humour in order to encourage ridicule. ‘If gays are granted rights,’ she argued, ‘next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nailbiters.’ Intoxicated by the approval of her adoring crowds, she grew increasingly malevolent. At one highly charged rally, she described gays as ‘human garbage’, who demand the right ‘to have intercourse with beasts’. Lending support was the conservative firebrand Jerry Falwell, who warned that ‘So-called gay folks would just as soon kill you as look at you.’ Before long, every publicity-hungry bigot in Dade County was joining Bryant’s choir. A local evangelist asserted that ‘homosexuality is a sin so rotten, so low, so dirty that even cats and dogs don’t practice it’.⁴³

Bryant saw Miami as the first line of defence against the gay invasion. If the amendment won in Dade, that invasion would prove unstoppable. She warned that Congress was about to approve a ‘national homosexuality bill’ making it ‘mandatory nationwide to hire known practicing homosexuals in public schools and in other areas’. That was wild exaggeration, but truth always came second to emotion. ‘The hurt in my heart and the agony in my soul were of such intensity . . . when I heard . . . the news of a national homosexuality bill,’ she told listeners. ‘All I could do was cry.’ Fanning the flames, the conservative columnist George Will warned that the Miami ordinance meant ‘the moral disarmament of society’, with the right of homosexuals to marry coming next.44

Bryant proved an adept political campaigner – photogenic, confident and synthetically honest. Huge donations poured in, allowing her forces to run slickly produced television ads warning of a gay scourge. One in particular juxtaposed wholesome images of Miami’s Orange Bowl parade with footage of a Gay Pride march in San Francisco. The narrator drove home the message: ‘In San Francisco, when they take to the streets, it’s a parade of homosexuals. Men hugging other men. Cavorting with little boys. Wearing dresses and makeup. The same people who turned San Francisco into a hotbed of homosexuality . . . want to do the same thing to Dade.’⁴⁵

‘The campaign’, the Miami Herald remarked with disdain, ‘has all the ingredients, from sex to religion to Anita Bryant bursting into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, for a national media spectacular.’ Ambitious right-wingers like Falwell, Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, Senator Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schlafly boarded her bandwagon. In January, Bryant appeared on Bakker’s nationally broadcast Christian television show, The PTL Club, and, in the following month, headlined Robertson’s 700 Club. Both appearances elicited the heaviest volume of positive mail ever experienced by either programme. Bakker called her ‘the bombshell that exploded over America’, while a Newsweek cover story titled ‘Battle Over Gay Rights’ had a montage of a fierce-looking Bryant against the backdrop of a gay rights parade. The suggestion was clear: she was defending America in a war against deviancy.⁴⁶

‘It breaks my heart’, Shack confessed ‘that we are sending people to the polls to decide whether or not we will discriminate against a segment of the community.’ As a spokesperson for gay rights, she lacked Bryant’s passion and had the disadvantage of being heterosexual. The media, craving flamboyance, wanted someone suitably outrageous to voice the gay argument. Into the fray stepped Bob Kunst, who ran a sexual awareness group called the Transperience Center. He perfectly embodied his own favourite slogan – ‘Better blatant than latent’. To the frightened public, Kunst seemed proof of Bryant’s warnings. She blamed Kunst’s flamboyance on the fact that homosexuals like to swallow sperm, which is ‘the concentrated form of life’.47

Shack watched in horror as an honest piece of liberal legislation was hijacked by two opposing sets of fundamentalists. ‘I introduced this as an antidiscrimination ordinance,’ she remarked ruefully; ‘[Kunst] turned it into a lifestyle discussion. It . . . [became] a discussion of sexuality and bestiality and pedophilia, as opposed to discrimination in the workforce.’ Kunst nevertheless remains unrepentant. ‘There’s no other community in the world that had the debate about sexuality like we did,’ he remarked on the thirtieth anniversary of the campaign. ‘What did we do that was so wrong?’ Blinded by television lights, he failed to notice the damage he caused.⁴⁸

Lesbian and gay activists were slow to react to Bryant’s offensive, for the simple reason that they found it so funny. Certain that the best response was ridicule, hundreds sent postcards to Bryant which read: ‘We are switching to prune juice, and we will send you the results.’ Experience had taught them that homophobics made lots of noise, but were generally unsuccessful in swaying public opinion. Miami, they felt confident, would not stoop to bigotry. That assumption was supported by an early poll showing 42 per cent in favour of the amendment, 33 per cent opposed, and the rest undecided. The National Gay Task Force decided not to join the fight, on the assumption that Bryant would hang herself. ‘The feebleness of her arguments and the embarrassing backwardness of her stance both makes her attacks easier to counteract and tends to generate “liberal” backlash in our favor,’ the group concluded. ‘We can make her rantings work for us just as Sheriff Bull Connor’s cattle prods and police dogs ultimately aided desegregation in the South.’ The Lesbian Tide reflected:

Bryant’s image was not one to strike fear into the heart. Rivalling the Lennon Sisters for blandness, Anita Bryant seemed laughable when she started talking about ‘men wearing dresses’ teaching in public schools, and ‘the devastation of the moral fibre of the youth of America’. Her ignorance of homosexuality was so complete, her prejudice so simplistic, she seemed a ludicrous parody of 1950s style American ‘womanhood’; a sort of ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ gone mad.

What activists did not understand was that Bryant’s ignorance harmonized perfectly with that of ordinary Americans. For them, homosexuality remained mysterious and threatening. It is well to bear in mind that, up until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association had classified homosexuality a mental disorder. The decision to remove that classification was reached only after acrimonious debate. At the APA annual meeting the previous year, a gay psychiatrist had worn a mask while giving a speech advocating reclassification, so that his identity would not be revealed and his career ruined.49

When the gay rights lobby finally recognized Bryant’s danger, a more serious approach evolved. A fund-raising campaign was launched and activists, many from the Bay Area, rushed to Miami. Jim Foster, an aide to San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, soon came to the conclusion that an overtly gay rights campaign ‘has no way of winning’. Focus was instead shifted toward the inviolable nature of freedom. ‘A day without human rights is like a day without sunshine’ became the motto. Echoing that sympathy, Shack argued that, ‘Human rights are not gifts to be distributed to those who meet our approval and withheld from those with whom we disagree.’⁵⁰

Logic, however, could not sway a public baying for blood. Bumper stickers read: ‘KILL A QUEER FOR CHRIST’. Before long, local newspapers lined up behind Bryant. The Miami News, Miami Beach Sun Reporter and the Catholic Miami Voice abandoned moderation. They recycled old stories about gay sex crimes, stories which then made their way into Bryant’s speeches. The Herald was initially more restrained, expressing guarded support for the ordinance. When popular opposition coalesced, however, the paper reversed its stance. An editorial signed by the executive editor, John McMullan, assured readers that the Herald ‘opposed discrimination toward any group, including gays’, but had no intention of ‘endorsing homosexuality’. The furore, he argued, seemed unnecessary. The issue was ‘manufactured . . . concocted, we suspect, by those more interested in flaunting their new deviate freedom than in preventing discrimination which . . . they had not experienced’. Shack’s amendment, in other words, was a waste of money.51

Opponents of the ordinance were generally more emotionally motivated than supporters. Since backing for gay rights among heterosexuals was always lukewarm, the great difficulty lay in getting them to vote. As a result, the amendment was crushed, by a margin of 69 to 31 per cent, on 7 June. That result was probably not an accurate reflection of public sympathy, though it was an indication of Bryant’s ability to rouse fear.

‘Today, the laws of God and the cultural values of man have been vindicated,’ Bryant declared. ‘All America and all the world have heard the people of Miami.’ Posing for photographers, her husband threw his arms around her, kissed her fully on the mouth and shouted: ‘This is what heterosexuals do, fellas.’ Bryant went on to reiterate that Miami was simply the first battle in a long crusade. She would take her show on the road.⁵²

Thanks to Bryant, the idea that gays and lesbians habitually molested children was now commonly accepted. In response to the landslide, the Florida Legislature passed a new law prohibiting gays from adopting children or serving as foster parents. A nationwide Gallup poll found that while a majority believed in equal rights for homosexuals, 65 per cent thought they should be banned from teaching. The Miami campaign provided a template for anti-gay groups around the country. Over the next ten years, forty-four attempts were made to repeal similar antidiscrimination ordinances, with thirty-three successful.⁵³

Bryant had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. She had not simply overturned a local ordinance, she had also inspired a nationwide movement. The Dade result had demonstrated how a populist campaign based on bigotry and fear could motivate the otherwise apathetic to go to the polls. The chief beneficiary was Falwell, who quickly colonized the constituency Bryant had identified. At a meeting of like-minded conservatives in 1979, the campaigner Paul M. Weyrich remarked: ‘Jerry, there is in America a moral majority that agrees about the basic issues. But they aren’t organized.’ Weyrich felt that otherwise disparate individuals could be drawn together on the simple issue of morality, thus negating the doctrinal differences that had previously doomed attempts at uniting diverse evangelical groups. ‘I was convinced’, Falwell later wrote, ‘that there was a “moral majority” out there . . . sufficient in number to turn back the flood tide of moral permissiveness, family breakdown and general capitulation to evil and to foreign policies such as Marxism-Leninism.’ While holding aloft a Bible, Falwell shouted: ‘If a man stands by this book, vote for him. If he doesn’t, don’t.’ Within three years of its founding, the Moral Majority had a $10 million budget, 100,000 trained clergymen and several million volunteers. Once mobilized, this powerful political group could be delivered en bloc to approved political candidates. The goal was to ‘get them saved, baptized and registered’. In truth, Falwell was tapping into the constituency already identified by Nixon. ‘God’, he proclaimed, ‘is calling millions of Americans in the so-often silent majority to join in the moral-majority crusade to turn America around.’54

‘We are fighting a holy war,’ Falwell bellowed, ‘and this time we are going to win.’ He promised to turn America into a ‘Christian republic’. ‘The idea that religion and politics don’t mix’, he argued, ‘was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.’ Lending support, the evangelist James Robinson blasted those who called themselves ‘pro-family’ but refused to fight for family values: ‘I’m sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals, and the perverts and the liberals, and the leftists, and the communists coming out of the closet. It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet, out of the churches, and change America.’⁵⁵

There were, however, limits to what mobilized moral righteousness could achieve. A year after the Dade result, Bryant was in California, campaigning with Falwell on behalf of a ballot proposition that would ban gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools. That proved a bridge too far, as evidenced by the fact that opposition was voiced by both the arch-liberal Harvey Milk and the conservative Ronald Reagan. The former governor and would-be presidential candidate was happy to accept the support of the Christian right, but was reluctant to disturb his populist constituency by pushing through divisive legislation.

Bryant eventually discovered that she could not be both a conservative politician and a popular entertainer. Uncomfortable with controversy, the Florida Citrus Commission did not renew her contract. In quick succession, NBC replaced her as host of the Orange Bowl Parade and a planned television series was dropped because of ‘the extensive national publicity arising from the controversial activities you have engaged in’. Her anti-gay campaign drew to a close in 1979 when her two organizations, Anita Bryant Ministries and Protect America’s Children, collapsed due to mismanagement. The dream of fronting a nationwide campaign was never realized, due primarily to the fact that she lacked the emotional fortitude to handle the hatred she inspired. Addicted to love, she soon tired of politics, and tried instead to deliver her message by other means. A song called ‘There’s Nothing Like the Love Between a Man and a Woman’ demonstrated, however, that bigotry put to music had limited appeal.56

Reacting to the demonization of Bryant, the New York Times lambasted ‘Miami homosexualdom’ for demonstrating ‘how quickly a minority that had suffered discrimination of its own will use its newly won position to suppress and punish its critics’. Like so much of America, the paper preferred gays to be silent. But behind that broadside lay an important observation. Gays were speaking out, and they had Bryant to thank. ‘It was the beginning of two movements, the Christian Coalition and gay rights,’ Shack now feels. The Dade County debacle had starkly demonstrated that rights would not be granted without a fight. A more assertive and significantly more organized movement evolved. ‘In a completely unintended way, Anita Bryant was about the best thing to happen to the gay rights movement,’ feels John Coppola, a curator at the Stonewall Center. ‘She and her cohorts were so over the top that it just completely galvanized the gay rights movement.’ Among many homosexuals, Anita Bryant is affectionately remembered as the godmother of the gay rights movement.57

In Bed: Coming for Christ

In mid-Seventies America, good Christian women took to wrapping their naked bodies in cling film, the better to titillate their husbands. The idea was inspired by Marabel Morgan, whose answer to marital discontent was not to revolt but to submit. ‘Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord,’ she advised, quoting Ephesians. ‘It is only when a wife surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him, and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him . . . she becomes a priceless jewel, the glory of femininity, his queen.’58

While there was nothing particularly new about wifely submission within Christian fundamentalist circles, what made Morgan different was that thorny issue of sex. She was the freak offspring of two otherwise disparate movements: the conservative evangelical revival and the Sixties sexual revolution. Morgan advised discontented women to put ‘sizzle back into your marriage’ by ‘plugging into God as the power source’. Religion offered a shining path to great sex and marital bliss.⁵⁹

Morgan spoke from personal experience. In the mid-1960s, she was living her dream – nice home, loving husband, secure future. ‘I played wife. It was fun cooking . . . folding his shirts, doing my little fairy tale stuff . . . life was strawberries for breakfast and lovin’ all the time.’ Then came the babies. ‘Our lives became more complicated, and we gradually changed . . . I was helpless and unhappy.’ She struggled with a ‘nameless, intangible enemy that I could not define or fight’ – a malaise not unlike the ‘problem that has no name’ Betty Friedan identified in The Feminine Mystique. Morgan’s solution, however, was entirely different.⁶⁰

At first, she tried assertiveness: she pursued her own interests, objected to her husband’s dominance, argued, argued, argued. ‘I really tried to insist on my rights and demand what I thought was due me.’ Contentment remained elusive, however, and her marriage steadily unravelled. ‘At the rate we were going, 10 years from now we would hate each other!’ She then shifted focus. ‘I’d tried to change Charlie, and that hadn’t worked. Now I would have to change me.’ Self-help books, bought in desperation, proved less useful than her own, irrepressible, can-do logic. ‘A great marriage is not so much finding the right person’, she decided, ‘as being the right person.’61

The first step was to please Charlie sexually. ‘[He] was looking for me to make him happy when he came home, and I began to do it.’ On Day One of the new Marabel, she finished her housework early, pampered herself with a bubble bath, slipped on a baby doll nightie and white go-go boots, put perfume in the right places and then awaited Charlie’s return. ‘My quiet, reserved, nonexcitable husband took one look, dropped his briefcase on the doorstep, and chased me around the dining room table. We were in stitches by the time he caught me, and breathless with that old feeling of romance.’ The process was repeated over subsequent days, with costume changes keeping the adventure alive. Sex kitten morphed into pirate, then into cowgirl, then into harem slave. The ‘super sex’ brought instant rewards. A week into the new regime, ‘I was stunned to see a truck pull up with a new refrigerator-freezer . . . Now, without being nagged, [Charlie] was beginning to give me what I yearned for.’ He even let her redecorate the family room. ‘I saw how hard she was trying,’ he explained, ‘and I couldn’t help but respond.’⁶²

Submission came easily because Morgan sincerely believed that God had ‘planned for the woman to be under her husband’s rule’. Though always religious, true fulfilment had come when she was born again. ‘I asked him to take me and he took me. There was no bolt of lightning, only peace. I was tickled to death.’ Her relationship with Christ had an erotic quality. ‘Getting married or raising children doesn’t completely fulfill a woman. [God] is the only One who can make you complete . . . A beautiful spiritual transaction occurs when a mortal woman tells an immortal Saviour what’s bothering her . . . He whispers in her mind, “Dare to trust Me.” And timidly she assents yes, and peace comes.’63

Morgan’s friends, intrigued by the change that had occurred, demanded to know the secret. ‘At night women would call every half-hour until midnight,’ Charlie recalled. ‘I was about to go up the wall.’ By 1971, she was giving Total Woman seminars around the country and was a frequent guest on the Phil Donahue Show. She franchised her method, training counsellors to teach submission at $15 per course. Among her students were Mrs Jack Nicklaus, Mrs Joe Frazier and Anita Bryant. ‘Her enthusiasm is so contagious, so upbeat and optimistic,’ Bryant remarked, ‘I just knew all that womanliness was bound to rub off on me.’⁶⁴

In 1973, her first book, Total Woman, was published. It was marketed by word of mouth and through the courses, for which it was required reading. To everyone’s surprise, it became the most successful non-fiction title of 1974, outselling All the President’s Men. Three other books quickly followed, including the Total Woman Cookbook, which included the ‘You Tiger You’ menu and the ‘Reconcile Feast’. As a result of her success, People magazine named her one of the twenty-five ‘most influential’ Americans of 1975. ‘What a gal!’ wrote one (male) correspondent to Time. ‘Her concerns, beliefs and fresh, wholesome image are a welcome relief from the hardcore, ego-stomping, stern-looking, rebellious feminists.’⁶⁵

Total Woman reads like a neighbour’s warm-hearted advice offered over the back fence. That perhaps explains its success. Homespun homilies blend with practical suggestions. ‘A merry heart helps melt away the troubles,’ Morgan advises. Harriet Habit and Phoebe Phobia – mortal enemies of marital harmony – are introduced. Another enemy is inefficiency: women who organize their days with military precision easily find time to seduce their husbands. A slovenly wife, on the other hand, is usually ‘too tired to be available to him’.⁶⁶

‘A Total Woman is not a slave,’ Morgan insists. ‘She graciously chooses to adapt to her husband’s way, even though at times she desperately may not want to. He in turn will gratefully respond by trying to make it up to her and grant her desires. He may even want to spoil her with goodies.’ Submit, the book advises, or you might lose him. ‘A man needs to be accepted as he is, just exactly as he is.’ There was no secret in why men occasionally strayed. ‘Many a husband rushes off to work leaving his wife slumped over a cup of coffee in her grubby undies. His once sexy bride is now wrapped in rollers and smells like bacon and eggs. All day long he’s surrounded at the office by dazzling secretaries who emit clouds of perfume.’ The book offers four simple steps to marital bliss – ‘Accept Him, Admire Him, Adapt to Him, Appreciate Him’. The wife who baulks risks being cut adrift. Divorce lurks like a demon on every page. ‘Carl has since found someone else to enjoy his exciting new way of life with him,’ one parable concludes. ‘In your marriage it only makes sense for both of you to paddle in the same direction. Otherwise, you’ll only go in circles – or like Carl, he may pull out and go downstream.’67

Helpful hints are delivered in woodpecker rhythm: ‘be touchable and kissable’, ‘remove all prickly hairs and be squeaky clean’, keep your hands moving and moan a lot during intercourse, bolster a man’s ego by letting him open jars, use dental floss, be ready for intercourse every night, put sexy notes in hubby’s lunch box, call him at work and say ‘I crave your body’. Variety is essential: have sex under the dining room table, on bales of hay, on the diving board or a trampoline; use lotions, candles, music and toys. Those too shy to buy nipple tassels should try using tea bags. Husbands also like partners driven ditzy by love. For instance, the wife should propose sex in a hammock. When he says: ‘We don’t have a hammock’, she can then reply: ‘Oh, darling, I forgot!’⁶⁸

‘It’s a struggle to submit’, Morgan admits, ‘but it’s worth it.’ Husbands are by nature despots; whether they are benevolent depends on the wife. By submitting, women are rewarded with a comfortable home, a stable marriage, great sex and unexpected presents. ‘He has never brought me a gift before’, one satisfied student wrote, ‘but this past week he bought me two nighties, two rose bushes, and a can opener!’ Critics accused Morgan of turning marriage into a manipulative system of barter. ‘The image of women . . . is an ultimately demeaning one,’ wrote the journalist Joyce Maynard, ‘it represents women as weak and empty-headed complainers, obsessed with material possessions.’ One young woman, writing to Time, confessed that she found Morgan ‘more dangerous to my liberty than either the Soviet Union or Communist China’. Unapologetic, Morgan countered: ‘if I do something because I want to, because it gives joy, I’m not being manipulative at all’.69

Give and you shall receive, she insisted. After all, it was not just men who benefited from great sex. Orgasms were little gifts from God; sex was as ‘clean and pure as . . . cottage cheese’. This advice departed sharply from traditional evangelicals who held that sex was devilish. ‘Sexuality is nature’s strongest competitor for . . . loyalty to Christ,’ argued the fundamentalist Lewis Smedes. ‘You cannot love God and sex.’ Morgan, in contrast, argued that loving sex was loving God. Sex, as long as it occurred within marriage, was divine. Women might, however, have to teach their husbands a few things: ‘Have him apply rhythmic pressure [to the clitoris] and don’t give up.’⁷⁰

Where Morgan led, others followed; top shelves at Christian bookshops were suddenly populated with titles like Tough and Tender, Celebration in the Bedroom, The Gift of Sex and Intended for Pleasure, all of which maintained that sex was holy. In Do Yourself a Favor: Love Your Wife, Pastor H. Page Williams urged husbands to discuss sex with their wives. ‘It is in talking . . . that you let her take off your clothes, so to speak. She “talks off” your shirt of self-righteousness, your pants of self-sufficiency, your undershorts of self-pity. This is what stimulates her sexually.’ ‘Every wife has the right to be loved to orgasm,’ advised Reverend Tim LaHaye, writing with his wife Beverley. He suggested that guidance on clitoral stimulation could be found in Song of Solomon and that penetration should be delayed in order to ‘increase the possibility for both to experience orgasm’. Clifford and Joyce Penner promoted oral sex, while Reverend Charles Shedd and his wife Martha championed anal penetration. They were also rather fond of sex toys, boasting to Phil Donahue about their ‘whole drawerful’ of vibrators.⁷¹

Despite the acknowledgement of female sexual needs, these authors did not stray from the central premise that women should submit. Helen Andelin, a Mormon, argued that submission would give women a ‘strange but righteous power over your man’. In her Fascinating Womanhood classes, students were encouraged to act and dress like little girls. One lesson focused on ‘how to be cute, even adorable when you are angry’. ‘Stomp your foot. Or, beat your fists on your husband’s chest, pouting: “You hairy beast . . . How can a great big man like you pick on a poor little helpless girl? I’ll tell your mother on you.”’ Therapists advised that the husband needed to feel superior, especially intellectually, even when he wasn’t. ‘There aren’t many things more upsetting to the male ego than a female super-brain,’ one book advised.72

In stark contrast to feminists, these advisers suggested that liberation would come through vulnerability. Beverley LaHaye urged wives to emulate Christ’s ‘willingness to be humbled, to be obedient unto death, and to be submissive . . . As the woman humbles herself (dies to self) and submits to her husband (serves him) she begins to find herself.’ She related the joy she derived from tidying up after her husband. ‘I was serving the Lord Jesus by doing this . . . It was almost a time of devotion each day as I lovingly picked up those blessed dirty socks.’ When her husband began picking up his own socks she was distraught. ‘Oh, how I missed those socks. I still get to take them from the clothes hamper and put them into the washing machine. May I do it heartily as unto the Lord!’ Accepted wisdom held that women who refused to submit were asking to be abused. ‘Wife-beating is on the rise because men are no longer leaders in their homes,’ one minister argued. ‘I tell the women they must go back home and be more submissive. I know this works, because the women don’t come back.’⁷³

The arguments of Morgan, LaHaye and others dovetailed nicely with the anti-feminist campaign conducted by Phyllis Schlafly. She was the Moral Majority’s Wonder Woman – a hugely successful lawyer and politician who had never placed any of her six children in daycare. Feminists, she sneered, ‘tell . . . women they are victims . . . Men are the enemy; if you go in the workforce, you will never be paid what you ought to be paid; and if you get married, your husband will probably beat you up.’ In 1972 Schlafly published an article entitled ‘What’s Wrong with “Equal Rights” for Women?’, which set in motion the nationwide campaign to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The ERA, which sailed through Congress in 1971, was making steady progress toward ratification by the individual states when the Schlafly juggernaut stopped it dead in its tracks.74

Schlafly began her attack with reference to biological inevitability. The position of women in society, she argued, ‘is based on the fact of life – which no legislation or agitation can erase – that women have babies and men don’t’. She then went on to argue that women, because of these biological differences, enjoyed special privileges. ‘Our Judeo-Christian civilization has developed the law and custom that, since women must bear the physical consequences of the sex act, men must be required to bear the other consequences and pay in other ways.’ Feminists, she warned, threatened to undermine that beautiful symbiosis. Equal rights would mean equal suffering; women would have to bear unpleasant burdens heretofore shouldered exclusively by men. ‘Why should we lower ourselves to “equal rights” when we already have the status of special privilege?’ If the ERA succeeded, Schlafly warned, women would lose the right to child support and alimony, they would be forced to serve in the military and they would lose their dower right to their husband’s property in the event of divorce. Lending support, others argued that no-fault divorce made it easier for husbands to ‘run off with their secretaries’. In other words, ‘the women’s movement is turning into men’s liberation’.⁷⁵

The family, Schlafly argued, ‘gives a woman the physical, financial and emotional security of the home – for all her life’. Rather like Morgan, she argued that the home was not a pit of oppression, but a place where women could find fulfilment. Homes had become all the more idyllic because of the labour-saving devices produced by the ‘inventive geniuses’ (i.e. men) inspired by American free enterprise. ‘The great heroes of women’s liberation are not the straggly-haired women on television talk shows and picket lines, but Thomas Edison . . . or Clarence Birdseye . . . or Henry Ford.’ Liberation came not through votes but vacuum cleaners.⁷⁶

‘Women’s libbers’, argued Schlafly ‘are waging a total assault on the family, on marriage and on children.’ Lending support, the child psychologist James Dobson advised that ‘children need their mothers [at home] more than they do a newer car or a larger house’. Liberated women were, in other words, destroying the family, the very bedrock of American society. ‘We are now raising a generation of children from broken homes’, warned Reader’s Digest, ‘and creating a social time bomb.’ Schlafly saw the campaign for equal rights as a conspiracy ‘to make wives and mothers unhappy with their career, make them feel that they are “second-class citizens” and “abject slaves”. Women’s libbers are promoting free sex instead of the “slavery” of marriage. They are promoting Federal “day-care centers” instead of homes. They are promoting abortions instead of families.’ Feminism, like communism, was ‘godless’. The brilliance of Schlafly’s campaign lay in its smooth transition from the particular to the general, household matters became national issues. By attacking feminism, she defended family and nation. The state, she argued, should buttress the family by outlawing abortion, making divorce difficult, restoring traditional educational standards, supporting prayer in schools, and by demonstrating its disapproval of homosexuality. In other words, government should go to war against ‘deviancy’, while leaving ‘normal’ people alone. ‘The bottom line of the pro-family people’, she stated, ‘is to get the federal government off our backs.’77

‘We’re not trying to jam our moral philosophy down the throats of others,’ argued Falwell. ‘We’re simply trying to keep others from jamming their amoral philosophies down our throats.’ Anti-ERA activists argued that a ‘tiny minority of dissatisfied, highly vocal, militant’ feminists were trying to abolish the right of women to ‘to stay at home, to rear your children, to be supported by your husband’. The ‘war on the family’, Schlafly maintained, ‘deliberately degrades the homemaker’. ‘There are sufficient men to be Presidents and not nearly enough women to be good mothers,’ counselled Andelin. This line of argument exposed a significant weakness within the feminist movement, namely its inability to recognize that some women genuinely took pride in being good housewives and mothers. Feminists of the 1970s tended to see the home as a prison that needed to be escaped if true liberation was to occur. In Let Me Be a Woman, evangelist Elisabeth Elliot countered that ‘“Equal opportunity” nearly always implies that women want to do what men do . . . which indicates that prestige is attached to men’s work but not to women’s. Women’s work, particularly the task assigned by Creation exclusively to women, that of bearing and nurturing children, is regarded not only as of lesser value but even degrading.’78

‘Women don’t want to imitate the male pattern of obsessive work ending up with a heart attack and an engraved wrist watch,’ wrote the feminist Gloria Steinem in 1971. ‘We want to humanize the work pattern, to make new, egalitarian life-styles.’ That might have been true in theory, but in practice feminists too often measured women’s progress in relation to men, ignoring the fact that men’s lives were far from perfect. As a result, women who either did not aspire to the male standard of success, or felt incapable of achieving it, had difficulty seeing what feminism could offer. No wonder, then, that Morgan became so popular; she gave these women the opportunity to feel pride in their accomplishments. ‘So many women get “testy” when discussing [submission],’ wrote Beverley LaHaye. ‘All they can think of is their downtrodden rights. Has it ever occurred to you that God would never have asked you to submit to your husband unless he had a need for your respect and admiration?’ Marriages were failing, argued Morgan, because the distinctions between men and women had become blurred. Women were seeking careers, rejecting motherhood, expecting equality. They were becoming too ‘masculine’. ‘God ordained man to be the head of the family, its president, and his wife to be the executive vice-president,’ she wrote. By rededicating themselves to traditional roles, women would find marital harmony and empowerment. The husband, no longer feeling threatened, would learn to adore his wife.⁷⁹

Thanks in large part to the efforts of Schlafly, the ERA eventually failed, falling three states short of ratification when the final deadline passed on 30 June 1982. While feminists cried foul, railing against a right-wing conspiracy of chauvinist men and quisling women, the failure had much to do with feminism itself. The movement of the 1970s never quite figured out how to recognize the dignity of motherhood, or the desire of some women to be home-makers. Central to the feminist thesis was the principle that ‘a woman’s role as a wife and as the socializer of children acts as a stunting influence on her creativity’, or, as the feminist Laurel Limpus wrote: ‘Men are encouraged to play out their lives in the realm of transcendence, whereas women are confined to immanence. This simply means that men work, create, do things, are in positions of authority, create their own histories; whereas women are confined to the home, where their function is not to create, but to maintain.’ An assembly line worker would undoubtedly have been perplexed to discover that his job offered transcendence, just as a mother would be intrigued to find that rearing a child required no creativity. No wonder, then, that so many women found feminism threatening and so many men found it ridiculous. The futile campaign by radical feminists to make gender irrelevant would eventually inspire a new group to march in a different direction: the cultural feminists of the 1990s were essentialists who emphasized and celebrated female qualities. Morgan went down that road, but unfortunately brought with her the baggage of dependence and subservience.80

‘I don’t know why Total Woman should be a threat to feminists,’ Morgan remarked, with that coy ingenuousness that Charlie loved. ‘I’m for women’s liberation in that it opens up more options. But marriage and children is also an option. When I share with other women what happened to me, I give them hope.’ That was probably true. For many women, the simple solutions and limited empowerment offered by Morgan seemed a great deal more realistic (and a lot less scary) than the grandiose ambitions of feminists. ‘You don’t have to be a doormat anymore,’ Mary Morris, the quintessential happy housewife, argued in the documentary Who Will Save the Children? ‘That’s not what submission means. It means we’re equal but we each have certain things we do better than the other. Like diapers. I change diapers better than he does.’ State legislators – the men who decided whether or not to ratify the ERA – interpreted the popularity of Morgan’s advice as evidence that many women didn’t want equal rights.81

This was a tale of ‘do as I say, not as I do’. Schlafly became one of the most powerful women in America by telling women they did not need liberating. Morgan became a multimillionaire by teaching women to be submissive. Yet her peculiar brand of erotic domesticity had eventually to be sacrificed in favour of her career. ‘I haven’t had a bubble bath in years,’ she complained in 1977. That was a lesson in itself. Perhaps without realizing it, Morgan had demonstrated the importance of women having a choice. ‘After another long, depressing day as a secretary, my spirits were lifted by reading your article on the Total Woman,’ one correspondent wrote to Time. ‘I am no longer embarrassed that my goal in life is to be a wife and mother, rather than pound a typewriter or even be an executive. But I am also grateful to the women’s liberation movement for allowing me the chance to choose.’⁸²