Kanawha County Textbook War, a Look Back

[LadyTevar]

Link

August 21, 2009
Kanawha County Textbook War was pivotal to life in America today
Events called omen of 'rightward shift' from '60s liberal radicalism

Kanawha County Textbook War Reunion page is here.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Bishop Avis Hill can't help feeling a little like a pioneer these days.

All across the country, he has seen people organizing, rallying and demonstrating: brandishing tea bags in the April rain to protest taxes, gathering to condemn a congressional energy bill and shouting down politicians at raucous public meetings on health care.

For Hill and others planning a reunion today in South Charleston, the current clamor is the fruit from seeds they planted 35 years ago during what's become known as the Kanawha County Textbook War.

"We were a sleeping giant in the '70s," Hill said. "If we'd had the Internet in the '70s, things would have been different."

Hill, who recently retired as pastor of a nondenominational church in Florida, was one of the leaders of a protest movement that sprouted in the summer of 1974 over a seemingly routine bit of business: new textbooks being adopted by the Kanawha County Board of Education.

Before it was over, schools had been bombed, coal mines had been idled by strikes and American politics got an early look at a strain of conservative populism that continues today.

"Without a doubt, the textbook controversy heralded the post-1960s rightward shift in American culture and politics," said Carol Mason, an Oklahoma State University professor whose book about the controversy, "Reading Appalachia From Left to Right," was published this month by Cornell University Press.

Protesters initially objected to new multicultural content, along with material they called anti-American and anti-Christian. Before long, rumors had grown far beyond the textbooks' actual content. A newspaper photo from the era shows one picket with a sign proclaiming, "I have the Bible, I don't need those dirty books."

In September 1974, about 3,500 coal miners walked off the job in support of the textbook protests. Pickets halted city bus service, disrupted construction projects and held up delivery of groceries all across Southern West Virginia.

The protests also spawned violence. Picket lines occasionally erupted into rock throwing and fistfights; school buses and pickets were shot at; a UPS employee was lucky to survive after being shot in the chest; and schools and the board of education's headquarters were bombed.

At one point, the school superintendent canceled all classes countywide. Even when classes resumed, many parents kept their children home to protest textbooks, while others observed the boycott out of fear of reprisal.

"A lot of the people were passionate, but I want to separate them from the very small number of people passionate enough to do something criminal," said Karl Priest, who was at the time a protester and a Kanawha County schoolteacher.

Protest veterans today have tempered their passion somewhat. Hill, 66, had a pacemaker implanted two years ago, and said part of the motivation for the reunion is to assemble while most of the protesters are still alive. Instead of fiery speeches, Hill is asking people to bring lawn chairs and a covered dish.

"It's really just a good, old country picnic," Priest said.

The memories from those days are still potent, though, and not just for the protesters.

The Rev. Jim Lewis was a young Episcopal priest with four children in public schools in 1974. After he spoke out in favor of the new textbooks, he became seen as a clerical counterpoint to the protesters. For a while, he and his family had round-the-clock police protection because of death threats he'd received.

One night, Lewis said, he checked into a hotel room with his family under an assumed name on the advice of police. He went out to buy doughnuts and ran into a reporter from a local newspaper who warned him to get back inside because textbook foes were looking for him.

"That's how crazy it was," Lewis said.

Mason said many people dismissed the protest as a throwback to early fundamentalism.

"But the controversy actually forged new alliances, tactics and arguments that helped shape not only future curriculum disputes but also a variety of conservative campaigns and right-wing efforts," she said.

People on both sides now agree that it was about more than textbooks.

"We thought we were just objecting to a few books in Kanawha County, but really it was a worldview battle that was going on," Priest said. "The textbook war is not over. It'll go on as long as we have two diametrically opposed worldviews that won't compromise."

[LadyTevar]

And the woman who started it all: Alice Moore
Link

Friday August 21, 2009
Preacher's wife knew firestorm would come
Alice Moore recalls textbook battle some say set off modern conservative movement

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Alice Moore, mother of four, decided at the last minute to run for school board.

It was the final day to file for the 1970 Kanawha County Board of Education election, and she was sitting at the Capitol with a group who opposed sex education classes. After a long day of getting nowhere with the Legislature, someone asked who was going to try to get on the school board.

Moore, who had been thinking about it, didn't have the money in her purse to pay the $5 filing fee. But, nevertheless, someone drove her to the courthouse and paid the fee for her.

"It was just that fast," Moore recalls.

She ran. She won. And four years later, on one unsuspecting April night, Moore helped start one of the strangest, longest conflagrations in West Virginia's short history and, some now say, launched the modern conservative movement.

'I would do it again'

In 1974, along with the political death throes of Richard Nixon and the Arab oil embargo that suddenly had Americans waiting in long lines for gas, the Kanawha County textbook controversy was big news. That's when objections to a new series of textbooks escalated into a bitter, violent clash of cultures.

Now, 35 years later, people are taking another look at what happened. Textbook protestors are holding a reunion Saturday in South Charleston; a scholarly analysis of the controversy has just come out from Cornell University Press; a radio documentary is in the works; and participants from both sides, including Moore, will meet at an October forum in the Culture Center.

But first of all - and for the record - Moore, now 68, says she would do it all again.

"As far as what I did, I have no regrets about taking that issue to the public," she said this week. "I would do that again."

What Moore did, at first, was simply raise questions about 327 new language textbooks a committee of teachers had recommended for county schools. The new textbooks were designed to meet state mandates that they be multiethnic and multiracial.

Moore, who had five children by the time she left the school board, had come to the board less interested in buying buses and erecting buildings than in the quality of education in the classroom.

She was unhappy with what she perceived as the say unelected technocrats had in running the education system, with the secular philosophies being taught in teachers colleges and with the view that teachers were agents of social change.

She saw teachers as school employees, not school leaders.

"They are employees of the school system, they are employees of the parents," Moore said. "Employees don't generally run the company."

When one of the teachers mentioned that the books would include "non-standard English," Moore's interest was piqued.

"What got my attention was the ghetto English and the Appalachian English and, in general, the non-standard English and the whole approach that we would be teaching anything other than correct English in textbooks," she said.

She asked questions but nevertheless made a motion to adopt the textbooks, although the board decided to hold off on buying the books pending further review.

After the meeting her husband, a minister, came up to her and showed her a passage from one of the books.

It was from black leader Malcolm X's autobiography. "All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn't, I'd probably still be a brainwashed black Christian," he had written.

Moore said she asked that all the books brought to her house. They started coming the very next day. It wasn't too long until she was shocked and appalled by what she was reading.

Many of the passages would hardly be shocking to many people today, and many of them were printed in the newspapers at the time. But Moore was concerned with the whole tenor and tone of the material, which she thought ridiculed or put down God and Christianity.

"I knew I could take that and create an explosion in the community with those books," Moore said. "But I did not want to do that."

Standing her ground

Moore recalls trying to keep things quiet. Her hope was that the books could go away without a fuss.

She asked for a private meeting with the other school board members. Most of them were concerned and wanted to have a private meeting with the teachers who selected the books. But word of that meeting resulted in a call to the newspaper.

That caused the superintendent to decide the meeting would have to be public, Moore said.

"Very much to my dismay," she said. "I never wanted that to happen. I did not start this controversy; somebody else started it."

But she was going to stand her ground.

"I was not going to let those books be quietly just slipped into the schools without the public knowing what was in their children's books," Moore said.

She went to the newspaper herself to try head off any confusion about her position.

"I said, 'I know what's going to happen, and I know I am going to be accused of book burning, and I know I am going to be compared to Nazis, so I want you to know in advance or show you what I am concerned about so you know what my position is before this blows up and gets all emotional,' " Moore said.

Things quickly did become emotional.

Almost 25 percent of the county's 45,000 students did not report on the first day of school in the fall of 1974. In sympathy with the protestors, 3,500 coal miners walked out in a wildcat strike not due to start until November.

By the end of the year, school buildings had been firebombed, dynamited and damaged by a Molotov cocktail.

Moore said a few people got out of hand.

"Nobody had any business blowing up a classroom. Shooting into a school bus shouldn't have happened," she said. (No children were aboard.)

But she said the violence was not one-sided and it's not even clear who did what.

"If you get right down to looking at the violence, protestors were as much victims of it and maybe even more than the so-called other side, the pro-book side," she said.

On one side, the textbook protestors felt the textbooks were trying to indoctrinate children with anti-God and anti-family values and erase the distinction of moral absolutes. On the other side, the pro-textbook group believed the books would help to open the curriculum to new voices.

To show what was going on, Moore still uses the example of "Jack and the Beanstalk."

She said headlines around the country erroneously suggested the Kanawha school board was trying to ban the story. Instead, she said, she was concerned about a thought experiment children were to do. One student would defend Jack's stealing of the coin bag while another would oppose it. Then they would switch sides.

Moore says that's a technique used to change values.

"We put second-graders in the position of having to defend the right to steal," she said. "Why would we do that to a second-grader?"

She felt the books were trying to restructure society. To change people.

Moore said the fight was important because each thing that is taught in schools matters.

"If it didn't, why on earth do we have schools?" she said.

Elements coalesce

Ultimately the pro-textbook side won, but only on paper. At the end of 1974, the Kanawha school board went ahead and allowed the books into schools.

But the board also gave parents and individual schools the choice of whether or not to use them. Few did.

Some now view the conflict as the first victory of the new religious right that later brought Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to office and that today is fighting health care reform, high taxes and the country's deepening deficit.

Moore said she didn't realize what was happening at the time, nor did she think of what happened in Kanawha County as the beginning of what later became the Moral Majority until she started reading that in other people's books.

But, looking back, Moore calls the textbook controversy the "coalescing" of elements from battles that had happened across the country. But those other battles were only small stories in the backs of newspapers before Kanawha County, she said.

"It started encouraging people that they weren't crazy, that they weren't imagining things, that there was a serious thing going on in the school system," she said.

Moore has been compared to a current star of the right, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. This flatters her greatly.

"I was a school board member, she was running for vice president," Moore said. "I don't compare the two, but I am flattered to have people to compare me to Sarah Palin. And yes, people have set out to destroy her."

She added, "They went out of the way to present her as some hick and some ignorant woman who knew nothing about policy, and yet she is a very successful governor of Alaska."

Moore herself has settled down and takes care of her family in her hometown of Acton, Tenn., just a mile or so from the Mississippi line. She isn't much involved in politics, although she writes letters and makes phone calls.

But she keeps an eye on things. She said the textbook controversy slowed but did not stop the "literal disaster" of what she calls "socialism, liberalism."

What's happening now, Moore said, is a result of what is being taught in schools. She says there has been a dumbing down of the American people so that they can't reason and think logically or understand their system of government.

If people are not governed internally to behave properly and do the right thing, "Then it takes an iron fist to control those people."

She also remembers stories in the books that she felt negatively portrayed the elderly.

"Are we trying to teach young people that the elderly people don't have any value to society - maybe they are a burden on society?" she said. "Maybe that's the reason a lot of people, senior adults, are getting disturbed about cutting the cost of medical care."

If anything, the textbook battle drew conservatives to the front lines. Moore said conservatives previously were not inclined to get involved because they didn't want to interfere in other people's lives if people weren't interfering in theirs.

"Liberals sort of set out to want to reshape society, and they are drawn to professions that give that opportunity, perhaps such as news media and education - two good examples," Moore said.

But that's changed now - out of necessity, she said.

"We're fighting for our lives now," Moore said. "We're fighting for our country."

[[R_H]]

That's... bat-shit insane.

Protesters initially objected to new multicultural content, along with material they called anti-American and anti-Christian.

What exactly was this offensive content? I couldn't find any examples after doing a quick search.

[LadyTevar]

After the meeting her husband, a minister, came up to her and showed her a passage from one of the books.

It was from black leader Malcolm X's autobiography. "All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn't, I'd probably still be a brainwashed black Christian," he had written.

That's what got Mrs Alice Moore started. A shorter article about the reunion that I didn't post states:

Some of the books contained information about sex and evolution. Others were by writers like Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ernest Hemingway.

In short, it was a book far too liberal for the "Good Upstanding Christians of Kanawha County" in 200- ... er 1974.

[[R_H]]

Yeah, after I posted I saw the bit about Malcom X. Which would have been, and probably still is, quite contreversial. I also read that there was material written by black Americans and information about other cultures - did that also create contraversy?

She said headlines around the country erroneously suggested the Kanawha school board was trying to ban the story. Instead, she said, she was concerned about a thought experiment children were to do. One student would defend Jack's stealing of the coin bag while another would oppose it. Then they would switch sides.

Moore says that's a technique used to change values.

Later on she goes to say

What's happening now, Moore said, is a result of what is being taught in schools. She says there has been a dumbing down of the American people so that they can't reason and think logically or understand their system of government.

This really says it all about her

"I was a school board member, she was running for vice president," Moore said. "I don't compare the two, but I am flattered to have people to compare me to Sarah Palin. And yes, people have set out to destroy her."

"Are we trying to teach young people that the elderly people don't have any value to society - maybe they are a burden on society?" she said. "Maybe that's the reason a lot of people, senior adults, are getting disturbed about cutting the cost of medical care."

Her first sentence is definitely incorrect, they do have value, on the other hand they're a burden too.

Second sentence makes no sense. Lower cost of health car = old people have less worth = old people are a burden?

[Alyrium Denryle]

In other words, the backward fucking yokels in this county objected to an education that would elevate their children above their status as "cousin fuckers". This is the kind of shit I expect to see in the middle east, not supposedly civilized place. Tev tells me they have become more liberal over the years, but at this rate all that means is that they have stopped burning witches and exorcising demons from epilepsy patients (oh wait...)

Now for a few gems

"I have the Bible, I don't need those dirty books."

I cannot even respond to this intelligently. I am forced to sit sputtering in frustration. However a picture says a thousand words.

Here we are folks

Protesters initially objected to new multicultural content, along with material they called anti-American and anti-Christian.

"Enslaving black people was wrong"

"People of different religions are not the spawn of the devil"

"The Salem witch trials are not something you should aspire to"

The protests also spawned violence. Picket lines occasionally erupted into rock throwing and fistfights; school buses and pickets were shot at; a UPS employee was lucky to survive after being shot in the chest; and schools and the board of education's headquarters were bombed.

Behold! PROTESTANT RAGE!!!

This is what happens when people are SO convinced that they are right, and that Jesus loves them (and will forgive their sins, but not the other guys). They are given free reign to murder.

"It's really just a good, old country picnic,"

If those include a lynching and a good ol' fashioned book burning.

"But the controversy actually forged new alliances, tactics and arguments that helped shape not only future curriculum disputes but also a variety of conservative campaigns and right-wing efforts,"

"If you disagree with us, we will murder you"

Yeah that sounds about right.

Honestly every last one of these people should be arrested for Terrorism.

"As far as what I did, I have no regrets about taking that issue to the public," she said this week. "I would do that again."

I wonder if she regrets being the causative agent behind murder and bombings. Oh, wait... Jesus has forgiven her of her sins, thus allowing her to avoid her guilt and personal responsibility. What a cowardly old cunt.

She was unhappy with what she perceived as the say unelected technocrats had in running the education system, with the secular philosophies being taught in teachers colleges and with the view that teachers were agents of social change.

Oh heaven forbid a secular country have a secular education system, and those best equipped to make decisions making them. Oh no! We have to have a populist democracy, where everything is elected by people who have only read one book in their entire lives! Oh... but wait again... when these people dont get what they want they try to intimidate or kill you. It isnt about democracy at all, that is just a smokescreen for delusions of religious purity.

Many of the passages would hardly be shocking to many people today, and many of them were printed in the newspapers at the time. But Moore was concerned with the whole tenor and tone of the material, which she thought ridiculed or put down God and Christianity.

heaven forbid someone other than a white protestant be quoted...

I said, 'I know what's going to happen, and I know I am going to be accused of book burning, and I know I am going to be compared to Nazis

Holy shit, she is capable of accurate foresight. I am pleasantly surprised.

"If you get right down to looking at the violence, protestors were as much victims of it and maybe even more than the so-called other side, the pro-book side,"

Victims of self defense...

"We put second-graders in the position of having to defend the right to steal," she said. "Why would we do that to a second-grader?"

So they understand why stealing is wrong rather than blindly parroting what you tell them?

She felt the books were trying to restructure society. To change people.

Education does that

She says there has been a dumbing down of the American people so that they can't reason and think logically or understand their system of government.

The irony here is really really thick...

[Glocksman]

While Evansville, Indiana isn't quite that narrow minded, there are enough of that type here to make it worth Sarah Palin's time to address the local 'Right to Life' group a few months ago.

For me, the sad part is that up until 2005 or so, I would have counted myself among their numbers.
Not because I was particularly religious, but because the religious right were allies and an attack on an ally was an attack on me.
That said I was never really comfortable with the religious right because my right wing views stemmed from a big 'L' libertarian outlook, and Libertarians have significant disagreements WRT social (and in some cases economic*) issues with the RR.

Of course the last 4 years cured me of the belief that economic libertarianism and 'trickle down economics' are the answers to our problems.

I guess my point is that while there are a lot of people who are too closed minded to reach with honest debate, I'd like to think that there are a lot more people who are willing to change when faced with facts that prove a particular viewpoint to be grounded in falsehoods.




*Huckabee's economic populist rhetoric during the primaries scared the shit out of the corporatist wing of the party.
Though Huck's show on FOX is evidence in my mind that he 'sold out' whatever feelings he had about social justice in favor of a huge paycheck.

[The Yosemite Bear]

I for one used to piss off fundy teachers in high school, and then read banned classics during the saturday "Breakfast Club".

I have never been happier being bad.

[Simon_Jester]

While Evansville, Indiana isn't quite that narrow minded, there are enough of that type here to make it worth Sarah Palin's time to address the local 'Right to Life' group a few months ago.

For me, the sad part is that up until 2005 or so, I would have counted myself among their numbers.
Not because I was particularly religious, but because the religious right were allies and an attack on an ally was an attack on me.
That said I was never really comfortable with the religious right because my right wing views stemmed from a big 'L' libertarian outlook, and Libertarians have significant disagreements WRT social (and in some cases economic*) issues with the RR.

Of course the last 4 years cured me of the belief that economic libertarianism and 'trickle down economics' are the answers to our problems.

S'OK. It's a common problem; politics is the mind-killer.

[LadyTevar]

That "Little Country Picnic" they were having? It's almost as bad as Ally thought. You've got KKK, HomeSchoolers, Intelligent Design, and all the "Phear the Govn'ment" you could ever want, all wrapped up in one tidy package. Pardon me, I'm going to go wash the Stupid out of my brain now.

Link

August 22, 2009
Book protesters reunite

SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Nearly 40 people met at a pavilion at Little Creek Park Saturday afternoon to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Kanawha County textbook protests.

They said the protests helped birth a conservative movement, now manifested through anti-tax tea parties and the raucous protests at town hall meetings on health care.

Today, Larry Pratt is executive director of Gun Owners of America in Springfield, Va. During the book protests, Pratt worked for the conservative Heritage Foundation, which helped provide lawyers for book protesters.

"In the Heritage Foundation, I was involved in the cultural wars. One of the major battles was here in West Virginia.

"The book protest was one of the opening battles of the culture wars we are still fighting."

Pratt criticized the "arrogance of today's elite" in trying to establish "nationalization of health care" and pass gun-control laws.

Posters displayed at the gathering included those saying:

"Concerned Citizens Agianst [sic] Textbooks"

"Kanawha County Held the First Tea Party 35 Years Ago."

"God Bless the Protesters."

"Public Schools Harm Children. Let My Children Go."

The Rev. Avis Hill, a minister who helped lead the protests and now lives in West Palm Beach, Fla., spoke and introduced other leaders of the protests in 1974.

Protests were touched off on April 11, when the Kanawha County Board of Education adopted new textbooks for creative writing and English literature. Protesters opposed the use of 300 different books as being "anti-Christian" or "obscene."

The Board of Education eventually decided to allow parents to decide whether their children could read certain books.

Hill is now 66 and plans to retire from his ministry next month.

"I am saddened that we have lost a generation in the public education system," he said.

"We are throwing God out of our schools and throwing God out of our government. We were right back then, and they were wrong.

"Many students graduating from high school today can hardly read," Hill said. "They need help figuring out how to get change for a $10 bill. They don't know where the USA is on a map."

Before Saturday's program, Hill was surprised to meet an unexpected guest -- Bill Meester, his old postal deliveryman who convinced Hill to get saved as a young man.

The book protests were accompanied by violence, including explosives thrown inside Midway Elementary School on Campbells Creek and a bomb that blew windows out of the Board of Education building on the East End.

The Rev. Marvin Horan, a protest leader who did not attend Saturday's reunion, was convicted of charges related to those bombings.

Critics said the protests had a racist streak. In 1974, Father Hilarion Cann in Charleston said book protesters exhibited "an unwillingness to deal with anything about black people." The West Virginia Council of Churches publicly criticized the book protest as racist.

Protesters singled out books written by black writers including: Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dick Gregory, George Jackson and Malcolm X.

The Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society backed the protest. In January 1975, Klan leaders claimed "international Jews who own the U.S. publishing houses" printed the controversial books.

Book protester Karl C. Priest, now 61 and living near Poca, expressed some regrets.

"That was a time we should have realized Christians should haven gotten their children out of public schools. It is time to get your children into home schooling or Christian schools.

"Those textbooks were a spearhead of an unpatriotic and un-Godly America. Terrible things go on in our public schools today. We need to get our children out of public schools.

"I hope my grandson never sees the inside of a public school. They are government schools."

Today, Priest drives his "bug mobile" to schools to give talks about "God's incredible and inspirational insects," accompanied by displays of beautiful butterflies, moths and other insects. Priest is a former teacher and a strong opponent of evolutionary science.

Priest praised the late Elmer Fike, who operated a nonunion chemical plant in Nitro. During the book protests, Fike headed the Business and Professional People's Alliance for Better Textbooks.

Alice Moore, a protest leader who won a seat on the Kanawha County Board of Education, spoke to the gathering by telephone, from her current home in Acton, Tenn., near the border with Mississippi, where she grew up.

"I think we won a real battle. We brought together people from all over the nation, concerned with their children's textbooks," she said.

Now 68, Moore said people who backed the protest were "not illiterate parents who were extremist, but mainstream Americans."

Moore will be at the Culture Center at the state Capitol Oct. 6 to participate in a book protest panel discussion.

The Rev. Ezra Graley, now 80, still lives in St. Albans. "Times proved we were right. But the liberals want to prove us wrong. I never broke the law. They just put me in jail three times.... But we saved 11 souls while we were in jail.

"Today, I am a farmer and a preacher. I am still mowing my fields with a tractor."

The Rev. Henry Thaxton, a Union Carbide financial accountant during the protest, said, "I want to thank Avis for being the ramrod, the mouth, the voice for the protest.

"We stood up against the establishment and brought them to their knees. I would do it again.

"Stand against the establishment. That is the American way. Do the right thing. We were right, and they were wrong," Thaxton said.

Phyllis Harman, now Phyllis Higgenbotham of Poca, ran the St. Albans office for textbook protesters back in 1974.

"The textbook controversy was the major point in my life," Higgenbotham said. "I saw a lot of people who were saved during the protest. I met some of the most fantastic people in the world.

"My children stopped going to public school one day after the protest started. We have to stand our ground. We can't stand for the things the government is shoving down our throats."

Thousands of coal miners went out on strike in apparent support of the book protest. But during the 1970s, coal miners routinely refused to cross picket lines, no matter who was picketing.

In a 1975 interview, The Rev. Ronald W. English, a black Baptist minister in Charleston and member of the Citizens' Textbook Review Committee, said the book protesters never were close to the labor movement.

"They were nowhere to be seen when the Charleston municipal and sanitation workers were on strike in 1972. At that time, [UMW President] Arnold Miller came to Charleston to support their strike, but these people were nowhere to be seen."

English also criticized Kanawha County School Board members for doing a poor job communicating with people.

"The book protest also reflects people's frustrations at unemployment and inflation, especially of the man being the head of a household and losing his job. Some feel the books attack parental authority," English said.

But a Picture's Worth 1000 Words: Note the posters behind Rev. Avis Hill.

[The Spartan]

One of those signs reads, "Concerned citizens agianst textbooks" [sic].

The irony writes itself...

[SirNitram]

Tev tells me they have become more liberal over the years, but at this rate all that means is that they have stopped burning witches and exorcising demons from epilepsy patients (oh wait...)

Less so the people involved with it being any less batshit-crazy-conservative, but more the rest of the state getting on with reality. Not to mention a large rejection of national level Republicans because they oppose things WVers all know and appreciate: Labour laws, social security in all three forms(SSI, SSD, SS), etc.

[sketerpot]

"We are throwing God out of our schools and throwing God out of our government. We were right back then, and they were wrong.

"Many students graduating from high school today can hardly read," Hill said. "They need help figuring out how to get change for a $10 bill. They don't know where the USA is on a map."

This is telling. There's no logical connection between stopping religious indoctrination in schools and declining educational standards, but the issues get conflated because this isn't about being right; it's about group identity. These guys define themselves as conservatives, and the conservative position includes calling for prayer in schools and for traditional schooling methods, and that is the connection for these people.

This also makes them insanely easy to manipulate through simple propaganda-driven peer pressure. Convince them that something is the Conservative Position, and they'll believe it ardently without any further thought.

[SirNitram]

However, everyone missed something. I mean, honestly.

"Kanawha County Held the First Tea Party 35 Years Ago."

Boston Harbour is not in Kanawha County, and that's one hell of a long 35 years!

[Darmalus]

However, everyone missed something. I mean, honestly.

"Kanawha County Held the First Tea Party 35 Years Ago."

Boston Harbour is not in Kanawha County, and that's one hell of a long 35 years!

I thought they were talking about a "Tea Party" where they stand on public roads and complain about the government paying for their medicare.

[Shadowtraveler]

I remember reading a book about Kanawha (among other things involving book censorship) from my high school library. I think it had something about a plot to bomb school buses over this. It was pretty disgusting, overall.

[Tanasinn]

More evidence that the far right are not people you want to form a middle ground with, they're people you want to permanently politically marginalize.

[Chris OFarrell]

That "Little Country Picnic" they were having? It's almost as bad as Ally thought. You've got KKK, HomeSchoolers, Intelligent Design, and all the "Phear the Govn'ment" you could ever want, all wrapped up in one tidy package.

Anyone got a Smart Bomb we can drop on them? I doubt they would get the irony, but then again, it wouldn't really matter...

[LadyTevar]

I remember reading a book about Kanawha (among other things involving book censorship) from my high school library. I think it had something about a plot to bomb school buses over this. It was pretty disgusting, overall.

From the first article:

... The protests also spawned violence. Picket lines occasionally erupted into rock throwing and fistfights; school buses and pickets were shot at; a UPS employee was lucky to survive after being shot in the chest; and schools and the board of education's headquarters were bombed....

... The Rev. Jim Lewis was a young Episcopal priest with four children in public schools in 1974. After he spoke out in favor of the new textbooks, he became seen as a clerical counterpoint to the protesters. For a while, he and his family had round-the-clock police protection because of death threats he'd received.
One night, Lewis said, he checked into a hotel room with his family under an assumed name on the advice of police. He went out to buy doughnuts and ran into a reporter from a local newspaper who warned him to get back inside because textbook foes were looking for him. ...

From the second article:

... By the end of the year, school buildings had been firebombed, dynamited and damaged by a Molotov cocktail. ...

From the "Little Picnic" article:

... The book protests were accompanied by violence, including explosives thrown inside Midway Elementary School on Campbells Creek and a bomb that blew windows out of the Board of Education building on the East End.
The Rev. Marvin Horan, a protest leader who did not attend Saturday's reunion, was convicted of charges related to those bombings. ...

... The Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society backed the protest. In January 1975, Klan leaders claimed "international Jews who own the U.S. publishing houses" printed the controversial books. ...

So, yes, it was 'pretty disgusting'. I don't remember it, as I was only 4 at the time.

[The Yosemite Bear]

yeah they didn't send me any memos, and I still haven't gotten any cheques, I guess the half jewish don't get to be part of the Illuminati...

[Alyrium Denryle]

That "Little Country Picnic" they were having? It's almost as bad as Ally thought. You've got KKK, HomeSchoolers, Intelligent Design, and all the "Phear the Govn'ment" you could ever want, all wrapped up in one tidy package.

Anyone got a Smart Bomb we can drop on them? I doubt they would get the irony, but then again, it wouldn't really matter...

You know, I didnt even know that the KKK backed this thing. I knew they were probably all creationist homeschooling knuckledraggers... I just sort of assumed that they would be racists too. It seemed to fit perfectly. I was right, who called it? Yeah that's right... I called it.