Collectivists, communists, organized labor bosses,

banksters, and subversion:

The Tea Parties as a countersubversion panic

by Chip Berlet

This was originally submitted as a conference abstract with the title:

Bad "Banksters" or Capitalism's Punch Line
And became a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, NV, 2011-08-12

A revised version appeared in Critical Sociology as:

“Collectivists, communists, organized labor bosses, banksters, and subversion:
The Tea Parties as a countersubversion panic”

Please cite the version from Critical Sociology and not this version

Abstract

This study explains how power elites in the United States periodically generate a

countersubversion panic tactically using right-wing populist rhetoric and producerist narratives

to enlist a mass base to defend their unfair power, privilege, and wealth. A large, middle-class,

white constituency is thus convinced to side with organized wealth as a way to defend their

relative and precarious power and privilege in society. The blame for economic, political, and

social tensions is transferred away from Free Market capitalism to collectivists, communists,

organized labor bosses, banksters, and other scapegoated subversives and traitors. At the same

time, defense of unequal racial and gender hierarchies can be mobilized as part of the

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countersubversion effort. The rapid rise of the Tea Parties is also due to the incorporation of the

frames and narratives of pre-existing movements with a conspiracist worldview such as the

Patriot Movement (from the John Birch Society to the armed militias) and the Christian Right

(especially the Dominionist tendency). The Tea Parties are therefore just the latest appearance of

a right-wing populist revolt tracing back to attacks on Roosevelt Administration policies and

even earlier episodes of white nationalist populist revolts.

Keywords

Sociology, Anti-communism, collectivism, conspiracism, countersubversion, framing,

populism, producerism, narratives.

Introduction

The U.S. Tea Party Movement began as an elite conservative campaign designed as

“astroturfing,” which is a propaganda model that creates the false impression of an actual

grassroots movement. The idea, however, gained momentum and swept across the country. The

Tea Parties became an actual social movement, and by the autumn of 2009 were beginning to

build social movement organizations in most states, and negotiate with the Republican Party over

policy matters.

At first much of the energy for organizing the grassroots portion of the movement came

from libertarians and supporters of Ron Paul. Over time, participants in the pre-existing Christian

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Right and Patriot Movements emerged as playing an increasingly significant role in local units

and chapters of the Tea Party Movement. They brought into the tea party racial antipathies

towards people of color, and opposition to gay rights and reproductive rights. They also brought

in a broader range of conspiracy theories than those promulgated by Ron Paul supporters. The

Christian Right involvement in the Tea Party campaign to gain political power is related to the

role of Dominionism, a broad theological tendency that began growing in the 1970s (Barron,

1992; Diamond, 1989,1998; Clarkson, 1997; Goldberg, 2006). According to Diamond, ‘the

concept that Christians are Biblically mandated to “occupy” all secular institutions has become

the central unifying ideology for the Christian Right’ (1989: 138, italics in the original).

When Tea Party activists hold government spending hostage they see themselves as patriots

protecting America from financial ruin at the hands of tax-and-spend liberals. Congressional

Town Halls ring with polemics charging that President Barack Obama is greasing a slippery

slope of big government collectivism that will slurry the nation into an immoral cesspit of

totalitarian tyranny. Signs appear at rallies comparing Obama to both Hitler and Stalin.

Within several subcultures of the political right in the United States, such claims are

common sense and received wisdom from a long line of authors whose books sit on the shelves

of conservatives, economic libertarians, and right-wing Christian evangelicals. These tomes

warned of the dangers of collectivists, banksters, the Federal Reserve, and organized labor

bosses. At meetings the debate over dinner centers on who is really behind this awful conspiracy

to destroy our nation. Is it the Bilderberg banking group, the Trilateral Commission, the

Rockefeller family, the Freemasons and their Illuminati handlers, or the Jews? Since the terror

attacks on 9/11/2001 Muslims have been incorporated into some right-wing conspiracy

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narratives. For some Christians who embrace conspiracism, the devil is in the details, working

behind the scenes like a fire-breathing chimera.

Tea Parties

Many of the negative claims about Obama flowing out of the Tea Parties are based on conspiracy

theories about subversion and betrayal by political liberals. (Berlet, 2010). Some of these

conspiracy theories are recycled from the militia and Patriot movements of the 1990s. Others

were originally aimed at George W. Bush from the right, including claims of eroding sovereignty

made by right-wing ideologues including Jerome Corsi, Phyllis Schlafly, and Pat Buchanan. For

a time, these conspiracy theories were repeated and amplified by Lou Dobbs on CNN before he

was terminated (Berlet, 2009). Fox News helps encourage the growth of the Tea Parties while

heaping abuse on critics of the movement. When Glenn Beck was on Fox News, his program

frequently sported conspiracy theories that previously had been circulated by the conspiracist

John Birch Society (Zaitchik, 2010).

Socialism and National Socialism (Nazism) are portrayed by the Tea Partiers and Town Hall

criers as two sides of the same collectivist and totalitarian coin. This is the argument found in the

best-selling book by Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left,

From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (2007). According to Goldberg, Today we still live

under the fundamentally fascistic economic system established by Wilson and FDR. We do live

in an ‘unconscious civilization’ of fascism, albeit of a friendly sort infinitely more benign that

that of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, or FDRs America (2007: 330). This idea traces back

to Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). The Tea Parties accept this argument, and it is therefore

logical for them to view destroying ‘big government’ as the first step in freeing the nation from

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the web of collectivism by that great agent of fascism, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

For the Tea Party Caucus in Congress the budget showdown in the summer of 2011

represented not only rolling back the ‘collectivist’ economic policies of the Roosevelt

administration, but also starving the beast of the federal government which is enforcing political

correctness and multiculturalism. Specific Tea Party activists can use the economic argument to

mask their anger at politicians who tolerate gay marriage, feminists, abortionists, Black

Presidents, and the wave of dark-skinned immigrants polluting our nation.

After reviewing the websites of 137 ‘tea party backed candidates’ who in 2010 sought

election to the House of Representatives, Keil and Keil found that one of the most common

themes … among the Tea Party candidates was that they were overwhelmingly pro-life.’ They

opposed abortion and most also supported the ‘traditional family’ and ‘traditional marriage.’

(2011: 3).

Clement and Green found that Tea Party supporters ‘tend to have conservative opinions not

just about economic matters, but also about social issues such as abortion and same-sex

marriage’ Some 42% ‘said they agree with the conservative Christian movement,’ and they are

‘much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most

important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues’ (Clement and Green).

Grassroots Tea Party activists pick up bits and pieces of right-wing conspiracy theories and

anti-immigrant xenophobia from a variety of sources, including xenophobic White Nationalists

and White Supremacists attempting to recruit members from the Tea Parties (Burghart and

Zeskind, 2010). Prejudice toward Blacks and Latinos is significantly higher among Tea Party

supporters than among the general population (Parker, 2010). When asked if ‘racism [is] still a

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major problem in America,’ about 75 percent of those polled agreed, but that shrinks to about 58

percent among Tea Party supporters (Gardner and Thompson, 2010).

In their study of the 2010 election races, Keil and Keil found that the candidates backed by

the Tea Partiers ‘frequently used the code words long associated with negative evaluations and

treatment of blacks—words such as school choice, states rights, personal responsibility, etc.’ The

researchers speculated that ‘in some sense, then, the 2010 election was a racial referendum—a

reaction by whites who wanted to take back their country from the usurpers who had won the

2008 election’ (Keil and Keil, 2011: 12).

In reviewing scores of Tea Party websites it becomes clear that the movement is built around

populist rhetorical framing. Canovan writes that all forms of populism ‘involve some kind of

exaltation of and appeal to “the people,” and all are in one sense or another antielitist.’ While

some forms of populism are progressive, others are right wing.

In our book Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, Matthew N. Lyons

and I trace the roots of the right-wing populist frame back to 1676 and Bacon’s Rebellion in the

Virginia Colony. We argued that the 1990s “Christian Right, the Buchananites, and the militias

were the heirs to this legacy that included the Jacksonian period of the mid 1800s, anti-Chinese

crusades of the 1880s, Father Coughlin’s movement in the 1930s which turned antisemitic,

and various eras of Ku Klux Klan activism (Berlet & Lyons, 2000). We suggested these and

other right-wing populist movements often borrowed:

[P]olitical slogans, tactics, and forms of organization from the Left, but harness
them to rightist goals. They attract people who often have genuine grievances against
elites, but channel such resentments in ways that reinforce social, cultural, political, or
economic power and privilege (Berlet and Lyons, 2000: 2)

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 Right-wing populist movements throughout U.S. history “have reflected the interests of two

different kinds of social groups,” that can combine in creative ways that resonate with mass

constituencies:

• Middle-level groups in the social hierarchy, notably middle- and working-class Whites,

who have a stake in traditional social privilege but resent the power of upper-class elites

over them, and,

• “Outsider” factions of the elite itself, who sometimes use distorted forms of antielitism

as part of their own bid for greater power (Berlet and Lyons, 2000: )

The Tea Party movement also uses the classic “producerist” narrative of right-wing

populism. The producerist storyline claims that heroic “productive” middle class stalwarts are

defending themselves against the vise grip of corrupt parasitic elites above and lazy, sinful, and

subversive parasites below. Producerism starts as an agrarian economic narrative in the 1800s

(Stock, 1996). Now it sweeps up predominantly white people from cities and suburbs as well

(Kazin, 1995; Berlet and Lyons, 2000). Marxist analysis of political economy analyzes systems,

structures, and institutions of power through the lens of class. Producerist populism

individualizes societal problems—converting angry energy into a misdirected hunt for the dread

menace of conspirators and parasites.

To understand why the Tea Party is common sense when viewed from inside the movement,

we have to revisit the framing of right-wing conspiracy theories searching out subversion in the

land of the free and the home of the brave.

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Framing the Conspiracy

From the colonial Salem witch hunts, to the anti-Catholic nativism of the 1800s, to the Palmer

raids of 1919-1920, to the 1950s McCarthy-era Red Scare, to the Tea Parties of today, the hunt

for subversion is built around conspiracy theories. Those seeking to expose the conspiracy build

movements to counter the alleged subversion. Their central frame is that the national is imperiled

by a secret and sinister conspiracy seeking to crush democracy and install some form of evil

totalitarian rule.

The framing process is well-studied in sociology (Goffman, 1959, 1974; Johnston, 1995;

Snow and Benford, 1988, 1992). Social movements have a better chance of success if they align

their ideology with supportive frames and narratives (Davis, 2002; Gamson, 1995; McAdam and

Snow, 1997; Mason, 2002; Oliver and Johnston, 2000; Polletta, 1998; Zald, 1996). Narrative

storylines can subvert the dominant consensus in society, explain Ewick and Silbey (1995), or

they can support hegemonic ideas that help stabilize the existing hierarchical power structure.

Mills (1956) and Domhoff (1979, 1986) have shown that power elites seek to protect their

disproportionate wealth, often through informal networks that seek allies. This mobilization on

behalf of elites can seek allies in other social classes and create right-wing populist narratives of

the middle class in danger in order to garner mass support (Berlet and Lyons, 2000; Frank, 2004;

Hardisty, 1999; Laclau, 1977).

Blaming hard times as being the result of the secret conspiracy is a time honored tradition

and conspiracy theories function as a narrative form of scapegoating. Today, most right-wing

conspiracy theories can be traced to two main sources published in the late 1700s. Robison

([1798] 1967) and Barruel (1797–1798) blamed revolutionary ardor to establish civil equality

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and to separate church and state on a secret conspiracy working inside the Freemasons. The core

cadre were said to be the mysterious Illuminati which was an actual pro-Enlightenment study

group that functioned for several years in Bavaria. The John Birch society still promotes this

version of the conspiracy. This is the generic conspiracist narrative.

The other main conspiracist narrative is based on antisemitic allegations. In the 1800s

blaming economic problems on the Jews was relatively common and considered appropriate text

for major newspapers and magazines in the United States. When the People’s party, composed

primarily of progressive populists, began to devolve, some factions adopted conspiracy theory

analysis dividing their scapegoated targets between the oil trusts and Jewish bankers. During this

same period, August Bebel called antisemitic conspiracy theories the ‘socialism of fools.’1

Bebel, a social democrat, was trying to get German workers to pay attention to the structural

inequalities of the economic system rather than scapegoating Jewish financiers and bankers. As

David Hirsh observes, the formal study of sociology emerged at a time in the 1800s when it was

common to believe that a nation’s economy was manipulated by ‘the Jews’ and some

intellectuals began to articulate more accurate and useful analytical models (2009, personal

communication).

In the early 1900s the czarist secret police in Russia concocted the hoax document the

protocols of the Elders of Zion, which blamed everything on the Jews. The protocols suggest that

behind the Freemasons are the elders of Zion. After World War I in Austria, some Marxists

spoke of the ‘enslavement of Jewish international finance capital’ (Pauley, 1992: 141).

Countersubversion Panics

The fear of the Red Menace in some ultraconservative Protestant circles was fueled by

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apocalyptic Biblical prophecy. The term ‘apocalypse’ simply means the idea that there is an

approaching confrontation of epic proportions after which the world will be changed forever and

hidden truths will be revealed. A number of Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists have

historically connected apocalyptic prophecies in the Bible’s book of Revelation to current

political and social events (Boyer, 1992; Fuller, 1995). For example the evil Antichrist is

prophesied as the sidekick of Satan in Revelation. Fuller notes that naming the antichrist by

pointing at real life political figures became something of a historic American ‘obsession’ in

certain Christian circles (1995: 13).

Donner helped develop the concept of right-wing populist movements built around a

countersubversive impulse. According to Donner, the ‘anti-subversive impulse’ was built around

the concept of the Red Menace, acquiring a ‘folkish’ aspect. Some in the Christian Right from

the 1920s forward saw this in terms of apocalyptic prophecy about the End Times. Therefore

‘God-fearing Americans’ saw Marxism as the ideology that would be used by the ‘Antichrist

come to do eschatological battle with the children of light.’ A more secular variant emerged in

‘rural and small-town America’ in which ‘decent upright folk’ would need to confront

‘radicalism—alien, satanic, immorality incarnate.’ Donner noted that in the 1930s:

…this secular religion evolved into…anti-communism, and influenced by populist

politics, it retained a highly personalized conception of radicals and dissenters, not as
advocates of programs for legitimate political ends but as individuals, evil men plotting
in dark corners, heretics who mocked the truth that we are a uniquely created nation.
(1980: 47-48).
In the late 1800s, fear of communist subversion ‘was being developed as a weapon to isolate

labor organizations and control the untamed urban masses,’ writes Heale (1990: 27). This

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worked in a way that ‘legitimated the use of strong–arm tactics and the expansion of police

powers’ (Heale, 1990: 27).

Roosevelt’s Red Plot

Following an 1877 railway strike, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher warned against the

importation of communist ideas from Europe. The popular preacher Beecher, writes Heale,

thought ‘un-American’ the idea that government should provide for the welfare of its citizens,

described collectivist theories as destructive of that ‘individuality of the person’ that alone

preserved liberty, and unabashedly insisted that ‘God has intended the great to be great and the

little to be little,’ (1990: 28).

Up until the Roosevelt administration, laissez-faire economic policies were the

‘conventional wisdom’ being taught at Harvard and other universities where theorists ‘insisted

that workers benefited from the free enterprise of the capitalist, that trade unions were potential

monopolies that disrupted the free market, and that labor actions like strikes were offenses

against society’ (Heale, 1990: 28).

Just before the nation crashed into the Great Depression, the presidential campaign focused

on whether or not the government should directly develop policies and programs promoting

economic fairness and social justice. Unions and most working people backed this concept and

thus supported the candidacy of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR faced the incumbent

President, Herbert Hoover, whose 1928 Republican campaign speech on ‘Rugged Individualism’

left no doubt where he stood on the question.

Hoover claimed that during World War I, in order to ensure the ‘preservation of the State the

Government became a centralized despotism’ (Hoover, 1928). After the war the nation was faced

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with the choice of the American system ‘rugged individualism’ or the choice of a European

system of diametrically opposed doctrines—doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. The

acceptance of these ideas meant the destruction of self-government through centralization of

government (Hoover 1928). Hoover argued that the proposals of Franklin D. Roosevelt would

‘wreck our democracy’ and weaken the ‘foundations of social and spiritual progress in America’

(Hoover 1928).

After his inauguration in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt slapped laissez-faire elites in the face

with a clearly visible hand when he launched a number of massive and controversial federal

government programs to restore the economy. Over the next two decades, the conservative elites

and their ideologues slapped back, handing out millions of dollars in pamphlets, advertisements,

movies, and books equating the defense of democracy and the ‘American Way of Life’ with

restoring ‘Free Market’ government policies. Ringleaders included the U.S. Chamber of

Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), but they were hardly alone

(Phillips-Fein, 2009).

Conservative ideologues in both the United States and Europe began to bemoan creeping

socialism, and in 1935 Austrian School economist Friedrich A. Hayek edited a volume called

Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism (1935). In the

US, the anti-socialist crusade built to oppose the policies of FDR forged an alliance between the

ideological Free Marketeers and the theologues of the Christian Right (Ricca, 2002). The latter

worried that big government and big labor union ‘collectivism’ threatened the social contract, the

radical individualism of unrefined Calvinism, and the proper relationship between the Godly

individual and both church and state. Weber studied the roots of this tendency in The Protestant

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Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1905] 2000).

While publically praising civic participation, many of these same conservative and

libertarian ideologues tried to curtail or crush labor unions as a form of ‘collectivism’ just as

detrimental to democracy as those ‘European’ collectivist schemes: socialism and National

Socialism. Thus, today President Obama is said to be both a socialist and a fascist—both Hitler

and Stalin. Back in the 1930s FDR was also tarred by conservatives for bringing socialist and

fascist ideas into the political economy of the US. Some critics were even more histrionic.

Among the many critics of the Roosevelt administration are those conspiracists who

scapegoat it as the puppet of secret liberal collectivists, or Reds, or Jews, or all three (Berlet and

Lyons, 2000; Davis, 1972; Dinnerstein, 1994; Kazin, 1995; Kovel, 1994; Ribuffo, 1983). For

some, this is a continuation of a critique of the collectivist and elitist Federal Reserve System,

merging elements of populism and conspiracism, but often avoiding rank antisemitism (Mintz,

1985).

There is interplay between conspiracists in the United States and Britain during this period.

The Reverend Denis Fahey in Dublin becomes an adviser to Father Coughlin of Detroit, linking

the manipulation of money to Jews, Russia, Godless communism, and ultimately to Roosevelt

(Fahey, 1935).

Gertrude Coogan writes about an alleged banking conspiracy in The Money Creators (1935).

Elizabeth Dilling’s The Red Network: A Who’s Who of Radicalism for Patriots (1934), and its

update, The Roosevelt Red Record and its Background (1936), are well-known publications from

this genre(for a thorough look at Dilling, see Jeansonne, 1996). Later books such as The Octopus

by Dilling (1940) were more overtly antisemitic.

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 The pre-war The Reign of the Elders (Gold, Gold, Gold), is a short book by an anonymous

that starts with the Protocols, moves through the Rothschilds, and ends up with Roosevelt’s ‘Jew

Deal’ (Armstrong, 1938). The phrase ‘Jew Deal’ is incorporated into titles for chapters eight and

fifteen (Armstrong, 1938).

The anonymously written pamphlet New Dealers in Office is primarily a list of hundreds of

names of Roosevelt Administration appointees and staff that to the author reveal ‘Jewish

ancestry’ (Anonymous, circa 1941: 2). Singerman (1982: 141, entry 0591) notes that in the tract,

‘most of the persons named are Jewish.’ Some think it was all a ‘Zionist’ plot (Hendrickson,

2002).

Rollback Using the Right to Work Frame

In July of 1935 Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which is also called the

Wagner Act to honor Senator Robert R. Wagner of New York. The Act sought to ensure that

working people had the right ‘to self–organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to

bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted

activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection’ (United

States Congress, 1935).

In part to avoid another negative ruling from the US Supreme Court, the Act specifically

applied only to employees working for companies involved in interstate commerce. Those

working for the government, airlines, and railroads were exempted from coverage, as were

agricultural workers. ‘In order to enforce and maintain those rights, the act included provision for

the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to arbitrate deadlocked labor–management disputes,

guarantee democratic union elections, and penalize unfair labor practices by employers’ (United

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States Congress, 1935).

Immediately upon passage of the National Labor Relations Act, ‘business and political

conservatives’ sought legislation to undercut union organizing, especially in the period 1938-

1941 (Gall, 1988: 14). Gall writes:

Lobbyists of the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of

Commerce argued that Congress should change the law to prohibit ‘coercion from any
source.’ They obviously hoped that such a clause would function as a mandatory open
ship provision under statutory interpretation, making it impossible for unions to obtain
union security through bargaining. (1988: 14-15)
Opposition to these proposed restrictive laws aimed at weakening unions and worker’s

rights came from both Republicans and Democrats, and it became a campaign issue in 1936.

Presidential candidates from both major political parties offered support for the concept of the

union shop as authorized in the National Labor Relations Act.

‘Open shop’ campaigns are sometimes based on arguments for states’ rights—an idea that

comes with some historic baggage. The primary source of states’ rights philosophy in US politics

is the antebellum south of the early- to mid-1800s. John C. Calhoun formulated the main

arguments, and delivered them in flamboyant oratory during a historic debate with fellow US

Senator Daniel Webster over the issue of states’ rights and their relationship to slavery. The

philosophical battle over states’ rights fueled southern succession and helped pave the road to the

Civil War.

In the 1930s, appeals to White supremacy and White racial solidarity were hardly marginal.

In an editorial highlighting a speech by NAM president John E. Edgerton, the New York Times

editorialized, ‘To aid him and his associates in their effort to maintain the open shop he has the

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racial and language unity of [employees] and employers in the South, and the pressure of long

custom’ (New York Times, 1930).

As Edgerton explained, in the South, ‘The wage-earners, like the employers of this section,

are almost wholly of one blood, one God, and one language …. No people on earth love

individual liberty, or will make greater sacrifices for it, than … those proud Anglo-Saxon

elements who constitute the working army of this homogenious section of the nation’ (Edgerton,

1930: 6). Edgerton was outlining NAM’s proposed ‘Labor Policy for The South,’ which was

based on ‘The open shop—the unabridged and unrestricted freedom of contract, and complete

individual liberty within the law’ (Edgerton, 1930: 11).

In some portions of the Hard Right the problems posed by labor unions, communism, and

integration were discussed as a single topic. In part this derived from the fact that the Roosevelt

Administration designed government programs that selected African Americans and other people

of color for training and jobs.

During the war years, Right-to-Work legislation went nowhere on the federal level, and the

focus shifted to the state level where a variety of legislative battles were waged. In the ‘period

from 1938 to 1944, numerous states passed harsh and sometimes punitive laws restricting union

behavior,’ and ‘some of the laws simply aimed to harass unions,’ says Gall (1988: 19).There was

a major emphasis on restricting union security arrangements, and regulations concerning

picketing or strikes, although ‘much of this state anti-union legislation proved unconstitutional in

those areas affecting interstate commerce’ (Gall, 1988: 19).

After the end of World War II and the death of President Roosevelt, however, the

ultraconservatives developed plans to ‘roll back’ the economic fairness and social justice policies

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of the Roosevelt Administration. Along with this strategy for unweaving the government social

safety net were parallel plans to discourage workers from joining labor unions. ‘Right-to-Work’

legislation returned on the federal level and headed to Congress.

Ultraconservatives remained undaunted. On Labor Day 1941, with the US entry into World

War II seeming to be increasingly inevitable and just weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor

would plunge the nation into war, an editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News. ‘The

greatest crisis that confronts the nation today,’ wrote editor William B. Ruggles, ‘is the domestic

issue of the right to work as a member of a labor union, if the individual wishes, or without

membership in a union is he elects’ (1941). This editorial, titled ‘Magna Carta,’ coined the term

‘right to work’ (Dixon, 2003: 137-138). The drive to pass federal legislation, however, was put

on hold until the end of World War II, and it coincided with the turmoil created in the shift from

a wartime economy and the return of veterans to peacetime work (Nicholson, 2004; Lichtenstein,

[1982] 2003, 2002).

The Taft-Hartley Act was primarily a series of pro-management amendments to the National

Labor Relations Act. The National Association of Manufacturers still considers the passage of

Taft–Hartley one of its crowning achievements. In its written history, the group brags ‘NAM

played a leading role in the 1947 enactment, overriding President Harry Truman’s veto, of the

Taft-Hartley Act, which served to level the playing field in labor relations’ (National Association

of Manufacturers, 2005; Burch, 1980: 121n; see also, Burch, 1973, 1997).

With the passage of Taft-Hartley, the anti-union legislative campaign shifted back to the

state level. Throughout the period after World War II the anti-New Deal rollback campaign

flourished. Before we review the state Right to Work campaigns of the late 1940s and early

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1950s, we need to take one more step back into history to understand some of the underlying

issues behind the heated rhetoric attacking Roosevelt and the campaign to rollback his social and

economic policies and projects.

Collectivism, Labor Bosses, and Slippery Slopes

In 1945, the CIO identified the Christian American Association as pressing to get passage of

‘anti-closed shop and other labor regulating laws in Southern States’ and said the group had

pledged to pass similar legislation in every state (New York Times, 1945). Both the CIO and AFL

were organizing in the South during this period, and this in turn mobilized a major campaign

against unions. According to Dixon, starting in the 1930s, several reactionary organizations

participated with the Christian American Association, including the American Farm Bureau

Federation, the Southern States Industrial Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and state

affiliates of the NAM. The ‘claims made against unions centered on communism, corruption, and

un-Americanism (2003: 20).

The attack on labor unions as subversive had its supporter inside the US Congress. Bennett

explains that the House Committee on Un-American Activities under Chairman Martin Dies in

the early 1940s became a vehicle for an ‘anticommunist, anti-union, and anti-New Deal’

campaign ([1988] 1995: 286).

The National Association of Evangelicals, founded in 1942, also ‘assailed the revolutionary

activities of the New Deal and the infiltration of government, the unions, and churches by reds‘

(Heale, 1990: 139; Fuller, 1995). This type of attack lasted well into the 1950s. For Catholics,

anti-Red fear mongering took the form of warnings from church leaders such as Francis Cardinal

Spellman and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (Bennett, [1988] 1995; Heale, 1990).

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 According to Diamond, the ‘internal subversion thesis and the view of liberalism as merely a

soft form of communism provided the logic for Christian Rightists’ attacks on reputable Church

bodies’ (1995: 102; see also Diamond, 1989).

What we learn by looking at the interrelated currents of this period of the late 1930s and

early 1940s is that ultraconservative strategists saw connections linking several overlapping

social and political movements. These included the southern-based states’ rights movement; Old

Christian Right concerns over a sinful immoral culture; White fears about increasing rights for

Blacks and other people of color; and a conspiracy theory about Roosevelt and communist

subversion that went far beyond legitimate concerns about communism as an ideology. To put it

another way, ultraconservatives who wanted to garner public support for attacks on the rights of

workers could exploit fears over communism, race, sin, and states’ rights.

The linkage between Business Nationalists, anti-union campaigns, and countersubversion

was an enduring one. A good example was the House Un-American Activities Committee

(HUAC), committee chaired by Texas Congressman Martin Dies in 1938 (Berlet and Lyons,

2000).2 Dies focused the committee’s work ‘partly in response to the sit-down strikes by

automobile workers’ and ‘much of the Dies Committee’s first year of hearings was directed at

the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations and at radicals in the labor movement’

(Schultz and Schultz, 2001: 13; see also Ginger and Christiano, 1987).

McCarthyism and the New Red Scare

Business Nationalists could package states’ rights as Americanism. In 1950 Claude A.

Putnam, president of the National Association of Manufacturers wrote, If we do not cut big

government down to the relative size and shape the founding fathers intended—then government

19
eventually will dominate our lives, destroy our freedom and kill the spirit of individual enterprise

and initiative which has made America great (Putnam, 1950: iv). Putnam wanted to ‘restore the

historic balance of power between central and state governments’ by ‘transferring back to the

states various service responsibilities which they can and should assume’ (Putnam, 1950: iv).

Putnam wrote this in his foreword to the NAM book Bring Government Back Home!: A Program

for the Re-Allocation of Tax Resources and Service Responsibilities Between Federal and State

Governments, by Harely L. Lutz (1950). ‘Bring Government Back Home’ is a slogan used today

by various right-wing groups concerned with the size of government.

The most visible figure of this new Red Scare was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

McCarthy began has campaign in early 1950 by targeting the State Department, with a goal of

weeding out ‘the whole group of twisted-thinking New Dealers’ who he claimed had ‘led

America to near ruin at home and abroad’ (Goldman, 1960: 144).

In the broadest sense, the post-war Red Scare and the McCarthy Period ran from 1946 to

1954 (Goldstein, 1978). During this period, the unions, the mainstream churches, and agencies of

the federal government itself were all under attack. The New Deal, unions, Social Security,

government regulations, groups of people who did not know their ‘proper place’ in society—all

were framed by ultraconservatives as part of a collectivist conspiracy to weaken America.

McCarthy’s primary tactic was issuing public allegations of communist sympathy, which

were then investigated by the FBI or other government agencies, which in turn sometimes led to

specific hearings by HUAC or other Congressional committees such as the Senate Internal

Security Subcommittee (SISS). Employers frequently fired people named as subversive or called

to a hearing. This had a devastating effect on public debate and created a chilling effect on free

20
speech (Goldstein, 1978). In fact, McCarthy never actually found even a single communist

employed by the US government, and the only two federal employees convicted on any charge

were convicted of perjury (Goldstein, 1978).

The National Association of Manufacturers, US Chamber of Commerce, and US Business

and Industry Council had helped create the Red Scare of the McCarthy Period. As they backed

away from the racist and hyperbolic Christian American Association, another outfit emerged to

play a coordinating role in the anti-union network: the DeMille Foundation for Political

Freedom, founded in 1945.

The DeMille Foundation was not as shrill as the Christian American Association, but it too

became enmeshed in the Red Scare and supplied names to HUAC (Navasky, 1980). Cecile B.

DeMille tied himself to the fortunes of the witch hunts when in 1950 he tried, and failed, to

impose a loyalty oath on members of the Screen Directors Guild in Hollywood, in part in

response to the publication of blacklisting guides such as Red Channels (Archerd, 1999; Brady,

1950; Mitchell, 1998).

A number of private groups were set up to monitor communist influences in the media, with

special attention to theatre, film, radio, and television. Some fraternal organizations and veterans

organizations issued educational materials on subversion (Heale, 1990). There were also

‘patriotic’ women’s groups such as the Minutewomen that sought to warn of subversion (Scher,

1995). The ultraconservative Church League of America attacked mainline Protestant

denominations, but also kept a huge collection of files on subversives. For a fee, employers could

have the files searched to see if a prospective employee had ‘subversive’ sympathies or would be

a ‘troublemaker’ or ‘radical’ in the workplace. The more secular American Security Council

21
originally offered a similar blacklisting service (Donner, 1980). That this search was meant to

ferret out union sympathizers seems obvious.

Although many events of the Red Scare received widespread publicity, McCarthyism was

not a grassroots populist movement. It was primarily a power struggle within ‘the nation’s

governing elites,’ involving ‘a concerted campaign by a loosely structured, but surprisingly self-

conscious, network of political activists who had been working for years’ to rid America of what

they saw as communist subversion (Schrecker, 1998: xiii). As we have seen, this

ultraconservative network overlapped substantially with the anti-union alliance.

McCarthy finally went too far in attacks on the US Army, and in 1954 McCarthy was

condemned in a Senate vote and quickly vanished from the political limelight. Hyperbolic

anticommunism rapidly lost much of its public appeal. In order to carry on their campaign

against collectivism of any sort, ultraconservative groups such as the American Security Council

and the Foreign Policy Research Institute were established the next year—along with the

National Right to Work Committee (Group Research, 1962, 1966).

Ultraconservatives, especially elitist libertarians, still denounce the National Labor Relations

Act. Sennholz writes the U.S. by passing the Act ‘abandoned a great achievement of Western

civilization, equality under the law’ (Sennholz, 1975 quoted in Reed 2005)

Communism, Collectivism, and Culture Wars

After World War Two, right-wing movements split into two forms of anti-communism:

generic and antisemitic.

The John Birch society, founded in 1959, warned of creeping collectivism as a form of

communist subversion peddled in America by political liberals who are either witting or

22
unwitting agents of Marxist totalitarianism with the assistance of the Illuminati. The Liberty

Lobby, founded by Willis Carto, promoted the anti-Semitic version of the subversive conspiracy

but often cloaked their bigotry in obscure coded rhetoric.

A classic example of the antisemitic genre is John Beaty’s The Iron Curtain over America in

which he blamed the conspiracy on the ‘Khazars’ (1951). Many readers interpreted this to mean

the Jews no matter what they were called. Bendersky notes that antisemitism found a safe base

inside sectors of the U.S. military officer corps: Marine Corps General Pedro del Valle …

believed that an ‘invisible government’ of international Jews controlled America and worked in

conjunction with their coconspirators in Russia. As late as 1962, he still emphasized the

significance of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1951: 366-367).

Fourth Reich of the Rich by Des Griffin (1978) is another book that implicated the Jews in

the conspiracy of secret elites. Singerman (1982: 317-318) summarizes the theme of the Griffin

book as alleging, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a Satan-inspired, Illuminist blueprint

for the systematic destruction of civilization, all government and religion, and the establishment

of a One-World totalitarian dictatorship.’

The struggle against the demonized enemy can be cast as a plot in which political leftists

and liberals take their marching orders from nefarious secret elites or communist cadres, or from

communist cadres in league with nefarious secret elites on behalf of Satan. Add to this an

additional dimension of conspiracist thinking in which race, religion, and gender issues are

woven into the fabric of the conspiracy theory in different combinations.

The Culture War as a Leftist Conspiracy

Within the broad projects of the Christian Right, Christian cultural conservatives are allied with

23
Christian economic conservatives who base their view of proper political economy on the

Austrian school of economics, especially Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

By the late 1970s the social traditionalists in the Christian Right had shifted to a broader

cultural analysis that blamed the rise of secular humanism for the erosion of America as a

Christian nation. Marsden traced the shift in focus from communism to a more generic secular

humanist demon, writing that it ‘revitalized fundamentalist conspiracy theory’ (Marsden, 1991:

109).

Popular theologian Francis A. Schaeffer helped develop the philosophical arguments for

Christians to challenge secular humanism, but he did not make it a conspiracy theory. That was

the task of Christian Right ideologues such as Tim LaHaye, who taught at John Birch Society

seminars. LaHaye claims it is all a monstrous conspiracy (LaHaye, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003a,

2003b). LaHaye wrote a series of books in the 1970s and 1980s that elaborated on the liberal

secular humanist conspiracy and how conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists had to

become politically active to stop the plot (1978, 1980, 1982).

Patrick J. Buchanan’s 1992 ‘Culture Wars’ address to the Republican National Convention

brought this conspiracist frame into public view. In the full transcript we can see the rhetoric of

right-wing populism in service to a claim that liberals are conspiring against God and country.

Buchanan (1992) is throwing his support behind the nomination of President Bush for a second

term:

There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to

the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of
America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the

24
 other side, and George Bush is on our side ….[W]e must take back our cities, and take
back our culture, and take back our country.
The Culture War frame could be invoked to support specific right-wing ideological positions

on the economy, gender roles, and White racial solidarity. The Culture War also involved a

conservative critique of multiculturalism and ‘political correctness’ (Messer-Davidow 1993,

1994; Scatamburlo, 1998; Schultz, 1993).

The Vast Cultural Marxism Conspiracy

The discussion of the conspiracy of cultural Marxism can easily be found across a wide range of

right-wing groups in the United States. For example, the Westerly Tea Party (2011) has a

website for ‘News of interest to and commentary by Tea Party Patriots in Westerly, RI.’ A

featured text is ‘Welcome to the Machine: Cultural Marxism in Education’ (Rogér, 2010). The

same text is linked to by the Abingdon/Bristol/SW Virginia Tea Party (2011). That website

features this billboard statement:

• We are called racist. Hatemongers. Right wing nut-jobs. Domestic terrorists.

• All by our own Department of Homeland Security. We are none of those things.

• We don’t want to ‘fundamentally change’ America. We want to fundamentally

RESTORE our country to the divinely inspired vision that our Founders fought for,

risking everything. We are the Tea Party Movement. WE HAVE A LOT TO DO!!! Join

us.

Over at the American Thinker website, Rogér (2010) claims that ‘to the left, cloaked within

the progressive movement which has been attacking America since the early 1900s, Western

society and capitalism mark the main battlefront.’ According to Rogér, within ‘progressivism

25
hides cultural Marxism, which attacks minds not only through corrupted textbooks, but also

through more insidious channels.’ Rogér continues:

Along with the philosophy of John Dewy, cultural Marxism constitutes a currency
traded within the education profession. Ayers and other left-dogmatists spread the
currency like a virus throughout universities, infecting teachers with Deweyism and
cultural Marxism without regard for how the ideologies sicken America. Teachers carry
the virus into elementary, middle, and high schools, to inoculate the children of America
and guarantee the spread of a cultural disease called progressivism. (2010)
Linda Kimball, also an author at American Thinker, warned in 2007 that ‘The linchpin of

Cultural Marxism is cultural determinism, the parent of identity politics and group solidarity.’

Kimball then cites David Horowitz, claiming, ‘Cultural determinism’ is ‘identity politics—the

politics of radical feminism, queer revolution, and Afro-centrism—which is the basis of

academic multiculturalism … a form of intellectual fascism and, insofar as it has any politics, of

political fascism as well’ (Horowitz, [1997] 1998).

Conclusions

McVeigh’s Power Devaluation model (2009) is a useful tool to understand why right-wing

movements behave differently from left-wing movements in certain respects.

McVeigh argues that it is shifts in power dynamics and hierarchies in economic, political,

and social spheres that launch the processes in which right-wing groups attract members and

sometimes a mass base large enough to intrude into the larger society. According to McVeigh,

the Resource Mobilization and Political Process models work better with left-wing movements

and movements in which relatively oppressed groups are seeking equality or liberation. Using as

his analytical example the Klan in the 1920s, McVeigh demonstrates that the right-wing KKK in

26
the 1920s was composed of White people attempting to defend their relatively more privileged

position in the social, political, and economic life of their communities.

Research has shown there is no direct causal relationship between national economic

indicators such as unemployment or wage levels and the growth of ethnonationalist groups and

ethnoviolence. Something more complicated is involved. Studies since the 1990s have teased out

a role for economic competition and anxiety coupled with other factors in prompting ethnic

conflict promoted by the political right, but no over-arching coherent explanation emerged.

McVeigh uses his Power Devaluation model to explain why White Protestant Klan members in

the 1920s would fear losing economic power at a time of national prosperity, and argues the

same model can help explain the dynamics in other right-wing groups at different historic

periods.

After the debt-ceiling vote in August 2011, Amanda Marcotte, writing on the feminist

research website RH Reality Check, explained ‘How Abortion Caused the Debt Crisis:’

The genius of conservative leadership was that they were able to take all this anger
about sexual freedom and desegregation and put the blame on two enemies: Democrats
and the federal government. Democrats were blamed for society getting ‘out of control’
and the federal government’s role in enforcing women’s rights and desegregation made
them an easy target. Once these villains were established, all this right-wing populist
anger could be pointed towards generic goals of big business Republicans. If you hate
the federal government for enforcing the Civil Rights Act, it’s easy enough to start
hating them for levying taxes, especially if you can be convinced those taxes are going
to welfare to pay for what you believe is immoral behavior, such as single motherhood.
If you hate the Supreme Court for Roe v. Wade, it’s easy to get you to support putting
more conservative justices up there who will routinely vote for business interests.
The Tea Partiers are one more iteration of a long series of right-wing populist movements

27
that mobilize the white middle class and working class in the United States. When they fade

away, the power elites will flex the muscles of organized wealth and promote a new movement.

That mass right-wing movement, whatever it is called, will be mobilized by demonizing selected

scapegoats and fomenting a countersubversion panic pitting heroic patriotic producers against

nefarious subversive parasites.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the board, staff, interns, and volunteers at Political Research Associates who gave

me the time and assistance to research and write this chapter.

Funding

Research for this work was funded in part by American Rights at Work in a grant made to

Political Research Associates.

1
August Bebel is said to have used the phrase ‘Der Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus der

dummen Kerle.’ It can be translated as ‘antisemitism is the socialism of fools’ or of the ‘dumb’

or ‘stupid.’ See Robert Fulford, The socialism of fools, The National Post, 22 October 2005,

http://robertfulford.com/2005-10-22-left.html. The concept and perhaps the phrase itself

circulated before Bebel’s use. See for details, Richard J. Evans, 2005, The Coming of the Third

Reich, Penguin Group; Peter G. J. Pulzer, 1964, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany

and Austria, in New Dimensions in History. New York: John Wiley and Sons; and for those that

read German (I do not), Francis L. Cartsen, Augustt Bebel und die Organisation der Massen,

28
Berlin, 1991.
2
Although popularly known as HUAC, the actual name originally was the Special

Committee on Un-American Activities, and later, the House Committee on Un-American

Activities (HCUA).

29
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