Thunder on the Right: The Roots of Conservative Victory in the 1960s

Abstract

Four scenes from the spring and summer of 1963: In Florissant, Missouri, not far outside St. Louis, 500 protesters hold up a forest of picket signs and chant angry slogans: another disruptive Sixties protest. The state legislature has refused the activists' demands concerning the local schools, and the activists have responded by trying to shut the schools down. They are demonstrating for busing. Only none of the demonstrators are black. They are parents of children in Catholic schools, and the legislature, citing the First Amendment's proscription against the mixing of church and state, has refused their request for the same bus service that public school families receive. They sing the same “freedom songs” they have recently heard Martin Luther King's demonstrators sing in Birmingham, Alabama. “I am here as a taxpayer,” one mother tells the press. “An irate, angry, and broke taxpayer.” In northern California, eighty-seven rampaging radicals barge...