A Mid-Century Playbook for Saving Progressive American Education
Fifty Years Ago, Parents United to Get the Far-Right John Birch Society Out of Their Schools
This May, an email landed in my inbox. The correspondent, who’d come across my new book on the John Birch Society, wanted to share how members of this far-right anticommunist group won control of his local Parent Teacher Association when he was in kindergarten at San Rafael Elementary.
This was early 1960s Pasadena, California, during the rise of the Birchers. What happened then and there was a story unfolding in many communities around the country.
In one way, the story was similar to the pressures that schools are seeing now. In recent …
