Abstract
On June 23, 1964, Tom Charles Huston, national chairman of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a conservative political activist organization, delivered an address to the national convention of Alpha Gamma Delta sorority in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, Huston spoke passionately about what he termed, “‘Operation Greek’—the effort to destroy the fraternity system.” He explained that the program was “well financed” and led “by the same prophets of equalitarianism who are dedicated to the extermination of all those institutions and traditions which are part of the American way of life.” These alleged enemies of the fraternity system, Huston argued, “clothed” their criticisms “in the sacred garment of ‘civil rights.’”1
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Notes
Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6–11.
Recent studies such as Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005);
Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006);
and Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) illuminate the importance of race in the mobilization of grassroots conservatism in the South. For a party-level analysis of race as it influenced the Southern political shift toward the conservative movement and the GOP, see Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right.
George Lewis, The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945— 1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004) shows how Southern white supremacists used anticommunist rhetoric to remove race from debates over segregation policies.
Numan Bartley, The Rise ofMassive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 37–38.
George Lewis, “White South, Red Nation: Massive Resistance and the Cold War,” in Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction, ed. Clive Webb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 122.
“The NPC Declaration for Freedom.” On the Manion Forum, see Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 3–16.
David Lawrence, “‘Civil Rights’ That Breed ‘Civil Wrongs,’” U.S. News & World Report, July 19, 1957; David Lawrence, “There Is No ‘Fourteenth Amendment!” U.S. News & World Report, September 27, 1957, quotation from p. 139; David Lawrence, “Illegality Breeds Illegality,” U.S. News & World Report, October 4, 1957; and Nancy MacLean, “Neo-Confederacy versus the New Deal: The Regional Utopia of the Modern American Right,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 318–19.
Annadell Craig Lamb, The History of Phi Mu: The First 130 Years (Atlanta: Phi Mu Fraternity, 1982), 65–66;
Genevieve Forbes Morse, A History of Kappa Delta Sorority, 1897–1972 (Springfield, MO: Kappa Delta Sorority, 1973), 251–52; and Report of the 31st National Panhellenic Conference, 1949, 22–23.
“United States National Student Association,” 1950–1951, “All-American Conference to Combat Communism, 1951–1962” folder, box 1, NPC Fraternity Affairs File, 1941–1985 (41/82/9), NPC Archives; Duke Sorority Woman to Eileen Rudolph, September 28, 1962, box 2, Duke Panhellenic Council Records, 1936–1993, Duke University Archives, Duke University. In fact, since 1952, the financially strapped NSA had been funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in an effort to deter the group from accepting Communist subsidies. See “NSA Contemplates Its Shattered Image,” Washington Post, February 20, 1967; Eugene G. Schwartz, ed., American Students Organize: Founding the National Student Asso ciation after World War II: An Anthology and Sourcebook (Westport, CT: American Council on Education/Prager Publishers, 2006), 219;
and J. Angus Johnston, “The United States National Student Association: Democracy, Activism, and the Idea of the Student, 1947–1978” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2009), 226.
NPC Proceedings, 1949, 118; “NPC: An Historical Record of Achievement,” (c. 1957), NPC Archives, NPC Publications (41/82/800), box 1, SLC, UIUC, 15; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 176–79; “From the NPC-RPA Committee,” April 18, 1960, “NPC Research and Public Relations Committee, 1957–58, 1960” folder, box 1, NPC Committee File (41/82/50), NPC Archives; and Sam M. Jones, “It Could Happen Here,” National Review, December 28, 1955, 2.
Gregory L. Schneider, Cadres for Conservatism: YoungAmericans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 32–33; Huston, “Fraternities and Freedom,” 8; and “NSA Contemplates Its Shattered Image.”
Anthony James, “The Defenders of Tradition: College Social Fraternities, Race, and Gender, 1945–1980” (PhD diss., University of Mississippi, 1998), 102–4;
Nicholas L. Syrett, The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 256; and Wallace Turner, “Colleges Face U.S. Aid Cutoff If They Permit Fraternity Bias,” The New York Times, June 18, 1965, 1, 24.
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© 2012 Laura Jane Gifford and Daniel K. Williams
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Freeman, M.L. (2012). “Inequality for All and Mint Juleps, Too”. In: Gifford, L.J., Williams, D.K. (eds) The Right Side of the Sixties. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014795_3
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