Wrapped in the Flag by Claire Conner Read Free Book Online Page A

father said nothing. He seemed to think no comment was required.
    My friends said nothing. They just stopped calling.
    A few days later, I tried to talk about Regina, but my mother cut off the conversation. “Your parents will choose another school for you,” she said. “Stop acting like this is the end of the world.”

    Mother and Dad were not solitary warriors in the textbook battle. They joined a small but very effective group of right-wing activists who fought for curriculum changes in both public and private schools. 4 One of those school critics was none other than Robert Welch, who had made education a majorpart of the agenda of the National Association of Manufacturers, an ultraconservative business group he headed in the 1950s. In 1954, the association printed and distributed more than two hundred thousand copies of its thirty-two-page pamphlet
This We Believe About Education
, and Welch himself crisscrossed the country chairing meetings on the state of American schools. 5 It’s a safe bet that Mother and Dad received a copy of that pamphlet when they met Welch for the first time.
    Make no mistake: Welch predicted a grim future for education. “In my honest opinion,” he wrote in 1952, “when the Federal Government controls our schools—as control them it must if it supports our schools—we shall have taken the most dangerous possible step toward a tyrannical totalitarianism.” 6
    This threat of tyranny had jolted my parents into action. In the process, they met and worked with several of the most influential textbook critics of the day, including Mel and Norma Gabler, founders of the Educational Research Analysts, based in Longview, Texas. The Gablers prepared long lists of objections to textbooks.
    In her book
As Texas Goes
. . . , Gail Collins describes the Gablers’ “
scroll of shame
, which listed objections they had to the content of the current reading material. At times, the scroll was 54 feet long.” 7
    I chuckle at this image of the endless scroll, but I can’t laugh at the Gablers. Those two folks changed the landscape for the adoption of textbooks, not only in Texas but in much of the country. 8
    Mother couldn’t heap enough praise on the Gablers. “I just love Norma,” she said. “She knows more about textbooks than anyone in the country, and Mel’s a saint.”
    The Gablers identified specific errors in the books they attacked. Any criticism of our constitution or the Founding Fathers was unacceptable. Support for one-world government or the United Nations was unforgivable. Gun control was a major no-no, as was any suggestion of limits on ammunition. Our nation, they believed, was first and foremost Christian. Thus, any suggestion that the founders were deists was intolerable. There could be no discussion of other nations as equal to the United States. After all, our country was exceptional and a perfect embodiment of what government ought to be.
    Good books also had specific characteristics. They always emphasized states’ rights over federal authority. Good books trumpeted small government and the idea that we ought to spread our wonderful system all over the world. Good books taught that the Confederate generals were great patriots. Good books showed the weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Good books respected Judeo-Christian morals, emphasized abstinence in sex education, anddescribed the principles and benefits of free enterprise. 9
    Not everyone appreciated the Gablers. As
Time
said in 1979, “Though the Gablers claim only to seek ‘balance,’ their criticism seems to spring from a hell-for-leather conservatism in politics and Bible belt fundamentalism.” 10
    Along with the Gablers, Mother also met Phyllis Schlafly in the textbook trenches. Both women had a love affair with the nineteenth-century school primers the McGuffey Readers, and both put considerable effort into “selling” McGuffey as the answer to lagging reading skills among America’s children. 11
    Mother