Wrapped in the Flag (16 page)

Birchers were denounced as desperate and pessimistic, a group using a “patriotic foam of uncompromising war on Communism, at home and abroad.” According to
Life
, the basic problem for the Birchers was “how to combat a monolithic Soviet enemy with an 18th Century-style minimum government and budget.” The society was summed up in the word “lunacy.” I had to admit that Dad had this one pegged right: the real criticism of the JBS was not in the photos; it was ninety-two pages earlier in the feature editorial.

Wow, was I grateful that Sister Anna Raphael had focused on the photographs. It also helped that school was out for summer vacation. I told myself that the uproar around the JBS would die down before school started in the fall. It just had to.

The June 10 edition of the
Chicago Tribune
dashed my pipe dream. On page six, I read, “Hint Pentagon to Reprimand Gen. Walker: Chiefs Get Report on Anti-Red Drive.”
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Any good Bircher, especially one living in the
Conner house, understood the significance of that headline: the Kennedy administration had the Birchers’ favorite general in its crosshairs.

Edwin A. Walker, a two-star army general and a JBS member, had enjoyed a storied military career as a combat veteran of both World War II and the Korean War. In 1959 he was named commander of the 24th Infantry Division in Germany, where he developed his “Pro-Blue” troop training program, designed to educate soldiers about the evils of Communism. Walker incorporated Birch materials into this program and advised his soldiers how to vote.
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According to witnesses, Walker also accused both former President Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt of being “pinko,” a common euphemism for having Communist leanings. The general’s comments and the contents of his “Pro-Blue” program made the front page of the
Overseas Weekly
, a tabloid that Walker described as “immoral, unscrupulous, incompetent, and destructive.” Shortly after the article was published, the general was suspended from duty.
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The Walker saga escalated all throughout the summer. Finally, the general was admonished by the Department of Defense for failing to “heed cautions by superior officers to refrain from . . . controversial activities,” leading the JBS to scream about muzzling the military.
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Historian Jonathan Schoenwald explained the reasons behind uproar: “After the disappointment of Eisenhower’s relatively liberal presidency, conservatives expected JFK’s tenure to be even worse. But no one believed their government would go so far as to discharge anticommunist generals whose job was fighting communism.”
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In his book
Cruising Speed
, Bill Buckley put it more colorfully: “General Edwin Walker . . . betrayed a Birchite ignorance of any distinctions, shored up by his indecipherably documented certainty that everyone in sight was an agent of the Communist Party.”
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For Americans today, General Walker and his “pro-Blue” program have been relegated to the dustbin of American history. But in 1961, he was a headliner. His plight—as a brave anti-Communist destroyed by his own government—resonated with the Right. For many, including my parents, Walker was proof positive that un-American elements lurked high in the government, high enough to destroy the career of a general in the U.S. Army.

All summer I watched and listened as my dad defended Walker and the JBS against all critics. For Dad, there was no other option; he’d never abandon that “great cause” of his life, as he called the Birch Society. He’d sworn, many times over, to live for—or, if necessary, die for—that cause. As I’d gotten older, I’d dismissed a lot of my father’s rhetoric as overly dramatic,
but by the end of August, I saw another reality: my father was paying a high price for his JBS obsession.

My first clue was Rolaids. Rolls and bottles in the bathroom, on his bedroom dresser, in the corner of the kitchen counter, on the dining-room table. He also had a stash of prescriptions for his “fussy belly” and Alka-Seltzer for quick relief from indigestion.

I noticed his nervous mannerisms, usually preceding a fit of temper: drumming fingers, pursing lips, narrowed eyes. I heard him pace the floor in the living room and raise his voice to my mother. Sometimes he forgot to kiss Mother before taking his place at the table—a dramatic departure from the norm.

One day, I overheard him arguing on the phone. “No, I won’t,” he said. “God damn it, I won’t compromise for a few bucks and you know it.” He slammed the phone down and looked over at me. “Don’t eavesdrop again,” he said.

I figured that Dad was talking to one of his business partners and things were not going well. “Thanks to that socialist in the White House, the economy stinks,” was Dad’s mantra. Kennedy made a perfect scapegoat, but I wondered about the impact of the JBS. It seemed to me that being the face of an organization labeled as crackpot couldn’t be helping.

I felt sorry for my father, and I tried to stay out of his way. Dad was volatile even on the best day, but when things were bad, he was a tinderbox. School couldn’t start soon enough for me.

I lived in a white world.

Everywhere I went, from school to church, the country club to the grocery store, I saw almost all white faces. The only exceptions were the women who worked as maids, a few busboys at the country club, and the handymen who did odd jobs.

I was a good citizen growing up in the Land of Lincoln. I knew that Honest Abe was born in a one-room log cabin, became the sixteenth president of the United States in 1861, and was shot to death by John Wilkes Booth six days after the Civil War ended. I knew that the North fought to keep the union together and end slavery, while the South fought for states’ rights. I could recite every word of the Gettysburg Address and sing the first three stanzas of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

And I could write everything I knew about being black in America on the palm of one hand.

By the time I was sixteen, I had known, by name, only four African Americans: Maddie and Alberta, our maids; Olie, the housekeeper in Gloucester, and her husband, Brooks.

Growing up, I was expected to call all adults Mr., Mrs., or Miss followed by their last name. So Robert Welch was always Mr. Welch, our family friend Ellen White was always Mrs. White, and so on. “It’s courteous and respectful,” my mother explained. “Children do not address adults by their first names.” The rule did not apply to African Americans, however. They were always called by first names; I did not even know their last names.

I heard white people use the n-word in casual conversation, but Mother said the word was vulgar. Mother preferred “colored” to describe black Americans. I thought myself highly evolved because I used “Negro,” just like my teachers did.

This question of what to call African Americans ignored the real issue: African Americans in the South—and in many parts of the North—were second-class citizens. As a white girl, living on Chicago’s affluent North Side, I had no experience of second-class.

All of that changed in the fall of 1961. My teacher for junior English, a laywoman with a love of fiction, introduced me to her “restricted” shelf. On it, she had a collection of extraordinary books, each camouflaged with a carefully folded brown-paper cover. On the spine, she had printed “Honors English.” She and I made a bargain: as long as all of my grades were As or Bs, I had access to that treasure trove. Bad marks in geometry or chemistry would cost me my reading privileges. I made sure that didn’t happen.

My teacher never told me in advance what book she’d selected. One time it was
Catcher in the Rye
; another time,
1984
. Of all the books she shared with me that year, the one that moved me the most was John Howard Griffin’s
Black Like Me
. I read the first two sentences of the preface: “This may not be all of it. It may not cover all of the questions, but it is what it is like to be a Negro in the land where we keep the Negro down,”
⁸
and I knew my parents would be enraged if they ever discovered that I’d read this book. From past experience at Regina High, I knew they’d take their fury out on my teacher and me. So I read
Black Like Me
in study hall and stowed it in my locker for safekeeping.

Griffin, a white writer from Texas, dyed his skin black and for thirty-seven days traveled through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to experience life as a black man. After a month of struggling for his basic needs—a restroom, a drink of water, a meal, a place to sleep—Griffin wrote, “My skin was dark. That was sufficient reason for them to deny me those
rights and freedoms without which life . . . becomes a matter of little more than animal survival.”
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I’d never struggled to find a restroom or a drinking fountain. I’d never been refused a table in a restaurant or a seat on the bus. I couldn’t grasp being beaten for no reason or being threatened for looking at a white person. No one had ever said to me, “What’re you doing in here, nigger?”
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Griffin made me feel those things. He also forced me to discard many of my notions about being black in America. Before
Black Like Me
, I thought that anyone could make it in America with hard work and perseverance. I imagined African Americans living like I did, well, except for smaller houses and smaller bank accounts. I had seen Chicago’s skid row and tenements, but I assumed that only drunks and bums fell that far. Where they landed was their own fault.

When I finished
Black Like Me
, I wondered if Griffin was right when he said, “I like to see good in the white man . . . but after this experience, it’s hard to find it in the Southern white.”
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That Griffin didn’t indict the Northern whites gave me some comfort.

After reading Griffin’s book, I paid more attention to the women who worked in our house three days a week. For the first time, I noticed the Ace bandages wrapped around Alberta’s knees. One day, I saw her, on all fours, washing the kitchen floor. She was humming. When she realized I was standing by the doorway, she stopped.

“What is that?” I asked. Alberta sat back on her heels and in a haunting alto voice sang, “Swing low, sweet chariot. Coming for to carry me home.” I realized that I did know that song, but I’d never heard it sung like that. When she finished, she picked up her rag and went back to scrubbing. Later, I wondered if she needed help getting to her feet, and I was angry at myself for not offering my arm.

Our maid Maddie had large arthritic knots on the joints of her fingers, and I knew the ironing had to be hard on her. I’d heard Mother scold her about a scorched handkerchief or pillow case, and I worried if Maddie would be let go. But I said nothing.

Mother could have hired younger maids, but she never did. Every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, for as long as we lived in Chicago, Maddie and Alberta rode the bus from the South Side, came in our back door, and went to work.

One afternoon, I saw Alberta and Maddie getting on the CTA bus heading home just as I was getting off my bus from Evanston. I watched as the two women dropped their coins into the fare bucket and go to the back of the bus.
They stood while the bus pulled from the curb. Plenty of seats were empty, but the women didn’t sit.

That was the day I stopped placing all racial problems south of the Mason-Dixon line. I began to wonder what was happening in Chicago.

I wasn’t entirely clear about race and inequality, but I was sure of one thing: I could not discuss my feelings with my parents. They were coming from a very different place, the one I’d heard at scores of John Birch Society meetings.

From the very first meeting of the JBS, in 1958, Robert Welch had talked about racial issues being “fomented almost entirely by the Communists to stir up such bitterness between whites and blacks in the South . . . that small flames of civil disorder would inevitably result. They could then fan and coalesce these little flames into one great conflagration of civil war.”
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Those “little flames” included the confrontation in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September of 1957 between Governor Orval Faubus and President Eisenhower. Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to keep nine African American students out of Central High School, but the president federalized those troops, put them under the command of General Edwin Walker—yes, that same Walker—and deployed them to keep those students safe.
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Eventually, the Arkansas schools were integrated; President Eisenhower got himself some enemies, including Robert Welch; and General Walker became “credible” to right-wingers when he talked about civil rights.
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