Wrapped in the Flag (21 page)

To me, the whole arrangement was completely unjust, unfair, and mean, but my parents didn’t give a damn. As Dad said, “Either go to the University of Dallas or don’t go to school at all. You decide.”

“We found the finest conservative Catholic school in the country for you,” Mother said. “It’s for your own good.”

My parents were convinced that this tiny Catholic school—fifteen miles outside of Dallas—would save me from the clutches of the liberals, Communists, and non-Catholics who peopled the secular universities. I’d be purified with huge doses of orthodox Roman Catholicism and correct political thought.

“Our job is to save your mind and your soul,” my father said.

“Your father knows what you need,” Mother added.

My parents had committed to the University of Dallas without ever seeing it. Instead, they relied on the recommendation of Robert Morris, the university’s former president and one of my father’s “associates in the cause,” as Mother referred to him. I knew what that meant—Morris was a Bircher.
²⁷

Morris had taken the reins at the University of Dallas in 1960, but his tenure was short and rocky. He spent so much time speaking at Birch rallies around the country that he neglected the needs of the struggling school.
²⁸
Two years after he arrived, the Board of Trustees sacked him.

My dad didn’t care. “UD is the only decent school out there,” he maintained.

I had a long list of reasons why the University of Dallas was not the school for me, reasons I pointed out every chance I got. The university had only 275 students, making it smaller than my high school. It was not accredited, offered only a few degrees, and had almost no social life. Worse yet, without a car, I’d be stranded in the boonies of Irving, Texas.

The final argument against the school: my brother was a student. I tried
to explain how much I didn’t want to be “Jay R. Conner’s little sister,” especially on a campus with such a tiny student body. My parents were not moved. They loved the university, period.

When I fretted to my school guidance counselor about this, she reminded me to focus. “A scholarship offer will change their minds,” she said. I followed her advice: I finished my college applications, took my SATs, and waited.

Early in March of 1963, I caught the early bus. I had several big assignments and wanted to get a start on my homework. When I opened the front door, I saw Mother camped at the dining room table doing research about something or other. “There’s a letter for you on the credenza,” she told me.

I grabbed the envelope. The first line of the return address was Otto Kerner, Governor. Curious, I slid my thumbnail under the envelope flap, took out the sheets, and began to read.

I’d been chosen as an Illinois State Scholarship winner, one of 1,800 students in the whole state offered a monetary stipend.
²⁹
I rifled through the enclosures: a letter of acceptance, details of the scholarship, and an explanation of renewal requirements. Then I returned to the letter and read it again, word for word.

Reality began to sink in: this award would pay for college, four years of college. It covered $600 per year—$600. I’d need some spending money and clothes, but I could figure that out. I knew I could.

A couple of hours later, I sat at the dinner table basking in the joy of having a bright future. I paid attention when I heard my mother say, “She got mail from Kerner, the governor. He’s liberal scum, that one.”

“I want to see it now,” my father said.

I waited. In the corner the grandfather clock tick-tocked. My heart pounded in my throat. Mother read the letter and passed it to my father. He read it and passed it back to her.

While I waited, I worried. My father couldn’t stand the governor, a situation made worse when Kerner had called the Birchers “dangerous” and then added, “Whatever they are doing and saying is a dangerous thing.”
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Of course, the remarks had been carried in the Chicago papers just a few months earlier. I prayed that my dad would look past the Democratic governor and his anti-Birch stand, and think about me.

“Why was I kept in the dark about this?” Dad asked.

“The guidance counselor and teachers at school recommended me,” I explained. “I didn’t think I’d win.”

Dad’s lips were pencil thin, his jaw tight. His face clouded over, and he inhaled deeply. “No child of mine will ever be in that school. I don’t care if they’re giving away five-dollar bills for four dollars. You know how awful that
place is. Dr. Oliver has talked about it hundreds of times.”

“How could you?” Mother said to me. “You are a disgrace.”

In no time at all, I was begging. I promised to meet my dad’s Birch friend Dr. Revilo Oliver on campus. I promised to take only classes he okayed. I even promised to come home every other weekend. I promised anything I could think of. Finally, I blurted out, “If I’m paying, why can’t I decide?”

I could hear my father breathing. The seconds passed.

Dad’s hand slammed on the table. “Enough!” he screamed. “You are going to the University of Dallas or you’ll be out on your ear. Another word and I’ll make you regret it.”

I knew my father’s rages, and I knew he’d get his way, with his belt if necessary. Then, when he was finished, I’d face months of disapproval and recriminations. My mother would support and enforce everything my father ordered.

When my father ordered me to my room to compose a letter declining the scholarship, I obeyed. When he insisted on reading what I wrote, I handed it over. The next day, I left the envelope addressed to Governor Kerner on the dining room table. My mother stamped it and put it in the mail.

I never said another word about the University of Illinois.

The black-white matter is still the Great American Obsession
.

—S
TUDS
T
ERKEL
¹

I resigned myself to reality: in the fall, I’d either be a freshman at the University of Dallas or I’d be in Chicago under my parents’ thumbs. With that in mind, UD looked a whole lot better. But, I needed money. That meant a job that paid a lot more than my current part-time retail gig in the neighborhood clothing shop.

Over Easter vacation, I walked up and down Devon Avenue, talking to every manager in every shop. “Nothing now. Try again in a month,” was the refrain I heard.

As much as it wounded my pride, I asked my father for help. In a couple of days, he sent me to a friend of a friend who had a few openings.

“What’s the job?” I asked.

“Something on the phone,” Dad said.

“Where?”

“Downtown in the Greyhound bus station,” he told me.

“What does it pay?” I wondered.

“More than you make now.”

The next day, I was in the line at the Greyhound bus station on the corner of Clark and Randolph in the heart of Chicago’s Loop. A dozen other people were waiting to interview for the information operator position. I worried: I had no skills or experience that applied, even remotely, to bus schedules or fares. I knew nothing of switchboards, and I’d never been on a Greyhound bus, but I needed this job. I swore to the station manager that I’d work hard and learn fast. I nearly fainted when I heard, “You’re hired.”

My head started to spin when I heard the salary, $2.47 per hour plus overtime. This job gave me a 325 percent pay jump. I decided to tell Dad the good news minus one little detail: I’d just landed a union job.

I went to work a week before I graduated from high school. For the first
time in my life, I had a full-time job downtown, punched a clock, and worked with tattooed motorcycle guys, military vets, single women, and many African Americans. I learned right off the bat that a lot of folks didn’t think I deserved my job—I was a rich, white kid from the suburbs. I didn’t try to correct them; I just worked hard, asked questions, and took advice. Before long, people stopped giving me grief and started helping me.

Thanks to new friends at Greyhound, I learned that “going South” always meant Memphis. I learned that many people were terrified that the racial unrest in the South would spread to Chicago. I learned about an influx of “Negroes” from New Orleans, many traveling to Chicago on free tickets given to them by the White Citizens Councils.
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All through that summer of 1963, while I worked to earn enough money for college, the country was grappling with a civil rights movement that would not be silenced and a preacher from Georgia who had a dream.

My parents had gotten their views about African Americans and the civil rights movement from Robert Welch, an old Southern boy. He’d always thought the Negroes had it good in the United States, a view he explained in a pamphlet published in the early 1960s,
Two Revolutions at Once
.

In it, Welch claimed that “educational opportunities [for Negroes] have tremendously improved” with “some states [in the South] spending as much as fifty percent of their total school budget on Negro schools, while deriving only fifteen percent . . . from taxes paid by the Negro population.”
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He claimed that job opportunities for the Negro had “markedly increased despite a determined undercover effort by the Communists to prevent this trend.” This assertion was unproven, but that didn’t stop Welch from repeating it. Welch even believed that “separate but equal” had been “gaining substance in the matter of equality and losing rigidity in the matter of separateness.”

In 1963, Welch was still insisting that “separate but equal” was “surely but slowly breaking down, with regard to public facilities, wherever Negroes earned the right by sanitation, education, and a sense of responsibility, to share such facilities.”
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As jarring as these words are today, they worked well for the John Birch Society in the 1960s—so well that, by 1965, JBS could boast more than one hundred chapters in Birmingham, Alabama, and its surrounding suburbs. The
New York Times
reported that “the society is capitalizing on white supremacy sentiment, as well as on a general social, religious and political conservatism in the south.”
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As a Birch kid, I wasn’t a bit surprised. The JBS had been fighting the civil rights movement since its founding, and the events of 1962 and 1963 added even more grist to their racist mill.

In the fall of 1962, chaos erupted in Mississippi when the federal courts ordered the admission of James Meredith, a twenty-nine-year-old Air Force veteran, to the University of Mississippi.
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The Ole Miss Rebels and segregationists across the former Confederacy were not about to sit quietly by while a “colored” man soiled the 144-year whites-only history of the university. Ross Barnett, Mississippi’s governor, didn’t help matters when he vowed that “no school in our state will be integrated while I am your Governor.”
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President Kennedy sent sixteen thousand federal troops to quell the rioting in Oxford. One of the protestors was General Edwin Walker, John Bircher, friend of my parents, and right-wing hero.

Walker had resigned from the Army almost a year earlier. In no time, he took up the cause he called “constitutional conservatism.” In speeches across the country, Walker denounced the Kennedy administration’s “no-win” foreign policy toward the “world Communist conspiracy.”
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Walker’s accusations alarmed members of the Special Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, which had called him to testify. In April, giving his Senate testimony, the general challenged the loyalty of then secretary of state Dean Rusk and of Walt W. Rostow, head of policy planning at State. When questioned about calling these men Communists, Walker said, “I reserve the right to call them something worse such as traitors to the American system of constitutional government, national and state sovereignty and independence.” A small melee occurred after the hearing when the general punched a reporter trying to ask a question.
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Following the hearing, Walker became “the flag-bearer for the entire conservative movement,” according to Jonathan Schoenwald.
¹⁰
In our house, he was simply “The General.”