Wrapped in the Flag (6 page)

To my surprise, my parents had barely unpacked when they announced a new house rule: my brother and I were instructed to bring our schoolbooks home every day.

“We want to know what you’re being taught,” Mother explained.

“What do I tell Sister?” I asked. “We are only allowed to take workbooks out of the room.”

“Just bring home the books,” Dad said.

The next day, when the final bell rang, I grabbed all the books from my desk and dashed to the door. Luckily, Sister was preoccupied; she didn’t even look up as I left the room.

After dinner, Mother sat at her end of the table, hunched over a book. Her eyes moved while she tapped a pencil on the pad next to her. Something stopped her, and she made a note and scratched a line under it.

“Jay, listen to this,” she said.

Dad leaned forward while Mother read to him. “It’s everywhere,” he said. “Nothing is sacred.”

“Just like Bob Welch told us,” Mother said. “He really is aware of the depth of the problem.”

I kicked the leg of my chair and rested my chin in my hand. My hope for a quick exit from the table had evaporated thirty minutes before.

“Take your elbows off the table and sit up straight,” Mother snapped. “We’re doing this for you.”

“What did Sister talk about today?” Dad asked.

I hesitated. “Nothing much,” I said.

“Answer your father, young lady,” Mother said.

“It wasn’t
anything, really. I did learn that farms in Sweden had electricity in their barns before most farms in the U.S., that’s all.”

Traffic whooshed by on Maplewood followed by a sharp honk and a quick screech of brakes. Outside our window, a small crowd of sparrows chirped away in the elm tree. The cuckoo in our clock marked eight o’clock. I yawned.

Mother sighed deeply, took a gulp of her scotch, and lit a cigarette. At the other end of the table, Dad mirrored her perfectly.

The boom of my father’s voice surprised me.

“What in God’s name are you talking about? Sweden? Sweden is a socialist country. One of the worst in the world.”

I sat there. My heart beat in my throat.

“Say something!” he shouted.

“I didn’t know,” I said, very softly.

“Now you do. Tomorrow you’ll tell your teacher.”

For the next hour, I sat while Mother and Dad reeducated me with the “correct” information about socialist Sweden. I was sent to school with the notes my parents had written and clear instruction to tell my teacher exactly what they had told me.

My teacher was not amused when I read my parents’ notes to the class.

“You dare talk back to me,” Sister screamed as she slapped my face. “Go home now and don’t return until you can be polite.”

That day, I was sure I’d get sympathy from my parents. Instead, Mother and Dad insisted I continue to speak up in class.

“Please, don’t make me,” I begged.

“You’ll obey your parents or answer to me,” my father said. “It’s time you learned to stand up for the truth.”

My parents loved to describe this incident to their right-wing associates. Dad usually introduced me and then explained how their “brainwashed” twelve-year-old daughter had awakened them to the dangers lurking in schools, even Catholic ones. It was not unusual for Dad’s friends to pat me on the back and congratulate me for having parents who cared enough to teach me the truth.

When I was in college, I did discover that my seventh-grade textbook had been correct about the electrification of Swedish farms: over 50 percent had electricity in 1930 compared to 13 percent in the Midwest and 3 percent in the South.
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I gradually came to understand that facts never changed my parents’ minds; they believed that socialist Europe was too bureaucratic and too anti–free enterprise to best the United States in anything. Their reasoning demanded that those socialist farms could never have had electricity before American farms did. That was that. Facts be damned.

After the Sweden debacle, my brother coached me on ways to avoid parental booby traps. “You’re telling me to lie,” I complained. “I’m not good at lying.”

“You’re not exactly lying,” he explained. “You’re telling them what they want to hear.”

“I want this to stop,” I told Jay R. “When will they stop?”

“They’re just getting going.”

I was catching it on both fronts—home and school—until a miracle happened. After Easter vacation, Sister Mary Austin was gone. “Sister was ill and needed rest,” we were told. No adult ever said another word about her. But I didn’t care. My tormentor was gone; I had a reprieve on the school front. On the home front, no so much.

Teachers like the one who terrorized my class worked in schools all over Chicago and all around the country. It was many years later that the Catholic Church recognized the abuse being perpetrated on children and took a few tiny steps to correct it. The larger scandal of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church would not be revealed for decades.

My teacher’s disappearance did not slow my mother at all; she ramped up her textbook wars until she was fighting with the entire Catholic school system of Chicago. In meeting after meeting with administrators who oversaw school policy, she presented detailed lists of the errors and omissions she’d documented in the textbooks. Mother’s objections were similar to those arising in other parts of the country. At first, she stressed the misinterpretation of American history. Later, she branched out into broad attacks on the entire curriculum.

Before long, no one in school was happy to see my mother. No matter, she refused to compromise or stand down. “I’m doing it for the children,” she said.

Ironically, as my mother devoted more and more time to save “the children,” she had less and less time for her children. This seeming contradiction did not trouble her in any way. She believed that God had set her path, and she followed His will. “Saving the country trumps fun and games,” she said without apology.

In the summer of 1959, my mother enrolled me at Regina Dominican, the newest girls’ high school in the northern suburbs of Chicago. The school had been commissioned by the Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Stritch, who served Chicago for eighteen years. Stritch was known for his commitment to Catholic schools as well as for his refusal to engage in interfaith dialogue, a stance that made him beloved by traditional Catholics like my parents.
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Cardinal Stritch died just as Regina opened its doors, but his death didn’t change my mother’s positive assessment of my new school. She described Regina as “orthodox” and its curriculum as “traditional.” To my ears, these terms meant that my new school had passed parental muster; my father and mother would have no reason to continue their feud with the Catholic school system in Chicago.

Besides all of that, in early 1959, my parents had escalated to really big worries: international conspiracy and imminent overthrow of the United States government. Words in textbooks had to take a distant back seat . . . or so I thought.

The night before my first day of high school, I could barely sleep. I fretted about my hair, finding my classes, and whether I’d have a place to sit at lunch. By morning, I was too tired to talk and too worried to choke down my breakfast. “You’re acting like a prima donna,” Mother said. “Eat your meal and go to school.”

That day lasted forever, but I survived. The next day and the one after that got easier. Before long, Latin declensions and conjugations made sense; solving for X became possible, and I could diagram complex sentences. New friends greeted me in the halls, and I found a group to share lunch.

One day, I looked in the mirror and smiled. “I’m a Regina girl and I’m glad.” I had to give my mother credit; she’d picked the perfect high school for me.

A few weeks later, my mother announced her plan to look more closely into my education.

“Why? I thought you approved of Regina,” I said.

“Don’t question your mother, young lady. Bring your books home, all of them.”

Soon enough, Mother and Dad had uncovered a nest of “errors, lies, and mistakes” in every one of my books.

“We have to go to the powers that be,” Mother announced.

The next day, in hat and gloves, Mother strode to Regina’s main office, the click-click of her three-inch pumps echoing across the tile floor. White index cards, marking dubious passages, poked from the top and sides of the books she carried. Before long, the girls in my classes noticed.

“She’s here,
again
,” someone would whisper. I’d groan and turn away.

At first, the Regina staff accommodated Mother, but as the year progressed, she became a nuisance. Sister Mary Kevin, the principal, and my teachers found as many ways as possible to avoid her. Calls were not returned;
scheduled meetings were abruptly canceled. Even her letters went unanswered.

Mother grew frustrated and enlisted Dad’s help. When he tried to ratchet up the pressure, the administration dug in all the deeper. Finally, my parents decided to take their concerns public.

During the spring meeting of the Regina Parents’ Association—even though they weren’t on the agenda—Mother and Dad interrupted the proceedings to give a detailed analysis of the pro-Communist, anti-American materials hiding in the textbooks. When other parents shouted my parents down, the meeting abruptly ended. Mother and Dad packed up their materials and left. No one spoke to them.
³

When I heard about the spring-meeting fiasco, I kept saying to myself, “This has nothing to do with me.” I tried to keep my head down, my grades up, and my opinions to myself. For the next few months, I thought I was successful.

Shortly before summer vacation, Sister Mary Kevin called me to her office. She spoke about her prayers for my future and the need to find a suitable place for me.

“What? You’re expelling me?” I said through tears.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll be happier somewhere else,” Sister told me.

“I’m perfectly happy here.”

“I’m sorry, dear. God bless you.”

With that, I was escorted from her office to my locker. My things had already been removed and stacked neatly on the floor. Before the dismissal bell rang, I was out the door where my mother was waiting to drive me home. She said nothing about what had just happened. “I have a flock of pressing things to finish before dinner” was her only comment.

That evening, my 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 major
part 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.
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It’s a safe bet that Mother and Dad received a copy of that pamphlet when they met Welch for the first time.