31 Politics
During the Nixon presidential campaign of 1972, my fourth grade friends and I, worried anxiously about who would win. After all, so much – our future, and the fate of the world – was at stake! One friend concluded, based on what her dad’s comments, that the outcome was obvious. “Everyone we know is voting for McGovern”.
Although at the time her conclusion left me disappointed, I took this as another sign that my family and I were different, a tiny minority of Christians in a hostile world. My father talked about politics regularly within our family, and though I was too young to understand the details, I knew that we were mostly cheering for the Republicans. Our reasons were not economic, or even social, as the “religious right” would later content. Dad was, simply, anti-communist, because communism was atheist. Our world was painted in stark black and white terms, as Jesus said “whoever is not for me is against me.” I think Dad could have supported any political movement, as long as it was anti-communist. We were sympathetic to the American party of the segregationist South, for example, because George Wallace was so fiercely anti-communist.
In rural America, though, to be a Republican was hardly a minority position. My McGovern-loving friend was wrong, as we soon learned in a classroom “election”, where Nixon won by even more of a landslide than he did in real life. Among my relatives, everyone was Republican, including my Catholic grandparents.
The one exception was my outspoken grandmother, but we thought of her generally as a crank about such things. And anyway it wasn’t clear she thought much about it, because her main reason seemed to be her gratitude to FDR for getting us out of the depression. Democrats, she believed, fought for the poor; communism, to her, was a sideshow.
To us, it was not a sideshow. To be anti-Communist was to be pro-America, pro-Christian. You couldn’t possibly think anything else. Protesting the Vietnam War, a clear case of good versus evil, was from this perspective an act of treachery. Evil communism was on the rise everywhere, and we Christians were the only significant force that would hold it back. We had to remain firm about this; America’s future was on the line.
We were encouraged, but not deceived, when Jimmy Carter’s election brought the idea of being a “Born Again” Christian as a topic of conversation in American politics. Supporting Carter over this was out of the question, though, given so many of his positions that waivered on the subject of communism. If anything, Carter’s religious positions became to us a warning of how deceptive the Devil could be, using the same language we used in order to trick us into supporting evil.
During the Bicentennial period, interest in American history was natural, and my father introduced me to a popular book among Christians at the time, a history of America called The Light and the Glory, by Presbyterian minister and one-time Senate chaplain Peter Marshall. It presented the history of America since Columbus as one of direct intervention by God, to create a special nation and culture built on Christian principles. Marshall’s book was full of wonderful details about American history that I saw for the first time, and it impressed me not just for its message but for the excitement of seeing how a whole new way of viewing history could be exposed by a careful researcher.
The Seventies were years of significant economic and political turmoil, with rising inflation, the shock of Watergate, American defeat in Vietnam, and a seemingly non-stop rise of Communism. As I became more aware and interested in the politics of the wider world, I also saw the Democratic Party as the clear overseer of all of this mayhem. After all, they controlled both houses of Congress (and the Presidency, after 1976). This was no coincidence, I concluded, and began to think of Republicans as the last defense American had against, not just godless communism, but also everything that went against American values.
What did I know about the world? I watched the nightly news, usually NBC, whenever we had a TV set. At various times throughout the 70’s, my father subscribed to US News & World Report, which I read too, though I don’t remember spending too much time on it. The biggest source of news was probably the Milwaukee Journal, which as the paper boy I had the opportunity to read regularly.
Our high school forensics club, a group focused on learning to speak in public, was a natural fit for me. Forensics was divided into different sections, some of them based on length, some based on style of speaking. I chose extemporaneous speaking, appealing to me because it required the least amount of actual preparation. While others (like Jimbo) had to spend weeks preparing a specific speech, working carefully on the content and delivery, I would be given a topic an hour before the speech, and was expected to speak for about five minutes, intelligently and with good delivery.
I enjoyed the chance to speak off the cuff, but doing well meant a different sort of preparation: I had to read the news generally, and absorb facts and ideas in a way that could be useful later. You never knew what the topic of your speech would be, only that it would have something to do with current events. So I read as much as I could about the headlines, and tried to develop opinions – and if possible, a framework for making opinions – to keep all of my speeches interesting and on-topic.
My brother, on the other hand, never showed interest one way or another. If you had asked him at the time, I’m sure he would nodded in general agreement if a conversation concluded the Democratic Party was godless and evil. But he wouldn’t have been interested in the details and certainly not in any debate about it.
He read the comic section in the newspapers he delivered, but the rest of the paper he found tedious and irrelevant. He had a practical bent. If you showed him how a policy proposal had a direct impact on his life, he might have had an interest. Otherwise, what was the point?
He was fiercely independent by nature, instinctively opposed to anyone who might try to limit his ability to do something. At the same time, he abhorred the idea of being dependent on others. He was viscerally opposed to the idea of ever receiving a government “handout”, for example, or somehow being given something without working for it. When my grandmother expressed support for government proposals like those of FDR or LBJ, Gary was skeptical. “If they’re that poor, they should just get a job”, he’d respond. After all, that’s what he did.
31.1 Race and Sex
Neillsville’s racial makeup might be worth noting to demographers of the early 21st century, who seem obsessed about such things. But it literally never occurred to us to think of ourselves as “white” or any other race. We were just normal Americans.
We knew, theoretically, about the existence of black people – we studied the horrors of slavery in school, like everybody else in America. We felt some pride at learning how Northerners had fought against slavery in the Civil War, and about the bravery of those Northerners who helped with the Underground Railroad.
The only exposure we had to black people was via the media, which always portrayed them as heroes and celebrities. Black athletes and movie stars didn’t dominate the way they do now, but we certainly knew of them and cheered for them, like everyone else.
Still, underneath our experience with the positive examples we saw in popular culture, we knew that some black people were stigmatized, for crime especially but also for other vices. We couldn’t point to any personal examples, but when traveling to other places it was natural to see them as “other”. We treated them like we treated all outsiders: be polite and helpful, give them the benefit of the doubt, but be a little careful.
We were aware that others, particularly those in the South, had different experiences with black people. My family was sympathetic with George Wallace despite his racial views, because he was so articulate in expressing his anti-communism. I was too young to have an opinion about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but none of its consequences mattered much to us at the time. Nobody in Neillsville would have imagined separate drinking fountains, or any rules that treated races differently.
Not everyone in our small community was white. We knew many Chippewa Indians, of course, and it wasn’t uncommon for people to boast of partial Indian ancestry. One of our church friends had a Filipina mother. My doctor was Japanese-American. The Gungors mother was Puerto Rican – which some people today would classify as non-white – but nobody would have thought that back then.
These many examples of interracial marriage prove that we were generally accepting of such things. That said, a black-white marriage would have strained our tolerance, though not because we would have objected per se. We had no animosity toward any race, but we recognized that not everyone felt the same way, and that marriage – being permanent – included children and grandchildren, whose own lives would naturally be affected by such a union. We knew that “half breed” could be a pejorative, and that parents bore some responsibility for bringing such a child into the world. Most of our community would have opposed laws that forbid interracial marriage, but we would have wanted the parents to think long and hard before bringing a child into it.
Homosexuality, on the other hand, was completely worthy of ridicule. We knew of no openly gay people, and to the extent we heard of them, they were targets of scorn deserving of our ridicule. It’s important to remember, of course, that we didn’t think of homosexuality as a trait, like skin color, that some people are born with and can do nothing about. Rather, it was an activity, like pedophilia, adultery, or prostitution. Sure, there may be people who do it, but it’s always bad.
I remember being told of the existence of a tall building in Minneapolis that was a popular gathering place for gay men. And of course we knew of San Francisco’s reputation as a haven for such people. But this was presented as a joke. It was completely acceptable to make fun of such people, in the same way you could make fun of somebody who chose to wear different clothing. We wouldn’t tolerate physical violence against such people, of course; peer pressure was enough disincentive to keep away any thoughts of something we considered so unnatural.
Once, during my summer job at the foundry, I remember one of my friends asking the serious question about how such a thing as homosexuality could even exist. “Where do they put it?”, he asked in all innocent sincerity.
Years later, as homosexuality became acceptable – and even praiseworthy – in mainstream American society, we learned of several Neillsville classmates who “came out”. After same-sex marriages were legally recognized, at least one of our classmates married. It’s difficult to describe how hard it would have been back in high school to understand – let alone condone or even celebrate – such an idea.
Along with the mainstream acceptance and then celebration of race and sexuality as a “core parts of who we are”, there is the opposite strain where it has become popular to criticize our “small town values” as bigotry, “hatred”, and even “un-American”. I think such a characterization overshoots, and misunderstands how we really thought.
Our fundamental, core value, was the acceptance that “all men are created equal”, that we are all God’s children. We also believed that none of us is without sin and that any criticism of our fellow humans must be accompanied by a health dose of humility.
That said, we also believed that Satan is real, and that there are evil forces hoping to undermine the basis on which we built our society. If we called out people who did something immoral or dangerous, we weren’t attacking the people, but rather their actions. Once they repented, they would be fully accepted.