From Textbooks to Tea Parties: An Appalachian Antecedent of Anti-Obama Rebellion

The excitement over a new radio documentary about a 1974 curriculum dispute in Kanawha County, West Virginia, blended with the excitement over anti-Obama administration tea party gatherings in the summer of 2009. By fall of that year, people were listening to “The Great Textbook War of 1974” on West Virginia Public Radio and declaring that “Kanawha County Held the First Tea Party 35 Years Ago.”¹ This essay argues that the famous textbook controversy was one among many precursors to the current conservative rebellion, and warns against romanticizing or demonizing West Virginia protesters whose links to national organizers and conservative supporters, which are often overlooked, strengthen their likeness to today’s tea partiers. Drawing from more extensive arguments in Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy, this essay situates the conflict in the evolving right-wing discourses of the times, as well as in the context of cultural assumptions about Appalachia.² Doing so helps acknowledge the influence of the West Virginia dispute on today’s uprisings without reducing the multiple issues and variety of protesters involved then and now to a simplistic, dualistic feud.

Quick Comparisons

At first glance, there are some compelling similarities between the Kanawha County textbook controversy and tea party protests. For instance, the earliest objections to the controversial language arts curriculum were made in 1974 by Alice Moore, a white conservative Christian woman whose maternity functioned as de facto moral authority. Tea party hero and 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin bears a striking historical resemblance to her in terms of conservative agendas and controversy surrounding their gender. The Charleston Gazette implied a connection when it reported in 2010 that “at the age of 69, [Moore] paid $560 to cheer Sarah Palin at the National Tea Party Convention at Nashville. Moore told reporters that troubles arose because 1960s radicals became schoolteachers and warped the young. ‘This is what led us to the election of this president,’ Moore said.”³ Without explaining the cultural logic behind this statement, the paper documents that Palin and Moore not only oppose the Obama administration, but also suggests that the two conservative women have naïve views of politics.

In addition, the vehemence of tea party confrontations in the summer of 2009 seemed to recall the violence that erupted in Kanawha County in 1974. Angry town hall meetings about health care reform seemed to harken back to angry public hearings about multiracial textbooks. However, according again to the Gazette, which then as now admonished protesters, the tea party “movement is gentle by comparison. We haven’t heard of any tea partiers throwing dynamite into schools or firing bullets into schoolbuses.”⁴

Those who opposed the textbooks in 1974 suggest that their protest was an originary moment, the point at which people began to wake up and start a conservative revolution. Avis Hill, a minister who led protests against the curriculum, said in 2009 that “the 1974 upheaval launched America’s conservative ‘culture war’ that is continued today by Tea Party protesters.”⁵ Thus, some opponents of the multiracial books proposed in 1974 in Kanawha County have forthrightly claimed the tea party movement as the legacy of their grassroots protests thirty-five years earlier. But there remains some doubt as to whether the protests of 2009 or 1974 are best described as grassroots because of ties to national organizers and wealthy conservative supporters.

Critics of the tea party movement have questioned the grassroots nature of today’s conservative rebellion, a reaction to the Obama administration. “Commenters such as Paul Krugman have cited the presence of FreedomWorks inside the Tea Parties as proof that the Tea Parties are an ‘astroturf’ phenomenon–a sleight-of-hand effort manufactured by inside-the-Beltway organizations to concoct the appearance of grassroots support. This suspicion is not completely unfounded.”⁶ It is well documented that elite conservatives such as former House majority leader Dick Armey (through his organization, FreedomWorks) and the billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch (supporting, for example, Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor from the tea party) have financially...