For Garden Country: Rally on the Right

by Judith Rascoe

ONE weekend this summer, while my friends and neighbors evacuated to the hills and beaches, I stayed in Boston and voluntarily attended the fourth New England Rally for God, Family & Country. My best defense is that the Statler Hilton, where the rally was held, was air-conditioned, and my apartment was not. For five dollars I got an awful lot of air conditioning.

Like most people, I have at times worried that my country (or my God, or my family, for that matter) may be getting worse. The signs of decadence are easily found: the popular music isn’t as good as it was when I was sixteen, and the beaches are overcrowded, and the new dimes look funny. I have to pay a lot of money to people I don’t even know in Washington in order to pay for more and more expensive military gadgets. Normally I believe that these and allied problems (like what do they mean by a national debt, and is any coming to me?) are incomprehensible or insoluble or both, and I believe I’m paying those people in Washington to study a lot of very boring information on potato acreage and Vietnamese fuel depots and to act on this information rather than on what they overheard in the bus yesterday. In the likely event that I discover I know more than they do, I write them an informative letter and trust to their willingness to learn.

However, now and again I want to know The Truth. I want to Do Something About It. Sometimes, in such moods, I work out my horoscope from those little numbers in the newspaper. This time I went to a Patriotic Rally.

I heard about the rally on the radio, and decided that it might be informative to spend the weekend with people Who Know What’s Wrong With the Country. After telephoning several places that professed never to have heard of the Garden Country and Rally, as they chose to interpret it, I finally got the name of the hotel; the hotel in turn put my call through to the rally ticket booth. A friendly lady at the ticket booth told me in detail about every event and speaker on the program. I decided to go ahead anyway.

On Friday evening I took the subway into Boston to buy my ticket and attend the Informal Reception which was to start the whole thing off. I paid my five dollars and received a card, with my name and address, in a plastic holder. I pinned this on and followed the signs downstairs to the Bay State Room, where a small crowd, looking like the congregation of a prosperous Baptist Church in Des Moines, was milling about a bowl of fruit punch and a table covered with plates of cheese balls, biscuits, and sweetmeats. Rows of empty chairs filled three quarters of the room, facing a speakers’ podium and an American flag.

We were still reading each other’s name tags when the lights flickered purposefully; we took our places in the rows of chairs. A lady folk singer wearing a squaw dress and a serious expression sang a song called “Sing Out for Freedom. The audience settled. She then sang “God Bless America,” twice, and this time we all joined in with comfortable fervor. Then Colonel Laurence Eliot Bunker, chairman of the rally, former aide-decamp to Douglas MacArthur, and a man prominent in anti-fluoridation circles, asked us to rise for the pledge of allegiance. We rose, we pledged, we sat down. Colonel Bunker then told those of us unwilling or unable to read our programs what events were going to occur; he stressed the particular importance of the Saturday morning seminar on Law Enforcement — a major theme of the rally was to be the drive to Support Our Local Police (the first line of defense against Communist violence).

Colonel Bunker was succeeded by Anna McKinney, a grandmotherly little woman with fierce black eyebrows and abundant white hair. If I had any suspicions that the John Birch Society or Christian Crusade was sponsoring the rally, she readily dispelled them: as she explained matters, the Rally Committee was only an organization for organizing the rally. The fifty-odd exhibitors (which included the John Birch Society, Christian Crusade, Friends of Rhodesia, and To Restore American Independence Now) paid nothing for the space their booths occupied. The speakers received only plane fare and hotel expenses. The rally would provide baby-sitting, with patriotic movies, for only two dollars a day. In short, we were all invited to donate what we could. In past years, she said, Colonel Bunker had made up the deficit. We applauded thankfully. One man stood up and gestured for us all to stand up; we did so and applauded Colonel Bunker some more. When we subsided, Mrs. McKinney went on to tell us more about the importance of the rally. I learned that Communists are running wild in the streets and that Colonel Bunker’s birthday is June 27 (for the astrologers in the audience). After the reception I went home, went to bed, mercifully overslept the next morning, and then dashed back to the Statler.

WHEN I arrived, shortly after lunch on Saturday, the rally was in full swing. From the lobby I could look up at the mezzanine balcony and see an expanded version of the Friday night crowd, still milling; the babble of voices and an elegant recorded version of “God Bless America” descended, like a flock of pigeons, on the helpless heads of the hotel’s regular guests, the bellboys, and the policemen who guarded the stairs leading upward. I ascended, and because there was an hour to go before the afternoon’s first speech, I headed toward the exhibit booths, where I found innumerable opportunities to learn The Truth and Do Something About It. I could collect armloads of pamphlets, mimeographed flyers, reprints, sample copies, and newsletters: these would help me recognize a crypto-Communist (“Has he been responsible for the dismissal, undermining, removal, or expulsion of known anti-Communists from important positions of responsibility in government or elsewhere?”); draft a letter to my senator (“avoid several common mistakes such as those contained in the following paragraph: ‘Dear Mr. ... You do not deserve to be called “Honorable,” in my estimation. If I were one of your constituents, I would work for your defeat in the next election’ ”); and get national publicity (“An opportunity exists for us to spread the Liberty Amendment message to 31/2 million people. It can be done simply by persuading PLAYBOY MAGAZINE to interview Liberty Amendment National Chairman Willis E. Stone. Playboy’s interviews . . . are noted for their fairness and interesting style — so regardless of what one may think of PLAYBOY as a magazine, one must admit that the opportunity to spread our message to so many people cannot be passed up. If everyone who reads this NEWSLETTER will write to PLAYBOY . . .”). (Sic, all the way.)

I could do my part by buying books, filmstrips, gilded birch leaves, handsomely mounted color photographs of Robert Welch, stamped envelopes (“Register Communists Not Firearms”), and buttons (“Wallace for President in 1968” — George Wallace, not Henry—and “Save Our Republic — Impeach Earl Warren”). I could sign petitions urging the President to support Friendly Little Rhodesia or investigate the Civil Rights Fraud. I could also walk on a United Nations flag, thoughtfully placed in the aisle for that purpose.

AFTER a half hour or so of booth-hopping and friendly nodding, I decided that virtually every man, woman, and child, inside the booths or walking past, already belonged to one of those organizations. It may have been that they had come with the unspoken hope of being able to proselytize; but they arrived, and discovered only one another. They rapidly adapted to the situation by proselytizing one another. (This served the secondary function of allowing them to check one another’s orthodoxy and find out about new Conspiracies.) In this situation, I wasn’t a very interesting proselytee: they realized at once that I didn’t even know about the old Conspiracies. I decided to put on my press badge. After that, people were more talkative, and a forlorn hope of getting The Truth into some corner of the national media alternated with the resigned conviction that I wouldn’t be allowed to print it. “We are getting a fairer press all the time,” said a John Birch coordinator.

Therefore, I feel I have a sacred trust not to describe in too much detail the speeches that I heard. I heard a great many of them, and many — if not all — of the speakers themselves referred to the perfidious behavior of the press. In fact, there was a whole session on the topic “Black Out on Communications.” It was preceded by a number of spontaneous denunciations of the great mass media, and by the time the session started, the members of the press were crouching in their chairs and showing the whites of their eyes. In the midst of this session, one of the speakers cried, “Let’s get the press!” There was a roar of approval from the audience. It was suggested that everybody buy a share of stock in CBS. One man told how he had joined a group that made selective investments and today controlled several millions of dollars’ worth of business “with an interesting advertising budget.” The press and the audience subsided.

Another reason for not describing the speeches in detail is that many of them are available in print. A stem-winding sermon by Reverend Cecil Todd called “Blue Print for Slavery” can be obtained by sending one dollar to Revival Fires in Joplin, Missouri — and that dollar will obtain twenty-three other “Revival Flavored Sermons,” including “Garbage Can Religion” and “The Devil’s Pitchfork.” The last speech of the rally, an address by Ezra Taft Benson called “Stand Up and Be Counted,” can be found in the December, 1964, issue of American Opinion. In fact, almost everything I heard at the rally can be found somewhere in American Opinion: the inside story on the Bilderberger Conspiracy, for instance, or the Communist plot behind the Great Blackout. When I discovered this, after the rally, I decided that the warm audience response to such familiar material could have only three explanations: a) not many people there read the magazine (but if they don’t, I can’t imagine who does), or b) they wanted to impress any stray observers with the thrilling nature of these truths, or c) there was just a lot of that old revival spirit, the kind that can’t hear those familiar gospel words too often.

These objections notwithstanding, I should like to pass on a few remarks of general interest. It may add to their effect if I describe the circumstances of their delivery: imagine a large ballroom (which is called the Grand Ballroom) decorated with ornate and gilded white plaster. Along two sides ran galleries, draped in bunting (upside down, one of the speakers noticed — we were flying the French colors rather than the American. This made a lot of people nervous because it meant somebody knew more about flag etiquette than they did and had been able to detect this); at one end, a large stage, curtained in gold, flanked by outsize potted palms, and set with podium and attendant tables. In the galleries on one side the Rally Committee relentlessly taped the proceedings; in the galleries on the other side, television crews appeared sporadically, hoping for photogenic moments. On the floor an audience of perhaps seven hundred people, depending more or less on the speaker, sat with exemplary good posture, neatly but not gaudily dressed, their laps full of pamphlets. Ashtrays were liberally provided, but not liberally used. There was lots of legroom for standing ovations. Most of the time it was impossible to imagine that audience surging up the stairs to “get” the press.

One of the most exciting speakers was Professor Revilo P. Oliver of the University of Illinois; he was, in fact, so dynamic that two or three people approached me afterward to say that they hadn’t agreed with many things Professor Oliver had said. However, when other speakers or moderators mentioned him, they spoke of him with evident enthusiasm, and I wouldn’t let myself be taken in by a few malcontents. His topic was “Conspiracy and Degeneracy,” and he revealed that “educators compel . . . students to share rooms with Asiatics, with Negroes, with known sexual perverts, and with narcotics addicts. . . .” The narcotics themselves come from subversive sources: heroin comes from Red China and Red Cuba, and LSD “is imported from Israel.” A scholarly man, he condemned on the one hand those who try to make a single Conspiracy the explanation for the whole declining history of the West, but argued on the other hand the vital importance of a series of Conspiracies in shaping history. Conspiracies alone cannot of course explain our decline; he called on biology: racial distinctions preceded humanity itself, and “despite the limitations imposed on science by liberal intellectuals and the like — all evidence indicates that physical traits and probably intelligence and moral instincts are unalterably hereditary. . . . All men are created unequal and there is nothing we can do about that.” Dr. Oliver, who resembles Adam Clayton Powell, received a standing ovation, cheers, whistles, and popping flashbulbs as he removed his glasses and bowed. The ovation went on, and the television cameras panned eagerly over the audience. (He was also, I should note, perhaps the first intellectual to propose the theory that Kennedy had been assassinated because he had not been keeping up the timetable of his Communist masters.)

Now, it is important not to misinterpret some of the more careful statements that were made. For instance, if I were to say that a man got up and proposed a solution to the war in Vietnam that involved cutting a corridor 130 miles long and 25 miles wide across that country, leveling the surrounding jungle with low-yield atomic weapons (applause), withdrawing American troops, and inviting the nations of Asia to man that corridor with a half million Oriental soldiers — well, one might interpret this to mean that that man is crazy. This would be an error. That man is Clyde Watts, Brigadier General USAR (ret.), and further, he is a lawyer for General Edwin A. Walker, who made a name for himself not only abroad but in Mississippi as well.

A former dean of the Notre Dame School of Law proposed a solution to the problem of the Supreme Court: Congress, he said, under Article III of the Constitution, has the right to limit the appellate jurisdiction of that court. Congress should limit that jurisdiction in such a way as to prevent the Supreme Court from having appellate jurisdiction in any matters involving constitutional questions.

And a lady from Mississippi told us what her cook told her — and her cook is an honest woman — that “they” have been telling the colored people to breed as fast as they can, in order to be ready to take over the country. If by this time any reader cannot guess who “they” are, that reader is either a very happy and productive person or in imminent danger from the Mental Health Conspiracy.

No, I speak hastily. There is a healthy difference of opinion, in fact, about who “they” are. The majority of men, women, and children attending that rally could have told you that “they” are the omniscient, omnipresent, and diabolically cunning members of the International Communist Conspiracy. However, a group called Cinema Educational Guild managed to distribute copies of their pamphlet “Documentations: Of UN Plots for Take-Over of U.S.,” which shows that the Communists have been, in fact, bankrolled by the Internationalists’ Great Conspiracy, otherwise known as Kuhn, Loeb & Company or Rothschild. This same group also dissents on the question of Ronald Reagan’s qualifications for office in California, and points out that Reagan has a very suspicious comsymp past. Contrary to popular opinion, there is room for disagreement on the Right.

I came away from the rally with one item which I think should certainly receive some attention. I was, perhaps by accident, given a list of 264 persons who are for Pornography, Narcotics, and Subversion of Youth. I must admit I know very little about the source; I found this remarkable list in a publication called Liberty Letter, the bulletin of Liberty Lobby (get the government out of business and abolish the Income Tax). Inside Liberty Letter there is a Tabulation of Ballots on important public issues, a balloting by Liberty Lobby’s Board of Policy (which apparently consists of all paid-up L.L. members). Five hundred and fifty ballots were cast for Foreign Aid; ten thousand five hundred and seventy-nine against. Eleven thousand one hundred and twenty-eight ballots were cast for Free Enterprise; one against. Ten thousand eight hundred and sixty-five ballots were cast against Pornography, Narcotics, and Subversion of Youth — which made me feel better about the whole thing. But if one is still concerned about those 264 — well, the editor says that “in most cases, where votes were cast in opposition to the majority, valid arguments were presented explaining the positions.”

The speeches and continuous film showings and exhibits went on from midmorning to ten thirty or so at night on Saturday and Sunday, and from Monday morning until five o’clock Monday afternoon. On Monday morning a young man gave a talk on how we could become as effective as the speakers we had heard; on Monday afternoon a lady recapitulated all the speeches and discussions in case we had missed any. The only succinct description of the effect of three days of this I can think of would be to compare it to spending a weekend in a pressure cooker wired for sound. By the time I left I was reasonably convinced that the rally itself was the pièce de résistance of the International Communist Conspiracy; certainly no other event, except perhaps Easter at Forest Lawn, had ever left me so repelled and bewildered by certain curious capacities of the American imagination. Yet these were clean, healthy, and for the most part exceptionally polite people; they found chairs and ashtrays for me, answered questions at length, and even offered me a free ticket to the Monday evening gala — dinner, dancing, and Robert Welch himself to introduce the guest of honor. I had toyed with the idea of going until, during one session, the speaker exclaimed: “Aid to those now on the Supreme Court who are aiding Communism is Treason!” And at the word, the audience rose and broke like a bubble on a boiling pot, applauding wildly. They hated the Supreme Court and its fussy restrictions, and they wanted that word. And Treason, fellow Americans, is a hanging offense.