In the early 1960s countless commentators attempted to explain a new political phenomenon: the “Radical Right.” Despite its pejorative overtones and somewhat amorphous definition, the phrase encapsulated a growing fervor amongst grassroots activists and a constellation of organizations, who were largely concentrated in the South and Southwest and were unified by a fervent anticommunism. Often to their own bemusement, many critics were drawn to a small, Church of Christ-affiliated college in rural Arkansas. There, they discovered the president of Harding College, George S. Benson, a stern and pious man in his early sixties, who regularly reached millions of Americans under the auspices of the National Education Program (NEP). Almost without fail, each piece in the cascading series of exposés on the “Radical Right” bestowed a similar epithet on Harding. “What MIT is to engineering and Harvard is to law,” Newsweek declared, “Harding College is to the far right”. Others described Harding as “perhaps the most prolific center of aggressive anti-Communist propaganda in the United States” (New York Times), the “Sorbonne of the ultra-rightists” (Boston Globe), “the West Point of the new patriotism” (Baltimore Sun), the “Little College at the Center of the Right” (Washington Post), and “the intellectual center of all the new right-wing movements” (The Reporter). Special features in Time, Newsweek, and The Nation reached similar conclusions, as did a series of books and pamphlets.Footnote ¹

Historians of modern American conservatism have also demonstrated a keen interest in the organizations and individuals who populated the so-called “Radical Right,” from the John Birch Society to grassroots “suburban warriors” in southern California. However, these historians, have, at best, fleetingly touched upon George Benson's contribution.Footnote ² The only scholarly study of Benson's career, written by L. Edward Hicks in the early 1990s, before the release of Benson's papers, focusses primarily on his impact within the Church of Christ and the religious right. Hicks briefly addresses the NEP during this period, but his work does not fully capture the organization's activities.Footnote ³ This article, by contrast, illuminates Benson's position at the nexus of the “Radical Right.”

Benson's activities complicate our existing understanding of conservatism in the early 1960s. Most scholars explore the “Radical Right” within the analytical paradigm that suffuses the literature on modern conservatism: the right's transformation from marginalization in the 1930s to its resurrection by the 1980s.Footnote ⁴ In particular, they emphasize the ways in which a new generation of Sunbelt conservatives, unified by a militant anticommunism, aligned a range of religious, economic, and racial concerns; made first forays into political activism; and pushed the Republican Party rightwards. This perspective has merit. Indeed, this article demonstrates the NEP's neglected contribution to this upswing in conservative activism. At the same time, however, the article suggests that this activism made a less significant contribution to the subsequent success of the conservative movement than has often been suggested. There are three strands to this argument. First, the nature of Benson's crusade since the early 1940s affirms the wisdom of historians such as Darren Dochuk and Kevin Kruse who demonstrate that conservative ideas relating to “free enterprise,” evangelical religion, and race were not as disparate or marginal in preceding decades as conventional wisdom dictates.Footnote ⁵ Second, Benson demonstrates that historians have overlooked the reality that the “Radical Right's” fixation with the intricacies of subversion often diluted efforts to promote conservative principles. From the late 1950s, the NEP became somewhat less focussed on advancing the ideological principles at the core of the future conservative movement, especially the ideology of the free market. Third, the NEP's activities suggest that the pockets of the South and Southwest where the “Radical Right” flourished were less emblematic of processes in motion across the Sunbelt than has sometimes been suggested.Footnote ⁶ In these pockets concerns regarding subversion were widely accepted, but elsewhere the declining legitimacy of McCarthyite politics after the mid-1950s undermined the NEP's long-standing and expansive efforts to reshape political culture across the Mid-west, South, and West. While historians have charted the decline of the “Radical Right” to the reshuffling of conservatism in the wake of conservative Republican candidate Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964, Benson's crusade entered a period of prolonged and irreversible decline after late 1961.

When the NEP was founded in 1943 it was not focussed on communist conspiracies, but rather on creating a popular appetite for “free enterprise” and undermining the New Deal and organized labor, both of which had reshaped politics since Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932. The NEP was financed by prominent business elites including J. Howard Pew, the president of Sun Oil; Charles White, the president of Republic Steel; and Alfred Sloan, the former president of General Motors. These elites were especially attracted by Benson's background and the distinctive tenor of his conservatism. Born in a log cabin in Oklahoma in 1898, Benson melded his “frontier” experiences with the mythology of frontier individualism and populist discourse to construct a “horse-sense” politics that celebrated corporate capitalism but opposed big government. Benson and his backers hoped that this amalgam would enable the NEP to communicate effectively with grassroots citizens, especially in the South, West, and Mid-west. To this end, the organization oversaw a newspaper column, “Looking Ahead,” syndicated in more than three thousand small-town newspapers; a syndicated radio broadcast, carried by 345 stations by 1950; the creation of more than fifty films; and a hectic speaking schedule fulfilled with the aid of Benson's private airplane.Footnote ⁷ By 1946, the NEP boasted of reaching a potential audience of 25 million every week.Footnote ⁸

In 1949 the NEP organized its first “Freedom Forum” to bring together business leaders, managers, and public relations experts, to facilitate the development of initiatives to proselytize “free enterprise” among the employees of many of the nation's leading companies, as well as the wider public. Keynote speakers at these events, which were held at least biannually, mostly in Searcy, hailed from companies including ARMCO, Republic Steel, International Harvester, Du Pont, Swift & Company, and Southwestern Bell Telephone. Their contributions chimed with those made by Lemuel Boulware, General Electric's prominent antilabor strategist, leading conservative economists, and politicians including Rep. Fred Hartley (R–NJ), co-sponsor of the Taft-Hartley Act, and Senator John McClellan (D–Ark), an ally of Benson's, whose 1958 address focussed on the Senate's McClellan Committee that was investigating “labor racketeering”, a cause célèbre on the right.Footnote ⁹ During the 1950s attendees at the forums increasingly included representatives from businesses with interests in the “proto-Sunbelt” South and West who were enthused by Benson's free-enterprise message and his attacks on labor, at a time when “right-to-work” campaigns were shaping a new political climate in the region.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1958 the NEP recruited Howard Bennett, who had previously worked for General Electric and had been instrumental in developing, as the NEP described it, “one of the most extensive economic education programs in American industry, reaching GE's 220,000 employees and supplying materials for similar programs in industries employing several million persons.”Footnote ¹¹

Benson also fused this “free-enterprise” message with religion, in a way that was consistent with some nascent trends on the right in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ¹² From its inception, the NEP mirrored Benson's conviction that America was the world's greatest, most prosperous nation because it was shaped by the confluence of “free enterprise” and religious piety. “Self-reliance coupled with faith in God gives a person the only genuine security there is,” Benson declared, “self-reliance builds economic security and faith in God gives spiritual security”.Footnote ¹³ Since the 1920s, when he echoed the concerns of many fundamentalists and evangelicals regarding a slacking of religious devotion – especially evident in the teaching of evolution and the acceptance of “errant” social and sexual mores – Benson had expressed anxiety about cracks in the nation's moral foundations, cracks through which errant political ideas could percolate. Like many on the religious right, by the mid-1950s the NEP emphasized such concerns more frequently in response to sexual conduct, crime, substance abuse, and juvenile delinquency, as well as a secular, relativistic philosophy in the education system.Footnote ¹⁴ Benson coupled these assertions with his contention that “free enterprise” was divinely ordained and criticized liberal politicians for their propensity to either ignore religious and moral issues, or to infer from the “social gospel” the following lesson: “Take therefore the wealth from him that hath earned it … to him that hath not (and understandeth not how to use) shall be given the wealth earned by others, so that the sluggard may have an abundance.”Footnote ¹⁵

Benson had also woven racial concerns into his politics before the 1960s. Benson presided over a segregated institution and was a member of a segregated church, and he believed that racial differences were divinely ordained, he expressed fears over miscegenation, and he asserted that America had the “most favored colored in the world”.Footnote ¹⁶ Although he infrequently addressed segregation directly in public, he also recognized the ways in which his celebration of localism and Anglo-Saxon virtues, like his opposition to liberal Democrats and unions, resonated with southern segregationists who viewed the expanding purview of the federal government and the labor movement as serious threats to the status quo from the mid-1930s onwards.Footnote ¹⁷ Benson, like many southerners also recoiled at Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Little Rock crisis, and the civil rights movement, which gathered momentum from 1960 with a raft of sit-in protests and “freedom rides.”Footnote ¹⁸

Benson's racial conservatism, like his economic and religious conservatism, also became enmeshed in the anticommunist revival that took place during the early Cold War. Like many conservative southerners, he suggested that communists were creating dissension “between races.”Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly, economic liberals were “totalitarians at heart” because of their location on the wrong side of a fundamental statist/antistatist divide, and would lead the nation, inexorably, down the slippery slope to communism. The dangers associated with liberal politics were, he argued, compounded by communist infiltration of unions, political organizations, and various agencies of government.Footnote ²⁰ He also emphasized communists’ “Godless fanaticism” and the alleged success of subversive efforts to infiltrate schools and churches to spread secularism and relativistic morality, values which corrupted the nation and, in turn, made Americans more susceptible to errant political ideas. “A real revival of Christian faith,” Benson suggested, “is the only answer to the challenge of communism.”Footnote ²¹

This variety of anticommunism, which emphasized that America was imperiled from within its own borders, lost significant ballast after the mid-1950s as a result of the dramatic decline of the CPUSA; the absence of major new scandals regarding subversion; the implosion of Joseph McCarthy's crusade; the growing centrism of liberals and the labor movement, which made it more difficult to portray them as socialistic; and the increased reluctance of politicians in Washington to endorse red baiting.Footnote ²² This decline coincided with a nascent readjustment on the right. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, intellectuals such as James Burnham and politicians such as Senator Barry Goldwater (R–AZ), accelerated an irreversible shift away from noninterventionism and towards an anticommunist internationalism.Footnote ²³

Despite this broader context, domestic-oriented anticommunism did not evaporate; indeed, from the mid-1950s, Benson, like some conservatives within the South and Southwest, not only persisted, but became, if anything, more fixated with socialism and subversion. As a result, Benson became increasingly aligned with organizations and individuals later associated with the “Radical Right.” These included the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (CACC), founded by Fred Schwarz in the mid-1950s; the John Birch Society (JBS), founded by Robert Welch in 1958; the Oklahoma-based Christian Crusade, founded by Billy James Hargis in 1950; Cleon Skousen, author of The Naked Communist (1958); and Herbert Philbrick, a former FBI counterspy, who gained notoiety as a consequence of his New York Herald Tribune column and the television show I Led Three Lives (1953–56). Like these conservatives, Benson was outraged at what he saw as growing complacency about the communist threat, typified by a “long series of Supreme Court decisions favoring the communist apparatus in America [that] has left our country's internal security shattered.”Footnote ²⁴ These decisions, especially those delivered on so-called “Red Monday” in mid-1957, undermined the Smith Act (1940), which notably made it a criminal offense to advocate the overthrow of government. “Red Monday” helped to turn Chief Justice Earl Warren into a totemic enemy. Benson's anticommunist hero J. Edgar Hoover also retained his emphasis on subversion. Benson, who was on the FBI's “Special Correspondents List,” continued to promote Hoover's work, including Masters of Deceit (1958), a key text for the anticommunist right. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) also continued to legitimize domestic-oriented anticommunism, as did some publications, such as U.S. News & World Report, a favourite of Benson's.Footnote ²⁵

This focus on domestic anticommunism helped to give coherence to the phenomenon of the “Radical Right,” which otherwise was often associated with ideological convictions indistinguishable from those held by other conservatives. In 1961 Time magazine reached the following conclusion: “What distinguishes [the Radical Right] from respectable conservatives, who are enjoying a resurgence of their own? In everything that he finds displeasing in modern society and political life, the ultra sees evidence of Communist plots and subversion.” As Time observed, the “Radical Right,” like the NEP, frequently refracted concerns regarding race, religion, and economic liberalism through the lens of anticommunism.Footnote ²⁶ On balance, religious conservatism was a more prominent component of the “Radical Right” than it was of earlier strains of anticommunism. The receptivity of evangelicals in the South and Southwest, in particular, to domestic-oriented anticommunism was linked to antipathy to social changes by the 1950s, but also frequently to an apocalyptic premillennialism, which emphasized a binary schism between darkness and light, and encouraged adherents’ sensitivity to the signs of worldly corrosion that would foreshadow the second coming.Footnote ²⁷ At the same time, domestic-oriented anticommunism gained some increased traction in the South, particularly in relation to challenges to segregation, although this discourse was far from universally aligned with the broader range of conservative concerns that animated the “Radical Right.”Footnote ²⁸

The anticommunism espoused by Benson and his cohorts was also profoundly shaped by developments in the Cold War, despite their characteristic unwillingness to consider military conflict as the primary threat.Footnote ²⁹ Benson and many others lamented the USSR's intervention in Hungary, Vice President Nixon's tumultuous visit to Venezuela in 1958, communist influence in decolonizing Africa, and Castro's victory in Cuba in 1959.Footnote ³⁰ The spike in anticommunist activity in the early 1960s, meanwhile, corresponded with the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as disputes over Berlin and continued rumblings elsewhere. “Without a notable exception,” Benson declared, “the United States has aided the Soviet empire in its piece-by-piece gobbling up of … the free world. This is dramatic testimony to the insidious power and influence of the fifth column.”Footnote ³¹ These subversives, he maintained, had facilitated the Soviet Union's postwar expansion into Eastern Europe and the “fall” of China and Cuba.Footnote ³² Benson remained convinced that “Russia's chief offensive arm is her infiltration and propaganda program … [which] cannot be met with guns and bombs.”Footnote ³³ In a similar vein, Robert Welch tersely concluded that “the danger [from communism] is almost entirely internal.”Footnote ³⁴ In this respect, the “Radical Right” promoted a waning conservative non-interventionism that bore little resemblance to the foreign-policy principles that defined subsequent conservative movements.

The NEP's Freedom Forums perfectly illustrated Benson's increased focus on domestic subversion by the early 1960s, as well as the ways in which this focus frequently diluted the NEP's efforts to proselytize conservatism. Whereas the forums were founded to provide an arena for collaboration between business conservatives, by the late 1950s and early 1960s they more frequently provided an arena for the formation of a common discourse and alliances among leading figures in the “Radical Right.” These individuals included Cleon Skousen; General Albert Wedemeyer (ret.), a leading critic of Communist China; Fred Schwarz, who delivered four keynote addresses between 1956 and 1961; Richard Arens, staff director at HUAC; Eddie Rickenbacker, the head of Eastern Airlines; and William Mayer, an army major and an “expert” in “neuro-psychiatry” and brainwashing (the NEP printed 3 million pamphlets of his speech). Prominent “Birchers” featured too. They included Tom Anderson, publisher of Farm and Ranch; Herbert Philbrick, a frequent participant after 1954 (who also sent his daughter to Harding College); Clarence Manion, presenter of the Manion Forum, which was carried by more than 250 radio stations and fifteen television stations; William Grede, founder of Grede Foundaries; and Revilo Oliver, the white supremacist Texas professor. Antistatism, concerns over moral decay, and, to a lesser extent, opposition to the civil rights movement featured, but these concerns were now frequently explored in relation to supposed intricate communist plots. Moreover, participants such as Oliver, Philbrick, Schwarz, and Mayer, in particular – in a manner consistent with their activities elsewhere – often eschewed making a positive case for conservatism in favour of rambling treatises detailing, for example, the definition of communism or the machinations of a subterranean cabal.Footnote ³⁵

The increased focus on domestic-oriented anticommunism was also evident among the NEP's staff. Howard Bennett, for example, never became a central figure. Glenn Green, who was hired as an NEP director in 1949, was more influential (ghostwriting many of Benson's columns, for example). At the time of his appointment, Green was executive director of the Arkansas Free Enterprise Association, an organization dominated by delta planters and businessmen, which helped secure the passage of right-to-work legislation.Footnote ³⁶ By the late 1950s, however, Green was increasingly preoccupied with subversion. When the JBS was created Green wrote to Robert Welch. “Last night,” Green declared, “I finished reading [The Blue Book, Welch's infamous call to arms]. I took flight into the wonderful World of Hope, after a considerable absence. This morning I tossed my hat in the air with a ‘Yipee!’ The John Birch Society is a God-send”.Footnote ³⁷ Doyle Swain, another NEP employee, headed the JBS chapter in Searcy, whose members included Green and Perry Mason, superintendent of Harding's academy. Benson did not join, but he devoted a 1960 “Looking Ahead” column to praising the JBS.Footnote ³⁸

Harding's Bible professor, James Bales, also did not join the JBS, but he corresponded with Welch and others paid his membership dues.Footnote ³⁹ Although not formally employed by the NEP, he became central to its anticommunist agenda. Bales, who was friendly with Herbert Philbrick, spoke at forums, authored countless books on communism, and shared advice, ideas, and research.Footnote ⁴⁰ His fixation with the “red menace” was so significant that even Benson felt the need to gently chide him for his chapel addresses at Harding: “Since these kids think you can't make a speech without a reference to COMMUNISM,” he wrote in 1962, “I'd suggest you fool them and not mention it at all.”Footnote ⁴¹

The NEP's films underwent a similar shift in emphasis. In the late 1940s Benson secured the financial support of the Sloan Foundation and the expertise of a former Disney employee to develop a series of ten animated Technicolor cartoons, which were sold and rented in 16 mm format to business organizations, civic clubs, educational institutions, and patriotic societies, reaching millions of Americans over the following decade. Many were also shown in ten thousand movie theaters, courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and were frequently broadcast on television stations across the nation in the 1950s (by 1952 one paean to “free enterprise” had been shown on two-thirds of US stations). In 1955, the NEP produced The American Adventure Series, which comprised lectures delivered by Harding's vice president, Clifton Ganus Jr. and, according to the NEP, had been seen by 22·5 million Americans by mid-1958. Anticommunism featured in these series, but the emphasis on the merits of free enterprise, in particular, contrasted sharply with NEP films made in the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote ⁴² Communism on the Map (1960), the most notorious of these films, provided an hour-long exposition of expanding communist influence since 1917 and concluded with stark image of a globe coated in pink and red ink; only Switzerland and General Franco's Spain were untouched. A question mark hovered over the United States. Two Berlins, which addressed the crisis in the German capital, similarly sought to alert Americans to the “international communist conspiracy.” A series of three films released in 1963 was exclusively preoccupied with explaining communist tactics, outlining countervailing techniques, and ramming home the threat of internal subversion. At the beginning of What Is Communism?, the presenter, Herbert Philbrick, declared his intention to explain that “Communism is a lying, dirty, shrewd, Godless, murderous, determined, as J. Edgar Hoover says [sic], a criminal conspiracy.”Footnote ⁴³

Although the “Radical Right” was fuelled by a range of developments, perhaps the single most influential was John F. Kennedy's election in 1960. Benson had echoed many conservatives’ frustrations with Eisenhower's unwillingness to uproot the New Deal, but the election of a Democratic President profoundly perturbed him. Sometimes he argued that the “New Frontier” was an anathema to “free enterprise”; sometimes he suggested that it was pushing the nation “toward socialism”; and sometimes he brazenly suggested the presence of an influential fifth column. “Have we another crop of agents operating around the intellectual elite of the White House?” an NEP newsletter asked.Footnote ⁴⁴ Others on the right, notably including grassroots activists in the parts of the South and Southwest, were similarly stirred. Since Kennedy was sworn in, The Nation reported in October 1961, “the activity on the right has been especially frenetic,” typified by the proliferation of “seminars, alerts, freedom forums and strategy-for-survival conferences.” In Dallas there were more than a hundred anticommunist study groups, while one report estimated that there were 1,800 active “far right” groups, eight hundred more than the previous year.Footnote ⁴⁵

As we shall see, this upswing in activism was met with waves of criticism from early 1961 onwards that undermined the NEP and had some ambivalent consequences for the broader conservative movement; but it did also demonstrate that the politics of the “Radical Right” had a remarkably galvanizing impact on select constituencies, particularly in parts of Texas and southern California. The NEP's significant contribution to this activism has been largely overlooked. In the 1959–60 fiscal year the NEP made $34,089 from the sale of materials, including pamphlets, newsletters, and 16 mm films. Assisted by the broader spike in anticommunism and armed with new material such as Communism on the Map, in the 1960–61 fiscal year the NEP made almost $150,000, a feat it emulated during the following year. As a result, the NEP's annual income returned to its mid-1950s level of almost $300,000 (this indicator of the organization's financial strength does not account for the substantial “in-kind” support provided by Harding College, which, for example, housed the NEP).Footnote ⁴⁶

As a result, the NEP became increasingly aligned with organizations whose success was, by contrast, generally unprecedented. In 1961, the CACC, which had headquarters in Los Angeles and Houston, raised $1,273,492, more than the combined total it had received across the previous six years. The money raised through the CACC's Schools of Anti-communism – which essentially constituted revival meetings – increased tenfold between 1960 and 1961. The number of subscribers to the CACC almost doubled to 70,000 over the same period.Footnote ⁴⁷ Within three years of its founding in late 1958, the JBS had perhaps 60,000 members; by 1962 JBS income, largely derived from membership fees, bookstores, and publications, was at a record high of more than $1,000,000. One-third of JBS members hailed from southern California, as did one-third of subscribers to the CACC.Footnote ⁴⁸

In reaching sympathetic constituencies, Benson, like many other domestic-oriented anticommunists, received notable support from local newspapers. A significant proportion of the newspapers that carried “Looking Ahead” were located in the South and Southwest. In 1962, a Los Angeles County resident wrote to one of these papers, the San Marino Tribune, to “congratulate you on your editorial policy and choice of political writers such as Tom Anderson, George S. Benson, Rosalie W. Gordon, and others. It is refreshing to see our home-town newspaper printing such excellent Pro-America, Anti-Socialist and Anti-World Government articles.”Footnote ⁴⁹ R. Cs. Hoiles’ Freedom Newspaper chain, whose flagship paper, the Santa Ana Register had a circulation of 70,000 in Orange County, provided a key outlet for Benson's column, as did the fourteen papers that the chain printed across Texas, California, and the Mid-west.Footnote ⁵⁰ The San Diego Tribune, part of the Copley chain that published sixteen newspapers in California and Illinois, similarly offered a platform for anticommunist conservatism and printed articles advertising Benson's efforts. “Leaders in the anti-communism movement,” the paper declared, “look to Benson and N.E.P. for much of their material … many believe Benson's efforts have helped generate the current anti-communist campaign.”Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, Paul Terry, Copley's “director of education,” attended the 1960 Freedom Forum and from his base in southern California used the company to circulate NEP materials, including twenty-five copies of Communism on the Map.Footnote ⁵² By 1961 southwestern newspapers such as the Los Angeles Herald Express, the Dallas News, and Phoenix's two leading dailies lent support to anticommunist “ultras.”Footnote ⁵³

Local television stations played a similarly important role, even though NEP films were not as widely broadcast as they had been in the 1950s. NEP films, including Communism on the Map and a revised version, Communist Encirclement (1961), were shown on many stations in the South and West. Dallas's mayor, Earle Cabell, even introduced Encirclement on WFAA-TV.Footnote ⁵⁴ Elsewhere in Texas, NEP films appeared on the same channel as Dan Smoot's Smoot Report. With the backing of men like Walter Knott, the proprietor of Knott's Berry Farm in California, an array of regional stations in the Southwest broadcast programs like the Smoot Report, Edgar Bundy's Church League of America, or the Manion Forum.Footnote ⁵⁵ Patrick Frawley, the chairman of Technicolor, paid for advertising to cover the cost of broadcasting CACC schools, while Benson appeared at a number of televised events, including a School of Anti-communism in Los Angeles.Footnote ⁵⁶

Benson's focus on the education system also helped to secure his status within the “Radical Right.” Protests – often framed by anticommunism – over textbooks and high-school courses were particularly notable in southern California and Texas, and provided pathways to grassroots activism for economic, racial, and religious conservatives.Footnote ⁵⁷ Benson had, in fact, deployed strategies for imbuing elementary, secondary, and college education with conservative principles for several decades – by the 1958, for instance, at least seven hundred schools had bought prints of the American Adventure Series.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the early 1960s these efforts were increasingly defined by an anticommunism. During this period NEP films were used by a significant number of schools in southern California. In San Diego, Los Angeles, and Dallas, they appeared alongside materials from J. Edgar Hoover and the CACC as part of anticommunism programs. The Tennessee and Florida legislatures also made NEP films part of their high-school anticommunist programs. Louisiana, meanwhile, launched a compulsory “Communism vs. Americanism” course, which utilized NEP films and recordings made by Benson, Schwarz, Philbrick, and Skousen. The National Education Association received many complaints from teachers being pressurized to show Communism on the Map.Footnote ⁵⁹ According to the New York Times, by early 1962, the NEP was shaping the curriculum of hundreds of schools.Footnote ⁶⁰

The blossoming of the “Radical Right” also enabled Benson to establish new “Freedom Forums.” Three Church of Christ-affiliated institutions – Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, Oklahoma Christian College (OCC), and Lubbock Christian College (LCC) in Texas – launched programs modeled on the Freedom Forums as part of a broader commitment to promoting “Americanism.” At Pepperdine and OCC, in particular, Benson was closely involved. Two former NEP employees were at the forefront of Pepperdine's efforts to “parry the angry sweep of the hammer and sickle,” which used many of the same methods employed by the NEP and produced films such as Communist Accent on Youth (1961).Footnote ⁶¹ The forums at Pepperdine, OCC, and LCC featured many of the same religious, business, and anticommunist leaders who gathered in Searcy. They also recruited new participants. For example, economist Milton Friedman addressed the OCC Forum; Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, addressed Lubbock's Southwestern Freedom Forum; and Barry Goldwater and economist Friedrich von Hayek addressed Pepperdine's Forums.Footnote ⁶² The NEP also instigated one-day forums, organized in conjunction with chambers of commerce, religious groups, local businesses, and anticommunist organizations in the South and Southwest. In the 1960–61 fiscal year, the NEP sponsored twelve of these forums, which typically featured NEP representatives and films.Footnote ⁶³

Freedom Forums helped to showcase the NEP's materials. During the 1961–62 fiscal year the NEP sold 1,500 films, 27,455 pamphlets, and 181 taped speeches, frequently to those in the orbit of the “Radical Right.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The CACC, for instance, regularly used the American Adventure Series featuring Clifton Ganus, who also spoke at the organization's School of Anti-communism in Houston. In 1960, Benson told Irénée du Pont, a long-time NEP supporter, that “Fred Schwarz thinks ‘Communism on the Map’ is one of the finest things that has been done in the country so far. He is using it everywhere.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The CACC also advertised NEP films, which likely explained their use at anticommunist gatherings such as that at the Yucaipa First Baptist Church in Redlands, California, organized by the Dunlap Women's Club and the CACC. Benson, in turn, continued to champion Schwarz.Footnote ⁶⁶ Robert Welch, meanwhile, told NBC in May 1961 that he was “pretty sure our people have shown more of the film strip ‘Communism on the Map’ … than all the others put together.” The JBS, he claimed, had showed the film “thousands” of times.Footnote ⁶⁷ In their efforts to bring the politics of the “Radical Right” to rural Americans, many state farm bureaus in the Mid-west and South also circulated NEP films (the Michigan bureau showed Communism on the Map more than 150 times), printed “Looking Ahead” in their monthly journals, and invited Benson and NEP figures to speak at numerous gatherings. The American Farm Bureau Federation President, meanwhile, spoke at the NEP's 1964 Forum.Footnote ⁶⁸

Local anti-communist groups, particularly in the Southwest, also collaborated with the NEP in the early 1960s. In Southern California, the NEP assisted the Whittier Freedom Forum, founded by the owner of a plumbing company after thousands attended meetings headlined by Cleon Skousen. To bring “the full realization of the threat of the criminal communist conspiracy to every resident of the Greater Whittier Area,” the forum hosted meetings and a night class, arranged showings of Communism on the Map, published a newsletter, produced material for schools, established study groups, and collaborated with the local chamber of commerce and local churches. Moreover, Clifton Ganus traveled to Whittier to address several of the forum's events. “Free enterprise” and religious concerns were addressed during the night class, but the use of Communism, along with the prevalence of material from Philbrick, Skousen, and Schwarz, encapsulated the forum's substantial focus on subversion and communist philosophy.Footnote ⁶⁹

Elsewhere in California, the NEP's materials were proliferated by two influential organizations, the Orange County Freedom Forum and the California Free Enterprise Association.Footnote ⁷⁰ These organizations were likely responsible, for example, for the sale or rental of Communism on the Map to organizations such as the Anti-Communism Study Group of the Contemporary Club, which arranged a showing at the Redlands Bowl.Footnote ⁷¹ As Darren Dochuk and Lisa McGirr have demonstrated, religious conservatives were often at the forefront of the anticommunist revival in southern California, and churches throughout the region arranged showings of NEP films. “So rapid was the spread of right-wing activity [in Orange County] during this period,” McGirr writes, “that, in any one week, an interested citizen might have chosen from two, and possibly three, showings of such films as Communism on the Map and Operation Abolition.”Footnote ⁷²

Business elites also helped the NEP and the “Radical Right” in the early 1960s. As McGirr notes, in southern California prominent activists were often white-collar employees in prospering Sunbelt businesses. In his capacity as a member of the “Watchdogs of Freedom,” Paul Kahn, an employee of Aerojet, arranged public showings of Communism on the Map.Footnote ⁷³ Civic clubs and local chambers in the South and Southwest dispersed NEP films and invited its spokesmen to their events; they extended similar assistance to many other anticommunists.Footnote ⁷⁴ Corporate leaders assisted too. Boeing sent representatives to Harding's forums, brought Glenn Green to speak at its Wichita plant, and bought multiple copies of Communism on the Map. In one month in 1960 Boeing's Wichita plant showed the film to more than five thousand citizens, while by February 1961 its Seattle operation had shown their copies more than two hundred times.Footnote ⁷⁵ Copies of Communism were also circulated by Puget Sound Power & Light, Goodyear, Alcoa, Jones and Laughlin Steel, Texas Power and Light, Schick Safety Razor, Ohio Bell Telephone, and North American Aviation.Footnote ⁷⁶

More broadly, organizations such as the NEP, the JBS, and the CACC were supported by a notable array of wealthy businessmen who embraced, or at least tolerated, domestic-oriented anticommunism. These often colourful individuals included J. Howard Pew; Walter Knott; Patrick Frawley of Eversharp, Inc., H. L. Hunt, the eccentric Texan billionaire; and F. Gano Chance of AB Chance. The JBS had particularly close links with business. Welch had served on the board of directors of the National Association of Manufacturers between 1950 and 1957, and many of the organization's key allies, such as William Grede and Alfred Kohlberg, hailed from similar backgrounds.Footnote ⁷⁷

Many of those businesses that supported Benson and his cohorts benefited greatly from the massive postwar investment in defence infrastructure in the South and Southwest, but this investment inadvertently encouraged another, less heralded, contributant to the growth of anticommunist conservatism: the military itself. In 1958 the National Security Council issued a directive to encourage “military personnel and facilities to arouse the public ‘to the menace of the cold war.’” The result was a series of relatively ad hoc initiatives, often involving anticommunist conservatives.Footnote ⁷⁸ According to one exposé, Vice Admiral Robert Goldthwaite, who was stationed in Pensacola and commanded 150,000 naval airmen, “conducted a virtual one-man crusade for right-wing extremism from coast to coast.” In Goldthwaite's mind, hyper-patriotism, concerns over moral decay, and “free enterprise” were linked to a socialistic drift or communist infiltration.Footnote ⁷⁹ The NEP worked closely with Goldthwaite and the Navy League to develop Project Alert, a series of anticommunist events, often featuring speakers such as Benson, Green, Ganus, Rickenbacker and Skousen, as well as NEP materials, and hosted in conjunction with civic clubs, businesses, patriotic societies, and religious groups. The project's planning committee, including Goldthwaite, regularly flew to Searcy to train with Ganus and Green, who designed a program for two-day seminars and follow-up meetings. Within its first year, 520 meetings had been held – by 1962 there were one hundred committees, mostly in the South and Southwest. In Los Angeles, Benson appeared at a School of Anti-communism, sponsored by the local project committee. The event also featured actor John Wayne; Cleon Skousen; Bella Dodd, ex-CPUSA member; Robert Morris, president of the University of Dallas, former chief counsel of the SISS, and a former naval intelligence reserve officer; and Rear Admiral Chester Ward (ret.) and Admiral Felix Stump, influential members of the American Security Council. Colonel Mitchell Paige (ret.) also spoke and requested that the audience forget the clamor to have Earl Warren impeached – “a more deserving punishment would be hanging.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Project Alert, in fact, was consistent with the anti-communist right's broader relationships with the Navy and other representatives of the armed forces. Goldthwaite, for example, used the Navy League, the Naval Air Training Command (NATC), and “the civilian communities with which we have contact” to spread NEP materials. By the summer of 1960, the NATC had sent sixty-five “top officers,” “commanding Admirals and their top staffs,” to Searcy to collect materials and receive training. In October, Benson boasted to Edgar Queeny, the Monsanto executive and another long-standing supporter, that the navy “is giving [Communism on the Map] very wide distribution”. One estimate suggested that they purchased at least fifty copies.Footnote ⁸¹ In 1959 Clifton Ganus was invited to Wright-Paterson Air Force Base in Ohio, the headquarters of Air Materiel Command (AMC), where NEP films were part of a program aimed at informing AMC members and nearby civilians of “the ism that threatens our way of life.” Ganus's contacts at Wright-Paterson arranged a touring itinerary taking in similar events at air force bases in eight states. Leading figures in the AMC, in turn, spoke at the 1961 forum in Searcy, while the NEP's inaugural one-day forum was held at the Blytheville Air Force Base in Arkansas, in conjunction with the Arkansas–Missouri Power Company and the local chamber of commerce.Footnote ⁸² Army representatives, meanwhile, spoke at Project Alert events and Freedom Forums, while the American Legion assisted to the NEP, for example by screening Communism on the Map “throughout” Mississippi.Footnote ⁸³ In California, meanwhile, military personnel were often keen participants in grassroots anticommunist activities.Footnote ⁸⁴

The relationship between the military, the NEP, and organizations in Benson's orbit, however, fuelled consequential criticisms of the “Radical Right.” Historians have tended to suggest that the “Radical Right” declined in efficacy as a result of a showdown with more moderate conservatives in the wake of Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964, but the experience of Benson and some of his cohorts suggests that their brand of anticommunism had begun to undermine their ability to effect political discourse several years earlier.Footnote ⁸⁵ In early 1961, Benson and Ganus participated in a “Strategy for Survival” program, orchestrated principally by military figures in Arkansas. Thousands gathered in Fort Smith, Little Rock, and Fayetteville over two days to hear Benson, Ganus, Robert Morris, and Brigadier General Clyde Watts. In Fort Smith, Ganus, who flew between venues at the navy's expense, reportedly declared that local Congressman J. W. Trimble (D–AR) had “voted eighty-nine percent of the time to aid and abet the Communist Party.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Senator William Fulbright (D–AR) was alarmed. His aide, Jack Yingling – a Harding graduate – drafted an investigative report into the military's anticommunism. The result was the “Fulbright Memorandum,” which was leaked in the summer of 1961. The document exposed NSC-68 as having spawned initiatives that “made use of extremely radical right-wing speakers and/or materials.” It cited links with the JBS, and singled out the NEP and the CACC as chief miscreants.Footnote ⁸⁷ To compound matters, that summer Edwin Walker, commander of the 24th Infantry Division in Europe, resigned after the Kennedy administration exposed his “Pro-Blue” program aimed at indoctrinating those under his command. Walker had previously been stationed in Arkansas. In 1959 he attended the NEP's forum, where Benson bestowed upon him Harding's “highest civilian award”– in recognition of his “fight against un-Americanism and subversion” – at a farewell reception. NEP materials had been central to the “Pro-Blue” program.Footnote ⁸⁸

Between February and December 1961, one estimate suggests, more than seven hundred newspaper articles focussing on the JBS alone were published. In November, Kennedy, whose administration closely followed the “Radical Right,” warned of the increasingly audible “discordant voices of extremism.” Many moderate Republicans mirrored the Kennedy administration's sense of foreboding, but also its perception that there were political advantages to associating conservatism with “extremism”.Footnote ⁸⁹ Prominent liberal intellectuals, meanwhile, revitalized the “status anxiety” theory, which had permeated their earlier response to McCarthyism. This revitalization was evident in the publication of an updated version of The New American Right, an influential set of essays edited by Daniel Bell (in which Benson now received dishonourable mention). Bell's book offered the most sophisticated articulation of a nonetheless widespread conviction that the “Radical Right” was motivated as much by psychological flaws as by ideological conviction. The “Radical Right's” preoccupation with communist conspiracies was invariably identified as the primary symptom of dangerous, irrational stirrings.Footnote ⁹⁰ “If in the old days Benson's message was of the common garden reactionary variety,” one critic concluded, “it is now distinctly of a radical rightist stripe.”Footnote ⁹¹

Some conservatives who were less preoccupied with domestic subversion than their “Radical Right” counterparts offered muffled or overt rebukes to conspiratorial politics. In early 1961, the conservative-leaning Los Angeles Times warned that “if the John Birchers follow the program of their leader … they will weaken the very strong case for conservatism.”Footnote ⁹² From 1962 onwards William F. Buckley, the influential publisher of National Review, and politicians like Barry Goldwater similarly spoke out against the domestic-oriented anticommunism espoused by “Radical Right” luminaries, although they avoided directly criticizing grassroots activists.Footnote ⁹³ George Sokolsky, the influential syndicated Hearst columnist, once described as the “high priest” of McCarthyism, distinguished between a destructive “pseudo conservatism” and the non-conspiratorial politics that he associated with conservatives like Buckley. Even J. Edgar Hoover declared that “too many self-styled experts on communism are plying the highways of America, giving erroneous and distorted information … [and causing] hysteria”.Footnote ⁹⁴

On the one hand, the extremist critique often heightened the sense of injustice prevalent amongst those constituencies in the South and Southwest who were already attracted to the “Radical Right.” In the wake of the revelations regarding the military, for example, General Walker was elevated to martyrdom, while Senator Strom Thurmond (D–SC) became a leading critic of “military muzzling” and central to a tumultuous Senate Armed Services Commission investigation. Thurmond, indeed, asked Benson for the script of Communist Encirclement, which he read into the Congressional Record to demonstrate its “factual, nonpartisan presentation of the Communist threat.” The “muzzling” issue was also persistently emphasized by the NEP, grassroots activists, the CACC, the JBS, the Christian Crusade, Dan Smoot, and “Herb” Philbrick.Footnote ⁹⁵

On the other hand, the criticism aimed at the “Radical Right” often encouraged the retort that “anti-anti-communism” demonstrated the power of subversive forces and socialistic sympathies.Footnote ⁹⁶ This, in turn, exacerbated criticisms of extremism. While Benson made some minor efforts to moderate his approach – for example by rejecting some of Welch's especially outlandish contentions – he ultimately offered what Danger on the Right concluded was a “Welchian defense.” The “determined fight for the destruction of the anti-communist groups in America,” Benson argued, was the communists’ “latest major tactic.”Footnote ⁹⁷ This problematic response was compounded by the increasing effort that Benson and his cohorts devoted to rebuffing their critics. One headline in the Arkansas Gazette simply read, “Benson: Busy on the Defensive.” “Harding College is conservative and it is anti-communist,” Benson wrote to the editor of the Kansas City Star, in one of many such letters, “but standing for these fundamentals doesn't make the college ‘radical,’ ‘extremist’ or ‘ultra-rightist.’”Footnote ⁹⁸ James Bales published Americanism under Fire, “an answer to the Communists' attack on the anti-communists”.Footnote ⁹⁹

There were additional consequences of this criticism. The military severed its relationship with the NEP, as it did with other anticommunists such as Fred Schwarz. Official use of Communism on the Map and Communist Encirclement was banned, while unofficial connections with the military had largely disappeared by 1962.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Protests against the NEP's films, in particular, mounted: Governor Mennen Williams of Michigan, a Democrat, called for the state police subversive-activities squads to stop public showings of Communism on the Map; in Seattle, university professors led a successful campaign to ensure that Communism was not incorporated into the public-school system; in Louisiana, Bales and Ganus appeared on a television debate amidst controversy over the state's anticommunist school program.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Benson remained on the FBI's special correspondents list, but the bureau reviewed Communist Encirclement and in consequence ensured that the FBI's anticommunist materials would not appear at events where NEP films were used, lest it be construed that this constituted some form of endorsement.Footnote ¹⁰² In December 1961, Fred Schwarz wrote to a long-time collaborator expressing his concern over giving “ammunition” to critics. “Please do not officially show or advocate,” he advised, “‘Communism on the Map’ or ‘Communist Encirclement.’”Footnote ¹⁰³

The most obvious sign of the damage done to the NEP was the drop-off in the sale of materials – for the 1962–63 fiscal year the income from sales dropped to less than half of the figure for each of the previous two years. In 1962–63 and 1963–64, the NEP's income was roughly half what it had been in the previous two years. By 1963, the number of newspapers carrying “Looking Ahead” had dropped by almost a quarter since the late 1950s, while the number of subscribers to the NEP's newsletter had fallen by a third. This decline subsequently gathered speed, partly in concert with Benson's increasingly bizarre utterances (in the 1970s he even accused liberals of secretly releasing dangerous gases into the air near Harding College).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Similar patterns were in evidence elsewhere. In 1962 the CACC's revenue tumbled to half of the 1961 figure – in the coming years, the number of Schools of Anti-communism dwindled, largely because they now operated at a loss. After struggling through 1962 and 1963 the Christian Crusade had a debt of $300,000 and had greatly reduced its output, although it temporarily recovered ground in 1964.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ To be sure, the process of decline across the “Radical Right,” as a whole, occurred unevenly – the JBS initially weathered the storm somewhat better, perhaps as a consequence of the investment made by members, but declined after the middle of the decade, as did the organizations led by Dan Smoot and Carl McIntire.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ At the same time, even though organizations like the JBS retained a core of support during this period, their association with “extremism” and domestic-oriented anticommunism likely limited their ability to promote conservative values beyond those core supporters.

To an extent that historians have not fully grasped, there was a disjuncture between the cacophony of criticism that the “Radical Right” attracted and its strength as political phenomenon. When viewed in a broader context, the activist heartlands in parts of southern California and Texas seem somewhat less emblematic of trends across the South and Southwest than has sometimes been intimated. The political toxicity of an amalgam of domestic-oriented anticommunism and conservative ideology in the early 1960s testifies to the ways in which the appeal of Benson's message – to an extent that had never been evident before – was confined to particular constituencies. In Texas, Earle Cabell's presence in Dallas was coupled with the election of a JBS mayor in Amarillo, but, as Sean Cunningham demonstrates, across the state as a whole the politics of the “Radical Right” was marginal – the calamity of Edwin Walker's gubernatorial campaign evinced this, as did the decision of the Houston Post and Houston Chronicle, which had encouraged the Red Scare in the 1950s, to distance themselves from anticommunism. Indeed, from Cunningham's perspective, the subsequent resurgence of conservatism in Texas was not closely related to anticommunist activism in the early 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In southern California, activists who were often steeped in the politics of the “Radical Right” contributed to a rightward shift within the GOP, but in 1962 Congressmen John Rousselot and Edgar Heistand, two avowed Birchers, failed to get reelected, while Joe Shell fell well short in the GOP's gubernatorial primary. In Santa Barbara, unlike Orange County, many conservatives challenged conspiratorial anticommunism, concluding that organizations like the JBS threatened the conservative movement.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In Arkansas, Benson considered running against Senator Fulbright in 1962. The hefty defeat meted out to Winston Chandler, who ran on a “Radical Right” platform, confirmed the wisdom of Benson's decision not to run.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Elizabeth Tandy Shermer's recent study of business elites in Phoenix, meanwhile, demonstrates that by the 1960s longer-term economic changes in the Sunbelt had fostered a nascent conservatism that was not defined by anticommunism.Footnote ¹¹⁰ By 1964 the few successful politicians who deployed domestic-oriented anticommunism were generally southerners whose attacks on the civil rights movement were sometimes unsubtly expressed through this discourse.Footnote ¹¹¹

While many conservatives spurned the conspiracies of the “Radical Right,” prior to the mid-1960s they were unable to establish clear lines of demarcation between a nominal mainstream and people like George Benson. Moderate Republicans, Democrats, and liberal commentators sometimes differentiated between conservatives of different types (as Time did), but they almost always emphasized that such distinctions were blurred by shared ideological convictions, by shared funding sources and political platforms, by and non-conspiratorial conservatives’ reluctance to ostracize enthusiastic activists.Footnote ¹¹² For this reason, while Barry Goldwater's campaign received significant assistance from many associated with the “Radical Right,” particularly in southern California, his landslide defeat was influenced by his perceived association with “extremism.” This perception was encouraged by moderate Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller, Goldwater's opponent for the GOP nomination, who declared that the Arizonian would become “a captive” of the “radical right lunatic branch” of the conservative movement; by Goldwater himself, who infamously declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” during his speech accepting the GOP's nomination and was reluctant to criticize those associated with the “Radical Right”; and by the ringing endorsements offered by Benson and others, which encouraged the idea that Goldwater was “the charm boy of the Far Right.”Footnote ¹¹³

Unquestionably, George Benson made a hitherto largely unheralded contribution to a notable upswing in conservative activism in the early 1960s, one that gave Americans in places like Orange County a first taste of political activism and thereby laid some foundations for the conservative movement that would propel Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980. This activism must be contextualized, however. Benson's career and the recent work of a number of historians demonstrate that conservatives were more active and innovative between the rise of the New Deal in the 1930s and the early 1960s than was once assumed. Moreover, the ideological agenda that often animated the “Radical Right” was less innovative than has sometimes been suggested. Indeed, by the early 1960s Benson railed against communism to the extent that he became a somewhat less consistent advocate of the notion that conservative principles were essential components of a prosperous and virtuous society. He shared this predilection with many of his contemporaries. In the early 1960s George Benson's political project was fleetingly illuminated in a way that it had never been before, but despite this scrutiny most commentators did not discern the extent to which Benson's continued domestic-oriented anticommunism ensured that he had swapped an expansive crusade for a controversial crusade that excited consequential activism among narrow constituencies in the South and Southwest. Finally, the longer-term legacy of the “Radical Right” also deserves greater scrutiny. Jonathan Schoenwald suggests that after 1964 conservative Republicans’ concerted efforts to distinguish themselves from domestic-oriented anticommunists enabled their politics to appear, by contrast, more modest and mainstream. It seems at least as plausible, however, that the substantial overlap between a “respectable” mainstream and the “Radical Right” – which had been endlessly highlighted throughout the early 1960s – cast a lengthier shadow over the right in the minds of many Americans.Footnote ¹¹⁴