In June 1922, Ann Rogers Minor, the president general of the nationalist women's organization Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), warned fellow members of “the poisonous doctrines of socialism” that were “spreading everywhere and trapping the unwary under the guise of a false Americanism or some apparently innocent and desirable reform.” Minor believed that there were “other utterly un-American movements on foot,” but she considered socialism to be the gravest danger, since it was “an open foe of our form of Government and Constitution, of our home and family life, of our religion and all that we hold most sacred.”Footnote ¹ Six years after these dire warnings appeared in the DAR Magazine, Mary P. Macfarland, a prominent member of the organization who had been expulsed for criticizing the organization's efforts to blacklist prominent liberals and socialists, called such forms of antiradicalism “to the highest degree un-American, unintelligent and unworthy of the descendants of the men and women of 1776.”Footnote ²

The different ways in which these two women employed the term “un-American” hint at the complexities of American patriotism during the interwar period. A closer look at the DAR's history in the 1920s and 1930s helps us understand some of these complexities. Over the past three decades, a number of scholars have explored the organization's antiradicalism during the 1920s, as well as its controversial decision to bar African American singer Marian Anderson from its Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, in 1939. While not explicitly addressing the history of “un-Americanism,” their studies shed light on the gendered nature of the DAR's antiradical ideology and its racially exclusionary brand of US nationalism.Footnote ³ This article likewise argues that the Daughters' warnings against “un-Americans” are difficult to fully comprehend without acknowledging their gendered and racial dimensions; more importantly, it contends that the DAR's history helps us better understand conflicting interpretations of un-Americanism during the interwar period. Previous studies have neglected the fact that the organization itself was repeatedly branded “un-American” in the 1920s and 1930s, which reflects the tendency among scholars to concentrate on antiradicals' and anticommunists' attempts to denigrate proponents of leftist positions. Yet the public controversies over the DAR's antiradicalism in 1928 and its discriminatory policies toward Marian Anderson in 1939 reveal that liberal commentators and activists repeatedly appropriated this label to express more forcefully their alternative vision of the American nation. While the Daughters’ use of un-Americanism reflected an exclusionary ethnic nationalism that sought to silence any critique of the American nation-state, their liberal critics employed the term to advocate ideological pluralism and an inclusionary civic nationalism.Footnote ⁴ Although the latter group's critique failed to sway the DAR toward ideological moderation, it had a considerable impact on public discourse, convincing many that antiradicals themselves might jeopardize America and what it stood for. The history of the Daughters of the American Revolution thus provides a more thorough understanding of the intricacies of un-Americanism between World War I and World War II, calling attention to its highly gendered symbolism and its use by both conservatives and liberals to define what it meant to be American.

The interest of the Daughters of the American Revolution in un-American activities began during World War I. Founded in 1890 in Washington, DC, in response to the refusal of the Sons of the American Revolution to admit female members, the DAR admits only those women who can prove lineal descent from Americans who contributed actively to the cause of the American Revolution. It promotes patriotism and the preservation of US history through commemoration and education. Americans’ increasing interest in genealogy around 1900, coupled with the organization's relative exclusivity, made the DAR extremely popular among white middle-class women. By the early 1920s, the organization boasted a membership of 140,000, which consisted primarily of fairly well-educated Protestants. In the following decades, its membership soared to almost 200,000.Footnote ⁵ Although its founding generation included a number of liberal clubwomen and women's rights activists, the DAR became increasingly conservative after World War I. This development was a result of the organization's ideological shift in the wake of the Great War. In its early years, the Daughters supported many campaigns associated with liberal Progressivism, including settlement houses and anti-child-labor legislation. After 1918, however, the organization underwent a process of radicalization, which was reflected in its steadfast support for military preparedness, antiradicalism, and restrictive immigration laws.Footnote ⁶

The DAR thus became part of what Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary has interpreted as a fundamental change in the history of American nationalism during and after World War I. Prior to the Great War, American patriotism was promoted primarily by private voluntary associations and was characterized by an ideological pluralism that featured both inclusionary and exclusionary strains of nationalist ideology. After 1914, the US government increasingly intervened in this discourse, allying itself with conservative private organizations such as the DAR to elevate “a racially exclusive, culturally conformist” and “militaristic patriotism” to a hegemonic status, although this dominance was followed by further debates about the essence of American nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ⁷ The Daughters of the American Revolution played an important role in these discussions.

Within this context, the period from 1914 to 1918 was a watershed period for the DAR and other antiradical women's organizations because it marked the emergence of an antiradical movement that received much of its support from white middle-class women and made antifeminism a central pillar of its ideological thrust. Three interrelated events contributed to this expansion of female antiradical activism. First, the beginning of World War I led to an upsurge in patriotism and related suspicions of subversive ideologies. Even though a majority of Americans opposed US involvement in the war prior to 1917, patriotic women's associations echoed male nationalists’ early calls for military preparedness and cooperated with these organizations, the government, and the War Department to further the cause of national defense. When the United States entered the war, female patriots supported the efforts of the US government and a large network of patriotic civic organizations such as the American Protective League to fight disloyalty within American society.Footnote ⁸ The second, and certainly the most important, event that led to the birth of the antiradical movement was the Russian Revolution of 1917. The revolution deeply disturbed male and female antiradicals alike because they regarded Bolshevism as a thoroughly alien ideology that jeopardized America's institutions and its values.Footnote ⁹

Finally, Congressional passage of the Nineteenth Amendment brought a large number of female anti-suffrage activists into the camp of conservative antiradicals, which energized the entire movement and contributed to its strongly antifeminist agenda during the 1920s. Among the most prominent anti-suffragists-turned-patriots was the Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, which renamed itself Woman Patriots once women's right to vote seemed inevitable. When these female antifeminists recognized that they could no longer prevent the Nineteenth Amendment's passage, they sought to prevent feminist ideas from gaining influence among female voters.Footnote ¹⁰ Many DAR members were ideologically in line with anti-suffragists and their successors. Even though the organization's membership had included well-known suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward, its leadership had banned open discussions of the issue and endorsed the Nineteenth Amendment only in April 1920, almost a year after its passage.Footnote ¹¹

As a vocal member of this antiradical movement of female patriots, the DAR explicitly linked antiradicalism, antifeminism, and military preparedness in its nationalist rhetoric and in its efforts to root out un-Americanism. In the eyes of the Daughters, these three themes were inextricably intertwined because they believed that any type of change with regard to America's entrenched gender hierarchies would be detrimental to the country's political system and vice versa. The organization's insistence on improving national defense was a consequence of its efforts to safeguard America, but also inadvertently highlighted the DAR's conservative ideas about femininity and masculinity within the American family, which they believed were essential to the future of the American republic.

In terms of national defense, the DAR was among the first patriotic women's organizations to call for an increase in defense spending prior to America's entry into World War I. As early as February 1914, a state regent from the Georgia DAR deplored the inadequacy of the US Navy in the face of European nations' growing military might. Less than a year later, the national DAR joined in the efforts of the woman's section of the Navy League and other nationalist women's associations to lobby the federal government for a stronger national defense. As they had done during the Spanish–American war, the Daughters also supported the war effort by selling Liberty Loans; by sending clothes, food, and reading material to American troops in Europe; and by dispatching volunteers to serve as nurses in army hospitals in the United States and Europe. Once the United States had entered the war, the DAR demanded unconditional national loyalty and applauded the efforts of the federal government to repress domestic opposition to the war. By the spring of 1916, military preparedness had become a dominant theme in the DAR's activities at the national, state, and chapter level. Like other conservative women patriots, the organization also warned of the dangers that the Russian Revolution posed to American ideals. In April 1919, the DAR's annual Continental Congress passed a resolution that strongly denounced Bolshevism.Footnote ¹²

Given its early support for military preparedness and its pronounced anti-Bolshevism, it was not surprising that the DAR applauded the efforts of the federal government to root out socialist and communist radicals during the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920. The general fear of communism that had been triggered by the Russian Revolution grew in the aftermath of World War I, as millions of American workers went on strike to obtain higher wages and better working conditions. Even though the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 had severely weakened the American Socialist Party and militant labor organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), industrialists, journalists, and patriotic organizations predicted that the wave of strikes was the harbinger of a Bolshevik-inspired revolution. The founding of the Communist Party of the United States in 1919 and a series of terrorist bombings that targeted public officials were seen as additional evidence of violent upheavals to come. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer reacted to this growing fear by securing Congressional appropriations for a Radical Division in the Justice Department. Founded to scrutinize and quell domestic radicalism, the new agency immediately began to disrupt left-wing activism. Between November 1919 and January 1920, the Radical Division's Palmer Raids led to the arrest of more than 4,000 leftist activists and the deportation of several hundred foreign nationals. Across the country, the Justice Department's agents received support from anticommunist organizations such as the American Legion and former members of the civic organizations that had fought disloyalty during World War I. Eventually, however, the new agency's flagrant violations of civil liberties, and the fact that the violent socialist revolution which had been predicted did not occur, led many Americans to question the necessity for the Radical Division's aggressive strategies to safeguard the American nation. By the summer of 1920, the Red Scare was over.Footnote ¹³

Although most Americans no longer feared a communist takeover, male and female nationalists, the US War Department,and the newly established Bureau of Investigation, which succeeded the Radical Division, were certain that the threat was far from being contained. From their perspective, the danger had actually increased, since radicals were believed to have infiltrated many civic organizations to reach their long-term goal of overthrowing, or at least undermining, the US government. The 1920s thus saw the emergence of a powerful antiradical movement that incessantly warned of “un-American” ideologies and activities. Although this movement regarded socialism as the most dangerous form of un-Americanism, government agencies and private antiradical organizations were also suspicious of other ideologies such as feminism, pacifism, and progressivism that challenged or sought to reform America's political, social, cultural, or economic status quo. This antiradical movement was diverse and did not always speak with one voice, but its members generally agreed that un-American radicalism would destroy the foundations of the American nation.Footnote ¹⁴

The DAR helped fellow antiradicals define un-Americanism during the interwar period. The DAR agreed with its male counterparts that un-American radicals sought to accomplish six goals: (1) the abolition of government, (2) the abolition of patriotism, (3) the abolition of private property, (4) the abolition of rights of inheritance, (5) the abolition of religion, and (6) the abolition of family relations. To many antiradicals, “These six principles” formed “the basis of all radicalism in any country,”Footnote ¹⁵ to use the words of self-proclaimed anticommunist and officer of the Military Order of the World War Capt. George L. Darte, who spoke before the DAR in 1927. Throughout the interwar period, the Daughters repeatedly referred to some or all of these six principles when warning of un-American radicalism.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1926, for instance, the head of the California DAR's committee on patriotic instruction implicitly referred to these “un-American” principles when warning of “red” teachers who asked young Americans to “throw aside American ideals and substitute for them atheism, materialism, and Communism.” According to this DAR officer, disloyal teachers would tell their students that there was “no God, no home, no country,” and indoctrinate them into believing that patriotism was “silly” and the Constitution “old-fashioned and outlived.”Footnote ¹⁷ As suggested by such statements, the Daughters and their conservative allies believed that America's Republican form of government was sacrosanct and that the Constitution was a sacred document. Love of country, property ownership, Christianity, and gender identities as they were epitomized by the traditional nuclear family were seen as part and parcel of a patriotic equilibrium that was in danger of being destroyed by un-American radicals. Nothing less than a strong US military and constant vigilance on the part of the entire US population would save America from total destruction.

Given the fact that the Daughters' membership primarily comprised white middle-class women whose families had lived in America for generations, this fight to save the American nation reflected xenophobia and a fear of class warfare. Immigrants and labor activists were suspected to be the main disseminators of “poisonous” un-American doctrines. Especially immigrants from Eastern Europe were frequently portrayed as harbingers of doom. Speaking at the DAR's Continental Congress in April 1920, the retiring president general, Sarah Mitchell Guernsey, warned of the “law-defying, God-denying, man-defiling, vicious vagrants” who had come to America's “shore to destroy the only country which has ever held out hope to aspiring men to seek it as a refuge from tyrants.”Footnote ¹⁸ Because of such concerns, the Daughters joined early on in the efforts of private middle-class associations to “Americanize” the country's foreign population, which they hoped would stem the tide of un-Americanism.Footnote ¹⁹ But the DAR's anxieties also contained explicit class dimensions. Echoing traditions of Republicanism, the Daughters warned of mob rule and the death of patriotism if un-American socialists, communists, and other radicals were allowed to spread their dangerous doctrines within American labor unions. In an address to the DAR's annual meeting in April 1922, for instance, president general Ann Rogers Minor warned fellow members that a “false democracy” was “seeking to overturn” America's “representative form of government and to replace it with mob rule or government directly by the populace.” According to Minor, such a “false industrial democracy” would ultimately lead to “a group or class legislation, bloc control of the government, and the dictation of powerful minorities.”Footnote ²⁰ Regional DAR officers seconded such charges, repeatedly warning of the class warfare that un-American radicals planned to provoke.Footnote ²¹

But the gender dimensions of the Daughters' anti-un-Americanism were even more pronounced. Like other conservative white middle-class women who joined patriotic organizations, the Daughters believed that the patriarchal family and the American nation were inextricably intertwined. The stability of both, the DAR and its allies said, depended on clearly defined notions of masculinity and femininity, as well as rigid relationships of men and women to the state. Real patriotic men were brave in the face of military crisis and were autonomous and self-determined individuals in their daily lives, and they had a direct relationship to the state as patriarchal heads of their families.Footnote ²² Truly patriotic women, by contrast, were expected to conform to the two nineteenth-century middle-class ideals of True Womanhood and Republican Motherhood and had only an indirect relationship to the state through their husbands. Women thus were dependent on and happily submitted to their spouses without question, were sexually pure and pious, and focused on benevolently serving others. Motherhood was seen as women's ultimate fulfillment and the family as the center of their lives. As Republican Mothers, their obligation to care for their children was also seen as a political and patriotic duty to serve the state. They were expected to devote all energies to the raising of the nation's future generation of virtuous citizens and to supporting their husbands in building and sustaining the American Republic.Footnote ²³

Given their belief in the close connections between the family, rigidly defined gender roles, and the American nation, the Daughters of the American Revolution repeatedly warned of the consequences that the purported sixth principle of the radicals' agenda – the abolition of family relations – would have on US society. Since traditional notions of gender were seen as essential to both the stability and the survival of the American nation, any ideology that challenged these traditions was seen as utterly un-American. Specifically, the Daughters branded socialism, feminism, and pacifism as threats to the American gender order. Socialism seemed the most dangerous of these subversive ideologies because it appeared to be intent on destroying women's feminine identity and the patriarchal relationships that protected them. For example, the organization's president general, Grace Brosseau, insisted before the 1928 state conference of the California DAR,

Such statements reveal a strongly felt angst about the impact that communism might have on US society in general and white middle-class women's status in particular. Brosseau and others believed that un-American radicals would ultimately seek to erase traditional gender differences and take away the privileges that the Daughters thought protected women and the family under America's Republican form of government. The Daughters were certain that the erosion of the family and the home would also be accomplished through un-American radicals' efforts to introduce novel notions of romantic partnership and sexuality. In 1929, Flora A. Walker, head of the DAR's powerful National Defense Committee, elaborated on how radicals planned to attack the American family by planning the “destruction of the home,” which was “to be accomplished through…laxity in marriage and divorce laws; through advocacy of free love; through promotion of immoral literature, plays, and motion pictures.”Footnote ²⁵ To Walker and fellow DAR officers, allowing radicalism to do its corrosive work would enable un-Americans to strike at one of the major foundations of US society: the clearly defined boundaries between men and women.

But in the eyes of the DAR, other un-American “-isms” were just as dangerous to the stability of the family and the nation, since all of them were believed to be connected to the poisonous doctrines emanating from Russia. Feminism was seen as a threat because its advocacy of female autonomy, gender equality, and self-fulfillment struck at the very heart of patriarchy. Confronted with the specter of the “New Woman” and an increasingly vocal feminist movement, both challenging traditional ideals of wifehood, motherhood, and domesticity, DAR leaders insisted on the continuing importance of Republican Motherhood.Footnote ²⁶ The organization had defended these traditions from its inception, notwithstanding the fact that its founding generation included a number of liberal clubwomen and women's rights activists. In 1896, for instance, the DAR's president general, Mrs. John W. Foster, proudly proclaimed that only “old-fashioned womanliness” would enable women “to train the children in the ways of true patriotism.” According to Foster, they should be “content to be loving wives and mothers, making in our homes loyal husbands, brothers, and citizens.”Footnote ²⁷ As the women's suffrage movement became more vocal in the late nineteenth century, many DAR officers accused the younger generation of self-assertive women of unpatriotic selfishness. True patriotism, the Daughters said, required self-sacrifice and Republican virtue, which had to be transmitted to American children within the confines of the home.Footnote ²⁸ The fact that most members used the name of their husbands, rather than their own name, when acting in official capacity reflected the organization's belief that women should generally refrain from any self-assertive behavior.

After World War I, the DAR seemed to be even more adamant that truly patriotic American women ought to shun feminist tenets and frequently evoked the memory of the American past to warn of the danger that feminism posed to the American family and the nation. In their commemorative campaigns, the Daughters stressed that mothers had contributed to the process of American nation-building from the very first moment that European women set foot on the continent and exhorted their audiences to cherish their feminine virtues in the present.Footnote ²⁹ “Like the Pilgrim Mothers,” president general Anne Rogers Minor exclaimed at the Pilgrim Tercentenary of 1920 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, “we must be filled with the same spirit of service to the common cause, the same faith, courage and unselfish devotion that led them into a strange world and enabled them to build the homes that they have transmitted to us to preserve.”Footnote ³⁰ Five years later, Minor and her successor, Lora Haines Cook, reiterated this message during a commemorative event in Plymouth, Massachusetts, putting particular emphasis on the role of the Pilgrim Mothers as homemakers and helpmates of their husbands. Criticizing feminist tenets that advocated women's independence, individuality, self-expression, and self-fulfillment, Cook expressed her dismay at such attacks “upon the family as a unit and as an institution” and exhorted women to follow the example of the Pilgrim Mothers and serve their country by concentrating on their roles as “helpmates and mothers.” If they failed to do so, Cook warned, “strange…cults” such as feminism would “lead the innocent and the foolish into the dangerous morasses of emotional license and depravity and make of them standard bearers of bolshevistic and communistic propaganda.”Footnote ³¹ To the Daughters, then, preserving traditional gender roles and safeguarding the American nation were closely interconnected. Challenging the former would inevitably empower un-American radicals.

Finally, while socialism and feminism were regarded as closely connected forms of un-Americanism that endangered the American nation by undermining US gender relations, pacifists were considered just as treacherous. Not only were pacifists believed to leave the American nation defenseless in the face of foreign foes, but their teachings also undermined traditional gender identities because they challenged the dominant ideal of the manly citizen soldier.Footnote ³² As early as 1919, the DAR issued a report on the organization's work during World War I in which it warned of “the avowed defense-destroying pacifist” who endangered America's ability to protect itself against other hostile nations.Footnote ³³ Hinting at the gender dimensions of this critique, the organization's leaders repeatedly accused pacifists of being “cowards” or “weaklings” who displayed “selfish fear for personal safety” rather than patriotic loyalty toward the nation.Footnote ³⁴ In 1928, the editors of the Washington Post echoed such warnings and praised the DAR's support for naval defense. “The pacifists are incurably wrong in logic and common sense,” the Post wrote. “Cowardice is a large element in their makeup, together with its twin, false witness.”Footnote ³⁵ The Daughters and their nationalist allies believed that women had an obligation to affirm long-standing traditions of the manly citizen soldier to protect the United States against the menace of un-Americanism. Since many members of the organization had been part of the Progressive Movement, there were certainly a number of members who opposed militarism and advocated less martial solutions to political conflicts. But during World War I, a majority of the DAR's membership appeared to feel that their allegiance to the American nation-state in times of war required undivided support for soldierly manhood and military preparedness. This steadfast support continued largely unabated throughout the interwar period.Footnote ³⁶

As suggested by these warnings, the Daughters denounced virtually every ideology that challenged the political, social, economic, and cultural status quo of US society. Socialism, feminism, and pacifism were regarded as a threat to the kind of stability that the Daughters believed had characterized US society in general and American gender relations in particular prior to the onset of modernity. True Americans honored and sought to preserve individualism, property ownership, capitalism, the Constitution, Christianity, the Republican form of government, traditions of nationalism, and long-held notions of femininity and masculinity.

Their vocal antiradicalism during the interwar period made them a vital part of the conservative movement that sought to protect the United States against un-Americanism, and representatives of the US government lauded the Daughters for their contributions to this movement. Speaking to five thousand members at the DAR's thirty-seventh Continental Congress in 1928, Labor Secretary James D. Davis said, “Un-American and un-patriotic groups are against you, as they are against us in the enforcement of the law. By taking your stand on these fundamentals of the Constitution and our laws, you will grow to and remain a healthy and virile organization.”Footnote ³⁷ Not only the Labor Department commended the DAR for its antiradicalism and sought to forge an alliance with the conservative women's organization. Between 1926 and 1932, the Military Intelligence Division (MID) of the US War Department also gladly shared with the Daughters confidential documents about peace activists and un-American radicals. If ordinary citizens contacted the MID to learn more about American radicalism, the agency referred them to the DAR's library in Washington, DC for more information. In the interwar period, then, the Daughters certainly had an impact on public debates about un-Americanism and, to a lesser extent, on discussions about the subject within government circles.Footnote ³⁸

Yet not everyone praised the organization's antiradicalism, which complicates our understanding of un-Americanism during the interwar period. While the Daughters' antiradical ideology provides crucial insights into conservative interpretations of un-Americanism after World War I, the organization's history also reveals how liberal individuals and groups repeatedly appropriated the term to criticize the DAR's antiradical and racist policies. Such appropriations might seem unsurprising, but analyzing this phenomenon more thoroughly helps us better understand the ways in which the term “un-American” was used by conservative and liberal groups to define what they regarded as “true” Americanism. Two public controversies provide evidence of the conflicting interpretations of American nationalism during the interwar period. In 1928, the DAR had to fend off criticism in reaction to the organization's support for the blacklisting of prominent liberals and socialists. Eleven years later, a controversy over the Daughters' decision to bar famous black opera singer Marian Anderson from its Constitution Hall in Washington, DC caused an even greater public uproar over the organization's racism and tarnished its reputation to the present day.

The blacklist controversy was the result of DAR leaders' efforts to ban “un-American” speakers from appearing before its chapters. In early 1928, newspapers across the country reported that the Massachusetts DAR circulated so-called “undesired speakers” lists among its local chapters. Quickly dubbed blacklists, the documents named dozens of well-known liberal organizations and individuals, including settlement house worker Jane Addams, liberal defense attorney Clarence Darrow, and African American intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. In February, Helen Tufts Bailie, a liberal writer from Massachusetts and member of both the DAR and the blacklisted Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), launched a well-prepared campaign to protest the blacklists and to initiate liberal reforms within the DAR. Bailie founded a DAR Committee of Protest and wrote a number of widely publicized essays to criticize what she considered a violation of the freedom of speech, as well as the organization's undemocratic policies. Ultimately, however, Bailie's reform efforts proved unsuccessful. From the very beginning, the DAR's national leadership denied having authored or distributed such blacklists, forced the Committee of Protest to disband, and ultimately expelled Bailie and some of her allies.Footnote ³⁹ The blacklist affair could thus be seen as a major triumph for the organization's antiradical leadership, since it effectively silenced the last remnants of liberal opposition that had remained in the organization after the organization's radicalization during World War I.

Yet a closer look at the reactions to the blacklist controversy reveals that it was not necessarily an unqualified success. Prior to this event it had been primarily conservative radicals such as the DAR that used the term “un-American” to denounce leftist and liberal individuals and organizations. The blacklist affair marked the first time that liberal activists appropriated conservatives' language to denounce antiradical patriots. Once the term “un-American” had entered the liberal vocabulary, it lent more rhetorical force to their attempts to promote a more liberal vision of the American nation.

As soon as the first reports about the blacklists appeared, numerous commentators denounced the DAR's policies as un-American, echoing Helen Tufts Bailie's charges that they constituted a violation of the Constitutional right of free speech. Blacklisted individuals and their relatives were among the most ardent critics. For example, the Rev. E. Tallmadge Root, executive secretary of the Massachusetts Federation of Churches, condemned the DAR's policy as “unauthorized, unjustified, un-American and unnecessary.”Footnote ⁴⁰ A DAR member and wife of a blacklisted Methodist Episcopal bishop from Massachusetts similarly disparaged the organization's “un-American and un-Christian attitude.” From her perspective, the Daughters had departed “from the principles of independent thought and action and puritan ideals” which she believed had “characterized the founders of our country.”Footnote ⁴¹ Many journalists concurred and also used the term “un-American” when criticizing the Daughters. The editor of the Atlanta Constitution, M. Ashby Jones, for instance, expressed his hope that the DAR, which he continued to regard as an “ancient and honorable organization,” was not “involved in this most un-American business.” He was disturbed by what he termed “a cowardly method” that aimed “to suppress free speech.”Footnote ⁴² To most detractors, the exercise of free speech was a Constitutional right that could not be taken away from American citizens.

Within the DAR, a few women who were courageous enough to speak out also called the organization's actions un-American because they regarded them as a violation of the principles of the very Founding Fathers that the Daughters constantly evoked to justify their militant antiradicalism. One former vice president general wrote in a letter to the editor of a Massachusetts newspaper that even though the DAR and its allies should strive to uncover subversive propaganda, methods such as blacklisting were “certainly not in tune with the principles of our patriotic ancestors.” The fact that they had “not been submitted to the members” of the DAR, this critic charged, was “unjust and un-American.”Footnote ⁴³ Mary P. MacFarland of Hanover, NJ agreed, not least because she was expulsed from the organization in November 1928 for supporting Helen Tufts Bailie and her Committee of Protest. The prominent New Jersey president of the American Association of University Women and officer in the League of Voters also called the DAR un-American and suggested that the Founding Fathers would have disapproved of its policies. Urging Americans to view the originators of the American Revolution and the Constitution from a different perspective, MacFarland expressed her hope “that our policy may entirely cease to be negative and reactionary and become thoroughly positive, constructive and progressive as was that of our fathers of '76.”Footnote ⁴⁴ However, most Daughters refrained from publicly criticizing the organization's leadership. Some chapters wrote letters of protest to the national leadership, but the majority of members remained silent or defended the DAR against the charges that were leveled against it by Bailie, MacFarland, and other liberal detractors.Footnote ⁴⁵

To many liberal commentators, the DAR's actions reminded them of what they believed was the epitome of un-Americanism: the Ku Klux Klan. These critics variously called the organization the “Daughters of the Ku Klux Klan” or a “Ku Klux Klan of women,” or suggested that the DAR's leader, Grace Brosseau, had “allowed several lengths of Ku Klux nightie to show under her red, white and blue.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet even though the Daughters echoed Ku Klux Klan tenets such as their emphasis on “100 per cent Americanism” and their praise for the “Anglo-Saxon strain in American civilization,” the organization never had any working relationship with the Ku Klux Klan.Footnote ⁴⁷ While it is not entirely clear why there were no such relations, historian Carol Medlicott suspects that the upper-middle-class Daughters considered the Klan to be a lower-class phenomenon that was not worth their attention.Footnote ⁴⁸ But to many liberal activists and commentators, the Ku Klux Klan analogy seemed fitting, since both organizations were believed to advocate un-American tenets by attempting to silence those who disagreed with their particular interpretation of American nationalism.

Confronted with such unflattering comparisons, the Daughters vehemently rejected any suggestions that its support for the blacklists made them into an intellectual ally of the Ku Klux Klan. The organization believed that its state officers, in the words of Flora A. Walker, were “within their legal and moral rights when they advise their chapters regarding speakers whom they consider, because of publicly expressed views, as out of harmony with our avowed purposes.”Footnote ⁴⁹ More importantly, the Daughters had long argued that the First Amendment had its limits. As early as 1921, president general Anne Rogers Minor had bluntly stated that in the face of un-American radicalism, freedom of speech “[did]not mean freedom to destroy.”Footnote ⁵⁰ During the blacklist controversy, the organization's leadership similarly argued that the American Constitution should not protect those who called into question US society and its political system. Flora Walker said as much in a letter to some of the organization's internal critics. “‘Hearing all sides,’” she wrote in April 1928, was a slogan that was used “to convert conservatives to radicalism by the subtle method of infiltration.”Footnote ⁵¹ In the eyes of the Daughters, their approval of the blacklisting of America's critics was actually an expression of true Americanism, not of un-Americanism.

As indicated by Walker's statement, the DAR's national leadership brooked no dissent and quickly silenced any internal voices of protest. One member, Elaine Goodale Eastman, who along with Helen Tufts Bailie had attempted to democratize the DAR from within, described her experience as one of blatant repression of even the slightest hint of opposition. According to Eastman, “courteous requests for information upon matters of policy” were “either ignored completely or…snubbed.” Any “dissenting opinion” was “characterized as ‘disloyal’ and as far as possible suppressed.”Footnote ⁵² Consequently, those who disagreed with the organization's national leaders or aired their grievances publicly were either censured or expelled. Apparently, the majority of the DAR's membership either approved of this policy or was indifferent to it. The prolonged applause that followed the final vote to expel Helen Tufts Bailie during the DAR's annual meeting in April 1929 certainly indicates approval among the elected representatives of the DAR's local chapters. One entry in a minute book from a chapter in Denver, Colorado suggests that the blacklist controversy was occasionally discussed, but it seems to have rarely led to disputes among a large portion of the organization's membership. The efforts of Bailie and her allies to form a nucleus of an internal protest movement for democratic change within the DAR apparently elicited few responses.Footnote ⁵³ The minority of women who did not agree with the national leadership's policies seemed to recognize that their demands for change would lead nowhere and either remained silent or quit in protest.Footnote ⁵⁴

Although the DAR is likely to have lost several hundred members and had to endure scathing criticism as well as ridicule as a result of the blacklist controversy, the organization continued its efforts to restrain un-American radicalism in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. Most of their warnings revolved around the potentially subversive effects of communism among America's youth. For example, at the Fourth Women's Patriotic Conference on National Defense at the DAR's Memorial Continental Hall in early 1929, Flora Walker reiterated the organization's warnings that un-American radicals' six-principle agenda was disseminated within US high schools. American children, Walker said, were deluged with atheistic literature that “poisoned … their minds…against military training, reverence for patriots, respect for law and Government, belief in eternal truths, and devotion to God and country.”Footnote ⁵⁵ As Florence Hague Becker, the national chairman of the DAR's National Defense Embodying Patriotic Education Committee, pointed out in a 1932 letter to the organization's membership, only a truly American education would counteract Russia's subversive forces and inculcate true patriotism.Footnote ⁵⁶

According to the Daughters, loyal teachers would be of utmost importance to instil such patriotic principles, since educators were believed to be the source of the subversive ideas that undermined children's love of country. During the Depression decade, high-school teachers therefore became the prime targets of the DAR's campaign against un-Americanism. Educators had been identified as a menace before, but in the mid-1930s the DAR stepped up its antiradical efforts to counteract unpatriotic subversion in the classroom. Consequently, the DAR's 1936 Continental Congress passed a resolution that vowed to intensify the organization's campaign against radicalism in America's schools by eliminating teachers who opposed aconstitutional form of government. The organization also insisted that public-school teachers ought to take an oath of allegiance to the US Constitution.Footnote ⁵⁷ Such loyalty oaths, Florence Becker, who had become president general in 1935, explained in a press release, would help “to weed out, as far as is possible, the un-American teacher engaged in planting subversive and communistic doctrines in the minds of future citizens.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Yet, as in the 1920s, the Daughters' definition of un-Americanism encompassed not only communism but also new forms of activism that appeared to implement radicals' six subversive principles. In 1938, for instance, once more reflecting the organization's fear of class warfare, the state conference of the Colorado DAR passed a resolution that branded labor activists’ use of “sit-down strikes and other coercive measures” as “unpatriotic and un-American.”Footnote ⁵⁹ That same year, the DAR's president general, Sarah Robert, was eager to discuss her organization's suspicions of and strategies to counter such un-patriotic radicals with members of the newly established House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), recommending to the panel a general “revival of Americanism” to convince American citizens of the superiority of US society and its political system.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Daughters continued to be proud of their close working relationship with government agencies that investigated un-American radicalism, and they asserted that HUAC members regularly consulted the DAR's library in Washington, DC to gather information on subversive literature.Footnote ⁶¹

But in 1939, a little more than a decade after the blacklist controversy, the organization was once more confronted with accusations that the DAR itself advocated un-American ideas. In January of that year, the organization barred famous black opera singer Marian Anderson from performing at its Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. Marian Anderson was the main attraction of a concert series that the city's African American Howard University organized annually to raise funds for its School of Music. Unlike other major cities in the United States, Washington, DC had no municipal concert hall that was large enough to accommodate the enormous crowds that famous performers such as Anderson usually drew. For that reason, orchestras, singers, and theater companies regularly booked the DAR's Constitution Hall, an auditorium that could seat almost four thousand people. When Howard University sought to book the auditorium in early January 1939, the DAR refused, enforcing a “white artists only” policy that had been requested by a major donor before construction of the building was completed. In the early 1930s, the organization had briefly allowed black artists to perform before integrated audiences, which was not uncommon in the nation's capital, where segregation existed but remained more flexible than in the South. However, more and more white concertgoers began to complain about these integrated audiences, and, in 1934, black singer Roland Hayes clashed with the auditorium's management over segregated seating. Only then did the DAR begin to bar black performers, although it continued to allow African Americans to sit in subtly segregated sections of the building. The organization's refusal would have caused little controversy if the District's Board of Education had approved of Howard University's request to use a white high-school auditorium for the Anderson concert as an alternative to Constitution Hall. But when the board refused, Anderson's manager, Sol Hurok, the quickly established Marian Anderson Citizens Committee, and the NAAC Plaunched a highly publicized campaign to integrate the DAR's auditorium.Footnote ⁶²

These events took place only eight months before the outbreak of World War II and have to be viewed within the context of the rise of fascism in Europe as well as the changing views on un-Americanism within the United States. Those who sympathized with Nazi Germany, for instance, gradually became as suspicious in the eyes of government agencies and HUAC as had been communists and socialists during the 1920s and early 1930s.Footnote ⁶³ In addition, many Americans opposed any US involvement in the European conflict. During the debates about American neutrality, for instance, the mostly female America First Movement (AFM) lobbied forcefully for an isolationist US foreign policy and anti-intervention in Europe. Although it was supported by a number of politicians and business leaders, as well as by aviator celebrity Charles Lindbergh, the AFM was primarily a network of conservative mothers’ groups that spanned the entire nation. It argued that isolationism was a form of patriotism because it served to preserve the American home and the American family. Most women became involved in the movement to keep their sons and husbands out of the growing military conflict, but their activism also reflected a critique of internationalist foreign policy and centralized government, which purportedly threatened the traditional nuclear family. It was only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that the AFM's isolationism was no longer tenable, although the movement continued to criticize what they considered the US government's detrimental internationalism.Footnote ⁶⁴ It is likely that DAR leaders initially sympathized with the AFM since they espoused an isolationist foreign policy throughout the 1930s, notwithstanding their repeated calls for larger appropriations for the US military to be prepared for potential attacks from Nazi Germany. Like many other conservatives, the Daughters believed that the United States should not send any troops to Europe. Once America had officially entered the war, however, the DAR steadfastly supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt's activist foreign-policy agenda, as well as his plans for US military intervention in Asia and Europe.Footnote ⁶⁵

It is against this backdrop of the rise of fascism in Europe and the general fear of another global war that the DAR was once more accused of being un-American as soon as national and international newspapers published their first reports about Marian Anderson's rejection. From the perspective of these detractors, the Daughters espoused a form of ethnic nationalism that maliciously misinterpreted the Founding Fathers' civic creed. Already in February 1939, Anderson's manager, Sol Hurok, commented on the affair: “The D.A.R.'s un-American, unconstitutional restriction upon Marian Anderson is a plain instance of the charge…that they have not yet begun to understand the true meaning of American democracy.”Footnote ⁶⁶ A month later, in a letter to the organization's president general Sarah Corbin Robert, S. P. Rosenthal, the executive secretary of the American Federation for Democracy, protested the DAR's “un-American action,” which, if left unchallenged, would lead to “the loss of most of the democratic privileges for which the patriots of '76, whose name you bear, fought and died.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In a telegram addressed to the NAACP, Lawrence Tibbett, president of the American Guild of Musical Artists, similarly expressed his hope that the Daughters would “not wish to perpetuate such an obviously undemocratic and un-American rule as one which bars the appearance of any artist of whatever race, creed or color.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Perceiving their exclusionary patriotism as a slap in the face of civil rights activists, liberal detractors used the term “un-American” to draw a stark contrast between their advocacy of an inclusive civic nationalism and the DAR's rigid ethnic nationalism, which denied African Americans full membership in the American nation.Footnote ⁶⁹

Surprisingly, even southern newspapers criticized the DAR and used the term that had so long been reserved for socialists, communists, feminists, and pacifists. The Brunswick (Ga.) News called it “rather ironical” that “the daughters of those brave Revolutionary heroes who fought and died in order that freedom might flourish in this country should have taken this un-American and intolerable step.”Footnote ⁷⁰ More than three-fourths of southern newspaper editorials that commented on the Anderson case deplored the actions of the DAR, considering it detrimental to America's efforts to defeat Nazi Germany and occasionally mentioning that southern communities rarely barred black artists from the region's auditoriums. While a substantial part of this criticism may have been penned by more liberal southern editors, it is important to understand that such disapproving editorials did not contradict the general understanding among white southerners that black performers were regarded as inferior servants. Marian Anderson and other black singers were frequently allowed to perform in the South, but they continued to be subjected to racial segregation in hotels, restaurants, and other public places. Hence criticizing the DAR did not necessarily entail a more egalitarian view of Jim Crow on the part of white southerners.Footnote ⁷¹ Still, the fact that even southern newspapers called the DAR's support for racial segregation un-American testifies to the continuing erosion of the organization's reputation and the growing dissemination of the term “un-American” beyond the circles of conservative antiradicals during the interwar period.

Although a few DAR members sought to discuss their organization's discriminatory policies within their respective chapters, hardly any member publicly criticized its national leadership.Footnote ⁷² Mrs. Clarence J. Hand, former regent of the DAR Essex County chapter in Newark, New Jersey, was one of the few who spoke out in 1939, telling the New York Times that the “action of the national society was definitely not Americanism and absolutely against the principles for which the D.A.R. stands.”Footnote ⁷³ In general, however, there appeared to be no internal dissenters intrepid enough to speak out publicly.

As during the 1920s, the DAR's critics pondered analogies that would best express just how un-American the organization's actions were. During the blacklist affair most commentators had regarded the Ku Klux Klan as the epitome of un-Americanism. Eleven years later, the Klan had been trumped by fascism, a shift that could be seen in the charges of Bishop Francis J. McConnell of Chicago's Methodist Episcopal Church, who called the Daughters “the Mothers of Fascism” in a talk before the American League for Peace and Democracy.Footnote ⁷⁴ Democratic New York congressman Joseph A. Gavagan used the same analogy to express his outrage, writing in a letter to president general Sarah Robert that her refusal to let Marian Anderson perform in Constitution Hall smacked of “Nazi and Fascist philosophy.” Gavagan mused that the DAR might have abandoned its original principles, “to foster and maintain the principles of the Fuehrer and Il Duce.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Other commentators used similar comparisons.Footnote ⁷⁶ While liberal critics during the blacklist affair had focused on the issue of freedom of speech when denouncing the DAR's un-Americanism, in 1939 they singled out the organization's racism, which reflected some of the fundamental differences between conservative and liberal understandings of Americanism between World War I and World War II. The Daughters and like-minded conservatives sought to limit constitutional liberties if they were used to call into question US society and America's political system. They also believed in an exclusive nationalism that barred or discriminated against nonwhite people. By contrast, more liberal voices envisioned an inclusive nationalist pluralism that allowed for critical intellectual exchange over what they perceived as distorted interpretations of the US Constitution.

In many ways, the Marian Anderson controversy marked an important step toward a gradual shift in the interpretations of what the American nation stood for. The DAR's exclusive ethnic nationalism in particular was increasingly questioned during World War II, although it took more than two decades and the nonviolent protests of the civil rights movement to eradicate the most blatant forms of racial exclusionism. Consequently, the Marian Anderson affair was a devastating blow to the organization's public standing. When civil rights activists managed to have Marian Anderson perform on Easter Sunday 1939 in front of the Lincoln Memorial before an integrated audience of 75,000 people, it was a major triumph for the civil rights movement and a disgraceful defeat for the DAR.Footnote ⁷⁷ After Anderson's inspiring concert, African American activists continued to press their argument that un-American racial discrimination had no place in US society. At its annual conference on 1 July 1939, the NAACP passed a resolution that deplored “with great earnestness the un-democratic and un-American action of the Daughters of the American Revolution and of the Board of Education of Washington, D. C., in refusing Marian Anderson…a proper place to sing.” Using the Anderson affair as a reminder of the stark reality of racial segregation in America, the organization demanded “that every force be used to open all halls, public and private, to all artists regardless of race.”Footnote ⁷⁸

The DAR attempted to counter the NAACP's charges by stressing its patriotism during World War II and by finally allowing Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall in 1943. Yet the organization never recovered from the public-relations fiasco of 1939 and confirmed people's prejudices when it barred black jazz pianist Hazel Scott from its auditorium in 1945, continuing its controversial “white artists only” policy.Footnote ⁷⁹ In contrast to the Marian Anderson controversy, however, a few internal dissenters finally spoke out forcefully to protest the DAR's discriminatory policies. In 1946 Clare Booth Luce, who was a DAR member and a member of the US Congress, founded a DAR Committee against Racial Discrimination that sought to eliminate the organization's “white artists only” clause and received nationwide publicity. In addition, a number of DAR chapters passed resolutions that condemned racial discrimination in Constitution Hall. Unlike Helen Tufts Bailie during the blacklist controversy, Luce was not expelled, which was probably due to her status as a well-respected politician; yet she was ultimately forced to disband her committee, and her efforts did little to erode the entrenched racism that characterized the national DAR's policies.Footnote ⁸⁰ The organization's support for segregation during the civil rights era cemented its racist reputation. Only in 1977 did the organization finally admit its first black member and subsequently even began to document the patriotic contributions of African Americans to the American Revolution.Footnote ⁸¹ Despite these attempts to improve its image, however, the DAR is remembered primarily for its racist stance during the Marian Anderson controversy.

Yet the DAR's increasing marginalization after 1939 did not prevent the organization from continuing to warn of the dangers of un-Americanism, and the emerging Cold War in the aftermath of World War II provided them another opportunity to make their case. Writing in 1947, president general Mrs. Julius Y. Talmadge wrote in an article for the International News Service, “Communism today is America's problem No. 1. It is more vital than all others facing American citizens.”Footnote ⁸² In 1948, buoyed by the anticommunist Cold War rhetoric that began to dominate public discourse in the late 1940s, the DAR rededicated itself to “the business of recognizing and exposing communism wherever it is seeking to entrench itself or has already done so.”Footnote ⁸³ During the 1950s, the Daughters felt themselves vindicated by the anticommunist hysteria that gripped US society during the first half of the decade. Once more, conservative politicians and government officials praised the organization for its fight against un-Americanism. Frequently ridiculed for their shrill antiradicalism during the Great Depression, they became part of the anticommunist mainstream during the McCarthy era and joined in anticommunists' demands to outlaw the Communist Party, to strip communists of their US citizenship, and to institute loyalty oaths for teachers and government employees.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Daughters also lauded professional anticommunists such as Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who uttered the same warnings that the Daughters and their antiradical allies had voiced since World War I. Hoover in particular was a frequent speaker at the DAR's annual meetings and published numerous articles in the organization's monthly magazine.Footnote ⁸⁵ Even after the communist hysteria of the 1950s had subsided, the organization upheld the banner of anticommunism and warned of the devastating consequences this un-American ideology would have for US society. Writing in 1954 in the DAR Magazine, Marguerite C. Patton, the head of the organization's National Defense Committee, described communism as “a criminal and treasonous conspiracy aimed at the destruction of our Constitutional Government.”Footnote ⁸⁶

In the following decades, the Daughters continued their diatribes against what they regarded as un-American ideologies and organizations, including the United Nations, which they believed undermined the national sovereignty of the United States, as well as their long-time nemesis: feminism. By the early 1970s, however, few people took notice. Their support for racial segregation, as well as their rabid anticommunism and isolationism, had reduced the organization to a ridiculed remnant of an era that seemed utterly out of place in an increasingly globalized post-civil rights world. Writing in 1974, the journalist Elaine Kendall derided their “laughably reactionary” resolutions and concluded, “no one really pays much attention to them.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet, despite the fact that the DAR's influence on public discussions about un-Americanism had waned, many of its members became part of a powerful movement of grassroots conservatives who continued their fight against communism and aided conservative politicians such as Ronald Reagan to enter the political mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁸⁸ More importantly, its antiradicalism and racist nationalism prior to World War II had shaped public debates about un-Americanism among conservatives and liberals alike. The organization and its critics thus left a powerful legacy that contributed to the increasingly amorphous character of the term “un-Americanism” in the interwar period and beyond.