Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last week, when Alabama Senator Katie Britt delivered the Republican response to Biden's State of the Union address from her kitchen table, many found it a trifle intense.

Katie Britt: I want to make a direct appeal to the parents out there, and in particular to my fellow moms, many of whom I know will be up tossing and turning at 2:00 AM wondering how you're going to be in three places at once and then somehow still get dinner on the table.

Brooke Gladstone: As we know, Britt was excoriated both for her overwrought performance and her misleading content, but it was the constant reference to her momitude that stuck in the craw of many a mom as Scarlett Johansson spoofed on Saturday Night Live.

Scarlett Johansson: Good evening America, my name is Katie Britt and I have the honor of [chuckles] serving the great people of Alabama, but tonight I'll be auditioning for the part of scary mom. You see, I'm not just a senator. I'm a wife, a mother, and the craziest bitch in the Target parking lot.

Brooke Gladstone: The conservative movement has capitalized on the power of motherhood for many a year, but especially lately, advocating and agitating in the name of parental rights, as when some moms protested against school closings back during the pandemic.

News clip: Your job is to find a proper place for them to have their education. Get back in your lane and let me be the parent.

Brooke Gladstone: Argued over trans students' use of bathrooms.

News clip: Ask yourself if you're willing to pay the litigation costs that will be brought by every family in this district whose rights are being infringed upon and forgotten about while you sop on the graves of our founding fathers.

Brooke Gladstone: Pushed to take books out of schools.

News clip: What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into? What is your fear?

Tiffany Justice: I think parents' fears are realized. They're looking at these books where sexual discussions are happening with their children at younger and younger ages.

Brooke Gladstone: That's Scott Pelley speaking with Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich in a fiery 60 Minute segment earlier this month.

Scott Pelley: Tiffany Justice read from sexually explicit books written for older teens but found in a few lower schools. Most people wouldn't want them in a lower school but in a tactic of outrage politics, Moms for Liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes these examples are not rare mistakes, but a plot to sexualize children.

Brooke Gladstone: Framing their book-banning efforts as a fight for parental rights, Moms for Liberty candidates have been running for school boards and local elections, with some success, as happened last week.

News clip: There were too many surprises in last night's primary, with one big exception. The incumbent in the race for superintendent of public instruction lost to a political newcomer.

Brooke Gladstone: Michelle Murrow, a far-right Moms for Liberty-backed candidate with no public education experience, won the primary for North Carolina's top school job.

News clip: On paper, she didn't look like an election-day threat. She didn't have a career in education. The homeschool mom also spoke out against public schools calling them "socialism centers and indoctrination centers."

Brooke Gladstone: The movement has also seen big losses at the ballot box, as in the 2023 midterms.

News clip: In Iowa, 12 of the 13 candidates backed by Moms for Liberty were wiped out. In Pennsylvania, Democrats won against at least 11 candidates aligned with the Moms for Liberty platform. In Virginia, three Moms for Liberty candidates lost by a lot.

News clip: Book banning is unpopular. Who knew?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, historians who follow what happens to conservative women's groups like Moms for Liberty would know there's a century-long track record.

Adam Laats: It's almost eerie how similar the claims are.

Brooke Gladstone: Adam Laats, a professor of education and history at Binghamton University from a conversation we had in December.

Adam Laats: From the 1920s on, there's been a call campaigning on the platform of parents' rights that parents should have the ultimate right, not just to approve of what goes on in public schools, but also to veto what could go on in public schools. That's been Moms for Liberty, repeating this long pattern.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's pursue the pattern and start with Alice Moore. She was a leader of one of these movements that bubbled up in the '70s in West Virginia.

Adam Laats: Her claim was that she was just a mom over and over, especially conservative women who have exerted a lot of influence like Phyllis Schlafly and Alice Moore and the Moms for Liberty. They say, "Hey, don't worry, we're just moms." Alice Moore took that line. Although when she ran for school board to take charge of what she saw as a two-progressive school board in Charleston West Virginia, she had been an engaged conservative activist for years.

Brooke Gladstone: Her platform was blocking books and fighting for parents' rights. What did she end up getting done?

Adam Laats: Well, Alice Moore was in a minority. She got outvoted to block the books. Other conservatives in the area said, "Well if the books are going in, our kids are staying out." For about three weeks, maybe longer it looked as if, and this is what The New York Times called it, as if Alice Moore had flipped the script for the entire nation in terms of what would go on in public schools because she had taken on these national textbook publishers and groups like the Heritage Foundation, which was just starting at the time, called it. Finally, what conservatives have been waiting for, we're taking schools back over.

Brooke Gladstone: Moore warned that she was fighting books that would force white kids into feeling guilt and anguish about America's racism. This was back in '74. She railed against public school's alleged progressive agenda, destroying our children's patriotism, trust in God, respect for authority, confidence in their parents, déjà vu all over again. She was inspired by another activist 10 years prior, someone named Norma Gabler.

Adam Laats: Mel and Norma Gabler. Norma was the powerhouse, but again, she pretended she wasn't. She always referred to herself as just a housewife. She was a full-time activist with eight employees running these textbook inspections. She brought the school publishing industry to their knees by exploiting one of Texas's rules. Texas had a rule that they had a board to approve textbooks but had to be open to public comment and without limit of time. Norma did her homework, read textbooks that no one else had really read, and the textbook publishers sought meetings with Norma Gabler of Longview, Texas, and said, "What do we have to do to get your thumbs up on these books?"

Brooke Gladstone: What was she objecting to?

Adam Laats: She thought the textbooks had an anti-American slant.

Brooke Gladstone: Why?

Adam Laats: They said in 1961, their son was doing his homework and he said, "Hey, my textbook says that the people who wrote the Constitution didn't get rid of slavery because some of them were slave owners." They thought that their son and America's sons and daughters, if they read the simple facts about America's founding that would make them anti-American.

Brooke Gladstone: I know from my own past reporting that textbooks that are influenced by activists in Texas can change the books for the entire rest of the country because it's such a big market.

Adam Laats: It's not quite as true now, but certainly in the early 1960s when Norma Gabler was beginning her campaign, it was absolutely true. Texas and California together would determine what publishers would make available for the entire country because publishing technology was such that it was prohibitively expensive for them to make different books for different regions. Certainly, when Norma Gabler was able to sit at one committee meeting in Texas, one person was able to simply put her thumb on this chokehold of the entire American educational system.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay. In our backwards trek through the history of these movements, let's go to the 1920s, the Daughters of the American Revolution, they directly you say, inspired the advocacy of Norma Gabler. Their campaign was to keep America's public schools fundamentally Anglo-Saxon. Didn't they claim back then almost 200,000 members?

Adam Laats: Yes. In the '20s, the national leadership were fervent anti-communist activists, and they took their primary role as education.

Brooke Gladstone: I was struck by a leader of the group in the '20s, Anne Rogers Minor. She said that we want no teachers who say there are two sides to every question.

Adam Laats: Right. The Daughter of the American Revolution line was that the purpose for public schools was to take every single student of whatever background, put them through a very structured course in what they called patriotic education. You needed to actively teach kids that America was the best country on earth and it had always been the best country on earth and its system of capitalism was the best on earth.

Brooke Gladstone: They were behind the book bannings between the '20s and the '50s. You wrote that the organization spiraled wildly out of control of its national leaders and led to its ultimate loss of power. It had something to do with a baby squirrel.

Adam Laats: [laughs]It did. The Daughters for American Revolution didn't have a ton of control over local members, and one member from the Mississippi State Chapter infamously objected to a children's book that had been used for a while in Mississippi public schools about bunnies and kittens and squirrels. The squirrel story was what this Daughter of the American Revolution objected to.

In the book, the squirrel asks for a nut and it gets a nut. The Mississippi Daughters of the American Revolution insisted that this book be banned because it was sneakily teaching children to be communists. That welfare was something to rely on instead of your own labor. It just became this laughing stock. Brooke, so for example, I don't know if you've ever read And Tango Makes Three.

Brooke Gladstone: No.

Adam Laats: It's a picture book for kids. Two male penguins who have adopted a baby penguin at a zoo but because it's two male penguins, this is one of the books that groups like Moms For Liberty insists is not safe for children. I think it's the same kind of thing where it's like if the kids can't read adorable stories about baby animals, it causes the deflation of the brand of groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution or Moms for Liberty.

Brooke Gladstone: I just wonder how these groups initially so successful lose control.

Adam Laats: Pulling a fire alarm in a crowded theater it works. Everyone runs, but it's dangerous. Once people say, "Well, why did you pull the fire alarm?" Alice Moore kept saying, "I'm not racist, but I don't like these books with Black authors." When she talked about the dangers of Black authors, the Ku Klux Klan shows up in West Virginia to support Alice Moore's mission and she didn't want their support. There were protests in the street and people were holding signs up. We don't want those N-word books. You say you're not being racist, but the people who are supporting you are certainly racist.

Brooke Gladstone: It didn't end with signs though, did it?

Adam Laats: Oh, no, no. The dangers of saying that people are after your children can get out of hand really quickly. The school board building got bombed. The school board members got beat up during a meeting. The school superintendent, he moved his family out of town and he slept in a different place every night. He had received so many death threats. Two people were shot, one person was pushed down a set of stairs.

Elementary schools were firebombed. No one was hurt but still firebombed an elementary school. I don't think it's fair for the Alice Moore or the Moms for Liberty to say, "Hey, we told people not to be violent." If you are calling teachers groomers, telling people that these textbooks are going to hurt children, it's predictable that people are going to react with violence.

Brooke Gladstone: You noted that Klan's local leader, he used the same words as Moore. He promised to return patriotism and Christianity to our schools, and she may have denounced it, but the damage was done. How does all this history help us better understand the trajectory of Moms for Liberty? What's the lesson here?

Adam Laats: It's difficult for people trying to build their brands or ambitious politicians or even journalists to resist this low-hanging fruit of school politics because it's easy to get people motivated with these kind of scare tactics.

Brooke Gladstone: Then what happens?

Adam Laats: You force-feed this politics of fear into headlines and it terrifies people, but after people have enough time to evaluate these charges and to see what goes on in their actual schools that their kids actually attend, the charges are false. They pulled the fire alarm, but there wasn't a fire. Then what happens is you've discredited your organization.

Brooke Gladstone: Also, it's hard to control the message and it's hard to duck embarrassment.

Adam Laats: The rapid growth you have in Moms for Liberty in different chapters doing things that humiliate the rest of the organization like famously quoting Hitler on their newsletter.

Brooke Gladstone: What was Hitler saying that they felt the need to share with the rest of us?

Adam Laats: Something along the lines of whoever controls the children, controls the nation or something like that. They were trying to say, "Hey, we're fighting against ideas like this, against progressive control of our children."

Brooke Gladstone: Another way in which Moms for Liberty seems to echo the history of other groups is that it attracts bad actors. In the case of Moms for Liberty, they were backed up by ranks of Proud Boys.

Adam Laats: I see Proud Boys and other right-wing militias showing up at school board meetings and exerting a very menacing presence standing with sunglasses in the back of the room. When you look at the history of groups like the Ku Klux Klan showing up to support Alice Moore, the Ku Klux Klan showing up to support the Daughters of the American Revolution in the '20s, over and over again it's irresponsible to say that people out there, including teachers, are trying to hurt children and then when violent groups show up to stop the harm, it's not a legitimate position to say, "We didn't tell anyone to harm anyone."

Brooke Gladstone: Are you saying that the steam has gotten out of the public school poses a danger to your child movement?

Adam Laats: The steam will never go out of the idea that public school is a danger to your child. There's always going to be this low-hanging fruit in the culture wars to say the schools are dangerous, it's all connected, and if you vote for me or if you click like and subscribe, I can explain it all to you in one word. That claim has for 100 years driven school politics and it will continue to do so.

Brooke Gladstone: You say this is a chronic condition in the US. Why?

Adam Laats: It comes down, for school politics, to a question of pronouns. Not he and her, but we and they. The United States has always relegated these unsolved questions about who we are to schools and to teachers to answer because the rest of society doesn't have a clear answer.

Brooke Gladstone: You mean we don't have a defined sense of our collective identity?

Adam Laats: We don't. People like Alice Moore, Norma Gabler, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Moms for Liberty, they're able to say schools have to tell America that America is the greatest. That's the job of schools.

Brooke Gladstone: Under the guidance of groups like Moms for Liberty, they have taken on the mantle of determining what our identity is.

Adam Laats: They have. They feel they deserve the right to do so. The rest of us, however, just don't agree.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much, Adam.

Adam Laats: It's been a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for calling.

Brooke Gladstone: Adam Laats, professor of education and history at Binghamton University.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, it's not really about books, it's not really about school boards, it's about something a whole lot bigger.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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