Monday Document Fun Day

Ye Ole Wingnut Welfare Edition

Insight and Outlook was a conservative magazine published by students at the University of Wisconsin. I photocopied this 1961 issue when I was researching my first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus in 1997, during a document deep dive in the home of a generous conservative publisher who was active in right-wing student politics at the time. This was during the reign of the “Silent Generation,” as young people then were dubbed; with the formation of Young Americans for Freedom in 1960, however, conservatism began thriving on campuses, as practically the only political game in town. But, things were beginning to stir on the left too, certainly in Madison, where some Badgers began calling this rag “Hindsight and Outhouse.”

The ads are the most revealing part. As I noted in Before the Storm with this as my documentary evidence, if you were a college student in the market for “iron, steel & ductile castings,” Insight and Outlook was the magazine for you. Recently, an apostate from Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, Ashley St. Clair, dropped an extraordinary video explaining how the entire conservative influence infrastructure runs on pay-to-play principles. As a reader of mine once described the relationship between my historical work on the 1950s-1980s conservative movement, “There’s always more, and it’s always worse. But it’s never new.” Just so. Planting one’s flag as a youthful right-winger has always been a lucrative business play.

(Fun fact: when I started researching the conservative movement, I was startled to recognize the names of companies like these. I delivered spare parts and payroll records to them in my summer job for the Perlstein family business, Bonded Messenger Service. Grede Foundries was one. Their founder, William Grede—pronounced “greedy,” appropriately enough—was one of the dozen or so original members of the John Birch Society.)

Where are they now? Millard W. Johnson became a professor of engineering mechanics. Timothy J. Wheeler started his own short-lived national magazine for young conservatives (check out the Exciting Game of Profits), kept up a correspondence with J.R.R. Tolkien, and hosted a 2005 meeting of the right-wing Philadelphia Society called “The Ownership Society and Conservative Principles.” (My friend Jesse Walker, a historian of libertarianism, informs me he also grew a lot of pot.) Cy Butt? One Cyrus M. Butt III (1090-1968) “was a colorful character, known well by residents of Madison and Viroqua for his letter-writing and unique perspective,” and was “institutionalized for reasons related to alcohol.” (Perhaps our Butt was Cy Butt IV?) I couldn’t figure out who John Radke was, nor whether he was related to my high school English teacher Mrs. Radke. Henry Hempe’s later service as Chairman of the Wisconsin Employment Labor Commission under a Republican governor tracks. All respect, however, for his skill at wrangling the elusive Fish of Ten Thousand Casts. Barbara Sturgeon might have played vibraphone.

UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold died when his plane went down when he was traveling to Africa to settle the civil war in the Congo. You can learn more about that conflict in the most brilliant documentary I’ve ever seen, Sound Track to a Coup d’Etat, or the excellent film Lumumba. Briefly, the war was between followers of a heroic anti-colonialist democrat, Patrice Lumumba, whose assassination the CIA saw to late in the 1960s, and a grifting thug who called himself a Christian and whose platform was turning over the country’s mineral resources to multinational corporations, Moïse Tshombe (pronounced, more or less, “Shomb,” so disgusted Black folks in America called him “Uncle Tshombe.”) Hammarskjold’s death was his own fault, I&O suggests, for not simply turning over the country to Tschombe; because “freedom”: “In short, we lament here not so much the death of a man, but the death of the United States by its own hand. We lament the death-throes of Western Civilization.”

Clearly, a political scientist who utters the banality “Government should do for the people what the people cannot do for themselves” is brainwashing young minds to let thieves get away scot-free from their crimes, out of a surfeit of “Envy and covetousness. (“We hope the professor will learn to be less careless with his world.”) Also, W.H. Brady was three miles from my high school.

This “Freedom School” (bottom right): note its “All-expense scholarships.” It helps us grasp a crucial, consistent demerit of “libertarianism,” namely that, in practice, it could never survive in an actual free market of ideas, so people have to be paid to propound it. “Individualism” requires top-down indoctrination. Freedom!

(Even a wingnutologist of my considerable attainments has no freaking clue about what this one is supposed too e about.)

Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame, was the first writer to describe Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” and was said to be “surprisingly kind to Fascist Italy.”

(Negroes are chiseling liars; but you can’t do anything about it, because then you’ll be accused of “discrimination.”)

The poet finds it inscrutable that the “one-party press” would take offense at a general indoctrinating troops with John Birch Society literature. The unmentionable newspaper Capital Times was nicknamed ,by Madison conservatives, “Prairie Pravda.” Insight & Outlook’s publishers, my host the conservative friend helpfully explained, held an annual “William Evjue Lecture,” named after the Capital Times’ publisher, a scourge of the late Joseph McCarthy, that featured speakers sympathetic to McCarthy, and was advertised by flyers printed on pink paper. The puerile practice now known as “trolling” has always been a part of right-wing politics.

You can read all about the the Battle of Newburgh in Before the Storm; a right-wing city manager became a national sensation when he announced a plan to weed out a supposed surfeit of chiselers from the town’s welfare rolls, then found not a single one. I have a theory that the urban legend that welfare mothers were buying Cadillacs with their ill-gotten gains came out of the fact that a local good Samaritan there ferried recipients to the city manager’s cruel muster in her Cadillac. The claim became subject of a country song, “Welfare Cadillac,” a favorite of Richard Nixon. He requested Johnny Cash to play it in a White House concert. Cash sang commie stuff instead.

I used to make delivers to Pfister and Vogel (bottom left), one of the biggest tanneries in America. The place smelled like ass. A scion of their family with whom I went to grade school became a prominent Buddhist nun.

What would become the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the most far-reaching federal support for public schooling in U.S. history was being debated. By 1979, it had helped close the gap between Black and white literacy rates almost entirely. Methinks the stout-hearted manufacturer of agricultural implements at lower right would have found this this a bug, not a feature.

The proprietor of the Harnischfeger Corporation, seen here disingenuously stanning Abraham Lincoln, was one of America’s last out-and-proud Hitler fans in the 1940s. He said the Nuremburg trials were worse than anything Hitler did. “It beats Dachau.”

(Yes, I know. It’s Tuesday, not Monday. My promise to myself for my writing, after finishing Infernal Triangle, was: “no deadlines.” Then, almost immediately, publicly announcing: every Monday, this; every Tuesday, that; etc. Did I mention the compulsion to repeat? Yes, I did, on “Wingnut Wednesday.” I’d better get cracking on that, because I gots a banger on the way…)