CALIFORNIA'S NEW VIGILANTES

...Letters denouncing it have filled the letters-to-the-editor columns of California's newspapers...

...It would have taken decisions out of the hands of judges and placed full jurisdiction—even to fines and punishment—in the hands of juries that might be cowed by the demands of self-appointed censors...

...It is not only the Birch members who threaten the Bill of Rights...

...Many of the Birchers and kindred extremists seem to be turning away from Rafferty as their choice to run this year in the Republican primary against Senator Thomas H. Kuchel...

...Members of the committee were Allan Nevins, twice a Pulitzer prize-winner—for history and biography—and two other historians: Glenn S. Dumke, Chancellor of the California State Colleges...

...State Attorney-General Thomas Lynch has ruled that it must be used...

...Along with harassing advertisers, Thayer reported, they not only send twenty-five to 200 letters a day to the local station, but they also write to the main office of Metromedia, Inc., in New York City—owner of KLAC and Los Angeles television station KTTV— with demands that some broadcaster be fired...

...Ernest R. May of Harvard...

...In 1962, H. L. "Bill" Richardson and compatriots placed a full page advertisement in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner pledging support to Chief Parker...

...Rafferty's books, Suffer Little Children, and What They Are Doing to Your Children—which oppose many educational advances—are prominently displayed in the Birch bookstores...

...The object of this blistering controversy was written by history professors John Caughey of UCLA...

...People call in and repeat the same thing over and over again...

...They use the same threats...

...One of her authorities is Plato, whom she quotes from The Republic: "The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state, since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions...

...he has spent some time in jail for taking the Fifth Amendment before HUAC...

...The Free Press maintains a bookstore called "The Kazoo" on Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood...

...They are looking with increasing favor upon Curtis Le-May, the retired Air Force general and author of the proposal to bomb a recalcitrant North Vietnam "back into the Stone...

...The club sought to bring spokesmen representing all points of view to the campus...

...Ed Gray of the American Civil Liberties Union office in Los Angeles and many others believe that the attack on Land of the Free originated with Max Rafferty, California's ultra-conservative and politically active state superintendent of public instruction, who claimed the volume ridiculed America...

...One of their loudest objections was that the "hippie house" was selling the Free Press and kindred newspapers...

...Rafferty changed his tune...

...The rightists are very active with the telephone," Thayer said...

...The criticism is that the records, so admired by younger Americans, undermine our way of life and encourage drugs and immorality...

...Shortly after Governor Reagan took office, Alan Bock, president of the California Young Republican College Federation and the Young Americans for Freedom chapter at the University of California at Los Angeles, along with Judy Borgerding, president of the UCLA Young Republicans, called a press conference...

...Miss Larson went on to disclose that rock-'n-roll and Beatle music was really developed in the Sixth Century, B.C., by Pythagoras, a philosopher and mathematician of ancient Greece...

...We had Land of the Free on display...

...Robert Conot in his book, Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness, wrote that members of this group obtain material at American Opinion bookstores for distribution to their fellow officers...

...Even radio-interviewer Joe Pyne, sometimes known as "the grand inquisitor of the far right," has been assailed by the Birch-types...

...J. Ray Risser, a member of the Pasadena City College board of trustees, and one of the more vocal critics of Land of the Free, tried to get the board to adopt a rule barring "controversial" speakers from the campus...

...Slanted," "pro-Communist," "pro-Negro," "anti-American," "anti-Republican"—these are some of the charges made against Land of the Free...

...In the view of seasoned observers of the local scene, this was not so much a routine police raid for obscene material as reciprocity for the special affection which the extreme right has demonstrated for the Los Angeles police...

...he was one of the members of the statewide advisory committee supporting CLEAN, an initiative measure defeated in the 1966 California general election...

...The measure failed by 711,510 votes, although a week before the election newspaper polls indicated it would pass by an overwhelming majority...

...One woman on the Los Angeles radio show run by Joe Pyne—a rightist whose program reaches audiences in a number of other cities across the country—shrieked, "If my child brings that book home from school, I'll burn it and rot in jail before I let my child use it...

...American Opinion bookstores have been promoting lectures and films allegedly exposing the whole hippie and "underground" movement and calling for suppression of the newspaper on grounds of "treason and obscenity...

...and John Hope Franklin, chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago...

...In addition to seeking book censorship, the right wing of this region has been busy with assaults upon freedom of speech and the press...

...Members of the John Birch Society formed the hard core of his campaign workers when he was elected state superintendent in 1962...

...State Senator John Schmitz was quoted in Newsweek, during the 1966 gubernatorial election, as saying he considered Reagan too liberal and wanted Parker for governor...

...Richardson formerly served as the Society's major coordinator for Southern California...

...Califonia's New Vigilantes by WILLIAM WINGFIELD Covina, California For the super-patriots, happiness is a lynch-in, and seldom have they been happier than in the past year in Southern California with their United Nations' flag-burnings, their censorship drives, and campaigns to have those who displease them fired from their jobs...

...I fail to understand what the sudden furor is all about...

...the school board at Glendale voted three to one to bar Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, one of the most widely-discussed novels of recent years, from high school supplementary reading lists...

...The Birchers and Birch-types have developed a "cell group"—the Fire and Police Research Association (FiPo) — within the Los Angeles police department...

...Conot wrote that in one police station the "cell" members put up a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt with the caption "Nigger Lover...

...Bock and another student, Geraldine Anderson, went to court to seek a writ preventing publication of the Bruin...

...The California Junior Chamber of Commerce, at the urging of a Monrovia gas station operator, made suppression of Land of the Free its "community service" project for the year...

...They come and go in droves...

...They have contrived a calculated and scientific technique aimed at creating a generation of immoral and emotionally unstable youth by using Conditioned Reflex Therapy...

...This proposal would have opened the door to vigilante action against all bookstores whose wares offended anyone who looked at or perused them...

...When he retires from the charge, they lay the banners down...

...They call for boycotts to force music stores to stop selling records by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Pete Seeger, and others...

...She was reelected although her opponent made an issue of the book...

...In another instance, free speech was the issue in a flare-up involving Keith Shirey, a young social science instructor who initiated a campus forum and discussion group called the Student Committee on Political Education (SCOPE) at Citrus College in Glen-dora in 1966...

...In another sound area, California radio's "talk stations" have been a major outlet for venting rightist spleen...

...Everyone knows John Rousselot is a good American, so he has every right to speak...

...Apparently, only a last minute all-out assault by the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and virtually every other major newspaper in the state turned the tide against CLEAN...

...Their court action specified that its purpose was to prevent the Bruin from publishing "pornography" and "material in which the Christian religion was held up to ridicule...

...The suit cited an editorial by Brian Weiss—then Bruin managing editor—which questioned the veracity of Governor Reagan, along with material in Intro, the newspaper's regular weekly literary supplement...

...It is doubtful that more than a handful of the critics of Land of the Free have read it...

...His articles have appeared in The Nation and The West, by the State Board of Education and the State Curriculum Committee...

...Communists obedient to Moscow took over Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania...

...Thomas W. Braden, publisher of the Oceanside Daily Blade-Tribune, who was ousted by Governor Ronald Reagan as president and member of the California State Board of Education, once wrote in Look magazine that "Dr...

...Some school districts under conservative control have said they will refuse to use it...

...Radio stations that feature programs inviting listeners to telephone their views and bandy opinions with the moderator have been deluged with callers assailing the book...

...In spite of the defeat of CLEAN, its sponsors are still pressing for some form of legislative action...

...Bock's "finest hour" came last spring when he led a rally of the "Friends of Rhodesia" which included an attempt to burn the United Nations flag, along with the Russian and Nazi flags, as a gesture of contempt by association...

...The school trustee was recalled in an election by the voters...

...In Covina last July, when a group of hippies opened a "hippie house," Birchers flooded the city council meeting with demands that the place be closed down...

...Many of these stores display a column by Alice Widener from the March 11, 1967, issue of Human Events, a right-wing weekly with a national circulation...

...the Communists resurrected it to implant political slogans in the minds of the young...

...After both vowed undying allegiance to Governor Reagan, Miss Borgerding called for the student body to drop the student newspaper, the UCLA Daily Bruin, as "not representative of student opinion...

...The basic idea of Communism was that the government should own all land, natural resources, power plants, factories, stores—in short, everything...

...They now accuse Rafferty of "finking out" to the "liberals...

...His newspaper kept up a steady drumfire against the Bruin all through the spring semester...

...Some parent groups have talked about burning the book on school lawns...

...In the final years before his death, the late Police Chief William H. Parker was one of the Birchers' favorite heroes...

...Under one provision, citizens could file a civil suit to compel the district attorney to prosecute or be removed from office...

...When he chooses his battleground, they pick up the banners...

...One of the supervisors is Warren Dorn, one of America's most active advocates of censorship...

...One of SCOPE's early speakers was John Rousselot, former Congressman from the San Gabriel Valley district and later the national public relations director of the John Birch Society...

...Clean...

...His repeated campaigns against "pornography," now called "Dornography" by some Southern California residents, have included his cries of outrage against exhibits at the new County Museum of Art, and his sponsorship of initiative measures to outlaw alleged pornography...

...Meanwhile, however, Stalin took over Czechoslovakia and the whole eastern half of Germany and tried to take over Greece...

...The supervisors later established a board of censors to screen all plays before the company leasing the Music Center from the county is given permission to present them...

...Shirey's efforts to defend himself and SCOPE by pointing out the wide range of speakers invited, aroused the critics to new heights of irrationality: "I don't know why he's comparing John Rousselot with Wilkinson," said one woman angrily...

...A clipping of a newspaper story announcing Wilkinson's speech was tacked to the bulletin board of the local American Opinion bookstore, with the name of Shirey, as club sponsor, underlined...

...But the rightist troops, rallied by Rafferty's earlier calls to arms, went right on charging, leaving their commander far behind...

...Gordon Browning, Los Angeles policeman and one of the founders of FiPo, is a frequent speaker at meetings and study groups held in, or sponsored by, these bookstores...

...Most of SCOPE's activities passed unnoticed, both on campus and in the outside community, until the group invited Frank Wilkinson to speak...

...Their hope is that he will enter the GOP lists against Kuchel...

...Veiled threats...

...The publisher of this daily newspaper was one of the prime backers of Proposition Fourteen, the anti-open housing measure approved by the state's voters in a referendum, and now declared unconstitutional by the California and U.S...

...Conditioned Reflex Therapy involves the use of hypnosis, word conditioning, and emotional conditioning...

...She charged that it "is used to advance political causes...

...They tie up the switchboard...

...Elaine Donaldson, president of the Covina Valley Unified School District, and a Republican, pointed out during her campaign for another term on the school board: "Each year we have had on display all the textbooks being considered for adoption...

...All the faults he found in the book had been corrected, he said, and it was now "a text we can live with...

...The rightists began calling and writing the local newspapers and college trustees, protesting Wilkinson's speech, and demanding that Shirey be fired...

...The semester preceding that when Bock and Miss Borgerding declared war on the Daily Bruin, the student paper won the "All American Award" from the Associated Collegiate Press...

...The Beatles have been a recent target...

...Whether or not Rafferty touched off the uproar in this case, in the past he has summoned the right-wingers to war against some book or person he disliked...

...From time to time Southern California's vigilantes crusade against folk-singers and other recording stars...

...Richardson and Schmitz are the two admitted members of the John Birch Society in the California state senate...

...Subversion-through-music was described by Linda Larson in the Freedom Club bulletin of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles: "The Communists might well be congratulated for their successful infiltration into the subversion of American music, inflicting upon the American public a program announced beforehand and one which they are pursuing at a phenomenal rate...

...He has left the Society, and is now a candidate for Congress from Orange county...

...The proposed measure would have forbidden any judge from dismissing a pornography case on his own ruling...

...When one of the three theaters in the new Los Angeles Music Center, the Mark Taper Forum, presented The Devils (a play based on Aldous Huxley's novel The Devils of Loudun) as its inaugural production, the county board of supervisors proved receptive to complaints against the play charging "blasphemy," "use of obscene words," and "frank sex scenes...

...Because of the criticisms by Rafferty and his followers, a special committee was created to review Land of the Free and suggest changes...

...Governor Reagan, who supported CLEAN, has placed outlawing "pornography" high on his priority list of "must" legislation...

...The board rejected Risser's demand, but the Free Press, perhaps the nation's largest and most popular "underground" newspaper, has become another target for the ultra-right...

...A school board member there held a meeting of the American Civil Liberties "Union in his home...

...Yugoslavia in time broke away, though remaining Communist in philosophy...

...It is published by Franklin Publications, Inc., of Pasadena, a firm founded by these three eminent scholars, and is printed and distributed by Ward Ritchie Press, a Southern California firm specializing in books on the American west...

...It is a grim prospect, for this is the part of California where the preponderance of its voters live, the area that increasingly will dictate the political and social direction of the most populous state in the Union...

...Jack Thayer, general manager of KLAC-AM in Los Angeles, observed: "Their tactics are easy to spot...

...The rightists in Southern California are battering at the Bill of Rights with increasing power and virulence...

...Although recommending a number of minor revisions, many of which Caughey said that he had planned to make himself, the report submitted by the committee to the State Board of Education stated: "We have been impressed both by the generally high quality of the book and by the earnestness and merit of many of the critical judgments...

...Although extremists failed to get Shirey fired in Glendora, they did claim a victim in Anaheim...

...In 1966, the Los Angeles police raided the store for selling Lenore Kandel's Love Book...

...But, in fact, Communist Russia was a dictatorship, and its dictator, Joseph Stalin, was a brutal tyrant...

...Not one person ever came to inspect the books...

...The latter activity has brought Dorn public recognition as "Mr...

...The new, old sound...

...Pythagorian music was revived by the Communists in 1946, Miss Larson revealed, after lying dormant for 2,600 years...

...Widener's column called for the formation of a group to be known as the American Family Association to counteract the American Civil Liberties Union and to work for the banning of publications such as the Free Press and plays such as MacBird...

...Wilkinson spoke at the gathering...

...After the war, an endless chain of 'Nyets1 in the Security Council of the United Nations identified Communist Russia as anti-American...

...What sparked Risser's wrath was that students had invited Jerry Far-ber, a writer for the Los Angeles Free Press, to speak...

...Stalin's barbarities and Khrushchev's repeated promise that he would 'bury us' bore out the worst that Americans were prepared to believe about Communism...

...Land of the Free has been approved WILLIAM WINGFIELD is a newspaper reporter in Southern California...

...Some of the other speakers were Gordon Browning, a representative of the Black Nationalists, and two representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union...

...Supreme Courts...

...Miss Borgerding then attempted to serve legal papers on UCLA Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy...

...With the suit still in the courts and ignored by the administration, Bock and Miss Borgerding secured the support of the Evening Outlook in nearby Santa Monica...

...These tactics were successful in removing famed comedian Mort Sahl from KLAC and KTTV, Sahl's supporters contend...

...They have been attacked by extremists as havens for "Commie-casters...

...and Charles Sellers of the University of California at Berkeley...

...Although the ultra-rightists have been warring against "subversion" on many fronts, a principal target of their fury is an eighth-grade history textbook, Land of the Free...

...Critics who cry "pro-Communist" remain unappeased even when their attention is called to the following passages from the original version: ". . . Far from being a democratic nation, Russia had one ruling party and one ruling philosophy, Communism...

...Ford Sammis of Pasadena, who identifies himself as a "marketing economist," has produced a pamphlet which, among other bizarre complaints about the book, claims it was inspired by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and downgrades all religious groups except the Unitarians...

...The Sammis monograph is available through the American Opinion bookstores of the John Birch Society...

...Wilkinson is secretary of the Los Angeles Citizens Committee to Preserve American Freedoms, which seeks to abolish the House Committee on Un-American Activities...

...This music was outlawed by the ancient Greeks, she reports, as "being too lascivious...

...You can tell when they've had a meeting or something...

...Although the Birchites were defeated in the battle over Land of the Free, their tactics succeeded in another Southern California censorship case...

...Members of FiPo publish a newsletter on allegedly subversive activities that is distributed to the general public through the Birch bookshops...

...This is the top honor that can be bestowed upon a college publication, and the UCLA newspaper has received it a number of times...

...No form of expression is free of the rightist blight...

...Long before the schools began using it last September, the book came under heavy fire...

...They also harass advertisers with telephone calls...

...Rafferty is the darling of the hate groups...