As the Cold War erupted, schools became a focus of this anxiety because of the stakes. Across the nation, American public school children, clad in dog tags to facilitate the identification of remains in the event of a nuclear attack, participated in “duck and cover” and “sneak attack" drills.
But schools also had the potential to be an asset in this existential struggle. In 1949, President Harry S. Truman declared, “Education is our first line of defense,” envisioning schools as places to inculcate American values, as well as nurturers of the talent needed to win the war.
Yet, for pundits like Allen Zoll, a renowned conservative redbaiter and antisemite, the reliance on schools and teachers was a cause for panic not reassurance. Cautioning that public schools had been infiltrated by communists, he sounded the alarm: “THEY WANT THE CHILDREN OF AMERICA. THEY WANT YOUR CHILD.”
Claims like these were not based in fact but that mattered little when the fears they evoked were so powerful. Such charges sent districts around the country scurrying to ferret out and purge reds from the schools. But, hand-wringing from Zoll and others aside, communists had never infiltrated the nation’s schools. In many cases, these provocateurs were simply cynically utilizing the anxiety around schools and children to mobilize a broader conservative movement that had nothing to do with education at all.
Concerns about espionage and indoctrination weren’t the only worry about the nation’s public schools during these years. In the 1950s, politicians also fretted that the supposedly deficient American education system was disastrously lagging behind the Soviet Union when it came to science instruction. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 only intensified these fears.
In response, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958 in an attempt to “correct as rapidly as possible the existing imbalances in our educational programs.” The law aimed to protect society by allocating millions of dollars to STEM instruction and other initiatives in public schools.
As the 20th century progressed, the politics of fear tied to schools expanded, becoming more pernicious and abstract. Politicians on both sides of the aisle drove this sense of foreboding as they tried to score points and warn about the dangers posed by the opposition to impressionable children. In the early 1960s, for example, Republican California Superintendent of Education Max Rafferty built a political career on the idea that the collective failure of public schools to teach patriotism was eroding American family values. Meanwhile, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson mobilized support for federal involvement in local public schools by setting up a simple choice: fund schools or fund prisons. Richard Nixon may have summarized the strategy best when he reflected, “people react to fear, not love.”