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versial" but can bring in sales and good will, so that hitherto cautious
corporate officials who undoubtedly supported Eisenhower and after
him,
Nixon, now may listen to the peddlers of propaganda films and
educational materials like those General Walker thought his divisions
in Gennany required. Furthennore, while many of the scientists and
other staff men who work for the big missile and electronics companies
are apolitical and at times quite cynical about their work (and a very
few actively favor anns limitation), some may be grateful for the ideo–
logical justification provided by that Right Wing brain trust, swelled
by fonner Communists who have seen the light, without which Senator
McCarthy himself would not have known the First Amendment from
the Fifth Amendment or a Trotskyite from a Social Fascist.
To be sure, it remains true that the growing minority of old people
who feel rejected, disoriented, impoverished and resentful are ready to
applaud an anti-political movement that promises to reorganize the
world so that the old folks can understand it again. Many of them,
less well educated than their children or even the entertainers who
nightly abuse them on television, are grateful for the simplistic, evangel–
istic messages of anti-Communism, which affinn that their hearers
are the really good Americans, whatever their ethnicity, whatever
their failure to live up to the American dream of youthfulness, com–
petence, love and success. These disinherited elders may also be willing
to applaud a speaker who denounces the income tax, though the de–
nunciation may matter more to them than the target. But it remains
a question whether the rich reactionaries and the poor oldsters can
fonn a united front around the anti-Communist issue when what they
actually want from society is quite different.
In many communities, notably in the South and Southwest, ex–
tremely rapid urbanization and industrialization (often indeed based
on or growing out of defense activities) have disrupted the already
fragile social structure, so that there is no old elite sufficiently in charge
of affairs to say "nobody is going to beat up Freedom Riders in this
town and nobody's going, in the name of anti-Communism, to push
librarians and school teachers around either." It is notable that per–
haps the first public opposition to the John Birch Society came in
Santa Barbara from a very old man, a newspaper publisher who had
grown up with the community and who assumed responsibility for
civic decency when no one else would. (Papers owned by the staff or by
a chain are often too impersonal for this sort of free enterprise.) The
fluid social structure in many expanding communities both creates anxiety
and bewildennent and as well as opening opportunities for aggressive po-
