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Albert E. Burke: Difference between revisions
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No, it was not just Dallas, but my hometown was already gaining the reputation of being the <mark>capital of this '''new world'''</mark>. ... | No, it was not just Dallas, but my hometown was already gaining the reputation of being the <mark>capital of this '''new world'''</mark>. ... | ||
It was November 4, 1960, Republican Tag Day in Dallas, and the downtown lunch crowd was being canvassed by three hundred women in red-white-and-blue outfits. ... | It was November 4, 1960, Republican Tag Day in Dallas, and the downtown lunch crowd was being canvassed by three hundred women in red-white-and-blue outfits. ... | ||
Several Tag Girls spotted the Johnsons arriving and rushed over to surround the car. As Lady Bird was stepping out of the Lincoln one of the pickets impulsively snatched her gloves from her hands and <mark>threw them into the gutter. '''Lady Bird went white'''. It was still a time when incivility was rare in politics, when public figures felt safe in crowds</mark>. No one, perhaps not even the Tag Girls themselves, was prepared to understand the ferocity of the anger in those otherwise happy and well-cared-for women. | Several Tag Girls spotted the Johnsons arriving and rushed over to surround the car. As Lady Bird was stepping out of the Lincoln one of the pickets impulsively snatched her gloves from her hands and <mark>threw them into the gutter. '''Lady Bird went white'''. It was still a time when '''incivility''' was rare in politics, when public figures felt safe in crowds</mark>. No one, perhaps not even the Tag Girls themselves, was prepared to understand the ferocity of the anger in those otherwise happy and well-cared-for women. | ||
What was more surprising was that the sign carriers and catcallers were for the most part well-groomed women from some of the finest homes in the city, and yet as soon as the Johnsons waded into Commerce Street the women in red, white, and blue began to <mark>curse</mark> them and to <mark>spit</mark>. (Later, some members of the “<mark>Mink Coat Mob</mark>,” as they came to be known, claimed that they were not spitting, exactly—they were frothing.) | What was more surprising was that the sign carriers and catcallers were for the most part well-groomed women from some of the finest homes in the city, and yet as soon as the Johnsons waded into Commerce Street the women in red, white, and blue began to <mark>curse</mark> them and to <mark>spit</mark>. (Later, some members of the “<mark>Mink Coat Mob</mark>,” as they came to be known, claimed that they were not spitting, exactly—they were frothing.) | ||
Why? What accounted for the <mark>hostility</mark> (or to use her word, indignation) of the <mark>fashionable and affluent</mark> Dallas woman? In part she was simply a prisoner of her age: a women of <mark>unfocused ambition, intensely competitive</mark> but unemployed (the working wife was still a signal of economic desperation), <mark>lonely at home</mark> and given to <mark>causes</mark>. She may have been financially secure, but she was deeply troubled by some <mark>unnamed fear that her castle was built of sand and the coming tide would wash away her American dreams [fairy tale]</mark>. She named the tide International Communism, or '''<mark>Creeping Socialism</mark>'''. When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted to the West, “We will bury you,” the conservative Dallas woman believed him. Earlier that autumn Khrushchev had come to the United Nations and pounded on the table with his shoe—a gesture of such swaggering boorishness that it justified every qualm the Dallas woman felt about Russia, the United Nations, and American foreign policy. She worried about the missile gap and the spread of communism to Cuba. Moreover, people in her own country were talking enthusiastically about social change—Kennedy was already speaking of the “the revolutionary sixties”—and the Dallas woman knew those changes would come at her expense. She worried about the erosion of liberty caused by recent Supreme Court decisions (often delivered by <mark>Chief Justice Earl Warren</mark>, who was the <mark>creeping socialist personified</mark>). The court was <mark>taking rights away from the Dallas woman and awarding them to pornographers, criminals, atheists, communists, and Negroes</mark>. The Dallas woman felt herself to be under attack at home and abroad. ... | Why? What accounted for the <mark>hostility</mark> (or to use her word, indignation) of the <mark>fashionable and affluent</mark> Dallas woman? In part she was simply a prisoner of her age: a women of <mark>unfocused ambition, intensely competitive</mark> but unemployed (the working wife was still a signal of economic desperation), <mark>lonely at home</mark> and given to <mark>causes</mark>. She may have been financially secure, but she was deeply troubled by some <mark>unnamed fear that her castle was built of sand and the coming tide would wash away her American dreams [fairy tale]</mark>. She named the tide International Communism, or '''<mark>Creeping Socialism</mark>'''. When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted to the West, “We will bury you,” the conservative Dallas woman believed him. Earlier that autumn Khrushchev had come to the United Nations and pounded on the table with his shoe—a gesture of such swaggering boorishness that it justified every qualm the Dallas woman felt about Russia, the United Nations, and American foreign policy. She worried about the missile gap and the spread of communism to Cuba. Moreover, people in her own country were talking enthusiastically about social change—Kennedy was already speaking of the “the revolutionary sixties”—and the Dallas woman knew those changes would come at her expense. She worried about the erosion of liberty caused by recent Supreme Court decisions (often delivered by <mark>Chief Justice Earl Warren</mark>, who was the <mark>creeping socialist personified</mark>). The court was <mark>taking rights away from the Dallas woman and awarding them to pornographers, criminals, atheists, communists, and Negroes</mark>. The Dallas woman felt herself to be under attack at home and abroad. ... | ||