ABSTRACT
The red scare was far from being only a matter for legislatures, federal agencies and the courts. The issues that confronted those bodies were matters most Americans might read about in the daily newspaper or hear about on the radio or television and then dismiss from their minds as someone else's problem. The 1930s had not been kind to the business leaders of the US economy. If, in the eyes of conservatives, the war between the United States and "world communism" was religious, then education—especially at the secondary and college levels—was one of the most important battlefields of that war. Meanwhile rightwing groups like the Minute Women of the U.S.A. and the National Council for American Education harassed liberal administrators in the school systems as coddlers of subversion, scoring outstanding successes in driving them from their positions in Pasadena, CA, and in Houston, TX.
