ABSTRACT
The “combat” to which Richard Hofstadter refers turned out to be a civil as well as foreign war, one in which public school teachers and professors of education were soundly defeated by a coalition of left- and right-wing politicians dedicated to business models of education. In Education and Freedom, Hyman Rickover accused the American public of indifference to intellectual achievement and excellence. While gender politics in education have a long history, their present versions became imprinted during the post-Sputnik era, and especially in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. The Cold War attack on textbooks was animated at first by the paranoid anti-Communism of the Right. Right-wing assaults on school textbooks were most intense south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The regional difference became apparent, Zimmerman suggests, in the controversy surrounding the 1958 publication of Brainwashing in the High Schools by E. Merrill Root, a former English professor and right-wing zealot.
