This is part 2 of my series explaining how climate denial came to be a powerful force. In my previous section, I discussed how from the late 1800s to the 1950s power swayed from rich businessmen to workers demanding better rights. In this section I discuss how American unions reached their zenith in the late 70’s, and then power started to return to the corporations. I am also going to discuss how the Cold War strongly influenced American beliefs in the righteousness of capitalism. Linking the Cold War to a fear of environmental regulations is important to understand the depth of individuals’ fears of an overreaching government.
The Rise and Fall of Workers Rights
By the 1950s the climate change science was pretty well established. In 1957, scientists at what is now called ExxonMobil wrote internal documents discussing concerns about fossil fuels causing greenhouse gases. The term Greenhouse gas had been coined half a century earlier in the late 1800s.
As stated in my previous section, unions started forming during the Great Depression. From the 1950s to the 1970s unions continued gaining strength. In 1960, 1 in 3 working Americans belonged to a union. In 1965, Cesar Chavez organized the infamous Grape Strike among farm laborers to demand higher wages and safer working conditions. In 1970, over 180,000 employees of the United States Postal Office went on strike to demand better working rights. And in 1981, more than 11,000 of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike.
But the PATCO strike was not successful. President Ronald Reagan refused to honor their demands, and citing the clause that government employees are not allowed to strike he demanded their return to work. After 48 hours the 11,345 striking employees were summarily fired. This was a huge blow to unions and a big win to businesses. By 1997 only 14% of Americans were part of a union. In 2019, only a little over 10% of American employees were in a union.
In 1973, a very influential conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation was created. Heritage has strongly affected American politics since being created, and is a major producer of climate change denial propaganda. ExxonMobil is a major donor to the foundation.
Capitalism and Communism
Central to this view of American Ideals is the power of capitalism and democracy. The enemy of capitalism is communism (and socialism), and businessmen had been leery since Karl Marx rose to prominence and wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Marxism soon spread, most prominently to the Soviet Union and China. While the communism of Karl Marx was idealistic, within a generation his ideas had been perverted into incredible cruelty.
When World War II ended in 1945, the post-war era flooded America with money. Think of the 1950s when the baby boomers were being born into the classic nuclear family and their mothers stayed home cooking meals while their fathers wore suits to their white collar jobs. Sons were involved in Boy Scouts, daughters wore poodle skirts, and DisneyLand opened to the public. The automobile was king, freeways were built every which way (frequently bulldozing through minority communities), and white flight was in full effect as the wealthy fled the inner cities to find their suburban dream homes. The fact that this Leave It To Beaver style household was a complete fantasy to most Americans does not detract from the fact that it’s become an idolized moment, a belief in the paramount of American Ideals.
At the same time that American’s were watching I Love Lucy, the Soviet Union was under the control of Joseph Stalin, and China was ruled by Mao Zedong. These bloodthirsty rulers were responsible for some of the most heinous crimes known to man, with tens of millions of their citizens dying as a direct result of their leadership. Watching newsreels of foreign events would be enough to turn any American’s stomach. This had to be profound proof to many Americans that their capitalistic and democratic ways were morally superior.
Americans were not going to let dangerous communist ideology come into their country and ruin it. The Red Scare and McCarthyism caused enough fear and determination in the American people that many joined political groups and organized to ostracize any communist friends they may know. Patriotism was at a fever pitch. In 1958 the John Birch Society was created to promote anti-communism and limited governments. This influential advocacy group would eventually be responsible for a number of conspiracy theories that became mainstream in the Republican Party. This helped meld together the ideas that big government was overreaching and in fact part of the communistic attack on America.
Here is an excerpt from a 2016 New Republic article explaining that John Birch Society is not a footnote in history, but dramatically affects politics today:
Historians of American conservatism, following the pattern set by George Nash in his foundational tome The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, have tended to give pride of place to deep thinkers like Buckley while relegating the Birch Society to the status of being an embarrassing fringe phenomenon barely worth noting.
But with Trump triumphant, we have to see the Birch Society and its style of conspiracy-mongering in a new light. Far from belonging merely to the lunatic fringe, the Birchers were important precursors to what is now the governing ideology of the Republican Party: Trumpism.
Obama-the-secret Muslim is the modern version of Eisenhower-the-secret-communist.
As to how they have remained successful, here is an excerpt from the Southern Poverty Law Center with a quote from Robert Welch the founder of the John Birch Society:
During its height in the 1960s, the society may have had as many as 100,000 members, still well short of Welch’s oft-stated goal of 1 million Birchers. But few know for sure how many Birchers exist today. Then and now, the group’s membership rolls are a closely guarded secret. “We’re not vast numbers,” Thompson told the banquet. “We’ve never been vast numbers. You don’t need to be vast numbers. You just need to be the dedicated few, who are focused on doing the same thing, at the same time, with the same intellectual arguments to the right people.”
I will be writing more specifically on the anti-climate movement’s messaging in a later section of this series. Welch’s quote about doggedly attacking the same institutions with the same arguments can cause a major shift in opinion. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, “Insanity is the definition of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” but maybe it should be: “Conspiracy is the definition of doing the same thing over and over again and forcing different results.”
Many of these advocacy groups also included racist ideology (both anti-semetic and anti-black) as people feared for the White American experience. Many of John Birch Society’s ideas made a resurgence during the 2016 election under presidential candidate Donald Trump. They also worried about the power of unions and feared their communistic collective bargaining power. To quote at length the wikipedia entry on Movement Conservatism:
“Movement conservatives embraced an anti-regulation and anti-union message as part of their appeal to business interests, with whom they had common ground in terms of tax policy. For example, in 1958 Barry Goldwater referred to influential union leader Walter Reuther as a ‘more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do to America.’ While unions had a strong presence in major northern manufacturing industries, many southern and western states had significantly less union presence and many business leaders wanted them to remain that way.”
The 1960s arrived, and with it the space race, increased Cold War paranoia, and the Civil Rights movement. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 made it feel like missiles were right on top of American soil. People created bunkers and worried that the end of the world was imminent. President John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, and Senator Robert Kennedy were all assassinated. Americans became disillusioned with the Vietnam War and the government’s power. Hippies grew long hair and challenged traditional American values. Great Society programs like Medicare and Medicaid represented vast expansions of government into new areas of American life. The country was changing fast, and many conservatives saw danger lurking around every corner. Senator Barry Goldwater won the Republicant nomination for president in 1964 and pushed the Republican Party in a more conservative direction. Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged was also very influential in the demand for limited government.
America was kind of freaking out, man.
Communism and Civil Rights
The fear of communists took a new turn during the Civil Rights Movement. Many whites reacted in fear to the political changes taking place, and connected their racism to fear of communists. At first, this sounds absurd. But there is a direct connection between communism and rights for minorities.
The Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery in 1863, but it was not until 1865 that the last slaves in Texas were finally set free (now celebrated as Juneteenth). A few months later slavery was formally abolished from Kentucky and Delaware, finally letting all Americans be free. But the transition from slavery to freedom was not a smooth one. Many whites that were against slavery were still racist and did not want to work or live near black Americans. Freeing slaves did not include giving them paid work or safe living arrangements.
Many freed people became sharecroppers (also referred to as tenant farmers). As PBS puts it:
“Sharecropping is a system where the landlord/planter allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of the crop. This encouraged tenants to work to produce the biggest harvest that they could, and ensured they would remain tied to the land and unlikely to leave for other opportunities. In the South, after the Civil War, many black families rented land from white owners and raised cash crops such as cotton, tobacco, and rice. In many cases, the landlords or nearby merchants would lease equipment to the renters, and offer seed, fertilizer, food, and other items on credit until the harvest season. At that time, the tenant and landlord or merchant would settle up, figuring out who owed whom and how much
High interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and unscrupulous landlords and merchants often kept tenant farm families severely indebted, requiring the debt to be carried over until the next year or the next. “
https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/sharecropping/
Ned Cobb (1885 – 1973) was a sharecropper in Alabama and he was not satisfied with these arrangements. His father had been a slave, and Cobb was a free man because he was lucky enough to be born after slavery was abolished. When a group of African Americans with the support of the Communist Party USA created the Sharecroppers’ Union in 1931, Cobb promptly join them. By 1936, membership had increased to 10,000. Cobb’s story is told under the pseudonym Nate Shaw in the book All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw.
National Public Radio (NPR) in 2010 spoke with Robin D. G. Kelly, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. During the interview they discuss how communism influenced the Civil Rights Movement. Kelly states that a major impact was the communist party’s organizing and training of new recruits. Kelly continues with:
Some of the most important organizers in steel, in iron were communists; who, after 1935, were some of the lead organizers in training and organizing, which really made a difference in workers lives in the 50s and 60s. The other thing is that there were many people who were trained in the Communist Party who went on to become Civil Rights activists. Asbury Howard, who was a radical who went onto to play a significant role in Alabamas Civil Rights Movement.
And then, Rosa Parks. What does Rosa Parks had to do with any of this? Well, some of her first political activities were around the Scottsboro case, you know? She never joined the party, but as a young woman, she and her husband, in fact, attended some of the meetings. Then the other area is, just in the rural areas – this may seem like a small thing, but imagine if you’re picking cotton at basically 30 cents a day and you fight and fight and you can get your wages up to 50 cents or a dollar a day. It took about five years and a lot of blood shed, but they were able to raise the wages as a result.
So, they may not be huge victories, but I know one thing, the infrastructure that was laid forward becomes the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, was laid in many ways, not entirely, by the Communist Party.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123771194
The Cold War left America a little unhinged, a bit paranoid, and left a lot of people grasping to understand the massive cultural shifts occurring. In Part 3 of my climate change denial series I am going to pick up in the 1970s and discuss the creation of the environmental movement. Afterwards I am going to explain how all these different forces converged in the 1980s to create a perfect storm of limited government, powerful corporations, and the beginnings of marketed corporate deceit to give powerful businessmen huge amounts of influence over public policy. In Part 4, I am going to discuss in detail how corporations created a huge denial movement, and connect the dots from the tobacco industry’s misrepresentation of the dangers of smoking to climate change denial.
Part 3 coming soon
Meandering Streams 
