{"id":10162,"date":"2012-07-05T21:08:14","date_gmt":"2012-07-06T04:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=10162"},"modified":"2012-07-05T21:08:14","modified_gmt":"2012-07-06T04:08:14","slug":"bill-moyers-richmond-indiana-1970","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2012\/07\/05\/bill-moyers-richmond-indiana-1970\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Moyers; Richmond, Indiana 1970"},"content":{"rendered":"
I had come in 1962 to refute charges that the Peace Corps had been infiltrated by Communist provacateurs, charges which the American Legion in Richmond was circulating with considerable attention from the Midwestern press.\u00c2\u00a0 Having sought an audience which I could face our accusers, I went to Richmond for the confrontation in a Legion hall.\u00c2\u00a0 There were at least two hundred men present that evening and they were not in the mood to tolerate the supplications of a twenty-eight year old bureacrat from Washington.\u00c2\u00a0 “He don’t even look old enough to recognize a Communist, much less fight ’em” one man said.\u00c2\u00a0 Several veterans hooted and hissed and laughed as I spoke, and one huge man with a broad forehead descending down a conclave face into a long narrow chin kept picking his nose and flicking the fruits of his labor at my feet.\u00c2\u00a0 […]<\/div>\n
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“Well, I think it’s because Earlham College over there” — overe there is west, across the Whitewater River, which divides the town.\u00c2\u00a0 “There’s a lot of folks think some Communists got in there a few years back and were going to cause trouble and they joined the Legion to help oppose them.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, Earlham College is a fine school and a credit to this town, and 95 percent of the student and faculty are good people.\u00c2\u00a0 But there was a lot of people who believed some Communist influences were at work.\u00c2\u00a0 It only takes a few to stir up trouble.\u00c2\u00a0 Here, let me read you something.”
\nHe picked from the table two copies of a one page flyer, handed one to me, and read aloud from the other.<\/div>\n
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(a document which had fallen into my hands, a duplicate of one found by our Allied forces in May of 1919 at Dusseldorf, Germany which contained \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Communist Rules for Revolution\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/a>)<\/div>\n
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I was to see these “Communist Rules for Revolution in town after town, in newspaper after newspaper, and even when they had been exposed as a hoax by no less a Tory than James J Kilpatrick, the columinist<\/a>, they continued to circulate widely.<\/div>\n
“We’ve reprinted them and have been passing them out all around town,” Bob Kimbrough said.\u00c2\u00a0 “The young people should be educated as to what to look for, especially the trickery that communism represnets.\u00c2\u00a0 And I think we have to take a stand against Communism everywhere we can.\u00c2\u00a0 We have this undesirable thing in Vietnam.\u00c2\u00a0 Should never have been there in the first place.\u00c2\u00a0 The French tried it and didn’t make it.\u00c2\u00a0 But if only the force of arms can stop Communism, we have to use force of arms.\u00c2\u00a0 You can’t back down or they’ll take more and more.”<\/div>\n
“This is why we have to promote Americanism.\u00c2\u00a0 We try to get to the young with things like baseball, even though it costs us about $3,000 a year, oratorical awards, essays, Boys State, Boy Scout troops, things like that.\u00c2\u00a0 Last year we got American flags on the sleeves of all the athletes in the school.\u00c2\u00a0 We had to put a little pressure on the school officials to get it done but we did it.”<\/div>\n
Did the kids object?
\n“Heck, no.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re proud.\u00c2\u00a0 We also donated to the fire department and the mounted patrols.\u00c2\u00a0 We haven’t got to Earlham College yet but we want to get flags on their athletes too.\u00c2\u00a0 You see, we got these demonstrations and riots because the Communists are trying to use the kids, but if we wake up we can handle them.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ll tell you — the old Yank sits around on his butt until he gets pushed into the corner and then he comes out swingin’.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like Pearl Harbor.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, we had trouble lately at the colleges and the colored folks have been actin’ up.\u00c2\u00a0 Eleanor Roosevelt started that when she went to England and posed with the colored boys.\u00c2\u00a0 But I can’t blame them because I think …<\/div>\n
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Listening to America; Bill Moyers; 1970; pgs 29; 31-33<\/a>.<\/div>\n
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And other\u00c2\u00a0Totalitarian parallels echo in our fevered minds at all times<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 (I like the part about Hitler instituting Socialized Medicine, and thus driving all the good doctors away.)\u00c2\u00a0 The Cold War is over, so that one edges away.<\/div>\n


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I had come in 1962 to refute charges that the Peace Corps had been infiltrated by Communist provacateurs, charges which the American Legion in Richmond was circulating with considerable attention from the Midwestern press.\u00c2\u00a0 Having sought an audience which I could face our accusers, I went to Richmond for the confrontation in a Legion hall.\u00c2\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10162"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10179,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10162\/revisions\/10179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}