Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

by Nancy MacLean

National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. defended the governor’s actions, telling his readers that Faubus had been merely “interposing” his authority against the Supreme Court’s “tyranny.” Buckley condemned “the shameful spectacle of heavily armed troops patrolling . . . once tranquil towns.” The nine justices of the Supreme Court had created a situation that could “be settled only by violence and the threat of force.” And besides, Buckley said, the NAACP was exaggerating the mistreatment of the black students. What were “ugly epithets,” spitting, and being “pushed around” compared with “the picket-line practices of monolithic labor unions”?38 The “line of bayonets in Little Rock,” intoned Buckley, was what had always been hidden under “the maternal skirts” of “Mother Welfare State.” What civil rights, labor unions, and social insurance came down to in the end, Buckley warned, was the “army of occupation . . . enforcing unconditional surrender.”