The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

On a dreary May day in Washington D.C. in 1972, 10,000 people took to the streets despite the drizzle. They were protesting what they saw as an out-of-control Supreme Court that had undermined and betrayed America. They denounced the Court for “banning” God and His word from schools. By reversing the Court’s decision to take God out of schools, the 10,000 protestors believed America could be saved from “the disaster of dope” engulfing the country. The feeling that the Supreme Court had betrayed and undermined its duty to uphold white supremacy, the alleged religious nature of America, and the Constitution is what compelled most conservatives to anathematize the institution.

This article examines the conservative reaction to five cases: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Engel vs. Vitale (1962), Abington vs. Schempp (1963), Roe v. Wade (1973), and Bob Jones University vs. United States (1983). By examining these cases together, the role of emotion in shaping political behavior is evident. We see common rhetorical tropes about the Court’s betrayal of America repeated in all of these cases. We also see how the rhetoric of betrayal and subversion circulated among different factions of conservatism. A caveat for my thesis is that most of my sources came from non-scholars who may have relied on emotional rhetoric more than their scholarly counterparts. However, even if this is true, the words of angry conservatives in journals from the Atlantic to the Christian Beacon show an important and understudied thread of anti-Court rhetoric.