This book is about a state legislative committee that originated as a tool of massive resistance in Florida, but, through its investigations of gay and lesbian teachers, indecent literature, and liberal professors, became a conservative cultural watchdog and a forerunner in the modern culture wars. The committee's targets illuminate the extent to which national discussions about race, sexuality, education, and communism shaped political concerns on the local and state levels and intersected with the desire to maintain racial segregation beginning in the 1950s. The book also demonstrates that r ... More

This book is about a state legislative committee that originated as a tool of massive resistance in Florida, but, through its investigations of gay and lesbian teachers, indecent literature, and liberal professors, became a conservative cultural watchdog and a forerunner in the modern culture wars. The committee's targets illuminate the extent to which national discussions about race, sexuality, education, and communism shaped political concerns on the local and state levels and intersected with the desire to maintain racial segregation beginning in the 1950s. The book also demonstrates that red-baiting civil rights activists, claims of protecting youth from homosexual predators, eradicating smut from newsstands and classrooms, and defending the rights of Christian college students could be politically useful, but also that these tactics were based on more than mere political expediency. They were carried out and popularly supported by people who believed that their values were, at best, being undermined through modernization and, at worst, being threatened with extinction through the liberal subversion of American institutions. The Johns Committee's anti-Communist critique of sexual and racial perversion bound them together under the rubric of subversion and the rhetoric of defending children. This book suggests rethinking the origins of the social conservatism that became central to the New Right and the Republican Party by examining the ideas invoked to marginalize and silence those who opposed segregation as well as the imagined links between sexual and political nonconformity in the postwar period.