“The Day Freedom Lost the War”: Massive Resistance, Cold War Americanism, and the Case of Edwin Walker

The historical record of former Major General Edwin A. Walker is a series of strange and sometimes contradictory headlines, strung together by patriotic anticommunism, dogmatic racism, and conspiracy theories. Walker, the accomplished veteran who kept the peace with the 101st Airborne Division during school integration in Little Rock; Walker, the staunch segregationist and antistatist; Walker, who commanded 10,000 soldiers in West Germany, enacting a widespread program of far-right political indoctrination with John Birch Society literature; Walker, exposed by a rebel tabloid that printed investigations into racism and abuse of power in the U.S. military next to pin-ups and cartoons; Walker, admonished for calling Eleanor Roosevelt pink, resigning to Dallas, where he planned a national speaking tour called “Operation Midnight Ride”; Walker, who rallied for insurrection during desegregation in Mississippi, calling integration a “conspiracy of the crucifixion by anti-Christ conspirators of the Supreme Court”; Walker, who survived an assassination attempt by Lee Harvey Oswald. Accounts of Edwin Walker often proceed in this manner, isolated and sensationalized incidents without full regard for how they might inform one another or their broader context. Drawing on Walker’s personal papers and other far-right literature, military and Congressional records, newspaper accounts, and perspectives of his critics across the postwar left, this paper argues for a more collective consideration of Walker’s life, politics, and legacy. Situated within Cold War civil rights historiography and recent trends in fascist studies, Walker’s military service and fringe political activities are no less strange or contradictory, but come to shed light on globally-circulating ideas and practices of racism, anti-Semitism, anticommunism, and “Americanism” in operation by midcentury. With a focus on massive white resistance movements and conservative assertions of a particular American way of life, this paper reveals dynamic, intimate, and enduring connections between margin and center of the burgeoning US. right.