The Founders, Pt. 1
Conservative Historians, Cold Warriors, Culture War
Two days before Donald Trump left the White House, his administration released its nationalistic “1776 Report” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This parting shot alleged to come “with the intention of cultivating a better education among Americans” about the origins of the United States, but this could hardly be further from the truth.
Trump’s 1776 Commission was established in the final months of his presidency to promote “patriotic education,” at least partially in response to the New York Times 1619 Project, which marked “the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery” by trying to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
Since then, presumably laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has led a Republican crusade against the “woke mind virus” (the LGBT community, “critical race theory,” and more) in schools. Whether or not it’s about trying to one-up Donald Trump in the state they both call home, DeSantis has declared war on public education. “Florida is where woke goes to die,” he claimed after being re-elected in November.
As part of DeSantis’ “war on woke,” and his trial run for a national(ist) assault on higher education, the Trumpian governor has appointed half a dozen right-wing trustees at New College of Florida, a public liberal arts school. Among them is Matthew Spalding, the former executive director of Trump’s 1776 Commission.
Spalding’s wife chairs the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) and is the founding director of its museum in Washington. Her father, “not just a leading historian of the conservative movement” but also said to be “an active player in the movement longer than anyone else,” is the VOC patriarch.
According to Ron DeSantis’ chief of staff, the Florida governor’s overhaul of New College aims to reshape this reportedly “tight-nit, progressive” school into the “Hillsdale of the South.” Hillsdale is a private conservative Christian college in Michigan that selected Jordan Peterson as its commencement speaker last year. According to its website, “in the fall of 1975, the trustees of Hillsdale College decided that Title IX was such a serious assault on the school’s freedom that we simply could not accept it.”
DeSantis’ takeover of New College’s board of trustees included the appointment of Christopher Rufo, who has “led the fight against critical race theory in American institutions” according to the Florida governor’s website. Rufo has contributed to DeSantis’ culture wars (including the anti-LGBT “groomer” panic) as an advisor to the governor and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank co-founded by Ronald Reagan’s CIA director. Following the news of his appointment, Christopher Rufo declared, “We are recapturing higher education,” and shared with Twitter followers a speech he gave at Hillsdale College that “outlined my theory of action.”
Matthew Spalding is a professor and dean at Hillsdale College’s Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship who has argued that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional. “I have known Governor DeSantis since he was a congressman and have been working with the Florida Department of Education on his civic literacy initiative,” Spalding said in February.
His wife Elizabeth Spalding teaches Cold War history at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, and serves on the advisory council of its “American Project on the Future of Conservatism,” which was inspired by conservative historian George Nash. In a 2016 essay on “Trumpist populism,” Nash suggested that “by getting back, very deliberately to basics, conservative intellectuals can begin to restore some clarity and direction to the debate.”
Elizabeth Edwards Spalding received a full-tuition scholarship to attend Hillsdale College in the 1980s, perhaps because her father, also a conservative historian, in his words, “played a key role in the struggle for freedom.”
I was a founder of Young Americans for Freedom, which provided the ground troops for the Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan presidential campaigns. I was the director of information for the Goldwater for President Committee, which secured the 1964 presidential nomination for Senator Goldwater and changed the course of conservative (and American) history. I wrote the first political biography of Reagan. I was the founding editor of Conservative Digest, which had at one time the greatest circulation of any conservative journal. I organized the largest Washington rally for the Vietnam War and our troops. I was denounced as a “son of a Birch” by a nationally syndicated columnist and described by the New York Times as “The ‘Voice’ of the Silent Majority.”
Lee Edwards was also “a stalwart of the emergent New Right in American politics, and brought his own questionable background and motives into the World Anti-Communist League [WACL] as a professional fund-raiser.” According to Scott and Jon Lee Anderson’s 1986 exposé of the far-right WACL, an almost cartoonishly evil organization, Edwards was the principal co-founder of its first U.S. chapter, the American Council for World Freedom.
According to Edwards, although Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy visited his childhood home, it wasn’t until the Soviet Union crushed the “Hungarian Revolution” in 1956 that his “dormant anticommunism came alive,” and 23 year old Lee Edwards “resolved that for the rest of my life, wherever I was, whatever I was, I would help those who resisted communism however I could.”
Reflecting on the 1960s, Edwards recalled, “It was the decade when conservatism was transformed from a debating society into a political movement, and I collaborated with almost every conservative leader who effected the transition.” That apparently did not include Robert Welch, founder of the conspiracist John Birch Society, which Edwards nevertheless remembered as being “made up of good, good Americans terribly frustrated by what they saw as the direction of the country.”
The Taiwan-led Asian People’s Anti-Communist League, established in 1954, spearheaded a years-long effort to create the World Anti-Communist League in 1967. Around then, Lee Edwards began to ghostwrite a book for Senator Strom Thurmond, one of the most infamous segregationists of the 20th century. Thurmond addressed the 1970 WACL conference in Tokyo, which was spearheaded by “Moonies,” or cult followers of the Unification Church, but not before Edwards founded the American Council for World Freedom (ACWF), which he called a “Who’s Who of anticommunists in America.”
According to WACL historian Keith Allen Dennis, the ACWF represented a right-wing anti-communist coalition led by the American Security Council, which we’ve previously touched on as an influential “Cold Warrior think tank.” By 1974, Lee Edwards became the secretary of the ACWF, which organized that year’s WACL conference in Washington. Special guests included Yaroslav Stetsko, former “Prime Minister” of a pro-Nazi government in 1941 western Ukraine that the Germans immediately squashed, and the Nicaraguan dictator, “whose security guard was only slightly smaller than our president’s,” recalled Edwards.
Edwards acted as the master of ceremonies at a “WACL Freedom Rally,” and was reportedly named Secretary General of the World Anti-Communist League. “I am proud of that conference,” he wrote years later. “But as I traveled about meeting WACL chapter leaders and discussing the program agenda, I became uneasy. Some chapters were led by men who were openly anti-Semitic.” But he was mainly referring to the Mexicans, instead of Stetsko’s Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, which Scott and Jon Lee Anderson described as the “largest and most important umbrella of former Nazi collaborators in the world.”
The ACWF coalition included the National Captive Nations Committee and the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, both chaired by Lev Dobriansky, who was under the sway of Yaroslav Stetsko as leader of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (1968-86). Dobriansky eventually co-founded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) with Lee Edwards, but more about Dobriansky in “The Founders, Pt.2.” All you need to know for now is that Edwards eulogized him as a “hero of the Cold War.”
The ACWF married their milieus, so Edwards became the executive secretary of the National Captive Nations Committee, and got a “World Outlook” column in the nationalist Ukrainian Weekly, a newspaper published in Jersey City, to bash the foreign policy of the Jimmy Carter administration. (His “World Outlook” included the following hits: “Carter fails captive nations — again,” “Getting back to number one [militarily in the world],” “Red star over Africa?” and “The Chinese-Latin American connection.”)
By 1979, the year that Washington cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan, and Amnesty International accused the US-backed military dictatorship in Argentina of “disappearing” thousands of citizens during its “Dirty War,” Lee Edwards’ public relations firm registered as a foreign agent of both countries. According to historian Patrice McSherry, “The 1980 WACL meeting in Buenos Aires seems to have been a defining event in the exporting of the Condor system from the Southern Cone.”
In the 1980s, the World Anti-Communist League reached the height of its influence with Ronald Reagan in the White House, meanwhile Lee Edwards & Associates continued to work for WACL’s Chinese branch, which was controlled by the Taiwanese government. John K. Singlaub, readers may recall—“an anti-communist’s anti-communist,” according to Edwards—revived the ACWF as the U.S. Council for World Freedom (with money from Taiwan), and later took over the WACL, just in time for the Reagan administration to keep U.S. military aid flowing to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua after it was banned by Congress.
Of course, this is extremely far from a comprehensive overview of the World Anti-Communist League or the career of Lee Edwards, but it seems like a good place to start. Future posts will continue to touch on the WACL as a sort of predecessor to the VOC, and get into Edwards’ relationship with organizations like the Unification Church, Institute of World Politics, and the Heritage Foundation, that are relevant to the “Victims of Communism.”
In 1993, Lee Edwards decried a conspiracy in Washington to “to wipe out the record of imperial Moscow’s expansionism,” and the following year co-founded the VOC as Dobriansky’s right-hand man on the National Captive Nations Committee (NCNC), but more about that later. The 1990s turned out to be a disappointment for the NCNC, which set up the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, dreaming of a $100 million museum.
“More than once between 1994 and 1999 I almost gave up,” Edwards admitted. Dobriansky stepped down as chairman in 2003, and died five years later, but his former sidekick, determined to honor Dobriansky and Hungary in particular, settled for a memorial in 2007, and stayed at the helm of the board until 2022. At 90 years old, Edwards passed the torch (and a new museum) to his daughter, with whom he has authored several books.
In the 21st century, Lee Edwards may have lost touch, but he’s still got plenty of hatred in his heart, and that’s all that matters. In 2018, he repeatedly suggested that Ben Shapiro could be the next William F. Buckley. At that year’s annual “Roll Call of Nations” wreath-laying ceremony at the VOC memorial in Washington, Edwards declared, “In our conflicted world, telling the truth about socialism has become a revolutionary act. So, my friends, let us all join the revolution!”
In 2019, echoing Russell Kirk, the conservative veteran explained that the U.S. suffers from “the tyranny of minorities—the feminist minority, the welfare-rights minority, the homosexual minority, the animal-rights minority.” At the same time, Edwards warned fellow conservatives, “if we look closely, we can see that we are in danger of becoming the very thing we accuse our opponents of being—rigid, dogmatic, in a word, ideological.”
Last year, he advised, “You cannot understand Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine unless you understand that he is a Marxist-Leninist.” Two days after the National Review published this laughable nonsense, Edwards attended the grand opening of the Victims of Communism museum, which is a five minute walk from the White House.
Just ahead of the event, almost thirty years in the making, the Washington Free Beacon interviewed a member of the VOC Speakers Bureau, who explained to the right-wing outlet, “Marxism has gained a foothold in the American education system through the rise of cancel culture, revisionist history lessons, critical race theory, and divisive gender ideology… The coronavirus pandemic, [she] said, unveiled the extent of Marxist ideology in public education…”
Two months later, Edwards argued that conservative infighting is “a sign of vitality and proof, it seems to me, of the movement’s importance and the role that it still plays.” For years, he has called for a “new fusionism” to “meld the disparate elements of twenty-first-century conservatism” and “unite our divided movement in the face of a common enemy.” Even putting aside that his son-in-law was part of the 1776 Commission, it’s easy to imagine that Edwards (and the VOC leadership) is on board with the far-right “war on woke” to accomplish this. As Ronald Reagan once said, “Lee Edwards has always been in the forefront of the struggle to restore America, to bring it back to its ancient moorings.”