by Matt Stevens

Michelle Nickerson wanted answers.

The Yale doctoral candidate was at The Huntington in 2000 on a history fellowship, trying to reconstruct the impact women had on conservative politics in Los Angeles during the 1950s and ’60s. She hoped to demonstrate that women played a vital role through their grassroots activism—conducting meetings, challenging school boards, and distributing pamphlets, newsletters, and flyers. The activists were the bloggers of yesteryear, producing and distributing materials at a frantic pace, but their paper trail had disappeared into the proverbial ether.

Nickerson’s curiosity brought her out of the confines of the Library and into the homes of 28 local women who had played active roles in various clubs and organizations. “I wanted to get their perspective,” she explains. “I wanted to visualize this political landscape through their eyes.”

Now an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas, Dallas, Nickerson is back at The Huntington as the Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow, working on a new book—Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right. While supplementing her research in the Library with testimony from activists, she met two women who had much more than stories to share. Their personal archives—newsletters, correspondence, news clippings, reports, magazines, and books—comprise a trove that has since become part of the Huntington’s rich collection of 20th-century political materials.

Equal parts gumshoe and scholar, Nickerson cobbled together several fellowships to keep her in Southern California for the 2000–2001 academic year. But while digging through archives was vital to her research, it left her begging for details about the lives of women and their grassroots activism. The papers she found provided mere hints. “Maybe you would find something with a woman’s name on it,” Nickerson says. “But you were shooting in the dark.”

So at the end of her long days in the stacks, she tried to call some of the people who had been mentioned in various news articles and reports. It didn’t seem to bother her that she was working off leads that were 40 or 50 years old. She wanted to know what made these women become political. “What made them want to get a babysitter and go to a meeting?” she asked herself. “How did they put dinner on the table and then go out at night and give talks?”

One night she picked up the phone and called F.X. Ranuzzi. She had found the name in an archive housed at California State University, Northridge—the “Spy Reports” of the Community Relations Council, a division of the Jewish Federation Council of Los Angeles that monitored right-wing activity. Ranuzzi, it said, ran the “right-wing” Poor Richard’s Book Shop on Hollywood Boulevard in the early 1960s. A quick search on the computer turned up a listing in Tehachapi, Calif.

Nickerson was greeted by an awkward silence on the other end of the line. When she described her research and explained that she was hoping to interview activists of the era, the voice warmed up. Frank X. Ranuzzi had passed away, his stepdaughter explained, “But it was my mother who really ran that bookstore. And she would love to talk to you.”

Mrs. F.X. Ranuzzi was Florence Ranuzzi, who saw no reason to change the phone listing after the death of her second husband some years before. The common practice among widows of her generation had made it difficult for Nickerson to track down other women who balanced household responsibilities with activism while avoiding the limelight.

Ironically, Ranuzzi began her career in the spotlight—literally—as a movie actress. But she suffered from “Klieg eyes,” a common affliction among actors sensitive to the bright lights on movie sets. She would thrive behind the scenes, though, first as a legal secretary and eventually as the manager of the bookstore run in the back of her husband’s insurance company.

“Not only did I learn that this woman ran the bookstore,” Nickerson says now in recalling the weekend she spent at the Ranuzzi home with Florence and her daughter, Mary Cunningham. “I learned that the bookstore was a clearinghouse for right-wing literature for the entire country!”

Throughout her reminiscences, Ranuzzi would punctuate her tales by showing Nickerson some of the materials she had sold in her shop as well as old letters, photos, and scrapbooks—touchstones that led to digressions and memories of old movies, family history, and politics. Nickerson had a hard time keeping up with the effusive 93-year-old, but managed to inject follow-up questions about groups like the Mothers of Good Council or the John Birch Society. Ranuzzi and her cohorts were suspicious of the United Nations and other government programs that smacked of “creeping socialism.”

Many women entered activism when their children started school, not because they had more time on their hands but because they grew increasingly wary of “progressive” education methods. In 1955, for example, the superintendent of schools in Pasadena met resistance when he tried to combine the early-20th-century reform principles of John Dewey with summer education “camps,” among other programs. This was at the height of the red scare, and a number of groups—many composed mostly of women—were taking action to protest policies with allegedly “collectivist” or “socialist” agendas. The superintendent eventually was pressured to resign.

When Nickerson came back to The Huntington, she shared her findings with Alan Jutzi, the Avery Chief Curator of Rare Books. Both agreed that the binders and boxes of speeches, correspondences, diaries, and political literature offered a rare portrait of an activist in Los Angeles in the 1950s and ‘60s. Jutzi eventually would contact the family about donating the materials to The Huntington.

Meanwhile, Nickerson focused on finding more former activists. Jutzi suggested she approach the local San Marino Tribune, which ended up running a feature story about a young scholar’s quest to interview conservative women activists. Her phone started ringing off the hook.

“What I learned was that these women were serious, but they had not been taken particularly seriously,” Nickerson says.

The “little old ladies in tennis shoes” were dismissed by Democrats in the early 1960s. The disparaging phrase was attributed to California State Attorney General Stanley Mosk and then picked up by a number of newspaper cartoonists. The label stuck regardless of the diversity of age and apparel preferences among conservative women. Cheryl Walker, president of the Tuesday Morning Club at the time, embraced the epithet while convening a luncheon of the women’s political group at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. She made a gavel out of a bronzed tennis shoe and hammered it on the podium. “The place fell apart,” mused her sister, Joan Bennett, in an interview with Nickerson at her San Marino home in 2002.

Some of the very same women have also been guilty of painting with a broad brush, mislabeling many so-called opponents as Communists and contributing to a climate of suspicion and fear. For too long, though, right-wing women have endured stereotypes and neglect within the academic world. Only recently have scholars like Nickerson begun to challenge these one-dimensional portraits. Bill Deverell, the director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW), attributes the change to the curiosity of a new generation of scholars. “Michelle is writing in a period of time in which the scholarly rediscovery of conservative politics is really a growth field.”

Nickerson admits that her original dissertation topic had been an environmental history of Alaska. A seminar on 20th-century political history resulted in a paper about the Alaska Mental Health Bill—legislation in 1956 that appropriated land and money to fund psychiatric facilities and programs. Opposition to the bill came from—of all places—the suburbs of Los Angeles. Groups of conservative women vociferously attacked a policy that would allow Alaskan police officers or health care professionals to incarcerate mentally ill patients in facilities that they contended would transform the state into “Siberia, U.S.A.” Despite passage of the bill, a grassroots movement led by two women’s clubs—the American Public Relations Forum and the Minute Women of the U.S.A.—gained considerable attention. Nickerson was hooked.

The admitted liberal was 30 years old in 2001 when she set out to interview staunchly conservative women who were in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. But Nickerson seemed to tap into the authentic voices of her subjects. Call it a common language of bravado or chutzpah; more than likely it boiled down to a mutual respect and curiosity.

“I told them I wasn’t going to write a polemic against the organizations they belonged to,” Nickerson explains. The women opened up. They wanted their stories to be heard.

Not long after the appearance of the Tribune article, Nickerson received a letter and résumé from Marie Koenig, a Pasadena resident who proudly explained that she had compiled one of the larger research collections devoted to the anti-Communist movement.

Born Marie King in New Orleans in 1919, Koenig had been raised by a family that had rallied around the populist—and Democrat—Huey P. Long. “Nobody was a Republican in those days,” she told Nickerson. Koenig adapted her homegrown populism to the anti-Communist movement of the postwar suburbs. Nickerson suggests that “right-wingers saw themselves as the people in the community, constantly doing battle with intellectuals or the government.”

Koenig moved west in the late 1940s, and later landed a job at Spiritual Mobilization, an anti-Communist organization founded by the Rev. James W. Fifield of the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles. A chance encounter there with the president of the American Public Relations Forum got her involved in that organization—the very same group that stood up to “Siberia, U.S.A.” From there she kept track of just about every cause or group that attempted to hold Communism at bay.

For decades, Koenig had kept a full-blown archive on the second floor of her traditional home. “Marie was clearly a packrat,” Nickerson says now with obvious relish. Her holdings included a dozen four-drawer file cabinets with books and binders piled on top of them.

“The folders were organized exactly the way I could only beg for,” Nickerson recalls with a grin as she thinks back to the days she spent in libraries looking for needles in haystacks.

“Over the course of my year in Southern California, I would call her up and ask questions like, ‘What do you know about Fred Schwarz and the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade?’ And Marie would respond, ‘Oh, I have a couple folders on them. Come on over and copy them. I knew Fred Schwarz. We were friends.’”

If Florence Ranuzzi’s material was a snapshot of one activist, then Marie Koenig’s collection represented a complex portrait of the American right. Her 600-plus files ran the gamut of local, national, and international issues: UNESCO and education in public schools, Christianity and the National Council of Churches, fluoridation, and Communists in Hollywood. She kept binders and folders on local clubs, national organizations, and political figures. Like any compulsive collector, she saved indiscriminately, so her stash of periodicals and books representing the left likely rivaled the inventories of used bookstores in Berkeley.

Alan Jutzi and Bill Deverell soon paid a visit to see the materials for themselves. “The Koenig house was a time capsule,” Deverell says, “and Marie Koenig had a librarian’s sensibilities.”

Sadly, both Ranuzzi and Koenig passed away before the completion of Nickerson’s dissertation in 2003. Their daughters then worked with Jutzi to complete the move of each collection.

In the summer of 2004, Nickerson hosted a reception at The Huntington for the two dozen surviving women she had interviewed. Part reunion, part wake, the occasion gave the women the opportunity to listen to highlights from Nickerson’s research and contemplate their impact. They didn’t need someone to tell them that they had played critical roles. But few people had ever acknowledged the connections between their years of grassroots activism and the eventual rise of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater or California governor Ronald Reagan in the mid-1960s. Nickerson concluded her dissertation by saying that “conservatism was not simply mass hysteria, but more thought-out, organized, female, and deeply woven into the fabric of American political life.”

Today, other scholars are benefiting from the Koenig Papers. USC graduate students Daniel HoSang and Barbara Soliz recently presented articles from their own research at a workshop moderated by Nickerson and sponsored by Deverell’s ICW—“Grassroots Conservatism in Post-War California: New Research from The Huntington’s Marie Koenig Papers.” Soliz had begun asking Nickerson for advice a year earlier, when she was in her first year of graduate school. She says that her final dissertation topic will likely address the effects of Communism and anti-Communism on Los Angeles political activism and will draw heavily from the Koenig collection.

Like Nickerson back in 2000, HoSang is in the thick of his own dissertation, “Contested Terrain: Ballot Initiatives, Race, and Political Culture in Post-War California.” The Koenig collection—which spans a broad swath of time—has allowed him to trace the progression and contradictions of ideas about race, housing, and busing. Koenig’s file on the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963, for instance, contains grassroots literature on legislation that pitted anti-Communist activists against civil rights proponents.

Nickerson concedes that Marie Koenig might not have agreed with interpretations from young scholars like Soliz and HoSang, but she would have been pleased to see people using her materials. Nickerson, too, is pleased that more answers are now being found within the Huntington Library. “Every time I’ve been curious about a specific subject,” HoSang explains, “I find that Koenig seems to have paid attention to it.”

Matt Stevens is editor of Huntington Frontiers magazine.