Green Feather Movement

The Green Feather Movement was a series of college protests directed against McCarthyism at the height of the Red Scare in the United States. The movement arose in response to an attempt to censor Robin Hood because of its alleged communist connotations and eventually spread to universities across the nation.

The Green Feather Movement came during the height of the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the United States following World War II and the establishment of Communist governments abroad and the Great Depression, after which many were disillusioned by capitalism. Americans were especially paranoid about possibly having communists in the country, especially in the government, so alleged communists were often tried and fired. People like Senator Joseph McCarthy were able to capitalize on this widespread fear of communism to gain political power. McCarthy claimed to have the names of more than 200 communists in the state department, and he held a series of televised smear campaigns in order to rid the government of communists. However, his attempts to find communists were largely unsuccessful; he ended up accusing the US army of containing communists, leading to his downfall and irrelevance after his inquiry of the army starting in 1953.

Censorship was an important part of the Red Scare and containment of communism in the United States. The film and music industries were especially censored, as well as literature. Writers, screenwriters, directors, etc. were often investigated and blacklisted due to claims of their alleged communist beliefs. Lawyers, social workers, and especially teachers lost their jobs for the same reason. Loyalty oaths from teachers were also required in more than 39 states to ensure that they will not teach communist-leaning lessons to students. Educational literature and literature in college curricula were especially targeted under McCarthyism due to the fear that communism will be taught to students. As a result, many famous works were censored during the 1950s, including Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Civil Disobedience (Thoreau) by Henry David Thoreau, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. The newly popular genre of writing, comic books, was also especially targeted because they were seen as corrupting the minds of young people. The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency oversaw this problem and aimed to completely ban comic books.

Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin held a series of investigations and hearings during the 1950s aimed at exposing supposed communist infiltration of various areas of the U.S. government. McCarthy gained prominence in February 1950 claiming he had a list of communists who had infiltrated the State Department. Elected chairman of the Committee on Government Operations in 1952, he proceeded to use his position on the Investigations Subcommittee to conduct a wide-ranging smear campaign. Despite investigating various departments and questioning witnesses about their suspected communist affiliations, he failed to identify any communists in the government. McCarthyism both reached its peak and began its decline when he launched an investigation into possible espionage and subversive activities at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey: 36 days of televised investigative hearings in 1954. McCarthy however then switched the investigation into whether the Army had promoted a dentist who had refused to answer questions for the Loyalty Security Screening Board. The hearings reached their climax when McCarthy claimed that Joseph Welch, the Army's lawyer had employed a man who at one time had belonged to a communist front group. Welch rebuked the senator saying, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” and discredited McCarthy and his investigation. This and the broadcast of McCarthy tactics turned the public against him and support for him plummeted. McCarthy was further undermined by a critical television editorial by journalist Edward R. Murrow. The Senate voted (67 to 22) in December 1954 to censure McCarthy for conduct unbecoming.

The students responsible for starting this movement were motivated not only by the Red Scare, but also by their religious faith. In an interview, Bernard Bray, one of the original five students, talked about how he and his friends attended the Roger Williams Fellowship at a local Baptist church to discuss social issues while performing vespers. The group met for Wednesday night discussion and communal Sunday night suppers led by Dr. W. Douglas Rae, church adviser, and Miss Emily Watson, faculty adviser. The purpose of the group was to promote Christian social action in the community and on campus. Bray explained the importance of these meetings by saying that “my sort of spirituality was a . . . struggle to find a way to make God’s will become a reality in my life and to that working in fellowship with others and the Roger Williams Fellowship was the ideal context for doing that.” As McCarthyism became more and more popular, the students felt a need to stand up. Bray preferred to think of the movement more as Christian work, rather than courageous activism. And it was through that faith, that the five students found the strength to face potential consequences.

He was also inspired by a seminarian he knew growing up who refused to fight in World War II and was, as a result, jailed. The religious activism of his parents, Helen and Earl Bray, who stood up and walked out of their church after someone made a racist comment about a Japanese American, also prompted his action. When asked why attempts to censor Robin Hood pushed Bray to action, he explained that the issue wasn’t Robin Hood as much as “a great opportunity to find a symbol to fight McCarthyism —  it was more a matter of principle.”

On November 13, 1953, Ada White of the Indiana Textbook Commission, referred to solely as Mrs. Thomas J. White in news stories of the time, proposed to ban Robin Hood from the grade school curriculum because of its supposed communist connotations. She claimed that Robin Hood embodied communist and socialist ideals because he stole from the rich and gave to the poor, saying that "there is now a Communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood. They want to stress it because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. That’s the Communist line. It’s just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat." Robin Hood was not banned from Indiana schools, however Indiana Governor George Craig did say that "Communists have gone to work twisting the meaning of the Robin Hood legend." In fact, Mrs. White’s push to have the subject banned had the opposite effect of what was desired.

In response to this attempt to ban Robin Hood, and the larger McCarthy witch hunt it was a part of, five college students, junior Bernard Bray, sophomore Mary Dawson, Graduate student Edwin Napier, junior Blas Davila, and senior Jeanine Carter, at Indiana University Bloomington started the Green Feather Movement. These students were Indiana natives from mostly small towns, although the leader of the group, Blas Davis, was from the Gary-Hammond-East Chicago area. Most were liberal arts undergraduates with one graduate student in history. The students went to a local poultry farm, bought six large bags of chicken feathers, took them to the basement of a nearby house and dyed them green to represent the one worn by Robin Hood. Then on March 1, 1954, they put one on every bulletin board on campus to protest censorship and attaching them to white buttons with slogans like "They’re your books; don’t let McCarthyism burn them". These students called themselves Robin Hood's "Merry Outlaws" and circulated an anonymous protest papers against McCarthyism. Blas Davila, one of the 5 undergraduate students who came up with the plan, later became a psychology professor at the University of Indianapolis.