Phoebe Courtney

The late 1950s and 1960s was, oddly enough, a period of growth in conservative activism, certainly amplified by the 1958 midterms, which were devastating for conservatives. When Americans for Constitutional Action released their first ratings in May 1960, many were satisfied with this comprehensive scoring system. However, not all were. Among these people were Kent and Phoebe Courtney, a radical conservative husband and wife team who headed up the Conservative Society of America and were displeased with ACA for not grading final passage of foreign aid (they would start to do so for some years starting in 1962) and including no votes regarding reciprocal trade (they would grade the Mason motion in the House to recommit the Trade Expansion Act in 1962). They saw them as too favorable to Republican moderates and liberals and were in truth so radical that they were hesitant to vote for Goldwater in 1964 – to them he was too accommodating to GOP liberals. The Courtneys, who resided in New Orleans, were also segregationists. Their organization had some notable people involved, including Salt Lake City Mayor J. Bracken Lee, retired Major General Charles Willoughby (who I previously wrote about as one of the worst intelligence officers in American history), Professor Medford Bryan Evans (father of conservative writer and activist M. Stanton Evans), and Harold Lord Varney (a writer who had radical shifts in his political thinking over his life). Kent also would join the Board of Policy of Liberty Lobby. Thanks to some searching through the Internet Archive for yet more information on Americans for Constitutional Action, I have found some information including one of their scorecards for their “CSA Voting Index” for the House and Senate, specifically 1961. The pair are incredibly strict graders and remind me a bit of Mark Levin’s (who I can’t listen to because he regularly shouts himself until he is blue in the face) “Conservative Review”.

Minority Leader Charles Halleck of Indiana, known as a leader of the Conservative Coalition, scores a 32% in 1961. ACA by contrast scored him a 100% that year while ADA scored him a 10%. Even John Bircher John Rousselot of California, praised by conservative sources as a model legislator, got two votes wrong by Courtney’s measure, thus scoring an 89%. ACA and ADA, on the other hand, had respectively no complaints and no compliments about his 87th Congress record. The same went for John Ashbrook of Ohio, also regarded as a model legislator by conservatives. However, the Courtneys found three votes to dislike from him, rendering his score an 85%. Ashbrook, whose campaign slogan in his 1972 quixotic effort against Nixon was “No Left Turns”, never scored that low by ACA. Courtney’s measure also reminds me a bit of John Birch Society’s “Freedom Index”, although not close to as ridiculous as scoring Elizabeth Warren equal to Ted Cruz and higher than McConnell in the 2015-2017 Congress (The New American).

A mere five representatives were perfect by the Courtneys that year: Congressmen James B. Utt (R-Calif.) (who I have covered before), Elmer Hoffman (R-Ill.), Clare Hoffman (R-Mich.) (whose opposition to FDR was so staunch he wanted him indicted for sedition), Clarence Kilburn (R-N.Y.) (although if they had counted legislative pairs he would have been nailed on foreign aid spending), and Bruce Alger (R-Tex.). By contrast, sixty-three representatives scored a 100% by ACA in 1961.

For the Senate, Senators Strom Thurmond (D-S.C.) and John Tower (R-Tex.) also got 100%. By contrast, seven senators scored a 100% by ACA in 1961. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) scored an 88%, with the Courtneys finding him having erred in voting for an unemployment compensation bill that only four senators voted against. Numerous Republicans are found little to no better than liberal Democrats: John Sherman Cooper (R-Ky.) gets hit with a big fat zero while Hiram Fong (R-Haw.) is only found to have voted right by them in opposing a feed grains bill. Prescott Bush (R-Conn.), father and grandfather to presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush, at 20% barely fares better than his Democratic colleague from the state, Thomas Dodd, who scores a 13%. One thing that surprised me was that given the Courtneys’ hostility to desegregation they didn’t include a single vote regarding civil rights. The ACA, on the other hand, included a vote striking a proposal from Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.) to permit the Attorney General to bring civil suits for injunctions to prevent deprivation of civil rights. Other notable exclusions include the issue of Hanford public power generation and the Ayres (R-Ohio) conservative substitute for minimum wage legislation, which both ACA and ADA covered in their ratings. For information on ACA scores for 1961, see my previous post on the subject.

I not only find ideology interesting, but also how people view others’ ideology based on voting, and the expectations of the Courtneys are, dare I say, ludicrously high from a right-wing perspective. Funny enough, the way some history YouTubers of a distinctly un-conservative perspective portray the Republican Party at the time they reinforce the views of the Courtneys in saying that they were by and large New Deal supporters, that both were big government parties.

References

Courtney, K. & Courtney, P. (1962). The CSA Voting Index. Conservative Society of America. (see pages 34 to 140)

Retrieved from

https://archive.org/details/ConservativeSocietyOfAmericaKentAndPhoebeCourtneyHQ62107722

Freedom Index Congressional Scorecard. The New American.

Retrieved from

https://thenewamerican.com/freedom-index/report/freedom-index-114-1//