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>THE CONSERVATIVE SOCIETY OF AMER ICA is run from New Orleans by a former Pan American airline pilot named Kent Courtney, 43, who, with his wife Phoebe, started publishing anti-Communist literature in 1954 with only $18 in capital. Courtney, an unsuccessful candidate for Governor of Louisiana on the States' Rights ticket in 1960, believes that "socialist and Communist influence now pervades the thinking of our Federal Government and the two major political parties." He claims members in 45 states, distributes about half a million pamphlets a year, is an active, unit-founding member of the John Birch Society.
>THE NATIONAL INDIGNATION CONVENTION, one of the fastest growing of the new groups, was started recently by Dallas Garage Owner Frank McGehee, 32, to protest the training of Yugoslav pilots in the U.S. It has since spread across the country through supporting committees. With a keen eye peeled for "modern traitors" in government, the movement holds evangelistic-like meetings at which members have heard the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations condemned as "treasonous." along with suggestions for lynching Earl Warren.
>THE ALL-AMERICAN SOCIETY, founded in Salt Lake City, has as its guiding light one of the busiest speakers in the rightist movement: W. Cleon Skousen, a balding, bespectacled onetime FBIman who hit the anti-Communist circuit in earnest in 1960. after being fired from his job as Salt Lake City's police chief ("He operated the police department like a Gestapo." says Salt Lake City's conservative Mayor J. Bracken Lee). Skousen freely quotes the Bible, constantly plugs his book, The Naked Communist, presses for a full congressional investigation of the State Department.
Current Hero. The rightist movement is most pronounced in the West, the Southwest and the South; it has a distinctly anti-Eastern flavor that reflects old and basic regional rivalries. Its organizations seem to gain most of their support from middle-and upper-income groups—doctors, dentists, merchants and industrialists, many of them leaders in their own fields and genuinely concerned about the position of the U.S. in the cold war. Some of the rightists have even taken up arms: the Minutemen (TIME, Nov. 3) regularly train with firearms in preparation for the day when the Communists may take over the country.
The far-right surge is salted with military men, both active and retired. Those still on active duty can often command a captive audience. Thus, until his recent transfer to Pentagon duty, U.S. Navy Captain Kenneth J. Sanger, commanding officer of the Sand Point Naval Air Station in Seattle, was wont to require attendance at his dramatic platform demonstrations. On a mast labeled "Free Enterprise," he would hoist signs representing such virtues as "Loyalty," "Patriotism." and "Self-Reliance." Then he would pick up a stick called "Communism," take a hefty swing—and watch all the virtues come tumbling down.