An Appeal to the House of Representatives - Abolish HUAC* [Verso] Incredible - Walk on the Wild Side - Hard To Beat!

[Cincinnati: Circuit Riders, Inc., 1962]. Broadsheeet, 43cm x 58.25cm (17" x 23"). Printed on both sides of a single sheet of newsprint; recto reprints a petition originally published in the New York Times for Feb 22, 1962; verso is commentary by Circuit Riders, Inc., a Cincinnati-based Christian-Nationalist conservative movement. Horizontal fold; mild toning to margins; Very Good.

The petition, signed by some six hundred public figures including Noam Chomsky, James Baldwin, Denise Levertov, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others, calls for the immediate abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee, accusing its members of dividing the citizenry, denying free speech, and distracting the public from matters of real political importance. Printed on the verso, amid an amalgam of sensational headlines clipped from the press, is a statement by Circuit Riders, Inc. identifying the signers of the petition as members of "militant pacifist organizations," "one-world groups ... dedicated to the drastic abridgement or destruction of the sovereignty of the United States..."; socialist organizations, popular-front organizations, and Communist-front organizations...and other projects which have been adjudged subversive by official agencies of government." There is also a list of publications for sale, most being compilations of names and addresses of reputed leftist leaders in the clergy and in education.

Circuit Riders Inc. was founded by the Cincinnati Methodist layman Myers G. Lowman in 1951 with the stated mission of opposing "all efforts to propagate Socialism and Communism and other anti-American teachings in the Methodist church." In the following decade the group's mission expanded outside the church, and Lowman reputedly became a trusted source of conservative talking-points for southern segregationist politicians, especially valued for his willingness to link the Black civil rights movement with communism (see Yasuhiro Katagiri, Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace: Civil Rights and Anticommunism in the Jim Crow South. Baton Rouge: 2014). This broadsheet, probably distributed through Lowman's vast newsletter network, is not separately recorded in OCLC.