I will be answering your question only in part. I will address how and why some Americans attacked the UN and began ending of American support for it. In particular, I will look at education. Nevertheless, I believe that my answer also speaks to how they saw it as communist.

Context

One thing to keep in mind is that at the end of World War II, educational systems became a battleground between liberal and progressive Americans on the one hand and conservatives on the other. It was a period that saw conservatives create, for possibly the first time, a coherent and fairly united movement. Traditionalists and libertarians both united in this group and opposed what they saw as “collectivism,” a grouping which combined not just communism and progressivism, but also liberalism. In this formulation, even liberal ideals, such as final two expressed in FDR’s Four Freedoms speech—freedom from want and freedom from fear—would ultimately lead to totalitarianism.

Traditionalist Richard Weaver expressed a conservative framework in his 1948 work, Ideas have Consequences. He argued for metaphysical properties of ideas. In other words, universal principles existed and were, for him, grounded in the divine. These truths were delivered from one generation to the next through education and were the ONLY basis for a functioning society. Of course, the United States had been built upon these ideals. In fact, for Weaver, the South had exhibited these principles more fully than the North and was superior to the Northern states that conquered it. What he opposed was the perceived moral relativism of liberalism, socialism, and communism. The stakes? American society and the future of the country.

Obviously, in this context, education became central to the debate. In the prior two decades, progressive thinkers like John Dewey and George Counts had been influential. Educators had introduced methods which focused on student-centered learning. This encouraged teachers to lead students toward discovery and critical thinking. Note, this approach was built around pragmatism—language and thinking are tools for problem solving—rather than idealism.

According to conservatives, progressives had turned schools into places where students were taught that humanity was the center of the universe. They abhorred that young Americans were not taught a definitive right from wrong or beautiful from ugly but instead to alter the environment to achieve their goals. In other words, Conservatives believed in specific and unalterable laws that defined life and they loathed progressive views that denied such principles.

In the context of the burgeoning Cold War, this contest, as were so many, was often discussed in terms of democracy. Weaver believed that the failure to learn “natural laws,” such as those of capitalism and its work=reward approach, would lead to a collapse of the United States. He believed that progressive education, with its egalitarian approach, was leading American students “for that disillusionment and resentment which lay behind the mass psychosis of fascism.” In other words, telling students that they deserved “freedom from want” simply because they were humans was setting them up for disillusionment. Capitalist laws determined that such a freedom didn’t exist and Weaver, therefore, assumed that it would only lead to anger and a fall to totalitarianism. Dewey, for his part, was a strong proponent of democracy, but he saw it as something to be worked on and toward, rather than as a set of laws to be maintained.

Hence, as you can see, the new conservative movement sought to challenge progressive education. A system which emphasized economic rights, intercultural education, culturally determined moral systems, global values, and collective responsibility. Instead, conservatives trusted in three things: Family, Church, and School. In all of them they focused on inherited values and decried involvement from the state. In the last, in particular, they wanted only the teaching of the “Three Rs” and respect for authority without any addition of “critical thinking” or questioning of tradition.

We will see how conservatives came to view the UN as a progressive threat to all three institutions they cherished.

To be continued...

PART 1

Did you know that the same year Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK, he attempted to assassinate a major general? (He missed; the bullet hit a window frame.)

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Ever since the United States joined the United Nations in 1945, there have been calls to leave.

This was stoked by fears of world government, and racism; there was concern among segregationists that the United Nations might meddle in civil rights legislation.

The National Negro Congress in fact did try to petition the UN for help regarding oppression; they were told they needed to provide more evidence, and that the United Nations didn't have authority to receive petitions from non-government groups and had no power to intervene in "domestic affairs".

In 1946, that "domestic affairs" argument was thrown for a loop. India lodged a complaint with the UN about the treatment of Indians in South Africa. They claimed a treaty violation where laborers would enjoy "the rights and privileges of citizenship"; South Africa claimed there was no such treaty and the UN had no power of domestic affairs.

This case alarmed the US; one senator fretted there was little difference between "Indians in South Africa and negroes in Alabama"; essentially, if the case were to go through, the concern was that the oppressed blacks could haul the US to international court. The US tried several tactics, including attempting to move the complaint to the International Court of Justice (making it purely a treaty violation matter). They did not work; the UN made a January 1947 resolution condemning human rights violations in South Africa.

This gave an opening for further UN petitions; the NNC dissolved before they could get much farther (complicated reasons including financial ones) but the torch was picked up by others. A 1951 petition "We Charge Genocide" includes the paragraph:

Your petitioners will prove that the crime of which we complain is in fact genocide within the terms and meaning of the United Nations Convention providing for the prevention and punishment of this crime. We shall submit evidence, tragically voluminous, of "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such," --in this case the 15,000,000 Negro people of the United States.

There was no UN comment regarding the petition; by the time it arrived, it had become too reliant on the power of the US behind it. There really was a brief window where it seemed like the UN might become involved in (for example) anti-lynching efforts. (What matters here is perception; in the early history of the UN it was hard for observers to know what its role really was.)

Such efforts did not go unnoticed in the far-right. A senator from Ohio, John W. Bricker, tried (starting in 1951) to push an amendment that would limit the president's ability to sign international treaties. Despite being mainly held up by fringe conservatives this ended up lasting a significant time, with the effort only fizzling out in 1957.

Let's now connect this with Texas...

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The Minute Women were founded in Connecticut (1949) by Suzanne Silvercruys Stevenson, but for our story today, we're worried about one of their biggest and most active chapters: the one in Houston, Texas.

They were essentially Communism vigilantes.

They worked by "telephone chain", so that one member would call five, and then each of those would call five more, such that they could quickly get hundreds of people involved in an effort; they stopped Dr. Rufus Clement (president of Atlanta University) from lecturing at a Houston church for being "too controversial"; they stopped a Quaker meeting because of supposed links to Alger Hiss to Quakerism. They planted observers in University of Houston classrooms to screen for controversial material.

Relevant to the main question, they got schools to ban a UN essay contest; they printed a false report that "troops flying the United Nations flag once took over several American cities in a surprise move, throwing the mayors in jail and locking up the police chiefs." (This was a distorted riff on what was actually an Army exercise, done in collaboration with the government.)

This was all in the early 50s, so not quite close yet to the time period the question was asking about; they lasted all throughout the Communist paranoia phase up to the 60s. (Perhaps most spectacularly, in 1956 they were part of a protest against the Alaska Mental Health Bill, claiming it was intended make concentration camps to house political prisoners, "our own version of the Siberia slave camps run by the Russian government.")

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To pick up in 1955, Senator Dorsey Hardeman introduced a series of bills. SB 244 related to "prohibiting the display of flags of international organizations, other nations or states in equal or superior prominence or honor to the flag of the United States or of the State of the Texas. SB 245 prohibits any flag other than that of the United States being in a position superior to that of Texas.

What happened to cause this? At the University of Texas, a United Nations flag was flown in place of a Texas one. Unfortunately, I haven't found record of if it was a protest or innocent international salute.

ASIDE: I did find a 1996 complaint that was similar -- a UN flag being flown at Jesse Hall at the University of Missouri, in order to recognize the student international population.

Senator Peter Kinder, commenting on the matter:

I think most Missourians would be concerned the U.N. flag is flying at the same level as the American flag. There are other ways to honor international students. There's enough multiculturalism on campus. Multiculturalism is poison. Resist multiculturalism.