Those "funny" fluoride fighters were, frankly, fanners of fascism's flames

Or, how I learned to stop laughing and love talking seriously about the anti-fluoridation movement

Since the 1960s, finding humor in the anti-fluoride obsessives from the Cold War era has been a sort of national pastime…

An iconic clip from Dr. Strangelove or; How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

For many of us, the anti-fluoride activists of the 1950s and 60s fit neatly into a familiar category in our national imaginary—the half-cuddly and half-terrifying conspiracy crank, the guy at the end of the bar who will talk your ear off about black helicopters and the New World Order and FEMA camps and obscure executive orders issued during the Nixon Administration which have mysteriously never been rescinded.

I suspect many of you have read the wacky fine print on Dr. Bronner’s soap bottles and found it pleasingly strange. Well, good old Dr. Bronner, I learned recently, was an influential voice in the 1950s era antisemitic “fluoride is Communism” movement, despite the fact that he was a Jewish refugee whose parents had been murdered in the Holocaust.

An anti-fluoride newsletter an Oregonian sent to Governor Tom McCall in 1969 after the governor expressed support for a bill that would fund the fluoridation of water in the state. The bill did not pass.

I’ll bet you’re chuckling right now after reading Dr. Bronner’s anti-communist stylings. And I will admit that I enjoy laughing at this farfetched conspiratorial silliness as much as the next person. But after spending several hours reading the avalanche of anti-fluoridation letters Oregon Governor Tom McCall received in 1969, and then looking more deeply into the Hitler-admiring fascists who were on the cutting edge of the anti-fluoride movement in the early 1950s, I’ve started to think that all of that laughter has distracted us from appreciating how much influence those anti-fluoride “kooks” actually had on our political culture. Many of these activists saw water fluoridation as just one front in a much broader battle—and that battle was the corrosive one fascists have waged throughout the 20th (and 21st) century against the institutions, values, and habits of mind that make democratic self-rule in complex modern societies possible. Anti-fluoridation, in other words, amplified a form of politics I would describe as “participatory anti-democracy.”¹ It fired up a fairly small community of people to aggressively use their voices, their bodies, and their votes to gum up the works of democratic self-governance—to create innumerable local firestorms comprised of propagandistic disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories that needlessly absorbed an inordinate amount of public attention and, in many cases, generated enough public cynicism about government, the media, and science to short circuit the implementation of inexpensive and beneficial public policies.

Anti-fluoridation was, in other words, a political movement, not an unfortunate and laughable psychological tic manifested by a handful of uniquely maladjusted individuals. A significant number of that movement’s most active leaders were Jew-hating, white Christian Nationalist fascists, several of whom had been tried for sedition in 1944 for their pro-Hitler activities in the US before and during WWII.

The political strategies deployed by these anti-fluoride activists drew from a familiar fascist playbook. They used disruptive tactics at the local level to subvert the process of democratic deliberation. They sought to win the day not by using evidence and good faith argumentation to persuade their fellow citizens, but by bombarding the public sphere with a surfeit of inaccurate and inflammatory propaganda that encouraged readers to think that no one really knew what was true and that all opinions about fluoride were equally valid. Public figures who spoke of abstractions like “the public interest” or a “scientific consensus,” these activists suggested, should not be engaged with earnestly, but rather should be assumed to be tyrannical agents of some evil intentioned, anti-American force. I imagine these tactics sound familiar to you as someone who has lived through the last 3 years of anti-vaxx activism, Covid disinformation, and now “parents rights” activism around “groomers” or “CRT.” And indeed, as I sat in the archive reading these 1960s era anti-fluoride letters to Tom McCall I couldn’t stop hearing the echoes of our present moment.

Before we dive more deeply into an analysis of what I learned from my time in the archive, here is a small sampling of the sort of level-headed literature the anti-fluoride folks mailed to Tom McCall in 1969.

The hyperbolic claims about how 1ppm of fluoride in the water will lead to the destruction of civilization are absurd, but no more absurd than today’s unhinged claims about the Covid vaccine that millions of our fellow citizens today believe; or at least consider to be a perfectly normal thing for others to believe. It wasn’t enough to argue that the Covid vaccine was untested or only partially effective, it had to be killing people in droves and functioning as an arm of some vast global conspiracy orchestrated by (((them))), some “great reset” intended to undermine western civilization or permanently alter your DNA or install microchips in you or institute the rule of Satan on earth or cull undesirable portions of the gene pool.

Many people believe these absurd claims about Covid and vaccines on the authority of celebrities or other public figures who they trust (but shouldn’t). But it’s important to recognize that the anti-Covid and anti-fluoride movement also drew participants in by offering up an intellectually-engaging, fun-house-mirror simulacrum of scientific inquiry—a densely populated alternative informational universe conjured into existence by reams of material (much of it with footnotes!) produced by an unrepresentative handful of fringe figures with real PhDs and MDs. Obviously, if this one real doctor claimed that the Covid vaccine or fluoride was a globalist bioweapon and included footnotes to prove it, then this must raise massive questions about what sorts of monsters would impose such murderous evil upon their fellow humans and what their secret motives might be! Of course, (((they))) don’t want you to know these forbidden truths, which is why I always do my own research and never trust the lamestream media!

The images below are excerpted from a 10-page letter a husband and wife in Sweet Home, OR sent to Gov. Tom McCall in 1969. The letter consisted mostly of a long bibliography of studies upon which they based their opposition to fluoridation. Almost all of the references were to works that were published more than 25 years earlier, before the first public experiments with mass fluoridation had even been tried.

“There are none so blind as those who won’t see.” A red-pilled modern day anti-vaxxer couldn’t have put it any better.

The problem with people like this wasn’t that they knew nothing about fluoride and thus only needed to be better informed. Rather, the problem was that they had a surfeit of highly selective and often inaccurate information that confirmed their anti-government and anti-science priors. They also had zero interest in reconsidering their position based on new information.

This created a dynamic that will sound familiar. A pro-fluoride advocate would earnestly try to engage a critic of fluoride and get bombarded with the names of one “expert” after another who they’d never heard of. And why had they never heard of so-called Expert X or Y? Well, they must have been brainwashed by the media or “the scientific establishment” or Communists or Jews or all of the above. The poor fluoride advocate was thus in the impossible position of having to either admit they hadn’t read those obscure and often irrelevant articles, or take the time to read and debunk those texts which, in most cases, were pure propagandistic bullshit from the start and were never written with an intent to persuade an informed and critical reader anyway. “There are none so blind as those who won’t see.” Indeed.

Bend, Oregon (population 12,000) witnessed a particularly heated public debate over fluoridation because it was the home of Robert Edmondson, a viciously antisemitic fascist who’d been tried for sedition in the 1940s. In the 1950s, with Hitler dead and Nazism discredited in the US, Edmondson focused his anti-democratic energies on preventing the fluoridation of Bend’s water supply. After watching Edmondson’s propaganda campaign win over a good number of Bend residents, the editors of the town’s newspaper wrote an op-ed demonstrating how the anti-fluoride movement relied entirely upon the unconvincing claims of misinformed quacks.

To the editors of the Bend Bulletin the situation seemed pretty clear—there was a handful of extremist cranks and con men who were using scare tactics to whip up popular opposition to an inexpensive public health measure that had clear benefits and no documented risks. Why on earth should the people of Bend take the word of disreputable figures around the country like these, or the word of the town’s local pro-Hitler seditionist, Robert Edmondson?

You might remember Edmondson from a previous Rightlandia newsletter. He died in 1959 before achieving his life’s mission of expelling Jews from the United States and turning the nation into a white Christian authoritarian ethno-state, but Edmondson’s activism did help ensure that the children of Bend would have far more cavities than they needed to for decades to come. To this day, Bend’s public water supply is still not fluoridated.

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The Fascists who promoted the Fluoride scare

The story of how Hitler-admirer Robert Edmondson stymied the efforts of public health officials in the 1950s to fluoridate Bend’s water points to an important but under-appreciated feature of the anti-fluoride movement—a significant number of its key activists and promoters had cut their teeth as promoters of American fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. It probably should not come as a surprise that the same sort of people who believed the Jews were behind a Communist plot to subvert America and Christianity via New Deal legislation, would also be inclined to believe that fluoridated water played a key role in a Jewish/Communist plot to subvert America and Christianity via municipal public health measures. Indeed, while opinions about fluoride divided many communities in the US and did not line up neatly along partisan lines, I have yet to find a single self-identified “rightist” from the 1950s and early 1960s who was publicly pro-fluoridation. Not all opponents of fluoride in the 1950s were fascists, but every 1950s fascist opposed fluoridation.

The mobilization of the fascist far right around the issue of fluoridation is succinctly illustrated in this 1959 letter to Lt. Gen. Pedro del Valle from Charles Hudson. Hudson, like Edmondson, had been tried for sedition in 1944. In this letter we see Hudson bragging to del Valle about how he’d been an early adopter and promoter of the “truth” about fluoridation’s role in “the plot to destroy our once Christian Constitutional Representative Republic.” Hudson claims he began this effort in 1946, one year after the first experimental tests of fluoridation in Grand Rapids, MI.

The list of circled names in that letter reads like a who’s who of the pro-Nazi movement of the 1940s. These were the central figures in the pre-existing ultra-right political networks that Hudson and others activated in order to begin pumping their inaccurate “truths” about fluoride into the nation’s bloodstream. While Hudson admits that he only reached a few hundred people with his writings, his ideas and arguments found a much larger audience via the publications produced by his fellow antisemitic anti-communists Gerald LK Smith, Elizabeth Dilling, Robert Williams, Conde McGinley, and Lyrl Clark Van Hyning. There was nothing inevitable about fluoridation becoming controversial in the 1950s and 60s. It was the work of a nationally-coordinated political movement with outposts in localities around the country—of which Robert Edmondson’s Bend, Oregon is just one of many examples.

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The early results of Grand Rapids’ 1945 experiment with fluoridation were so stunningly positive that other cities quickly clamored to join them. A perusal of the newspaper conversation about fluoridation in the late 1940s and first years of the 1950s reveals a broad consensus about the benefits of fluoridation. The few dissenting voices that found their way into newspapers generally expressed modest and reasonable concerns about as-yet-unknown negative effects that might reveal themselves over time. The experience of reading those newspaper articles from the late 40s and early 50s was a sobering reminder of what public deliberation can look like, with people judiciously weighing the pros and cons based on the best available evidence and offering an array of competing logical arguments.

But early in the 1950s, for reasons that I have yet to fully discern but which were likely connected to the rising McCarthyite mania about the internal Communist menace, the ultra-right press decided that they were going to try to wage a full-fledged propaganda campaign against fluoride, linking it to their broader claim that White Christian America was on the brink of being destroyed by a massive, underground, Jewish/Communist conspiracy. After hundreds of municipalities had rushed to fluoridate their water in the late 1940s and early 1950s, beginning in 1953 there emerged first a subtle and then a more forceful and coordinated pushback against fluoridation.

The anti-fluoride counter-mobilization of the mid- to late-1950s was comprised of a complex coalition of anti-statists, environmentalists, organic gardeners (JJ Rodale, was a very influential anti-fluoride voice), food faddists, and religious minorities. By no means would it be accurate to classify every fluoride skeptic as “a fascist.” But the point I want to emphasize here is that many of the earliest innovators of the case against fluoride were fascists of the Old Right, pro-Hitler America First, anti-”Jew Deal,” “Communism is Jewish” variety. While these folks appear to have truly believed that fluoride was part of the communist conspiracy, that’s not saying much considering that these people were willing to believe just about anything that confirmed their priors about “the Jewish conspiracy.”

Take, for example this precociously early anti-fluoride article from the August 1951 edition of The Broom, a white Christian supremacist periodical published in San Diego that proudly noted in its masthead that “You cannot buy The Broom on the newsstands because the Jews will not allow it.” This is the earliest expression I’ve been able to find of the argument that fluoridation is ackshually 100% harmful and thus must be part of some nefarious conspiracy against us real Americans.

Another early adopter (July 1951) was a similarly ultra-right publication from Virginia entitled The Individualist. “Every individual has inalienable rights that all just persons must respect,” says the editor of the white supremacist periodical devoted to the idea that Jews are Communists who pose an existential threat to the nation.

Yet another important early articulator of the claim that “fluoridation is part of a Jewish/Communist conspiracy” was W.D. Herrstrom, Minnesota’s most prolific and infamous antisemite (now there’s a claim to fame for you!). The Herrstrom article below appeared in Gerald LK Smith’s The Cross and the Flag in November 1953. Given that this was right around the time that the public tide against fluoridation seems to have turned, I’d hypothesize that Smith’s nationally-circulated magazine played a significant role in that process. While concrete circulation numbers are difficult to establish, Smith claimed to have a mailing list consisting of 3 million people and at one point The Cross and the Flag reached over 300,000 monthly subscribers, one of whom (of course) was a fluoride opponent from Oregon named Walter Huss. [For context, the leading “responsible” conservative outlet in the 1960s, the National Review edited by William F. Buckley, had a circulation of about 95,000.]

And when I say that Herrstrom was an antisemite, I mean like he was such a deranged antisemite that he believed Hitler was ackshually a Jewish Communist who worked in cahoots with the Soviets during WWII to hoodwink Americans into funding and arming the Reds. Hitler didn’t kill 6 million Jews, according to Herrstrom, he actually trained them in Marxism and sent armies of them to the US to lead the secret communist revolution over here. But also, those Communist Jews who had immigrated illegally to stage a red revolution in the US were not real Jews, but Yiddish-speaking Khazars instead. You got that?

Herrstrom “learned” much of this from Ken Goff’s book “Hitler—The 20th Century Hoax.” Regular readers of Rightlandia will recognize Goff as a great hero of Walter Huss’s who toured Oregon multiple times in the 1960s as Huss’s invited guest. The excerpts below are from Herrstrom’s “Americanism Bulletin” of July 1955. I include them because I would totally understand if you didn’t believe me about how kooky Herrstrom’s take on Hitler was unless you read it with your own eyes.

A significant number of anti-fluoride fascists in the mid-1950s also took a “brave” stand against the “dangers” of the Salk polio vaccine which was supposedly another arm of the Russian plot against American freedom. The article below linking the noble battle against communist fluoride to the battle against the communist polio vaccine is from the February 1955 “National Newspaper for Patriots” edited by arch segregationist Kent Courtney. Courtney (along with his political partner and wife Phoebe Courtney) would go on to be a major national organizer of the far right forces that promoted Goldwater as the 1964 GOP POTUS candidate and worked effectively to push the GOP rightward throughout the 1950s and into the 1970s by threatening to hive “the real conservatives” off into a third party.²

[As you read this February 1955 article, keep in mind that Salk’s breakthrough had been announced in March 1953. By February 1955, 1.3 million American children had been given the Salk vaccine as part of a trial, and in April 1955 it would be officially approved. These far right activists failed in their efforts to scuttle public uptake of the polio vaccine in 1955, but not for a lack of trying.]

By 1957 Willis Carto’s white nationalist and antisemitic newsletter, Right, was claiming victory in the battle against the “fluoridation conspiracy,” and he wanted to be sure that his coalition of ultra-rightists got their share of the credit.

Indeed, by 1957 fluoridation was no longer just a no-nonsense, low-cost public health measure that localities could implement without controversy. The story of how the politics of fluoridation shifted is far more complicated than can be conveyed here. The ultra-rightists discussed so far were not solely responsible for it—but they were instrumental in sounding the alarm, precipitating the “crisis,” and innovating many of the central talking points and pieces of “evidence” deployed by the broader anti-fluoride movement.

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Walter Huss’s friend Ken Goff—the guy who singlehandedly invented the “first-hand evidence” that Fluoride was a Communist bioweapon

Where did the idea come from that “fluoride was first deployed by the Soviets to taint the precious bodily fluids of their enemies and sap them of their manly will to resist Communism?” This is the claim satirized in 1964’s Dr. Strangelove and which, while not the dominant note in the letters McCall received in 1969, shows up with some regularity and constantly lurked in the background of the fluoride conversation as one plausible explanation for why public officials would even consider doing such a supposedly harmful thing.

I’m fairly certain that I’ve identified THE SINGLE SOURCE that everyone used to back up the spurious claim that Soviets used fluoride to neutralize their enemy’s will to resist—and that source was Walter Huss’s friend, the ubiquitous Ken Goff who I’ve started to think of as the Forrest Gump of Cold War American fascism.

In June of 1957 Goff sought to ride the wave of rising opposition to fluoridation by inserting himself into the national conversation with a blockbuster affidavit. Goff claimed that back when he was a Communist in 1939 he was told firsthand that the Russians used fluoride as a tranquilizer in prison camps and would soon deploy it in the US to “bring about a spirit of lethargy in the nation” so as to facilitate the triumph of Communism. Goff had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1939 and he implied in this 1957 affidavit that he had shared this information back then. So while, as we’ve seen, Goff’s fellow fascists had been promoting the idea that fluoride was part of the international Jewish/Communist conspiracy since 1951, Goff’s 1957 claim that he’d told HUAC about the Commies’ fluoride plot in 1939 supercharged and lent evidential credence to the idea that “fluoridation is a Red plot that is being covered up by the government.”

Goff’s affidavit became a ubiquitous proof text for anti-fluoride activists in localities across the country. After all, his sworn testimony had appeared in the Congressional Record! How could anyone argue with that? I’ve found scores of stories in local newspapers where angry anti-fluoride activists in the late 1950s and early 1960s made a scene at their city council meetings demanding to know why their elected officials were cooperating with the Communist fluoridation plot so clearly exposed in Kenneth Goff’s testimony which you can read in the Congressional Record.

Below is one representative example from North Adams, MA where a local anti-fluoride activist cites Goff’s affidavit as proof. My favorite part of this story is when anti-fluoride spokeswoman “Mrs. Alberti,” a frequent writer of letters to the editor, complained in the hearing about the local paper because “You can’t write an article…without them coming back at you. I’m getting a little bit out of control about that.” How dare a newspaper editor point it out when she’d said something inaccurate in one of her letters!?!?

My least favorite part of this episode, however, is that Mrs. Alberti got her way. The city council tabled the motion to fluoridate the municipality’s water, despite a poll taken a few years earlier showing overwhelming public support for the measure. As any modern day book banning Mom for Liberty can tell you, being loud, angry, and “conservative” at a public meeting is often an effective way to achieve your minoritarian political goals.

North Adams [MA] Transcript, 26 February 1958.

Goff’s affidavit was cited as a proof text not just by right wing cranks who wrote weekly letters to the editor of their local newspapers. Even the blue-blooded Daughters of the American Revolution got in on the act in 1958. The syndicated Drew Pearson column below was published in scores of newspapers across the country and did much to further the “look at these anti-fluoride wackos” attitude that marked much of the mainstream press coverage of the movement. It’s worth noting that Pearson used only ad hominem ridicule and name calling (“rabble rouser”) to contest Goff’s claim.

Deseret News and Salt Lake Telegram, 16 April 1958.

The Cincinnati Enquirer (screenshot below) was one of the few newspapers I found that directly debunked Goff’s ludicrous claim. Indeed, anyone who took the time to look at the 1939 Congressional Record would find that Goff’s testimony said nothing about fluoride. Goff, a con man and a sociopathic liar, had almost certainly made up the story about Russians and fluoride in 1957 as a way to garner more attention (and money) for himself. It seems to have worked.

Even though the Cincinnati paper got the story right, note how their headline doesn’t say “Fluoride Foes Falsely Claim it is a Red Plot,” but rather passes no judgment on the veracity of the anti-fluoride camp’s claims. “On one hand we have the entire medical and scientific community saying fluoride is safe, while on the other hand we have a few antisemitic fabulists who claim on the basis of fabricated evidence that it is a Communist plot. Who’s to say what the takeaway should be?”

Cincinnati Enquirer, 17 October 1960

There seems to have been a significant overlap between the sorts of people who read periodicals that spoke positively of antisemitic racists like Kenneth Goff, and the sorts of people who wrote anti-fluoride letters to the editor of their local newspaper. While most editors printed such Goff-citing letters without comment, some chose to append a note pointing out that “the Communist bit is obviously ridiculous.”

Lincoln [NE] Star, 31 March 1961.

I’ll leave you with one final example of a person citing Goff to “prove” that fluoridation was a communist plot. This one has particular relevance for readers of Rightlandia because it takes place in 1964 in Albany, Oregon where Goff had recently spoken and where some high school students had shown up to protest. I wrote about that episode in the most recent Rightlandia newsletter.

The Everyday Antifascists who pushed back against Walter Huss, Episode 1

Leonard Kuske served on the Albany City Council from 1963 to 1966, and one of his marquee issues was fluoridation. He was also a firm believer in Kenneth Goff’s testimony.

[Albany, OR] Greater Oregon, 11 September 1964.

This was just one of over a dozen anti-fluoride pieces Kuske wrote for Albany newspapers over the years as he continued his battle against the evils of fluoridation. Albany eventually voted to fluoridate its water in 1968 and Kuske never relented in his opposition. In 1974 he wrote a letter to the editor claiming that a public hearing about fluoride would make “the Watergate mess look like a midget in comparison.” The specific horrors of what exactly such an investigation would uncover was left to the reader’s imagination.

Albany Democrat-Herald, 20 May 1974.

The spirit of Leonard Kuske still lives on in Albany apparently, because in the spring of 2022 city councilor Matilda Novak unsuccessfully pushed to remove fluoride from the city’s water supply.

And Novak isn’t just any old city council member. She’s a former believer in the Qanon conspiracy (she now thinks it’s a “psyop”) who at a city council meeting this spring made an antisemitic speech in opposition to the city flying a pride flag. The screenshot below is from the text of a paywalled article in the Albany Democrat-Herald about the incident.

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In the 1960s Albany had a far right Republican city councilor who opposed fluoridation and promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories. In 2022-3 Albany had a far right Republican city councilor who opposed fluoridation and promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories. Albany is also currently home to JoRae Perkins, the Qanon devotee and anti-vaxxer who has been the Republican candidate for US Senate in the past two elections. Those continuities aside, it’s important to note that Perkins lost in both general elections by an almost 20 point margin, Albany’s water has been fluoridated since 1968, and the city flew a Pride flag during June of this year despite Novak’s objection.

Albany, like all places, contains multitudes. But one significant strand in the mosaic that is Albany’s (and Oregon’s, and America’s) political culture is a conspiratorial far right imaginary convinced that “we, the good people” are beset by nefarious, even “Satanic,” forces that can not be reasoned or compromised with, but which must be fought against with every fiber of one’s being if America is to be saved.

In this one and a half minute video, we see Tom McCall in 1969 eloquently and (ultimately) fruitlessly urging the state legislature to pass a bill facilitating and funding the addition of fluoride to municipal water supplies across the state. He bemoaned the outsized influence of “a minority of activists [who have] blown up a storm of unscientific evidence to distort perspective and paralyze progress.” I don’t think McCall fully grasped the scale and coordinated nature of the network of activists he was pitted against. Nor did he appreciate just how corrosive and effective anti-fluoride propaganda had been.

Just as the anti-vaccine propaganda and the wider world of Covid conspiracies surrounding it have had real world consequences in the form of lower vaccine uptake and organized resistance to common sense public health measures, the anti-fluoride movement of the 1950s (which was especially vocal and influential in Oregon) had consequences as well. The most concrete impact can be seen in the fact that Oregon ranks 49th in the country for the percentage of residents who have access to fluoridated water. Only 26% of Oregonians drink fluoridated water, while the national average is 73%. Who knows how many thousands of Oregonians have had to cope with tooth decay (and its many attendant negative health effects) which could have easily been avoided by consuming fluoridated water when they were young?

This is what I mean when I say there are reasons to stop laughing at the anti-fluoride fanatics and start taking them seriously as efficacious political actors.

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For a fuller account of the anti-fluoride movement that talks about the elements in the movement that I didn’t focus on here, I highly recommend this brief article by Jesse Hicks as well as chapter 2 of this 2013 book.

1. I learned this concept from historian Joseph Fronczak, whose new book on the history of antifascism and democracy in the 1930s is very much worth reading.

2. The Courtney’s are grievously understudied and underappreciated as key figures in the history of the American right. The best discussion of the Courtneys is in John Huntington’s excellent 2021 book Far Right Vanguard.