The amendment she proposed would codify state and local control of schools. Each state, it read, shall have “complete, absolute, direct and indirect control of all schools and training” within its borders. Secondly, “All federal educational and training appropriations funded by the Congress shall be allocated, as the states’ agreed-upon formula—per student, direct to the states and local school districts without any kind of federal control, except for reports on the expenditures.” Section three mandated that “No more than one-half of one percent of all funds for education and training appropriated by the US Congress shall be used for administration and State-Federal Relations in any department of the federal government.”20 “I think this is going to save our country,” Phoebe declared. “The states are closer to the people; they understand their problems.”21
It should be noted that this whole debate was taking place within the context of the country’s turmoil over civil rights, desegregation, and efforts to ensure racial balance within the schools. “States rights” and “local control” functioned as euphemisms for states’ desires to maintain segregation. A constitutional amendment, in this context, was an attempted end run around legislative and judicial enforcement of civil rights.
While in Washington, Phoebe sought the assistance of Senator Everett Dirksen to press for “the enactment of a Constitutional Amendment that would clearly define the powers of the States and local School Districts. It is my opinion that drastic actions must be taken now to quell the unrest that exists in our country today. We are committed to shed the blood of our youth around the world to provide self-determination to everyone, yet, here at home our present leaders are gradually whittling away at all pretense of self-determination in our educational system.” Dirksen’s reply reminded her that the passage of an amendment required a two-thirds vote by the Senate, which, he said, would be unlikely given the “rather close vote” on the education bill.22 The vote to which Dirksen referred was the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), passed in 1965, which funded primary and secondary education. Opposition to federal aid to the schools was based primarily on the contention that federal aid meant federal control. To mollify these critics, the act as passed explicitly stated that there was to be no federal control over the curriculum, selection of books, or personnel of any school aided by the ESEA. After another bitter partisan battle in 1966, Congress added language prohibiting the federal government from requiring the transfer of students or teachers to overcome racial imbalance, but left intact the government’s authority to withhold federal funds from schools that did not comply with the non-discrimination requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Again, during another contentious reauthorization process in 1967, though Congress did not directly address the racial issue, it did rewrite some provisions to expressly give most of the control for the dispersal of funds to state education agencies.23
Phoebe had been following these developments closely, even campaigning for the approval of the ESEA and the similar Vocational Education Act of 1963, which authorized a major expansion and redirection of vocational education.24 But, as she complained in numerous letters over the years, “The Acts were passed, but the ink on the Presidents’ [sic] signature was hardly dry before ‘guidelines’ were issued by HEW. First, to apply only in the South, using the double-school system as an excuse, but with the full intention of eventually covering the entire country.”25 Again, the primary issue here was school desegregation. The guidelines referenced included the mandate for “categorical aid” geared primarily to upgrade the education of low-income pupils and the provision, based upon Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that no federal funds would be expended in support of segregated schools. These limitations imposed upon the separate states’ total control of the schools within their borders amounted to, in Phoebe’s way of thinking, Soviet-style “thought-control.”26
Phoebe left Washington sometime after writing Dirksen in mid-1967. Aviation journalist H. Glenn Buffington gathered a stream of forwarded and returned letters to various friends and acquaintances of Phoebe’s that help to account for her wanderings over the next few years. After he wrote to her in Washington seeking her permission to publish an article about her, Phoebe responded from Montgomery, Alabama, several months later, but when he tried again to reach her there, his letter was returned with a note by the occupant, Lillian Fields, saying that Phoebe had left Montgomery, and was heading for Florida. She supplied the Florida address but noted that she felt sure Phoebe was no longer there.27 Phoebe apparently caught a bus to Florida where she worked as a companion for an elderly woman for a time in Jacksonville before relocating to the home of an old friend, Marie Ryan in Silver Springs. “She arrived in Silver Springs all bedraggled and worn out from bus travel,” reported one friend to another. “Her stay there was brief. Miss Ryan was, herself, old and ill. While there, Phoebe received money and clothes from her friend in Miami. She would not accept the money, but did take the clothes.”28
Phoebe spent some time during the summer in Atlanta, then headed north to visit an old acquaintance, Richard Cornell, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Meanwhile, Buffington exchanged letters with Percy McDonald in early 1969, asking if he had any information about her whereabouts. McDonald replied that he didn’t know where Phoebe was, adding:
Phoebe had accumulated some money and left a very satisfactory job in Washington to come down here and against advice of her friends bought a plantation and lost every cent. She has been practically destitute every [sic] since that time. The last time I heard anything about her was from a lawyer in Jacksonville, Florida who wanted to hire her for a companson [sic] for his mother. When I knew Phoebe she was OK, and I told him I had not heard from her in quite a number of years. I do not know whether she secured the job or not.29
In fact, by that time Phoebe had already moved on. She placed an ad in the Chicago Tribune: “Situations Wanted-Women. Companion to elderly lady. I will live in, drive, light housework, travel. $50 a week.” She worked for three months as a companion in Chicago, then moved to Cleveland, living presumably in the home of a friend for a time and then for several months at the Quad Hall Hotel in the city.30 Buffington finally caught up with her there. She replied to him:
I am pretty much on-the-go, still fighting for a more practical approach in starting the youth of America toward a goal that can bring them contentment and happiness. It has been a long, hard, rough and rugged road, but I think the people are beginning to see the futility of listening to the professors and young “diploma-holders” and their philosophies. Their thinking that money will solve everything just is NOT true. If we used the funds already appropriated to train people, instead of for high-salaried personnel in the federal government, we would have an entirely different outlook from our youth. I have spent the 1960’s talking with hundreds of people representing all sections of the country, and feel that I really know how they think. They are fed-up!!! … The great mistake that many of the so-called leaders make is that, people are “dumb.” They are years ahead of the leaders. Well, anyway, there is a beginning of a little light on the horizon. Thank you again for remembering me.31
After he heard from her, Buffington contacted Glenn Messer in Birmingham, telling him he had found Phoebe and urging her old friend to contact her. “We believe Phoebe has been having a rather rough time of it lately, so I imagine she would be happy to hear from some of her old-time friends.”32
At about the same time, Louise Thaden flew into Memphis asking about Phoebe. The Press-Scimitar’s aviation writer, Orville Hancock, wrote that the latest word received from Phoebe was from Florida, but she had reportedly moved to California. “If anyone knows Phoebe Omlie’s whereabouts, the aviation community would like to know how to reach her.”33 Phoebe later contacted Louise from Cleveland, saying she’d been busy working on political issues for free, and would stop now and then to take odd jobs until she had saved enough to start again. She was meeting lots of folks, she said, who
were urging her to write about these issues. She had come to Ohio “because there has been so many ‘school bond’ failures. The people are just fed up with the squandering and waste in education funds that have already been appropriated.”34
While she had been traveling about, Phoebe told Buffington, she had been working on a book, but had been unable to find a publisher who would contract to market it “the way I think it should be handled, a direct-mail distribution.”35 She initially called her book S.O.S.: Save Our Schools from Federal Control, but changed the title to The Silent Majority Speaks Out, after Nixon’s characterization of patriotic Americans who did not join in public demonstrations. Based upon her “personal contacts with thousands of people throughout the entire country during the past ten years and from actual experiences of the author,” the book represented the culmination of her quest.
“When I resigned from a federal government job in Washington,” she wrote in her foreword, “I willingly gave up my future security to help alert the American people to the threat of the federal government to brain-wash the youth of the country through the public schools. Hundreds of letters poured in from every State in the country thanking me for trying to alert the people to what was taking place.”36 Her “introductory” set the tone for the work. “This book will concentrate on why it is necessary that the people take a good look at the bureaucrats in Washington, how they want to control the schools in our country, to ‘brain-wash’ the youth to accept federally-controlled ideologies and philosophies in every phase of government.”37 In addition to taking on the “ultra-liberals” and “intellectual morons” who misled people about the need for a college education at the cost of vocational training, she also raised alarms about “foreign ideologies” infiltrating education at all levels and posited that “much of the trouble in the schools today is caused by the gradual breakdown of the homes, which has been engineered psychologically by those who are out to capture the country from within.”38 In the ten chapters of her manifesto, she also critiqued Social Security, the Alliance for Progress, government funding of the transportation system, as well as the “one-worlders” and the United Nations. All of these were part of a conspiracy to crush independence and individualism, leading to “the conquering of the minds of the masses.”39
Throughout the manuscript, she defined the development of aviation as the epitome of rugged individualism and entrepreneurship, and its takeover by the federal bureaucracy as the forerunner of the decline and fall of America. Her concern about excessive regulation of civil aviation, combined with her distaste for forced racial integration in the schools, had evolved, in the overheated anticommunism climate of the period, into an obsession with looming federal control over every aspect of American life.
Her manuscript concluded with a proposal for a Constitutional Convention to create a new Bill of Rights that included provisions to ensure unfettered state control of schools, welfare programs, and voter requirements; a balanced federal budget; limits on all taxes to 25 percent of the Gross National Product and the return of 10 percent of all income taxes to the states. Congress members would be forbidden to hold outside employment or take expense-paid junkets; all Supreme Court decisions would be limited to “Constitutional issues (no legislative actions).” Federal civil service retirement was to be placed under the rules and regulations of Social Security and “the United States shall remain on the existing system of measurements” (a reference to her continued hostility to the adoption of the nautical mile).40
Phoebe designed the cover and guidelines for publication. She estimated the printing costs for her 150-page paperback, including mail solicitations and a royalty of six cents per volume, at forty-nine cents each. The cover price of $1.00 would result in a net profit for a million copies of $510,000.41 She repeatedly sent out the manuscript with her guidelines for publication to conservative publishing houses, beginning in 1968 and continuing through the mid-1970s, and was just as repeatedly rejected.42 Many rejected it without comment, but one who did offer a critique was managing editor Donald Graff of the Newspaper Enterprise Association in Cleveland.
The major problem, briefly, is that it comes through more as an expression of highly personal opinion, a lengthy letter to the editor, than as a coherently organized and thoroughly documented expose, which is apparently what you are attempting … You have stated a case—or a number of cases, but not made one … A guarantee of a million sales would require quite a bit in the way of advance orders to make it convincing. Bibles and cookbooks sell in that range, but there are few, if any, other such sure things.43
When her efforts to lure a publisher were unavailing, she drew up a plan to form her own company, to be called Grass-Roots America Press, to publish and distribute her book. The press would be incorporated for $20,000, ten shares at $2,000 per share. Her plan called for mass mailings to school boards, PTA organizations, “dedicated teachers throughout the country,” the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and “many, many small groups of concerned citizens who have joined together to save the public schools from federal control.” She predicted “a conservative estimate for the first year’s publication would be over a million copies if the above mentioned memberships were properly alerted.” There is no evidence she ever followed through on this plan.44
Despite the difficulties in doing so in the midst of her peripatetic life, Phoebe kept up a lively correspondence with a broad array of political figures, editors, aviation writers, and journalists, as well as with contemporaries like Louise Thaden, Pancho Barnes, Bobbi Trout, Jimmy Doolittle, Cliff Henderson, and Karl Voelter, who ran an air service in Miami.45 Many of them could not understand why she was spending all her energies on political issues at the expense of writing her memoirs. She responded that it was far more important to find a way to deter the infiltration of foreign ideology into the schools that could ultimately destroy the American system. She told Louise, in a typical retort, “This is, probably, the most crucial time in our history—whether we will sink into socialistic—bureaucratic—dictatorship or stay in the pattern laid down by our forefathers in the Constitution.”46
Louise Thaden was her most constant correspondent. They exchanged numerous letters about the “old days,” and Louise repeatedly urged Phoebe to write down all she knew before it was too late. To aid in this effort, she suggested Phoebe contact aviation writer Philip Wendell about assisting her with her writing. Phoebe relocated to Wendell’s home in Burr Oak, Michigan, in mid-1970. When she insisted that she wanted to publish the Silent Majority book first, Wendell told her she had it backward. “We’re going to need exposure to the Omlie tome to really sell the education tome,” he told her, emphasizing that the autobiography must come first because it is “the springboard … For Crysakes, finish it!”47 Wendell also expressed his frustration to Buffington:
To the best of my knowledge, Phoebe has not attacked the manuscript one bit since she finished page 134 [with Swanee Taylor]. She simply won’t let anything interfere with her pursuit of her first interest, the publication of a 10-year work on solving the nation’s Education mess … Her autobiography is a solid, tender, commercial seller—so far. BUT she’s covered only the first four flying years from 1920 to 1925. As she says, “That leaves 10,000 pages to go.” Her funds are low but her spirits aren’t. I’d like to figure a way of getting her back up here in a warm cubicle for the winter, typing. It would call for a grant of some kind; I can’t afford the pleasure and she won’t listen to charity.48
Wendell was in poor health and exasperated with trying to work with Phoebe, who accused him of not listening to her.49 He suggested that Robert McComb, another early aviation pilot, then living in Fort Wayne, Indiana, might be a better writing companion. So Phoebe relocated once again. McComb later revealed what happened between them in a letter to another mutual friend and pilot, Bobbi Trout. He wrote that he thought that Phoebe had come to Fort Wayne to seek his help in shaping the final draft of her autobiography, but soon learned
that she wanted his help in “promoting, underwriting, funding, finding a sponsor” for her Silent Majority manuscript. He found her to be “very guarded in her manner of revealing the subject-matter. She carefully weighed every word before and as she spoke.” After three weeks, she finally allowed him to read a few excerpts. From those, “I had gathered just enough information to realize the entire text was perhaps too controversial” for him to find anyone willing to underwrite the publication. He told her he knew “no one willing to stand beside her and share the brunt of any repercussion which might result.” McComb told Trout that “the best thing I could think to do to help Phoebe was to get her acquainted with my nephew who was in the state legislature at that time and possibly make some worthwhile connections—going that route—to further her quest toward getting published.”50
Phoebe moved to Indianapolis in April 1971 to be nearer the seat of power, hoping she could accomplish through the political system that which she cared so passionately about. She wrote to friends that she had come to the capitol and intended to “headquarter here for some time, as it is in the middle of an area that is very important in helping solve the school situation.”51 She moved into the York Hotel, a fading downtown transient hotel, renting a room for $21 a week.52 Louise wrote plaintively to Phoebe, saying she hoped that her friend “won’t get lost again,” adding that it was too bad she didn’t settle in Burr Oak where people “are pulling for you with sincere interest …. Do you stay with itching feet or wouldn’t putting down (even shallow) roots have merit?”53
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