Max Rafferty

Max Rafferty

Max Rafferty

Maxwell Lewis Rafferty, Jr. was a renowned California educator whose teaching/educational career was incubated in three of San Benardino County’s smallest, remote and most obscure communities.
Known as Max Rafferty, he was born in May 1917 in New Orleans to Maxwell Rafferty, Sr. (1886-1967), and the former DeEtta Frances Cox (c. 1892-1972). He was one of two children, his sister being the actress and pin-up girl Frances Rafferty, a co-star of the CBS television sitcom December Bride. Rafferty spent most of his childhood in Sioux City, Iowa, where his sister was born in 1922. The family relocated to California in 1931.
Rafferty graduated in 1933 from Beverly Hills High School. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1938.
Rafferty was not at home, exactly in the ivory towers of academia and on the campus at Westwood, which he considered to be a hotbed of radicalism. While an undergraduate at UCLA, Rafferty “took umbrage at many of the things” in the college newspaper, the Daily Bruin, “particularly the editorial page,” editor Stanley Rubin recalled in 1970, “to the point of charging into the office and physically attacking me.” In 1937 Rafferty wrote a letter to The Los Angeles Times in which he described The Bruin as “one of the most prejudiced newspapers on the Pacific Coast” and complained that the Bruin’s “radicalism is not so funny if it keeps you from getting a job.”
Rafferty’s first job, during World War II, was as a classroom teacher in the Trona Unified School District in the Mojave Desert at the extreme northwest tip of San Bernardino County near the gateway to Death Valley.
In 1944, he married the former Frances Longman, and the couple had three children, Kathleen, Dennis, and Eileen.
His detestation of UCLA did not prevent him from returning there to get his Master of Arts degree, which he achieved in 1949. While attending UCLA he was a member, and president, of the Sigma Pi fraternity chapter. A few years later he would switch to UCLA’s rival, the University of Southern California, to get his Ed.D. in 1955.
After World War II, Rafferty became vice-principal, principal, and school superintendent in various California school districts, including Big Bear High School in Big Bear Lake from 1948 to 1951. He was the superintendent at sparsely populated Saticoy in Ventura County from 1951 to 1955, Needles from 1955 to 1961, and moved on to upscale La Cañada in Los Angeles County in 1961 and 1962.
Later, when he was a newspaper columnist, Rafferty noted with nostalgia how his first teaching jobs in California had been the most personally satisfying of his career.
In 1962, he was elected to the nonpartisan office of California education superintendent, defeating Los Angeles school board president Ralph Richardson. He held this office for two terms, from 1963 to 1971.
Rafferty established himself politically as a “far right” reactionary. He earned the moniker of “America’s outspoken antiprogressive educator.” His reputation grew beyond the Golden State, as he attacked busing, sex education and the “New Left.” He began writing and publishing books to propound his views. His books, Suffer, Little Children and What They Are Doing to Your Children, lambasted the dual concepts of liberalism and progressive education He urged a “return to the fundamentals” in education. Schools should, he insisted, focus on phonics, memorization and drill; utilize American history and children’s classics in teaching from the early grades forward; and drop psychology and “life adjustment” approaches from education. As California’s school superintendent he issued a dictum from on high that several contemporary books such as Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and Leroi Jones’s Dutchman were obscene, and he sought to revoke the teaching certificate of any teacher who used such works. He sought to have the Dictionary of American Slang removed from school libraries.
Politically, he was known as an “articulate spokesman for the far right” who had a “nationwide reputation as a Fourth-of-July style orator and writer.”
In 1968 Rafferty challenged and defeated incumbent Republican Senator Thomas H. Kuchel, whom Rafferty branded as a “moderate,” in the Republican primary election. This has been described as “one of the biggest primary upsets in Senate history.” Rafferty ran as a conservative, overcoming Kuchel among “red meat” Republicans. He then had to face Alan Cranston, the former state controller in the general election. Cranston nearly thirty years before had published a verbatim translation of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in an effort toward cutting edge scholarship, which prompted a copyright infringement lawsuit from Hitler’s publisher, which was upheld by a New Jersey Court. Thus, the 1968 California Senatorial Election was seen as a referendum on intellectual honesty in scholarship.
In the 1968 campaign, Rafferty opined that those caught in the act of looting should be shot. He urged quick, stiff punishment for crimes, saying “Retribution is what I’m talking about, friends, and ever since we crawled out of caves, retribution has followed wrongdoing as the night does the day.” He promised never to vote for higher taxes or for foreign aid to “dictators who hate us,” and he criticized judges who “coddle criminals,” saying he could not have voted to confirm any of the then Supreme Court Justices.
Cranston won.
Two years later, in 1970, Rafferty failed in his bid for a third term as superintendent of public instruction, losing to Wilson Riles, the first African-American to be elected to statewide office in California and a Democrat in the nonpartisan race.
Rafferty then moved to Alabama to serve on the faculty at Troy University in Troy, Alabama, serving as Dean of Education from 1971 to 1981. In Birmingham, they loved the governor, George Wallace, whose defection from the Democratic Party in 1968 diverted much of the Dixiecrat vote to himself, a major factor in Richard Nixon’s defeat of Democrat Hubert Humphrey.
Rafferty jumped right into Alabama politics and in 1972, he campaigned for and served as a stand-in speaker for Wallace after the latter had reinvented himself as a Democrat and was seeking the Democratic nomination for U.S. President, until Wallace was felled by would-be assassin, Arthur Bremer in May of that year.
Rafferty was the author of several books on educational philosophy, including Practice and Trends in School Administration (1961), the previously-mentioned Suffer, Little Children (1962), What They Are Doing to Your Children (1964), and Max Rafferty on Education (1968). His newspaper column, “Dr. Max Rafferty”, was syndicated nationally. He was the recipient of the George Washington Honor Medal from the Freedoms Foundation.
Rafferty was named the Sorrell Chairman of Education at Troy University in 1981. In 1982 he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to a national advisory board on the financing of elementary and secondary education.
Rafferty was active in the Lions Club and Rotary International. He died on June 13, 1982, at age 65 when his car plunged off an earthen dam into a pond near Troy, Alabama.

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