I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 25the Pacific Northwest. Obama visited the Seattle area last October, and in a speech to a Democratic
Party rally at Bellevue Community College, he mentioned that his mother attended Mercer Island
High School before moving on to Hawaii. In Dreams, Obama wrote that the family moved to
Seattle “long enough for my mother to finish high school.”’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007)
In reality, Ann Dunham started out as something of a bluestocking, a nonconformist and radical
who was profoundly ill-at-ease with the superficial normalcy of the Eisenhower years. She was a
left liberal, a feminist and a parlor atheist. The Dunham family moved to the Seattle area in the mid-
1950s, and it was there that Ann Dunham attended Mercer Island High School, where not just the
existentialists Sartre and Kierkegaard, but even “The Communist Manifesto” were in the
curriculum. Coming as she did from a heterodox and nonconformist family, it is not surprising to
find Ann Dunham described as having been both a communist sympathizer and a liberal. Obama
thus qualifies in some sense as a red diaper baby.
Madelyn and Stanley, originally Methodist and Baptist respectively, along with their daughter
joined the East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue, Washington. ‘“In the 1950s, this was
sometimes known as ‘the little Red church on the hill,” said Peter Luton, the church’s senior
minister, referring to the effects of McCarthyism. Skepticism, the kind that Stanley embraced and
passed on to his daughter, was welcomed here.’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007) Ann Dunham
actively embraced the cause of skepticism and freethinking. ‘“She touted herself as an atheist, and it
was something she’d read about and could argue,” said Maxine Box, who was Dunham’s best friend
in high school. “She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking
about things that the rest of us hadn’t.”’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007) Ann Dunham also
showed a lively interest in international politics, quite possibly with a tendency to sympathize with
the Moscow line: ‘“If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley
would know about it first,” said Chip Wall, who described her as “a fellow traveler.... We were
liberals before we knew what liberals were.”’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007) “Fellow traveler”
is a term used during the McCarthy era to describe a communist sympathizer.
The “fellow traveler” issue became prominent at Mercer Island High School when Ann was
studying there, thanks to one of the anti-Communist witch hunts of the House Committee on Un-
American Activities, the infamous HUAC. ‘In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school
board, John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he
had been a member of the Communist Party. At Mercer High School, two teachers — Val Foubert
and Jim Wichterman — generated regular parental thunderstorms by teaching their students to
challenge societal norms and question all manner of authority. Foubert, who died recently, taught
English. His texts were cutting edge: “Atlas Shrugged,” “The Organization Man,” “The Hidden
Persuaders,” “1984” and the acerbic writings of H.L. Mencken.’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27,
2007) As we can see, there is nothing communist about these texts, which are variously libertarian,
British intelligence, foundation-funded, and simple muckraking, but Foubert and Wichterman must
have loomed as a new Lenin-Trotsky or Stalin-Mao duo in the provincial imaginations of the local
parents. ‘Wichterman taught philosophy. The hallway between the two classes was known as
“anarchy alley,” and students pondered the challenging notions of Wichterman’s teachings,
including such philosophers as Sartre and Kierkegaard. He also touched the societal third rail of the
1950s: He questioned the existence of God. And he didn’t stop there.’ (Chicago Tribune, March 27,
2007)
With Stanley always looking for better opportunities, the family moved to Hawaii. Ann Dunham
“began classes at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and shortly after that...had fallen in love with a