Max Rafferty
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Max Rafferty | |
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| In office 1963 – 1971 |
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| Preceded by | Roy E. Simpson |
| Succeeded by | Wilson C. Riles |
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| Born | May 9, 1917 New Orleans, Louisiana |
| Died | June 13, 1982 Alabama |
| Political party | Republican |
| Profession | Author & Teacher |
Maxwell Lewis Rafferty (born May 9, 1917, in New Orleans, Louisiana; died June 13, 1982, in Alabama) was an author, educator, and politician.
Rafferty spent most of his childhood in Sioux City, Iowa, before his family moved to California in 1931. He graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1933. Rafferty earned his bachelor of arts (1938), Master of Arts (1949) and Ph.D. (1955) from the University of California, Los Angeles. Rafferty was a career educator. His first job was as a teacher in the Trona Unified School District in the Mojave Desert portion of San Bernardino County, California during World War II. (During his Senate campaign later in life, in 1968, David Shaw, a young reporter for the Long Beach Independent who went on to a distinguished career at the Los Angeles Times, drove out to Trona and discovered that Rafferty had used a walking cane to avoid service in World War II and thrown the cane away after the victory dance, an incident which had become a local joke. That revelation and others in a five-part series written by Shaw damaged Rafferty's political image severely, because he had been campaigning as a super patriot and criticizing the young men who were beginning to oppose the Vietnam War, and the disclosures contributed to his sound defeat by former Senator Alan Cranston.) From Trona, after World War II Rafferty went on to jobs as vice-principal, principal, and school superintendent in various California schools. In 1962, he was elected to the nonpartisan office of Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of California. He held this office for two terms, from 1963 to 1971, after which time he became the Dean of Education at Troy State University in Alabama. His educational philosophy was one of back to basics, and he bragged that he "killed progressive education in California."
Rafferty was the author of a number of books on educational philosophy, including Suffer, Little Children (1963), What They Are Doing to Your Children (1964), and Max Rafferty on Education (1968). His newspaper column, "Dr. Max Rafferty", was syndicated nationally. Rafferty was the conservative Republican candidate for the U. S. Senate in 1968, having beaten Senator Thomas H. Kuchel, who he had excoriated as a "liberal", in the Republican primary. As mentioned above, Rafferty was defeated soundly in the general election by State Controller Alan Cranston. After his defeat in the Senate race, Rafferty was defeated in 1970 for re-election as Superintendent of Public Instruction by Wilson C. Riles, a liberal African American.
Rafferty died at the age of sixty-five when his car plunged off an earthen dam into a pond. His papers were donated to the Special Collections Department of the University of Iowa Libraries in Iowa City.
