Local responses to the controversy varied. The majority of the community (overwhelmingly Christian and Republican) found the Daily News article and our book review persuasive, and many began organizing to oppose what they viewed as yet another eruption of white supremacy in their own backyard. In fact, a number of them were proud veterans of the battle against the Aryan Nations only two years earlier in Coeur D’Alene . Ira Berlin’s credentials meant little, however, to some Idahoans who had already written off the last fifty years of historical scholarship on slavery as “abolitionist propaganda.” Douglas Wilson, one of the author’s of the now infamous pro-slavery booklet, actually dismissed Berlin publicly as an “abolitionist.” Efforts to discuss these differences only served again and again to clarify the chasm separating the two camps. Sincere invitations to dialogue and communication succeeded only in demonstrating that dialogue and communication made the problem worse. No one could remember anything quite like it.

In addition to marking out skirmish lines, the controversy made it clear that Douglas Wilson was more than just a local troublemaker and southern partisan. He had established two “Reformed” evangelical churches in town whose congregations, thanks to nationwide recruitment efforts, now represented 10 percent of Moscow ’s entire population. He had founded a k-12 school called “Logos” that taught history from a “Biblical Worldview” and an unaccredited college called “New Saint Andrews,” where he had installed himself as “Senior Fellow of Theology.” Other faculty members at the college included Wilson ’s son Nate, his brother Gordon, and son-in-law Ben. Wilson , it turned out, had cultivated an empire of “classical” schools based on a biblical worldview that included over 165 private academies around the country, all of which purchased educational materials published by his personal “Canon Press” in Moscow , Idaho , or affiliated “Veritas Press” in Lancaster , Pennsylvania . His empire of private academies paled, however, in comparison to his real passion for home-schooling. Wilson ’s view of slavery currently services thousands of home-school families around the country with materials published by Canon and Veritas Presses.

Information about Wilson ’s ninth annual “history conference” in February 2004 turned out to be the final straw for many residents. Wilson had scheduled himself as the keynote speaker, praising the southern racist ideologue R.L. Dabney, but he had also scheduled as co-speakers white supremacist League of the South co-founder Steve Wilkins and the anti-gay Tennessee minister George Grant, notorious for advocating the extermination of all homosexuals in his book Legislating Immorality.. University of Idaho students were especially outraged that the conference was surreptitiously scheduled to take place on their own campus in the Student Union Building. Wilson had apparently paid good money for the facility well in advance, and nobody had balked at taking it. Student anger, however, ultimately forced the president and provost of the University to issue a joint disclaimer of the event, which tried retroactively to take the moral high ground by denouncing efforts to “recast or minimize the evils of slavery.”