Google Honors Zora Neale Hurston, Conservative Writer from Florida

Tuesdays Google doodle honors writer Zora Neale Hurston, who was born on Jan. 7 1891. While shes best remembered for her literary works, including Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston was also a staunch conservative, especially in the last decade of her life. Hurston was an outspoken critic of communism but also of the federal government and American intervention overseas. She was, despite her reputation on civil rights, a skeptic of federal integration, writing a letter to the Orlando Sentinel back in 1955 about her concerns over the U.S. Supreme Courts decision on Brown v. Board of Education.

An opponent of FDR and the New Deal, Hurston wrote approvingly of Robert Tafts bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952 and eventually got on the bandwagon. While Mr. Republican lost the nomination to Dwight Eisenhower and never followed his fathers footsteps to the White House, Taft was the closest thing conservatives had to standard bearer at the national level between Calvin Coolidges triumphs in the 1920s and Barry Goldwaters nomination in 1964.

Hurstons reputation has grown since her death in 1960 but her opposition to the growth of the federal government and her support of conservatives like Taft have generally been forgotten.