The John Birch Society

From Before the Storm

the room in diamond fonnation, an old Communist trick to give the appear-
ance of greater number to manufacture acclaim for their speakers. The next
day, the surprising degree of conservatism among college students was widely
noted in newspapers around the country. Murray Kempton would write in The
Progressive, “We must assume that the conservative revival is the youth move-
ment of the ’6os.” And another wave of disaffected young collegians read the
reports and signed on with the battalions‘Ban'y Goldwater was not sure he
wanted to lead.
The day Young Americans for Freedom rallied in New York, an issue of Time
reporting on a group that made YAF look tame found its way to mailboxes.
The John Birch Society, apparently, believed General Dwight David
Eisenhower to be a secret agent of the Intemational Communist Conspiracy.
The group’s absolute leader was a man named Robert Welch; there was a gov-
erning council (including Manion and several of his Americans for Goldwater
stalwarts, and three past presidents of the National Association of Manufactur-
ers), but it was said that its main purpose was to choose a successor should
Welch be assassinated by Communists. Every year the Society published a
“scoreboard” of how far down the road to complete Communist subversion
country was; the United States was 50 to 60 percent, Iceland 80 to I00
According to Time, the John Birch Society was “a goose step away
formation of goon squads.”
To congressmen, the eerily uniform flood of letters they had been receiv-
ing calling for the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren
finally made sense: that was one of the Society’s four goals—along with saving
HUAC, abolishing the income tax, and banning the sale of goods manufactured
in Communist countries. The media coverage opened the eyes of community
groups whose meetings were being disrupted by unfamiliar faces shouting
“republic!” every time someone called America a “democracy” (it was Society
doctrine that “democracy” meant rule by mob, and Society tactics to press the
case through heckling) and the eyes of PTA leaders who had learned to rue
sudden spikes in membership: Welch urged members to join the local PTA and
“go to work to take it over.”
By April of I961 you had to have been living in a cave not to know about
Robert Welch and his John Birch Society. The daily barrage of reports left
Americans baffled and scared at this freakish power suddenly revealed in their
midst. It also left some eager to leam where they could sign up.
Robert Harold Winbome Welch was born in I899 on a farm in Chowan
County, North Carolina. His people were simple farmers and Southern Baptist
' ‘sters. Young Robert was a genius. He left home to enroll at the state uni-
 at twelve then eamed a commission to the Naval Academy when he
verslgalventeen. He decided he wanted to be a writer. The Navy being over-
Zgfzked with officers at the close of the Great War, he was let go. But his nerve
failed him. He enrolled at the Harvard Law School instead—then quit to
quickly raise the means to win the hand of the daughter of a wealthy Akron,
Q1110, businessman. His brother had a candy business outside Boston. So candy
it would be. _
Welch specialized in sales. The frustrated writer’s first book, in I941, The
Road to Salesmanship, proclaimed selling a profession more important than
law or medicine. “Instead of the bread and circuses handed out to idle mobs by
politicians,” salesmen drove progress itself by inducing Americans to want
more things and then to strive to better themselves in order to earn enough to
buy them. Wartime experience as an Office of Price Administration consultant
for the candy industry hardened Welch’s conservatism; lobbying as chair of the
Washington Committee of the National Confectioners Association (he was
named Candy Industry Man of the Year in 1947) petrified it. He masteredthe
signal vocation of America’s domestic Cold Warriors: compiling, organizing,
and cross-referencing files—who had belonged to what? who had been where?
who knew whom‘? He devoured history, newspapers, socialist organs; and
became convinced (incredulous that anyone would want to deliver more power
into the hands of an all-powerful central government) that Westem Europe’s
welfare states were products of a Communist conspiracy—and that the con-
spiracy was gaining ground here, too. He began taking longer and longer trips
abroad, winning audiences with men like Chiang Kai-shek and Konrad Ade-
nauer. In 1950 Welch ran for the Republican nomination for lieutenant gover-
nor of Massachusetts. He declared his platform the United States Constitution.
He came in fourth. Elective office would not be his métier.
‘ The next April, President Truman relieved General MacArthur of his com-
inand in Korea. There followed an unprecedented outpouring of popular emo-
tion for the general—he was, said one Republican congressman, “a great hunk
Of God in the flesh”—-and a triumphant national tour. Alongside McCarthy’s
Ongoing inquisition, it marked a new tendency on the American right: it was
that much easier to believe you were doing patriotic work even-—perhaps espe-
bially-—if you defied the govemment. In I951 Welch traveled New England
decrying the aid and comfort Dean Acheson’s State Department was providing
the Communists. In one town a listener wrote a critical open letter to a local
Wasn’t McCarthyism fast becoming a political liability for ‘the
Party? Welch, compelled to answer, spent the next two weeks in a
stupor.

and

By the time of the John Birch Society’s sudden national coming-out in the
spring of 1961, they had 20,000 members (or 60,000, or 100,000; eStiInates
van'ed—-but even 20,000 was greater than the membership of the Communist
Party of the United States in its i93os heyday). An office down the road from
Welch’s fieldstone~and-frame home in the Boston suburb of Belmont employed
some twenty-eight full-time staffers and an equal number of volunteers, who
dumped $4,000 worth of mail each week at the Belmont post office next door.
An Iowa pen company gave an expensive fountain model as a premium to each
new member. Centralia, Missouri, was a virtual Birch fiefdom; the owner of
the factory that employed half the town’s workforce made membership practi-
cally a condition for advancement. By I962 Welch was raising over a million
dollars a year. '
Since McCarthy’s day, liberals had been wondering why apparently intel-
ligent people could believe that the wrong kind of politics in the United States
would inexorably hasten its takeover by the USSR. It was concluded that these
were people who feared for their status in a rapidly changing, complex urban
society, who pined for a simpler past (they were for the “repeal of industrial-
ism,” said Commentary, which was odd, since most Birch leaders were
industrialists). The cognoscenti neglected the simplest answer: people were
afraid of internal Communist takeover because the govemment had been
telling them to be afraid—at least since I947, when George F. Kennan argued
in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the founding document of U.S. Cold War
doctrine, excerpted in Reader’s Digest, that “exhibitions of indecision, dis-
unity, and intemal disintegration within this country have an exhilarating effect
on the whole Communist movement.” Through the 1960s, AFL-CIO president
George Meany loved to flatter rank-and-file members that they were the first
line of resistance against the Communists: in Czechoslovakiafhe said, “they
controlled the trade union movement, and within seven days they controlled
the country.” Attomey General Robert Kennedy told a I961 press conference,
“Communist espionage here in this country is more active than it has ever
been.” (There had been none to speak of since World War II.) Army recruits
saw films like Red Nightmare, narrated by Jack Webb, which depicted an
ersatz American town deep within the Soviet interior where spies were suppos-
edly training in indigenous American arts like sipping sodas at drugstore foun-
tains in order to infiltrate the United States. You could no less avoid breathing
in a bit of paranoia in Cold War America, in fact, than you could soot in
Charles Dickens’s Manchester. Did Birchers and their ideological cognates
claim that dangerous “fallout” from nuclear testing was a hoax? So did the
Atomic Energy Commission, all through the 1950s. And it was the “discover-
ies". of the CIA chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, not Robert
Welch, that a KGB “Master Plan” allowed no Soviet to defect to the United
States except as a KGB double agent (thus bona fide Soviet defectors were
often kept naked in isolation in a brightly lit room and had to submit to cruel
fhrge-year interrogations to force them to give up their KGB secrets); and that
mere was a second, secret Kremlin inside the official Kremlin whose existence
could only be inferred because no one who had ever been inside it was ever
‘allowed beyond its walls.
It shouldn’t have been surprising that the John Birch Society was able to
win a membership in the tens of thousands in an officially encouraged atmo-
sphere of fear and suspicion. The John Birch Society was also a voice for con-
servatism—its motto was “Less govemment and more responsibility”—at a
time when the Republican Party was turning more liberal. At a time when a
housewife from suburban New York, Betty Friedan, was writing a book argu-
ing that the alienation and boredom of housewives was Amen'ca’s “problem
that has no name,” the Society gave housewives world-historic purpose to their
lives. (“I just don’t have time for anything,” one told a Time magazine inter-
viewer. “I’m fighting Communism three nights a week.”) And last but not
least, being a Bircher was fun. The fellowship was vouchsafed by the rule that
when a chapter grew bigger than two dozen, it was split in half—~the rationale
being that unwieldy chapters were easier for the Communists to infiltrate. The
groups’ main activity was monthly meetings in members’ living rooms (at
which the main activity might be watching a film of a lecture given by Welch,
who looked a bit like TV’s Mr. McGoo and, eerily, recited his interminable
talks from memory); and group members would carry out whatever sugges-
tions they cared to that were handed down in Welch’s monthly Bulletin. They
might write the director of the Boy Scouts to ask why the president of the
Communist-infiltrated National Council of Churches addressed the National
Jamboree; or they might send postcards to congressmen showing the map the
“Negro Soviet Republic” Communists proposed be carved out of the American
South in 1928. They might be asked to attend meetings of “Communist fronts”
like the ACLU to shout down “disloyal” speakers, or to urge their dentist and
the airlines to display National Review and Human Events on their magazine
racks, or to form a local chapter of a Birch front organization like Support Your
Local Police. And, most of all, members were instructed to keep informed by
reading books like Tito: Moscow ’s Trojan Horse and I Saw Poland Betrayed.
Welch could have remained obscure forever if not for his success. Disillu-
sionment with the GOP after Nixon’s 1960 defeat swelled the membership
rolls; by February of 1961 the John Birch Society was large enough that when
Welch wanted them to write their congressmen demanding the impeachment of Earl Warren for favoring civil libertarians over read-hunters, letters flooded into Capitol Hill. Enterprising reporters took note.