The World of the John Birch Society

Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War

D. Mulloy

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780826519818
• eBook ISBN: 9780826519832
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As far as members of the hugely controversial John Birch Society were concerned, the Cold War revealed in stark clarity the loyalties and disloyalties of numerous important Americans, including Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Earl Warren. Founded in 1958 as a force for conservative political advocacy, the Society espoused the dangers of enemies foreign and domestic, including the Soviet Union, organizers of the US civil rights movement, and government officials who were deemed "soft" on communism in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Sound familiar? In The World of the John Birch Society, author D. J. Mulloy reveals the tactics of the Society in a way they've never been understood before, allowing the reader to make the connections to contemporary American politics, up to and including the Tea Party. These tactics included organized dissemination of broad-based accusations and innuendo, political brinksmanship within the Republican Party, and frequent doomsday predictions regarding world events. At the heart of the organization was Robert Welch, a charismatic writer and organizer who is revealed to have been the lifeblood of the Society's efforts.

The Society has seen its influence recede from the high-water mark of 1970s, but the organization still exists today. Throughout The World of the John Birch Society, the reader sees the very tenets and practices in play that make the contemporary Tea Party so effective on a local level. Indeed, without the John Birch Society paving the way, the Tea Party may have encountered a dramatically different political terrain on its path to power.

PART I

Chapter 1

Exposure

For eighteen months following its formation in December 1958 the John Birch Society operated in relative obscurity. This period of initial calm was brought to an abrupt end in July 1960 when the Chicago Daily News published the first significant exposé of the Society, including the contention of its founder, Robert Welch, that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of the communist conspiracy in the United States. For the next few years Birchers found themselves at the center of a storm of controversy. This chapter examines the period in which the Birch Society and its leaders first came to widespread public attention, focusing especially on the crucial years of 1960 and 1961.

There had certainly been criticism of the Society before the Chicago Daily News articles appeared, but it had largely been confined to fellow conservatives and other members of the anticommunist network. For example, the Society’s Committee Against Summit Entanglements had protested—and attempted to prevent—Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States. In the December 1959 issue of American Opinion, Welch reflected on the negative reaction this had generated in some quarters. “Most of these critics are sincere, and all of them are wrong,” Welch stated. “It is of vital importance to the Communists to split Americans into all kinds of groups, snarling at each other.” This would not be the Birch Society’s approach, however. “We are fighting Communists. Period. Nobody else,” he said.¹

Similarly, in “An Aside to the Squeamish” in the June 1960 issue of the Bulletin, Welch acknowledged the “lack of enthusiasm” some of the Society’s members had evidenced for the slogan it had deployed in the hope of dissuading Eisenhower from attending the planned follow-up summit with Khrushchev, British prime minister Harold Macmillan, and French president Charles de Gaulle, in Paris in May 1960. The summit collapsed in the aftermath of the shooting down of Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane on May 1, but the Birch Society’s message to Eisenhower, “If you go, don’t come back!,” delivered by means of telegrams, postcards, and letters, had been too much for some Birchers.

In “charting the course of the Society we are at all times torn between two forces tugging in opposite directions,” or “tugging in the same direction at very different speeds,” Welch noted. There were members of the organization who wanted it to be “much more outspoken or even belligerent” in its statements and letters, and those who wished it to be “more restrained.” In this case “the number applauding the slogan ran about four to one against those who disliked it,” but Welch hoped the dissenters would bear with him “in the assurance that we do not intend to ‘run wild,’ nor to indulge in any dramatics just for the excitement.” At the same time, though, he also sought to remind them that the Birch Society as a whole was not engaged in a “cream-puff war” or “a pillow fight” and that, as another of its slogans had it, “we do mean business every step of the way.”²

As we shall see, internecine conflicts and internal tensions of this kind never disappeared, but for the next couple of years they were greatly overshadowed by all the externally generated attention directed toward the Society.

A “Vicious Attack”

Timed to coincide with the Republican national convention taking place in Chicago that year, the Birch Society’s first taste of more widespread exposure occurred in the summer of 1960, with two articles by Jack Mabley in the Chicago Daily News on July 25 and 26. Describing the Birchers as an organization of “ultra-conservatives” who had banded together to fight communism in the United States, Mabley noted that while “not a secret society in the normal sense of the word,” it did try to “avoid publicity”—and indeed had been largely successful in that endeavor until now. In Mabley’s view, however, the prominent conservatives and thousands of ordinary people who had been attracted to the Society “should know the thinking of the man to whom they are pledging their energies and loyalty.”

Setting the tone for much of the criticism that would follow, Mabley quoted Welch’s “dim view of democracy” from The Blue Book as a “deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery, and a perennial fraud,” and characterized the Society as authoritarian, monolithic, and dictatorial, with Welch functioning as its “absolute and unquestioned head.” Mabley’s real journalistic coup, though, was that he had managed to obtain a copy of The Politician, which he described as “a 302-page black paperbound book . . . intended for secret distribution only to the leaders of the society.” It was in the pages of The Politician that the most damning evidence against the Birch Society was to be found.

This “fantastic document,” Mabley reported, “accuses President Eisenhower of treason. It flatly calls him a Communist, and for 302 pages attempts to document the charge.” And he provided “an exact quote” from the book to prove his claim—one that would haunt Welch and the Birch Society for years to come, but which was mysteriously—although understandably—absent when the book was “officially” published in 1963. It was: “While I too think that Milton Eisenhower [the president’s brother] is a Communist, and has been for thirty years, this opinion is based largely on general circumstances of his conduct. But my firm belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy is based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to me to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt.”³ Mabley also noted the other significant figures Welch accused of being part of a communist conspiracy to take over the nation, including U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, the director of the CIA; Chief Justice Earl Warren; former defense secretary Neil McElroy; and “dozens of others.” It might be tempting to dismiss all of this as the work of a “crackpot,” but “the circumstances of Welch’s position and influence”—together with his persuasiveness as a public speaker—as the Society tried to reach its goal of a million members, necessitated “further examination,” Mabley contended.⁴

Other articles followed in the wake of the revelations contained in the Chicago Daily News, including in the Milwaukee Journal, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Boston Herald—all essentially repeating Mabley’s critique and focusing on the allegations made in The Politician—but the Society was able to weather this first wave of attention relatively easily. Welch reported to the Society’s members in the August 1960 issue of the Bulletin that the negative publicity the Society had attracted would only make it stronger, and that such attention should be understood as part of the “growing pains” of a new organization that was “rapidly gaining stature.”⁵ He did, though, also feel the need to address some of the issues raised by The Politician for those Birchers who had not previously been aware of its existence.

Figure 2.1. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (center) and his brother Milton (left), who were both accused of being communist agents in The Politician, work on the president’s 1955 State of the Union address at his Key West headquarters in Florida, in the company of the president’s chief speechwriter, Kevin McCann. © Bettmann/CORBIS

Welch explained that its origins lay in December 1954 in the form of “a long letter to a friend” in which he had “expressed very severe opinions concerning the purposes of some of the top men in Washington.” Carbon copies of this letter had been sent to a “few other friends, who in turn asked for copies for their friends.” By 1956, through various revisions and additions, the length of the letter had grown to sixty thousand words. It was only at this point, Welch said, that “we had begun to refer to [the letter] as the manuscript of The Politician.” By 1958, another twenty thousand words had been added. Welch having decided not to make any further amendments, this “final version” was typed up, and a “limited number” of copies were prepared “for the convenience of any other readers to whom it would be sent.”⁶

“A majority of these more formalized copies of the long letter was sent to various friends during the summer and early fall of 1958,” Welch went on, the crucial point of this being that this was “before The John Birch Society was even founded.” Thus, in what was to become the crux of his defense whenever its status was raised, as far as Welch was concerned, “the document had, and still has, no connection with the Society in any way except that: (1) it was written by your Founder; and (2) as the Society grew I sent copies to some of those new acquaintances who had now become my good friends through their work for the cause.” For Welch, the nature and form of the letter/manuscript/document was of crucial importance. “The introductory page to this manuscript states clearly that this is not a book, has never been intended for publication, and is still of the nature of a long letter to a friend,” he told his readers. No copy had ever been sold, and those that were loaned out all contained a covering letter explaining that the views expressed in the accompanying manuscript were simply “this writer’s opinions, and a collection of facts . . . on which those opinions are based.”⁷

Because of “new forces and new leaders now appearing on the scene,” it had been his intention, Welch said, to allow “this whole ‘letter’ to fade out of the picture,” but then Mabley’s columns appeared—although Welch refused to identify him by name, referring to him only as “a columnist of the Chicago Daily News.” Through “some violation of confidence,” someone who had been sent the letter in 1958 had passed it on to Mabley, and the journalist had naturally “selected for quotation the most extreme statements he could find, without the benefit of any of the explanation or modifying import of the context around them.” This was only to be expected. “What was categorically unfair,” in Welch’s view, however, “was that this column quoted me as stating as fact in a book sentences which the whole document clearly revealed were expressions of opinion in an unpublished confidential manuscript of the nature of a letter.”⁸

In other words, it was not just the uncertain ontological status of the letter/manuscript/document/book that was important, but also the epistemological caveats embedded carefully within it. After all, it was just Welch’s “firm belief” that Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and the evidence on which this belief was based—although “extensive” and “palpable”—only “seemed” to put his “conviction” beyond any reasonable doubt.

Welch also contested Mabley’s assertion that the “book” was intended for secret distribution only to the leaders of the Society. Given the “history of the document” he had outlined, and “since at least two-thirds of our Chapter Leaders had never even heard of The Politician,” any “attempted tying of the Society to the manuscript, or vice versa, is entirely unsupported by the facts,” he said. Moreover, if Mabley had “expected to do serious damage to The John Birch Society he must by now be badly disappointed.” The “total net effect” of the Chicago Daily News articles had been that three new members of the Society had asked for their membership applications to be “‘held in abeyance’ until they could find out what was what.” (Welch allowed that Mabley’s “only real purpose may have been to make his column exciting,” in which case he was prepared to concede him “a certain measure of success”—presumably on the basis that the revelation of any kind of secret is always exciting to a certain extent.)⁹

Some members of the Society may “feel that I made a mistake by being so outspoken, even in a confidential statement of opinions,” Welch confessed, but he questioned whether anyone really knew what was right “in this gathering nightmare of our times which none of us have wished?” Treason was still to be found in the United States’ government, he reminded his readers, and he illustrated the point with “a horrible truth which most people seem determined to avoid,” insisting that the forthcoming 1960 presidential campaign was really a contest between two puppets: Welch viewed John F. Kennedy as the “longtime stooge” of Walter P. Reuther, the leader of the United Automobile Workers union, and Richard M. Nixon as the “newly acquired stooge” of Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal New York governor. The election would determine whether Reuther or Rockefeller would “be the boss of the United States under a one-world international socialist government.” In a formulation that pointed to the dark heart of the Society’s metaphysical understanding of American politics and world history, Welch explained that “we have no clear grasp of what is going on, or how near we are to the end of American independence. But of course it is so much nicer to accept the surface appearances as themselves the realities of the contest.”¹⁰

The Founder’s defense of the Society ended with a prediction that the “recent vicious attack, in Chicago, is undoubtedly only the forerunner of many more, of many kinds, to come.”¹¹ He was right. The events of 1960 paled in comparison with the attention the Society received in 1961.

The “Attack” Intensifies

The second and much more widespread exposure of the Birchers began on the West Coast. In January 1961 the Santa Barbara News-Press published an investigation of the Society by its reporter Hans Engh. The organization had begun its “semi-secret existence” in the county the previous year, but had already developed several chapters, with membership in the hundreds, and the rumors were “flying,” Engh said. His account outlined the origins of the Society and Welch’s background, but not surprisingly it focused on Welch’s statements in The Politician, his critical views of democracy, and his more recent recommendation—made in the September 1960 issue of the Bulletin—that Birchers should work to “take over” their local parent-teacher associations.¹²

The paper’s stand on the Birch Society was made abundantly clear in a series of highly critical editorials written by its editor and publisher, Thomas M. Storke. In “Statement of Principles,” published on February 26, for example, Storke acknowledged that “communism’s advance” threatened democratic institutions around the world, but argued—in what would become a commonplace contention in discussions of the Birch Society—that democracy could be endangered as much by “extremists of the right as by those of the left,” that it could be strengthened only through the open discussion of ideas, and that “secret or semi-secret political organizations” had “no place” in American society. Evoking the memory of the McCarthy years—although not by name—Storke also argued that “democracy suffers when fear of communism leads to irresponsible, unsubstantiated charges of treason or evil connivance against our political, religious, education...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontispiece
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraphs
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index