The John Birch Society was an extreme Right wing political organization established by Robert Welch in 1958. Its membership reached its height of around 100,000 during the 1964 Presidential election and later declined. Although it was created primarily to educate the American public about the dangers of domestic Communism, it quickly became one of the largest right wing activist groups in the United States. Along with its anti-Communism, Welch proclaimed that its goals were to combat ‘collectivism’ and to return America to the values of ‘individualism’. Although the Birchers were a fringe group, numerous congressmen and even Republican Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater openly praised and admired the its members. Following Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, the John Birch Society was ostracized from the emerging Conservative movement due to concerns that its exaggerated rhetoric and conspiracy theories were damaging their cause.
Robert Welch was born in Chowan County, North Carolina in 1899. At the age of three he could read. He applied to a state university when he was twelve years old. After spending a few years at the United States Naval Academy, Welch attended Harvard University and graduated in 1922. His first book, The Road to Salesmanship, written in 1941, proclaimed that salesmanship was one of the highest professions. After several failures in the candy industry, Welch finally found success while working for his brother’s candy company. It was during his time as an industrialist and after retiring with considerable weallth that his conservatism views led to action.
Robert Welch defined his politics in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal,’ As one of the board of directors of the National Manufacturer’s Association, he was frightened by what he saw as the ‘creeping collectivism’ of Roosevelt’s welfare policies. He openly opposed socialized medicine and government funding for education and housing. As a result, he became in various chambers of commerce and was a member of his local school board. After serving on the National Association of Manufacturers, he came into contact with other industrialists who held similar conservative views.
It was in 1954 that Robert Welch published his first conspiracy book, titled The Politician. Originally a letter to his friends, its basic premise was that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,’ and that he had plenty of hard evidence to prove it. Eisenhower’s charm and skills as a politician, Robert Welch believed, made him easily manipulated. Welch blamed the loss of several Republican congressional seats during the 1954 midterm elections on Eisenhower’s failure to make public appearances on their behalf. Eisenhower’s defeat of conservative messiah Robert Taft in the 1952 Republican primary became something that Welch was deeply upset by, and which he could only explain by corruption and conspiracy. Furthermore, he claimed that there was no way Communists could have made such strong advances in the early 1950s - in places such as Korea, China, and the Soviet Union - without outside help. In fact, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration in January of 1953 saved the Soviet Union, because simply Eisenhower was a “traitor” under Communist influences.
With over one hundred pages of footnotes, Welch stated that The Politician was “... the most important manuscript or book you have ever read.” He labeled multiple high-profile politicians as Communist agents. More specifically, Franklin Roosevelt was working for the Communists because he “saved” the Soviet Union by recognizing it in 1933 and offering it financial aid. Dwight D Eisenhower’s brother, Milton (then President of Pennsylvania State University), George Marshall (who served in President Harry S. Truman’s cabinet), along with John Foster Dulles and Allen Foster Dulles (Secretary of State and Director of the CIA under Eisenhower, respectively) were all secretly working for the Communists. When Robert Welch hand delivered a copy of The Politician to Barry Goldwater, the future presidential nominee told him he wanted “no part in this” and to burn every copy. Nevertheless, cospiracism led to action.
The John Birch Society was formed on December 8, 1958 during a meeting that lasted for several days in Indianapolis. During its proceedings, Robert Welch delivered speeches from morning until night, which would later become the basis for his Blue Book of the John Birch Society. These speeches depicted a Communist conspiracy that was the most destructive the world had ever seen. A force that was spreading to new areas daily.
Welch tried to establish credibility by claiming to have spent nine years part time and three years full time studying the Communist conspiracy. He concluded that Vladinir Lenin, the Russian Revolutionary leader, envisioned that Communism would take over the world. He believed that this would be accomplished not through force, but through Communist front organizations, propaganda, and “colonizing minds.” According to his studies, this had already been accomplished in Hawaii, all major labor unions, and was beginning to unfold with every major national independence movement around the globe. What made Welch’s speeches unique was that he offered a solution: organize a group of committed patriots to educate the American public about these fears.
The society itself was the heir to two conservative organizations: the National Association of Manufacturers and The Foundation for Economic Education - which were anti-union, pro-business, and libertarian in their outlook. Its membership lists were kept secret, while its leaders handled public relations. Places like Southern California and Texas were hotbeds for membership. Each chapter usually included 7-20 members, lead by a chapter leader. Section leaders supervised multiple chapters in one region. The top leadership consisted of paid members appointed by Robert Welch and Welch himself. Its members, discontented with the political establishment in Washington D.C., watched films, studied books, and conducted letter writing campaigns all at the direction of Robert Welch. Internal democracy for the group did not exist because Welch claimed that this would allow Communists to exploit and weaken it.
A 1974 survey of Birchers’ opinions by Barabara S. Stone found that members were concerned with high taxes, inflation, international instability, and civil strife, categorizing them as “modern conservatives, but classic liberals.” Almost all of the John Birch Society’s members overwhelmingly accepted the conspiracy theories of Robert Welch. Most of its members had some sort of college degree and income that was higher than the average American income. Interestingly, a large number of housewives belonged to the society.
Several events during the early 1960s brought the John Birch Society into the public spotlight. In April of 1961, General Edwin Walker, a commander of the U.S. army stationed in West Germany, was reprimanded. The New York Times revealed that he had distributed literature from the John Birch Society to his troops. Several months later, he resigned - despite a light punishment that didn’t affect his military record. In response, Birchers made attempts to connect his firing to a Communist conspiracy, leading Welch to declare that 60% of the media was controlled by Communists.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was followed by inflammatory articles in the Bircher press that outraged the public. One bircher headline read “COMMUNISM KILLED KENNEDY.” In particular, “Marxmanship in Dallas,” written by Professor Revilo P. Oliver, stated that Lee Harvey Oswald was brought back from the Soviet Union by “our Communist dominated State Department,” after being trained by the Soviets. Professor Oliver believed that most of Kennedy’s foreign policy decisions intentionally benefitted the Communist Conspiracy: “He is the John F. Kennedy who, by shameless intimidation, bribery, and blackmail, induced weaklings in Congress to approve treasonable acts designed to disarm us and to make us the helpless prey of the affiliated criminals and savages of the "United Nations."” Much of the public interpreted Oliver’s editorial as a character assassination piece with distasteful timing.
The John Birch Society’s membership and notoriety swelled with the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater’s positions against the Eisenhower administration’s spending and the censure of the redbaiting Joseph McCarthy made him popular among Birchers. At the Republican convention in 1964, Barry Goldwater famously stated “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” These words were widely interpreted as a tacit endorsement of extremist groups, such as the John Birch Society. When asked about the society’s members by reporters, he frequently responded that Birchers were the “finest people” he knew. Ultimately, Barry Goldwater was hesitant to publicly reject the John Birch Society because he knew that its members provided much of the backbone of his campaign.
After Goldwater’s defeat to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 Presidential election, conservative Republican leaders took steps to expel not just Robert Welch, but also his supporters from their movement. Martin Luther King Jr. publicly proclaimed that there were “dangerous signs of Hitlerism,” as conservatives began to fear that Birchers might take control of the Republican Party. The National Review, under William F. Buckley, focused much of its efforts on criticizing the John Birch Society in the early 1960s. This culminated in editorials in October of 1965 that directly attacked the society’s members. James Burnham, a regular contributor to the National Review proclaimed that the John Birch Society was dangerig American national security in his article “Get Us Out!”. From that point on, members of the John Birch Society were no longer welcome in conservative organizations and the Republican Party.
The close association of Goldwater, extremism, and the Birchers created a climate of paranoia that made conspiracy theories proliferate. The John Birch Society declared that Social Security was a “big brother” (reference to Orwell’s 1984) plot. Fluoride was put in the water to dumb down the population and make people more subservient. Communists were behind the NAACP, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement. What made the JBS truly radical in the eyes of the public was its insistence on an internal communist threat. It seems obvious that Welch borrowed his organizational structure from the communists, whom he openly admired for their discipline. While the John Birch Society was ostracized from the New Right, its legacy left a lasting impact on the political philosophy of conservatism and its strategies and tactics for gaining power.
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