The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War

Introduction

1 Introduction It was an extraordinary claim. The thirty-fourth president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower—the widely beloved war hero, the man who had helped save the world from fascism during World War II—was a traitor, a “dedicated, conscious agent” of the Soviet Union and of the whole “Communist conspiracy.” Nor was he the only American political figure apparently in thrall to the nation’s deadliest enemy. U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles and his brother, Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles, were similarly indicted, as were numerous other senior members of the Eisenhower administration and the wider political establishment. In fact, in what might have been the most fantastical claim of all, Dwight Eisenhower—“Ike,” as he was almost universally known—was not even the ringleader of this cunning group of plotters. That accolade went to his younger brother Milton (who, when not busy directing the conspiracy, bided his time as the president of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore). The allegations had been circulating around the conservative anticommunist network in the United States since the mid-1950s in the form of a privately printed letter called The Politician.1 They were the work of Robert H. W. Welch Jr.—a retired candy manufacturer, former board member of the National Association of Manufacturers, and poetry aficionado. They are obviously easy to ridicule—as indeed they were when they became much more widely known in the summer of 1960, and have been ever since. Yet Welch was also the founder, in 1958, of what was to become the largest, most important, best organized, and most formidable “radical” or “ultra” right-wing group of the period, the John Birch Society—although members of the Society preferred the terms “conservative,” “anticommunist,” or “Americanist” to describe themselves— which at the height of its power in the mid-1960s was taken very seriously by considerable swaths of the American population, as well as leading politicians, journalists, academics, and cultural commentators of all kinds. So seriously, in fact, that the “Birchers”—as they were called—were feared to be on the verge not only of taking over the Republican Party and propelling a dangerous “extremist” into the White House, but also of being a threat to the very foundations of American democracy itself, and perhaps even enabling the rise of fascism in the United States. “The political extremism of the Radical Right and of The John Birch Society,” wrote Benjamin Epstein and Arnold Forster of the Anti-Defamation League in one notable and widely read report on the 2   The World of the John Birch Society organization in 1967, “is no minor surface rash on the body politic. It can be a creeping malignancy that would destroy the vital centers of the American political organism. And it is still spreading.”2 As it turned out, just as Epstein and Forster were publishing their report, the heyday of the Birch Society was fast approaching its end. With an estimated peak membership of one hundred thousand in 1965–1966, Birchers had played a substantial role in—and, initially at least, had also benefited from—the energizing and enormously consequential 1964 presidential campaign of the Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater. By 1968 the number of Birchers had declined to between sixty thousand and seventy thousand, and by the mid1990s the figure was down to fifteen thousand or twenty thousand (estimates are all that are available because the Society declined to release its official membership rolls).3 Such figures, while not inconsiderable, are a long way from the million members Welch set out to recruit when he first established the Society —or even his revised goal of four hundred thousand, announced on the occasion of its tenth anniversary in 1968—and the Birch Society’s relatively small size, its sudden appearance and precipitous decline, and the tendency of many of its key figures to “believe the unbelievable,” as one of its contemporary critics put it, meant that there has long been a tendency to dismiss the significance of the organization and its concerns.4 If the Society is remembered at all, it is generally as just another example of the marginal, esoteric, and exotic groups that have always existed on the abundant and historically deeply rooted “lunatic fringe” of American life. But the significance of an organization is to be found not only in the number of its recruits, or how long it manages to command attention on the political scene. Seemingly small groups...