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8 • EXTREMISM IN DEFENSE OF INFLUENCE The John Birch Society The John Birch Society has more respectable community leaders and solid citizens than any extremist group in years. —Detroit Free Press reporter after several months undercover in the Society With a solid majority of Americans so obviously opposed to all that Communism represented, no vigilant minority needed to organize, or so it would seem. Robert Welch thought differently when he assembled 11 men from nine states for a two-day meeting in Indianapolis in December 1958. Before the meeting adjourned, the John Birch Society was on its way to a platform and structure that would soon make it the largest, most wellfunded , best-organized, most-publicized anti-Communist group in the country.1 Michigan had its ‹rst chapter within a few months, the twelfth in the nation. Robert Welch, a prominent businessman living in Massachusetts, was a Baptist whose origins were in North Carolina. He had graduated from the University of North Carolina and attended law school at Harvard for two years. After early business failures, Welch joined his brother’s candy manufacturing ‹rm as the vice president of sales and advertising where his success established his reputation. He became a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Manufacturers and its regional vice president for a time. On business or pleasure trips, Welch arranged interviews with world leaders including Konrad Adenauer, Chiang Kaishek , and Syngman Rhee; in England he looked for the “effects of the Socialist government” at ‹rst hand. Prominent in Massachusetts Republican politics, Welch was a supporter of Joe McCarthy, worked hard for presidential nomination of the conservative Robert Taft in 1952, and was bitterly disappointed that the convention nominated Dwight Eisenhower. 196 On the heels of the 1954 congressional elections, Welch had begun issuing a “private letter” titled The Politician. Eisenhower was the initial focus of his conviction that a deep-seated, far-reaching Communist penetration was under way in America. Eisenhower’s failure to do more to help conservative candidates, he wrote, convinced him that the president was a “dedicated , conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”2 By 1956, he began editing and publishing a monthly magazine, One Man’s Opinion. Welch had learned about John Birch in the process of reading through the reams of material turned up in the course of the McCarthy hearings. Birch was born in India while his parents were there serving as missionaries, but he grew up in Georgia. Like Welch, he was a Baptist and was serving as a missionary stationed in China when World War II started. Soon he joined the army air force and became a captain. Since he was able to speak Chinese, Birch was selected ten days after V-J Day to lead a special force of American , Chinese Nationalist, and Korean soldiers into China. The purpose of the mission remains unclear, but when he and his men encountered a group of Red Chinese, John Birch was shot and then bayoneted to death. The others were taken prisoner. Men along on the mission later reported that Birch tried to bluff his way out, insulted the Communist Chinese, and displayed such anger and arrogance that the Chinese leader shot him. But as Welch saw it and wrote in The Life of John Birch, this hero’s death marked the ‹rst casualty of World War III, the war against the Communists.3 Most who came to the founding meeting in Indiana were older businessmen already familiar with Robert Welch through various contacts. They knew his views, whether or not they had much knowledge of John Birch. All but one of the eleven in attendance agreed to join the board of the new society named for Birch—whom they elevated to martyr status. Like Welch, the other board members believed the greatest danger to America came not from a possible military takeover by the Soviets or Chinese but from a conspiratorial cabal of Communists inside the country who were boring into its institutions. Like Welch too, they thought the situation had been worsening since the time when Woodrow Wilson put the country “in the same house” with European “collectivists” and that dangers escalated under Franklin Roosevelt who went even farther, putting the nation in the“same bed”with them while“lying in his teeth”about it.4 With the Society agreed upon, the new board members went home to tap wealthy like-minded friends and political acquaintances for contributions . Welch went home to Belmont...

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