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

Notes

191 Notes INTRODUCTION 1. See G. Edward Griffin, The Life and Words of Robert Welch: Founder of the John Birch Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: American Media, 1975), 240. When the manuscript of The Politician was officially published as a book in 1963, Welch altered the text. No longer was the president described as a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” The corresponding section now stated that Eisenhower “has been sympathetic to ultimate Communist aims, realistically and even mercilessly willing to help them achieve their goals, knowingly receiving and abiding by Communist orders, and consciously serving the Communist conspiracy, for all of his adult life”—a distinction without much discernable difference, one might reasonably object. See Robert Welch, The Politician (Belmont, MA: Belmont Publishing, 1963), 278. 2. Benjamin R. Epstein and Arnold Forster, The Radical Right: Report on the John Birch Society and Its Allies (New York: Vintage, 1967), 218. 3. On the membership numbers of the Society, see, for example, Epstein and Forster, Radical Right, 195; Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 48; and John George and Laird Wilcox, American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists, and Others (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996), 192. 4. The goal of recruiting a million members can be found in Robert Welch, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society (Belmont, MA: Western Islands, 1961), 152. On the revision to four hundred thousand, see Douglas E. Kneeland, “Birch Society, Age 10, Vows Red Rout,” New York Times, December 8, 1968. The critic in question was the Democratic Wisconsin senator Gale McGee (“They Believe the Unbelievable,” Congressional Record, March 3, 1964, 4,199). 5. James McEvoy III, Radicals or Conservatives: The Contemporary Radical Right (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971), 12. See also Alan F. Westin, “The John Birch Society: Fundamentalism on the Right,” Commentary 32, no. 2 (August 1961): 93. 6. McEvoy, Radicals or Conservatives, 12. 7. The phrase was popularized by Godfrey Hodgson in his book America in Our Time: From World War Two to Nixon (London: Macmillan, 1977), 67–98. He used it to describe the way in which most conservatives accepted the “liberal” domestic policies of the welfare state—an outgrowth of the political success of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal—and almost all liberals agreed with the “conservative” foreign policy of Cold War containment during the 1950s and early 1960s. 8. Welch, Blue Book, 21. 9. Ibid., 3. 10. Ibid., 60–61. Emphasis in original. 11. As a consequence of its black binding, and perhaps because it added an additional layer 192  Notes to Pages 4–8 of intrigue or mystery to the organization, The Politician was also referred to as “The Black Book” of the Society. 12. On the various members of the radical or anticommunist Right of this period, see, for example, Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right: “The New American Right,” Expanded and Updated (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963); Epstein and Forster, Radical Right; George Thayer, The Farther Shores of Politics: The American Political Fringe Today, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 174–278; William W. Turner, Power on the Right (Berkeley, CA: Ramparts Press, 1971); Richard Gid Powers, Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: Free Press, 1995), 273–318; Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guildford Press, 2000), 200–202; and Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the Republican Right Rose to Power in Modern America, 2nd. ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 32–37. 13. See, for example, Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2003); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); Griffin Fariello, Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition (New York: Norton, 1995); and David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). 14. This biographical sketch is drawn primarily from Griffin’s Life and Words, together with George Barrett’s “Close-Up of the Birchers’ ‘Founder,’” New York Times, May 14, 1961; J. Allen Broyles’s The John Birch Society: Anatomy of a Protest (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); and...