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

Part 1: chapter 1. Exposure

15 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 16   The World of the John Birch Society 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...