Cancelling Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

BY MARY ANNE TRASCIATTI
MAY 24, 2023

LAWCHA | 

If you blinked, you might have missed the historical marker dedicated to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at the site of her childhood home in Concord, New Hampshire, on May 1, 2023. That’s because Republican lawmakers had it removed just two weeks after it was unveiled, arguing that Flynn did not deserve such recognition because she was “un-American.”

They based their charge on her membership in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Flynn joined the Party during the Popular Front period and remained a member until her death in 1964.

The marker does not shy away from this history. It explicitly states that Flynn was a Party member and that she was sent to prison under “the notorious Smith Act,” a reference to the 1940 law that made it a crime to advocate the violent overthrow of the federal government. Although it was supposed to protect the nation from Nazis as well as Communists, the law –like most anti-subversive legislation — was used almost exclusively as a weapon to bludgeon the Left.

Early in the Cold War, in 1948, at the urging of J. Edgar Hoover, federal agents arrested CPUSA leaders around the country and brought them to trial, presenting dubious evidence, much of it provided by paid informers, to secure convictions. In 1951, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions in Dennis v. United States. Almost immediately after that decision was announced, Flynn and several other Communists were arrested and indicted under the Smith Act. In 1953, all of them were found guilty.

After the appeals were exhausted, Flynn served twenty-eight months in prison. She was nearly sixty-seven years old when she was released in May 1957. Two months later, the Supreme Court decided in Yates v. United States that the First Amendment protects radical speech, which effectively ended Smith Act prosecutions. Now, nearly seventy years after her Smith Act conviction, when the Cold War is supposedly over, Flynn is once again being penalized for her political ideas.

Gurley Flynn, who started as a soapbox speaker in high school, inspired the Song by Joe Hill. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

If Flynn were around today, she would undoubtedly unleash her quick wit and sharp tongue to roast her critics. And she would be justified. To label her un-American is preposterous. Most of her life was spent fighting with and for working people in the U.S. During her years with the Industrial Workers of the World, she led organizing drives, strikes, and free speech fights. She had toyed with the idea of becoming a Constitutional lawyer, but instead, she studied the Constitution on her own, becoming an expert of sorts on civil liberties. In 1918, she founded the Workers Defense Union to aid labor activists whose First Amendment rights were endangered by the wartime Espionage Act and to advocate for recognition of political prisoners by the federal government.

Flynn used this experience as a founding member of the ACLU and she acted as a bridge between the liberals in that organization and the radical labor activists they had pledged to defend, including Sacco and Vanzetti. Long before most Americans understood the danger posed by Mussolini, she recognized his fascist regime as a threat to democracy around the world and spoke against it. She also opposed the Ku Klux Klan, which she saw as a uniquely American fascist organization.

Flynn’s commitment to the struggle for Black liberation was unsurpassed among white activists of her era. She campaigned alongside Black comrades against lynching, suppression of voting rights, housing discrimination, job discrimination, education discrimination, and police brutality. In the final years of her life, when she was appealing the denial of her passport under Section 6 of the McCarran Act, she wrote numerous articles in which she argued that freedom of movement was necessary for the exercise of one’s First Amendment rights. All Americans should be this un-American.

The marker to Flynn in Concord, N.H. was one of 278 across the state. It lasted less than two weeks. Credit: Joseph Alsip.

While I bristle at the claim that Flynn (or, as New Hampshire Executive Councilmember Joseph Kenney called her, “someone like that”) does not deserve to be commemorated in public space, I also regret the way that New Hampshire activists chose to remember her. The plaque in Concord identified Flynn as a “nationally renowned labor leader” whose “fiery speeches” earned her the nickname “the Rebel Girl.” Yet it also claimed that Flynn worked through the ACLU to advocate for women’s rights, particularly suffrage and birth control. That claim is simply not accurate. Flynn was not a proponent of voting until she joined the CUPSA and cast a ballot for Roosevelt in 1937. Although she fought for the right of Margaret Sanger to speak about birth control, the issue was not a priority for her. The idea that Flynn was primarily a women’s rights activist has also seeped into media coverage of the controversy over the plaque. The Washington Post, for example, bears a headline that refers to Flynn as “feminist, with Communist past.” She would be surprised to see herself described this way, even if she espoused many ideas that we think of as feminist.

Moreover, Flynn would recoil at the subordination of “Communist” to “feminist.” From the moment she joined the CPUSA until the day she died, Flynn saw herself as a Communist – no qualifier. The movement to which she dedicated her life was, in her own words, “the working-class movement” and the organization that she believed best advanced the interests of the working class was the Communist Party of the United States. In fact, when she was faced with a choice between the ACLU and the CPUSA, she chose the latter. Her refusal to let the ACLU dictate her politics resulted in her expulsion from the organization in 1940.

We can debate her decision to join the Party or to stay with the Party as long as she did. Nevertheless, if we are going to commemorate Elizabeth Gurley Flynn or any other controversial figures whom we believe have made important and valuable contributions to U.S. society, we should commemorate them as they really were, not as we want to see them. In the case of Flynn, the epitaph from her tombstone in Forest Home Cemetery, where her ashes lie near the graves of the Haymarket Martyrs, may offer the best guidance:

“The Rebel Girl”
Fighter for Working Class Emancipation

Credit:
Credit: Einar E Kvaran aka carptrash courtesy https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Elizabeth_Gurley_Flynn#Media/File:Elizabeth_Gurley_Flynn_gravestone,_Chicago,_IL,_USA.jpeg


Mary Anne Trasciatti

History.acadiau.ca

https://history.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/history/Documents/Carlie%20Visser.pdf

REDISCOVERING ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN IN THE ... 

This thesis focuses on the early life and activism of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a ... pdf. 46 Foner, Women and the ... 100 Flynn, Sabotage, 4. 101 Elizabeth Gurley ...

Archive.org

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Memories of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 

Jun 28, 2010 ... p5^e. MEMORIES OF THE INDUSTRIAL. WORKERS OF THE WORLD CIWW). by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Occasional Paper No. 2k (1977).

Historyireland.com

https://www.historyireland.com/the-girl-orator-of-the-bowery-elizabeth-gurley-flynn-ireland-and-the-industrial-workers-of-the-world

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He organised for the IWW and soon moved to a Bronx flat near Flynn's family. Connolly's ability to inspire multilingual audiences impressed Flynn. Her memoirs ...

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The backstory of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who had begun to fa... 

Jul 14, 2023 ... Alpert offered a backstory for a woman who had begun to fade from memory. Inspired by the dangerous and unsafe conditions she saw in the mill ...

Dp.la

https://dp.la/exhibitions/breadandroses/strikers/elizabeth-gurley-flynn

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn - Digital Public Library of America 

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a labor leader, activist, and feminist who played a leading role in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She is just one of ...

Historyisaweapon.com

https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/gurleyflynnpaterson.html

The Truth about the Paterson Strike | Elizabeth Gurley Flynn... 

Born in 1890 in New Hampshire, Gurley Flynn joined the I.W.W. in 1906 at the age of sixteen and for the next ten years was a leading organizer, soapboxer, and ...

 

Why Capitalism Cannot Finally Repress Socialism

Richard D. Wolff | 25 Oct 2023

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Nothing more surely secures the future of socialism than the persistence of capitalism.

Image Courtesy: Flickr

Socialism is capitalism’s critical shadow. When lights shift, a shadow may seem to disappear, but sooner or later, with further shifts of light, it comes back. Capitalism’s ideologues have long fantasised that capitalism would finally outwit, outperform, and thereby overcome socialism: make the shadow vanish permanently. Like children, they bemoan their failure when, in the light of new social circumstances, the shadow reappears clear and sharp. Recent efforts to dispel the shadow having failed again, the contest of capitalism versus socialism resumes. In the United States, young people especially applaud socialism so much recently that think tanks like PragerU and the Hoover Institute at Stanford University urgently recycle the old anti-socialist tropes.

In fact, the capitalism-versus-socialism contest does not really resume because it never really stopped. As changing social conditions changed socialism—a process that took time—it sometimes seemed to wishful thinkers that the systems struggle had ended with capitalism’s victory. Thus, the 1920s saw anti-socialist witch-hunts (especially the Palmer raids by the US Department of Justice and the Sacco and Vanzetti persecution) that many believed at the time would extinguish US socialism.

What had happened in Russia in 1917 would not be allowed to sneak into the United States with all those European immigrants. The grossly unfair Sacco and Vanzetti trial (recognised as such even by the state of Massachusetts) did little to prevent—and much to prepare for—subsequent similar anti-socialist efforts by government officials in the United States.

With the 1929 crash, socialism revived to become a powerful movement in the United States and beyond during the 1930s and 1940s. After World War II ended, the political Right and most major capitalist employers tried once again to squash capitalism’s socialist shadow. They fostered McCarthy’s “anti-communist” crusades. They executed the Rosenbergs.

By the end of the 1950s, once again, many in the United States could indulge the thought that capitalism had vanquished socialism. Then the 1960s upset that indulgence as millions—especially young people—enthusiastically rediscovered Marx, Marxism, and socialism.

Shortly after that, the (Ronald) Reagan and (Margaret) Thatcher reaction tried a bit differently to resume anti-socialism. They simply asserted and reasserted to a receptive mass media that “there is no alternative” (TINA) to capitalism any longer. Socialism, where it survived, they insisted, had proved so inferior to capitalism that it was fading in the present and possessed no future. With the 1989 collapse of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and Eastern Europe, many again believed that the old capitalism versus socialism struggle had finally been resolved.

But, of course, the shadow returned. Nothing more surely secures the future of socialism than the persistence of capitalism. In the United States, it returned with Occupy Wall Street, then Bernie Sanders’s campaigns, and now the moderate socialists bubbling up inside US politics. Each time (Donald) Trump and the Far Right equate liberals and Democrats with socialism, communism, Marxism, and anarchism, they help recruit new socialists.

Socialism’s enemies understandably exhibit their frustration. With so little exposure to Hegel, the idea that modern society might be a unity of opposites—capitalism and socialism both reproducing and undermining one another—is not available to help them understand their world.

Handling life’s contradictions has always, for many, entailed pretending they are not there. Very young children do something like that when they encounter a scary dog, cover their eyes with their hands, and believe so doing makes the dog vanish. With time, the children mature and grasp that the dog is still there despite hand-covered eyes. With time, too, adults will grasp that making the socialist other/shadow vanish is a capitalist project sure to fail. One effect of that failed project over the last 75 years is widespread ignorance of how socialism was continuing to change.

Over the last two centuries, as socialism spread from Western Europe across the globe, it interacted with very diverse economic, political, and cultural conditions. Those interactions yielded multiple, different interpretations of socialism. For some, it was an evolving critique of capitalism, especially its injustices, inequalities, and cyclical instability. For others, it became the ongoing construction of an alternative economic system.

More broadly, millions were brought to socialisms that aimed to change basic social institutions (family, city, government) that capitalism had subordinated to its needs. The different, multiple socialisms debated and influenced one another, accelerating change within them all.

One kind of socialism that became prominent in the 19th and 20th centuries (and still exists) focuses on economics and government. It criticises how governments are captured by the capitalist class and serve its social hegemony. It strategises that using mass struggle (and eventually universal suffrage) can free the state from its subordination to capitalism and use it instead for transition beyond capitalism to socialism.

In the 20th century, this kind of socialism offered a framework for constructing a socialist economic system alternative to capitalism. Such a socialist system entails the continuance of traditional capitalism: enterprises owned and operated mostly by private capitalists, individuals, or corporate groups. What it adds that makes it socialist is a government (often but not necessarily run by a socialist party) that closely regulates and supervises markets and enterprises.

Such socialist governments aim to moderate key effects of private capitalism including its very unequal distributions of income and wealth, extreme business cycles, and unaffordable access by the general population to healthcare, education, and much else. Progressive taxation typifies socialist governments’ means of intervening in otherwise private capitalism. Moderate socialisms of this sort are found in many European nations, in the programmes of many socialist parties around the world, and in the statements and writings of socialist individuals.

Another kind of socialism shares moderate socialism’s focus on government and economics but differs from it by transforming many or all privately owned and operated enterprises into state-owned-and-operated ones. Often referred to as Soviet socialism—because the Soviet Union adopted it a decade after the 1917 revolution—this kind assigned greater powers to the state: to set prices, wages, interest rates, and foreign trade parameters according to a state plan for the economy.

Because socialists around the world split over World War I and the Russian Revolution, one side (more aligned with the USSR) took the name “communist” while the other retained “socialist.” Soviet socialism was thus organised and operated by a state apparatus governed by the communist party of the USSR. Variations of Soviet socialism in other countries (Eastern Europe and beyond) were established and operated similarly by communist parties there. The Soviet and other communist parties always referred to the Soviet Union as a socialist system. It was mostly the enemies of socialism—or those simply uninformed—that persisted in referring to the USSR as an example of “communism.”

A third kind of socialism, comprising a hybrid form of the first two, is how the People’s Republic of China organises its economy. There the Chinese Communist Party oversees a strong state apparatus that supervises a mixed economy of both state-owned-and-operated enterprises (on the Soviet model) and private capitalist enterprises (on the moderate socialism model). It is roughly a 50-50 split between state- and privately owned-and-operated enterprises in China.

China had experimented with both moderate and Soviet socialisms since the 1949 revolution brought its Communist Party to power. Based on its critiques of both prior socialist models and the stunningly rapid economic growth achieved by the hybrid, a focus on fine-tuning the hybrid model seems settled policy in China today. The criticisms and opposition from both the Trump and (Joe) Biden administrations have not changed that.

A fourth model is newly important in and for this century even though examples of its way of organising the production and distribution of goods and services exist throughout human history. People have often organised their collaborative production and distribution of goods and services as self-conscious communities within larger societies. Sometimes such productive communities were organised hierarchically with governing groups (councils of elders, chiefs, kings, lords, and masters) paralleling how they organized residential communities. At other times, they organised productive communities more horizontally as democratic cooperatives.

A rapidly rising concept of socialism in the 21st century differs from the three basic models discussed above in its focus on and advocacy for the organisation of workplaces as democratic, productive communities functioning within society.

This fourth model emerges from a socialist critique of the other three. Socialists have acknowledged the lesser inequalities and greater economic growth achieved by the other models. However, socialists have also faced and considered when excessive powers were accorded to and abused by states and parties. Among critical socialists’ analyses, some eventually reached the conclusion that previous socialisms focused too much on the macro-level of capitalist society and too little on the micro-level.

Socialism cannot only be about the balance between private and state enterprises, about “free” versus state-regulated markets, and about market versus state-planned distributions of resources and products. That limitation can and should be broken. Failures at the macro level had causes at a micro level that socialists had too often neglected.

When socialisms left the internal organisations of production and distribution enterprises inherited from capitalism largely unchanged, they made a major error. They left in place human relationships that undermined chances for enterprises in socialist economies to reach socialism’s goals.

A truly democratic society cannot be built on a foundation of productive enterprises whose internal structure is the opposite of democratic. The employer-employee capitalist model is that foundational opposite. Capitalist employers are neither chosen by nor genuinely accountable to their employees.

In worker cooperatives, by contrast, the employer-employee division is ended and replaced by a democratic community. The employees are likewise and collectively the employer. Their one-person-one-vote decisions, by the majority, govern what gets produced: how, where, and when. They likewise decide democratically what to do with the fruits of their collective labour, how enterprise revenues will be distributed among individual workers, and as investment funds and reserve funds.

This fourth kind of socialism repairs the other three kinds’ relative neglect of the micro-level transformation of capitalism into socialism. It does not reject or refuse those other kinds; it rather adds something crucial to them. It represents an important stage reached by prior forms of and social experiments with socialism.

Previous socialisms changed because of their results, good and bad. Those results provoked self-awareness, self-criticism, and determination to improve the emerging, new forms of socialism.

Capitalism’s critical shadow returns again to challenge capitalism by inspiring a powerful new alliance of its victims with its critics. That has been, after all, the goal all along: to empower and inform social change beyond capitalism, to realise the slogan, “We can do better than capitalism.”

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York.

SOURCE: Independent Media Institute

CREDIT LINE: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The Anarchist Nov 11

The Anarchist Nov 11

There is A different reason to commemorate Nov 11 for anarchists, it was the day that the Haymarket Anarchists were hung in 1887. And like Sacco and Vanzetti they too were subject to nativist reactionary anti-immigrant hysteria and the anti-worker/anti-socialist fears of the Chicago ruling class.

Today the same hysteria is used to justify the so called War on Terror.

The labour and socialist movements globally usually commemorate their efforts to win the right to the eight hour day and the right to organize unions, on May Day.

The date of their state sanctioned assassination often gets overlooked. And that day was November 11, 1887.

READ ON LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for HAYMARKET 

Trump-Appointed Judge’s ‘Originalist’ Claim Is Absurd

David R. Lurie
Sat, September 10, 2022

Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty, Rmesanic/Wikimedia Commons and Wikimedia Commons

During her confirmation hearing to become a federal judge in July 2020, Aileen Cannon, like virtually every GOP nominee, described herself as an “originalist.” Originalists claim to be paragons of judicial restraint, devoted to limiting the scope of their rulings, thereby not veering into the role assigned to the democratically elected branches of government to make laws and decide political and social policy. But Judge Cannon’s recent ruling in Donald Trump’s case against the United States government—ordering the partial shutdown of an investigation into the purloining of national security materials by the former president who appointed her—demonstrates that conservative jurisprudence has devolved into a brazen power grab, at direct odds with our democratic system of government, and the constitutional separation of powers.

Cannon's order may ultimately be voided; but the fact that she issued it will remain as a stark warning about just how far Trump judges and other similarly minded GOP nominees—hundreds of whom have been installed, at all levels of the federal judiciary—are willing to take the very judicial “activism” they claim to abhor to serve radically anti-democratic goals.

In recent decades, GOP judges have (i) selected a president, (ii) remade the electoral process, including by gutting campaign finance laws, as well as the heart of the Voting Rights Act; and (iii) trashed a constitutional fundamental right generations of Americans relied upon.


Now, avowed originalist Judge Cannon, installed during the waning days of the Trump administration, has engaged in one of the most audacious acts of right wing judicial overreach to date: Directly interfering with the current president’s performance of his core, constitutionally assigned, duties to protect national security and enforce the criminal laws enacted by Congress. It is hard to imagine a more brazen act of judicial supremacy.

Cannon's ruling is a very good subject for legal realist analysis. Legal realism was a theory of judicial decision-making developed in the first half of the 20th Century, and initially associated with liberal scholars, who posited that judicial rulings purportedly grounded on abstract legal principles are inevitably actually products of the political and normative views of the judges who issue them.

While not an exponent of realism, Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard Law School professor, and later appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt,, shared realists’ skepticism about the often unacknowledged motives underlying judicial decisions.

Frankfurter had been perhaps the leading liberal lawyer and scholar of his generation.He courageously led the unsuccessful effort to obtain due process for alleged anarchist terrorists Sacco and Vanzetti during the height of the racially tinged Red Scare that overtook the country during and following World War I. But after joining the Supreme Court in 1939, and initially voting to uphold FDR’s New Deal reforms as enacted by Congress, Frankfurter became an increasingly squeaky wheel on a liberal post-World War II Supreme Court–most notably where issues of school desegregation were concerned.

Frankfurter’s view was that judges must hesitate to move into the purview of the political branches, and therefore he spent much of his career on the bench seeking to police what he viewed as the danger of judicial overreach.

Cannon’s ruling exemplifies just that danger. A realist would say Cannon apparently issued her ruling for career reasons, and that her audience is a future GOP president who might elevate her to a higher court.

In this regard, Cannon appears to be following the strategy employed by some Trump appointees to the Supreme Court, including Neil Gorsuch, who famously argued, in a lower court dissent, that a “textual” reading of a federal safety law permitted an employer to fire a trucker for leaving his damaged trailer during subzero weather to avoid dying of hypothermia. Gorsuch’s dissent was absurdly cruel and nonsensical, but it sure got him noticed by Trump’s judge pickers.

Similarly, Cannon is likely betting that—even though her opinion is being rightfully mocked as sloppy and at odds with the law—it will please, and ensure she is noticed favorably by, those who matter to an ambitious Trump judge: those who select appellate 

There is a dark irony to this development, because concerns about the risk of judicial overreach were also a purported foundation of the “original understanding” theory initially advocated by conservative judicial luminaries Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia. And, purportedly, adopted by Judge Cannon herself.

In an odd parallel with realists (who favored empirical approaches to judicial decision-making), originalists purported to ground their rulings on historically driven inquiries into the prevailing “understanding” of a given law or constitutional provision at the time of its enactment. Originalists claimed that their historical approach to adjudication would limit the risk of judicial overreach, by preventing judges from inserting their own normative and political views in their decisions, thereby leaving it to voters and the officials they elect to do heavy lifting of governance and public policy, as they should. Realists are skeptical of such claims, and in the case of self-described originalists on the right, such skepticism has proven to be merited.

Cannon’s claim to be an originalist goes to show how absurdly unmoored supposed originalists, like Cannon and Alito (who was once nicknamed Scalito) have become from the original rationale for originalism. They’re now brazen opportunists, willing to use the thinnest of analytic and factual bases to reach the results they want.

In Alito’s case, his plain goal is to impose reactionary social and political policies on the entire nation, voters’ preferences be darned. In Cannon’s case, the likely goal is simply personal aggrandizement. But, in both cases, the damage to the democratic system, and to the separation of powers that is fundamental to our constitutional system of government, is equally grave.

Frankfurter would be shocked to see how the principle of judicial restraint he hewed to—at the cost of being regularly criticized by his past liberal allies—has been betrayed by right wingers who disingenuously employ rhetoric of restraint to engage in judicial overreach.

It is hard to believe, however, that Antonin Scalia, the patron saint of all right wing originalists, would share the same unhappiness. Scalia was never a particularly principled adherent to the judicial philosophy he championed. He had a curious tendency to consistently “find” that the original understanding of constitutional provisions matched up exactly with his own favored right wing social policies. Scalia’s most outrageous departure from his own originalist theory was in the Bush v. Gore case, where he and four other right wing justices on the Supreme Court employed the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause—which Scalia and others had devoted decades to undermining—as a basis to install George W. Bush in the White House (don’t ask me to explain how). The Court’s “reasoning” was so embarrassingly flimsy that the majority opinion expressly warned against lower courts relying upon it in the future.

Before issuing the decision effectively declaring Bush the winner of the election, the Court ordered a halt to the recount of votes in the state of Florida. Scalia, in a concurrence to that earlier decision, observed that it was important to end the counting of votes, because it risked “casting a cloud upon what [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.” Put otherwise, the recount risked demonstrating that Gore received more votes.

In her Trump ruling, Cannon curiously echoed Scalia’s reasoning, stating that she was blocking the criminal investigation of Donald Trump in part because of the risk that a review of the evidence could lead to an indictment that could inflict grave “reputational harm” to the former president. Of course it is true that a meritless indictment does great damage to the defendant (and I, as a lawyer, have proudly sought to vindicate the rights of wrongfully accused persons). But assuming that the use of evidence obtained pursuant to a properly issued search warrant will lead to a wrongful indictment, an argument concerned about reputational harm to Trump—like Scalia’s assumption that counting duly cast votes would undermine the “legitimacy” of Bush’s claim to the presidency—is not only absurd, but more than a little disturbing.

Both judicial remarks are emblematic of the now routine overreach that has come to permeate the right wing judiciary, at grave cost to our nation, and its constitutional and democratic order. There is every reason to be concerned that the worst is yet to come.

Before Trump, Alex Jones and QAnon: How Robert Welch and the John Birch Society created the paranoid far right

Kathryn Joyce,

 Salon
February 09, 2022

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo123795778.html

In the standard origin story of the modern U.S. right, today's conservative movement was born with an excommunication: when William F. Buckley, the erudite, upper-crust founder of the National Review, turned on his onetime ally, Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, driving Welch and the rest of the conspiracy-hunting "Birchers" out of the respectable right. 

The truth, as always, is much messier, as historian and Northeastern University professor Edward H. Miller demonstrates in his new book, "A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism," published this month by the University of Chicago Press.

"Like the fundamentalists of the 1920s, many Birchers did disengage when it became an embarrassment to be associated with the Society," Miller writes. "Welch's followers were seen as crackpots, deplorables, losers who did not fit into the modern world." But rather than disappear, the Birchers just assumed a lower profile. And today, the ideas they promoted "are everywhere — even in the White House. Even in your own house."

Miller's book constitutes the first full-scale biography of Welch, which is surprising in and of itself, considering the impact the Birchers had on American politics, as the most successful anti-Communist organization in U.S. history. And it takes an impressively long view, beginning almost 200 years before Welch's birth, on the North Carolina farms worked by his forebears — initially too poor to be slave-owners, and later on, consumed with elaborate paranoia about shadowy forces conspiring to take their human property away. Later still, as Welch grew up in the first decades of the 20th century — a child prodigy who became the University of North Carolina's youngest student at age 12 —evidence of Southern farmers' diminished status, and their fears of further "slippage," was all around him.

It doesn't take much of a leap to see the resonance of that broad narrative today, or its psycho-political implications. Miller acknowledges this early on, writing that Donald Trump's "entire political career — and a great deal of his popular appeal — lay in conspiracism of a kind that owes something to Robert Welch."

But the deeper imperative of the book, Miller writes, is to correct historians' long-standing misapprehensions about conservatism, and what the field has missed by dismissing the darker, stranger corners of the right, and how its apparent losers may have won the long game.

"For about two decades we have falsely bought into a narrative of American conservatism as a mild-mannered phenomenon," with historical treatments of the New Right making "the tones of American conservatism sound like the Beach Boys," argues Miller. In reality, "it has always sounded like death metal."

Miller spoke with Salon this January.

How did we get here, and what does the answer to that question have to do with Robert Welch?

Well, a lot of the conspiratorial views he possessed are now reflected in the culture. He is primarily known as the individual who founded the John Birch Society and called Dwight Eisenhower a communist. He had other conspiratorial perspectives, arguing that schools, academia, the government, the media and other institutions of society were inundated with communists. And he had a conspiratorial view of history. He believed Sputnik was fake; that the Cuban Missile Crisis was exaggerated; that the 1952 election was rigged. He was a precursor to many of the issues that the "Reagan revolution" embraced, including abortion, anti-[Equal Rights Amendment] policy and tax reform.

What sparked the idea for this book?

I wrote a book called "Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy," and I just kept thinking that I'd missed something in the story of Robert Welch; that Welch was more important to what I was talking about than I'd mentioned. So it was basically a continuation of what I was doing with the first book, but at a new level, exploring the nuances of his conspiratorial style, his paranoid style, as Richard Hofstadter called it.

How have historians typically thought about Welch and the John Birch Society, and where did you feel a corrective was needed?

Typically the narrative has been promoted that was inaugurated by Lisa McGirr's classic "Suburban Warriors": that the John Birch Society was fringe, and not part of the respectable conservatism that gave way to the Reagan revolution. The John Birch Society wasn't given the attention other organizations and individuals on the right, like William F. Buckley, were. But as things going on in the United States and around the world started to reflect some of the concerns the John Birch Society promulgated, I realized that this was not the correct narrative, and that we historians needed to look further at the intellectual losers of the far right: the surrealists, the individuals historians saw as charlatans outside the fringe.

Kimberly Phillips-Fein, a historian at NYU, says we have to start looking at the far right and considering its relationship with what's considered "respectable conservatism." I argue in the book that there really is no clear demarcation between the two — that "respectable conservatism" is influenced by the far right. And despite the narrative that Welch was ostracized from the conservative movement by Buckley, I argue in the book that he wasn't, and his views were reflected in the views of Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and '80s and continue to influence the right into the 21st century.

I'm not alone. Historians John Huntington and Seth Cotlar have been hard at work making the case that we need to really look at the far right. David Austin Walsh has a book coming out in a few years. So my book is an attempt to look at one group that was the most important anti-communist organization to influence the far right and get a general audience to realize that the far right is more influential than we thought.

In discussing this myth that the Birchers were purged from conservatism, a couple of lines you wrote stood out to me: One, that the concept of the responsible right is a delusion; and two, that American conservatism sounds like death metal.

If we look at William F. Buckley, he said the 14th and 15th Amendments were "inorganic accretions" tacked on by the winners of the Civil War. He said we should never get rid of colonies in Africa until Africans "stop eating each other." He says, in his letter to the South, that the white race is the advanced race at this particular moment in time. These are egregious things said by the "respectable" right. But he's urbane, stylish, cosmopolitan, a member of the establishment.

Reagan continued to promote conspiracy theories throughout the 1970s. He was talking about how Gerald Ford was faking his own assassination attempts; in his campaign newsletter Reagan promoted a John Birch Society quack remedy for cancer called Laetrile. And his Iran-Contra policy was basically right out of the John Birch Society playbook: that the communists are taking over South and Central America. So I think it's very clear that this "respectable" right has to be looked at again.

In terms of "death metal," I guess I was having a little fun. "Suburban Warriors" is about Orange County, California. And when I read that it's the story of upwardly mobile men and women in Southern California, I got the feeling that they were innocuous. No criticism of Lisa McGirr — it's a pathbreaking book. But it's a book that doesn't focus enough on race and doesn't focus enough on the strangeness of some of the things they were saying. I discovered "Suburban Warriors" during a graduate school colloquium, and as I read it, I said, this doesn't sound like the conservatism I grew up with in Boston in the 1970s and early '80s. This seems a lot more like the early Beach Boys. It really doesn't show the darkness and the danger of some of the conspiratorial ideas that reverberated throughout the right.

Was Welch a victim of a paranoid time, or a leader who led other people into paranoia?

I think he sincerely believed. He was not anybody who presented these views for political or monetary gain. But there were unintended consequences of his political imagination that we see playing out. I do see him as a leader of that style, and really as the person that Hofstadter was homing in on. Hofstadter mentioned that it was a characteristic of American history. Welch was born in 1899, and I spent a lot of time on his family and their ownership of slaves and what it was like to live in the South at that particular time, with the fear of losing their slaves and this idea of a Northeastern establishment of bankers controlling them. That's how they viewed the world. Welch is a sincere believer from this environment. But I don't consider him a victim. He embraced this. He's a very, very intelligent person who falls into this worldview.

I was interested in your description of Welch's family's sense of "slippage." It's almost impossible to read that without thinking of the wealth of stories we've seen about Trump voters, and their fear of losing status in a diversifying world.

I think it's analogous. Honestly, Welch's family was very lucky. They were doing very well. Welch himself did very well. I don't think status anxiety applies to Welch individually. He was a very successful businessman. He had a loving family. He was surrounded by business leaders who revered him. He enjoyed white privilege. But at the same time, his family suffered some difficult times in the South after the Civil War, and there was a fear that things could fall apart. I never came across anything [from Welch] that's exactly about those particular views. He was too optimistic about his future, I think, to suggest that. But definitely that connection can be made: that his family felt the same economic and social pressures that modern working-class folks feel in the deindustrialized Midwest.

You note several times in the book that we now live in Welch's America.

Well, No. 1, conspiracy theories abound. There are conspiracy theories about vaccination policy and [vaccines'] alleged futility, despite the fact that these vaccines are saving lives. You can get into some of the strange things, like people who are using dirt to cure the coronavirus. At the same time, you have this belief that the [2020] election was rigged, despite all evidence to the contrary that suggests it was completely legitimate. Many of the conspiratorial views far-right media expounds would be something expressed by Welch back in his heyday. I mean, he doesn't believe Sputnik exists. He believes the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came closest to nuclear annihilation, was exaggerated. He believes Vietnam was a phony war run by the Kremlin. He believes that the Korean War was run by the Kremlin. These are the kinds of things we'd hear today. Not necessarily the exact same things, but the unreality of it.


There are a number of places where that historical rhyming is so exact that it's jarring: Welch belonged to an America First committee in World War II, while today we have a white nationalist movement called America First. Welch constantly depicted the civil rights movement as communist, just as today's Black Lives Matter movement is called Marxist by right-wing media and politicians.

Well, here we are talking on Martin Luther King Day. Welch had a perspective that in Birmingham, when Bull Connor unleashed his dogs on African-American people fighting for justice, Welch came to the conclusion that what happened was one of the African-Americans hit one of the dogs and then it started to attack the crowd, and that's where [reporters] came in and captured that picture. There's no evidence whatsoever of that. That's not what happened. It was Bull Connor who was attacking African-Americans and using fire hoses on people struggling for their civil rights. But it's the same type of false flags you hear every day on the Alex Jones program, where there are communist agents provocateurs and no evidence to make that case.

If we continue to go down that line where we believe this nonsense, I think we're going to be in a suboptimal position. Reality is very important and truth is very important. And if we're going to continue to live in a country where we love one another, as Martin Luther King dreamed of, we have to have some agreement on what reality is.


Can you talk about Welch's role in facilitating the presence of so much racism and antisemitism in movement conservatism?

As I mention in the book, it's a complicated subject. There were contradictions, sophistry and duplicity in how he presented himself. He would denounce [America First Party founder] Gerald L.K. Smith, who was the most notorious antisemite, but at the same time, he would say that the parent of the communist conspiracy was the Zionist conspiracy. He would argue that some of his best friends were Jewish — and he did have a more amicable relationship with Jews, for his time, than Dwight Eisenhower — but he maintains relationships with some antisemites of the old guard. He kicked [white nationalist] Revilo Oliver — a fascinating palindrome — out of the John Birch Society, but he's too slow to do so. I kind of agonized over this while writing; it was a complicated matter. But there never should have been antisemites in his organization. It's inexcusable.

In the final analysis, he could have done a better job to extirpate the vehement and notorious antisemitism that existed in the old guard. But I think William F. Buckley could have as well. Buckley had some of the same individuals in the National Review. So I think there's a case that it's not just Welch, it's the institutional antisemitism that is part of both the new and the old right.

Were there points where you felt sympathy for Welch?

Some of the characterizations that were directed at Welch in the early 1960s were incorrect. There were individuals like Mike Newberry and [FDR's son] John Aspinwall Roosevelt who called Welch a fascist and a Nazi. There were pictures of Welch next to [American Nazi Party founder] George Lincoln Rockwell. But those characterizations should have been handled with more nuance. And the idea that Welch was an authoritarian, there couldn't be anyone further from that. He was not a charismatic speaker. He was a rather clumsy speaker. He would get up to deliver his speech, and it was kind of a disaster. His papers would be dropping. He looked like a professor. But they called him one goose-step away from fascism. And I just didn't see anything in his personality, and in the John Birch Society's response to that, that could substantiate those claims.

There was also so much infighting in the society. If you take a look at what early 1960s journalists and other authors wrote about him, they claimed that he would brook no insubordination. But the fact was he had to deal with too much of it, even from his own national council. He couldn't get anybody to agree with what he was saying. Many people argued that he should just hand over the keys to the John Birch Society and somebody else should take over because of his conspiratorial screeds.

Are there figures today who play similar roles to those of Welch and Buckley?

I think it's mirrored throughout the Republican Party. When [Sen.] Mike Lee says we live in a republic, not a democracy, those same points were made [by Welch]. There was a suggestion somewhere that fluoride should be outlawed. That was one of the pet projects of the John Birch Society. The goal of Steve Bannon to get [conservatives] on the PTA to address the vaccine — there have been disruptions in the middle of school board meetings because of this. There's just so many. I read something and think, there we go again. The de-legitimacy of presidents. Welch suggested the Eisenhower presidency was illegitimate, that Ike stole the 1952 Republican primary from Robert Taft. We see the same effort to undermine Joe Biden's presidency with the current shenanigans. I could go on and on. History doesn't repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes, as you alluded to.

You write that Welch sincerely believed even his most ludicrous conspiracy theories. How does that compare today, in terms of people who sincerely believe conspiracy theories versus those who use them more cynically?

Robert Welch died with nothing. He spent all his money on fighting windmills. His wife had to sell their house [after his death] to survive. But today I think the temptation to make money off this is so powerful that many embrace this false reality for monetary gain. Welch wouldn't and didn't do that. It was completely different than something you'd see today, where people promote climate denial when they don't believe it; when they're taking the vaccines and the boosters while telling people it's against their freedoms. I mean, it's unconscionable. Sorry to get emotional, but I don't know how they can sleep at night.

For people disturbed by living in Robert Welch's America today, what can we learn from his story?

The more history we study, the more we realize that the actions of individuals create history. The idea that there is this grand conspiracy is false. The claim that everything is planned in advance is lazy and actually dangerous. We have to get beyond this nonsensical view of reality. There is a truth that we can get to and we have to make that commitment, and that involves some effort.

https://ucf.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/ucf%3A4861

205: Americanist Library

by Josh MacPhee

Judging Books by Their Covers

December 8, 2014

https://ia803009.us.archive.org/12/items/TheWebOfSubversionJamesBurnham/The_Web_of_Subversion_-_James_Burnham.pdf

This week we swing from left to far right, Africa to Belmont, Massachusetts. Sorry for the whiplash. The Americanist Library is a collection of almost twenty mass market paperbacks put out by Western Islands, the publishing wing of the extreme right-wing John Birch Society. Chronicling the book covers of the far right is not normally what I do here, but hell, they’re interesting and they’re political. I first stumbled on Western Islands at a used bookshop in Los Angeles (where else?), when I found the book above: The Web of Subversion. The cover is amazing, with the capital tangled up in a crazed set of intersecting lines and connections. The active illustration is offset by a classic frame, silver circle within silver rectangle, on a field of regal blue. Good stuff.
 
Turns out I was pulling at the tail end of a little gold mine, this being the eighteenth book in the series (all appear to be published in 1965), which includes volumes about strikes, anarchists, spies, communists, traitors, and so much other awesome stuff, all seen through the lens of fanatical anti-communist lunatics!
 
The basic cover design is the same for each book, all done by Peppino Rizzuto. I assume he also did each of the cover illustrations, as none of them have individual artists attributed, and most are stylistically similar. The back covers match the front in simplicity, with the same silver border, rich blue field, and then the press logo—an eagle with its wings outstretched into flag-like stripes, sitting on a couple of stars, of course. The bird also becomes both book and pen nib, a volume written by freedom!
 

 
The two books below are about Asia’s communist turn (China, Vietnam, Cambodia, N. Korea, etc.), bemoaning how we “lost” them. This all looks quite silly in the contemporary context of Vietnam and China’s full embrace of market systems and logics. Below these two I’ve discussed certain covers when interesting ideas emerged, but left others without comment.
 

 
The Whole of Their Lives is an expose about how the Communist Party controls people, and the cover illustration is an interesting visual articulation of this. The shared head outlines are supposed to illustrate the terrors of collectivism, but they can just as easily be read as an articulation of how “we are all connected.” This speaks directly to how much as designers and artists we assume our audience will see things through the same lens we created them. (An aside: Max Eastman, who wrote the foreword, was the editor of the socialist/anarchist paper The Masses from 1912-1917, but then went on to become a free-market ideologue and virulent anti-communist in the 1940s/50s.)
 

 
While at initial glance, the portraits of Sacco and Vanzetti on the cover of Montgomery’s book below look sympathetic, it’s a rouse. To cut straight through the feigned neutrality, we can skip straight to the last line of the book: the “myth” of their innocence is “the Greatest Lie of all.”
 

 
The cover image on The Kohler Strike is one of my favorites—there is something about the composition of the tools, and the burning orange, that remind me of Orozco’s Man of Fire. On the cover of Smoots’ The Invisible Government is a enigmatic “CFR” floating in the clouds. This logo stands for the Council on Foreign Relations, a shady Trilateral Commission-type entity made up of bankers supposedly trying to rule the world. Of course the ruling class seem to be doing just fine ruling the world without their crypto-fascist clubhouses, but alas, how can a rational materialist analysis of how capitalism functions hold up against conspiracy theories about lizard people? At least we know that people had to contend with these idiots fifty years ago, and they weren’t created by 9/11.
 

 
The cover of the Shanghai Conspiracy is the most successful of the “comic” covers (like the dragon on While You Slept and blinded figure on The People’s Pottage, both above). The three figures are simultaneously creepy and sad, their fedoras and red glowing eyes seeming as much a burden as accoutrements of sneaky spy-craft.
 

 
When I originally published this post back in 2014, I couldn’t find what seemed like a key title in the series: Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery. I even suspected that it might not really exist. But I eventually found it, at a little used bookstore in Grand Rapids, MI. In 1965, the John Birch Society was upwards of 100% white, yet they had no problem absorbing Booker T. into their narrative of American individualism and market ingenuity. And to add some frosting to the cake, at the time they were republishing Washington, they were simultaneously claiming the the Civil Rights Movement was entirely the fabrication of a small group of Communists in order to destroy America!
 
[Post updated with additional images and information on 01/07/18.]