In small-town Wisconsin, looking for the roots of the modern American conspiracy theory

A portrait of John Birch hangs in an office cubicle at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. The once-powerful John Birch Society is largely forgotten today, relegated to a pair of squat buildings along a busy commercial street in small-town Wisconsin. But that is only part of their story. Because outside those cramped little offices is a national political landscape that the Society helped forge. (AP Photo/David Goldman)Read More

Executive Senior Editor Steve Bonta, left, and writer Daniel Natal, with the John Birch Society’s New American magazine, film a live broadcast at the organization’s headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. Back when the Cold War was looming and TV was still mostly in black and white, the Society was a powerful presence in American life. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

CEO Bill Hahn watches a live broadcast from a production booth at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

An employee walks through a library at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

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BY TIM SULLIVAN

January 21, 2024

APPLETON, Wis. (AP) — The decades fall away as you open the front doors.

It’s the late 1950s in the cramped little offices — or maybe the pre-hippie 1960s. It’s a place where army-style buzz cuts are still in fashion, communism remains the primary enemy and the decor is dominated by American flags and portraits of once-famous Cold Warriors.

At the John Birch Society, they’ve been waging war for more than 60 years against what they’re sure is a vast, diabolical conspiracy. As they tell it, it’s a plot with tentacles that reach from 19th-century railroad magnates to the Biden White House, from the Federal Reserve to COVID vaccines.

Long before QAnon, Pizzagate and the modern crop of politicians who will happily repeat apocalyptic talking points, there was Birch. And outside these cramped small-town offices is a national political landscape that the Society helped shape.

“We have a bad reputation. You know: ‘You guys are insane,’” says Wayne Morrow, a Society vice president. He is standing in the group’s warehouse amid 10-foot (3-meter) shelves of Birch literature waiting to be distributed.

“But all the things that we wrote about are coming to pass.”

___

Back when the Cold War loomed and TV was still mostly in black and white, the John Birch Society mattered. There were dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and meetings with powerful politicians. There was a headquarters on each coast, a chain of bookstores, hundreds of local chapters, radio shows, summer camps for members’ children.

A chair sits at the end of a row of file cabinets at a library in the John Birch Society headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Well-funded and well-organized, they sent forth fevered warnings about a secret communist plot to take over America. It made them heroes to broad swaths of conservatives, even as they became a punchline to a generation of comedians.

“They created this alternative political tradition,” says Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University and author of “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.” He says it forged a right-wing culture that fell, at first, well outside mainstream Republican politics.

Conspiracy theories have a long history in the United States, going back at least to 1800, when secret forces were said to be backing Thomas Jefferson’s presidential bid. It was a time when such talk moved slowly, spread through sermons, letters and tavern visits.

No more. Fueled by social media and the rise of celebrity conspiracists, the last two decades have seen ever-increasing numbers of Americans lose faith in everything from government institutions to journalism. And year after year, ideas once relegated to fringe newsletters, little-known websites and the occasional AM radio station pushed their way into the mainstream.

CEO Bill Hahn points to articles of the Constitution in his office during an interview at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Today, outlandish conspiracy theories are quoted by more than a few U.S. senators, and millions of Americans believe the COVID pandemic was orchestrated by powerful elites. Prominent cable news commentators speak darkly of government agents seizing citizens off the streets.

But the John Birch Society itself is largely forgotten, relegated to a pair of squat buildings along a busy commercial street in small-town Wisconsin.

So why even take note of it today? Because many of its ideas — from anger at a mysterious, powerful elite to fears that America’s main enemy was hidden within the country, biding its time — percolated into pockets of American culture over the last half-century. Those who came later simply out-Birched the Birchers. Says Dallek: “Their successors were politically savvier and took Birch ideas and updated them for contemporary politics.”

The result has been a new political terrain. What was once at the edges had worked its way toward the heart of the discourse.

To some, the fringe has gone all the way to the White House. In the Society’s offices, they’ll tell you that Donald Trump would never have been elected if they hadn’t paved the way.

Boxes of John Birch Society literature waiting to be distributed pamphlets and reports on a range of issues from COVID to inflation are stored in a warehouse at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

“The bulk of Trump’s campaign was Birch,” Art Thompson, a retired Society CEO who remains one of its most prominent voices, says proudly. “All he did was bring it out into the open.”

There’s some truth in that, even if Thompson is overstating things.

The Society had spent decades calling for a populist president who would preach patriotism, oppose immigration, pull out of international treaties and root out the forces trying to undermine America. Trump may not have realized it, but when he warned about a “Deep State” — a supposed cabal of bureaucrats that secretly controls U.S. policy — he was repeating a longtime Birch talking point.

A savvy reality TV star, Trump capitalized on a conservative political landscape that had been shaped by decades of right-wing talk radio, fears about America’s seismic cultural shifts and the explosive online spread of misinformation.

While the Birch Society echoes in that mix, tracing those echoes is impossible. It’s hard to draw neat historical lines in American politics. Was the Society a prime mover, or a bit player? In a nation fragmented by social media and offshoot groups by the dozens, there’s just no way to be sure. What is certain, though, is this:

“The conspiratorial fringe is now the conspiratorial mainstream,” says Paul Matzko, a historian and research fellow at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. “Right-wing conspiracism has simply outgrown the John Birch Society.”
___

Their beliefs skip along the surface of the truth, with facts and rumors and outright fantasies banging together into a complex mythology. “The great conspiracy” is what Birch Society founder Robert Welch called it in “The Blue Book,” the collection of his writings and speeches still treated as near-mystical scripture in the Society’s corridors.

Wayne Morrow, vice president of the John Society, walks past a world map hanging in a warehouse storing the organization’s literature, stickers and buttons at its headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Welch, a wealthy candy company executive, formed the Society in the late 1950s, naming it for an American missionary and U.S. Army intelligence officer killed in 1945 by communist Chinese forces. Welch viewed Birch as the first casualty of the Cold War. Communist agents, he said, were everywhere in America.

Welch shot to prominence, and infamy, when he claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the hero general of World War II, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Also under Kremlin control, Welch asserted: the secretary of state, the head of the CIA, and Eisenhower’s younger brother Milton.

Subtlety has never been a strong Birch tradition. Over the decades, the Birch conspiracy grew to encompass the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, public education, the United Nations, the civil rights movement, The Rockefeller Foundation, the space program, the COVID pandemic, the 2020 presidential election and climate-change activism. In short, things the Birchers don’t like.

The plot’s leaders — “insiders,” in Society lexicon — range from railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt to former President George H.W. Bush and Bill Gates, whose vaccine advocacy is, they say, part of a plan to control the global population. While his main focus was always communism, Welch eventually came to believe that the conspiracy’s roots twisted far back into history, to the Illuminati, an 18th-century Bavarian secret society.

By the 1980s, the Society was well into its decline. Welch died in 1985 and the society’s reins passed to a series of successors. There were internal revolts. While its aura has waned, it is still a force among some conservatives — its videos are popular in parts of right-wing America, and its offices include a sophisticated basement TV studio for internet news reports. Its members speak at right-wing conferences and work booths at the occasional county fair.

Scholars say its ranks are far reduced from the 1960s and early 1970s, when membership estimates ranged from 50,000 to 100,000. “Membership is something that has been closely guarded since day one,” says Bill Hahn, who became CEO in 2020. He will only say the organization “continues to be a growing operation.

Today, the Society frames itself as almost conventional. Almost.

“We have succeeded in attracting mainstream people,” says Steve Bonta, a top editor for the Society’s New American magazine. The group has toned down the rhetoric and is a little more careful these days about throwing around accusations of conspiracies. But members still believe in them fiercely.

“As Mr. Welch came out with on Day One: There is a conspiracy,” Hahn says. “It’s no different today than it was back in December 1958.”

It can feel that way. Ask about the conspiracy’s goal, and things swerve into unexpected territory. The sharp rhetoric re-emerges and, once again, the decades seem to fall away.

“They really want to cut back on the population of the Earth. That is their intent,” Thompson says.

But why?

“Well, that’s a good question, isn’t it?” he responds. “It makes no sense. But that’s the way they think.”
___

Follow AP National Writer Tim Sullivan on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ByTimSullivan

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

From the Inside Flap

The blueprint of the modern Tea Party, front and center in the John Birch Society's strongest years'

Hardcover – June 27, 2014

by D. J. Mulloy (Author) is Associate Professor of History

at Wilfrid Laurier University and author of American Extremism

 Selection of the History Book Club
Named One of "Six Books for Insight on a Trump Presidency" by the Washington Post

As far as members of the hugely controversial John Birch Society were concerned, the Cold War revealed in stark clarity the loyalties and disloyalties of numerous important Americans, including Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Earl Warren. Founded in 1958 as a force for conservative political advocacy, the Society espoused the dangers of enemies foreign and domestic, including the Soviet Union, organizers of the US civil rights movement, and government officials who were deemed "soft" on communism in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Sound familiar? In The World of the John Birch Society, author D. J. Mulloy reveals the tactics of the Society in a way they've never been understood before, allowing the reader to make the connections to contemporary American politics, up to and including the Tea Party. These tactics included organized dissemination of broad-based accusations and innuendo, political brinksmanship within the Republican Party, and frequent doomsday predictions regarding world events. At the heart of the organization was Robert Welch, a charismatic writer and organizer who is revealed to have been the lifeblood of the Society's efforts.

The Society has seen its influence recede from the high-water mark of 1970s, but the organization still exists today. Throughout The World of the John Birch Society, the reader sees the very tenets and practices in play that make the contemporary Tea Party so effective on a local level. Indeed, without the John Birch Society paving the way, the Tea Party may have encountered a dramatically different political terrain on its path to power.

Review

"The World of the John Birch Society is a thorough, fair, and nuanced examination of the controversial organization. . . . [A] must-read for anyone who wants to understand the mind-set of the JBS."
—H-Net Reviews in the Humanities & Social Sciences

"Mulloy's essential look at [the John Birch Society] brilliantly reveals the Society's hard-nosed conservatism while linking it to movements that preceded today's Tea Party."
—Publishers Weekly

"Mulloy's work offers a much-needed return to an examination of the far right. The rise of the Tea Party, the persistence of allegations about the place of Barack Obama's birth, his alleged 'un-Americanism,' and other recent political developments suggest that some of the older concepts, and the older focus on more extreme elements of the right, remain warranted."
—Timothy Thurber, author of Republicans and Rac

https://www.amazon.com/World-John-Birch-Society-Conservatism/dp/0826519814

Buckley’s Battle with the Birchers Was No Myth

National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.(National Review)

By ALVIN S. FELZENBERG
April 23, 2023 

His full-scale attack on the John Birch Society was a turning point. He emerged from the controversy in the role of ‘tablet keeper’ of the conservative movement.

‘Of all the crusades William F. Buckley took on in his half century on the national political stage,” I wrote in 2017, “none did more to cement his reputation as a gatekeeper of the conservative movement — or consumed more of his time — than that which he launched against the John Birch Society.”

But was his heart really in it? Matthew Dallek in his Politico discussion of William F. Buckley Jr. and the John Birch Society offers a resounding “no.” He debunks what he calls “a popular idea that Buckley cordoned off the Birchers and expelled them” from the conservative movement. He goes as far as to declare the action so many of Buckley’s admirers across the political spectrum consider his “finest hour” a “myth.” Dallek concedes that Buckley moved against JBS founder Robert Welch but states that he did not truly attack the organization Welch founded. Not so.


In the early 1960s, Buckley condemned Welch in the strongest possible terms. He feared that the liberal establishment and the Rockefeller wing of the GOP would use Welch’s comments (especially his characterization of Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent” of an international communist conspiracy) to cast all conservatives as “extremists,” and, therefore, unfit for public office or to influence public opinion.

Early in that decade, few, whether on the left or on the right, regarded William F. Buckley Jr. as the recognized leader of the conservative movement. Barry Goldwater was. And, as Dallek points out, Goldwater was in no mood to take on Welch’s organization, whose members Goldwater considered “nice people” (an assessment he voiced at a meeting with Buckley plotting how to disentangle conservatism from Bircherism). National Review followed Goldwater’s lead and limited its criticism of the JBS to Welch. That was then.

More on

CONSERVATISM

William F. Buckley Sr.: Father of a Revolution

The Inside Story of William F. Buckley Jr.’s Crusade against the John Birch Society

Goldwater’s national influence within the conservative movement began to decline after his landslide defeat to LBJ in the 1964 presidential election. In 1965, Buckley, as a candidate for mayor of New York City running against a liberal Republican and a liberal Democrat, wasted no time ferreting the John Birch Society out of the movement he helped found. That is what Dallek misses.

In August 1965, Buckley published three columns — both nationally and in National Review — taking the JBS to task. In a special issue of the magazine, he ran supportive commentary by Goldwater, Senator John Tower, and retired admiral William Radford. In the first essay, Buckley referenced ten JBS positions, all culled from a single issue of its magazine, American Opinion. Each statement took as its premise that large segments of the United States government were under communist control. Buckley inquired how the society’s membership could tolerate “such paranoid and unpatriotic drivel.” Elsewhere, he urged Birchers who disagreed with these positions to leave the society and beseeched readers of his own magazine to disassociate themselves politically from those who adhered to such positions.

In his attempt to draw parallels between Buckley’s actions then and Republicans of today seeking to draw distinctions between Trump and Trumpism, Dallek downplays the hailstorm Buckley brought down on himself and his magazine. Dallek refers to this as an “underappreciated price”: He “lost some subscribers; he endured barbs from allies as a result of his editorials, which had put him in the crosshairs of many leaders of the far right.” This is an understatement, to say the least. The cost was serious. So much so that, alarmed at the hemorrhaging of fleeing subscribers and donors NR was experiencing after Buckley’s scorching criticisms of the JBS, conservative columnist James Kilpatrick turned his column into a beg-a-thon to keep National Review afloat.

Undeterred, Buckley, in a photograph published by Life Magazine, delighted in holding up a one-word letter he received from an enraged Bircher. (Across the page was scribbled in Magic Marker the word “Judas.” Others proclaimed him a “traitor.”) With the Birchers attacking him so vigorously, Buckley’s liberal opponents gained little traction when they tried to portray Buckley as an “extremist.” Ditto today, as Dallek tries to fault Buckley for failing to stop the sort of radicalism, such as the January 6 Capitol riot, that his successors at NR condemned. Indeed, Buckley’s full-scale attack on the John Birch Society was a turning point for him and for the conservative movement. Buckley emerged from the controversy having assured his place as “tablet keeper” of the conservative movement, a role to which he had long aspired. It does his labors a disservice to belittle them as mere “fence-walking.”
NEXT ARTICLETrump on Late-Term Abortion: Promises Made, Promises Broken?

ALVIN S. FELZENBERG is the author of A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. and The Leaders We Deserved: Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game.

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.]

How the GOP Surrendered to Extremism

Sixty years ago, many GOP leaders resisted radicals in their ranks. Now they’re not even trying.

RONALD BROWNSTEIN

FEBRUARY 4, 2021

Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican National Convention (Francis Miller / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty)

It’s an image that still shocks in its feral intensity: On July 14, 1964, supporters of Barry Goldwater, the arch-conservative senator from Arizona whom the Republican Party was preparing to crown as its presidential nominee, unleashed a torrent of boos against New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as he spoke at the party’s national convention in San Francisco.

More than half a century later, Goldwater’s army of conservatives from cookie-cutter Sun Belt subdivisions howling their discontent at Rockefeller—the embodiment of the GOP’s centrist, East Coast establishment—remains a milestone in the right’s conquest of the party. The atmosphere was so heated that Jackie Robinson, who was a Rockefeller supporter, nearly got into a fight on the floor with a Goldwater acolyte from Alabama.

What’s less remembered is why Rockefeller, who had lost the nomination to Goldwater, was standing behind the lectern in the first place: to speak in support of an amendment to the party platform that would condemn political extremism. The resolution repudiated “the efforts of irresponsible extremist organizations,” including the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society, a rapidly growing far-right grassroots group obsessed with the alleged communist infiltration of America.

The resolution failed, which testifies to the GOP’s long-standing reluctance to draw a bright line against the extremists who congregate at its fringes. But the fact that such a resolution was debated at all—in such a visible venue, with such high-profile advocates—also says something about Republicans today: In the past, the GOP had a stronger core of resistance to extremism than it’s had in the era of Donald Trump, QAnon, the Proud Boys, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“There were a lot more Republican leaders, and their constituents, who attempted to push back then than there are now,” says Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University and the author of an upcoming history of the John Birch Society. “To a large extent, the people who have inherited the Birch legacy today, I think, are more empowered [and] more visible within the Republican Party. There is much less criticism; there is much less of an effort to drum them out; there is a much greater fear of antagonizing them. They are the so-called Republican base.”

The question of how Republicans deal with the extremists in their ranks is now more urgent than perhaps at any other point since the Birch Society’s heyday in the 1960s. So far, as Dallek notes, the party has done little to uproot them. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House GOP leader, this week reportedly pressured Greene to apologize for past statements that were racist, anti-Semitic, and encouraged violence, and to relinquish one committee assignment. But ultimately the GOP chose to take no action against her and instead criticized a floor vote Democrats scheduled for today to remove her from all her committees. (By several accounts, many of Greene’s GOP colleagues even gave her a standing ovation after she addressed a caucus meeting yesterday afternoon.) Nor have McCarthy and other GOP leaders shown any interest in acting against the House members who promoted or spoke at Trump’s rally ahead of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. And while GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and some other Senate Republicans have criticized Greene—a relatively easy target—almost all have signaled that they will not vote in Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial to impose any consequences on him for his role in fomenting the attack.

In these accommodating responses, the GOP appears caught on a treadmill. The more the party allows itself to be branded as tolerating (or even welcoming) extremism, the more its support is likely to erode among previously Republican-leaning constituencies, especially white-collar suburbanites. That, in turn, will make the party only more dependent on massive turnout among the most culturally alienated voters who compose the Trump base. And that pressure could further erode any willingness on leaders’ part to isolate people like Greene who push cultural alienation to the point of conspiracy theories, open racism and anti-Semitism, and threats of violence. Greene is hardly alone out there: Polls have found that a significant minority of Republican voters believe the QAnon conspiracy theory (that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles was leading the opposition to Trump). Surveys have also consistently found that the large majority of rank-and-file Republican voters believe Trump’s equally baseless claims that the election was stolen.

Even during the 1960s, the GOP’s response to the rise of the John Birch Society was not exactly a profile in courage. But while today few Republicans are “taking a stand against QAnon and drawing a clear line in the sand and doing it repeatedly,” at least back then “there was a real range of reactions among Republican elected officials” to the Birchers, Dallek told me. Named after a Christian missionary killed in China immediately after World War II, the society was founded by Robert Welch, a bright but paranoid candy salesman living in Boston. Welch spent the 1950s—the Red Scare era of Joseph McCarthy, the Hollywood blacklist, and the House Un-American Activities Committee—spinning elaborate conspiracy theories about communist infiltration in his many writings. (He once said that Dwight Eisenhower had been “consciously serving the communist conspiracy for all of his adult life.”)

In December 1958, Welch formally launched the John Birch Society with funding from 11 wealthy conservatives, including three past presidents of the National Association of Manufacturers, as the historian Rick Perlstein recounts in his energetic history of Goldwater and the conservative movement, Before the Storm.

Welch was nothing if not a salesman, and he steadily built a national organization. He was an innovator in his organizing strategies, particularly the creation of an alternative media world for his members (who probably numbered about 100,000 at the society’s peak). “They were extremely effective at flooding the zone with their own version of reality,” Dallek said. “They had a Birch Society bulletin, Welch’s monthly American Opinion magazine; they had pamphlets galore; they set up dozens of Birch ‘freedom stores,’ where they sold tracts and stickers and booklets. They weren’t the only ones, but they were certainly part of the innovation of this conservative far-right media.”

Ku Klux Klan members wave signs in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in 1964. An African American man tries to push signs back. (Warren K Leffler / PhotoQuest / Getty)

Through those channels, Welch mobilized his members to support an ill-fated attempt to impeach Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren (whom he called a communist dupe), oppose the fluoridation of water (which he considered a communist plot), and resist the civil-rights movement (which he labeled another communist plot). “They were very out in front on prayer in school, on science denialism. They were anti-globalism, anti-UN, and [pro–]local police—they were ardent defenders of police against these ‘communist’ rioters,” Dallek said.

From the start, Republicans were divided over Welch’s movement. They liked the volunteers and donors who emerged from his ranks, but many in the party recoiled from his wilder claims of treason, particularly those directed against Eisenhower. Some leading GOP moderates condemned the movement outright. Richard Nixon, who generally tried to bridge his party’s differences, forcefully criticized the group during his unsuccessful 1962 race for governor in California, where the group had the most support

Nixon’s defeat encapsulated the challenge that the Birchers presented to Republicans, similar to the one they’re facing now. During that 1962 race, California’s Democratic governor, Pat Brown, roundly condemned the Birchers as a threat to democracy. That increased pressure on Nixon to separate from the organization, but he lost members’ votes in the process. After many Birchers sat out the election, Republican operatives concluded that their absence was one reason Nixon lost. Subsequently, many leading conservatives—Goldwater and Ronald Reagan among them—settled on a dodge: They denounced Welch personally (particularly for his accusations against Eisenhower) but avoided criticizing, and sometimes even praised, his followers.

With such equivocation from leading conservatives, the Birchers established a secure beachhead in the Republican Party. Several Birch sympathizers were elected to Congress. But the group’s influence remained bounded because enough party leaders and intellectuals held the line on excluding it from the GOP mainstream.

The key figure in that process was William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative intellectual and founder of National Review, the right’s leading journal at the time. Though Welch had been a friend and financial supporter, Buckley came to view his unbalanced extremism as a threat to conservatism, and over time he wrote a succession of editorials and newspaper columns trying to excommunicate the Birchers from the movement. “Buckley believed [that] before he could make conservatism dominant in the Republican Party, he had to be able to compete on equal terms with the moderates and with respectable liberal opinion,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of Rule and Ruin, a history of moderate Republicans, and the director of political studies at the libertarian Niskanen Center. “It was really important for him for conservatism to be respectable and not tainted by association with these extremists. Buckley understood there is a price to be paid for tolerating people like that.” Contained, if not directly confronted, by this generation of Republicans, the John Birch Society’s institutional strength declined after the 1960s (though the group still operates today).

The response among conservative media organs and right-leaning intellectuals to GOP extremism is very different now. Compared with the Birch era, thinkers on the right are doing “less policing of the borders” between conservatism and extremism, as Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative political strategist, put it succinctly. Buckley’s successors at National Review have condemned QAnon and Greene (even if they’ve blunted that message by relentlessly insisting that conservatives are being unfairly persecuted for their views, as Kabaservice notes). Right-leaning anti-Trump outlets such as The Bulwark have been unequivocal. But the most powerful voices on the right—Fox News and talk-radio hosts—have done backflips to avoid disowning Greene and other radical voices. Tucker Carlson has suggested that criticism of QAnon’s bizarre beliefs represents a step toward “tyranny … and dictatorship.”

Of course, the biggest difference between now and the Birch era is that today’s far-right extremists are operating under an umbrella of protection from a former president who remains the most popular figure to the GOP’s base. “I love Buckley dealing with the Birch Society, but he was able to repudiate a group that never had the support of any president and was sort of repudiated by Goldwater,” Kristol told me. Now most GOP elected officials have concluded that the risk of pushback from Trump is too high to speak out. “They think that the danger of getting in a fight with Trump and splitting the party is so much greater than a little bit of accommodation with some wackos and a little bit of groveling to the Trump base,” said Kristol, one of the leading voices in the conservative Never Trump movement.

Kevin McCarthy’s half-hearted slap on the wrist for Greene this week was a measure of the GOP’s limited appetite for constructing a clear boundary against extremism. The likelihood that the majority of Senate Republicans will soon vote to exempt Trump from any punishment for the Capitol riot underscores that message. As does the likelihood that the large majority of House Republicans will vote to defend Greene when Democrats try to remove her from her committee assignments.

These choices may carry political consequences: In a recent Public Religion Research Institute survey, nearly two-thirds of all Americans, including one-fourth of Republicans, said Trump encourages white-supremacist groups. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last week started running ads tying potentially vulnerable GOP House members to both QAnon’s rising presence and Trump’s role in provoking the riot. Democrats believe that the GOP’s tolerance of extremism, symbolized by its acceptance of Greene, will deepen the party’s retreat in the well-educated suburbs that consistently moved toward Democrats in the Trump era. “They can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters. They cannot do both,” Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the new chair of the DCCC, told Politico this week.

Yet most Republicans appear more comfortable weathering those attacks than confronting what McConnell has called the “cancer” of growing extremist influence in the party. Opening the door to radicals like Greene is part of a much larger shift: As I’ve written before, the GOP is morphing into a quasi-authoritarian party—one that’s becoming more willing to undermine democratic norms to maintain power. Its long-term evolution toward any-means-necessary militance is likely to only intensify as the nation’s growing racial and religious diversity, which triggers so many in the party’s base, unspools through the 2020s. This tug toward conspiracy-theory-laden, often-racist extremism “is in the Republican Party DNA,” Kabaservice told me. “If the party isn’t going to forcefully turn against QAnon and the Proud Boys and the neo-Nazis who invaded the Capitol … then that DNA is going to be passed along in an even more virulent form to the next generation of Republicans.”


RONALD BROWNSTEIN is a senior editor at The Atlantic.