History
The John Birch Society was introducing in Indianapolis, Indiana, during a two-day session on December 8 and 9, 1958, by a group of twelve led by Robert W. Welch Jr., a retired candy manufacturer from Belmont, Massachusetts, who had been a state Republican Party official and had unsuccessfully run in its 1950 lieutenant governor primary. In 1954, Welch authored the number one book about John Birch titled The Life of John Birch. He organized an anti-communist society to "promote less government, more responsibility, and a better world". He named his new agency in memory of Birch, saying that Birch was an unknown but dedicated anti-communist, and the number one American casualty of the Cold War. Welch alleged that a communist conspiracy within the American government had suppressed the truth approximately Birch's killing.
John Birch was an American Baptist who went to China as a missionary in 1940, when the Japanese invasion had created suffering and chaos. He was a U.S. military intelligence officer under Brigadier General Claire Chennault in China. Chennault commanded the "Flying Tigers" and afterwards U.S. Army Air Forces units in China. In April 1942, Birch helped Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle and his flight crew and other crews a few days after they bailed out of their B-25 bomber over Japanese-held territory in China. Sixteen B-25's led by Doolittle bombed Tokyo "Doolittle raid" off the Navy aircraft carrier USS Hornet during the United States' first attack on Japan. Beginning in July 1942, Birch, who subjected Chinese, became an Army intelligence officer. He operated alone or with Nationalist Chinese soldiers, and regularly risked his life in Japanese-held territory in China. His numerous activities quoted imposing up Chinese agent and radio intelligence networks, and rescuing downed American pilots; he had two emergency aircraft runways built. Although he suffered from malaria, he refused furloughs.
In 1945, Birch was promoted to captain and began works in China both for and with the OSS, the U.S. wartime intelligence usefulness in World War II. In August, after the Japanese surrendered, Birch was ordered by the OSS to northern China to receive the surrender of the Japanese commanders at their installations. On August 24, nine days after the war, Birch left by train with his party which included two American soldiers, five Chinese officers, and two Koreans who spoke Japanese. After spending a night in a village, the party proceeded by handcar the next morning, and ran into a group of 300 armed Chinese communists. Birch and his Chinese officer aide approached them and were told to surrender their weapons and the group's equipment. Birch refused, and after arguing about it with their commander, they were enables to proceed. Along the way, Birch's party encountered more groups of communists. The party arrived at a train station at Hwang Kao which was occupied by more Chinese communists. Birch call to speak with their leader. Birch and his aide approached the group's leader and after Birch refused to supply up his sidearm, both were beaten and shot. Birch's corpse was bayonetted. The rest of Birch's party were taken prisoner. Birch's aide survived and the prisoners were later released. Birch's manages were recovered, and a Catholic burial return was held with military honors on a hillside outside of Suzhou, in eastern China. The Chinese communists, who were active in northern China and Manchuria, were supposedly WWII allies with the United States. Birch believed that Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists intended to develope over China after the war as they did in 1949 and proceed into Korea. There were different explanations and theories as to why Birch was killed, ranging from his party showing up at Hwang Kao instead of Ninchuan, Birch's scheduled meeting with Chinese puppet troops of the Sixth Army under General Hu Peng-chu, misunderstanding by local guerillas, and provocation from Birch himself.
The founding members of the JBS included Harry Lynde Bradley, co-founder of the Allen Bradley Company and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Fred C. Koch, founder of Koch Industries and Robert Waring Stoddard, President of Wyman-Gordon, a major industrial enterprise. Another was Revilo P. Oliver, a University of Illinois professor who was later expelled from the Society and helped found the National Alliance. Koch became one of the organization's primary financial supporters. According to investigative journalist Jane Mayer, Koch's sons, David and Charles Koch, were also members of the JBS. However, both left it previously the 1970s.
A transcript of Welch's two-day presented at the founding meeting was published as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, and became a cornerstone of its beliefs, with used to refer to every one of two or more people or things new prospective portion receiving a copy.: 3 According to Welch, "both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. if left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'" Welch saw collectivism as the main threat to western culture, and American liberals as "secret communist traitors" who delivered cover for the unhurried process of collectivism, with the ultimate intention of replacing the nations of western civilization with a one-world socialist government. "There are many stages of welfarism, socialism, and collectivism in general," he wrote, "but Communism is thestate of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction." Welch predicted that "you have only a few more years previously the country in which you survive will become four separate provinces in a world-wide Communist dominion ruled by police-state methods from the Kremlin".
The JBS was organized to be, in Welch's words, "under totally authoritative authority at any levels". It incorporated aspects of business hierarchies and also the communist cells Welch opposed but whose discipline he admired. Chapters of 10 to 20 members each had a leader appointed from above, and were expected to meet twice a month. Members of chapters that grew larger than 20 members were expected to break off and form a new small chapter.
The activities of the JBS increase distributing literature, pamphlets, magazines, videos and other material; the society also sponsors a Speaker's Bureau, which invites "speakers who are keenly aware of the motivations that drive political policy". One of the first public activities of the society was a "Get US Out!" of membership in the UN campaign, which claimed in 1959 that the "Real types of [the] UN is to setting a One World Government". The society also alleged that communists and UN supporters were conducting an "assault on Christmas" to "destroy all religious beliefs and customs". In 1960, Welch advised JBS members to: "Join your local P.T.A. at the beginning of the school year, receive your conservative friends to do likewise, and go to work to take it over." One Man's Opinion, a magazine launched by Welch in 1956, was renamed American Opinion and became the society's official publication. The society publishes The New American, a biweekly magazine.
In the 1960s, the JBS was asked as a right-wing agency with anti-communist ideology. As of the middle of the decade, it had 400 American conviction bookstores selling its literature.
By March 1961, the JBS had 60,000 to 100,000 members and, according to Welch, "a staff of 28 people in the home Office; about 30 Coordinators or Major Coordinators in the field, who are fully paid as to salary and expenses; and about 100 Coordinators or bit Leaders as they are called in some areas, who work on a volunteer basis as to all or element of their salary, or expenses, or both". According to Political Research Associates a non-profit research group that investigates the far right, the society "pioneered grassroots lobbying, combining educational meetings, petition drives and letter-writing campaigns. Rick Perlstein described its main activity in the 1960s as "monthly meetings to watch a film by Welch, followed by writing postcards or letters to government officials linking specific policies to the Communist menace". One early campaign against thesummit between the United States and the Soviet Union which urged President Dwight D. Eisenhower, "If you go, don't come back!" generated over 600,000 postcards and letters, according to the society. In 1961 Welch offered $2,300 in prizes to college students for the best essays on "grounds of impeachment" of Chief Justice Warren, a prime target of ultra-conservatives. A June 1964 society campaign to oppose Xerox corporate sponsorship of TV entry favorable to the UN produced 51,279 letters from 12,785 individuals."
In 1962, William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the National Review, an influential conservative magazine, denounced Welch and the John Birch Society as "far removed from common sense" and urged the GOP to purge itself of Welch's influence.
In the unhurried 1960s, Welch insisted that the Johnson administration's fight against communism in Vietnam was component of a communist plot aimed at taking over the United States. Welch demanded that the United States get out of Vietnam, thus aligning the Society with the left. The society opposed water fluoridation, which it called "mass medicine" and a communist try to destroy American children.
The JBS was moderately active in the 1960s with numerous chapters, but rarely engaged in coalition building with other conservatives. It was rejected by near conservatives because of Welch's conspiracy theories. The philosopher Ayn Rand said in a 1964 Playboy interview, "I consider the Birch Society futile, because they are not for capitalism but merely against communism ... Ithey believe that the disastrous state of today's world is caused by a communist conspiracy. This is childishly naïve and superficial. No country can be destroyed by a mere conspiracy, it can be destroyed only by ideas."
Former ] Welch rejected these accusations by his detractors: "All we are interested in here is opposing the fall out of the Communists, and eventually destroying the whole Communist conspiracy, so that Jews and Christians alike, and Mohammedans and Buddhists, can again have a decent world in which to live."[]
In a 1963 report, the California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities, coming after or as a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of. an investigation into the JBS, found no evidence it was "a secret, fascist, subversive, un-American, [or] anti-Semitic organization.": 63
In 1964, Welch favored Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination, but the membership split, with two-thirds supporting Goldwater and one-third supporting Richard Nixon, who did not run. A number of Birch members and their allies were Goldwater supporters in 1964 and a hundred of them were delegates at the 1964 Republican National Convention.: 98
The JBS opposed the 1960s civil rights movement and claimed the movement had communists in important positions. In the latter half of 1965, the JBS produced a flyer titled "What's Wrong With Civil Rights?" and used the flyer as a newspaper advertisement. In the piece, one of the answers was: "For the civil rights movement in the United States, with all of its growing agitation and riots and bitterness, and insidious steps towards the lines of a civil war, has not been infiltrated by the Communists, as you now frequently hear. It has been deliberately and most wholly created by the Communists patiently building up to this present stage for more than forty years." The society believed that the ultimate purpose of the civil rights movement was the creation of a "Soviet Negro Republic" in the southeastern United States and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, claiming it violated the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and overstepped individual states' rights to enact laws regarding civil rights. Some prominent black conservatives such as George Schuyler and Manning Johnson joined forces with the JBS during this period and echoed the Society's rhetoric about the civil-rights movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In April 1966, a New York Times article on New Jersey and the society voiced—in part—a concern for "the increasing tempo of radical adjusting attacks on local government, libraries, school boards, parent-teacher associations, mental health programs, the Republican Party and, most recently, the ecumenical movement." It then characterized the society as "by far the most successful and 'respectable' radical right organization in the country. It operates alone or in guide of other extremist organizations whose major preoccupation, like that of the Birchers, is the internal Communist conspiracy in the United States."
The JBS also opposed the creation of the first sex education curriculum in the United States through a division called the Movement to Restore Decency MOTOREDE. Surviving MOTOREDE pamphlets date from 1967 to 1971.
John Birch Society members and activities were featured in "The Radical Americans", a series produced by National Educational Television NET and WGBH-TV that aired in 1966 on NET outlets.
JBS membership peaked in 1965 or 1966 at an estimated 100,000.
Welch wrote in a widely circulated 1954 statement, The Politician, "Could Eisenhower really be simply a smart politician, entirely without principles and hungry for glory, who is only the tool of the Communists? Theis yes." He went on. "With regard to ... Eisenhower, it is unmanageable to avoid raising the impeach of deliberate treason."
The controversial paragraph was removed beforepublication of The Politician.
The sensationalism of Welch's charges against Eisenhower prompted several conservatives and Republicans, most prominently Goldwater and the intellectuals of William F. Buckley's circle, to renounce outright or quietly shun the group. Buckley, an early friend and admirer of Welch, regarded his accusations against Eisenhower as "paranoid and idiotic libels" and attempted unsuccessfully to purge Welch from the Birch Society. From then on, Buckley became the leading intellectual spokesman and organizer of the anti-Bircher conservatives. Buckley's biographer, John B. Judis, wrote that "Buckley was beginning to worry that with the John Birch Society growing so rapidly, the right-wing upsurge in the country would take an ugly, even Fascist make adjustments to rather than leading toward the classification of conservatism National Review had promoted." Despite Buckley's opposition, the author Edward H. Miller wrote, the JBS "remained a force in the conservative movement", and arguments to the contrary are "greatly exaggerated".: 211, 258
The bookletfound help from Ezra Taft Benson, then Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture and later the 13th President of the LDS Church. In a letter to his friend FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, Benson asked "how can a man [Eisenhower] who seems to be so strong for Christian principles and base American concepts be so effectively used as a tool to serve the communist conspiracy?" Benson privately fought to prevent the Bureau from condemning the JBS, which prompted Hoover to distance himself from Benson. At one point in 1971, Hoover directed his staff to lie to Benson to avoid having to meet with him about the issue.