Thread by @hradzka

Gather ‘round everybody — we’re all locked down for a pandemic, so it’s time for #radicalbookclub! (For the newbies, #radicalbookclub is where I read books by and/or about radicals and tell Twitter what’s in ‘em)

today radical book club is actually #reactionarybookclub because we’re covering D.J. Mulloy’s 2014 book THE WORLD OF THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY: CONSPIRACY, CONSERVATISM, AND THE COLD WAR!
amazon.com/World-John-Bir…

Whenever you mention the Birchers, some Righty wag will pop up to say, “Where were they wrong, though?” Well, just to head this old chestnut off at the pass:

*President Dwight D. Eisenhower was not a communist spy.*

*Francis Gary Powers did not deliberately fly his U2 into Russian airspace in order to be shot down.*

*The assassination of John F. Kennedy was not an attempted false flag to discredit anticommunists.*

And (my fave): *in 1963, there were not a hundred thousand UN soldiers, including 16,000 African cannibal mercenaries, training under Russian command in the swamps of Georgia.*

(That last one made it into a Bircherite congressman’s official newsletter.)

So why pay attention to the Birchers at all? Because they’re a rare & remarkable example of Righty organizing.

In the span of a few years, Robert Welch Jr. took the John Birch Society from 12 dudes in a room to 4,000 chapters & a peak membership of 100,000 people.

How the hell did he do that? And how can we?

And how did he fail, so we don’t?

To answer these questions, we’ll trace the major currents of Mulloy’s book on the John Birch Society (hereafter JBS), focusing on founder Robert Welch Jr., how he built & structured the JBS, and how & why it rose & fell as part of the emerging conservative movement of the 60s.

Robert Welch Jr. was born on a farm in Chowan County, North Carolina, on 1 December 1899. A child prodigy, he started Latin at 7, graduated college at 16, and then went on to Harvard Law. He didn’t finish, though, electing to get married and go to work in the candy business.

After a few false starts of his own, Welch wound up working at his brother’s company, where he prospered, rising to VP of sales and advertising. He travelled around the country, met lots of people, and became prominent in the community.

Welch did the normal stuff you’d expect a prominent man of his era to do: Chamber of Commerce, bank, school board, National Confectioners Association (candy business, remember?). From 1950 to 1956, he was on the board of directors of the National Association of Manufacturers.

But Welch also dabbled in politics, and this is where his radicalization begins. Because in 1952 he backed Robert Taft for the Republican presidential nomination.

To understand how a guy like Robert Welch — professional, accomplished, established — gets radicalized, you have to take an empathetic look at the world as he saw it, which means you have to imagine being a conservative Republican in 1952.

I’ll take a few tweets here to crib from Rick Perlstein, who has a very good summary of the situation in his BEFORE THE STORM.
amazon.com/Before-Storm-G…

From the 19th century up to 1952, Republican factionalism wasn’t ideological, but geographical: East vs. Midwest. It’s not that there weren’t ideological differences, but they were tied to regional economic interests.

19th century Easterners were all about local manufacturing, so they wanted high tariffs to keep foreign competition out. The Midwest, who had to *buy* Eastern products, wanted free trade to keep prices down.

But as Eastern money piled up and up and up, the East became more and more about finance and internationalism, less about manufacturing — and now they saw the merits of free trade! Whereas for the Midwestern farmer or manufacturer trying to get a good price for his products…

So by 1952 you’ve got isolationist farmers and manufacturers in the Midwest wanting tariffs for foreigners and hands off their business at home, and in the East you’ve got cosmopolitan internationalist limousine liberals and *stop me if this is starting to sound familiar.*

The other thing you have to remember about 1952 is that the Republican Party had not held the presidency since FDR’s inauguration in 1933.

Republicans: take a long moment to imagine how you’d feel after *12 years of Obama followed by seven years of Hillary Clinton,* in all but two of which years of which the Democrats also controlled *both houses of Congress.*

That is how Republicans felt in 1952.

There were two schools of thought among the Republicans on how to handle their problem of not winning any fucking elections.

The liberal Easterners, who ran the party (in part through their chokehold on the Midwesterners’ access to Eastern credit), wanted to put forth candidates who would appeal to Democrats and Independents. Candidates who were ideologically like… well, like Easterners.

The conservative Midwesterners wanted to offer the people a clear choice, and put forth conservative, isolationist candidates like… well, like Midwesterners.

Both camps absolutely detested each other, not helped by the fact that the Easterners had had several bites at the apple — Alf Langdon, Wendell Wilkie, Thomas Dewey — to no avail. Cthulhu had not merely swum left; he had hydrofoiled. Now the conservatives wanted their turn.

And then came the 1952 national convention. The conservative Republican hero, Midwestern isolationist Robert Taft, came into the convention with enough delegates to win — and the Easterners, who backed Eisenhower, pulled crafty moves to uncredential a bunch of his delegates.

So the Eisenhower folks won — and won the presidency. And did they undo Obamacare, I mean the New Deal? Did they hell: *they gave us Chief Justice Earl Warren.*

The 1952 Republican convention screwjob marks the inciting incident of conservatism as we know it today. That’s the essential thing you have to understand about conservatism in the 60s: it organized not in reaction to leftists, but in reaction to the Eisenhower administration.

Which brings us to Robert Welch’s friend and adversary: William F. Buckley, Jr.

Born to wealth and privilege in 1925, Buckley got into the Ivy League late owing to his (stateside) WWII service.

WFB was at Yale from 1945-1950, and from 1951-1953 he was in the CIA. In 1951, he published a book: the legendary GOD AND MAN AT YALE, the original conservative college student’s cri de coeur against liberal professors. It made him famous.

In 1955, Buckley founded NATIONAL REVIEW.

Robert Welch invested $1000 in it (around $9680 in 2019 dollars). He would invest another $1000 two years later ($9200 in 2019 dollars).

But Welch wasn’t going to just sit around and hand would-be conservative activists money. No sir: Welch had already been working and writing on his own.

In 1952 Welch had published a critical take on Asia policy, the pro-Chiang Kai-shek MAY GOD FORGIVE US (his research for which, Mulloy notes, is likely where he he first encountered the martyred John Birch, a missionary turned soldier killed by communist guerrillas).

Welch wrote a biography of Birch in 1954, then turned to his most infamous work: a critique of Eisenhower later known as THE POLITICIAN, the tl;dr of which is “Ike is a communist spy and his brother is his controller.”

THE POLITICIAN originated in a long road trip on which Welch ranted to his fellow road-tripper about Ike until, possibly to get Welch to shut up, the guy told him he should write it down.

…holy shit I just realized THE POLITICIAN is the daddy of right-wing rants delivered in cars; it’s just that Robert Welch wasn’t streaming

THE POLITICIAN, which Welch continued to revise, began to circulate privately (Buckley thought it was crap; Barry Goldwater told Welch he should burn every copy).

In February 1956 Welch, not content to merely donate to NATIONAL REVIEW, launched a magazine, which he literally called ONE MAN’S OPINION (it later became AMERICAN OPINION). He resigned from the candy business at the beginning of 1957 to plan his next phase.

That'd be the JBS.

In late 1958, Welch invited 17 men he knew — mostly prominent businessmen — to meet in Indianapolis, IN on December 8-9. Eleven said yes, and ten became founding members and the first National Council of the John Birch Society.

The structure of the JBS merged lessons Welch had taken from business and his studies of communist organizations. At the top was the Founder (Welch, naturally).

The society also had a National Council, whose role was to advise Welch; their only actual power was to name Welch’s successor upon his death. The Council were mostly figureheads whose personal prominence gave the society gravitas.

Below the Founder was a system of coordinators in basically a tiered structure. Major coordinators operated on a regional basis; they supervised and helped out local coordinators.

The local coordinator was basically an NCO role; they supervised chapters and helped form new ones. If your area didn’t have a Birch group, you were considered a member of the Home Chapter.

JBS chapters were deliberately small: 20 people or fewer, in a cell structure. If a chapter grew larger than 20, the excess split off and formed a new chapter. This was a guard against infiltration.

Another guard: chapter leaders were appointed by HQ (who could also dismiss them), and HQ could also expel people from the society at any time with no due process.

The JBS monthly newsletter was the BULLETIN, and each issue came with articles and a few specific action items: tell people about anti-communist film X, get 4 friends to read anti-communist literature Y, write a letter of support to anti-communist person Z, like that.

And that’s not all. At its peak, the JBS had the BULLETIN, 400 American Opinion libraries (essentially right-wing reading rooms for conservative and anti-communist literature), their monthly magazine AMERICAN OPINION, their weekly paper THE REVIEW OF THE NEWS...

...their weekly radio show ARE YOU LISTENING, UNCLE SAM? on over 100+ stations nationwide, their book publisher Western Islands, and several fronts and committees.

How was this funded? By dues: $24/year for men, $12/year for women, $1000 for life membership. (Roughly $210, $105, and $8750 in 2019 dollars.) Chapter leaders were volunteers. Local coordinators were either volunteers or paid part-time. Major coordinators: were paid full-time.

In January 1959, Robert Welch broke the news of the JBS to William F. Buckley, Jr., and that conversation went something like this:

Robert Welch: “Hey Bill, remember the anticommunist book I wrote you said was bunk”
WFB: “…uh-huh”
RW. “Off the record”
WFB. “Uh-oh”

RW. “I’m starting an anticommunist organization”
WFB. “Um”
RW. “to go along with my conservative magazine”
WFB. “Wait what”
RW. “Yeah, got a bunch of folks who are or were with NATIONAL REVIEW on the editorial board"
WFB. “Sonofabitch”

RW. “Also, Roger Milliken joined my new group — you know him, your key donor”
WFB. *sound of gnashing teeth*

You can immediately see the potential for a crabs in the barrel situation.

But although they later became famous as rivals, even enemies, *the John Birch Society and NATIONAL REVIEW started off as allies.*

They had a common project — the revival of conservatism as a political force — and while we tend to think of the JBS as weirdos who only existed to be run out of the party, the JBS was wildly popular. Not just with a few eccentric devotees, but *actually wildly popular.*

To give you an idea of the JBS’s popularity, let’s compare the John Birch Society of 1961 with 1961’s NATIONAL REVIEW.

1961’s JBS (founded December 1958) has 60-80K members, probably closer to the latter. It has 28 paid headquarters staff, 30 paid traveling major coordinators, 100 volunteer/part-time coordinators. Its annual revenue was $1.6 million (a bit under $13.9 million in 2019 dollars).

1961’s NATIONAL REVIEW (founded 1955) has a circulation of 54K. It put out 26 issues in 1961, $0.40/issue, meaning $10.40/year at cover price. Multiplying circulation by cover price gets you $561,600 in 1961 dollars (a bit under $4.9 million in 2019 dollars).

That’s right: in a 1961 head-to-head comparison, the dues-funded John Birch Society was pulling down close to THREE TIMES the subscription income of NATIONAL REVIEW.

By 1964, NATIONAL REVIEW would almost double its circulation to 90K people, and *still* be making less money from subscriptions than the John Birch Society had from dues in 1961.

That’s genuine popularity. So what happened?

The conservative movement legend is that the Birchers were extremists, fascists or something, and William F. Buckley, Jr. heroically purged them, God bless William F. Buckley, etc.

This legend is kind of bunk.

Birchers believed all kinds of weird things (see the start of this thread), but the JBS wasn't about political extremism.

Political extremists -- including some notable ones -- who joined the John Birch Society usually found it disappointing & left in search of something else.

The Birchers weren’t read out of the conservative movement because they were extremists. They were read out of the movement because they were *embarrassing.*

(A short break now; details in a bit.)

Threadbreak; picks up here:

https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/1243670927528939520?s=20

To resume:

The three big things that led up to the JBS being read out of movement conservatism were 1) critical press coverage, 2) a public scandal about Bircher influence called the Walker Affair, and 3) subsequent federal and state investigations.

In July 1960 — seven months after JBS’s founding — a journo just happened to drop in a JBS meeting in Chicago, where one attendee just happened to forcefully criticize Welch’s “Ike is a commie” manifesto THE POLITICIAN, & even just happened to have a copy to give to the journo.

While Welch publicly blamed communists, he knew full well who was responsible: a fellow anti-communist, Fred Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (CACC).

Yes, that’s right: the first shiv in the John Birch Society came as a result of *anti-communist infighting.*

There were methodological differences (Welch’s “unity of purpose and of action”) vs. Schwarz’s diversity of tactics). And professional jealousy & personal animosity were certainly issues: Schwarz was losing members to the JBS, & one defector had criticized him at a JBS meeting.

Regardless, Schwarz — little-remembered today, but basically think of a grifter doing anti-communist lecture tours and you’ve got the gist — had looked at the JBS, the major new outlet of enthusiastic right-wing organizing, and tried to kneecap it. And now journos began digging.

The larger conservative movement kept growing; Buckley helped form YAF and started laying the groundwork for New York’s Conservative Party. The Birchers encouraged their people to perform entryism on their local PTA and laid groundwork for their campaign to impeach Earl Warren.

But in January 1961, everything went to shit. An avalanche of bad press presented the Birchers as an organization of nefarious fascists. Even the (then Righty) LA TIMES was critical. TIME took the opprobrium nationwide.

Moderate Republicans turned on the Birchers, noting (fairly) that they criticized moderate Republicans more than liberal Democrats. Senator Milton Young (R-ND) denounced the JBS on the Senate floor. Calls for federal and state investigations quickly followed.

That was the first three months of 1961 for the John Birch Society.

In April, the Walker Affair broke.

The Walker in question was Major General Edwin A. Walker, commanding the 24th Infantry Division in Augsburg, West Germany. When tabloid OVERSEAS WEEKLY claimed he was indoctrinating troops with John Birch Society literature, Walker was relieved of his post pending investigation.

When you’re a controversial group in the middle of a wave of negative press and a prominent person is accused of being associated with you, what is the one thing you do? That’s right: you SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

Here’s how Robert Welch responded to the Walker Affair:

JOURNOS. “He's with the John Birch Society”
NORMIES. “I dunno, I’m not seeing any proof —”
ROBERT WELCH. “WALKER'S SUBSCRIBED TO OUR MAG FOR 3 YRS”
NORMIES. “…”
WALKER. “…”
RW. “WE SENT HIM STUFF FOR SPECIAL PROJECTS”

*one month later*
ROBERT WELCH, trying to walk it back a little. “Uh Walker… Walker… Walker’s subordinate who ran the anti-communist program never heard of us!”
WALKER. “Sonofabitch”

The official report released in July 1961 was a bit of a whitewash. Walker’s anticommunist program was ruled officially not Bircher-linked, but Walker was found to have called some prominent people commies. He was reassigned & given admonishment, the lightest punishment possible.

ME. “It’s basically the best outcome you could hope for; the Birchers have a prominent, popular public ally on the inside —”
WALKER. “I resign in protest”
ME. “What”
WALKER. “This will allow me to speak freely and enter politics”
WELCH. “Fantastic”
ME. “Oh you fucking morons”

But it’s okay: Robert Welch had a plan!

ME. “So, uh, Robert Welch, journos are calling your group a fascist conspiracy, digging into everything you do”
ROBERT WELCH. “I know, I’ll give every daily & weekly newspaper in America a free subscription to our BULLETIN”
ME. “Wait what”

ROBERT WELCH. “well, the journos out to get us can’t call us a conspiracy if we just let them know every single thing we’re doing”
ME. “sweet Jesus”

Yes: Robert Welch thought he could appease and redpill journos with lit drops.

As Mulloy aptly notes, “Welch… seemed to believe that all that was really necessary for the communist advance to be stopped (or Earl Warren to be impeached) was for people to read the right books.”

(I can’t come down on Welch too hard for this, because you see this same mindset among radical, fringe, and mainstream conservatives today; we’re still pushing THE ROAD TO SERFDOM and ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON.)

For his part, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy wasn’t sure what to do about the Birchers and the larger radical right. So in the fall of 1961, he asked for advice… from union leaders Walter and Victor Reuther and civil rights lawyer Joseph L. Rauh Jr.

(Think Attorney General Eric Holder asking Media Matters for a list of policy prescriptions of what to do about Fox News.)

The Reuther Memo, which reached RFK’s desk the week before Christmas 1961, called for kneecapping the radical and fringe right, returning it to the outer darkness by using the full force of government power.

The Reuthers wanted righty radicals to be on subversives lists; the FBI should cointelpro them, the IRS revoke their tax status, and the FCC deplatform them by yanking the licenses of the radio and TV stations airing their material.

Also, the Reuthers added, the Kennedy administration should tone down its own anticommunist rhetoric, in order to deny the Righties fuel.

Not all of this wound up happening. But some of it did; the JBS and Christian Crusade were among the orgs targeted by the IRS after the Reuther memo. The real action, though, happened inside the still-evolving conservative movement.

As Rick Perlstein puts it, there were four factions of Republicans in the early 60s, held together by the glue of their shared anti-communism. These were moderates, progressives, stalwarts (aka Taftites, after Robert Taft; this included the JBS), and conservatives.

Conservatives were the smallest group, but they were the most organized and disciplined, with the most coherent ideology. (Perlstein holds conservatives also had the most energy, but I'd give this award to the stalwarts, mostly bc of the Birchers. But energy is insufficient.)

The real split between Buckley and the Birchers was less ideological than methodological. Buckley wanted to focus on elections and education, leading to electoral victory and political power.

The Birchers were believers in ENERGY and ACTION, which mostly meant taking over ideologically-aligned groups and launching quixotic campaigns that puzzled and alienated more people than they attracted.

The conservatives were desperate for power, they saw a shot at it, and now — with the unending waves of bad publicity, and an unforced error that actually hurt the anticommunist cause — they saw the Birchers as a boat anchor.

Buckley fully agreed with the Birchers that they were being deliberately targeted in order to hurt conservatism. But what this meant to him was that the JBS was a liability.

The glue that held the factions in the Republican Party together was anticommunism. And the increasingly shit-covered JBS was hugging anticommunism to death. So the truce between Buckley’s conservatives and the stalwarts of the John Birch Society ended.

As 1962 dawned, Buckley was ready to ditch the Birchers. He and Russell Kirk tried to convince Barry Goldwater to do their dirty work and burn the JBS publicly.

Barry Goldwater declined to dance to WFB’s tune, for four reasons.

1) Barry Goldwater personally knew and liked many prominent Birchers, and knew they weren’t extremists.
2) He respected the regular members, whose concerns had long been neglected by the party.
3) He needed the enthusiastic Bircher chapters for campaigning.

And finally:

4) This “extremism” claim was just political abuse — no way THAT label would stick! No, the American public would see through this…

(Barry Goldwater did not always have the best political judgment, is what I’m getting at here)

The base hated it. Their view was that Buckley was just trying to cut the nuts off the JBS so he’d be the only game in town for their membership. 70 subscriptions were cancelled, and 20 donors giving $100+ (in 2019 dollars, around $860 and up) cancelled pledges.

Welch was confident that fortunes would reverse soon. Remember the Walker Affair? Well, that shit is still ongoing, because the Senate Armed Forces Committee authorized hearings about it. About which the JBS was absolutely stoked.

The best modern parallel to the way the JBS viewed these hearings is the way the QAnon crowd were counting down to the release of the first IG report as THE ONE THING THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING.

Welch was convinced Walker’s testimony would result in instant watershed change: it would legitimize use of anti-communist material by the military — the same anti-communist material (like the films COMMUNISM ON THE MAP and OPERATION ABOLITION) often used by the JBS.

Nobody could call the JBS extremists then! THE JBS WOULD WIN AND EVERYTHING WOULD BE AWESOME!

And then they had the hearings, and General Walker muffed it.
maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?d…

The 46-page report of the committee — to which Strom Thurmond wrote a massive dissent— KNEECAPPED THE LIVING SHIT out of anticommunists’ desire to indoctrinate troops. Anticommunism was too important for DoD bureaucrats *not* to control.

The executive branch could require military to submit public statements for review before delivery.

Not only did the JBS not gain what they'd hoped to gain, they'd lost what they'd previously had.

But Walker regrouped, learned from his mistakes, and went on to -- nah, I’m kidding; he went into a right-wing radical spiral, hanging with harder right groups like American Loyal Rangers, Americans for Preservation of the White Race, and the National States Rights Party.

By the fall of 1962 Walker was up to his neck in the riot following the admission of the first black student to Ole Miss. There were two or three thousand rioters, two people died, and 375 were injured.

A federal grand jury refused to indict Walker on charges of inciting rebellion or insurrection, so RFK actually had him briefly committed to a mental institution.

Not only did Walker do all that as the JBS’s fair-haired boy, he did it *while running for governor of Texas.*

(FWIW: Walker ran as a Democrat, and finished last in a field of six with less than ten percent of the vote. His star subsequently dimmed; the low came in 1976 when he was arrested for propositioning a dude in a men’s room. He died in 1993.)

Looking back later, Welch admitted that the Senate hearings in which he’d been so confident had been an absolute disaster for the cause of anti-communism.

That’s how the Walker Affair went over 2 yrs: a simmering stewpot full of turds, it eventually blew up all over the kitchen.

Not content with a face-saving win, wanting full-throated validation and acceptance, the Birchers had bet for higher stakes, assuming victory inevitable. And they’d lost.

If the conservatives had disliked the Birchers before, they absolutely *detested* them now.

Matters got even worse in 1963, when JFK was shot. Dallas a right-wing town, and media focus on the JBS and other fringe & far-right groups — including a CBS TV special on the aforementioned lunatic rumor about African cannibal troops — primed the nation for far-right violence.

So when JFK was shot and killed by Actual Communist^TM Lee Harvey Oswald, not shot and killed by fervent Righties, it was too much cognitive dissonance. Nobody could process it.

I honestly think that's where a lot of the JFK conspiracy theory stuff came from.

If you’ve never read Earl Warren’s eulogy for JFK, it’s a beautiful specimen of “we may never know why he did it,” in exactly the way modern-day pols and journos react when a perpetrator is caught live on a 911 tape screaming “JIHAD JIHAD JIHAD.”
americanrhetoric.com/speeches/earlw…

In a deft bit of political redirection, Warren blamed “the forces of hatred and malevolence” — using an act of violence by a communist to boost the call for a crackdown on the violent Hard Right in the South (which at this point the feds had been reluctant to get involved with).

A lot of people blamed the John Birch Society.

The JBS office in Phoenix was shot up by a man with a .357 magnum; no one was hurt and he did only ten days in jail.

Robert Welch’s own office at JBS HQ had bricks thrown through the window, and crowds of angry college students encircled the building.

For their part, the John Birch Society’s response to JFK’s assassination wasn’t exactly coherent.

JBS. “The JFK assassination shows we were right about the dangers of communists”
ME. “Not wrong!”
JBS. “The assassination was a commie plot to false-flag anticommunists, foiled when Oswald was arrested too quickly and the press found out his communist background”
ME. “Wait what”

So, yeah: an *actual communist* had *murdered the president of the United States,* and everybody’s reaction was to hate Birchers even more.

(Another short break; will resume soon)

In 1963 and 1964, the moderates and progressives in the Republican Party establishment became downright paranoid that the Birchers were going to try to commit entryism against them. So they clamped down on Birchers harder… completely missing the *conservative* entryist threat.

And the conservatives capitalized. William Rusher and Clif White’s syndicate took over the Young Republicans.

They used YR, Buckley’s YAF, and everything else conservative networks had been doing for the past decade to secure the Republican nomination for Goldwater.

And when Goldwater lost devastatingly, the Republicans blamed… the Birchers.

Holding the JBS at arms’ length had done nothing. Trying to discipline them had done nothing. Running their ideal candidate had done nothing.

The JBS brought a lot of grief and delivered no value.

And just blaming Welch had brought them no credit.

In 1964, the ADL released the DANGER ON THE RIGHT: THE ATTITUDES, PERSONNEL, AND INFLUENCES OF THE RADICAL RIGHT AND EXTREME CONSERVATIVES.

You can kind of tell the tenor by the title, right?

DANGER ON THE RIGHT opened with the John Birch Society and similar fringe groups, but ran down the spectrum to include such outlets as HUMAN EVENTS, YAF, and NATIONAL REVIEW.

By December 1964, the establishment and the conservatives had all had quite enough. Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton called for the Birchers to be expelled from the Republican Party.

Some efforts to replace the Birchers took place.

The new American Conservative Union allowed Birchers to be members but not officers, directors, or advisors.

The Freedom Society Association, announced by Barry Goldwater himself in June 1965, barred Birchers entirely (a distinction they shared with Klan).

The FSA's announced purpose: “channel conservative voters and political action into a more moderate and acceptable force than the John Birch Society or other right-wing groups.”

(Its goal: 150K members. Actually achieved: 38K.)

On September 30, 1965, joint Republican congressional leadership read the Birchers out of the movement.

And then, finally, NATIONAL REVIEW read the Birchers out...

... in the issue for 19 October 1965.

The NR piece, by Frank Meyer, listed the Birchers sins: they had become “more virulent,” they hadn’t acted against Welch, and they were increasingly ineffective. A quote:

“The false analysis and conspiratorial mania of the John Birch Society has moved beyond diversion and waste of the devotion of its members to the mobilization of that devotion in ways directly anti-conservative and dangerous to the interests of the United States.”

So yeah: contrary to myth, Buckley didn’t lead the charge against the Birchers.

He tried to get somebody else to lead it, then tried to split the difference, and then — after everybody else had made it a safe position — read out the Birchers & took credit for their expungement.

And that marked the end of the John Birch Society!

Except, you know, it didn’t.

Because *the Birchers still had around a hundred thousand members.*

The members of the John Birch Society were not deterred. They believed in the JBS and they liked what it was selling. They stuck by it and Robert Welch. through the ridicule, through the scandal, through the opprobrium.

They stuck through 1961 and 1962, and the Walker Affair. They stuck through 1963 and being blamed for the JFK assassination. They stuck through 1964 and the ignominious defeat of Barry Goldwater. They stuck through 1965 and the Birchers being read out of the Republican Party.

The JBS's members stuck through *being personally rejected by their hero Barry Goldwater.*

No: after all of that, it was was *1967 and 1968* that saw people leave the John Birch Society in droves. That’s when a full third of the membership walked out.

And why?

BECAUSE ROBERT WELCH WENT FULL ILLUMINATI, THAT'S WHY

In November 1966, Welch published “The Truth in Time” (in AMERICAN OPINION, & as pamphlet, & as 73 min 16mm film). Its revelation: the communists were ACTUALLY JUST ONE FACET of the supreme conspiracy, which was either descended from or was in fact the actual Bavarian Illuminati.

And a third of the Birchers hit the bricks.

It was a bridge too far. The Illuminati conspiracy theory (as Welch dubbed them, the Insiders) wasn’t just a departure from how they saw the world; it was a departure from how they saw themselves: they weren’t into weird shit, they were *ardent anti-communists.*

The Birchers had been told that they were following a kook. They rejected this. They stood by their kook.

And then their kook proved that everybody who said they were following a kook was right.

That’s what felled the John Birch Society. They’re still around, but they never came near that peak again.

Welch himself stayed on, and the people who stayed (there were fewer and fewer of them) stayed with him. He was chairman of the John Birch Society for another eighteen years, finally stepping down in 1983. Welch passed away January 6, 1985, aged eighty-five.

So, in the end: how did Robert Welch succeed, and why did he fail?

The John Birch Society succeeded because Robert Welch was an intelligent, able man who knew intelligent, able people, and because he had professional experience in putting people together to accomplish things.

It failed because *Robert Welch was kind of fucking crazy.*

Robert Welch was not a political extremist. But he was inexorably attracted to conspiracy theory, and eventually he was drawn to conspiracies that were a bridge too far for ardent anti-communists, who were his base.

The top-down structure of the JBS — created to prevent communist entryism — meant that Welch’s actual base had no influence within the organization, meaning that like the establishment it detested the JBS wasn’t responsive to changes in its own grassroots.

(This, in researcher Lisa McGirr’s view, is why the Birchers didn’t take the opportunity to make a comeback with the rise of social conservatism in the ‘80s: they couldn't pivot).

The Birchers also shared a downside common to right-wing populists: the faith that the solution was ACTION and ENERGY and PUBLICITY. They tended to focus on quixotic campaigns without assessing whether or not their methods worked. Nor were they particularly capable of evolving.

Mulloy notes Earl Haynes's assessment that “For all its sporadic ugliness, excesses, and silliness, the anticommunism of the 1940s and 1950s was an understandable and rational response to a real danger to American democracy.” The Birchers couldn't grasp conditions had changed.

Like a lot of Righty groups — mainstream, fringe, and radical — the John Birch Society fell in love with a theory and kept loving it even when it was unsustainable in practice.

Unlike a lot of Righty groups — mainstream, fringe, and radical — the John Birch Society enjoyed a period of actual popularity. But they weren’t able to translate this into actual material effect, in part because they were naive.

The JBS was sometimes effective in small local campaigns — taking over local school boards, for example — but their larger quixotic campaigns didn’t bear fruit even when the subjects were things the larger conservative base could have gotten behind.

Birchers tried to get Earl Warren impeached by letter-writing campaigns and pestering elected officials. Unlike Lefties, the Birchers didn’t know how to create actual pressure. They could create a clamor, but were powerless if the people they were clamoring at said “No.”

And this is another case of the fringe and radicals being diagnostic of the mainstream, because this is a skill that the mainstream Right of today still lacks.

Nor does the mainstream Right of today know what to do with its Bircher types: excitable, energetic, not political extremists, with a weakness for conspiracy theory.

They’re never going to be placid precinct workers. But there probably is some kind of a useful role for them, and somebody should figure out what it is.

That's it for today's book, D.J. Mulloy’s THE WORLD OF THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY: CONSPIRACY, CONSERVATISM, AND THE COLD WAR. Well worth a read.
amazon.com/World-John-Bir…

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