An Authoritarian Spirit:The Extent of Robert Welch’s Ideological Influence in the John Birch

Society

By

Michelle Anna InterranteMay 2015

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for theMaster of Arts in History

Dual-Degree Program in History and Archives ManagementSimmons College

Boston, Massachusetts

The author grants Simmons College permission to include this thesis in its Library and to make it available to the academic community for scholarly purposes.

Submitted by

Approved by:

______ Stephen Berry Zhigang LiuAssociate Professor of History Associate Professor of History

© 2015, Michelle Anna Interrante

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Acknowledgements

I am happy to thank to my fellow thesis writers, who remain a constant source of surprise and inspiration. I also extend thanks to the staff at the John Hay Library at Brown University and my second reader Zhigang Liu. I would also like to thank Laura Prieto, Sarah Leonard, and Katherine Wisser for their support and intellectual generosity. I would, finally, like to thank my thesis advisor Stephen Berry, whose guidance has extended throughout my entire graduate career at Simmons, and whose nuanced insight into the historical process has made this thesis a true capstone to my educational experience.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 4I.Before there was John Birch there was The Politician 12II.Populating the John Birch Society 25III.The Kooks and the Nuts 34

Conclusion 46

Works Cited 51

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Introduction

“You may think I am an alarmist,” wrote Robert H. W. Welch in 1961, “Frankly, I am.”1

Through virulent anti-Communist rhetoric this candy maker-turned prolific conservative author

sought to alert the United States to an imminent threat: communism within the United States

government and military. Conservatives across the political spectrum warned against American

complacency in the face of a disturbing rise in global communism and the potential dangers of

communist infiltration in the United States government. However, this shared concern does not

mean conservatives agreed with Welch. To many, he comprised the “lunatic fringe,” (in

conservative writer Russell Kirk’s words), who were doing the anti-communist cause more ill

than any communist or sympathetic group ever could.2 The problem with Kirk’s position was

Welch had created an organization, the John Birch Society, that would be, if only for a brief

moment in the earlier half of the 1960s, one of the largest and most influential conservative

groups in the entire nation. He did so through a combination of clear rhetoric, a finely tuned ear

to the insecurities of rural and suburban conservatives, and a persuasive message that appealed to

their concerns. He also wove a group of geographically disparate Society chapters into a

community of conservatives who believed they were taking action that could affect the course of

American history.

In the view of contemporary conservatives, Welch raised some dangerously false notions

about the American government. A 1962 issue of the National Review asked, “Can one endorse

the efforts of a man who, in one’s judgment, goes about bearing false witness? … We have no

doubt Mr. Welch himself honestly believed that all those people are communists—that mitigates

1 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society (Belmont, MA: 1961), 35.2 Quoted in George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, Inc. 1976), 293.

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his moral culpability.”1 This harsh indictment appeared in 1962; only one year after the Society

achieved national attention and only four years after its inception. Welch’s paranoia was genuine

and perhaps was even admirable in his zeal, if only he promoted a strictly anti-communist

agenda.  Instead, in the view of conservative critics, he presented a fanatic, paranoid vision of the

United States. In the opinion of the National Review and other mainstream conservatives, people

who supported Welch did so not only by joining the Society, but remaining silent as he

continued his conspiratorial rhetoric. Welch represented a danger to the newly formed

conservative movement (sometimes referred to as the New Right) because of his outrageous

rhetoric and tactics disturbingly similar to those of the Soviet Union. With authoritarian rigidity,

Welch handed down his opinions to the receptive Society members, who conservative and liberal

critics derivatively referred to as “Birchers,” who gladly set his directives into motion.

When the conservative movement began to take shape in the late 1950s and early 1960s,

academics and historians championed one of two methods for thinking about the John Birch

Society. The argued conservative organizations—the John Birch Society, the Minute Men, or the

Christian Anti-Communism Crusade to name three examples—threatened democracy and civil

liberties. In his highly influential 1964 article for Harper’s magazine “The Paranoid Style in

American Politics” (which he expanded into a book later that year), historian Richard Hofstadter

presented one of the first assessments of the conservative movement: a “paranoid style” of

thinking had taken hold in the new movement. Hofstadter interpreted the conservative movement

as containing two separate ideological factions, a pluralistic view of conservatism that broke the

burgeoning movement down into component parts: the paranoid style obsessed with anti-

communism to the point of hysteria and rational, mainstream conservatives. 2

1 “The Question of Robert Welch,” National Review (February 13, 1962), 88.2 Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s (November 1964), http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/.

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Jonathan M. Schoenwald, in 2003, revived Hofstadter’s pluralistic interpretation of

conservatism, which had fallen out of favor with many academics. The title of his book, A Time

for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism, sets up the dichotomy of the

conservative mainstream versus radical, or “extremist.” In the 1950s, these two groups were

distinct, Schoenwald argues. They came together in the early 1960s, when the “extremists”

would retain powerful sway over the moderates.1

George H. Nash challenged this dualistic view of conservatism, so-called radicals on one

side and mainstream conservatives on the other, in his seminal 1976 work The Conservative

Intellectual Movement in America, Since 1945. This text remains one of the most important

academic projects undertaken in the study of conservative politics because of its relentlessly

evenhanded approach to the subject. Unlike Hofstadter, Nash identified himself as a

conservative, and his treatment conveyed the nuanced perspective of an insider. The most

important contribution of The Conservative Intellectual Movement was its identification of three

separate groups: anti-Communists, libertarians, and traditionalists. Instead of a spectrum of

conservatism, as Hofstadter had envisioned, Nash saw no overlap between the distinct groups. 2

Another outstanding text in the area of conservative history, Lisa McGirr’s Suburban

Warriors: The Origins of The New American Right, emerged in the early 2000s. This frequently

cited work examines the rise of grassroots conservative activism in Southern California. She

asserts conservatives “occupied a central, if not dominant,” place in American politics for most

of its history.3 By framing the origins of the “New Right,” as she refers to the conservative

movement since the 1960s, McGirr presents a new way of looking at the conservative

1 Jonathan Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).2 Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement.3 Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 17.

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movement. Her thesis places liberalism as the disrupting factor in the lives of many Americans,

particularly the white middle and upper-middle classes. By using Southern California and

investigating the ways the people there asserted their conservative belief system, McGirr finds

that the New Right was not so much reaction as reclamation. Its emergence in the 1960s from

largely grassroots organizations testified to the pervasive power of the private organizations to

inspire citizens, particularly those not previously politically active, such as housewives and

mothers.

Two very recent works, two historians have introduced exciting new interpretations of

the John Birch Society, building off of McGirr’s incisive analysis of the conservative grassroots.

Both examine the membership of the John Birch Society, in conjunction with other conservative

groups, and target its unique appeal. D. J. Mulloy, in The World of the John Birch Society:

Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War, published in 2014, expands upon points made by

McGirr and applies them to the John Birch Society. Mulloy maintains people isolated in new

suburbs or rural areas were drawn to the John Birch Society because Robert Welch made it easy

for them to feel as though they played a direct role in eradicating communism from their

communities.1 Another recent addition to the conservative historiography is Samuel Brenner’s

2009 dissertation “Shouting at the Rain: The Voices and Ideas of Right-Wing Anti-Communist

Americanists in the Era of Modern American Conservatism, 1950-1974,” which attempts to

document a survey of right-wing “americanists,” individuals he defines as anti-communist and

conspiratorially minded. Though the word appears elsewhere in different contexts and with

wildly different meanings, Brenner uses Robert Welch’s definition from The Blue Book of the

John Birch Society, the Society’s foundational text. Welch favored the label “americanist” for

1 D. J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014).

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members of the Society, defining americanism as an oppositional ideology to communism.

Brenner disagrees with most of the historians that came before him, suggesting that the

americanist movement grew alongside the conservative movement, not within it. In spite of

having many common political goals, the two represent separate ideologies.1

None of these major texts has explored the intellectual impact of Robert Welch’s

authoritative leadership on the John Birch Society. Intellectual scholarship on the conservative

movement is a relatively new area of study, with few historians picking up where Nash left off in

1976. Therefore, in this thesis, I intended to explore Robert Welch’s authoritarian bent. The John

Birch Society is a hierarchically organized authoritative organization: all directives and

instructions came from Welch and were passed to local chapter leaders who dispersed them to

the membership. Critics were quick to point out the parallels between the Society’s

organizational structure and the organizational structure of the Soviet Union, and Welch eagerly

acknowledged the similarities. He admired the efficiency of the Soviet system. It worked well for

the communists, and it would work well to fight them. Welch’s authoritarian leadership was the

Society’s greatest asset, but also an enormous liability. Members were not strictly bound to

adhere to Welch’s opinion, but the Society as a whole was inextricably tied to him. Welch grew

the largest conservative society in the entire country from eleven men in 1958 to at least 60,000

in less than five years, but as the personification of the John Birch Society, his unpopular

opinions lead to the Society’s sharp decline in the later half of the 1960s and early 1970s.

In my undergraduate thesis at Barnard College “Nothing So Powerful and Nothing So

Strange: The Problem of Robert Welch in Conservative Intellectual Discourse,” I argue Robert

Welch was instrumental in the formation of modern conservative ideology because he

1 Samuel Brenner, “Shouting at the Rain: The Voices and Ideas of Right-Wing Anti-CommunistAmericanists in the Era of Modern American Conservatism, 1950-1974” (Diss. Brown University, 2009), 14.

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represented a paranoid point of view the leaders of the conservative movement wanted to avoid.

They used him and the John Birch Society to define what the conservative movement was not,

instead of focusing rhetorical energy on what the movement could be.1 The conservative

movement could not have defined itself without outlier groups, such as the John Birch Society.

The terminology I chose to employ continued in this vein, emphasizing the continuity between

Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the conservative movement as a whole.

As I undertook the task of writing this thesis, I made some important decisions about how

to represent the John Birch Society. Even in my brief historiography above, historians used

several different terms for the same conservative movement. “Americanist,” “New Right,”

“Birchers,” are some I have already introduced, and additional terms such as “radical,”

“extremist,” “fringe,” and “ultraconservative” appear interchangeably in the literature. My initial

challenge was making sense of these terms, and deciding how to use them in reference to the

John Birch Society. My first decision was not to use charged terms such as “radical” or

“extremist” when I described the Society. Instead, I allowed the ideas and paranoid concerns of

the Society to speak for themselves. I also made this choice in order to normalize the Society’s

membership. It is difficult to argue many of the Society’s activist activities were “radical” or

“extreme.” Letter writing campaigns and petitions are fairly benign, and the Society did not

officially condone any violent activism. The Society and Robert Welch’s ideas about the

communist conspiracy (and the existence of a conspiracy) differentiated them from other

conservatives. “Mainstream” conservatives, such as William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, or the

Republican Party, are loosely defined by necessity because in the late 1950s and early 1960s,

they were still trying to define an ideology in the existing political climate.

1 Michelle Interrante, “Nothing So Powerful and Nothing So Strange: The Problem of Robert Welch in Conservative Intellectual Discourse,” (Thesis, Barnard College, 2011).

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This thesis is divided into three sections, each focusing primarily on a single primary

source or set of primary sources in a rough chronological order. In section I, I examined The

Politician, a privately published letter which was later publically published as a book, Welch

wrote years before forming the John Birch Society. It is significant because it first introduced the

idea of an anti-communist society that would combat the communist conspiracy. These were the

first murmurs of what would become the John Birch Society. It is also significant because of the

immense controversy it incurred. Welch accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being a

communist plant, specifically installed to facilitate the insidious takeover of the United States.

Though it predated the Society, its outlandish claims stuck in people’s minds and would

characterize the Society’s public perception. Welch tried to distance The Politician from the

Society, claiming the book could only be fairly connected to his personal opinions, but it was too

late. The Politician, and a penchant for unsustainable claims about communist activity in the

United States, followed the Society for the first few years of its existence.

In section II, I used the California Senate’s Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding

Committee on Un-American Activities to understand the average member of the John Birch

Society’s relationship to the ideas introduced by Welch in The Blue Book. The surprisingly

sympathetic report provided one of the few descriptions of a John Birch Society meeting, and has

extensive quotations from actual members. It was published in 1963, before the conservative

movement as a whole turned on the Society, and clears them of any “un-American” activities. It

highlighted the social importance of political organizations like the John Birch Society, and

emphasized the non-radical nature of its membership. It also demonstrated the devotion of many

members to the anti-communist cause and varying level of adherence to Welch’s ideas. The

general ideas of the Society—anti-communism, anti-collectivism, and activism—resonated the

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most, but most pointed to Welch as a valuable contributor to the conservative discourse. His

voice, to members of his Society, was essential to preserving the American way of life.

In the last section, section III, I use letters from people whose prejudicial beliefs made

them outliers in the John Birch Society’s ideology. The Society itself tolerated a variety of faiths,

ethnicities, and races. Welch insisted the movement needed to include anyone who was

committed to the cause of anti-communism, and excluding a person based on their appearance or

religion was tantamount to succumbing to the communist conspiracy. Communists wanted to

divide Americans. It would make their infiltration that much easier. Despite this, the Society

attracted a number of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic letter writers who wanted to join. As

the most visible conservative organization, it was a natural target for people who wanted to

become politically involved, and its emphasis on activism differentiated it from other

conservative groups and the Republican Party.

By bringing these three sources together, my goal is to expose the extent to which

Welch’s authoritarianism was successful in achieving an ideologically cohesive organization.

The John Birch Society was his brainchild come to life, and it largely succeeded for the first ten

years of its existence. The first five to six years, from 1958 to 1964, were particularly impressive

as membership burgeoned, and conservatives and liberals alike seemed surprised at Welch’s

ability to rally the dormant conservative grassroots. His ideology permeated the Society, and

while members were allowed to pick and choose the portions that best suited their interests, the

Society was inextricably linked to Welch’s paranoid anti-communism.

I. Before there was John Birch there was The Politician

From the start, Robert Welch instilled the John Birch Society with existential and

apocalyptic immediacy: if an organization like the John Birch Society did not exist, then the

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United States would fall to communism. Good, educated, patriotic Americans, under Welch’s

authority and guidance and would counter this deadly threat.

But who was Robert Welch? What gave this otherwise seemingly obscure man the

authority to organize a Society that could combat an invisible enemy? He was born in 1899 in

North Carolina, and quickly progressed through school. At sixteen, he graduated from the

University of North Carolina and moved on to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis,

Maryland, leaving out two years into the program and enrolling Harvard Law School. Again, he

dropped out before graduating. At this point, he and his younger brother, James O. Welch,

ventured into business together, starting the Oxford Candy Company in the early 1920s.

Business, however, was not the elder Welch’s strong suit. He would start three candy ventures

before 1935, and all ended in failure. His success finally arrived in the 1940s when he became

vice president of the James O. Welch Candy Company, which his brother had formed after

leaving the Oxford Candy Company in 1927.1

During this time, Welch made his first forays into a more public sphere. He was

appointed to the board of directors of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). This

was a critical moment in Welch’s life—it was where he made the initial contacts with wealthy

businessmen and corporate leaders who would eventually make the John Birch Society possible.

Another boon to the eventual formation of the John Birch Society was Welch’s unsuccessful bid

for lieutenant governorship of Massachusetts in 1950. He would come into contact with even

more wealthy conservatives willing to part with their money for the right cause. Welch’s

campaign letters and letters to supporters were already hinting at the necessity of a society that

would counteract a communist conspiracy.2

1 D. J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society, 5.2 Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society, 6.

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In the years immediately following Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist fervor,

the the mid- and late-1950s, anti-communism seemed to be a waning concern. George H. Nash,

in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, Since 1945, notes that the conservative

movement, what some would categorize as the New Right, was still gaining momentum as a

viable political alternative to liberalism.1 Senator Joseph McCarthy, however, had energized

many conservative non-politicians who felt alienated from the social and economic reforms of

the New Deal. Many of McCarthy’s strongest support came from ethnic Catholics and

fundamentalist Protestants (a similar demographic would make up the majority of the John Birch

Society). David Bennett, in his book The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism

to the Militia Movement, writes this constituency of people was enamored with McCarthy’s

“politics of resentment:” his harsh treatment of liberals and the humiliation of suspected

communists. Embarrassment and spectacle far outweighed anti-communism for these

supporters.2 Robert Welch was also an admirer of McCarthy, and hoped to continue the good

work he had started in the earlier half of the decade.

The ultimate success of a society that intended to reanimate Americans to fight

communism would have to also tap into the “politics of resentment” and bring a new layer of

meaning to anti-communism. In the winter of 1958, Welch founded the John Birch Society after

a two-day meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana. He invited eleven colleagues and acquaintances from

his years in NAM and running for office to listen to him deliver a long, apocalyptic speech that

would eventually become The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, the organization’s

foundational text.3 It laid out the communist conspiracy in no uncertain terms, and was an

1 Nash The Conservative Intellectual Movement, 293.2 David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 313.3 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 1.

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effective call to action to take action against the march towards slavery under a communist

police state. The Blue Book, and the John Birch Society it preceded, was not only about anti-

communism. It focused on the idea of a communist conspiracy, which resonated with its

potential members (this idea will be discussed in section III). It also inspired strong emotional

responses to anti-communist efforts. The Blue Book emphasized the limited time Americans had

to save the nation they loved, and the dangers of allowing the conspiracy to continue. All

Americans were equally implicated in the communist plot—whether they realized it or not—by

their inaction.1

Welch’s supposition individuals could combat communism through the directives of The

Blue Book was appealing in much the same way McCarthy’s humiliation tactics were appealing.

Welch utilized “McCarthy-like rhetoric” to pit his followers against an educated elite—a

fascinating framework to utilize, considering the John Birch Society’s membership was largely

wealthier and more educated than the majority of Americans.2 He created an “us versus them”

mentality, in which there was one crowd that was right and another group that was decidedly

wrong. McCarthy had been right. Robert Welch was right and so was the John Birch Society.

The John Birch Society was less mean-spirited than McCarthyites, but they expressed their

anxiety about the role of government and the dangers of collectivism on similar emotional terms.

Between Welch’s failed bid for lieutenant governorship and the publishing of The Blue

Book, he penned his most controversial works. The Politician is a compelling artifact both for the

statements it makes, which posited the book even farther to the right than the John Birch Society,

and for the efforts Welch took to distance it from the Society. The Politician first appeared in

1954 in letter form. Ever conscious of the demands of the conservative movement, Welch did

1 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 102.2 Bennett, The Party of Fear, 322.

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finally publish it in 1958, though he contended that this was only to make it easier for his readers

—his enemies in the Communist Party and the United States government were already aware of

the manuscript and would have been keen to let it fade into obscurity.1 Welch maintained this

text “was never written, nor intended, for publication” and its appearance as a book was due

largely to public demand.2 Welch first began the research that became The Politician because he

wanted to explore the depth of what he already suspected was a communist conspiracy in the

United States government.

The titular politician in Welch’s first major foray into controversy was sitting president

Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man Welch accused of furthering the global communist plot by

infiltrating the highest seat of American power. He was a plant by the communists to “throw the

game,” as Welch’s extended and apt football analogy would have phrased it.3  The president

conspired to appoint his comrades to strategic government and civil service positions.

Eisenhower’s brother, Milton Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and Supreme Court Justice Earl

Warren were among other notables Welch implicated in the plot. All had been “under the control

of the Soviet management” since their political beginnings, but by exposing the conspiracy, true

patriots (the designated readers of The Politician and later John Birch Society literature) could

aid in the fight against communist takeover.4

The circumstances surrounding The Politician’s publication remain unclear. Welch (and

some historians) maintains that the manuscript was indeed a privately printed letter distributed to

Welch’s business colleagues. The term “letter” was open to interpretation. The manuscript was

300 pages long in its final form, and not the kind of friendly letter one might share with a close

1 Robert H. W. Welch, The Politician (Belmont, MA: Belmont Publishing Company, 1964), ix.2 Welch, The Politician, vii.3 Welch, The Politician, 133.4 Welch, The Politician, 136.

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confidante. Instead, The Politician was probably better characterized as an introduction to (or

induction into) the Welchian communist conspiracy. In this conception, The Politician became a

valuable tool for Welch to determine who would be most receptive to his new organization. Who

amongst his business associates and friends would be the most willing to join a right-wing

activist organization, and, more importantly, who would be willing to contribute the necessary

funds?

Even though Welch alleged the president was a communist, he offered no prescription for

how anyone might eradicate the problem. The Politician described the depth of the communist

conspiracy, and the subsequent formation of the John Birch Society was his solution. Perhaps

Welch was only a fear-monger (a label he relished) who had no viable solutions to the dire

problems he described, but this supposition misses the entire point of The Politician’s

relationship to the formation of the Society. As the first explicit link between Welch’s writing

and the Society, The Politician represents much more than a letter to like-minded friends. It was

one of Welch’s test spaces for these ideas. He gauged whether his accusations had traction, saw

how much support he could garner from wealthy friends and acquaintances, and put the John

Birch Society into motion. The Society’s existence was the antidote to the ill of the global

communist conspiracy. Welch firmly believed in the ability of a group of dedicated individuals

to divert what, without the Society, would be the United States’ inevitable decline into

communism.

The Politician was not published to attract more people to Welch’s cause. As a letter, it

already had a targeted audience because Welch carefully selected the recipients. The Politician

was a tool to garner financial support by overstating the extent of the problem. Welch was very

aware of the controversial statements of the book. Welch redacted and edited some of the most

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incriminating portions of The Politician in later published editions, and his use of “I” instead of

“we” further cemented his insistence the ideas contained in the book were his alone.1 By framing

The Politician as a letter, Welch attempted to protect his ideas from unnecessary backlash and

distance the text from the John Birch Society. How much of this was calculated to garner support

and gain attention? It’s impossible to definitively say. Welch may have been acutely aware

through the entire process of writing The Politician of the inflammatory nature of his statements.

It was very successful as a tool to acquire financial support for what would become the John

Birch Society.

When the letter finally appeared in book form in 1958, The Politician marked a shift in

the conservative conversation and introduced Welch to a national audience. It revived McCarthy-

style anti-communism, but with an added emphasis on a global conspiracy. There is no way to

verify Welch’s claims increasing numbers of people clamored for The Politician to be made

widely available, but some John Birch Society members did mention it in their interviews with

the California Senate Un-American Activities Committee, suggesting at least some familiarity

with the book. Welch did not want The Politician to be associated with the Society, though he

never retracted any of the statements.

One of Welch’s top priorities was, ostensibly, maintaining authoritative control over the

Society. Later in this thesis, I demonstrate the many ways members did not adhere to all of

Robert Welch’s ideas. Welch encouraged members of the John Birch Society to develop their

own opinions. Many would, as a result, describe themselves as less radical than Welch. The

Politician posed a unique problem for the John Birch Society, founded years after Welch wrote

it, because people outside the Society associated with all members, not just Welch. The Time

article mentioned earlier was among the first nationally published reports on the John Birch

1 Welch, The Politician, vi.

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Society, and its mischaracterization of The Politician stuck. Although some members did not

identify with The Politician, they were nevertheless associated with its radical statements. They

were intellectually implicated with Robert Welch, and all that might have entailed, by being

members of the John Birch Society.

Welch and the Society’s treatment of The Politician marked a divergence from Welch’s

“completely authoritarian control” over the John Birch Society.1 It allowed him to make a

distinction between himself and the Society as he created a narrative that structured itself around

the publication of The Blue Book and formation of the John Birch Society. There were those

publications, like The Politician, that came before Welch had formally proposed the Society.

Welch insisted The Politician was intellectually separate from the ideas and directives contained

in The Blue Book. It is the only text over which Welch claimed sole ownership. This suggests he

was unconcerned with members’ strict adherence to his ideology when it came to who was a

communist in the United States government. It was the membership’s prerogative if it disagreed

Eisenhower was a communist plant, as long as members were participating in the fight against

global communism through the prescribed means. It is also possible that Welch might not have

fully believed Eisenhower was part of a global conspiracy. The inflammatory comments and

accusations were part of an idea that erupted during the McCarthy Era, and subsequently abated

as the decade wore on.

The Politician focused primarily on Eisenhower’s participation in the communist

infiltration of the United States and its influence on international relations, but it implicated

others in the plot, notably, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. Welch targeted Warren not

because of the decisions of the Warren court (reactions to which were as could expected from the

Welch and other conservatives: overwhelmingly negative), but because he was “a consummate

1 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 159.

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hypocrite.”1 Warren, according to Welch, was not personally a communist, though one might be

tempted to label him as such based on the company he kept (notably Eleanor Roosevelt) and the

increasingly “pro-Socialist” decisions he passed down.

Warren gets about a paragraph in The Politician, but the John Birch Society would

undertake a fanatic campaign to secure his impeachment. In The World of the John Birch

Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War, D. J. Mulloy explains this famous Birch

Society activity: its massive letter writing campaign to impeach Earl Warren. Early in 1961,

members, eager to take on their first major action as willing foot soldiers for the John Birch

Society, wrote thousands to letters to legislators. Even to other conservatives, the petition to

impeach Warren seemed futile.2

Why did the Warren campaign gain so much traction when Eisenhower purportedly

posed the bigger threat to American security? Welch cleared Warren of communist ties, though

he was almost certainly a “comsymp” or dupe. In 1961, The Politician still haunted Robert

Welch. In a notable Time magazine article, the book was referred to as his Mein Kampf.3 Welch

needed to deflect for the sake of the Society. Whenever The Politician was brought up in the

press, it inspired either fear or ridicule, so Welch diverted their focus. The letter writing

campaign to impeach Earl Warren shifted the narrative away from inflammatory rhetoric about

Eisenhower and onto a new target.

The John Birch Society underwent its first major national campaign focused on someone

more in line with the insecurities and fears of the Society at large. Eisenhower represented the

kind of moderate conservatism that Welch believed made communist infiltration easier, but, as

Lisa McGirr describes, liberal impulse legislating civil liberties was becoming the most

1 Welch, The Politician, 236.2 Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society, 110.3 Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society, 21.

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disturbing aspect of the Cold War.1 Conservatives saw the court favoring individual civil

liberties instead of protecting the liberties of society as a whole, which disadvantaged business

interests.2 Warren had been sworn in as Chief Justice in 1953, and by 1964, when the California

Senate published the Twelfth Report of the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American

Activities, the letter writing campaign to impeach Warren was heavily underway. At least three

major civil rights decisions, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963),

and Reynolds v. Sims (1964) represented landmarks for the Civil Rights Movement, but for

Society members (and many conservatives outside the Society), they marked a disturbing shift in

the priorities of a once-great nation. Jonathan Schoenwald discusses the specific impacts of court

rulings on conservatives in A Time For Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism,

and adds they believed the Civil Rights Movement was a key component to the communist

conspiracy. Any court decision that favored civil rights directly contributed to the imminent

destruction of the American way of life.

“Red Monday” was one early example of a disturbing court decision that prioritized

components of the communist plot while disadvantaging corporate interest. In 1957 the Warren

Court handed down a series of decisions that seemed to flout the Smith Act. The Smith Act,

actually the Alien Registration Act of 1940, made it an illegal to “encourage the overthrow or

destruction of any such government by force or violence.”3 Anti-communist efforts had been

justified until this point using the Smith Act, but after 1957, the court did an “about-face” in the

way it interpreted cases involving suspected communists and the Communist Party.4 Outraged,

Welch and others perceived a Supreme Court that had gone dangerously soft on communism and

1 McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 67.2 Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, 36.3 Alien Registration Act of 1940. 76th Cong., 3rd Sess., U.S. Statutes at Large, (1940): 670-676, http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/polsciwb/brianl/docs/1940AlienRegistrationAct.pdf.4 Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, 36.

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put the rest of the country at risk. Warren wrote the decision in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957)

in which the Supreme Court overturned a University of New Hampshire professor’s conviction.

The professor had been convicted of contempt of court for refusing to answer questions about his

involvement with the Communist Party. The decision asserted, “that every citizen shall have the

right to engage in political action and association.”1 This decision would have only reinforced

Welch’s belief that the Warren Court was going soft on communism, which was synonymous

with anti-anti-communism. It put him in line with other conservatives who were beginning to

think the same thing.2

Although not as big a threat as Eisenhower, Warren became the target for the Society’s

uneasiness about collectivism and the changing nature of American politics. McGirr notes

conservatives believed the United States before World War II represented the ideal of

governmental and societal relationships. Any alteration to that model was fundamentally

disturbing, and try as he may have, Welch was unsuccessful in convincing even the most stalwart

members of the Society that Eisenhower was a part of the civil rights upheaval of the 1950s and

early 1960s. Welch could, however, definitively link Earl Warren to the shift in priorities from

prosecuting alleged communists to legislating civil rights. The political advantages of ignoring

the Eisenhower accusations and the political capital Welch could gain attacking Earl Warren

outweighed his commitment to ideological purity. This time, it was not just Welch criticizing a

public figure. He had huge swaths of conservative legislators and civilians on his side.

Additionally, Welch maintained in the prologue to The Politician it was his “opinion”

that Eisenhower was a Communist, a tonal departure from the “facts” he presented elsewhere in

the book. Though Welch was neither a captivating speaker nor an engaging writer, he possessed

1 Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957).2 Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, 36-37.

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a certain flair for inciting both liberals and conservatives. Naming Eisenhower as a Communist

may have been just such a situation. It was an attention-seeking tactic Welch employed. His

corporate and political activities brought him into contact with wealthy conservatives across the

country, and The Politician was his first opportunity to gauge their potential support. There is

continued debate amongst historians and sociologists about the extent to which Welch can be

rightfully characterized as “an embittered candy maker.” But before the infamy that

accompanied The Politician and later the John Birch Society, he had accomplished little to

warrant any national attention.1 Could The Politician have been a cry for attention? Maybe, but

Welch himself provides so little explanation for apparently distancing himself from The

Politician that there is only room for conjecture.

Whatever Welch’s reason for reframing The Politician as opinion and not fact, as a letter

and not a publication, it was a departed from the typically authoritarian nature of his writings. It

offered a rare opportunity for Society members to depart from the ideology Welch handed down

from the Belmont headquarters. If this was an intentional tactic, it created the appearance of a

society in which individual members were afforded a degree of autonomy from Welch. It seemed

to defy one of the most troubling criticisms of the John Birch Society: it was utilizing Soviet-like

organizational tactics to wrangle its tens of thousands of members. If few members subscribed to

the belief that Eisenhower had been a Communist infiltrator, as Welch insisted, and they were

not punished for that rejection, then perhaps the Society was not as rigid as some suggested.

There was a variation in adherence to Welch’s “opinions,” and that was just fine by the Society--

as long as those members were still committed to the overarching cause of fighting communism

in the United States.

1 California Senate, Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities (Sacramento, CA: 1963), 31.

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A major component of the opposition to communism was stifling the encroachment of

the federal government into the private lives of ordinary Americans. D. J. Mulloy provides an

extensive discussion of Welch’s stance on the role of the federal government and the ways that

the Warren court represented the overstepped boundary between citizen and state. In his book,

Mulloy writes Welch believed states’ rights were the last remaining barrier between freedom and

“a monolithic dictatorship in Washington.”1 Welch, the John Birch Society, and other

conservatives interpreted the Warren Court’s decisions as the legislation of civil rights. The

courts overstepped of states’ rights to govern their own people, and there was a certain sense that

the American populace at large was ignorant of the effects such an overstep could have on their

way of life. Welch, throughout The Politician and his other assumed the tone of someone

presenting facts—easily accessible through newspapers and research—that others had

overlooked, or not considered in the right sequence. By bringing these facts to light, he was

exposing the truth about American policies that pointed to a collectivist conspiracy and the

pummeling freedom was receiving at the hands of judges and legislators like Warren.

The existence of a Civil Rights Movement was evidence in itself of communist

interference because it caused huge rifts amongst Americans. Otherwise patriotic citizens,

participants in the Civil Rights Movement were duped by Communist plants and prevented from

forming a united front against all forms of collectivism. The Civil Rights Movement was a

diversion—the biggest threat to American liberty being communism, naturally—and the Warren

Court was betraying the American people by handing down decisions that acknowledged the

legitimacy of the Movement. Welch firmly believed members of the Communist Party were

inciting riots, pickets, and sit-ins to create division in the United States so they might more easily

gain influence amongst a splintered populace.

1 Quoted in Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society, 110.

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Additionally, his and the rest of the John Birch Society’s criticisms of civil rights

activists extended beyond disdain for the unrest and upheaval in legislature that the movement

required. It bore into the very idea of who could claim legitimacy as an American citizen. By

framing civil rights leaders, particularly (but not limited to) Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm

X, as communist plants, the Society denied them a place as true American citizens. Welch was

nearly obsessed with a vicious with-us-or-against-us philosophy. One was a Communist, a

comsymp, or dupe, all of which were harmful to the United States, or a loyal member of the John

Birch Society.

II. Populating the John Birch Society

Robert Welch created, in the John Birch Society, an organization that locally affected its

members even as its influence spread around the United States. They felt a sense of ownership

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and commitment to the cause. Although their ideas about anti-communism could be

characterized as less fanatic that of Welch, their concerns about collectivism and the role of

government aligned nearly perfectly. The Society still felt the pangs of the potential loss of the

America they saw slipping away into something unrecognizable, and the communist conspiracy

seemed one way to understand how they were feeling.

The Society’s reach, however, seemed to guarantee at least some divergence from the

prescribed organizational doctrine. The membership had grown prolifically throughout the

United States, and by the mid-1960s, it was one of the largest conservative organizations in the

nation. The John Birch Society, beholden to its founder’s ideas, also consisted of chapter leaders,

managers, and members who brought their own interpretations of Welch’s words to the Society.

This section will examine the average member of the John Birch Society through a report

published by the California Senate Un-American Activities Committee, which includes

quotations and an analysis of the John Birch Society. This document includes interviews with

current members and one of the few first-hand accounts of a John Birch Society meeting. The

report suggests a small, but definite, level of disconnect between Robert Welch’s version of the

Society and the membership’s interpretation of their own activities. It demonstrates a group

concerned with the social connections the Society facilitated, with participatory anti-communist

efforts, and with being perceived as good Americans by their neighbors.

The success of the Society in these early years appears more attributable to the

community-based structure of local chapters than to strict adherence to Welch’s The Blue Book

of the John Birch Society. While the Society was strictly hierarchical, its members were entering

into each other’s homes, congregating in John Birch Society reading rooms, and inviting

neighbors and friends to join them. The Society itself was not secret, though it was not secretive,

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nor did it try to be. The general feeling of the Society seemed to be that while activities

performed in each meeting were regarded with a certain level of secrecy, the existence of the

John Birch Society should not be a secret--it needed to be publicized in order to effectively fight

communism.

In March of 1961, Welch invited the California Senate Un-American Activities

Committee to investigate the John Birch Society in a telegram to Governor Pat Brown in light of

increasing speculation that the Society “is or could become subversive.”1 Controversy

surrounding The Politician was beginning to have an impact on the national conversation about

conservatism, and Welch seemed eager to temper the heated accusations about the un-American

nature of the Society. The telegram was also copied to Senator Hugh Burns, who responded to

the clamor of the press that investigation alone was not an admission of un-American activities

or a report on the Society’s views and policies, but a baseline investigation into whether the

group as a whole was un-American.2

The comments from the membership collected by the Factfinding Subcommittee

challenge the extent to which Welch can be considered the final authority on all matters

regarding the John Birch Society. Ultimately, Welch was the final arbiter of the Society’s

ideology, but he was not the only one allowed to have an “American opinion.” Welch may have

been the only one handing down directives, there were chapter leaders and financial leaders who

had a say in the way each individual chapter functioned.3 If the John Birch Society was supposed

to be monolithic, the thousands of tiny legs that propelled it into the consciousness of political

junkies and fear mongers nationwide were its vocal members.

1 California Senate, Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities,22 California Senate, Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities, 2.3 California Senate, Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities, 32.

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Society members were less concerned with Welch’s remarks and writings than with

general insecurity about the meaning of citizenship. One member remarked that in his

estimation, “99 percent of our membership disagree,” with Welch’s remarked regarding

Eisenhower, and many viewed this as an attempt to discredit the entire Society by inflating what

was simply a lack of the “prudence and judgment a man in his position should have exercised.”1

While they were thankful for his guidance towards their educational enrichment, Society

members were far more likely to mention their past ignorance about international affairs and the

confidence they had gained by becoming part of a larger organization than mention the specific

actions they had taken to incite change. They frequently mention being a “good citizen”--they

had not been good citizens before joining the John Birch Society, but now they could confidently

label themselves as such. Members were writing and calling local legislators and taking interest

in local politics, something many would have agreed “any good citizen should do.”2

Mulloy offers a compelling perspective on the Society’s notion of good American

citizenship and the ways Welch believed it could undermine the communist conspiracy. He

writes that paranoia about the strength of the Soviet Union would not have been unusual.

Concerns about atomic weapons, defeated uprisings in Soviet controlled areas, and the

imminence of another “hot” war were all concerns many millions of Americans shared. There

was nothing necessarily remarkable about these worries, but when the Welch placed the

communist enemy within the United States government, he veered away from these

“conventional pieties.” Believing there was an enemy destroying the government from the inside

could provide “comfort” to the Society because it implied there was a singular fix for the

nation’s problems.3 Remove the communists from the government, and the United States would

1 California Senate, Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities, 46.2 California Senate, Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities, 44.3 D. J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society, 166.

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reclaim the status it lost in the years following World War II. David Bennett in The Party of

Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement notes, additionally, that

during the Cold War, the United States seemed to be in a precarious position: the “paradox” of

unparalleled strength and vulnerability as long range weapons and increased communication

made isolationism seem an impossible retreat.1 Welch wrote in The Blue Book that the Soviet

Union “beguiled” governments in Asia, Europe, and South America into staging wars and

rebellions, and that the same was about to happen in the United States.2  Members of the John

Birch Society hoped to combat these anxieties through their participation in Society activities

and by following Welch’s directives.

Members invited friends and neighbors, and, as they filled seats in John Birch Society

reading rooms around the country, influences beyond the organizational lines may have taken

hold. While certainly committed to reducing the size and scope of the federal government and

decrying the evils of communism, the Society was also a means for creating a sense of

community out of a common fear. Part of the maintenance of the community was through

secrecy. The “alleged secrecy and conspiratorial atmosphere” of the Society was marginally

disproven by the subcommittee, as the report claimed members of the committee were easily

able to gain access to reading rooms and John Birch Society meetings.3 The fact that the

committee was invited by Welch to investigate, and the growing constituency of John Birch

Society members in California may have had an impact on the ease with which the committee

was able to gain access.

Faith-based morality was another unifying thread in the Society, particularly

fundamentalist Protestantism. Though the subcommittee did not find the Society to be any sort of

1 David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear, 274.2 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 27.3 California Senate, Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities, 39.

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secret organization, it did find that the allegations of its conspiratorial nature to be true, which

may have been among the reasons it was able to attract so many enthusiastic members.

Sociologist Sara Diamond notes the not-so-casual link between fundamentalist Protestants, who

according to one study made up the majority of the Society’s membership, and an “attraction to

conspiracy theories” in Roads to Dominion: Right Wing Movements and Political Power in the

United States. Citing an inclination towards personal responsibility over “larger social forces,”

Diamond suggests the John Birch Society’s emphasis on individual action (although letter

writing may seem like busy work, it was one of the primary activities members interviewed by

the subcommittee mentioned as important Society work) may have been particularly well suited

to the Protestant demographic.12 Welch wrote directly to his fundamentalist Protestant

supporters, as well as Catholics (a topic addressed in section III), when he wrote “morality must

be based on a bedrock of faith.” He states the two are connected and essential to fighting

communism and collectivism, and suggests the inability to fight communism without a faith-

based system of morals. Uniting the Society, even if only in part, through their religious

convictions seemed to only reinforce a member's commitment to its causes.

The subcommittee also examined the types of activities in which the Society engaged in

order to gain greater understanding of the types of people it attracted. One member described the

monthly meetings as discussions of “books, lectures, and so on. We review the monthly bulletin,

and its 10 suggestions,” adding parenthetically that “anyone is free to decline to follow any of

the suggestions in it [the Bulletin, the official monthly publication of the John Birch Society].”3

They were important social experiences for the thousands of members. McGirr again provides a

1 Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 55.2 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 145.3 California Senate, Twelfth Report, 44.

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compelling explanation for this phenomenon, in which a singular cause--anti-communism in this

instance--becomes a cover for cohesive community. Conservatism, she argues, is personal

because it represents the fear that something held very dear to a person is going to be taken

away. At their very core, conservatives represented “staunch nationalism, moral absolutes, and a

belief in limited government.”1 Understanding the way the members of the John Birch Society

presented its specific morality is key to understanding the way it functioned and the way it

defined nationality.

The Society members surveyed seemed preoccupied with the idea that before they had

joined, they were part of a glut of uninformed citizens who were all too happy to continue their

lives neglecting their civil duties. By latching onto the educational aspect of the John Birch

Society, they reframed it as a means to better themselves on a personal level that happened to

coincide with being a better person on a civic level, and eradicating “political indifference.”2

Welch was a huge proponent of anti-communism through education, perhaps as evidenced by his

use of the word “dupe” with its connotations of victimization and a general lack of awareness.

According to Welch, the greatest challenge for eradicating communism was “the difficulty of

getting the ordinary patriotic American to sit up and take an honest look at what is happening.”3

Understanding the depth of the communist conspiracy took courage and knowledge for Welch

and Society members—they sometimes spoke of being “awakened” to the political and social

realities of the world through Society literature and film. Society members understood that the

facts Welch presented did not speak for themselves—it was up to the American citizenship to

recognize the danger and immediately spring into action. The communist conspiracy was so

1 Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 272.2 California Senate, Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities, 44.3 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, iii.

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deeply and globally entrenched, the average American might not notice its machinations. Once

they were educated, they would see the conspiracy everywhere. As far as Welch was concerned,

everything he wrote was common knowledge, but he was just the first to put action and

education into the equation.

Welch even had a name for only ideology he believed could combat communism:

americanism. According to Welch, an “americanist” was the epitome of the anti-communist.

Americanists upheld freedom and American “values,” and could exist anywhere in the world—

as long as they were fighting the evils of communism. One did not have to be a member of the

John Birch Society to be an americanist. It had no connection to the Society, whose long-term

purpose was “to promote less government, more responsibility, and a better world.”1 The

Society, Welch wrote, was a springboard to educate the American populace about the extent of

the communist infiltration in the United States. This would bring about a national awakening and

prioritization of americanism over communism.

The conservative world, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, seems to have

represented a zero-sum game of rights and privileges. As more and more people fought to gain

equality in civic life, some conservatives interpreted the new legislation that resulted from these

battles as an encroachment on their personal freedoms. If the federal government could grant

rights, it could just as easily take them away--and for a group like the John Birch Society, it was

this kind of overreaching federal authority that signified the descent into communism. It is a

fascinating phenomenon that the people who so loudly proclaim their patriotism and devotion to

good citizenship should have abandoned the notion of American progress, but conservatives,

according to McGirr, were determined to reclaim that ephemeral something that had been lost

1 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book, 162.

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between the New Deal era and the 1960s. What was that something? A sense of civic duty?

Responsibility to one’s community?

Whatever it may have been, two critical components appear to have been apprehension

and self-preservation. These two impulses dictated the morality of the John Birch Society.

Members were apprehensive about the future. Many, many things had changed in communities

across the country in the years following the New Deal, and many more things seemed to be on

the cusp of change. Revolution did not seem like something that only happened in far-off foreign

lands--suddenly, revolution could be imminent in the United States. How could this have

happened? Only due to secret communist infiltration, Welch told them, could the last bastion of

capitalism find itself prey to revolutionary ideas. If the communists were not acting covertly, no

American would stand for their ideas. This is the point where self-preservation becomes most

apparent. The conservative Society members were attempting to conserve a specific way of life,

convinced of its efficacy and universal applicability. Ensuring restrictions on the federal

government was an important tool to this end because under the Warren Court, communism was

finding a receptive audience. Under the guise of civil rights, decisions were being handed down

and legislation rewritten to explicate what it meant to be a citizen. Liberals may have lauded the

decision, but for the John Birch Society, it was evidence of the Communist Party’s advancement

into the United States.

Anti-communism was a moral issue because it reflected a certain steadfastness of

character for conservatives and members of the John Birch Society alike. Communists were

tricky; they had tricked Americans for decades. It was only when Senator Joseph McCarthy

emerged onto the political scene that their underhanded dealings in the government were

uncovered. One member put it this way: “we can’t talk peace with the Russians, or trade with the

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Yugoslavs, or give foreign aid to those who would murder us if given the chance.”1 The

differences between Americans and communists, and Welch frequently framed the conversation

in such terms, were insurmountable because the two parties were operating on different moral

frequencies. The communists wanted to murder, to destroy; Americans wanted to educate and

strengthen. Communism was destructive and americanism was conservativ

III. The Kooks and the Nuts

The previous sections of this thesis detail the official character of the John Birch Society.

That is, the characteristics Robert Welch hoped to impart, and the characteristics of the majority

of the members. These two tended to align relatively closely in the early years of the Society,

and in the places where they may have diverged, the membership and its leader were essentially

conjoined by a common anti-communist goal. Anti-communism was the most important aspect

of the first five or six years of the John Birch Society, but it was not always the most pressing

issue for those outside of the society. Even those who sought membership seemed to miss this

essential point. Just as prescient, however, other concerns about what constituted a threat to the

nation prompted many to write to the Society seeking membership from an organization they

believed was aligned with white supremacist ideals. These people, though sometimes prolific

correspondents with the Society’s headquarters in Belmont, were rejected from the ranks or

allowed time to “phase themselves out,” as one chapter leader put it, because their concerns

seemed to lie outside of anti-communist goals. It may have also been true that the prevalence of

racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and white supremacy in many of the letters only

reinforced the Society’s belief in the prevalence of communism in every corner of American life.

Even those who were interested membership were susceptible to its influence, and were

participating in its weakening effects by holding prejudicial thoughts against other Americans.

1 California Senate, Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities, 44.

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Regardless of the Society’s reaction, however, it seems the letters mark a breaking point

for the John Birch Society in at least two different ways. First, it represented the moment when

Robert Welch’s initial impulse for a strictly anti-communist society begins to get away from

him; the Society was attracting people whose concern about communism was vague at best.

Second, it marks the end of the membership’s good standing in the eyes of more mainstream

conservatism. This had been crucially important to the growth and health of the John Birch

Society in the early 1960s, but by the middle of the decade, even the National Review was

critical of the membership, implicating it in the magazine’s regular lambasts of Robert Welch.1

As the conservative movement gained in legitimacy, it seemed there were more options for those

who wanted to be involved in conservative political action, particularly as the Republican Party

gained momentum through popular mainstream candidates like Barry Goldwater and Ronald

Reagan. Groups like the John Birch Society, then, were increasingly attracting those who still

felt marginalized by the conservative movement. Those who might have otherwise joined the

ranks of the Silver Legion of America or the Ku Klux Klan found themselves without an

appropriate organizational outlet.2 The John Birch Society, frequently under attack from the

media, but with a sensationalist message that placed emphasis on action, may have appealed to

those people in spite of itself.

This section will explore a sampling of these would-be John Birch Society members

through letters sent in to the Society’s Home Chapter in Belmont. Though there are many dozens

of letters requesting membership, the following selections represent the primary concerns of

people writing to the Society. The one outlier in this regard is Fiammetta Bozzuffi, an Italian

woman whose concerns about communism in Europe prompted her to write to an organization an

1 Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, 293.2 Bennett, The Party of Fear, 246.

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ocean away. Her anti-Catholic concerns, however, were not unusual. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the

Society maintained records of who had been rejected from membership, and very nearly all of

the people who were barred from joining because of their prejudicial views.

In the early years of the John Birch Society, the leadership at Belmont worked to weed

out the obviously racist or anti-Semitic from their ranks. Many wrote along the lines of Dorothy

Forrest of Arkansas, who included the following in her application:

I do not know very much about the John Birch, but I understand that their aim is the same as mine, to do every thing [sic] within my power to counteract the Communist take over or the Presidents [sic] great Communist type society, to preserve our Constitutional freedoms and keep our white race pure also to protect our right to worship our Lord without first asking the Fed. Gov.’s O.K.1

On one level, this is exactly the kind of letter one might expect from a “Bircher,” a sarcastic term

many in the 1960s would sue to describe the Society. Its author is racist, white supremacist,

small-government, Christian. This is the type of person Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein

of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith feared would become the disturbingly vocal

minority in their work Danger on the Right2. An administrator in the Home office, perhaps

Donald F. Folkers, the Home Office Coordinator, had underlined “keep our white race pure” in

his copy of the letter, suggesting this was ultimately the reason Forrest was rejected. The

notation on the letter would have signified to other administrators the Forrest’s offense. Letters

like Forrest’s seem to have been circulated through the administrative staff of the Home Office

so they might look out for more correspondence from the individual in the future. The John

Birch Society, under Welch’s paranoid influence, would not take any chances correspondence

from a person like Forrest might go unmonitored.

1 Letter from Dorothy Forrest to the John Birch Society, John Birch Society records, Ms. 2013.003, Brown University Library, Box 9.2 Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, Danger on the Right, (New York: Random House, 1964).

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Forrest’s ignorance about the Society might have also been ideologically at odds with the

Society. Not only would it probably be bad practice to have a membership unaware of the

ideology of the organization, it goes against one of the main unifying principles of the John

Birch Society: its insistence that communism can be combated if Americans are united in their

commitment to understanding the pervasive nature of the problem. Not knowing “very much”

about the Society was tantamount to not knowing much about the communist conspiracy, which

was not a threat to white “purity.” It is certain, however, that an emphasis on American values

could have been easily interpreted as code for white supremacy. However, most members of the

Society, who made up the overwhelming majority of all letters written into the Home Office,

seemed to understand this distinction. As Vera M. Baliff of Sherman Oaks, California put it in a

statement to the California Senate, the Society’s “main function is educational,” and those who

would write to a Society based on an impression of its goals instead of fact would not be

welcome.1

Nazism was a social and political affiliation that was similarly incompatible with the

John Birch Society. Over the course of three years, from June 1966 to July 1969, the Home

Office received a series of letters from Lars J. Been about various flyers put up in his local post

office by the Boy Scouts of America. While perhaps under other circumstances, the Home Office

would have written a letter thanking Been for his diligence in keeping track of the Boy Scouts, a

group that would be a prime target for communists, Been’s letter was disturbing in other ways. A

note on one of Been’s later letters notes his admiration for “G L Rockwell,” referring to George

Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. It is unclear how the Society found

1 California Senate, Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities, 44

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out about this particular political leaning, but it is possible that the local Society chapter had been

keeping tabs on Been and had informed the Home Chapter.1

The Society was generally laissez-faire when it came to its tolerance of anti-Semitic

members. Welch himself never wrote anything suggesting anti-Semitism and writings published

for consumption by the Society strictly adhered to the unification of Americans across religious

lines to fight communism. However, he did allow anti-Semitic writing in official publications

like American Opinion, such as those penned by the former Notre Dame professor Revilo P.

Oliver.2 Ambivalence in the official literature was indicative of the Society’s attitude toward

anti-Semitism. In a letter dated November 16, 1964, Donald F. Folkers, Home Office

Coordinator, wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Lowry of Dallas Texas to notify them of their new chapter

after an apparent move. The letter was carbon copied to Bob Weedn, of Richardson, Texas, the

leader of the Lowrys’s new chapter. He replied to Folkers the Lowrys were “violently anti-

semitic,” but should be allowed to “phase themselves out” of the Society, instead of being

forcefully rejected. 3

Though the Lowrys were farther to the right in their social practices than the Society, as

dues-paying members, Weedn seemed reluctant to let them leave the chapter. It would be easier

to let them leave of their own volition especially because, as he notes, George Lincoln Rockwell

had just set up “his group” in Texas and Weedn had his “hands full of anti-semites.” Weedn

notes the chapter would have to have “another purge” soon, as the American Nazi Party was

drawing its membership from the same demographic as the John Birch Society. Though no other

1 Letter from Lars J. Been to the John Birch Society, June 9, 1966, John Birch Society records, Ms. 2013.003, Brown University Library, Box 9.

2 Bennett, The Party of Fear, 317.3 Letter from Donald J. Folkers to Mr. and Mrs. Lowry, November 16, 1964, John Birch Society records, Ms. 2013.003, Brown University Library, Box 9.

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letters or paperwork document purging anti-Semites or other bigots from the Society, the

chapters did keep detailed notes on those with prejudicial views and using those notes to

occasionally “purge” them from the local chapters seems to have been a priority.1

Anti-Semitism represented an interesting paradox for conservatives, the John Birch

Society included. Many of the “rejection” letters to the Society came from the South and West,

which had become a haven for conservatives in the years following the New Deal. The fact that

there was few Jews in these areas, particularly rural areas, did not stop prevents anti-Semitic

beliefs from proliferating, and in fact may have facilitated the process. The “specter” of unearned

profits, or of making profits off non-Jews, and ignorance of Jewish culture both fed into anti-

Semitic sentiment throughout the country.2 Furthermore, according to McGirr, the economic

boom of the Cold War years gave conservatives “confidence:” confidence they could compete

with the eastern intellectual elite with economic strength, and counter the stereotypical wealthy

eastern intellectual (and Jewish) elite with their own, fairly and capitalistically earned money.3 It

may have been Welch’s personal behavior itself that saved the Society from succumbing anti-

Semitism. While Welch would never claim to be an intellectual—a role perhaps more adequately

filled by William F. Buckley or Russell Kirk—he was obsessed with leading an educated group

of people. Thus the disdain for the eastern intellectual, which may have masked underlying anti-

Semitic beliefs, did not play as large a role in the John Birch Society.4 5

Catholicism, perhaps unsurprisingly, was another target of the Society’s membership.

One example of this comes from a prolific Italian member of the John Birch Society, Fiammetta

1 Note from Bob Weedn to Donald J. Folkers, John Birch Society records, Ms. 2013.003, Brown University Library, Box 9.2 Bennett, The Party of Fear, 246.3 McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 56.4 McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 57.5 Martin Durham, The Christian Right: The Far Right and the Boundaries of American Conservatism (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000), 117.

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Bozzuffi. Though Bozzuffi wrote to the Home Chapter for many years, many of her letters center

around communist activity in Italy and Europe--unless she was talking about the Kennedys.

Robert and John F. Kennedy were in league with the pope and the Vatican to “reconquest

America.”1 The idea that the Kennedys conspired with the pope was nothing new, but her letters

otherwise overlooked aspects of the John Birch Society. The first is the international existence of

conservatism. It is unclear how Bozzuffi came into contact with the John Birch Society, but she

was a diligent correspondent for over two years, sending a $5 contribution with each letter, along

with newspaper clippings and reports on Pope Paul VI, referred to as “Pope Montini.” The idea

that the United States might be exemplary for other nations would have been unsurprising to

members of the John Birch Society, but in the later half of the 1960s, when its influence was

beginning to wane, the Society needed to source monetary support where it could.

In his response to Bozzuffi, Richard B. McKinney, the Executive Secretary of the John

Birch Society, did not reiterate the Society line of including all religions, instead focusing on the

Society’s educational pursuits. “We are an educational ARMY,” he wrote, “that means business

every step of the way!”2 The correspondence series also demonstrates the Society’s adherence to

Welch and his emphasis on education over action, which may have lead many to ultimately leave

the group. If Welch’s plans were going to be successful, he would need more than just letter

writing campaigns, but the Society was not equipped to provide these services. McKinney never

mentions Bozzuffi’s anti-Catholic sentiments, in spite of the fact that Welch explicitly mentions

Catholics as his “friends and strongest supporters,” right alongside fundamentalist Protestants.

1 Letter from Fiammetta Bozzuffi to John Birch Society, June 20, 1966, John Birch Society records, Ms. 2013.003, Brown University Library, Box 1.2 Letter from Richard B. McKinney to Fiammetta Bozzuffi, October 6, 1966, John Birch Society records, Ms. 2013.003, Brown University Library, Box 1.

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The emphasis on “study,” as Welch frequently referred to it, was not meant to be solely

external, and members of the Society were meant to expect communistic influences in their own

lives. Welch, in The Blue Book, specifically calls out Protestants for sitting back on their duty as

good Americans. Some Protestant churches have “converted Christianity into a so-called ‘social

gospel’” that was “indistinguishable from advocacy of the welfare state by socialist politicians.”

Others were practically preaching communism to their parishioners.1 Though a Baptist himself,

many of Welch’s constituents would count themselves amongst the numerous Protestant or

Evangelist ranks.2 The statement was meant to highlight the “spiritual vacuum” into which the

United States had fallen.3 While it may have been one thing to highlight the Jews, “Moslems,” or

Catholics as susceptible to communist rhetoric, implicating Protestants was entirely different; it

placed the communist threat somewhere much more recognizable.

There were a number of pervasive binaries in the ways Welch constructed and conceived

of the John Birch Society, and one that seems to most directly speak to the membership was the

insider versus the outsider. In many ways, this idea underlies the entirety of the Society’s

ideology, but it was one that those outside the Society’s leadership could latch onto easily. There

were Americans and communists--a person was either a good American (and a member of the

Society) or a communist (even those who did not identify as Communists were aiding their cause

by not being proactive anti-communists). To the Society, the binary represented a “way of life,”

as newly elected Senator John Rousselot of California would phrase it in an address to Congress

on the principles of the John Birch Society.4 Communists, as the consummate outsiders, were so

foreign they were inassimilable to American society. “Communism as a way of life … is

1 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 59.2 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 62.3 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 60.4 John Rousselot, “Beliefs and Principles of the John Birch Society,” The Congressional Record, 1962.

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completely wrong; but our ultimate quarrel with the Communists is that they insist on imposing

that way of life on the rest of the world by murder, treason, and cruelty rather than by

persuasion,” Rousselot wrote in The Congressional Record. In other words, although the

Society’s structure might mimic that of an authoritarian or totalitarian government, there were

other irreconcilable differences between Americans and communists. Rousselot’s statement also

suggests that violence was a major component of the struggle between communism and the

Society. Violence, as in violent revolution or violent social behavior, was anathema to everything

the Society represented.

Community and the idea of the cohesion of the John Birch Society’s message were one

implicit way it fought communism. Although the Society provided the literature and basic

structure for each chapter meeting, there is an inherent informality in each meeting. They

frequently took place in member’s homes, and new recruits had to be invited to join individual

chapters, so while Welch could control the general activities of each chapter, it would be

impossible to police their tone and character.1 As suggested in Weedn’s note, undesirable

activities and sentiments could take hold of the chapters and cause divergence from Welch’s

original message. Chapters tended to emerge in suburban, but still populous areas (those who

lived in places to rural to support a John Birch Society chapter were encouraged to join the

Home Chapter in Belmont “on a sort of member-at-large basis,”2) and the Society was just as

much about forging connections as it was about combating communism. Like a Tupperware

party, John Birch Society meetings followed a specific structure, with patriotic oaths and

mandatory readings. In Thomas Hine’s Populuxe, he writes Tupperware parties “provided an

opportunity for arm’s-length sociability,” and it seems that the “cult of informality” he describes

1 California Senate, Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities, 19-20.2 California Senate, Tweltfh Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities, 20.

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could have also extended to political affiliations.1 The Society was a safe way to interact with

one’s neighbors that bound people together through a singular shared goal. While, in many

chapters, members were people who adhered closely to The Blue Book, others, like the one

described by Weedn, may have taken a more drastic turn.

The letters cited in this chapter reflect those written to and from the Home Chapter of the

Society, but the idea of “chapters” creates a strain on Welch’s authority. The relatively informal

nature of a chapter meeting could easily devolve into an extension of other, more ethnically or

religiously motivated, political expressions. That Weedn felt the need to “purge” some of his

membership speaks loudly to this fact, as do the many applications sent into the Home Chapter

that were ultimately rejected because of cross membership or sympathies to groups such as the

American Nazi Party, Ku Klux Klan, or Christian Crusade. Chapter leaders like Weedn did what

they could, but there would be no way for Welch to ensure all leaders would take such a

proactive position. The problem was made more difficult because of the vast swaths of the

population the Society appealed to. Many of the letters were from rural America, but the

majority of the Society was economically better situated than most Americans.2 They could

claim a certain degree of uniformity within the “cult of informality,” but such uniformity could

not be guaranteed. The culture of the era, in fact, may have prevented neighbors from getting to

know each other on a level that surpassed their surface political beliefs, so more “radical” social

and political interpretations may never have come up in John Birch Society meetings, controlled

as they were by Welch.

Welch strongly believed Christianity “supplied the fabric of morality of the whole

western world,” which made Christians uniquely suitable for combating the global communist

1 Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: The Overlook Press: 2007), 35-36.2 Bennett, Party of Fear, 322.

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threat.1 Although ostensibly always open to various religious groups, this oppositional struggle

between godly Americans and atheist communists would ultimately attract so many undesirable

“kooks” to the movement.2 By framing itself as a society for good Americans, Welch’s Society

left the definition too open to interpretation. The official guidelines for what was acceptable by

the Society’s standards seems to be clear for most members, but there were definite outliers. It is

unclear how far the Society as a whole was willing to go to remove these racist outliers from its

ranks, though it is certain it made an effort to be self-policing. Ultimately, however, the Society’s

attempts at maintaining a non-prejudicial reputation were unsuccessful. Some of the known

bigots who wrote into the Society seeking membership were simply ignored—the most violent

among them were more likely to be ignored than those whose feelings were more demurely

expressed. Thus, even they might not clearly understand the reasons for their rejection. Others

were convinced they were active John Birch Society members, and it was only the internal

memos and notes that proved opposite true.

Many conservative critics of the John Birch Society, particularly before 1964, were quick

to separate Welch from the Society membership. Welch was the conspiracist, the embodiment of

the “lunatic fringe;” his Society, however, represented a group of conservatives who simply

wanted to get things done. Maybe they were focusing their energies on the wrong projects, like

trying to get Earl Warren impeached or removing the United Nations logo from United Airlines

airplanes, but they were important components of the right-wing activist community.3 As long as

this impression of the membership was solid, conservatives outside the John Birch Society could

collectively respect, or tolerate, the Society. However, in 1965 those tides changed: the

1 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 62.2 Memoranda from Thomas N. Hill, January 1, 1968, John Birch Society records, Ms. 2013.003, Brown University Library, Box 9.3 Bennett, The Party of Fear, 316.

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membership was inextricably linked to Welch, and his paranoid opinions could no longer be

extricated from those of his followers.1 What caused this shift could be the subject of further

study, as few later historians have adequately dealt with the definite turn in conservative

treatment of the Society.

Outliers like the Lowrys, Bozzuffi, Forrest, and Been were also a growing problem

because they demonstrated the extent of the communist infiltration into the psyches of regular

people. Bozzuffi was, aside from her anti-Catholicism, an embodiment of what Welch may have

meant when he said americanists did not have to be Americans.2 She was a reliable financial

contributor, but the Society did chide her for her prejudice. She would have been an even more

valuable member of the Society had she adhered more closely to its relative tolerance. The others

were similarly trying to do their best by their country. Welch would have appreciated their

patriotic impulses, even if he directed the Home Chapter to reject their applications based on

their racial and religious vitriol.

Most members were introduced to the Society by invitation to one of the meetings, which

frequently took place in members’ homes, suggestive of a social club atmosphere, with like-

minded friends and acquaintances coming together to discuss anti-communism and read the

Monthly Bulletin.  Though some would claim the John Birch Society was a secret society, but

there is little evidence that the actions of the Society were ever a secret; the only guarded secret

in the 1960s were membership lists (and this was actually more of a stick in the side of other

conservative groups who would have liked to tap into the relatively deep pockets of Society

members). Instead, the Society functioned effectively as a conservative clique, and outsiders

were not welcome.

1 Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement, 293.2 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 162.

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Conclusion

In the earliest years of the modern conservative movement, the trajectory was unclear.

Not only did liberal movements overwhelmingly outnumber conservative ones, it seemed the

nation as a whole was leaning leftward. Spikes in conservative activity, like McCarthyism, came

and went quickly, seemingly overwhelmed by the desire for political stability and consensus.

The underlying anxieties, however, remained. Anti-communism represented the desire for

stability, panic about changes in social and economic order, and paranoia about the role of

federal government in everyday life.

The John Birch Society revived McCarthy-style anti-communism in the late 1950s and

early 1960s. Robert Welch adopted an authoritative leadership style and imposed it on his

fledgling society to great success. In just a few short years, the Society would grow from the

eleven men invited to Indianapolis to hear Welch present his speech, that would eventually

become The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, to tens of thousands. For a brief moment in

time, the John Birch Society was the largest conservative non-party group in the nation. Its

foundation in paranoia about an alleged global communist conspiracy attracted media attention,

ridicule, and predictions about the rise of fascism in the United States. The charges and

suspicions were so great, even government bodies had to get involved. The California Senate, in

publishing the Twelfth Report of the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities,

gained access to Society meetings and interviewed its members to determine whether their

fanatic anti-communism was also anti-American.

Robert Welch claimed his group was “americanist,” which he defined as the opposite of

“communist.” Lowercase ‘a’ americanists fought against collectivism in all its forms, and valued

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freedom of expression and action above all else.1 He envisioned a world in which americanists

overwhelmed the communist conspiracy, thwarting communists’ efforts to enslave the world.

Their last objective, before achieving this goal, was conquering the United States through the

insidious infiltration of its government. Welch hoped a loyal cadre of good Americans could

prevent this from happening, and eventually bring freedom to the entire world by revealing the

communist plot.

The John Birch Society, strictly hierarchical, deferred entirely to Robert Welch’s

authoritarian style of leadership. He controlled all aspects of the Society, from what happened in

meetings to what kind of person could be allowed into the Society. The rules were outlined

clearly, and chapter leaders and administrators followed them to the best of their ability.

Members responded well to the Society’s structure, relishing the ability to act and take part in a

grassroots activist organization. The John Birch Society was one of the very limited options for

conservatives who wanted to become politically active, but were unimpressed with the lack of

cohesion surrounding the Republican Party. When Society members congregated in John Birch

Society reading rooms and wrote the thousands of letters to local and federal legislators, they

could take pride in their commitment to civic activity and conservative political action.

There would always be outliers, however, who wanted to participate but did not

ideologically match up with the rest of the Society. People with professed racist, anti-Semitic, or

anti-Catholic sympathies were also a part of the growing conservative movement. Anti-

collectivist concerns ran deep, and had connections to earlier, pre-World War II nativist

movements as well as the most recent Red Scare immediately following the war’s conclusion.

Some of these people would have been candidates for membership in organizations like the Ku

Klux Klan, but by the late 1950s and early 1960s, their political capital and visibility had waned

1 The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, 136.

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almost entirely. Some would reach out to the John Birch Society, identifying with its paranoid

vision of the world, while misconstruing its message about what kind of person constituted a

“good” American.

During the early years of the Society, Welch’s authoritarian leadership was an asset to the

Society. It guaranteed a level of control over the membership, and made it easy for thousands of

people to join the Society. One did not have to plan out activities or figure out how to contribute

to the Society and its anti-communist battle--the directions came with membership. Each issue of

the Bulletin outlined new ways to participate in grassroots anti-communist activities. This was

what the California Senate found when it interviewed members: they had finally found an

organization that put them to work for conservative causes and united them with other like-

minded individuals in their area.

Before the mid-1960s, the membership easily dismissed even the problematic portions of

Welch’s ideology. The Politician was one example. Welch’s accusation that President Dwight D.

Eisenhower was a communist went too far, but many members seemed to believe it could be

excused as Welch’s personal opinion. It did not seem to matter that most of the Society’s

literature was also based in Welch’s opinions (for example, the official monthly periodical of the

John Birch Society was American Opinion, but prior to 1958 had been titled One Man’s

Opinion). The problem stemmed from people who were not part of the Society, the press and

other conservatives, who interpreted The Politician as radical conservative literature that

informed the entire Society. To what extent was the membership responsible for Welch’s

writings that predated the Society? Welch insisted on authoritative and intellectual control over

the John Birch Society. Although he insisted on distance between The Politician and the Society,

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it would be difficult to impart that nuance to a public that already had little patience for the

group.

Racial and religious bias also featured prominently in the John Birch Society’s popular

legacy, though like The Politician, they were not part of the Society’s ideology. The Blue Book

of the John Birch Society forbade both, noting they disserved the Society’s aims of fighting

communism. Anything that divided Americans against each other was part of the communist

conspiracy to enslave the nation. Prejudice became something closely associated with the entire

Society in spite of Welch’s efforts, though perhaps he did not take seriously efforts to counter the

Society’s reputation for attracting anti-Semites and racists.

The Society’s world was apocalyptic and constantly in existential crisis, but its fall was

ultimately hastened by its authoritarian structure and external perception. Lisa McGirr details its

fall from the most viable conservative organization in the United States to a small, perversely

paranoid group whose legacy of letter writing campaigns and government conspiracies

overshadowed its contributions to the rise of grassroots conservatism.1 She locates the decline of

the Society in 1967, when its membership took a hit. The John Birch Society’s ideology,

however, came under attack even earlier. Its staunch adherence to anti-communism seemed out

of step with the nation’s concerns, and conservatives like William F. Buckley excluded the John

Birch Society from the conversation about legitimizing the conservative movement and creating

a cohesive ideology for the right.  The Society struggled to regain its formerly privileged place in

the conservative movement. The term “extremist,” while not used in this text, had haunted the

Society for years, and by the middle and later years of the 1960s, its ubiquity had taken its toll.

Being associated with the John Birch Society no longer suggested devotion to anti-collectivism

1 McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 219.

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or the preservation of American values. To many, inside and outside the conservative movement,

it simply implied a person was one of the “kooks.”1

Finally, Robert Welch was ultimately the cause of his Society’s decline. The strict,

authoritarian structure of the society made it difficult to adapt to changing social concerns. Even

into the late 1960s, the John Birch Society continued with its anti-communist directives in each

monthly Bulletin. By now, almost ten years after the formation of the Society, the warnings

about anti-communism were old news to the core of the Society. There was no way to inspire

support from the grassroots with an outmoded message, and anti-communism was increasingly

losing relevance.2 The ideas were the same as they had been in the 1950s, but 1968 was an

entirely different world from 1958. Welch himself insisted on continuing his message, but the

Society never regained its membership or prominence.

Works Cited

Primary Sources:

Alien Registration Act of 1940. 76th Cong., 3rd Sess., U.S. Statutes at Large, (1940): 670-676, http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/polsciwb/brianl/docs/1940AlienRegistrationAct.pdf.

California Senate. Twelfth Report on the Senate Factfinding Committee on Un-American Activities. Sacramento, CA: 1963.

The John Birch Society, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society. Belmont, MA: 1961.

John Birch Society records, Ms. 2013.003, Brown University Library.

“The Question of Robert Welch.” National Review. February 13, 1962.

Rousselot, John. “Beliefs and Principles of the John Birch Society,” The Congressional Record, 1962.

Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957).

1 McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 220.2 McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 221.

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Welch, Robert H. W. The Politician. Belmont, MA: Belmont Publishing Company, 1964.

Secondary Sources:

Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Brenner, Samuel. “Shouting at the Rain: The Voices and Ideas of Right-Wing Anti-Communist Americanists in the Era of Modern American Conservatism, 1950-1974.” Diss., Brown University, 2009.

Diamond, Sara. Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. New York: Guilford Press, 1995.

Durham, Martin. The Christian Right: The Far Right and the Boundaries of American Conservatism. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000.

Hine, Thomas. Populuxe. New York: The Overlook Press: 2007.

Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Harper’s. November 1964. http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/.

Interrante, Michelle. “Nothing So Powerful and Nothing So Strange: The Problem of Robert Welch in Conservative Intellectual Discourse.” Thesis, Barnard College, 2011.

McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Mulloy, D. J. The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014.

Nash, George H., The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. New York: Basic Books, Inc.,1976.

Schoenwald, Jonathan. A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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