Rise and Fall and Rise of John Birchers

Review by Bill Doughty––

Welch with portrait of Birch

Robert W. Welch Jr. attended both the U.S. Naval Academy and Harvard Law School, but finished neither. He abandoned careers in the Navy and in law and became a wealthy candy manufacturer. He also started one of the most divisive groups in American history, the John Birch Society. Welch named JBS for Christian missionary and U.S. Army Air Forces Capt. John Birch, who was killed by Chinese communists in 1945 –– what the society considered the start of a “Holy War.”

Emerging from the ashes of a long history of racist, nationalist, and populist movements, including 1950s McCarthyism, the John Birch Society dedicated itself to defeating global communism, propagating Christianity, countering civil and women’s rights, and promoting an America First agenda. The JBS latched onto the GOP like a sea lamprey and did not let go.

“By the early 60s Birchers had settled on the course they would follow in the decades to come. They would operate on the fringe of the conservative movement and, episodically and erratically, within the Republican Party,” according to Matthew Dallek, author of “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right” (Hachette, 2022)

“Ideologically, the society flaunted its antiestablishment sensibility and pumped hot-button cultural issues –– patriotic eduction, moral library books, an end to teaching sex education in schools –– into local debates over their communities’ most valued and non-partisan institutions.” Past is prologue, as the saying goes.

After President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court, the Warren Court ruled progressively in favor of integration in Brown v. Board of Education. SCOTUS also upheld the wall of separation between state and church in banning prayer in public schools. So the Birchers targeted and smeared Earl Warren and called for his impeachment.

At the 1964 GOP Convention, Michigan Governor George Romney warned his colleagues and electors about the rise of populism and radicalism within the Republican Party, calling for more tolerance, inclusion, and respect for diversity in the Republican platform under Goldwater. "The strongest personality on earth cannot deal with the problems of this nation except upon the basis of correct principles. Our party was founded at a time of grave national crisis," Romney said, noting Abraham Lincoln's role in saving the Union. "The nation and its destinies were in peril, not only by the irreconcilable conflict between slavery and freedom, but also by the extremism of that time. And the extremism and lily-white Protestantism destroyed the Whig Party and brought the Republican Party into being."

Senator George Romney at the GOP Convention, 1968

But for most of the past six decades, according to Dallek, “Birch ideas were hardly dominant in the Republican Party.” Those ideas –– anti immigration, anti world alliances, anti feminism, anti abortion, anti gun safety, and anti integration –– were on the rise with Barry Goldwater and in reaction to the civil rights movement.

“In some communities, the society was very much in the ascendant. Its influence in the GOP in 1963 was also greater than at any time since its inception. But most Birchers had lost their elections, they failed to stop candidates such as (George) Romney from winning their races, and numerous Republicans from the Northeast to the Midwest to the West Coast remained vigorously opposed to their ideology and political style. Unbeknownst to the society, in the summer of 1963 the White House was preparing to launch an all-out assault that had the potential to knock the Birch movement to the ground. The society’s prospect remained uncertain and contingent. The struggle for power in the Republican Party –– and in the United States –– was heating up. Birchers warned of Armageddon, cast critics as traitors and degenerates, disrupted civic meetings, harassed teachers and principals, and hinted at physical violence. More than any other movement of the 1960s, the Birch Society ignited what they described as an end-times contest for the very soul of the United States.”

“The ideas, activism, and style that Birchers helped pioneer has continued to drive well into the twenty-first century.” George Romney’s speech in 1964 –– really a warning –– is chillingly relevant today.

The JBS wanted to ban alcohol, according to Dallek. They were also against Hollywood, the media, school integration, fluoridation of water, and teaching of evolution instead of creationism. “They sought to use the power of government to enforce Christian identity in American culture while repudiating allegedly alien values like pluralism and tolerance.” Dallek contends they “helped launch a culture war that reverberates today.”

Maddox and Wallace

One of the stars of intolerance and the culture war in the 1960s and 70s was Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, who became popular by wielding axe handles to chase black people out of his restaurant. Maddox was befriended and supported by JBS founder Robert Welch.

Welch endorsed Alabama Governor George Wallace’s run for president in 1968. Wallace was an avowed segregationist and racist. He chose as his running mate retired Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who Dallek describes as “the real-life inspiration for the cigar-smoking General Jack D. Ripper” of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove.

“An architect of firebombing in World War II, LeMay had a fascination with nuclear weapons and drew howls of outrage when he endorsed their use while on the campaign trail. Although LeMay had a record of innovative military leadership, Wallace’s choosing him was a running mate was perceived as empowering Birchers and the far-right fringe.”

Dallek writes:

“Haltingly, over decades, this fringe usurped the party’s center. The trajectory was alterable, not inevitable, contingent rather than certain. Many Republican leaders worked to stop it, until they didn’t. The society fostered apocalyptic thinking about the country’s direction, mistrusted elites as traitors, and raised the specter that only drastic remedies, including violence, could save the country. Its brand of mass politics fed money, energy, and ideas to conservative Republicans. And by offering a home for conspiracy theorists, racists, and antisemites, some Republican leaders emboldened the rights most noxious and violent bigots. The GOP establishment’s effort to court this fringe and keep it in the coalition allowed it to gain a foothold and eventually cannibalize the entire party, Over time, this uneasy alliance came to seem commonplace, part of the zeitgeist –– more and more alarming yet no longer shocking.”

On the other hand…

Clinton and Carter

A goal of liberals and other anti-Birchers was “to build the world they wanted –– a world where pluralism trumped hate, science trounced unreason, and democracy conquered fascism.” Progressives witnessed how an “America First” fascist-friendly and non-interventionist approach, including appeasement, led to the Second World War.

Those on the Left also saw how the Birchers’ fervent and feverish anti-Communism and white Christian nationalism led the nation into the war in Vietnam, invasion of Iraq, and a culture war at home. By the early 1990s, the us-and-them influence of the Birchers, personified by politicians Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich, was rejected with the election of Navy Veteran Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in 1992.

“Clinton used his bully pulpit to tie the GOP to far-right militants like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City mass murderer, and Randy Weaver, the white separatist who triggered a bloody confrontation with the FBI at Ruby Ridge. After McVeigh’s powerful homemade bomb tore through the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Clinton attended a memorial service in Oklahoma City and urged Americans ‘to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil. They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life,’ and, he vowed, ‘we will stand against the forces of fear.’ Some right-wing talk show hosts and politicians, he added, had to realized that their ‘incendiary talk’ moved fanatics to action. Their ‘constant bashing of government, and relentless assumption that forces beyond our control run our government’ had spread dark views of federal employees and could trigger more bloodshed.”

That warning was nearly 30 years ago!

In the yin-yang of the American republic’s elections under the constraints of the Electoral College, George W. Bush was elected president. Bush’s presidency was the “most consequential chapter yet in the Birchification of the American right and the GOP.” Bush, whose father appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, chose John Ashcroft as his first attorney general. Ashcroft expressed his belief, shared by many on the far-right, that “Jesus is king,” reigning above the Constitution and civil authority.

During Bush’s presidency, another politician, far more conservative than Bush, made a name for himself. Ron Paul (father or currently serving Senator Rand Paul) marked the time when, Dallek says, the fringe became mainstream. “Paul’s influence was substantial, opening the Republican Party to previously unthinkable views.”

The senior Paul as countered, however, by statesman and Republican standard-bearer John McCain, a Navy veteran and former POW, who said those who engage “in the politics of division and slander” are “corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country.” Although McCain called out Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance,” he would later backtrack and reconcile with Falwell, hoping to woo Christian fundamentalists.

Ultimately, according to Dalleck, “McCain saw that it was no longer possible to navigate the tension between the far right and the mainstream because by 2008, in the Republican Party, the fringe had begun to gain the upper hand. If he wanted to win, McCain had little choice but to violate his own principles.” He selected Sarah Palin as his running mate.

With Obama’s election, gun sales rose dramatically, militia membership increased, and “the far right was now entering the mainstream of the Republican Party, bringing with it the legacy of the John Birch Society.” Along with Pat Buchanan and Rand Paul, politicians supporting or condoning extremism in the GOP included Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Ron Johnson as well as “fringe” Representatives Jim Jordan and Michelle Bachman, according to Dallek.

Alex Jones

“Unlike in the mid-1960s, the Republican Party of the early 2010s failed to check the extreme right,” Dallek says. Instead, “social media and the ubiquitous, sophisticated right-wing amplified the far right’s most inflammatory claims.”

Media stars arose to spread the authoritarian populism of the far right: The Drudge Report, FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and “breakout media star of the far right” Alex Jones, who as a young teen was influenced by John Birch Society PR director Gary Allen’s book “None Dare Call It Conspiracy.” Jones aligned with Roger Stone, a massive influencer of the extremist fringe right, even as Jones capitalized on conspiracies. Jones spread falsehoods related to the the 9/11 attacks, the Sandy Hook massacre, and supposed cannibalization of children by Democrats, including Hillary Clinton.

Conspiracies became part of the right’s bloodstream as it had been in the 1960s.

Just as the Birchers feared communists were in control of the civil rights movement, MAGA followers believed America’s first black president was born overseas and was not eligible to serve. While JBS followers feared adding fluoride in water as a government conspiracy, sixty years later many far right extremists feared COVID vaccinations and believed various pandemic-related conspiracies.

“Trump drew energy, as Birchers had, from white supremacists, militias, and nativists and brought them into his coalition. His alliances with the white nationalists who rioted in Charlottesville (‘fine people’), with the far-right, all-male Proud Boys (‘stand back and stand by’), and with the deep-state-obsessed, conspiratorial QAnon (‘people that love our country’) blended racism and conspiracy theories in ways that harked back to the mix of racism, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories that drew many Birchers to their movement.”

And Dallek contends, “Just as Birchers took a dim view of democracy, Trump questioned the integrity of elections in which millions of people of color voted.” The conspiracy theory of a stolen election, though disproven in dozens of court cases and denied by sane Republicans in many states, led to the tragedy of the insurrection of January 6.

Dallek may be right in his overall thesis, that the United States is still under the influence of the John Birch Society. He believes the Bircher years/epoch/era started in 1958 and continues through today. On the other hand, it may have been with us for for far longer –– perhaps for centuries under different names: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, Know Nothings, Lost Cause, America First, and White Christian Nationalism.

Three events in the news coalesced over the past week or so as I finished this important book, bringing some of the book's points home:

First, President Joe Biden visited a memorial in Vietnam that honors a great American, late Senator John S. McCain III; when all is said and done McCain stood up for the Constitution.  McCain also stood up for democracy and against autocracy and theocracy. He conceded his election loss to President Obama in 2008. McCain even asked Obama to offer a eulogy at his funeral.

Second, last week I watched another Republican – American statesman Mitt Romney – announce he would not seek reelection. Romney is a former Republican nominee for the Presidency who won 47 percent of the popular vote but lost – and conceded gracefully – to President Obama in 2012. Romney acknowledges in a forthcoming biography by McKay Coppins, “Romney: A Reckoning,” that he does not recognize today’s GOP, where many of his Republican colleagues, he says, no longer support the Constitution.

Finally, I read with sadness that President Biden has called to offer his final good-bye to a dying former president with gold standard ethics and integrity: Navy veteran Jimmy Carter, despite being a victim of Birchers and their ilk more than four decades ago, conceded to President Ronald Reagan in 1980. During his naval career and presidency, Carter, a Navy submariner and commander in chief, literally protected and defended the U.S. Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.