December 9, 2006
The Birchers Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:55 PM EST Josh Zeitz’s lead piece on the website today, “The Right Wing Takes Off,” begins by noting that today is the forty-eighth anniversary of Robert Welch, Jr.’s founding of the John Birch Society, and traces the rise—such as it was—and fall of the organization. Josh notes that the Birchers reached their height in the early 1960s and became “something of a joke” in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, but he concludes that some of Welch’s “views were closer to the American center than almost anyone would have imagined in 1958.” Josh argues that “upwardly mobile white citizens resented taxes and government regulations even as they welcomed the extensive federal defense spending that fueled the burgeoning local economy. From these grass roots, the Birchers helped build one of the foundations of the mainstream Republican ascendance of later decades.” I am not sure that resentment of government regulation is what inspired the eventual deregulation of the American economy. My memory is that the process began under Carter, and was elite-led rather than populist-inspired, a key figure being Alfred Kahn, Carter’s head of the Civil Aeronautics Board and later chief adviser on deregulation. I have the impression that the crucial influence was the work of academic research, some of it historical, and done from the left, some of it economic, revealing that the regulated, who could sometimes use regulation to keep out economic competition, rather than consumers, were often the beneficiaries of government regulation; this was the theory of regulatory capture. One of the boys from my high school was at that time working for Kahn, and I may recall a self-serving account of the origins of the movement from a tenth-reunion picnic, but it may be relevant that the boy was the son of a trade union leader, a keen Democrat, a graduate of Harvard Law and the Kennedy School. He thought the Birchers were a joke. But I do remember the Birchers. I remember being taken by my parents to see a concert at the local high school, one where Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were singing. A picket line had been thrown up by the Birchers, who shouted at us as we crossed. They handed out literature, one piece of which I took, and I remember reading that the singers had been part of something called the Fair Play For Cuba Committee. This must have been in the very early sixties. The Birchers were not yet a joke, but neither were they particularly alarming, other than to a child; I had never before seen adults scream in public, and I have a vivid memory of one man with a contorted face shouting at us. My father, a Truman Democrat and not a particularly timid man, took my hand and hauled me past the picketers. I remember him saying that evening that he would not have attended the concert if he had not heard that the Birchers were picketing it; he cared little for that sort of music and less for Cuba, but he disliked the Birchers thinking they could dissuade any American from doing anything, and he went to spite them. A couple of years later the Birchers were indeed a joke. A handful of boys in the high school had founded the Teenage Republicans, and one of them tried to set up a chapter of Young Americans For Freedom. They were the sort of Irish-American kids who thought William F. Buckley a great wit and a thrilling gentleman dandy. They read National Review, and they were a tiny minority in the school; out of 1,200 or so students they numbered something like 8, and they were the ones who found the Birchers amusing: The Birchers were cranks’ cranks. The looniest bits of the agenda—Welch’s conviction that Eisenhower was an agent of the Communists, that Ronald Reagan was an agent of the Communists—were what struck people at the time, and were by a long chalk the most distinctive thing about the Birchers. Goldwater was not a joke; these boys idolized Goldwater. But the Birchers were goofy. They were imagined as little old ladies from Pasadena, or nuts of some other variety. That is why I’m not sure that time vindicated Robert Welch in any significant way. I do not think he truly prefigured the forces that subsequently changed our political history. I think the 1964 Civil Rights Act changed electoral demography for a generation and produced the Republican majorities, and presidential victories, by shifting control of the South, and I think this was reinforced by a perception of rising crime, and in 1968 and 1972 by some irritation at the antiwar movement. I think stagflation seemed to discredit the Keynesian consensus, that supply-side theories were offered to justify painless tax cuts by not requiring proportional cuts in federal expenditures, that disenchantment with the powers of the state—the result of failures in social policy and Vietnam—probably did a lot more than convictions about the intrinsic wickedness of high taxes and an interventionist state. I think anti-Communism got a small boost from the invasion of Czechoslovakia and a larger one from the invasion of Afghanistan and the crackdown on Solidarity. I think the Iranians who seized our embassy did a lot more to elect Ronald Reagan than anyone else did. The cultural and social conservatives who began to exert such force in Republican primary politics did not, I think, have anti–big government views originating in detestation of the New Deal. Being in the right place at the right time counts for a lot in politics, and winning the Republican nomination in the middle of the hostage crisis was the right place at the right time. Similarly, I think it is hard to imagine George Bush being re-elected without 9/11, or elected the first time without the intervention of the Supreme Court and distaste for Clinton’s behavior; I do not think Bush’s views on the proper role of the state were decisive in getting him even as close as he came to an electoral victory in 2000. For that matter, starting in the late 1970s, tax revolts and some rolling back of the state occurred in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe; this was a broader trend than can be associated with the inspiration of the Birchers. But this is instinct, and memory, not historical research.
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