The Right Wing Takes Off
Forty-eight years ago today a group of 11 men converged on a stately Tudor home in a leafy suburban neighborhood in Indianapolis. There, in Marguerite Dice’s living room, they sipped cups of coffee as Robert Welch, Jr., an eccentric candy manufacturer from Massachusetts, spoke for seven hours straight about the perils of international Communism, interrupted only by a short lunch break. The following day, Welch enlisted 10 of the 11 men present to be charter members of the John Birch Society, a right-wing political advocacy group that would reinvigorate grassroots conservatism while walking a thin line between respectability and conspiratorial fantasy.
Named for a 27-year-old fundamentalist missionary and soldier who had been killed by Chinese Communists in 1945, the organization quickly assumed its place as a leading vehicle of the postwar conservative resurgence. By the early 1960s few newspaper readers were unaware of the Birchers, who numbered anywhere between 20,000 and 100,000 at their peak, depending on who was doing the counting, and whose hard-line ideology saw the specter of Soviet treachery behind every center-left innovation from the progressive income tax and Social Security to civil rights for black Americans and American participation in the United Nations. In his tartly worded book The Politician, published two years before the founding of the society, Welch went so far as to accuse President Dwight Eisenhower—who, after all, did little to dismantle the New Deal welfare state and pursued vigorous engagement with the rest of the world—of being a “dedicated conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”
Very few Americans bought into the Birchers’ conspiracy theories, but the organization quickly amassed success in electing its members to town councils and school boards, particularly in areas like Orange County, California, where 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. By the early 1960s the Birchers were even a force to be reckoned with in many Republican primary elections, although mainstream conservative candidates were reluctant to be photographed with Welch and his associates. John Rousselot, a prominent Bircher from California, served eight non-consecutive terms in Congress between 1960 and 1982.
Robert Welch was a North Carolina native who moved as a young man to Massachusetts, earned a fortune with his family’s candy company, whose products included Sugar Daddies and Junior Mints, ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor, and then became a right-wing polemicist of some note. To understand his political appeal one has to appreciate the bankruptcy of American conservatism in the 1950s. Martin Peretz, the political scientist and longtime publisher of The New Republic, has called the conservative movement of Welch’s day “a congeries of cranky prejudices, a closed church with an archaic doctrine proclaimed by spoiled swells.” Its few leading lights, including William F. Buckley, the pugnacious and gifted founder of National Review, and Russell Kirk, his sometime partner in that endeavor, stood out among so many angry paranoiacs for their staid intelligence, though the historian Clinton Rossiter said that even Kirk “sound[ed] like a man born one hundred and fifty years too late and in the wrong country.”
After 16 years of New Deal and Fair Deal liberalism, of activist federal courts, and of an ascendant regulatory state, conservatives were left to rage in silence against the growth of activist government. The John Birch Society, along with its more cerebral counterparts like National Review and its more mainstream political counterparts like the Young Americans For Freedom, offered critics of liberalism a new way to voice their concerns. They didn’t always see eye to eye. Buckley, for one, told Welch, “I . . . disavow your hypotheses” about Dwight Eisenhower. “I do not even find them plausible.” On the other hand, Buckley acknowledged that “improbable though I believe your reading of events to be, it is really no less improbable than my own.” But clearly there was a vacuum where a conservative movement should exist, and anyone with enough dynamism and anger could appeal to tens of thousands of angry citizens.
According to Jonathan Schoenwald, a leading historian of postwar conservatism, a 1965 study found that the “typical Bircher was a forty-one-year-old white male. He was more likely than the average American to live in a less densely populated state and in a smaller community; had nearly a 50% chance of practicing a form of liberal Protestant Christianity and was much more likely than his neighbors actually to attend church; and was perhaps a college graduate, although if he were (like one-third surveyed), he probably had majored in either engineering or some other practical study and had received his training at a lesser-quality college or university. A Bircher’s social class and income registered far above average, and not surprisingly he was probably a Republican.”
In the aftermath of Barry Goldwater’s stunning loss to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election, the Birchers became something of a joke even among most conservatives. Surely if a respectable conservative like Goldwater (to whom Robert Welch lent qualified support) was too radical for America, the Birchers were off the chart. The Chad Mitchell Trio, a buttoned-down folk group, scored a minor hit with their song “The John Birch Society,” which contained lines like “Oh, we’re the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society./ Here to save our country from a Communistic plot. /Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks./ To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks.”
When Ronald Reagan first ran for governor of California, in 1966, he faced a quandary: Should he rebut the standard liberal charge that he was an extremist by denouncing the Birchers, thus risking the ire of some in the conservative grass-roots movement, or should he ignore the Birchers entirely? Recognizing the movement’s importance, he chose the latter course, privately hoping that his campaign could “keep some of the kooks quiet” long enough to avoid the controversy altogether.
But time partly vindicated Robert Welch, even if Welch never realized it. Antistate and anti-Communist politics flourished in California, triggering a nationwide tax revolt in the late 1970s and soon delivering Ronald Reagan to the White House. Lisa McGirr, the author of an influential book on grassroots conservatism in postwar Orange County, has found that “building on lessons learned from Goldwater’s defeat and the new opportunities brought about by the social turbulence of the decade, conservatives moved increasingly into the respectable mainstream.” This meant repudiating Welch and jettisoning some of the movement’s more extreme positions, like the call to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren and the charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist. But it also meant strengthening other articles of faith, particularly the antitax and antiregulatory elements of the movement’s appeal.
Reagan’s anti-Communism was far saner than Welch’s, his rhetoric was certainly more staid, and his assault on the New Deal was less powerful than would have suited most members of the John Birch Society, but he helped bridge the gap between the extreme right wing and mainstream conservatism. Nonetheless Welch, who lived to be 85 and died just shortly before Reagan’s second inauguration, once called the California governor a Communist “lackey.”
Robert Welch would die an extremist, and his group would never again enjoy anything like its early influence. But some of his views were closer to the American center than almost anyone would have imagined in 1958, when his motley band of middle-class managers and businessmen gathered in Indianapolis to tell the world about the threat to liberty and free enterprise.