He sent the letter to three friends. Friends asked for copies for their friends. Soon, as if by mitosis, Welch was mailing out hundreds, then thousands of copies—although it was not, as Welch might have put it, an accident. The master salesman had incorporated a “Welch Mailing Committee”—five energetic young Bay Staters “frightened to death of what is happening to our country”—to drum up readers. He called his tract May God Forgive Us.
In November, he submitted the piece to Henry Regnery, the shy, cerebral son of a Midwestern Quaker pacifist family whose Regnery Company was the most respected of the nation’s handful of conservative publishers. They had been nearly bankrupt—as they would be many times in the future—when Regnery published Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. Welch bet Henry Regnery a good dinner “that within the next twelve months you sell more than twice as many copies of May God Forgive Us.” It was a token of the man’s very curious arrogance and innocence. Welch believed that if you only told the American people the truth—the truth he had had the bad luck to discover in his investigations—they would respond and set things right. Years later, at the opening meeting of Manion’s Americans for Goldwater committee, Welch said that Goldwater had only to take the lead in opposing Eisenhower’s planned May summit with Khrushchev for a grateful Republican rank and file to ring him into nomination by acclamation.
When May God’s first sales figures were tallied, Regnery told Welch the book was flying off the shelves by the tens of thousands. Welch was incredulous. Why wasn’t it selling in the hundreds of thousands? Regnery protested that there simply wasn’t that kind of demand for this kind of book. This Welch simply could not accept. So he revived the Welch Mailing Committee, bought out Regnery’s inventory, and sold the books while campaigning for Robert Taft. After the 1952 Republican Convention, Welch was one more who reluctantly went to work for Ike; in December he wrote Regnery that the Republican presidential victory “highlighted a definite turn back from the left, which will make it easier for the soundly factual books which you publish to obtain a wider readership.” Welch offered to buy enough stock to join his board of directors. Regnery refused—then he refused to publish Welch’s hulking allegorical novel on the civilization of ants who were seduced into accepting a paternalistic government that soon came to enslave them.
Regnery accepted one more book from Welch. The Life of John Birch: In the Story of One American Boy, the Ordeal of His Age told the tale of a young American Baptist missionary-cum-spy who learned at the close of World War II of the Communists’ secret plan to take over China. He was assassinated, and his murder was supposedly covered up by State Department quislings who knew if the story got out their own complicity in Mao’s victory would be revealed. John Birch was “the first casualty of the Cold War.” If he had lived, how different the world would have been! If every American knew this story, how ready everyone would be to do what was right! Regnery’s stubborn refusal to realize his obligation to Western civilization—not to stop until he had put the book into the hands of every American—convinced Welch that he once more would have to do this job himself. The hour was dark. For now he had discovered how Dwight Eisenhower’s career-long liaison and cooperation with the Communist Party had led to the fall of Eastern Europe. He circulated his three-hundred-page letter on the subject, The Politician, to a few close friends who could handle this level of truth.
Robert Welch built the John Birch Society on the foundation of two important earlier groups that kept alive the conservative message during the right’s years in the wilderness. One was the National Association of Manufacturers. Welch was chair of its Education Committee, an important job: NAM was a group with a keen, even prescient appreciation of how to use public relations to shape political opinion. “We have allowed our detractors to put over on us their symbols,” its president declared. Businesses had to counter with symbols of their own. The organization spent millions to drive home the message that it was employers, not unions, who were the natural allies of workers. In 1947 NAM took out ads in 265 daily papers (“We are all workers, we are all capitalists”) and issued two million pieces of literature; in 1950 it launched a $1.5 million radio program, Industry on Parade—more popular in its time slot than Meet the Press, which did not boast its own singing group. A full-time staff of debaters fanned out to appear on local radio shows; other staff gave two-day seminars to businessmen on how “to become better champions of the American way.”
Then there was the Foundation for Economic Education, on whose board Welch served. Founded in 1946, FEE spread a libertarian gospel so uncompromising it bordered on anarchism. And they spread it everywhere. The organization had pamphlets designed for placement on bookracks in factory break rooms (31 Cents, on the amount of taxes extracted from each dollar earned; The First Leftists, on the French Revolution’s Great Terror). At FEE seminars, businessmen learned the words, phrases, and ideas to freeze liberals in debate. The Foundation searched out cash-strapped high schools to whom it distributed free conservative textbooks. And after The Freeman folded, FEE revived it as a controlled circulation magazine that businessmen could pay to have sent free to employees, vendors, and clients.
FEE and NAM were conservative media empires. Welch took inspiration from them to build a media empire of his own. First he put out his own magazine, One Man’s Opinion; when it had passed a few thousand in circulation, he changed the name to American Opinion. He did all this after work and on weekends. In 1957 he retired from business, contemplated a run against Massachusetts’s blue-blooded Senator Leverett Saltonstall, then changed his mind. The Communists, after all, did not work their domination through electoral politics. They did it by seizing institutions from within. If he recruited enough people to explain the conspiracy (for instance, how the Communists bamboozled Americans into believing they lived in a democracy, not a republic), the conspiracy could not work. He figured he’d need about a million people to rout the Communists altogether.
He founded the John Birch Society on December 8, 1958, at an Indianapolis lecture delivered to eleven wealthy men, three of them past presidents of NAM, that lasted two straight days—breaking only for lunch, coffee, and dinner. Identical meetings were held in a dozen more cities in the year to come. The transcript of the lecture would later become the Society’s catechism, The Blue Book. The invitees were men like Harry Lynd Bradley, CEO of Allen-Bradley, whose electronics factory lorded over Milwaukee’s South Side with the biggest four-sided clock tower in the world; and Robert W. Stoddard, who owned the world’s largest manufacturer of metal forgings, the morning and evening newspapers in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the city’s leading radio station. Men like Bradley and Stoddard listened to Welch with awe. “These were two of the most worthwhile days I have ever spent,” one textile-mill owner wrote Manion. “Here for the first time is hope—hope of success instead of more frustrated shadow boxing.”
“We are living in America today,” Welch’s lesson began, “in such a fool’s paradise as the people of China lived in twenty years ago, as the people of Czechoslovakia lived in a dozen years ago, as the people of North Vietnam lived in five years ago, and as the people of Iraq lived in only yesterday.” Lenin had declared a three-stage strategy for world conquest: “First, we will take Eastern Europe. Next, the masses of Asia. Then we shall encircle that last bastion of capitalism, the United States of America. We shall not have to attack; it will fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” Welch said the fruit was already one-quarter loosened.
Only rarely, Welch explained, did Communists take over countries through force. More often they disguised theirs as just another political party, then struck peacefully from within the system; or they slipped the noose over a people through steady and subtle propaganda, colonizing their very minds. That, he concluded, was what was happening in America. “The trouble in our southern states has been fomented almost entirely by the Communists for this purpose,” he explained by way of example, “to stir up such bitterness between whites and blacks in t
he South that small flames of civil disorder would inevitably result. They could then fan and coalesce these little flames into one great conflagration of civil war.... The whole slogan of ‘civil rights,’ as used to make trouble in the South today, is an exact parallel to the slogan of ‘agrarian reform’ which they used in China.” It was all part of the plan: elites surrendering American sovereignty to the UN; foreign aid rotting our balance of payments; skyrocketing taxes, unbalanced budgets, inflation. There was only one way to explain it: our labor unions, churches, schools, the government—all had been infiltrated. Voices of opposition were censored: not by outright ban, but the way Stalin censored Trotsky—by holding down his press runs because there wasn’t enough “demand.”
Two days, dozens of conspiracy theories, and God knows how many cups of coffee later, Welch explained what the members of his group were going to do about it.
The message of the organic unity of the American welfare state and Russian imperial expansion was not new to them; it was a commonplace of organizations like Kent and Phoebe Courtney’s Conservative Society of America, Chicago’s We, The People!, and H. L. Hunt’s Life Line, and of radio ministries like Carl McIntire’s and Billy James Hargis’s. What differed was the clarity of Welch’s solution. All it would require was a coordinated body of patriots, disciplined under a single command: not running for office, not taking up guns—but educating. For if America had only learned the truth about John Birch in time, then Communism’s spread might have ended then and there. Welch doubted he was up to the task of directing the effort, but as a dedicated patriot he was willing to answer the call. The only condition for membership in the Society was that members follow his dictates absolutely. They could quit if they didn’t like it. Otherwise internal power struggles would kill them. The Communists hadn’t won their gains through parliamentary procedure.
He started by hiring a staff of bright young salesmen who believed in the product, would not question the boss, and would work long hours on commission (they focused their pitches on houses flying the American flag out front). By the time of the John Birch Society’s sudden national coming-out in the spring of 1961, they had 20,000 members (or 60,000, or 100,000; estimates varied—but even 20,000 was greater than the membership of the Communist Party of the United States in its 1930s heyday). An office down the road from Welch’s fieldstone-and-frame home in the Boston suburb of Belmont employed some twenty-eight full-time staffers and an equal number of volunteers, who dumped $4,000 worth of mail each week at the Belmont post office next door. An Iowa pen company gave an expensive fountain model as a premium to each new member. Centralia, Missouri, was a virtual Birch fiefdom; the owner of the factory that employed half the town’s workforce made membership practically a condition for advancement. By 1962 Welch was raising over a million dollars a year.
Since McCarthy’s day, liberals had been wondering why apparently intelligent people could believe that the wrong kind of politics in the United States would inexorably hasten its takeover by the USSR. It was concluded that these were people who feared for their status in a rapidly changing, complex urban society, who pined for a simpler past (they were for the “repeal of industrialism,” said Commentary, which was odd, since most Birch leaders were industrialists). The cognoscenti neglected the simplest answer: people were afraid of internal Communist takeover because the government had been telling them to be afraid—at least since 1947, when George F. Kennan argued in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the founding document of U.S. Cold War doctrine, excerpted in Reader’s Digest, that “exhibitions of indecision, disunity, and internal disintegration within this country have an exhilarating effect on the whole Communist movement.” Through the 1960s, AFL-CIO president George Meany loved to flatter rank-and-file members that they were the first line of resistance against the Communists: in Czechoslovakia, he said, “they controlled the trade union movement, and within seven days they controlled the country.” Attorney General Robert Kennedy told a 1961 press conference, “Communist espionage here in this country is more active than it has ever been.” (There had been none to speak of since World War II.) Army recruits saw films like Red Nightmare, narrated by Jack Webb, which depicted an ersatz American town deep within the Soviet interior where spies were supposedly training in indigenous American arts like sipping sodas at drugstore fountains in order to infiltrate the United States. You could no less avoid breathing in a bit of paranoia in Cold War America, in fact, than you could soot in Charles Dickens’s Manchester. Did Birchers and their ideological cognates claim that dangerous “fallout” from nuclear testing was a hoax? So did the Atomic Energy Commission, all through the 1950s. And it was the “discoveries” of the CIA chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, not Robert Welch, that a KGB “Master Plan” allowed no Soviet to defect to the United States except as a KGB double agent (thus bona fide Soviet defectors were often kept naked in isolation in a brightly lit room and had to submit to cruel three-year interrogations to force them to give up their KGB secrets); and that there was a second, secret Kremlin inside the official Kremlin whose existence could only be inferred because no one who had ever been inside it was ever allowed beyond its walls.
It shouldn’t have been surprising that the John Birch Society was able to win a membership in the tens of thousands in an officially encouraged atmosphere of fear and suspicion. The John Birch Society was also a voice for conservatism—its motto was “Less government and more responsibility”—at a time when the Republican Party was turning more liberal. At a time when a housewife from suburban New York, Betty Friedan, was writing a book arguing that the alienation and boredom of housewives was America’s “problem that has no name,” the Society gave housewives world-historic purpose to their lives. (“I just don’t have time for anything,” one told a Time magazine interviewer. “I’m fighting Communism three nights a week.”) And last but not least, being a Bircher was fun. The fellowship was vouchsafed by the rule that when a chapter grew bigger than two dozen, it was split in half—the rationale being that unwieldy chapters were easier for the Communists to infiltrate. The groups’ main activity was monthly meetings in members’ living rooms (at which the main activity might be watching a film of a lecture given by Welch, who looked a bit like TV’s Mr. McGoo and, eerily, recited his interminable talks from memory); and group members would carry out whatever suggestions they cared to that were handed down in Welch’s monthly Bulletin. They might write the director of the Boy Scouts to ask why the president of the Communist-infiltrated National Council of Churches addressed the National Jamboree; or they might send postcards to congressmen showing the map the “Negro Soviet Republic” Communists proposed be carved out of the American South in 1928. They might be asked to attend meetings of “Communist fronts” like the ACLU to shout down “disloyal” speakers, or to urge their dentist and the airlines to display National Review and Human Events on their magazine racks, or to form a local chapter of a Birch front organization like Support Your Local Police. And, most of all, members were instructed to keep informed by reading books like Tito: Moscow’s Trojan Horse and I Saw Poland Betrayed.
Welch could have remained obscure forever if not for his success. Disillusionment with the GOP after Nixon’s 1960 defeat swelled the membership rolls; by February of 1961 the John Birch Society was large enough that when members read in the Bulletin that Welch wanted them to write their congressmen demanding the impeachment of Earl Warren for his decisions favoring civil libertarians over red-hunters, letters flooded in to Capitol Hill. Enterprising reporters took notice. And the story spread like wildfire.
By April I the Birchers made page I of the New York Times; by the twelfth Ohio’s aging, acid-tongued Senator Stephen Young, labeling Welch a “Hitler,” commandeered a copy of Welch’s notorious The Politician and entered into the Congressional Record its claim that Eisenhower “has been sympathetic to ultimate Communist aims, realistically willing to use Communist means to help them achieve their goals, knowingly accepting
and abiding by Communist orders, and consciously serving the Communist conspiracy for all of his adult life.” Cries went up for congressional investigations; Welch proposed that the proceedings be carried out by Senate Internal Security Committee chair James Eastland of Mississippi, who praised the society as “patriotic.” Cardinal Cushing, three months after giving the benediction at the Kennedy inauguration, announced that he was a Welch admirer; two southern California congressmen, Edgar Hiestand and John Rousselot—Rousselot was chair of the congressional Republican freshmen caucus and a Nixon protege—announced that they were proud members (as did all Society members, they creepily referred to Welch as “The Founder”). Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s agriculture secretary and a Mormon elder, was also a member. Barry Goldwater, reached in Los Angeles, volunteered that “a lot of people in my home town have been attracted to the society, and I am impressed by the type of people in it. They are the kind we need in politics.”
Welch devoted his April Bulletin to the uproar. “On February 25, 1961,” he explained,
The People’s World, official communist newspaper published in San Francisco, attacked the John Birch Society. Time magazine attacked on March 10, 1961, using the word “cells” in reference to Birch Society chapters, just as the communist newspaper had done; and singling out the same Birch Society Council members that the communists had singled out. Within two weeks, more than a hundred newspapers throughout the nation ran articles, practically all of them inaccurately condemning the Society for things it has never done or does not believe in. A good many of these so slavishly followed the line set down in San Francisco that the communist attack can reasonably be called the “mother article” for scores of tirades against the Society in big metropolitan dailies all over the nation.
Before the Storm Page 17