How the Right-Wing “Fringe Engulfed the Center”
A history of the John Birch Society, with Professor Matthew Dallek
With Super Tuesday coming up and Trump’s nomination all but secured, I thought I’d share a relevant interview that paying subscribers had early access to last year. In his book, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, and in conversation, Professor Matthew Dallek illuminates the ongoing influence of a far-right group in the ‘60s called the John Birch Society.
Professor Dallek is a historian at George Washington University. He’s a frequent national commentator and his articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications. A condensed transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity, is below.
You can also listen to the full audio of our conversation, which includes a few more examples of the group’s influence on politics in the 2000s, Professor Dallek connecting the rise of the JBS back to the fall of Reconstruction, me mixing a lot of metaphors, and more:
Ben: Today, let's trace the history of the John Birch Society (JBS). To begin, who was the group’s founder, why did he start the JBS, and why should he have stuck to candy (pun intended)?
MD: Well, as the pun suggests, Robert Welch was a one-time candy executive. He was a very good salesman and grew quite wealthy. Welch was also a member of the board of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and he became a hard-line anti-communist and a conspiracy theorist.
Editors note: you can learn more about NAM from an earlier post…
In the 1950s, Welch believed that the greatest threat to the United States was an internal communist conspiracy. Infamously, he accused Dwight Eisenhower of being a dedicated agent of that conspiracy. In 1957, Welch retired from candy to go full-time into anti-communist proselytizing. The following year, he had a very hush-hush meeting with 11 other white, mostly Christian, mostly wealthy men in Indianapolis. Together, they decided to establish the JBS to educate the country about the internal communist threat.
Ben: As you cite, Welch proudly announced he was “now spending my whole life spreading bad news, every day, everywhere I can.”
MD: Not a very uplifting message.
Ben: No, and it sounds uncomfortably like what I do for a living.
What kinds of other people did the JBS attract?
MD: I like to think of the group’s membership in concentric circles.
There was an inner circle of mostly wealthy business people, their friends, and “the wives,” to use Welch’s term. Women were an integral part of the JBS from very early on.
After the first year, they started to recruit people from outside their more immediate circles: specifically, upwardly mobile, upper-middle-class suburbanites and doctors, reverends, teachers, and small business owners. The JBS’ headquarters were in Belmont, Massachusetts, but as their ranks grew, JBS members established 20-person chapters nationwide.
Ben: You quote The Bulletin, a publication the JBS started, where they characterized Birchers as “a phalanx of tens of thousands of spears, which can be hurled simultaneously as one mighty weapon against any vulnerable spot in the Communist line.” How nice it would be to see all of those people actually hurled as spears.
MD: At first Welch and his fellow founders hoped to recruit a million Americans to their organization. They tempered their goal and realized they could still make a dent in the universe with tens of thousands of people, hence the quote.
But yeah, they thought of themselves as a kind of shock force, and they were going to hurl themselves wherever they thought communists were operating in their local community and at the national level.
Ben: Can you elaborate on the JBS’ tactics in the ‘60s?
MD: Their tactics varied. Sometimes, members went on postcard- and letter-writing campaigns to bombard, for example, the CEO of American Airlines and demand “Americanist” magazines in the backs of plane seats.
At other times they would protest principals or teachers whom they thought were teaching socialistic or communistic texts. The JBS thought young impressionable minds were being indoctrinated with communist teachings, so they started their own mobile libraries, opened bookstores, and founded new publications. (There’s a long history of “alternative facts.”)
And sometimes, their tactics were more aggressive. I open the book with the story of Patricia Hitt, a strong supporter of Richard Nixon running for a committee chair in Orange County in 1962. The Birchers hated anyone they saw as an establishment Republican. They started sending vaguely threatening letters to her home and called voters in the district, denouncing Hitt as “a pinko, a socialist, and a communist.” She was none of those things, but she lost the election.
Ben: How did Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the JBS?
MD: For the most part, the Birchers loved Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president in 1964.
At the 1964 Republican Convention, Birchers and Goldwater forces defeated a resolution to condemn extremists — basically the JBS, the KKK, and White Citizens’ Councils. On stage, Goldwater proclaimed, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” which was really a sop to the Birchers. The JBS soon became a huge phenomenon, kind of a household name written about everywhere.
On the other hand, Goldwater got crushed in the general election, and he tried to distance himself from the JBS as their conspiracy theories started attracting even more radical, sometimes violent people. Increasingly the JBS suffered from internal dissent. The idea of an extremist movement that burns itself out? We see that clearly with the Birchers in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
And yet, even if the JBS was a shadow of its former self by the mid-70s, I argue that many of the ideas they helped forge lived on: not just conspiracy theories but also isolationism, dedication to hardline culture wars, and a more apocalyptic, violent, anti-establishment mode of politics, often mixed with explicit racism.
Ben: You describe how as the JBS faded from public view, other people and groups picked up their tactics, ideas, and rhetoric. What are some examples?
MD: Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition drew people and ideas from the Birch movement. Their larger, politically savvier groups helped radicalize the right in general. All of these groups owed a lot to the JBS — Schlafly was even a member and friend of Welch’s.
Similarly, Fred Koch’s children, Charles and David Koch, started funding far-right causes. Fred had been one of the founders of the JBS, and Charles later joined the JBS, too. Likewise, the National Rifle Association over time became more and more Birchite in its language and ideology, seeing a Communist plot to destroy the Second Amendment.
Of course, you can’t say that all the individuals in these groups were Birchers. They weren’t. But their ideas and tactics reflected a far-right tradition that the JBS honed and popularized.
Ben: You write that for Republicans, “treating the fringe as allies rather than banishing it was a choice. Through much of the late twentieth century, the Birch successors mostly stood outside the gates, shouting in protest. The leaders of the GOP did not have to placate them, did not have to let them knock the metal down, inch by inch, until the gates fell and the renegades stormed the grounds.”
How did the gates ultimately fall?
MD: Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and many others tried to appeal to the radical fringe on the campaign trail, but once they got into office, most conservatives governed in ways that frustrated the fringe, right? In radicals’ minds, elected officials didn’t go far enough. Essentially, that dynamic held for several decades, from Goldwater up to the second Bush.
During Bush’s second term, he had 30% approval ratings, the Great Recession began, and the Iraq War was falling on its face. Bush also failed to pass immigration reform, which infuriated figures in the far right like Anne Coulter and Laura Ingraham. The collapse of the Bush presidency created an opening for radical ideas.
Sarah Palin brought them to a national audience as the VP nominee in 2008; then the Tea Party emerged with lots of Birch overtones. And Trump, whether he believed the stuff he said or not, picked up on far-right ideas that had been swirling for decades about immigration, race, “America first,” and the media being the enemy. All of these ideas emerged from a tradition that, again, the JBS played an integral role in advancing. Ultimately, as we’ve witnessed, the fringe engulfed the center.
Ben: A disturbing synthesis, but at least I can check off my agenda item for today of “spreading bad news everywhere I can.”
MD: Ha! Happy to help.
Ben: Thanks so much for your work, Professor Dallek, and for speaking with me today.
MD: Thank you, Ben.