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The John Birch Society was established in Indianapolis on December 9, 1958 by a group of twelve "patriotic and public-spirited" men led by Robert Welch, Jr., a retired candy manufacturer from Belmont, Massachusetts. Another noted founding member was Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries, currently the largest private corporation in America. A transcript of Welch's two-day presentation at the founding meeting was published as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society and became a cornerstone of its beliefs, with each new JBS member receiving a copy.
The JBS's objective has been to fight communism using some of communism's own techniques —- organization of front groups, infiltration of other groups and letter-writing campaigns. One of the first public activities of the JBS was a "Get US out!" (of membership in the UN) campaign, which alleged in 1959 that the "Real nature of [the] UN is to build One World Government (New World Order)." In 1960, Welch advised JBS members to "join your local PTA at the beginning of the school year, get your conservative friends to do likewise, and go to work to take it over."
One Man's Opinion, a magazine launched by Welch in 1956, was renamed American Opinion and became the Birch Society's official publication. It has since been replaced by the bi-weekly magazine, The New American.
By March of 1961, the Society had an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 members and, according to Welch, "a staff of twenty-eight people in the Home Office; about thirty Coordinators (or Major Coordinators) in the field, who are fully-paid as to salary and expenses; and about one hundred Coordinators (or Section Leaders as they are called in some areas), who work on a volunteer basis as to all or part of their salary, or expenses, or both." According to its profile by Political Research Associates, an organization that tracks supposed conspiracies on the Right, JBS "pioneered grassroots lobbying, combining educational meetings, petition drives, and letter writing campaigns. One early campaign against the second Summit Conference between the US and the Soviet Union generated over 600,000 postcards and letters, according to the Society. A June 1964 Birch campaign to oppose Xerox Corporation sponsorship of TV programs favorable to the UN produced 51,279 letters from 12,785 individuals."[1]
Republican mainstream unhappiness with the Birch Society intensified after Welch circulated a letter calling President Dwight D. Eisenhower a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy.” Welch went further in a book titled The Politician, written in 1956 and published by the JBS in 1963, which declared that Eisenhower’s brother Milton was Ike’s superior within the Communist apparatus and alleging that other top government officials were also Communist tools. Included were ex-president Truman, Roosevelt, the last Sec. Of State John Foster Dulles and former CIA Director Allan W. Dulles. Conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr., an early friend and admirer of Welch, regarded his accusations against Eisenhower as "paranoid and idiotic libels" and attempted unsuccessfully to purge Welch from the JBS.
In their early days, the JBS shared a common ideology and some overlapping membership with Fred Schwarz and his California-based Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. John Birch Society influence on US politics hit its high point in the years around the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who lost to incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Welch had supported Goldwater over Richard Nixon for the Republican nomination, but the membership split, with two-thirds supporting Goldwater and one-third supporting Nixon. A number of Birch members and their allies were Goldwater supporters in 1964 and some were delegates at the 1964 Republican National Convention. The Goldwater campaign in turn brought together the nucleus of what later became known as the New Right, many of whom had been groomed by the Birch Society but whose more pragmatic members realized that the group's conspiracism was an impediment to electoral success.
John Birch Society members and allies also authored several widely-distributed books that promoted conspiracy theories and mobilized support for the Goldwater campaign:
- A Choice, Not an Echo by Phyllis Schlafly, which suggested that the Republican Party was secretly controlled by elitist intellectuals dominated by members of the Bilderberger banking conference, and whose policies were designed to usher in global communist conquest. "A Choice, Not an Echo" became one of Goldwater's campaign slogans.
- The Gravediggers, co-authored by Schlafly and retired Rear Admiral Chester Ward of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, claimed that U.S. military strategy and tactics were actually designed to pave the way for global communist conquest.
- None Dare Call It Treason, by John A. Stormer, sold over seven million copies, making it one of the largest-selling paperback books of the day. It decried "the concurrent decay in America's schools, churches, and press which has conditioned the American people to accept 20 years of retreat in the face of the communist enemy." Mr. Stormer also added, in his 1998 preface to the paperback edition: "Communism, which some believe (or hope) died in the Soviet Union, is alive and on the march in Asia, the Middle East, Central and Southern Africa and through guerrilla groups in Central and South America."
- A Texan Looks at Lyndon by J. Evetts Haley, a book containing a number of allegations of political corruption throughout the career of Lyndon Johnson.
In April 1966, the New York Times reported on "the increasing tempo of radical right attacks on local government, libraries, school boards, parent-teachers associations, mental health programs, the Republican Party and, most recently, the ecumenical movement […] The Birch Society is by far the most successful and 'respectable' radical right organization in the country. It operates alone or in support of other extremist organizations whose major preoccupation, like that of the Birchers, is the internal Communist conspiracy in the United States."
The Society wound up at the center of an important free-speech law case in the 1970s, after one of its magazines, American Opinion, accused a Chicago lawyer representing the family of a young man killed by a police officer of being part of a Communist conspiracy to merge all police agencies in the country into one large force. The resulting libel suit, Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., reached the United States Supreme Court, which said that opinions cannot be false under the First Amendment (while nevertheless finding for the plaintiff, who prevailed upon retrial).
Key Birch Society causes of the 1970s included opposition to OSHA and the establishment of diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China. The organization claimed in 1973 that the regime of Mao Zedong had murdered 64 million Chinese as of that year, and further accused the country of being the primary supplier of illicit heroin into the United States, leading to its designing bumper stickers showing a pair of scissors cutting a hypodermic needle in half, accompanied by the slogan "Cut The Red China Connection". The society was also vehemently opposed to transferring control of the Panama Canal from American to Panamanian sovereignty, resulting in another slogan: "Don't Give Panama Our Canal — Give Them Kissinger Instead."
The Birch Society was organized into local chapters, imitating Welch's understanding of Communist organizing techniques. Ernest Brosang, a New Jersey regional coordinator, contended that it is virtually impossible for opponents of the society to penetrate its policy-making levels. Its activities included distribution of literature attacking proposed civil rights legislation, warning of the influence of the United Nations, and distributing petitions to impeach liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. To spread their message, members held Sunday showings of documentary films and operated initiatives such as "Let Freedom Ring," a nationwide network of recorded telephone messages. Some Birch Society members also helped organized the "Minutemen," a paramilitary group training to lead guerrilla warfare in case of a Communist take over.
The second John Birch Society chairman, US Representative Dr. Larry McDonald, was killed in the 1983 KAL-007 shootdown incident. Society members suggested that McDonald had been the principal href = "http://www.experiencefestival.com/1945">1945, 1958, 1964 Republican National Convention, 1964 presidential campaign, 1970s, 1973, 2005, Allan W. Dulles, American, Anti-communism, Appleton, Wisconsin, Baptist, Barry Goldwater, Belmont,
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