“If Bill Clinton wins, we will have abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units…….Not the stuff we want in ‘God’s country.’” Pat Buchanon
This month’s book (A Conspiratorial Life by Edward Miller) is a biography of Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society (JBS). Ask your children I they know of this topic: you will get a quizzical look. For my peers, it is an almost forgotten name. The JBS was a real thing in the town I grew up. HIs magazine, American Opinion was found in the homes of my friends when I was a child. If I picked one up, I quickly put it down as the contents might as well have been written in Latin, they seemed so foreign and strange--not unlike the tabloids like The National Inquirer seen at the check-out stand at Safeway. One subscriber to that magazine proudly voted for George Wallace in 1968. For me, that was simply amazing. Those times were as radical and polarizing as they are now: it was the time of Viet Nam, protests, violent protests, and a dramatic political shift in the country that resonates to this very day, our very next election. Little did I know, the American Opinion proved to be a playbook for our modern political games. For me, Robert Welch was a relic of McCarthyism—prominent before and during the year of my birth. For decades, I thought that like McCarthy, Welch had lost his idealogical war—badly! I was wrong. Robert Welch may have lost many battles, but his people are still fighting, front and center.
NUTS AND BOLTS:
Welch was born in rural North Carolina and raised as a Southern Baptist. He had a good intellect and was both an avid reader and understood complex mathematics at an early age. He attended the University of North Carolina when he was twelve and was accepted to the US Naval Academy when he was sixteen. Given his age, the Naval Academy found him without peers; he felt isolated. While attending during World War I, he knew before graduating he did not want a military career. His understanding of the world is reflected, in part, by his strategy for resigning from the Academy and not incurring further obligation to military service. He was fourth in his class and was going to be sought as an officer. He understood that several of his classmates were politically “connected” and could petition for a resignation with no further service required. He timed his resignation letter with those students. It worked; he was allowed to leave with no further obligation. He next attempted Law School—at Harvard. The legal education at Harvard in the early 1920’s saw many progressives and pioneering legal scholars advocating a different perspective than that dominating courts of the Gilded Age. He rejected this education and left without graduating.
Contemplating his interests and a need to generate an income, he thought through options, given that he had no specific technical skills. Welch’s candy company was born. While it required no great talent, it did require a good work ethic which he had throughout his life. We owe this man our debt: Sugar Daddy, Sugar Baby, and Junior Mint candies were all products of his mind. His business acumen and plans found him at a loss when the depression hit (as it did many others); he filed for bankruptcy and he spent the remainder of his working life as an employee of his brother. While in that employment, he was able to flesh out his concerns about American Society and attempted to influence it—his lifetime work.
Before World War II, Welch was fervently against Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the very concept of a large government engagement influencing American society. He had intellectual company in his disparaging “collectivism.” The popularity of FDR was not to be taken for granted in the 1930’s—-there were many allied with Welch’s thinking (He would later declare his position for clarity ie “Calvin Coolidge was too liberal for me.”). In the same vein, during the depression, when the population of the United States was looking for leadership from the government, “ I am convinced that America would be better off with a government of 300,000 officials and agents, every one of them a thief, than a government of 3 million agents with every single one of them an honest, honorable public servant,” he said. “For the first group would only steal from the American economic system; the second group would be bound in time to destroy it.”
Robert’s definition of conservatism was stark: a minimalist federal government and each state managing its population—minimally. He thought that the government that governs least governs best. A major depression, an epidemic of lynchings over racial tensions, and an international scene that found all major powers arming for a big fight did not change this view of an ideal American government.
He, with many Americans before Pearl Harbor, actively sought to keep the United States out of war and felt that FDR had manipulated the outcome we faced. He worked hard in the candy business with his brother during World War II and again, managed, “the system” to get more than his quota of supplies for the company in the setting of large scale economic controls. His editorial opinions and speechmaking were scaled back: they were unpopular during wartime.
He would run for office in his new home state (Massachusetts) after the war. He lost but still aspired to a place in Congress or the Senate. He contemplated running against JFK for senate. It became clear to him that his views were not popular and his understanding of party machines poor; He was an outsider. He elected to lobby and give speeches with his concerns in mind. After his election defeat in Massachusetts (for Lieutenant Governor) he would take his election committee and decentralize it modeling a grass roots advocacy group. This model would be the foundation of the JBS.
The aftermath of World War II found him bewildered by events and it was during these years and the McCarthy years that he developed complex beliefs about conspiracies to both attack the foundational principles of a large nation state, such as we had after the war, and the pre-eminence of the Communists World Wide.
Enter John Birch: A Georgian Evangelical Missionary who spent much time in China before and during the Japanese occupation. As the war ended, his fluency with Chinese and his knowledge of Chinese culture found him recruited to provide intelligence to the US government. He refused to surrender his weapon and was shot and killed at a road block manned by Communist Chinese in the 1940’s. This was an international incident made trivial by the larger world events of the time. A book focussing on this man and later, the founding of the John Birch Society by Robert Welch would come about by the mid 1950’s in an effort to buttress the thinking of those who had supported senator McCarthy, then, seemingly on the wrong side of history.
The next decade would find Welch building a larger and larger complex of conspiracy theories that linked to an insecurity about modern times and a loss of what he labeled traditional American values. His vehicle publishing would be the magazine American Opinion. The society itself met in small “cells” that were decentralized in communities across the United States. He would support Goldwater in 1960 (when he did not run) and again in 1964. By 1964 Welch’s JBS was under a cloud—-the basis of his conspiracy theories was a clearly minority view, his link to other conservatives such as William F Buckley unraveled as Birchers were thought to be a liability in the general election, and Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 raised awareness about how conspiracy theories could have fatal outcomes—even when his had nothing to do with Kennedy’s death. The vice presidential candidate with Goldwater noted after the loss, “The American people were just not in the mood to assassinate two presidents in one year.”
In 1968 he would support George Wallace for president as their social agendas were quite similar.
HIs conspiracies would continue to be outlandish (Nixon in resigning in 1973 was being groomed to lead a one-world government under the auspices of the United Nations). He learned with time that there was a role for him by toning down the Communist focus of his conspiracies. He secularized his enemies to suggest that such conspiracies pre-dated the communists and were born from the Illuminati (Google it!) in the 1700’s.
His career as conspirator theorist-at-large and spoiler came to fruition in the culture wars during and after the Nixon years. His advocacy would help defeat the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) and make the concept of culture wars explicit: His strong grass roots advocacy reflected concern about changing roles (women in army), sex (sex ed, contraception, and abortion) and traditional values he thought should never change. He assigned among the “failed” social programs of liberals specific outcomes such as pornography, increasing divorce rates, increasing drug use, free love, communes, inner city riots, and the prospect of civil wars stemming from efforts to integrate racially—not to mention our many foreign policy misadventures.
Details:
What was the problem the JBS set out to solve?
Conspiracies that are fundamental to the JBS speak to an insecurity about how the world works and how it should work. How should it work? Society should be simple and managed locally. Social, political, and economic chaos are to be avoided and require management. God has given us simple rules to live by and were we to simply follow those, we would be successful, not to mention happy and content. There is a terrible enemy out there and chaos in the social, political, and economic spheres are the tools of that enemy. Robert Welch fought that chaos his whole adult life. He believed that the USA had a special place in God’s plan and that its failures could only be accounted for by some diabolical process.
While virulently anti Democrat and anti FDR before World War II—a view that was held by a significant minority— the post war environment raised this question: The United States, with all its resources, physical, spiritual, and cultural should be both victorious and dominant world-wide. He believed fervently in American Exceptionalism. In the wake of World War II this should have found us with no contenders on the world stage. Instead, disaster after disaster followed that war: The Eastern Block formed; China became communist; Russia got the bomb; European colonies were falling to leftist native regimes. Big business and the US government seemed to have interests and influence that added to this world chaos as they had more and more power in all of our everyday lives.
He provided a prophesy in the 1950’s guided by his world view that proved accurate: “greatly expanded government spending…for foreign aid”…and “every conceivable means of getting rid of ever larger sums for American money as wastefully as possible.” He predicted higher taxes, unbalanced budgets, “wild inflation: of American currency, government control of prices, wages, and materials, greatly increased socialistic controls and centralized power in WA”—also more federal control over the education system and a constant hammering into the American consciousness of the horror of modern warfare….
He also pegged Nixon accurately—in his view, he was not a true conservative despite the press he got during the McCarthy hearings—he was simply an opportunist interested in the acquisition of power. Again, to be a true conservative, one had to redirect the sources of power in American society—away from the Federal Government and Big Business. A true conservative would also be a social conservative. Many Republicans would tolerate contraception and abortion as tools for population control and their antecedents might even have had a eugenic attachment to these tools, but within a decade, true conservatives under the Republican banner would accept his social agenda and discard these tools.
The Korean War started with an invasion and was something of a surprise in the West. No one predicted that —though to him— it was very predictable. Why was that? His skill-set, experience, and belief in a grand conspiracy guide us—that there were active plots that included leaders at the highest levels to cause all this post-war chaos and decline in the United States. He attributed this broadly to “communists” but encompassed socialists in his definitions of the enemy. In his mind, our primary ally during world war II, England, was already lost to this influence. He believed that when European countries spoke of “Democracy” they were not meaning the same thing we Americans mean when we use the word. Borrowing from a pre-war dean of Notre Dame’s law school: Our rights were not given by the state (the European orientation since the French Revolution) but by God himself, inalienable rights. Our Christian traditions are tied to governmental philosophy and divorced from the European model. This in part reflects his unusual orientation to World War II—first working to avoid our involvement but once engaged, to let the Europeans work it out on their own and focus on Asia.
His notions about of the Korean War were also not mainstream: this was not a challenge by Communists to our version of the world order—it was a conspiracy that Truman’s administration shared in that to fight the communists, the machinery of a large bureaucratic federal government—the one put together to win World War II—was allowed to continue and grow—all in accordance with the development of and eventual play for a one world government. The firing of General MacArther who had demonstrated his expertise both in World War II and Korea only proved his point. Prolonging the war endlessly worked for the one-worlders.
The post-McCarthy world would prove to be a time for a constellation of accusations and conspiracies on the part of Welch that were ever- expanding and ever-changing:
While starting with credible but minority opinions: FDR was a socialist and that was bad—-The United States should not get involved in a war in Europe under any circumstances—that England was already lost morally—he moved on to the following:
Eisenhower was an active tool of the communist for over fifteen years.
George Marshal, likewise.
The Bay of Pigs was a set-up by our own leaders so as to scare the populations into accepted larger and larger governmental authority.
Viet Nam and Korea were “fake wars” easily avoided and yet his conclusion was that we should use nuclear weapons to end both.
The Colonial Wars after WWII were all inspired by communists who were duping natives into fighting their colonial master who had in fact raised their standards of living. He used the Algerian Civil War as a model for why he believed the Civil Rights movement in the US was all part of a communist plot to destabilize our society.
John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assassinated by the communists when their utility was diminishing and there was more chaos to be driven by their deaths.
Earl Warren as supreme chief justice had influence Brown vs The Board of Education; he was a communist tool. A long running effort of the JBS was to impeach Earl Warren.
With time, Environmental and energy groups would all be accused of the same faults. Under Nixon, the establishment of OSHA, “was the worse piece of tyranny ever imposed on any people by any government.”
By the mid 1970’s he advocated first strike nuclear war agains the Russians and Chinese.
An observer (Richard Hofstadter) on Robert Welch’s thinking noted, if you have beliefs with which you are unwilling to bargain or compromise, and you have no ability to influence a government that is based on bargaining and compromise, you are in fact, legitimate in your belief that you are irrelevant to the system of government; it makes you believe power of these others is omnipotent, sinister, and malicious and you are not wrong given your starting point. This leads to paranoid thinking about the “vast conspiracy” against you and yours.
OUTCOMES AND MUSINGS:
The John Birch Society was an outlier and largely discredited in its heyday the 1950’s and 1960’s. The conspiracy theories and the conservative political philosophy seeking traction did not work well when a strong national government in the wake of World War II seemed logical and protective in what had proven to be a very dangerous world. It also occurred during a long running economic boom for the American middle class. Why rock the boat?
2) As the economy and society became less secure, his approach did get traction-as it does today. As Communism became less threatening as a world movement, attributing every failure in American foreign and domestic policy was not changing anyone’s mind. He secularized his thinking and stopped talking about communists, attributing his conspiracies to the Illuminati. His point was that the philosophy of making citizens dependent on a large government remained the obstacle to freedom and too many citizens accepted the premise of a large federal government.
3) While the JBS was thought to be a liability for Goldwater’s run for president, by the end of the Nixon years, it had contributed to the disruption of Democratic party’s hegemony. His strategy of pointing out “liberal” policies that failed on their face and linking them to the cultural norms he wanted back front and center supported what we now know as the culture wars. The “solid South” no longer voted Democratic. While Welch was raised Baptist and referred to God and America’s special place with God, he was very willing to be accept religious diversity in the face of a conservative social agenda. When Evangelicals and Catholics in the South had traditionally not got along, there was now a compact he helped broker to bring them together politically. He allied with Christian nationalists. The defeat of ERA speaks to his strategy and connection to his base which was growing and the most impressive tangible victory it had. His argument: what did “they” want? Females in combat roles and unisex bathrooms. HIs view was that women were separate but equal and confined. He saw women’s rights as antifamily. Sex education? Same.
4) Robert Welch had prejudices stemming from his time and place of origin. His writings and behavior were rarely overtly prejudiced with respect to race or religion. His social philosophy attracted many who were uncompromising about their prejudices and he was a political animal as he engaged and disengaged from them within the JBS and as allies with the JBS. His legacy may well have us where he might not have intended it. His hatred of big government overode everything else. Tom Anderson who supported the JBS position in Africa (specifically the countries of Rhodesia and S. Africa) felt that the issue was not color, but capacity, not race, but fitness to shoulder responsibility; one man one vote would lead to black majority rule and that would lead to chaos and subsequently communism. Anderson wrote “….part of the grand design that the collectivists for their one world: one race, mongrel; one church, apostate and antichrist; one government under the beast.”
5) Robert Welch sometimes spoke out of both sides of his mouth. His philosophical foundations found him as suspicious of Big Business as he was of Big Government. Nonetheless, he was happy to solicit millions of dollars from Nelson Bunker Hunt the Texas Oilman who cornered the silver market in the 1970’s. He saw value in a government that had a lead in nuclear weapons—and would have used them if he could make that decision—and they were the product that only a large organized federal government could have delivered. Again, he was not antisemitic or anti black in his personal writings, yet took people under his wings that were overtly prejudiced—and he selectively disciplined them as the needs of the organization required.
6) If I was Robert Welch’s old man, I would be a bit disappointed—he never personally finished anything he started. He did not graduate the naval academy or law school. His business went bankrupt. His one attempt to win an elected office ended in loss. None of his conspiracy theories and one-world predictions came on the timeline he predicted. Despite this, he was a recognized force to the end and his legacy lives on. If I was Robert’s best friend, I would thank him for the ride and tell him his successes shaking things up got better after he passed in 1985. One wonders what he would have thought of January 6.......
That seems like a fitting conclusion. Anyone want to run for School Board?
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