36 The New York ReviewThe Birchers & the Trumpers
James MannA Conspiratorial Life:
Robert Welch, the John Birch Society,
and the Revolution of American
Conservatism
by Edward H. Miller.
University of Chicago Press,
456 pp., $30.00During the insurrection at the US
Capitol last year, the so- called QAnon
Shaman, sporting a painted face and
horned cap, sat on the Senate dais
and offered a prayer. He thanked God
“for allowing us to get rid of the Com-
munists, the globalists, and the trai-
tors within our government.”^1 With
those words he paid homage, however
unintentionally, to the John Birch
Society, the conspiracy- obsessed anti-
Communist organization that became
a fixture in American life and, espe-
cially, Republican politics in the 1960s.
The John Birch Society may be little
remembered today, but in its time it had
a dues- paying membership of at least
30,000, a staff of 240 people, and more
than 400 bookstores across the United
States. The conspiratorial thinking of
the Birchers became part of popular
culture. In 1962 Bob Dylan wrote a folk
song about them, “Talkin’ John Birch
Paranoid Blues”: “I was looking every-
where for them gol- darned Reds / I got
up in the mornin’ ’n’ looked under my
bed...”
Robert Welch, a successful candy
manufacturer, founded the organiza-
tion on December 8, 1958, by conven-
ing a group of eleven conservatives,
almost all of them prominent business
leaders, for a two- day gathering at
a private home in Indianapolis. The
businessmen (they were all men) had
for years complained that America
was moving toward socialism and that
Dwight Eisenhower, the first Repub-
lican president in a quarter- century,
was doing little to reverse the drift.
But Welch’s new group—named after a
Baptist missionary and longtime mili-
tary intelligence officer who had been
killed by Chinese Communist forces
just after the end of World War II,
and whom Welch considered the first
American killed in the cold war—took
a different tack than earlier anti–New
Deal business leaders. The John Birch
Society had the same interest in domes-
tic economic conflicts but portrayed
them as the result of foreign conspir-
acies. Welch took Joseph McCarthy’s
anticommunism to heights beyond
even his imagination. While McCarthy
was infamous for his attacks on specific
officials involved in foreign policy, the
Birch Society focused on broader, more
amorphous targets and plots.
Edward H. Miller’s new biography
of Welch, A Conspiratorial Life, traces
the origins and history of the John
Birch Society and, in the process, pro-
vides historical perspective on the far-
right populism of the Trump era. Many
of the issues, themes, and causes the
Birchers seized upon six decades ago
can still be found on the political righttoday. In an essay titled “There Goes
Christmas,” Welch complained that de-
partment stores were, in Miller’s words,
“stocking subversively secular UN hol-
iday propaganda”; because the stores
did not have enough “Merry Christ-
mas” decorations, Welch complained,
they were trying to take Christ out of
the holiday. The Birch Society called
for defending the police against charges
of brutality, opposed putting fluoride in
the water supply with the fervor of to-
day’s anti- vaxxers, and fought efforts at
gun control, which they depicted as the
preliminary step for confiscation and
a Communist takeover of the United
States. Much like Donald Trump and
his base today, the Birchers refused to
acknowledge the legitimacy of politi-
cal opposition, suggesting that those
who disagreed with them were acting
in bad faith, if not as part of a sinister
conspiracy.
There are even some blood ties be-
tween the Birchers and the modern far
right: one of the business leaders Welch
assembled to create the Birch Society
was Fred Koch, the father of Charles
and David, who became longtime do-
nors to conservative causes.^2 Welch’s
first anti- Communist tract was pub-
lished by Henry Regnery, the founder
of the Regnery Press, which still spe-
cializes in books by conservative au-
thors such as Ann Coulter and Josh
Hawley. And Roger Stone, admittedlya questionable source, once told an
interviewer that Trump’s father, Fred
Trump, was a quiet funder of the Birch
Society and a friend of Robert Welch.From its origins at the Indianapolis
meeting, the group grew quickly. In
early 1959 Welch first organized chap-
ters in Massachusetts, his native state,
and then began touring the country,
giving his standard stump speech
eighty times over a three- year period.
He founded a magazine (its initial title
was One Man’s Opinion, but it soon
was renamed American Opinion) to
propagate the Birch Society’s version
of events, informing his followers that
President Eisenhower was a Commu-
nist, the Soviet Union had faked the
Hungarian revolution, Sputnik was a
hoax, and Communists within the US
government had planned for the Bay
of Pigs invasion in 1961 to fail in order
to help Fidel Castro. It was Welch who
came up with the epithet “comsymp”
to disparage Americans who weren’t
Communists but were said to be sym-
pathizing with them.
The Birchers’ views appealed to some
middle- class white Americans worried
about various changes in the 1950s and
1960s, such as the civil rights movement
and the expansion of the federal gov-
ernment. The Birch Society’s “Impeach
Earl Warren” billboards were aimed at
those opposed to the new mandate of
Brown v. Board of Education to inte-
grate public schools. Welch also courted
the support of doctors who were op-
posed to the establishment of Medicare
and Medicaid in 1965. His conspiracytheories suggested either that Commu-
nists had orchestrated these and other
changes in American society, or that
the changes were themselves a form of
creeping communism. “The storm over
integration,” he wrote of Brown, “has
been brought on by the Communists.”
In the early 1960s, after McCarthy-
ism had subsided and Eisenhower had
left office, anticommunism became too
narrow a cause. Welch and the John
Birch Society took aim at a wide range
of new targets, all subsumed under the
epithet “globalists”: the United Na-
tions, international and multilateral
organizations, even the staid, moderate
Council on Foreign Relations. (In this,
Welch and his society were influenced
by a 1962 book, The Invisible Gov-
ernment, by a broadcaster named Dan
Smoot, which claimed to find a conspir-
acy by a hidden “establishment” within
the United States, with the Council on
Foreign Relations as a leading force.)
The group’s targets didn’t need to be
involved in international affairs: the
Birchers also railed against socialists
or, simply, Democrats. “Our menace
is not the Big Red Army from with-
out, but the Big Pink Enemy within,”
observed one Bircher. “Our menace
is the KKK—Kennedy, Kennedy, and
Kennedy.” It was clear that the Birch
Society’s anticommunism was not re-
ally the same as that of, say, an émigré
from Eastern Europe, China, or Cuba;
rather, for the Birchers, “communism”
became a term used to smear liberal-
ism. President John F. Kennedy once
aptly said of them, “They equate the
Democratic Party with the welfare
state, the welfare state with socialism,
and socialism with communism.”
The Birchers had considerable influ-
ence upon Republican politics, partic-
ularly in California and the Southwest,
regions then growing fast with new-
comers from the East and Midwest.
Republican politicians fretted about
the risks of alienating the Birchers in
much the same way that Republicans
today worry about running afoul of
Donald Trump’s base. When George
H.W. Bush, the incarnation of main-
stream Republicanism, ran against
Ronald Reagan for the party’s 1980
presidential nomination, he resigned
from the Council on Foreign Relations.
For a time, some feared a possible
infiltration of the military by the John
Birch Society, much as the Trump sup-
porters’ insurrection at the Capitol has
sparked concerns about possible sym-
pathizers within the police or military.
In both instances, the worry was that
the uniformed forces might be politi-
cized in such a way that they might in-
tervene, or refuse to intervene, in some
future political crisis. In the case of the
Birch Society, those fears were height-
ened by General Edwin Walker, a
military commander and society mem-
ber who instructed his troops to read
Welch’s Life of John Birch and other
right- wing material. He was relieved
of command in 1961, resigned from the
army, and toured the country giving
speeches on behalf of Bircher causes.In 1961, Stanley Mosk, then the Cal-
ifornia attorney general, mockingly
depicted the John Birch Society’s sup-Members of the John Birch Society pledging allegiance
to the flag at a meeting, Chicago, 1961Francis Miller/LIFEPicture Collection/Shutterstock(^1) His real name is Jacob Chansley, and he
was eventually sentenced to forty- one
months in prison. See Tom Jackman,
“‘QAnon Shaman’ Sentenced to 41
Months for Role in Capitol Riot,” The
Washington Post, November 18, 2021.
(^2) According to Miller, Charles Koch
formally resigned from the society in
1968, after Welch gave a speech calling
for the United States to withdraw from
the United Nations.
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