Matthew Dallek - Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right

I n 1962, a secretive, far-right group called the John Birch Society was scheming to stop the California Republican Partys preferred candidate in a bitter electoral contestone of many such campaigns it was waging in local and state elections. Just four years old at the time, the Birch Society was already the countrys most notorious far-right movement, and it had become known for its brutal tactics and extremist ideas concerning hidden communist conspiracies within the United States. It tended to harass its foes and paint them as rank traitors. Its opponent in this particular battle, Patricia Hitt, was a member of the Republican National Committee, a top ally of Richard Nixon, and a rare woman in a position of party leadership. At the time, Birchers were running for seats on Orange County school boards and plotting to wrest power from moderates in GOP womens clubs. Hitt was one of the establishment Republicans who stood squarely in their path. When she ran for a seat on her partys county committee, the society unloaded on her.

Letters, many using the same stock phrases, started arriving at her home. The tone, she said, was nasty, and considerable hate was raining down on her and her family. Worse still was the phone harassment. At all hours, Hitt received calls from anonymous speakers with essentially the same message: Youll rue this day. When she and her husband switched to an unlisted number, the Birchers shifted to calling registered Republicans throughout her district and denouncing her as a communist, a socialist, and a pinko. That kind of slander was effective, Hitt recalled. People who didnt know who I was defeated me.

Tangling with the John Birch Society was an unforgettable ordeal for opponents like Hitt who endured it. More than the loss itself, what scarred Hitt was the Birchers zealotry. They were wild, she later reflected. They were haters beyond anything Ive ever seen in my life. They were an enormously destructive force. In my opinion, theyre more destructive than the other extreme. Maybe its because theyre ours. The Birch Society, she underscored, is ours.

Hitt assumed that such a loathsome faction would stay at the margins of her party. Birchers might harass her and her GOP colleagues, win an election here and there, or launch a few quixotic primary campaigns to topple incumbents. But, she reasoned, they were destined to hover at the far-right edge of the political spectrum. Hitt figured that the midcentury consensus, in which citizens were thought to abhor extremists on the left and the right, would keep Birchers on the defensive and ensure that mainstream sensibilities prevailed. Her colleagues in the Republican establishmenteven on the right-wing edge of that establishmentagreed. They were convinced that there was simply no realistic way for the fringe to assemble an electoral coalition that could vault them to power. And for a long time they were correct.

But in recent years, especially with the ascent of Donald Trump to the presidency and to leadership of the American right, what it means to be a conservative or a member of the Republican Party has changedand the newly dominant political ideas and attitudes bear the imprint of the John Birch Society. The extremist takeover of the American right required more than six decades and was by no means inevitable. In fact, for a while the John Birch Society receded from influence, but over time its ideasor the lineal descendants of its ideassolidified their place in the conservative coalition and eventually, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, enjoyed a revival. Birchers depicts the life and afterlife of an organization that did more than any other conservative entity to propel this extremist takeover: the John Birch Society, which mobilized a loyal army of activists and forged ideas that ultimately upended American politics.

Even long after its membership waned and its time in the spotlight faded, the Birch Society influenced the ideas and the style of far-right activists and groups, eventually enabling the fringe to engulf the GOP. Drawing on thousands of documents from a variety of archives, this story encompasses the voices of activists, many of them women, as well as those of the movements allies and critics. It shows the extraordinary steps that a liberal Cold War coalition took to constrain the society, including a massive and previously undisclosed spy operation that targeted Birchers over many years, penetrating its inner sanctum and contributing to the societys downfall. Yet the ideas and tactics of Birchism continued to inspire the far right and today have made a stunning comeback.

The political right in the United States has always encompassed a variety of factions or dispositions, including chamber of commerce conservatives and Wall Street conservatives, libertarians and fundamentalist Christians, those reconciled to the New Deal and those bent on repealing it. Historians have typically distinguished between the more moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, who dominated the party for years, and the more ideological movement conservatives, who burst on the scene first with Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s and then, more enduringly, with Ronald Reagans election as president in 1980. But this story makes clear that another dividing line also existed within the conservative coalitionwith all the mainstream, electorally successful figures, from Eisenhower to Reagan, on one side and a more extreme, ultraconservative faction, including the Birchers, on the other. It also makes clear that the differences between these ultraconservatives and what I will call the mainstream right were real and substantive.