D. J. Mulloy - The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War

The World of the

JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY

The World of the
JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY

Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War

D. J. MULLOY

Vanderbilt University Press
NASHVILLE

2014 by Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235

All rights reserved

First printing 2014

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Book design by Dariel Mayer

Composition by Vanderbilt University Press

: Former major general Edwin Walker is led away at bayonet point by U.S. troops after refusing to move from the courthouse in downtown Oxford, Mississippi, during the attempt to prevent James Meredith from registering at the University of Mississippi, October 1, 1962.

Bettmann/CORBIS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

LC control number 2013039765

LC classification number E740 .J6M86 2014

Dewey class number 322.44dc23

ISBN 978-0-8265-1981-8 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8265-1983-2 (ebook)

To my grandparents

Catherine Kitty McCabe (19061986)

John Mulloy (19051951)

Edith King (19221980)

and Thomas Telford (19211987)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Many people have contributed to this book and I am extremely grateful to all of them. Much of the initial research for it took place in the wonderful archives of the Wilcox Collection for Contemporary Political Movements in the Kenneth Spenser Research Library at the University of Kansas. Because of the expertise and generosity of all the staff there, including Tara Wenger, Karen Cook, Letha Johnson, Sherry Williams, Deborah Dandridge, Meredith Huff, Toni Bresler, and especially Rebecca Schulte and Kathy Lafferty, the time I spent in Lawrence was immensely rewarding and productive. I am very grateful for the short term research grant I received from the Research Office of Wilfrid Laurier University for enabling that trip, as well as for a book preparation grant. My thanks also to the dedicated librarians of my own university who have helped with this project in countless ways, especially Patti Metzger, Angela Davidson, and Hlne LeBlanc, as well as to the outstanding administrative assistants in the History Department at Laurier, Colleen Ginn and Cindi Wieg. I would like to thank my editor at Vanderbilt University Press, Eli Bortz, for his enthusiasm for, and commitment to, the project, as well as all the people at Vanderbilt who worked so hard to bring it to fruition, including Susan Havlish, Betsy Phillips, Joell Smith-Borne, and Peg Duthie. Adam Crerar and David Monod read the manuscript at various stages: their careful attentiveness and insightfulnessas well as that of two anonymous reviewersimproved the book beyond measure. Thank you. Thank you also to Sarah Cracknell, Jnsi Birgisson, Neil Halstead, and Mark Hollis for keeping me company during the writing process, and to my friends and colleagues in the History Department at Wilfrid Laurier University, where I have the great pleasure to teach. Above all, though, I would like to thank the two other writers in my family, Pamela and Esme Mulloy, for their love, support, and considerable patience.

Fantastic? Of course its fantastic....

We are living in fantastic times

and a fantastic situation....

We are in circumstances where

it is realistic to be fantastic.

Robert Welch, The Blue Book

A conspiracy is everything

that ordinary life is not.

Don DeLillo, Libra

Introduction

It was an extraordinary claim. The thirty-fourth president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhowerthe widely beloved war hero, the man who had helped save the world from fascism during World War IIwas a traitor, a dedicated, conscious agent of the Soviet Union and of the whole Communist conspiracy. Nor was he the only American political figure apparently in thrall to the nations deadliest enemy. U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles and his brother, Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles, were similarly indicted, as were numerous other senior members of the Eisenhower administration and the wider political establishment. In fact, in what might have been the most fantastical claim of all, Dwight EisenhowerIke, as he was almost universally knownwas not even the ringleader of this cunning group of plotters. That accolade went to his younger brother Milton (who, when not busy directing the conspiracy, bided his time as the president of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore).

The allegations had been circulating around the conservative anticommunist network in the United States since the mid-1950s in the form of a privately printed letter called The Politician.

As it turned out, just as Epstein and Forster were publishing their report, the heyday of the Birch Society was fast approaching its end. With an estimated peak membership of one hundred thousand in 19651966, Birchers had played a substantial role inand, initially at least, had also benefited fromthe energizing and enormously consequential 1964 presidential campaign of the Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater. By 1968 the number of Birchers had declined to between sixty thousand and seventy thousand, and by the mid-1990s the figure was down to fifteen thousand or twenty thousand (estimates are all that are available because the Society declined to release its official membership rolls). If the Society is remembered at all, it is generally as just another example of the marginal, esoteric, and exotic groups that have always existed on the abundant and historically deeply rooted lunatic fringe of American life.

But the significance of an organization is to be found not only in the number of its recruits, or how long it manages to command attention on the political scene. Seemingly small groups can still have a powerful impact on a society, and they can also provide a meaningful window through which one can better understand and come to terms with that society at a particular moment in its history. Such organizations can generate new ideas, or give a renewed lease of life to old ones; they can pioneer innovative modes of political activity or communication; they can embodyand give voice tosome of the central tensions or conflicts of the time, and through their actions and beliefs they can compel opponents and observers to defend and sharpen their own positions, policies, and practices; they can attract millions of sympathizers and supporters to their cause; and they can leave behind a substantial legacypositive and negativefor others to examine and learn from. As we shall see, all of this applies to the John Birch Society in the years between 1958 and 1968. It also applies to contemporary political movements (whether of the Left or the Right). Indeed, many of the key lessons to be drawn from an examination of the John Birch Society are more than applicable to the various forms of extremism that have been such a prominent feature of American political life during the opening decades of the twenty-first century.

Far from being an irrelevant or easily dismissible footnote to the politics and history of the late 1950s and 1960s, the John Birch Society was actually closely involved inor at least had much to say aboutmany of the major issues and controversies of the period, such as the rise of the civil rights movement, the role

Robert Welch would do all he could to deny any direct connection between his privately expressed views in The Politician and the official policies and beliefs of the Birch Society, but his disavowals were not successful. Even though the extent to which ordinary Birchers shared their leaders views about President Eisenhower in particular is by no means clearand one must also raise the possibility that Welch himself may not have believed his own charges literally, seeing them more as a hyperbolic warning about what he regarded as the deeply lamentable state of American politics at the time and about the extraordinary dangers the United States faced from the unrelenting communist threathis allegations haunted the Society throughout its controversial spell in the political spotlight. And whether or not all Birchers believed that Eisenhower was a secret communist agent, there was no escaping the fact that conspiracism and an implacable hostility to communism were the central components of the Societys worldview.