Birchers, p.1
Birchers, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Matthew Dallek
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dallek, Matthew, 1969- author.
Title: Birchers: how the John Birch society radicalized the American right / Matthew Dallek.
Description: New York: Basic Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022049307 | ISBN 9781541673564 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541673571 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Conservatism—United States—History. | John Birch Society—History. | Right-wing extremists—United States—History. | Welch, Robert, 1899-1985. | United States—Politics and government.
Classification: LCC JC573.2.U6 D35 2023 | DDC 320.520973—dc23/eng/20221115
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049307
ISBNs: 9781541673564 (hardcover), 9781541673571 (ebook)
E3-20230215-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1 “God’s Angry Men”
Chapter 2 “Some Rather Frightening Aspects”
Chapter 3 Witch Hunt
Chapter 4 Shock Troops
Chapter 5 “A Dirty War”
Chapter 6 Birch Watchers
Chapter 7 “Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes”
Chapter 8 Fringe
Chapter 9 Succession
Chapter 10 Crack-Up
Chapter 11 Takeover
Chapter 12 Radicalization
Conclusion
Photos
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Archival Collections
Notes
About the Author
Also by Matthew Dallek
To Robert Dallek
a great historian—but an even better dad
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Introduction
FRINGE TO CENTER
In 1962, a secretive, far-right group called the John Birch Society was scheming to stop the California Republican Party’s preferred candidate in a bitter electoral contest—one 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 country’s 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 women’s clubs. Hitt was one of the establishment Republicans who stood squarely in their path. When she ran for a seat on her party’s 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: “You’ll 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 didn’t 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 I’ve ever seen in my life.” They were “an enormously destructive force. In my opinion, they’re more destructive than the other extreme. Maybe it’s because they’re ours. The Birch Society,” she underscored, “is ours.”1
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 establishment—even on the right-wing edge of that establishment—agreed. 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 changed—and 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 ideas—or the lineal descendants of its ideas—solidified 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 movement’s 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 society’s 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 Reagan’s election as president in 1980.2 But this story makes clear that another dividing line also existed within the conservative coalition—with 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.
Many issues separated the Birch fringe from the Reagan-Goldwater right, but major distinctions centered on explicit racism, anti-interventionism versus internationalism, conspiracy theories, and a more apocalyptic, violent, antiestablishment mode of politics. While the mainstream and fringe wings of conservatism aligned on discrete issues and in particular moments, the Birch Society and the mainstream conservative movement frequently had sharp differences of opinion that pulled them in opposing directions. For years, the two were more antagonists than partners, each side working to check the other and seeing each other as the enemy within. More than mainstream conservatives, Birchers trafficked in conspiracy theories and advocated aggressive resistance to the civil rights movement. After NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated by a white supremacist, a Birch film blamed him for his own death—a contention that didn’t sit well with
Conservative GOP leaders like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Barry Goldwater—politicians who, despite their differences with one another, all fit within the Republican conservative mainstream—sometimes invoked Bircher language and copied these extremist tactics. But their oratory and ideas were consistently less violent, conspiratorial, and apocalyptic, and when pressed they made clear that they wished to separate themselves from at least some elements of their far-right flank. This was true even of Goldwater, seen by many at the time as the epitome of right-wing Republicanism. Birchers declared that communists controlled the civil rights movement, but Goldwater, despite voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a US senator, avoided such talk. While Birchers spun out scenarios of communist plots in government, equating liberals with left-wingers and both with communists, Goldwater merely claimed that the Democratic Party “was captured by Socialist ideologues in and about the labor movement.”4 When Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren, Goldwater agreed that Warren and the Supreme Court had abused their power without going so far as to call for his removal. Whereas Birchers occasionally flirted with third parties, ran for office as states’ rights candidates, and challenged mainstream conservatives in long-shot GOP primary bids, Goldwater urged conservatives to “grow up” and take over the Republican Party. The handful of Birchers who held seats in Congress during the 1960s and 1970s bucked the Republican Party’s support for military interventions and immigration reform, instead clamoring for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations and viewing international alliances as a socialist one-world plot to destroy America’s sovereignty.5
The far right’s role and impact within the broader conservative movement from roughly 1974 to 2010 was a mixed bag. At times, fringe individuals and groups successfully pushed their ideas into the heart of national politics and a position of power within the Republican Party, especially on questions of morality, gender, and sexuality. But on some of the weightiest issues of those decades—immigration, internationalism, military interventions, the size of the welfare state, civil rights, and taxes—the far right also experienced numerous setbacks. The right-wing fringe was part of the conservative GOP’s coalition but only intermittently came out on top, and its constellation of ideas—explicit racism, anti-interventionism, conspiracism, an apocalyptic mindset, and culture wars—haltingly, over many decades, exerted more and more authority within the broader GOP conservative coalition.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the society’s culture-war legacy combined with its radical brand of economic libertarianism to become more central to conservative Republicans. In the 1990s, a strain of isolationism began to creep more forcefully into GOP rhetoric and legislative policy, and conspiracy theories in response to Bill Clinton’s presidency ensconced themselves in the broader American right. Around 2008 to 2010, with the election of Barack Obama, some Republicans turned to more explicit racism and intensified the Birch-like, apocalyptic approach to politics and policy. In the 2010s, the far right, inheritors of the Birch tradition, finally came out on top. Though it is tempting to lump the mainstream right and the right-wing fringe together, especially in light of where they ended up, the right became radicalized because conservative leaders had courted the fringe (especially during their election campaigns) over five decades; large-scale changes sweeping the economy, culture, and world popularized the far right’s ideas; and the fringe’s decades-long quest to gain power came to maturation.
Republican conservative candidates for high office also made a series of bets that backfired. They wooed far-right activists on the theory that their political support was essential to winning elections and that their more outlandish ideas could be kept at bay. Conservatives vying for office attended rallies sponsored by the far right, endorsed some of their causes, and spoke in their idiom. But when these GOP leaders took office, they governed to the far right’s satisfaction only intermittently. Republican leaders figured that they could do just enough to keep the culture warriors, conspiracy theorists, extreme free marketeers, and anti–civil rights radicals in their camp while also maintaining support from mainstream conservatives, especially suburban women. Their bet paid off for a time, until control over the process ultimately slipped from their grasp. Especially in the final years of George W. Bush’s presidency, with the administration losing credibility in both foreign and economic policy, the far right’s ideas grew more popular. On the big issues—America’s role in the world, the nation’s stance toward immigrants, race relations, and views of major institutions and elites—Republican voters started to shift in the far right’s favor. The internet made it harder for Republican leaders to check the fringe members of their coalition, and the far right effectively weaponized the primary process. From GOP-backed tax hikes in the 1980s and early 1990s to the GOP-led wars in Iraq, from failure to curb immigration in the 2000s to the financial crash of 2008, the far right’s frustration with the conservative establishment intensified, and a narrative among the activists took root: Republican leaders had betrayed them. Bitterness and resentments deepened.
Beyond the internecine warfare, the nation’s changing economy and culture enabled Birch successors to gain adherents and ascend to power. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, economic and demographic shifts intensified the far right’s sense of alienation and disempowerment. A steady influx of Asian, African, and Latin American immigrants (and fewer white European immigrants) unnerved many whites, who feared that the interlopers threatened their values and their belief that the United States was a white Christian country. The decades-long process of deindustrialization, 1970s-era inflation, and the combination of a fraying safety net, declining public investment, and widening income and wealth disparities in the 1980s seemed to make the American dream increasingly unattainable. The severing of white working-class voters from unions (over many decades) helped break those voters’ connection with the Democratic Party and New Deal liberalism. These were forces in the rise of Reagan, of course, but they also played into the agenda of the Birch Society’s successors on the movement’s fringe, who exploited the cultural shifts and economic shocks, stoking white citizens’ resentments. Such broad changes in politics and culture amplified fears that immigrants were flooding the borders and taking people’s jobs. Structural shifts—including popular revulsion with the federal government—blocked Democrats’ attempts to mitigate economic pain. Right-wing press and politicians constantly told voters that snooty liberal elites were laughing at them, disrespecting them. The culture—Hollywood actors, Harvard professors, Beltway pundits—now seemed stacked against many white citizens, rigged to mock their habits, their faith, their families. After failing to win majorities at the ballot box, some heirs to the Birchers increasingly turned to violent and antidemocratic means of wielding power.
The end of the Cold War also shook the foundations of American politics and imbued the anti-interventionist successors to the Birchers with political authority and moral zeal. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 gave isolationists a chance to critique the broad bipartisan commitment to America’s liberal internationalist leadership. With the implosion of the Soviet Union, the conservative belief in militarism abroad started to waver. Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and other proponents of anti-intervention argued that America’s alliances, treaties, wars, and free-trade pacts eroded US sovereignty. They urged Americans to revive the 1920s-era traditions of avoiding entangling alliances, closing America’s borders, and celebrating the nation’s Anglo-Saxon heritage.6
