Gather ‘round everybody — we’re all locked down for a pandemic, so it’s time for #radicalbookclub! (For the newbies, #radicalbookclub is where I read books by and/or about radicals and tell Twitter what’s in ‘em)

today radical book club is actually #reactionarybookclub because we’re covering D.J. Mulloy’s 2014 book THE WORLD OF THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY: CONSPIRACY, CONSERVATISM, AND THE COLD WAR! https://www.amazon.com/World-John-Birch-Society-Conservatism-ebook/dp/B00L32QN82/

Whenever you mention the Birchers, some Righty wag will pop up to say, “Where were they wrong, though?” Well, just to head this old chestnut off at the pass:

*President Dwight D. Eisenhower was not a communist spy.*

*Francis Gary Powers did not deliberately fly his U2 into Russian airspace in order to be shot down.*

*The assassination of John F. Kennedy was not an attempted false flag to discredit anticommunists.*

And (my fave): *in 1963, there were not a hundred thousand UN soldiers, including 16,000 African cannibal mercenaries, training under Russian command in the swamps of Georgia.*

(That last one made it into a Bircherite congressman’s official newsletter.)

So why pay attention to the Birchers at all? Because they’re a rare & remarkable example of Righty organizing.

In the span of a few years, Robert Welch Jr. took the John Birch Society from 12 dudes in a room to 4,000 chapters & a peak membership of 100,000 people.

How the hell did he do that? And how can we?

And how did he fail, so we don’t?

To answer these questions, we’ll trace the major currents of Mulloy’s book on the John Birch Society (hereafter JBS), focusing on founder Robert Welch Jr., how he built & structured the JBS, and how & why it rose & fell as part of the emerging conservative movement of the 60s.

Robert Welch Jr. was born on a farm in Chowan County, North Carolina, on 1 December 1899. A child prodigy, he started Latin at 7, graduated college at 16, and then went on to Harvard Law. He didn’t finish, though, electing to get married and go to work in the candy business.

After a few false starts of his own, Welch wound up working at his brother’s company, where he prospered, rising to VP of sales and advertising. He travelled around the country, met lots of people, and became prominent in the community.

Welch did the normal stuff you’d expect a prominent man of his era to do: Chamber of Commerce, bank, school board, National Confectioners Association (candy business, remember?). From 1950 to 1956, he was on the board of directors of the National Association of Manufacturers.

But Welch also dabbled in politics, and this is where his radicalization begins. Because in 1952 he backed Robert Taft for the Republican presidential nomination.

To understand how a guy like Robert Welch — professional, accomplished, established — gets radicalized, you have to take an empathetic look at the world as he saw it, which means you have to imagine being a conservative Republican in 1952.

I’ll take a few tweets here to crib from Rick Perlstein, who has a very good summary of the situation in his BEFORE THE STORM. https://www.amazon.com/Before-Storm-Goldwater-Unmaking-Consensus-ebook/dp/B0087GZE32/

From the 19th century up to 1952, Republican factionalism wasn’t ideological, but geographical: East vs. Midwest. It’s not that there weren’t ideological differences, but they were tied to regional economic interests.

19th century Easterners were all about local manufacturing, so they wanted high tariffs to keep foreign competition out. The Midwest, who had to *buy* Eastern products, wanted free trade to keep prices down.

But as Eastern money piled up and up and up, the East became more and more about finance and internationalism, less about manufacturing — and now they saw the merits of free trade! Whereas for the Midwestern farmer or manufacturer trying to get a good price for his products…

So by 1952 you’ve got isolationist farmers and manufacturers in the Midwest wanting tariffs for foreigners and hands off their business at home, and in the East you’ve got cosmopolitan internationalist limousine liberals and *stop me if this is starting to sound familiar.*

The other thing you have to remember about 1952 is that the Republican Party had not held the presidency since FDR’s inauguration in 1933.

Republicans: take a long moment to imagine how you’d feel after *12 years of Obama followed by seven years of Hillary Clinton,* in all but two of which years of which the Democrats also controlled *both houses of Congress.*

That is how Republicans felt in 1952.

There were two schools of thought among the Republicans on how to handle their problem of not winning any fucking elections.

The liberal Easterners, who ran the party (in part through their chokehold on the Midwesterners’ access to Eastern credit), wanted to put forth candidates who would appeal to Democrats and Independents. Candidates who were ideologically like… well, like Easterners.

The conservative Midwesterners wanted to offer the people a clear choice, and put forth conservative, isolationist candidates like… well, like Midwesterners.

Both camps absolutely detested each other, not helped by the fact that the Easterners had had several bites at the apple — Alf Langdon, Wendell Wilkie, Thomas Dewey — to no avail. Cthulhu had not merely swum left; he had hydrofoiled. Now the conservatives wanted their turn.

And then came the 1952 national convention. The conservative Republican hero, Midwestern isolationist Robert Taft, came into the convention with enough delegates to win — and the Easterners, who backed Eisenhower, pulled crafty moves to uncredential a bunch of his delegates.

So the Eisenhower folks won — and won the presidency. And did they undo Obamacare, I mean the New Deal? Did they hell: *they gave us Chief Justice Earl Warren.*

The 1952 Republican convention screwjob marks the inciting incident of conservatism as we know it today. That’s the essential thing you have to understand about conservatism in the 60s: it organized not in reaction to leftists, but in reaction to the Eisenhower administration.

Which brings us to Robert Welch’s friend and adversary: William F. Buckley, Jr.

Born to wealth and privilege in 1925, Buckley got into the Ivy League late owing to his (stateside) WWII service.

WFB was at Yale from 1945-1950, and from 1951-1953 he was in the CIA. In 1951, he published a book: the legendary GOD AND MAN AT YALE, the original conservative college student’s cri de coeur against liberal professors. It made him famous.

In 1955, Buckley founded NATIONAL REVIEW.

Robert Welch invested $1000 in it (around $9680 in 2019 dollars). He would invest another $1000 two years later ($9200 in 2019 dollars).

But Welch wasn’t going to just sit around and hand would-be conservative activists money. No sir: Welch had already been working and writing on his own.

In 1952 Welch had published a critical take on Asia policy, the pro-Chiang Kai-shek MAY GOD FORGIVE US (his research for which, Mulloy notes, is likely where he he first encountered the martyred John Birch, a missionary turned soldier killed by communist guerrillas).

Welch wrote a biography of Birch in 1954, then turned to his most infamous work: a critique of Eisenhower later known as THE POLITICIAN, the tl;dr of which is “Ike is a communist spy and his brother is his controller.”

THE POLITICIAN originated in a long road trip on which Welch ranted to his fellow road-tripper about Ike until, possibly to get Welch to shut up, the guy told him he should write it down.

…holy shit I just realized THE POLITICIAN is the daddy of right-wing rants delivered in cars; it’s just that Robert Welch wasn’t streaming

THE POLITICIAN, which Welch continued to revise, began to circulate privately (Buckley thought it was crap; Barry Goldwater told Welch he should burn every copy).

In February 1956 Welch, not content to merely donate to NATIONAL REVIEW, launched a magazine, which he literally called ONE MAN’S OPINION (it later became AMERICAN OPINION). He resigned from the candy business at the beginning of 1957 to plan his next phase.

That'd be the JBS.

In late 1958, Welch invited 17 men he knew — mostly prominent businessmen — to meet in Indianapolis, IN on December 8-9. Eleven said yes, and ten became founding members and the first National Council of the John Birch Society.

The structure of the JBS merged lessons Welch had taken from business and his studies of communist organizations. At the top was the Founder (Welch, naturally).

The society also had a National Council, whose role was to advise Welch; their only actual power was to name Welch’s successor upon his death. The Council were mostly figureheads whose personal prominence gave the society gravitas.

Threadbreak; picks up here: https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/1243670927528939520?s=20