Verhoeven published his dissertation thesis after defending to University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts. This thesis aims to investigate the role of the anti-communist John Birch Society within the greater American conservative field. More specifically, it focuses on the period from the Society's inception in 1958 to the beginning of its relative decline in significance, which can be situated after the first election of Richard M. Nixon as president in 1968.
The main focus of the thesis lies on challenging more traditional classifications of the JBS as an extremist outcast divorced from the American political mainstream, and argues that through their innovative organizational methods, national presence, and capacity to link up a variety of domestic and international affairs to an overarching conspiratorial narrative, the Birchers were able to tap into a new and powerful force of largely white suburban conservatives and contribute significantly to the growth and development of the post-war New Right. For this purpose, the research interrogates the established scholarship and draws upon key primary source material, including official publications, internal communications and the private correspondence of founder and chairman Robert Welch as well as other prominent members.
The author concluded that students of conservatism have reached a consensus over the importance of Barry Goldwater’s failed campaign in reconfiguring partisan politics and raising the profile of conservative challenges to the New Deal order. The John Birch Society’s controversial presence around that campaign worried a number of prominent conservatives, including Goldwater himself, not just because of the effectiveness with which Lyndon Johnson could
tarnish his opponent as a dangerous extremist, but because of the Society’s capacity to connect members and motivate them to infiltrate local political structures and mobilize, established conservatives formally excluded the JBS from interfering with electoral campaigns. At the same time, the JBS remained a powerful organization that could still align itself with conservative protest movements, as best illustrated by SYLP and the Birchers’ opposition to civil rights. The populist campaign of George Wallace not only proved to be an accurate bellwether of the direction in which political discourse was moving, but it also illustrated the capacity for political mobilization and ideological zeal that the Society had instilled in its national membership.
Nevertheless, the election – and reelection – of Richard Nixon as President revealed the Society’s limitations and long-term incapacity to remain a stable factor within the conservative landscape. Welch’s uncompromising adherence to conspiracy theories had helped connect deeply frustrated conservatives who felt politically marginalized within the liberal consensus, but as the New Right became increasingly successful at exploiting the weaknesses of liberalism on a national scale, the JBS would be confronted with its own unwillingness to recognize the validity of the conservative counterrevolution that it had helped bring about. Not unlike a reagent accelerating a chemical reaction, the prominence of the John Birch Society would be largely consumed in the process.
When Robert Welch in 1958 wondered aloud "why people became Communists," he advanced a primarily psychological explanation, and linked left-wing radicalism and idealism with profound emotional disorders, feelings of hatred and a paralyzing lack of self-esteem. Ironically, as Welch’s contemporaneous observers wondered why people became Birchers, and what it was that attracted them to the retired businessman’s quixotic struggle against international collectivism, many turned to similarly clinical language and speculated these people suffered from status deprivation, serious mental anxieties to outright paranoia and a pseudo-Fascist personality. In doing so, serious scholars like Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, and their fellow writers who subscribed to the liberal consensus school, failed to grasp the strengths and accomplishments of Robert Welch’s enigmatic organization. As a result, satisfying answers to what attracted ordinary citizens to the Society, and what the organization provided for them and the greater conservative field, remained lacking.
First, the timing was crucial. As the JBS emerged in the late 1950s, it could offer anxious Cold War citizens a set of explanations and remedies for a dualistic world and the dissonance between living in the world’s most powerful state and the realities of international conflict and a perceived worldwide Communist conspiracy. The JBS responded to the desire on behalf of conservatives to feel represented in national politics and helped push the Republican Party, at a time of significant partisan realignment, to the right. Most importantly, though the JBS remained an essentially well-coordinated top-down structure, it connected ordinary people, representing an emerging Sun Belt variety of conservatism, and gave them a clear enemy and a mission. Birchers had access to inexhaustible bodies of literature that tied the establishment of the Federal Reserve together with the French Revolution and the Montgomery Bus Boycott with sinister plans to establish a “Soviet Negro Republic” in the
Deep South.
Through its countless Ad Hoc Committees, Members’ Monthly Messages, speaking tours and various other mutual engagements, the Society retained close control over its members and provided them with a sense of community and accomplishment. In a 1965 speech, Welch boasted that the only danger to the Communist conspiracy was exposure though education and that “in this undertaking, we [the JBS] have become a new form of opposition to the Communists, which they have never faced before in any of the vast areas they have already taken over.” Though Welch’s claims were possibly somewhat overblown, it remains true that the Birch Society provided motivated citizens with and organizational platform, and clear answers to growing social turmoil. As such, it linked the problem of civil rights to sophisticated conservative counterarguments including free-market liberalism, an originalist defense of constitutional supremacy and an emphasis on law and order.
The historiography of modern American conservatism has come a long way since Samuel Huntington in 1957 posed the question “Does conservative political thought have a place in America today?”, or even since Alan Brinkley declared the study of the U.S. right “something of an orphan” almost four decades later. Accomplishments in the field have painted a different picture from the “liberal consensus” school was that dominant at the time of the Birchers’ inception. The alleged “vital center” upon which American politics was based no longer seems viable, and Louis Hartz’s dictum that liberalism remained the “master assumption of American political thought,” has been falsified. What this thesis has argued is that the modern conservative movement emerged from the 1960s emboldened by electoral victories and superior organization skills, and that the John Birch Society through its visible presence and capacity for mobilization made it ultimately stronger.
As such, the study of the Birchers transcends the problem of mainstream versus extremist movements, and puts a greater emphasis not merely on the importance of grassroots movements, but on the interaction, conflict and synergy of ideas and resources into a dynamic picture of the development of modern conservatism in the United States. The persistent conspiratorial worldview that defined the organization eventually left the JBS obsolete on the greater political scene, but during the crucial period where the New Right transitioned from an intellectual movement to a powerful, popular and electable force, relying on newly emerging demographic realities and partisan realignment, it profited from the achievements and failures of the John Birch Society.
Verhoeven has made the argument that the role of the JBS needs to be reconsidered in terms of significance and influence. At a time when the liberal order seemed dominant, the Birchers created a professional and efficient platform for national organization around a variety of issues, all key to the development of modern conservatism. At the crucial time of Barry Goldwater’s rise and nomination, the Birchers acted as a catalytic factor, pushing the right wing of the party over the threshold, though increasingly marginalizing themselves in the process.
Verhoeven has provided an essentially organizational history connecting the dots between the business elites who supported its cause and a new, burgeoning conservative populace that the wider conservative movement would learn to incorporate. Concretely, Verhoeven discussed the Birchers’ importance for the connection between strands of Old Guard business conservatism to the more modern Sun Belt right-wing variety that would usher in crucial figures like Goldwater and Reagan, and that would seriously compete with liberalism for dominance over mainstream American politics. In
addition, the Birchers helped popularize right-wing alternative narratives to issues such as civil rights, international affairs, redistributive economics and even the counterculture, thus contributing to the amalgamation of a conservative challenge to the liberal order. Although the Society’s uncompromising conspiracism would become by and large incompatible with most established strands of conservative thought, it helped muster and mobilize an attack on
that same liberal order and appealed to the frustrations and patriotism of thousands of
motivated citizen activists.
In terms of periodization, Verhoeven has suggested the years from 1958 to 1968 to be by far the most crucial and defining for the Society and its efforts, though the link up to the present has shown its impact still reverberates today. Therefore, it is here that more research can and should be done. More in-depth studies focusing on the ideological and organizational links between the JBS and Tea Party politics as well as contemporary conspiracy culture and
right-wing business astroturfing are necessary to further understand the odyssey of the post-Cold War right. There is room for comparative studies with the rise of European populist and nationalist politics, the development of neoliberal interest groups and the internal struggles of contemporary conservatism in an increasingly diverse and globalized political culture. Though the JBS has only occupied a modest space within modern American political history,
it is clear the implications of its innovative and yet divisive tactics and activities remain highly relevant in our present-day world. Even today (circa 2015), the John Birch Society remains in existence, although it has never attained the prominence and significance it enjoyed during its first decade. As Sara Diamond has illustrated, the 1970s and 1980s brought more competition from Posse Comitatus, Christian Identity groups and other conspiratorial organizations such as Liberty Lobby, while most conservatives struggled to identify with groups on the far right. The Society faithfully continued to campaign on issues ranging from sex education to environmentalism, and from affirmative action to the Panama Canal Treaties, but it could rarely find an entrance into the public debate or attract enough attention to regain significant political leverage.
While the Republican Party accommodated an increasingly resilient coalition of fiscal conservatives, adherents to the Christian Right and neoconservative supporters of an aggressive anticommunist foreign policy, growing social liberalism on other fronts as well as declining McCarthyism in American political culture rendered the Society increasingly marginalized.
It is not clear how the actual membership of the JBS has exactly evolved over the years, but it seems unlikely the Society has been able, either before or after Robert Welch’s death in 1985, to maintain the extent of its visibility, let alone expand it. A California JBS member and spokesman for the Society’s tax reform project TRIM (“Tax Reform Immediately”) in 1979 claimed there were an estimated 3,000 chapters nationwide “with 25-30 members each,” thus bringing its total to 80,000 or perhaps even 100,000 members. During the following election year, the retired Welch mentioned he expected most of what he estimated to be 50,000 members would support candidate Ronald Reagan for president. Only two years later, a spokesman placed national membership of somewhere “in excess of 40,000.” Observers of the right have questioned this and ADL-employed Harvey Schecter, who had been monitoring the JBS for over a decade, suggested a total following of 15,000 to 20,000 might be more realistic.
What is more, Schecter speculated the election of Reagan, a self-avowed conservative whose rise to the presidency had depended immensely on Christian conservatives as well as a wider electorate skeptical of the role of government, would hurt the Society even more than the election of Richard Nixon had, which proved correct. Whereas Nixon accepted and expanded several liberal programs and actively sought détente on the international scene, Reagan banked heavily on aggressive anti-communist rhetoric, anti-labor sentiment and populist backlash against civil rights programs.
Thus the new administration severely undercut the Birchers' unyielding claim that the federal government was still in the hands of collectivist conspirators and that Americans were still in need of alarmist groups like the John birch Society to safeguard against Communist subversion. When the Society started to criticize Reagan for compromising on taxation and government spending with a Democratic controlled Congress, or budged on his campaign promise to abolish the Department of Education, the Birch leadership remained unsure as to how fiercely Reagan should be criticized, leading to internal strife and a severe drop in subscriptions to its flagship magazine. Meanwhile, due to its emphasis on government infiltration and global Communist subversion, the JBS could not exploit the rise of Christian fundamentalism to the same extent as for example STOP ERA and the growing pro-life movement could. Finally, when during the George H.W. Bush Administration the Berlin Wall came crashing down and the Soviet
Then again, the Society simply proceeded to incorporate subsequent developments into its dualistic, Manichean program, and with modest success. The increased visibility of the United Nations in international conflicts such as the US-led Gulf War, as well as Bush's clarion call for a “New World Order” contributed heavily to renewed interest in and popularity of conspiratorial thought. Radio pundits, church leaders and even ambitious politicians recycled many of the long-standing cabal narratives, from mass-scale financial manipulation plots to alleged UN plans to invade and enslave the United States, all to
question the legitimacy and intent of the federal government. Transnational organizations and elite discussion groups ranging from the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group to even NAFTA and the European Union invited the suspicion of professional conspiracy theorists and anti-statists, leading to increased cynicism and sometimes even acts of violence such as Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City. Playing on such anxieties and sentiments, Berlet has speculated the Society - now operating from Joe McCarthy's birthplace Appleton, Wisconsin - might have seen its membership shoot up from under 20,000 to nearly 60,000 between 1988 and 1995.
More recently, the events surrounding and following the September 11th, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. have unleashed veritable waves of conspiratorial thought, often characterized by suspicions of treason within the American political elite and plans for an installment of a dictatorial “One World Government,” both central themes to Bircher logic. The subsequent “War on Terror” escalated by the George W. Bush Administration and subprime mortgage crisis only heightened and accelerated such tendencies and helped raise the profile of anti-statist protest groups and politicians, such as
Texan libertarian and Liberty Amendment supporter Ron Paul.
In her introduction to Wrapped in the Flag, Claire Conner argues how although the Society had lost much, if not most, of its clout by the time of the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, influential figures that had been active within the JBS, simply took their expertise and resources elsewhere, rather than disappear from the political landscape altogether. During those few years when Birchers could positively measure the scope of their impact on the political mainstream, they had been trained to organize small chapters, aggressively recruit members, effectively mount local campaigns, gather invaluable resources and politically pressurize their environment. Conner's own parents threw their weight behind local rightwing Catholic organizations to fight abortion, school prayer rulings, gay rights and the Equal Rights Amendment, alongside Phyllis Schlafly.
However, the most prominent examples are indubitably Charles and David Koch, sons of Fred Koch, the influential JBS Council member and confidant of Robert Welch. Known widely as the Koch Brothers, Charles and David inherited and expanded their father's industrial empire, amassing enormous wealth and channeling vast amounts of resources into a variety of right-wing causes. In 1974, Charles helped found the influential libertarian Cato Institute, which has played a significant role in conservative economic policy. Similarly, both have consistently supported the Heritage Foundation, which lobbies extensively for rightwing positions on social issues. Up to this day, the Koch Brothers are known to spend millions every year funding electoral campaigns and supporting right-wing, pro-business causes, ranging from the American Enterprise Institute to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
In recent years, both the Koch Brothers and the John Birch Society have attracted significantly more attention when put in connection with what has been dubbed the “Tea Party Movement,” a loosely connected series of protests grown partly out of the Ron Paul presidential campaign in 2007, as well as popular conservative resentment over the Bush Administration's TARP bailout package and the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008. The Tea Party's most prominent targets have included government spending, affirmative action, healthcare reform and even the validity of Obama's own birth certificate. Its impact has been virtually immediate, with the Republican Party recapturing the House of Representatives in 2010 in a sweeping landslide reminiscent of the 1994 “Gingrich Revolution.” As a result, congressional politics has been defined by gridlock, protracted battles over healthcare reform, immigration and fiscal matters. On a state level, “right-to-work” legislation and electoral reform, targeting organized labor and Democratic voter turnout have been launched by Republican legislatures, spurred on by Tea Party forces and a renewed right-wing climate. More recently, the refusal of Republican lawmakers to support the raising of the U.S. debt ceiling, again under pressure from Tea Party-esque fundamentalists, caused a 16-day government shutdown and spending freeze.
While political observers and scientists are still debating the validity of the Tea Party as an actual “grassroots” movement, similarities with the JBS abound. As Darren Mulloy observes, the Birchers can be seen as a “kind of bridge between the older Right of the 1940s and 1950s – including the McCarthyite Right – and the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s, and on into the Tea Party of the twenty-first century, to a time when ‘anti-government’ rhetoric and attitudes have become so central to American conservatism they almost seem to provide it with its sole reason for existence.”14 If the Tea Party thus can be seen as an extension or natural successor to the Birchism of Welch and his allies, historian Sean Wilentz seems to agree, as he explicitly traces back the conspiracism and alarmist anti-government rhetoric of key Tea Party figures such as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin to influential Birch authors, such as Mormon writer W. Cleon Skousen in Beck’s case, and obviously the Koch brothers taking up their father’s mantle.
The connection with business lobbyists is obvious. Charles and David Koch, sons of Birch insider Fred, remain the best example. Through their projects Freedom Works and Americans For Prosperity, the Koch Brothers have become the definition of right-wing “astroturfing” or the funding and coordinating of supposedly spontaneous grassroots protests. Tea Party manifestations and friendly political candidates, including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker during his 2012 recall election, continue to receive large contributions from organized business lobbies, who help steer the political mainstream rightward and in
opposition to government regulation, universal healthcare and progressive taxation.
Also, not unlike the Birchers of the 1960s, most of the controversy the Tea Party has been causing can be situated within the conservative camp. Since the 2010 midterms, Tea Party-backed candidates have threatened to oust more moderate Republicans in vicious primary contests. As a result, the more established leadership of the party has moved significantly to the right and intraparty tensions severely disrupted and encumbered the nomination process for the 2012 presidential elections, with Mitt Romney finally emerging against populist candidates such as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain, as well as libertarian Ron Paul. Only a few months ago, prominent Congressman Eric Cantor was surprisingly defeated by Tea Party-supported Dave Brat in the Virginia primary, an illustration of the schism between the GOP establishment and the fundamentalist insurgency on the right.
The rise of the Tea Party has again raised the profile of the Birchers, many of whom have joined Tea Party protests and organizations all over the country. In 2010, the JBS was even invited to the 2010 CPAC convention and the year after to its rival LPAC, a sign perhaps that the Birchers might be recovering their long lost political capital. In states like Michigan, local Birchers have even been working together with Tea Party organizations allied groups to ensure the passing of right-to-work legislation. Though it is unsure to what extent the Society itself will emerge as a visible and resilient force, it remains clear to see its message – or at least powerful remnants of it – continues to be carried forward into present American political culture.
See references.
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