Matthew Dallek’s third book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right could have been subtitled “This is How We Got Here.” It’s an extensively well-researched and timely book about one of the most important far-right groups of the past 100 years in America. Oddly enough, the Birchers don’t make it into much of the conversation about modern far-right extremism, even though the group’s messaging of hate and conspiracy form its backbone.
Rightwing broadcaster Alex Jones regularly cites the fact that his father was a Bircher as one of the reasons he does what he does and believes the wild conspiracies that he professes. Much of the conspiracy culture that exists on the Internet today has its basis in Bircher ideas from the 1950s and 1960s. The books that the Birchers published and distributed in their hundreds of bookstores across the country, such as None Dare Call it Treason, which argued that the reason America was “losing” the Cold War was because of communist elites in government and Hollywood.
The paranoia that there was a dirty commie lurking behind every door, on every movie set, in every government office (even President Eisenhower was not above being accused) is not much different from former president Donald Trump’s “deep state.” The purpose is the same—to build distrust in anyone, including your neighbors and family members, outside of your circle of fellow Birchers or MAGA members.
Q: What is the John Birch Society?
Matthew Dallek: It was a group of, at its peak, about 60,000 to 100,000 Americans in chapters all over the country that said [they were] fighting communism within their communities, within the United States. Its leader, Robert Welch, a former candy manufacturer, famously had this conspiracy theory that Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the communist conspiracy.
Q: Who was Robert Welch, the man that started the Birchers?
Dallek: Welch was basically a salesman. And he was a pretty good salesman. He did well. He worked for his brother’s candy firm, and created Sugar Daddy. These were popular candies in the 1940s and 1950s. And they made those candies and Welch was also a member of the National Association of Manufacturers, the leading industrial lobbying group. He was very conspiratorial and became a hard-line anti-communist.
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[After World War II], he looks at Western Europe, America’s allies, and he thinks that Britain, for example, is becoming socialistic. He sees the New Deal also as a giant communistic undertaking inside the United States. And so, from his perch in the National Association of Manufacturers, he gives a lot of speeches and writes all these books about communism inside the United States and about the communist conspiracy.
The Politician is where he lodges this charge that Eisenhower is a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy. And Welch, around 1957, decides he’s going to retire from the business world. He had made his money and he’s going to go into full-time anti-communist proselytizing.
The basic idea behind the Birch Society is that, even though he didn’t put it this way explicitly, the Republican Party is complicit in the conspiracy because [Wisconsin Senator] Joe McCarthy and the Senator from Ohio, Bob Taft, two of Welch’s heroes, had been sidelined or maybe even killed by the communists. And there was really very little hope within the two-party system. And so the goal of the John Birch Society was to educate the masses, educate the American public about the dire nature of the internal communist threat.
Q: Who was the John Birch behind the group’s name?
Dallek: Birch was an evangelical-turned-warrior. He was an U.S. Army intelligence officer in World War II, served in China, and he became a martyr to a lot of hardline anti-communists because he was killed by Mao’s Communist forces ten days after the end of the war.
There’s a whole kind of back story to how the Birch Society becomes named after John Birch. But basically Robert Welch, the candy man, actually wrote the first biography of John Birch called The Life of John Birch in the mid-1950s. And the idea of martyrdom comes not just because he was killed by communists in China [according to Welch], making him the first victim of World War III, the State Department and the American government covered up this crime. This heinous act was hidden by communist sympathizers within our own government.
Q: Did the Birchers ever push for their own political party?
Dallek: There was talk among Birchers about forming a third party, and they convened on that front. Most Birchers were not fans of Richard Nixon in 1960 during his presidential campaign. They kind of loathed Nixon, and associated him with Eisenhower. But Birchers in the early sixties supported a lot of hardline Republicans.
Some of them ran for office themselves as Republicans, and they supported Joe Schell, a California assemblyman who challenged Richard Nixon in the 1962 California governor’s election. Most famously, of course, many Birchers loved Barry Goldwater [the Republican candidate for President in 1964]. There was certainly a period of time when Birchers made common cause in some instances, or had a more uneasy relationship, with Republican leaders.
But in 1968, a lot of them supported George Wallace’s American Independent Party candidacy [for President]. And in 1972, two Birchers—John Schmitz, a former member of Congress, and Tom Anderson—ran for President on a third party ticket, and got about a million votes. So you get a sense, that the Birchers never found a totally comfortable home inside the two party system; although, as I argue in the book, their successors were savvier and did find more of a home.
Q: The founders of the Birch Society were the wealthy, the newspaper publishers, business magnates that had power and influence already, correct?
Dallek: You have to ask “what were they trying to achieve?” I think that a lot of Birchers realized that ultimately, even though the two-party system was [in their eyes] communistic and corrupt, they would at some point have to go through it to achieve power.
But you're right. They had a lot of money, and a lot of the individuals associated with it were rich. They could be influential on their own. And the reality, too, was that some of these founders, like a guy named Bill Grede, who was from Wisconsin, actually supported Joe McCarthy in Wisconsin in the 1950s, but he also backed Dwight Eisenhower.
They’re establishment figures in the world's most dynamic economy. But they also see themselves as dissidents rebelling against the dominant trends in American life.
They’re establishment figures in the world's most dynamic economy. But they also see themselves as dissidents rebelling against the dominant trends in American life.
Q: It’s fascinating that their influence can be found everywhere in modern conservatism, down to the “socialism sucks” t-shirts sold at Turning Point USA, but they constantly will be claiming that “No, we're on the outside.”
Dallek: That’s one of the puzzles in the book that I was really interested in, and I’m not sure I fully put it together. This guy Grede whom I mentioned a minute ago, he was a leader of the YMCA and the Milwaukee Sentinel’s Man of the Year.
You don’t get more mainstream and establishment than that. And yet their mindset was to see the trajectory of American life going against them for decades. The Progressive Era and Woodrow Wilson’s interventions overseas; World Wars I and II; and the New Deal, of course. It was this idea that these political leaders and elites in the media and universities have fundamentally corrupted the Constitution.
And this was true of social issues as well. After Brown v. Board of Education, they had a campaign to impeach [U.S. Supreme Court Justice] Earl Warren. Well, what was that about? The Warren Court had banned prayer in school, and desegregation gave rights to defendants. This was all quite offensive to Birchers and to their beliefs and their conception of what freedom means and what the Constitution says about it.
Q: In a lot of ways the Birch Society gave the people who normally would not be in the Klan a more political and respectable outlet.
Dallek: The Birchers, and Welch himself, very explicitly said we want really respectable people. Welch called them at one point “A-1 men.” And they wanted people who thought the way they did. They didn’t want dissidents in their ranks.
Members were upwardly mobile. They were doctors and publishers and novelists and a dentist. But at the same time, in the context of the 1960s, even though the Birchers were not the KKK or the White Citizens Council, they did become branded in much of popular culture in American life as extremists. The Birchers attracted a lot of Americans, but they also rarely got above, I think 3 or 4 percent in the Gallup polls. And by the early 1970s, [“Bircher”] was kind of an epithet.
Q: What was their name recognition? If you walked up to a random person on the street in 1965, would they have any idea what the John Birch Society was?
Dallek: A lot of people certainly knew the name. And they knew the name Robert Welch and the Birch Society because the Birch Society penetrated popular culture when the news broke that Welch had formed this new organization. [They knew] that it was secretive; it was maybe anti-democracy, perhaps it was even fascistic, and that Welch had called Eisenhower a communist agent in the secret book that he had written.
Welch went on Meet the Press twice in 1961 and 1964. Birchers had bookstores all over the country; they were pretty ubiquitous and they were part of the culture. I think a lot of people, though, did not want to be associated with the Birchers at all because they saw them as nuts.
Most Birch members were actually not paranoid; they were rational and educated. But a lot of people saw them as crazy conspiracy theorists. They were in your face; they were picketing people like [President] John F. Kennedy and Earl Warren. The popular image was what Stanley Moss, the California attorney general, said in his [1961] report on the Birch Society, when he called them basically retired businessmen, former military generals, and little old ladies in tennis shoes. And that became a kind of popular phrase, a demeaning phrase.
Q: How well would Trump fit into the Birch Society?
Dallek: Roger Stone has claimed that Fred Trump, Donald’s father, was friends with Welch.
I don’t know if that’s true. But what I think is telling about it is it’s not that wild of a thing [to imagine], right? So if you were to say Donald Trump was a member of some far-right organization, even before he ran for President, it wouldn’t be like he’s sort of a familiar figure.
He’s arguably the greatest and most visible conspiracy theorist since Joe McCarthy in American politics. What I try to argue in the book is not to say “Trump’s a Bircher,” but to look at how some of these Bircher ideas, even after the organization lapsed, have their own afterlife and became popularized.
Q: Does the Birch Society still exist?
Dallek: The society still exists. They moved their headquarters from Belmont, Massachusetts, to Appleton, Wisconsin. That’s [also] the home of Joe McCarthy.
But the Birch Society as an organization has been overtaken by groups like the Tea Party, for example. A lot of the ideas, I argue, certainly overlap. They’re ideologically and stylistically [congruent].
Q: Do we get to where we are today without the Birch Society?
Dallek: The argument in the book is that the Birchers helped to establish this alternative political tradition on the far right in the 1960s. There are a lot of traditions and conspiracy theories, of course, that go back to the founding of the country. But I do think that Birch Society challenged some of the ideas and the approach of what I call the more mainstream right. The Birchers and the Ronald Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s of the world, they worked together or they were part of a coalition at times. But there was a lot of tension on a lot of core issues, and they moved in different directions.
The Birchers punched above their weight. They carried an outsized impact and, honestly, a lot of their ideas in books like None Dare Call It Conspiracy and None Dare Call It Treason were influential to people like Glenn Beck or Alex Jones. Would they have existed without the Birch Society? It’s possible, certainly. But the Birchers bequeathed to them an ideological legacy that they could appropriate and update for their own times. And, in that sense, it created a usable past for a lot of elements of the Tea Party and the MAGA movement. I don’t know that history would have quite gone the same way had the society never existed.