The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War

by D.J. Mulloy

"A Selection of the History Book Club"
As far as members of the hugely controversial John Birch Society were concerned, the Cold War revealed in stark clarity the loyalties and disloyalties of numerous important Americans, including Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Earl Warren. Founded in 1958 as a force for conservative political advocacy, the Society espoused the dangers of enemies foreign and domestic, including the Soviet Union, organizers of the US civil rights movement, and government officials who were deemed "soft" on communism in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Sound familiar? In "The World of the John Birch Society," author D. J. Mulloy reveals the tactics of the Society in a way they've never been understood before, allowing the reader to make the connections to contemporary American politics, up to and including the Tea Party. These tactics included organized dissemination of broad-based accusations and innuendo, political brinksmanship within the Republican Party, and frequent doomsday predictions regarding world events. At the heart of the organization was Robert Welch, a charismatic writer and organizer who is revealed to have been the lifeblood of the Society's efforts.

The Society has seen its influence recede from the high-water mark of 1970s, but the organization still exists today. Throughout "The World of the John Birch Society," the reader sees the very tenets and practices in play that make the contemporary Tea Party so effective on a local level. Indeed, without the John Birch Society paving the way, the Tea Party may have encountered a dramatically different political terrain on its path to power.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, American History

296 pages, Hardcover

First published June 27, 2014

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Occasionally apologetic telling of an insane fringe group that tends more towards fascism then the author was willing to admit and is foundational to the modern Republican party of Donald Trump and his enablers of today.

The author mentioned that he did not think of Birchers as fascist since they would have to advocate using the power of the government to punish their enemies in the same manner as President Obama did when he used the IRS to go after the Tea Party groups and other conservatives. That statement struck me as an anachronism and out of synch with today and made me realize this book was written in 2014 not 2020.

Weirdly, the author made several statements such as ‘the causes of the Watts riots are complicated and multiple reasons can explain them’, as the author was basically offering a defense for the Birchers’ beliefs. Sure, the author can muddle the facts by asserting multiple reasonable theories, but he needs to say something along the lines that ‘institutional injustice derived from systemic racial discrimination was a factor’ in the Watts riots which he did not.

The Birchers morphed into the Tea Party and their fascism is easily connected. Birchers and Trump do not like democracy and equality (primordial belief among fascist), they look inward and hate global over local and value the self-selected privileged class over all others, despise others who aren’t a member of their selected in-group and so on. Sure, this book was written in 2014 but John McCain had already picked Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate, or people would say to McCain ‘I can’t trust Obama because he’s a Muslim’. Fox News and their hate was spewing out their fascist first principles even in those days.

The author specifically claims the Birchers weren’t fascist, perhaps they weren’t, but they definitely have similarities that are worth mentioning in order to understand what was going to happen. The Birchers’ bête noir was communism and that gave them justification in their twisted world-view to hate fairness across society; Trump’s boogey man and justification for hating in his and his followers twisted minds is the other, but both Trump and Birchers hate globalism and are anti-humanist in all their thinking and despise equality across social groups except for their own self-selected social group. History only rhymes, it never repeats because the hate and their enablers change over time and it is for historians to connect the dots by looking at the past and understanding the present through that prism.

The author does get the fact the fringe groups need conspiracy theories to sustain themselves and an alternate reality with ‘false facts’ is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the insane fringe, but the thing the author is missing sometimes the ‘fringe’ can morph into 48% of the country as it did when it voted for ‘climate change is a Chinese hoax’, or having a Sarah Palin one heart beat away from the presidency.

I wouldn’t really recommend this book. The author’s apologia towards the despicable Birchers seemed misplaced. Only a racist used the argument of state rights for not allowing a black student to go to Ole Miss, or against civil rights, or against voting rights, and maybe as the author states the anti-Viet Nam War movement didn’t make a difference but the Birchers were still wrong to support the war, or not support integration, or not support voting rights for all, or not support civil rights, or to systematically make anyone not in their self-selected privileged group an other.

[Michael Samerdyke · Rating 2 out of 5]

A puzzling and disappointing book.

I had always considered the John Birch Society to be an aftershock of the McCarthy era. They were a group famous for insisting that President Eisenhower was really a Communist.

"World of the John Birch Society" covers the years 1958 to 1968, when, the author argues, the JBS was at its peak of influence. The first three chapters of the book take a chronological approach. The last three take a thematic approach.

Part of the problem I had with the book was that while the grand overview of the era and the issues was handled well, once the book started dealing with the minutiae of the "Impeach Earl Warren" movement or the weird career of General Walker, it got bogged down in boring detail.

More serious, however, was the suspicion that the book was attempting to be an apology for the John Birch Society. Several times, Mulloy makes the argument that the JBS was not anti-Semitic or racist (the opposition to Warren and the Civil Rights movement was based on fear of Supreme Court overreach.) He also goes on to argue that anti-Communist language used by the JBS isn't that different from language used in George Kennan's "Long Telegram" or Paul Nitze's NSC-68. Mulloy also argues that some of the statements of the JBS' Founder, Richard Welch, might not have been meant to be taken seriously.

Then, in the last pages of the book, Mulloy mentions that membership in the JBS fell dramatically when Welch began talking about how the Communists themselves were merely pawns of a bigger conspiracy, which he called "the Insiders," and implied they were the descendants of the Illuminati, a secret society held responsible (by some) for the French Revolution. No wonder Mulloy holds this back to the very end of his book and skims over it, because it knocks his argument about the JBS and Welch as being not quite so "Kooky" as often depicted into a cocked hat.

I also found it odd that in a book that argues that Welch's founding of the JBS was based on his belief that Robert Taft and Joe McCarthy had been betrayed by Eisenhower and the Republican establishment, the author never mentioned "The Hidden-Hand Presidency," a book about the "devious" side of Eisenhower.

Basically, while Mulloy argues for the importance of the JBS in understanding the Sixties, I was not convinced. I see them as a symptom of that troubled time, something that was used (and discarded) rather than makers of events.

[Stewart Sternberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love well researched and we'll documented academic works on history. The John Birch Society foreshadowed Q and the current right wing extremists, although the current group is far more dangerous.

Reading this I was struck by the society's obsession with conspiracy and with its need to identify a ruling elite of Communists they referred to as the Insiders. The name conjured up the current term The Deep State.

[Julian Douglass · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very detailed account of not only the society, but of the world that the society presided in and the way that many members of the Birch Society was and was not able to cope with the times. Mr. Mulloy does a good job of not completely smearing the society, while offering a good does of criticism and skepticism towards the members, especially its founder Robert Welch. Mr. Mulloy also paints the society as a test dummy for many of the late 20th/early 21st century conservative movements and figures. He also points out many modern conservative movements learned from the mistakes of the society to make the movement a major political force. Good history, and as Mr. Muuloy point out in the introduction of his book, hopefully more histories of the society can be written.

[Victor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid, if overly sympathetic, history of the John Birch Society's birth and initial flowering in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The author clearly set himself the unstated goal of delivering a history of the society that emphasizes its influence on and continuity with the slightly more mainstream conservative movement in the late 1900s in America exemplified by the National Review/Ronald Reagan wing that dominated American politics 20 years after the Birch Society's heyday, and by that metric, he has succeeded reasonably well.

However, a decade post-Tea Party and post-Trump, a deeper history and analysis of the Birch Society's deeper dive into conspiratorialism after the 1964 election deserves much more attention than it receives here. The book suffers somewhat well from an odd structure that begins as a narrative history stripped of most descriptions of what the JBS actually did (as opposed to what they thought, wrote, or had thought of them) before turning halfway through to an analysis of JBS members activities and reactions to various then-contemporary events, including, mystifyingly, much discussion of Society activity, writing, and publishing for years the earlier narrative history doesn't cover.

Despite this, the book is entertaining and somewhat revelatory, pointing out repeatedly the conspiratorial worldview inherent in contemporary American conservatism and its roots in pre-WW2 antisemitism.

[Kimba Tichenor · Rating 2 out of 5]

D.J. Mulloy, the author of The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War, published in 2015, relies largely on published primary sources to make the argument that the conspiracy theories of the JBS did not differ significantly from those being advanced in mainstream circles at that time. Thus, “far from being consigned to the margins of American life or American politics, to enter the world of the John Birch Society in the years between 1958 and 1968 was to find oneself at the very heart of some of the most telling, significant, and consequential events, issues, and controversies of the period” —most notably, the perceived threat posed by domestic agents of communism.” This alleged threat found expression in charges that the US Civil Rights movement was communist controlled, that communist agents had infiltrated the American government, and that liberal institutions of higher education were indoctrinating young people in communist ideology. Certainly, there is good reason for claiming that during the early Cold War years, conspiracy theories abounded in mainstream discourse and media. Movies, such as the 1962 The Manchurian Candidate (based on the 1959 novel by Richard Condon) and J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with proving that the Civil Rights movement was a communist project certainly attest to the role of conspiracy theories in mainstream politics of that era. In fact, Mulloy’s argument that the JBS played an integral role in early Cold War politics was not new at the time of the book’s publication—a fact noted by several historians, including Tim Lacy, an instructor at Loyola University in Chicago, and Alex Goodall, a senior lecturer at the University of York. However, what distinguishes this work from other works that have convincingly made this argument is its sympathetic portrayal of the JBS, which results in the author significantly downplaying, among other things, the society’s hostility to racial equality, the harm done to individuals accused falsely of being communist agents, and the violent actions of some of the group’s members, including the creation of a paramilitary group in 1961 by Robert Depugh which was stock piling weapons so that it could serve as the nation’s “last line of defense” against communism.

In discussing the society’s views on the Civil Rights Movement, the author distinguishes between the early 1960s in which he claims its rejection of the Civil Rights Movement was motivated by its belief in state’s rights and its fear that the movement had been infiltrated by communist, rather than racism, and the society’s later “thinly disguised” racist rhetoric. Whether one accepts this distinction or no, one cannot help but notice that the author provides multiple quotes to illustrate the former and none to illustrate the transition to the latter. Moreover, as with author’s treatment of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, he never addresses how the two men’s position that civil rights should be left to the states meant leaving virulent segregationist like Alabama Governor George Wallace and Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett in control, thereby endangering the lives of African Americans who sought equal rights. Nor does the author entertain the possibility that Welch’s policy of barring known KKK members from the JBS was motivated less by the founder’s anti-racist sentiments than by his desire to improve the organization’s image, which already in the 1950s was being debunked by its critics for its fantastical views. Interestingly, this willingness to give the JBS the benefit of the doubt does not extend to liberals, such as Walter Reuther, who in December 1961 wrote a memorandum in which he urged action be taken against far-right groups, such as JBS, to reduce their influence on American political culture and on the military. The proposed action included adding right-wing extremists to the “subversive” list and investigating the tax-exempt status of such organizations. Instead, the author describes such actions as a case of targeting political opponents, rather than perhaps the result of a genuine concern about the potential of such groups to become violent, and in fact, two months after the memos release a connection was found between the JBS and a group that bombed the homes of two clergymen as they were taking part in a panel discussion entitled “The Extreme Right: A Threat to Democracy.”

Although less dramatic than the above oversights, the author’s decision to perpetuate a disingenuous statement about Hilary Clinton’s early association with the Birch Society as proof that many mainstream conservatives were affiliated with the organization is hardly commendable. The author writes, “What’s more, to focus only on ‘extremists’ who once belonged to the Society, is to ignore the many more mainstream conservatives and thousands of ordinary Americans who also joined or were equally associated with the Society at one point or another (Hillary Clinton as a ‘Goldwater Girl,’ after all.)” While it is true that Hillary Clinton, whose father was a die-hard Republican, endorsed her father’s support of conservatism as a sixteen-year-old in 1964—a fact that Clinton acknowledges in her biography Living History—she had abandoned right-wing ideology by the time she could vote in a presidential election. This detail the author omits. To cite the politics of a 16-year-old minor as proof that mainstream conservatives at some time embraced JBS is questionable at best, given most children do not develop political views independent of those of their parents until adulthood. At worst, it is a deliberate effort to taint the political reputation of a well-known liberal.

The author never explains the distinction which he is drawing between right-wing extremism and mainstream conservatism. Is it an ideological difference? And if so, is it one of degree or one of kind? Or is the distinction based on success, that is, number of supporters? This failure to take a clear stance leads to it being unclear if the author considers individuals such as Barry Goldwater who advocated the use of low-yield nuclear weapons to defoliate the forests of Vietnam to be extremist. In fact, he seems to suggest instead that charges of conspiracism made against Goldwater were mere political ploys by the left to discredit him.

Finally, the text includes some statements for which the author provides no citations. For example, the author claims that thanks to Gerald Ford who acted as the FBI’s secret informant on the Warren Commission, the FBI was able to hide from the commission that it had known of Oswald’s propensity for political violence and that he worked at the Texas School Book Repository along the route of President Kennedy’s motorcade. However, he provides no citation or proof for this claim.

For these reasons, I cannot recommend this book.

[Jonathan Greer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clearly a great deal of research was accomplished by Mulloy in his work on this book. He shows his work and I'm grateful for it, but I found the text to be overlong and in need of editing. This is a fascinating snapshot of a group that seemed fringe in the late 50s, early 60s, but its influence was not only felt in politics, especially in the 1964 Presidential Election, but beyond into modern day politics. I always find that great works of scholarship lead the reader to the bibliography to explore more, and Mulloy certainly unlocked my interest in learning more about William F. Buckley and those who shaped the modern-day conservative movement . Though Buckley was not part of the John Birch Society, it was fascinating to see conservative groups within the period working towards common goals and initiatives with broad perceptions on how to implement them. The history of the John Birch Society is important, especially when reading from the modern lens. Mulloy's work is thorough and full of depth, but I would have enjoyed the experience more if he had cut quite a few sections (footnotes were needed for repetitive examples and quotes), and perhaps worked on the thread that connects the JBS with modern groups like the Tea Party.

[Alex Frame · Rating 3 out of 5]

A conservative society formed in the late 1950s to combat the spread of communism gained the unfair label of a right wing extremist group.
Protecting the values America was founded on was their goal during a time of Soviet expansion.
It grew to be a force and was endorsed by presidential Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 and faded after his big defeat.
Such conservative beliefs are still part of American politics and were revived somewhat with the tea party and to a degree Trump but it remains a fringe part of the GOP.

[Chad Montabon · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a lot of the information I was looking for in this volume; the names and events that created the movement. I was also impressed with how well they presented the influence the Birchers had and where they failed to have the influence they desired.
I was surprised, considering the lasting impression left by the JBS, at how little sway they held in their own time and how short their period in the spotlight lasted.

[Brian S · Rating 3 out of 5]

In fairness, the substance of the subject matter is well researched and comprehensive, so you can expect to learn much about the JBS in this book. However, the monotone prose permits, even encourages, a wandering mind. I often resigned to just plowing through the current chapter in hopes that the next would bring relief. It did not.