Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.

 

17 August 2014

Meet the Flathead’s supporters of the John Birch Society

Sarah Palin, Ron Paul, and the ghost of Robert F. Welch, Jr., would have felt right at home. There, two booths south of the Flathead Democrats’ booth at the Northwest Montana Fair in Kalispell, was the John Birch Society, which from 1962 until 2008, when he died, National Review founder William F. Buckley had kept from tainting the conservative movement. In a book on Barry Goldwater he was writing, Buckley said “The wound we Palm Beach plotters delivered to the John Birch Society proved fatal over time.”

But with Buckley dead, and no conservative replacing him to keep the crackpots at bay, the JBS is back, drinking tea and riding higher all the time — and without a trace of shame for Robert Welch’s legacy. How boldly — and proudly — the Flathead JBS displayed the names of its local supporters, several of whom the cognoscenti will recognize instantly as tea party leaders and politicians.

That’s right. I took photographs, and now I’m publishing names.

Here are the names:

Flathead supporters of the John Birch Society

Robert Welch, Jr. — he thought Eisenhower was a communist

Welch was the driving force behind the creation of the JBS in 1958, and along with Fred Koch, whose sons are the tea party’s chief bankrollers, one of its 12 founders. He was, reported Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, able to detect more communists than any man alive:

Welch was a retired candy maker who created the Birch Society in 1958 to mobilize conservatives against what he saw as an imminent Communist takeover of the United States from within. Buckley himself had sounded similar alarms on behalf of red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy, but believed that Welch crossed into paranoia with his assertion that America’s government leaders — including President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and most members of the Supreme Court — were active Communist agents. Buckley was also distressed by other Birch claims: that Red Chinese armies were massing at the Mexican border to invade the U.S.; University of Chicago professors were plotting to deprive Americans of their rights to vote and hold property; and elite groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bildergbergers were seeking to merge the U.S. with the Soviet Union in a one-world socialist government. The Birch Society’s notion that those who doubted these theories thereby revealed themselves as Communist sympathizers struck Buckley as self-reinforcing lunacy.

Welch died in 1985, much to Buckley’s relief, I suspect. His successors were — are — less colorful and less zany. They fear Agenda 21, seem to think most Americans are unwitting socialists, and no doubt scan the skies for black helicopters coming to take good Christians to concentration camps. But so far I haven’t heard them claim that North Korean missile brigades are massing south of El Paso, preparing to vaporize Denver. That’s progress, faint though it is.

Birch flavored tea?

“The Tea Party is not,” Kabaservice notes,

…the modern-day counterpart of the Birch Society; it more resembles the broad and diffuse right-wing upheaval of the early 1960s of which the Birch movement was a part, and which culminated in the conservative seizure of the GOP presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater in 1964. Still, there are parallels between the two phenomena that ought to concern conservatives today.

Tea Partiers for the most part have policed their ranks to exclude overt racists and anti-Semites, but have trafficked in wild, Birch-flavored conspiracy theories, such as the claim that Christians are persecuted in America and that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Muslim socialist. Glenn Beck, while he was the Tea Party guru at Fox News, peddled the views of Welch and Birch fellow-traveler W. Cleon Skousen to an audience of millions. [Flathead Memo link to Skousen.]

Those similarities led a former research director for the Republican National Committee, David Welch (“no relation, thank heaven”), to write Where Have You Gone, Bill Buckley?

The modern-day Birchers are the Tea Party. By loudly espousing extreme rhetoric, yet holding untenable beliefs, they have run virtually unchallenged by the Republican leadership, aided by irresponsible radio talk-show hosts and right-wing pundits. While the Tea Party grew, respected moderate voices in the party were further pushed toward extinction. Republicans need a Buckley to bring us back.

Indeed the Republicans do. But now it will take an army of Buckleys to tamp down the outbreak of tea party intoxication and John Birch Fever. As Rachel Maddow observed, the JBS, no longer held down by Buckely’s boot on its shoulder, now sponsors major conservative events.

In the early 1960s, before being skewered with Buckley’s pen, the JBS was an object of derision, a fat target for folk musicians. Mary Brook wrote the Jack Ash Society, and the Chad Mitchell Trio’s John Birch Society brought down the house. Below, the Mitchell Trio’s song performed on 6 February 2014 at Tufts University: