Bircher Blues

C onservatives have long understood that nothing new is ever truly new. Old ideas and old movements never truly disappear, and no victory is ever truly permanent. As the United States grapples with radicalism on both sides of the aisle, it may seem tempting to think this moment is uniquely bad. But the history of American society is riddled with the husks of extremist movements. Matthew Dallek, historian and professor at George Washington University, writes a timeline of one such movement in Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.

In only 288 well-written pages, Birchers captures in great detail the rise, fall, and resurrection of the John Birch Society (JBS), a radical right-wing group that was a focal point of American politics in the 1960s. It skillfully fleshes out the relationship between the society at its zenith and the contemporary players in American politics. In his effort to portray the society’s effects on the American Right, however, Dallek obfuscates or ignores the serious conflicts between the JBS and other conservative groups (including National Review under William F. Buckley Jr). As the book moves past the heyday of the JBS, Dallek’s attempted connections between the group’s ideas and contemporary politics grow tenuous. But it still provides valuable insight into the heritage of the contemporary Right’s more-extreme elements.

Birchers begins with an in-depth account of the creation of the John Birch Society, and of Robert Welch, its founder. With what Dallek describes as the “mindset of a crusader,” Welch set out to forge a coalition of like-minded folk to fight against what he saw as corruption and betrayal from American leadership in the face of the Communist threat. Dallek shows how Welch came to hold his radical, often conspiratorial views, including his infamous declaration that President Eisenhower was a Communist plant. Composed of fellow businessmen, the initial meeting of what would become the JBS was, in Dallek’s estimation, a smashing success on Welch’s part. Dallek’s description of the group’s founding board is apt and sets the stage for the rest of the narrative. As he tells it, its members were united by their extensive resources, shared distrust of the New Deal, and rage at the seeming fecklessness of the U.S. establishment against the “Armageddon that was closing in on the United States.”

Dallek continues with a familiar description of the complex interplay between the John Birch Society and the mainstream media. Birchers outlines how early in the group’s history it actively tried to stay out of the limelight. Afraid of infiltration and worried about the way its views would be framed by a predominantly liberal media, the JBS maintained a low profile in its early years. As Dallek notes, however, the radical tendencies of Welch and the group’s fringe members made this untenable. The society’s demand for the impeachment of Supreme Court justice Earl Warren and the publication of Welch’s conspiracies surrounding Eisenhower helped give it nationwide infamy, making it seem to contemporary society both ridiculous and dangerous.

But the John Birch Society in its heyday was more than just a national-level attention-getter. Much of the organization’s power derived from its more workaday functions. Dallek painstakingly describes the group’s local, decentralized nature. Implicitly alluding to contemporary struggles, Dallek uses the Birchers’ fights for control of school boards to highlight the zeal with which they pursued their political goals. Women played a key role in such activities. Derisively labeled “little old ladies in tennis shoes” by the California attorney general’s office in 1961, female JBS members had an outsized influence in local chapters, according to Dallek. In 1965, at the peak of the group’s power, they constituted nearly half of all membership. Dallek’s emphasis on the role women played in the group showcases how, despite its reactionary politics, the JBS was shaped by contemporary circumstances and by modern ideas about the role of women in society. He specifically credits these women for having “helped launch a culture war that reverberates to this day.”

Though detailed and mostly evenhanded, Birchers takes some unwarranted potshots at the non-Bircher Right. Dallek dramatically understates the role William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review played in exorcising the John Birch Society from the channels of legitimate discourse. He accuses movement conservatives of mythologizing Buckley’s position as arbiter of the movement. But the implication that Buckley and NR failed to gatekeep the JBS, or that their attempts were ineffectual and tardy, is both inaccurate and unfair. As Dallek himself notes, Buckley published a number of editorials in 1961 and 1962 criticizing Robert Welch for his extravagant conspiracy theories. Dallek fails to mention that in 1965 Buckley continued his crusade against Bircherism through another series of columns condemning the JBS as a whole. Without Buckley’s actions, there is no telling how influential Welch would have become in the conservative movement post-1964. There is no myth to what Buckley and NR did in cordoning off Welch and his organization from the movement. It was one of Buckley’s best moments, and it nearly cost the magazine everything when many readers revolted. As Alvin Felzenberg noted last April in response to Dallek’s comments:

Buckley emerged from the controversy having assured his place as “tablet keeper” of the conservative movement, a role to which he had long aspired. It does his labors a disservice to belittle them as mere “fence-walking.”

As Birchers leaves the 1960s and moves into the decline of the John Birch Society, the connections Dallek attempts to make between the organization and the conservative movement writ large grow strained. There is much discussion of how the various policy points of Reaganite conservatism show JBS influence, but the conflation Dallek makes here between traditional conservative policy and the radicalism of Welch’s group does a disservice to the distinct differences that existed between the Reagan model and the Birchers. It is true, as Birchers details, that there were overlaps in personnel between the JBS of the late 1960s and 1970s and the conservative advocacy groups that had sprung up by the time Ronald Reagan was elected president. There’s also something to the book’s argument that Welch’s and the John Birch Society’s single-issue activism became a powerful tool used by later, more-respectable conservative groups to mobilize support and advance their causes. Yet Dallek’s correlation of the now-conventional organizational tactics the Birchers pioneered with the conspiratorial beliefs that Welch and his acolytes espoused blurs the lines between traditional conservatism and Bircherism. Dallek believes those lines were blurring on their own, but that he feels the need to engage in additional, duplicitous blurring of his own undercuts his case.

The comparison Birchers makes between the John Birch Society and Donald Trump’s rise to dominance in right-wing politics is much more plausible. The fringe that Trump helped empower, and that helped empower him (though it did not account for the entirety of his support, and still doesn’t), drew from a conspiratorial energy similar to that which drove Robert Welch to form the JBS. These reactionaries both emerged after periods of massive social and economic upheaval, too; the JBS in post–World War II America and the Trump movement in the aftermath of two costly Middle Eastern wars and a historic recession. Dallek shows undeniable parallels between the Trump movement and the John Birch Society at its peak. Buckleyite conservatives can learn important lessons from that comparison.

Matthew Dallek set out to chronicle a group whose actions cast a long shadow over the 1960s, a shadow Dallek believes can still be seen today. He has a strong case, albeit a flawed one, given the failure of Birchers to capture fully the conflict between Buckleyite conservatism and the JBS, and its subtle conflations of traditional conservative beliefs and tactics with the radicalism that characterized Robert Welch and his followers. Readers who remain mindful of these flaws can still profit from the well-researched work, whose details lay out a society worth remembering, and a history that is relevant for today.