John Birch Society

• 1. Introduction

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  The John Birch Society was founded on the 9th of December 1958, in Indianapolis, Indiana, at the end of a two-day meeting of just twelve people. A retired candy manufacturer named Robert W. Welch Jr. opened that session with a dire prediction: Americans had only a few years before their country would become four separate provinces in a worldwide Communist dominion ruled from the Kremlin. That warning set the tone for an organization that would, over the following decades, be condemned, ridiculed, nearly buried, and then quietly vindicated by the very political movement that once tried to destroy it. How did a group born in a room of twelve people come to be described as the intellectual seed bank of the American right? And who was John Birch, the man whose name it carries?

• 2. The Man Behind the Name

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  John Birch arrived in China in 1940 as a Baptist missionary, just as the Japanese invasion had turned the country into a landscape of suffering and chaos. He became a military intelligence officer under Brigadier General Claire Lee Chennault, the commander of the famous Flying Tigers. In April 1942, Birch helped Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle and members of his flight crew in the days after they bailed out of their B-25 bomber over Japanese-held territory following the Doolittle raid. Beginning in July 1942, Birch operated alone or alongside Nationalist Chinese soldiers deep in enemy territory, setting up radio intelligence networks and rescuing downed American pilots. He had two emergency aircraft runways built, and although he suffered from malaria, he refused furloughs.

  In 1945, Birch was promoted to captain and began working with the Office of Strategic Services, the U.S. wartime intelligence service. Nine days after the Japanese surrender, on the 24th of August 1945, Birch left by train with a small party that included two American soldiers, five Chinese officers, and two Korean interpreters. The group encountered several armed units of Chinese Communists. At a train station called Hwang Kao, Birch approached the local commander and, after refusing to surrender his sidearm, was beaten and shot. His body was bayonetted. The rest of his party were taken prisoner and later released. Birch was buried with military honors on a hillside outside Suzhou, in eastern China. Welch, who wrote the first book about Birch in 1954, believed that the U.S. government had deliberately suppressed the truth about the killing to avoid embarrassing its wartime Communist allies.

• 3. Founding and Inner Logic

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  The founding members gathered around Welch in Indianapolis included Fred C. Koch, the founder of Koch Industries, and Harry Lynde Bradley, co-founder of the Allen Bradley Company. Koch became one of the organization's primary financial supporters, and according to investigative journalist Jane Mayer, his sons David and Charles Koch were also members, though both left before the 1970s. A transcript of Welch's two-day founding presentation was published as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, and every new prospective member received a copy.

  Welch argued that both the U.S. and Soviet governments were controlled by the same conspiratorial group of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. He saw modern American liberals as secret Communist traitors providing cover for what he called a gradual process of collectivism. The organization he built was structured, in his own words, to be under completely authoritative control at all levels. Each local chapter held ten to twenty members led by a person appointed from above; chapters were expected to meet twice a month, and any chapter that grew larger than twenty members was required to split.

  From its earliest days the JBS kept its membership numbers private, but one of its first public acts, a campaign called Get US Out! demanding American withdrawal from the United Nations, claimed in 1959 that the real nature of the UN was to build a one world government. Welch also launched a magazine, One Man's Opinion, in 1956, which was later renamed American Opinion. A 1965 publication called The Review of the News was intended for a broader readership. The two eventually merged in 1985 into The New American, a biweekly magazine that the society still publishes.

• 4. The Eisenhower Accusation

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  For the first eighteen months of its existence, the JBS operated in relative obscurity. That ended in July 1960, when the Chicago Daily News published an in-depth story including Welch's claim that President Eisenhower was a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy. Welch had first made the allegation in writing in 1954, asking whether Eisenhower might be simply a tool of the Communists and adding that it was difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason. That controversial paragraph was removed before the final publication of his document, known as The Politician.

  Before the accusation became widely known, the JBS had already used Eisenhower's 1959 summit with Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev to build momentum. Through a front group called the Committee Against Summit Entanglements, or CASE, it raised money from wealthy business figures to purchase advertisements in The New York Times and over a hundred other newspapers, circulated a petition, and sent hundreds of thousands of postcards. The campaign succeeded in pulling Birch talking points into broader conservative discourse.

  William F. Buckley, who had once been a friend and admirer of Welch, called the Eisenhower accusations paranoid and idiotic libels. Buckley tried and failed to purge Welch from the society, and from that point became the leading organizer of anti-Bircher conservatives. His biographer John B. Judis wrote that Buckley worried a rapidly growing JBS could push the right toward an ugly, even Fascist turn. Despite Buckley's opposition, the JBS remained a force. Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower's own Secretary of Agriculture and later the 13th president of the LDS Church, privately supported Welch's booklet, writing a letter to FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover questioning how Eisenhower could be so effectively used as a tool to serve the Communist conspiracy. Hoover eventually directed his staff to lie to Benson to avoid meeting with him about the matter.

• 5. Peak Membership and Controversy

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  By March 1961, the JBS had between 60,000 and 100,000 members, according to Welch himself, along with a paid staff of 28 people in the home office and roughly 30 fully compensated field coordinators. Membership peaked in 1965 or 1966 at an estimated 100,000. At its height, the society operated 400 American Opinion bookstores across the country selling its literature.

  The society's campaigns during the 1960s were extraordinarily specific. A 1961 drive offering $2,300 in prizes to college students for essays on impeaching Chief Justice Earl Warren drew wide attention. A single 1964 campaign urging Xerox to drop its sponsorship of UN-friendly television programs produced 51,279 letters from 12,785 separate individuals. One campaign against a second superpower summit generated over 600,000 postcards and letters.

  The JBS opposed the 1960s civil rights movement, claiming it had been deliberately created by Communists over more than forty years. In the latter half of 1965, the society distributed a flyer titled What's Wrong With Civil Rights? as a newspaper advertisement. It believed the ultimate aim of the movement was the creation of what it called a Soviet Negro Republic in the southeastern United States, and it opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the grounds that it violated the Tenth Amendment. Philosopher Ayn Rand, in a 1964 Playboy interview, dismissed the society as futile, arguing that no country can be destroyed by a mere conspiracy and can only be destroyed by ideas. In 1963, a California Senate subcommittee investigating the JBS found no evidence it was a secret, fascist, subversive, un-American, or antisemitic organization. Nonetheless, the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League documented that antisemitic and racist elements had existed within the membership; several individuals, including founding member Revilo P. Oliver, a University of Illinois professor, were later expelled.

• 6. Legal Battles and Decline

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  By 1976, the JBS had 90,000 members, 240 paid staffers, and a seven-million-dollar annual budget, according to a paper written by Charles Koch. That peak was followed by a prolonged decline. Welch died in 1985 at age 85, and the Cold War ended in 1991, removing the organizing principle around which the society had built its entire identity. By the mid-1990s, membership had fallen to an estimated 15,000 to 20,000.

  The 1970s brought the organization into the U.S. Supreme Court on a libel case that reshaped American media law. JBS's magazine American Opinion had accused a Chicago lawyer named Elmer Gertz, who was representing the family of a young man killed by a police officer, of being part of a Communist conspiracy. Gertz sued for libel. The resulting case, Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., produced a landmark ruling: a private figure does not need to prove actual malice to recover actual damages from a media defendant, though a public figure does. The court ordered a retrial in which Gertz prevailed.

  During the same decade, the society ran a prominent campaign promoting laetrile as a cancer cure. A 1977 review in The New York Times found JBS and other far-right groups involved in pro-laetrile campaigns in at least nine states, and virtually all officers of the leading pro-laetrile group were JBS members. Congressman Larry McDonald, who would later become the society's chairman, was among them. McDonald was killed in 1983 when the Soviet Union shot down airliner KAL 007. The society's national office eventually consolidated in Appleton, Wisconsin, the birthplace of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

• 7. Resurgence and the Conservative Mainstream

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  The JBS was a co-sponsor of the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference, ending decades of distance from the mainstream conservative movement. It returned to CPAC in 2023 and 2024. A 2017 Politico article described the group's growing activity in Texas, where it reported a resurgence in membership. In July 2021, the Republican central committees of Kootenai County and Benewah County in Idaho unanimously approved resolutions calling the JBS a valuable organization dedicated to restoring the Republic. Idaho's Republican Party later elected a JBS member, Dorothy Moon, as state chair in July 2022.

  Donald Trump's 2016 election accelerated the reassessment. Roger Stone said that Trump's father Fred Trump was a financier of the JBS and a personal friend of Welch. Former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney spoke at the JBS's National Council dinner shortly before joining the Trump administration. Former Congressman Ron Paul celebrated the society's work in his keynote speech at its 50th anniversary event in 2008. The keynote speaker at the 60th anniversary was Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Former JBS CEO Arthur R. Thompson stated simply: the bulk of Trump's campaign was Birch.

  Professor Matthew Dallek wrote that the GOP has largely replaced the ideological tenets of Reaganism with a worldview inherited from the John Birch Society. Scholar D. J. Mulloy wrote in 2014 that the JBS served as a kind of bridge between the McCarthyite Old Right of the 1940s-50s, the New Right of the 1970s-80s, and the Tea Party right of the 21st century. Professor John Kenneth White argued, noting actions taken by the second Trump administration, that Trump's second term has brought about the final victory of the John Birch Society. Senator Mike Lee, when introducing legislation to withdraw the U.S. from the United Nations, used some of the same arguments the JBS first employed. The society's model resolutions against UN Agenda 21, adopted word-for-word by the Tennessee House of Representatives in 2012, stand as perhaps the clearest measure of how far its language had traveled from the fringe.

• 8. In the Culture

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  Pete Seeger lampooned the society with a song called The Jack Ash Society, recorded on his 1961 Folkways Records album Gazette Vol. 2. The title is a pun: it swaps one type of tree (birch) for another (ash), while sounding like the word jackass.

  Bob Dylan recorded Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues in 1962, mocking the society's tendency to find Communist conspiracies everywhere. When Dylan attempted to perform it on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1963, CBS's Standards and Practices department blocked it, fearing that lyrics comparing the society's views to those of Adolf Hitler could trigger a defamation lawsuit. Dylan refused to perform a substitute song and walked away; the story drew widespread media attention, and Sullivan publicly denounced the network's decision.

  The 1964 film Dr. Strangelove includes a U.S. Air Force general who claims water fluoridation would sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids as part of a Communist conspiracy, a direct parody of positions the JBS actually held. Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip collected its own JBS satire in The Jack Acid Society Black Book in 1962. The Chad Mitchell Trio recorded a satirical song simply titled The John Birch Society in 1962, which reached number 99 on the Billboard Hot 100. When jazz trumpeter John Birks Dizzy Gillespie launched a mock presidential campaign in 1963, his fans created a John Birks Society in his honor. The 2020 miniseries Mrs. America includes a subplot in episode 4 in which Betty Friedan objects to Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign accepting funds from the JBS, a reminder that the society's opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment was not merely rhetorical. JBS played a role, on par with Schlafly herself, in stopping the ERA's ratification during the 1970s.