How the GOP Surrendered to Extremism

Even during the 1960s, the GOP’s response to the rise of the John Birch Society was not exactly a profile in courage. But while today few Republicans are “taking a stand against QAnon and drawing a clear line in the sand and doing it repeatedly,” at least back then “there was a real range of reactions among Republican elected officials” to the Birchers, Dallek told me. Named after a Christian missionary killed in China immediately after World War II, the society was founded by Robert Welch, a bright but paranoid candy salesman living in Boston. Welch spent the 1950s—the Red Scare era of Joseph McCarthy, the Hollywood blacklist, and the House Un-American Activities Committee—spinning elaborate conspiracy theories about communist infiltration in his many writings. (He once said that Dwight Eisenhower had been “consciously serving the communist conspiracy for all of his adult life.”)

In December 1958, Welch formally launched the John Birch Society with funding from 11 wealthy conservatives, including three past presidents of the National Association of Manufacturers, as the historian Rick Perlstein recounts in his energetic history of Goldwater and the conservative movement, Before the Storm.

Welch was nothing if not a salesman, and he steadily built a national organization. He was an innovator in his organizing strategies, particularly the creation of an alternative media world for his members (who probably numbered about 100,000 at the society’s peak). “They were extremely effective at flooding the zone with their own version of reality,” Dallek said. “They had a Birch Society bulletin, Welch’s monthly American Opinion magazine; they had pamphlets galore; they set up dozens of Birch ‘freedom stores,’ where they sold tracts and stickers and booklets. They weren’t the only ones, but they were certainly part of the innovation of this conservative far-right media.”

Read: Betraying your church—and your party

Through those channels, Welch mobilized his members to support an ill-fated attempt to impeach Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren (whom he called a communist dupe), oppose the fluoridation of water (which he considered a communist plot), and resist the civil-rights movement (which he labeled another communist plot). “They were very out in front on prayer in school, on science denialism. They were anti-globalism, anti-UN, and [pro–]local police—they were ardent defenders of police against these ‘communist’ rioters,” Dallek said.

From the start, Republicans were divided over Welch’s movement. They liked the volunteers and donors who emerged from his ranks, but many in the party recoiled from his wilder claims of treason, particularly those directed against Eisenhower. Some leading GOP moderates condemned the movement outright. Richard Nixon, who generally tried to bridge his party’s differences, forcefully criticized the group during his unsuccessful 1962 race for governor in California, where the group had the most support.