‘Alive and Well’ : Birchers See Rising Tide for Society

Whatever happened to the John Birch Society?

Charles R. Armour, the society’s western district governor and national public relations director, is traveling the country posing that question and telling listeners that the ultraconservative organization is “alive and well.”

Born in the Cold War days of the late 1950s, denounced by critics in the 1960s, then virtually ignored for years, the society is emerging from years of isolation and entering what it calls a “new era of increased activity, visibility and leadership.” Buoyed by a new chairman, Virginia industrialist A. Clifford Barker, 52, and what Birchers perceive as the nation’s shift toward a renewed regard for patriotism, the free-market system and individualism, the society is mounting a campaign for new members and increased influence.

Discerning a Trend

“What we’re hoping is that the conservative trend that started in the past few years can be made permanent,” Barker said in a recent interview from the society’s Belmont, Mass., headquarters.

Barker is pinning much of his hopes for nurturing both the group’s philosophy and membership on a new magazine, “The New American,” a weekly review of news and opinion that began publication in September. As public relations director, Armour suggests that the political climate for spreading the Birchers’ ultraconservative, nationalistic message is “better than it has been in a decade.”

How successful the Birchers are in their comeback campaign remains to be seen. But the society faces a problem pointed out by its members: Many people who might join have never heard of the organization or, if they have, they don’t know what it is.

Eye on the White House

Critical observers also question the society’s vitality, its ability to get the public to listen to its ideas, and its capacity to grow without a liberal President in the White House acting as a focus of right-wing criticism--although Birchers have been vocal in their criticism of President Reagan for what they charge is a gap between his rhetoric and his actions.

In pursuit of its goals, the society’s national staff of 55 to 60 full-time paid coordinators has been directed to recruit members, develop volunteer leaders for new chapters and inform individual Birchers how they can support the organization’s efforts.

Armour estimates that there are 50,000 Birchers in 3,500 local chapters across the nation--perhaps one-half of the society’s maximum strength and only a fraction of the million members that its late founder, Robert Welch, once hoped to have around the world. But Birch leaders minimize the “numbers game,” insisting that influence is more important than mere size because, as Welch taught, the future will be controlled by small, dedicated groups that know what they want and lead those who do not know.

“We are not a mass movement,” said Armour, a Birch staff member for 22 years. “It is the same old premise: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

The society’s dilemma in recruiting more “sighted” Birchers, however, is illustrated by the recent experience of Mark Carroll, a 32-year-old society coordinator who works out of Rancho Cucamonga.

“For example, yesterday I had my car worked on (in Long Beach),” Carroll said. “It was a place where I had worked a number of years, and I was asked, ‘Where do you work now?’ and I said, ‘the John Birch Society,’ and they said, ‘What’s that?’ I had at least three or four people say, ‘What’s that?’. . . I think people more in my age group and younger don’t know. . . . And, we’ve had the same thing at the (Los Angeles County) fair. . . . People walk over and look at the sign and say, ‘I’ve heard of the John Birch Society, but what is it?’ ”

Clayton Hurley, a retired attorney and society member for nearly a quarter-century, talked about the society’s problems before the start of a recent chapter meeting attended by about 50 people in his Pasadena home.

Apathy Criticized

“We’re going to have our problems, but we got to lick ‘em,” he said. “We’ve got to get more people who know what we’re here for, what we stand for. Find enough people and we can do something about it. There’s too much apathy. Too many people haven’t heard about the John Birch Society and if they have, they’ve got the wrong opinion.”

The society was founded in December, 1958, by Robert Henry Winborne Welch Jr., a wealthy former candy manufacturer who died in a Winchester, Mass., nursing home in January at 85.

Meeting with 11 others in Indianapolis, Welch formed a monolithic, authoritarian and virulently anti-Communist organization. It was named after John Birch, an American Army intelligence officer killed by Chinese Communists a week after the end of World War II.

Under Welch’s leadership, the fledgling society rapidly gained national recognition and notoriety, in part because of its sensational charges of treason at the highest levels, including the White House.

Critics joined in a chorus of vituperation, charging, among other things, that the society was secretive, conspiratorial, fascist, anti-Semitic, racist, a peril to civil liberties and un-American.

The Times Editorial

After publishing a five-part series on the society as revealed in the “Blue Book,” the organization’s bible, The Times ran a front-page editorial in March, 1961, titled “Peril to Conservatives.” It was signed by then-Publisher Otis Chandler.

“If the John Birchers follow the program of their leader, they will bring our institutions into question exactly as the Communists try to do. They will sow distrust, and aggravate disputes, and they will weaken the very strong case for conservatism,” the editorial said.

“What are we to think when our last three Presidents, Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, are accused either of being Communists or Communist dupes? . . . What are we to think when we are told that our nation’s press almost without exception is Communist-infiltrated and-inspired? What are we to think when we are told that our churches almost without exception are corroded with active agents of Moscow?”

And, it concluded: “Subversion, whether of the left or right, is still subversion.”

Despite the din of criticism from both the political right and left, the society flourished through Republican nominee Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful 1964 White House race. Always strong in Southern California, its national membership soared to a reported 90,000 to 95,000 and started to fall.

Armour, long leery of the “same lousy line” of reporting on the society, blames the media--by deliberately ignoring Birchers--for contributing to the organization’s decade-long decline to about 40,000 members. “I think they found out literally that the more they threw, the more we grew, and the publicity spigot was turned off,” Armour said in a recent interview at the society’s new regional headquarters in San Marino.

Others suggest that there are other basic reasons for the society’s decline, however.

Lack of Appeal Cited

Seymour Martin Lipset, a Stanford University sociologist and political scientist, said the society was an “interesting media event” back in the 1960s, then the press stopped paying attention. “I never saw any evidence of their having a mass appeal,” he said in an interview. “Their problem is how to get people to listen.”

Conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick said there was “always some madness” in Birchers. “They always had to go the mile beyond into wacky areas. They were kind of bit by the conspiratorial bug. They destroyed themselves by their extremism.”

David Lehrer, western states counsel of the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith, suggested that the society is in a “time warp.” He said, “It may be alive but it’s not very vital.’

And Harvey Schechter, that league’s executive secretary, said he has a “nickel theory” that organizations such as the Birch society grow when liberal Democrats are in the White House. “With the election of Richard Nixon in ‘68, it was almost a death knell for them,” he said.

Undaunted by Criticism

Armour is undaunted by critical evaluations of the society and its ideas.

“All the bad publicity that we got or might get is not going to destroy us,” he said. “We’re one organization that has a national network of chapters. . . . We have a different structure than most conservative groups in that we are monolithic and authoritarian. We don’t take a vote every Monday morning to see what we’re going to do that week. We have a continuing program that our membership or our supporters reject or accept. We don’t deal in quick solutions. Our programs are long range.”

The ideological course set for Birchers by the strong-willed Welch has not changed in more than a quarter-century, Armour says. The society still pursues its motto of “Less government, more responsibility and, with God’s help, a better world” through education about its “Americanist” principles, he says.

The society strives “to create a climate of political opinion” by publishing books and its new magazine, producing movies and cassettes, running a speakers’ bureau and operating nearly a dozen summer camps for young people who are exposed to the Birch version of “Americanism 102.”

‘Fighting Communists’

From the beginning, Welch said the society’s “first great task” was mortal opposition to communism. “We are fighting Communists. Nobody else,” he once observed.

That anti-Communist fervor was dramatically reinforced for Birchers on Sept. 1, 1983, when a Soviet fighter pilot shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, killing Rep. Larry McDonald (D-Ga.), the society chairman, and 268 others on board.

Welch, an articulate ideologue, viewed government as man’s greatest enemy. And the more extensive the government, the greater the enemy. He likened collectivism to cancer of the body politic. He abhorred internationalism as an attempt to impose centralized world government.

He believed that a “master conspiracy” to impose totalitarianism on the world grew out of the Illuminati, a secret organization founded by Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria in 1776, and that the ideological heirs of that centuries-old conspiracy have the same goal today. Like its founder, the society officially embraces the conspiracy theory as an explanation for recent history.

“The difference, I think, between conservatives and liberals literally is that a conservative sees a series of events and uses that evidence to come to a conclusion,” Armour said. “We’re not satisfied today to simply say, ‘Well, this is just ineptness or stupidity or coincidence.’ The coincidence is far too consistent for it to be coincidence, in our opinion. So we take the conspiratorial view.”

Against the U.N.

Perhaps one of the society’s best known campaigns against perceived conspiracies--advertised on billboards, bus benches and with bumper stickers--is its demand to “Get the U.S. Out of the United Nations.”

Over the years, the society has also opposed federal personal income taxes, compulsory Social Security, the civil rights movement, gun control, the proposed equal rights amendment, abortion, the American Indian Movement, summit meetings, foreign aid, the nuclear freeze proposal, federal aid to education, busing for integration purposes, affirmative action in hiring, civilian police review boards, the Federal Reserve Board, the Food and Drug Administration and the Interstate Commerce Commission--among other things.

Birchers believe that their efforts on such issues helped create the conservative mood that led to Reagan’s election in 1980 and his reelection in 1984.

“If you look at the 1980 election--even though we don’t feel that what Ronald Reagan does and his rhetoric match--his rhetoric was almost word-for-word the Birch Society point of view,” Hurley said. “He could have been a spokesman for us. . . . Look at the way people voted for him. So, we feel the average person out there thinks the way we do.”

Adamant About Reagan

Armour is even more adamant about Reagan.

“We had it on a roll in 1980 and lost it,” he said. “We didn’t keep the momentum going, largely because we were sitting here with so many people mesmerized by the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan. Probably the most debilitating thing that’s happened to the whole conservative movement in this country in the last five years has been and is today Ronald Reagan, because any attempt to match his rhetoric with his record falls far short.”

When he attacks Reagan or talks about the threats facing the United States and the world, Armour, a 60-year-old former insurance executive, sounds like a believer proclaiming doctrine. And when the occasion calls for it, he closes with an “altar call” appeal to join in the society’s struggle.

Pointing at red-tinged world maps at the recent speech in Pasadena, Armour estimated that “better than half” of the world’s land mass and “probably close to half” of all the Earth’s people “live under this alien philosophy of communism.” Like a preacher calling for repentence, he declared that unless something is done about what he sees as a deterioration of the nation’s free market system by government meddling, burgeoning bureaucracy, debauchery of the dollar, a decline in morality and failed U.S. foreign policy, “it’s just a matter of time until the whole (map) is red.”

An ‘Establishment Crowd’

He warned that U.S. sovereignty is threatened by a “diabolical” international conspiracy of an “Establishment crowd” of “insiders” intent on imposing totalitarianism by bringing about world government. He theorized that the conspirators plan to achieve this by balancing the superpowers, promoting regionalization through treaty organizations, then uniting the apparatus under a world body that would strip the United States of its sovereignty.

“It’s the idea of internationalism, one world, the brotherhood of nations, the world community . . . all being sold on a business of, ‘Peace brother,’ ” Armour said. “That is the final objective because nothing else makes any sense at all as to why the leadership of our nation would continue to aid and abet this diabolical conspiracy all over the globe.”

Birchers determine who is a conspirator, according to Armour, by studying the record of an individual, regardless of his or her affiliation or rhetoric.

“There seems to be a self-perpetuating crowd that runs the foreign and domestic policies, principally in the executive branch of government,” he said. “We call it the Establishment crowd. (Secretary of State) George Shultz is certainly an Establishment man. (White House Chief of Staff) Donald Regan is an Establishment man. I think we can boil it all down to say that that crowd . . . is literally in control of the philosophy.”

Trilaterals Spotlighted

He singled out the Trilateral Commission, organized by David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank in the early 1970s to promote economic cooperation in North America, Japan and Western Europe, and the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent New York-based organization, as “insiders.”

William Buckley Jr., editor of the National Review, a conservative opinion magazine that denounced the society and its founder in 1962, ridiculed the Birch view of the foreign relations group. What one hears at council sessions is the stuff of UC Berkeley seminars, he said in an interview. And, as far as the master conspiracy theory, Buckley said: “It’s preposterous. It’s hardly worth bothering to analyze.”

Lipset described the Illuminati conspiracy theory favored by Welch as “kooky” and expressed doubt that the society will develop “into an important organization” if it promulgates the idea that there is a master conspiracy of “insiders” bent on world government.

“I think that kind of theory can only get support in time of severe crisis,” he said.

Advice to Members

Armour’s advice to fellow Birchers and prospective members is to do their own studying and thinking.

“Don’t get caught up in this idea that we are in some kind of an ivory tower argument,” he told listeners recently. “Don’t get caught up in the intellectualism we hear from the William Buckleys or the Henry Kissingers. Don’t get caught in this thesis or that thesis that can’t come to a conclusion because too many extraneous things are being fed into it.

“Look at the realities of the world: One, we’re losing. Two, an alien diabolical philosophy is encompassing the Earth. Three, it has largely been able to do so because of the Western nations and principally the government of the United States’ policy. Four, the only . . . chance at all in stopping it today is people like you and me in this country.”

The best place to do that, according to Armour, is in a revitalized John Birch Society.