Birch Society Guides Young Campers to Right Path

Dad was right. Claudia Hamlin has to admit it. She is having fun, making friends and learning all sorts of things she would never learn in school. The freckle-faced 16-year-old from Santa Monica is a happy camper.

“I didn’t really want to come,” Claudia says. “But my dad kind of forced--um, convinced me that I should.”

The John Birch Society Summer Youth Camp comes only once a year, after all, held this summer at a YMCA campground near this hamlet in the San Bernardino Mountains. In a hometown so liberal it is sometimes referred to as the People’s Republic of Santa Monica,

Claudia’s father has the distinction of being a Birch Society chapter leader. Claudia is being brought up right--extreme right, you might say.

Claudia and 64 other young people with like-minded parents spent the last week in the clean, thin air here to learn the Birch Society’s conspiratorial view of the world. Volleyball, canoeing and campfire-song singing were interspersed with “Americanism” lectures on the welfare state, gun control and abortion. Lecturers covered such topics as “Refuting Liberal Cliches,” “How to Educate Your Classmates” and “What About Rock Music?”

“We feel we’re planting seeds. It’s important in that sense,” said Kevin Bearly, the Southern California coordinator for the Birch Society who runs the camp with his wife, Ellen. Their own daughter is a camper--one of almost 1,000 in 10 Birch camps throughout the country.

Bridging Generations

“She cried all the way up,” Robert Hamlin, Claudia’s father, recalled of the drive last Sunday. “Now she’ll probably cry all the way back.”

A former Los Angeles policeman and an ordained minister, Bearly proudly notes that he is the “first second-generation” Bircher to hold a staff position. Bridging generations is what camp is all about. “We want them to learn to think for themselves,” he said.

Not every camper’s parent is a Birch Society member. But as camp counselor Bob Olson said, “You just don’t get Jane Fonda sending her kids up here.”

Rebellion is not much of a problem. Campers said they pretty much agreed with what the lecturers had to say--with one notable exception. The rock music discussion struck a nerve. Many campers, ages 12 to 20, shook their heads when an ordained minister blamed that throbbing beat on Satan.

But all in all, challenging questions were not in abundance.

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision regarding the burning of the American flag inspired discussion but not debate. A popular cabin decoration was a sign depicting the flag in flames and these words: “United States Supreme Court is Guilty of Treason.”

Some campers even erected shrines featuring Old Glory and the Bible side by side. They were trying to impress the CIA--Cabin Inspection Agency.

A little humor and fun, Bearly said, is all part of the Birch Camp experience. Softball and volleyball seem like only warm-ups. The activity scheduled for Friday was something called “Thermo-Nuclear Flour War.”

The newsletter features camp gossip, cabin reviews by the CIA and a word puzzle that gets progressively trickier with each issue. Monday’s correct answers included such words as communism, barbarian and media. By Wednesday the correct answers included Ted Kennedy (“Chappaquiddick villain”) and Martin Luther King (“Commie civil rights leader”).

The political science classes are Claudia’s favorite, and Ralph Epperson was a favorite lecturer. Considered a leader in Birch thought, Epperson is the author of “The Unseen Hand,” a 500-page introduction “to the conspiratorial view of history.” Among other things, Epperson argues that the theory of evolution is a fraud and a hoax, that Abraham Lincoln and Gen. George Patton were assassinated because they discovered the conspiracy and that the Vietnam War was planned in 1945.

His next book, Epperson says, will provide “further evidence that many people at the very top worship Lucifer.”

Claudia and her new pals Brandi Moss of Dana Point and Mary Hunter of Omaha, Neb., decorated their cabin with bumper stickers saying “Oliver North, American Hero,” “There Are Americans and Then There Are Liberals” and “If You Liked Idi Amin, You’ll Love Nelson Mandela.”

South Africa’s system of apartheid is a tough one to explain. At one session, a camper asked, “What should be our attitude toward South Africa?”

Epperson and other lecturers suggested that economic sanctions would only hurt the blacks and that South Africa isn’t ready for majority rule. “Turning it over to a Marxist, revolutionary group like the African National Congress is not the answer,” Epperson declared.

Over lunch, Claudia was asked if she knows who Mandela is. She said he is a South African revolutionary. Mandela is in prison, another camper explained.

“I used to think he should be let out,” said 13-year-old Daniel Kremer. “But since I’ve come here I’m not so sure.”

There were no black campers, no black staff members, not at this camp. There were a few Latino campers. Bearly is quick to point out that there are black Birchers, however, and black Birch staff members. The Birch Society, Bearly said, has long suffered unfair accusations of racism. One reason Birchers distrust the media, he said, is that the group frequently finds itself lumped with such organizations as the Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan--”groups we absolutely abhor.”

Now there is little doubt, Bearly says, that the Birch Society is making great strides. The Reagan years were bad, he said, because Reagan had duped many conservatives into thinking that they were in control. One sign of the growing conservatism can be found on college campuses.

Camp counselor Olson, 21, founded Biola’s New Americans Club, a Birch-sponsored organization. It grew to 30 members. And there is always the possibility that more Birch families are in the making.

It’s summer camp, after all, and romance blossoms under the ponderosa pines. Campers are allowed to hold hands at the campfire.

Olson and fellow counselor Mary McKiernan, 18, met at camp two years ago. They have been going steady for 1 1/2 years and an engagement is not out of the question, they say.

“Our first date,” Olson recalled, smiling, “was a symposium on the Constitution.”