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Article Excerpt
During the height of the cold war and nuclear brinksmanship in the 1950s and 1960s, a number of self-styled crusaders and organizations took up the challenge begun by congressional committees and Joseph McCarthy to expose and defeat the communist menace threatening the United States and the free world. For example, the Reverend Carl McIntire preached his anti-communist message throughout the United States, published innumerable tracts such as "Communism Is of the Devil," and through the 20th Century Reformation Hour, broadcast a thirty-minute radio message Monday through Friday. The Reverend Billy James Hargis formed the anti-communist Christian Crusade, toured the country with numerous rally's "for God and against communism," and broadcast his messages on hundreds of radio stations.
The largest, most thoroughly organized, and visible effort began when Robert Welch, a retired candy company executive, met in Indianapolis on December 9 and 10, 1958 with eleven handpicked businessmen. Welch delivered a two-day speech in which he identified the "Communist conspiracy" as "Our immediate and most urgent anxiety." (1) He warned his business friends that:
.. you have only a few more years before the country in which you live will become four separate provinces in a world-wide Communist dominion ruled by police-state methods from the Kremlin.... We are living, in America today, in such a fool's paradise as the people of China lived in twenty years ago, as the people of Czechoslovakia lived in a dozen years ago, as the people of North Vietnam lived in five years ago, and as the people of Iraq lived in only yesterday. (2)
This speech became The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, named after a U.S. Array captain apparently killed by Communist Chinese soldiers at the end of World War II. Birch became the Society's "first martyr" of the cold war, and Welch became the Society's unquestioned, authoritarian leader. (3) He had devoted the previous three years of his life to studying the world situation and the communist conspiracy, so he alone was capable of leading the life and death struggle against freedom's archenemy.
At its peak in the mid-1960s, following two near-nuclear wars (the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962) and when thousands of Americans were building bomb shelters in their basements and backyards in anticipation of a nuclear holocaust, the Birch Society had hundreds of chapters throughout the country, 100,000 members, 400 American Opinion bookstores to distribute and sell its literature, and an active cadre of speakers that crisscrossed the country. The Society's declared purpose was to educate the American people to the dangers of the communist conspiracy, expose communism and communists everywhere, and stop the conspiracy's planned takeover of the United States and the free world. The media and many American leaders branded the Society as an extremist, ultra-right, fringe group that saw communists behind every tree and under every bed and had the audacity to slander American heroes such as George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, accusing them of being conscious or unwitting supporters of the communist conspiracy. Convinced that such criticisms came from those who were ignorant of the conspiracy or part of it, Welch and his followers remained committed to the cause.
As the cold war began to thaw and the threat of nuclear war seemed increasingly remote, McIntire, Hargis, and other anti-communist speakers and groups disappeared from the scene. The Birch Society continued the crusade, but its membership declined during the Reagan-Bush years to below 50,000 members. It faced severe economic problems as income dropped and it tried to maintain headquarters on both the east and west coasts. (4) The Society suffered a demoralizing leadership vacuum when, first, its young, charismatic president, Congressman Lawrence McDonald, was, in their words, a martyr who murdered by assassination in the "mid-air massacre" of Korean Airlines Flight 007 in 1983 when Soviet fighter planes shot it down after it strayed into Soviet air space north of Japan. (5) Members saw this as neither an accident nor a coincidence. A second blow occurred in 1985 when its founder Robert Welch died at age eighty-five. Successive leaders proved ineffective.
When Soviet satellites overthrew their communist leaders and announced their independence in the 1990s, followed quickly by the unthinkable dissolution of the Soviet Union, many assumed that the John Birch Society would join McIntire's 20th Century Reformation Hour and Hargis's Christian Crusade into the dustbin of history. A political scientist at Indiana University commented that "There's no real anti-Communist push anymore.... They're swimming against the stream." (6) The Society's reason for being, the communist conspiracy, was dead.
But the John Birch Society did not go quietly into the night after noting but not celebrating the demise of its long-time archenemy and threat to free people everywhere. It resolved its economic difficulties by consolidating its national office in Appleton, Wisconsin (the birth and final resting-place of Senator Joseph McCarthy), found new leaders, and began to rebuild its membership. New chapters appeared around the country, particularly in the mountain states of the west, and its membership grew to approximately 60,000 in 1,000 chapters. It created summer camps for teenagers to spend a week studying the United States Constitution and principles of the Society. (7) News reports and publications indicated that the Society had found a new target following the Gulf War when President George H. Bush declared that we were witnessing the dawn of a "new world order." Somehow, the Society was moving successfully and effortlessly from one conspiracy to another and discovering new prosperity in doing so.
The John Birch Society's survival for more than forty years and its newfound energy and growth in the 1990s are due to more than hitching its right wing brand of protest to a new conspiracy and devil, the new world order. It can best be understood as the result of four inherently rhetorical characteristics: consistent application of three principles Welch laid down in his early writings (history is a history of collectivism and conspiracies, appearances are deceiving, nothing happens by accident), a broad-based ideology, development of a master conspiracy, and adaptation to temporal changes. A study of the Birch Society's rhetoric can aid us in understanding not only the survival of the Society but (1) how protest groups may evolve and adapt to sustain themselves for the long haul in bringing about or resisting change and (2) the rhetorical advantages of developing a master or grand conspiracy as the fundamental premise of a protest group.
To understand the conspiracy rhetoric of the John Birch Society and why it experienced resurgence in the 1990s, it is necessary to trace the Society's development from that first meeting in 1958 through the 1990s because the present cannot be understood apart from its past. Literature analyzed for this study of John Birch Society rhetoric includes The Blue Book (first published in 1958), American Opinion (a magazine published monthly from 1958 to 1985), The New American (a weekly magazine inaugurated in 1985), leaflets, and pamphlets.
A Broad-Based Ideology: The Disease of Collectivism
The Communist Conspiracy
Early John Birch Society rhetoric, as expected, focused heavily on the world-wide communist conspiracy. It reflected the tenor of the times that was stoked by Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev's declarations that "we will bury you," the Berlin crisis, the Cuban missile crisis, and the growing involvement of American military forces in Vietnam. Numerous articles in American Opinion addressed the communist conspiracy, including ones entitled "Latin America: Communist Strategy," "If You Want It Straight" (arguing that President John Kennedy was assassinated by a communist), and "Cuba and the Conspiracy." (8) This prolific rhetoric identified all of the classic characteristics of a Conspiracy. (9)
The first half of The Blue Book, Welch's launching instrument for the Society, described communism in vivid detail as a cleverly structured, devious, cunning, ruthless, brutal, bloodthirsty, inhumane, atheistic, foreign conspiracy inaugurated in the 1920s to take over the world by propaganda and subversion if possible and by force when necessary. He stressed the certainty of the conspiracy for anyone who might doubt its existence, its scope, and its evil goals that must be stopped at all costs. "Communism, in its unmistakable present reality," he claimed, "is wholly a conspiracy, a gigantic conspiracy to enslave mankind; an increasingly successful conspiracy controlled by determined, cunning, and utterly ruthless gangsters, willing to use any means to achieve its end." (10) Unfortunately for the United States and all free peoples, Welch warned, the communist conspiracy had a wide variety of weapons at its disposal and did not hesitate to employ them: "They have also used bribery, lies, bluff, brutality, the countless tentacles of treason, murder on a scale never before dreamed of in the world, and every possible means to advance them on this road, without the slightest concern for any moral difference in those various means. And above all, they have used patience." (11)
A note of urgency permeated The Blue Book and Birch literature. Welch and other Birchers portrayed the speed with which the conspiracy was enslaving the world in its goal of a "world-wide government ruled by the Kremlin." Welch warned readers and listeners that, "every hour, twenty-four hours of every day, 365 days of every year, for the past thirteen years" seven thousand human beings are brought under control of the communist police state, and that "Today the rate of conquest and enslavement is actually increasing--as the eighty million people of Indonesia would gladly testify." (12) Communism was able to subvert any government or cause, including the civil rights movement in America. In The Blue Book and an article entitled "Civil Rights: Communist Betrayal of a Good Cause," Birchers claimed communists instigated and controlled the civil rights movement in the United States. Welch wrote:
The trouble in our southern states has been fomented almost entirely by the Communists for this purpose [to create strife within the United States]. It has been their plan, gradually carried out over a long period with meticulous cunning, to stir up such bitterness between whites and blacks in the South that small flames of civil disorder would inevitably result. They could then fan and coalesce these little flames into one great conflagration of civil war, in time, if the need arose. The whole slogan of "civil rights,"...
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