Last November, I posted about a woman named Claire Conner, and her experiences in Dallas on that fateful November day when President Kennedy died. Conner’s observations about the JFK assassination are interesting, but rather peripheral. On the other hand, her observations in another area of politics and parapolitics are crucial, especially with respect to what I wish to explore soon.
As a former member of the John Birch Society, she grew up steeped in the ideology of totalitarian supremacy disguised as super-“patriotism,” and presented in such glowing terms as “Liberty.”
As she has explained in interviews and in her 2014 memoir Wrapped in the Flag, she was born into a family of founding Birch Society members. And, as a teenager and young adult, she ardently helped that cause with pretty much the fiber of her being. As she would later explain, her schism with the JBS specifically, and right-wing activism in general, happened in small steps over the course of about twenty years--not surprising, given that her family was hardcore in it’s involvement. Worse, those born into the group faced severe indoctrination, which she described as cult-like in nature. Turning your back on the JBS meant turning your back on your family, your friends, and the network of powerful people who could seriously enhance (or compromise) the quality of your life.
Conner has pointedly said that her first break with the JBS came courtesy of her empathy with the US civil-rights movement of the 1960s. She believed that all people should have the same legal rights. It came to her as a shock when her parents not only disagreed with this sentiment, but that the very organization she loved and supported aggressively targeted such people as US Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren for his judicial support in such civil rights cases as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and Baker v. Carr.* One by one, she to have doubts about all of the JBS’s main tenet’s. And subsequently began to reject them.
When it comes to the development of right-wing politics, Conner has quite a bit to say, which is why Wrapped in the Flag is still on my reading list. But for our purposes here, I’d like to examine a couple of her key points.
1. A Healthy Kind of Poverty
According to Conner, the JBS and like-minded groups endeavored to take the United States, if the not the rest of the world, back to the year 1900. The far-right, she explained, saw this as an ideal time. Although the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 made industrial monopolization a criminal offense, there were loopholes that fostered mergers and acquisitions, thus allowing for the greater concentration of wealth into smaller hands. Moreover, it extended the concept to labor, effectively making collective actions by working persons a criminal offense until a later antitrust law enacted in 1914.** And the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies), wouldn’t form until 1905.
The Birchers conceded that the resultant disparity of power between workers and wealthy industrialists resulted in poverty. But, as Conner states, the JBS downplayed the extent of that blight, saying that there were merely “pockets of poverty.” To add insult to injury, they maintained that it was “a healthy poverty,” one in which the Birchers would proudly defend the poor’s right to starve to death. As she said in a 2014 YouTube post:
Obviously, this scenario would give almost exclusive control of the nation and her people to the very wealthy. Yet, Conner insisted that this was the goal of the JBS: in effect, to erase the Twentieth Century.
This viewpoint wouldn’t be so bad had the Birchers remained a fringe group on the margin of politics. But some of these ideas were quite present in the 2013 GOP bid to reduce funding of food stamp programs, presumably with an eye toward reducing aid to below subsistence levels. As Conner noted in a 2014 Liberal Fix podcast:
2. Death and Rebirth: The Southern Strategy
Such ultra-conservatives as William Buckley denounced the JBS for, among other things, accusing President Dwight Eisenhower and other centrists of being active and witting Soviet spies. This led to the US Republican party's general rejection of the Birchers by the late-1960s. It would then seem that the JBS was finished, a curious trivia question in the history of American politics. But as Conner points out, another reckless allegation rekindled the dying movement’s fire, and would in large part sustain not only their resurgence, but that of more mainstream conservatism.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a number of whites living in the southern US seethed at federally mandated policies that eliminated the de jure basis for racial dominion. They held special attempt for the man they would refer to as “Martin Luther Coon,” a Nobel Laureate and arguably the most visible activist at this time.
The Birch Society had attacked him for years. “It’s Very Simple,” a 1962 essay by Bircher Alan Stang, depicted Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King as a communist who, apparently acting under the orders of Mother Russia, was forcing the national government “to install more collectivism.”**** The following year, JBS founder Robert Welch published a paper titled “Two Revolutions at Once,” in which he declared, that a:
Figure 1. JBS anti-King billboard.
After 1965, the longstanding JBS attacks began to find resonance in the US South, which led to an increase in membership. As Conner recalled:
The JBS activation of disaffected white southern voters hardly went unnoticed. From 1968 on, more of the GOP had made similar overtures to the same voting bloc, albeit in far more coded terms than the Birchers.
__________________
*Warren considered Baker v. Carr the most important case he ever sat on. It involved redistricting issues within state governments allowing a specific type of gerrymandering which usually resulted in the over-representation of white rural voters, and the under-representation not only of the handful of African-American voters who managed to cast ballots in southern states, but also white Southern urbanites who were statistically more likely to be liberal and pro-civil rights.
**An 1893 federal lawsuit, United States v. Workingmen's Amalgamated Council of New Orleans, asserted that the Sherman Antitrust Act could be used to prohibit labor union activity. Legal interpretations about Sherman’s applicability to labor were clarified and in some cases reversed by the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.
***The average American lifespan was forty-seven years in 1900. That’s overall. Obviously, the poorer you were, the more you were likely to die of tuberculosis, influenza, or a host of other diseases. So life expectancy was much shorter. In fact, only 4% of people reached the age of sixty at this time.
****There’s a certain irony here in that King, like the Birchers, was openly anti-communist. As he said in a 1967 episode of the Merv Griffith Show:
As a former member of the John Birch Society, she grew up steeped in the ideology of totalitarian supremacy disguised as super-“patriotism,” and presented in such glowing terms as “Liberty.”
As she has explained in interviews and in her 2014 memoir Wrapped in the Flag, she was born into a family of founding Birch Society members. And, as a teenager and young adult, she ardently helped that cause with pretty much the fiber of her being. As she would later explain, her schism with the JBS specifically, and right-wing activism in general, happened in small steps over the course of about twenty years--not surprising, given that her family was hardcore in it’s involvement. Worse, those born into the group faced severe indoctrination, which she described as cult-like in nature. Turning your back on the JBS meant turning your back on your family, your friends, and the network of powerful people who could seriously enhance (or compromise) the quality of your life.
Conner has pointedly said that her first break with the JBS came courtesy of her empathy with the US civil-rights movement of the 1960s. She believed that all people should have the same legal rights. It came to her as a shock when her parents not only disagreed with this sentiment, but that the very organization she loved and supported aggressively targeted such people as US Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren for his judicial support in such civil rights cases as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and Baker v. Carr.* One by one, she to have doubts about all of the JBS’s main tenet’s. And subsequently began to reject them.
When it comes to the development of right-wing politics, Conner has quite a bit to say, which is why Wrapped in the Flag is still on my reading list. But for our purposes here, I’d like to examine a couple of her key points.
1. A Healthy Kind of Poverty
According to Conner, the JBS and like-minded groups endeavored to take the United States, if the not the rest of the world, back to the year 1900. The far-right, she explained, saw this as an ideal time. Although the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 made industrial monopolization a criminal offense, there were loopholes that fostered mergers and acquisitions, thus allowing for the greater concentration of wealth into smaller hands. Moreover, it extended the concept to labor, effectively making collective actions by working persons a criminal offense until a later antitrust law enacted in 1914.** And the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies), wouldn’t form until 1905.
The Birchers conceded that the resultant disparity of power between workers and wealthy industrialists resulted in poverty. But, as Conner states, the JBS downplayed the extent of that blight, saying that there were merely “pockets of poverty.” To add insult to injury, they maintained that it was “a healthy poverty,” one in which the Birchers would proudly defend the poor’s right to starve to death. As she said in a 2014 YouTube post:
The radical right wants to...rid us of every piece of progressive legislation ever passed. The radical right wants to take us back, back 114 years. They saw 1900 in America as like the apex of when we were great as a nation. 1900: before the Income Tax; before the Federal Reserve; before any progressive legislation was considered or passed; before child labor laws; before women had any rights,.before women even had the right to vote.Never mind that those healthy pockets of poverty were rife with high infant mortality and really short life expectancy.*** And forget, for a moment, that then as now most poverty isn’t caused by idleness, unemployment, irresponsibility or malingering, but rather a lack of bargaining power over hard-earned wages against a class that predominantly acquired its wealth, privileges and power through inheritance. In the 1900s, that lack of power was exacerbated by such things as Sherman, and by the physical violence directed at labor activists. “Government interference” especially when involving regulatory affairs, anti-discrimination and child labor laws, workers’ benefits, workplace safety issues, and environmental responsibility might have seemed like red demons to Birchers, but most of us can see the necessity of these things, especially when one works for a living. Taking controls off of government, removing what we have now come to know as the “social safety net,” would leave the vast majority of Americans with a lower standard of living. Imagine compulsory non-compensated overtime, little kids starving in the streets unless they ditch that useless schooling and get to work in the factory (who cares if they’re ripped apart by machines on occasion?), and pensions only available courtesy of the private securities market-- where a few bad trades and economic downturns can zero out all of your savings.
Robert Welch talked a lot about 1900 as this glorious time in American history. And he said, he said, ‘there were pockets of poverty.’ Now if you know anything about 1900, you are now laughing. Pockets of poverty. ‘However,’ he said, ‘but it was a healthy kind of poverty, poverty free from government interference, where every man understood that relief from dire want was entirely his own responsibility.
Obviously, this scenario would give almost exclusive control of the nation and her people to the very wealthy. Yet, Conner insisted that this was the goal of the JBS: in effect, to erase the Twentieth Century.
This viewpoint wouldn’t be so bad had the Birchers remained a fringe group on the margin of politics. But some of these ideas were quite present in the 2013 GOP bid to reduce funding of food stamp programs, presumably with an eye toward reducing aid to below subsistence levels. As Conner noted in a 2014 Liberal Fix podcast:
When you listen to the GOP arguing for the complete elimination of food stamps, all I can think of is these guys are absolutely Birchers.
2. Death and Rebirth: The Southern Strategy
Such ultra-conservatives as William Buckley denounced the JBS for, among other things, accusing President Dwight Eisenhower and other centrists of being active and witting Soviet spies. This led to the US Republican party's general rejection of the Birchers by the late-1960s. It would then seem that the JBS was finished, a curious trivia question in the history of American politics. But as Conner points out, another reckless allegation rekindled the dying movement’s fire, and would in large part sustain not only their resurgence, but that of more mainstream conservatism.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a number of whites living in the southern US seethed at federally mandated policies that eliminated the de jure basis for racial dominion. They held special attempt for the man they would refer to as “Martin Luther Coon,” a Nobel Laureate and arguably the most visible activist at this time.
The Birch Society had attacked him for years. “It’s Very Simple,” a 1962 essay by Bircher Alan Stang, depicted Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King as a communist who, apparently acting under the orders of Mother Russia, was forcing the national government “to install more collectivism.”**** The following year, JBS founder Robert Welch published a paper titled “Two Revolutions at Once,” in which he declared, that a:
...detailed study of ‘the life and lies’ of Martin Luther King...will convince any reasonable American that this man is not working for, but against, the real welfare and best interests of either the Negroes in the United States, or the United States as a whole.Also in 1963, the JBS paid for over 100 billboards that presumably showed Rev. King training with Soviet agents. Here in the age of Photoshop, we might think that an obviously fake pic wouldn’t have had any effect other than mild laughter. But for those looking for any pretense to take King down in 1963, this would come across as genuine and highly motivating.
Figure 1. JBS anti-King billboard.
After 1965, the longstanding JBS attacks began to find resonance in the US South, which led to an increase in membership. As Conner recalled:
While the Chad Mitchell Trio and Bob Dylan were singing and making fun of the John Birch Society, and others were busy dancing on the Birch grave, guess what: the John Birch Society was not vanquished. The John Birch Society saw something. And they did something. Something that from their point of view was very smart.Conner went on to say that by 1965, 100 JBS chapters were active in Birmingham, AL, the site of Dr. King’s most notable triumphs. By comparison, Chicago, Conner’s home town, had only twenty-five, despite being approximately four times larger.
The John Birch Society looked south. They looked to the southern part United States to what had been Dixie. And they did it for a simple reason. Because in the South, in the middle-Sixties, white citizens were getting very afraid of their ‘coloreds.’ (My mother used to call them that, ‘the coloreds.’.) The incoming tide of the Civil Rights Movement had a lot of people very, very nervous.
Robert Welch jumped on the anti-civil-rights bandwagon, and called Dr. Martin Luther King ‘a Communist lackey.’ Robert Welch also insisted, numerous times, that the forced integration of the schools would create a permanent police state in the United States All across Dixie, the John Birch Society grew. They flourished
The JBS activation of disaffected white southern voters hardly went unnoticed. From 1968 on, more of the GOP had made similar overtures to the same voting bloc, albeit in far more coded terms than the Birchers.
__________________
*Warren considered Baker v. Carr the most important case he ever sat on. It involved redistricting issues within state governments allowing a specific type of gerrymandering which usually resulted in the over-representation of white rural voters, and the under-representation not only of the handful of African-American voters who managed to cast ballots in southern states, but also white Southern urbanites who were statistically more likely to be liberal and pro-civil rights.
**An 1893 federal lawsuit, United States v. Workingmen's Amalgamated Council of New Orleans, asserted that the Sherman Antitrust Act could be used to prohibit labor union activity. Legal interpretations about Sherman’s applicability to labor were clarified and in some cases reversed by the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.
***The average American lifespan was forty-seven years in 1900. That’s overall. Obviously, the poorer you were, the more you were likely to die of tuberculosis, influenza, or a host of other diseases. So life expectancy was much shorter. In fact, only 4% of people reached the age of sixty at this time.
****There’s a certain irony here in that King, like the Birchers, was openly anti-communist. As he said in a 1967 episode of the Merv Griffith Show:
Now it so happens that Communism is a system that I disagree with philosophically. I would not prefer to live under the Communist system. I happen to feel that the great moments of history have been those moments when individuals have been left free to think and to act. And I feel that Communism often stands in the way of certain First Amendment privileges that we have in America , for instance, that I just couldn’t adjust to.
