Conservative maverick’s fringe theories persist today

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/06/2022 (1535 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

President Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent. President Kennedy schemed to place the American military under the control of the United Nations as a step towards incorporating the United States into the Soviet Union and establishing a one-world socialist dictatorship. The Civil Rights movement, women’s liberation, sex education and abortion are communist plots. Communism itself is the creation of the members of a two-hundred year old secret society called the Illuminati.

If you believe any of that, you won’t like this book. On the other hand, if you don’t live in fantasyland, you will find Edward H. Miller’s book helpful in understanding how we became a culture of “alternative facts.”

Miller, a professor at Boston’s Northeastern University, uses the life of Robert Welch to explain how the Republican Party shifted to the extreme right and beyond.

Born in 1899 in North Carolina, Robert Welch grew up in an affluent family which revered religion and the myth of the Old South. He was highly intelligent. At 12 years old, he became the youngest student ever to enroll at the University of North Carolina. He excelled at English literature, German, French and, above all, math.

Determined to achieve the financial freedom that would allow him to lead a life of intellectual inquiry, he founded a candy manufacturing company which went bankrupt but eventually prospered, thanks in large part to a lollipop called the Sugar Daddy (this is not an “alternative fact”).

Roosevelt’s New Deal, with its government-subsidized projects, support for labour and a social safety net, horrified American business leaders. They retaliated with waves of propaganda extolling the free market, low taxes and the rugged individualism of the frontier as the foundations of American greatness.

Welch was one of those business leaders. Miller tries to explain, not altogether satisfactorily, how, of all these rightists, Welch came to believe his outlandish conspiracy theories. He suggests that his addiction to math may have made him seek out pure logical sequences as explanations of world events.

Nevertheless, Welch did develop his theories and, according to Miller, sincerely believed them. All he had to do to save Western civilization was to reveal the truth to the American people.

For decades, Welch spread his message through radio, books, newspapers and support for organizations such as the America First Committee and authoritarians such as Charles Lindbergh and Joe McCarthy. Eventually in 1958, he decided that a more focused grassroots organization was necessary and founded the John Birch Society. Named after an American missionary killed by Chinese communists, the Society opened branches across the country to spread Welch’s message and elect supporters to school boards and state and federal governments.

Although Miller is at pains to excuse Welch of being antisemitic or anti-African-American, the society attracted many notorious racists. Welch’s own denials of bigotry cannot hide his views that a Zionist conspiracy contributed to the origins of communism, or that Black Americans would have been happy with their lot except for communist agitators.

Initially popular, the society began to lose mainstream Republican support when Welch attacked Eisenhower as a willing agent of the Soviet Union. However, Welch’s views took on new life in the 1970s with revelations of government lies about Vietnam, Watergate, the Equal Rights (for women) Amendment campaign, the acceptance of homosexuality and the legalization of abortion.

Free-market industrialists and ultra-evangelical religious groups found common cause in opposing the emergence of a more tolerant, socially responsible country. Welch died in 1985, just before digital media arrived to lock the public into toxic echo chambers endlessly reinforcing their prejudices. Far from repudiating conspiracy theories, today’s Republican Party embraces them. It seem Welch’s version of truth just goes marching on.

Every night, Winnipegger John K. Collins leaves out a glass of whisky to keep the fairies at the bottom of his garden happy.