The Birch Society was founded in 1958 by 12 white men, mostly Christian and wealthy, including oil and gas magnate Fred Koch, and ex-candy manufacturer Robert Welch, the group’s leader.
But it only exploded into the American consciousness in 1961, when reporters and political leaders revealed to the public that Welch had formed a secret anticommunist society that saw conspiracies proliferating inside the United States. The Birch Society, which numbered between 60,000 and 100,000 members at its height in the mid-1960s, sought to impose its version of Christian morality on American public life. This included giving parents veto power over sex education, giving students easier access to approved pro-“Americanist” texts, and minimizing teachings that they considered antithetical to traditional morality and culture.
In this local work, the Birch Society, while overwhelmingly male in its national leadership, was powered by grassroots efforts by women who used their status as moms to claim a moral order and impose it on schools and communities. Their methods are reminiscent of those used by today’s Moms for Liberty.
Sometimes, the Birchers could win even by losing, inserting their issues into the public square and pushing the conversation in a direction they wished. But more often, the Birchers and their allies lost their fights to take over PTAs and school boards, and to force libraries to stock shelves with conservative tracts. These defeats were fueled by the concerted mobilization of institutions, individuals, and elected officials devoted to repelling the Birch-backed assault on progressive education.
For instance, when Birch leader Laurence Bunker won a seat as a trustee of his local library in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Bunker’s own Unitarian pastor, apparently chafing at a radical’s ascent atop the library’s administration, decided to challenge him in the next election. He ultimately assembled a coalition that unseated Bunker.
In other cases, institutions and their leaders organized the resistance. When Birchers and members of the American Legion in Paradise, California, charged that a popular government teacher Virginia Franklin had immersed her pupils in communist ideas (she exposed them to the Quaker-led American Friends Service Committee), the community largely rallied behind Franklin. Her principal backed her, the school board cleared her of wrongdoing, the media painted her in a sympathetic light, and the courts later awarded her monetary damages in her lawsuit claiming defamation.