The far right’s victory in the 21st century is hardly assured. And the story of the decline of the John Birch Society offers possible strategies for containment.
By the 1960s, the John Birch Society had become, to its legion of critics, an authoritarian movement seeking to topple the nation’s fledgling multiracial democracy. Welch had once charged that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist agent. Birch members called to impeach Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren (a radical step at the time), smeared Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist, promoted “America First”–style isolationism, and dabbled in anti-Semitism and racism. Liberals fretted that the society would use secretive, violent means to disrupt free and fair elections and help tip the United States into a civil war. Many in the GOP were worried too. Patricia Hitt, a prominent California Republican and an ally of President Richard Nixon, called Birchers “haters beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Around this time, a coalition of public agencies and liberal organizations arose to tarnish the Birch movement, acting both independently and in concert. These included presidents and former presidents, other federal and state actors, members of Congress, civil-rights NGOs, and the news media.
Attorneys general, activists, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the Defense Department, and the FBI all at various times worked to discredit the movement, in some cases investigating Birchers or publishing mocking and even scathing reports about them. Military leaders reprimanded Birch-preaching officers (the society’s supporters criticized the practice as “muzzling”), while some mayors and police chiefs threatened to punish police officers for being members. Human-rights and civil-rights groups—including the NAACP, the union-backed Group Research, and Americans for Democratic Action—put out press releases, speeches, and reports branding Birchers as conspiratorial, malicious, and hostile to racial equality and to democracy.
No institution took more aggressive (and, arguably, effective) steps to discredit the society than the Anti-Defamation League, the nation’s foremost organization devoted to combatting anti-Semitism. Like many liberals, the ADL’s leaders feared that a Bircher-led movement fueled by anti-government zeal and easy access to firearms could explode into violence against racial and religious minorities, and they felt a moral obligation to stamp the movement out. Starting around 1959 and continuing through at least the early ’70s, the ADL mounted an extensive counterintelligence operation to infiltrate the John Birch Society and dig up damaging information about it.