Ian Ward
How did the founders relate to the Republican Party?
Matthew Dallek
It was a very complicated relationship. Some of them viewed the Eisenhower Republican Party as one of the greatest threats to the country. Welch wrote in a letter to his friends that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy. Looking back to what happened to Joe McCarthy and to Robert Taft — two of their heroes — they saw the modern Republican Party as un-American.
But they had a relationship with the GOP. Welch ran for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts as a Republican in 1950. Bill Grede, who was an industrialist from Wisconsin and a founding member of the society, had fundraised for Eisenhower’s campaign in 1956 and served on a labor management committee that was appointed by Eisenhower.
Ian Ward
What sort of tactics did the Birchers use in their early days to mobilize the conservative grassroots outside of the party apparatus of the GOP?
Matthew Dallek
Their mission throughout the 1960s was to try to educate the American people about the communist conspiracy, and many of the Birchers — not all, but many — were suspicious of the two-party system.
They didn’t like democracy, and they believed the only way to save the country was through a kind of shock education — through controlling the kinds of texts that kids and college students and other Americans were exposed to — and through direct action: setting up front groups and committees that could attack what they saw as the weak points in the communist line.
For example, they set up the Committee Against Summit Entanglements, which was a direct action protest against the Khrushchev-Eisenhower summit in 1959, and they set up the campaign to impeach Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, because they saw Warren as a communist.
So it was a combination of trying to create a space where they could spread an alternative message about this alleged conspiracy, but also to shock their enemies and mobilize the public to attack what they saw as their communist foes.
Ian Ward
The Birchers gradually became more willing to work within Republican Party politics in the early 1960s. They were involved, for instance, in the 1962 midterm campaigns, and many of them supported Barry Goldwater’s campaign for president in 1964. What convinced them that they could work within Republican politics?
Matthew Dallek
I think a lot of them did see being active in Republican politics as a viable path because they had longstanding Republican ties, and some of them saw the Republican Party as an anti-big government vehicle. But they also flirted with third parties as well. That third-party option rarely went off the table, even if they never fully pursued it.