The Birchers Are Busy in Belmont

The John Birch Society has been more successful than George Wallace (at least for the Society's approximately 75,000 members) at evoking the horrors of Big Government, or maybe it has just been more graphic. Instead of referring vaguely to pointy-headed pencil-pushers on the Potomac, the Birchers never miss the chance in their literature to say that endless waves of rules and regulations, paperwork, and forms to fill out are tentacles of central government reaching out to clasp Americans in warm, dark totalitarianism.

The Society's "common goal," its literature says, is "Less government, more responsibility, and--with God's help--a better world." It even wants to abolish the graduated income tax--to cut down on this intrusion of government on the individual, among other reasons. But the elderly, red-haired receptionist in the John Birch Society's national headquarters in Belmont spends her working day filling out requisitions, resupply forms, and sales slips, because the John Birch Society is a business.

The Society is also a pseudonym. As you drive out Concord Avenue towards Belmont Center, the middle of three innocuously drab brick buildings is labeled "American Opinion, 395 Concord Ave.," with a single large American flag dangling over the front door. Inside, the only open doors are to the right, in a sea of fake wood paneling. The doors lead into a bookstore where sits the receptionist, Sally Riley, amidst a welter of reprints, newsletters, magazines, bumper stickers, and books with screaming titles, blood dripping dramatically down the covers, chains a prominent motif, and "Conspiracy" figuring in almost every title. During a five-hour span when I was in and out of the bookstore, as I toured the Society's headquarters, nobody else ever came in to peruse the displays.

Perhaps the adventurous ones had not liked Riley--she never looked me in the eye the whole time she was explaining how prolific all the Society's "brilliant" writers were, and her spiel varied somewhat with the official line. For instance, she said, "You know, of course, that Mr. Welch [Robert Welch, Founder of the Society] learned to read at age two" --the official biography says he was three. And she told me that John Birch, who was a fundamentalist missionary to China in the early 1940's and later became an intelligence agent for Gen. Clair Chennault in China, was "ruthlessly murdered by the Russian Communists in 1945." Welch's definitive Life of John Birch (1954) says that the "bloodthirsty killers" were Chinese Communists.

But Riley agrees with the rest of the Society on one of its most coherent themes--hero worship of Robert Welch. Riley told me that "Mr. Welch was reading Greek and Latin at age 6, knew algebra by 8, went to college at 12." Andrew Lane, a full-time employee who answers Society members' complaints and questions, called Welch "a brilliant man, an historian of the first rank. He read Ridpath's History of the world--that's nine volumes you know--by age 7." My tour guide, Frank Gotch, who had just come from Texas to work with Lane, made sure to call my attention to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves which run the length of the second floor--as Lane says, "Mr. Welch has read everything worth reading."

Welch has had a checkered career. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at 16, entered the Naval Academy but dropped out when World War 1 ended, dropped out of Harvard Law School because, his official biography says, "he had one too many arguments with Prof. Felix Frankfurter." Welch then went into the candy business, but had an unhappy encounter with the Great Depression, and even his invention of the candy bar which eventually became the Sugar Daddy didn't save him. He later joined his brother's company, Welch Candy Company, and became vice-president. At one time, he served on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Manufacturers. In the 1950's, however, inspired by what he called the "heroic example" of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Welch resigned his position and began research that resulted in his book on John Birch, "an unknown martyr." In December 1958, he founded The John Birch Society, dedicating it to perpetuate those ideals and virtues that Birch exemplified--"patriotism, faith-inspiring morality, the spiritual sense of values, and individual freedom and responsibility on which our western civilization has been built." Welch has concluded that these ideals are threatened by a "gigantic Communist Conspiracy of Insiders, headquartered in David Rockfeller's Council on Foreign Relations in New York, that controls 60-80 per cent [by latest "Scoreboard" count issued each year] of the United States."

Welch himself is rather unprepossessing. When I was ushered in to meet him, he was wearing pajamas and a worn blue corduroy bathrobe with a hole in the right elbow; my tour guide explained later that the 76-year-old Welch can only sleep two hours at a time, "it's not just physical, you know, there's just so much to do and watch for." It was a large office/sanctum on the second floor of 395 Concord Avenue, carpeted, bookshelved, same fake wood paneling as everything else, spattered with flag plaques and Statue of Liberty trophies, with typewriters pittering in the outer offices, and a casual hum of secretaries. The jowled, paunchy, business-suited Robert Welch of the Society's official portrait would have fit right in here--a solid, substantial businessman you would want to make candy for your kids. But the frail, pale just-this-side-of-the-nursing-home Robert Welch who told me he was "too busy to talk--all these manuscripts to go over, they need guidance from me, the monthly Bulletin to write," gesturing almost helplessly at the piles of paperwork his own bureaucracy was feeding him, was out-of-place in a milieu that had been built for him.

The John Birch bureaucracy that feeds Welch consists of about 250 full-time staff people, 110 of them in Belmont and the rest scattered around the country (there is a secondary headquarters in San Marino, California.) In Belmont, the Society occupies three buildings--it owns 395 Concord Avenue, and a sympathetic real estate agency provided two others. At the warehouse, wholesale book, and shipping division at 778 Pleasant Street, between a drugstore and a gas station, there were canyons of books in cardboard boxes (unfortunate because the covers are the best parts), and two fifty-foot tables in the basement where four harassed-looking, prominently-sideburned men were collating stacks of Get US Out of the UN petitions. My guide explained that each Society member had been asked to send in 537 petitions with the same five signatures on each--one for every Congressman, one for the Vice-President, and one for the President. At Belmont the men with the sideburns made packets and sent them to Washington. According to Frank Gotch, "we've sent four million of these petitions out, but if you divide by 537, that's not so many people. But have you ever tried to sign your name and address 537 times? Man, writer's cramp!"

The warehouse is panelled with books, books, and more books! There are forty feet of Welch's famous tome The Politician, which accused Dwight Eisenhower of being a "conscious and willing agent of the Communist Conspiracy." There are fifty feet of the distilled essence of conspiracy, None Dare Call It Conspiracy! Another whole side of the warehouse is devoted to How We Lost...-- books on Poland, China, Korea, Vietnam, East Europe, etc. Then there are stacks of The Blue Book, Welch's original exposition of the Birch code, which describes democracy as "merely a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery, a perennial fraud. . . the worst of all forms of government."

The Society has its own publishing firm, Western Islands, but carries as a service to its members hosts of books like Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, as well as Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. But the Society's own "brilliant" writers are rather obscure--Welch's choice in 1965 for "quite possibly the world's greatest living scholar," Relivo P. Oliver, was a professor of classics at the University of Illinois.

The Society does more with these books than just sell them in American Opinion bookstores. This month, for instance, Western Islands printed up a hardbound biography of Patrick Henry, pegged its retail price at $10, and then sent the books out free as an incentive for renewing subscriptions to the Society's monthly American Opinion magazine. The Society also sends copies out to local chapters across the country for the chapter library. Gotch showed me boxes of materials, including back issues of publications and reprints of articles, as well as books, which Belmont sends to the chapters. "There's fifty dollars worth of stuff in each of those boxes, retail value," he said reverently.

Inspiration for the chapters comes from the John Birch Society's third building in Belmont, 4 Hill Road. This completely unmarked colonial block-building in the midst of suburbia also houses the Society's research files, which take up most of the second floor in row upon row of olive-green Army-jeep-looking file cabinets. William E. Dunham, the research director for the Society, called the files "invaluable."

"We have a complete set, almost, of the publications of the House Un-American Activities Committee," Dunham said.

On the first and third floors are editorial offices for the various publications--the weekly Review of the News, the monthly magazine American Opinion--as well as for Western Islands. Interior decoration consists of the original paintings that were reproduced on the cover of American Opinion. Most are either portraits--Chaing Kai-Shek, Ian Smith, Gen. Curtis Lemay, Gen. Douglas MacArthur--or scenes of American life, as Birchers view it: anxious mothers seeing upright young men off to war, congregational picnics after church on Sundays, flags everywhere.

Four Hill Road also houses the Ad Hoc Committees of the John Birch Society:

TRIM, or Tax Reform Immediately, "Lower Taxes through Less Government";

MOTOREDE, The Movement to Restore Decency, "to expose the immoral sex education programs in the schools, and to halt the mushrooming use of narcotics, the steady increase in drunkenness, the pervasive spread of pornography, the growing exhibitionism of filth in mind, body, clothes, and language, and the discarding of all morality in every sound sense of values";

TRAIN, To Restore American Independence Now, "stop foreign aid and Get US Out of the UN";

TACT, or Truth About Civil Turmoil, "very successful in exposing the Communist hands behind the Civil Rights movement"; and

SYLP, Support Your Local Police, "dramatically blocked the Communists' attempt to destroy local police forces through the creation of Police Review Boards, and continually battled Federal government attempts to create a national gestapo."

The funny thing about all of these committees is that none of them list the John Birch Society on any of their bulletins, pamphlets, or organizational material. The Society claims that 90 per cent of the Committees' members are non-Birchers, and that 4 Hill Road only gives impetus and direction to them. But as Gotch told me apologetically as we drove away from the buildings, "The Communists have fronts. We have Ad Hoc Committees."

The John Birch Society and other conspiracy theorists of world history have accomplished at least a consciousness-raising exercise. They were the first to point with alarm at the international power of multinational corporations. They opposed intervention in South Vietnam, arguing that such action was designed by the Communist Conspiracy embedded in the US government to waste American resources in a fruitless cause, to create instability in the American economy, and to divide and polarize American society.

Out in Belmont, however, these issues form a small fraction of the bookshelves. The pride and joy of Society headquarters is the $40,000 mail-stuffing machine, which according to Gotch, can put as many as nine enclosures in a letter, fold, seal, and stamp a computer-typed address on it, and churn 'em out at 50 per minute.