Nora Sayre
Among the Birchers
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Blue flames bursting through the darkness, jouncing to the beat of ‘Hey, Look Me Over’: held high over waiters’ heads, fifty bombs of Baked Alaska speed to our tables, while everybody cheers. When the lights go on, the snowy crewcut on my right says: ‘Pass the Rockefeller cream’. He explains that the food-business is part of the Conspiracy: the Communists are weakening and starving our bodies so that we’ll knuckle under more easily. That filthy socialist Rockefeller controls the milk-industry, and he uses that foundation of his to research formulas for polluting dairy-products. ‘Not poison’, he grunts, holding up the cream. ‘Just weak.’ We compare our tastes in salads. It’s very easy to talk with Birchers and their friends: you befoul Nelson Rockefeller, praise watercress and radishes, agree that Washington’s gone bananas, and curse inflation. The doctor across the table repeats, ‘Nixon should be tried for treason’. Fine. Here, in the Boston Statler-Hilton’s ballroom, when the swing band plays each state’s song, Ohioans or Rhode Islanders or Virginians whip to their feet and whirl their yellow napkins in wide circles at the ceiling. After ‘Dixie’, the rebel-yell sounds very much like the cry of the Algerian women or the Yip-whoop-perhaps because most larynxes are withered or worn.
For five days, I’ve been clutching my collarbone to pledge allegiance, and jumping up to sing the national anthem again and again, or bowing my head for benedictions. (The only way to report on the John Birch Society is to be invisible.) Hence it’s soothing to sit still and hear Art Smith sing ‘The Hawk and the Dove’ – ‘They’re two different birds, / They’ll never make love’ – and the evening’s most popular song, ‘Accentuate the Positive’, which makes me hope for ‘Celery Stalks at Midnight’ or ‘Fry Me Cookie With a Can of Lard’. But we never get beyond ‘Don’t mess with mister in between’. At Smith’s request, we all hold hands around the table while he sings ‘A Closer Walk With Thee’. There are some little yuks about sensitivity-training, which the Birchers deplore, and a murmur of distress when he says that a song was inspired by Plato (‘That homo, Socrates’), but Smith is far better received than Rudy Vallee, who doesn’t seem to understand his audience. He tells dozens of shattering drunk-jokes (‘After the Taj Mahal cocktail, ya won’t know what got India’), shocks his listeners by saying that he campaigned for Nixon, hauls out the old mouldy about the pregnant woman carrying the sign reading ‘Nixon’s the One’, and confuses them with ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’ and ‘Winchester Cathedral’.
Therefore, my table is grateful when (some) conversation can be resumed. Still, the man on my left – who looks very much as Lee Harvey Oswald might have if he’d passed 45 – maintains a nervy silence, aside from saying that he’s heard that there are lots of patriots in Florida. (Some Birchers immediately tell you that they’re members, while others never do – they just talk about patriots.) The old man beside me asserts that some public figure will be assassinated this year: the Communists – in league with part of the establishment – will kill someone in order to make the public clamour for gun-control. Then everyone will have to register their guns, and ‘they’ll know who and where we are’. The sole point of the assassination will be the identification of the Birchers, since they’re such a threat to the Conspiracy. Hawaii may be used as a refuge for ‘some of the big boys—to sit it out until the shooting-war is over’.
The Conspiracy may sound like a boutique to you, but it’s plasma to the Birchers. Basically, much of the US federal government and the rich are plotting to bring about world government, which will eventually mean Communism – which has always been financed by ‘the international bankers’. In a wonderful lecture by G. Edward Griffin – whom some expect to be Robert Welch’s successor – slides and diagrams of triangles and arrows and circles show how the Conspiracy learned its techniques from the eighteenth-century Freemasons of Europe. Those at the centre control the dupes or lackeys in the outer rings. After references to the Warburgs and the Rothschilds, accompanied by drawings of dusky, shifty-eyed men whispering behind their hands, I thought that the Anti-Defamation League would have some fresh ammunition. However, ‘not all international bankers are Jewish’. (Even the Panthers have never been so unkind to the Rockefellers, who may be the wickedest tycoons of all.) Our politicians have had a secret agreement with the ‘private banking dynasties’, hence ‘the total control of the nation’s money fell into private hands’. Suddenly, the name of RUSKIN! flashed across the screen. Ruskin’s ‘ruling class ideas’ influenced Cecil Rhodes, whose secret society was inherited by Lord Alfred Milner … In the US, this pattern is imitated by the Council on Foreign Relations, which is a front for J. P. Morgan and Co. While the Council isn’t the absolute centre of the Conspiracy, it ‘governs the country’ through its control of education and the media. However, some of the Council’s own members don’t realize that it’s a front.
Those who plan a ‘world super-state’ pay and incite left-wing groups to start confrontations – so that the terrified public will accept a police state, martial rule, and a larger government. In fact, world government will be offered as the only alternative to violence. The Birchers don’t seem much alarmed by the Movement, since it’s just a tool of the establishment – which ‘needs chaos and crime in the streets and the threat of nuclear war’.
Stokely Carmichael was respectfully quoted as saying that the Morgan Guaranty Trust and the Chase Bank ‘own most of the mortgages in Harlem’, and Griffin suggested that Carmichael was expelled from SNCC and the Panthers because he knew ‘the truth’. (The Birchers would loathe all those rumours about Carmichael being a CIA agent.) So ‘the establishment publicly condemns but privately supports the revolution’. And Communists are secretly encouraged because the Conspiracy ‘depends on a huge foe’. (Here, my neighbour crooned the Birch bumper slogan: ‘Get the US out of the UN and the UN out of the US.’) Griffin urged his audience to ‘challenge the establishment’s candidates’, and ‘to return government to the hands of the people’. He added: ‘Is it possible that the Communist and capitalist conspiracies have one more inner circle? We don’t know, but it seems likely.’ My neighbour sighed: ‘One ball of wax.’ Griffin concluded by quoting Looney Tunes: ‘That’s all, folks!’
Feeling funny? So do some of the Birchers, especially when the long arms of the Conspiracy reach out to clasp so many institutions – there has been some confusion about tentacles and testicles. The testicles of the Supreme Court? Anyway, ‘the greatest threat to constitutional government is not Communism from without, but the Supreme Court from within’ according to Congressman John Rarick of Louisiana, who kept calling Chief Justice Burger ‘Booger’ – nearly bugger – throughout his speech on ‘We Live and Serve For Those We Love’, which was mainly a disgruntled listing of federal expenditures.
During long days of staring at liver spots on the backs of bald heads, and wondering where the men found those old seersucker jackets of the ‘fifties, I unwound by chatting with a very pleasant Judo instructor in the hotel’s basement, where he taught self-defence to children and adults throughout the rally. Small Birchers tumbled in cartwheels around his knees, while he explained to me that it takes only three pounds of pressure to break someone’s finger. Few at the rally looked younger than 50; a trickle of teenagers had clearly been brought by their parents. They had discussions about ‘whether rock music is part of the Conspiracy’, and practised singing ‘Godless America’ for the final dinner.
Quite a few Birchers dozed or took little naps as soon as the speeches began; others applauded at the wrong moments and were gently reproached by the speakers. With nine hours of lectures a day, many seemed quite exhausted, and they wandered off to the exhibition halls, where booths were staffed by sympathetic organizations. (The rally is said to be sponsored by ‘a coalition’ of conservative groups, but the Boston press sets it firmly in Birchdom.) The bazaar of Birch-related products ranged from alfalfa sprouts and little dishes of seeds, which you should grow and can to become SHELF-SUFFICIENT – as riots, pollution, and strikes increase, you won’t be able to leave your house, and the supermarkets will be empty – to rhinestone flag-pins, or pamphlets on ‘Freedom’s Judas-Goat’ (Fullbright, sometimes called Fooldull), bumper stickers – MY GOD IS ALIVE – SORRY ABOUT YOURS, SHOOT LOOTERS, SEE AMERICA FIRST – IT’S A RIOT – or Orwell’s Animal Farm, a great favourite of the Birchers.
Spooning up wet, cold beans and apple mush, dispensed by the Hippocrates Health Society, you could read the riveting hand-outs on devil worship in America or how to massage your feet to regenerate other parts of the body: pressing your big toe to relieve the back of your neck, or squeezing your heel for the sake of your hips. (‘Two persons can accomplish wonders by working at each others’ feet at the same time.’) At the Birch Society’s own tables, Teddy Bare, a right-wing analysis of Chappaquiddick, was this year’s best seller. The usual Birch front groups offered their regular literature: TACT (Truth About Civil Turmoil), which connects black groups with the Communists; TRAIN (To Restore American Independence Now), which belts the UN and the peace mongers; SYLP (Support Your Local Police); and MOTOREDE (The Movement To Restore Decency), which fights sex education, birth control, and abortion. These organizations recruit citizens who may not realize that they’re halfway into the Birch Society. There wasn’t much evidence of SHAME (Stop Helping America’s Marxist Enemies). They recommend boycotting stores which sell Polish hams, Czech toys, also Camel, Winston, and Salem cigarettes—which are supposed to be made with Yugoslavian tobacco. In the past, SHAME has intimidated even Sears, Roebuck, Woolworth, and Kresge out of selling products from East Europe.
You can easily predict what the Birchers hate: disarmament, socialized medicine, busing, programmes to aid Appalachia, The New York Times, taxes, John Dewey (who is still being ‘exposed’), and of course any Kennedy. Throughout, we were swimming in Chappaquiddick jokes: ‘Teddyboy laid down his friends for his life’; the races run by Kennedys include ‘the race to get out of a submerged automobile’; the Democrats, who will definitely nominate him, ‘can swallow a bridge or two’; ‘some condemned Teddy for wearing his neck-brace to the Kopechne funeral. But he needed it: to hold his head up.’ (These are in keeping with the Birchers’ old gags about JFK’s funeral: ‘Jackie got a Jack-in-the-box’.) Only Pat Nixon escaped; ‘Isn’t it nice to have a lady in the White House again.’ (Timid applause.) Certain names are magic : Bernadette Devlin, Jane Fonda, Walter Lippmann. But only Sammy Davis, Jr, got hissed.
At other moments, when the Birchers repeat: the government’s lying to us! the media distorts! public schools are disintegrating, the establishment is exploiting us all … you wonder if you ever left home. The Birchers are fascinating because they’re half-right on some points, also because they’re fuelled by a period in which it’s often hard to know what’s true or crazy. They also dislike the CIA, the AMA, the National Council of Churches, and ‘capitalists’ – meaning rich socialists’ who don’t serve free enterprise. They’re not a bit fond of John Mitchell, and even Agnew (who was hardly mentioned) is understood to be a ‘phoney conservative’ – a front for the left-wing government we actually have. As for the Silent Majority, it ‘never saved any nation’ and it ‘stood back’ while Jesus was crucified; ‘the Silent Majority is yellow and always has been’.
It’s beguiling to hear the Birchers use certain phrases when they’re obviously innocent of the source: the AMA and other medical organizations which ‘deny individuals their rights’ are ‘not part of the solution, but part of the problem’; what the US needs is ‘people-power’; those who are ruining America should be lined ‘up against the wall’ (before a firing squad). At moments, I felt as though I was again covering the Panther conventions of the last two years. Still, nobody said Right On.
The Birchers naturally uphold the Vietnam war – but they don’t love it. Robert Scott, the retired Brigadier General, author of God Is My Co-Pilot and its recent sequel, God Is Still My Co-Pilot, survivor of 388 Far East combat missions in the Second World War, mentioned that Douglas MacArthur and others advised against a land war in Vietnam, and added: ‘Then we sent our sons away to do the dirtiest job in the world.’ Lecturing on ‘The Poison of “Peace”’ he said that ‘our carefully planned failure’ were conceived by ‘very intelligent men’; again, they’re part of the Conspiracy ‘to unite with Soviet Russia’. (Birchers refer to Russia much oftener than China.) God willed us to have the atomic bomb – not only to win the Second World War, but for peace-keeping. However, we’ve been sold out by the Conspiracy. Scott blames the military’s drug-problem – ‘if there is one’ – on letting the war ‘get boring’. Also, ‘the uniform has lost its glamour’. (He and others were very reluctant to believe that the army’s stoned; narcotics programmes can be just an excuse for raising taxes.) Proudly, he said: ‘I was as much a murderer as ten Calleys.’ But his hometown gave him a hero’s parade, and even rented a water buffalo – ‘at great expense’ – for him to ride on.
The Birchers cherish their weapons for self-defence: ‘Take up a relevant sport – target practice.’ Although the speakers aren’t inciteful, a couple of men in the audience chuckled over the possibility that Mike Mansfield might get shot during the next hunting season in Montana: ‘He better stay out of the woods.’ Of course, the US itself is under-armed. One Bircher urged his audience to press their congressmen for the rapid development of ‘exotic weapons’, such as more bacteriological warfare and the ‘neutron bomb’, which is ‘destructive to human tissue’ but leaves most buildings standing. It removes people, not cities, and ‘doesn’t make rubble out of the land’.
Nixon? Some were hopeful at his election, but he’s now despised as ‘the liberal he always was’. And ‘trading LBJ for Nixon is like getting custody of your ex-wife’s parents’. Nixon was used by the Conspiracy during the Hiss case, when ‘only one Communist was exposed, and the public was placated’. After many sneers at Keynes’ homosexuality, plus references to Keynes’ ‘dear friend, FDR’, it was stressed that ‘Franklin Delano Nixon’ has finally ‘confessed that he’s a Keynesian – though that doesn’t mean he’s a homosexual’. (For some reason, the Conspiracy didn’t want Humphrey for president, and they elected Nixon by saying that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Humphrey.) Hence, Nixon, like the CIA – and its employee, Daniel Ellsberg – feeds the Conspiracy. ‘Let’s fly above those silly Pentagon Papers’ – which were leaked by the government to make the public demand peace, which means defeat.
Old Birch-buffs say that many who embraced the Conspiracy theory used to be openly anti-Semitic – despite Robert Welch’s efforts to keep racism at bay. (Welch has written that anti-Semitism is a weapon of the Communists. Others have claimed that the Society has been plagued by ‘anti-Semitic infiltrators’.) So most Birchers are extremely cautious now. They even produced a couple of black speakers. One explained that employers who wouldn’t hire blacks were ‘sitting on the boards of the NAACP and the Urban League’; the same people ‘were making the problem and financing the protest’. Later, I questioned him during a whispery rap-session in the hall, while square dancers in mammoth crinolines thundered by. He confirmed that ‘coloured people’ and whites can get along – it’s only ‘planned class warfare that makes them fight’. He referred to ‘those Hollywood movies that make coloured people look dumb’, and insisted that ‘civil rights’ leaders really deprive other blacks of their rights.
The square-dance caller shouted: ‘Do-si-do!’ The black Bircher began to weave a wild parallel between the US and medieval Europe: ‘See, the squires finked on their own families, to get themselves up the ladder … ’
‘Allemand left!’
‘And the fiefs … ’
‘Swing your partner!’
‘What’s Queen Elizabeth ever done against the Communists? Nothing. They help to keep her in power.’
‘Do-si-do!’
‘Shoot a leader – like Joe Columbo or Martin Luther King – and you solidify the people. They think there’s a plot against them – so they’re ready to fight other races.’
‘Now I want to see a graaaaaannd chaaaaiinn.’
At a reception for some hoop-skirted women, who’d dressed themselves and a collection of dolls in the style of Godey’s Ladies, an exercise which was somehow plugged into ‘the priceless heritage of being an American woman’, it was repeated that the Alabama Negroes love Governor Wallace. The Birchers paid tribute to ‘predominantly Negro’ colleges; Daniel Payne College is one of the few in America ‘that’s never had any violence on campus’. Moreover, the aim of integrated schools is ‘not to educate Negroes but to keep whites ignorant’. (The ‘purpose of keeping people ignorant is to make them more malleable, easier to lead’.) Prior to integration, the all-black public schools in Washington were very good – and so were the white schools. Now, most public schools are bad, while the ‘private’ black schools in the South are doing fine. Still, it’s ‘not a racial question’.
Beneath the emblem of a broken hammer and sickle, superimposed by a sword-tipped cross and flag, speech after speech confirmed the Birchers’ beliefs. ‘The poor of America own more cars than all the people in Russia.’ Hence, ‘Mostly, poverty is a state of mind … Money and education cannot end poverty.’ Higher education is ‘the most overrated thing since Jackie Kennedy’. (Cheers.) There is no population explosion, so there’s no excuse for birth control; also, ‘have you noticed that those who support abortion are also against capital punishment?’ Sex education is designed simply to distract children from learning anything else. Students take drugs ‘because someone wanted it that way, and industriously promoted it’. However, all drug-users should be jailed. This may be the age of Aquarius, but the water in that sign ‘isn’t being used for purification, but for brainwashing our youth’. Modern women are ‘immodest and unclean’. (Birchers snort gleefully whenever the women’s movement is mentioned.) The churches could have prevented the Communist takeover; instead, they promoted it. And the ‘pagan’ peace symbol is an inverted crucifix, designed by Nero, and was originally used for crucifying St Peter and others upside-down. Throughout, ‘You can’t play down the possibility that the same group may be running the capitalists and the Communists.’
Although ‘we depend on the press for information as a child depends on its mother’s breast for milk’, all publications which aren’t produced by the Birch Society are toxic. One white reporter was forced to leave the rally when he tried to cover it for The Boston Herald Traveller, and was threatened with ‘personal assault’ if he returned. À black cameraman, who had the Society’s permission to film the rally for a Boston TV station, was kicked, kneed, and carried out by a group of men who didn’t want their pictures taken.
The Birchers are anarchists – if only they knew it. They detest most professional politicians, except for Wallace, and they don’t seem to like any form of government. ‘Our authority is not the President, but the Constitution … anyone who sabotages the Constitution should be resisted’ – like Richard Nixon. The audience loved a story from ancient Greece: ‘When a senator made a proposal, he stood on a box with a rope around his neck. If the people liked the proposal, they took away the rope. If they didn’t, they kicked away the box.’ Huge applause.
Any kind of liberal should be flattered to learn that the Conspiracy is brilliantly organized, and that its members have been very well ‘trained’. The world is laced with corridors and wings: FDR was ‘waiting in the corridor’; Communists ‘always have a student waiting in the wings’. But the Birchers’ strength springs from their knowledge: again and again, the speakers told them: You know so much, you’re the only ones who know what’s going on in this country. Hence their sense of superiority. Certain as any astrologer that he knows what lies ahead, the Bircher feels a Titanic responsibility: to tell others about the Conspiracy. ‘It’s our duty to inform them, and to name the culprits.’
There’s great emphasis on organizing in your own community to fight the local jobs corps or the schoolboard or the library or fluoridation, or to harry the sponsors of tv and radio stations who finance unpatriotic programs. Speakers stress that ‘we have only fourteen months in which to do something for America’, (convince students to vote against Teddy Kennedy); ‘we have only thirty-six months’ before the Russians ‘force a confrontation in the Middle East’. Yet they know that many Americans will ignore or try to suppress them. ‘If there’s a murderer crawling into your bedroom at night, and your dog barks in the yard, you have two problems: discomfort at being awakened’ – and the suspicion that ‘something’s wrong with the dog’. But if you shoot the dog, you’ve lost your protection from the murderer. And that’s how the spiritual watchdogs of the Birch Society feel that they’re treated today.
Aside from the ego-biscuits, part of the Society’s spell may be cast by the vagueness and the rambling contradictions of the speakers. The polite audience sighs or gasps in response to passwords like Conspiracy or fluoridation, but few can explain the concepts to you. (Does the Conspiracy direct the Communists, or vice versa? You hear it both ways.) Most of the Birchers I met were doctors and teachers and small businessmen; all were from the professional classes, and there was no mention of Middle America. Yet, unlike the yelling uglies I’ve seen at Wallace rallies, or the smug ‘realists’ who turn out for Ayn Rand, many Birchers seemed quite forlorn or washed-out people. The hatred and rage which they were known for in the past may have ebbed, although many are very bitter indeed, and their jokes have a queasy malice. But they didn’t gleam with the confidence which you see at most rallies – that exhilaration which often peaks when any kind of faithful get together.
So you feel that the Birchers are losing the momentum which they had in ’66 or ’67. Last year, even the Young Americans for Freedom broke with them, and denounced Lester Maddox, their prime speaker, for his racism. Empty of all political sophistication, the Birchers seem unable to capitalize on most conservative sentiments in the country now. Yet, although they seem rather powerless en masse, I’m sure that they can still exert furious pressures in their own small towns or neighbourhoods. After all those boring speeches, many kept saying what fun the rally had been, how lovely it was to see each other again, and how they looked forward to meeting next year – if only the Conspiracy doesn’t kill a lot of us off, if only we can work fast enough to prevent it.
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Nora Sayre, an American journalist and critic, wrote this dispatch from The John Birch Society conference. It was first published in 1972 in the magazine’s August/September issue and reprinted in her National Book Award nominated collection, Sixties Going on Seventies, a year later.
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