Before the Storm (22 page)

Welch specialized in sales. The frustrated writer's first book, in 1941,
The Road to Salesmanship,
proclaimed selling a profession more important than law or medicine. “Instead of the bread and circuses handed out to idle mobs by politicians,” salesmen drove progress itself by inducing Americans to want more things and then to strive to better themselves in order to earn enough to buy them. Wartime experience as an Office of Price Administration consultant for the candy industry hardened Welch's conservatism; lobbying as chair of the Washington Committee of the National Confectioners Association (he was named Candy Industry Man of the Year in 1947) petrified it. He mastered the signal vocation of America's domestic Cold Warriors: compiling, organizing, and cross-referencing files-who had belonged to what? who had been where? who knew whom? He devoured history, newspapers, socialist organs; and became convinced (incredulous that anyone would want to deliver more power into the hands of an all-powerful central government) that Western Europe's welfare states were products of a Communist conspiracy—and that the conspiracy was gaining ground here, too. He began taking longer and longer trips abroad, winning audiences with men like Chiang Kai-shek and Konrad Adenauer. In 1950 Welch ran for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. He declared his platform the United States Constitution. He came in fourth. Elective office would not be his metier.

The next April, President Truman relieved General MacArthur of his command in Korea. There followed an unprecedented outpouring of popular emotion for the general—he was, said one Republican congressman, “a great hunk of God in the flesh”—and a triumphant national tour. Alongside McCarthy's ongoing inquisition, it marked a new tendency on the American right: it was that much easier to believe you were doing patriotic work even—perhaps especially—if you defied the government. In 1951 Welch traveled New England decrying the aid and comfort Dean Acheson's State Department was providing to the Communists. In one town a listener wrote a critical open letter to a local newspaper: Wasn't McCarthyism fast becoming a political liability for the Republican Party? Welch, compelled to answer, spent the next two weeks in a graphomaniacal stupor.

His eighty-page response defined a method that would hardly waver over the next thirty years and untold thousands of pages. It was a letter, beginning with an apology for length (“For I have to go far afield, and build up these facts step by step, in order to show the ultimate impact and significance of the partly completed pattern as it now appears to me”). Welch expressed befuddlement that august congressional investigators who had looked at the same facts neither “knew, nor took the trouble to find out, the right questions to ask.” Then came the eye-popping, awful revelations, thick with documentation, deduced with unshakable confidence—in this case concerning how “at every step Mao could have been stopped by our government.... Instead we deliberately turned over rule of China's four hundred million people to Stalin's stooge.” He was sorry he was the one who had to discover the ugly news.

He sent the letter to three friends. Friends asked for copies for their friends. Soon, as if by mitosis, Welch was mailing out hundreds, then thousands of copies—although it was not, as Welch might have put it, an accident. The master salesman had incorporated a “Welch Mailing Committee”—five energetic young Bay Staters “frightened to death of what is happening to our country”—to drum up readers. He called his tract
May God Forgive Us.

In November, he submitted the piece to Henry Regnery, the shy, cerebral son of a Midwestern Quaker pacifist family whose Regnery Company was the most respected of the nation's handful of conservative publishers. They had been nearly bankrupt—as they would be many times in the future—when Regnery published Buckley's
God and Man at Yale.
Welch bet Henry Regnery a good dinner “that within the next twelve months you sell more than twice as many copies of
May God Forgive Us.”
It was a token of the man's very curious arrogance and innocence. Welch believed that if you only told the American people the truth—the truth he had had the bad luck to discover in his investigations—they would respond and set things right. Years later, at the opening meeting of Manion's Americans for Goldwater committee, Welch said that Goldwater had only to take the lead in opposing Eisenhower's planned May summit with Khrushchev for a grateful Republican rank and file to ring him into nomination by acclamation.

When
May God's
first sales figures were tallied, Regnery told Welch the book was flying off the shelves by the tens of thousands. Welch was incredulous. Why wasn't it selling in the hundreds of thousands? Regnery protested that there simply wasn't that kind of demand for this kind of book. This Welch simply could not accept. So he revived the Welch Mailing Committee, bought out Regnery's inventory, and sold the books while campaigning for Robert Taft. After the 1952 Republican Convention, Welch was one more who reluctantly went to work for Ike; in December he wrote Regnery that the Republican
presidential victory “highlighted a definite turn back from the left, which will make it easier for the soundly factual books which you publish to obtain a wider readership.” Welch offered to buy enough stock to join his board of directors. Regnery refused—then he refused to publish Welch's hulking allegorical novel on the civilization of ants who were seduced into accepting a paternalistic government that soon came to enslave them.

Regnery accepted one more book from Welch.
The Life of John Birch: In the Story of One American Boy, the Ordeal of His Age
told the tale of a young American Baptist missionary-cum-spy who learned at the close of World War II of the Communists' secret plan to take over China. He was assassinated, and his murder was supposedly covered up by State Department quislings who knew if the story got out their own complicity in Mao's victory would be revealed. John Birch was “the first casualty of the Cold War.” If he had lived, how different the world would have been! If every American knew this story, how ready everyone would be to do what was right! Regnery's stubborn refusal to realize his obligation to Western civilization—not to stop until he had put the book into the hands of every American—convinced Welch that he once more would have to do this job himself. The hour was dark. For now he had discovered how Dwight Eisenhower's career-long liaison and cooperation with the Communist Party had led to the fall of Eastern Europe. He circulated his three-hundred-page letter on the subject,
The Politician,
to a few close friends who could handle this level of truth.

Robert Welch built the John Birch Society on the foundation of two important earlier groups that kept alive the conservative message during the right's years in the wilderness. One was the National Association of Manufacturers. Welch was chair of its Education Committee, an important job: NAM was a group with a keen, even prescient appreciation of how to use public relations to shape political opinion. “We have allowed our detractors to put over on us their symbols,” its president declared. Businesses had to counter with symbols of their own. The organization spent millions to drive home the message that it was employers, not unions, who were the natural allies of workers. In 1947 NAM took out ads in 265 daily papers (“We are all workers, we are all capitalists”) and issued two million pieces of literature; in 1950 it launched a $1.5 million radio program,
Industry
on
Parade
—more popular in its time slot than
Meet the Press,
which did not boast its own singing group. A full-time staff of debaters fanned out to appear on local radio shows; other staff gave two-day seminars to businessmen on how “to become better champions of the American way.”

Then there was the Foundation for Economic Education, on whose board Welch served. Founded in 1946, FEE spread a libertarian gospel so uncompromising
it bordered on anarchism. And they spread it
everywhere.
The organization had pamphlets designed for placement on bookracks in factory break rooms (31
Cents,
on the amount of taxes extracted from each dollar earned;
The First Leftists,
on the French Revolution's Great Terror). At FEE seminars, businessmen learned the words, phrases, and ideas to freeze liberals in debate. The Foundation searched out cash-strapped high schools to whom it distributed free conservative textbooks. And after
The Freeman
folded, FEE revived it as a controlled circulation magazine that businessmen could pay to have sent free to employees, vendors, and clients.

FEE and NAM were conservative media empires. Welch took inspiration from them to build a media empire of his own. First he put out his own magazine,
One Man's Opinion;
when it had passed a few thousand in circulation, he changed the name to
American Opinion.
He did all this after work and on weekends. In 1957 he retired from business, contemplated a run against Massachusetts's blue-blooded Senator Leverett Saltonstall, then changed his mind. The Communists, after all, did not work their domination through electoral politics. They did it by seizing institutions from within. If he recruited enough people to
explain
the conspiracy (for instance, how the Communists bamboozled Americans into believing they lived in a democracy, not a republic), the conspiracy could not work. He figured he'd need about a million people to rout the Communists altogether.

He founded the John Birch Society on December 8, 1958, at an Indianapolis lecture delivered to eleven wealthy men, three of them past presidents of NAM, that lasted two straight days—breaking only for lunch, coffee, and dinner. Identical meetings were held in a dozen more cities in the year to come. The transcript of the lecture would later become the Society's catechism, The
Blue Book.
The invitees were men like Harry Lynd Bradley, CEO of Allen-Bradley, whose electronics factory lorded over Milwaukee's South Side with the biggest four-sided clock tower in the world; and Robert W. Stoddard, who owned the world's largest manufacturer of metal forgings, the morning and evening newspapers in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the city's leading radio station. Men like Bradley and Stoddard listened to Welch with awe. “These were two of the most worthwhile days I have ever spent,” one textile-mill owner wrote Manion. “Here for the first time is hope—hope of success instead of more frustrated shadow boxing.”

“We are living in America today,” Welch's lesson began, “in such a fool's paradise as the people of China lived in twenty years ago, as the people of Czechoslovakia lived in a dozen years ago, as the people of North Vietnam lived in five years ago, and as the people of Iraq lived in only yesterday.” Lenin had declared a three-stage strategy for world conquest: “First, we will take
Eastern Europe. Next, the masses of Asia. Then we shall encircle that last bastion of capitalism, the United States of America. We shall not have to attack; it will fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” Welch said the fruit was already one-quarter loosened.

Only rarely, Welch explained, did Communists take over countries through force. More often they disguised theirs as just another political party, then struck peacefully from within the system; or they slipped the noose over a people through steady and subtle propaganda, colonizing their very minds. That, he concluded, was what was happening in America. “The trouble in our southern states has been fomented almost entirely by the Communists for this purpose,” he explained by way of example, “to stir up such bitterness between whites and blacks in the South that small flames of civil disorder would inevitably result. They could then fan and coalesce these little flames into one great conflagration of civil war.... The whole slogan of ‘civil rights,' as used to make trouble in the South today, is an exact parallel to the slogan of ‘agrarian reform' which they used in China.” It was all part of the plan: elites surrendering American sovereignty to the UN; foreign aid rotting our balance of payments; skyrocketing taxes, unbalanced budgets, inflation. There was only one way to explain it: our labor unions, churches, schools,
the government
—all had been infiltrated. Voices of opposition were censored: not by outright ban, but the way Stalin censored Trotsky—by holding down his press runs because there wasn't enough “demand.”

Two days, dozens of conspiracy theories, and God knows how many cups of coffee later, Welch explained what the members of his group were going to do about it.

The message of the organic unity of the American welfare state and Russian imperial expansion was not new to them; it was a commonplace of organizations like Kent and Phoebe Courtney's Conservative Society of America, Chicago's We, The People!, and H. L. Hunt's Life Line, and of radio ministries like Carl McIntire's and Billy James Hargis's. What differed was the clarity of Welch's solution. All it would require was a coordinated body of patriots, disciplined under a single command: not running for office, not taking up guns—but educating. For if America had only learned the truth about John Birch in time, then Communism's spread might have ended then and there. Welch doubted he was up to the task of directing the effort, but as a dedicated patriot he was willing to answer the call. The only condition for membership in the Society was that members follow his dictates absolutely. They could quit if they didn't like it. Otherwise internal power struggles would kill them. The Communists hadn't won their gains through parliamentary procedure.

He started by hiring a staff of bright young salesmen who believed in the
product, would not question the boss, and would work long hours on commission (they focused their pitches on houses flying the American flag out front). By the time of the John Birch Society's sudden national coming-out in the spring of 1961, they had 20,000 members (or 60,000, or 100,000; estimates varied—but even 20,000 was greater than the membership of the Communist Party of the United States in its 1930s heyday). An office down the road from Welch's fieldstone-and-frame home in the Boston suburb of Belmont employed some twenty-eight full-time staffers and an equal number of volunteers, who dumped $4,000 worth of mail each week at the Belmont post office next door. An Iowa pen company gave an expensive fountain model as a premium to each new member. Centralia, Missouri, was a virtual Birch fiefdom; the owner of the factory that employed half the town's workforce made membership practically a condition for advancement. By 1962 Welch was raising over a million dollars a year.