THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY

[LadyBlue]

With the onset of the McCarthy era 50 years ago, any perceived threat to U.S. sovereignty from the British Round Table and its American branch shifted to an obsession with the Soviet Union. Roy Cohn, who was legal counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the anti-Communist Senate investigations of the 1950s, would later become a member of the John Birch Society and a principle figure in the JBS intelligence gathering operation, the Western Goals Foundation.

Out of the latter emerged the core group which, in 1981, formed the present Council for National Policy -- a consortium of high level political, corporate and evangelical leaders which is the primary coordinating body and funding conduit for Christian Right projects.

Sara Diamond's book, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States, notes:"Before and after the formation of the John Birch Society, corporations played a major role in rallying the public to the anticommunist cause."

In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act granted corporations the right to distribute literature to counter labor union organizing -- a movement they blamed on the communists. To reduce the cost of producing and distributing anti-Communist materials, corporations turned to non-profit organizations such as the JBS.

By 1963, corporations were spending an estimated $25 million per year on anticommunist literature... Some corporations circulated print and audio-visual materials produced by the John Birch Society; other corporations produced their own in-house literature...By the early 1960s, the Nation magazine reported that there was a minimum of 6,600 corporate-financed anticommunist broadcasts, carried by more than 1,300 radio and television stations at a total annual budget of about $20 million...Leading sponsors included Texas oil billionaire H.L. Hunt and Howard J. Pew of Sun Oil. The corporate sector's massive anticommunist propaganda campaigns created a favorable climate for the mobilization of activist groups like the John Birch Society.

On the other hand, or rather the other side of the dialectic, super-capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller would come to understand the potential of using labor unions to corporate advantage -- as a means of controlling the opposition.

The Rockefeller interests have not overlooked and have made good use of the monopoly of labor that is afforded to unions, to effect monopolies of industry that would be recognized as illegal if they had been effected by a monopoly of machinery. Labor unions have proved to be a powerful weapon for the Rockefeller Empire in extending its world conquest; and subsidized unioneers are always in the forefront of the emissaries that they send out into newly conquered territories. With Marxism as a shibboleth, they are rapidly accomplishing a world-wide subjugation of the "peasantry". This has earned for wily John D. Jr. a reputation for "liberalism". It is more appropriately called "Rockefellerism".

64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:6bQfv6q7ouYJ:watch.pair.com/jbs-cnp.html+cia+john+birch+society&hl=en

[LadyBlue]

In reference to a man named Isaacs, who seemed to be linked somehow to Oswald and allegedly appeared in film footage near the President when he arrived in Texas, Turner indicated that a classified document did, in fact, exist, entitled “Harold Isaacs.” An unnamed Garrison investigator had located a man somewhere in Texas with that name, who admitted to owning a 1958 Ford which had been destroyed in a wrecking yard. [The investigator was William Wood, aka William Boxley, but the man named Harold Isaacs was not the subject of the still-classified document—CD 1080—and the 1958 vehicle discussed at the Winnipeg Airport was a Dodge.] Finally, Turner, in reference to the Kansas City meeting mentioned in the Winnipeg conversation [which was to take place at the Townhouse Motor Hotel, located at Broadway and Kellogg Sts. in Wichita, Kansas, as the FBI had discovered, as reflected in a report I obtained in 1999], pointed out that this happened to be the headquarters of the Minutemen, a right-wing, paramilitary organization that Garrison suspected was involved in the assassination. [Wichita had been the head office of AMERICAN MERCURY magazine in the early 1960s, however, and was the home of oilman Fred Koch, who had cofounded the John Birch Society in the 1950s, as pointed out in a June, 1994 VANITY FAIR article on the family.]

tinyurl.com/5uy2t

[LadyBlue]

There is virtually no public information about the involvement of Wichita's business elite with fair housing, public accommodations, or school desegregation.

Indeed, the records of the aircraft industries are locked away underground in Wichita's salt mines, inaccessible to researchers. Many of the business elite lived in Eastborough, an incorporated area within Wichita that although surrounded by the city maintains its own police force and government.

Eastborough residents were generally untouched by civil rights protest. Some were instrumental in supporting Very few among this elite used their power to redress the wrongs of Jim Crow. Only a handful of individual businessmen voluntarily broke the informal color bar by hiring blacks for other than unskilled jobs.

Collegiate High School, a private institution that promised an excellent conservative education. Among those families whose children attended Collegiate were the Lears, the Colemans, the Loves, and the Kochs. Some were members of the John Birch Society and presumably agreed with its hostility to civil rights.

John Oxler of Southwestern Bell, Samuel H. Marcus of the Excel Packing Company, Martin Eby of Eby Construction, and Gordon Evans of Kansas Gas and Electricity are chief executives remembered fondly by African Americans for the support they provided. The white owner of radio station KFH helped expose issues that concerned the black community by initiating a regular program featuring Hugh Jackson.

He was able to say whatever he wanted, uncensored, and he continued to send tapes back to Wichita for airing even after he moved to California in 1972. The vice president and general manager of KAKE-TV, Martin Umansky, whose wife, Mary, served on the LEAP Committee, gave Jackson regular airtime on his television station.

[LadyBlue]

The “John Birch Society” was gratuitously cold-shouldered Tuesday night at a city political meeting.

There were 23 of the 25 Board of Education candidates present at the Southwest Civic Council session, as well as 16 of the 17 City Commission candidates.

[...] Questions were asked [...]
One that caught the school board candidates point-blank was: “How many of you are members of the John Birch Society?”<br>
No one admitted belonging.
(The Birch group, apparently self-appointed guardian of Americanism had been rumored to be trying to place several candidates on the Board of Education. Several city teachers are said to be out of favor with the society.) [“John Birch Society Gets Cold Shoulder”, The

Wichita Eagle, March 1, 1961: 3A].

Three candidates even took out ads in the paper denying that they were associated with the Birchers. Fred Linde and W. H. Kolins’ ad stated: “WE ARE NOT AND WE HAVE NEVER BEEN MEMBERS OF THE JOHN BIRCH SOC. WE ARE NOT ENDORSED BY THEM, NOR ARE WE IN SYMPATHY WITH THEM.” [“A Joint Statement”, The Wichita Eagle, March 13, 1961].

By November of 1961, when Robert Love agreed to a debate in the University Commons Auditorium with Dr. Jack Robertson, assistant professor of economics at the University of Wichita, the show was almost over. From the account of one attending the debate, Robertson devastated Love’s position, and the audience applauded him enthusiastically for it. [Conversation between Mel Schroeder and Lee Streiff, January 21, 2000].

There was one last gasp of the anti-Communists, however. In December of 1961, they were able to influence The Wichita Symphony Society into not bringing a Russian pianist in to play at a performance. The Wichita Eagle editorial was full of ridicule. It began:

The Wichita Symphony Society struck a blow for freedom last month. Yes sir! It decided to deny a Soviet musician the chance to subvert Wichitans with Red piano music.

Among the people particularly skewered in “Wichita Vortex Sutra” is Robert Love. [Ginsberg, 1988: 778].

into the heart of the Vortex
where anxiety rings
the University with millionaire pressure,
lonely crank telephone voices sighing in dread,
[Ginsberg, 1988: 395].

It is not a matter of record where Ginsberg may have heard about the pressure and its source, but Love’s previous attempts to influence the University administration make such an assumption at least likely. Ironically, Love was later to disassociate himself from the John Birch Society — though not, we can assume because of Ginsberg’s influence.

tinyurl.com/4ucg5

[LadyBlue]

The witty and brilliant economist, poet, and pacifist, Professor Kenneth Boulding of the University of Colorado, was our first lecturer.

He had a terrible stammer which he often used to good effect. On his way to Lawrence he had delivered a talk in Wichita, then a hot-bed of the John Birch Society which saw calamitous, communist conspiracies everywhere.

He said he told them that if anyone wanted to know what it was like to live in a communist society, he ought to m-m-m-m-m-m-m-M-MOVE to Wichita.

All the really important decisions about the economy of Wichita are made in the Pentagon.

[LadyBlue]

The Birch Society was offered by the Coleman Company as a public service to any organization or group in the community desiring to use the facility.

[LadyBlue]

The John Birch Society

The assault of the John Birch Society on Wichita and its educational establishments began quietly enough on November 2, 1959, in a letter from Mrs. Kenneth Myers to the Wichita Eagle. It was a stealth offensive, not mentioning the John Birch Society itself, which had its national organizational meeting on December 9th of 1958 and distributed its “Bible” and declaration of war, The Blue Book of THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY.

But in the next few months, the Birch Society came out of the closet, and the newspapers’ letter columns were flooded with letters both advancing its cause and denouncing it. It all came to a head in October of 1960. For the Birchers it was a holy war against “the Kremlin”, “so called Democratic processes”, “hard-core Communists”, and “ultra liberals”. [Mrs. Robert H. Lowe, “Public Forum”, The Wichita Eagle, October 15, 1960]. For those opposed to the Society, the posture of the Birchers raised the specter of Mein Kampf, and neo-Fascism. [Frank L. Vannerson, “Public Forum”, The Wichita Eagle, October 13, 1960].

One of the first Wichitans to come out publicly for the Society was Fred C. Koch, a man who had made his billions in oil — ironically, developing oil fields in the Soviet Union, and who now headed Koch Industries and was a member of the national board of the John Birch Society. Interviewed by the Wichita Eagle, Koch was asked if there were any Communist activities in Wichita. “There is not much of a problem here,” he replied; but went on to say, “One sometimes finds evidence of it in schools. But it’s bound to creep in.” [“Birch Society Leader Warns of Red Danger”, The Wichita Sunday Eagle, October 16, 1960].

Asked about reports that students had been told to spy on their teachers and report them to the Society, Koch denied any knowledge of such “spy activities” in the schools and universities in Wichita. He did, however, admit that “information on conditions in some classes had been submitted by students on a strictly voluntary basis.” [“Birch Society Leader Warns of Red Danger”, The Wichita Sunday Eagle, October 16, 1960].

Koch revealed that a Wichita attorney, Kenneth L. Myers, was one of the Society’s leaders in the city, and stated that Roman Catholic Bishop Mark Carroll was in agreement with the Society’s views. He also revealed that there were six John Birch Society chapters in Wichita, with a combined membership “in excess of 100”. Then the newspaper quoted a startling statement from Robert Welch, founder of the Society:

[...] I believe every man in this room [at the organizational meeting]
clearly recognizes—democracy is merely a deceptive phrase, a
weapon of demagoguery, and a perennial fraud.” [“Birch Society
Leader Warns of Red Danger”, The Wichita Sunday Eagle, October 16,
1960].

Later it was revealed that two other local leaders were Love Box Company owner Robert Love (also a national board member) and attorney Leonard F. Banowetz. The Society also picked up support from a motley crew of fringe segregationists, a local American Legion Post, and such anti-tax protesters as real estate developer Willard Garvey and his conservative publication, Wichita This Week. By a twist of fate, my brother-in-law, Brad Hammond — a liberal — got himself hired as Editor of Wichita This Week in early 1962 and printed several subversive articles written by me under a nom de plume.

A film strip, Communism on the Map, was the tool the Birchers were using to spread the fear that Communism was going to take over the world unless drastic measures were introduced to fight it. Birchers were getting the filmstrip shown at churches and civic groups, and were attempting to browbeat the schools into showing it in classes. On October 23, 1960, the Wichita Sunday Eagle printed an editorial blasting the Society’s methods:

[...] the film described the advance of Soviet tyranny.
It ends on a stirring note, after stating that one billion persons are under Communist rule and another billion partly so, and showing broad, threatening arrows encircling the United States. [...] The viewers are aroused emotionally to “do something” about fighting communism.
[...]
To use overdrawn, one-sided and emotionally charged methods, such as this film, tends to divert us from our proper best weapons against communism — the improvement of our military power, strengthening of our democratic institutions and girding of our allies with economic and military aid to shore up their defenses.

Let us fight communism, yes. Let us fight it with all our might. But let us not adopt the same kind of “big lie and half truth” technique that the enemy uses. [“‘Communism on Map’ Not Whole Story”, The Wichita Sunday Eagle, October 23, 1960: 4A].

This editorial spelled the end of the Society’s influence in Wichita. The Birchers had been served notice that their crusade would not have the support of the main-line business and social leaders of the community.