Introduction

Richard Nixon’s anti-communist bona fides were difficult to assail. As a congressman in 1948, he was already spearheading investigations into suspected communist traitors like Alger Hiss (before it was cool, so to speak, or at least before the Second Red Scare in the mid-1950s). In Congress, he made his name as a communist hunter and a close ally of Joseph McCarthy. And as Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice-President from 1953-1961, he fiercely debated the merits of capitalism and communism with Nikita Khrushchev and played a key role in the anti-Soviet foreign policy of “rollback” conceived by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Yet, despite all of that, for many in the grassroots of his own Republican Party—increasingly disillusioned with the moderate “Eastern Establishment” that had prevailed starting with Eisenhower’s victory over the archconservative Robert Taft in the 1952 primary—Nixon became what could be called an “anti-communist in name only.” This denunciation was largely the concerted creation of the John Birch Society, a reactionary anticommunist organization established in 1958 by former candy manufacturer Robert Welch, Jr. The militantly conservative Birchers, whose propensity to see conspiracy everywhere may have been influenced by Welch’s experience in the secretive candy business, maligned Nixon for his appeals to moderates (seen in his 1960 “Treaty of Fifth Avenue” with liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller) and for his association with President Dwight Eisenhower, whom Welch believed to be a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” But despite the paranoia pervading his writings, Welch had tapped into a well of powerful popular sentiment with the John Birch Society, and the chaptered national organization took off like a Space Age rocketship. As the Birch Society’s grassroots political power became unignorable in the early 1960s, the ferocity of their opposition to Nixon ultimately damaged his chances for election as Governor of California in 1962. The battle between Nixon and the Birchers over the soul, or at least the control, of the Republican Party in California in 1962 reveals some powerful themes about American conservative politics in the early 1960s—a moment in which the grassroots and establishment of the Republican Party clashed over who truly owned and represented the interests and ideology of conservatism. 

Bircher Insurgency Against California GOP

By 1960, the long-dominant Republican Party establishment in California was vulnerable to a takeover from below. According to a 1963 report, “the loosely-structured Republican organization in California made penetration by the Birchers relatively easy and also gave them an influence far out of proportion to their numbers.” This penetration began ostensibly outside of conventional politics, through PTA campaigns, church organization, fund-raising events, and insinuation into the social circles of polite SoCal society by committed Birchers. An army of “mostly upwardly mobile, middle-class, upper-middle-class professionals, mostly white, mostly Christian” activists—what scholar Lisa McGirr has called “suburban warriors”—used social prestige and personal wealth to take charge of the state Republican apparatus, commandeering decision-making on questions of candidate endorsements, policy preferences, and political activism, especially in schools. Birchers did not look the part of ‘60s extremists: unlike bomb-throwing leftists and those on the right still wearing white hoods, they were far more likely to be, in the words of California Attorney General Stanley Mosk, who investigated the Golden State Birchers, “little old ladies in tennis shoes.” But that deplorable dismissal eventually became a rallying cry for female activists, who organized Birch Society meetings in their homes and opened up dozens of non-profit conservative bookstores. Although the one woman present at the founding meeting of the JBS in 1958, Marguerite Dice, only served coffee to Welch and his friends, women soon became the most enthusiastic and indispensable activists within the society, especially in the PTA of California.

Frustrated by the defeat of Taft in 1952 and the censure of McCarthy in 1954 (not to mention the perceived complicity of Republican Congressmen on civil rights legislation, starting in 1957), the conservative grassroots was mobilized and poised to take over the party establishment in California. From the bottom up, the JBS-led grassroots in California transformed the Republican Party even at a time when the majority of the party’s national establishment, including Senator Everett Dirksen and Rep. Gerald Ford, denounced the organization. Rather in line with the tactics of the communist menace they were so afraid of, the JBS exemplified the power of a minority-led vanguard movement—through local politics, ideological uniformity, and organization persistence, they infiltrated the California Republican Party, one level at a time (with eerie consonance to the communist subversion they so feared, the JBS used secret membership, front organizations, and a cellular organizational structure to do so). California became a stronghold of the John Birch Society in an extraordinarily short period of time in the early 1960s. California boasted 25 to 34 percent of national Birch Society members, far out of proportion with its percentage of the country’s total population. A radically conservative “volunteer army” at the grassroots, mobilized through churches, PTAs, local clubs, “patriotic bookstores” and Young Republican organizations virtually took over the state Republican Party, including the California Republican Assembly, a powerful unofficial institution in the state’s GOP machinery. The CRA came to be a particular beacon of Bircher success in California. Remarkably, “five members of the CRA Executive Board were members of the society” at a time when Bircher congressmen chose to remain in the “closet.” Particularly strong in the urban centers of Southern California—Los Angeles, Pasadena, Orange County, and San Diego––the state’s JBS-led grassroots insurgency against the moderate Republican establishment would eventually lead to Barry Goldwater’s triumph in the presidential primary in 1964, and to Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial triumph in 1966. In 1962, however, it spelled trouble for Richard Nixon—even though he was California’s “native son” and boasted those impressive anticommunist credentials, Nixon had been tarred with the brush of the accommodationist “establishment,” an increasingly fatal tool in the Bircher arsenal. So how did the John Birch Society orchestrate such a successful takeover of the state Republican Party in such a short period of time? The short answer is this: sophisticated tactics and unwavering resolve, both of which combined to make Birchers the masters of the political art of translation. That is, translating influence in community institutions—especially schools—into the invaluable political capital of grassroots enthusiasm.

Starting in the Schools: Bircher Takeover of the PTA

The activism began, as it so often does, in schools. The John Birch Society’s war against the California PTA featured some of the group’s most militant tactics. Birchers printed fake membership cards to “pack” meetings (including with those who were not even parents of enrolled students) in order to sway the vote on resolutions. Others followed school officials home from meetings and some even phoned violent threats to school boards.” The threats were sometimes genuine, such as a case in which “a restaurant belonging to the author of a PTA fundraising skit was bombed in an apparent attempt to cancel the event.” Schools were a particular target of Birchers’ ire—the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions in Brown v. Board of Education (1952) and Engel v. Vitale (1962) convinced many Birchers that a cabal of leftists and communist sympathizers, led by former (moderate) Republican Governor of California and Chief Justice Earl Warren, were facilitating communist infiltration of the school system. The decisions were major impetuses for grassroots mobilization, leading to tactics like “hiding a tape recorder in a textbook to try to catch a high school civics or government teacher refusing to allow a prayer in the classroom.” The impact of this relentless agitation was astonishing: the president of the California State Board of Education reported that the JBS had become strong enough to seriously “‘disrupt the school program’ in at least ten school districts.”

Schools, however, were just launchpads for a broader political campaign, seen through the apocalyptically high-stakes prism of Welch’s Birchism. According to scholar Jonathan Schoenwald, the group “applied similar tactics [as in the PTA takeover] to capture community GOP leadership positions.” The John Birch Society leveraged political influence in schools and other community institutions to infiltrate local and state levels of Republican politics, gaining control of the California Republican Assembly. The “housewives, doctors, dentists, engineers, and ministers” in Orange County studied by Lisa McGirr created their own “movement culture,” translating the social capital carried by those secure social positions into the most dynamic and committed political force in the state. Orange County was a particular hotbed: Bircher-led conservative activists there translated widespread concerns about alleged communist infiltration of schools into specific political measures, such as Proposition 24, a referendum which would have mandated “congressional and legislative committee inquiries concerning communist affiliation and subversion” in schools. Additionally California JBS chapters also took the lead on a campaign to impeach Earl Warren, an idea first conceived by Welch himself. Infuriated by Brown and Engel, the Society launched a campaign to remove Warren from the Court, powered by letter-writing campaigns, highway billboards, and student essay contests, including one won by a UCLA student. The campaign was particularly strong in Warren’s home state of California, where angry Bircher activists felt particularly affronted by Warren’s apparent betrayal of conservatism. Although these specific campaigns failed (Warren did retire from the court in 1969, but not because of the impeachment campaign), the “movement culture” they conjured into existence, and the sense of purpose they inculcated in activists, lit the fire of the Bircher insurgency against the Republican establishment. And in the absence of ideological coherence or the structures of a well-oiled political machine at the top of the state Republican Party, the Bircher-led grassroots was fast becoming the “real party” more than the party itself. To put it bluntly, in the words of a contemporary analysis, the JBS “rocked the GOP organization” in California in the early 1960s. By the time of the 1962 midterms, the Birchers were confident enough to seek a knockout blow against establishment moderates.

Shell Game: The 1962 Primary

That desired suckerpunch took shape in the ambitious endeavor to primary Richard Nixon in the race for Governor. The John Birch Society, through the CRA, supported a primary opponent, the wealthy oil businessman and former USC football captain Joe Shell, against Nixon in 1962. The surprising strength of grassroots support for Shell (who ended up winning 35% of the vote against Nixon, a remarkable showing for a Bakersfield assemblyman against a former general election nominee) was a veritable cannon blast signaling the Birchers’ astonishingly ambitious program of defiance against the mainstream Republican establishment. Goodie Knight, a popular former Republican Governor who had been running against Nixon, was forced to withdraw due to hepatitis in January 1962, and Joe Shell announced his candidacy shortly thereafter. Considering the power of the conservative base, Shell, the “champion of the state’s deep-dyed Republican conservatives,” posed a far greater threat to Nixon than Knight had. His own uncompromising rhetoric matched that of the Birchers who so admired him: “many of my supporters will not vote for Nixon under any circumstances,” he intoned in June 1962, after losing the primary. “[Nixon] will be washed up if Brown defeats him. We will then be in a position to pick up the pieces. We conservatives will dominate the party.” This divisive language of defeat and domination—by any means necessary—appealed to the Birchers’ of guerrilla PTA fame, many of whom would subsequently applaud Barry Goldwater’s paean to extremism at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in 1964. Unsurprisingly, early poll numbers indicated that support for Shell was very strong among the most politically engaged wing of the California Republican party, that indefatigable Bircher-led grassroots. Translating tactics and lessons from the PTA battles, the Birchers mobilized behind Shell with astonishing commitment and enthusiasm. According to an analysis, the 1962 gubernatorial race in California featured “unusually vigorous registration and “get out the vote” drives.” The Birchers developed a ground game which could reach 600,000 homes in one day in L.A. and Orange County, in one famous instance. Nixon watched all these developments closely, and yet could still not bring himself to endorse, embrace, or co-opt the Birchers. 

The primary candidacy of Joe Shell had crystallized a key reality for Nixon: the rise of the John Birch Society was bad news for his own political prospects and, as he saw it, for the future of the party. Less than two years earlier, Nixon had been “the hero of the national Republican Party” and had come “breathlessly close to the White House.” Although he ultimately defeated Shell, the margin was, considering his relative position in 1960, “humiliatingly close,” in the words of historian Rick Perlstein. To be fair, in one sense, it should not have been politically costly for Nixon to reject the Birchers. Birchers excluded, Nixon was already a remarkably difficult electoral position in the 1962 race: although he was running against a somewhat vulnerable Democrat incumbent, Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, registered Democrats in California outnumbered registered Republicans by a ratio of 3 to 2 (1.5 million voters at the time). Nixon did need to court the support of Democrats and more liberal Rockefeller conservatives, much as he had done in 1960. But sheer numbers do not always tell you where power is located, even in electoral politics. The liberal and moderate constituencies wielded a pittance of political power in comparison with the far-right Bircher-led grassroots described in the previous section. Most political observers in California at the time understood this, as a series of alarm-ringing newspaper editorials from 1961 indicate. So it is telling that Nixon was unwilling to compromise on his opposition to the John Birch Society to save himself the headache of a grueling primary campaign. Of course, as the former two-term vice-president under Eisenhower (that “dedicated” agent of the Kremlin), Nixon was necessarily implicated in Welch’s conspiratorial vision of the internal communist threat in the United States government. Welch—whose prolific writings and strongman presence at the top of the Birch Society’s organization pyramid made his ideas highly influential at the grassroots—even thought Nixon was not a real conservative. He called him (with perhaps uncharacteristic perspicacity): “one of the … most disingenuous, and slipperiest politicians that ever showed up on the American scene,” someone who “wasn’t committed to anything other than the career of Richard Nixon.”

Nixon was not in a good place to earn Birchers’ support, and, for being a “slippery,” self-serving politician, he never really made an effort to improve that position by pivoting his Bircher stance during the 1962 campaign.

What Nixon did instead is somewhat remarkable. Nixon “vociferously” denounced the John Birch Society and even asserted that “it was irrefutable that you could not be a Birch Society member and a member of the Republican Party” As a sign of how little he seemed to regard the political consequences of such a denunciation, he even made this comment at a 1962 meeting of the increasingly JBS-led dominated CRA. Like William F. Buckley and other conservatives who found the Birchers’ conspiracies loony and dangerous, Nixon took particular umbrage with Welch himself, telling California Birchers either to remove the tycoon as its leader, or get out of the society. Nixon’s criticism of the Birchers went pretty far for a savvy, shifty politician of his ilk: sometimes, he seemed to be deliberately trying to push Bircher’s buttons, such as when he accused them of doing a “disservice to the anti-Red cause” by tarring genuine anticommunist efforts with the brush of conspiratorial paranoia. In a tart jab, he noted to an audience of students at San Francisco State College that, when he was going after the infamous communist agent Alger Hiss in 1948, “many of the present experts [i.e. Welch] were making candy.” Much as contemporary Trump supporters take umbrage at personal attacks on Trump’s business acumen and personal peccadilloes, jabs at their founder’s sweet past often elicited very bitter responses from Bircher activists. Such comments left a “residue of resentment for conservatives” in the Bircher ranks about Nixon for the rest of his political career.

It is an understatement to say that the “suburban warriors” did not take kindly to Nixon’s admonitions: they flatly denied the premise that Nixon had any authority over them to dictate the party line, turning Republican primary politics on its head. A revealing series of letters to the editor of the San Diego Union by conservative voters displeased with Nixon’s denunciations of the JBS reveals the kind of committed political volunteer Nixon was losing by rejecting the Bircher-led far-right grassroots. One Maria L. Stille fumed that Nixon had asked for a resolution condemning Welch and the Birchers at a CRA meeting: “now, that’s real democracy for you!” she wrote, “a candidate for the governorship of California says: ‘You can belong to ‘this’ organization— but you can’t belong to ‘that’ organization—because I say it’s no good.’ What happened to the first amendment to the Constitution?” J. Roy Smith (not a Birch member himself) said that he had conducted his own “investigation” of the group and concluded that “there were no secrets … [and] no tendency towards fascism” among Birchers. Smith instead found members to be “among the most trustworthy, loyal patriotic citizens I have ever known” and accused Nixon of “jockeying politically for the liberal vote” by rejecting them. H.C. Peck suggested Nixon was no better than the Democrats, “with their history of protecting communists.” He also called Nixon merely the “titular” leader of the Republican Party—referring back to that “anti-communist in name only” paradigm. But Richard E. Brakefield of Coronado went perhaps the furthest, calling Nixon “dictatorial” and accusing him of causing “a very serious split in the Republican Party.”

These letters give us a sense of how potentially tens of thousands of motivated political activists, and potential door-knocking volunteers (Birchers or not), would have reacted to Nixon’s repudiation of the Birch Society. By rejecting conspiratorial conservatism, Nixon lost a powerful volunteer base which could have saved him the headache of a major primary challenge and given him more time to focus on the general election against Governor Brown. Acquiescing to Welch could also have helped him consolidate control of the Republican vote in an election in which he probably needed at least 90% of his own party’s support. These letters reveal the political price Nixon paid for believing he could control the grassroots. After all, Maria Stille concluded her letter with this: “I think I’ll vote for Joe Shell.”

Consequences and Implications

Despite his departure for national politics in 1952, Nixon understood California politics well enough to be fully aware of what he was losing by alienating the Bircher-dominated grassroots. Ironically in 1953, Nixon had said: “volunteer organizations are the life blood of a political party.  That is why all Republicans in California should give their wholehearted support to the CRA, which is the outstanding Republican organization in the state.” Obviously, the CRA of 1962 was not the CRA of 1953. The weight of the JBS and the CRA behind Joe Shell in the primary damaged Nixon politically and outraged him personally. A 1972 opinion in the New York Times concluded that the Shell primary “cost [Nixon] the support of California conservatives and probably the statehouse.” This may be simplifying things—again, Nixon had good reason to believe that association with the far-right would hurt him in a general election where he needed the support of disaffected Democrats and other moderates. And likewise, Nixon’s dissociation from the grassroots may have helped him return to the summit of the Republican Party after Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964. Nevertheless, the 1962 gubernatorial primary in California had a clear long-term winner. Nixon’s short-term gain—even including the presidency—does not match up particularly impressively against the Birch Society’s long-term, slow-burn takeover of the Republican Party, a phenomenon documented by a number of scholars and writers in recent years. Who has had a greater impact on today’s Republican Party—the disgraced president of Watergate infamy, or the grassroots organization which arguably paved the way for the Tea Party, Stop the Steal, Q, PTA activism, Moms for Liberty, and the other grassroots accoutrements of Trumpism? 

Even before Trumpism, the John Birch Society obtained a major victory in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, who, although squirrelly about tying himself to Welch, never outright denounced the Birchers. According to historian Matthew Dallek, “for the most part Reagan applauded the men and women who peopled [the Birch Society’s] ranks. They were, he implied on more than one occasion, patriotic Americans who deserved recognition for their steadfast devotion to the Republic.” And although the Birch Society was a shell of its former self by 1980, its influence over Reagan was notable; in fact, Reagan’s own meteoric national political career began on the launchpad of the California conservative grassroots, when he won for governor in 1966, just four years after Nixon’s demoralizing defeat.

In that race, Reagan, although repeatedly pressed to do so by reporters, refused to denounce the increasingly violent John Birch Society in the same terms as the KKK and American Communist Party. Reagan benefited from the same conservative grassroots ground game, still largely powered by the Birchers, that had spelled doom for Nixon in 1962. The 12,000 to 15,000 committed warriors of the JBS in 1966 (nudging along a more conservative electorate, stirred up with fear over the dangers of campus activism at Berkeley) certainly had at least a little to do with getting Reagan to the Sacramento statehouse. And, of course, Reagan returned the favor to a certain degree in his 1980 campaign for president, mobilizing the conservative grassroots better than any Republican politician perhaps ever, with discernible impact on the present day. In research for his recent biography of Reagan, Max Boot even discovered that Reagan was imbibing Bircher literature well into the 1970s and 1980s and parroting spurious Lenin quotations from Welch’s Blue Book in foreign policy meetings during his presidency. 

And although they always had their criticisms, Birchers were far more pleased with Reagan’s presidency than they were with Nixon’s: Birchers wrote letters opposing Nixon’s visit to China and promoted unflattering and conspiratorial books about him with titles such as The Man Behind the Mask and Richard Nixon and the Palace Guard. Birchers moaned about his approach to desegregation, expansion of Social Security, and cuts in defense spending during Vietnamization. The Birch Society volunteer base never fully got behind his presidency, even in the context of the “radical leftism” against which Nixon appeared to be the best bulwark. Thousands of Birch Society members volunteered for George Wallace instead of Nixon in the 1968 campaign. And, in a full-circle moment, the California Republican establishment, overhauled by the Birchers ten years prior, very nearly rejected its native son’s bid for re-election: at a March 1971 meeting of the CRA, a resolution was proposed that “the CRA will not support Nixon for President in 1972.” The bitter resentments of 1962 lingered for a long, long time.  

By Zachary Partnoy

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