The John Birch Society Ushered in a New Era for the American Right

A Birch Society billboard circa 1960

File this one under know thine enemy.  On December 9, 1958 Robert Welch, Jr. and eleven cronies founded The John Birch Society in Indianapolis, Indiana.  

Largely moribund American conservatism got an infusion of well organized and funded zeal from the extreme right.  Over the next decades, even after the Birch Society itself waned in significance, that movement would virtually take over the entire Republican Party and eventually make a serious run at overturning decades of hard fought progressive reforms.

The North Carolina born Welch was a very bright young man and in his early days an ardent Baptist.  He was also deeply conservative.  He was admitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the age of 12 where he became unpopular for his tireless Christian proselytizing. 

 

Along the way, however, some of the skeptics must have got to him.  He jettisoned his Baptist faith as unreasonable and became a Unitarian.  He retained that identification most of the rest of his life, abandoning it only very late after consolidation created the Unitarian Universalist Association which immediately immersed itself in the Civil Rights Movement.  Despite his long association he almost never shows up in the ubiquitous lists of famous U.U.s.  Not someone to brag about, I guess.

Young Welch went on to study at the Naval Academy and Harvard but dropped out of both schools claiming to be disgusted by liberal faculty.  

He went into the candy manufacturing business with his brother in Brooklyn, New York.  After starting and failing with his own firm, he rejoined his brother and became the driving force behind the James O. Welch Company which went on to great success marketing Sugar Daddies, Sugar Babies, Pom Poms, and Junior Mints.  He retired in 1956 a very wealthy man determined to remake America to his own satisfaction.

From the beginning the John Birch Society, was the closely held vehicle for promoting Welch’s stridently anti-Communist views and conspiracy theories.  Although the organization would grow from the original 12 member to a reported—but possibly inflated—claim of over 100,000 organized in local chapters around the country, the Welsh called the shots and demanded ideological fealty of all branches and members.

He named his fledgling organization for an obscure missionary and covert American intelligence agent who was executed by Communists in China in August 1945.  Welch claimed that this John Birch was the first casualty in the Cold War.

Welch and his wealthy friends underwrote and extensive publishing program.  Those friends included Fred C, Koch, founder of Koch Industry and the founder of the Koch dynasty that currently funds many far right political organizations.  It also included controversial racist and anti-Semite Revilo P. Oliver, a University of Illinois professor and founder of the crypto-fascist National Alliance.  Oliver’s many contributions to Birch Society publications eventually led to some early supporters like William O. Buckley, founder of the National Review, to distance himself from the Welch and the Society.

The foundational document of the Society was the Blue Book, steno graphically transcribed from two days of speeches by Welch at the founding meeting.  Each new member received a copy.  It outlined Welch’s fundamental belief:  “…both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world socialist government.’”

The Society also published and Welch edited the monthly magazine American Opinion and the weekly The Review of the News in addition to an extensive pamphlet operation and speaker’s bureau.

Early campaigns famously called for “U.S. Out of the UN” and demanded the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren for his rulings in favor of civil rights.  Much of the early energy of the organization was rooted in opposition to the civil rights movement, which it accused of being a total creature of international communism, and on civil rights legislation for undermining States Rights. 

Although officially separate from the Republican Party, many of whose leaders he accused of being at best “dupes” of Communism, Welch and the Society Supported far right candidates in the GOP, including Senator Barry Goldwater.  The opposition to civil rights by the Birch Society was a factor in beginning to move Southern racists from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, a process that would take decades to complete.

By the early ‘60’s the Birch Society was an influential public presence and a growing cause for alarm among liberals who denounced it for extremism.  Welch reported that it had "a staff of 28 people in the Home Office; about 30 Coordinators (or Major Coordinators) in the field, who are fully paid as to salary and expenses; and about 100 Coordinators (or Section Leaders as they are called in some areas), who work on a volunteer basis as to all or part of their salary, or expenses, or both."

A word from Welch in one of the Birch Society publications could generate up to 600,000 letters and postcards in protest.  Many of those were sent out by the dozen by members using various identities, but it could be very intimidating and made it seem that there were a vast number of supporters.

But even at the height of his success, Welch’s refusal to form alliances or work with other conservative groups created friction on the right.  Oliver’s anti-Semitism became such as embarrassment that he and other overt racists were purged.  But that only earned the wrath of former allies in the White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan front groups.  Welch got the support of powerful Mormon leader Ezra Taft Benton, but that alienated religious fundamentalists who despised Mormons,  Catholics, and Jews who were also prominent in the Society.  

Welch spun ever more complicated conspiracy theories, many of which are still the by-word of the ultra-far right.  He concluded that everything was ultimately a master plot of the Illuminati and of International Bankers including the Rothchilds and the American Rockefellers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.  These “crazy” conspiracy theories also contributed to Buckley’s defection and even caused the leadership of the Latter Day Saints to officially distance themselves, even though they continued to follow many of Welch’s other ideas.

But when Welch directly attacked Dwight Eisenhower, war hero and Republican President for being a communist and a traitor, he shattered many of his connection with the Party.  Goldwater had to denounce him.  Welch did so in a book he published privately and not officially issued by the Society.  But the attempt to separate the Society from the views in the book, The Politician was doomed to failure, even after a second edition drastically toned down the most extreme charges.

As the Birch Society began to lose traction, new right wing forces were rising, including Alabama Governor George Wallace’s American Independence Party, which ran staunch anti-Communist in the Birch mold General Curtis LeMay were on the rise.

The society dwindled to a shadow of itself.  By the time Welch died in 1985 it was almost just a memory.  But when President George H.W. Bush launched the Gulf War in the name of a New World Order—an phrase that was a major Society bug-a-boo—it received a modest new round of interest on the far right.

Current leaders have tried to end the Society’s long standing isolation from other conservative groups.  They signed on as a sponsor of the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference.  It has also been shopping it longstanding opposition to the Federal Reserve and support of the gold standard to Ron Paul supporters and the Tea Party.

While it is unlikely that the John Birch Society will re-emerge as a force, its dark legacy thrives.

Have a Merry UU Christmas?

The Rev. Scrooge in his study prepares the Christmas sermon.

Note:  Adapted from a 2008 post.

Nothing brings out the latent Puritan in some Unitarian Universalists like Christmas.  Some years the tisk-tisking and finger waving seems to start as soon as we put away the sugar skulls from the Day of the Dead service.  And sometimes the harping and scolding never lets up.  Bloggers stew and fret.  The list of reasons to downplay—or boycott—the holiday grow yearly.  Sometimes it seems that the sanctimonious sneer is the order of the day.

In my own congregation, not a year went by in church without our well beloved former minister giving what some congregants called his slash-your-writs sermon sometime during the season.  This is the one where he went on—at great length—about all of the folks who are depressed and lonely over the holidays.  He never said anything that cheered those folks up, but he sure did make everyone else feel guilty if they took a scintilla of pleasure in the season.  And we would have folks from a parade of committees light chalices all season in competition with each other over how austere we should make our own holidays in order to save the rain forest or save an African AIDS orphan.

I should point out that this is not universal.  In fact I think most occupants of UU pews are fine with the holiday and keep it in their own lives and families in their own ways.  Some of the old theological wars between the UU Christians, humanists, and pagans seem to have dissipated of late and there is a greater tendency to respect each other’s traditions while finding common ground in Season of Light.  And a lot of ministers are gifted at creative, inclusive, affirming liturgies.

Again in my own congregation some most spiritual worship experiences come in this season via lively and engaging children’s pageants, great music including unbelievable choir concerts, traditions of sharing and generosity, and the lovely Christmas Eve candle light services that include a reading of the traditional Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke and end with singing Silent Night in the darkened sanctuary as we light candles had to hand.

The tendency toward Christmas Grinching seems to come from a pious but loud minority including some leading ministers and self-appointed guardians of UU morals, including, unfortunately, folks intently focused on social justice and ecological issues.  It seems to me that both of the later could more effectively find ways to adapt obvious seasonal connections instead of giving in to self-satisfying harrumphing for the sake of being purely countercultural.  Besides, such lofty disdain and pronunciations practically guarantee that their messages will be lost on most folks who in some way still treasure the season.

Look, like everyone else I enjoy simplicity in Christmas.  Lord knows the two nickels left in my pocket preclude a consumerist orgy.  But I do love the season.  Stripped of way too many faux Santa Clauses, there is still something warm and even inspiring in the festivals of light, the sense of generosity and community.  I’m already humming carols under my breath and enjoying sparkling lit Woodstock Square.

Maybe we should reflect a moment how our Unitarian ancestors rejected Puritan priggishness about Christmas and did a whole lot to make the holiday we celebrate today.  The Rev. Charles Follen introduced the Christmas tree to New England.  The Rev. Edward Hamilton Sears gave us It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.  James Lord Pierpont scribbled Jingle Bells while serving as organist at his brother’s Savannah, Georgia church and he was home sick for New England.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poignant I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day after hearing his son was badly wounded in the Civil War. 

From across the puddle Unitarian Charles Dickens wrote the perennial classic A Christmas Carol with no hint or mention of the Christ child.  Louisa May Alcott gave us one of the first detailed descriptions of a family Christmas celebration in New England in Little Women.

More recently the famed choral conductor Robert Shaw, music director at UU congregations in Cincinnati and Los Angeles has given us too much glorious Christmas music to count.  Actress Michael Learned was the mother on all of the Walton Christmases.  I’m sure I’ve left someone out.

Anyway, have yourself a merry little Christmas.  I will.

Admiral Murfin and the No Good, Very Bad, Terrible Day

The Court of Inquiry:  Admiral Edward Kalbfus; Admiral Orin G. Murfin, President;Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews. 

Today is December 7, a date so significant in American history almost every one—except recent high school graduates who never got that far in their pitiful history survey classes—immediately recognizes.  Yes, it is “a date that shall live in infamy,” in the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the day when the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hickam Field, and other naval and military installations in Hawaii.  

I’m betting you know at least the rough details of that catastrophe, so this post is not going to detail them.  If not, look it up.

I am going to take the opportunity to explore a kinship relationship, albeit a distant one, with a historical personage connected to the events.  Actually, I also have a much closer connection, too.  Lemuel Mills, my maternal grandfather, was a civilian construction worker on Ford Island who came under personal fire that Sunday morning.  He shared the story in a letter to his daughter, my mother, Ruby Irene Mills Murfin.  She was not pleased to hear from the nasty, drunken, abusive father who had abandoned her mother, to no one’s regret, years before.  Even dodging Japanese bullets couldn’t make a hero out of the man so despised by his family that when he died in Arizona years later my Uncle Pearl Mills—no that isn’t a typo, that was his name—went all the way there from South Dakota just to make sure the bastard was dead and piss on his grave.

Anyway, my distant kinsman Admiral Orin Gould Murfin, is the one I want to write about today.  Not that he was there that Sunday.  The Admiral had recently retired stateside after serving from 1936 to late 1940 as Commander of the 14th Naval District, headquartered at Pearl Harbor.  But in 1944 he was called out of retirement to become the President of the Navy Court of Inquiry of the attack.  This is his story.

Murfin was born on April 13, 1876 at Hanging Rock, Ohio.  His father was an engineer of the coal fired furnaces used in the iron and steel industries.  By the age of four the family had relocated to Wellston, Ohio where his father was made superintendent of Superior Coal Plant #1.

The boy was such a bright and eager student that he obtained an appointment to the Naval Academy after completing his junior year of high school.  He graduated from the Academy in 1897 and although he saw no action in the Spanish-American War advanced rapidly in the Navy.  He was a full Lieutenant in 1902, very rapid advancement indeed.

By World War I Murfin was a Captain.  He was decorated for his service as the commander of U.S. mine laying bases in Scotland.  His greatest achievement was laying the Northern Mine Barrage--57,000 mines laid across the North Sea from the Orkney Islands off Scotland to the three mile limit off Bergen, Norway.  The mine field effectively hemmed in the German fleet to  home waters and cut off virtually all remaining maritime trade.  His citation for the Navy Distinguished Service Medal cited “the pioneer work performed by Captain Murfin in the establishment of the bases and the development and administration of the industrial organization required.”

Those organizational and technical skills excelerated Murfin’s career even through the period of Naval Disarmament of the 1920’s.  He was the final Captain of the venerable cruiser the USS Alabany (CL-23) and was named in 1929 Captain of the USS West Virginia, then the largest and newest of the Navy’s battleships.

In 1930 he made rear admiral and in 1931 was named Judge Advocate of the United States Navy. This shore assignment gave the newly minted Admiral experience in legal and administrative affairs that would be called on in the future.

 

But you can’t keep a blue water sailor ashore for long.  After three years at a desk he was named Commander of the 3rd Division of the Battleship Fleet in the Atlantic.

As the Navy’s attention shifted to Asia and the Pacific so did Murfin’s career.  After serving as President of the board of inquiry of the crash of the Navy Airship Macon into the Pacific in 1935, he was advanced to Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Fleet. During this assignment he gained public notice for conducting the search for missing aviatrix Amelia Earhardt.  During this assignment, he was promoted to full four star Admiral.

Murfin’s final duty assignment was as Commander of the 14th District at Pearl Harbor.  At first glance, this might seem a come down from a Fleet command.  But it came as the Navy was increasingly alarmed by Japanese aggression and growing naval might and was beefing up its greatest naval base, Pearl Harbor.  Admiral Murfin was expected to bring his noted administrative skills to upgrading and expanding the facilities, along with forward bases at Midway and Wake Islands while making plans to defend them from possible attack. 

When he retired, those plans were well underway.  I am sure the Admiral thought he had done everything in his considerable powers to carry out his duty.

How his heart must have sunk as, like most Americans, he heard the news of he attack on December 7 on the radio.  Within days the scope of the disaster became clear—the destruction of much of the heart of the Pacific Fleet, including many of its great battleships, at their moorage or in dry dock.  Only the fortunate fact that the Fleets’s two carriers were at sea averted total disaster.

The Admiral hoped to be recalled to active duty.  It didn’t happen.   But then in 1944 he was recalled to the Presidency of the Board on Inquiry.  He was perfectly qualified by his experience as Judge Advocate and as President of the Macon Board of Inquiry, but the appointment raised eyebrows in and out of the Navy.  He would be called to judge the performance of many close former comrades, some of whose careers he had personally mentored and who he had appointed to high positions as well as those of his superiors in Washington.  And it was a fact that a good portion of the defense plans for Pearl Harbor had been drawn up under his watch, although they had been somewhat modified by the time of the attack.

No matter how you looked at it, the assignment was a hot potato.  Inside the Navy and Army officer corps was a wide spread belief that the first official inquiry, hastily assembled at President Roosevelt’s direction by General George C. Marshall, was something of a kangaroo court aimed at scapegoating the on scene commanders, Admiral Husband Kimmel, of the  Pacific Fleet, and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, Army’s Hawaiian Department to protect higher-ups in Washington including General Marshal himself and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Herald Stark.

On the other hand, pressure was growing in Congress for a more complete investigation. 

 

Murfin’s Board of Inquiry wove a path in between.  It was critical enough of high command to earn the wrath of both Marshall, who thought that it was too harsh on the high command  and Secretary of the Navy James Forestall, who felt it was to lenient.  But it still lay most of the blame on Kimmel and Short.  Missing from the equation was the full knowledge of the extent to which Naval Intelligence had broken Japanese Naval codes and exactly what was known about enemy intentions and movements in Washington when.  Most of the intelligence, which might have effected operational decisions, was denied to the commanders in the Pacific.

Today Admiral Murfin is most frequently noted by authors in the mini-industry that has sprung up around investigating Pearl Harbor.  Ranging from crack-pot conspiracy nuts to serious historians, most have criticized Murfin and his investigation as being lax on Washington.  Thus an extraordinary officer with an unblemished record enters history as a footnote and a failure.

The Admiral died October 22, 1956 at the age of 80.

How Did a Second Century Bishop Become Santa Claus?

Note:  Adapted from a post on December 6, 2010.

When our children were young, they always found stockings filled on December 2, St. Nicholas Day.  It was a custom in my wife’s Polish family which originated in Prussia where the peasantry was Slavic and the aristocrats German. I’m told that Poles from southern parts of the country are mystified by this.

Today is St. Nicholas Day.  A traditional Catholic Feast Day in the West, it celebrates the day Nikolaos of Myra, the Greek Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor died in 346.  He is one of the most important Saints in the Orthodox tradition as well and is venerated in Greece and especially in Russia where is the national patron.  The bishop was considered a vigorous defender of what became orthodox belief after the Council of Nicaea in 325.  As legend has it, Nicholas actually slapped the Presbyter Arius, the leader of a minority who held a crypto-unitarian theology.

Despite this, Nicholas is best remembered in the west for his kindness to children and his gifts of alms to the poor.

  The major miracle attributed to him, told in many variations, is that he discovered the murder of three children by a butcher who was curing their bodies in a barrel to sell as ham.  Nicholas discovered the ruse, had the villain arrested and then resurrected the innocent children.

Nicholas came from a very wealthy family.  Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by an uncle, also named Nicholas who was Bishop of Patara who raised the boy for the priesthood.  Later the very devout young man began discretely using his wealth to make gifts to the poor.  He supposedly did so anonymously, often by throwing purses of coins over garden walls or through open windows in the dead of night. 

 

The most famous story, also told with many variations, is that he took pity on a poor man with three daughters who could not marry because they had no dowry.  For three nights running, or once a year for three years, or once each girl reached marriageable age depending on the version being told, Nicholas tossed a customary purse of gold into the man’s home.  The third time the man sought to hide himself so that he could thank his benefactor.  Seeing this, Nicholas supposedly tossed the final bag down the chimney, where it dropped into the stocking of the youngest girl who had hung it to dry.  This is the origin of gifts in shoes or stockings associated with Nicholas in later folk lore.

In commemoration of this story, most icons of St. Nicholas show him with three purses tied to his belt, which were often stylized into three golden balls.  In the Netherlands, where so much of the gift giving tradition associated with him became popularized, the three golden balls became associated with oranges, which the Saint would bring with him on his annual visits from Spain.  This part of the legend is associated with the long rule of the Netherlands by the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty.

In an even stranger twist, the three balls morphed into the three balls traditional emblematic of pawn brokers.  St. Nicholas is the patron of these petty money lenders, supposedly because they, like him, are the last resort of the poor.  Nicholas is also venerated as the patron of sailors, children, scholars, and thieves as well Russia and several other nations.

Myra was overtaken by the Seljuk Turks early in the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus around 1085.  To save them from the Islamic invaders sailors from Bari, an important port on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy, seized the relics of Saint Nicholas, over the objections of the monks caring for them at the Cathedral in Myra.  They arrived on May 9, 1087, and a new tomb was built for the intact body of the Saint.  Bari became a pilgrimage site and the relocated Bishop is often called St. Nicholas of Bari in the west. 

About this time, iconography in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions began to divide.  In the east he his generally shown bare headed and bald in rich golden vestments.  In the west he is usually portrayed in a red bishop’s miter and red cloak, symbolic of his office.

Much of the change to a folkloric figure took place in the Netherlands and spread across Northern Europe, where, particularly in eastern Germany, it was blended with even older pagan traditions associated with the worship of Odin.

As the Dutch story evolved, St. Nicholas would arrive every year by ship from Spain about two weeks before his feast day.  With the help of a small, dark skinned helper named Zwarte Piet, Black Peter, he would check on the behavior of children.  Carrying a pack of goodies on his white horse, St. Nicholas would travel from town to town on the eve of his feast day and leave gifts in the wooden shoes of poor children.  This story spread over much of northern Europe and was adapted to local customs.  The names of St. Nicholas and his helper also changed from place to place.  In Dutch he was called Sinterklass.  

St. Nicholas Day was a separate tradition from Christmas.  But because it fell early in the Advent season, it was probably inevitable that the celebrations and the Saint would become intertwined.  Scholars are unsure of exactly when St. Nicholas added Christmas to his rounds of gift giving, but most believe it did not take hold until the early years of the 19th Century in America.

The Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam undoubtedly brought the tradition of St. Nicholas Day with them to the New World.  By the post Revolutionary era it had passed on to English residents of the New York.  Washington Irving, who preserved the old Dutch folk tales—and made more than a few up himself—noted the custom at some point prior to the 1820’s, St. Nicholas had shifted his gift giving to Christmas in areas of the Hudson Valley.

In 1823 a newspaper in Troy, New York published an anonymous poem titled A Visit from St. Nicholas that was later attributed to Clement Clark Moore.  Within years it was being re-printed annually in newspapers across the United States.  In the poem, Moore invented many of the “traditions” associated with St. Nicholas’s visit on Christmas Eve, including his reindeer and sleigh transport and a physical description of “the jolly old elf” that strips him of his Bishop’s regalia, dresses him in fur, and transforms him from a tall, regal figure to a rotund, bearded little man.

This new character was called Santa Claus, derived from the Dutch Sinterklass regionally, but remained better known as St. Nicholas through most of the following century.  Thomas Nast’s mid-century cartoon helped define his appearance, including the fur trimmed cap instead of the miter, top hat, or cowl depicted in earlier illustrations.  There was not much agreement on the color of his outfit, which was often pictured as brown fur trimmed in ermine or as green or blue, until the spread of cheep popular color lithography in which artists used the bishop’s red of Europe because it showed up so brilliantly.

The name Santa Claus did not really begin to overtake St. Nicholas nationally until the New York Sun published its famous editorial Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus in 1897.  It, too, “went viral” and became an annual event in papers across the country.  In 1902 L. Frank Baum, the creator of the Wizard of Oz published a now largely forgotten book, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which was so popular at the time that it virtually completed the metamorphosis of St. Nicholas to Santa Claus.

The physical image of Santa was refined by the illustrators of popular magazine covers in the early decades of the 20th Century, including many by Norman Rockwell.   The fully definitive modern Santa Claus was created by artist Haddon Sundblom for Coca Cola advertising that ran from 1931 to 1964.

Along the way Santa Claus picked up many accouterments that had nothing in common with the Bishop of Myra.  The most obvious of these is Mrs. Claus.  Although there were some early passing references to a spouse for the gift giver as early as the 1850s, she first got wide exposure in a poem by Katherine Lee Bates, best known as the writer of America the Beautiful.  In Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride, she is an uncompromising feminist who show’s Santa what she can do.  She really took off as a separate character in stories and films from the 1950’s on, where she is stripped of Bates’s feminism and is pictured as an adoring, chubby helpmate to her husband.

The power of American film, music, and television has brought Santa Claus to every corner of the globe.  Even in countries with strong St. Nicholas traditions, he has taken on the characteristics of the American Santa.  He also appears in countries with no religious celebration of Christmas and is popular in Japan and Korea.  Under the Soviets, the Russians transformed their patron saint into Father Winter, as Santa Claus clone who visits on New Year’s Eve.

Symbolic of the eclipse of St. Nicholas by Santa Claus is the fate of the statue of St. Nicholas in the town of Demre, Turkey, near the site of historic Myra.  In order to facilitate tourism the now Muslim town commissioned a statue of St. Nicholas to be placed in the town square by a Russian Iconographer.  The Russian government made it a gift to the city and it was dedicated in 2000.  After just a few years, however, the local Mayor discovered that tourists were disappointed.  They had not come to venerate a Saint, but visit the home of Santa Claus.  So the mayor had the original statue removed and replaced by a plastic Santa in a red suit—a Santa modeled after Haddon Sundblom’s Coca Cola creation.