Word: birchings
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...Stripes provides the only glint of color near the bleak rectangle of red bricks. This is a decidedly no-nonsense building, surrounded by an equally no-nonsense post office and public library. No doubt about it, there is work to be done at the national headquarters of the John Birch Society, 12 minutes from Harvard Square...
...topics prompt more immediate-and impassioned-responses than the John Birch Society. Reactionary. Ultra-right wing. Anti fluoridation. But almost no one seems to know how these associations came to exist. The answer goes back to a single book, a single angry man and his cause...
Welch decide he needed a long-term outlet for his views, so on December 9, 1959, in Indianapolis, Ind., Welch and 11 friends founded the John Birch Society. John Birch was a young Baptist preacher who had served as an Army captain in China during World War II. Chinese Communists had killed him ten days after the Japanese surrendered, and Birch was, according to Welch, "the first American to die in World War III." The society's basic philosophy holds that "The world is engaged in this war from which either Communism or Christian-style civilization must emerge with...
...right-wing organizations in the United States-the Liberty Lobby, the Rev. Carl McIntire's Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, the Rev. Billy James Hargis's Manion Forum-Welch managed to build the only one with a broad base of popular support. The John Birch Society quickly jumped to about 50,000 members, and John F. McManus, director of public relations, says membership since then has remained between...
...secret to the society's longevity lies in the simplicity of its message and its diligence in spreading the word. Communists, or their minions, are working to see the "Christian style civilization" buried under Marx's big boot. But Birch Communism has almost nothing to do with Marx; "Communist" for the society is simply an adjective, a pejorative applied to any form of government control. John Birchers have a nearly pathological fear of government control; the line blurrs between traffic lights and the abolition of private property, both forms of governmental intrusion into people's lives. It is nostalgia tempered...