John Birch Society
Welch founded the John Birch Society (JBS) in December 1958. Its original membership consisted of only eleven men but Welch's wealth allowed the organization to have a wide impact and sponsor a number of publications. At its height, the organization claimed it had approximately 100,000 members, but its political views limited its ability to form alliances with other groups (even other anti-Communists like Richard Nixon and, to a lesser extent, Ronald Reagan, were denounced by the Society as being too liberal) and diminished its real impact.
In October 1965, William F. Buckley, Jr. denounced Welch in his magazine National Review as promoting conspiracy theories far removed from common sense, and for working with racists like University of Illinois Classics Professor Revilo P. Oliver. (Professor Oliver had been ousted from the Society in a purge of antisemitic and racist members in the early 1960s.) While not attacking the members of the Society, Buckley attacked Welch in order to prevent his controversial views from tarnishing the entire conservative movement. Divergent foreign policy views between Buckley and Welch also played a role in the break. Being in the tradition of an older, Taftian conservatism, Welch favored a foreign policy of "Fortress America" rather than "entangling alliances" through NATO and the UN. For this reason, Welch combined a strong anti-Communism with opposition to the bipartisan Cold War consensus of armed internationalism. Beginning in 1965, he opposed the escalating U.S. war in Vietnam. In the view of the more hawkish Buckley, Welch lacked sufficient support for U.S. political and military leadership of the world.
Welch was the editor and publisher of the monthly magazine American Opinion and the weekly "The Review of the News". He also wrote The Road to Salesmanship (1941), May God Forgive Us (1951), "The Politician" (about Eisenhower) and The Life of John Birch (1954). A collection of his essays were also edited into a book "The New Americanism".
In the 1960s, Welch began to believe that even the Communists were not the top level of his perceived conspiracy and began saying that Communism was just a front for a Master Conspiracy, which had roots in the Illuminati; the essay "The Truth in Time" is an example . He referred to the Conspirators as "The Insiders," seeing them mainly in internationalist financial and business families such as the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, and organizations such as the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. He did avoid the antisemitism, anti-Freemasonry, and anti-Catholicism of other Conspiracy theorists, saying that such prejudices would "neutralize" anti-Communist, anti-Conspiracy efforts. According to one source, Welch converted to Catholicism in the months before his death. As a result of his conspiracy theories, the John Birch Society became synonymous with right-wing extremism, earning satirical blasts from critics ranging from the cartoonist Walt Kelly to the musicians Bob Dylan and Dizzy Gillespie.
Read more about this topic: Robert W. Welch, Jr.
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