John Birch Society
Anticommunist membership society founded by the candy manufacturer Robert Welch at Indianapolis in December 1958, whose first council included Fred Koch and the Wackenhut director Ralph E. Davis, and which circulated Senator Eastland's speeches.
The John Birch Society was founded by Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer of Massachusetts, who on December 8 and 9, 1958, addressed eleven invited men for two days at the Indianapolis house of Marguerite Dice, national vice chairman of the Minute Women of the U.S.A. The talk was published as the society's Blue Book. The society took its name from an American missionary and army intelligence officer killed by Chinese Communist troops in August 1945.1
The Council
The first national council, as listed in the files of the FBI, included T. Coleman Andrews; Spruille Braden; Colonel Laurence Bunker; Ralph E. Davis, later a director of the Wackenhut Corporation; Fred C. Koch, founder of what became Koch Industries; Alfred Kohlberg; Clarence Manion; Adolphe Menjou; Revilo P. Oliver; and Lieutenant General Charles B. Stone III. Koch wrote to Welch on April 2, 1962: "We have been on the defensive too long." Braden, Menjou, and Oliver later left.1
Welch reported to the council in confidence that the society's direct income for 1959 was 71,225 dollars and 80 cents, and that in its first year it had grown from about 75 chapters and 1,400 members to about 150 chapters and 2,800 members.1
Eastland and the Hunts
On March 31, 1961, Welch telegraphed Senator James Eastland, chairman of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, asking that the subcommittee investigate the society: "None of our members will plead the Fifth Amendment." On July 3, 1962, he wrote Eastland that the society had spent "several thousand dollars" to send every member a copy of the senator's speech "Is The Supreme Court Pro-Communist?" and that "I agreed one hundred percent." A council memorandum of May 7, 1962, lists among those invited to its meeting at the Union League Club in Chicago the Dallas oil man H.L. Hunt, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, Ezra Taft Benson, and Senator Strom Thurmond. Hunt's son Nelson Bunker Hunt later sat on the council. The man who collected the money for the black-bordered advertisement "Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas" of November 22, 1963, to which Bunker Hunt contributed, was the society's Dallas coordinator, Joseph P. Grinnan.12
An informant of the FBI inside the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, the Reverend Delmar Dennis, who testified against the Klansmen tried for the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964, was a member of the society and was afterward employed by it as a coordinator and speaker.1
Sources
- Federal Bureau of Investigation files on the John Birch Society and correspondence of its council, compiled by Ernie Lazar from Freedom of Information Act releases. https://archive.org/details/foia_JBS_Report--combined ↩
- Bellant, Russ. The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism. South End Press, 1991; Testimony of Bernard William Weissman, Hearings Before the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, vol. 5; Weissman Exhibit No. 1, vol. 21, p. 722. ↩
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