Birchers by Matthew Dallek

Author:Matthew Dallek [Dallek, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2023-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

George Wallace’s 1968 American Independent Party presidential run made clear just how much the Birchers had soured on the Nixon-Reagan-Goldwater Republican Party. Birchers hadn’t abandoned all hope for electoral politics, and Wallace’s fiery third-party bid resonated with Birchers who saw his candidacy as a prime chance to take their country back. Talk of forming a third party, present since the society’s earliest days, had picked up after Goldwater’s defeat. John Weisman of Monkton, Maryland, wondered whether third-party discussions between Edwin Walker, Bob Welch, and Georgia governor Lester Maddox had gone anywhere, while Birchers Kent and Phoebe Courtney continued to entertain the option.37 When a credible third-party presidential campaign finally materialized that year, many Birchers flocked to join it.

Despite their agreement with Richard Nixon’s calls for law and order, most Birchers refused to back the GOP presidential nominee, whom they had long ago demonized as conniving and fuzzyheaded. They sowed doubts about rising conservative Republicans too. Although the society included Reagan’s famous 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” among its promotional materials, its bookstore business manager also hyped Kent Steffgen’s Here’s the Rest of Him, a book criticizing Reagan as a socialist wolf in conservative garb.38 In 1967 Phoebe Courtney expressed support for a Reagan White House run, but most Birchers looked outside the GOP for a candidate.39

Wallace, Alabama’s segregationist governor, had stood in a schoolhouse door and vowed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” defying the Supreme Court and the 1964 civil rights law. His campaign answered the Birchite call to arms. He claimed to speak for white working-class voters disturbed by street crime, supposedly communist riots, and communist-liberal domination of the airwaves, government, and universities. He spoke their language, and many Birchers felt inspired.

Starting around 1965 Welch funneled the names of Birch Society members to Sheriff Jim Clark of Selma, Alabama, whose forces had clubbed nonviolent civil rights demonstrators on Bloody Sunday. Welch hoped to lay the groundwork for a Wallace campaign, which he thought could “save our country from being taken over by the Communists.” One report put the number of Birch chapters in Birmingham and its suburbs at more than one hundred. After Wallace announced his candidacy, Birchers, versed in organizing and messaging, recruited and trained nearly four thousand volunteers in California alone. “In state after state outside the South,” Wallace biographer Dan Carter wrote, “dedicated Birchers stepped into the organizational void in the 1968 campaign; they dominated the Wallace movement in nearly a dozen states from Maine to California.”40

Yet even some Wallace supporters were wary of the Birch stigma. While the candidate’s team understood members’ unmatched exuberance and their invaluable role as a field army, they feared that the association tethered the candidate to far-right extremists and spooked mainstream voters. One of Wallace’s top aides viewed Birch supporters as fanatics. “We have all the nuts in the country,” a senior aide told his boss, pleading with him to balance the ticket by choosing a relatively moderate vice-presidential nominee. “We have all the Ku Klux Klan, we have the Birch Society.

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