New Book of Interest for Readers of Rightlandia
Matthew Dallek's "Birchers" was released yesterday and it's well worth your time
This post is a placeholder of sorts until I get a chance to fully read this new book that I just received yesterday. I’m two chapters in and am finding it to be a compelling, informed, and well-written account of the John Birch Society and its place in American political history.
That said, no book is without its limitations and this excellent review by Sam Adler-Bell (one half of the duo that produces the essential podcast about the history of the US Right, Know Your Enemy), offers some insightful criticism of Dallek’s interpretation. There’s also a review in the NYTimes that offers a capable, but largely uncritical summary of the book.
One of Sam’s criticisms of Dallek’s book is that lacks sufficient sociological depth to explain how the Bircherite persuasion went from being a suburban, upper-middle class phenomenon to one that’s more predominant in white working class and more rural areas today. The corporate elites who started the John Birch Society in the late 1950s and early 1960s were well-regarded titans of establishment industry, many being former leaders in the National Association of Manufacturers. Today’s corporate MAGA types are rogue weirdos like the MyPillow guy and the Overstock dot com guy. So clearly both the leadership class and the rank-and-file of this “Bircherite” movement have shifted over time in ways that, according to Sam, Dallek doesn’t do enough to explain.
Reading Sam’s review made me immediately think of Walter Huss and the Oregon variant of this story. (Shocking, I know.) You’d think that Walter Huss would be exactly the sort of person who would be discussed in a book like “Birchers,” but in actuality it’s more complicated than that. One detail about Huss’s life that has always stood out to me was that he personally resented Oregon’s Birchers and felt like they were snooty and looked down on him as white trash. And you know what, Huss was right, that IS how the leading Oregon Birchers thought of people like Huss and his supporters in the 1960s.
The head of the John Birch Society in Oregon, Ernie Swigert, was one of the eleven people who attended the founding JBS meeting in Indianapolis in 1958. Swigert was one of the state’s richest men and from his perch at the Arlington Club in Portland was a king-maker of sorts for the OR GOP. If you wanted to run for state-wide office as a Republican in Oregon, you had to get Swigert’s nod (and thereby the financial support of rich Oregonians like him who were members of the all white, all male, and all Christian Arlington Club).
Salem Statesman Journal, 24 April 1961.
One of the great ironies I’ve run across in my research (with much help from one of my students, Ian Lynch, who is working on an article about the history of the tensions between moderates and ultraconservatives in the OR GOP) is that Oregon’s famously moderate Republican Senators from the 1960s into the 1990s (Bob Packwood and Mark Hatfield) both got a significant amount of support from…you guessed it…Ernie Swigert, one of the founding members of the John Birch Society. Both Packwood and Hatfield were about as far from being Birchers as you could imagine, but Swigert helped promote their political careers. Meanwhile Walter Huss, who ran against Hatfield in the 1966 US Senate GOP primary) was far more ideologically aligned with Swigert, yet Swigert never gave Huss the time of day.
In sum, the path from the Bircher-ites of the 1960s to the MAGA GOP of today, at least in Oregon, passes through someone like Huss far more than it passes through Ernie Swigert. I’ll be eagerly reading Dallek’s book over the next few days and will write up a Part II to this post that offers a fuller assessment of it.