Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Walsh, David Austin

Titel

Birch Watching: The Anti-Defamation League and Countermobilization Against the Radical Right

Ist Teil von

• American Jewish history, 2023-10, Vol.107 (4), p.707-729

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Today and its liberal allies assisted local activists in setting up "Birch Watching" organizations to monitor and combat right-wingers in their communities, built detailed files o as in 1923–1924, the moderate conservative upper-class community has finally been aroused to the threat to its position and values represented by the radical right.1 Hofstadter, Bell, and Lipset were wrong.2 The radical right was not a spent force in American politics, and the growth of the John Birch Society in the early 1960s sufficiently alarmed them that in 1962 they issued an expanded and updated version of Bell's 1955 edited volume The Radical Right. The ADLn individuals and groups associated with the John Birch Society, and assisted activists and reporters with background information about local Birch leaders. Founded by retired candy manufacturer Robert Welch at a meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana in December 1958, its founding membership was a motley assortment of prominent businessmen associated with the National Association of Manufacturers and ex-military men, as well as Oliver, who was the odd man out as a distinguished classicist at the University of Illinois. The John Franklin Letters, an anonymously authored 1959 novel that received glowing reviews in the Birch magazine American Opinion, illustrates what Oliver had in mind: in the book, an underground militant organization of "patriots" violently overthrows the communist-controlled United States government.8 Welch's clandestine strategy became a moot point in July 1960, when a series of articles in the Chicago Daily News exposed both the existence of the group and of Welch's outré political views, including his belief that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a dedicated communist agent.