October 31, 2024 • 32 mins
In the 1960s, a right-wing organization led by a former candy tycoon rose to fame in America for their anti-communist campaigns. They called themselves the John Birch Society. Then, they tried to take over the Parent-Teacher Association. This week, what the battle between the two organizations tells us about the fate of American politics, and the history of your Halloween candy.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Bushkin. I want to read to you from a very
important historical document, the April nineteen sixty two edition of
the wellby Way Elementary School Parent Teacher Association newsletter, the
well Be Buzzings, written of course, by the PTA of
(00:37):
the elementary school in the West Hills area of Los Angeles.
First item, President's message. I would like to say thank
you to the ladies that work so hard on the
and this is all in caps double parking safety campaign.
Second item sing along with progress PTA meeting for April.
Our hostesses will be the sixth grade motters. Third item
(01:01):
a meeting on safety in fire prevention. Fourth item an
interesting and informative trip to the fire station. Fifth item
the local count council meeting. Key detail. It's going to
be a luncheon. Are you still there? Still awake? Four
announcements on school safety, a fifth on participatory democracy. A luncheon.
(01:24):
I'm guessing you're poored to tears. It's all so very PTA.
The only things missing are the potluck supper, the newspaper drive,
the book fair. But that's where you're wrong. This newsletter is,
in fact the skeleton key to understanding our political moment
right now, Like this exact moment. If you're listening to
(01:47):
this episode soon after its release, there are two things
going on in your world, the US presidential election between
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and more Halloween candy than
you know what to do with. Well in this episode
a story that manages to bring both together. It all
(02:07):
really begins with the well Way PTA newsletter from April
nineteen sixty two, and specifically with the sixth and final item,
the editor's message, which begins the power to seek the
truth is within all of us. But there are some
who abuse this freedom and cloud the answers and the issues,
(02:29):
so that seeking the truth and knowing it is the
truth becomes a harder task than it was ever meant
to be. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about
things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Goldwell. Here's our question, why,
in this otherwise very dull PTA newsletter does the mother
(02:50):
who wrote it feel the need to write an urgent
defense of democracy. She doesn't say, but as my colleague
Bendadaff Hafrey discovered, it has to do with a man who,
perhaps more than almost anyone else, is responsible for creating
the modern style of far right conspiratorial thinking running rampant today.
(03:12):
A man who write, at the time that Editor's Note
was published, held in his hands the fate of the
PTA and American public life. Here's Ben.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
The video is grainy, but you can make out an
older man, late sixties, standing in a suit and tie
against a black backdrop, clasping his hands on a lecturn.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Faithful citizens, wherever you may be.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
He's got big ears, a big nose, and a high
forehead well suited to an indignant raising of the eyebrows.
The media coverage of him lately had given him many
opportunities to do this. As he speaks, the camera pushes in.
It's a recruitment video.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
It is our deliberate and careful purpose to pull together
into one group, a body of morally good and truly
responsible citizens who are proud of each other and of
the society to which they belong.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
He then proceeds to reassure his viewers that the identities
of people in this group are never shared with anyone,
not least of all because their enemies abound.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
The carefully coordinated attacks against us from all points of
the ideological compass have reached a crescendo stage since the
rest of this year, with the surprising but visible result
of solidifying the dedication of our members still further, and
of stimulating their recruiting efforts.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
This is Robert Welch Junior. Consider the facts. He speaks
a little like a dictator. He seems to run some
sort of secret society, and consider himself public enemy number one.
Who is this titan? Well, naturally he's a candy tycoon.
Robert Welch Junior was born on a former plantation in
(05:12):
North Carolina just before the turn of the twentieth century.
As a kid, he was precocious and a daydreamer. Wanted
to be a writer an intellectual, but he felt that
before he could do so, he had to get rich.
So one night, as a young man, he had a brainstorm.
According to Edward H. Miller, who wrote a biography of
Welsh called A Conspiratorial Life, Welch stayed up late into
(05:36):
the evening, writing and writing to answer a single question,
what specific goods in demand would be best for me
to start manufacturing without either capital or experience. This is
a quote Miller found from an associate of Welch's recalling
this legendary moment quote. As the sky began to show
the first streaks of dawn, Robert stared at the notes
(05:59):
in front of him. One word remained amid the maze
of dark lines scratched across the pages. That word was candy.
We've arrived at the Halloween portion of our programming. So
if in your baskets this year you find the following
candies Sugar Daddy, Sugar Baby, or the Junior Mint, you're
(06:21):
encountering a piece of the Welsh legacy, and actually the
legacy of his brother too, who naturally also worked in
the candy business. The Welsh nuclear family of Hit Candies,
the patriarch of which the Sugar Daddy, I have to
say I find totally inedible, has been a mainstay forever.
Children of the nineteen eighties may remember the jingle for
(06:43):
Sugar Babby for.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
Sugar Derby.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Welsh was part of what I've come to think of
as the American sweets aristocracy. I'm talking about a special
class of confectioners and bakers who turned out to have
a surprising number of ideas about how society ought to
be run. In the Pantheon, we have Milton Snavely Hershey,
whose chocolates were so delectable he was able to put
his social ideas to the test, building utopian town called Hershey, Pennsylvania.
(07:15):
Then there's Sylvester Graham, the clergyman who invented the Graham
Cracker to combat youth masturbation. John Harvey Kellogg, the Seventh
day Adventist, who invented cornflakes to do the same. The
candy makers, in particular tended to be extremely paranoid because
there was actually quite a bit of spying in their industry.
They had to guard their secrets, their recipes, their fortunes.
(07:37):
Some would even blindfold the people who repaired their machines.
But I digress. After establishing himself in the candy business
and drinking deeply at the trough of its paranoia, Welch
set out to elbow his way into the intellectual class,
specifically the anti communist class. Over the years, he wrote
(07:58):
a number of articles in books about the rise of communism, including,
per his biographer, a novel about inant society oppressed by
a monolithic state, which somehow went unpublished. But it was
in nineteen fifty four that one of his ideas finally
broke through.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
He was very secretive about these because Welch was always
worried about the Communists as he saw getting a hold
of what he was saying.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Historian Matthew Dallak, author of the book Birchers, talking about
Welch's penchant for sending secret letters.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Because they exposed him and they damaged you know, the
true this patriotic movement to destroy communism. It would be
it would basically be like killing his movement.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
In the crypt. Now, the letter he sent in nineteen
fifty four, in particular, merited sensitivity. It was a roughly
nine thousand word attempt to explain why he disliked Dwight
Eisenhower so much, the first Republican president in multiple decades.
The letter built to the irrefutable conclusion that Dwight Eisenhower
(09:10):
was not really a Republican. He was quote a dedicated,
conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy, operating under the direction
of his brother, the affable Milton.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
They're really divorced from any semblance of the truth. The
other thing, though, is that the argument against Eisenhower I
think fits into the Joe McCarthy argument that clearly the
setbacks in the world for the United States in the
(09:44):
fight against communism is a result of communists in the government,
including Eisenhower, allowing the communists to win.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Where the ant book had failed, the letter succeeded wildly.
It ballooned into a book that is over four hundred
pages long, complete with an extremely tedious footnote section explaining
the sourcing for his atlandish claims. As Wels once wrote,
explanations are like government. Nobody loves them, but a minimum
amount of both is a necessary evil. But anyway, Welch
(10:18):
was not content to mail secret letters the rest of
his life. He wanted to build a movement. So four
years after that letter, in October nineteen fifty eight, Welch
brought together eleven of his most powerful friends to a
secret meeting in Indianapolis. He didn't say what for, but
(10:39):
he did tell them each to book their own hotel
rooms so people wouldn't see them together. Then he promised
them that there was nothing conspiratorial about what they were
about to do, which was to gather in a secret
location for two days and conspire.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
My undertaking today is to try to tell you all
about the background, methods, and purposes of the John Birg Society.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
This date is from a recruitment video he made later on.
We don't have a recording of what he said that
day in Indianapolis. I mean, it was a secret meeting,
but I think it's safe to assume he was on message.
Welch was there to start a new anti communist organization.
After all, with the Communists already in control of the
US presidency, the situation was getting a little out of hand.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
As we have said many times before, they fundamentally decent
American mind simply refuses to recognize the nature of the
cunning beasts who constitute our enemies today. This is especially
true when these criminal gangsters assume all of the suavity
and regalire of high office.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Eleven men walked into that room in Indianapolis, and the
John Birch Society walked out, named by the way for
an American missionary who'd been killed by Chinese communists and
then became a kind of patron saint for people like
Robert Welch Junior. These were important men with money and
time to burn and an acts to grind. They had
Eisenhower's former IRS Commissioner, presidents of major companies, a former
(12:09):
aid to Douglas MacArthur, and Fred Koch, oil man and
father to the Koch brothers, was there too.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
I'll wake my friends and our rise now I'll be
forever fallen. We mean business and we can still win,
but we are in our race against time, with the
enemy advancing every day.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Welch knew what he was doing. He took his show
on the road, giving versions of that speech across the country,
and a lot of the listeners, bored Americans rattled by
war and freaked out by integration, thought hey, this guy's
got a point. He started with just his friends who
thought like he did, then his friend's friends, and then
his friend's friends friends. But Welch's dreams were always much grander.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
By any realistic appraisal of our size against our need,
we are still very small, but we certainly expect our
present growth to continue until we have the minion members
of Fervat take and unassailable character, which is our goal.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Despite Welch's vision for one million patriots to join the
John Birch Society, estimates show that the membership was likely
at an all time high when it hit thirty thousand
members in the sixties.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
The mission was not explicitly to take over a political Party.
It was not to even take over nessilly American institutions.
It was to wage a mass education campaign to allure Americans,
to educate them about the dire nature of the communist
(13:46):
conspiracy inside the United States.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
And so a small but influential group of right wingers
became convinced that there was a war going on at home.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
A continuous, undeclared war in which our enemiests observed no
rules of international law, of civilization, or of human decency.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Was the front in this war. Exactly two years after
its founding, the Birch Society had part of the answer
the Parent Teacher Association. Of course, we'll be right back.
(14:38):
The bitter Root Valley lies in the southwest of Montana,
between the Sapphire and bitter Root Mountains. It's the place
they filmed Yellowstone Today. It's gorgeous.
Speaker 5 (14:49):
Okay, so small town.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Gail Laro Munson was a little girl growing up in
the valley in the nineteen sixties in a town called Darby.
Back then, its population was three hundred and ninety eight.
Speaker 5 (15:02):
Close snit neighbors looked out for each other. Kids could
be out till dark and back home they would be safe.
If you were caught doing something wrong, the neighbors would
let your parents know and they'd be ready when you
got home.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Darby was the kind of place where you knew everyone,
especially if you were in Gale's family. Her dad, or
Vill Roe was the superintendent of the school district. But
in the early nineteen sixties, strangers began to show up
in the valley. Orville was busy right around then getting
new Bibles for a local school. Because theres we're all
beaten up. He asked a local clergyman how to get
(15:41):
rid of the old ones in a respectful way, and
he was told to burn them. So he gathered up
the bibles and set them on fire, and all of
a sudden, those strangers leapt into action. It turned out
they were part of a club, the John Birch Society.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
Merch members appeared at the regular school board meeting with
a petition.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Demanding that Larol not be offered a new contract.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
It was all over the local radio.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Majority of the board rejected that demand. This action of
the board intensified an already steady program of intimidation against
the Row and his family.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
The Butchers, returning Orville's quiet life in Derby with his
three kids and his wife completely upside down. Here's Orville.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
There are individuals, of course, the community who will drive
by and make obscene signs. There have been an incidents
where people have called the house my wife had answered
and have used obscene language on the telephone. Basically, it's
a joy, simple constant harassment.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
An archivist in Montana named Kristen Gates wrote an essay
about all this. She found letters from the principle of
the local school who said the butchers were quote using
the local PTA as a springboard to infiltrate the schools.
(17:10):
Here I'm telling you about what unfolded for the LaRose
in a tiny town in Montana. But they weren't the
only people involved in local ptas or schools who became targets.
This is not the case now, but in the nineteen sixties,
according to one study, almost half of all families in
America were represented in the PTA fifty percent. The PTA
(17:32):
became such a well known part of public life that
it was even the subject of a number one song
in the nineteen sixties, Harper Valley PTA, and.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
It was signed by the secretary Harper Valetta.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
The PTA played a huge role in modernizing American education.
Every local PTA was part of the National PTA, which
was run out of Washington, and they worked together to
petition schools to adapt and modernize, like a miniature version
of the federal government. It was actually originally called the
Congress of Mother Anyways, all this paid dividends. If you've
(18:12):
drunk fluoridated water, which you have gotten vaccinated in schools,
gone to a public kindergarten, or just been at a
school that received federal funds, you can thank the PTA
next bakesale, maybe by cookie. As a sociologist, Robert Putnam writes,
the PTA in its day was quote one of the
(18:33):
most impressive organizational success stories in American history end quote.
And who at that exact moment wanted to pull off
another of the most impressive organizational success stories in American
history Dark Willy Wonka Robert Welch Junior, whose recruiting methods
(18:53):
were slightly more apocalyptic.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
The wise and the brave do not hold back until
it is too late.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
In its newsletter, the John Birch Society told its members
to quote join your local PTA at the beginning of
the school year, get your conservative friends to do likewise,
and go to work to take it over. You will
run into real battles against determined leftists who have had
everything their way. But it is time we went on
the offensive to make such groups the instrument of conservative
(19:24):
purpose with the same vigor and determination that the liberals
have used to the opposite aims. With encouragement from the
John Birch Society, extremists of all stripes started showing up
to local ptas across the country trying to take them over.
Speaker 7 (19:41):
You know, all kinds of methods were being used.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Sarah Heath, a historian at Indiana University Kocomo.
Speaker 7 (19:48):
So the Birch Society might pack cars full of people,
so if I bring thirty people to a local meeting
of a PTA. But basically what they would try to
do is if I can get thirty people to go
to this one local meeting, we can try to take
over the proceedings of that meeting.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Suddenly, amid the conversations about fire safety and participatory democracy,
parents had to consider things like whether skipping the pledge
of allegiance at the start of a meeting made you
a Stalin level communist or an Eisenhower level one. Such considerations,
it turned out demand quite a bit of everyone's time.
Speaker 7 (20:24):
Because what they wanted to do was first get some
people to get so tired that they would just say,
I've got to go home, right. PTA meetings are usually
in the early evening, so some people would leave. Then
they called the vote, and then they have a majority.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
The virtuers wanted to use the ptas to reach school
boards so they could change the textbooks and root out
all the commedy and sex education stuff. But a lot
of what they did was actual harassment.
Speaker 7 (20:52):
You know. There are examples of people throwing trash on
the lawns of PTA members, or threatening people by the phone,
calling them at all hours of the night, you know,
just to keep them awake.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
The PTA fought back in classic PTA form, with pamphlet
and lists of meeting best practices, but this was a
little like bringing knives to a gunfight. At this point,
there'd even been a report of a bombing at a
restaurant where a PTA meeting was going to be held.
This is what happens when you talk about national politics,
like Robert Welch Junior, like you're in a shadowy war.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
A continuous, undeclared war in which our enemies observed no
rules of international law of civilization, are of human decency.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
The PTA kept pushing back in their own way against
the virtures. There's even a quote from the PTA president
in the congressional record saying these extremists are not really
after the PTA, but are attempting to gain control of
it to get at their real objective, the educational system.
But for Orville Row, the superintendent in Darby, Montana, these
(22:02):
extremists weren't some faraway thing. They were at his doorstep.
Speaker 6 (22:07):
And I walked home in the evening. At times I've
had a car follow me. It was ordinarily. They apparently
are cowards because when I stopped and gone over to
take their license.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Them and there was how the picture.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
But the aggression wasn't just limited to Orville. Orville's eldest
son was the fifth grader in the local school. One day,
there was a basketball game. He was sitting in the
stands watching. He was not an unpopular kid, but midway
through the game, a couple of classmates walked up to him.
They pulled him out of his seat and they began
(22:44):
to beat him mercilessly. This is Gail again, his.
Speaker 5 (22:48):
Sister, And when they were beating him up, he was
at a basketball game in the gym and other kids
were sturing it.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
All the kids weren't Birchers all they knew he was Orville,
the Bible Burner's son.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Then he's coming into.
Speaker 6 (23:05):
The house and ask pissed why they are calling him names.
I didn't do anything, and of course it's rather had
to explain it for youngster.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
In that age.
Speaker 5 (23:16):
He came home bloodied. He was We were all confused,
why you know, what did I do? Why did this happen?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
The tipping point came when Orvill le Rowe was driving
his whole family along one of the roads around Derby.
Suddenly another car appeared and tried to run them off
the road. They all could have died, and that was
the last straw. After years of harassment, he decided it
was time to leave Darby.
Speaker 5 (23:47):
He sacrificed for the family. And I know that was
a really difficult thing to not stay in fight because
my dad has so much integrity and he's a tough guy,
and if he hadn't had a family, I firmly believe
my brothers and I believe he would have stayed and
(24:07):
he would have fought this situation.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
The people of Derby had a picnic for the LaRose
before they packed up and left. Montana had been Orville's
home since he was a kid, the place he'd loved
to fish and hunt, taught school, and raised a family.
When the LaRose left, the school system didn't just lose
its superintendent, It fell apart. There were twenty three teachers
(24:32):
in the Derby Consolidated School that fall, only seven went
back to work. Things were never the same for the
Lreaux family either. When I called the kids up, none
of them really wanted to talk about this. Then they
changed their mind, I think, if I had to guess,
because they wanted to stand up against the people who
(24:52):
did this to their family, to their father and also
to their mother.
Speaker 5 (24:57):
Dorothy made said before this happened, she was such a
fun person, great sense of humor. I'd love to hear
my dead stories of because I didn't, I didn't witness
a lot of this, and so you know, we were
all cheated out of an amazing person. And just I
(25:26):
just I just can pick to her kind of don't
don't tell you know, the neighbors this, don't tell the
neighbors that, don't tell anybody this, don't tell anybody this.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
They moved from one small town to another, but Dorothy
never could quite trust her neighbors again. What came of
the Birch Society and the PTA after the break? A
(26:06):
little while ago I stopped by a house in Los Angeles.
It was shaded by a sick More tree, and there
was a Root sixty six sign leaning in the front windowsill,
facing the quiet street. I was there to talk to
a woman named Marva Felchlin. Marva grew up in California
and was a student at welby Way Elementary School. She
was a baby boomer in the classical sense, a house
(26:29):
in a safe and lovely subdivision, a dad in the
defense industry, and a mom in the PTA that, yes,
Bircher's had tried to take over. Her mom's name was Zelda,
and she never got over what happened.
Speaker 8 (26:43):
It's a big thing that happened in our lives.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Why do you think the story had added to your
mother so much?
Speaker 8 (26:52):
Because I think you know the PTA in her activities
in the PTA probably represented, as with other women in there,
a lot of what they believed in. And here they're
being accused of being liars and dishonest and Unamerican. Those
of those people were probably children of immigrants. I mean,
(27:15):
that's a serious accusation in those anytime.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
But in those days, Zelda had always wanted to be
a writer. She once submitted a script to the Twilight Zone,
but the place she really wrote was her Parent Teacher
Association newsletter. It's the one we read from at the
beginning of this episode, the April nineteen sixty two edition
of the welby Way Elementary School PTA newsletter The Well
(27:40):
be Buzzings With the curious editor's note, Zelda wrote that
when Bircher's across the country were trying to take down
the PTA, she took to her newsletter to fight back.
Speaker 8 (27:53):
I don't I'm not surprised that my mother pushed back
in any way, because that's I think she's kind of
that kind of personality that she didn't stand for a
lot of crap.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
You know, Marva has held on to the original copy
of that newsletter for years. I asked sure to read
me the editor's message.
Speaker 8 (28:12):
Okay, the power to seek the truth is within all
of us. The way in which we seek it is
privilege and right of all of us. We are fortunate
enough to live under a system of government that secures
and protects that right. But there are some who abuse
this freedom and cloud the answers and the issues, so
that seeking the truth and knowing it is the truth
(28:35):
becomes a harder task than it was ever meant to be.
I say this, Give me the right to seek the truth,
but justly, and rationally and kindly. Give me the wisdom
to understand and recognize the truth simply, without unseen or
unknown factors behind it. Give me the wisdom to use
the truth properly, openly, knowingly, and in its entirety, without
(28:59):
bending or twisting said truth to fit my own purposes.
Give me the graciousness to accept the truth, although it
may disagree with or disapprove my own personal opinions and beliefs.
And last, give me the wisdom and right to seek
the truth in whatever manner I so choose, so long
(29:20):
as I in the manner I have chosen, do not
belittle or deface the object of my search, so long
as I can honestly say to myself it is the
truth alone that I am seeking. So the last off editor.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
During those same years when Bircher's were mobbing PTA meetings,
the PTA as a national organization began to die for good.
It just kept losing numbers until it became effectively a
loose group of local organizations. It still exists, but you
wouldn't write a number one song about it anymore. I
(29:59):
don't think that was all the doing of the Birch Society,
though it certainly didn't help the rise of the Butchers
in the fall of the PTA were both part of
the backlash to Brown versus Board of Education, a response
to integration and civil rights. The Birch Society went into
decline then too. It had become radioactive, mocked to death
in the press, repudiated by even William F. Buckley, turned
(30:22):
on by mainstream Republicans, torn by its own infighting, investigated
by the Anti Defamation League in the FBI, but it
never vanished. Robert Welch Junior was involved with the Birch
Society almost until his death in nineteen eighty five. Under
the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who, true to form Welsh
once called a communist Blackie. His society lives on in
(30:46):
diminished form these days. They're a lot less notable. They're
just one in a sea of right wing groups. But
why did people like Welsh hate the parent Teacher Association
so much it seems to me like the Birch Society
and the PTA were locked in a kind of death
match between two visions of American civil society. The PTA
(31:08):
was the vision of the America and Vital Center, progressive, orderly, incremental,
and evidence based. Its model was the US federal system,
local and national working patiently together. But the John Birch
Society was modeled on communist cells, secretive with hard caps
on membership to keep things decentralized rather than optimistic. It
(31:31):
was paranoid rather than incremental. They called for kind of revolution.
The PTA was about trusting your neighbors to share your
interests too. The John Birch Society was about always suspecting
them of betraying you. I don't know if that sounds
familiar to you, but it shure does to me. Revisionist
(32:04):
History is produced by me Ben Matt of Haffrey and
Lucy Sullivan with Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Chakerji.
Fact checking on this episode by Sam Russick. Original scoring
by Luis Gara, mastering by Jake Gorski. Our executive producer
is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix the State
(32:25):
Historical Society of North Dakota, the University of Montana, and
the UCLA Library Special Collections. I'm ben matafafor
Bushkin. I want to read to you from a very
important historical document, the April nineteen sixty two edition of
the wellby Way Elementary School Parent Teacher Association newsletter, the
well Be Buzzings, written of course, by the PTA of
(00:37):
the elementary school in the West Hills area of Los Angeles.
First item, President's message. I would like to say thank
you to the ladies that work so hard on the
and this is all in caps double parking safety campaign.
Second item sing along with progress PTA meeting for April.
Our hostesses will be the sixth grade motters. Third item
(01:01):
a meeting on safety in fire prevention. Fourth item an
interesting and informative trip to the fire station. Fifth item
the local count council meeting. Key detail. It's going to
be a luncheon. Are you still there? Still awake? Four
announcements on school safety, a fifth on participatory democracy. A luncheon.
(01:24):
I'm guessing you're poored to tears. It's all so very PTA.
The only things missing are the potluck supper, the newspaper drive,
the book fair. But that's where you're wrong. This newsletter is,
in fact the skeleton key to understanding our political moment
right now, Like this exact moment. If you're listening to
(01:47):
this episode soon after its release, there are two things
going on in your world, the US presidential election between
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and more Halloween candy than
you know what to do with. Well in this episode
a story that manages to bring both together. It all
(02:07):
really begins with the well Way PTA newsletter from April
nineteen sixty two, and specifically with the sixth and final item,
the editor's message, which begins the power to seek the
truth is within all of us. But there are some
who abuse this freedom and cloud the answers and the issues,
(02:29):
so that seeking the truth and knowing it is the
truth becomes a harder task than it was ever meant
to be. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about
things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Goldwell. Here's our question, why,
in this otherwise very dull PTA newsletter does the mother
(02:50):
who wrote it feel the need to write an urgent
defense of democracy. She doesn't say, but as my colleague
Bendadaff Hafrey discovered, it has to do with a man who,
perhaps more than almost anyone else, is responsible for creating
the modern style of far right conspiratorial thinking running rampant today.
(03:12):
A man who write, at the time that Editor's Note
was published, held in his hands the fate of the
PTA and American public life. Here's Ben.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
The video is grainy, but you can make out an
older man, late sixties, standing in a suit and tie
against a black backdrop, clasping his hands on a lecturn.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Faithful citizens, wherever you may be.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
He's got big ears, a big nose, and a high
forehead well suited to an indignant raising of the eyebrows.
The media coverage of him lately had given him many
opportunities to do this. As he speaks, the camera pushes in.
It's a recruitment video.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
It is our deliberate and careful purpose to pull together
into one group, a body of morally good and truly
responsible citizens who are proud of each other and of
the society to which they belong.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
He then proceeds to reassure his viewers that the identities
of people in this group are never shared with anyone,
not least of all because their enemies abound.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
The carefully coordinated attacks against us from all points of
the ideological compass have reached a crescendo stage since the
rest of this year, with the surprising but visible result
of solidifying the dedication of our members still further, and
of stimulating their recruiting efforts.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
This is Robert Welch Junior. Consider the facts. He speaks
a little like a dictator. He seems to run some
sort of secret society, and consider himself public enemy number one.
Who is this titan? Well, naturally he's a candy tycoon.
Robert Welch Junior was born on a former plantation in
(05:12):
North Carolina just before the turn of the twentieth century.
As a kid, he was precocious and a daydreamer. Wanted
to be a writer an intellectual, but he felt that
before he could do so, he had to get rich.
So one night, as a young man, he had a brainstorm.
According to Edward H. Miller, who wrote a biography of
Welsh called A Conspiratorial Life, Welch stayed up late into
(05:36):
the evening, writing and writing to answer a single question,
what specific goods in demand would be best for me
to start manufacturing without either capital or experience. This is
a quote Miller found from an associate of Welch's recalling
this legendary moment quote. As the sky began to show
the first streaks of dawn, Robert stared at the notes
(05:59):
in front of him. One word remained amid the maze
of dark lines scratched across the pages. That word was candy.
We've arrived at the Halloween portion of our programming. So
if in your baskets this year you find the following
candies Sugar Daddy, Sugar Baby, or the Junior Mint, you're
(06:21):
encountering a piece of the Welsh legacy, and actually the
legacy of his brother too, who naturally also worked in
the candy business. The Welsh nuclear family of Hit Candies,
the patriarch of which the Sugar Daddy, I have to
say I find totally inedible, has been a mainstay forever.
Children of the nineteen eighties may remember the jingle for
(06:43):
Sugar Babby for.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
Sugar Derby.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Welsh was part of what I've come to think of
as the American sweets aristocracy. I'm talking about a special
class of confectioners and bakers who turned out to have
a surprising number of ideas about how society ought to
be run. In the Pantheon, we have Milton Snavely Hershey,
whose chocolates were so delectable he was able to put
his social ideas to the test, building utopian town called Hershey, Pennsylvania.
(07:15):
Then there's Sylvester Graham, the clergyman who invented the Graham
Cracker to combat youth masturbation. John Harvey Kellogg, the Seventh
day Adventist, who invented cornflakes to do the same. The
candy makers, in particular tended to be extremely paranoid because
there was actually quite a bit of spying in their industry.
They had to guard their secrets, their recipes, their fortunes.
(07:37):
Some would even blindfold the people who repaired their machines.
But I digress. After establishing himself in the candy business
and drinking deeply at the trough of its paranoia, Welch
set out to elbow his way into the intellectual class,
specifically the anti communist class. Over the years, he wrote
(07:58):
a number of articles in books about the rise of communism, including,
per his biographer, a novel about inant society oppressed by
a monolithic state, which somehow went unpublished. But it was
in nineteen fifty four that one of his ideas finally
broke through.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
He was very secretive about these because Welch was always
worried about the Communists as he saw getting a hold
of what he was saying.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Historian Matthew Dallak, author of the book Birchers, talking about
Welch's penchant for sending secret letters.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Because they exposed him and they damaged you know, the
true this patriotic movement to destroy communism. It would be
it would basically be like killing his movement.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
In the crypt. Now, the letter he sent in nineteen
fifty four, in particular, merited sensitivity. It was a roughly
nine thousand word attempt to explain why he disliked Dwight
Eisenhower so much, the first Republican president in multiple decades.
The letter built to the irrefutable conclusion that Dwight Eisenhower
(09:10):
was not really a Republican. He was quote a dedicated,
conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy, operating under the direction
of his brother, the affable Milton.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
They're really divorced from any semblance of the truth. The
other thing, though, is that the argument against Eisenhower I
think fits into the Joe McCarthy argument that clearly the
setbacks in the world for the United States in the
(09:44):
fight against communism is a result of communists in the government,
including Eisenhower, allowing the communists to win.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Where the ant book had failed, the letter succeeded wildly.
It ballooned into a book that is over four hundred
pages long, complete with an extremely tedious footnote section explaining
the sourcing for his atlandish claims. As Wels once wrote,
explanations are like government. Nobody loves them, but a minimum
amount of both is a necessary evil. But anyway, Welch
(10:18):
was not content to mail secret letters the rest of
his life. He wanted to build a movement. So four
years after that letter, in October nineteen fifty eight, Welch
brought together eleven of his most powerful friends to a
secret meeting in Indianapolis. He didn't say what for, but
(10:39):
he did tell them each to book their own hotel
rooms so people wouldn't see them together. Then he promised
them that there was nothing conspiratorial about what they were
about to do, which was to gather in a secret
location for two days and conspire.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
My undertaking today is to try to tell you all
about the background, methods, and purposes of the John Birg Society.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
This date is from a recruitment video he made later on.
We don't have a recording of what he said that
day in Indianapolis. I mean, it was a secret meeting,
but I think it's safe to assume he was on message.
Welch was there to start a new anti communist organization.
After all, with the Communists already in control of the
US presidency, the situation was getting a little out of hand.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
As we have said many times before, they fundamentally decent
American mind simply refuses to recognize the nature of the
cunning beasts who constitute our enemies today. This is especially
true when these criminal gangsters assume all of the suavity
and regalire of high office.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Eleven men walked into that room in Indianapolis, and the
John Birch Society walked out, named by the way for
an American missionary who'd been killed by Chinese communists and
then became a kind of patron saint for people like
Robert Welch Junior. These were important men with money and
time to burn and an acts to grind. They had
Eisenhower's former IRS Commissioner, presidents of major companies, a former
(12:09):
aid to Douglas MacArthur, and Fred Koch, oil man and
father to the Koch brothers, was there too.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
I'll wake my friends and our rise now I'll be
forever fallen. We mean business and we can still win,
but we are in our race against time, with the
enemy advancing every day.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Welch knew what he was doing. He took his show
on the road, giving versions of that speech across the country,
and a lot of the listeners, bored Americans rattled by
war and freaked out by integration, thought hey, this guy's
got a point. He started with just his friends who
thought like he did, then his friend's friends, and then
his friend's friends friends. But Welch's dreams were always much grander.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
By any realistic appraisal of our size against our need,
we are still very small, but we certainly expect our
present growth to continue until we have the minion members
of Fervat take and unassailable character, which is our goal.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Despite Welch's vision for one million patriots to join the
John Birch Society, estimates show that the membership was likely
at an all time high when it hit thirty thousand
members in the sixties.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
The mission was not explicitly to take over a political Party.
It was not to even take over nessilly American institutions.
It was to wage a mass education campaign to allure Americans,
to educate them about the dire nature of the communist
(13:46):
conspiracy inside the United States.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
And so a small but influential group of right wingers
became convinced that there was a war going on at home.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
A continuous, undeclared war in which our enemiests observed no
rules of international law, of civilization, or of human decency.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Was the front in this war. Exactly two years after
its founding, the Birch Society had part of the answer
the Parent Teacher Association. Of course, we'll be right back.
(14:38):
The bitter Root Valley lies in the southwest of Montana,
between the Sapphire and bitter Root Mountains. It's the place
they filmed Yellowstone Today. It's gorgeous.
Speaker 5 (14:49):
Okay, so small town.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Gail Laro Munson was a little girl growing up in
the valley in the nineteen sixties in a town called Darby.
Back then, its population was three hundred and ninety eight.
Speaker 5 (15:02):
Close snit neighbors looked out for each other. Kids could
be out till dark and back home they would be safe.
If you were caught doing something wrong, the neighbors would
let your parents know and they'd be ready when you
got home.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Darby was the kind of place where you knew everyone,
especially if you were in Gale's family. Her dad, or
Vill Roe was the superintendent of the school district. But
in the early nineteen sixties, strangers began to show up
in the valley. Orville was busy right around then getting
new Bibles for a local school. Because theres we're all
beaten up. He asked a local clergyman how to get
(15:41):
rid of the old ones in a respectful way, and
he was told to burn them. So he gathered up
the bibles and set them on fire, and all of
a sudden, those strangers leapt into action. It turned out
they were part of a club, the John Birch Society.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
Merch members appeared at the regular school board meeting with
a petition.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Demanding that Larol not be offered a new contract.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
It was all over the local radio.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Majority of the board rejected that demand. This action of
the board intensified an already steady program of intimidation against
the Row and his family.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
The Butchers, returning Orville's quiet life in Derby with his
three kids and his wife completely upside down. Here's Orville.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
There are individuals, of course, the community who will drive
by and make obscene signs. There have been an incidents
where people have called the house my wife had answered
and have used obscene language on the telephone. Basically, it's
a joy, simple constant harassment.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
An archivist in Montana named Kristen Gates wrote an essay
about all this. She found letters from the principle of
the local school who said the butchers were quote using
the local PTA as a springboard to infiltrate the schools.
(17:10):
Here I'm telling you about what unfolded for the LaRose
in a tiny town in Montana. But they weren't the
only people involved in local ptas or schools who became targets.
This is not the case now, but in the nineteen sixties,
according to one study, almost half of all families in
America were represented in the PTA fifty percent. The PTA
(17:32):
became such a well known part of public life that
it was even the subject of a number one song
in the nineteen sixties, Harper Valley PTA, and.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
It was signed by the secretary Harper Valetta.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
The PTA played a huge role in modernizing American education.
Every local PTA was part of the National PTA, which
was run out of Washington, and they worked together to
petition schools to adapt and modernize, like a miniature version
of the federal government. It was actually originally called the
Congress of Mother Anyways, all this paid dividends. If you've
(18:12):
drunk fluoridated water, which you have gotten vaccinated in schools,
gone to a public kindergarten, or just been at a
school that received federal funds, you can thank the PTA
next bakesale, maybe by cookie. As a sociologist, Robert Putnam writes,
the PTA in its day was quote one of the
(18:33):
most impressive organizational success stories in American history end quote.
And who at that exact moment wanted to pull off
another of the most impressive organizational success stories in American
history Dark Willy Wonka Robert Welch Junior, whose recruiting methods
(18:53):
were slightly more apocalyptic.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
The wise and the brave do not hold back until
it is too late.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
In its newsletter, the John Birch Society told its members
to quote join your local PTA at the beginning of
the school year, get your conservative friends to do likewise,
and go to work to take it over. You will
run into real battles against determined leftists who have had
everything their way. But it is time we went on
the offensive to make such groups the instrument of conservative
(19:24):
purpose with the same vigor and determination that the liberals
have used to the opposite aims. With encouragement from the
John Birch Society, extremists of all stripes started showing up
to local ptas across the country trying to take them over.
Speaker 7 (19:41):
You know, all kinds of methods were being used.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Sarah Heath, a historian at Indiana University Kocomo.
Speaker 7 (19:48):
So the Birch Society might pack cars full of people,
so if I bring thirty people to a local meeting
of a PTA. But basically what they would try to
do is if I can get thirty people to go
to this one local meeting, we can try to take
over the proceedings of that meeting.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Suddenly, amid the conversations about fire safety and participatory democracy,
parents had to consider things like whether skipping the pledge
of allegiance at the start of a meeting made you
a Stalin level communist or an Eisenhower level one. Such considerations,
it turned out demand quite a bit of everyone's time.
Speaker 7 (20:24):
Because what they wanted to do was first get some
people to get so tired that they would just say,
I've got to go home, right. PTA meetings are usually
in the early evening, so some people would leave. Then
they called the vote, and then they have a majority.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
The virtuers wanted to use the ptas to reach school
boards so they could change the textbooks and root out
all the commedy and sex education stuff. But a lot
of what they did was actual harassment.
Speaker 7 (20:52):
You know. There are examples of people throwing trash on
the lawns of PTA members, or threatening people by the phone,
calling them at all hours of the night, you know,
just to keep them awake.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
The PTA fought back in classic PTA form, with pamphlet
and lists of meeting best practices, but this was a
little like bringing knives to a gunfight. At this point,
there'd even been a report of a bombing at a
restaurant where a PTA meeting was going to be held.
This is what happens when you talk about national politics,
like Robert Welch Junior, like you're in a shadowy war.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
A continuous, undeclared war in which our enemies observed no
rules of international law of civilization, are of human decency.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
The PTA kept pushing back in their own way against
the virtures. There's even a quote from the PTA president
in the congressional record saying these extremists are not really
after the PTA, but are attempting to gain control of
it to get at their real objective, the educational system.
But for Orville Row, the superintendent in Darby, Montana, these
(22:02):
extremists weren't some faraway thing. They were at his doorstep.
Speaker 6 (22:07):
And I walked home in the evening. At times I've
had a car follow me. It was ordinarily. They apparently
are cowards because when I stopped and gone over to
take their license.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Them and there was how the picture.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
But the aggression wasn't just limited to Orville. Orville's eldest
son was the fifth grader in the local school. One day,
there was a basketball game. He was sitting in the
stands watching. He was not an unpopular kid, but midway
through the game, a couple of classmates walked up to him.
They pulled him out of his seat and they began
(22:44):
to beat him mercilessly. This is Gail again, his.
Speaker 5 (22:48):
Sister, And when they were beating him up, he was
at a basketball game in the gym and other kids
were sturing it.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
All the kids weren't Birchers all they knew he was Orville,
the Bible Burner's son.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Then he's coming into.
Speaker 6 (23:05):
The house and ask pissed why they are calling him names.
I didn't do anything, and of course it's rather had
to explain it for youngster.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
In that age.
Speaker 5 (23:16):
He came home bloodied. He was We were all confused,
why you know, what did I do? Why did this happen?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
The tipping point came when Orvill le Rowe was driving
his whole family along one of the roads around Derby.
Suddenly another car appeared and tried to run them off
the road. They all could have died, and that was
the last straw. After years of harassment, he decided it
was time to leave Darby.
Speaker 5 (23:47):
He sacrificed for the family. And I know that was
a really difficult thing to not stay in fight because
my dad has so much integrity and he's a tough guy,
and if he hadn't had a family, I firmly believe
my brothers and I believe he would have stayed and
(24:07):
he would have fought this situation.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
The people of Derby had a picnic for the LaRose
before they packed up and left. Montana had been Orville's
home since he was a kid, the place he'd loved
to fish and hunt, taught school, and raised a family.
When the LaRose left, the school system didn't just lose
its superintendent, It fell apart. There were twenty three teachers
(24:32):
in the Derby Consolidated School that fall, only seven went
back to work. Things were never the same for the
Lreaux family either. When I called the kids up, none
of them really wanted to talk about this. Then they
changed their mind, I think, if I had to guess,
because they wanted to stand up against the people who
(24:52):
did this to their family, to their father and also
to their mother.
Speaker 5 (24:57):
Dorothy made said before this happened, she was such a
fun person, great sense of humor. I'd love to hear
my dead stories of because I didn't, I didn't witness
a lot of this, and so you know, we were
all cheated out of an amazing person. And just I
(25:26):
just I just can pick to her kind of don't
don't tell you know, the neighbors this, don't tell the
neighbors that, don't tell anybody this, don't tell anybody this.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
They moved from one small town to another, but Dorothy
never could quite trust her neighbors again. What came of
the Birch Society and the PTA after the break? A
(26:06):
little while ago I stopped by a house in Los Angeles.
It was shaded by a sick More tree, and there
was a Root sixty six sign leaning in the front windowsill,
facing the quiet street. I was there to talk to
a woman named Marva Felchlin. Marva grew up in California
and was a student at welby Way Elementary School. She
was a baby boomer in the classical sense, a house
(26:29):
in a safe and lovely subdivision, a dad in the
defense industry, and a mom in the PTA that, yes,
Bircher's had tried to take over. Her mom's name was Zelda,
and she never got over what happened.
Speaker 8 (26:43):
It's a big thing that happened in our lives.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Why do you think the story had added to your
mother so much?
Speaker 8 (26:52):
Because I think you know the PTA in her activities
in the PTA probably represented, as with other women in there,
a lot of what they believed in. And here they're
being accused of being liars and dishonest and Unamerican. Those
of those people were probably children of immigrants. I mean,
(27:15):
that's a serious accusation in those anytime.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
But in those days, Zelda had always wanted to be
a writer. She once submitted a script to the Twilight Zone,
but the place she really wrote was her Parent Teacher
Association newsletter. It's the one we read from at the
beginning of this episode, the April nineteen sixty two edition
of the welby Way Elementary School PTA newsletter The Well
(27:40):
be Buzzings With the curious editor's note, Zelda wrote that
when Bircher's across the country were trying to take down
the PTA, she took to her newsletter to fight back.
Speaker 8 (27:53):
I don't I'm not surprised that my mother pushed back
in any way, because that's I think she's kind of
that kind of personality that she didn't stand for a
lot of crap.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
You know, Marva has held on to the original copy
of that newsletter for years. I asked sure to read
me the editor's message.
Speaker 8 (28:12):
Okay, the power to seek the truth is within all
of us. The way in which we seek it is
privilege and right of all of us. We are fortunate
enough to live under a system of government that secures
and protects that right. But there are some who abuse
this freedom and cloud the answers and the issues, so
that seeking the truth and knowing it is the truth
(28:35):
becomes a harder task than it was ever meant to be.
I say this, Give me the right to seek the truth,
but justly, and rationally and kindly. Give me the wisdom
to understand and recognize the truth simply, without unseen or
unknown factors behind it. Give me the wisdom to use
the truth properly, openly, knowingly, and in its entirety, without
(28:59):
bending or twisting said truth to fit my own purposes.
Give me the graciousness to accept the truth, although it
may disagree with or disapprove my own personal opinions and beliefs.
And last, give me the wisdom and right to seek
the truth in whatever manner I so choose, so long
(29:20):
as I in the manner I have chosen, do not
belittle or deface the object of my search, so long
as I can honestly say to myself it is the
truth alone that I am seeking. So the last off editor.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
During those same years when Bircher's were mobbing PTA meetings,
the PTA as a national organization began to die for good.
It just kept losing numbers until it became effectively a
loose group of local organizations. It still exists, but you
wouldn't write a number one song about it anymore. I
(29:59):
don't think that was all the doing of the Birch Society,
though it certainly didn't help the rise of the Butchers
in the fall of the PTA were both part of
the backlash to Brown versus Board of Education, a response
to integration and civil rights. The Birch Society went into
decline then too. It had become radioactive, mocked to death
in the press, repudiated by even William F. Buckley, turned
(30:22):
on by mainstream Republicans, torn by its own infighting, investigated
by the Anti Defamation League in the FBI, but it
never vanished. Robert Welch Junior was involved with the Birch
Society almost until his death in nineteen eighty five. Under
the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who, true to form Welsh
once called a communist Blackie. His society lives on in
(30:46):
diminished form these days. They're a lot less notable. They're
just one in a sea of right wing groups. But
why did people like Welsh hate the parent Teacher Association
so much it seems to me like the Birch Society
and the PTA were locked in a kind of death
match between two visions of American civil society. The PTA
(31:08):
was the vision of the America and Vital Center, progressive, orderly, incremental,
and evidence based. Its model was the US federal system,
local and national working patiently together. But the John Birch
Society was modeled on communist cells, secretive with hard caps
on membership to keep things decentralized rather than optimistic. It
(31:31):
was paranoid rather than incremental. They called for kind of revolution.
The PTA was about trusting your neighbors to share your
interests too. The John Birch Society was about always suspecting
them of betraying you. I don't know if that sounds
familiar to you, but it shure does to me. Revisionist
(32:04):
History is produced by me Ben Matt of Haffrey and
Lucy Sullivan with Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Chakerji.
Fact checking on this episode by Sam Russick. Original scoring
by Luis Gara, mastering by Jake Gorski. Our executive producer
is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix the State
(32:25):
Historical Society of North Dakota, the University of Montana, and
the UCLA Library Special Collections. I'm ben matafafor
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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