I grew up in a John Birch Society household. From birth to age 18+, those were the waters in which I swam. My family made up nearly 100% of my social scene and if I wasn’t hanging out with immediate or extended family, we had “Bible study” most Saturday nights with other John Birch Society families. It wasn’t a cult, per se, but it was a very narrow view onto the larger world. During the summers of my 6th, 7th and 8th grade years, I attended week-long John Birch Camps. It was exactly what it sounds like. My grandparents would pay for me to go. My mom volunteered as a cook at the camp. We campers slept in cabins and after an early breakfast there were “American history” classes, “Constitutional law” classes, “Civics” classes, etc. The afternoons were largely given over to free time for swimming, canoeing, volleyball and other such wholesome camping activities. And I was as happy as a white clam.
As I got older, the casual racism of jokes about Mexicans and African-Americans didn’t really strike me as that odd. Of course, our one black neighbor who lived several miles away (and was named, ironically enough, Robert Lee) was exempt from being lumped in with the butt of the jokes. As were those Mexican ranch hands who worked on my grandparents’ ranch. The concern was largely focused on those darn urban minorities who were undermining the work of us real Americans.
And so… here I am, at age 48, reading this article from The New Yorker about the past — and possible future — of the Republican Party. Over the years, I’ve been able to push the more extreme right-wing and conspiratorial views of my family to the periphery and just focus on being cordial and getting along. But now that extreme right-wing and conspiratorial views form the mainstream of the Republican Party, it’s a lot harder to ignore. Especially when I read that the founder of the John Birch Society espoused that the civil rights movement of the 60’s would lead to a “Soviet Negro Republic” and needed to be halted.
Right.
African-Americans needed to be denied the right to vote (among other liberties) because they were going to carve out a separate nation with MLK as their president. While that forecast was obviously pretty far off base, the article below from the New York Times was published a full decade before I was born into my JBS household. But my parents joined the Birch Society in 1960 or 1961, I believe. That means they have been stewing in this type of thought for 60+ years.
I’m not sure what, if anything, to do with this information other than tuck it away and recognize it as one of the “Founding Documents” of the current Republican Party. I’m sure it was merely an oversight, but somehow this forecast and warning of a Soviet Negro Republic was never mentioned around the John Birch camp nightly campfire.
ReMarkable 