John Birch vs. the PTA
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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. Our podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. Decisions like, should you bet on the election? Maybe. Should you even be able to? Yes. And questions like, have presidential candidates made the most optimal decisions in their campaigns? And how does that translate into the polling? We're talking about it all in the lead up and aftermath of the election. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

I want to read to you from a very important historical document. The April 1962 edition of the Welby Way Elementary School Parent Teacher Association newsletter, The Welby Buzzings. Written, of course, by the PTA of 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 mutters. Third item, a meeting on safety and fire prevention. Fourth item, an interesting and informative trip to the fire station. Fifth item, the local 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. I'm guessing you're bored 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 this episode soon after its release, there are two things going on in your world. The U.S. 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 really begins with the Well Be Way PTA newsletter from April 1962, 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 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 Gladwell. Here's our question. Why in this otherwise very dull PTA newsletter does the mother who wrote it feel the need to write an urgent defense of democracy? She doesn't say.

as my colleague Ben-Nadaf Halfrey 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. A man who, right 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.

The video is grainy, but you can make out an older man, late 60s, standing in a suit and tie against a black backdrop, clasping his hands on a lectern. Faithful citizens, wherever you may be. 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.

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. 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. The carefully coordinated attacks against us from all points of the ideological compass

have reached a crescendo stage since the first of this year, with the surprising but visible result of solidifying the dedication of our members still further and of stimulating their recruiting efforts. This is Robert Welch Jr. 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 Jr. was born on a former plantation in North Carolina just before the turn of the 20th 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 Welch called A Conspiratorial Life, Welch stayed up late into 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,

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 encountering a piece of the Welsh legacy. And actually the legacy of his brother, too, who naturally also worked in the candy business.

The Welch 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 1980s may remember the jingle. Welch 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 a utopian town called Hershey, Pennsylvania. 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. 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 a number of articles and books about the rise of communism, including, per his biographer, a novel about an ant society oppressed by a monolithic state, which somehow went unpublished. But it was in 1954 that one of his ideas finally broke through. He was very secretive about these because Welch was always worried about the communists, as he saw it, getting a hold of what he was saying.

Historian Matthew Dalek, author of the book Birchers, talking about Welch's penchant for sending secret letters. Because if they exposed him and they damaged, you know, these true, this patriotic movement to destroy communism, it would be, it would basically be like killing his movement in the crib. Now, the letter he sent in 1954 in particular merited sensitivity.

It was a roughly 9,000-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 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.

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 fight against communism is a result of communists in the government, including Eisenhower, allowing the communists to win.

Where the Ant book had failed, the letter succeeded wildly. It ballooned into a book that is over 400 pages long, complete with an extremely tedious footnote section explaining the sourcing for his outlandish claims. As Welch once wrote, explanations are like government. Nobody loves them, but a minimum amount of both is a necessary evil. But anyway, Welch 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 1958, Welch brought together 11 of his most powerful friends to a secret meeting in Indianapolis. He didn't say what for, but 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.

My undertaking today is to try to tell you all about the background methods and purposes of the John Birch Society. This tape 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 U.S. presidency, the situation was getting a little out of hand.

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 Jr. These were important men with money and time to burn and an axe to grind. They had Eisenhower's former IRS commissioner, presidents of major companies, a former aide to Douglas MacArthur, and Fred Koch, oil man and father to the Koch brothers, was there too.

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 friends' friends, and then his friends' friends' friends. But Welch's dreams were always much grander. 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 million members of fervent patriotism and unassailable character, which is our goal.

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 30,000 members in the 60s. The mission was not explicitly to take over a political party. It was not...

to even take over necessarily American institutions. It was to wage a mass education campaign to alert Americans, to educate them about the dire nature of the communist conspiracy inside the United States. And so a small but influential group of right-wingers became convinced that there was a war going on at home.

A continuous, undeclared war in which our enemies observe no rules of international law, of civilization, or of human decency. But where 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. Chase for Business and iHeart bring you a podcast series called The Unshakeables.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. Our podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. Decisions like, should you bet on the election? Maybe. Should you even be able to? Yes. And questions like, have presidential candidates made the most optimal decisions in their campaigns? And how does that translate into the polling? We're talking about it all in the lead up and aftermath of the election. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

The Bitterroot Valley lies in the southwest of Montana, between the Sapphire and Bitterroot Mountains. It's the place they film Yellowstone today. It's gorgeous. Okay, so, small town. Gail Leroux Munson was a little girl growing up in the valley in the 1960s, in a town called Darby. Back then, its population was 398.

Close-knit. Neighbors looked out for each other. Kids could be out till dark and come 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. Darby was the kind of place where you knew everyone, especially if you were in Gail's family. Her dad, Orville Leroux, was the superintendent of the school district.

But in the early 1960s, strangers began to show up in the valley. Orville was busy right around then getting new Bibles for a local school because theirs were all beaten up. He asked a local clergyman how to get 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.

It was all over the local radio. The Birchers were turning Orville's quiet life in Darby with his three kids and his wife completely upside down. Here's Orville.

There are individuals, of course, in the community who will drive by and make obscene signs. There have been incidents where people have called the house, my wife has answered, and have used obscene language on the telephone. Basically, it's just pure and simple, constant harassment.

An archivist in Montana named Kristen Gates wrote an essay about all this. She found letters from the principal of the local school who said the Birchers were, quote, using the local PTA as a springboard to infiltrate the schools.

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 1960s, according to one study, almost half of all families in America were represented in the PTA. 50%.

The PTA became such a well-known part of public life that it was even the subject of a number one song in the 1960s, Harper Valley PTA. 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 Mothers. Anyways, all this paid dividends. If you've 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 bake sale, maybe buy a cookie. As a sociologist, Robert Putnam writes, the PTA in its day was, quote, one of the 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 Jr., whose recruiting methods were slightly more apocalyptic.

The wise and the brave do not hold back until it is too late. 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 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. You know, all kinds of methods were being used. Sarah Heath, a historian at Indiana University Kokomo. So the Birch Society might pack cars full of people. So if I bring 30 people to a local meeting of a PTA...

But basically what they would try to do is, if I can get 30 people to go to this one local meeting, we can try to take over the proceedings of that meeting. 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.

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 a vote, and then they have a majority. The Birchers wanted to use the PTAs to reach school boards so they could change the textbooks and root out all the commie and sex education stuff.

But a lot of what they did was actual harassment. 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.

The PTA fought back in classic PTA form, with pamphlets 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 Jr., like you're in a shadowy war.

a continuous undeclared war in which our enemies observe no rules of international law, of civilization, or of human decency. The PTA kept pushing back in their own way against the Birchers. 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 Leroux, the superintendent in Darby, Montana, these extremists weren't some faraway thing. They were at his doorstep. When I walked home in the evenings, at times I've had a car follow me. Ordinarily, they apparently are cowards because when I stop and go over to take their license number, they'll zoom out of the picture. But the aggression wasn't just limited to Orville.

Orville's eldest son was a 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 to beat him mercilessly.

This is Gail again, his sister. And when they were beating him up, he was at a basketball game in the gym. And other kids were cheering it on. The kids weren't Birchers. All they knew, he was Orville the Bible Burner's son. Then he's come into the house and asked us why they are calling him names. He says, I didn't do anything.

And of course it's rather hard to explain for a youngster of that age. He came home bloodied. He was, we were all confused. Why, you know, what did I do? Why did this happen? The tipping point came when Orville Leroux was driving his whole family along one of the roads around Darby. 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. He sacrificed for the family. And I know that was a really difficult thing to not stay and 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 he would have fought this situation.

The people of Darby 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 23 teachers in the Darby Consolidated School. That fall, only seven went back to work. Things were never the same for the LaRose 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 did this to their family, to their father, and also to their mother, Dorothy. My dad said before this happened, she...

was such a fun person, great sense of humor. I loved to hear my dad's stories of my mom because I didn't witness a lot of this. And so, you know, we were all cheated out of an amazing person. And just... I just can picture her. Don't tell...

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?

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Welcome back, Ms. Klein.

I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. Our podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. Decisions like, should you bet on the election? Maybe. Should you even be able to? Yes. And questions like, have presidential candidates made the most optimal decisions in their campaigns? And how does that translate into the polling? We're talking about it all in the lead up and aftermath of the election. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

A little while ago, I stopped by a house in Los Angeles. It was shaded by a sycamore tree. There was a Route 66 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 in a safe and lovely subdivision, a dad in the defense industry, and a mom in the PTA that, yes, Birchers had tried to take over. Her mom's name was Zelda, and she never got over what happened. It's a big thing that happened in our lives. Why do you think the story mattered to your mother so much? Um...

Because I think, you know, the PTA and 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 un-American. Most of those people were probably children of immigrants. I mean, that's a serious accusation in those, any time, 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 1962 edition of the Welby Way Elementary School PTA newsletter, The Welby Buzzings, with the curious editor's note. Zelda wrote that. When birchers across the country were trying to take down the PTA, she took to her newsletter to fight back.

I'm not surprised that my mother pushed back in any way because I think she's kind of that kind of personality that she didn't stand for a lot of crap. Marva has held on to the original copy of that newsletter for years. I asked her to read me the editor's message. 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 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.

And last,

Give me the wisdom and right to seek the truth in whatever manner I so choose, so long 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. Zoldalasov, editor. During those same years when Birchers were mobbing PTA meetings, the PTA as a national organization began to die for good.

It just kept losing members 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 don't think that was all the doing of the Birch Society, though it certainly didn't help. The rise of the Birchers and the fall of the PTA were both part of the backlash to Brown v. 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 on by mainstream Republicans, torn by its own infighting, investigated by the Anti-Defamation League and the FBI. But it never vanished. Robert Welch Jr. was involved with the Birch Society almost until his death in 1985 under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who, true to form, Welch once called a communist lackey.

His society lives on in 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 Welch 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 was the vision of the American vital center. Progressive, orderly, incremental, and evidence-based society.

Its model was the U.S. 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 was paranoid. Rather than incremental, they called for a 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 sure does to me. Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Natif-Haffrey, and Lucy Sullivan with Nina Byrd-Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shikurji. Fact-checking on this episode by Sam Rusick. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Jake Gorski. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Special thanks to Sarah Nix, the State Historical Society of North Dakota, the University of Montana, and the UCLA Library Special Collections. I'm Ben Mattafaffer.

I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. Our podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. Decisions like, should you bet on the election? Maybe. Should you even be able to? Yes. And questions like, have presidential candidates made the most optimal decisions in their campaigns? And how does that translate into the polling? We're talking about it all in the lead up and aftermath of the election. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.