What Has America Become?

Right Around the Corner


Fifty years ago, 12 convservatives came together in an Indianapolis living room to thwart the conspirators who sought to bring America down from within. For members of the society they formed, little has changed.



By Nancy Comiskey

Mary Black joined the John Birch Society in 1974. Fresh out of Marian College, she knew two things: She wanted to teach, and she wanted to protect America. The daughter of a JBS council member, Mary grew up with talk of plots to infiltrate our government, undermine our Constitution, and destroy our way of life. Joining the society, she says, was a moral obligation.

On this September night, her 56th birthday, she leads the monthly meeting of the South and West Indianapolis chapters of the JBS in a library meeting room. Black is tiny, just 4-foot-10 with cropped dark hair and a fringe of bangs. During the day, she teaches mentally disabled students at a local school—she’d rather not say where. Black is friendly but efficient, welcoming six members with some brief small talk. Tom Rice, a full-time JBS field coordinator, has joined the group. He says he’d rather not have the meeting recorded.

Tonight’s topic, in Indianapolis and in JBS chapters across the country, is the economy. The Federal Reserve has been a perennial JBS target since the ultra-conservative political group was founded in Indianapolis 50 years ago.

One by one, the members, ranging in age from late 50s to early 80s, read from typed, double-spaced reports as listeners nod in agreement. Each, in turn, drives home a key point:

“The Federal Reserve is counterfeiting money,” Black says.

“The greatest fears of our founding fathers have been realized,” says Jo Ann Jones, a 20-year member.

“Before long, there won’t be any middle class,” says Dave Manning, the one member who speaks without notes.

When the last person finishes, Black sums up the reports.

“Are our leaders stupid? No. Are our leaders ignorant? No. Is there a design behind all of this? That’s the only reasonable assumption we can make.”

Fifty years ago, another Indianapolis woman shared Black’s fears of a far-reaching conspiracy. Marguerite Dice, then 74, was a member of the Indiana Minute Women, a secretive anti-Communist group. She had read the political writings of Robert Welch, a former Massachusetts candy maker, and they began a correspondence. When Welch told her of plans to found a new group to fight Communism, she offered her home at 3650 North Washington Boulevard for the first meeting.

Welch sent cryptic invitations across the country to like-minded men, most mid-sized manufacturers like himself, asking them to attend an urgent two-day conference in Indianapolis. On Monday, Dec. 8, 1958, 11 of those men arrived at Dice’s English Tudor home. They tramped through heavy snow and temperatures that had dipped below zero. In Dice’s living room, they took seats arranged in a semicircle around one empty chair. When the last man sat down, Welch entered the room.

Robert Welch had been born in North Carolina one month before the dawn of the 20th century. He graduated from college at 17 and attended Harvard Law School before deciding his future lay in chocolate. He joined his younger brother at the James O. Welch Company, best known for producing the Sugar Daddy and Junior Mints.

The family lived for a time in Attica, Indiana, in the 1930s, and then resettled in Massachusetts, says Welch’s son Hillard “Hid” Welch, now 83 and living in Centerville, Mass. The elder Welch recited poetry, played a killer game of chess, and had the wildest golf swing on the links. “If you looked at his swing, you’d say he couldn’t possibly hit the ball,” Hid Welch says. “But Dad had a tremendous power of concentration.”

He also had a gift for sales and built his brother’s company from $200,000 to $20 million in two decades. He loved puns and wrote jokes for the company newsletter. But he didn’t joke about politics. He became alarmed by what he saw as the decline of Christian values and the rise of Communism.

Welch started the magazine One Man’s Opinion in 1954 to promote his views and published The Life of John Birch, which told the story of a U.S. intelligence officer killed by Chinese Communists. Birch was, in Welch’s eyes, the first casualty of the Cold War. In 1957, Welch left the candy business to battle Communism full-time.

Dale Sorenson, who studied anti-Communist sentiment in Indiana for his dissertation at Indiana University, isn’t surprised that Welch chose Indianapolis for his first meeting. The presence of the right-leaning Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News, and the headquarters of the American Legion, made the city an attractive setting. “If you were looking for a place that was conservative,” he says, “certainly Indianapolis would have been as or more conservative as anywhere else.”


None of the 12 men who arrived at Dice’s house that Monday morning is alive to tell exactly what happened there. But accounts say 58-year-old Welch, a rather formal gentleman with thinning gray hair, thick brows, and heavy-lidded blue eyes, greeted his guests and then launched into a two-day jeremiad that would become, almost verbatim, The Blue Book of The John Birch Society.

Welch laid out his convictions on the advance of Communism and his plan to defeat it. It was “a worldwide battle … between light and darkness; between freedom and slavery; between the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of the anti-Christ for the souls and bodies of men.” And time was running out, he cautioned.

As founder, Welch said, he would control this new organization. “You have no other choice, and neither do I,” he said. The society would not be a democracy, which Welch disdained, and members who disagreed with him and his appointed council could choose to resign or be turned out.

Welch’s salesmanship paid off. By Tuesday evening, 10 of the 11 had signed on, and Welch later appointed nine to the JBS council. Nathaniel Adamson Jr., now 89, is the only living member of the first council. A few weeks after the Indianapolis meeting, he sat through Welch’s talk, trimmed to a mere eight hours. “In the early days,” Adamson says, “nobody could join the society if they hadn’t been to a presentation.” Clarence Manion, a former Notre Dame law-school dean known for his conservative radio/TV talk show, “The Manion Forum,” joined Adamson and 21 others on the first council. The only other Hoosier was Evansville businessman Louis Ruthenburg.

The JBS grew steadily, especially in Indiana and a handful of other states. While firm numbers are hard to find, by 1961 membership had climbed to somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000. Birchers were likely to be white, educated, well-off, religious, and Republican. In its early years, the society spoke out against international alliances, collective bargaining, income tax, the media, federal aid to education, and the civil-rights movement, which Welch saw as a “fraud” created by Communists.

Ironically, given Welch’s reputation for long-windedness, the JBS was best known for three terse billboards: “Get US Out of the UN;” “Impeach Earl Warren;” and “Support Your Local Police.” The society saw the UN as a step on the road to one-world government. They believed liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren was legislating from the bench. And they opposed federal agents going into Southern states to enforce civil rights laws.

Welch and the JBS continued to rail against Communism’s unwitting dupes in America. In 1960, Welch claimed the U.S. government was “40 to 60 percent Communist-controlled.” But the circulation of an attack on Dwight Eisenhower eventually reversed the society’s fortunes. When Welch wrote that he was convinced that the war-hero president was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” even fellow conservatives balked. Welch backpedaled, saying his 302-page memorandum had never been intended for public distribution, but the damage was done. Conservative luminaries William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater dissociated themselves from Welch.