Before the 2016 presidential election and Trumpism, before Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, there was the John Birch Society: Founded in 1958 at a secret meeting of 12 men, the group was named after a young missionary and intelligence officer who was killed by Mao’s Communist forces in 1945. As the historian Matthew Dallek explains in “Birchers,” his illuminating new account of the society’s right-wing activism amid postwar prosperity, a number of the founding members were business leaders, and all of them felt deeply aggrieved.
“Rich, white and almost uniformly Christian,” Dallek writes, the first Birchers nevertheless believed they had been “abandoned” and “exiled to the margins.” They railed against Communism, the civil rights movement and the New Deal. Their fulminations were often dismissed as ludicrous and paranoid; in the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper’s rant about a commie plot “to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” wasn’t even that much of a parody. For the last six decades, a standard Bircher talking point has revolved around the evils of a fluoridated water supply (or, as the group’s website currently has it, “a form of government mass medication of citizens in violation of their individual right to choose which medicines they ingest”).
