Washington-U.S.A..
COFFIN, TRISTRAM
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. By Tristram Coffin The Yahoo Returns TOURISTS WHO SWARM about Washington this raw April often discover a curiosity that government clerks who pass by every day never...
...The yahoo rarely limits his fears and hates...
...There is a peculiar contradiction in this war on social doctrine...
...A freshman at the University of Wichita who heckled a Birch leader at a public meeting learned afterwards that Birchers called the manager of the grocery where he works and demanded the boy be fired as a pro-Communist...
...The "Know Nothings" also grabbed the records of the Monument Society and threw out its officers, declaring themselves the only true patriots who knew how to revere George Washington...
...They call school teachers and college professors in the middle of the night and denounce them as Communists...
...As he wrote in a letter to the local newspaper: "One of the students who heard my speech phoned her mother from school stating that I called her (the mother) a Communist and had strongly attacked the John Birch Society...
...Only if the members of these groups declared allegiance to, came to feel an unshakable loyalty for, and thus accepted direction from, a dynamic personal leader...
...who is obsessed with flying saucers...
...the devil worship, the false gods out to destroy mankind all over again...
...Welch is a millionaire and apparently he is adding to his personal wealth by the promotion of the John Birch Society...
...This is a scar of the fury of a yahooism that lies under the American crust, and is with us today in a bizarre band of crackpots, bullies and retired colonels called the John Birch Society...
...The Vatican gave a marble block from the Temple of Concord...
...The chief Congressional defender and an admitted member is Representative Edgar W. Hiestand (R.-Calif...
...Newspaper accounts from across the nation show an inordinate number of retired service officers, wealthy eccentrics, and businessmen...
...One of their major objectives in the state is to destroy collective bargaining...
...He is a poor devil who burns with rage at fate for having cheated him...
...Tie's got money and influence...
...In it he has written: "Democracy is merely a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery and a perennial fraud...
...it inevitably spreads to cover all who are unlike him or frustrate him, so that he finally trusts only 100 per cent Aryans who are, at the same time, hard shell Protestants, Taft Republicans for Byrd Democrats), and who swear eternal damnation on labor unions, modern education and every President of the United States since Herbert Hoover...
...The John Birch Society rides in the well worn ruts of yahooism...
...But in 1934, he was turned down in his bid for the Democratic nomination for Senator by the McNutt organization and soured so that in the past two decades he has been a leader of the far right...
...The men who join the John Birch Society during the next few months or few years are going to be doing so primarily because they believe in me and what I am doing and are willing to accept my leadership anyway...
...This is the Black Mass...
...The yahoo has little, if any idea of what Communism is or how it operates, but it is emotionally satisfying to believe that a sinister conspiracy from the dread walled citadel of the Kremlin, using Jews, school teachers, New Dealers, used car salesmen or whoever he happens to hate at the moment, is at work...
...He was followed by Gerald L. K. Smith and others who preached a brand of home-town fascism...
...The attack upon teachers is yahooism at its worst...
...Its greatest power was in Indiana, where organizers became wealthy, and the KKK controlled the Statehouse, the Congressional delegation and membership in country clubs, extorted tribute from stores, and was destroyed only when its leader was involved in the vile death of a Statehouse stenographer...
...Other Council members include a former NAM president, a onetime aide to General MacArthur, a retired Lieutenant General of the Air Force, and the editor of a small Catholic publication...
...The Washington Post in a report from that city states, "The leadership of the Birch Society overlaps heavily with the leadership of the organization that successfully campaigned in 1958 for a right-to-work amendment to the State Constitution...
...It is a fascist group practicing character assassination without regard for the truth, threatening merchants with boycotts, threatening college professors and school principals with dismissal...
...Their two leading targets are ministers who preach social doctrines, as advocated by Jesus, and teachers who are advanced enough to think there may be something to Darwin...
...In Wichita, as elsewhere, the Society has been active in pushing the film, Operation Abolition, defending the House Un-American Activities Committee, and another film, Communism on the Map, prepared by the "National Education Program" of Harding College of Searcy, Arkansas...
...We cannot stop for parliamentary procedures or a lot of arguments among ourselves...
...It was Senator Stephen Young who said, "Using the convenient cover of patriotism, members of the John Birch Society would crucify democracy itself, and crush the precious rights and liberties we cherish...
...I merely stated the facts as I found them in both Time and your newspaper...
...Maybe it's hard these days to get a man smeared in Washington, but in a small city like this it can still be done...
...he hasn't the mind or knowledge or courage to figure out the cause of his misery, and is ready to believe a fiendish conspiracy is at work against him...
...A member of the Council is Clarence Manion, who in the 1930s was a torch-carrying liberal and dean of the Notre Dame Law School...
...He confuses Communism with all that he personally dislikes...
...His fanatic views are revealed in a mysterious book, The Politician, which he wrote and reserves only for the most faithful disciples...
...The people who have been publicly identified with the Society offer additional clues to what kind of an outfit it is...
...Don't even hesitate to break the heads of those you find creeping toward the wall...
...The strong link between the Society and the right wing of American business is shown in Wichita...
...The telephone call tactic is terrifying in its violence and tacit threat...
...I am convinced America would be better off with a government of 300.000 officials and agents, every single one of them a thief, than a government of 3,000,000 agents with every single one of them an honest, honorable public servant...
...He is a disappointed politician, having run for the GOP nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts and flopped...
...Senator Barry Goldwater, (R.-Ariz...
...They plant people in public lectures to ask loaded questions...
...They spread fear, hatred and suspicion...
...As a child in Indianapolis, I can remember great parades of hooded Klansmen filling the main street, and fiery crosses burning on the lawns of Catholics, Jews and dissenters...
...Its leader, Robert Welch, carried all the genes of the society in his own background...
...The lady and members of the John Birch Society went to my teacher, superintendent of schools and principal trying desperately to get me to retract, apologize and possibly be expelled...
...They try to get their idiotic films and maps used in high schools...
...Since the Bolsheviks seized control of Russia, the yahoo increasingly has been pulled out of his seat by cries of "Communism...
...The liberal clergy was hit several glancing blows by Joe McCarthy...
...A number of the Catholic hierachy have expressed support for the Society, and the Bishop of Wichita, the Reverend Mark K. Carroll, gave a $10 contribution...
...The monument was being constructed by individual subscription and by gifts from friendly nations...
...it was essentially anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish...
...They are the kind we need in politics...
...J. T. Rutherford, a conservative Democrat who has done the most effective job of exposing the Birchers, received a letter condemning him and accusing the NAACP, B'nai Brith and Anti-Defamation League of "subversive acts...
...Yet in Kansas and other Midwestern areas, the John Birch Society was responsible for some of the most vicious anti-Catholic literature distributed during the 1960 Presidential campaign...
...In the gay 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan spread across the country, and particularly into the Midwest...
...The attack on the clergy is part of an ancient struggle between the old priests and the new prophets...
...Judging from their own activities, the Birchers are not really very concerned by Communism...
...In return for the tremendous amount of emotional energy the yahoo puts into his labor, he gets nothing but high blood pressure, and the chance to pistol whip a Negro college student or bully an underpaid teacher...
...Children are urged to rat on their teachers, and bring prejudices and gossip to the Society...
...Down in the back hills of Kentucky, they believe the Pope directs this conspiracy...
...he is exploited by politicians, organizers who know how to make a buck collecting dues and donations for good works, and, occasionally, by religious fanatics...
...Also, volunteer Democrat workers were called up at night by Birchers demanding to know why they were supporting "that Catholic...
...The Washington Monument from its base up to the 153foot mark is a whiter shade than the rest of the shaft...
...The Birchers also abominate integration, social security and the Federal income tax, all symbols of change and democracy...
...They organize in task forces...
...A decade later, Father Coughlin, the radio priest, stirred such a frenzy of hate against the New Deal that the Catholic Church quietly took away his microphone...
...You fellows over there, all of you, get the heaviest clubs you can find, spread yourselves out and don't hesitate to break the heads of any saboteurs you find monkeying with it...
...The Communists are trying to repeal the oil depletion allowance...
...Letters to editors and Congressmen hotly supporting the Society come from fundamentalist preachers and crackpots of the far right...
...Membership costs at least $24 a year for men and $12 for women, and a lifetime membership is $1,000...
...The John Birch Society was founded in Indianapolis...
...His chief investigator, J. B. Matthews, now one of Welch's top aides, had asserted "the largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus" is the clergy...
...This same book describes General Eisenhower, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Milton Eisenhower, the late John Foster Dulles and Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles as either Communists or Communist sympathizers...
...This stopped the Washington Monument...
...Studies during and since the McCarthy era estimate that about 10 per cent of the American population are potential yahoos, susceptible to the waves of inspired hate...
...only under those conditions would there be any possibility of the member supplying what is needed...
...He couldn't tell a Communist from Robert A. Taft, but he's trying to get his crackpots on the school board and a lot of us are worried.'" "He" is the local boss of the John Birch Society...
...I even received a telephone threat saying for me not to use that speech again...
...Such a hue and cry was raised that he was forced to resign, smarting with bitterness...
...It was signed by the Grand Dragon of the Aryan Knights of the Ku Klux Klan...
...Naval Academy, was a business man on the middle level and a director of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM...
...When a man or woman has dozed off to sleep and the telephone rings at two o'clock in the morning, he answers to hear a voice demanding to know why he lets the preacher "talk Communism...
...The more involved and absurd the explanation, the greater the yahoo's credence...
...The caller implies that the parishioner will meet with economic or physical harm if he does not do as ordered...
...A professor of economics at the University of Wichita has charged that Birchers "virtually control the Wichita Chamber of Commerce and seem to have a dominant influence in the state chamber...
...One winter night, a masked band of "Know Nothings" broke into a shed on the monument grounds, seized what they called "that marble block from Rome" and dumped it in the river...
...The red neck in the South blames "bad niggers" and "nigger lovers...
...His life remains mean...
...When work was resumed, the builders were unable to duplicate exactly the shade of Maryland marble in the base...
...Greece, for example, sent a block of white marble from the ruins of the Parthenon...
...The yahoo is an awful sucker...
...Today, southern Baptist fundamentalists are aligned, curiously, with conservative members of the Catholic hierarchy, for what their antagonists are doing is equating goodness with conduct instead of acceptance of the orders and rites of the church...
...He went two years to the U.S...
...The Washington Monument was blighted in 1854 by the "Know Nothing" movement, a secret, violently anti-foreign group which elected governors in seven states, had a large membership in Congress and enrolled President Millard Fillmore...
...The name came from the members' pledge to do exactly as they were told and reply, "I know nothing," to all inquiries, thus giving an historical precedent for the Fifth Amendment Communists and Teamsters of today...
...Eric Severeid recently described how this spying works: "On a street in Kansas, my host stopped his car to point to a new office building...
...Then, only a few years ago, as unlikely looking a leader as ever slouched on the American scene, Joe McCarthy, turned meetings into an imitation of Hitler's mass hysteria...
...Of Welch, Senator Stephen Young (D.-Ohio) recently said, "Their Mussolini, their chief promoter, il duce or Der Fuehrer, is a fake patriot, a slick demagogue proposing dangerous nonsense...
...The fellow who falls for all this is the yahoo...
...The "Know Nothings" were not the first or the last of the organized yahoos in our history...
...His paternal ancestors were fundamentalist Baptist preachers from the South...
...took a different view: "I am impressed by the kind of people in it...
...He owns that, and a lot else besides,' my host explained...
...By Tristram Coffin The Yahoo Returns TOURISTS WHO SWARM about Washington this raw April often discover a curiosity that government clerks who pass by every day never notice...
...In the paneled board rooms, it is Walter Reuther...
...they are responsible for the income tax, foreign aid, free love (not enjoyed by the yahoo) and Robert Taft's defeat at the 1952 Republican convention...
...For nearly a quarter century, the monument to the Father of America stood like a broken sword...
...What is not only needed but is absolutely imperative, is for some hardboiled, dictatorial and dynamic boss to come along and deliver himself approximately as follows, 'Hey, you guys, all of you, drop those pretty brooms start running for empty bags keep bringing them . . . get 'em any way, just get 'em...
...In oil-rich Midland, Texas, another Birch enclave, a senior high school student gave a talk in his speech class on the Society from information in Time magazine...
...They recruit kids as spies to take down classroom remarks of their teachers...
...I am thoroughly convinced that we cannot count on politicians, political leadership or even political action...
Vol. 44 • April 1961 • No. 16
