THE NEW KNOW-NOTHINGS
COFFIN, TRISTRAM
THE NEW KNOW-NOTHINGS by TRISTRAM COFFIN ONE WINTER night in 1854, a band of masked men broke into a shed within sight of the White House. They searched for what one called "that damned stone...
...Yet behind the loud uproar is only a minute segment of American society...
...Hargis aspires to be king-pin of the Right and this summer announced the formation of "Country Savers" to coordinate his operations...
...His name is Robert Welch . . ." A good many retired military officers are active in the Birch Society or in other ultra-Right organizations...
...The young Rightists and their national organization, Young Americans for Freedom, have all the spontaneity and idealism of a company union...
...The waves of Catholic Irish and German immigrants brought over to dig the canals and build the railroads were gathering political power...
...One tract included at Glenview was entitled "Background Material that Every Patriot Should Know...
...They sought to have naturalized citizens banned from public office and to extend the waiting time for citizenship to twenty-one years...
...The divisive activities of the Birchers are illustrated by an episode in Midland, Texas...
...The big guns of the radical Right are trained on Senator Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who faces a serious fight for reelection next year in Arkansas...
...his eager helpers are the National Council of Churches, modern education, Freedom Riders, and whoever is in power in Washington...
...Synagogues are defaced...
...Their theft of the Papal gift was a protest against a profound social change then stirring the nation...
...Welch personally directs the attacks, by mail and telephone and on the platform, against schools, churches, libraries, businesses, Congress, newspapers, and magazines, or "those places where a minimum of pressure can produce maximum terror and restrictive responses," according to Professor Alan A. Westin, Columbia University...
...He is for it...
...it has an advisory board which includes Senator Barry Goldwater, Lewis Strauss, General Mark Clark, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Clarence Manion...
...For several weeks following an appearance at the Glenview, Illinois, naval air station, Fred Schwarz was given office space at the base, where he tape-recorded a statement criticizing the Democratic candidate for Congress...
...A movie widely shown at the seminars was supervised by a Bircher...
...They searched for what one called "that damned stone from Rome," a beautiful block of marble from the Temple of Concord, a gift from the Vatican to be used in constructing the Washington Monument...
...At a Fort Smith, Arkansas, "Strategy for Survival Conference," the local Congressman was described thus: "Your Representative has voted eighty-nine per cent of the time to aid and abet the Communist Party...
...The radicalism of the Right can be expected to have great mass appeal," observed Senator J. William Fulbright...
...Its success, measured by publicity, is immense...
...but by accomplishment, it rates low...
...They are well-financed, and in action tend to be quite brash...
...Secretary McNamara has now issued clear-cut orders banning military participation in seminars that might "lend an air of sponsorship to the statements of others which may be either partisan in character or contrary to established national policy...
...When he completed his talk, a woman arose in the audience and shouted, "I don't know why all this time is being wasted on talk...
...The professional red-hunters, who use a quasi-religious, evangelical approach, are increasingly popular on the luncheon club, business convention, and military seminar circuit...
...This lady and members of the Society went to my teacher, superintendent of schools, and principal trying desperately to get me to retract, apologize, and possibly be expelled from school...
...Even a U. S. President, Millard Fillmore, at one time was a member...
...The masked men rolled the block onto a wagon and dumped it in the Potomac River...
...Within this bloc are such organizations as the Circuit Riders, American Council of Christian Laymen, American Council of Christian Churches, and Church League of America...
...after a year of turmoil, the troubles were traced to exactly twelve persons...
...At each seminar, kits of written material are distributed...
...Increasingly within the past few years, the military establishment has promoted Rightist doctrine in official seminars...
...Another speaker, a fundamentalist minister, attacked liberalism in the churches and praised General Walker...
...The Pilot, organ of the Catholic diocese of Boston, has called the Birch Society "unbalanced, excited, and definitely out of focus," and warned, "In protecting ourselves against Communism we should be careful we do not fall into evils almost as bad...
...The Army Command General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth was promoting the hard line on foreign policy at a time when the President was trying delicately to steer a middle course...
...Speakers ride up and down the Rotary Club and military seminar circuit crying out that Communists or their "dupes" r u n the government, the schools, and the churches...
...A city of 25,000 in western New York was beset by constant attacks and harassment of its public schools...
...One reason is that the age of innocence for the United States is coming to an end...
...The immediate target of the far Right is political...
...One of Welch's orders was to protest to the Boy Scouts of America because the president of the National Council of Churches addressed the national jamboree...
...One of the leading practitioners of Americanism is not an American at all, but an Australian physician, Dr...
...Secretary McNamara issued orders this spring to tone down the extreme Right emphasis of the seminars, but a spot check in September revealed these orders were being ignored in some cases...
...forbid fluoridation (a Soviet plot...
...That word is 'treason' . . . Dag Hammarskjold is one of the most contemptible agents of the Kremlin ever to be supported by the American taxpayers...
...The seeds of Know-Nothingism lie deep in the American soil, and periodically crises occur which stimulate the seeds to force up shoots —the Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction days, the Klan's revival in the 1920's, Coughlinites, America Firsters, McCarthyites, White Citizens Councils, and John Birchers...
...Bumper stickers, "IMPEACH EARL WARREN," are seen throughout the South and Southwest...
...Major General Edwin A. Walker was relieved of his command in Germany because, as Baltimore Sun columnist Thomas O'Neill reported, "The idiot attitudes of the John Birch Society were reflected in his instructions given his troops upon the nature of Communism...
...Last summer, YAF tried to storm the National Student Association convention and the Young Republican national conclave...
...They profess to be crusaders against Communism yet their chief targets are not Communists but teachers, ministers, liberals, Jews, Catholics, and Negroes...
...California's Senator Thomas Kuchel, minority whip of the Senate...
...An observer sent by the Christian Century to watch Schwarz in action at a seminar of his tax-exempt "Christian Anti-Communism Crusade" reported the dragons he slew included "liberals, modernists, John Dewey, Kirtley Mather, Harvard students, high school students, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, textbooks, the American Friends Service Committee, pacifists, the book sections of the New York Times and Herald Tribune, Elmer Davis, public libraries, beatniks, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and naive ministers...
...junk the income tax, social security, and foreign aid...
...He suffered a humiliating political defeat in Massachusetts, and now calls democracy "merely a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery, and a perpetual fraud...
...Unprintable letters are written to African Negro diplomats...
...He has set up Communisttype cells and keeps them busy with directives...
...For Eisenhower there] is only one possible word to describe his purposes and actions...
...It is, therefore, almost inevitable that, on many issues, the party line will coincide with the position of many non-Communists...
...He finds the Communists in almost complete control of the United States...
...The books were removed from the shelves for "investigation...
...T h e professor was fired, even though no member of the college administration attended any of his classes...
...They engage in such activities as demonstrating in support of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and presenting awards to Herbert V. Kohler, an antiunion industrialist, and Ambassador George K. C. Yeh of Nationalist China...
...There are signs now that alarm is spreading, not so much on the Left as on the moderate Right...
...Professor D. W. Brogan of Cambridge University wrote in the Manchester Guardian of "a steady deterioration in American self confidence and trust in the 'American way of life.' " Many Americans are bewildered by what, they fear is a loss of American power, and alarmed at social changes wrought by integration, automation, and the giant size of modern government and industry...
...J. Edgar Hoover, in a recent report to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, issued this timely warning: "Because Communism thrives on turmoil the [Communist] Party is continuously attempting to exploit all grievances—real or imagined—for its own tactical purposes...
...One of his pet lecture topics is "Why Millionaires, College Professors, and Ministers Become Communists...
...Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina delivered the featured speech...
...In hundreds of towns, the normal quiet has been broken and with bitter charges and countercharges lifetime friendships are being destroyed...
...Welch is an organizer with an ear for the furies and fears that beset many Americans of his generation and background...
...A favorite of the group is Billy Hargis, an Oklahoma radio evangelist who pushes a restorative product known as "Nutrio-Bio...
...They belong to some one thousand organizations...
...Those in the line of the Rightists' fire in the 1962 election campaign include some Southern Democrats and such conservative Republicans as North Dakota's Senator Milton Young, who blocked a Birch scheme to get a Constitutional amendment outlawing the federal income tax through the state legislature...
...His technique on the platform is oddly reminiscent of the old time lay preacher sweating by torch light...
...The National Education Association in a recent bulletin carried a warning against the Schwarz program: "Boards of education," said NEA, "will do well to take a second look at the procedures of this group before cooperating with an agency that makes such broad accusations against educators and the instructional materials used in the schools today...
...The head of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch, is an admirer of Schwarz and has remarked that his "schools" have done "a superb job . . . of preliminary education...
...They read tracts which, the University of Illinois Library School reports, "range all the way from the earnest, smudgily mimeographed Voice of the Hour put out occasionally by Captain Edward Miles of 'Rally Point, U.S.A.,' to the handsome quarterly, Modern Age...
...A study of ultraRight political organizations which reported their 1960 campaign contributions reveals that the largest share came from Texas oil millionaires...
...The seminars are sponsored jointly by the military and business organizations, such as the local Chamber of Commerce...
...They find comfort and reassurance in the Rightist dogma that it is all the fault of a vast, hidden Communist conspiracy...
...Today, the United States is experiencing a new Know-Nothing eruption...
...Schwarz promotes an instruction program for schools, complete with manual and films...
...In the lobby of the auditorium, the Birch Society's Blue Book was on sale...
...blacklist teachers and ministers who discuss social problems...
...one of the tracts distributed through the 550 White Citizens Councils is "God's Answer to Segregation...
...Episcopal bishops denounced those who stir a "hysterical fear of Communism...
...Ordinarily this kind of lunacy grinds on grimly below the surface of any society...
...He went to a one-room segregated country school...
...Fred C. Schwarz...
...The organizations backed by the oil men reflect their benefactors' dislike of income taxes and government interest in natural resources...
...Perhaps it will embolden liberals in Congress and out in the country to fight back—before it is too late— against the counsel of intolerance and reaction which are the staples of the new Know-Nothings...
...These persons would do well to recall a recent lesson from history...
...YAF is the brainchild of William F. Buckley, editor of National Review...
...The John Birch Society is the senior activist group of the ultraRight...
...Other speakers attacked fluoridation, immigration, the film Exodus, urban renewal, the income tax, and the Federal Reserve Act...
...Unfortunately, there are those who make the very mistake the Communists are so careful to avoid...
...The hard core of the radical Right is made up of what California's attorney general described as "old ladies in tennis shoes," Holy Rollers, unemployed majors, retired businessmen, Kluxers, professional red-baiters, and assorted bigots...
...Admiral John Crommelin is a veteran segregationist who ran unsuccessfully for the Senate from Alabama...
...The Communists, he declaims, "will come for you, as they have for others, on a dark night, in a dank cellar, and they will take a wide bore revolver with a soft nose bullet, and place it at the nape of your neck...
...The radical Right is financed to a considerable extent by the oil depletion allowance...
...A leaflet given out at the Minneapolis Naval Air Station, "What I Can Do to Stop Communism," recommended joining the Birch Society or Fred Schwarz' organization, and listening to Fulton Lewis, Clarence Manion, and Billy Hargis...
...he urges "direct action" and the use of "dirty tactics...
...One of the more significant commentaries on all this activity was the observation last spring by Moscow's Literary Gazette that the Rightists were doing Communism a good turn by casting suspicion on the moderates, adding, "Now the Communist movement has gained unexpectedly a new supporter...
...The Fourth Army and San Antonio Junior Chamber of Commerce sponsored a seminar in September at which one of the speakers, General Wedemeyer (who told reporters he is an adviser to the Birch Society), accused the Kennedy Administration of "appeasement," advocated breaking relations with Russia, opposed admitting new African nations to the United Nations, and criticized the Episcopal Church...
...It was one of his followers who slipped into an Air Force training manual the notorious attack on the National Council of Churches and the Revised Standard Version of the Bible...
...The membership of the John Birch Society is estimated at less than 50,000...
...abandon the United Nations...
...PTA meetings are thrown into confusion...
...The high school senior wrote later to the San Angelo Standard-Times, "One of the students phoned her mother from school stating that I strongly attacked the Birch Society...
...O'Neill reflected, "A valid criticism . . . is that the discrediting of the government and of eminent persons at home carries the danger of suggesting to troops that the real enemy is behind them, a morale-destroying force that plays into the hands of the real enemy...
...Here, from a man who managed to tolerate McCarthy, is a deadly indictment of the divisive methods and negative philosophy of the radical Right...
...The confusion which is thereby created helps the Communists by diffusing the forces of their opponents...
...Welch comes out of a narrow fundamentalist background —his forebears were Southern Baptist preachers in rural North Carolina...
...Fulbright's opponent, possibly Representative Dale Alford, will be heavily financed and aided from outside his own state...
...cries Schwarz...
...The cry of the far right is: Declare war on Russia and her allies (the Pillion Resolution...
...it repeats many of the old, discredited McCarthy charges...
...Milton A. Dushkin writing in the AMA's Today's Health: "When a person feels overwhelmed by feelings of insecurity and frustrations beyond his control, he must find a scapegoat...
...One of the most widely quoted newsletters of the far right has a circulation of 16,000...
...They are merely against Communism without being for any positive measures to eliminate the social, political, and economic frictions which the Communists are so adroit at exploiting...
...Yet, today, many Americans outside the hard core of the Right are listening, and they are disturbed...
...A seventeen-yearold high school senior, described by his Congressman as "a good student, active in community affairs and from a very respected and fine family," quoted Time magazine in a debate on the Birch Society...
...Both Hitler and Mussolini were against Communism...
...George Rockwell's American Nazis actively promote segregation with their "hate bus" tours of the South...
...President Kennedy, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and moderate Congressmen have been denounced...
...These individuals concentrate on the negative rather than on the positive...
...Lieutenant General Pedro del Valle is the head of Defenders of the American Constitution...
...Christians, to arms...
...The late H. R. Cullen of Houston was for many years the radical Right's most generous angel...
...However, it was what they stood for, not against, that history has judged them...
...Senator Strom Thurmond said recently that both parties were too much alike, and that a third party was needed...
...In the same town, Birchers circulated an unsigned mimeographed sheet demanding the removal from the high school library of such books as Andersonville, Laughing Boy, The Big Sky, Marjorie Morningstar, and 1984...
...They tune their radios to Fulton Lewis, Jr., the Clarence Manion Forum, and Billy Hargis...
...Today the Devil is a Communist...
...The fury of these outbreaks is explained by Dr...
...He has had a. crush on the military since attending the U. S. Naval Academy for two years...
...The seminars might conceivably have served a useful purpose if they had adhered to the chosen subject—Communist strategies—and if qualified speakers were used...
...The vandals were "Know-Nothings...
...Self-appointed censors pore through school texts and library books...
...In Tampa, Florida, Birchers demanded the dismissal of a popular young professor for "following the Communist Party line of appeasement, co-existence, and advocating the subjection of our constitutional form of government to a World Court...
...The fundamentalists work closely v i t h the racists...
...A kit distributed to servicemen at Pensacola recommended reading Welch's magazine, American Opinion...
...Another directive to his followers ordered that postcards be mailed to President Eisenhower on the eve of the summit meeting, saying, "If you go, don't come back...
...In Port Angeles, Washington, anonymous telephone calls to the school board caused the contracts of three teachers to be held up, simply because they had signed a newspaper advertisement urging caution and restraint in world affairs...
...Reserve officers are given credit points for attending...
...What is equally disturbing to the President, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and Senator Fulbright is that for three years the military seminars have served as a platform from which extreme Rightist propaganda has been fed to reservists and businessmen...
...Orators like Billy Hargis and Fred Schwarz fill the faithful with fear and hate...
...I even received a telephone threat not to make that speech again...
...The usually calm United States Senate last summer broke into a fit of hysteria because an unemployed used car salesman and his sixteen-year-old son tried to hijack a passenger plane...
...invade Cuba...
...Buckle on the armor of the Christian and go forth to battle...
...and Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana...
...Senator Strom Thurmond is the best known of the ultra-rightists who entered this amalgam through the segregation door...
...The Harvard Crimson commented, "The much heralded 'conservative challenge' to the long-liberal NSA leadership was a dismal failure...
...The largest of the Right's blocs is the "blood redemption Christians," as the University of Illinois study calls them...
...entrench segregation...
...A school is bombed...
...The best way to get rid of our problems is to kill all the damn niggers and Jews...
...others include John Kasper, Admiral John Crommelin, and Leander Perez...
...It was used extensively in the 1960 election campaigns...
...At the "Congress of Freedom," General Fellers called for an effort to capture the G.O.P...
...Their preachers still "coo" and bellow up the rustic backways, but the old Satans—-the Pope, city women, Wall Street, and Darwin— have been traded off...
...This interweaving was clearly illustrated at the "Congress of Freedom" last spring, convened by the Soldiers of the Cross, the American Coalition, the Committee to Impeach, and the Constitution Party...
...Young Republican delegates were shocked by the bully-boy tactics of YAF...
...In 1844, the "Native Americans" rioted in Philadelphia and burned two old and famous Catholic churches...
...The late John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, former Central Intelligence Agency chief, have been characterized as Communist agents by Welch...
...A public relations officer at the Port Migu Naval Mission Center attacked Governor Pat Brown of California for his criticism of the Birch Society...
...It offers the simple solution, easily understood, scouring the devil within the body politic or, in the extreme, lashing out at the enemy...
...One said, "If Eichmann is calling for witnesses, let them take the six million Jews out of New York and send their ghosts back as witnesses...
...The enemy is at the gates...
...and let the generals engage in Rightist political campaigning...
...They belonged to a secret order whose members were pledged to do exactly as told and to reply, "I know nothing," to all questions asked by non-members...
...Welch thus fills an important psychological need among the Rightists...
...Welch harnesses these pent-up emotions by giving them specific tasks to perform...
...The danger of indiscriminately alleging that someone is a Communist merely because his views on a particular issue happen to parallel the official party position is obvious...
...H. L. Hunt, another Texas oil man, has also given liberally...
...banish the revised Bible...
...The folder attacked the National Council of Churches, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Education Association, COPE (labor's political action center), and Americans for Democratic Action...
...The Supreme Court, Congress, and Executive departments are actively promoting Communist aims...
...Navy seminars still used unauthorized extremist films...
...and, failing that, to start a third party...
...Some of Welch's other extreme views—most of them in books intended only for private distribution —include: "My firm belief [is] that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy . . . Milton Eisenhower is actually Dwight Eisenhower's superior and boss within the Communist Party...
...Among them are Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, onetime military secretary to General Douglas MacArthur, General A. C. Wedemeyer, and Lieutenant General George E. Stratemeyer, who are members of "For America," which demands an end to the income tax and the development of "overwhelming air power...
...Furious and often obscene letters and telephone calls threaten teachers and ministers...
...abandon mental health programs...
...Today, as one foreign visitor discovered, our faith in ourselves and our destiny is shaken...
...Each member of the Rightist groups tends to take on the others' causes: an archsegregationist may appear before a Congressional committee to oppose a mental health plan...
...A decade later, the Know-Nothings had grown into a movement powerful enough to elect governors in seven states...
...But the seminars in many cases merely opened the doors indiscriminately to the radical Right and their pet hates, including fluoridation and the National Council of Churches...
...He is head of the "Christian Crusade," which he boasts is the largest antiCommunist organization in the nation...
Vol. 25 • December 1961 • No. 12
