CHAPTER 4

Tightening Networks

“How many stay-at-home voters will there be in the 1956 Presidential election?” New Orleans publisher Kent Courtney thundered in a letter to the Hartford Courant. “They may number in tens of millions who cannot in good conscience vote for either a New Deal Democrat or a New Deal Republican.” During the summer of 1955, Courtney worked as the executive secretary and main propagandist for the Interim Committee for a New Party, which sought to provide Americans with a right-wing alternative to the two major parties. Courtney envisioned establishing a party of conservative purists that would stop America from becoming a “one-party socialist nation.” To Courtney’s mind, President Dwight Eisenhower and the Republican Party were just as complicit in putting America on the path to communism as the Democrats. “We believe the American people have a right to have a choice,” Courtney fulminated. “Americans should have the opportunity to vote for a man who stands for the principles set forth in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.”¹

By the mid-1950s, numerous ultraconservative organizations declared that the liberal hegemony in American politics necessitated radical action, a fracturing of the two-party system. These organizations included For America, the Christian Crusade, the American Progress Foundation, and other affiliated groups, a growing network that snaked from the Northeast through the industrial Midwest and the South before terminating on the West Coast. Not every far-right group stumped for political candidates, but the trend line showed ultraconservatives moving toward party politics. Courtney’s Interim Committee, for example, argued that conservatives were “the numerical majority” and contended that a right-wing party would stymie “the socialism that is taking over the country.” The group’s slogan, “Get the change in ’56 you voted for in ’52,” spoke to Eisenhower’s perceived betrayal of right-wing values.² The Interim Committee soon morphed into the National Committee for a New Party (NCNP)—Courtney maintained his position as executive secretary—and set up a headquarters in Chicago. Conservative posters adorned its walls. “Get government out of private enterprise.” “Release American soldiers from Red Chinese prisons.” “Federal aid means federal control.” “Foreign aid aids Reds.”³

The NCNP helped establish the Constitution Party in 1956 on a far-right foundation. The new party exemplified the ultraconservative movement up to that point: a fringe caucus agitating for a strict interpretation of the Tenth Amendment, a repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, withdrawal from the United Nations, and a coded white supremacist recognition that “each State is an independent and sovereign republic.”⁴ Though the Constitution Party represented a small band of diehards, the group forged alliances with other ultraconservative outfits, including For America and the Federation for Constitutional Government. The Chicago Daily Tribune described the Constitution Party as “a collection of splinter parties” attempting to “bind themselves into a big political stick.”⁵ The stick’s target: Dwight Eisenhower and his liberal allies.

The political environment of the mid-to-late 1950s fueled ultraconservative organizing and tightened far-right networks. The continued dominance of modern liberalism and the burgeoning civil rights movement stoked a conservative backlash and, to radical right-wingers, evinced communist influence in government and society. Ultraconservatives saw their country being dominated by a statist cabal that was dedicated to collectivization and egalitarian leveling. During Eisenhower’s 1956 reelection bid, a revanchist right-wing coalition united to stem the liberal tide. New activists and organizations, including Courtney and the Constitution Party, joined forces with old hands such as J. Evetts Haley and Clarence Manion to sunder the two-party duopoly through third-party organizing.⁶

The third-party candidacy of former IRS chairman T. Coleman Andrews in 1956 served as a central nexus for disgruntled conservatives and galvanized far-right mobilization. Willis Stone and the American Progress Foundation capitalized on Andrews’s anti-taxation messaging to cultivate support for Stone’s “Proposed 23rd Amendment.” During the late 1950s, Stone’s proposal received backing from right-wing politicians and far-right allies, enabling its passage in multiple state legislatures. After spearheading Andrews’s candidacy, For America extended its activism through state chapters, particularly Haley’s Texans For America affiliate. Then, in 1958, an Indianapolis meeting led to the creation of the most infamous midcentury far-right group: the John Birch Society. Robert H. W. Welch Jr., the self-styled founder of the society, believed liberal politicians conspired to conceal a communist leviathan. “This octopus is so large,” Welch declared, “that its tentacles now reach into all of the legislative halls, all of the union labor meetings, a majority of the religious gatherings, and most of the schools of the whole world.”⁷ Welch established an ultraconservative empire by stoking anxieties about internal subversion and the erosion of sociocultural traditions—the Birch Society became a critical node within the burgeoning network of far-right institutions and activists. Throughout the late 1950s, ultraconservatives put their stamp on the political landscape by invading party politics, laying the groundwork for an eventual coup within the two-party system.

Dwight Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism convinced ultraconservatives that the GOP had given over to liberalism, if not communism. Eisenhower described his political beliefs as a “middle way,” a moderate philosophy which sought to curb the anti-statist impulses of old guard conservatives while reducing the “big government” imprint of modern liberalism. According to Eisenhower, the government was, in some respects, responsible for the general welfare of the country; he notably called the military-industrial complex “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.”⁸ Despite his own conservative convictions, Eisenhower followed in the popular liberal footsteps of Roosevelt and Truman. He expanded Social Security coverage; created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and initiated the building of a vast federal highway system. To fund all of these enterprises, and to rein in debt from World War II, a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats hiked taxes. Rates soared for the wealthiest Americans, and the trimming of corporate tax rates failed to mollify the rancor of business executives.⁹

To far-right conservatives, Eisenhower was a New Deal wolf in sheep’s clothing. Clarence Manion, For America’s co-chairman, analyzed Eisenhower’s presidency in stark terms: “The solvency and sovereignty of the United States are threatened by the growing centralization of socialistic despotism.”¹⁰ As the 1956 campaign season approached, a right-wing rallying cry came from an unlikely source: T. Coleman Andrews. A former Democrat who bolted to support Eisenhower in 1952, Andrews served as Ike’s IRS commissioner from 1953 through 1955; ironically, he was the man responsible for denying For America’s tax exemption. He then returned to the private sector, where he worked as the board chairman for American Fidelity and Casualty Company. After resigning his post as the country’s primary taxman, Andrews published a scathing anti-taxation screed in the Washington Post. Andrews did not have a change of heart—he equivocated that no one bothered to ask his opinion on taxation during his IRS stint. Now, Andrews described taxation as an “intolerable threat to the unfettered freedom of enterprise,” “legalized confiscation,” and a Marxist plot to “bring capitalism to its knees.” Progressive taxation was anti–middle class, he claimed, and any “advocate of statism” was “either a dupe or, at heart, a dictator.” Andrews foreshadowed the language of future tax-reductionists, calling the tax code “bewildering, confusing, and frustrating.” Reflecting the ideals of the business conservative movement, especially Willis Stone’s critiques, Andrews excoriated “the government’s engagement in business activities that compete with private enterprise.” As with many right-wing businessmen, Andrews’s anti-tax agenda doubled as a medium for his own economic self-interest. Nevertheless, Andrews warned, “Time’s a-wasting, and the enemies of the way of life that we cherish rejoice as we are obligingly led closer and closer to national suicide.”¹¹

Suddenly Andrews’s name was on the lips of ultraconservatives around the country. In American Progress Willis Stone crowed that Andrews had “joined the resistance” against “the piracy we call income taxes” and the “evil of bureaucratic competition with private enterprise.”¹² Andrews’s rapid ascent in right-wing circles sparked rumblings of a new challenge to the liberal order. In mid-August, Charles Edison, the former Democratic governor of New Jersey, threw together a conference to convince Andrews to run as a third-party candidate in 1956. States’ rights advocates from around the country flocked to meet with Andrews. Manion went with For America’s national director Bonner Fellers, a former Brigadier General and Republican who defected from the RNC after Eisenhower’s nomination. Also present were John U. Barr and Zack R. Cecil. Barr was a New Orleans industrialist and chairman of the Federation for Constitutional Government (a “coordinating body for the pro-segragation [sic] citizens councils in 11 southern states”), while Cecil directed the monetary research division of the libertarian American Economic Foundation.¹³ Frank Chodorov, author of The Income Tax—Root of All Evil, lent his libertarian heft to the cause. The meeting’s ideological heterodoxy illustrated the intertwining of southern segregationism, free-market theories, noninterventionist philosophies, reactionary traditionalism, and conspiratorial anti-communism.¹⁴

For America played a key role in the movement to draft Andrews. Manion served as the coalition’s spokesman, remarking, “Andrews would give millions of Americans a chance to vote against socialism, to which both the Democratic and Republican parties have now officially surrendered.” For America devoted increased attention to tax policy, the issue that made Andrews a star. Manion referred to the income tax as “the root cause of this evil,” “confiscatory,” “class-conscious,” and “discriminatory.”¹⁵ Dan Smoot, For America’s other co-chairman, said his organization supported Andrews because he was the “foremost enemy of our iniquitous Federal income tax laws.”¹⁶ Andrews’s running mate, Thomas Werdel, was a darling of states’ rights advocates because he had run against Earl Warren in the 1952 California gubernatorial primary. For America produced pamphlets lambasting the two-party system. “Remember!” urged one pamphlet. “When you vote for the lesser of two evils you are still voting for evil!”¹⁷ Manion proposed to “draft” Andrews by putting independent electors on individual state ballots—electors who could have voted for Andrews if no other candidate won a majority—which wooed Andrews into giving For America’s proposal “serious consideration.”¹⁸

However, For America was not the only group eyeing Andrews as a potential third-party challenger. In late August, the Constitution Party held its national convention in Fort Worth, Texas. Rather than selecting a candidate—in many states the date had already passed to put a candidate on official ballots—the seventy-five delegates representing seventeen states recommended that state-level organizations “draft” Andrews as the candidate. Neither Andrews nor Werdel attended the convention, foreshadowing that the third-party movement would be led by grassroots activists rather than a centralized campaign. In fact, Andrews admitted that he could not devote time to a presidential contest. Nevertheless, the Constitution Party planned a mid-September National States’ Rights Conference in Memphis, hoping to unify the ultraconservative movement under a permanent third-party banner. Robert Bent Taft, a Chicago industrialist and cousin of the late senator Robert A. Taft, and Marion R. Cleveland, the director of the Independent Elector Plan association, pledged to attend on behalf of the Illinois States’ Rights Party. The leadership of For America and the Federation for Constitutional Government also answered the call. The man coordinating this broad far-right alliance was the Constitution Party’s executive secretary, Kent Courtney.¹⁹

Courtney used the 1956 election as a launch pad for his extensive career in far-right activism. Born in St. Paul on October 23, 1918, Kent was raised in a conservative, Catholic household by Joseph Frank Courtney, a production engineer, and artist Zella Edana Smith. The Courtneys moved to New Orleans during Kent’s childhood, and the Big Easy later served as his home and activist headquarters. A young Courtney joined the U.S. Navy as an aviator on September 12, 1941, but was honorably discharged less than a year later on August 19, 1942. Archival documents do not reveal the reason behind Courtney’s abrupt discharge, but he continued to work with the U.S. military by transporting troops overseas as a pilot for Pan American Airways. Afterward he attended the University of Idaho and Tulane University, receiving a business degree from the latter in 1950.²⁰

Courtney’s formative years fostered his ultraconservative zeal. His radicalization started with positions in the American Legion, the Chamber of Commerce, and the New Orleans Citizens’ Council. While working as the counter subversive chairman for the New Orleans area American Legion, Courtney honed his right-wing rhetoric. He also spent two years as the membership director for the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, where he gained valuable marketing experience by promoting the organization’s business and civic affairs. Kent married Phoebe Green Courtney and the pair started a self-publishing business in 1954 that evolved into the foundation for their activism. Phoebe sharpened Kent’s writing, often serving as the editor of the duo’s newspaper, Free Men Speak. She reminded contemporaries of fire-breathing women such as Elizabeth Dilling; Kent dubbed Phoebe the “tigress of the Right.”²¹ Phoebe accomplished a great deal behind the scenes as a writer and editor while Kent endeavored as the organization’s primary spokesperson.²²

Kent Courtney’s political philosophies ticked all of the ultraconservative boxes. He viewed the civil rights movement as a communist usurpation of property rights and called for an unfettered free market, the nullification of union power, and severe spending cuts. He opposed federal taxation and became the Louisiana state chairman in Stone’s organization. “You have no moral right to pay taxes which support the hundreds of government activities which are in direct competition with private enterprise,” Courtney wrote in a Los Angeles Times letter to the editor, concluding, “In effect they are buying you off with your own money.”²³ Not only did Courtney view taxation as a moral issue, he equated liberal economic platforms with communist planning. “It matters very little if … [Franklin] Roosevelt or Eisenhower is a Communist or not,” Courtney proclaimed. “What does matter is that they have advanced the Communist cause and American Liberals, by participating in the advance of the cause of Communism are unwitting dupes of the International Communist Conspiracy.”²⁴ The combination of anti-communist conspiracies, states’ rights segregationism, and fiscal conservatism placed Courtney well within the ultraconservative vanguard. Phoebe proved just as radical as Kent, but the Courtneys avoided anti-Semitism and violent rhetoric out of a concern for respectability.²⁵

Kent’s far-right philosophies and lack of faith in the two major parties catalyzed his political activism, starting with the Constitution Party’s 1956 campaign. Throughout his life Courtney identified as a political outsider, oscillating between third-party activism and supporting right-wingers in both major parties. He feared the American republic would “disappear into some sort of One-World Government” without the emergence of a truly conservative party.²⁶ However, Courtney’s call to create a permanent third party, not just an ephemeral election-year challenge, revealed a strategic fault line within the ultraconservative movement. Some activists, like Courtney, believed that political change would happen only by forming a brand-new party of conservative purists. On the other hand, leaders like Manion hedged against forming a permanent alternative party. Manion believed his independent electors initiative could form a conservative firewall while obviating any sticky third-party affiliations. William F. Buckley Jr., editor and founder of National Review, supported Manion’s gambit, emphasizing that the independent elector strategy might enable conservatives to “defeat [the] international Socialism which has captured both political parties.”²⁷

This strategic disagreement—of whether to form an official third party or to work within the traditional two-party channels—underscored the larger debate over party politics dividing the ultraconservative movement. The debate pitted political pragmatism against ideological purity. The goal was to sunder the liberal two-party duopoly and carve out a right-wing party. One strategy involved a pragmatic, gradualist approach, building a conservative movement within, and then eventually taking over, one of the major parties. On the other hand, far-right puritans like Courtney obsessed over third-party action—they had no interest in reforming one of the existing parties because it required a longer timeline and necessitated working with moderates. During the late 1950s, ultraconservatism crossed party lines, which made calls for a cross-party ideological alliance, a conservative third party, seem reasonable. As liberalism increasingly dominated the Democratic Party and reduced southern conservatives to a rump faction, this idea seemed even more plausible. However, the Republican Party provided fertile soil for conservatives, and far-right activists eventually came to believe that infiltrating the GOP provided the best avenue for creating a conservative party. This protracted debate played out over the next couple of decades as ultraconservatives vacillated between forming third parties and collaborating with the Republicans.

Courtney hoped his National States’ Rights Conference would convince other activists to join his third-party crusade and, thus, unify the ultraconservative movement. In mid-September, over 300 delegates representing 25 states, plus around 150 spectators, most of whom were die-hard states’ rightists, traveled to Memphis. Conference leaders believed the gathering evinced a thriving “national conservative movement” and crafted a platform featuring familiar right-wing demands such as limiting federal power, eliminating the Sixteenth Amendment, restraining presidential power through the Bricker Amendment, restricting the Supreme Court to “only its constitutional duties,” and urging Congress to “repeal all illegal, anti-states rights acts enacted by the Supreme Court under the guise of judicial decisions.”²⁸ As the last two planks indicated, the platform veiled the attendees’ anti–civil rights impulses behind the mask of states’ rights and strict constitutionalism. Neither Andrews nor Werdel attended the conference, but both agreed to be placed on state ballots where possible. The meeting appeared to portend a viable third-party movement and the issue was put up to a vote, but Courtney’s dream of a permanent conservative coalition crashed against the same partisan rocks that stymied the Dixiecrats in 1948. According to New York Times writer John N. Popham, numerous far-right leaders worried that a permanent third party “would constitute a barrier for independent electors in southern states where voters traditionally adhere to the Democratic Party and usually frown on giving support to any other group with a party label.”²⁹ Conference leaders voted down Courtney’s third-party ambitions. Defeated, Courtney settled for promoting Andrews in 1956, but he never abandoned his dream of forming a permanent conservative third party.

The 1956 election marked the first presidential contest since the development of a national right-wing media sphere, headlined by Buckley’s National Review. In its early days, National Review overlapped significantly with the ultraconservative movement. Robert Welch purchased $2,000 of privately issued stock to aid the inchoate magazine. Buckley, the periodical’s intellectual doyen, promised Welch that National Review would provide a medium for conservatism’s “desperately isolated voices.”³⁰ On the other hand, John Fischer of Harper’s denounced National Review as “an organ, not of conservatism, but of radicalism,” the readership of which formed “the hard core of many religious, nationalist and revolutionary movements.”³¹ Fischer’s words seem hyperbolic, but in its infancy National Review reflected, or at least pandered to, the more radical elements of the conservative movement. Buckley opposed Eisenhower’s reelection and declared the GOP platform “essentially one of measured socialism,” which he admitted was preferable to the unmeasured version proffered by the Democrats.³² Buckley’s socialism-in-both-parties rhetoric bore a strong resemblance to the far right’s conspiratorial language; however, the National Review founder took a moderate position by not endorsing Andrews’s ticket, setting himself up as a future right-wing gatekeeper and translator. By and large, conservatives had to forge their own path outside of the political mainstream in 1956.

The movement to draft an alternative ticket did not gain steam until October, far too late to make any discernable impact on the upcoming election; however, the National Committee for Andrews-Werdel brought together a coterie of hard-line right-wingers. Manion, Smoot, Fellers, and J. Evetts Haley all served on the committee, illustrating For America’s centrality within the ultraconservative network. In fact, For America housed the Andrews-Werdel headquarters in Washington, D.C., and acted as the ticket’s public relations firm. Vivien Kellems, the leader of the anti-tax Liberty Belles, and General George E. Stratemeyer, the McCarthy-supporting chairman of the “Committee for Ten Million Americans,” also joined the National Committee. Augereau Gray (A. G.) Heinsohn—the APF Tennessee state chairman, For America committeeman, future Birch member, and owner of Spindale Textile Mills—connected the Andrews campaign to Willis Stone’s anti-tax movement. Other notable members included retired New York broker Robert M. Harriss, former Democratic congressman Samuel B. Pettengill, and Ruth McCormick Tankersley, the former editor of the Washington Times Herald and niece of the late Colonel McCormick. Notably, Courtney did not hold a position on the National Committee. Courtney’s hard-line third-party demands rendered him an outcast, for the moment, highlighting the ultraconservative movement’s strategic and ideological fault lines.³³

Less than one month before the election, the official National States’ Rights Party convention took place in Richmond, Virginia. Andrews took the Mosque auditorium’s stage to a cacophony of 2,200 rabid supporters, and his diatribe did not disappoint. “Yes, my friends,” intoned the 57-year-old former Democrat, “the income tax has been the bonanza that has financed every boondoggling usurpation of the rights of States and every something-for-nothing fraud against the people that the perverted mind of the New Dealers, Fair Dealers and raw dealers have conceived and foisted upon us since we started down the road to Socialistic ruin in 1933.” Andrews bellowed that both major parties had “converged onto a common highway to one-doctrine, one-party dictatorship under which, as in Russia and her satellite countries, the people are permitted only a choice of men, never a choice of political philosophies.”³⁴ Appealing to his southern audience, Andrews condemned Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren as an “integrationist” who had usurped state control over public schooling. During the proceedings, an 80-year-old widow even serenaded the audience with an original states’ rights hymn:

Every star with equal light … Not one State a satellite

O Lord from rash dictator’s might … Defend our Statehood’s glory.

Let no thoughtless court decree … What our way of life shall be

O keep us safe from tyranny … And all who would divide us.

Unsurprisingly, Andrews’s overt states’ rights appeal struck a chord in the old Confederacy. By late September the Andrews-Werdel ticket had made it onto the ballot in eight former Confederate states and fourteen states overall: Arkansas, Alabama, Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Numerous other states had a slate of independent electors who could have chosen Andrews in the unlikely absence of a clear winner. In theory, Andrews’s strategy was to siphon enough electoral votes to throw the election to the House of Representatives. However, the National Committee for Andrews-Werdel knew this was a pipe dream, so they portrayed the Andrews movement as a protest vehicle against the two major parties. Rather than turning into a permanent third party, Andrews’s ticket became an experiment to gauge the strength of ultraconservatism with an eye toward 1960.³⁵

On Election Day, the Andrews-Werdel ticket encountered numerous difficulties. Ballot naming conventions reflected the slapdash nature of the far right’s third-party effort. Andrews’s party, officially called the Independent States’ Rights Party, appeared under a variety of names, including the States Rights Party, the Constitution Party, For America, the Conservative Party, and the New Party. Even the “States’ Rights Party” ticket was not identical on every state ballot. In South Carolina and Mississippi, the States’ Rights ticket featured a pair of southerners aligned with the Democratic Party’s Dixiecrat wing, Virginia senator Harry F. Byrd and Mississippi congressman John Bell Williams. In Kentucky, Byrd was listed under the States’ Rights banner alongside Senator William E. Jenner, an Indiana Republican. Additionally, some states did not provide a full count of third-party votes. In Arkansas, for example, the Andrews-Werdel ticket received an estimated 5,000 votes, but numerous counties failed to include the ticket in their final tallies, so the actual total remained a mystery. Even though Andrews’s campaign had zero chance of winning, these technical difficulties further diluted the power of Andrews’s third-party protest.³⁶

Eisenhower skated to a blowout landslide in 1956. The two major parties accrued over 60 million votes, with Eisenhower netting over 35 million votes to Democrat Adlai Stevenson’s 26 million. The Andrews-Werdel ticket earned a paltry 111,178 votes, with four old Confederate states, Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Virginia, tallying the most votes. The party notched zero electoral votes. But the national humiliation did not diminish ultraconservative ambitions. On the contrary, the defeat galvanized the far right’s resolve to challenge Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism and the liberal consensus. Andrews remained defiant. “If we were an old established party, I would feel discouraged but we are just starting,” he asserted. “We are here to stay.”³⁷

The 1956 election revealed an ultraconservatism in flux. One year earlier, the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, “Third parties are like bees; once they have stung, they die,” the general assumption being that a successful third-party movement will be co-opted by a major party.³⁸ However, the Independent States’ Rights Party did not earn enough votes to sting either side in the election; 100,000 ballots were not going to threaten the behemoths. Yet, Andrews’s candidacy left a substantial legacy. It forced right-wingers to wrangle with strategic choices: whether to pursue a permanent third party or stage a coup within an existing major party. Most importantly, Andrews’s campaign marked the first time ultraconservatives united under one banner. It served as a rallying point and harbinger of further far-right action. George Peck, the distribution point man for Stone’s American Progress, spoke for many ultraconservatives who viewed the grassroots fervor surrounding Andrews’s candidacy as a predictor of future success: “There are millions of conservatives who for the past five national elections have voted for the lesser of two evils—or did not vote at all. In 1960 they’ll find a haven of refuge in the States Rights Party.”³⁹ The 1948 Dixiecrats provided a regional spark, but Andrews’s candidacy solidified a national web connecting a heretofore disparate far-right patchwork.

It was no coincidence that ultraconservatives rallied around states’ rights ideologies at the exact moment the civil rights movement blossomed into a national phenomenon. Numerous events during Eisenhower’s presidency galvanized civil rights activism and illuminated the deep-seated racism in southern states. In the summer of 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped and brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly offending a white woman. Later that same year, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for violating a city segregation ordinance, initiating the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the meteoric rise of Martin Luther King Jr. Public schools in a post-Brown world became the brightest flash points. In early 1956, Autherine Lucy broke the color line by enrolling in the University of Alabama, but rioting whites, including Alabama Klansmen, screaming “Kill her!” convinced the school’s leadership to expel Lucy and restore segregation. The very next year a high-profile standoff occurred in Arkansas when nine black teenagers enrolled in the all-white Little Rock Central High School. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to keep them out while angry white mobs stalked the streets. Eisenhower sent in the military, under the leadership of future far-right firebrand Edwin Walker, to integrate the school by force. The global Cold War put these events under a microscope, paving the way for slow, incremental civil rights successes.⁴⁰

Right-wing outrage smoldered over federal intervention. Congressman Williams adopted the rhetoric of the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause,” arguing that favorable civil rights laws and court decisions constituted “the most serious constitutional crisis … since the war for southern independence.”⁴¹ Overt racism and distrust of civil rights and federal action was not limited to the South or the Democratic Party. Buckley wrote a National Review column admitting his belief that the “White community” should dominate southern culture because it was the “advanced race.”⁴² Congressman Noah M. Mason, an Illinois Republican, lambasted Eisenhower for disregarding states’ rights. “I think he not only exceeded his authority but went entirely contrary to the constitution of the United States,” Mason argued on a Citizens’ Council radio show.⁴³ However, the South, ever the poster child of segregation and racism, lobbied the hardest against civil rights. Over one hundred congressmen, including Martin Dies Jr. of Texas, signed the “Southern Manifesto,” a bold defense of segregation and states’ rights penned by senators Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell. Many reactionaries, especially those from the South, viewed Eisenhower’s actions, and the civil rights movement more broadly, as proof of liberalism’s red-tinted tyranny. In the wake of Little Rock, radical agrarian Richard M. Weaver wrote in the pages of National Review, “Integration is Communization.”⁴⁴ Southern politicians and far-right activists developed “massive resistance” to civil rights by harmonizing the conspiratorial anti-communism of the Cold War with states’ rights philosophies.⁴⁵

The Brown decision, combined with Cold War anti-communism and lingering white supremacy, produced outbursts of reactionary violence, notably from the specter of the Old South, the Ku Klux Klan. After its zenith in the 1920s, the Klan experienced lean years during the Great Depression and held marginal influence during World War II through collaborative efforts with extremist groups such as the German-American Bund. The Klan nevertheless carried its extensive list of hatreds into the Cold War—a list that included blacks, Catholics, Jews, unionists, moral trespassers, and “radicals” of all stripes—and when the push for racial equality stoked a southern backlash, the Klan stood ready to capitalize. Atlanta-based obstetrician Samuel Green organized the first Stone Mountain cross burning of the Cold War era in October of 1946. Green hoped to restore the “Invisible Empire” to its 1920s glory days, and in some ways he succeeded: the Klan intimidated black voters and helped segregationist Eugene Talmadge win the Georgia governorship. However, pressure from federal, state, and local governments impeded his efforts. In 1947, the Klan found itself next to the Communist Party on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, and numerous states passed anti-mask laws and prohibited cross burnings. When Green unexpectedly passed away in 1949, the delicate centralized structure of the Klan splintered. Numerous competing Klans popped up throughout the South, including the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (or the U.S. Klan) in Georgia, North Carolina’s United Klans of America, and Alabama’s Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy.⁴⁶

Despite the factionalism, the Klan remained active, and violent. Groups of hooded Klansmen went on “night rides,” carrying out harassment, threats, floggings, and even murders. At least 145 Klan-inspired bombings took place throughout the South between 1956 and 1963, many of which targeted civil rights leadership. Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred L. Shuttlesworth, the co-founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, both survived bombings at the hands of local Klansmen in 1956. Asa Earl “Ace” Carter’s Klan of the Confederacy proved particularly violent, gaining national notoriety when seven Klansmen stormed a Birmingham stage and assaulted popular black singer Nat King Cole. The Klan also targeted white integrationists, union leaders, Jews, and black homeowners in white neighborhoods—anyone deemed a threat to the South’s racial, religious, and social tradition. Unlike the 1920s, however, the Klan struggled to gain respectability during the Cold War, a phenomenon explained by the nation’s growing discomfort with the group’s wanton violence. The largest group, the U.S. Klan, led by Eldon Edwards, credibly claimed between 12,000 and 15,000 followers while other Klans garnered only a few thousand members. The Klan flourished in states where white citizens viewed their state government as insufficiently dedicated to resisting racial integration, such as North Carolina, but violence generally relegated the organization to the political fringe.⁴⁷

Instead of risking credibility by joining the Klan, many of the South’s more “respectable” citizens formed a new organization to maintain white supremacy: the Citizens’ Council. The original Citizens’ Council formed in the summer of 1954 in Indianola, Mississippi. The seat of rural Sunflower County, Indianola was a sleepy town of roughly 5,000 nestled along the banks of a thin tendril of the Mississippi Delta. The fact that arch-segregationist Senator James O. Eastland maintained his vast cotton plantation in Indianola betrayed the region’s conservative bent. Voter suppression was rampant. Black citizens comprised a majority of Sunflower County’s population but only 0.03 percent of its registered voters. After the Brown decision threatened segregationist tradition, a cadre of Indianola’s civic and economic elite, including the town’s mayor and city attorney, founded the first Citizens’ Council. The group had been inspired by Mississippi Circuit Court judge Tom P. Brady’s speech-turned-booklet titled Black Monday. Rife with white supremacist and anti-statist language, Brady’s book blared, “Segregation or Amalgamation … America has its Choice.”⁴⁸ “Black Monday” became a pejorative for the Brown decision, and Brady’s book served as a populist rallying cry for white southerners. Indianola lit the torch, and Citizens’ Councils started spreading across Dixieland like wildfire.⁴⁹

The Citizens’ Council became the most powerful, well-known group in a constellation of “protective societies” dedicated to preserving states’ rights and white supremacy. Roughly 90 Citizens’ Councils and council-affiliated groups dotted the South, a network which credibly claimed over a quarter of a million members by 1956. The organization had a much more mainstream footprint than Klan. Leadership often stemmed from the South’s economic and social elite, but the councils employed grassroots populism to appeal to working-class whites. Though at first excluded from membership, white women joined the Citizens’ Council in droves, energizing the council by recruiting, organizing, and serving in leadership positions. The Citizens’ Council blanketed the South with segregationist propaganda, including a radio show, weekly telecasts, newspapers, pamphlets, reprinted speeches, and broadsides. Publications ranged from lowest-common-denominator racist screeds to more sophisticated appeals to southern whites who were wary of publicly supporting “massive resistance.” Council messaging, particularly the more refined variety, often stretched beyond Dixieland’s borders and landed in the working-class communities of the Midwest and Northeast.⁵⁰

Distancing the council from extremists was critical to the organization’s success. Brady urged the Indianola Citizens’ Council to “pitch our battle on a high plane” and avoid the “demagogue, the renegade, the lawless and the violent.”⁵¹ The Citizens’ Council rejected Klan-style terror, instead using economic sanctions to maintain racial segregation. The councils supported right-wing candidates, stymied civil rights progress, and suppressed dissenting opinions, even from fellow white southerners. Council activity often intertwined with state and local power structures. Famous segregationists, such as Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge and Senator Eastland, frequented council gatherings as invited speakers, lending the organization a degree of legitimacy. However, many contemporary critics saw little difference between the Citizens’ Council and extremist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Writers derided the council as a “white-collar Klan,” an “uptown Klan,” and a “country club Klan.” At times the line demarcating the council from the extreme right blurred when individual council members were linked to violent terrorism, the most famous example of which was the trial and acquittal of Byron De La Beckwith for the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Nevertheless, despite the organization’s acidic racism, open defiance of federal mandates, and links to right-wing extremism, the Citizens’ Council provided a respectable alternative to the Klan’s night-riding vigilantes.⁵²

The council’s complicated, overlapping relationship with extremism and respectability was a microcosm of the far right’s political reality. Indeed, the Citizens’ Council constituted a thick branch of the ultraconservative family tree, and a great deal of connectivity existed between the council and other far-right organizations. Kent Courtney joined the New Orleans Citizens’ Council, while Texas council members supported J. Evetts Haley’s gubernatorial bid in 1956. In multiple states the Citizens’ Council formulated independent elector initiatives similar to the Texas Regulars revolt and Andrews’s campaign to try and deadlock elections. Even though visceral racism constituted the “nucleus” of Citizens’ Council thought, the councils shared the far right’s philosophical framework of anti-communism and anti-statism. Medford Evans—a southern journalist, future John Birch Society member, and father to National Review’s M. Stanton Evans—roared in the council’s publication, The Citizen: “Forced Integration is Communism in Action.”⁵³ The Citizens’ Council portrayed integrated union campaigns as efforts to empower blacks and communists. Anti-communism never eclipsed the council’s focus on defending racial segregation, but it provided a strategy for building grassroots coalitions and a link to the broader conservative movement.⁵⁴

Ultraconservative leaders eagerly defended the social substructure of white supremacy, states’ rights, and anti-communism. Billy James Hargis employed a biblical justification for segregation and saw interracial relationships (“mongrelization,” according to Hargis) as a communist plot to “build a world race, by gradually wearing down the resistance between the races.”⁵⁵ Courtney accused both political parties of trying to “establish tyrannical rule over the sovereign states.”⁵⁶ Haley and For America derided Eisenhower’s forceful integration of Little Rock Central High as “one of the worst depravities of political history” because it reduced “the once sovereign states to iron-curtain satellites.”⁵⁷ Stone, a California radical, did not wield the racist, segregationist language of his southern brethren, but he employed the language of states’ rights and contorted civil rights philosophies into diatribes against federal overreach. In the wake of the Brown decision, for example, Stone argued that his proposed amendment would “prevent this new invasion of the states.”⁵⁸ Former America First leader John T. Flynn wrote the only article in Stone’s American Progress to mention “civil rights” in the title—“What About This Civil Right?”—in which he argued a citizen should possess “the great civil right to spend his own money.”⁵⁹ Refusing to acknowledge the reality of racism and discrimination, ultraconservatives instead refracted rights-based rhetoric onto the language of states’ rights, property rights, free markets, and societal traditionalism.⁶⁰

J. Evetts Haley joined this “massive resistance” by running an ill-fated campaign for Texas governor in 1956. If elected, Haley promised to deploy the Texas Rangers to stop the federal government from enforcing the Brown decision in Texas. He peppered his segregationist rhetoric with anti-communist conspiracies: “I am for [the use of interposition] to stop this mixing, by coercion and immoral force, of white and Negro children in public schools, with its consequent destruction of our race and our way of life.”⁶¹ Letters from Haley’s supporters revealed anxieties about “the destruction of the white race,” “red-tinged judicial tyranny,” and “the conspiracy to change our form of gov’t.”⁶² Smoot, a fellow Texan, supported Haley’s crusade: “For years conservatives have belly-ached—with just cause—that we didn’t have a real choice to vote for. In Texas this year we do have a choice—and I hope that every Texan who calls himself a conservative will work for J. Evetts Haley.”⁶³ Haley ultimately placed fourth in the Democratic primary; W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, the former senator, governor, and leader of the Texas Regulars, split the segregationist vote with Haley. Moderate Democrat Price Daniel won the ensuing runoff and general election with ease. Nevertheless, Haley’s campaign exemplified how “massive resistance” served as a gateway for ultraconservative activism and fueled the “Southern Red Scare,” wherein southerners sought to stymie the push for racial equality by associating the civil rights movement with communism.⁶⁴

Following the 1956 election, Haley poured his energy into For America and its state affiliate, Texans For America (TFA). After leading the third-party charge in 1956, For America emerged as a central player in the far-right movement. The organization received $73,000 during the election from around 7,000 individual contributors, and by the end of 1956 For America had 33,000 members and chapters in all fifty states. Manion described For America’s support in the South as “more vehement than anywhere else in the nation,” a result of the group’s dedication to states’ rights and social traditionalism.⁶⁵ In fact, Manion thought the South’s growing discontent was the key to unlocking a conservative Republican Party in the future. The 1956 election marked For America’s transition into an action group hell-bent on reorienting national politics, but the organization’s influence extended well beyond the confines of presidential contests. Similar to far-right predecessors such as the Jeffersonian Democrats, For America’s state chapters marshaled the ultraconservative vanguard at the ground level, and (again like the Jeffersonians) the Lone Star State boasted one of the most active branches.⁶⁶

Haley joined For America prior to his gubernatorial campaign—he helped establish TFA in 1954 and served as the state chairman—but he accelerated his efforts after losing the primary. Haley infused TFA with his combination of states’ rights, conspiratorial anti-communism, and anti-statist libertarianism. Speaking before the American National Cattlemen’s Association, Haley inverted Franklin Roosevelt’s pledge to privilege economic security over economic freedom, arguing that “the communistic goal of material security, aided and abetted by public education, sometimes by the churches, and especially by the government, is taking the place of the adventurous appeal of liberty.”⁶⁷ He stumped for “individual liberties and sound government,” implying that liberals discarded both, and warned about the power of “socialists and communists … to divide and conquer.”⁶⁸ Haley and TFA’s primary objective was to promote far-right ideals with the intent of transforming one of the major political parties—the focus eventually became the GOP—into a bastion of conservatism.

Texans For America promoted its brand of far-right conservatism by blanketing the state with propaganda ranging from polemical educational materials and films to traveling speakers and radio/television programs. Most importantly, Haley established TFA’s Committees of Correspondence, which were modeled after the Revolutionary-era committees of correspondence, wherein patriots would disseminate revolutionary propaganda and news throughout the colonies. The committee’s mass-mailing campaigns represented the bulk of TFA’s grassroots action in the Lone Star State. Haley argued that the “concentration of firepower on the proper target at the right moment will amplify, in geometric proportions, our strength and effectiveness.”⁶⁹ He and Kara Hart, a fellow conspiracy theorist and chair of TFA’s correspondence committees, recruited letter writers by surveying Texas newspapers for conservative editorials and letters to the editor. By late 1959, TFA had over 250 correspondence committee members. Many of the letter writers enlisted by Haley and Hart saw the specter of socialism around every corner, especially concerning federal economic regulations. The committees promoted conservative platforms through fearmongering, ranging from allegations of communist infiltration to diatribes against integration and increased taxation. For example, Haley derided Governor Daniel’s plan to increase teachers’ salaries as the “teacher tenure” bill and called it a clandestine scheme to increase taxes. TFA’s committees followed Haley’s lead, writing hundreds of letters criticizing the bill and urging Daniel to slash the budget instead. The debate over teacher salaries raged for two years, but Daniel’s teacher pay bill passed in 1961 despite far-right acrimony. Nevertheless, the Committees of Correspondence helped build the grassroots coalition that Haley envisioned would transform conservatism in Texas by pressuring politicians to address right-wing concerns. Furthermore, Haley’s ability to cultivate a politically engaged constituency illustrated his gradual maturation as a far-right leader.⁷⁰

In order to support the broader ultraconservative movement, Haley connected TFA with other far-right leaders and organizations. Texans For America teamed up with Hargis’s Christian Crusade to fight the Forand Bill, formally titled the “Social Security Amendments of 1958,” which tried to extend Social Security hospital insurance benefits to elderly citizens. Haley decried the Forand Bill as “communizing medical treatment,” while Hargis prevaricated that “left-wingers” devised the legislation to implement “a fully socialized medical system in America.”⁷¹ Ultimately, the Forand Bill failed to pass the House Ways and Means Committee; Secretary of Health Arthur S. Flemming argued that the legislation failed to address Social Security’s problems. Haley and TFA also accused Earl Warren of “usurping” power through civil rights decisions. A TFA petition demanding the impeachment of the entire Supreme Court contained around 12,000 signatures by January 1959. The signature count by no means indicated an ultraconservative mandate, but TFA’s anti-Warren campaign provided a grassroots foundation for the Birch Society’s future battle against the Supreme Court. Through these coordinated efforts, Haley bolstered the institutional connections within the ultraconservative network.⁷²

Haley attempted to establish a similar relationship with the business community. Big business, especially the oil industry, played a crucial role in Texas politics, and Haley recognized that recruiting high-profile entrepreneurs would legitimize TFA as a mainstream conservative outlet. Haley told his constituents, “We cannot succeed without the support of business,” citing “the deadly threat to free enterprise” as “an opportunity to enlist strong financial support.”⁷³ Though Haley’s ideologies intersected with the free-market ideals of the business conservative movement, TFA’s financial statements revealed that the organization struggled for funding and often operated on a shoestring budget. TFA failed to obtain corporate backing and relied on small, individual donations, indicating that Haley’s racially charged rhetoric might have disaffected commercial benefactors. In fact, Texas politics was experiencing an important transformation during the late 1950s as politicians softened their white-supremacist rhetoric. Southerners were alarmed by the rapidly changing racial mores of southern society, but, in general, Texans had greater tolerance for racial inclusion than the rest of the Deep South. Nevertheless, Haley tapped into an ultraconservative constituency that viewed liberalism as anathema to traditional sociopolitical norms, and TFA’s mass letter-writing campaigns indicated an eagerness to amplify conservative demands through local activism and organizational networks. Ultimately, Haley and TFA galvanized grassroots right-wingers and established connections with other ultraconservative groups, underscoring the broader right-wing surge happening across the country.⁷⁴

Out on the West Coast, Willis Stone’s crusade to pass the “Proposed 23rd Amendment” continued to gain steam during the late 1950s. In 1957, Republican congressman Clare E. Hoffman of Michigan, a former America Firster with fascist sympathies, introduced a bill to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. Stone quickly adapted Hoffman’s idea to his own proposal. The final form of Stone’s bill sought to retrench all government economic activity and strike down the Sixteenth Amendment. That same year, Congressman Ralph Gwinn, a right-wing Republican from New York, submitted Stone’s “Proposed 23rd Amendment” twice, once without a section about dismantling income taxes, and then again, just a few months later, with an updated section calling for the Sixteenth’s repeal. Though Congress tabled both of Gwinn’s proposals, the support of far-right congressmen helped Stone gain traction. The House Ways and Means Committee invited Stone to speak in 1958, where he argued that his amendment’s economic alchemy would turn a massive debt into a surplus. Stone told the committee members, “Instead of the violent conflict between government and people regarding which shall own and operate the enterprises created by the people, we will have a government devoted to protecting our lives and properties.”⁷⁵ Of course, Stone’s proposal necessitated unwinding the lingering welfare state, an action he viewed as an appropriate “return to the basic concept which we all regard as truly American.”⁷⁶ A mythologized free market, in other words. Three days after Stone’s appearance before Ways and Means, Congressman Edgar Hiestand, a California Republican and future Birch Society member, put forth a bill to create a select committee to investigate the “scope of and justification for activities of the United States that compete with private enterprise.”⁷⁷ Hiestand’s language seemed to come straight from Stone’s presentation.⁷⁸

Stone’s ideas percolated throughout Washington’s right-wing circles. Later that summer, Congressman James B. Utt, an ultraconservative Republican from Orange County, California, appeared on Courtney’s radio show. Utt had sailed into office during the Eisenhower electoral wave in 1952 and received an immediate appointment to the Ways and Means Committee—a rare privilege for a freshman congressman.⁷⁹ During the interview, Courtney quizzed Utt: “Are you familiar with Stone’s proposed constitutional amendment?” “Yes, I am,” Utt enthused. “I am a hundred percent in support of it.”⁸⁰ One year after Stone appeared before the Ways and Means Committee, Utt introduced Stone’s amendment as House Joint Resolution 23. Then, fifteen days after Utt’s proposal, Hiestand submitted numerous bills to reduce capital gains taxes and lower taxes on business owners. Hiestand sent copies of the bills to Stone, who wrote an encouraging note back: “You are doing a great job in these efforts, and I hope they materialize.”⁸¹ The fact that Hiestand, Utt, and Gwinn advocated Stone’s ideas illustrated that ultraconservative positions were gradually seeping into the GOP. Stone had become a confidant and ideological wellspring for the Republican Party’s right-wing vanguard.⁸²

The excitement surrounding Stone’s amendment extended to the grass roots. In 1959, activists pushed resolutions in favor of the “Proposed 23rd Amendment” through the state governments of Wyoming and Texas. They were joined one year later by successful resolutions in Nevada and Louisiana. American Progress served as APF’s organizational nerve center and information clearinghouse, promoting state-level activism and providing in-depth coverage each time Stone’s amendment passed a state legislature. For example, Ernest E. Anthony Jr., APF’s Texas state chairman, wrote an ebullient editorial after Texas passed an affirmative resolution. Anthony lauded the efforts of State Representative Jerry Sadler, a segregationist southern Democrat, and grassroots activists, including Haley and Texans For America, for their role in spearheading the movement. Anthony regaled readers with stories of “telegrams, phone calls, letters, [and] cards from across the state flooding the Texas capital.”⁸³ Reverend Gordon Winrod—an anti-Semitic extremist and son of radical preacher Gerald B. Winrod—also received praise from Anthony and Stone, highlighting the intersection of Protestant fundamentalism and political ultraconservatism. More propaganda appeared in American Progress as Stone’s movement gained momentum, recounting the patriotic efforts of activists in early-adopter states.⁸⁴

Stone leaned on his business acumen and marketing experience to build upon his movement’s early success. Selling advertisements in American Progress kept the periodical afloat and provided an opportunity for business owners to contribute to the cause while simultaneously advertising to like-minded customers. To right-wing thinking, soliciting the support of conservative businessmen offered a powerful counter to liberal politicians and union leaders. “Frankly,” Hiestand wrote to Stone, “we can’t ever recover the control of Congress unless we adopt and develop more hard business-like political management techniques.”⁸⁵ Stone targeted the economic self-interest and libertarian lean of right-wing business owners; he boasted that American Progress was “a highly effective media for advertisers seeking to preserve American ideals as well as promote their products and services.” Advertising in American Progress, Stone declared, proved that patron companies were “in favor of FREE ENTERPRISE.”⁸⁶ Stone sold advertisements—ranging from $50 for partial-page to $500 for back-cover ads—to a wide range of firms, and his relationship with business owners produced a cozy environment where commercial and editorial interests intertwined. In short, ads often doubled as right-wing propaganda.⁸⁷

Owners of small and medium-sized businesses lined up to purchase space in American Progress, a periodical that reflected their libertarian values. One alarmist advertisement, paid for by businessman and future Birch Society councilman F. Gano Chance, castigated liberalism as a grand plot to destroy capitalism. “This is a process that must be stopped, for it can only destroy our free, competitive private enterprise system,” blared Chance’s full-page advertisement. “And it must be stopped soon, for anyone who has watched the tidal wave of governmental control over private business knows—IT IS LATER THAN YOU THINK!”⁸⁸ Other ads professed support for Stone’s amendment. Joseph S. Kimmel Sr., President of Republic Electric Company, disguised a full-page advertisement as an open letter to taxpayers. “The worst self-inflicted thing that ever happened to the American people was the adoption of the 16th Amendment,” read Kimmel’s letter.⁸⁹ Such propagandistic messaging laid bare any notion of ideological impartiality, but to Stone that was the whole point: advertisements funded American Progress, amplified its right-wing philosophies, and burnished the relationships between business interests and far-right activists.

Broadcasting ideological values through advertisements highlighted the collision between sociopolitical activism and American consumer culture. Stone’s advertising ethos mirrored that of the Advertising Council, a conglomerate of ad agencies and corporations that promoted free-market capitalism and fretted about Americans turning into “pawns of a master state.”⁹⁰ Politically charged ads appeared throughout right-wing publications, from Buckley’s National Review to Hargis’s Christian Crusade. Ads in National Review for industrial companies such as Kennametal—owned by Philip McKenna, an American Progress advertiser who doubled as an APF state chairman—and Timken Roller Bearing Company featured conservative talking points about returning to the gold standard and reducing taxes. Stone also provided space, free of charge, for National Review ads. Right-wing periodicals cultivated an incestuous community—they advertised each other’s magazines, received funding from the same sources, and bore similar ideological overtones, all of which revealed a significant overlap between mainstream conservative outlets and far-right publications. Furthermore, the corporate support for Stone’s crusade indicated that businessmen identified more with Stone’s “colorblind” libertarianism than Haley’s fire-breathing segregationism.⁹¹

The emphasis on advertising facilitated American Progress’s slow, fitful growth. By 1957 each issue raked in roughly $2,000, keeping annual subscriptions at the low cost of three dollars and facilitating the introduction of bicolor gloss covers by the end of the year. The gradual aesthetic improvements signified the maturation of Stone’s movement. In 1959 Stone sent only 8,000 copies of American Progress to a select few states: Washington, Massachusetts, Texas, Illinois, Wyoming, California, and Oregon. By the early 1960s, however, Stone and APF distributed over 16,000 copies of American Progress throughout twenty-eight states in all regions of the country. Local social organizations, such as the Kiwanis Club in Glendale, California, helped APF hand out copies of American Progress (the Glendale Kiwanis Club dissembled that it was taking not a political stance, but rather “an active interest in the principles upon which the conduct of government depends”).⁹² Stone claimed that subscribers circulated the magazine to friends and colleagues, estimating that over 50,000 “business, labor, civic, professional, and industrial leaders of the 48 sovereign states” read American Progress.⁹³ Even if Stone exaggerated the numbers, American Progress, and APF by extension, nevertheless served as a binding agent, intertwining the philosophies and actions of right-wing businesspeople, activists, and institutions.⁹⁴

Not all of Stone’s organizational maneuvering went according to plan, however. Stone attempted to expand the anti-tax movement in 1957 by merging APF with another Los Angeles–based libertarian organization, the Organization to Repeal Federal Income Taxes (ORFIT). He hoped the unification would create a well-organized anti-tax program in every state and strengthen the lines of communication between local activists. American Progress became the merger’s de facto periodical, and Stone provided editorial space for ORFIT’s leadership. The organizations created a Joint Operating Committee (JOC) to manage the merger, but the union was fraught from the beginning. Funding and membership were meddlesome problems; ORFIT and APF brought in only a few dozen members every month and operated on meager budgets, rarely carrying over more than a few hundred dollars a month. The turmoil escalated when Stone accused the Joint Committee of neglecting fundraising and charged JOC vice president and general manager Paul K. Morganthaler with shutting him out of the decision-making process. Stone believed the merger was sabotaging the central mission of promoting the “Proposed 23rd Amendment.” The arguments over money and authority turned personal, and by 1958 Stone found himself ostracized as the merger imploded. In a private letter to F. Gano Chance, Stone claimed that he and the other APF board members had been ousted by a “willful few who grabbed control of the machinery.”⁹⁵

Though Stone lost access to APF’s subscription lists, he retained ownership of American Progress and created a new organization, the National Committee for Economic Freedom (NCEF), to continue his anti-taxation crusade. Most APF state chairmen followed Stone to NCEF, and Stone recruited other key ultraconservative figures, such as Kent Courtney, to bolster the new organization’s reputation. Courtney served as the national vice chairman and Louisiana state chairman while businessman Walter Knott—a longtime advertiser in American Progress, future Birch Society member, and owner of Knott’s Berry Farm, a theme park featuring an idealized, right-wing version of the American frontier—worked as treasurer. By the end of the 1950s, Stone could boast that he led the preeminent anti-tax organization and that four states had adopted resolutions in favor of his amendment.⁹⁶

As the decade drew to a close, the far right’s disjointed patchwork was starting to resemble a coherent, interconnected web, but the ultraconservative movement still lacked a flagship organization. Robert Welch decided to create one. In late 1958, Welch summoned eleven fellow ultraconservatives to a mysterious meeting in Indianapolis. Welch’s invitations provided no information about the gathering, but his guests were about to be treated to a two-day seminar on the growing communist threat in America. After the men settled in, Welch got to the heart of the issue: “Gentlemen, we are losing, rapidly losing, a cold war in which our freedom, our country, and our very existence are at stake.”⁹⁷ On the first day, Welch spent seven hours detailing his conspiratorial theories while his guests took copious notes. The attendees included T. Coleman Andrews; industrialists Fred C. Koch, William J. Grede, Ernest G. Swigert, and Louis Ruthenberg; and anti-Semitic professor Revilo P. Oliver. Welch told them that conservatives needed to organize, to fight the existential threat of communism by adopting communist tactics.⁹⁸

On the second day, Welch proposed the creation of the John Birch Society, a new far-right organization to lead the charge against the communist conspiracy. Named after a Christian evangelist whose death at the hands of Chinese communists made him the first casualty of the Cold War—according to Welch, at least—the John Birch Society promoted an apocalyptic vision of Christian conservatives under siege by atheistic communists. The time to organize was now, Welch informed his confidants, because “both internationally, and within the United States, the Communists are much further advanced and more deeply entrenched than is realized by even most of the serious students of the danger among the anti-Communists.”⁹⁹ To Welch, the war against communism represented a civilizational crisis, and losing meant ushering in “long and feudal Dark Ages after we have been killed, our children have been enslaved, and all that we value has been destroyed.”¹⁰⁰ Spurred into action, ten of the eleven attendees became the first Birch Society members, and nine, including Andrews, formed the organization’s inaugural National Council. Welch installed himself as the “Founder” atop an organizational hierarchy because, as he told his fellow conspirators, “Communist infiltrators could bog us down in interminable disagreements, schisms, and feuds.”¹⁰¹ He turned his meeting notes into the group’s ideological blueprint and recruiting tool, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, and the society soon became a far-right nexus, one that came to define the shape of the mid-twentieth century ultraconservative movement. ¹⁰²

Robert Henry Winborne Welch Jr. was born on December 1, 1899, to a landowning family in North Carolina, and during his formative years he developed the ideologies that shaped the John Birch Society. Welch grew up in a wealthy household. His parents, Robert and Lina Welch, hired seasonal farmhands, which afforded young Robert the opportunity to focus on education. A precocious youth, Welch excelled in academics. He finished high school by age twelve and then graduated from the University of North Carolina four years later at the age of sixteen. During World War I, Welch briefly attended the United States Naval Academy before transferring to Harvard Law School in 1919. Welch’s time at Harvard coincided with the onset of the First Red Scare, which incubated his anti-communist, conspiratorial mindset. The federal government passed anti-sedition legislation and deported supposed radical immigrants while Welch attended classes in Cambridge. Accusations of communism punctuated the battles between labor and capital. One of Welch’s Harvard professors, Felix Frankfurter, a future Supreme Court justice, sympathized with immigrants and labor unions. After enrolling in Frankfurter’s class on labor law, Welch accused the professor of harboring Marxist sympathies. Welch’s characterization of Frankfurter distorted reality. Frankfurter openly disavowed Bolshevik communism and instead adhered to the reformist mindset of the Progressive era. Regardless, Welch believed Frankfurter’s (and the broader academy’s) progressive tendencies suggested communist underpinnings. Welch’s perception of Frankfurter highlighted his own Manichean worldview—a person was either a conservative, representing true American values, or a dangerous subversive with communist sympathies. The anti-communist, anti-intellectual anxieties Welch developed during the First Red Scare shaped his political philosophies for the rest of his life.¹⁰³

Welch soon left Harvard to join the ranks of entrepreneurial Americans, which put him in contact with right-wing businessmen and nurtured his ultraconservatism. Welch had a briefly successful venture with the Oxford Candy Company before leaving in 1935 to work as a sales manager for his brother’s company, the James O. Welch Company. Welch’s enterprising nature led him into political activism; he joined the Boston Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) during the 1930s and 1940s. The National Association of Manufacturers originally formed in the late nineteenth century to fight industrial labor unions, and during the 1930s it expanded its mission by attacking Rooseveltian liberalism. Through NAM, Welch joined the angry chorus of anti–New Deal industrialists and imbibed the group’s message of free-market capitalism, managerial and property rights, and enmity toward organized labor. The presidential election of 1952, particularly Senator Robert Taft’s primary defeat, convinced Welch that a vast conspiracy controlled the government, thereby preventing conservatives from gaining tangible political power.¹⁰⁴

Anti-communism jaundiced Welch’s entire worldview. Welch blamed liberalism for abetting communist infiltration and conflated liberal policies with the Soviet Union’s state-dominated economy and political repression. He alleged that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt implemented a “Marxian program” through progressive income taxes, and argued that any expansion of the welfare state paved the way for an “all-powerful completely socialistic central government.”¹⁰⁵ An FBI official aptly described Welch as a “disillusioned” “Republican of the extreme Right-Wing” who was “frustrated by the preponderance of Moderate Republicans in the present administration.”¹⁰⁶ Welch’s delusions occasionally surpassed even those of his fellow ultraconservatives. For example, not only did Welch believe Eisenhower intended to destroy the Republican Party’s anti-communist impetus, he argued that “communist bosses” controlled Eisenhower because the president refused to break up or sell the Tennessee Valley Authority.¹⁰⁷

Welch’s conspiratorial anti-communism inflamed his antipathy toward civil rights. A native-born southerner, Welch resembled the white antebellum patricians who believed only they understood the realities of race relations. Instead of viewing the lingering impact of economic exploitation and segregation as the catalyst for civil rights activism, Welch held communists responsible for disturbing the South’s “peaceful” race relations.¹⁰⁸ Communists intended “to stir up such bitterness between whites and blacks in the South that small flames of civil disorder would inevitably result,” he declared.¹⁰⁹ Welch even referred to the civil rights movement as the “Negro Revolutionary Movement,” which he believed was intent on setting up a “Negro Soviet Republic” in the South, even though the already minuscule number of black communists dwindled steadily during the Cold War.¹¹⁰ The insistence that the push for racial equality was communist-inspired explained Welch’s adherence to states’ rights ideologies and the intense support he garnered from white southerners.¹¹¹

Welch also attributed a decline in social traditionalism to communist infiltration. During his youth Welch attended a fundamentalist Baptist church, but he rejected the tenets of strict fundamentalism as an adult. Nevertheless, Welch understood that his anti-communist movement needed the support of conservative Christians. By depicting deceased missionary John Birch as a martyr for conservatism and appropriating his name, Welch’s organization became a defender of Christian America. Welch argued that “family units [were] the very bricks out of which a stable and happy society is built,” illustrating an inchoate form of the anti-welfare, “family values” ideas that would later dominate American conservatism.¹¹² Furthermore, he pushed an inclusive version of Christianity to broaden his appeal. Using a phrase coined by poet Harry Kemp, Welch tried to unify religious conservatives by noting that all denominations preached an “upward reach in the hearts of man.”¹¹³ Though Welch’s moralism ironically resembled a form of religious collectivism, it served as a politically motivated proxy to aid his far-right crusade and connected him with anti-communist ministers such as Billy James Hargis and Fred Schwarz.¹¹⁴

The Birch Society became Welch’s vessel for thrusting his conspiratorial ultraconservatism into the political arena, and the founder used numerous platforms to amplify the Birch Society’s outreach. Periodicals served as both recruitment tools and a method of ideological indoctrination, or, as Birchers saw it, anti-communist education. Welch started a self-publishing operation in 1956 with the creation of One Man’s Opinion, which eventually transformed into American Opinion, the official Bircher publication. American Opinion amounted to a far-right review of current affairs with editorial contributions from fellow ultraconservatives, including former HUAC chairman Martin Dies Jr., Revilo Oliver, Dan Smoot, and General Albert C. Wedemeyer, a U.S. Army general and member of For America’s National Policy Committee. Analysts from the Anti-Defamation League called American Opinion “a molder of Americanist’ thinking” that imparted “a profound consciousness of the all-pervading Communist conspiracy.”¹¹⁵ The organization’s other major periodical, the monthly John Birch Society Bulletin, disseminated Welch’s marching orders to the Bircher faithful. In this respect, the Bulletin was the Society’s core publication. The Bulletin contained Welch’s short- and long-term goals for the organization, promoted Society-approved books for purchase, and listed the “Agenda of the Month,” which detailed the Society-sponsored political activism expected of each member. Illustrating a similarity to Haley’s Texans For America, one member noted that Welch expected individual Birchers “to conduct a massive one-man letter-writing campaign, directed at our congressmen, state senators and representatives and other public officials.”¹¹⁶ On a national level, Birch Society activism took place through front groups—a political action strategy pioneered by communist groups which produced high levels of grassroots participation while providing the parent organization with a certain amount of plausible deniability.¹¹⁷

Despite his organization’s overt political goals, Welch attempted to maintain a façade of impartiality by forbidding the Birch Society, but not individual Birchers, from supporting or funding specific politicians or their campaigns. He used indirect language—“urging” or “expecting,” rather than ordering—to avoid accusations of partisanship. This curated language, to Welch’s mind, defined the Birch Society as an educational, not political, organization. However, this description did not match reality. Newspaper editor Leonard Finder thought only “apologists” believed that the Birch Society, a group driven by “fanatical” conservatives, was a strictly educational, apolitical organization.¹¹⁸ The society supported conservative politicians rather than a single political party, but Birchers infiltrated the Republican apparatus, especially in California, in order to push the party rightward. Welch believed the GOP needed Bircher help doing “the thorough and painstaking organization and work at the precinct levels, which wins elections.”¹¹⁹ Bircher activism also included the legion of Birch-fronted bookstores that sold American Opinion pamphlets and various conservative books and magazines. Other far-right periodicals, such as Hargis’s Christian Crusade, advertised Birch Society books, which lubricated the relationships between ultraconservative organizations.¹²⁰

In fact, the Birch Society bridged many of the regional and ideological divisions separating ultraconservative groups. Welch discouraged John Birch Society chapters from inviting outside speakers, so the organization created the American Opinion Speakers Bureau, featuring high-profile ultraconservatives such as Willis Stone, to cement ideological standardization and speak for the “entire Conservative movement.”¹²¹ Stone wrote for American Opinion and traveled to conferences with Welch. Such was the trust between the two men that Welch sent Stone an advance copy of The Politician—Welch’s inflammatory manuscript in which he accused numerous government officials, including President Eisenhower, of being communist agents. A significant amount of symbiosis existed between the Birch Society and Stone’s organization. Retired brigadier general W. C. Lemly, who served as both a Birch chapter leader and one of Stone’s national vice chairmen, noted this phenomenon to Welch: “I am fully aware of the dedicated work of very many Birchers for [Stone’s proposed] Liberty Amendment, and I know a lot of Birchers who were recruited into the JBS through their participation in the Liberty Amendment movement.”¹²² Courtney, also an NCEF chapter leader, joined the Birch Society in 1960 and soon became the chairman of Chapter 246 in New Orleans. Welch described Courtney’s efforts as “parallel to my own.”¹²³ Seven members of the Birch Society’s National Council, including future California congressman John Rousselot and Clarence Manion, served on the Christian Crusade’s National Advisory Committee. In return, Hargis served on the Birch Society’s advisory board, and Martin Dies Jr. worked as a contributing editor for American Opinion. Not only did the Birch Society serve as a central hub for the far-right movement, its political activism sparked increased far-right collaboration.¹²⁴

The creation of the first Bircher front group, the Committee Against Summit Entanglements (CASE), marked the society’s initial foray into national politics. CASE was a reaction to a proposed summit between Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and President Dwight Eisenhower in July 1959. The thought of a Soviet leader stepping foot on American soil horrified Welch. Just a year prior Welch had published an acerbic, delusional open letter to Khrushchev, accusing the premier of being a “front” for the real Soviet dictator—Welch suspected Communist Party leader Georgy Malenkov—operating behind the scenes.¹²⁵ Months before the scheduled summit, President Eisenhower announced that he and Khrushchev were going to take good-will visits to each other’s countries. The Birch Society, in response, circulated 70,000 petitions to protest both Khrushchev’s visit and the summit meeting. Bircher handbills screamed “Please, Mr. President, Don’t Go!,” and full-page Society-sponsored advertisements in the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times called Khrushchev’s planned visit a “crime against humanity.”¹²⁶ Welch estimated that the petitions gathered one million signatures total, a number which seems exaggerated and is impossible to verify. CASE grew into the largest national Bircher front organization and provided an outlet for non-Birch conservatives to protest Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism.¹²⁷

The CASE campaign knit together a broad right-wing coalition. Welch served as the chairman, and right-wing Republicans, including Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, New York congressman Norman J. Gould, and former Utah governor J. Bracken Lee, joined CASE’s executive committee and national board. The front group featured numerous industrialists, including Roger Milliken, Pierre S. du Pont III, and Fred C. Koch. For America was well-represented: Manion and Wedemeyer served as vice chairmen and Fellers occupied a spot on the executive committee. CASE featured numerous Willis Stone associates, such as Courtney, Chance, Heinsohn, and Kimmel. The CASE national board also housed a wide range of conservative thinkers, including Andrews, Buckley, Ludwig Von Mises, and L. Brent Bozell. Elizabeth Churchill Brown, a right-wing journalist, tentatively agreed to serve on the board, but she sent a letter cautioning Welch against collaborating with open anti-Semites. Though Brown did not name the individual, she most likely meant Revilo P. Oliver, the classics professor, founding Birch Society member, and CASE board member. As the far-right movement gradually penetrated the political mainstream, Brown did not want to see the ultraconservative cause delegitimized over associations with fringe extremists.¹²⁸

Numerous nodes within the far-right network promoted CASE’s crusade. TFA’s Kara Hart thought Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s proposed visit constituted an “abject surrender to the communist conception of coexistence.” She sent instructions to TFA’s committees of correspondence: “Register your opposition.”¹²⁹ Stone published articles condemning the summit. Tom Anderson—CASE executive committee member, publisher of the right-wing Farm and Ranch magazine, and Christian Crusade advisory board member—wrote in American Progress, “The only way to coexist peacefully with the Communists is to surrender.”¹³⁰ Fellers went on Manion’s radio show, The Manion Forum, and wondered if the summit was laying the groundwork for total disarmament and a new “world order.”¹³¹ Wedemeyer also appeared on Manion’s broadcast, questioning Eisenhower’s judgment for engaging with “fanatically mad, atheistic materialists” and warning that the summit might sound “the death knell for this Republic and in fact for all free nations.”¹³² Manion himself finished one broadcast with a conspiratorial flourish: “My friends, since 1945, we have sold hundreds of millions of people into Soviet slavery for the counterfeit coin of Communist promises. This time the Red tiger is demanding that we feed him with our own flesh. It’s your slavery that is at stake now.”¹³³

Ultimately, Khrushchev’s trip to the United States occurred as planned, but Eisenhower did not make the return trip to the Soviet Union. Ultraconservatives believed their outcry influenced Eisenhower’s decision. In reality, the U-2 Incident—a scandal involving the downing of a U.S. spy plane by the Soviet Union in May 1959—bred mistrust between the two superpowers and scuttled Eisenhower’s trip and the summit meeting. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the Birch Society, CASE was a resounding success. Not only did the Birchers feel that their pleas were heard by national politicians, but the campaign galvanized their constituency and further reinforced the far-right network. By decade’s end, the Birch Society had built upon the movement’s foundations to become the apotheosis of the midcentury far right. The question for the next decade was how to turn that grassroots zealotry into tangible political victories.¹³⁴

In the fall of 1959, hundreds of ultraconservatives gathered for a rally at Chicago’s Morrison Hotel. The New Party Rally, sponsored by Courtney’s Independent American newspaper and Stone’s National Committee for Economic Freedom, sought to continue the fight started by Andrews’s third-party run in 1956. The conference illustrated the growth of far-right conservatism during Eisenhower’s presidency. Over five hundred people from thirty-five states flocked to Chicago, impressive growth considering the Constitution Party’s 1956 convention attracted a meager seventy-five delegates. Numerous right-wing luminaries appeared on the speaking schedule. Buckley addressed a dinner preceding the rally, while Smoot, Welch, Haley, Anderson, Courtney, Lee, and Medford Evans each took a turn on the convention stump. According to a Chicago Daily Tribune reporter, the conference’s central message was that “both national parties are practicing socialism today, so a new party is the answer.”¹³⁵ Or, as Tom Anderson quipped, “changing from Eisenhower to Rockefeller, Nixon, Symington, or Kennedy is like leaving the diaper on the baby and just changing the pin.”¹³⁶

The conference issued a For America–inspired statement of principles, and Courtney hoped to consolidate the third-party forces around the country into a collaborative federation, the Independent American Federation of State Parties, before the election of 1960. Rather than resuscitating the Dixiecrat or States’ Rights parties, under Courtney’s plan state-level third parties would retain their independence while working together to boost national candidates and put independent electors on state ballots. This strategy would obviate the problem of needing to create, as Courtney put it, “a national platform that will appeal to all sections of the country and a candidate who will personify those things.”¹³⁷ The federation intended to bring isolated third-party outfits, such as New Jersey’s Conservative Party, Louisiana’s States’ Rights Party, and Washington’s Constitution Party, into a cooperative third-party confederation. This was Courtney’s answer to losing the strategic argument in 1956. Texans For America lauded the creation of the federation as an important strike against the “Republican-Democrat, socialistic coalition.”¹³⁸

In an interesting twist of fate, the Lincoln National Republican Club held its own conference at the exact same time and place. Led by Southern Baptist minister and former Air Force major Edgar C. Bundy, the Lincoln Club advocated “corrective measures” to ensure a more conservative Republican Party. Senator Styles Bridges, a New Hampshire Republican, told the club’s audience, “All over the world, and in this country, there is a political upsurge in the conservative direction.”¹³⁹ Bridges pointed to recent conservative congressional victories, including a “strong labor bill” and opposition to “free spending,” as evidence of this right-wing groundswell. The Lincoln Club’s message seemed simple enough—keep proposing reasonable conservative legislation and the voters will follow—but it hinted at a significant shift in Republican strategy. Despite the continued influence of liberalism during the mid-1950s, more Republicans were beginning to view conservatism as the party’s future. The GOP was gradually pivoting toward its right-wing vanguard.¹⁴⁰

Nevertheless, the two meetings illustrated the variance in conservative strategies. Lincoln Club leaders believed America leaned conservative and thus pushed for reform, hoping to nudge the Republican Party further to the right. The New Party Rally, on the other hand, pursued a political revolution. Courtney and his collaborators yearned to throw off the shackles of the two-party duopoly and consolidate conservatives within a new party. When asked about the fortuitous scheduling, Courtney noted that the rallies’ concurrence was “very much of a coincidence.”¹⁴¹ He wanted nothing to do with the Lincoln Club’s gradualist approach. However, the ultraconservative coalition remained divided. Courtney’s bid for a permanent third party went down in flames in 1956, and now, heading into the election year 1960, conservative Republicans had a promising standard bearer: Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater’s unabashed right-wing platforms and participation in CASE led ultraconservatives to view him as one of their own. During the early 1960s, the far-right movement burst into the political mainstream as activists mobilized behind Goldwater and the Republican Party.