Speaker 1: Pushkin. I want to read to you from a very
Speaker 1: important historical document, the April nineteen sixty two edition of
Speaker 1: the wellby Way Elementary School Parent Teacher Association newsletter, The
Speaker 1: well Be Buzzings, written of course, by the PTA of
Speaker 1: the elementary school in the West Hills area of Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: First item, President's message. I would like to say thank
Speaker 1: you to the ladies that work so hard on the
Speaker 1: and this is all in caps double parking safety campaign.
Speaker 1: Second item sing along with progress PTA meeting for April.
Speaker 1: Our hostesses will be the sixth grade mothers. Third item
Speaker 1: a meeting on safety in fire prevention. Fourth item an
Speaker 1: interesting and informative trip to the fire station. Fifth item
Speaker 1: the local count meeting. Key detail. It's going to be
Speaker 1: a luncheon. Are you still there? Still awake? Four announcements
Speaker 1: on school safety, a fifth on participatory democracy. A luncheon.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing you're poored to tears. It's all so very PTA.
Speaker 1: The only things missing are the potluck supper, the newspaper drive,
Speaker 1: the book fair. But that's where you're wrong. This newsletter is,
Speaker 1: in fact the skeleton key to understanding our political moment
Speaker 1: right now. Like this exact moment. If you're listening to
Speaker 1: this episode soon after its release, there are two things
Speaker 1: going on in your world, the US presidential election between
Speaker 1: Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and more Halloween candy than
Speaker 1: you know what to do with. Well in this episode
Speaker 1: a story that manages to bring both together. It all
Speaker 1: really begins with the Well Being PTA newsletter from April
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two, and specifically with the sixth and final item,
Speaker 1: the editor's message, which begins the power to seek the
Speaker 1: truth is within all of us. But there are some
Speaker 1: who abuse this freedom and cloud the answers and the issues,
Speaker 1: so that seeking the truth and knowing it is the
Speaker 1: truth becomes a harder task than it was ever meant
Speaker 1: to be. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about
Speaker 1: things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Goldwell. Here's our question, why,
Speaker 1: in this otherwise very dull PTA newsletter does the mother
Speaker 1: who wrote it feel the need to write an urgent
Speaker 1: defense of democracy. She doesn't say, but as my colleague
Speaker 1: BENDADAPF Hafrey discovered, it has to do with a man who,
Speaker 1: perhaps more than almost anyone else, is responsible for creating
Speaker 1: the modern style of far right conspiratorial thinking running rampant today.
Speaker 1: A man who write, at the time that Editor's note
Speaker 1: was published, held in his hands the fate of the
Speaker 1: PTA and American public life. Here's Ben.
Speaker 2: The video is grainy, but you can make out an
Speaker 2: older man, late sixties, standing in a suit and tie
Speaker 2: against a black backdrop, clasping his hands on a lecturn.
Speaker 3: Faithful citizens, wherever.
Speaker 4: You may be.
Speaker 2: He's got big ears, a big nose, and a high
Speaker 2: forehead well suited to an indignant raising of the eyebrows.
Speaker 2: The media coverage of him lately had given him many
Speaker 2: opportunities to do this. As he speaks, the camera pushes in.
Speaker 2: It's a recruitment video.
Speaker 3: It is our deliberate and careful purpose to pull together
Speaker 3: into one group, a body of morally good and truly
Speaker 3: responsible citizens who are proud of each other and of
Speaker 3: the society to which they belong.
Speaker 2: He then proceeds to reassure his viewers that the identities
Speaker 2: of people in this group are never shared with anyone,
Speaker 2: not least of all because their enemies abound.
Speaker 3: The carefully coordinated attacks against us from all points of
Speaker 3: the ideological compass have reached a crescendo stage since the
Speaker 3: rest of this year, with the surprising but visible result
Speaker 3: of solidifying the dedication of our numbers still further, and
Speaker 3: of stimulating their recruiting efforts.
Speaker 2: This is Robert Welch Junior. Consider the facts. He speaks
Speaker 2: a little like a dictator. He seems to run some
Speaker 2: sort of secret society, and consider himself public enemy number one.
Speaker 2: Who is this titan? Well, naturally he's a candy tycoon.
Speaker 2: Robert Welch Junior was born on a former plantation in
Speaker 2: North Carolina just before the turn of the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: As a kid, he was precocious and a daydreamer. Wanted
Speaker 2: to be a writer an intellectual, but he felt that
Speaker 2: before he could do so, he had to get rich.
Speaker 2: So one night, as a young man, he had a brainstorm.
Speaker 2: According to Edward H. Miller, who wrote a biography of
Speaker 2: Welsh called A Conspiratorial Life, Welch stayed up late into
Speaker 2: the evening, writing and writing to answer a single question,
Speaker 2: what specific goods in demand would be best for me
Speaker 2: to start manufacturing without either capital or experience. This is
Speaker 2: a quote Miller found from an associate of Welsh's recalling
Speaker 2: this legendary moment quote. As the sky began to show
Speaker 2: the first streaks of dawn, Robert stared at the notes
Speaker 2: in front of him. One word remained amid the maze
Speaker 2: of dark lines scratched across the pages. That word was candy.
Speaker 2: We've arrived at the Halloween portion of our programming. So
Speaker 2: if in your baskets this year you find the following
Speaker 2: candies Sugar Daddy, Sugar Baby, or the Junior Mint, you're
Speaker 2: encountering a piece of the Welsh legacy, and actually the
Speaker 2: legacy of his brother too, who naturally also worked in
Speaker 2: the candy business. The Welsh nuclear family of Hit candies,
Speaker 2: the patriarch of which the Sugar Daddy, I have to
Speaker 2: say I find totally inedible, has been a mainstay forever.
Speaker 2: Children of the nineteen eighties may remember the jingle for
Speaker 2: Sugar Daddy for.
Speaker 5: Sugar Dirty.
Speaker 2: Welsh was part of what I've come to think of
Speaker 2: as the American sweets aristocracy. I'm talking about a special
Speaker 2: class of confectioners and bakers who turned out to have
Speaker 2: a surprising number of ideas about how society ought to
Speaker 2: be run. In the Pantheon, we have Milton's Navely Hershey,
Speaker 2: whose chocolates were so delectable he was able to put
Speaker 2: his social ideas to the test, building utopian town called Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2: Then there's Sylvester Graham, the clergyman who invented the Graham
Speaker 2: Cracker to combat youth masturbation. John Harvey Kellogg, the Seventh
Speaker 2: day Adventist, who invented cornflakes to do the same. The
Speaker 2: candy makers, in particular tended to be extremely paranoid because
Speaker 2: there was actually quite a bit of spying in their industry.
Speaker 2: They had to guard their secrets, their recipes, their fortunes.
Speaker 2: Some would even blindfold the people who repaired their machines.
Speaker 2: But I digress. After establishing himself in the candy business
Speaker 2: and drinking deeply at the trough of its paranoia, Welch
Speaker 2: set out to elbow his way into the intellectual class,
Speaker 2: specifically the anti communist class. Over the years, he wrote
Speaker 2: a number of articles in books about the rise of communism, including,
Speaker 2: per his biographer, a novel about in ant society oppressed
Speaker 2: by a monolithic state, which somehow went unpublished. But it
Speaker 2: was in nineteen fifty four that one of his ideas
Speaker 2: finally broke through.
Speaker 5: He was very secretive about these because Welch was always
Speaker 5: worried about the Communists as he saw getting a hold
Speaker 5: of what he was saying.
Speaker 2: Historian Matthew Dallak, author of the book Bircher's, talking about
Speaker 2: Welch's penchant for sending secret letters because.
Speaker 5: They exposed him and they damaged you know, the true
Speaker 5: this patriotic movement to destroy communism. It would be it
Speaker 5: would basically be like killing his movement in the crypt.
Speaker 2: Now, the letter he sent in nineteen fifty four, in particular,
Speaker 2: merited sensitivity. It was a roughly nine thousand word attempt
Speaker 2: to explain why he disliked Dwight Eisenhower so much, the
Speaker 2: first Republican president in multiple decades. The letter built to
Speaker 2: the irrefutable conclusion that Dwight Eisenhower was not really a Republican.
Speaker 2: He was quote a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,
Speaker 2: operating under the direction of his brother, the affable Milton.
Speaker 5: They're really divorced from any semblance of the truth. The
Speaker 5: other thing, though, is that the argument against Eisenhower I
Speaker 5: think fits into the Joe McCarthy argument that clearly the
Speaker 5: setbacks in the world for the United States and the
Speaker 5: fight against communism is a result of communists in the government,
Speaker 5: including Eisenhower, allowing the communists to win.
Speaker 2: Where the ant book had failed, the letter succeeded wildly.
Speaker 2: It ballooned into a book that is over four hundred
Speaker 2: pages long, complete with an extremely tedious footnote section explaining
Speaker 2: the sourcing for his atlandish claims. As wels Us wrote,
Speaker 2: explanations are like government. Nobody loves them, but a minimum
Speaker 2: amount of both is a necessary evil. But anyway, Welch
Speaker 2: was not content to mail secret letters the rest of
Speaker 2: his life. He wanted to build a movement. So four
Speaker 2: years after that letter, in October nineteen fifty eight, Welch
Speaker 2: brought together eleven of his most powerful friends to a
Speaker 2: secret meeting in Indianapolis. He didn't say what for, but
Speaker 2: he did tell them each to book their own hotel
Speaker 2: rooms so people wouldn't see them together. Then he promised
Speaker 2: them that there was nothing conspiratorial about what they were
Speaker 2: about to do, which was to gather in a secret
Speaker 2: location for two days and conspire.
Speaker 3: My undertaking today is to try to tell you all
Speaker 3: about the background, methods, and purposes of the John Birg Society.
Speaker 2: This tape is from a recruitment video he made later on.
Speaker 2: We don't have a recording of what he said that
Speaker 2: day in Indianapolis. I mean, it was a secret meeting,
Speaker 2: but I think it's safe to assume he was on message.
Speaker 2: Welch was there to start a new anti communist organization.
Speaker 2: After all, with the Communists already in control of the
Speaker 2: US presidency, the situation was getting a little out of hand.
Speaker 3: As we have said many times before, the fundamentally decent
Speaker 3: American mind simply refuses to recognize the nature of the
Speaker 3: cunning beasts who constitute our enemies today. This is especially
Speaker 3: true when these criminal gangsters assume all of the suavity
Speaker 3: and regalia of high office.
Speaker 2: Eleven men walked into that room in Indianapolis, and the
Speaker 2: John Birch Society walked out, named by the way for
Speaker 2: an American missionary who'd been killed by Chinese communists and
Speaker 2: then became a kind of patron saint for people like
Speaker 2: Robert Welch Junior. These were important men with money and
Speaker 2: time to burn and an acts to grind. They had
Speaker 2: Eisenhower's former IRS Commissioner, presidents of major companies, a former
Speaker 2: aid to Douglas MacArthur, and Fred Koch, oil man and
Speaker 2: father to the Koch brothers, was there too.
Speaker 3: I'll wake my friends and our rise now I'll be
Speaker 3: forever fallen. We mean business and we can still win,
Speaker 3: but we are in our race against time, with the
Speaker 3: enemy advancing every day.
Speaker 2: Welch knew what he was doing. He took his show
Speaker 2: on the road, giving versions of that speech across the country,
Speaker 2: and a lot of the listeners, bored Americans rattled by
Speaker 2: war and freaked out by integration, thought hey, this guy's
Speaker 2: got a point. He started with just his friends who
Speaker 2: thought like he did, then his friend's friends, and then
Speaker 2: his friend's friends friends. But Welch's dreams were always much grander.
Speaker 3: By any realistic appraisal of our size against our need,
Speaker 3: we are still very small, but we certainly expect our
Speaker 3: present growth to continue until we have the million members
Speaker 3: of Ferva page and unassailable character, which is our goal.
Speaker 2: Despite Welsh's vision for one million patriots to join the
Speaker 2: John Birch Society, estimates show that the membership was likely
Speaker 2: at an all time high when it hit thirty thousand
Speaker 2: members in the sixties.
Speaker 5: The mission was not explicitly to take over a political party.
Speaker 5: It was not to even take over in nessilly American institutions.
Speaker 5: It was to wage a mass education campaign to allure Americans,
Speaker 5: to educate them about the dire nature of the communist
Speaker 5: conspiracy inside the United States.
Speaker 2: And so a small but influential group of right wingers
Speaker 2: became convinced that there was a war going on at home.
Speaker 3: A continuous, undeclared war in which our enemiests observed no
Speaker 3: rules of international law, of civilization, or of human decency.
Speaker 2: But where was the front in this war? Exactly two
Speaker 2: years after its founding, the Birch Society had part of
Speaker 2: the answer the Parent Teacher Association. Of course, we'll be
Speaker 2: right back. The bitter Root Valley lies in the southwest
Speaker 2: of Montana, between the Sapphire and Bitterroot Mountains. It's the
Speaker 2: place they filmed Yellowstone Today. It's gorgeous.
Speaker 6: Okay, so small town.
Speaker 2: Gail Laro Munson was a little girl growing up in
Speaker 2: the valley in the nineteen sixties in a town called Darby.
Speaker 2: Back then, its population was three hundred and ninety eight.
Speaker 6: Close snit neighbors looked out for each other. Kids could
Speaker 6: be out till dark and back home they would be safe.
Speaker 6: If you were caught doing something wrong, the neighbors would
Speaker 6: let your parents know and they'd be ready when you
Speaker 6: got home.
Speaker 2: Darby was the kind of place where you knew everyone,
Speaker 2: especially if you were in Gale's family. Her dad, or
Speaker 2: Villa Rowe, was the superintendent of the school district, but
Speaker 2: in the early nineteen sixties, strangers began to show up
Speaker 2: in the valley. Orville was busy right around then getting
Speaker 2: new Bibles for a local school because there as we're
Speaker 2: all beaten up. He asked a local clergyman how to
Speaker 2: get rid of the old ones in a respectful way,
Speaker 2: and he was told to burn them. So he gathered
Speaker 2: up the bibles and set them on fire, and all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, those strangers leapt into action. It turned
Speaker 2: out they were part of a club, the John Birch Society.
Speaker 7: Merch members appeared at the regular school board meeting with
Speaker 7: a petition demanding that Larree not be offered a new contract.
Speaker 2: It was all over the local radio.
Speaker 7: Majority of the board rejected that demand. This action of
Speaker 7: the board intensified an already steady program of intimidation against
Speaker 7: the role in his family.
Speaker 2: The Butchers. Returning Orville's quiet life in Derby with his
Speaker 2: three kids and his wife completely upside down. Here's Orville.
Speaker 8: There are individuals, of course the community who will drive
Speaker 8: by and make obscene signs. There have been an incidents
Speaker 8: where people have called the house my wife had answered
Speaker 8: and have used obscene language on the telephone. Basically, it's
Speaker 8: a joy, simple constant harassment.
Speaker 2: An archivist in Montana named Kristen Gates wrote an essay
Speaker 2: about all this. She found letters from the principle of
Speaker 2: the local school who said the butchers were quote using
Speaker 2: the local PTA as a springboard to infiltrate the schools.
Speaker 2: Here I'm telling you about what unfolded for the LaRose
Speaker 2: in a tiny town in Montana. But they weren't the
Speaker 2: only people involved in local ptas or schools who became targets.
Speaker 2: This is not the case now, but in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 2: according to one study, almost half of all families in
Speaker 2: America were represented in the PTA fifty percent. The PTA
Speaker 2: became such a well known part of public life that
Speaker 2: it was even the subject of a number one song
Speaker 2: in the nineteen sixties, Harper Valley PTA.
Speaker 3: And it was signed by the secretary Harper Valetta.
Speaker 2: The PTA played a huge role in modernizing American education.
Speaker 2: Every local PTA was part of the National PTA, which
Speaker 2: was run out of Washington, and they worked together to
Speaker 2: petition schools to adapt and modernize, like a miniature version
Speaker 2: of the federal government. It was actually originally called the
Speaker 2: Congress of Mother Anyways, all this paid dividends. If you've
Speaker 2: drunk fluoridated water, which you have gotten vaccinated in schools,
Speaker 2: gone to a public kindergarten, or just been at a
Speaker 2: school that received federal funds, you can thank the PTA
Speaker 2: next bakesale, maybe by a cookie. As a sociologist, Robert
Speaker 2: Putnam writes, the PTA in its day was quote one
Speaker 2: of the most impressive organizational success stories in American history
Speaker 2: end quote. And who at that exact moment wanted to
Speaker 2: pull off another of the most impressive organizational success stories
Speaker 2: in American history Dark Willy Wonka Robert Welch Junior, whose
Speaker 2: recruiting methods were slightly more apocalyptic.
Speaker 3: The Wise and the Brave, do not hold back, gonna
Speaker 3: kill it is too late.
Speaker 2: In its newsletter, the John Birch Society told its members
Speaker 2: to quote join your local PTA at the beginning of
Speaker 2: the school year. Get your conservative friends to do likewise
Speaker 2: and go to work to take it over, you will
Speaker 2: run into real battles against determined leftists who have had
Speaker 2: everything their way. But it is time we went on
Speaker 2: the offensive to make such groups the instrument of conservative
Speaker 2: purpose with the same vigor and determination that the liberals
Speaker 2: have used to the opposite aims. With encouragement from the
Speaker 2: John Birch Society, extremists of all stripes started showing up
Speaker 2: to local ptas across the country trying to take them over.
Speaker 4: You know, all kinds of methods were being used.
Speaker 2: Sarah Heath, a historian at Indiana University Kocomo.
Speaker 4: So, the Birch Society might pack cars full of people,
Speaker 4: so if I bring thirty people to a local meeting
Speaker 4: of a PTA.
Speaker 6: But basically what they.
Speaker 4: Would try to do is, if I can get thirty
Speaker 4: people to go to this one local meeting, we can
Speaker 4: try to take over the proceedings of that meeting.
Speaker 2: Suddenly, amid the conversations about fire safety and participatory democracy,
Speaker 2: parents had to consider things like whether skipping the pledge
Speaker 2: of allegiance at the start of a meeting made you
Speaker 2: a Stalin level communist or an Eisenhower level one. Such
Speaker 2: considerations it turned out demand quite a bit of everyone's.
Speaker 4: Time, because what they wanted to do was first get
Speaker 4: some people to get so tired that they would just say,
Speaker 4: I've got to go home, right. PTA meetings are usually
Speaker 4: in the early evening, so some people would leave. Then
Speaker 4: they call the vote, and then they have a majority.
Speaker 2: The virtuers wanted to use the ptas to reach school
Speaker 2: boards so they could change the textbooks and root out
Speaker 2: all the commune and sex education stuff. But a lot
Speaker 2: of what they did was actual harassment.
Speaker 4: You know. There are examples of people throwing trash on
Speaker 4: the lawns of PTA members, or threatening people by the phone,
Speaker 4: calling them at all hours of the night, you know,
Speaker 4: just to keep them awake.
Speaker 2: The PTA fought back in classic PTA form, with pamphlet
Speaker 2: and lists of meeting best practices, but this was a
Speaker 2: little like bringing knives to a gunfight. At this point,
Speaker 2: there'd even been a report of a bombing at a
Speaker 2: restaurant where a PTA meeting was going to be held.
Speaker 2: This is what happens when you talk about national politics,
Speaker 2: like Robert Welsch Junior, like you're in a shadowy.
Speaker 3: War, a continuous, undeclared war in which our enemies observed
Speaker 3: no rules of international law of civilization are of human decency.
Speaker 2: The PTA kept pushing back in their own way against
Speaker 2: the virtures. There's even a quote from the PTA president
Speaker 2: in the congressional record saying, these extremists are not really
Speaker 2: after the PTA, but are attempting to gain control of
Speaker 2: it to get at their real objective, the educational system.
Speaker 2: But for Orville Row, the superintendent in Darby, Montana, these
Speaker 2: extremists weren't some faraway thing. They were at his doorstep.
Speaker 8: And I walked home in the evening. At times I've
Speaker 8: had a car follow me. Ordinarily, they apparently are cowards
Speaker 8: because when I stopped and gone over to take their
Speaker 8: license them But there was how the picture.
Speaker 2: But the aggression wasn't just limited to Orville. Orville's eldest
Speaker 2: son was a fifth grader in the local school. One day,
Speaker 2: there was a basketball game. He was sitting in the
Speaker 2: stands watching. He was not an unpopular kid, but midway
Speaker 2: through the game, a couple of classmates walked up to him.
Speaker 2: They pulled him out of his seat and they began
Speaker 2: to beat him mercilessly. This is Gail again, his.
Speaker 6: Sister, and when they were beating him up. He was
Speaker 6: at a basketball game in the gym and other kids
Speaker 6: were sturing it on.
Speaker 2: The kids weren't Birchers all they knew he was Orville,
Speaker 2: the Bible Burner's son.
Speaker 8: Then he's coming into the house and ask pissed why
Speaker 8: they are calling him names?
Speaker 3: Is I didn't do anything?
Speaker 8: And of course it's rather had to explain, very youngster
Speaker 8: in that age.
Speaker 6: He came home bloodied, he was We were all confused,
Speaker 6: why you know, what did I do? Why did this happen?
Speaker 2: The tipping point came when Orville le Rowe was driving
Speaker 2: his whole family along one of the roads around Derby.
Speaker 2: Suddenly another car appeared and tried to run them off
Speaker 2: the road. They all could have died, and that was
Speaker 2: the last straw. After years of harassment, he decided it
Speaker 2: was time to leave Derby.
Speaker 6: He sacrificed for the family. And I know that was
Speaker 6: a really difficult thing to not stay in fight, because
Speaker 6: my dad has so much integrity and he's a tough guy,
Speaker 6: and if he hadn't had a family, I firmly believe
Speaker 6: my brothers and I believe he would have stayed and
Speaker 6: he would have fought this situation.
Speaker 2: The people of Derby had a picnic for the LaRose
Speaker 2: before they packed up and left. Montana had been Orville's
Speaker 2: home since he was a kid, the place he'd loved
Speaker 2: to fish and hunt, taught school, and raised a family.
Speaker 2: When the LaRose left, the school system didn't just lose
Speaker 2: its superintendent, It fell apart. There were twenty three teachers
Speaker 2: in the Derby Consolidated School that fall, only seven went
Speaker 2: back to work. Things were never the same for the
Speaker 2: Lereaux family either. When I called the kids up, none
Speaker 2: of them really wanted to talk about this. Then they
Speaker 2: changed their mind, I think, if I had to guess,
Speaker 2: because they wanted to stand up against the people who
Speaker 2: did this to their family, to their father and also
Speaker 2: to their mother.
Speaker 6: Dorothy, mydad said before this happened, she was such a
Speaker 6: fun person, great sense of humor. I'd love to hear
Speaker 6: my dead stories of because I didn't, I didn't witness
Speaker 6: a lot of this, and so you know, we were
Speaker 6: all cheated out of an amazing person. And just I
Speaker 6: just I just can picture her kind of don't don't
Speaker 6: tell you know, the neighbors this, don't tell the neighbors that,
Speaker 6: don't tell anybody this, don't tell anybody this.
Speaker 2: They moved from one small town to another, but Dorothy
Speaker 2: never could quite trust her neighbors again. What came of
Speaker 2: the Birch Society and the PTA after the break? A
Speaker 2: little while ago I stopped by a house in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: It was shaded by a sycamore tree, and there was
Speaker 2: a root sixty six sign leaning in the front windowsill,
Speaker 2: facing the quiet street. I was there to talk to
Speaker 2: a woman named Marva Felchlin. Marva grew up in California
Speaker 2: and was a student at welby Way Elementary School. She
Speaker 2: was a baby boomer in the classical sense, a house
Speaker 2: in a safe and lovely subdivision, a dad in the
Speaker 2: defense industry, and a mom in the PTA that, yes,
Speaker 2: Bircher's had tried to take over. Her mom's name was Zelda,
Speaker 2: and she never got over what happened.
Speaker 9: It's a big thing that happened in our lives.
Speaker 5: Why do you think the story had banded to your
Speaker 5: mother so much?
Speaker 9: Because I think you know, the PTA and her activities
Speaker 9: in the PTA probably represented, as with other women in there,
Speaker 9: a lot of what they believed in. And here they're
Speaker 9: being accused of being liars and dishonest and Unamerican. Those
Speaker 9: of those people were probably children of immigrants. I mean,
Speaker 9: that's a serious accusation in those anytime.
Speaker 2: But in those days, Zelda had always wanted to be
Speaker 2: a writer. She once submitted a script to the Twilight Zone,
Speaker 2: but the place she really wrote was her Parent Teacher
Speaker 2: Association newsletter. It's the one we read from at the
Speaker 2: beginning of this episode, the April nineteen sixty two edition
Speaker 2: of the welby Way Elementary School PTA newsletter The Well
Speaker 2: be Buzzings With the curious editor's note, Zelda wrote that
Speaker 2: when Bircher's across the country were trying to take down
Speaker 2: the PTA, she took to her newsletter to fight back.
Speaker 9: I don't I'm not surprised that my mother pushed back
Speaker 9: in any way, because that's I think she's kind of
Speaker 9: that kind of personality that she didn't stand for a
Speaker 9: lot of crap.
Speaker 2: You know, Marva has held on to the original copy
Speaker 2: of that newsletter for years. I asked her to read
Speaker 2: me the editor's message.
Speaker 9: Okay, the power to seek the truth is within all
Speaker 9: of us. The way in which we seek it is
Speaker 9: privilege and right of all of us. We are fortunate
Speaker 9: enough to live under a system of government that secures
Speaker 9: and protects that right. But there are some who abuse
Speaker 9: this freedom and cloud the answers and the issues, so
Speaker 9: that seeking the truth and knowing it is the truth
Speaker 9: becomes a harder task than it was ever meant to be.
Speaker 9: I say this, give me the right to seek the truth,
Speaker 9: but justly, and rationally and kindly. Give me the wisdom
Speaker 9: to understand and recognize the truth simply, without unseen or
Speaker 9: unknown factors behind it. Give me the wisdom to use
Speaker 9: the truth properly, openly, knowingly, and in its entirety, without
Speaker 9: bending or twisting said truth to fit my own purposes.
Speaker 9: Give me the graciousness to accept the truth, although it
Speaker 9: may disagree with or disapprove my own personal opinions and beliefs.
Speaker 9: And last, give me the wisdom and right to seek
Speaker 9: the truth in whatever manner I so choose, so long
Speaker 9: as I in the manner I have chosen, do not
Speaker 9: belittle or deface the object of my search, so long
Speaker 9: as I can honestly say to myself it is the
Speaker 9: truth alone that I am seeking. So the last off editor.
Speaker 2: During those same years when Bircher's were mobbing PTA meetings,
Speaker 2: the PTA as a national organization began to die for good.
Speaker 2: It just kept losing members until it became effectively a
Speaker 2: loose group of local organizations. It still exists, but you
Speaker 2: wouldn't write a number one song about it anymore. I
Speaker 2: don't think that was all the doing of the Birch Society,
Speaker 2: though it certainly didn't help. The rise of the Butchers
Speaker 2: in the fall of the PTA were both part of
Speaker 2: the backlash to Brown versus Board of Education, a response
Speaker 2: to integration and civil rights. The Birch Society went into
Speaker 2: decline then too. It had become radioactive, mocked to death
Speaker 2: in the press, repudiated by even William F. Buckley, turned
Speaker 2: on by mainstream Republicans, torn by its own infighting, investigated
Speaker 2: by the Anti Defamation League in the FBI, but it
Speaker 2: never vanished. Robert Welch Junior was involved with the Birch
Speaker 2: Society almost until his death in nineteen eighty five. Under
Speaker 2: the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who, true to form wels
Speaker 2: once called a communist Lackeye, his society lives on in
Speaker 2: diminished form these days. They're a lot less notable. They're
Speaker 2: just one in a sea of right wing groups. But
Speaker 2: why did people like Welsh hate the Parent Teacher Association
Speaker 2: so much it seems to me like the Birch Society
Speaker 2: and the PTA were locked in a kind of death
Speaker 2: match between two visions of American civil society. The PTA
Speaker 2: was the vision of the America and Vital Center, progressive, orderly, incremental,
Speaker 2: and evidence based. Its model was the US federal system,
Speaker 2: local and national working patiently together. But the John Birch
Speaker 2: Society was modeled on communist cells, secretive with hard caps
Speaker 2: on membership to keep things decentralized rather than optimistic. It
Speaker 2: was paranoid rather than incremental. They called for kind of revolution.
Speaker 2: The PTA was about trusting your neighbors to share your
Speaker 2: interests too. The John Birch Society was about always suspecting
Speaker 2: them of betraying you. I don't know if that sounds
Speaker 2: familiar to you, but it shure does to me. Revisionist
Speaker 2: History is produced by me Ben Att, Fhaffrey, and Lucy
Speaker 2: Sullivan with Nina Bird Lawrens. Our editor is Karen Schakerji.
Speaker 2: Fact checking on this episode by Sam Russick. Original scoring
Speaker 2: by Luis Gara, mastering by Jake Gorski. Our executive producer
Speaker 2: is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix, the State
Speaker 2: Historical Society of North Dakota, the University of Montana, and
Speaker 2: the UCLA Library Special Collections. I'm Ben Mattafaffor