Origins
The society was established in Indianapolis, Indiana, on December 9, 1958, by a group of twelve led by Robert W. Welch Jr., a retired candy manufacturer from Belmont, Massachusetts. Welch named the new organization after John Birch, an American Baptist missionary and military intelligence officer who was killed by communist forces in China in August 1945, shortly after the conclusion of World War II. Welch claimed that Birch was an unknown but dedicated anti-communist, and the first American casualty of the Cold War.[29] Jimmy Doolittle, who met Birch after bailing out over China following the Tokyo Raid, said in his autobiography that he was certain that Birch "would not have approved" of that particular use of his name.[30] One of the first members of the John Birch Society was Fred C. Koch, who became one of its primary financial supporters. According to investigative journalist Jane Mayer, Koch's sons, David and Charles Koch were also members of the John Birch Society. However, they left before the 1970s.[31]
Harry Lynde Bradley, co-founder of the Allen Bradley Company and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,[32][33] Fred C. Koch, founder of Koch Industries[34][35][36][37] and Robert Waring Stoddard, President of Wyman-Gordon, a major industrial enterprise, were among the founding members.[38] Another was Revilo P. Oliver, a University of Illinois professor who was later expelled from the Society and helped found the National Alliance. A transcript of Welch's two-day presentation at the founding meeting was published as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, and became a cornerstone of its beliefs, with each new member receiving a copy.[citation needed] According to Welch, "both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'"[39][40] Welch saw collectivism as the main threat to western culture, and American liberals as "secret communist traitors" who provided cover for the gradual process of collectivism, with the ultimate goal of replacing the nations of western civilization with a one-world socialist government. "There are many stages of welfarism, socialism, and collectivism in general," he wrote, "but Communism is the ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction."[40]
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