Haunted Across the Political Spectrum: The Specter of Communism in Two Midcentury American Organizations

Organizations operating in midcentury America experienced a period of relative economic prosperity and global power. While political tensions existed between the United States and the Soviet Union since the culmination of the World War II, when the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test in 1949 and then successfully launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, these political tensions became more pressing concerns to American organizations. In fact, the perceived existential threat posed by communism became an observable rhetorical justification for organization and action within the United States. Through the use of corpus linguistics techniques, a comparative analysis was conducted on the foundational documents of the rightwing, John Birch Society and the leftwing, Students for a Democratic Society. Relative word frequencies, collocations, concordancing and statistical analyses were conducted around the use and context of the keyword communism. The results suggest that while these radical and reactionary groups perceived a common threat, multifinality exists in terms of organizational response. This insight is useful to those engaged in strategy development and rhetoric for political and business organizations.

‘Fight the reds, support the blue’: Blue Lives Matter and the US counter-subversive tradition

In the wake of the rightwing siege of the US Capitol, which put ‘Blue Lives Matter’ supporters at odds with police protecting the Capitol, the authors look to the history and contours of the ‘counter-subversive tradition’ in the United States and its locus in local police departments. They examine a similar moment of social unrest – the mid-to-late 1960s – and the pro-police organising undertaken by Support Your Local Police (SYLP), a front group of the ultra-right John Birch Society, which blended anti-communism with opposition to the Black Freedom Movement, with particular anxiety about the spectre of united white and black revolt from below and the encroachment of the federal government on local power from above. The campaign also presented a kind of uniquely rightwing anti-statism, largely through the rejection of impediments to local powers and, specifically, the untrammelled power of the cops. In making sense of the Capitol siege, and the years of rightwing organising that preceded it, the article argues that this important precursor to ‘Blue Lives Matter’ presents a schema for understanding longstanding efforts in police organising in defence of what James Baldwin called ‘arrogant autonomy’ – freedom from civilian oversight or political challenges to cop power, and from all challenges to locally entrenched structures of white power.

Conservatives vs. Managers

This chapter highlights the fissures among and between corporate capitalists and conservatives in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1950s, businessmen and journalists alike regarded the National Association of Manufacturers' (NAM) ideological “backwardness” as a hindrance to business's interests and unrepresentative of the business community. Partly, this was about corporate liberals criticizing NAM to highlight their own enlightened and reasonable moderation. But mostly, this criticism was fairly earned by a group of “ultraconservatives,” whose control of the purse strings and ties to far-right groups like the John Birch Society were increasingly at odds with NAM's internationalism, professional goals, and membership quandaries—areas overseen by NAM staff. It would be wrong to call the NAM staff “liberal,” but its outlook was more pragmatic, more influenced by business and management schools, and less committed to “rugged individualism” than that of NAM's conservative leaders. The tensions created by ultraconservatives would lead to a restructuring of NAM that sidelined the “old guard” and gave NAM its first full-time paid president and a more pragmatic, issues-based approach to its work.

As teorias conspiratórias nos Estados Unidos: do Citzens Councils e da JBS a Donald Trump

<p>Este artigo discute duas organizações políticas dos EUA da década de 1950/1960, o <em>Citizens Councils</em> (CCs) e a <em>The John Birch Society</em> (JBS). Nossa proposta é entender como a retórica "populista" / "americanista" historicamente se disseminou e se propagou chegando ao presente com Donald Trump, entendendo-o como um fenômeno contemporâneo cujo governo - no primeiro mandato - apoia de forma velada e com retórica confusa, as vezes apoiando supremacistas raciais, defendendo ideias nostálgicas e propagando cotidianamente teorias conspiratórias. Para além da retorica, Trump adota teses populistas propõe leis mais rígidas anti-imigração, políticas anti-refugiados e restrições aos requerentes de asilo, além de propõe acelerar a construção do muro na fronteira mexicana.</p>

From New Deal to New Right

This essay foregrounds the beliefs of Ezra Taft Benson concerning the social, political, and diplomatic crises facing the United States since World War II in the context of the rise of the American conservative movement. The Old Right mobilized on a platform of anti-communism, small government, and defense of traditional values and institutions. As secretary of agriculture and a member of the Quorum of the Twelve of the LDS church, Benson played a key role in the movement’s development and growth. He was in touch with leading conservatives such as Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, Governor George Wallace of Alabama, and Robert Welch of the John Birch Society. Benson was also active in moving Mormons into the Republican Party and conservative groups. His commitment to conservative politics carried into the 1970s and 1980s and helped shape the emergence of the New Right.

Anticommunists and the World Government Conspiracy

Chapter 2 uncovers the rhetoric of national anticommunist organizations, especially Minute Women and the John Birch Society, with regard to fears of a totalitarian world government during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s and explores the related history of one-worldism and millennialism. Activities of Minute Women in Indianapolis prove they acted as guardians of their local communities and sought to block the formation of local groups they believed connected to the communist conspiracy. Also discussed is the appeal of conspiracy theory to rightwing women and connections between anticommunist fears of one-worldism and the burgeoning feminist movement in the early 1960s.

Women’s Experience in Cold War America

Chapter 1 surveys Cold War America and looks at the experience of American women coming out of World War II. This chapter explains the history of world federalism and the desire for increased global cooperation after two world wars in the twentieth century. It also introduces important anticommunist organizations that challenged world government, like Pro America, the Minute Women, and the John Birch Society and activism in Indiana. Finally, it discusses rightwing women’s politics during the postwar era. Like their leftwing counterparts active in Women Strike for Peace, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement, rightwing women were intensely active during the 1950s and 1960s. In that way, they too defy the notion of apolitical housewives and offer more proof that American women were “not June Cleaver,” but unlike their leftist counterparts, they rooted their political activism in maternalism and essentialized the nature of women to include antisubversive political activity.

Big Sister

This book maps the interplay of conservative and feminist women in Indiana during the second half of the twentieth century and proposes an alternative framework for understanding the second wave feminist movement. The central theme is that rightwing women’s understanding of one-worldism--a conspiracy theory refined by grassroots anticommunists during the height of the Cold War--shaped conservative women’s response to the second wave feminist movement and circumscribed feminist activism. Over the course of the postwar era, anticommunist organizations like the Minute Women of the U.S.A., Pro America, and the John Birch Society provided a forum for rightwing women to develop their understanding of related forces pushing for a “one-world,” totalitarian supra-government, forces they described as treasonous. While communists often were lumped under the “one-worlder” category, the two were not synonymous. In literature rightwing women described a spectrum of subversion that included a fifth column but also those advocating domestic cooperation through federal regionalism, gender equality as opposed to gender difference, and internationalists advocating stronger authority for the United Nations. The book documents the work of Hoosier feminists to accomplish their goals, especially the Equal Rights Amendment, in a hostile political environment and the work of rightwing women to counter the threat of internationalism or one-worldism, culminating in a showdown at the 1977 International Women’s Year celebration.