A Conspiratorial Life
Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The first full-scale biography of Robert Welch, who founded the John Birch Society and planted some of modern conservatism’s most insidious seeds.
Though you may not know his name, Robert Welch (1899-1985)—founder of the John Birch Society—is easily one of the most significant architects of our current political moment. In A Conspiratorial Life, the first full-scale biography of Welch, Edward H. Miller delves deep into the life of an overlooked figure whose ideas nevertheless reshaped the American right.
A child prodigy who entered college at age 12, Welch became an unlikely candy magnate, founding the company that created Sugar Daddies, Junior Mints, and other famed confections. In 1958, he funneled his wealth into establishing the organization that would define his legacy and change the face of American politics: the John Birch Society. Though the group’s paranoiac right-wing nativism was dismissed by conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley, its ideas gradually moved from the far-right fringe into the mainstream. By exploring the development of Welch’s political worldview, A Conspiratorial Life shows how the John Birch Society’s rabid libertarianism—and its highly effective grassroots networking—became a profound, yet often ignored or derided influence on the modern Republican Party. Miller convincingly connects the accusatory conservatism of the midcentury John Birch Society to the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party, the Trump administration, Q, and more. As this book makes clear, whether or not you know his name or what he accomplished, it’s hard to deny that we’re living in Robert Welch’s America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this immersive biography, historian Miller (Nut Country) traces the roots of today's right-wing conspiracy theories to John Birch Society founder Robert Welch (1899–1985). Raised on a former plantation in North Carolina, Welch enrolled at the University of North Carolina at age 12 and, after losing his own successful candy company during the Great Depression, became wealthy working as the head of sales for his younger brother's candy firm. Miller carefully documents how Welch's opposition to the New Deal and "longing for a bygone era that government interference and rampant immigration had destroyed" evolved in full-fledged conspiracy mongering in the 1960s and '70s, when he accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist agent and alleged that the Illuminati were planning to "revamp the United Nations into a strong one world government." Though National Review editor William F. Buckley tried to marginalize Welch and the John Birch Society, Miller argues that Welch's lack of pretension appealed to grassroots conservatives in a way that the patrician Buckley never could, and that the rise of Trumpism and QAnon shows that "Buckley would win many battles, but Welch won the war." Scrupulously researched and lucidly written, this is an enlightening study of an overlooked yet influential figure in American politics.
