Robert W. Welch Jr.
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Robert Henry Winborne Welch Jr. (December 1, 1899 - January 6, 1985) was an American anti-communist and co-founder of the John Birch Society.
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[edit] Biography
Welch was born in rural Chowan County, North Carolina. He was a gifted child who received his early education at home from his mother, a school teacher. He enrolled in high school at the age of ten and was admitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the age of twelve. Welch was a fundamentalist Baptist and, by his own admission, was "insufferable" in his attempts to convert his fellow students. He later became a Unitarian, remaining so for most his life. Welch would later attend the United States Naval Academy and Harvard Law School but would drop out of both institutions before graduating. He would later assert this was because of his opposition to the political leanings of the instructors.
Welch decided to manufacture candy as a way to earn a living, describing it as "the one field in which it seemed least impossible to get started without either capital or experience." He founded the Oxford Candy Company in Brooklyn, New York, which was a one-man operation until he hired his brother James to assist him. James Welch left to start his own candy company in 1925.
Welch was inspired one day while making a batch of caramel to pour out a flat piece and put a stick in the candy so it could be eaten like a lollipop. He named this candy a Papa Sucker and licensed the idea to the Brach's candy company in Chicago.
The Oxford Candy Company went out of business during the Great Depression, but his brother's company, the James O. Welch Company, survived, and Robert was hired by his brother. The company began making caramel lollipops, renamed Sugar Daddies, and Welch developed other well known candies such as Sugar Babies, Junior Mints, and Pom Poms. Welch retired a wealthy man in 1956.
From his teenage years, Welch had been an opponent of Communism. He was a strong believer in various conspiracies in which he believed a wide range of individuals and organizations were part of an international Communist plot. In his own words, the American people consisted of four groups: "Communists, communist dupes or sympathizers, the uninformed who have yet to be awakened to the communist danger, and the ignorant."
Welch joined the Republican Party and then ran and lost an election for the post of Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts in 1950. In 1952, he supported Robert Taft's unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination, and was a prominent campaign contributor to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy's re-election campaign.
Welch founded the John Birch Society in December of 1958 [[1]]. Its original membership consisted of only eleven men. But Welch's wealth allowed the organization to have a wide impact and sponsor a number of publications. At its height, the organization claimed it had tens of thousands of members, but its political views limited its ability to form alliances with other groups (even other anti-Communists like Richard Nixon and, to a lesser extent, Ronald Reagan, were denounced by the Society as being too liberal) and diminished its real impact. In October 1965, William F. Buckley, Jr. denounced Welch in his magazine National Review as promoting bizarre conspiracy theories far removed from common sense, and for working with racists like Revilo P. Oliver. While not attacking the members of the society, Buckley attacked Welch in order to prevent his outlandish views from sinking the conservative movement. Oliver was later ousted in a purge of anti-Semitic and racist members in the early 1960s.
Welch accused Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower of being communist sympathisers and possibly Soviet agents of influence. He alleged that President Eisenhower was a "conscious, dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy", and that Eisenhower's brother Milton was the President's superior in the communist apparatus. Eisenhower never responded publicly to Welch's claims.
Welch's communist accusations led to the landmark Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. case, which established that the New York Times v. Sullivan press protections do not apply to defamed private individuals.
In the 1960s, Welch began to believe that even the Communists were not the final level of his perceived conspiracy and began saying that Communism was just a front for a Master Conspiracy, which had roots in the Illuminati; The essay "The Truth in Time" is an example[2]. He referred to the Conspirators as "The Insiders," seeing them mainly in internationalist financial and business families such as the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, and organizations such as the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. He did avoid the anti-Semitism, anti-Masonry, and anti-Catholicism of other Conspiracy theorists, saying that such prejudices would "neutralize" anti-Communist, anti-Conspiracy efforts; in fact, according to one source (see footnote 55), Welch converted to Catholicism in the months before his death.
Welch was the editor and publisher of the monthly magazine American Opinion and the weekly "The Review of the News". He also wrote The Road to Salesmanship (1941), May God Forgive Us (1951), "The Politician" (about Eisenhower) and The Life of John Birch (1954). A collection of his essays were also edited into a book "The New Americanism".
Welch was married to Marian Probert Welch and had two sons. He died on January 6, 1985. James Welch, who had publicly distanced himself from his brother's political views, died less than a month later.
Welch and other Birch leaders, including Oliver, appear as characters in William Buckley's novel "Getting It Right."
[edit] Quotes
“Madison and Hamilton and Jay and their compatriots of the Convention prepared and adopted a Constitution in which they nowhere even mentioned the word democracy, not because they were not familiar with such a form of government, but because they were.” – Robert Welch, in a speech at the Constitution Day luncheon of We, The People in Chicago, on September 17, 1961 (reprinted in the June 30, 1986 issue of The New American magazine)
“The American Republic was bound — is still bound – to follow in the centuries to come the same course to destruction as did Rome. But our real ground of complaint is that we have been pushed down the demagogic road to disaster by conspiratorial hands, far sooner and far faster than would have been the results of natural political evolution. ... We are being insidiously, conspiratorially, and treasonously led by deception, by bribery, by coercion, and by fear, to destroy a republic that was the envy and model for all of the civilized world.” – Robert Welch, Ibid.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Janson, Donald & Eismann, Bernard "The John Birch Society" pages 25-54 from The Far Right, New York: McGraw-Hill Inc, 1963.
