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The Birchers got much right, including their admiration of the heroic fight of Joseph McCarthy and others against domestic Communists and other subversives. They lost their way when Robert Welch and his associates went beyond fighting Marxists, Fabian socialists, and New Leftists and developed a universal conspiracy theory cleaned up of the anti-Semitism that was characteristic of earlier theories based on the spurious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This conspiracy theory became their dogma and they tried to interpret events in light of that dogma.

I was a member of the Birch Society for a time, having been enticed to join by reading the Blue Book and some of their early publications. However, I quickly soured on the "master conspiracy" theory, which is oddly similar to V. I. Lenin's view of how the world works as expressed in his pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

After I left, a friend of mine joined and became a chapter chairman in the mid-1980's. I was about to rejoin the society so I could become a member of his chapter, but before I could do so, he got purged. At chapter meetings, my friend had been trying to instill in his listeners an awareness and understanding of such real world issues as the Soviet threat and President Reagan's domestic agenda, while paying little or no attention to the "master conspiracy." Furthermore, rather than relying solely on Birch Society publications, he made available to his chapter publications from conservative journals and think tanks, and the Defense Department pamphlet, The Soviet Threat.

The Birch honcho for the region disapproved of this and dismissed him for not toeing the party line. His chapter quickly folded, but the society's ideological purity was preserved.

Robert Welch's organizational concepts are good ones: having actual groups physically meet on a periodic basis, learn politics and history, and engage in political action. Furthermore, hierarchy and top down decision making are effective safeguards against local groups going off on tangents or deviating from the organization's ideology. That may explain the Birch Society's longevity even as much younger groups like Concerned Women for America and Christian Coalition are struggling to stay alive. The Birch Society's main organizational problem is not a lack of structure, but the age of the members, as Steve Blow alluded to in his Dallas Morning News hit piece. However, theirs is a problem other groups like the VFW, Masons, Odd Fellows, Gideons, Kiwanis, and others suffer. Baby Boomers and succeeding generations seem to have problems with such groups.

The downside to any centrally controlled organization is that when the leadership goes off on a tangent, it is difficult to be a dissenter. If you are lobbying for veterans' rights, administering children's hospitals, or distributing Bibles to hotels and schools, it is relatively easy to stay on task. Because politics is not focused on a single issue, staying on task is more difficult.

Robert Welch and his associates began going off track in the early 1960s, between their earlier anti-Communism and their later anti-"Conspiracy" beliefs. They noted, and correctly so, that liberals like Adlai Stevenson and Nelson Rockefeller had many of the same goals as Marxists: centralized power, radical egalitarianism, support for international government over national sovereignty, and a cradle to grave welfare state. They also correctly believed there were financial and business links between Communists and very wealthy Americans and Europeans. These dealings were documented by the former Hoover Institute historian Antony Sutton in several books in the 1970s.

Robert Welch, Gary Allen (author of None Dare Call It Conspiracy) and others made the assumption that since there was philosophical common ground between modern liberalism and Communism and much evidence of commercial connections, there must also be an organizational linkage. Welch and Allen drew heavily from the writings of Nesta Webster, an early 20th Century British author who was a favorite of British and Continental fascists. They kept her central theme of a secret elite society dating from the 1700s with the goal of world domination. However, they gleaned out the anti-Semitic elements in her writings.

Welch and his associates never found a "Joe Valachi" who could tie all the groups together. At best they had a few statements by the historian Carroll Quigley, the reading of which he disputed, and some quotes attributed to various famous people, like Benjamin Disraeli and Joseph Kennedy. However, the Birch Society leadership decided that the "Conspiracy" message was so important that it outweighed the "nuts and bolts" issues like socialized medicine, Federal regulation of private business, appeasement of the Soviets, etc. They opposed these matters, to be sure, but their literature invariably incorporated their core belief that the "Conspiracy" was behind all of them.

That insistence on pushing conspiracy theory was the Birch Society's undoing. The tight command structure, while it did weed out racists and anti-Semites, also imposed a sort of group think on the members. That pattern, combined with an unprovable conspiracy theory regarded as "fringe" by most other conservatives, inhibited the recruitment necessary to fill the ranks to replace "burned out" members.

In the early 1960s, Robert Welch wrote a tract called "The Neutralizers", where he condemned the sort of tangentalism, such as single issue advocacy and millennialism, that neutralized political activists. The irony is that Welch's conspiracy theories were themselves neutralizers.