Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,149

This is the unmarked grave of Robert Welch.

Born in 1899 in Chowan County, North Carolina, Robert Welch is one of the worst humans to ever pollute this pretty terrible nation. Like a lot of the people competing for the title of Worst American Ever–Anthony Comstock, Donald Trump, J. Edgar Hoover, James Henry Hammond–he was pretty terrible from the time he was a child. He was a really smart kid and started at the University of North Carolina at the age of 12. He spent most of his time there telling his classmates they were going to Hell if they did not convert to his preferred form of fundamentalist Southern Baptist theology. Things did not improve as he aged. He later got an appointment to Annapolis but did not complete at the Naval Academy. Same with Harvard Law, where he dropped out.

Welch had money though and he opened a candy company. So this is going to be perhaps a bit of a weird moment–but the founder of the John Birch Society is also the inventor of Junior Mints, which is absolutely one of my favorite things to discuss in this series. I also don’t like Junior Mints, which doesn’t hurt here. He opened a candy company in Brooklyn in 1922. He bought someone else’s recipe for some candy to do it and he started experimenting. His brother worked for him and then found his own company in 1925. Welch created his first product that would last–Sugar Daddies. But the company went under during the Depression, so he joined his brother’s company. It was there that he came up with Junior Mints in 1949. He also was involved in the creation of Sugar Babies and Pom Poms.

But Welch’s true add to America was not his candy. It was his extremism. There was no conspiracy too crazy for Robert Welch. Everyone was a communist who did not share his crazy ideas. That included the entire Democratic Party and most of the Republican Party too. Welch saw conspiracies everywhere. He had always been a lunatic. At first, he was a big Robert Taft guy. He opposed American intervention into World War II, since he largely supported the Nazis and everything they stood for. He ran for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1950 but lost the primary since, you know, he was insane. He came to love Joe McCarthy and was a major donor to the drunken fascist senator from Wisconsin. He believed Eisenhower was a little on the pink side and so supported Taft’s no-shot bid to beat the general in the 1952 primaries. He then started traveling to Asia to meet with anti-communists as such as Chiang Kai-Shek and Syngman Rhee, getting the “real story” from the men on the front lines.

All of this led to Welch to form the John Birch Society in 1958. Finding the Republican Party not nearly committed enough to fight communism, he had to do it himself. Poor John Birch was a missionary and OSS agent in China who was killed by Chinese communists in 1945. I don’t know that Birch had right-wing politics per se (he was known for taking a lot of risks, which eventually led him into a place he couldn’t get out of) but Welch used him to name his new anti-communist conspiracy theory group, making him famous today.

Welch started this group with a tiny number of like-minded people at an Indianapolis conference, where he spoke for two days straight. I’m sure that was compelling. Welch was essentially an early version of Rand Paul–he opposed American intervention in Vietnam and loathed the United Nations, which he thought was a giant international conspiracy to overthrow American sovereignty, but he thought that the U.S. needed to fight communism at its borders. He was basically an old-school isolationist combined with an extreme radicalism about the threats abroad. He thought FDR had known that Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor and welcomed it to get the U.S. involved in World War II, a conspiracy theory with legs. The thing about Welch though is that in some ways, he really admired the Communist Party. He saw the discipline the CP placed on its members and the secret activities they engaged in as an ideal that the JBS could copy. Of course, that was truly a fantasy for Welch, but it gives you a sense of how he thought about political action.

To say that Welch was opposed to civil rights is like saying a Chicagoan is opposed to putting ketchup on a hot dog–oppose is just not the right word. Fluoride in water? Obviously a conspiracy. For example, one of the places the JBS really took off was Orange County. That was a place in the postwar years defined by a new suburbanization, a lot of defense jobs, and far-right politics as a lot of those folks had come from the Okie migrations twenty-five years earlier that brought evangelical Christianity in a major way to southern California. Things had a improved a lot for them since. It was JBS grassroots people who started organizing the far-right anger about civil rights and schools that fueled how Barry Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 and then Ronald Reagan became California’s nominee for governor in 1966. Now, Reagan, Nixon, and William F. Buckley were all very astute at distancing themselves officially from Welch and the JBS, while very much happy to take advantage of their incandescent anger over liberalism.

The thing is that Welch might just be a loon. I mean, he was a loon. But he’s a loon who laid a lot of the groundwork for the contemporary disaster that is the American right. He would fit in amazingly well in the contemporary Republican Party. I mean, what about Ken Paxton would Robert Welch not like? By the mid 60s, there were 100,000 members of the John Birch Society. But then far-right figures didn’t really need the JBS anymore. They could just have the Republican Party, which they did more and more by the rise of Goldwater and Reagan.

Welch stayed active in his insanity until 1983, when he had a stroke. He held on for two years and died in 1985. He was 85 years old.

I still absolutely love the idea that Welch created both the John Birch Society and Junior Mints. This is such a gloriously and horrifyingly American story.

Robert Welch is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit some other competitors for the title of Worst American Ever, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Granted, Donald Trump is still alive, so unfortunately we have to be patient. Joseph McCarthy is in Appleton, Wisconsin and Roy Cohn is in Queens. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.