Wrapped in the Flag (17 page)

In
The Politician
, the scathing attack on Eisenhower that thrust the JBS into the national headlines, Welch wrote, “A most interesting subject for detailed study would be Eisenhower’s role in connection with the segregation storm in the South; his part in bringing about that storm, in subtly promoting its increasing violence, and in steering it towards the ultimate objective of his Communist bosses who planned the whole thing far in advance.”
¹⁵

Welch castigated Eisenhower for Little Rock and further argued that the situation arose as a result of Ike’s greatest sin: the appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court. The magnitude of that choice had become clear in 1954 when Warren handed down the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision, which held that racially segregated schools were inherently unequal. For Welch, this ruling was “the most brazen and flagrant usurpation of power that has been seen, in a major court in the whole Anglo-American system of jurisprudence, in three hundred years.”
¹⁶

The vitriol against Warren evolved into the JBS “Movement to Impeach Earl Warren.” On January 1, 1961, Welch announced this new project, writing,
“We are aware that the whole Supreme Court is a nest of socialists and worse. . . . A
successful
impeachment of Earl Warren would ‘put the fear of God’ in the whole pro-Communist hierarchy that already controls our government.”
¹⁷

My parents and the members of our local chapter embraced the Impeach Earl Warren project enthusiastically. Meeting after meeting that year explored the horrors of forced integration of schools and the terror of the federal government trampling on the right of the Southern states to segregate African Americans in their own schools. Mother and Dad gave full-throated support to all the Jim Crow laws, including keeping public spaces segregated. Private spaces like restaurants, movie theatres, motels, and shops had the absolute right to keep their whites-only designations.

The Birch Society was not alone in defending the segregated South. In 1960,
National Review
, William F. Buckley’s magazine, editorialized, “In the Deep South the Negroes are, by comparison with whites, retarded (‘unadvanced,’ the NAACP might put it). Any effort to ignore the fact is sentimentalism and demagoguery. Leadership in the South, then, quite properly, rests in White hands.”
¹⁸

In the first months of 1961, Welch crisscrossed the United States, urging his followers to get on the Impeach Earl Warren bandwagon. “If we cannot impeach Earl Warren,” Welch said, “I doubt we can save America.”
¹⁹

Welch never said that Warren was a Communist. But he came close. During an interview in Tulsa, where he had been the keynote speaker at the Christian Crusade Convention, he was asked whether he thought Warren was a Communist. “I have no idea,” he said. “I have no way of knowing. We’re not going to run down specific facts—that’s the F.B.I’s job—but we can draw an over-all conclusion.”
²⁰

In the same interview, Welch suggested that the move to impeach Warren was behind most of the criticism of the JBS. “Somewhere behind the scenes,” he said, “a button was pushed and a violent and wild attack was begun on us.”
²¹

The biggest push in the Warren project was a petition drive, planned to be so gigantic that it would force Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against the chief justice. The goal was ten million signatures, to be gathered before January of 1962.
²²
That gave the JBS six months to do the impossible: collect signatures from almost 10 percent of the eligible voters in the entire country.

This petition drive became the be-all and end-all of activity in our house. Mother mustered as many JBS members as she could to go door-to-door. She
called and counted and called some more, but the results were underwhelming.

What happened in Chicago must have happened all over the country. January came and went; Welch never reported on how many signatures were collected. Mother gathered up the remnants of the petition drive and stored them in our basement closet. My parents echoed Welch’s insistence that the continuing media attacks on the JBS arose from the Impeach Warren project. “The god-damned liberal press is trying to kill the society,” Dad said.

The empty chairs on Birch meeting nights proved the attacks were working. Sometimes Mother waited in the living room for hours, arranging and rearranging the handouts and scratching notes to herself on her clipboard before she would accept the reality—no one was coming. Birchers were wilting under the heat of the negative press. I couldn’t blame them: they’d signed up to save the country and ended up being tagged as crackpots and cranks.

My parents grew more paranoid. They attributed the newest Birch attacks to those “secret” Communists Welch had mentioned in the founding meeting of the JBS. “One of the hardest things for the ordinary decent American to realize is that a secret Communist looks and acts just like anybody else, only more so. . . ,” Welch wrote. “Highly placed secret Communists . . . are something with which we are absolutely loaded.”
²³

My father believed that these “secret” Communists were organized in “secret cells” and just when they were needed, they’d be activated. Welch believed that we had six years before the Communists took control; but my parents were less confident. They were among those folks Welch described as “alarmed that they [the Communists] may actually take us over in six months’ time.”
²⁴

I knew—even though it was hard to admit—that I was moving in a different direction. I didn’t worry so much about Communists coming in six months, or in six years. I worried that my parents would discover my secret: I wasn’t their perfect little Bircher anymore. I had ideas, ideas that put me in the other camp—the bleeding-heart, left-wing, liberal camp.
Black Like Me
had started something. . . .

For the first time in my life, I had indigestion. When my stomach was upset, I chewed Rolaids or chugged Pepto-Bismol right out of the bottle. I had headaches so often that I kept even more aspirin in my purse and next to my bed. I had trouble sleeping. “You have black circles under your eyes,” Mother said. “Stop reading at night.”

While my friends got in trouble for typical teenage shenanigans: drinking, ditching school, dinging up the car, I got in trouble for ideas contrary to Conner family dogma. Early in my junior year, I inadvertently brought down the wrath of the Sioux Avenue thought police by doing my homework.

That year, my religion teacher was enamored of Pope John XXIII and spent several days discussing his sixth encyclical,
Mater et Magistra
(
Mother and Teacher
). In this letter to the faithful, the Pope “urged wealthy nations to “balance the differences between excessive production and misery and hunger.” Pope John went on to decry the plight of workers who are “paid wages which condemn them and their families to subhuman conditions of life.”
¹

At the end of the discussion, we were assigned to write an essay on practical ways to fight poverty. I wrote about using food surpluses, through the Food for Peace program, to feed hungry children in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I applauded President Kennedy for doubling food grants to needy Americans at home and expanding programs to reduce starvation abroad.
²
When Sister returned my essay, I smiled at my A, stowed the paper in one of my three-ring binders, and forgot all about it.

Several weeks later, Mother and Dad called me to the dining room. “Sit,” Dad told me. “What the hell is this?” He pushed my poverty essay across the table toward me. The two scowling faces told me I was in big trouble.

I had no idea where they’d found my paper, but I knew better than to ask. My father, in his role as inquisitor, demanded my complete attention. “You listen to me, girlie,” he hissed. “I want an explanation.”

I could feel a headache behind my right eye.

“You are not fit to be our daughter,” Mother said.

I felt tears and wiped my eyes.

My father pounced. “You know how I feel about crying. Stop right now or I’ll give you something to cry about.” He stood and started to unbuckle his belt. “What were you thinking?” he screamed as he stalked toward me.

My father belonged to the 1950s school of child-rearing, where using a hand or belt to make a point was neither unusual nor shocking. Like so many parents, he relied on the biblical principle spare the rod, spoil the child. That
night, I had no doubt my father might hit me; he had many times before. My only chance was to stop the situation from escalating by being polite and calm and praying that my mother would stop him before he lost all ability to step on the brakes.

For my part, I tried to explain how I
felt
: children were dying; the United States had more food than we needed, and we should share it. I did not realize that the word “feel” was red to a charging right-wing bull.

“You feel?” my father interrupted. “What do you
know?
”

“She knows nothing,” Mother answered. “Or she’d know that government is never the answer. Private charity is the only moral way to help the poor.”

“And you defend foreign aid? Foreign aid has always helped the Communists,” my father said.

Dad was repeating what Robert Welch had always said: “This pouring of American billions into foreign countries, to make things easier for the Communists . . . is exactly what the Communists wanted the American government to do. The one surest [
sic
] way in which foreign aid could be ballyhooed successfully, and made permanently acceptable to the American taxpayer, was to present it as a means of opposing Communism.”
³

My father continued. “It’s all unconstitutional,” he said. “Our framers never intended anything like this.” His voice was escalating. Bright pink streaked his cheeks. His tongue darted across his narrow lips.

“I didn’t mean anything,” I said. “I just
felt
so terrible when I saw the pictures of those starving babies. What if they were American babies?”

Dad slammed his open hand on the table. “I don’t care what you
feel
, goddammit, tell me what you
know!
What do you know?”

Dad stood right over me. I braced myself. He leaned into my face. “Answer me, I’m running out of patience.”

Finally, my mother said, “Stop, Jay. I don’t want you getting any more upset tonight. You know how these scenes irritate your digestion, dear.”

My father took a breath and stared at me. After a long pause, he hissed, “Do not try my patience anymore or you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

Many people have a hard time squaring my parents’ views with the Catholic Church’s positions on social justice. But, in fact, they had a simple justification: a principle called “subsidiarity.” This Catholic tenet says, “Nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity
which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be.”
⁴

According to right-wing Catholics in the 1960s and right-wing Catholics today, “This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.”

For many years I pondered this principle against the backdrop of starvation, famine, and increasing poverty. I have yet to meet any right-wing Catholics who could explain why their beloved principle of subsidiarity had never worked.

The uproar over my too-liberal essay was short-lived but long-remembered. I took care to store anything remotely controversial in my locker at school. I also tried to erase “I feel” from my vocabulary and replace it with “I think.” For a while, I was successful.

In January of 1962, the Birch Society unveiled a new project, one that would become a signature effort for decades: Get US Out! (of the United Nations).
⁵
“The United Nations has always been an instrument of Communist global conquest and was designed for that purpose,” wrote Robert Welch in his announcement of this effort, emphasizing that “the United Nations should not be reformed, but abolished. You don’t reform the rats and fleas that spread the bubonic plaque, you wipe ’em out. The guiltily responsible personnel of the United Nations are far worse.”