reedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” - A.J. Liebling
My father Bob Wilson took this to heart, and bought one and started his own newspaper, the Prairie Post of Maroa, Illinois in 1958, and ran it until he died in 1972. It never had a circulation of more than 2500 or so, but every week, he would fire off editorials at everyone and everything from local events to the actions of the nations of the world.
He may have been a Quaker peace activist in a Republican district, but his love and support of the farming communities garnered him enough respect that he eventually ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, though he lost. (He might have tried again, had he not died of an accident while only 49.) Many of his views ring true today. And he might have been willing to change the ones that fell behind the times. Although raised in the casual racism of the 1920s and 1930s, at the age of 15 he took stock of what he was being taught and discarded much of it as being wrong, and lived his life with respect for all. [well, almost all. I have found that his views on homosexuality were those common to his time. Would he have been able to change again? Maybe...]
I decided to transcribe his old editorials (I may make a book for some of my relatives) and every once in a while I will repost one here, as a view of how the world has changed wildly, or remained stubbornly the same.
October 8, 1964
AHHHH!
When you are forty you look back now and then. (“It ain't a real smart thing to do,” Satchel Paige used to say; “Something might be gaining on you!”)
What we are peering around for is causes for satisfaction. Even small things will do, when one is forty, a little thinner on top, thicker in the middle, and slower over the ground than he used to be.
We found one the other day. A man's judgement is about all he has, really, and he happily ignores the mistakes if he can find a few things that turn out well. We designed and built the new wing on our old farmhouse, and did it the way we pleased. If there is a roof leak or two we never quite corrected, this is easy to forget when we consider the remarkable advance in heating systems which we engineered.
There is no patent on this innovation, and we give it to you freely. You might get a million dollars for it, or even warm feet; and which is more important?
There is nothing like a shower in the morning, but when winter comes you uncoil from bed like a November grasshopper and creak downstairs. There you find the house congealed from the night's frost, and you ask yourself to step into a shuddering cold bathtub.
Here is our solution, and it may be our greatest heritage to the well-being of future generations. The furnace pipes run in the concrete slab floor, and we added one register directly beneath the tub. Step into it at any time, and it is warm as toast to the pinkies.
If you see this editor of a morning, wearing a look of self-satisfaction hardly suitable to his modest abilities and massive prejudices, now you may know why; it is warm feet on a cold morning!
October 15, 1964
THE LAUGH BUTTON
Would you find it helpful if newspapers and magazines followed every comment they wished you to consider humorous with the notation (ha ha) or (ho ho) or (he he)?
The great competing media, television, is already doing so. We understand about actors playing better to live audiences, and a show with a live audience frequently picks up the people on the screen.
Our beef today has to do with certain other shows which reason dictates cannot possibly be given before live audiences. These include the ones with special effects that are obtained only by manipulation of the camera. The deception, if such one may call it, would at once be apparent to a live audience, and so of course they simply are not there.
Still, we hear them laughing. Every punch line brings, exactly on cue, a burst of merriment from somewhere. The viewer at home hears laughter, and laughs with them, whether or not he has really seen anything which impresses him as being humorous.
It appears to us likely that, when the script calls for amusement, a monitor presses a button marked “Laughter”, and your living room is filled with the idiot giggling of an unseen audience.
It is one more step in the management of the viewing audience. We prefer to make our own decisions as to when we shall be amused.
November 19, 1964
A COUNTER REPORT
The CHICAGO TRIBUNE has once more proven its right to be known as the most vicious and irresponsible major newspaper in America.
On Sunday, November 15th, they published with their Sunday paper a magazine supplement entitled, “The John Birch Society: A Report.” Unbelievably, the whole thing is written and presented so as to appear as an ordinary magazine supplement. How do they excuse this monumental fraud upon their readers? At the top of each page, in type just one-sixteenth of an inch high, is the word “Advertisement”.
Taking the Tribune's listed advertising rate of $32.20 per column inch, this piece of work has cost the Birch Society approximately $37,000 to reach the homes of the Tribune's over 800,000 readers.
The Tribune has no possible excuse in this matter. Eighteen years ago, the United States Supreme Court ruled (in U.S. Postmaster General vs. Read Magazine, Inc.) that “Advertising as a whole must not create a misleading impression... Advertising must be written for the probable effect it produces on ordinary and trusting minds, as well as for those intellectually capable of penetrating analysis.”
It is depressing to have to waste our space and your time to repeat once more the hard facts which have discredited the John Birch Society and warned most Americans that these misguided zealots are more dangerous to us than Communists, because they come wrapped in the flag... to do their vile work of destroying our democracy.
It is nuisance work, but it must be done if America is to be saved from a reign of terror by home-grown Super-patriots who would make Hitler look like an amateur. (We have read stacks of Birch literature, and never in any of it do they say one unkind word about Adolf Hitler. Remember that.)
The supplement opens with handsome pictures of that fine young soldier boy, John Birch. He is the hero to end all heroes, according to his worshippers. What does the record show? in 1939, as a student at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, he led an attempt to purge five faculty members whom he accused of teaching “heretical doctrines.” His fellow students referred to him sarcastically as “Saint Birch” because he was so convicted that no-one else but him could possibly be right.
As a Baptist missionary in China, he learned the Chinese language and was a useful intelligence officer for that reason when he joined the U.S. Army Intelligence service there.
His death occurred near Suchow, in China, ten days after the end of the war with Japan. At that time our military forces and the Chinese Communists had both been fighting the Japanese and officially were allies. The two forces sent men in to occupy territory abandoned by the defeated Japanese. We give you the report of Joseph S. Sample, Office of Strategic Services, who investigated the circumstances of Birch's death for the United States Government.
“Birch was a man with no particularly distinguishing characteristics – a little stiff, perhaps, with a not very high regard for the Chinese, and somewhat self-important,” he wrote. “If he had strong political convictions, they were not in evidence.”
The mission on which Birch died should have been routine, Sample said, “except that when it arrived at its designated area it was met by a force of Chinese Reds. The Chinese were understandably disturbed by what seemed to them an unwarranted intrusion into their area and demanded an explanation. Some of them had undoubtedly never seen Americans before.
“Captain Birch chose to attempt to bluff his way out of a difficult situation. Harsh words led to insults, and insults to arrogance. Finally, in a fit of rage, the Chinese Communist leader shot Birch.
“The remainder of the team was released and returned to Kunming after an arduous trip on foot which consumed several weeks. The sergeant in command received a citation as a result of the successful withdrawal.
“The news of Birch's death created a sensation at OSS headquarters, primarily because of the irony of his being killed after the war was over. While succeeding OSS teams were more careful in the dealings with the Chinese Communists, there was no real object lesson in Birch's death and certainly no glory.”
That last sentence is worth reading twice. This is the man on whom these people chose to form an organization, and whom they now describe as a hero. The idea is a mockery of the memory of our thousands of brave men who died under actual combat conditions.
Next, the “advertisement” deals with the question of whether all of us are involved in the tragedy that touches any of us. The answer is of course, yes, and always has been. This is the one thing for which we must praise the Birchers, mistaken as they are, that they are not afraid to get involved. In the typical case of a woman being knifed to death on the street in full view of witnesses, no Bircher would stand idly by, they would take part. There is just one problem. From their erratic behavior and demented reasoning, one could never be sure whose side they would be on!
A page of photographs describes the national council members as “Men of Honor Dedicated to Liberty.” We don't know them all, the unbiased facts we have at hand about a few of them suggest that all of them may be similar. Those we can report on are, though men of wealth and position, the wildest and most intemperate kind of radicals, who keep their communities in a constant turmoil over spy hunts, impeaching Earl Warren, and the like.
T. Coleman Andrews is a “States Rights” type, who has declared that “the two major parties have turned the nation toward socialism and dictatorship.”
Draskovitch is an all-out-for war type, who says he does not trust Ambassador Adlai Stevenson any more than he trusted Nikita Krushchev.
Col. Bunker is an anti-fluoridation fanatic, who rejects even the rights of school districts to vote on the question, because some few might object.
Fred Koch is the Birch Society's prize labor hater, who tirelessly pushes “right-to-work” laws, more commonly known as “union-busting” laws.
Dean Clarence Manion also has his own hate-peddling forum on radio. He once held a government position under Eisenhower, who threw him out of it when he described the McCarthy hearings as “an act of treason.”
Thomas Anderson is publisher of “Farm and Ranch” and you should read some of his work to know what snarling, bitter ravings about treason and Communism in some places pass for journalism.
Wm. Grede is Milwaukee's gift to American Fascism. A wealthy industrialist with a chain of newspapers, he misses no opportunity to smear as “Reds” anyone who supports the United Nations.
F. Gano Chance, according to a Post-Dispatch survey, appears to own half the town of Centralia, Missouri, plus most of the elected officials. Anyone who criticizes his policies is suddenly out of a job, a house to rent, or a place to charge his purchases in that town.
Whom of us does not know the learned Revilo P. Oliver, of the University of Illinois? His most recent theory concerning the assassination is that it was plotted by the President's brother, Robert Kennedy, and that other dangerous radical, Chief Justice Earl Warren of the Supreme Court.
This is not a council, it is a rogue's gallery!
The organization, they claim, is “open and aboveboard.” Well, is it? Nowhere can you get any list of members of any cell, and only the most unusual and courageous individuals will admit their membership. As to its structure, Robert Welch himself writes in “The Politician” that “The John Birch Society will operate under completely authoritative control at all levels.” He goes on to add, “Democracy is merely a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery, and a perennial fraud.”
Therein lies the heart of their challenge to our American way of life. Without democracy, without elections, without rule by the people, what would we have? A dictatorship, of course... naturally, a dictatorship ruled by the wealthy, the educated, the competent... such as Robert Welch.
As to Birch activities, local people are too tired of fighting them to endure further recital of the underhanded methods they use – nameless phone calls at 2 a.m., unsigned dirty letters, rumors of Communism against school teachers and ministers who cross them.
Further in the Tribune's amazing supplement is the “Big Lie” charge that all the attacks on the JBS stem from an article in the Communist “People's World” of Los Angeles, for February 25, 1961.
Welch's memory is short. In his bulletin for August of 1960, he raved about “the series of newspaper attacks” on his group. In his September, 1960 issue, he wrote, “For the past five weeks – it seems like five months – The John Birch Society has lived through one massive smear campaign on a national scale, and several regional attacks...” In his February, 1961 bulletin he wrote, “We have given up all hope of avoiding publicity, either good or bad.”
Still he can write, in the Chicago Tribune, “The opening official attack against the Society came on February 25, 1961, in “People's World,” an official Communist newspaper... Much of the press picked up on the chant, spreading the falsehoods across the nation in a few short weeks.” Such a man simply fails to comprehend the meaning of truth.
Next we find the California Senate Investigation. It is obviously a put-up job. Two out of the five Senators taking part were listed as deceased at the time the report came out in 1963. (Look closely, it is on the cover.) Two Birchers out of the remaining three apparently outvoted the third Senator, and there you are. On the same page is another flat lie, an attempt to deny that Welch's major book “The Politician” is a publication of the Society, and an attempt to deny that in it he says that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist. If it is not their publication, why do they print and distribute it? As to the denial about Eisenhower, this writer has a copy of the book and has read every word in it twice, and has marked exactly twenty-four quotations in that book where Welch says in plain and unmistakable language that Eisenhower was a Communist and sold our country to the Soviet enemy.
Their list of five “National Leaders” include four too contemptible to mention; the fifth is J. Edgar Hoover, and his statement is subtitled “should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the John Birch Society as the FBI endorses no organization.”
We must not fail to mention their American Opinion Speakers Bureau, which keeps a kennel full of wild men to turn loose upon the public. Take Mr. Theodore Jackman. Two years ago, Senator Kuchel (Rep.) of California discovered people in California were being panicked by a speaker who claimed that 15,000 United Nations troops, including barefoot cannibals from the Congo, were being trained in Georgia, under a Russian colonel, for the purpose of taking over the United States. The speaker was Mr. Theodore Jackman, of Greenville, South Carolina. On a direct challenge from Kuchel, the Birch Society denied they had ever heard of the man... but senator Kuchel discovered that his name was listed as a speaker for their speaker's bureau, on printed material which was in circulation at that very time!
On the back of the $37,000 supplement which the Tribune has chosen to inflict upon its readers is a heart-gripping full-color shot of a group of people saluting the flag. “Men and women of integrity and purpose building rededication to God, to family, to country, and to strong moral principles.”
Permit us another quote: “No other group of people ever loved America more... or understood it less!” This is the kindest summation we have heard of the Birchers. Thank God their numbers are no greater than those of their reverse twins, the Communists; each group numbers about then thousand members in America. Many of the Birchers are deeply sincere and troubled people. Many more are outright kooks and fanatics, authentic Americans who worship Hitler's dream without quite knowing it.
They have become absurd and almost pitiful... until they lay hands on $37,000 and find a newspaper unscrupulous enough to take it for a “Report on the John Birch Society.”