Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein

James Wallace soon formed Anaheim’s first chapter of the John Birch Society. (Robert Welch, he said, “awakened us out of our selfish apathy and indifference to what is happening in America.”) Soon there were five chapters in Anaheim, and thirty-eight in Orange County. In January of 1961 Orange County State College and Fullerton Evening Junior College announced a series of lectures, “Understanding the Goals and Techniques of World Communism.” The course was promptly oversubscribed, as was Santa Ana College political science instructor John G. Schmitz’s course “Communist Aggression.” In March a coalition of civic leaders hosted a rally by the barnstorming Australian minister Fred C. Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (whose unique contribution to right-wing discourse was to draw on his background in disease pathology and to contend that the Communist Party held sway over the people of Russia via “the techniques of animal husbandry”). The publicity for Schwarz’s event warned of “communist plans for a flag of the USSR flying over every American city by 1973.” Principals were urged to suspend school; seven thousand children were obligingly trooped off to attend the all-day affair. Soon the ninety thousand parents of the Garden Grove School District were sent flyers assuring them that their children recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, in schools where “any type of propaganda in conflict with county, state, and national laws is prohibited.” And on April 18, 19...