AMERICAN NARCISSIST The Bath, Michigan School Bombing

I can see him clearly, as if he was standing next to me at this moment. And yet his image remains hazy. According to his drivers' license, he was five feet, nine inches tall, weighed 150 pounds and had gray hair. He was also described as “ ...a slight hollow-chested man”, of 46, with thin lips. And yet he remains an enigma. A neighbor, when shown several photographs of him, said, “ "I knew him well and he never looked like that.” And he was not just a physical enigma. Howard Kittle, the Clinton County agent and Farm Bureau manager, received a letter from him, and admitted that if anyone else had written it “I would have thought sure he was insane.'” But that was before - when he was an elected community leader, a trusted guardian of the communities' wealth and its future. Afterward - the Clinton County Republican-News was forced to wonder, “Is the building of a modern institution which equips children to meet the problems of the world a burden - or is it a privilege?” You see, the man at issue was a anti-tax warrior and an American narcissist.

Bath in 1927 was a little farm town of about 300 people 10 miles northeast of Lansing, Michigan. “(It) had a ( grain) elevator, a little drugstore, and you knew everybody within 20 miles” said a life long resident. In 1922 rural Clinton County closed its scattered one room school houses. They used $8,000 of their own hard earned money to buy five acres of ground just south of Bath. They borrowed $35,000 to build a two story Consolidated School building. Here, classes would be divided by ages, to protect the younger children from older bullies. With fewer teachers, higher standards could be required of the instructors, even a college teaching degree. And amenities such as a library, lunch programs, athletics, music and art were added. And buses picked children up at their front doors and returned them safely home each night. It was the foundation for the secure world we grew up in. And it was not cheap.

The future always costs. You either invest in it now, or, if you refuse, it proves much more expensive trying to catch up.  In 1922 property taxes in Clinton county were $12.26 per thousand dollars of valuation ($160 today, or over $16%). In 1923 those taxes had gone up by half to $18.80 ($235 today). This was not the decision of a few liberals. This was debated for years within the community. And over time the decision was made to invest in the future of Clinton County,  in the counties' children, and to spend the money on that future.  Three years later, eager to eliminate the debt quickly, the elected leaders of Clinton County paid off $7,200 of their obligation, and taxes topped out at one dollar higher (to $240 per thousand in today's dollars). It was expected taxes would now start to drop, but that did not take into account the rising inflation of the late 1920's, and the selfishness of one egomaniac who chose - chose -  not to have a future.

I shall not use his name because of something Neil Kaye, forensic psychiatrist at Jefferson Medical College told Time Magazine in April of 2007.  He said, “We glorify and revere these seemingly powerful people who take life. Meanwhile, I bet you couldn't tell me the name of even one of (serial killer) Ted Bundy's victims.” So let me just share a headline from the New York Times, dated Wednesday, 18 May, 1927, to explain who this man was, by what this man did.  “Maniac blows up school, kills 42, mostly children; Had protested high taxes...Children Pinned in Debris. Others hurled against walls or out windows – Searchers still hunt for missing. Agonizing scenes in yard. Distraught parents find little ones dead beneath blankets...”. The early numbers were wrong, of course. The maniac killed eight adults and 34 children at the school, that day. The last little victim, nine year old Richard Fitz, would die of an infection caused by his injuries, a week short of a year after the Bath School Disaster. And that was the name of one of this selfish bastard's victims.

Just before he murdered 34 children, the maniac had bludgeoned his wife to death, restrained all his animals in a burning barn, killed every fruit tree on his farm, and burned all his expensive farm equipment. Interestingly, it was figured by the cleanup crews, that he could have paid off his mortgage and his property taxes by selling most of his well maintained farm equipment, which, according to his neighbors, he rarely used.  Neighbor M.J. “Monty” Ellsworth wrote later, “He was at the height of his glory when fixing machinery or tinkering...He spent so much time tinkering that he didn't prosper.”  The maniac also stood out, as a farmer, for his meticulous appearance. He changed his shirt quickly should a spot of dirt appear on it and was often seen sitting on his front porch, in a smoking jacket,  puffing on a cigar.  But his primary interest, his obsession, was in cutting taxes.

The maniac had been elected to the school board in 1924, two years after the new school had opened and the first election after the new higher tax rate had been announced. His platform was to cut the cost of the new school. In 1925, after the death of Maude Detluff, the board's treasure, he had been appointed to fill that position. His book keeping was, like his appearance, meticulous. After his suicide, his books showed  “a long and detailed explination” of a 22 cent discrepancy. But in the spring of 1926, when he ran for election to officially take on that job, the voters had rejected him. Once again, the majority approved investment in the future  That rejection appears to have sparked the fuse. The maniac stopped paying the both the mortgage and the  insurance on his farm. The previous owner, his wife's relatives, eventually began foreclosure proceedings  His crops began to rot in the fields.

There is a story that decades earlier, a promising career as an electrician in St. Louis had been cut short by a fall and a serious head injury.  So farming was the maniac's second choice. He married and moved to Clinton county right after the First World War. He might have over paid for his farm, because land prices were inflated at time. And his wife was afflicted with tuberculosis, a wasting disease before antibiotics. The Klu Klux Klan would even alleged his Catholicism encouraged him to destroy the school because it was not a Catholic school. But even if all of that were true, none of it would justify the cold blooded murder of 34 innocent children, and nine adults, and the farm animals. All the maniac could focus on was HIS taxes.

Before the school was built, he had opposed it. Once it was decided to build it, he insisted it should be a 10 grade institution, instead of 12. He opposed the inclusion of a library, or athletic programs or a music department . And he lost every argument. Once the building was constructed, the tax increase gave him enough supporters to win election to the school board, where his obstinacy continued. He even opposed giving the superintendent a paid vacation each year, and then argued it should only be one week, not two. And as he lost each of these arguments, his obsession grew, day by day. Words used to describe him during this time were “surly”, “obstinate”, “impatient” and “arrogant”.  Eventually he began to invest his money not in his farm, or his wife,  but in World War surplus explosives, and to sneak them into the basement of the school house, rig them with a timer and set them to explode early on a Wednesday morning,  just after classes had begun.

The day after the bombing,  while still in shock and grief,  the Clinton Country Republican ran an editorial, which explains, far better than I ever could, the connection between the maniac's crime and his anti-tax fever. “That he was insane there is little doubt", wrote the editors of the paper. " But he was not always insane. To start with he was merely antagonistic. Then he became radical.. He was the victim of the progress of his own lack of balance...What a terrible price to pay for narrow-mindedness. What an awful calamity for one peaceful little community to bear for one man's lack of ordinary American ideals...Never before have we known of aversion of the cost of education taking such terrible form. There are, however, many people who unthinkingly hamper and discourage the progress of good schools and other institutions for the welfare and happiness of the public. What are we going to do about it?”

It is almost a century later, and the question begs to be asked of the nation which elected an admitted rapist President, and the power hungry unChristian unRight, - those who object to investing in the future because they choose not to believe we have one. And what are the majority of us going to do about it?  The answer at the dawn of the Trump Presidency is  - NOT ENOUGH.

- 30 -

POLITICAL PHOBIA

I think of this guy as just another one of those self-made right-wing technocrats, who used his fortune to finance an ultra-conservative agenda - a 19th century Ross Perot.  In this case the technology was the telegraph, and the agenda was the 19^th century version of Islamaphobia.  Samuel Finley Breese Morse (above) invented the telegraph. But before he learned about electricity he learned to fear the 'Bavarian Illuminati' from his father's Sunday sermons.

As an adult Samuel proselytized that the Roman Catholic Church was flooding America with Irish and German Catholic immigrants intent on establishing a new Vatican City in the Mississippi valley. Wrote Morse, “Surely American Protestants...(will) discover...the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. They will see that Popery is...a political as well as a religious system; that... differs totally...from all other forms of religion in the country.”  And like his 21st century progeny Donald Trump, the poison he was peddling (and funding) fed on fear and ignorance, and grew strong.

It sprouted into full flower in the congressional elections of 1854, catching on “like measles”, according to one Democrat. The organization was officially known as “The American Party”, but commonly refereed to as the Know Nothings, because its members were coached to respond to all questions by admitting only, “I don't know”, and because, frankly, in the eyes of their critics, the majority just seemed to be not very bright.  Membership was limited to white males of proven English heritage, and usually self described evangelical Protestants.

 And although most of the new candidates had never been active in politics or held public office before,  they won 61 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that year. They elected a governor and all the other posts open that year in Massachusetts and Maine.

They controlled the state legislatures in Pennsylvania and most of New England. They gained advantage in Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Tennessee by taking no position on slavery.  This hurt them in the deep south,  as did being linked to violence and even murders in Chicago, Philadelphia,  Baltimore, St. Louis, Boston, New York, Columbus, Cincinnati and New Orleans. Still, the Know Nothings looked certain to capture the White House in 1856. And then came Bloody Monday in Louisville, Kentucky.

They held three elections in Louisville in 1855. On 7 April voters threw out the incumbent mayor, who had converted to Catholicism when he married, and elected a Know Nothing replacement and a Know Nothing majority on the city council.

They followed this a month later by electing a Know Nothing majority of county court judges. Then the school board fired every Catholic teacher, save one. The Know Nothings were feeling both confident and paranoid - it was the nature of the party and the movement.  Now another Know Nothing, Charles Morehead, was favored to win the governorship of Kentucky on yet another election, Monday 6 May.  On the night before, 1,500 Know Nothings staged a torch light march through Catholic neighborhoods, warning them “to keep their elbows in” come election morning.

Maybe no one other than Reuben Thomas Durrett (above) could have made the nation face the truth about the Know Nothings. Others wrote about it, but they lacked his resume. R.T., as he preferred to be known, was a defense attorney, and familiar with arguing unpopular causes. He was “intellectually and physically...a magnificent man.” More than that he was a poet, and a lover of truth and history. He had a 50,000 volume personal library. And 300 years earlier, his French Protestant ancestors had barely escaped the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France when Catholic bigots had cleaned house. So when the political spin machine smothered every other honest voice in Louisville, it was R.T. who validated the reality when some tried to put the blame "on both sides".  “To my mind,” he wrote, “the whole secret of the success of this disgraceful affair was...that the Know Nothing sympathizers were prepared and armed for the conflict...”

According to R.T., the thugs, hired as “special police”, formed a gauntlet in front of the polls. If a would-be voter were an immigrant from Germany or Ireland he was presumed to be Catholic, and was “... ordered by one of the bullies to leave...” And if he refused, “...he was attacked by the whole mob, severely beaten and driven away.  If the man showed fight, his life was in great danger." 

Recently ousted Mayor James Speed watched the beatings on the courthouse front lawn from eight in the morning until six. “It was not fighting man to man," he recorded,  "but as many as could fall upon a single Irishman or German and beat him with sticks or short clubs...”  The clubs had been specially made with lead weights in their tips, and mass produced.  In the afternoon Speed was told 200 shotgun wielding “Germans” had captured a polling place. Speed knew this to be a fantasy and said so. But his informant, a judge, “replied with warmth showing that he believed it to be true.” About four in the afternoon, things went from bad to worse.

Two Louisville Catholic activists, Theodore Rhodes and David Doughtery were warning everyone in their east side neighborhood to stay off Main street. They stopped at Micheal O'Connor's grocery store, at the corner of 10^th street and Main and warned him to close. As they came out a Know Nothing ran up to them.   Basil Rhodes, Theodore's father, standing in front of his home a block away, watched the man shoot his son dead. The gun shot drew Know Nothings from all directions, and it quickly became accepted that a Catholic had killed a Know Nothing.  The exact opposite of what had really happened. What followed was mass murder.

The worst of it was Quinn's Row, a block of 12 three story row houses along Main between 11^th and 12^th streets. Around eight that evening a Know Nothing mob set fire to a ground floor corner grocery run by a family named Long. Recorded a Catholic newspaper, “Seeking to escape...the wretched inhabitants reached the street only to meet death in another form. As soon as one appeared at a door he was fired at...” Mr. Long and two of his sons died that night, as did several of the residents of the upper floor apartments.

“A number were taken off badly wounded, and others...returned to the burning houses, preferring rather to be burned than to meet the infuriated mob. One man escaped in woman’s clothes, was detected and shot. Another, who came out covered with a blanket, and, leaning on the arm of his wife, was torn away, and deliberately shot.”

While the first building was still raging, the feed store next door and its apartments went up, followed by a vacant house, then a tobacconist. Noted the newspaper, “How many of these miserable people thus caged in their own houses were burned alive there can be no computation.... Two men were hanged from their banisters of their own homes and also consumed in the flames.” In the last structure on the street, a rooming house, Patrick Quinn, who owned the entire block, was driven outside like the others. Recognized because of his investments around the city (and his brother, who was a priest) , he was singled out, beaten to death, and his corpse was thrown back into the fire.

The official version said that 22 people had been killed in the entire city on Bloody Monday. It is much more likely that the number was at least 100. The death toll would have been even higher but in the German district one of the first buildings looted was Armbruster's brewery. The rioters got so drunk they could only satisfy themselves with torching that building before passing out.

The new Know Nothing Mayor, John Barbee, managed to save two Catholic Churches from the arsonists, but no one was ever prosecuted for the murders, the beatings or the arson. In response the despised immigrants voted with their feet. Ten thousand left Louisville over the next few months, almost 25% of the cities' population. In the city left behind businesses failed, unemployment soared and city coffers dried up. Charles Morehead was easily elected governor in 1855, but it was the classic tale of “be careful what you wish for”.  And the bloodbath destroyed sympathy for the Know Nothings.  There would never be an American President from Samuel B. Morses' American Party.

Most of the Irish moved to Chicago. Typical was ex-Mayor Speed, who became active in Republican Party politics and served in the Lincoln administration.  The Germans mostly moved to St. Louis and Milwaukee, and some to Kansas City, Kansas – ensuring those states would remain in the Union come the Civil War.  It was that war which put the entire Know Nothing movement into perspective.

The Civil War made the Know Nothing agenda obsolete. Immigration was the great enemy in the eyes of Samuel Morse. But the actual enemy of the working class was Wall Street and the bankers who were profiting from low wages  at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

The mathematician Alfred Whitehead observed, “The major advances in civilization....all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” And in his book “War and Peace in the Global Village” Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan explains why that is so. “When one has been hurt by a new technology, when the private person or corporate body finds its entire identity endangered...it lashes back in a fury of self-defense...But... the symptom against which we lash out may be caused by something about which we know nothing.”  McLuhan calls that symptom “Phantom Pain”, and compares it to the agony amputees report they feel in missing limbs.

Although America has institutionalized such economic  revolutions, and has won economic advantage from them - such as the current electronic revolution -  that does not make the cultural revolutions that  accompany them any easier to live with.

Politics are never the solution. Politics are only another symptom. The solutions are always within ourselves, trusting ourselves to deal with whatever threats we perceive in our future  And the longer we blame others, Catholics or Muslims, Jews or Blacks, liberals or conservatives the longer and the more our nation suffers. The solution is never who to blame, but how together we can meet the challenges. Because eventually, we always do.  It just seems we waste a lot of time, energy and blood trying to avoid the obvious solutions.

- 30 - 

POLITICAL PHOBIA

I think of this guy as just another one of those self-made right-wing technocrats, who used his fortune to finance an ultra-conservative agenda - a 19th century Mercer family.  In his case the technology was the telegraph, and the agenda was the 19^th century version of Islamaphobia. Samuel Finley Breese Morse (above) invented the telegraph. But before he learned about electricity he learned to fear the 'Bavarian Illuminati' from his father's Sunday sermons. As an adult Samuel proselytized that the Roman Catholic Church was flooding America with Irish and German Catholic immigrants intent on establishing a new Vatican City in the Mississippi valley. Wrote Morse, “Surely American Protestants...(will) discover...the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. They will see that Popery is...a political as well as a religious system; that...differs totally...from all other forms of religion in the country.”  And like his 21st century prodgeny, the poison he was peddling (and funding) feed on fear and ignorance, and grow strong.

It sprouted into full flower in the congressional elections of 1854, catching on “like measles”, according to one Democrat. The organization was officially known as “The American Party”, but commonly refereed to as the Know Nothings, because its members were coached to respond to all questions by admitting only, “I don't know”, and because, frankly, in the eyes of their critics, the majority just seemed to be not very bright.  Membership was limited to white males of proven English heritage, and usually self described evangelical Protestants.  And although most of the new candidates had never been active in politics or held public office before,  they won 61 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that year. They elected a governor and all the other posts open that year in Massachusetts and Maine. They controlled the state legislatures in Pennsylvania and most of New England. They gained advantage in Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Tennessee by taking no position on slavery. This hurt them in the south, as did being linked to violence and even murders in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Boston, New York, Columbus, Cincinnati and New Orleans. Still, the Know Nothings looked certain to capture the White House in 1856. And then came Bloody Monday in Louisville, Kentucky.

They held three elections in Louisville in 1855. On 7 April voters threw out the incumbent mayor, who had converted to Catholicism when he married, and elected a Know Nothing replacement and a Know Nothing majority on the city council. They followed this a month later by electing a Know Nothing majority of county court judges. Then the school board fired every Catholic teacher, save one. The Know Nothings were feeling both confident and paranoid - it was the nature of the party and the movement. Now another Know Nothing, Charles Morehead, was favored to win the governorship of Kentucky on yet another election, Monday 6 May .  On the night before, 1,500 Know Nothings staged a torch light march through Catholic neighborhoods, warning them “to keep their elbows in” come election morning.

Maybe no one other than Reuben Thomas Durrett (above) could have made the nation face the truth about the Know Nothings. Others wrote about it, but they lacked his resume. R.T., as he preferred to be known, was a defense attorney, and familiar with arguing unpopular causes. He was “intellectually and physically...a magnificent man.” More than that he was a poet, and a lover of truth and history. He had a 50,000 volume personal library. And 300 years earlier, his French Protestant ancestors had barely escaped the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France when Catholic bigots had cleaned house. So when the political spin machine smothered every other honest voice in Louisville, it was R.T. who validated the reality. “To my mind,” he wrote, “the whole secret of the success of this disgraceful affair was...that the Know Nothing sympathizers were prepared and armed for the conflict...”

According to R.T., the thugs, hired as “special police”, formed a gauntlet in front of the polls. If a would-be voter were an immigrant from Germany or Ireland he was presumed to be Catholic, and was “... ordered by one of the bullies to leave...” And if he refused, “...he was attacked by the whole mob, severely beaten and driven away. If the man showed fight, his life was in great danger." Recently ousted Mayor James Speed watched the beatings on the courthouse front lawn from eight in the morning until six. “It was not fighting man to man," he recorded,  "but as many as could fall upon a single Irishman or German and beat him with sticks or short clubs...”  The clubs had been specially made with lead weights in their tips, and mass produced.  In the afternoon Speed was told 200 shotgun wielding “Germans” had captured a polling place. Speed knew this to be a fantasy and said so. But his informant, a judge, “replied with warmth showing that he believed it to be true.” About four in the afternoon, things went from bad to worse.

Two Louisville (above) Catholic activists, Theodore Rhodes and David Doughtery were warning everyone in their east side neighborhood to stay off Main street. They stopped at Micheal O'Connor's grocery store, at the corner of 10^th street and Main and warned him to close. As they came out a Know Nothing ran up to them. Basil Rhodes, Theodore's father, standing in front of his home a block away, watched the man shoot his son dead. The gun shot drew Know Nothings from all directions, and it quickly became accepted that a Catholic had killed a Know Nothing.  The exact opposite of what had really happened. What followed was mass murder.

The worst of it was Quinn's Row, a block of 12 three story row houses along Main between 11^th and 12^th streets. Around eight that evening a Know Nothing mob set fire to a ground floor corner grocery run by a family named Long. Recorded a Catholic newspaper, “Seeking to escape...the wretched inhabitants reached the street only to meet death in another form. As soon as one appeared at a door he was fired at...” Mr. Long and two of his sons died that night, as did several of the residents of the upper floor apartments. “A number were taken off badly wounded, and others...returned to the burning houses, preferring rather to be burned than to meet the infuriated mob. One man escaped in woman’s clothes, was detected and shot. Another, who came out covered with a blanket, and, leaning on the arm of his wife, was torn away, and deliberately shot.”

While the first building was still raging, the feed store next door and its apartments went up, followed by a vacant house, then a tobacconist. Noted the newspaper, “How many of these miserable people thus caged in their own houses were burned alive there can be no computation.... Two men were hanged from their banisters of their own homes and also consumed in the flames.” In the last structure on the street, a rooming house, Patrick Quinn, who owned the entire block, was driven outside like the others. Recognized because of his investments around the city (and his brother, who was a priest) , he was singled out, beaten to death, and his corpse was thrown back into the fire.

The official version said that 22 people had been killed in the entire city on Bloody Monday. It is much more likely that the number was at least 100. The death toll would have been higher but in the German district one of the first buildings looted was Armbruster's brewery. The rioters got so drunk they could only satisfy themselves with torching that building before passing out. The new Know Nothing Mayor, John Barbee, managed to save two Catholic Churches from the arsonists, but no one was ever prosecuted for the murders, the beatings or the arson. In response the despised immigrants voted with their feet. Ten thousand left Louisville over the next few months, almost 25% of the cities' population. In the city left behind businesses failed, unemployment soared and city coffers dried up. Charles Morehead was easily elected governor in 1855, but it was the classic tale of “be careful what you wish for”.  And the bloodbath destroyed sympathy for the Know Nothings.  There would never be an American President from Morse's American Party.

Most of the Irish moved to Chicago. Typical was ex-Mayor Speed, who became active in Republican Party politics and served in the Lincoln administration. The Germans mostly moved to St. Louis and Milwaukee, and some to Kansas City, Kansas – ensuring those states would remain in the Union come the Civil War. It was that war which put the entire Know Nothing movement into perspective.

The Civil War made the Know Nothing agenda obsolete. Immigration was the great enemy in the eyes of Samuel Morse. But the actual enemy was the industrial revolution. The mathematician Alfred Whitehead observed, “The major advances in civilization....all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” And in his book “War and Peace in the Global Village” Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan explains why that is so. “When one has been hurt by a new technology, when the private person or corporate body finds its entire identity endangered...it lashes back in a fury of self-defense...But... the symptom against which we lash out may be caused by something about which we know nothing.” McLuhan calls that symptom “Phantom Pain”, and compares it to the agony amputees report they feel in missing limbs.

Although America has institutionalized such economic  revolutions, and has won economic advantage from them - such as the current electronic revolution -  that does not make the cultural revolutions that  accompany them any easier to live with. Politics are never the solution. Politics are only another symptom. The solutions are always within ourselves, trusting ourselves to deal with whatever threats we perceive in our future  And the longer we blame others, Catholics or Muslims, Jews or Blacks, liberals or conservatives the longer and the more our nation suffers. The solution is never who to blame, but how together we can meet the challenges.

- 30 - 

WHO ARE THOSE GUYS - The John Birch Society

I would not have gotten along with Mr. John Morrison Birch.  Probably, whatever your politics, neither would you.  One of his college professors described Birch as “a one-way valve; everything coming out and no room to take anything in”. Honestly I think the odds were pretty good that eventually somebody somewhere was going to shoot him for shooting off his mouth.  Politics had almost nothing to do with it.  It just so happened that John Birch was a human bull who finally met his china shop on a road in northern China, and that the hot head who pulled the trigger happened to have been a communist. It was just as likely the shooter would have been a Methodist or a Mormon, or even a pacifist.  He was human tick, an irritant. An annoying loudmouthed fool who eventually drove everyone who knew him, to want him dead.

“Oh, we're meetin' at the courthouse at eight o'clock tonight. You just walk in the door and take the first turn to the right. Be careful when you get there, we hate to be bereft. But we're taking down the names of everybody turning left. Oh, we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society. Here to save our country from a communistic plot. Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks. To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks.” (lyrics and music by Michael Brown) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG6taS9R1KM

His commanding officer in the forerunner of the CIA, Major Gustav Krause, described the situation rather simply; “Militarily, John Birch brought about his own death.” Birch was a life long missionary on a military mission on 25 August, 1945, when he and a few other people ran into a patrol of Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army.  The commander asked Birch to hand over his revolver, and, surrounded by nervous soldiers, the other members of the group handed over their weapons. Birch decided to argue about it.  Eventually, embarrassed, frustrated and pissed off, the officer shot him. The other people were held for a few hours and then released unharmed. But the role of the missed opportunity for the application of common sense in John Birch's death did not stop candy-king Robert Welch from building an elaborate conspiracy theory around Birch’s death,

Welch, who never met John Birch, saw Birch as the first hero of the war against the international communist plan for world domination. Welch's vision of Birch as a hero evolved until it became a virtual black hole of paranoia and invective that eventually sucked into it everything Welch came in contact with, including the Republican Party, tooth decay, the Republican President and American hero Dwight David Eisenhower –whom Welch accused of being a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy” - and, believe it or not, the entire state of Alaska.

I’m not kidding about the Alaska thing. Conservative deity William F. Buckley even mentioned it in a column posthumously published in March of 2008, entitled “Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me.”  In discussing how to distance conservatism from the John Birch Society, Buckley described Welch's belief that "the state of Alaska was being prepared to house anyone who doubted his doctrine that fluoridated water was a Communist-backed plot to weaken the minds of the American public.” I guess Alaska was supposed to be the new Texas.

The John Birch Society is and was part of a long line of paranoia  that stains the American psyche, from the anti-French and anti-Irish ‘Alien and Sedition Acts’ of 1798, through the “Order of United Americans”, the “Know Nothing Party”, the Immigration Restriction League, the anarchists scare, the “Yellow Peril”, the imaginary Pearl Harbor betrayal, the Black helicopters hiding in our national parks, the militia movement and the mythical bombs planted in the twin towers on 9/11. In fact the John Birch Society cemented all that lunacy together on a firm foundation of anti-Semitism and white supremacy. And this legacy of lunacy and head-up-your-exclusion-duct thinking officially began in Indianapolis on 9 December, 1958.

Robert Welch organized and financed that meeting. He could afford to do that because a fortune by selling “Sugar Babies”, “Junior Mints” and “Pom Poms” to children. And that wealth built on the little holes in children's teeth gave Welch the authority to lecture to 12 true believers for two days straight, about the worldwide communist conspiracy to steal Welch's millions by inventing the myth that fluoride prevents tooth decay, much in the same way that "liberal environmentalists" have invented the myth of global warming to steal the Koch brothers billions.. 

That day in Indianapolis, Welch spewed out such run-on gems of wisdom as, “When Woodrow Wilson, cajoled and guided...by the collectivists of Europe, took us into the First World War, while solemnly swearing that he would never do so, he did much more than end America's great period of happy and wholesome independence of Europe. He put his healthy young country in the same house, and for a while in the same bed, with this parent who was already yielding to the collectivist cancer. We never got out of that house again. We were once more put back even in the same bed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, also while lying in his teeth about his intentions, and we have never been able to get out of that bed since.”  You might notice a disturbing repetition of bed and parent analogies throughout Welch’s theology, whether the parents and commies are in the bed or under the bed, alone in the bed or sharing the bed, there are a lot of beds and parents and Commies. And cancer - he refers to cancer a lot.

Warned, Mr Welch, “…both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'” Did I mention that the John Birch Society was anti-Semitic?  Ayn Rand, no Semitic lover herself, complained, “What is wrong with them (the JBS) is that they don't seem to have any specific, clearly defined political philosophy.”  She might have been talking about the Tea Party, who, in fact, were encouraged and funded by the JBS - or Donald Trump., whose politics are a sort of slow thinking man’s Klu Klux Klan, while the KKK remains a sort of the idiot's version of  the John Birch Society.

In 1966 the New York Times described the John Birch Society as “…the most successful and 'respectable' radical right organization in the country”, which, if you think about it, is the equivalent of being named Miss Congeniality in a mental institution -  she even brings smiles to the invisible people.  Robert Welch died in 1985 and his creation is now watched over by the Koch brothers, whose father Fred attended the very first meeting of the Society.  He funded the group for many years. Each year the John Birch Society continues to produce cadres of indoctrinated Johnny Apple Seeds like Steve Bannon,  planting fear and ignorance in every dark nook and cranny where it might take root – sort of like tooth decay.  And they have now taken over the entire Republican Party.

But the thing about Johnny Appleseed was that the all the apples which grew from his seeds were sour. Edible apples are possible only through a science of grafting – but then the John Birch Society never believed much in science - too many Jews.  Sounds like the Republican party today, doesn't it?

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