....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I would guess that nine out of ten Americans know his name: The press are devoting hours each day to him, the wheels of justice seem to be either rolling over him or spinning in the muck thrown up by his defenders. People who a few weeks ago had never heard of him are driven to hysteria, as if their lives will end if he is either not vindicated or denounced. If this is 2000, it must be Elian. If it was 1960 it would be John Birch.
John Birch the real man was a Baptist missionary in China and at the same time a U.S. intelligence officer. The morality of mixing those profession was not an issue in 1945, when John took the wrong road in the middle of a revolution and was executed by communist troops in Anhwei province.
In 1958 Robert Welch, a businessman from Massachusetts, chose John as the first official casualty of the Cold War, and named his new political organization after him. Two years later the John Birch Society, headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, could claim 100,000 members, a couple of million dollars in the bank and considerable political influence.
The John Birch Society was dedicated to the idea that there were communists under every bed and in every branch of government. These hidden communists wanted to outlaw all private ownership of guns, put chemicals into municipal water supplies in the name of mind control and mix the races to weaken the nation. The John Birch Society demanded the impeachment of President Eisenhower and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco they labeled President Kennedy a coward and a communist sympathizer. The society even distributed wanted posters in Dallas in 1963 that put a price on his head.
Wether the real John Birch would have approved of the John Birch Society was irrelevant. Being an icon he was their property and they could make him represent anything they wanted him to: eventually extremism to point of paranoia. When Korean Air flight 007 was shot down by Soviet fighters in 1983, one of the 250 plus dead was Congressman Larry P. McDonald, R-Georgia and the national chairman of the John Birch Society. It was seriously argued by some of his staff that the Soviets had lured the 747 into their airspace and shot it down just to murder the congressman.
With the end of the Cold War, and the seeming demise of communism, few people even remember the John Birch Society. Even fewer know that John Birch had ever been a flesh and blood human being. Certainly the children of Connersville, Indiana have no idea who he was.
Connersville is a small town of about fifteen thousand souls. It's only claim to fame is that it's citizens develop cavities in their teeth at a rate 20% higher than the rest of Indiana. Connersville has never put fluoride in its water, afraid it was to be used to control their minds.
The argument that an attempt to spare children the pain of the dentist's drill might actually be a communist plot may seem silly today but thirty years ago it reduced logical and sensible people to screaming maniacs. And if you have any doubts about the level of that hysteria, and the cost of it, you need only ask the children of Connersville and their parents, forty years later.
And what of the cost to John Birch? The argument and the hysteria weren't about him. He was just a symbol used by one side or the other. Luckily for him, he was dead before somebody made him an icon.
Kimit Muston is a writer living in North Hollywood, Ca. His work is also featured in the Los Angeles Daily News.