Abstract
The social movement literature lacks a historically sensitive analysis of pathways to founding and leading a movement organization. I connect biography and history to explain the timing and form of organizational emergence. I show how Robert Welch’s founding of the conspiratorial John Birch Society was pre-dated by moral shocks, a supportive culture and social network, experience organizing people in committees, as well as some dumb luck (in the form of fortuitous timing), all of which grew his reputation in the latent conservative movement. A national reputation allowed him to gather resources and unite regionally dispersed radical rightists into a coherent national organization.
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Notes
To construct Welch’s biography, and provide context for it, I utilize both primary and secondary “evidentiary clues” (Bryant 2000) that I weave together to form a historical narrative. On narrative analysis, see Bryant (2000) and Griffin (1993). Primary sources are all derived from my personal archive of John Birch Society and Robert Welch materials.
In The Politician, Welch claimed that Eisenhower was a dupe of the communist conspiracy and that his brother, Milton, was a communist agent. It was this claim that the news media publicized in the early 1960s and which brought the John Birch Society into the American consciousness.
Welch, it seems, never forgave Buckley. In an unpublished manuscript, False Leadership: William F. Buckley and the New World Order, Welch claimed Buckley was a member of the secret society of Insiders who were trying to take over the world.
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Acknowledgments
For their invaluable suggestions, I wish to thank the following: Javier Auyero, Shyon Bauman, Joseph Bryant, David Cunningham, Andrea Donovan, John Hannigan, Larry Isaac, Graham Knight, Andrew McKinnon, Karen Stanbridge, and Jack Veugelers, as well as two anonymous reviewers.
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Hart, R.J. There Comes a Time: Biography and the Founding of a Movement Organization. Qual Sociol 33, 55–77 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-009-9135-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-009-9135-3