“Gold Coast” conservatism underwent a shift in the 1960s from marginal credibility to mainstream respectability. The John Birch Society exemplified the marginality in the early stages of conservatism’s rise. Founded in 1958 by a wealthy, retired Boston candy manufacturer, Robert W. Welch, Jr., the society to this day has been an ultra-right-wing advocacy organization. It was named after a Baptist medical missionary in China who was assassinated by communists in August 1945. Welch and his followers held that the graduated income tax, social security, fluoridation of public drinking water, and civil rights legislation were all due to a gigantic communist conspiracy to undermine the United States. Moreover, they alleged that the United Nations was a communist organization in the process of creating a world government, and therefore the United States must withdraw from it. Welch is remembered for having called Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied forces in World War II, a “conscious, dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy.” Birchers furthermore claimed that Republican U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was a communist agent. Though William F. Buckley, Jr., arguably conservatism’s leading spokesperson, dismissed Welch and the Birchers in the early 1960s as “idiotic” and “paranoid,” the society established a strong presence in the southern California Republican enclaves of San Marino and Orange County.
In San Marino, Republican John H. Rousselot won election to the 25th Congressional District in 1961 as a member of the John Birch Society. Several years later he served as regional director of the society from his San Marino office, heading Bircher operations in the Far West. Beginning in 1970 he won half a dozen terms in the House of Representatives.
Orange County was equally friendly to the John Birch Society, where, according to McGirr, it had some 5,000 members in 1965. Society organizers in the county, known nationwide as a bastion of conservatism, promoted Republican candidates for public office. For example, Bircher and Santa Ana College philosophy and political science professor John Schmitz gained election to the state senate in 1964, serving two terms before winning a seat in the House of Representatives’ 35th Congressional District in 1970. In 1972 he ran for the presidency on the American Independent Party ticket as the conservative alternative to Richard Nixon, who prided himself on opening relations with the communist government of mainland China. “I have no objection to President Nixon going to China,” Schmitz quipped, “I just object to his coming back.” Schmitz received 1.1 million votes in that campaign. “I lost the presidency by a mere 44 million votes,” he afterward reportedly joked. He believed citizens should be free to carry loaded guns in their cars, that state universities should be sold to private corporations to curb student rebellions, and that sex education in public schools should be banned. The Watts riots of 1965, he held, were “a Communist operation.” Though trounced in the presidential election, his polling of more than a million votes is a barometer of the number of Americans who supported the far right. In the early 1980s, by which time he had stepped up his verbal attacks on women’s rights advocates and publicly supported General Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing military dictatorship in Chile, the John Birch Society expelled him for “extremism.”
While a force within southern Californian Republican circles in the 1960s, the John Birch Society thereafter declined substantially in numbers and influence. Near the end of that decade some Birchers grew impatient with the society’s unsupported conspiracy theories and tired of being labeled in the media as fringe-type people. The society did not appeal to Republican moderates, nor to conservative/libertarian-leaning independent thinkers, nor to entrepreneurs and middle-of-the road voters generally. Many such Republicans living along the “Gold Coast” formed the nucleus of a broader constituency that would one day rule national politics.
While Eric Hoffer did not fit the profile of Gold Coast conservatives, who led affluent lifestyles in southern California, nevertheless from the 1950s into the 1980s he was a consequential and popular figure among political moderates and right-leaning people nationwide. Of German descent, Hoffer had no schooling, lived simply (for a brief period he was a hobo), and after arriving in California from his home state of New York, picked crops in the Central Valley before becoming a San Francisco longshoreman. During much of this time, Hoffer read numerous books checked out from public libraries, becoming a self-educated citizen philosopher. In many of the more than 10 books he wrote, beginning with The True Believer (1951), Hoffer warned about zealots and the mass movements they often led. “The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto.” Abrupt societal change, the goal of such movements, could be catastrophic for humans; measured change over time was best. He viewed the student radicalism of the 1960s as the result of privileged youth, who, not having had to enter the paid labor force, had not found the meaning in their lives that comes with growing up and earning a living. Affluence kept college-age young people in a state of perpetual adolescence. Eschewing the label of “intellectual,” he preferred to be called a “longshoreman.” UC Berkeley saw him as an important thinker and hired him as an adjunct instructor. President Eisenhower read and expressed admiration for some of Hoffer’s books, and President Lyndon B. Johnson invited the dock worker and writer to the White House for conversation.
Meanwhile, in conservatism’s southern California heartland, the Lincoln Club, founded in 1962 and headquartered in Newport Beach, provided much of the leadership for a powerful right-wing cohort of voters. The non-profit business organization aimed to shrink the scope and size of government, reduce taxes, and expand economic freedom. It took its name from Abraham Lincoln, whom it quotes as having said: “In all that people can individually do as well for themselves, the government ought not do for them.” Herein was the “Gold Coast” evocation of the politics of limits. Club members included such corporate and political elites as Dr. Arnold O. Beckman, the founder of Beckman Instruments; Walter Knott, the founder of Knott’s Berry Farm; Si Fluor of the Fluor Corporation; soon-to-become president Richard Nixon; and movie star John Wayne.
At the non-elite, grassroots level of local politics Orange County’s widening base of conservatives formed advocacy groups that battled “obscenity” in speech and print, opposed sex education in the public schools, and campaigned against abortion. Looking back, one conservative parent in Orange County, for example, recalled: “It was so bad. . . all the rock groups, their music. . . the movies, television. Everything was changing, the whole system of values that we treasured in this country. . . . You know that Mario Savio thing from
Berkeley, ‘If it feels good, do it.’” That this was a wholly mistaken characterization of Mario Savio, who was highly disciplined, cerebral, and critical of “hippieness” and drug use, did not matter. No moral issue so galvanized the broader constituency as abortion. On this issue some Democrats linked with Republicans and many evangelical Protestants joined with Catholics, particularly in Orange County, to support a pro-life (meaning anti-abortion) movement. One former Democrat, Beverly Cielnicky, reregistered as a Republican and joined the Central Baptist Church in Huntington Beach, which she viewed as “very, very pro-life.” To such converts to Republican conservatism must be added a large share of the hundreds of thousands of people buying homes in Orange County in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these upper-middle-class, mainly white professional suburban denizens worked in the defense-aerospace sector, which virtually assured their support for high military expenditures to thwart the spread of communism. Hughes Aircraft, TRW, Ford Aerospace, Nortronics, Autonetics, and other military contractors provided well-paying jobs to this phalanx of high-tech “suburban warriors.”
Ably led by the Lincoln Club, this broader, more mainstream, vanguard of “Gold Coast” voters stood in need of political candidates who could garner mass appeal. They were in luck.
World History
