Read Online Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty by Daniel Schulman - Free Book Online

forceful, though deeply paranoid polemic intended to jar Americans from their apathy: “It is not the Communists who are destroying America,” he wrote. “America is being destroyed by citizens who will not listen, are not informed, and will not think.”
    One likely path to a communist coup, he wrote, was the “infiltration of high offices of government and political parties until the President of the U.S. is a Communist.… Even the Vice Presidency would do, as it could be easily arranged for the President to commit suicide.”
    Fred saw the specter of communism lurking behind everything from American foreign aid (“the U.S.A. is following Stalin’s spending prescription”) to tax-free nonprofits (“using the astronomical sums of money in their control to bring on socialism”), and from college campuses (“one of the breeding grounds of recruits for the Communist Party”) to churches (“ministers don’t become Communists but Communists become ministers”).
    Even modernist painters were part of the conspiracy: “The idea is to make our civilization seem degraded, ugly, and hopeless.” According to Bill Koch, Fred found Pablo Picasso particularly loathsome. “My father hated Picasso because he was a communist.”
    The American civil rights movement also figured into the plot. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred wrote, noting that he’d been told that the Communist Party had influenced the welfare laws in major American cities “to make it attractive for rural Southern Negroes and Puerto Ricans to come to those cities.” Later, when the communists wanted to seize control of urban centers, they “will use the colored people by getting a vicious race war started.”
    Fred reserved special scorn for labor unions, which endeavored to “have the worker do as little as possible for the money he receives,” he wrote. “This practice alone can destroy our country.” And he alleged that the “Communist-infiltrated union” whose members controlled the wire traffic in and out of the Pentagon had “probably” handed over America’s secrets to the communists.
    Fred initially printed 12,500 copies of his pamphlet, which he distributed to every weekly newspaper in the country, along with other interested parties. Demand was so great that by late 1961, it had entered its ninth printing. At least 2.6 million copies of
A Business Man Looks at Communism
would ultimately go into circulation.
    Readers of Fred’s anticommunist call to arms included FBI agents, who received numerous inquiries about the Wichita businessman. Worried Americans deluged FBI director J. Edgar Hoover with letters asking if Fred’s claims about the depth of the communist infiltration were valid—and in some cases wondering if his pamphlet was part of a subversive plot of its own.
    “Would you consider Fred Koch… a security risk?” asked one letter writer. “… I am astonished and appalled at the contents of this Publication.”
    Along with his pamphlet, Fred gave frequent speeches across the Midwest on the subject of communism. In 1960, he was the commencement speaker at Wichita State University, where he warned that the “tentacles” of socialism had crept “further and further” into the body politic, creating a national craving for government handouts that he likened to morphine addiction.
    The sad fact is that once people begin to get something for nothing then they want more and more at the same price. It destroys their independence, their self-reliance, and transforms them into dependent animal creatures without their knowing it. The end result is the human race as portrayed by Orwell—a human face ground into the earth by the large boot of benevolent Big Brother.
    Fred knew that many people viewed him as a red-baiting crackpot. Speaking out was uncharacteristic of him. He was a private man, who revealed little about himself, his family, and his company. But given the stakes, he