Read Online Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty by Daniel Schulman - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Daniel Schulman
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did not consider silence an option. The time had come to fight. “Maybe you don’t want to be controversial by getting mixed up in this anti-communist battle,” he told members of Kansas’s Northeast Johnson County Women’s Republican Club. “But you won’t be very controversial lying in a ditch with a bullet in your brain.”
Driving into Wichita from the west on Highway 54 during the 1960s, you could easily tell that you were entering Bircher country. IMPEACH EARL WARREN , the billboard on the edge of town implored. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was an early target of the Birch Society, which in addition to ads and billboards, launched petition drives seeking the judge’s ouster. Birchers reviled Warren for presiding over 1954’s
Brown v. Board of Education
ruling, which paved the way for school desegregation,inflaming the South and enraging conservatives who believed the high court had violated the Constitution. (“If many of the opinions of the Warren Supreme Court had been written in the Kremlin they could not have served the Communist better,” Fred wrote in
A Business Man Looks at Communism
.)
Fred had taken on a high-profile role within the society, as one of its national leaders. Family friend and fellow Wichita businessman Bob Love, the youthful president of the Love Box Company, also got involved with the movement. The pair had teamed up in the past to promote political causes. Love, who was closer in age to Fred’s sons, was a founder of Kansans for the Right to Work. Together he and Fred had led the successful effort to curb the power of unions in Kansas via a 1958 constitutional amendment. Now, the pair commanded Wichita’s growing Birch Society contingent, whose ranks included many of the same business leaders involved in the right-to-work battle.
Fred’s chapter met frequently in the basement trophy room of the Koch family’s stone mansion. “The room looks practically medieval,” recalled one visitor, a doctoral student doing his dissertation on the John Birch Society. “… Its walls are crowded with stuffed heads from the disappearing wildlife of Africa and North America.” During one meeting, the Ph.D. student wrote, a “speaker said that if the Communists take over, they will point to this as the place where the Americanist conspirators met.”
Charles joined the Birch Society in the early 1960s, and he held occasional political discussions of his own in the basement of his family’s mansion, inviting over members of the local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom to wax philosophical about the nature of government and its role in pilfering liberties from the people. Charles seemed to steer clear of the more hysterical claims being made by his father and other society luminaries, preferring to talk about big picture ideas. “He didn’t take the conspiracy stuff very seriously,” one participant in these discussions remembered.
But the “conspiracy stuff” gathered steam in Wichita, a Birch Society stronghold thanks to the efforts of Fred Koch and Bob Love.
The city’s schools and colleges became an early target of Wichita’s Birchers, who critics accused of running stealth candidates for school board positions and employing McCarthyesque tactics in the classroom. A former Wichita high school debate teacher recalled that “the Birch Society was giving the superintendent of schools and Board of Education a lot of headaches with their complaints.” One source of their ire was the UNICEF collection boxes children toted around during Halloween: “The Birch Society just went nuts over it.” She drew their wrath when the topic of the United Nations came up in her classroom: “I got phone calls from parents just furious because of something some debater said about the United Nations—didn’t I know that the United Nations was evil and trying to take over the world and destroy our independence?”
Meanwhile, Fred had even begun to harbor doubts about the patriotic
Driving into Wichita from the west on Highway 54 during the 1960s, you could easily tell that you were entering Bircher country. IMPEACH EARL WARREN , the billboard on the edge of town implored. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was an early target of the Birch Society, which in addition to ads and billboards, launched petition drives seeking the judge’s ouster. Birchers reviled Warren for presiding over 1954’s
Brown v. Board of Education
ruling, which paved the way for school desegregation,inflaming the South and enraging conservatives who believed the high court had violated the Constitution. (“If many of the opinions of the Warren Supreme Court had been written in the Kremlin they could not have served the Communist better,” Fred wrote in
A Business Man Looks at Communism
.)
Fred had taken on a high-profile role within the society, as one of its national leaders. Family friend and fellow Wichita businessman Bob Love, the youthful president of the Love Box Company, also got involved with the movement. The pair had teamed up in the past to promote political causes. Love, who was closer in age to Fred’s sons, was a founder of Kansans for the Right to Work. Together he and Fred had led the successful effort to curb the power of unions in Kansas via a 1958 constitutional amendment. Now, the pair commanded Wichita’s growing Birch Society contingent, whose ranks included many of the same business leaders involved in the right-to-work battle.
Fred’s chapter met frequently in the basement trophy room of the Koch family’s stone mansion. “The room looks practically medieval,” recalled one visitor, a doctoral student doing his dissertation on the John Birch Society. “… Its walls are crowded with stuffed heads from the disappearing wildlife of Africa and North America.” During one meeting, the Ph.D. student wrote, a “speaker said that if the Communists take over, they will point to this as the place where the Americanist conspirators met.”
Charles joined the Birch Society in the early 1960s, and he held occasional political discussions of his own in the basement of his family’s mansion, inviting over members of the local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom to wax philosophical about the nature of government and its role in pilfering liberties from the people. Charles seemed to steer clear of the more hysterical claims being made by his father and other society luminaries, preferring to talk about big picture ideas. “He didn’t take the conspiracy stuff very seriously,” one participant in these discussions remembered.
But the “conspiracy stuff” gathered steam in Wichita, a Birch Society stronghold thanks to the efforts of Fred Koch and Bob Love.
The city’s schools and colleges became an early target of Wichita’s Birchers, who critics accused of running stealth candidates for school board positions and employing McCarthyesque tactics in the classroom. A former Wichita high school debate teacher recalled that “the Birch Society was giving the superintendent of schools and Board of Education a lot of headaches with their complaints.” One source of their ire was the UNICEF collection boxes children toted around during Halloween: “The Birch Society just went nuts over it.” She drew their wrath when the topic of the United Nations came up in her classroom: “I got phone calls from parents just furious because of something some debater said about the United Nations—didn’t I know that the United Nations was evil and trying to take over the world and destroy our independence?”
Meanwhile, Fred had even begun to harbor doubts about the patriotic
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