Read Online Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty by Daniel Schulman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Daniel Schulman
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commitment of his beloved alma mater, MIT. He had donated regularly to the school, and in 1955, he served a five-year term on its board of trustees, a period when Bill, Charles, and David attended college there. But he came to believe the communist infestation had taken root at MIT, as it had elsewhere in the country.
Fred considered the university’s tolerance of a Dutch mathematician named Dirk Jan Struik particularly egregious. A member of MIT’s faculty since 1926, Struik was an unapologetic Marxist, who had joined the Communist Party in his native Netherlands. In 1951, Struik was hauled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where he pleaded the Fifth. A couple months later, Massachusetts indicted Struik for conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the government. MIT immediately suspended him pending the outcome of the case. “They used mytextbook on differential geometry, but I myself was not allowed to teach it,” he reflected years later. “… I’ve always said that that time was half Nazi Germany, half Alice in Wonderland.”
There was scant evidence to support the traitorous acts Struik was accused of, and in 1956, the charges were dropped. MIT reinstated the professor, who resumed teaching at the school during Charles’s senior year. The decision infuriated Fred. The man was an admitted communist, after all, and here he was once again in a position to mold young minds, maybe even his son’s. The professor’s retention, Fred griped to a fellow anticommunist, “meant… that there would be an MIT Alger Hiss some day for sure.”
Fred complained bitterly about Struik and wrote to MIT administrators warning of the communist influence on the campus where his sons were spending their college years. When an MIT fund-raiser visited Fred in Wichita, the industrialist told him he was “down on Tech” because the administration had done little to take a stand against Struik or other communists in its ranks.
“Fred Koch used all of his influence and all of his wallet and everything else to try to get this guy off the faculty—and he failed,” said John McManus, the current president of the John Birch Society. As a young Bircher in the mid-1960s, McManus recalled meeting Fred at a society function, where the businessman was still fuming about his inability to purge Struik from MIT.
By the early 1960s, the John Birch Society had some 60,000 members, 58 full-time employees, and annual revenues of $1.6 million. It was growing rapidly—and stirring up controversy across the nation. The
Saturday Evening Post
reported that its rabble-rousing members “are said to have infiltrated Republican organizations, disrupted school boards, harassed city councils and librarians and subverted PTA’s near and far.”
The society’s fierce letter-writing and lobbying campaigns targeted issues ranging from U.S. participation in the United Nations(“Get U.S. Out!”) to water fluoridation, which members claimed was a tool of communist dominion. (In Wichita, a Birch Society–led effort repealed by referendum a city fluoridation plan.)
Birchers also bitterly opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on states’ rights grounds, and believed that the civil rights movement itself was a communist creation to divide and conquer America. (“It always seemed to me that when the Communists… begin to light these racial fires all over the country as they are now doing, that it would be the beginning of a decisive move on their part,” Fred wrote to a fellow Birch Society council member in 1963.)
The Birchers formed the vanguard of a far-right awakening in America, and the group’s extreme rhetoric, charges of treason directed at the nation’s politicians, and aggressive recruiting practices, frightened not just the political Left, but the Right as well.
Such torchbearers of conservatism as the
National Review
’s William F. Buckley eyed the movement warily, seeing in the Birch Society’s rise
Fred considered the university’s tolerance of a Dutch mathematician named Dirk Jan Struik particularly egregious. A member of MIT’s faculty since 1926, Struik was an unapologetic Marxist, who had joined the Communist Party in his native Netherlands. In 1951, Struik was hauled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where he pleaded the Fifth. A couple months later, Massachusetts indicted Struik for conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the government. MIT immediately suspended him pending the outcome of the case. “They used mytextbook on differential geometry, but I myself was not allowed to teach it,” he reflected years later. “… I’ve always said that that time was half Nazi Germany, half Alice in Wonderland.”
There was scant evidence to support the traitorous acts Struik was accused of, and in 1956, the charges were dropped. MIT reinstated the professor, who resumed teaching at the school during Charles’s senior year. The decision infuriated Fred. The man was an admitted communist, after all, and here he was once again in a position to mold young minds, maybe even his son’s. The professor’s retention, Fred griped to a fellow anticommunist, “meant… that there would be an MIT Alger Hiss some day for sure.”
Fred complained bitterly about Struik and wrote to MIT administrators warning of the communist influence on the campus where his sons were spending their college years. When an MIT fund-raiser visited Fred in Wichita, the industrialist told him he was “down on Tech” because the administration had done little to take a stand against Struik or other communists in its ranks.
“Fred Koch used all of his influence and all of his wallet and everything else to try to get this guy off the faculty—and he failed,” said John McManus, the current president of the John Birch Society. As a young Bircher in the mid-1960s, McManus recalled meeting Fred at a society function, where the businessman was still fuming about his inability to purge Struik from MIT.
By the early 1960s, the John Birch Society had some 60,000 members, 58 full-time employees, and annual revenues of $1.6 million. It was growing rapidly—and stirring up controversy across the nation. The
Saturday Evening Post
reported that its rabble-rousing members “are said to have infiltrated Republican organizations, disrupted school boards, harassed city councils and librarians and subverted PTA’s near and far.”
The society’s fierce letter-writing and lobbying campaigns targeted issues ranging from U.S. participation in the United Nations(“Get U.S. Out!”) to water fluoridation, which members claimed was a tool of communist dominion. (In Wichita, a Birch Society–led effort repealed by referendum a city fluoridation plan.)
Birchers also bitterly opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on states’ rights grounds, and believed that the civil rights movement itself was a communist creation to divide and conquer America. (“It always seemed to me that when the Communists… begin to light these racial fires all over the country as they are now doing, that it would be the beginning of a decisive move on their part,” Fred wrote to a fellow Birch Society council member in 1963.)
The Birchers formed the vanguard of a far-right awakening in America, and the group’s extreme rhetoric, charges of treason directed at the nation’s politicians, and aggressive recruiting practices, frightened not just the political Left, but the Right as well.
Such torchbearers of conservatism as the
National Review
’s William F. Buckley eyed the movement warily, seeing in the Birch Society’s rise
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