The John Birch Society.

Given its emphasis on establishing a grassroots organization in local communities, the John Birch Society was probably the most important radical-right group during the 1960s. Founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a wealthy former candy manufacturer and onetime vice-president of the National Association of Manufacturers, the organization grew to forty thousand members in three hundred local chapters by 1963 and to eighty thousand members in four hundred local chapters by 1967. This broad organizational base made the John Birch Society highly influential on local issues and an easily mobilized force on national issues and political campaigns. Named after an American army captain and Baptist missionary who was killed by the Chinese Communists during the Chinese revolution of the late 1940s, the organization was virulently anti-communist and idolized the late Sen. Joe McCarthy for his rabid antired crusade of the early 1950s. In...