Impeach Earl Warren

The GOP’s Turn Toward Extremism

In 1961, an aging man with a high forehead topped by paper white hair named Robert Welch, Jr. sat down in his Belmont, Massachusetts home to write. Welch by then was a wealthy man. Despite his early failures in life—unfinished degrees from the U.S. Naval Academy and Harvard Law School and a business that failed during the Great Depression—Welch later joined his brother’s company, the James O. Welch Company, which introduced Sugar Daddies, Sugar Babies, and Junior Mints to American consumers. But, by the 1950s, the business of selling candy to children began to bore Welch. In 1950, he ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary race to become Massachusetts’ Lieutenant Governor. Soon, more political losses would come. In 1952, Senator Robert A. Taft, the champion of the Far Right, would lose the Republican nomination to centrist Dwight D. Eisenhower, and two years later in 1954, Welch’s favorite Senator to whom he contributed often, Joseph McCarthy, would be censured by the Senate. That same year, for Welch, something even worse happened: the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation was unconstitutional. To Welch, it was Communinstic influence run amok.

By late 1958, Welch founded what he hoped to be the antidote: the John Birch Society, named after a U.S. Army OSS field agent and missionary that was killed by Chinese Communist soldiers ten days after WWII ended in August of 1945. Welch considered Birch to be the first casualty in the Cold War and used him as the namesake in his organization’s fight against Communism. However, the Birch Society’s biggest fight focused at home: impeaching the man who authored the majority opinion in Brown v. Board: Chief Justice Earl Warren. Welch—writing from his Belmont, Massachusetts home in 1961—warned that Warren had allowed for “trouble [that] has been brought on by the Communists” including “riots and civil disorder,” and “the creation of ‘civil rights’ programs and organizations which can attract gullible do-gooders and then serve many other Communist purposes.” However, unlike many of the liberals that became the focus of other anti-Civil Rights and anti-Communist zealots, Warren was a Republican.

In 1942, Warren defeated Democrat Culbert Olson to become the Governor of California, a post he held until 1953, when President Eisenhower nominated him to the Supreme Court. Warren’s politics represented a popular strain of Republicanism at the time: a willingness to embrace the New Deal that had expanded government’s size and role during the 1930s and 1940s under President Roosevelt, and an openness to the expansion of Civil Rights for Black Americans. However, Welch began pushing back on this centrist vision for the G.O.P., instead latching onto Senators Taft and McCarthy. But by 1961, both men were dead—and Eisenhower’s Vice President, Richard Nixon, had lost to John F. Kennedy, who promised to take the push for Civil Rights to new heights, as its clarion call grew louder in the South, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others led the grassroots efforts to end segregation.

Soon, the Birch Society—and the campaign to impeach Justice Warren—gained tens of thousands of devotees, as chapter meetings sprouted up across the country, especially in places like Dallas and Orange County, where some of the largest meetings were held. Not long after that, across the country in places as far flung as Indiana, Florida, Alabama, Arizona, California, and Georgia, hundreds of billboards began to appear off the sides of highways which read, “Save Our Republic, Impeach Earl Warren.” It was a pressure campaign that only grew in influence as the Civil Rights Movement gained steam. John Birch Society literature referred to the campaign to expand freedom to Black Americans as the “Negro Revolutionary Movement,” which it said was “headed by Martin Luther King and all of the Communists with whom he has surrounded himself,” and that the movement was “the most important single part of the Communist program and strategy for taking over our country.” For Welch and his followers, the fight for Civil Rights was existential—directly connected to the Cold War—as one John Birch produced propaganda film, Anarchy, USA, warned, “the Civil Rights movement, as we know it today, is simply part of a worldwide movement, organized and directed by Communists, to enslave all mankind.”

However, Welch had his detractors even among those pushing for a conservative revival, such as National Review founder William F. Buckley, who described the anti-Warren effort as an “ill-conceived campaign” and wrote that Welch was only effective at “distorting reality and in refusing to make the crucial moral and political distinction…between (1) an active pro-communist, and (2) an ineffectually anti-Communist liberal.” Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, also accused Welch or being “an imbecile or a knave.” However, other Republicans were less willing to go so far. Senator Barry Goldwater, who sought to become the conservative movement’s voice in Washington, said that Birch Society members were among the “finest people” he’d met and that they were “the type of people we need in politics.”

Goldwater seemed to understand where Republican politics were headed. As the Civil Rights Movement achieved wins, first on the ground in places like Montgomery, Little Rock, Greensboro, and Birmingham and later through federal legislation passed by President Johnson, the GOP began to use Birch-style tactics it once criticized. In 1964, Goldwater became the Republican Party’s nominee. When he accepted the nomination at the party’s convention that summer, he declared, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” That fall, he ran an explicitly anti-Civil Rights campaign, using the dogwhistle slogan, “In Your Heart, You Know He's Right.” Eventually, Goldwater would lose in a historic landslide, as Johnson won 44 states and 60.1% of the popular vote, the largest percentage in American history.

The Great Society continued uninterrupted, as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start became reality. In the Warren Court, the gains were arguably even greater. Among many others, Loving v. Virginia (1967) ruled laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional; Miranda v. Arizona (1966) ensured a person’s rights after arrest; New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) protected a news organization from being sued for defamation for reporting the news; Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) protected a person’s right to privacy and use of contraception; Baker v. Carr (1962) ensured “one man, one vote” when it came to redistricting laws; Trop v. Dulles (1958) ruled that it was unconstitutional to revoke citizenship as punishment for a crime; and Cooper v. Aaron (1958) affirmed that the Supreme Court’s rulings are final and must be abided by, even if found disagreeable.

In the next few years, some of these are bound to be challenged because today, the Republican Party is using the same Birch-style playbook—except now, it is no longer fringe, it is the consensus. Right now, the target for impeachment is U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, a former classmate of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who received his first appointment to the federal bench from President George W. Bush. Soon, it will be somebody else who dares defy the President. Other strategies that have animated this administration—like the campaign to end “D.E.I.” and uproot “cultural Marxism”—are completely rooted in Welch’s crusade to impeach Warren and overturn Brown v. Board on the grounds of “Communist influence.” These efforts are born out of fear—and fear is perhaps the most effective political strategy when employed effectively. This time, however, there will be no standing up from fellow Republicans, and any subordination will be met with suppression, or worse. Because even though Robert Welch, Jr. may have lost the one race he ran in 1950, in 2025, he has surely won.

Sources:

Bethune, Brett. "Influence Without Impeachment: How the Impeach Earl Warren Movement Began, Faltered, But Avoided Irrelevance." Journal of Supreme Court History 47, no. 2 (2022): 142-161. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sch.2022.0022.

Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 2001. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691165738/suburban-warriors?srsltid=AfmBOopf7bgJ4iAVVCEW_ApMAW_rYP0IDJflThIfruYNZOwDFL_yacrl

Matthew Dallek, Birchers, 2003. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/matthew-dallek/birchers/9781541673571/?lens=basic-books