Vanguard of the Americanist Cause: A Close Look at The John Birch Society

The phrase Vanguard of the Americanist Cause is not metaphor but fact. From its founding in 1958, the John Birch Society carried the brunt of the attacks — branded, smeared, and defamed precisely because it named what others refused to: communist subversion inside America and globalist collusion at the highest levels. Gary Benoit, a JBS member since the ’60s and longtime editor of The New American, documents this story from the inside.

He shows how Robert Welch’s warnings about Castro, Alger Hiss, and the United Nations were vindicated; how the Society’s timeline of infiltration through tax, bank, and bureaucratic machinery was already in motion; and how ordinary members became extraordinary organizers, driving campaigns that reshaped communities and state legislatures alike. With chapters such as “Right All Along!” and “The Power of Organization,” the book names victories as well as betrayals, citing the roll-call votes, policies, and media attacks that defined the struggle.

Benoit also situates the JBS fight in its wider context: a world where elites in the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and World Economic Forum openly plotted “new world order” schemes, while Americans at home faced a steady march of socialism masked as progress. He describes the Society’s leaders — Welch, John F. McManus, Art Thompson — not as abstract figures, but as men he knew, debated with, and labored alongside in the trenches of publishing, education, and activism.

The book closes as it began: with an invitation. If the JBS was the vanguard in 1958, then its history is not mere nostalgia — it is a manual for the present. In an era of weaponized agencies, canceled voices, and collapsing independence, Benoit presses the point that a vanguard is needed now more than ever. This is not simply the biography of an organization, but a charge to join an epic undertaking of less government, more responsibility, and — with God’s help — a better world. (2025ed, 131pp, pb)