Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty by Daniel Schulman
Authors: Daniel Schulman
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Indianapolis, Fred Koch strode up the walkway to the sprawling brick Tudor home at 3650 Washington Boulevard. Stepping out of the chill and shedding his coat, Fred was greeted by Marguerite Dice, the widow who had volunteered to host the meeting that would mark the birth of the John Birch Society.
Fred found a seat in Dice’s spacious living room, where plush chairs and davenports had been arrayed in a semicircle. There with him were ten others, including T. Coleman Andrews, former commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, who had resigned his post in 1955, coming out as a vocal foe of the income tax; Col. Laurence Bunker, a former aide to General Douglas MacArthur; Wisconsin industrialist William Grede; W. B. McMillan, president of the Hussman Refrigerator Company; and University of Illinois classics professor Revilo Oliver, later a hero of white supremacists for his racist and anti-Semitic jeremiads.
Robert Welch had convened the meeting. He was a former candy company executive who in the mid-1950s had quit his job to devote himself full-time to fighting communism. How could he continue peddling Sugar Babies and Junior Mints when America—the world—was in crisis?
Welch was a child prodigy who had entered college at the age of twelve. He had dabbled in politics, launching a 1950 bid for lieutenant governor in Massachusetts on a platform of repelling the creep of socialism into state and federal government. He lost the race, but his dystopic vision of a subverted, subjugated America gained traction. To disseminate his ideas, Welch founded a magazine,
One Man’s Opinion
(later renamed
American Opinion
). And that was the problem: Welch was just one man. If he hoped to defeat the existential threat of communism, he would need an army.
Fred Koch, whose fervent anticommunism had brought him to Welch’s notice, seemed like an ideal general. Since returning from the Soviet Union in 1930, he had watched his four sons grow up in a world where the words of his old Bolshevik minder seemed to be coming true. Fred now saw evidence of communist infiltration everywhere. Jerome Livschitz’s taunt—
we will make you rotten to the core
—echoed in his ears. His time among the Soviets, and his firsthand experiences witnessing a society fully under the boot heel of government, was regular table talk for the Koch boys.
“He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government and government policy,” David has said. “It’s something I grew up with—a fundamental point of view that big government was bad, and imposition of government controls on our lives and economic fortunes was not good.”
Fred’s experiences in the Soviet Union, which in turn drove his interest in politics and economics, especially influenced Charles. “That sparked the evolution of Charles’s political views,” said Tony Woodlief, a former Koch Industries management consultant who knows Charles well. “You can blame it on Standard Oil.”
The more Fred traveled the world, the more horrified he became at the growing influence of socialism and communism—to the point where, on the cusp of World War II, he even saw something laudable in the rise of fascism. “Although nobody agrees with me,I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard,” he reported in an October 1938 letter to his mentor Charles de Ganahl, after an extensive trip that included stops in imperial Japan and (“violently socialistic”) New Zealand.
The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.
At the end of World War II, Fred
Fred found a seat in Dice’s spacious living room, where plush chairs and davenports had been arrayed in a semicircle. There with him were ten others, including T. Coleman Andrews, former commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, who had resigned his post in 1955, coming out as a vocal foe of the income tax; Col. Laurence Bunker, a former aide to General Douglas MacArthur; Wisconsin industrialist William Grede; W. B. McMillan, president of the Hussman Refrigerator Company; and University of Illinois classics professor Revilo Oliver, later a hero of white supremacists for his racist and anti-Semitic jeremiads.
Robert Welch had convened the meeting. He was a former candy company executive who in the mid-1950s had quit his job to devote himself full-time to fighting communism. How could he continue peddling Sugar Babies and Junior Mints when America—the world—was in crisis?
Welch was a child prodigy who had entered college at the age of twelve. He had dabbled in politics, launching a 1950 bid for lieutenant governor in Massachusetts on a platform of repelling the creep of socialism into state and federal government. He lost the race, but his dystopic vision of a subverted, subjugated America gained traction. To disseminate his ideas, Welch founded a magazine,
One Man’s Opinion
(later renamed
American Opinion
). And that was the problem: Welch was just one man. If he hoped to defeat the existential threat of communism, he would need an army.
Fred Koch, whose fervent anticommunism had brought him to Welch’s notice, seemed like an ideal general. Since returning from the Soviet Union in 1930, he had watched his four sons grow up in a world where the words of his old Bolshevik minder seemed to be coming true. Fred now saw evidence of communist infiltration everywhere. Jerome Livschitz’s taunt—
we will make you rotten to the core
—echoed in his ears. His time among the Soviets, and his firsthand experiences witnessing a society fully under the boot heel of government, was regular table talk for the Koch boys.
“He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government and government policy,” David has said. “It’s something I grew up with—a fundamental point of view that big government was bad, and imposition of government controls on our lives and economic fortunes was not good.”
Fred’s experiences in the Soviet Union, which in turn drove his interest in politics and economics, especially influenced Charles. “That sparked the evolution of Charles’s political views,” said Tony Woodlief, a former Koch Industries management consultant who knows Charles well. “You can blame it on Standard Oil.”
The more Fred traveled the world, the more horrified he became at the growing influence of socialism and communism—to the point where, on the cusp of World War II, he even saw something laudable in the rise of fascism. “Although nobody agrees with me,I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard,” he reported in an October 1938 letter to his mentor Charles de Ganahl, after an extensive trip that included stops in imperial Japan and (“violently socialistic”) New Zealand.
The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.
At the end of World War II, Fred
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