Welch continued to try to sell his own product, caramel lollipops later named Sugar Daddies, while working in sales for Brach and Sons for a couple of years.
[citation needed] In 1955, he traveled to Asia to meet Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee; "a formative moment for Welch, who found himself welcomed with effusive praise as a leading American anti-Communist.
"[14] He initially planned to form a third party, but after being rebuffed at the National States Rights Conference in 1956, Welch turned his focus towards public education on the threat of Communism.
[9][15] Welch published his "A Letter to the South" in the magazine that year, in which he blamed Communism for desegregation and spoke against the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
He named the organization for John Birch, an American missionary and military intelligence officer killed in a confrontation with Chinese Communist soldiers in 1945.
[17][18] Starting with eleven men, Welch greatly expanded the membership, exerted very tight control over revenues and set up a number of publications.
[19] Its main activity in the 1960s, says Rick Perlstein, "comprised monthly meetings to watch a film by Welch, followed by writing postcards or letters to government officials linking specific policies to the Communist menace".
While not attacking the members of the Society directly, Buckley concentrated his fire upon Welch in order to prevent his controversial views from tarnishing the entire conservative movement.
[citation needed] Being in the tradition of an older, Taftian conservatism, Welch favored a foreign policy of "Fortress America" rather than "entangling alliances" through NATO and the United Nations.
[citation needed] Welch was the editor and publisher of the Society's monthly magazine American Opinion and the weekly The Review of the News, which in 1971 incorporated the writings of another conservative activist, Dan Smoot.
[22][23] He referred to the Conspirators as "The Insiders", seeing them mainly in internationalist financial and business families such as the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, and organizations such as the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.
[25] Republican criticism of the John Birch Society intensified after Welch circulated a letter in 1954 calling President Dwight D. Eisenhower a possible "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy".
According to Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, "Wherever he looked, Welch saw Communist forces manipulating American economic and foreign policy on behalf of totalitarianism.
'"[29] "Consequently, he charged, the Progressive era, which expanded the federal government's role in curbing social and economic ills, was a dire period in our history, and Woodrow Wilson 'more than any other one man started this nation on its present road to totalitarianism' ...
'"[29] "This master conspiracy, he said, had forerunners in ancient Sparta, and sprang fully to life in the 18th century, in the 'uniformly Satanic creed and program' of the Bavarian Illuminati.