The Portland Soldiers and Sailors Monument sits in the center of Monument Square, on the former site of Portland's 1825 city hall. Dedicated on Oct. 28, 1891, it honors "those brave men of Portland, soldiers of the United States army and sailors of the navy of the United States, who died in defense of the country in the late civil war". Also known as "Our Lady of Victories".
I was in Portland, Maine, recently and found myself in Monument Square, where there is a very large statue dedicated to “Her sons who died for the Union.” Just like every other city or town, Portland sent young men south to protect Washington, D.C., and preserve the Union.
Right in front of the statue were two older gentlemen (perhaps collecting Social Security) with a large sign that read “End the Federal Reserve, Abolish the IRS, Join the John Birch Society.” If we end the Federal Reserve and abolish the IRS, there will be no federal taxes. If there are no taxes then we cannot have an army and we cannot defend the Union, which is exactly what men from Maine did, just as they fought in World War I, World War II and many other wars through the decades. We have seen efforts in Washington over the past few months to freeze the activities of the federal government. A very small group of people would be very happy if the federal government went away and stopped enforcing laws such as those against discrimination and those that protect the poor.
The extreme-right John Birch Society was a very active organization in the 1950s and early 1960s, perhaps an early omen of the then up and coming Goldwater faction of the Republican Party, which has played such an important role in the decades since. The society’s president was very rich businessman Robert Welch, who lived in Belmont, Mass. The society sponsored the “Impeach Earl Warren” campaign after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in puhlic schools unconstitutional.
The John Birch Society was riding high until it asserted that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist sympathizer. Not surprisingly, I do not have a photograph of President Eisenhower on my wall. Admittedly, when “Big Brother Bob Emery on his WBZ kids school asked us to raise a glass to the president of United States and I had a glass of milk in my hand while watching Channel 4 at 63 Gibson Street, in Boston’s Dorchester section. I did salute the president as they played “Hail to the Chief’’! Ike was certainly not perfect in my mind, but he was a great American, a great general, a unifier, a calmer of the waters who also warned us about the power of the military-industrial complex. He was many things, but he was not a Communist sympathizer. Who knows what they may be saying about the current president or maybe even the one who left office a couple of years ago?
The New York Times’s David Brooks, among others, has suggested that the current political climate reflects a rising nihilism, people who really are against everything. So be it. Maybe those folks holding the John Birch Society sign will be able to do fine without their Social Security checks; most older Americans would not.
Perhaps these nativist descendants of those who went off to war are concerned about migrants appearing on their streets, people who do not necessarily look like them, just as their ancestors feared the arrival of the Irish on Munjoy Hill and the French who played such an important role in the development of the State of Maine. Bigotry is a constant in American life. It was there at the time of the Civil War. It was there when Congress restricted the immigration of Italians and Jews and other Eastern Europeans. It is alive and well with groups, such as NSC 131, a neo-Nazi group, which proudly proclaims: “New England is ours, the rest must go.”
The Freedom of Speech which is accepted in our country, as recently seen in was said after Israel was attacked by Hamas terrorists, permits a wide-range of ideas, even like those of the John Birch Society that do no make any sense to me.
Lawrence "Larry" S. DiCara is a Massachusetts lawyer, author and political figure.
