I WAS DEEP IN THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS back in 2018, researching the John Birch Society. Sifting through the archives, I found an odd letter discussing the far-right, anti-Communist organization. One of the correspondents was Jerome Bakst, the research director for the Anti-Defamation League. Following the historian’s instinct to pursue leads, I wondered whether Bakst might have had any archival records pertaining to the society. So I sent a cold email to the ADL’s main office. Sure enough, a few days later I learned that Bakst had one box of files relating to the group stored in the ADL’s New Jersey warehouse. I was allowed to look at the box in the ADL’s New York headquarters. Inside was material hard to find elsewhere, such as lists of chapter members and donors to the society dating to 1971 and 1972. How on earth, I wondered, had Bakst come into possession of sensitive information about such a secretive organization?
I found my answer a few blocks south in a different ADL collection on the Birch Society, this time housed at the American Jewish Historical Society in the Center for Jewish History. The files were a goldmine.
They revealed that the ADL ran an extensive, multidimensional counterintelligence operation to dig up dirt on the Birchers and publicly expose the organization as hate-filled and anti-democratic. The files contained a trove of information about the Birch Society but also provided a window into the ADL’s sources and methods during that era.
To be honest, I was a little taken aback. Here was evidence that a venerable civil rights and civil liberties organization had spied, extensively, on a grassroots political movement. Some of the items were strikingly personal. The files included a codicil to a Birch donor’s will, credit checks on individuals suspected of membership, Birch members’ home addresses, chapter meetings, license-plate numbers, and more. Code-named agents posing as far-right activists had infiltrated the society, as well as white supremacist groups. Some of the ADL’s reports were sent to the FBI.
Such deceptive methods initially struck me as contrary to the ADL’s mission to advance human dignity and root out hate. However, as I learned more about the ADL’s history and delved deeper into the papers, trying to cast empathy in all directions (as a mentor once advised), I became sympathetic to the spy program. The ADL’s surreptitious activism helped keep an extremist, conspiratorial movement relegated to the margins of American politics, and it did so amid a surge of violence against civil rights protesters as the nation struggled to become a multiracial democracy.