These ‘Opinions’ Were Way Out There

If you were open to the idea that rock music might be a communist indoctrination tool, or that Russia’s space walk was filmed in a movie studio, Sierra Madre’s American Opinion Bookstore was once the place to go.

Located at 54 W. Sierra Madre Boulevard from 1965 until 1969, the store sold a variety of radical conservative literature, records, and other paraphernalia—most of which revolved around far-fetched Cold War conspiracy theories.

Though the store gave the folksy feel of a mom-and-pop, selling flags and children’s balloons with “SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE" printed on them, the American Opinion Bookstore was no small start-up, but part of a large national chain operated by the anti-communist John Birch Society, an organization founded in Massachusetts in 1958 by retired candy maker Robert W. Welch.

The bookstores, along with an accompanying magazine called American Opinion were an attempt to disseminate Welch's radical beliefs, which included claims that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist agent, that the civil rights movement was run by the Communist Party, that Woodrow Wilson was a "totalitarian" president, and that communism had been concocted centuries ago by a clandestine group called the Illuminati.

Welch, who is famous for creating the candy Junior Mints, once declared that Americans could be subdivided into four groups: "Communists, communist dupes or sympathizers, the uninformed who have yet to be awakened to the communist danger, and the ignorant."

At the height of their popularity, American Opinion Bookstores dotted the Southland, with branches in Arcadia, Covina, Montrose, Torrance, Downey, Canyon Country, and North Hollywood. The Birch Society's West Coast headquarters was located in San Marino.

The stores circulated their own newsletters, in which UNICEF was lambasted as a communist plot, California housing discrimination laws were decried as "socialistic," and readers were encouraged to “storm the ramparts of engulfing collectivism.” 

Though these were probably not the American opinions of most people in Sierra Madre, the store did cater to a small segment of the city's population—the kind of people who wrote letters to the Sierra Madre News complaining about “militant colored groups," "fuzzy-headed liberals," pinkos,” and “plain old commies," as one writer did on July 9, 1964.

During the 1960s, the store invited some of the most far-right figures of the era to make speaking appearances in town. Talks were held in local venues like Sierra Madre School, the Masonic Hall, and the bookstore itself.

On March 14, 1966, the bookstore sponsored a talk by Rousas John Rushdoony, a Calvinist Christian minister who believed the Holocaust never took place, advocated the death penalty for “practicing homosexuals,” thought that interracial marriage should be outlawed, and called American slavery "benevolent." On May 9, 1966, the store sponsored a lecture at Sierra Madre School by Alan Stang, a right-wing author who decried Martin Luther King Jr. as a “communist fraud,” called the Civil War "Lincoln’s Communist War," and in later years, claimed that Gerald Ford was a communist, and that Ronald Reagan was "our first homosexual president."

The Sierra Madre store was associated with other shadowy conservative groups in the San Gabriel Valley, such as the “Network of Patriotic Letter Writers,” a Pasadena organization, and Montrose newspaper The Ledger.

The American Opinion Bookstores experienced a decline in popularity after the 1960s, and by 2006, the last Southern California had shut its doors.

Today the John Birch Society has shrunken vastly, but was still listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of 824 anti-government "Patriot" groups that were operating in 2010.

They continue to a cast subtle influence on the national political scene. In 2010, the Birch Society co-sponsored the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual round table of prominent conservatives and figures from the Republican Party. House Minority Leader John Boehner and former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee appeared at the event.

The other sponsor was Oath Keepers, a conservative organization that has obliquely suggested that the U.S. government has secret plans to declare martial law and imprison Americans in concentration camps. Now there's a topic for a best-seller.