John Birch - Lautz, Terry

. .

Résumé :
John Birch was better known in death than life. Shot and killed by Communists in China in 1945, he posthumously became the namesake for a right-wing organization whose influence is still visible in today's Tea Party. This is the remarkable story of who he actually was: an American missionary-turned-soldier who wanted to save China, but became a victim instead. Terry Lautz, a longtime scholar of U.S.-China relations, has investigated archives, spoken with three of Birch's brothers, found letters written to the women he loved, and visited sites in China where he lived and died. The result, John Birch: A Life, is the first authoritative biography of this fascinating figure whose name was used for a political cause. Raised as a Baptist fundamentalist, Birch became a missionary to China prior to America's entry into the Second World War. After Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for the U.S. Army in China, served with Claire Chennault, commander of the famed Flying Tigers, and operated behind enemy lines as an intelligence officer. He planned to resume his missionary work after the war, but was killed in a dispute with Communist troops just days after Japan's surrender. During the heyday of the Cold War in the 1950s, Robert Welch, a retired businessman from Boston, chose Birch as the figurehead for the John Birch Society, believing that his death was evidence of conspiracy at the highest levels of government. The Birch Society became one of the most polarizing organizations of its time, and the name of John Birch became synonymous with right-wing extremism. Cutting through the layers of mythology surrounding Birch, Lautz deftly presents his life and his afterlife, placing him not only in the context of anti-communism but in the longstanding American quest to shape China's destiny....

Biographie:
Terry Lautz is a visiting professor at Syracuse University and former vice president of the Henry Luce Foundation. He graduated from Harvard, served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, and received his Ph.D. at Stanford University. He has also lived and worked in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China.

...

Sommaire:
John Birch is a totemic figure in American life. The society named after him is one of the famous far-right organizations in American history. It was also a paradigmatic example of anti-communist hysteria during the Cold War, and its influence on the American far right to this day remains significant. Yet despite his posthumous fame, Birch himself remains an obscure figure.

Terry Lautz, a longtime scholar of US-China relations, has spoken with all of Birch's remaining relatives, found shoeboxes filled with letters from one of his former lovers, and visited the various sites in China where he worked. The result is the first authoritative biography of this fascinating figure, who continues to haunt the political fringes of American life. Birch grew up in the rapidly growing Bible culture of the post-World War I period, and then became a missionary in China in the tumultuous period of its war against the Japanese and the escalating conflict between nationalists and communists. He fought with Claire Chennault's famed Flying Tigers and had a number of romantic relationships with women along the way. After the war ended, he committed himself to resuming his missionary activities in China, but was killed by communist guerrillas in an altercation a couple of weeks after the war ended in September 1945. A few years after his death, when China fell to the communists, anti-communists in Congress latched onto his life and promoted him as a martyr. Within a few years, Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer in New England, formed the John Birch Society, an extreme right-wing organization whose influence is still visible in the Tea Party movement. Lautz covers Birch's life and his afterlife, and also places him not merely in the context of the American far right, but in the revolutionary war that consumed China in the 1930s and 1940s.

In this critical study of a figure who has reached near-legendary status, Lautz cuts through the mythology to expose John Birch-both the man and the political phenomenon....