Robert W. Welch, Jr.
Robert W. Welch, Jr.
Robert Henry Winborne Welch, Jr.was an American businessman, political activist, and author. He was independently wealthy following his retirement and used that wealth to sponsor anti-Communist causes. He co-founded the conservative group the John Birch Societyin 1958 and tightly controlled it until his death. He became a highly controversial target of criticism by liberals, as well as by some leading conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Jr...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth1 December 1899
CountryUnited States of America
Newspapers write ringing editorials declaring that this is and always was a democracy.
For in the first place the American people could not have been swept too fast and too far in this movement without enough alarms being sounded to be heard and heeded.
All alone in a committee room of the Senate Office Building in Washington, I was reading the dry typewritten pages in an unpublished report of an almost forgotten congressional committee hearing.
The word democracy comes from the Greek and means, literally, government by the people.
And for well over a hundred years our politicians, statesmen, and people remembered that this was a republic, not a democracy, and knew what they meant when they made that distinction.
In a democracy there is a centralization of governmental power in a simple majority.
The American Republic was bound - is still bound - to follow in the centuries to come the same course to destruction as did Rome.
We have seen a central government taking more and more control over public education, over communications, over transportation, over every detail of our daily lives.
The difference is that for a soundly conceived and solidly endowed republic it takes a great deal longer for those seeds to germinate and the plants to grow.
In the best days of our republic Americans were fiercely proud of the fact that rich and poor met on such equal terms in so many ways, and without the slightest trace of hostility.
In summary, the Romans were opposed to tyranny in any form; and the feature of government to which they gave the most thought was an elaborate system of checks and balances.
For, quite literally, the whole world today is looking for us to take the lead in carrying out those obligations imposed on the American people as a whole by the beautiful, compassionate and courageous principle of noblesse oblige.
For not only every democracy, but certainly every republic, bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
In the Constitution of the American Republic there was a deliberate and very extensive and emphatic division of governmental power for the very purpose of preventing unbridled majority rule.