Koch Industries (and the Family) - Part 3

On one of his trips home to the US, Fred Chase Koch married Mary C. Robinson in 1932, in Kansas City, Missouri.  She was the daughter of a well-known physician, Ernest Franklin Robinson, who was one of the founders of the University of Kansas School of Medicine.  The couple had four sons:  Frederick, born in 1933; Charles, in 1935; and a set of twins in 1940, David and William.
  Having succeeded in securing the family fortune, Fred Koch joined with new partners to create the Wood River Oil and Refining Company in 1940.  Today that company is known as Koch Industries.  In 1946 the company purchased the Rock Island refinery and crude oil gathering system located near Duncan, Oklahoma. Wood River was later renamed the Rock Island Oil and Refining Company.  In 1956, Koch, along with eleven other prominent Wichita businessmen visited Moscow.  Fred Chase Koch returned to the United States and, immediately after that visit, began spouting anti-Communism rhetoric.
  Fred Koch started speaking out about the Communist threat in American.  He claimed that there was a massive Communist conspiracy to take control of the United States of America.  He stated that the Communist conspiracy was eroding the capitalist beliefs of American universities, churches, political parties, the US media, and that it was rampant in every branch of the United States government.  He stated , "The colored man looms large in the Communist plots to take over America," and that public welfare programs were a secret plan to attract rural African Americans and Puerto Ricans to eastern cities in order for them to vote for Communist causes and "getting a vicious race war started."  According to his son Charles, Fred Koch worked with "many Soviet engineers who were long-time Bolsheviks, who had helped bring on the Russian Revolution" and his father was deeply bothered that the Communist regime decided to purge his friends.
  On 9 December 1958, in Indianapolis, Indiana, a group of 12 men founded the John Birch Society.  The leader was Robert Welch, Jr, a retired candy manufacturer from Massachusetts; one of the other founding members was Fred  Koch.  The John Birch Society was named by Robert Welch after an American Baptist missionary (and United States military intelligence officer) who had been shot by Communist forces in China in August 1945, after the end of World War II.  Welch claimed that John Birch was an "unknown, but dedicated, anti-Communist" and that he was the first American casualty of the Cold War.  The John Birch Society claims to identify with Christian principles, seeks to limit governmental powers, and opposes wealth redistribution  and economic interventionism.  It opposes collectivism, totalitarianism, and communism.  It opposes socialism, as well, which it asserts is infiltrating the US government.
  The John Birch Society (JBS) opposed the civil rights movement, and claimed that the movement had communists in important positions. In late 1965, the JBS produced a flyer entitled "What's Wrong With Civil Rights?" that was distributed as a newspaper advertisement.  In the flyer, one of the answers was: "For the civil rights movement in the United States, with all of its growing agitation and riots and bitterness, and insidious steps towards the appearance of a civil war, has not been infiltrated by the Communists, as you now frequently hear.  It has been deliberately and almost wholly created by Communists patiently building up to this present stage for more than forty years."  The JBS opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, claiming it violated the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and overstepped individual states' rights to enact laws regarding civil rights.  The society opposes "one world government," and it has an immigration reduction view on immigration reform.  It opposes the United Nations, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Central America Free Trade Agreement, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and all other free trade agreements.  The JBS states that the US Constitution has been devalued in favor of political and economic globalization, and that this alleged trend is not accidental.
  In 1928, Koch traveled throughout the USSR looking for business opportunities; in 1956 he made his final trip to Russia.  In 1960, Fred published a book, A Business Man Looks at Communism, where he wrote that he found the Soviet Union "a land of hunger, misery, and terror."  In 1961, in a speech to the Women's Republican Club, Fred Chase Koch said, "Maybe you don't want to be controversial by getting mixed up in this anti-communist battle, but you won't be very controversial lying in a ditch with a bullet in your brain."  What a wonderful way to wake up a bunch of staid, quiet Republican wives!
  In 1966, Fred Chase Koch turned over the day-to-day management of Koch Industries to his son, Charles.  In 1967, Fred Koch passed away at the Bear River near Ogden, Utah.  His wife died in 1990.

      More to come about the Koch brothers and Koch Industries...