Alfred Kohlberg

Alfred Kohlberg (January 27, 1887, San Francisco, California, April 7, 1960, New York City) was an American textile importer and staunch anti-Communist, a member of the "China lobby", an ally of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, a friend and advisor of John Birch Society founder Robert W. Welch Jr. and a member of the original national council of the John Birch Society.

Born in San Francisco, Kohlberg moved to New York and set up a business buying linen in Ireland which was then shipped to China, where local weavers turned the raw linen into fine textiles. The finished products were then sent to the United States where they were sold to consumers as luxury fabrics. His business interests led him to travel often to China. During one such trip in 1943, after inspecting the progress of the Chinese war effort, he became convinced him that the many stories in the American press of Chiang Kai-shek's corruption were false and were being spread by communist sympathizers.

Subsequently, he founded a journal Plain Talk intended to rebut the claims made by the China Hands and support the Nationalist Government of Chiang, thus becoming an influential member of the "China lobby."

Kohlberg was a board member of the Institute of Pacific Relations, but he later claimed that it was infiltrated by communists. He was the financial backer of Plain Talk, which merged with The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, published by the Foundation for Economic Education in 1950.

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