The Delmarva To Restore American Independence Now ("TRAIN") committee that distributed this image was one of many TRAIN groups affiliated with the John Birch Society ("JBS"). JBS members first organized TRAIN committees as early as 1966; they quickly appeared throughout the United States. Operating largely independently from both JBS and one another, TRAIN groups were an example of JBS’s strategy o f forming "ad hoc" committees--others included "TACT: Truth About Civil Turmoil," and "TRIM: Tax Reform IMmediately"--in order to focus advocacy on single issues. Their organizers thought that these ad hoc organizations might more effectively win followers for narrow causes than could the broader and more grandiose goals of the JBS. (For more information on the John Birch Society, see: The Heartbeat of the Americanist Cause.) The particular TRAIN group that created this flyer was based in Salisbury, Maryland, a town on the Delmarva Peninsula.
TRAIN committees' main concern was to promote US nationalism and isolationism in order to protect against encroaching foreign communism, which they expressed in this illustration as an attempt to "expose" the supposed US funding of communist partisans in Vietnam. (Although not evident here, TRAIN committees were also an important outlet for anti-UN advocacy during the late 1960s.) To this end, TRAIN committees circulated petitions, sponsored talks, organized film viewings, and distributed literature like this flyer in order to stop what one Florida TRAIN activist called "the tragic result . . . that the American taxpayer is being forced to foot the bill for both sides of this [Vietnam] war."
