Ideology: The Christian Anti-Communism Crusade

There was a time, a decade or so ago, when a visit by Dr. Fred Schwarz to Chicago would have been news. Then, the founder and director of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade’s musings and declarations and “teachings” about the Soviet and Chinese Communists would have been carefully measured against others at the right end of the political spectrum; politicians might have weighed his potential influence on votes in the next election. That was Schwarz’s heyday, a Cold War era in which he enjoyed the honor of addressing state legislatures. Along with that of other so-called “extremists,” his influence was taken very seriously indeed by those who worked for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Now, although his academic veneer has been well polished and his ferociousness is somewhat modulated, he seems an anachronism. At a time of détente and relative international goodwill, he is preaching basically the same strident themes and warning of the same old bogeymen. Above all, even without the notoriety and the controversy, he is still drawing crowds, raking in money, sending missionaries to spread his word overseas, and analyzing the issues of the day in a widely circulated (55,000 copies twice a month) newsletter. He presides over a militant anti-Communist movement and business that show no signs of losing steam.

Last February, when I called on him, Dr. Schwarz was in his suite at the LaSalle Hotel on the eve of his “Chicago Anti-Subversive Seminar,” engrossed in Adam B. Ulam’s new biography of Stalin. “Aha, there it is,” Schwarz said with a grin, pointing to a passage in which Ulam explains that the origin of the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in the Russian Communist Party was a vote in 1903 on the tiny question of whether the editorial board of the Party’s revolutionary newspaper should have four or six members. “It can be stated categorically,” writes Ulam, “that until April 1917 there were no major ideological differences between the two factions, and whatever minor ones arose were temporary and unstable.”

Schwarz was pleased, and he was eager to share his pleasure, as though the Bolshevik-Menshevik split were the burning issue of the day. He crowed, “I’ve always taught that this ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ business”— the traditional view, popular in the West, that the Bolsheviks took a consistently tougher line—“is a lot of nonsense.” The point fitted straight into his philosophy: diversionary labels aside, a Communist is a Communist is a Communist; no doctrinal dispute, real or contrived, makes one Communist any better than another.

“It’s an incredible task, trying to keep up with all the literature,” said the doctor, sixty-one years old, an Australian who first imported his ideological fervor to America nearly a quarter-century ago. He put down the Ulam book with a sigh, but within moments he had picked up another book detailing the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in China. “Where is Liu Shao-chi?” he asked rhetorically. “I’m waiting for somebody to tell me where he is. He was only President of Communist China and, for twenty years, Mao Tse-tung’s sidekick. . . . This [the Chinese system] is supposed to be the glorious culmination of human freedom?”

Crusader

Schwarz was a general practitioner and sometime psychiatrist from Sydney who was riding the anti-Communist circuit in his own country when, in 1950, he first came to lecture in the United States. He was brought here by fundamentalist radio preacher Carl McIntire. As his message caught on, his trips became more frequent and his tours longer. Within five years he had given up his lucrative medical practice and moved to California as a full-time crusader. His family joined him only briefly and then returned to Australia; except for a daughter, a medical doctor in Michigan, they have remained there, so Schwarz sees his wife only twice a year during visits to the Crusade’s Australian “branch office.” He lives yearround in Long Beach, California, near the Crusade’s offices, but he is still an Australian citizen, and it is only as a “courtesy,” he says, that he pledges allegiance to the American flag at the start of every meeting.

In 1957, in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Schwarz cited Communist documents to warn that the world might fall to Communism as early as 1973. That made him famous. Five years later, in August, 1962, he was appearing on Meet the Press, dodging newsmen’s questions about his view of the John Birch Society, an organization that had recommended the Crusade’s publications to its own members. He insisted then that American efforts against Communism were “inadequate,” and that theme kept him in the limelight through Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential effort and beyond.

Seedbeds

This year, as in every year since his rallies and “schools” of the early sixties, Schwarz’s Crusade can expect to raise about half a million tax-free dollars from some thirty thousand contributors to fight the fight. The doctor, who says that he draws only a $24,000 annual salary plus expenses, insists that the organization’s funds are tightly managed and that every time an outside auditor looks over the books, “he becomes a friend.” (On one occasion, says Schwarz, a California state auditor “told us how to save thousands of dollars by changing our letterhead in a way that made us legally entitled not to pay sales tax.”) Even after the death of some major benefactors, the contributions have remained steady. The main expenditures are apparently for the seminars and for the operation of orphanages and anti-Communism “education” programs.

Schwarz boasts that he is “probably the best-read person in the world” on his subject—Communism—and even the Communists and other leftists whom he seeks out for debates and confrontations seem to agree with that claim. But in Chicago, with another virtuoso performance ahead of him, he was rather nervous and edgy, and that night he slept poorly. “Even after all these years,” he confided, “I always have trouble sleeping the night before.”

This was the first time that Schwarz was bringing his road show to Chicago; usually the Washington’s Birthday holiday weekend was reserved for a seminar on the safe, patriotic home turf of Southern California. But he is still driven by the urge to branch out and find new seedbeds for the message. Schwarz says he has no “basic support” in Chicago, no local businessmen who are willing to underwrite his activities as others have for years in, for example, Milwaukee; the money for the Chicago seminar, in fact, had been raised at a dinner meeting in Indianapolis, another of his strongholds. There had been no advertising campaign for the seminar, although announcements went out to every college and university within reasonable reach of Chicago; and word was passed in the parochial school systems and the city’s ethnic communities.

At first glance, it could have been just another convention. If one drove or walked north on LaSalle Street during the weekend, one saw a shopworn sign suspended from the canopy in front of the LaSalle Hotel that read: WELCOME CHRISTIAN ANTI-COMMUNISM CRUSADE.

WE’RE GLAD YOUR[sic] HERE. Going south, one saw the other side of the same sign with the same greeting, this one grammatically correct, welcoming the College Young Democratic Clubs to a convention. Meeting on another floor of the hotel, the Young Democrats heard a talk by Senator Vance Hartke, Democrat of Indiana, while Schwarz, in his part of the hotel, complained that the Senator had recently addressed what the doctor called a “Communist-front organization,” the National Peace Action Coalition.

Schwarz wondered about whether he would draw a good, seriousminded group to the seminar and keep them around for the full threeday “course.” “I prefer getting a few hundred who stay the whole time to having ten thousand at a one-shot rally,” he explained, as if a big rally were still a possibility for him in 1974.

What he got was a crowd of about two hundred; what he accomplished was not so clear. Some of the people seemed sad and frightened, people who perceived themselves to be at the ramparts facing a mysterious and treacherous “enemy.” They appeared to hang on Schwarz’s every word, to take comfort from his praise of their “effectiveness,” of their “attitude” or “approach” to the political problems of our time.

In the group were several nuns, a number of suburban housewives, earnest-seeming father-and-son teams (one son, proudly touted by his father, had been to East Germany on a tour and found the people “apathetic”), the Americanism chairman of an American Legion post, whose wife wore a badge for the “Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation,” and some Young Americans for Freedom.

There were quite a few old regulars such as Tedis Zierins, a Latvian émigré who had taught himself to write English well enough to get his anti-Soviet letters to the editor printed in many Midwestern newspapers and entered in the Congressional Record (his pockets bulged with copies of reprints, which he urged people to accept). Schwarz called him “one of the most effective anti-Communists in the United States ... an inspiration to me.” Fred Hohulin, a ninth-grade teacher from South Bend, Indiana, was back for his fourth seminar, having previously attended in Southern California, New York City, and Milwaukee. And there were the people Schwarz himself privately labeled “the crackpots”—a man who frequents downtown Chicago street corners with a sandwich-board sign that says, among other things: OIL YES/JEWS NO; a woman who shrieked at Schwarz that if John Cardinal Cody, Archbishop of Chicago, wasn’t doing anything about The Exorcist, then Schwarz should take the responsibility into his own hands; and a man carrying a stuffed animal and pretending to be a Marine commander. “Any group with enthusiasm attracts some crackpots,” Schwarz said defensively. “I bet you’d find the same number at the Young Democrats’ meeting.”

Punching in

LeRoy Bailey, twenty-six years old, was a haunting presence; his face was destroyed in combat in Vietnam. The Chicago newspapers had dramatized his plight, and by noting that the Veterans Administration had refused Bailey the medical treatment he had sought, they had prompted President Nixon to order the V.A. to provide the treatment. Blind, his mutilated face covered with gauze, Bailey sat and tape-recorded every session.

Most of the rest were a captive audience of high school and university students. Once they arrived, they stayed, largely because of Schwarz’s special technique for keeping the room full: any student, teacher, policeman, or clergyman who requested it qualified for a “full scholarship” to the seminar, $20 to cover “tuition” for the lectures and $30 more for food and lodging over the weekend. That was enough if they squeezed three and four into hotel rooms and ate meager meals. But there was a condition attached. The $30 was not paid out to a participant until the end of the seminar when he or she turned in a time card attesting to attendance at every morning, afternoon, and evening meeting all weekend. The “scholarship students” were expected to punch in and out at a time clock just outside the meeting room each time they arrived or departed. Once Schwarz had everyone in the room the first time, he made it clear, after placing an absolute ban on smoking, that the scholarship rule would be taken seriously. “If you miss one session,” he warned with a chuckle, “that cancels your contract and you don’t get anything.”

Thus indentured, many of the students became restless as time went on. A few felt trapped from the start—for example, a bus driver who had brought the sixteen-member “Iowa delegation” to Chicago from Waterloo, having been promised free room and board while he waited to drive them back, found that the price was his unintended and involuntary attendance at eleven lectures on anti-Communism (six of them by the doctor), five films, and three “free speech” hours. The schedule was relieved by breaks for lunch and dinner, and Sunday morning was blocked off on the agenda as “Time for Church.” But the program ran zealously on until about 9:30 on Saturday and Sunday nights.

The theme for the Chicago Crusade, as for many before it over the years, was set out in a written statement of the seminar’s “purposes”: To teach students, teachers and citizens the pathology of communism and its associated destructive forces and to inspire and train them for activity designed to preserve and promote freedom. The communists have long given the highest priority to work among university and college students. Most important communist leaders were recruited while they were students. Trained propagandists, exploiting the idealism of youth, recruit and train susceptible students for leadership in the communist movement. . . . The seminar is designed to inform students, teachers and citizens of the philosophy, morality, organization, techniques, strategy and objectives of communism and the New Left. It is based on the belief that knowledge is power, that ignorance creates fear and breeds apathy, despair or hysteria. Accurate information is a prerequisite of sound judgment and responsible action. The objective is that students at this seminar will commence a program of study and apply the knowledge obtained in practical programs related to their environment of school or community. In this way programs of local, national and international action can be built that will be effective in the preservation and extension of freedom.

Alongside were the nine “premises” on which the lectures were to be based:

America is threatened by forces dedicated to the destruction of its political, economic and cultural heritage; these forces are internal and external; among the most important are communism, anarchy and general totalitarianism; considerable success has attended their destructive efforts; past programs to prevent the advance of communism, anarchy and totalitarianism have proved inadequate; both governmental and nongovernmental action are necessary; action must be based on adequate knowledge of the nature, tactics and objectives of the enemy; this knowledge should be possessed by every citizen; [and] action must be in tune with the ideals of freedom.

Schwarz offers no specific recommendations for the new “programs” and the “action” that must be taken to fend off Communism, but he expresses the hope that his basic message—that Communism is an “evil” philosophy which brings in its wake “everything that is repugnant”—can be spread from one person to another in pyramid fashion. “If everyone you recruit reaches another,” he says, and the process repeats itself in just a week, it would theoretically take only “thirty-two doublings,” and less than a year, to reach all 4 billion people in the world. It is obvious that the doctor does not really think that this process is about to be unleashed, but he recalls wistfully that the phenomenon seemed to be off to an impressive start in 1961, “when we swept Southern California” with a five-day “antiCommunism school” in the Los Angeles Sports Arena. Those were the days when the Los Angeles Rotary Club, for example, raised what Schwarz recalls as a “spontaneous offering” of $5000 for the cause.

The days of those offerings and enthusiasms are long past, but the “curriculum” of the seminar in 1974 seems to appeal to the same old passions, seems to assume that public officials and other prominent citizens still worry about the labels and warnings that preoccupy Schwarz and other crusaders.

On the offensive

On screen, the participants saw the young Ronald Reagan narrating a scare movie, The Truth About Communism, produced by the “National Education Program” at Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas, years ago. Reagan related ominously that “four out of every ten of the world’s people are now oppressed” under Communism. His strident script offered a simplified version of the Russian Revolution and provided a facile context for old mug-shot photographs of Lenin, Trotsky, and other Communist leaders that made them look like candidates for the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Sunday afternoon’s film, The Riot Makers, was more modern and slick, but a genuinely frightening piece of propaganda. Its narrator, Fergus Currie, speaking quickly to get it all in, stared angrily from the screen as he lumped all civil rights and antiwar protest into the subversive category and described all the many leaders of these movements as “leninoids.”

Also required watching was one of Schwarz’s favorite souvenirs, a film of the famous (in these circles) television debate in Los Angeles between Schwarz and the late black journalist Louis Lomax. The doctor told some of the same stories he tells today and used the same old medical analogies—for example, comparing Communism to cancer. The film shows an infuriated Lomax, whose counterthrusts seem sadly ineffective. The point of the film today, Schwarz explained to the audience, is to demonstrate how “to take the offensive ... by being offensive.”

Schwarz has a loyal coterie of “faculty” members who often appear at the seminars. One is “moderator” Raymond A. Joseph, a Haitian exile who says that he is under a death sentence from the Duvalier government but feels that a Communist regime in his country would be just as bad. Now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Joseph describes his long-time involvement with the Crusade as “private activity, like with a political party.” Joseph acknowledges that he is embarrassed by the extreme views of some of the speakers and students, but says that he keeps coming back mostly out of personal loyalty to Schwarz and his conviction that the doctor’s own motives are pure.

The old crusader himself makes a point of the fact that he does not agree with everything his guest lecturers say and do—often he does not even sit in and listen, preferring to wander the hotel corridors or to find a quiet corner and get in some extra reading—but he vigorously defends their “academic freedom” to say what they will. Indeed, he admits that one regular, Juanita Castro, Fidel’s younger sister, has sometimes been an “embarrassment” because of her gung-ho support for questionable Cuban refugee causes. She was not on the program this time; but then neither was Dr. Walter Judd, the former Republican congressman from Minnesota, who often joins Schwarz to discuss, in medical parlance, the “diagnosis and treatment of Communism.”

One regular who did appear this time was M. Stanton Evans, associate editor of the National Review and editor of the Indianapolis News. He decried the imbalance between conservative and liberal faculty on campuses (the latter perform “philosophical lobotomies” on their students, turning them into “nonbelievers in traditional values”) and deplored the teaching of such subversive doctrines as “cultural relativism” and “Keynesian economics” without adequate access to other points of view. But Evans was able to stir audible sighs of relief from the devotees in the audience with his reassuring report that, with the passing of student uprisings, “the counterrevolution is continuing to grow in strength. We can restore this country to the ways of freedom intended for it by its founders.”

Charles E. Rice, a Notre Dame law professor who told the group that his presidential candidate in 1972 had been John Schmitz of the American Independent Party and the John Birch Society, lectured on the restrictions the First Amendment places on the government’s legitimate efforts “to protect itself from revolution.”

“Praise the Lord, we still have people who are concerned . . . concerned about the international Communist criminal conspiracy,” said Herbert A. Philbrick as he surveyed the crowd. Although Philbrick’s tale of how in the 1950s he “led three lives”—as an advertising man, a member of the American Communist Party, and an FBI counterspy— has been told and dramatized over and over again, it is still spellbinding. There were emphatic moans as he described how he was invited “to move up in the Communist ranks.” Some of his eventual conclusions: a Communist has “a criminal mind. . . . When someone becomes a Marxist-Leninist, he becomes a criminal; he rejects all morality.” One must always be on the lookout for Communist sympathizers, Philbrick warned. “In recent years, haven’t we noticed some individuals known as antiwar?” he asked. “Weigh their words. . . . They’re not against war, they’re against the United States, they support Communist aggression in Vietnam.”

The highlight of the weekend was the Sunday night appearance of Phyllis Schlafly, an apostle of many conservative causes, who is now barnstorming the country and urging state legislatures not to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Her argument, shared by Schwarz, was that the amendment represents an “attack on the family” and therefore fits into the Communist strategy to take over the country. Mrs. Schlafly recalled that her “first personal brush with Communism” came when a college friend was divorced: it seems that her husband was a member of a subversive organization and “got orders from the Party to leave his conservative wife and take a new, Communist wife.” Mrs. Schlafly has noticed ever since that “Communists always stir up one group against another,” and now they and their unwitting sympathizers in the women’s liberation movement are working to alienate women and men from each other. (“They don’t want men to like women ... I think that’s kind of part of it.”) “The most fulfilling thing for most women is to have a baby,” she declared; “for most women, the home is the place where they are most happy.” Adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment, she predicted, might deprive American women of their privileged status, of their “legal right” to stay home rather than work or go off to war, only to replace it with a “double burden,” such as the one which she says is imposed on women in the Soviet Union.

Some of the students seemed offended and openly challenged her to explain how she knew what “most women” were thinking. She replied that she was dealing with “self-evident facts,” and Dr. Schwarz chimed in that some of her assertions were supported by the mere existence of the “maternal instinct.” Mrs. Schlafly departed quickly to catch a plane, probably unaware that she had stirred considerable resentment with such statements as her contention that “the women’s liberation movement has definitely identified itself with the lesbian movement.”

“Trust a Communist”

The grand star of the seminar was, of course, Dr. Schwarz himself. He combines a slight teddy-bear quality with an eccentric-professor air; his benign appearance and manner contrast with the shrill voice, which becomes unnerving and almost deafening to those sitting close to a public address speaker. The Schwarz accent (in which “human” becomes “yuman” and “Berkeley” “Buhhklee”) makes some things sound even more sinister than they are purported to be. Typically, he begins by imploring the class to visit the stands at the rear of the room where books, especially his own, You Can Trust the Communists (To Be Communists)—two million copies, twenty languages, its distribution and publication assisted in Korea and Burma during the Kennedy Administration by the United States Information Agency— and The Three Faces of Revolution, and “patriotic jewelry” are on sale. Then, once the tape recorder has been switched on (all sessions are recorded, and tapes are later made available at a nominal fee), he wiggles closer and closer to the lectern and rocks sideways as he launches into his repertoire.

The repertoire is so varied and passionate, touching on so many areas of human endeavor and experience, that it becomes devilishly easy to imagine that the whole show—the Crusade, the seminar, everything—has been created merely as a pretext for the doctor to perform. There are formulas, aphorisms, anecdotes, and semicircular diversions. The battle cry, sometimes printed on backdrop banners displayed at the seminars, is: “External Encirclement Plus Internal Demoralization Leads to Progressive Surrender.” The United States, Dr. Schwarz explains, is being encircled numerically, militarily, economically (“The Arabs have shut down auto plants . . . America is isolated, a whole system of alliances shattered . . . the Arabs could buy up the whole Stock Exchange if they wanted to, shift their money from bank to bank, and destroy currencies at will”), and psychologically. Among the signs of internal demoralization are devaluation—of the dollar; of life, by way of permissive abortion (“a license to kill and mutilate the unborn at will”) and abolition of the death penalty; of government, through the “situation ethics” of the Watergate scandals; and of the churches, which have tried to become “copies of government social agencies.” “Whenever a church becomes social,

the press applauds, the intellectuals approve, and the people stay home.”

Schwarz devotes special attention to philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who, by putting a new political twist on the teachings of Sigmund Freud, has created the “sensualism” strain of revolutionary thought, “devious, dangerous, and destructive.” China? “A tyranny over the mind of a dimension unknown in history.” England’s “winter of discontent”? “Many factors are involved, but three are important: decline of religious faith, democratic socialist delusions, Communist infiltration and sabotage.”

Schwarz, the son of a Viennese Jew who was converted to Christianity in Britain before emigrating to Australia, has been hounded for years by the allegation that the Crusade, like some other organizations generally identified as being at the right end of the political spectrum, is anti-Semitic. Schwarz himself periodically revives the charge with his tendency, in the midst of a lecture, to compare Nazi Germany favorably with Communist-run nations. For example, this year he remarked, “No books are available in China that were not published or approved by Mao. In the worst days of Hitler’s tyranny, there were books available by hundreds of authors.” The allegation was suggested in Danger on the Right, a book published in 1964 by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Schwarz has never forgiven B’nai B’rith for that deed.

In about 1962, Schwarz says, Patrick Frawley, the safety razor and ballpoint pen tycoon who has bankrolled many conservative organizations, offered him a $100,000 contribution if he would placate the critics by changing the name of his organization to the “American AntiCommunism Crusade.” Schwarz declined, insisting that evangelical Christianity was an essential part of the work as he saw it. But he has bent over backwards ever since to demonstrate that “we’re pro-Jewish. . . . I’ve always contended that Israel has a right to exist and fought vehemently the idea that Communism is a Jewish conspiracy. In fact, I get more hostile letters attacking me for that point of view than on any other subject.” Last year Schwarz co-sponsored a motion before the World Anti-Communist League stating that “anti-Semitism is incompatible with enlightened, civilized conduct.”

One aspect of Schwarz’s defense against charges of anti-Semitism has been to include in the seminars a lecture entitled “Communism: The Enemy of Jewish People” by Joseph Dunner, chairman of the political science department at Yeshiva University. Dunner, speaking with a heavy European accent that has plenty of its own fire and brimstone, told the group that the Soviet Communists, “the modern pharaohs . . . turned synagogues into warehouses and pigsties” and otherwise far exceeded the pogroms and other antiJewish measures taken by the czars before the Russian Revolution. In 1948, he said, the Soviet Union “shipped hundreds of thousands of Jews to concentration camps . . . but the American press won’t tell about these things, not even the Chicago Tribune . . . after all, we are in an era of coexistence and détente, we have no right to tell the truth any longer.”

Asked why Jews have rarely if ever supported “the conservative cause” in the United States, Dunner explained that it would take them time to overcome their “tradition of liberalism,” and he proudly pointed out that, as for himself, he had been one of the founders of Young Americans for Freedom. He deplored the Nixon Administration’s decision to sign a Vietnam cease-fire rather than “carrying [the war] to the North,” but then, in apparent rejection of Schwarz’s view that the proceedings must remain “nonpolitical,” circulated copies of his “Open Letter on the Yom Kippur War and the Witch Hunt Against President Nixon.” Distributed by the “Jewish Freedom League of America,” of which Dunner is chairman, the letter blamed the effort to impeach Mr. Nixon in part on “the Communists and their fellow travelers.”

Dunner’s participation in the program, however, did not prevent Schwarz from keeping his usual heavy dose of evangelism in the seminar, including an occasional mention along the lines that the “guidance and compassion of Christ” are necessary for an effective fight against Communism. Each session opened with the pledge to the flag and a long rambling prayer invoking God’s assistance in the battle.

Stirring emotions

Religious themes were also dominant in the weekend’s “free speech” sessions, during which anyone in the room was entitled to speak on any subject for three minutes, so long as he or she accepted an immediate, brief public critique of the message from Schwarz. Gordon Graves, a young physics teacher, for example, said that he was very upset with the Watergate situation and other national problems: “I did trust Nixon, but now I’m not sure what to do. . . . The only true answer, and the only real one, is in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. . . . The peace He’s brought to my life is unbelievable.” That message drew praise from Schwarz and applause from the audience. When another student nervously read biblical quotations to make the point that one should bless “enemies” such as the Communists rather than curse them, the doctor gave this reply: “Amen, it’s the word of God, I agree with it and try to practice it. . . . Your manner and delivery will improve with experience.” When others criticized Schwarz for “emotionalism,” he shot back with the question, “Is there anything wrong with stirring emotions in a good cause?” Many in the audience indicated that they thought not.

The seminar drew mixed reviews from the class. Sister Fulgencia Joseph from St. Louis thought that it was “just wonderful,” and Fred Hohulin, the teacher from South Bend, found it “quite helpful.” The critics fell into two categories, some of them well to the right of Schwarz. To the very end, Craig Chilton of Waterloo, Iowa, struggled to have attention focused on the “insiders” from the Council on Foreign Relations and the news media who secretly run the country and serve the Communists’ goals. Patricia Sheehan of Chicago agreed; she said that she was disappointed that “the European bankers . . . whose money controls everything, even the World Council of Churches,” had not been exposed.

A surprisingly large number of the students told me that they had attended the seminar more as a lark than out of a desire to sign up in the fight against Communism, and they had been disappointed by it, though they stayed to the end. Steve Dick, from the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, objected to “wrapping the whole conservative political philosophy in with Christianity" and accused Schwarz of using “oversimplifications, generalizations, and false analogies . . . just like the Communists.” Enola Pirog, a Chicago schoolteacher, complained that “he shouldn’t just concentrate on far left subversion, but should look at the far right, too.” Ronn Faigen, a junior at Denison University in Ohio, who had driven eight hours to satisfy his curiosity about the Crusade, said that he was relieved to find that “they don’t beat you with a crucifix if you don’t beiieve,” but nonetheless found himself “frightened by the appeal to fears and frustrations.” Hilma Johnson, a senior at Northern Illinois University who came in search of a supplement to her study of Russian and Chinese history, said “it became a study of anti-Communism rather than of Communism.”

But Schwarz did not entertain many of these criticisms. He was busy. There was reading to do, and the daily letter to write to his wife, Lillian, whom he had not seen since Christmas and would not see again until August. And he was going on to Dallas in the morning to begin planning for the next meeting, this time to be called the “Dallas Freedom Seminar,” which was to have the cooperation of the city’s superintendent of schools.

“If the United States inhabited the planet alone, and the only danger was the American Communist Party, I think I could safely go home to Australia and enjoy my family,” said the doctor with a sigh. But he was compelled to continue his work “as long as I have the physical and mental ability to do it and the need for it exists.” He added that one of these days—but not now— he will have to grapple with the problem of finding a successor.

—SANFORD J. UNGAR