The Red and the Black

...During the postwar decade, The Churchman printed Harry Ward, William Henry Mellish, Stephen H. Fritchman...

...In a previous book, Apostles of Discord, he described the attempts of our native fascists and racist bigots to disrupt and subvert the churches of America...

...In April 1956, after the folksy and foxy Georgia boy had been exposed by Frederick Woltman in the WorldTelegram and by Stanley High in the Reader's Digest, the Methodist Council of Bishops adopted a resolution declaring that neither McMichael, the Bulletin or the Federation spoke for the Methodist Church...

...The Churchman, also Episcopal, which is reputed to be the oldest religious magazine in the English-speaking world, and is edited by Guy Emery Shipler...

...It also reeks with bathos, so that frequently one wishes Roy would tell us it wasn't so...

...The Bishop's early lapses from political grace were in fact due largely to failures of caution and judgment, and to his desire to defend respected friends and associates from what he considered to be unjust attacks...

...Undaunted, McMichael continued his editorial enormities and in 1951 defended the Communist invasion of South Korea...

...Four years after he got the job he was fired by a committee of tough-minded Unitarian laymen...

...James G. Endicott...

...During the party's "social Fascist" period she kept the Bulletin as Red as the Methodist elders would allow and Redder than they liked...

...As a historian, Roy combines scholarly scruple with journalistic clarity and pace...

...Wise men will follow it as far as its beams cast light and do so without fear, merely because its beams happen to be red...

...Unhappily, that is exactly the way it was and still is, except that now the fellow traveling pastors are fewer and less funny, and their flocks have dwindled...

...In his hands the history of the cold war on the religious front glitters with comedy and slap-stick farce, and darkens with tragedy...

...McMichael, who was appointed editor in 1944, hewed to the Communist line with equal strictness in almost everything he found fit to print...

...McMichael inherited the editorship of the Social Questions Bulletin, organ of the Methodist Federation for Social Action, from Winifred Chappell, a Methodist deaconess and a truly fanatical fellow traveler...

...J. Spencer Kennard Jr...

...In 1947 Shipler came to the rescue of his friend and fellow traveler Stephen H. Fritchman, then threatened with expulsion from the editorship of the Unitarian Register...

...The surprise one feels after reading Roy's detailed and meticulously fair chronicle is not that thousands of churchly innocents flocked into the Communist fronts of the '30s, '40s and '50s, but that during that whole period not a single outstanding religious leader, with the possible exception of Harry Ward, collaborated with the Communist party, or tried to lead his flock into the Communist fold...

...Some, like Bishop Oxnam, soon became highly intelligent and effective anti-Communists...

...Murray Kempton, New York Post columnist, attended one of these sessions expecting to fill his next day's column with his usual savage denunciation of the Committee and its counsel...

...There is a star in the East," wrote the infatuated cleric...

...Its prestige is still high despite the fellow-traveling exploits of its editor, William B. Spofford Jr., executive director of the Church League for Industrial Democracy...

...In the concluding section of his book, Roy tells the little-known but politically important story of how Moscow tried to capture and control the American churches of the Russian, Armenian and Eastern Orthodox immigrants and refugees, and their press...

...Hewlett Johnson, and a score of other Soviet apologists, but rarely found space for their critics...

...Perhaps the most revolting pages of Roy's dispassionate and relentlessly unexpurgated history recite the testimony of the political Elmer Gantries who were nabbed by subpoena servers and asked to sing for the entertainment and instruction of the House Lin-American Affairs Committee...

...But their editors, while not themselves party members, could be relied upon to follow the party line most of the time, to provide an outlet for the writings of other fellow travelers and Soviet sympathizers, and to reject the contributions of their critics...

...McMichael, he continued, "followed the Communist line for fourteen years, knew exactly what he was doing, and used every trick in the book (ad nauseam) yesterday to avoid admitting it...

...Later, when he appeared voluntarily before the Un-American Affairs Committee, his services to truth, unlike those of the Pecksniffian McMichael, were distinguished and enlightening...

...Fritchman, who became editor of the Register in 1943, had echoed the Communist line ("The Yanks are not coming") during the Stalin-Hitler pact and later welcomed the writings of Howard Selsam, director of the party's educational apparatus, Paul Robeson, Harry Ward and other Soviet sympathizers...

...The magazine achieved its peak influence during World War II when for a time it displayed on its masthead the names of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Sherwood Eddy, Edwin Mc-Neal Poteat and other editorial "advisors" who quickly backed away when they realized that The Protestant was loaded...

...During this period he has quoted Rauschenbusch frequently, but followed Lenin with a constancy that has troubled almost everybody but himself...

...When they knew what they were doing, which was rarely, they followed the Party line because for the moment it seemed to express their own convictions: their pacifism, their hatred of racial prejudice and discrimination, their zeal for social justice...

...Elliott White...

...Kenneth Leslie, who started The Protestant in 1938, has followed the party line and echoed the party propaganda for over 20 years...

...This attempt was thwarted too, despite the frequent failure of the American courts and ecclesiastical authorities to comprehend what the struggle was all about...

...Eight years older, but no wiser, Spofford took Stalin's rape of the Baltic nations in his stride and at the San Francisco Conference declared: "As for moral leadership I do not think anybody can deny that the Soviets took it in the opening days of the conference and held it throughout...

...But McMichael hung on to his editorial job despite repeated attempts by the anguished elders to shake him loose...

...In his present volume, he chronicles Moscow's attempt to recruit the churches as allies in its unceasing war, now hot, now cold, with the liberal democracies of the West...

...Spofford became managing editor of the paper during the mid-'20s...

...When the line changed they usually descended hurriedly from the zig-zagging express train of History, taking their convictions with them, more or less intact...

...By 1953 the Federation's membership had dropped so low that it was forced to close its New York office...

...The Churchman, an independent journal launched in 1804, has always championed liberal theology in the Protestant Episcopal Church...

...Their combined circulations provided the party's propagandists with a captive audience larger, in all probability, than they were able to assemble from any other social group...

...We'd all be better off", concluded Kempton, "if the Un-American Affairs Committee would go home...

...Joseph F. Fletcher, Willard Uphaus...

...Not all of the religious fellow travelers were bums, of course, and most of them weren't Communists...

...The Witness, an independent Episcopal weekly edited by William B. Spofford Sr...

...She denounced the "Fascist propensities" of the Roosevelt Administration, swallowed the Stalin-Hitler pact without blinking, and, after the Nazis invaded Russia, joined Moscow's outcries for a second front...

...The Witness is an old and distinguished religious journal which during the '50s claimed the largest circulation of any Episcopal weekly...

...A fellow-traveler's opinions are his own business, but there is such a thing as service to the truth, and this McMichael is a bum...

...In 1937, while the Moscow trials were still on, the Reverend Spofford visited the Soviet Union and returned to write that the people who had not been eliminated by the purges were literally "singing in the streets" and that fully 98 per cent of the population revered Stalin —at which Spofford's master, Walter Rauschenbusch, whom he frequently quotes, must have stood erect in his grave...

...None of these journals ever became definitely Communist or crypto-Communist like the New Masses or the National Guardian...

...Both attempts have failed...

...and the Unitarian Register...

...Instead, he described the witness, one Jack McMichael, as "a folksy, weedy, balding Georgia boy . . . the soul of irreverence, sniggling and weasling and larding his auditors with every Pecksniffism of the lower Protestantism...

...The other fellow traveling editors have been only slightly less Red and some have proved equally durable...

...and he is no less a bum for being in trouble with Harold Velde...

...Reviewed by James Rorty Author, "His Master's Voice," Co-author, "McCarthy and the Communists" RALPH LORD ROY is a philosopher and church historian as well as a practicing Methodist minister...

...In 1955 it crusaded against Rome in a series of articles whose anonymous author declared that "unbiased historians are able today to trace the role of the Vatican as the powerful instigator of the cold war...

...But it also inspired a generation of church leaders who, when the test came, proved themselves to be intellectually too sophisticated and morally too robust to succumb to the ideological infection of Marxism-Leninism...

...Guy Emery Shipler, dubbed "America's Red Dean" by THE NEW LEADER, has been its editor since 1924...

...The social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch nourished many a nest of cheeping clerical bird-brains...

...The greatest successes scored by the Communists' clerical sympathizers were the capture and exploitation, over a considerable period, of five influential religious journals: the Social Questions Bulletin, of which McMichaels was the editor...

...The Protestant, edited by Kenneth Leslie...

...His editorial span was brief...