Uncheckable Charge

"The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the U.S. today is composed of Protestant clergymen." This astounding and inherently uncheckable statement appears in the July issue of the American Mercury under the byline of Joseph B. Matthews. No sooner had his article been spotted than the protests began to crackle.

Main target of the uproar was Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigating committee three weeks ago hired J. B. Matthews as its executive director. Few Americans have held a Red hunting license longer or beat the bushes harder than J. B. Matthews. After getting an A.B. degree from Asbury College, Wilmore, Ky., he was a Methodist lay missionary in Java, translated a hymnal into Malay, later studied at Union Theological Seminary, taught Oriental languages and current events at Fisk and Howard Universities for Negroes. He became a Socialist, and, unlike most U.S. Socialists, an active fellow traveler of the Communists, belonging to 28 Commie fronts. In 1934 he broke with the party. Subsequently he went to work as chief investigator for the Dies committee, a job he held until 1945. Since then he has maintained what is probably the largest private file on U.S. Communists and suspected Communists.

Most of Matthews' Mercury article relates to the activities of Protestant clergymen in front organizations where Communists had a more or less hidden control. Fronts were an important but not the most important part of Red activity in the U.S., and some evidence of duped clergymen is a long way from constituting "the largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus."

Three Democratic members of the subcommittee indignantly denounced Matthews' American Mercury article as "a shocking and unwarranted attack." Matthews said that he had written it several months ago, and would not have done so if he had known he would be appointed by the committee. McCarthy said that the article was "hardly an attack upon the Protestant clergymen." Michigan's Republican Senator Charles E. Potter (whose vote would give anti-Matthews members of the seven-man committee a majority) announced that it was his "present" opinion that Matthews should be fired.

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