Crusader Schwarz

In the steadily heating controversy over mass-meeting antiCommunism, Frederick Charles Schwarz, 49, founder and director of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, is rapidly becoming the hottest thing around. Last week the keen, spellbinding Dr. Schwarz sallied out from Southern California, heartland of his movement, into another terrain, the San Francisco Bay area. There, in Oakland, he put on a five-day anti-Communist "school"; later this year he expects to carry his message to the Middle West and to New York.

Schwarz means to stir people up, and he does. He arouses an automatic-reflex hostility in the liberal-to-left camp, and an equally instinctive support on the far right. But for those Americans who are themselves less easily classified, Schwarz is a hard man to classify. For his crusade poses a question that is deeper than it looks: What is the role of the individual U.S. citizen in antiCommunism?

Rising Furor. "We're not angels," Schwarz says. "We haven't right wings, left wings, any wings." For those critics viscerally disposed to dislike his "Crusade," but not disposed to study it, Schwarz does not make things easy. He has not uttered any simple, memorable piece of nonsense, like Robert Welch's statement that Eisenhower was a Communist dupe. The Schwarz Crusade proceeds right out in the open without any of the conspiratorial folderol of Welch's Birchites.

Yet for weeks before Oakland's Auditorium Theater opened its doors on the first Crusade session there, the Bay Area was in furor. The San Francisco Chronicle denounced Schwarz as a phantom hunter; the Oakland Tribune, whose editor, former Senator William Knowland, is a Schwarz admirer ("Dr. Schwarz is very intelligent and sincere"), backed the Crusade. There was an unholy row about a proclamation, carrying the names of 55 Bay Area mayors, that declared last week "AntiCommunism Week." When Schwarz critics protested, the mayor of Fairfax denied that he had ever signed the proclamation, the mayor of San Jose said that his signature had been obtained "by misrepresentation," and the city councils of Berkeley, Sunnyvale and Mill Valley refused to endorse their mayors' signatures. California's Attorney General Stanley Mosk (who once described the John Birch Society as being composed of "retired military officers and little old ladies in tennis shoes") now called the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade a "fly-by-night promotion." Cried he: "Communism is much too serious a problem to leave in the hands of promoters and political opportunists." A group of eight prominent clergymen, including Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike, General Presbyter Dr. Robert D. Bulkley and Rabbi Sidney Akselrad, issued a statement declaring Schwarz's Crusade of "dubious value" and noting that "in several communities, in the wake of these 'schools,' there has been a resurgence of attacks on churches, schools and councils of churches."

"Don't Blame Me." The man who caused this commotion is an Australian citizen with a sharp chin, a penchant for maroon bow ties, and a salesman's exuberance and extroversion. Born in Brisbane, he was the fourth of the eleven children of Paul Schwarz, a Viennese Jew who was converted to Christianity, became a Pentecostal lay preacher, migrated to Australia for his health in 1905 and, after World War I, prospered as a dealer in war-surplus goods. Fred Schwarz graduated from Brisbane's University of Queensland with both science and arts degrees, took a post as a science instructor on the night staff of Queensland Teachers College, and studied medicine during the day. By 1953 he had established a medical practice that was earning him more than $11,000 a year in North Strathfield, a middle-class Sydney suburb; he was a psychiatrist as well as a general practitioner.

But Schwarz had an interest deeper than doctoring. In 1940 he fell into an argument with an Australian Communist. After this debate, he determined to find out all he could about Communism. He steeped himself in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, to the point that friends recall his wife, Lillian May, saying: "I'm never alone with Fred. He always has Karl Marx along."

Schwarz became a skilled anti-Communist orator, speaking from the pulpit (long a lay preacher, he describes himself as "a narrow-minded, Bible-believing Baptist") or on the public platform. He recalls one triumphant debate in his younger days with a Communist leader in a Sydney park: "I mentioned Dialectical Materialism, whereupon the Communist leader challenged me. 'What is Dialectical Materialism?' he asked. I replied, 'Dialectical Materialism is the philosophy of Karl Marx that he formulated by taking the dialectic of Hegel, marrying it to the materialism of Feuerbach, abstracting from it the concept of progress in terms of the conflict of contradictory, interacting forces called the Thesis and the Antithesis, culminating at a critical nodal point where one overthrows the other, giving rise to the Synthesis, applying it to the history of social development, and deriving therefrom an essentially revolutionary concept of social change.' The questioner looked at me with wide-open eyes. I added: 'Don't blame me. It is your philosophy, not mine.' "

In 1950 Schwarz's anti-Communism attracted the attention of two fundamentalist ministers, Rev. Carl McIntire of Collingswood, N.J., and Dr. T. T. Shields of Toronto,* who were touring Australia together. They persuaded him to travel to the U.S. for a two-month lecture tour on Communism.

Stool & Lectern. In 1953 Schwarz returned to this country again, developed his idea of a mass-effort Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, and eventually sold his medical practice in Sydney. Why did he do it? Explains Lillian May Schwarz, who remains in Australia with their three children and serves as secretary of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade organization in her native country: "We feel that if Fred worked every hour of every day in Australia, he could not archieve nearly as much as he is achieving in America. If he awakens the U.S. to the full danger of Communism, he is automatically getting that great country on the side of Australia."

The campaign to awaken America to the danger of Communism last week had led Fred Schwarz to Oakland. There, for five days of sessions that began at 8:30 a.m. and, with coffee and mealtime breaks, ended at 10:30 p.m., Schwarz's catechumens filed into the auditorium, their number increasing as the week went on. They got their money's worth ($20 per person for the week's sessions, with half-price admittance for students, teachers, clergymen, servicemen, police and firemen). Seated on a high stool behind a lectern on a stage otherwise bare, except for an American flag, Schwarz put on a flashing performance.

Now he was schoolmasterly: "Why is it that the appeal of Communism is so strong to the student mind? Students are turned toward Communism by four things. The first thing is disenchantment with capitalism--capitalistic disenchantment. The second thing is materialistic philosophy. The third thing is intellectual pride. And the fourth is unfulfilled religious need."

Now he was forebearing of his critics: "I believe that there is an area of discussion, persuasion, argument; that this is legitimate; that out of this thoughtful, intelligent, moderate, tolerant discussion we will get nearer to the truth."

Now he was angry--as, for example, against Minnesota's Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, who recently stated his belief that Communists feared nothing from Schwarz's campaign. "How does he know?" asked Schwarz. "Is he psychic? Apparently. I'd like to think it's this way: that Hubert Humphrey just knows how the Communists think by a kind of intuition. I'd hate to think that he has such close contacts that he is right in the heart of their--and I wouldn't suggest it for a minute, you see."

Now, in blood-chilling tones, he was telling his rapt listeners what will happen to them after a Communist takeover: "They'll take a wide-bore revolver with a soft-nosed bullet and place it at the nape of your neck to blow your brain and your face into a bloody and chaotic oblivion."

By the Book. All this was in tried-and-true Schwarz style, perfected in hundreds of speeches and based mostly on the arguments in his book, published in 1960, You Can Trust the Communists (. . . To Do Exactly as They Say ).

Schwarz starts with the laudable premise that Americans should be informed about Communism; if they understand it, they will be better able to combat it. "In the battle against Communism, there is no substitute for accurate, specific knowledge. Ignorance is evil and paralytic." Schwarz therefore sets out to inform--and in some ways he succeeds admirably. In his book, his treatment of such a difficult subject as dialectical materialism is a model of instructive popularization.

Unlike many of the U.S.'s ultraconservative anti-Communist leaders, Schwarz does not argue that domestic softness is the only thing Americans need worry about. Schwarz stresses the external threat and power of Communism. Sometimes he overrates the Reds: to read or hear Schwarz, the Communists have never suffered a setback in their march toward world domination; the free world has never scored the slightest cold war success. Communism is a monolith without internal dissension. Nikita Khrushchev, while describing Stalin as a sadistic, megalomaniacal murderer, in his famous January 6, 1961 speech, was by Communist standards of virtue commending his old boss, not condemning him. Today, there is no such thing as an ideological split between Moscow and Peking; the notion that there is, says Schwarz, is "just a product of our basic ignorance."

But it is on the susceptibility of modern society, especially American society, to exploitation for Communist ends that Schwarz really bears down. He notes that the number of actual, hard-core U.S. Communists has never been great. But they are surrounded by fellow travelers, sympathizers and "pseudo liberals." Most of these liberals "are to be found in the ivory cloisters of colleges and universities"; they are, in effect, the "protectors and runners of interference for the Communist conspirators."

Citing chapter and verse, Schwarz reviews the history of Communist efforts to subvert American society and institutions, to capture the mind of U.S. students ("That is always the first step"), to seize control of labor unions, to set up front groups to enlist the unwary to their causes. Such efforts, in fact, achieved their greatest successes in the 19305 and in the years during and immediately following World War II. But Schwarz, by slurring over dates and by drawing present-tense conclusions from past-tense examples, gives them dramatic currency, leaving the impression that the threat of internal subversion is greater today than at any time in U.S. history.

To Fred Schwarz the anti-Communist role of Government is limited at best, and his lopsided account of cold war history implies that the U.S. Government in spite of all its efforts has had no successes at all against Communism. Wrote Schwarz: "The time has come for people to cease looking for great organizations afar off, and to begin looking for things that can be done close at home. Every man who invites a friend into his home, gives him literature to read, and informs him of the danger, is helping to thwart the Communist program." Citizens so educated and so inspired can carry the fight to the Communist enemy both abroad and at home, and "upon such a foundation the political, legislative and cultural programs necessary can be built."

After Knowledge, What? Presumably, a citizenry well informed about the evils, strengths and tactics of Communism would be equipped to make itself felt in the voting booth, in letters to Congressmen, and other normal methods of political expression, on the specific issues of cold war policy--defense spending, foreign trade policy, foreign aid, atomic testing, fallout shelters, the role of the U.N., etc.

Schwarz ignores or shrugs off most of these issues. To him, a military program is merely a temporary measure "which may hold back the flood for a short period and give us a little more time to find a permanent solution." Foreign economic and military assistance is hardly worth the bother: "The idea is to give economic aid and military assistance in the expectation that Communism will lose its appeal and freedom will triumph. Materialistic measures do not control the minds and the hearts of the people."

Crusader Fred Schwarz does indeed leave his readers and listeners eager to do something about Communism. The question is: What specifically does he give them to do that can be translated into national policy and action?

*Presbyterian McIntire was expelled by his church in 1936 for "disturbing the peace of the church" by loud and vigorous protests against modernism. He organized his own fundamentalist Presbyterian Church, helped establish the fundamentalist International Council of Christian Churches in opposition to the ecumenical National Council of Churches. Baptist Shields for years, until his death in 1955, carried on a strident campaign against Catholicism and for stricter Bible interpretation.

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