Teaching Anticommunism: Fred Schwarz and American Postwar Conservatism

Abstract

The membership of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) never reached 100,000 at any one time, but the party nonetheless has attracted an extraordinary amount of scholarly attention over the years. Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been devoted to the CPUSA's activities. No political movement in U.S. history has been the subject of such frequent congressional investigations and hearings or faced more sustained attack by government agencies. The opposition to Communism during the Cold War was, arguably, more widespread and intense than Communism itself.One portion of this deep-seated anti-Communism has obsessed scholars. Senator Joseph McCarthy leaped into national prominence in 1950 when he launched an attack on Communists in government. Just four years later, he was censured by his Senate colleagues. The McCarthy phenomenon—and studies of his alleged precursors and aiders and abettors (Martin Dies, J. Edgar Hoover, the House Un-American Affairs Committee)—have been hardy perennials of scholarship on twentieth-century U.S. history.Far less attention has been given to the study of grassroots anti-Communism in the United States. Although scores of groups devoted to fighting Communism or exposing its evils and combatting its efforts were present in many nooks and corners of the United States, very few have received academic attention. Many were ephemeral, left meager records, and were either run by or attracted numerous crackpots. But others reinforced or reinvigorated conservative, traditionalist, and religious segments of the population whose aversion to Communism ran deep.Hubert Villeneuve, an independent scholar based in Canada, has refashioned his doctoral dissertation on one of the most influential movements, the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (CACC) and its founder and most recognizable figure, Fred Schwarz, to produce a sober, detailed, and fair-minded portrait of an organization that attracted wealthy donors, numerous public figures, and thousands of middle-class, religious Americans to combat the Communist menace.Schwarz was an unlikely icon for what became the most successful grassroots conservative organization in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Australia in 1913, he came from a poor family. His father, born Jewish in Austria, had converted to evangelical Christianity as a young man and fathered eleven children. Fred earned a bachelor's degree in science and eventually completed medical school, where he had numerous run-ins with Communists over their atheism. Determined to understand the doctrine, he carefully read Communist classics and won renown for forcefully challenging them in debates. Coming to the attention of ultra-orthodox Protestants in the United States, he was persuaded to come to the country in 1950 to deliver a series of lectures. He immediately became a hit and embarked on an exhausting schedule that had him speaking to as many as five audiences a day. His natural constituency was churches, but he quickly expanded to civic groups, conservative organizations, high schools, and military audiences. The Korean War, revelations about widespread Soviet espionage, and the rise of Joseph McCarthy had stoked anti-Communist sentiment in the United States. Schwarz's blend of expertise about Communism, humor, and avoidance of hysteria gave him credibility.Schwarz never became a U.S. citizen and carefully avoided partisan issues in order to preserve his organization's tax-exempt status. He was aware that large numbers of those who came to his lectures were supportive of McCarthyism, so he tiptoed around the issue, careful to avoid endorsing the senator's wildest charges against individuals. Although Schwarz's “Crusades,” modeled on those led by the evangelist Billy Graham, drew significant donations from local figures in the cities where they were held, he also gained financial support from a national network of wealthy conservative donors including the Pew and Bradley Foundations, Walter Knott of Knott's Berry Farm fame, and Alfred Kohlberg. Their contributions enabled Schwarz, headquartered in Long Beach, California, to mount weeklong schools around the country, where speakers included Herbert Philbrick and Congressman Walter Judd, as well as cameo appearances by such Hollywood stars as Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, George Murphy, and Ronald Reagan. One of Schwarz's early mainstays, W. Cleon Skousen, was quietly eased out because of his extreme conspiratorial theories.Unlike some other grassroots anti-Communist groups, Schwarz avoided both anti-Semitism and racism. He did not attack the civil rights movement as Communist-dominated. Although Schwarz was critical of urban rioting in the 1960s, he also condemned racism. Very few of his Crusades took place in the Deep South. Several of his allies, including Kohlberg and Marvin Liebman, his public relations expert, were Jewish. Villeneuve demonstrates that attacks accusing Schwarz of anti-Semitism by such prominent organizations as the Anti-Defamation League were inaccurate.Despite Schwarz's efforts to avoid identification with more extreme anti-Communist organizations, he eventually lost his footing with the increasing prominence of the John Birch Society (JBS). Privately, he was critical of the secretive, hierarchical, and “fascist” organization led by Robert Welch, but he refrained from an all-out assault, for fear it would antagonize many of his supporters and funders. When Schwarz publicly ridiculed Welch's characterization of Dwight Eisenhower as a Communist, Welch accused him of splitting the anti-Communist movement and gloated that the CACC had served as a recruiter for the JBS. As fears about a surge in far-right activity spiked in the early 1960s, liberals launched attacks on the CACC as a JBS offshoot, many organizations began to distance themselves from Schwarz, the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies began to cause problems, and financial support began to wither. By the 1970s health problems had limited Schwarz's role. He lived to see his one-time close ally Ronald Reagan win the presidency and the collapse of Communism before dying in 2009, but the CACC had long since faded into irrelevance.Villeneuve's book provides as thorough an accounting of the CACC's successes and failures as we will ever need and suggests the ways the organization foreshadowed the rise of the “new right” of the 1980s. At times the book's relentless compilation of Schwarz's numerous lectures and crusades becomes tedious, but overall it is a useful book.