Religion: The Matthews Story

When a former Methodist churchman named J. B. Matthews made the charge that U.S. Protestant ministers “are the largest single group supporting” Communism in the U.S. (TIME, July 13), he was hit by thunderbolts of protest. They forced him to resign as executive director of Joe McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee, and showed clearly that U.S. Protestants trust their clergy. But they threw little light on J. B. Matthews himself. In last week’s Christian Century, Editor Paul Hutchinson, who once “knew him well and . . . liked him greatly,” writes an account of him, in order to show “what strange and terrible things the tensions of these times can do to us.”

Joseph Brown Matthews began his career about as far away as possible from the Washington limelight—as a Methodist missionary in Java. He was a brilliant linguist, but his sympathy for Indonesian nationalists made him unpopular with the islands’ Dutch masters as well as executives of his own mission. Back in the U.S., he studied at several seminaries, then joined the faculty of Scarritt, a training college for Methodist church workers in Nashville, Tenn. He was forced to leave because of his liberal views. Recalls Hutchinson: there was a “furor over an interracial party held in his home, at which whites were reported to have danced with Negroes …”

Matthews next turned up in New York City “an avowed Socialist” and executive secretary of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. He believed in “the policy of a united front with Communism as the way to end war, [and] became the first head of the American League Against War and Fascism, probably the most successful ‘front’ ever organized by the American Communists.” He wrote a book, Partners in Plunder, in which he “proved,” Hutchinson recalls, that “J. Pierpont Morgan owned the Episcopal Church, Andrew Mellon had the Presbyterians in his vest pocket, and as for the Baptists—well, hadn’t Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rockefeller’s kept preacher, once said: ‘Personally, I dread the thought of collectivism … as I would dread the devil’?”

Matthews was now the Communists’ No. 1 fellow traveler. Then something happened that changed his life. He had become a director and vice president of Consumers’ Research (an organization formed to make impartial tests of consumer products and pass along its findings to subscribers). Employees of the growing enterprise shocked Matthews by going on strike. “Despite the pleas of liberal leaders,” reports Hutchinson, “Mr. Matthews refused to meet the strikers’ demands. To him they seemed not workers pursuing a normal course for bringing grievances to management’s attention; they were mutineers.” Matthews emerged from the dispute “an embittered man with a completely reversed outlook. He regarded himself as the victim of a Communist plot.” Matthews became chief investigator for Martin Dies’ new House Committee on Un-American Activities.

“From that point on, Mr. Matthews has been one of the most conspicuous Red-hunters in the field . . . The irony of Mr. Matthews’ career is underscored by the fact that, in his days of ‘united front’ leadership, he excoriated Protestantism as the dupe and servant of capitalism; today as the dupe and servant of Communism.” Hutchinson sees the Matthews story as a tragedy for which the church must accept some responsibility. “I know there must be deep flaws somewhere in the man . . .” he admits. “Yet I cannot help believing that if the church had only been a little more willing to grant him a hearing and opportunity in the days when he was trying to stir it to new outlooks, such a waste of ability and promise would never have happened.”

Another notable comment on the Matthews affair came from Virginia’s Senator Harry F. Byrd. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had told him, said Byrd, that the FBI knows of no minister who has been proved to be a Communist agent. To Harry Byrd, at least, this is “convincing evidence” that the Matthews charge was baseless. “If any ministers were engaged in Communist activities, it is a remarkable thing that Mr. Hoover hasn’t found one who can be convicted.”