Books: Against Intolerance

HISTORY OF BIGOTRY IN THE UNITED STATES — Gusfavus Myers —Random House ($3.50).

When the late Gustavus Myers first conceived this book (in 1925), he may not have thought that his theme would become more topical than the perpetuity of human malevolence. But since World War II began, surges of intolerance have grown so commonplace that the 20th Century, long accustomed to regarding itself as the most civilized age in human history, has been able blandly to disregard the fact that it has become the most savage. Race wars, class wars, the mistreatment of Negroes in the U.S., the deliberate efforts to exterminate the Jews in Europe, the coldblooded, scientific murder or enslavement of whole populations, the destruction of orderly life throughout the world and the preaching of hate as a doctrine—all these are present-day manifestations of bigotry, of fanatical intolerance of any but one’s own race, class, church, ideas.

In this 495-page book, Historian Myers gives bigotry one of its most strenuous workouts. He puts at the disposal of those who would combat bigotry, and who would preserve merely credulous and ill-informed people from the infection of intolerance, a tremendous arsenal of fact and of reference. Not content with the merely local effects of bigotry, Gustavus Myers moves, with exhaustive industry, in the iceberg depths of precedent and origin—deep into England, deep into ancient Rome.

Under his calm scrutiny of fact, myths small and large explode like popcorn. Mr. Myers’ explosion of three U.S. myths is particularly notable: the Myth of the Puritan, the Myth of the Catholic, the Myth of the Jew.

The Myth of the Puritan, dear to millions of U.S. hearts, is the belief that the Puritans were, and remain, responsible for U.S. bigotry in all its more characteristic forms. The facts, says Historian Myers, prove otherwise. In all the American colonies the general spirit was that prevalent in England. That spirit was one of rampant persecution. Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts, but they were persecuted in Virginia as well. Not only in Massachusetts but in Maryland, long famed for its religious tolerance, the penalty for inveterate blasphemy was death; and blasphemy was any doubt that the Bible was the Word or thatJesus was the Son of God. Blue laws began not with the Puritans but in England, in 1448, “when all England was Catholic.” Every American colony, Puritan and non-Puritan, Quakers included, had its quota of blue laws.

The Myth of the Catholic became the new focus of bigotry as Puritan theocracy faded. From the early 18303 up to the Civil War, and again among sheeted Klansmen, and in the weird, oratorical soapsuds of Alabama’s Senator Tom Heflin, and in a grand climax during Al Smith’s Presidential campaign, Catholicism was a favorite target for bigots. At the root of much of this bigotry lay Samuel F. B. Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States (a kind of anti-Catholic Protocols of the Elders of Zion), which decades later was still misinforming those who wanted to be misinformed. The Aw ful [and disproved] Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836) are still exhaling sulfur fumes on many a small-town bookshelf. But the true sources of this fantastic brouhaha are not literary. They lie deeper in human nature and history. Just as the Great Fire of London was blamed on the Roman Catholics of 17th Century England, the burning of Rome was blamed on the Roman Christians of Nero’s time. The moth-eaten charge that monasteries and convents are sinks of iniquity got its immortal impetus when Henry VIII sent forth investigators under instructions to furnish him with an alibi for pillaging the church. A favorite yawp of those who like to insist that Catholics have never stood for liberty — Pope Innocent Ill’s annulment of Magna Charta — disregards the fact that Magna Charta was drafted by Catholics, and is happily ignorant of the fact that Catholic priests and prelates fought for and preserved it in defiance of the Pope.

The Myth of the Jew, ever evil and ever active, burgeoned in the U.S. when Hitler came to power in Germany, had been quietly prospering for years. Ritual murder, the most sensational charge against the Jews, was originally charged against the early Christians. The charge against the Jews was especially popular in medieval Germany; and there are plenty of people who believe it today.

Myers effectively disposes of the myth that Jews control trade and finance, are incurably deceitful and tricky. He points to “the many successive laws — a long line of them century after century — which Parliament found necessary to enact in the effort to suppress deceit and fraud” — during the long period when no Jews were allowed in England (1290-1655).

Myers also discusses the most colossal of all libels against the Jews, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, once more gives the data which years ago proved it a rampant forgery.

It is not likely that Mr. Myers’ history will change the heart or the mind of a single bigot. For bigotry, it is pretty clear, is a disease as constant and incurable as it is appallingly dangerous.

-Youths assisting a Negro beaten up in Detroit riots (TIME, June 28).