In the recent spate of studies of mid-twentieth-century American anticommunist activism—including significant works by Heather Hendershot, D. J. Malloy, Paul Matzko, and Mark Ruotsila—we have learned about the collision of religion and politics in the crusading work of Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntire, Edgar C. Bundy, and Robert Welch's John Birch Society (JBS). Mostly absent from these important works has been the global ministry of the Australian physician turned American anticommunist activist, Fred C. Schwarz (1913–2009). Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communist Crusade (CACC) rivaled anything his midcentury American peers built with their respective organizations, yet Schwarz played an important, but now overlooked role in the rise of grassroots conservative activism in the latter-half of the twentieth century. With Hubert Villeneuve's excellent new study, Teaching Anticommunism: Fred Schwarz and American Postwar Conservatism, Schwarz and his organization get their due. Scholars can now return Schwarz to his proper place in the firmament of rightwing activists, eccentric autodidacts, and ferocious Protestant anticommunist ministers.
Based on Villeneuve's 2011 McGill University PhD thesis, the book provides an important reassessment of Schwarz's life and ministry while also offering a significant contribution to our understanding of the entanglement of religion and politics during the height of the Cold War. Even without direct access to Schwarz's own papers, Villeneuve's well-researched book romps through dozens of archives to reconstruct Schwarz's activities beginning with battles against communists in the Baptist minister's native Queensland, Australia, to the rise and fall of his popular anticommunism schools in the United States. The result is a narrative bursting with exacting detail on Schwarz's managerial activities, the organization of the CACC's many anticommunism seminars, and the funding of a global network of evangelical anticommunist activists. As names, dates, cities, organizations, and fundraising tallies march across the pages, the minutiae could overwhelm the most dedicated of specialist readers; however, Villeneuve's volume also offers rich anecdotal accounts and deft historiographic reflections that coax so many fresh interpretive insights from the material that his meticulous attention to detail will pay off for the patient reader.
Among the book's many useful contributions is Villeneuve's study of the international scope of Schwarz's anticommunist crusade. Beginning in the 1930s with Schwarz's Australian background as a Baptist lay-pastor and doctor debating communists on Australian campuses, Villeneuve recounts how Schwarz drew the attention of two prominent North American anticommunist pastors: U.S. Presbyterian Fundamentalist Carl McIntire and Canadian Baptist separatist T. T. Shields. With these sympathetic contacts, Schwarz soon found himself on a speaking tour of North America and realized he could mobilize the vast wealth and anticommunist sentiment of Americans to fund a global anticommunist crusade. Villeneuve outlines how Schwarz incorporated the CACC in 1953 to fundraise in the United States and distribute its resources through an international network of allied churches, pastors, and charity organizations. Unlike American firebrands like McIntire and Hargis—who proposed harebrained schemes like using balloons to float Bibles over the Iron Curtain—Schwarz methodically built a network in the United States, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippians, and across Central and South America. This international educational ministry rested on Schwarz's evangelical conviction that “a personal encounter with the truth” of the evils of communism “could provide the foundation for meaningful commitment” (302). Schwarz's focus on individual education and the distribution of anticommunist literature—such as the publication and translation of his own You Can Trust the Communists (To be Communists)—helped shape anticommunist movements across the globe.
In the United States, Schwarz created a traveling road show of anticommunist “schools,” taught by prominent midcentury activists such as former FBI informant Herbert Philbrick and Mormon firebrand W. Cleon Skousen. As these seminars rolled into cities across the United States, they educated local activists, often at the expense of offering school attendees a coherent intellectual vision or political project after the CACC moved on to its next stop. This left Schwarz's schools vulnerable to the accusation that “Schwarz stirs them up” while Welch's controversial JBS “signs them up” (152). In fact, Schwarz complained that after his seminars, churches and other respectable private groups should have stepped in to channel the energies of school attendees, but this rarely happened. Instead, as Villeneuve demonstrates, radical or controversial groups filled the vacuum.
This leads to another of Villeneuve's significant insights. In tracing the intersections of religion, politics, and extremism in Schwarz's U.S. ministry, Villeneuve extends Leo P. Ribuffo's argument from The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983) to situate the controversies over “ultraconservatism” in the early 1960s in a longer historiographic trajectory that finds continuities with the “Brown Scare,” a period of anti-Nazi and antifacist activism that Ribuffo identified in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Villeneuve presents the early 1960s as an analogous “little Brown Scare” that coincided with the Kennedy administration's efforts to rein in rightwing groups like the JBS and to combat massive resistance to the Civil Rights movement (227). Using tactics like those deployed in the 1930s, liberals in the 1960s mobilized an ad hoc network of federal agencies, the media, and voluntary organizations to expose and discredit right-leaning groups. This left Schwarz, in Villeneuve's telling, stuck between the extremes of ultraconservative anticommunists and the moderating demands of midcentury liberalism. Even as Schwarz worked to situate the CACC as a respectable, moderate anticommunist organization, he relied on more extreme local organizers and volunteer laborers for his anticommunist schools. These volunteers usually failed to draw bright lines between Civil Rights activists, the Kennedy administration, and Soviet Communism.
In the end, Villeneuve presents a man and an organization torn between extremism and respectability. As the 1960s closed, Schwarz found decreasing interest in anticommunism in the United States as the “Culture Wars” replaced fears of communist infiltration of American institutions. However, the international networks Schwarz helped shape led to the rise of rightwing, revolutionary juntas in Southeast Asia and Central and South America in the 1970s and 80s. While Villeneuve's book makes clear that Schwarz's critics cannot blame him exclusively for all these later developments, Teaching Anticommunism nonetheless builds a strong case that Schwarz and the CACC played key roles in forging the arguments against communism that had significant influence in the United States and across the globe.
