Westbrook Pegler
Wisconsin State Journal/June 20, 1951
Always glad to help, I write this to advise you that L. M. Birkhead’s Gestapo, the Friends of Democracy, seems to be having a time of it and is rattling the cup for money to carry on its work in New York.
It seems to me that the best way to appeal to public notice would be to enlarge my recent piece of free publicity for Friends of Democracy. In that case, those who agree with Birkhead might be moved to send him something right away. Those who disapprove his work, of course, would do him the honor of refraining.
Naturally, Birkhead wouldn’t be wanting money from those who oppose him, so surely he will thank me for notifying Americans who loathe the atheistic basis of Communism how he stands on religion, morals and so forth.
In this chore I am indebted to John T. Flynn, one of the great, original anti-Communists as distinguished from the recent converts who hollered up Communist books during the war, even sending them to members of congress, who joined Communist fronts and who suppressed the crime of Alger Hiss for 10 years but got scared when Stalin turned on us, and began calling him dirty names to show how brave they were. Mr. Flynn carries many a scar inflicted by these new anti-Communists during the time when to be a Red-baiter a man required courage, honor and patriotism.
In his booklet, “The Smear Terror,” Mr.Flynn, one of the best reporters we ever had in our journals, writes the results of his studies of Birkhead’s little books on religion. Birkhead is an old Kansas City preacher. Finding himself in geographical and intellectual proximity to E. Haldemann-Julius, the publisher of atheistic and particularly anti-Catholic books, it was natural that he should put out his works under the Haldemann-Julius imprimatur.
In one of his appeals for money to carry on his great work, Birkhead wrote: “An attack on any man’s religion is un-American.” A strange sentiment coming from any friend of Haldemann-Julius whose principal topic in his personal paper for many years has been the absurdity and tyranny of religion, especially Catholicism.
Again, Birkhead wrote: “If you join any movement which attacks beliefs of Protestants, Catholics or Jews, you are undermining the bill of rights.” Yet a recent issue of Haldemann-Julius carried a cartoon depicting tyranny with a cat-o-nine-tails, driving humanity over some brink into a bottomless but not hellish pit. The lashes on the cat are labelled “bigotry,” “priestcraft,” “superstition” and “fanaticism.”
“Haldemann-Julius was working the atheist side of the street,” Mr. Flynn wrote in “The Smear Terror,” “but we find Birkhead working both sides operating as a preacher in All Souls’ Unitarian church in Kansas City while knocking hell out of religion in the Haldemann-Julius little blue books and magazines.
“He used these atheistic publications to defame his fellow ministers. ‘Everyone,’ he wrote in the Haldemann-Julius Quarterly, ‘familiar with the status of the clergy in America knows that vulgarity and coarseness are characteristic of a majority of the preachers. He had several suggestions, one of them to ‘destroy the theological seminaries.’
“I do not quarrel with Reverend Birkhead because he is an atheist or an agnostic,” Mr. Flynn continued. “He is entitled to these views and to print them. I merely call attention to the phenomenon of the Christian preacher who urges in an atheist magazine abolition of theological seminaries and mass demobilization of ministers while preaching as pastor of a Christian church: scoffing at religion and religious people, announcing that ‘We cannot follow Christ,’ while on another platform he calls on Americans to choose between Hitler and Christ.”
The Haldemann-Julius literature contains a great bulk of books on sex, most of it in the phases which American morality holds to be loathsome. Perversion and prostitution are the subjects of many titles. Under the heading of “prostitution,” Birkhead is listed as the author of “The Sins of Good People.” Filthy gags abound in the copy which Haldemann-Julius pounds out endlessly. An interesting context for the works of a minister of the Gospel.
Though Haldemann-Julius says he is spiritless by comparison with his attacks opposed to Communism, his opposition is on Catholicism and a long roster of sects.
There is a regular department of the “lonely hearts” type of which the following is a sample: “Lonesome? Cheer up. Find your sweetheart. Confidential instructions by letter. Dependable nationwide service for men and women. Sealed particulars. Free.”
Another little ad in the same paper says: “Counteract Christian propaganda. Display freethought plaques.” And Haldemann-Julius tossed off this: “One thing I like about animals is that they do not waste their time moping over their souls.” Although Birkhead is not responsible for his publisher’s text, it may be noted that some clerics would find unbearable the company of Haldemann-Julius, his abusive atheism, his zest for the topic of perversion, and his laborious smut.
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