Chapter
6: THE COUNCILS AND THE GOVERNMENT (pps 63-64)
Chapter Summary: Councils have
won top posts and important friends in Federal government. Dean Acheson.
John Foster Dulles.Alger Hiss. Harold E. Stassen. Arthur S. Flemming.
Council lobbying. The mysterious Mr. Smith. Council support of government
policy. Foreign aid. Immigration. World organizations. Council for Social
Action. Lutheran, Congregational, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Protestant
Episcopal churches plunge into politics..... Tax-exempt foundations make
grants to Council, with political overtones....
THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CHURCHES, the
groundwork having been prepared by its predecessor, the Federal Council, has
captured strategic posts within the United States government and has
constructed an active lobbying machine. It has won
strong support from
tax-exempt foundations.
The main speaker at the Constituting
Convention of The National Council of Churches in Cleveland, Ohio, November
1950, was the Secretary of State, Mr. Dean Acheson. During this conclave,
Mr. Acheson’s foreign policy, a significant factor in the loss of China and
other sections of the Far East to the Communists, was praised by Council
spokesmen at the convention and throughout the country’s newspapers. After
all, Mr. Acheson was a very important person.
[p.63]
Mr.
John Foster Dulles, a
top-ranking officer of the Council, was assisting Mr. Acheson in the
State Department. And had not Mr.
Alger Hiss, who had
worked with Dean Acheson for so many years in the State Department, also
served as chairman of an important committee of The Federal Council of
Churches in 1948? And had he not used the committee as a propaganda
medium for the United Nations?
Now Mr. Dulles is Secretary of State for the Eisenhower Administration. And
Mr. Harold E. Stassen, elected a vice president-at-large of The National
Council of Churches, is special adviser to the President on disarmament,
with Cabinet rank....
It is not accidental, nor is it irrelevant,
that The National Council of Churches should have, among its officers and
chief window dressing, men who occupy high positions in the Federal
government. Because the Council has never advocated the spreading of
the Christian faith as its primary mission, but has
labored toward putting over massive political programs on a national
and international scale, nothing could be more logical than to encourage
administrators to accept, simultaneously, high positions in the Council and
in the government... [p.64]
Chapter 12:
Mr. DULLES AND COLLECTIVISTIC CHURCHMEN
(pps 178-181)
Mr. Dulles has made some very
basic criticisms of the American free-enterprise system, while
congratulating the Soviet Union for its “greater dependence on the incentive
of personal gain.” How would the millions in the
Soviet slavelabor
camps feel about this statement from a man who is considered a great
spiritual leader and is Secretary of State of the nation to which millions
of people enslaved under the Soviet system have looked for the moral and
spiritual leadership which would one day rid them of their chains!
Perhaps the most startling piece of
documentation on the bankrupt leadership of The Federal Council of Churches
and on the part that men like Mr. Dulles have played in influencing
government officials to adopt the Council’s program is found in the 1948
Biennial Report under the chapter title “International Justice and Goodwill”
(emphasis added):
"Accompanying changes in subject matter
have been changes in the structure of the Department. The wartime
division of the Federal Council’s work in this field between the
Department and the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace was
superseded in January 1948 by a reorganized Department. This
reorganization was designed to conserve the great values of the
specialized work of the Commission on problems of international
organization, in a Department Committee on Policy under the chairmanship
of John Foster Dulles.
"The Department held a two-day meeting in
Philadelphia, January 8 to consider moral issues in the proposed
European Recovery Program and to evaluate the work. Background
material on the European Recovery Program was prepared by two special
committees, with Charles H. Seaver and Marshall Harris serving as
chairmen. Similar background data on the United Nations was
prepared by a committee, under the chairmanship of Alger Hiss.
The Department divided into two sections,
Mr. Dulles chairing the section on the United Nations and Chester I.
Barnard the section on the European Recovery Program. The reports of
these sections, after consideration by the Department as a whole, were
approved and subsequently acted upon by the Federal Council’s Executive
Commitee meeting in Atlanta on January 13."
We know, from testimony given during the
hearing on Alger Hiss by the Committee on Un-American Activities, that
John Foster Dulles and Alger Hiss were friends of long standing.
Mr. Dulles recommended Mr. Hiss to head the
multi-milliondollar Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Dulles
worked side by side with Mr. Hiss in the State Department and in the various
conferences that planned the United Nations. But how many American church
people knew that Mr. Dulles and Mr. Hiss worked together in The Federal
Council of Churches and that both were chairmen of important committees
of the Council?
Alger Hiss landed in a Federal penitentiary
as a convicted perjurer—for lying under oath before a Federal grand jury
about his Communist intrigues.
Mr. Dulles, however, Mr. Hiss’s colleague
in the Federal Council, became the director of the foreign policy of the United
States. And the Federal Council used its vast machinery to filter their
un-American political programs down through the state, county, and city
councils to the individual churches and church people.[p.178-179]
[See "Transforming
the World by Subverting the Church"]
Further, the Federal Council used the full
power of its organization and such propagandists as Messrs. Dulles and Hiss
to influence the United States government in its most important
foreign-policy decisions. Here is proof from the Federal Council’s
Biennial Report of 1948:
"In support of this policy, a
considerable program of education was carried on by church bodies
cooperating in the Federal Council during February and March, when
the issues were being debated in the Congress. A petition endorsing
the principles of the statement and signed by 700
churchmen was presented by Bishop Stamm, Bishop Oxnam and other church leaders to Senator Vandenberg and
Speaker Martin on March 11.
"A conference of 250 denominational leaders met at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington under the auspices of the
Department.... That evening an impressive demonstration of Christian concern was shown in Washington
Cathedral. Bishop Stamm presided, Bishop Dun, Secretary Marshall, and
Mr. Dulles gave addresses, and the
heads of several communions joined in the procession.
"The audience of more than 2,000 included the President
and many members of Congress. Testimony in behalf of
the Federal Council’s recommendations was presented to
the proper Congressional Committees by Mr. Charles P. Taft.
"A full discussion by the Committee on Policy under the
chairmanship of Mr. Dulles showed agreement on the
need for action by the churches to change the prevailing
mood of the American people in order to lessen the dangers of
war. On the basis of this discussion a new statement of policy was
drafted and presented by the Department to the Executive Committee of the Federal Council
at a special meeting on April 26. The statement, 'A Positive Program for Peace,' was approved and distributed to
the churches by the denominational agencies and the state
and city councils of churches."5
Here, by its own admission, the Federal Council sought to
influence the President and the Congress of the United States
on behalf of its programs and sought “to change the prevailing
mood of the American people” by directing its propaganda down to
the denominational agencies and the state and city
councils of churches. One writer has referred to this Federal
Council organization as “an ecclesiastical octopus.”
Charles P. Taft, who presented the
Federal Council’s program to “the proper Congressional committees” was at one
time the president of the Federal Council and was the brother
of the late Senator Robert A. Taft, to whose economic and
political views his own were diametrically opposed.
According to the 1948 Biennial Report,
the executive secretary of the Commission on International Justice
and Goodwill was the late Rev. Walter W. VanKirk. Dr. VanKirk had
been associated with at least five Communist-front organizations, according to the files of the Committee on Un-American
Activities. He was a notorious pacifist and one-world promoter,
appearing on behalf of the Federal Council before church
groups and in universities.
The Biennial Report of 1948 indicates the variety of fields
in which the Federal Council’s representatives participated
and even lobbied among Congressional committees.
