Reveres v. Reverends

Evanston, Ill., famed for Charles Gales Dawes and Northwestern University, last week got into the nation's news as the battleground of an organization called the Paul Reveres. Founded four months ago in Glencoe, Ill., a smaller Chicago suburb seven miles north of Evanston, the Paul Reveres tub-thump against Communism and "subversive activities." Planning a nation-wide organization, they made a Colonel E. M. Hadley their president. In January, Evanston got its chapter, headed by one John A. Kappelman, insurance broker. Far from unusual in thesis or technique, the Evanston Reveres made news by choosing for their target one of the Methodist Church's ablest preachers. Rev. Dr. Ernest Fremont Tittle, 47, social-minded leader in the Federal Council of Churches. Big and muscular, Dr. Tittle served in the Y. M. C. A. during the St. Mihiel offensive. In 1918 he went to Evanston's smart First Methodist Church, where his sermons--spoken out of the side of his mouth--now draw large congregations.

The Evanston Reveres published a pamphlet crying up the fact that Dr. Tittle is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. The Union, said the Reveres, gets money from Communists. Communism and Atheism are the same thing, and "a preacher speaking the word of God in a House of God should not be a member of an atheistic society." The pamphlet also flayed Dr. Tittle for letting young Negroes mingle with young whites at a church party. And at the "Reverend Sirs" of Evanston the Reveres leveled three questions which seemed aimed chiefly at Dr. Tittle: "Would you be good enough to indicate . . . whether you favor the leanings of some of our Evanston churches toward Socialism and Communism? . . . Have you made a pulpit statement of your opinion of the end results of these leanings in the church of Jesus Christ? . . . If 'no,' will you?"

Heresy-hunting and clergy-baiting usually dwindle into dull squabbles. Evanston's brought an unpredicted turn. The lay members of First Methodist Church, among them President Fred Wesley Sargent of Chicago & North Western Railway Co., backed up their Dr. Tittle, issued a manifesto: "We stand for a free pulpit and a free church. . . . We vigorously resent the effort of outside organizations to dictate to the Church or to prescribe its message."

The Evanston clergy held their peace, save for Rev. R. Lester Mondale of First Unitarian Church who took Dr. Tittle's side. Chided the Christian Century in nearby Chicago: "If the ministers of Evanston--or of the other communities in which similar pieces of browbeating will undoubtedly be attempted--knuckle under to an implied threat of this sort, they will deserve nothing but the moral and intellectual slavery into which they will deliver themselves."

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