"Dieff" to the Transcript

A pioneer among secular newspapers was the Boston Transcript when it instituted a religious department -- "The Churchman Afield"--33 years ago. The "Churchman" was Herbert Hervey Fletcher, who had gone into journalism in 1879, became manager of the New England Associated Press in 1887, associate managing editor of the Transcript in 1897. New England came to know "Churchman" Fletcher well. Apocryphal perhaps but typical is the story of the provincial lady who wrote in to say her 25-year-old son was spending a week in Boston, would the Churchman be good enough to keep an eye on him? In the Transcript office Mr. Fletcher is famed for his eyeshades--envelopes stuck between his temples and the bows of his spectacles. He is a stubble-bearded, genteel, firm believer in oldtime Christianity and Prohibition. He is a baseball addict, fond of plucking batting averages from his capacious memory and correcting the errors of sportswriters. Last week "Churchman" Fletcher announced his retirement and the Transcript gave its readers a new and strikingly different religious editor. Dr. Albert Charles Dieffenbach is a religious Liberal, a believer in Humanism, Birth Control and Soviet Russia, an opponent of stage and book censorship. Successively a Reformed Church minister-missionary and a Unitarian minister, Dr. Dieffenbach became editor 15 years ago of the Christian Register, one of the oldest religious papers in the U. S. Observers have traced the Scopes trial in Tennessee to Dr. Dieffenbach's pungent words: it was he who first, like a beater stirring up game for hunters, brought the Fundamentalists into full view. Last December the Christian Register trustees agreed they had had enough of Liberalism. They let Editor Dieffenbach out on grounds of economy. Other religious editors deplored the ousting. Last week they congratulated the Transcript.

Called "Dieff" by his friends--including Henry Louis Mencken, with whom he was once a cub reporter in Baltimore--Dr. Dieffenbach is short, chubby, lively. He dresses fastidiously, plays tennis, occupies himself with the affairs of his fraternity Phi Kappa Sigma of which he was once national president. Dr. Dieffenbach says he will be not a "religious editor" but an "editor of religion," devoting himself to all trends of all creeds and sects.

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