Faces of Bigotry

Folded into all 1,300,000 copies of an issue of the United Auto Workers' weekly tabloid Solidarity last month was a provocative four-page insert calculated to catch the eye of each of its estimated 5,000,000 readers. Its cover page was alive with a drawing of a sheet-hooded, club-carrying Ku Klux Klanner standing menacingly next to the Statue of Liberty. Caption: WHICH Do You CHOOSE? LIBERTY or BIGOTRY. Printed inside was the full text of the rousing speech by U.A.W.-endorsed Jack Kennedy to Protestant ministers in Houston.

For three weeks the U.A.W. proudly stood behind its work, and even ordered reprints--until the independent Detroit News last week broke the first report of it, President Eisenhower took it up, and it became a national uproar.

Memories of McCarthy. "Unfair," complained the Michigan Fair Election Practices Commission. The Democratic-leaning Washington Post denounced it as "sheer demagogy . . . bigotry in the guise of anti-bigotry." A Detroit News editorial compared it to "the McCarthy tactic of yelling 'Communist' every time anybody disagreed with the Wisconsin Senator's ideas or methods. Today the too common practice is to holler 'bigot' at anyone in the opposite camp."

The U.A.W. retreated. President Walter Reuther protested that he had not seen the leaflet before publication, ordered distribution stopped. Solidarity went on the presses with a windy editorial offering regrets for any "misinterpretation." An A.F.L.-C.I.O. spokesman divorced the parent union from the leaflet: "It's a U.A.W. baby, and that's it." Solidarity Managing Editor Henry Santiestevan glumly admitted to a tactical error: "There were other ways we could have gotten Nixon."

God's Own Way. But if Republicans could make an issue out of reverse-twist bigotry, Democrats could make an issue out of a fresh wave of anti-Catholicism from Protestant fundamentalist areas.

A Senate subcommittee wanted to question Texas Oil Millionaire H. L. Hunt, 71, possibly the biggest of the Big Rich, and a man far to the right of McKinley. There were reports that he had put up the money to distribute 102,000 copies to Protestant clergymen around the nation of a violently anti-Catholic, anti-Kennedy sermon by Dallas Baptist Minister W. A. Criswell, who has the biggest white Baptist congregation in the U.S. (It is illegal to distribute a political tract without identifying the source.)

Sharpest assault of all was being mounted by the National Association of Evangelicals, embracing 38 fundamentalist denominations with a claimed membership of 10 million. It has urged its member ministers--some 28,000 in all 50 states--to deliver anti-Catholic sermons on next week's Reformation Sunday, which commemorates the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. Tinny "campaign" buttons are being circulated, each bearing a gold cross and the inscription: 1517--Reformation Sunday, Oct. 30, 1960. Church members will be urged to wear them through Election Day as "simple and unobtrusive Protestant identification."

"The Secular Attempt." Last week the General Council of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. carried one of the few notes of sane balance on the religion issue. In one of its rare pronouncements the council voiced "outrage and concern at the exploitation of the religious issue in the campaign, which has caused the American people chiefly to hear extremists. The General Council resents equally:

"1) the secular attempt to make churches appear irrelevant to American life,

"2) the current efforts to make Protestant convictions appear to be bigotry, and

"3) the propaganda implying that Roman Catholics are irresponsible citizens."

Then the council repeated the stand that its general assembly adopted last May: "It [is] the duty of all citizens to examine a candidate's position on important issues of public policy, including those relating to the separation of church and state; it is an act of irresponsible citizenship to support or oppose a candidate solely because of his religious affiliation."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.