In the steadily heating controversy over mass-meeting antiCommunism, Frederick Charles Schwarz, 49, founder and director of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, is rapidly becoming the hottest thing around. Last week the keen, spellbinding Dr. Schwarz sallied out from Southern California, heartland of his movement, into another terrain, the San Francisco Bay area. There, in Oakland, he put on a five-day anti-Communist "school"; later this year he expects to carry his message to the Middle West and to New York.
Schwarz means to stir people up, and he does. He arouses an automatic-reflex hostility in the liberal-to-left camp, and an equally instinctive support on the far right. But for those Americans who are themselves less easily classified, Schwarz is a hard man to classify. For his crusade poses a question that is deeper than it looks: What is the role of the individual U.S. citizen in antiCommunism?
Rising Furor. "We're not angels," Schwarz says. "We haven't right wings, left wings, any wings." For those critics viscerally disposed to dislike his "Crusade," but not disposed to study it, Schwarz does not make things easy. He has not uttered any simple, memorable piece of nonsense, like Robert Welch's statement that Eisenhower was a Communist dupe. The Schwarz Crusade proceeds right out in the open without any of the conspiratorial folderol of Welch's Birchites.
Yet for weeks before Oakland's Auditorium Theater opened its doors on the first Crusade session there, the Bay Area was in furor. The San Francisco Chronicle denounced Schwarz as a phantom hunter; the Oakland Tribune, whose editor, former Senator William Knowland, is a Schwarz admirer ("Dr. Schwarz is very intelligent and sincere"), backed the Crusade. There was an unholy row about a proclamation, carrying the names of 55 Bay Area mayors, that declared last week "AntiCommunism Week." When Schwarz critics protested, the mayor of Fairfax denied that he had ever signed the proclamation, the mayor of San Jose said that his signature had been obtained "by misrepresentation," and the city councils of Berkeley, Sunnyvale and Mill Valley refused to endorse their mayors' signatures. California's Attorney General Stanley Mosk (who once described the John Birch Society as being composed of "retired military officers and little old ladies in tennis shoes") now called the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade a "fly-by-night promotion." Cried he: "Communism is much too serious a problem to leave in the hands of promoters and political opportunists." A group of eight prominent clergymen, including Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike, General Presbyter Dr. Robert D. Bulkley and Rabbi Sidney Akselrad, issued a statement declaring Schwarz's Crusade of "dubious value" and noting that "in several communities, in the wake of these 'schools,' there has been a resurgence of attacks on churches, schools and councils of churches."