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MINISTER  DIDN'T  FEAR  RED  SCARE

On principle, Willard Uphaus went to jail

 

Friday, February 5, 1999 [Part of a continuing series of stories about the one hundred persons, chosen by the newspaper, who helped shape New Hampshire in the 20th century. The full list is here.]

 

By AMY McCONNELL

Concord NH Monitor staff

(Amy McConnell can be reached at 224-5301, ext. 321, or by e-mail at amcconnell@cmonitor.com.)

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The old Methodist measured the threats of the state and the weight of his conscience, and chose the lighter burden.

 

In December 1959, Willard Uphaus said goodbye to his wife and followed the sheriff out of Merrimack County Superior Court, through a crowd of supporters and toward the county jail. He had chosen to protect the names of friends accused of "subversion" and sought by the attorney general, and had been sentenced to one year in jail for contempt of court.

 

In Boscawen, jailers frisked Uphaus, 69, for dangerous weapons, led him to a 6-by-8-foot cell lit by a single bulb, and locked the steel door behind them.

 

His first night of imprisonment seemed endless, Uphaus later wrote.

 

"My bones ached fiercely on the hard narrow cot. A car swishing past on the highway tantalized me with the sound of freedom. I had just managed to doze, it seemed, when, with a bang and a clatter, a guard that I had not yet seen came to rouse us."

 

Uphaus served all but two days of his sentence.

 

During that jail term and the long legal battle preceding it, the Uphaus controversy became one local battlefield in the national war over limiting the rights of suspected communists.

 

In protecting the identities of his colleagues, his supporters said, Uphaus had become a symbol of resistance against a dangerous witch-hunt in New Hampshire.

 

In withholding the names of guests at his summer camp in Conway, according to Attorney General Louis Wyman, Gov. Hugh Gregg and the Legislature, Uphaus might be hiding Communists who were plotting to destroy the American way of life.

 

Uphaus, an Indiana farm boy who graduated from Yale with a doctorate in religious education, had spent much of his life trying to reconcile such apparent paradoxes. After years of teaching in religious schools and southern colleges for blacks - and seeing many churches ignore the racism and poverty around them - Uphaus tried bridge the gap between religion and the labor movement.

 

From 1934 to 1953, Uphaus ran a small organization called the National Religion and Labor Foundation, which encouraged religious leaders to help labor unions during strikes. He also began sponsoring organizations that advocated civil rights, better working conditions and world peace.

 

In 1953, he became the executive director of World Fellowship Center, a secluded camp in Conway still used by many liberal and radical workers, intellectuals and social activists for summer vacations. He served as director there until 1967, when he left to found a similar center in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Uphaus ran the Florida camp until his death in 1982.

 

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Communist fears

 

The Uphaus controversy began in the summer of 1953 as the momentum began to slow behind the national hunt for communists led by the late senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, but Uphaus's difficulties evolved in much the same way and for many of the same reasons.

 

With the memory of World War II casualties fresh in the national mind and with apprehension about the Soviet Union's atomic capabilities rising, fears of a communist takeover that had festered for decades grew virulent in New Hampshire and across the country.

 

James O'Neil, the Manchester police chief in 1947 and vice-president of the American Legion's Americanism Commission, claimed that year that as many as 1,000 enrolled communists and as many as 10,000 sympathizers might live in the state, based on what O'Neil called his personal information. (The year before, Elba Chase Nelson, the state Communist Party's candidate for governor, won only 67 votes.)

 

The New Hampshire Sunday News reported O'Neil's charge, in the first of what soon became a constant drumbeat of articles and editorials by it and The Union Leader of Manchester about the "red menace."

 

In addition to editorials warning about the dangers of possible subversion, The Union Leader advocated a loyalty oath for teachers in 1949 and published the headline, "NH Needs Strong Anti-Red Law" in January 1951.

 

Two years later, the Legislature passed a bill to prohibit "subversive organizations."

 

The State Subversive Activities Act outlawed any organization from committing or advocating any act intended to overthrow or destroy the constitutional form government by force or violence. Conviction was a Class A felony. Anyone remaining a member of an organization advocating or condoning violent revolution was guilty of a Class B felony. The law remained on the books until 1994.

 

Anyone convicted of violating the law was barred from working for state government and filing for election to public office. State employees had to sign an oath swearing not to belong to a subversive group.

 

When the attorney general had information about possible violations, he had to investigate and report the results to the Legislature along with recommended actions, according to the statute. He could subpoena correspondence, books and interviews, and make public any information he possessed, including the identities of people under investigation but not charged with any crime.

 

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Accused

 

In 1953, the first season Uphaus ran World Fellowship, a reporter from The Union Leader appeared at the center, Uphaus later wrote in his memoir, Commitment.

 

The reporter said he wanted to write a feature article about the camp, and Uphaus gave him informational pamphlets and showed him around World Fellowship.

 

In early September, the newspaper published a front-page story with the headline, "Pro-Red at World Fellowship" that claimed Uphaus supported the Communist Party and was harboring members of subversive organizations. In a small box on its front page, the paper also published a vow by Wyman that he would investigate the camp.

 

Whether or not members of the Communist Party attended World Fellowship - and some socialists and Marxists undoubtedly did - the goals endorsed by Uphaus and by the camp's promotional literature ran far afield from violent overthrow of the government.

 

The camp was trying to encourage friendships among people of different countries and to find ways to end war, poverty, hunger and bigotry - the lessons of social justice espoused by Old Testament prophets and by Jesus, according to Uphaus.

 

"Among those who come are philosophical materialists - Marxists and atheists - but they wouldn't be drawn to World Fellowship if they were not humanists with a real concern toward those who suffer from discrimination and exploitation, or dedicated peace workers who believe we should topple the walls that separate people and work together to save all from annihilation," Uphaus wrote.

 

Anyone who was willing to keep an open mind and work for social change through peaceful means could attend World Fellowship, Uphaus said. Many working people, religious and civil rights activists and intellectuals - and their children - took three-month summer vacations at the camp, during which they would debate issues and enjoy swimming, hiking and boating around Conway.

 

But according to Wyman, those religious ideals were only a false front of the communist conspiracy.

 

As Benjamin Gitlow, one of five paid witnesses who testified before McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee, had explained, religious agents of communism try to poison the minds of the pious with "a destructive atheistic ideology cloaked in the name of social action," according to Wyman.

 

Religious leaders were using Jesus's rebellion against conditions of his day as an example to encourage rebellion against social conditions today, according to the witnesses, who also alleged that 600 ministers had joined with communists to carry out a pro-Soviet plot.

 

The witnesses named 150 religious leaders supposedly involved in the conspiracy. In September 1953 Gitlow claimed Uphaus was one of the "principal individuals involved in the Communist conspiracy to convert the Methodist Church for Communist purposes," prompting another article by The Union Leader. Wyman continued to promise an investigation of the center.

 

No request for an interview arrived from Wyman that fall. But the next spring, Uphaus, who said he still thought the situation was a misunderstanding, sought out Wyman in Concord before opening the camp.

 

He hoped they would discuss the situation and resolve the confusion, Uphaus wrote in Commitment. Perhaps Wyman would come speak at World Fellowship and could reassure himself about the camp, Uphaus wrote.

 

Instead, Wyman subpoenaed Uphaus to return for questioning.

 

During a meeting in June, Uphaus answered Wyman's questions about the organizations he had supported or worked with during a lifetime of political activism.

 

That fall, another subpoena arrived just as Uphaus and his wife were closing World Fellowship for the winter. Uphaus had to bring a 1954 guest list, information about people who worked at the camp, a list of speakers and any correspondence Uphaus had with them, and any letters or documents that showed a relationship with organizations the federal authorities has labeled as subversive, the subpoena ordered.

 

But Uphaus refused.

 

"I had been harried, pilloried and branded," he wrote. "My actions, and my motives, had been publicly misconstrued. . . . To expose the good, law-abiding people who had been with us at World Fellowship would be a degrading thing to do."

 

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Defiance

 

Uphaus refused again in January 1956, when he appeared in Merrimack County Superior Court in response to yet another subpoena from Wyman. Satisfying the demands of his conscience, Uphaus said, took precedence over obeying the orders of the attorney general, the courts and the Legislature.

 

"I have been moved first by my religious convictions, my inner conscience, by the direct teaching of the Bible that it is wrong to bear false witness against my brother," Uphaus told the court.

 

"And in as much as I have no reason to believe that any of these persons whose names have been called for have in any sense hurt this state or our country, I have reason to believe that they should not be in possession of the attorney general," he said.

 

Judge George Grant Jr. declared Uphaus in contempt of court and sentenced him to jail until he surrendered the guest list and other information.

 

Released on bail, Uphaus appealed the ruling to the state Supreme Court, which upheld Wyman's right to investigate possible subversive activities based on hearsay evidence and to demand the guest list.

 

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Supreme Court fight

 

In 1958, more than four years after receiving Wyman's first subpoena, Uphaus's case was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court - a development Uphaus believed would vindicate his long struggle.

 

Despite the high hopes of Uphaus and his supporters, the justices ruled that the public interest outweighed Uphaus's private rights; given the power granted Wyman by the Legislature, the attorney general could force Uphaus to produce the guest list or prosecute him.

 

In his dissenting opinion, Justice William Brennan wrote that he disagreed not only with allowing the rights of the state to take precedence over the rights of the individual, but also with the purpose of the investigation.

 

"This record, I think, not only fails to reveal any interest of the State sufficient to subordinate appellant's constitutionally protected rights, but affirmatively shows that the investigatory objective was the impermissible one of exposure for exposure's sake," Brennan wrote.

 

Although Wyman eventually questioned 131 people he suspected of subversion - most of whom he identified in a public report to the Legislature in 1955 - none, including Uphaus, were ever indicted on criminal charges.

 

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Jail

 

Having exhausted his appeals, in December 1959 Uphaus returned for a final hearing in Merrimack County Superior Court - his last chance to turn over World Fellowship's guest list to spare himself a jail sentence.

 

But Uphaus refused yet again, and on December 14 began serving a one-year sentence in the county jail for contempt of court.

 

Soon, letters of support and criticism began pouring into the jail. Groups of supporters began appearing outside the jail on Sundays to sing hymns and old labor songs, according to Dr. Annette Rubinstein, a friend of Uphaus who attended the rallies and has lectured at World Fellowship since 1960.

 

Over time, Rubinstein said in a recent interview, some of the vagrants and petty criminals in jail with Uphaus learned the songs and sang along. It was that sort of friendship and solidarity - not violent revolution - that Uphaus and World Fellowship advocated, she said.

 

"It was a center for discussions - definitely left of center but certainly not revolutionary," said Rubinstein, who was blacklisted in 1952 for her participation in the American Labor Party, which McCarthy had labeled a communist front. "There were people with a Quaker background and socialists and religious groups, and the ordinary socialists and fellow travelers . . . people who were interested in peace and in opposition to racism."

 

The so-called "red menace" used to justify Wyman's investigations of World Fellowship had never posed a threat to the country's security, Rubinstein said.

 

"Anybody who said black people had a right to live where they wanted or who asked for higher wages was called a communist," she said. "Now you use the term 'terrorist,' but it never had the same meaning."

 

Audrey Rogers, who grew up in Conway and now lives near World Fellowship, said she saw first-hand how fear of the unknown - of "foreigners" and communists - created prejudice against people at the camp.

 

When she was a girl in the 1950s, Rogers said, people in town hated the center and were "petrified" that a communist takeover might begin there.

 

"You've got to remember that we live out in the country," Rogers said. "If you're from a small town and you're hearing people speaking a foreign language, you don't know if they talking about having a cup of tea or taking your life."

 

Fear of the unknown and a "high-strung prejudice" persists in Conway, Rogers said. World Fellowship is still called the "commie place," and its sign on Route 16 has been burned down as recently as two years ago.

 

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No regrets

 

But if fear helped drive the search for subversives during the 1950s, it wasn't necessarily misplaced, according to Stuart Conner, who helped in Wyman's investigation and who wrote most of the attorney general's 1955 report to the Legislature.

 

Communists had taken over Eastern Europe and much of Asia after the end of World War II, and they made no secret of their plans to extend that influence, Conner said. There was "absolutely no question" that communism threatened the United States, Conner said recently.

 

The situation wasn't close to a takeover but that was the goal; "agents of influence" concealed their real loyalties in order to influence people more easily, he said.

 

"They were able to sugarcoat the public line, but when you go back and read Marx and Engels and Lenin there isn't any question about what their plans were. . . . There's no prohibition against violence there."

 

Although New Hampshire's Bill of Rights guarantees the "right to revolution" if government has been perverted to serve one person, family or class of people and all other means of redress have been exhausted, the document implies that the people themselves - not foreign governments - possess that right, Conner said.

 

The implication of revolution as used by the communists, he said, is that of a takeover by people who have no loyalty to the United States or its form of government.

 

"The commies were loyal to a philosophy and theory that was alien in some respects," Conner said. "It was certainly operated by aliens."

 

Looking back on an era he hasn't talked about for many years, Conner said, he has no regrets about how the search for subversives was conducted.

 

The investigation of World Fellowship never penetrated far enough for Conner and Wyman to understand what activities were going on there or to discover whether the camp harbored subversives, Conner said.

 

But he and Wyman had the right and the duty to perform the job the Legislature had ordered, which included questioning people. Sometimes that duty also included threatening public exposure to force witnesses' cooperation if they refused to talk privately, he said.

 

"How can you ever prove a conspiracy if you don't ask the question of who was involved?" Conner asked. "It amuses me that people talk about guilt by association. . . . Ask drug investigators if it isn't very important to find out who a drug runner is associating with."