This Week in Texas Methodist History  May 9, 2021

 

 

Controversial Texas Congressman Protested at First General Conference of the Methodist Church, May 1940

 

The Methodist Church was created by the union of its three predecessor denominations in May 1939 at the Uniting Conference in Kansas City.  Although delegates worked all day for two weeks hammering out the details of the new organization, they agreed that some things would be left pending for another year as the boards, agencies, publishing houses, institutions, and other bodies worked out what unification really meant.

 

The first General Conference of the Methodist Church, held in Atlantic City in April and May of 1940. was very focused on resolving those pending issues.  This was intended to be a working General Conference, as shown by the adoption of a five minute limit on speeches.   On the last day, in the rush of unresolved issues,  that time was shortened to three minutes. 

 

Texans were prominent in the General Conference.  Their names would be familiar to readers of this blog.  Paul Quillian chaired a committee.  His parishioner, Ella Fondren, served on the Committee on Hospitals and Homes.  J. N. R Score, Paul, Martin, Joe Z Tower,  Frank Smith, etc all had significant roles.

 

One of the Texans who spoke got more newspaper headlines than any of these mentioned, and he was not even a Methodist.

 

That speaker was Representative Martin Dies, Jr., Chair of the House Committee on un-American Activities (HUAC), and already a controversial figure.

 

Dies was the son of Martin Dies, Sr., who preceded him Congress.  Although Dies had been raised Methodist, by 1940 he not longer was a member.

 

HUAC had been formed in 1938 ostensibly to keep an eye on the KKK and German-American organizations with overt Nazi ideologies.  Dies, however, ignored the KKK and investigated liberal causes which he branded as communistic.  His main targets were labor unions and African Americans.  

 

Although he had been a dependable New Dealer from 1933 to 1937, he turned against FDR, and especially any programs which supplied economic relief to African Americans.  He opposed minimum wage legislation because European American and African American workers would receive the same wage.  In the debate over the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937 he had said on the floor  “you cannot prescribe the same wages for the black man as for the white man."

 

The topic of the Dies speech to General Conference was Christian Citizenship, but his appearance on the program was controversial.  Some “young misguided people”  tried to picket the entrance to the auditorium before Dies spoke.  “Police came of their own accord to stop them.”    “A small group of young people in the gallery protested, and the police took care of them.”   (quotes are from Southwestern Christian Advocate coverage of the Conference, attributed to Bishop John M. Moore, acting editor)

 

Dies continued to be active in Texas politics, running for the Senate twice and winning an at-large congressional seat.  When out of office, he practiced law in Lufkin and wrote books warning of the menace of Communist infiltration in America.  Those books were so radical, that when he returned to Congress in the at-large seat, he was denied a seat on the committee he had created and first chaired, HUAC, because it was believed he was actually hurting the anti-communist brand. 

 

One example of his overreach had occurred during this first tenure on the committee.  A new, leftist newspaper had begun in Paris, and many Hollywood celebrities signed a letter of welcome.   Dies published the names of the signatories and denounced them as communist dupes.  One of them was Shirley Temple---ten years old at the time. 

 

Trivia Question:  What do Martin Dies and I have in common?  We both graduated from Beaumont High School.