Background
Joseph Brown Matthews was born on June 28, 1894 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. He was the son of Burrell Jones Mattews, a businessman and member of the Kentucky legislature, and Fanny Wellborn Brown, a former schoolteacher.
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Joseph Brown Matthews was born on June 28, 1894 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. He was the son of Burrell Jones Mattews, a businessman and member of the Kentucky legislature, and Fanny Wellborn Brown, a former schoolteacher.
In 1915, Matthews graduated from Asbury College in Wilmore, Ky. , where he majored in Greek and Latin. After ordination as a Methodist minister that same year, he went to Java to do missionary work and to teach at a Chinese school. To facilitate the teaching of native preachers, Matthews learned Malay. Within a few years, he was sufficiently fluent to edit a paper, translate over 200 Methodist hymns, and author numerous books in the language.
Sympathetic to Malay nationalistic aspirations, he criticized Dutch colonial rule, which prompted church officials to recall him in 1921. For the next three years, Matthews supported his family with grants from church foundations and part-time ministerial work while he earned a B. D. from Drew University, an S. T. M. from Union Theological Seminary, and an M. A. from Columbia University. He was greatly influenced by Social Gospel teachings. In 1924 he was appointed to teach at Scarritt College, a Methodist training school in Nashville, Tenn. In 1927 he resigned his teaching position and left the Methodist church. For two years, Matthews held short-term appointments, chiefly at two black universities, Fisk in Nashville and Howard in Washington, D. C. In June 1929, Matthews was appointed executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an organization dedicated to Christian pacifism, social reform, and better race relations. He later claimed membership in twenty-eight front organizations and official positions in fifteen. The best known was the American League Against War and Fascism, organized in October 1933, ostensibly to stop fascist aggression. The league was also the Communist party's most ambitious effort to influence public opinion through a united front. With the approval of Earl Browder, the party's chairman, league members chose Matthews as their first national chairman, although he always denied that he was a party member. He resigned in February 1934, following the disruption by Communists of a Socialist meeting at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Still committed to a united front, he remained a league member until September 1935. In early 1934, Matthews' friend Fred J. Schlink hired him as vice-president and member of the Board of Directors of Consumers' Research, an organization that sought to counter the effects of advertising by making product evaluations available to consumers. In 1935 he coauthored Partners in Plunder with his second wife Ruth Enalda Shallcross. Increasingly, he began to view himself as the innocent victim of a Communist conspiracy, and he resigned in June 1938. In August 1938, before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), chaired by Martin Dies, Matthews testified about the existence of united-front organizations, secretly organized and controlled by the Communist party, and named ninety-four. As an insider who had seen the light, Matthews was a real find for HUAC. The following month, Dies appointed him chief investigator and staff director, a post he held until 1945. During the year HUAC began to concentrate on those organizations and their members. Matthews and his staff began to pore over organizational letterheads, mailing lists, meeting programs, public statements, and back issues of the Daily Worker, compiling thousands of names. The Federal Bureau of Investigation supplied others from its confidential files. Initially, Matthews recognized that some participants were not Communists or fellow travelers, but he quickly became convinced that all were subversives. The investigations culminated in a seven-volume report, Communist Front Organizations with Special Reference to the National Citizens Political Action Committee (1944), one of whose appendices contained 22, 000 names identified as likely Communist subversives. To many contemporary observers, Matthews was the driving force behind Dies's chairmanship. He prepared most of HUAC's reports, often without benefit of public hearings or comment from other committee members. He wrote many of Dies's speeches and magazine articles, and most likely Dies's book The Trojan Horse in America (1940). It was under their joint direction that HUAC pioneered the technique of "guilt by association, " later popularized as "McCarthyism, " by which individuals were judged subversive because of their friends or relatives or the organizations they belonged to.
After leaving HUAC, Matthews remained active in the anti-Communist cause. The Hearst newspaper chain hired him as a consultant on Communism, and he continued to maintain his files, which by the late 1940's contained 500, 000 names linked in some fashion to left-wing organizations. For a fee, he would provide names of alleged subversives to state boards investigating Communism. In 1947 the American Legion hired him to compile a list of film-industry figures who had "Communist" associations. In New York City he presided over what one of his admirers called "the nearest thing to an anti-Communist salon" that ever existed there. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's rise to prominence occasioned a brief return to the limelight for Matthews. McCarthy needed evidence to support the reckless charges he had made about Communist subversion in the State Department. With his bulging files and numerous contacts, Matthews became the central figure in a clique of anti-Communists who provided McCarthy with names and support. McCarthy had raised the issue in hopes of gaining political advantage, but Matthews' group convinced him that Communist subversives were a threat to the United States. In turn, McCarthy recognized his debt to Matthews, calling him a "stars-spangled American. " In June 1953, to no one's surprise, McCarthy appointed Matthews executive director of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he chaired. However, the publication of Matthews' article "Reds and Our Churches" in the July 1953 issue of the American Mercury created a storm of protest. Opening with the startling assertion that "the largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant clergymen, " the article proclaimed a widespread clerical conspiracy. Although Matthews qualified his remarks by admitting that the vast majority of clergymen were loyal, he insisted that 7, 000 supported the Communist party. McCarthy's adversaries saw an opportunity to discredit him and organized a public rebuke by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and national religious leaders. Recognizing the damage that had been done, McCarthy reluctantly accepted Matthews' resignation on July 19, 1953. Throughout the 1950's, Matthews was a regular contributor to the American Mercury, by then a right-wing periodical, and in the 1960's he wrote for American Opinion, the organ of the John Birch Society. His name appeared on the masthead of the conservative National Review until his death in New York City.
His last years were spent as research director of the Church League of America, which was founded to combat Communism among the Protestant clergy but quickly expanded its scope and became a private dossier service that checked the backgrounds of suspected leftists for businesses and organizations. Matthews needed causes to which he could commit himself with the zealousness of the true believer.
Matthews advocated pacifism and the abolition of child labor, campaigned for Robert La Follette in 1924, and shocked college officials with his attacks on racial segregation. He proved to be an energetic administrator. Many of his associates were socialists, and in November 1929, Matthews, who had concluded that a new economic order was needed to achieve real reform, joined the Socialist party. He also questioned whether a Christian pacifist approach could be effective. He urged the FOR to abandon its insistence on pacifism and permit members to support class warfare. After a lengthy debate, the executive council accepted his resignation in December 1933. For several years, Matthews had worked to create a solid "united front" of left-wing groups to achieve peace and economic and social equality. His books and Guinea Pigs No More (1936) exposed the ways in which advertising misled consumers, but Matthews concluded that the real culprit was capitalism itself. In September 1935 a group of Consumers' Research employees went on strike after Schlink refused to recognize their union or improve salaries and working conditions. Matthews sided with Schlink, calling the strikers traitors and eventually denouncing the strike as a Communist conspiracy to seize control of the organization. Assailed by the Daily Worker and convicted at a mock trial in New York City of anti-working-class activities, Matthews soon found himself blacklisted by every left-wing organization that had once welcomed him.
The greater part of his intellectual journey from evangelical Protestantism to left-wing socialism was one made by many of his generation. But it was his final destination, militant and obsessive anti-Communism, that made him appear erratic and led to charges of opportunism, though he was sincerely fearful of the threat posed by Communist subversion.
In 1917 he married Grace Doswell Ison, a fellow Kentuckian and missionary in Java; they had four children. Then on on December 15, 1936 he married Ruth Enalda Shallcross, following the termination of his first marriage in 1934. In 1949 he married a fellow consultant for the Hearst Corporation, Ruth Inglis, as his third wife. She was treasurer, assistant publisher, and trustee of Consumers' Research. She was a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and research editor of Combat, a subsidiary of National Review.
