Another was a tiny newspaper rolled tight and mailed from Grand Central Station. I opened the newspaper first, found it to be The White Christian Minuteman, a scabrous, illiterate, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, anti-Catholic hate sheet published by the Reverend Doctor Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S. ‘Supreme Court,’ said the biggest headline, ‘Demands U.S. Be Mongrel!’
The second biggest headline said: ‘Red Cross Gives Whites Negro Blood!’
These headlines could hardly startle me. They were, after all, the sort of thing I had said for a living in Germany. Even closer to the spirit of the old Howard W. Campbell, Jr., actually, was the headline of a small story in one corner of the front page, a story titled: ‘International Jewry Only Winners of World War II.’
I now opened the letter from the American Legion Post. It said:
Dear Howard:
I was very surprised and disappointed to hear you weren’t dead yet. When I think of all the good people who died in World War Two, and then think that you’re still alive and living in the country you betrayed, it makes me want to throw up. You will be happy to know that our Post resolved unanimously last night to demand that you either get hanged by the neck until dead or get deported back to Germany, which is the country you love so much.
Now that I know where you are, I will be paying you a call real soon. It will be nice to talk over old times.
When you go to sleep tonight, you smelly rat, I hope you dream of the concentration camp at Ohrdruf. I should have pushed you into a lime pit when I had the chance.
Very, very truly yours,
Bernard B. O’Hare
Post Americanism Chairman
Carbon copies to:
J. Edgar Hoover, F.B.I., Washington, D.C. Director,
Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C.
Editor, Time, New York City
Editor, Newsweek, New York City
Editor, Infantry Journal, Washington, D.C.
Editor, The Legion Magazine, Indianapolis, Indiana
Chief Investigator, House Un-American Activities
Committee, Washington, D.C.
Editor, The White Christian Minuteman, 395 Bleecker
St, New York City
Bernard B. O’Hare, of course, was the young man who had captured me at the end of the war, who had frog-walked me through the death camp at Ohrdruf, who had joined me in a memorable photograph on the cover of Life.
When I found the letter from him in my mailbox in Greenwich Village, I was puzzled as to how he’d found out where I was.
I leafed through The White Christian Minuteman, found out O’Hare wasn’t the only person who had rediscovered Howard W. Campbell, Jr. On page three of the Minuteman, under a headline that said simply, ‘American Tragedy!’ was this brief tale:
Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a great writer and one of the most fearless patriots in American history, now lives in poverty and loneliness in the attic of 27 Bethune Street. Such is the fate of thinking men brave enough to tell the truth about the conspiracy of international Jewish bankers and international Jewish Communists who will not rest until the bloodstream of every American is hopelessly polluted with Negro and/or Oriental blood.
13: The Reverend Doctor Lionel Jason
David Jones, D.D.S., D.D… .
I am indebted to the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals for the source material that makes it possible for me to include in this account a biography of Dr. Jones, publisher of The White Christian Minuteman.
Jones, though subject to no prosecution as a war criminal, has a very fat dossier. Leafing through that treasure house of souvenirs, I find these things to be true:
The Reverend Doctor Lionel Jason David Jones, D.D.S., D.D., was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1889, was raised as a Methodist
He was the youngest son of a dentist, the grandson of two dentists, brother of two dentists, and the brother-in-law of three dentists. He himself set out to be a dentist, but was expelled from the Dental School of the University of Pittsburgh in 1910, for what would now be diagnosed, most likely, as paranoia. In 1910, he was dismissed for simple scholastic failure.
The syndrome of his failure was anything but simple. His examination papers were quite probably the longest such papers ever written in the history of dental education, and probably the most irrelevant as well. They began, sanely enough, with whatever subject the examination required Jones to discuss. But, regardless of that subject, Jones managed to go from it to a theory that was all his own ĄX that the teeth of Jews and Negroes proved beyond question that both groups were degenerate.
His dental work was of a high order, so the faculty hoped to see him outgrow his political interpretations of teeth. But his case grew worse, until his examinations became frantic pamphlets, warning all Protestant Anglo-Saxons to unite against Jewish-Negro domination.
When Jones began to detect proof of degeneracy in the teeth of Catholics and Unitarians, and when five loaded pistols and a bayonet were found under his mattress, Jones was finally given the old heave-ho.
Jones’ parents disowned him, which is something my parents never quite did to me.
Penniless, Jones found work as an apprentice embalmer in the Scharff Brothers Funeral Home in Pittsburgh. He became manager of the home within two years. A year after that, he married the widowed owner, Hattie Scharff. Hattie was fifty-eight at the time, and Jones was twenty-four. The many investigators into Jones’ life, unfriendly investigators almost to a man, have been bound to conclude that Jones really loved his Hattie. The marriage, which endured until the death of Hattie in 1928, was a happy one.
In fact, it was so happy, so whole, so self-sufficient a nation of two that Jones did almost nothing during that time by way of alerting the Anglo-Saxons. He seems to have been content to confine his remarks on racial matters to workroom jests about certain cadavers, jests that would have seemed workaday hi the most liberal of embalming establishments. And the years were golden, not only emotionally and financially, but creatively as well. Working with a chemist named Dr. Lomar Horthy, Jones developed Viverine, an embalming fluid, and Gingiva-Tru, a wonderfully lifelike, gum-simulating substance for false teeth.
When Jones’ wife died, Jones felt the need to be reborn. He was reborn a thing he had been latently all along. Jones became the sort of racial agitator who is spoken of as having crawled out from under a rock. Jones crawled out from under his rock in 1928. He sold his funeral home for eighty-four thousand dollars, and he founded The White Christian Minuteman.
Jones was wiped out by the stock market crash in 1929. His paper suspended publication after fourteen issues. The fourteen issues had been mailed free to every person in Who’s Who. The only illustrations were photographs and diagrams of teeth, and every article was an explanation of some current events in terms of Jones’ theories about dentition and race.
In the next-to-the-last issue, Jones billed himself on the masthead as, ‘Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S.’
Penniless again, now forty years of age, Jones answered an ad in a funeral-home trade journal. An embalming school in Little Rock, Arkansas, needed a president. The ad was signed by the widow of the former president and owner.
Jones got the job, and the widow, too. The widow’s name was Mary Alice Shoup. She was sixty-eight when Jones married her.
And Jones again became a devoted husband, a happy, whole, and quiet man.
The school he headed was named, straightforwardly enough, The Little Rock School of Embalming. It was losing eight thousand dollars a year. Jones took it out of the high-overhead field of embalming education, sold its real estate, and had it rechartered as The Western Hemisphere University of the Bible. The university held no classes, taught nothing, did all its business by mail. Its business was the awarding of doctorates in the field of divinity, framed and under glass, for eighty dollars a throw.
And Jones helped himself to a W.H.U.B. degree, out of open stock, so to speak. When his second wife died, when he brought out The White Christian Minuteman again, he appeared on the masthead as, The Reverend Doctor Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D.’
And he wrote and published at his own expense a book that combined not only dentistry and theology, but the fine arts as well. The name of the book was Christ Was Not a Jew. He proved his point by reproducing in the book fifty famous paintings of Jesus. According to Jones, not one painting showed Jewish jaws or teeth.
The first issues in the new series of The White Christian Minuteman were as unreadable as those of the old series. But then a miracle happened. The Minuteman jumped from four pages to eight. The make-up, the typography and the paper became snappy and handsome. Dental diagrams were replaced by newsy photographs, and the pages crackled with datelines and bylines from all over the world.