Mother Night (6 page)

The application form I filled out was necessarily full of lies, was such a fabric of mendacity that the school did not even bother to tell me that I was unacceptable. Be that as it may, my name somehow found its way onto a list of those supposedly in teaching. Thereafter, flyers without end flew in.

I opened my mailbox on an accumulation of three or four days.

There was a check from Coca-Cola, a notice of a General Motors stockholders’ meeting, a request from Standard Oil of New Jersey that I approve a new stock-option plan for my executives, and an ad for an eight-pound weight disguised to look like a schoolbook.

Object of the weight was to give schoolchildren something to exercise with, in between classes. The ad pointed out that the physical fitness of American children
was below that of the children of almost every land on earth.

But the ad for that queer weight wasn’t the queerest thing in my mailbox. There were some things a lot queerer than that.

One was from the Francis X. Donovan Post of the American Legion in Brookline, Massachusetts, a letter in a legal-size envelope.

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:

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:

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—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 in 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 life-like, 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 Minute-man
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
Minute-man
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.

The explanation was simple—and obvious. Jones had been recruited and financed as a propaganda agent for Hitler’s then-rising Third German Reich. Jones’ news, photographs, cartoons and editorials were coming straight from the Nazi propaganda mills in Erfurt, Germany.

It is quite possible, incidentally, that much of his more scurrilous material was written by me.

Jones continued as a German propaganda agent even after the United States of America entered the
Second World War. He wasn’t arrested until July in 1942, when he was indicted with twenty-seven others for:

Jones was convicted. He was sentenced to fourteen years, served eight. When he was freed from Atlanta in 1950, he was a wealthy man. Viverine, his embalming fluid, and Gingiva-Tru, his counterfeit gum substance for false teeth, had both come to dominate their respective markets.

In 1955, he resumed publication of
The White Christian Minuteman
.

Five years after that, a lively elder statesman of seventy-one, an alert old man with no regrets, the Reverend Doctor Lionel J.D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D., paid me a call.

Why should I have honored him with such a full-dress biography?

In order to contrast with myself a race-baiter who is ignorant and insane. I am neither ignorant nor insane.

Those whose orders I carried out in Germany were as ignorant and insane as Dr. Jones. I knew it.

God help me, I carried out their instructions anyway.

J
ONES PAID ME
a call a week after I found out how upsetting the contents of my mailbox had become. I tried to call on him first. He published his vile newspaper only a few blocks away from my attic, and I went there to beg him to retract the story.

He was not in.

When I got home, there was plenty of new mail in my mailbox, almost all of it from subscribers to
The White Christian Minuteman
. The common theme was that I was not alone, was not friendless. A woman in Mount Vernon, New York, told me there was a throne in Heaven for me. A man in Norfolk said I was the new Patrick Henry. A woman in St. Paul sent me two dollars to continue my good work. She apologized. She said that was all the money she had. A man in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, asked me why I didn’t get out of Jew York and come live in God’s country.

I didn’t have any idea how Jones had found out about me.

Kraft claimed to be mystified, too. He wasn’t really mystified. He had written to Jones as an anonymous fellow-patriot, telling him the glad news that I was alive. He had also asked that Jones send a complimentary copy of his great paper to Bernard B. O’Hare of the Francis X. Donovan Post of the American Legion.

Kraft had plans for me.

And he was, at the very same time, doing a portrait of me that surely showed more sympathetic insight into me, more intuitive affection than could ever have been produced by a wish to fool a boob.