Democrats' St. Paul

At one time or another, Dr. Stanley Hoflund High has turned his hand at religion, reform, journalism, politics. Chicago gave him birth. Nebraska Wesleyan Uni-versity educated him, Boston University made him a Bachelor of Sacred Theology. An aviation lieutenant during the War, Dr. High became a member of the European Reconstruction Committee in 1919, later went to China with a Methodist Mission. In 1928 he joined Dr. Daniel Alfred ("Call Me Dan") Poling in editing the Christian Herald. After Repeal, whose advance he bitterly contested with tongue and pen, Dr. High took to the radio, first as religious, then as current events lecturer for National Broadcasting Co. Never an ordained minister, he was for four years pastor of Stamford, Conn.'s First Congregational Church, resigning from that pastorate last October.

His friends always thought of Dr. High as a Republican. By 1934, however, he was telling a group of college students: "The fundamental objective of what we call the New Deal is religious. I think it is safe to say that this is the first time in modern history when a Government in any nation has set out to give practical application to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. And the tragedy is that the church, the organization which takes its charter from the New Testament, is so generally silent or critical."

Not even James Aloysius Farley could seriously deny that a great body of churchmen view with alarm the facts that President Roosevelt goes to church seldom, fishes on Sunday, restored liquor to the country, leaves God out of his speeches and permitted two divorces in his family in a year. Clearly, therefore, a sympathetic divine like Dr. High, who also happened to be a vigorous publicist, was a man the New Deal could find useful in an election year. It was not long before Dr. High's boyish face, which belies his 40 years, was to be seen in a cozy little office the Demo-cratic National Committee had rented in Washington's Munsey Building. There, after much pounding on his typewriter and puffing on his pipes, the Democrats' St. Paul last month brought forth his first effort to swing the great U. S. church vote to the Democratic ticket on Nov. 3. It was an organization titled the Good Neighbor League, whose directors included churchmen, businessmen, educators, feminists, reformers, in favor of the New Deal (TIME, May 4). Last week Dr. High's League in turn brought forth a sort of Sermon to the Ephesians in the form of a pamphlet called The Social Ideals of the Churches and the Social Program of the Government.

Actually written by Rev. Charles Stel-zle, seasoned Manhattan social worker, The Social Ideals of the Churches and the Social Program of the Government compares reforms advocated by Catholics, Jews and Protestants with legislation enacted under the New Deal. Thus, according to the booklet, the Social Security Act applies principles fostered by U. S. Catholic bishops in annual conclave; the National Labor Relations Act parallels collective bargaining pronouncements by the Federal Council of Churches; the "major commitment" of the Administration against child labor follows that of the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

Since Dr. High has been popping in & out of the White House so frequently of late that the rest of the President's corps of favorites is reported to be squirming with jealousy, the New York Sun's Correspondent George Van Slyke made so bold fortnight ago as to bill Dr. High not merely as the Democracy's political chaplain but as President Roosevelt's personal Richelieu. "It is to be an evangelical cam-paign," predicted Van Slyke. "Mr. Roosevelt will preach sugary sermons on brotherly love and the new social order, without making the direct appeal to class distinction and class hatreds as obvious and bitter as in his spring speeches. The new line is to be highly idealistic, so lofty that mere matters of budgets and taxes, debts and New Deal failures will be made to appear crude and vulgar. . . . The chief custodian of this plan of action ... is Dr. Stanley High."

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