The Dinkum Oil

From MURRAY KEMPTON NEW YORK DR.' FRED C. SCHWARZ'S Christian Anti-Corn- Munist Crusade is having less than what his fellow Australians used to call a bloody go so far with its mission to New York. Dr. Schwarz filled only half Madison Square Garden here last week, and has thus for the moment failed the basic test which our national church of market analysis lays upon both the entertainer and the evangelist. It is unpleasant to conceive the glee with which the Australian press agency office here must have transmitted homeward the news of this setback.

Enlightened Australia is ashamed of Fred Schwarz; this reflects; I ,am afraid, the sense of social :inferiority, whose victims are generally more embarrassed by their qualities than by their defects. To see Fred Schwarz is to understand the persistence of genetic transmission and to appre- ciate the flavour of which England deprived itself when it transported so many of its pedlars and sturdy beggars to Tasmania. Australia is a living museum of fauna which -have vanished every- where else.

Schwarz and Harry Bridges, the Slavophile labour leader, are • the two most conspicious Australian emigres to the United States. They share no quality except the gestures, manners and intonation of the migratory salesman of all- purpose cures. Each conveys the impression, I am sure without real justification, that he left Australia with a squad of aroused bushwhackers at his back. They are- salesmen of the bottle of water with horsehair in it which cures tuber- culosis and of the everlasting razor-blade. The most -noticeable gesture in Schwarz's public speeches is the repeated scrutiny of his watch, as though he were standing on a street corner exaggerating the properties of his magic potato peeler and knew he had to scuttle six seconds be- fore the policeman was due on his rounds.

Each then is a comfort to those Americans who cherish the civilisation which produced the great prototype of W. C. Fields and who grieve at its obsolescence into the figure of the television announcer whose wares arc no less dross but whose style requires an episcopal mantle of sin- cerity. The most depressing aspect of American commerce is the hypocrisy with which it is con- ducted; its practitioners are indignant at unbelief.

The Old-fashioned pitchman enjoyed distrust as a challenge and even encouraged it because he knew it increased the glory of the triumph of his sale. Only Australia is backward enough to pre- serve these engaging antiques, and those of us who long for a simpler America are grateful whenever one is exported here.

The Schwarz technique is, in essence, old- fashioned evangelism, with the Chinese com- mune replacing hell and Nikita Khrushchev placing Satan and the unfortunate American Communist replacing the saloon-keeper as instru- ment of *damnation. It has been 'vastly success- ful in Southern Califotnia, a Colony of refugees from the midwest of Sherwodd Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters. Schwarz has his foreign mis- sions in New Guinea and India; the sense that they theinselves are saved being the rock of the faithOf fundathentalist Protestants in Arnerica, it is necessary to remind them of the existence of heathens elsewhere to touch their purses.

Schwarz's meetings are keyed to the delusion of Americans that education means power. He subjects the faithful to two-hour lectures on the theory of dialectical materialism, a heresy which they are as likely to need knowledge to combat in America as Manichaeism. He favours visiting lecturers with the talent for lively evocation of what life will be like in. Gehenna, a wasteland of ravished maidens. The most popular of Schwarz curates is Herbert Philbrick, protagonist of / Led Three Lives, an interminable television series des tailing Communist plots to poison wells, push heroin, and assassinate policemen. The Supreme Court of the United States last year sent an. American Communist to prison for eight years on the testimony of a witness who swore that the defendant had instructed him in the technique of stabbing policemen with ball-point pens; since the sophisticated accept such stuff, the simple may be excused for believing Philbrick.

The Christian Anti-Communist Crusade tool: in better than a million dollars last year, an un- impressive figure by American standards, but enough to bring down the charge of his detractors that Schwarz entered -his vocation for money and is thus an insincere anti-Communist. When yoU contemplate the damage that sincere anti-Conte munists have done to-the peace of the nation, thi§ would seem rather a recommendation for Schwarz, but one hesitates to extend it; the most comfortable thing to be sincere about in America is anti-Communism.

Since New York is. .Sodom, the prospect of mass rape does not give.its inhabitants the same terror of personal property damage that seems to prevail in Omaha. Schwarz's appeal in New York has therefore been directed to the fears of businessmen for their. corporate possessions; con-1 tributions to the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade are particularly painless because the Id! ternal Revenue Services exempts them front taxation as religious beneficences. That advantage has so far proved of too small service against the indifference of New York in the sum- mer; Schwarz once estimated his deficit from this particular mission at $200,000.

He is particularly engaging because he cannot resist acting up to calumnies of those who call him a confidence man. He reminded his Madison, Square audience of the profit figures his critics' had cited to his detriment. There was a pause while his practised eye counted the empty seat and estimated his losses on the evening. 'That'sva joke,' he said, 'we're behind at least $15,000' sS far.'

`Yesterday,' he went on, 1 had to borrow $IO' from my secretary.' The million dollars of last year's receipts? 'That's the gross. Some people. don't know the difference between total sales and profits.'

The Communists are he said, after the bourgeoisie.

'In America, that's quite a group. How many of you have common stocks?' There was a dis; couraging display of hands. Schwarz smiled, the old interior laughter loud within him. 'Give them to us. We'll take the risk.

'The grim and ugly truth,' he went on, 'is that the tide is running against the West.' He inspected his watch. 'I've got to hurry,' he said, 'we've got a special treat. Pat Boone is here.'

Pat Boone, Western civilisation's last defence at five minutes to midnight, is that anomaly in American culture, a singer catering to adolescents with wholesome tastes.

`The most amazing things have happened to rae since Dr. Schwarz invited me to this meet- ing,' said Pat Boone. `So many of my friends begged me not to come. It may hurt your record sales and it may hurt you with the people who want to go to your pictures.'

But, he went on, he had settled for his responsibility as a citizen.

`I have four lovely daughters. I would rather see Cherry, Wendy, Debby and Laurie lined up and shot down before my eyes than for them to grow up in a Communist United States. I would rather see them blown into heaven by an atom bomb than taught into hell by Communism.'

The applause came back thin but fervent, like a hymn to the old faith by the waters of Babylon. Evangelists of the fundamental sort dare New York but seldom; whenever they come the wells of piety they tap are surprising for the mixture of the comic and the pathetic.

A worldly young man who had been hired to manufacture publicity for the Christian crusade was talking later about a moment in its office. '1 came in one afternoon,' he said, 'and one of these old ladies in tennis shoes kissed my hand and cried out to all the others to get down on their knees and pray for the health of this young man. And, do you know, they did it?' , The judicious -mixture of piety with deep understanding of the economic process has never before failed a commercial enterprise in New York. It has so far been a long, dry summer, but it is hard to believe that Fred Schwarz will leave a city which so appreciates those qualities with- out his due reward.