cont.
The year 1952 began with the H.C.U.A. exposing the Communists' Methodist Federation for Social Action, which was found to be directly linked to both the F.C.C. and the successor N.C.C. The House Committee also heard testimony from former Communist leader Joseph Kornfeder, who said there were at that time somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 American clergymen who were members of the Communist Party. Kornfeder had trained at the Lenin School of Political Warfare in Moscow from 1927 to 1930, been a top aide of Josef Stalin, and spoke from experience.
When Dwight Eisenhower took office, Leftists in the National Council of Churches began to pop up in key posts in the Administration. There was John Foster Dulles, who became Secretary of State; Harold Stassen, who became Mutual Security Director (he had been Vice President of the N.C.C. and President of its International Council of Religious Education); and, Arthur S. Flemming, who became head of the manpower division of the Department of Defense and later Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.3 President Eisenhower personally added prestige to the N.C.C. by speaking at its functions.
During 1953 the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and the House Committee on Un-American Activities took thousands of pages of testimony on Communist penetration of all phases of American life. In July of that year, H.C.U.A. heard testimony from such former leaders of the Communist Party as Manning Johnson, Benjamin Gitlow, and Joseph Kornfeder, detailing Communist infiltration and manipulation of our nation's churches. Supporting evidence was likewise given in sworn testimony by such experts as former Communists Paul Crouch, Karl Prussion, and Albert Vassart. The latter testified that "In 1936, Moscow sent out an order to have sure and carefully selected Communist youth enter the seminaries and become priests." After all, Stalin had himself been a seminarian.