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WARD, HARRY F. 1873-1966

MINISTER, ACTIVIST, AND PROFESSOR

Varied Career

Harry F. Ward was probably the best-known fellow traveler of the Communist Party among American Protestant clergy in the 1930s. He was born in England in 1873 and came to the United States in 1881. He was ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the norther n branch of the Methodist denomination, and quickly became active in reform movements in the early part of the century. He was one of the principal authors of "The Social Creed of the Churches," the most widely circulated expression of the Social Gospel, which attempted to articulate the social ethics of Christianity. In 1907 he organized the Methodist Federation for Social Action (later the Methodist Federation for Social Service). After teaching at Boston University, he joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he taught social ethics until his retirement in 1941.

Activism

There is no evidence that Ward ever joined the Communist Party, but he was a prominent supporter of organizations associated with the party during the 1930s. He criticized the actions of the both the American Communists and the Soviet Union from time to time but had little difficulty in following the general shifts in Communist positions through the turbulent decade of the 1930s. He served as president of the American League Against War and Fascism when it criticized American rearmament and the foreign policies of the Western democracies, and he remained president when the league was reorganized in 1938 as the American League for Peace and Freedom, which supported the rearming of the democracies and their united front with the Soviet Union against the growing threat of Nazi Germany.

Criticism

Ward's actions attracted widespread criticism and seemed to offer support for conservative charges that communists had infiltrated the Protestant clergy. In 1952, in the anticommunist climate of the Cold War, the Methodist Church severed its connections with the Federation for Social Service, but Ward remained a target of the red-baiting forces of that period,