Source: Unz.com
Although his name has been almost totally forgotten for more than two generations, during the early 1950s Prof. John Beaty was a figure of some prominence, at least within conservative circles.
A West Virginian born in 1890, Beaty earned his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Virginia, then completed his doctorate in Philosophy at Columbia University in 1921. Beginning in 1919 he spent his entire academic career teaching English at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, becoming a full professor in 1922 and finally retiring in 1957. For much of that time, he served as department chairman, and was a successful novelist and scholar, being the author or co-author of a dozen books, eventually used at over 700 American colleges and universities. During that long career, he enjoyed a number of academic honors and distinctions, even serving as president of the Conference of College Teachers of English, and prior to 1951 seems to have never attracted any significant controversy.
But Beaty was a patriotic individual who held a commission in the military reserves and as America moved towards involvement in World War II, his status was activated in 1941 and he joined our Military Intelligence as a captain, serving until 1947 when he left the army with the rank of full colonel and resumed his academic teaching career. During those war years, his government role had been an important one, serving as Chief of the Historical Section while also being responsible for summarizing all available American intelligence and producing the daily briefing report distributed to the White House and all of our other top political and military leaders. Later in the war, he was also required to interview and debrief thousands of our returning military servicemen, including very senior ones, summarizing their information and experiences for government files. Given such crucial activities, there were probably few Americans more familiar with nearly all aspects of our wartime information than Beaty when he returned to civilian life in 1947.
Beaty had always had a strong interest in broader political events. During the mid-1920s, he had been awarded an Alfred Kahn traveling fellowship to Europe, and subsequently drew upon the knowledge he had acquired to publish articles analyzing the continent’s geostrategic situation and the possible risks of a future war. As a strong conservative with traditional cultural values, he had published Image of Life in 1940, a book strongly critical of what he regarded as the ideological distortions often promoted by our mainstream media and publishing industry. And then in the postwar years, he became outraged over the total contrast between the true facts of the conflict that he had discovered from his central role in Military Intelligence and the extremely distorted and dishonest portrayal of those events provided by most of the mainstream media to our severely misinformed citizenry.
Many world developments greatly alarmed him. Stalin’s Soviet Union had seized half of Europe, while his subservient Communist parties held enormous influence in much of the rest, including France, Italy, and Greece. Beaty regarded the 1949 Communist victory in China as a gigantic strategic defeat for the West, and the sudden outbreak of the Korean War the following year had now drawn American forces into direct military conflict, with our inexperienced and under-equipped troops suffering serious early defeats at the hands of a large Chinese army.
During these years Beaty had been working on a book aimed at describing the root causes of our recent disasters and providing a candid account of the world war against Germany that we had recently fought. He believed that unless the American people learned these facts and mobilized themselves politically, they might both lose their traditional freedoms and be driven into a ruinous third world war against the powerful Communist bloc. So in December 1951 he published The Iron Curtain Over America.
Although Beaty had an illustrious academic career and stellar wartime credentials, he was a strong conservative Christian and a committed anti-Communist, and his fairly short but heavily documented book crossed every sort of impermissible red line in American publishing, especially with its focus upon what he regarded as the enormously pernicious role of organized Jewish groups in American politics. He was scathing towards the policies of Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but equally hostile towards many of their leading opponents such as Gov. Thomas Dewey, the Republican Presidential candidate in both 1944 and 1948. Given such sentiments, it was hardly surprising that his book was only released by a small Dallas publisher, with the author himself having to cover the costs of the initial print-run.
After reading Beaty’s very interesting text, I drew heavily upon the exhaustive archival research of Prof. Joseph Bendersky, a mainstream historian, and in articles published in 2018 and 2019, I described the surprising popular success of Beaty’s book:…