A Convert from Communism

A Convert from Communism

by Michael J. Miller

Douglas Hyde, a Communist party member in England and news editor of the Daily Worker, converted from atheism and was received into the Catholic Church in 1949.

As World War II was brewing, the Communist newspaper in London ran an “exposé” about the supposed Fascist connections of G. K. Chesterton’s Weekly Review. The articles were hastily written by Douglas Hyde, who was then a Communist Party member and the news editor of the Daily Worker. Most of the Catholic authors who were smeared responded by starting libel actions against him.

The libel suits proceeded at a leisurely pace, and Hyde began to study his opponents’ paper in earnest. He went so far as to buy bound volumes of back issues. Counsel for the Communist Party advised him in general to settle out of court and to fight only the case he seemed certain to win.

The Communists were disappointed. They lost their case. And in March 1948 Douglas Hyde held a press conference to announce that he had just resigned from his newspaper and from the Party, because he was taking instructions to join the Catholic Church.

Chesterton, no doubt, chuckled in Purgatory when news reached him that his colleagues’ pens had proved mightier than the Marxist sword. Hyde’s decision was a remarkable testimony to the power of the Catholic press in the mid-twentieth century, because until January 1948 he had not met one single practicing Catholic. His path to conversion was on intellectual grounds alone and was paved by what he read.

Douglas Hyde was born in 1911 in a Sussex village to a middle-class family and was nominally raised a Methodist. After an adolescent religious experience, he dreamed of going to India as a missionary. He finished his secondary schooling in Bristol, a harbor city with medieval churches, which had become an educational center for the British Empire.

The aftermath of the Great War and rising unemployment made the city a hotbed of economic and political conflicts in the late 1920’s. Hyde harnessed his immature zeal to a modern social Gospel, but those responsible for his training to be a minister sent him to preach to rural congregations. His sermons did not suit them, nor did his sponsors approve.

Card-carrying Communist

Rebelling against Christian complacency, young Hyde joined a committee advocating commonwealth status for India and another demanding an international tribunal for “class war prisoners.” By signing up with the “No More War” movement in 1928, he became a card-carrying Communist at the age of seventeen. Now Hyde burned the midnight oil reading Marx instead of Wesley.

He soon excelled as a “tutor” or trainer of Communist recruits, since he always combined the “science” of dialectical materialism with a strong emotional appeal. He raised funds for men who were arrested in labor disputes in Bristol and for the insurgents in the Spanish Civil War. When his work in dentistry took him to Northern Wales, where there was no Communist Party, he single-handedly and very thoroughly infiltrated the Independent Labour Party there. In December 1939 he was rewarded with a position on the staff of the Daily Worker in London.

Douglas Hyde had long since given up any thought of Christianizing the Communist movement and had become a blaspheming atheist. Once in a while he would go into Catholic churches, but only to replace the anti-communist leaflets on the pamphlet racks with Party propaganda. While the rest of Great Britain was covered by a “red haze” of sympathy for Russia, their ally against Fascism, sections of the Catholic press infuriated the Communists by remaining cool towards the Soviet Union.

Hyde was considered something of an expert on Fascism, having maintained over the years a card-file on Fascist organizations and activities in England. He ran a series of scare stories in the Daily Worker about Fascist slogans that “were appearing” on walls in a certain London neighborhood (even though the graffiti were all in the same handwriting and obviously of pre-World-War-II vintage). An anti-Fascist “campaign” was useful for boosting circulation and tarring enemies.

That is why marked copies of Chesterton’s Weekly Review arrived on Hyde’s desk from Party headquarters one day, with a note saying that he should expose the Catholic publication at once as a Fascist platform. Hyde started checking the facts in his file-cards but was told to hurry and get the story into print. Here was their chance to come before the public as the anti-Fascist paper and to smear the Catholic Church at the same time. Then the outbreak of war dashed the Party’s hopes for dramatic court scenes and free publicity.

Douglas Hyde continued to scan each new issue of The Weekly Review looking for “dirt” on the Church. He was indignant at what he viewed as reactionary attacks on communist ideology. He was surprised, though, to find also articles on medieval architecture, literature, and music, which he had loved since his youth, and even quotations from the socialist-utopian novelist, William Morris. It was disconcerting that people at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum could have cultural interests and dreams similar to his own. He kept reading The Weekly Review and told himself that it was only harmless recreation.

It was actually the first sign of a sea change in his beliefs. War-weariness was a major factor. During the bombings of London, Hyde’s reporters came back day after day with ghastly stories. Once the editor walked to work past a line of hearses, each carrying a small child’s coffin. At some point he lost the “steel-hardened” Marxist’s ability to view any disaster as more fuel for the ideological flames.

Moreover, the policy somersaults of the Communist Party disillusioned Hyde. As editor of the Daily Worker he took pride in the thought that his sunshine articles about British industrial workers had helped increase production to support the war effort. In reaction to the post-war Marshall Plan, however, Soviet policy shifted, and now he was obliged to call on British laborers to sabotage capitalism in the workplace. The barbaric tactics of the Communists in Eastern Europe after World War II further weakened his faith in their cause.

There were personal considerations, too. Douglas Hyde had tried the “free love” proclaimed in Marxist philosophy but had not found happiness in it. He settled down and married a fellow Party member, Carol Johnson. By the end of the War, they had a little ldaughter. Then Hyde, who had been working under tremendous strain for nearly two decades, developed health problems and feared that he had a degenerative heart condition.

An alternative?

For many reasons the fire had gone out of his Communist faith, but it seemed that he had no real alternative. He wished that he could just retire to the countryside to farm and to write for the agricultural press. Douglas Hyde described his state of mind then in his memoir, I Believed:

I hated big cities, longed for the sanity of rural life…. The soil had a fascination for me… the colossal satisfaction of spending hours quietly digging in solitude or kneeling weeding for hour after hour, the chance to think.

Yes, that was it. The chance to think for the sake of thinking. Not “applying” someone else’s thought to some line of action…. I longed to think independently, and yet how far away it all seemed (p. 198).

On reading about Distributism in The Weekly Review, Hyde supposed that this economic theory, first formulated by Hilaire Belloc, was merely nostalgic. One day, though, it hit him like a thunderbolt: the Distributists analyzed the ills of post-industrial society as incisively as any Marxist did, only they reached a different conclusion. The inequitable distribution of property was to blame, not private property itself. This realization struck at the very root of his dialectical materialism.

It made him wonder: if communism is based on a logical error, why should he accept the philosophy, the politics, and the way of life built on such a foundation? Hyde read everything that he could find about Distributism, then Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and books by other Catholic authors. He began leaving copies of The Weekly Review around at home, hoping that Carol would read them, too.

Mrs. Hyde, who had given up a frenetic schedule of party activity before the birth of their child, was having second thoughts of another kind. The young mother did not want her pretty daughter to grow up among the sort of comrades she herself had worked with. And, yes, she had been reading The Weekly Review and found in its pages truly satisfying answers to her questions about marriage and family.

After a particularly bleak radio news broadcast one evening in late 1947, Carol Hyde called her husband’s bluff. They admitted to each other their dissatisfaction with Communism and their intellectual agreement with Catholic social teaching. They concluded wistfully that they had become “Catholics who don’t believe in God.”

It may seem astonishing that Douglas and Carol Hyde could find their way intellectually and independently from Communism to the catechumenate. Like the Roman centurion, though, they had been “under authority,” strongly committed to accepting words from on high and putting them into action. The lessons of twentieth-century history taught them that they had accepted the wrong words; after much thought they found the right ones in the Church’s social encyclicals and moral teachings.

Their son Jocelyn was born in late 1947. In taking steps to have their children baptized, the Hydes discovered that they were not personally acquainted with any practicing Catholics at all! Douglas Hyde summoned his courage and sneaked into the back of the auditorium where Jesuits were conducting a “Sword of the Spirit” panel discussion. Afterwards he spoke to the question master, Fr. Francis Devas, S.J., and told him who and what he was. The priest, unperturbed, simply noted that “The Church is for sinners.” The rest is history—rather, a dialectic of divine grace working upon individual human beings in history. The Hydes began instructions in the Catholic faith.

During Lent of 1948, Douglas Hyde read an article called “The Fellowship of the Heart” by H. D. C. Pepler, one of the Catholic writers he had libelled years before. Pepler explained to his readers that he had angina pectoris and could not continue to work for The Weekly Review. Hyde sent him a sympathetic note, hoping to cheer him by admitting how influential the writings of Pepler and his colleagues had been for him.

He received a reply, sent from a Sussex nursing home, which began, “Your news provides me with an Eastertide in the middle of Lent and I thank you very much for so magnificent a welcome into the Fellowship of the Heart.” Pepler asked Hyde to visit him and became Hyde’s first lay Catholic contact.

There is no record of their conversations, but we can surmise that Pepler encouraged Hyde to apply his talents to Catholic journalism. During the next few years Douglas Hyde lectured throughout the English-speaking world about his conversion, wrote his autobiography, and joined the Catholic Herald newspaper as a staff member. It proved to be the sort of intellectual work that he had longed for. In his autobiography (1950) he explained:

With my communist background, I almost expected directives to come from the Cardinal as once they had come from the Party headquarters. None came. Soon I was enjoying to the full the freedom that comes from the self-imposed discipline of the mind that springs from a belief in that absolute truth which so many of our generation have rejected or forgotten (p. 304).

In Catholic truth he found intellectual freedom. Hyde continued to study the Church’s social teaching and worked as a journalist and eventually as an expert consultant to apply it to the complex economic problems of the twentieth century.

After a one-year catechumenate, Douglas and Carol Hyde were received into the Catholic Church in early 1949.

This article first appeared in the April 1999 issue of The Month: A Review of Christian thought and world affairs, published by the English Jesuits.