Fascism Called Peace Threat at Conference

Speakers at the Conference on War and Economic Injustice, held during morning and afternoon sessions at the Broadway Tabernacle yesterday, indicated that Fascism is one of the major threats to world peace and that the cause of Fascism is the peculiar economic muddle in which the finances of the world are tied up.

At the morning session Reinhold Niebuhr, principal speaker, declared that capitalism is seeking to save itself by enlisting the lower middle classes in Fascism. He defined Fascism as “a lower middle class psychosis-the poor man’s movement,” and stated that Germany had a choice of Fascism or Socialism. He indicated that the former course was adopted under the manipulation of the capitalist class.

VILLARD RECALLS WILSON

Oswald Garrison Villard, former editor of The Nation, recalled the late President Wilson’s assertion that America must face a revolution, more than likely a bloodless revolution. He declared that the World War interrupted the country’s trend toward revolution, and to this he laid most of the country’s recent economic distress.

Rabbi Louis I. Newmann held that ministers and rabbis are the champions of their congregations, favoring the under-dog rather than the better off element. He said that with respect to this, the clergy “are not carbon copies of the people in pews,” but they are, perforce, more radical. “We are the custodians of all good traditions and spokesmen for the little fellows,” he said.

BOWIE CONDUCTS DEVOTIONS

Dr. Russell W. Bowie conducted devotions at the opening of the conference at ten A.M.

Speakers during the afternoon session of the conference included Dr. Allen Knight Chalmers, Rabbi Edward L. Israel, Mrs. Elinore Morehouse Herrick, Dr. Henry W. Laidler, Dr. Charles C. Weber, and Maxwell S. Stewart.

The lower floor of the Tabernacle was well filled by more than five hundred persons, who took advantage of the opportunity to put questions to the speakers and speak their own mind on the subjects under discussion.