The photo is as accurate as I
remember the scene when I used to go to Dr. Bales’ office for communist
literature. Articles on the Internet say
he collected over 10,000 books and wrote 70 or more books. It’s said he was the ghost writer for J.
Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit. I loved it when he’d point out the
contradictions of Communism with quotes from The Worker, the Vietnam
Courier, or the World Marxist Review. As
a graduate of Berkeley – no less – J.D. Bales also debated atheism with Carl
Sagan in 1966. I liked him immediately because
he was a fighter. I also gleaned from the Internet
recently many anecdotes I did not know about Dr. Bales. I did not recall that he was the primary
researcher for the National Education Program (NEP) at Harding College and the
close associate of George S. Benson, its creator. I didn’t recall that both formed a formidable
national conservative think tank that fought the Left.
Perhaps it was his influence or just
the pragmatic necessity to store research material, but over the 40 years since
college, I did the same thing with hundreds of books and articles. With my 4-drawer Sears filing cabinet, it
was on a much smaller scale, of course. I liked
biographies the most. They add color, content, and meaning to history. Perhaps my own collections made my writing of
Journal of the Silent Majority
inevitable with its 700 plus footnotes. I’m fascinated by
history, but the influence that Dr. Bales had on my writing was co-incidental,
suggestive or maybe osmotic,and certainly not planned or deliberate; I’d
basically forgotten him.
I do remember Dr. Bale’s consuming
quest to expose militant atheism, but after college I never thought too much
about it because working for a living took up most of my time. Still, I read and kept up with what was going
on in America and it wasn’t pretty: riots, moral decline, attacks on religion
and every other institution. What was
the source of these attacks? I read
about the French Revolution and Bolshevik Revolution and found clues. I followed our 60s radicals like Tom Hayden
and Eldridge Cleaver by reading their biographies and a common denominator
reared its ugly head – militant atheism, the very thing Dr. Bales had always
written about.
Dr. Bales’ emphasis on the study
of militant atheism made a lasting impression on me. He reaffirmed the role of spirituality and
religion in the interpretation of history.
His encyclopedic mind and research techniques validated the scholarship
that we history majors were being taught and provided us with a reservoir of
facts and arguments supporting our own political views as a part of the Baby
Boom Generation and Silent Majority and . . . who knows where his contagious passion
came from? Maybe it was innate or incomprehensible,
but I can only guess it came from the same thrill of discovery that motivated
me.
