Paul Blanshard
From Philosopedia
Paul Beecher Blanshard (27 April 1892—1980)
Three generations of Protestant clergymen came to an end (at last in 1972, when Blanshard stopped being a minister and went on record as being an atheist. He was born in Fredericksburg, Ohio, the son of Francis George and Emily Coulter Blanshard.
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Early Life
He was married to Julia Anderson on October 20, 1915, the year after he graduated from the University of Michigan with an A.B. degree.
Paul continued his studies at Union Theological Seminary and was ordained to the ministry of the Congregational Church in 1917, after which he became pastor of the First Congregational Church in Tampa, Florida, a post which he held for a year
==His Social and Political Activism]] His interest in social and political organizations led Blanshard to leave the pastorate, serving from 1920 to 1924 in the position of educational director of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in Rochester, New York.
In 1925, he became field secretary for the League of Industrial Democracy and continued in this position until 1933. Between 1928 and 1929, he was also an associate editor for The Nation, known since 1865 as the weekly magazine of unconventional wisdom.
From 1930 to 1933, he was Director of City Affairs for New York City. Under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, he headed the New York City Department of Investigations and Accounts, during which time he was widely written about for exposing graft.
From 1942 to 1946, Blanshard was a State Department official in Washington and the Caribbean.
One of the best-known critics of organized religion in his day, Paul Blanshard - twin brother of Brand Blanshard - wrote for New Republic and The Humanist.
Selected Books
- Democracy and Empire in the Caribbean: A Contemporary Review (1947)
- American Freedom and Catholic Power (1950)
- Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power (1951)
- The Right to Read (1955)
- God and Man in Washington: The Church-State Battlefront in Congress, in the Supreme Court, in the Presidential Campaign (1960)
- Religion and the Schools: The Great Controversy (1963).
- Paul Blanshard on Vatican II (1966; paperback 1971)
- Personal and Controversial: An Autobiography (1973)
- Some of My Best Friends are Christians (1974)
On Catholicism
Typical of his criticism of Catholicism is the following from American Freedom and Catholic Power, which sold an estimated 300,000 copies:
- There is no doubt that the American Catholic hierarchy has entered the political arena, and that it is becoming more and more aggressive in extending the frontiers of Catholic authority into the fields of medicine, education and foreign policy. As we shall see in this book, the Catholic hierarchy in this country has great power as a pressure group, and no editor, politician, publisher, merchant or motion-picture producer can express defiance openly - or publicize documented facts - without risking his future.
The book helped lead to discontinuance of federal aid to Catholic schools for auxiliary services. Eleanor Roosevelt and New York City's Cardinal Spellman fought publicly on the subject.
In Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power, he described the fundamental resemblance between the Vatican and the Kremlin" in a further effort to show Catholicism was incompatible with American ideals.
In 1972, he went on record that "Christianity is so full of fraud that any honest man should repudiate the whole shebang and espouse atheism."
A journalist, Blanshard was editor of Classics of Free Thought (1977), which included essays concerning Bradlaugh, Burbank, Darrow, Darwin, Diderot, Draper, E. Haldeman-Julius, Holyoake, the Huxleys, Ingersoll, Jefferson, McCabe, Mencken, Paine, Russell, Shelley, Twain, Voltaire, and Wheless.
In 1954, Ernest Nagel wrote about him in Sovereign Reason. In 1980 Brand Blanshard wrote, "My Brother Paul" in Church and State (Vol XXXIII, no. 3). An extensive biography is found in Contemporary Authors (2006).
His Later Years
Jeanette Hopkins, in an article about his and his wife Mary Hillyer Blanshard's fights for social justice, wrote an extensive biography that included
- Both Mary and Paul Blanshard have definite ideas about what the Unitarian Universalist must do to survive and flourish in our age. They feel that the issues of war or peace, a solution to the race question, and the separation of church and state in that order are the most critical issues facing the world today. However, while all men and all religions must be concerned with the first two, they feel Unitarian Universalists are especially fitted to defend our basic constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.
Blanshard was a signer in 1973 of Humanist Manifesto II.
Blanshard's first wife was Julia Sweet Anderson, a journalist, who was the mother of his two sons, Paul Jr. and Rufus. She died in 1934. The following year, he married Mary W. Hillyer, who died in 1965. His third wife, Beatrice Mayer, outlived him. He had seven grandchildren.
Correspondence
Blanshard wrote letters in the mid-1950s to the book review editor of The Humanist.
The New York Times Obituary
See Paul Blanshard's obituary in The New York Times.
