The Red Dean of Canterbury: The Public and Private Faces of Hewlett Johnson by John Butler (review)

“Why another book about the Red Dean of Canterbury,” John Butler asks in the introduction to this handsomely illustrated new book. It is true that the last book about the once controversial Hewlett Johnson, Robert Hughes’s The Red Dean, appeared a quarter of a century ago and that, in the meantime, Johnson’s daughters have donated an enormous archive of their father’s papers to the University of Kent at Canterbury. These new materials, Butler claims, have permitted “new light” to be cast on the dean’s public career as a champion of communism and the Soviet Union, as well as on his private life, as a youngster growing up in a well-to-do Lancashire family and as a devoted family man. They have also brought into view the role of the Soviet propaganda organization VOKS in organizing Johnson’s many visits to the USSR and in providing him with information for his frequent public addresses, pamphlets, and widely read books—notably, The Socialist Sixth of the World (1939) and The Secret of Soviet Strength (1943). In addition, recently declassified records at the National Archives have shown that he was under observation by MI5 as a possible threat to national security. According to Butler, “He deserves better than to be remembered only as a controversial cleric who alienated his colleagues with a theology that was ahead of its time and who split public opinion with his strong political views. History will doubtless remember him as The Red Dean of Canterbury who stubbornly supported a murderous and godless regime, but at least there is now a footnote in the historical record that says: there was more to the man than just this.”

Butler’s book does tell a great deal (more than many readers might want or need to know) about the dean’s fractious relations with the canons at Canterbury. It also adds to our knowledge of his warm and loving relations with his intelligent and unwaveringly supportive wives—the second of whom, Nowell Edwards, provided the drawings that illustrate his books. The picture that emerges, however, is not substantially different from that presented in the earlier, more compact, and more engaging book by Hughes, on which Butler draws abundantly. The “Red Dean” of Hughes’s book—a complex and, despite his flaws, generous, energetic, compassionate, and likeable human being—was already far more than the gullible supporter of a “murderous and godless regime.”

Perhaps the question to be asked is not “Why another book,” but “Why any book at all about the Red Dean of Canterbury?” The Socialist Sixth of the World—in which Johnson communicated in often pithy prose his conviction that Soviet communism corresponds better than any other political and economic system to both the teachings of Christianity and the best insights of humanism—was published, in Johnson’s own words, “in upward of twelve languages, . . . its circulation, exceeding two million copies in the English tongue alone.” I personally remember seeing it on my father’s bookshelf in our flat in Glasgow in the early 1940s. But who reads it now? Who remembers Johnson’s journey to Spain at the time of the civil war; his vehemently expressed outrage at the bombing of Durango; his early 1930s travels in China, stricken by famine and under attack by the Japanese; his many visits to and widely publicized support of not only Stalin’s Soviet Union but Mao Tse-tung’s China and even Castro’s Cuba; his enthusiastically received speeches in favor of peace and friendship with the Soviet Union before huge audiences in Madison Square Garden? More generally, what is remembered of the long tradition of Christian socialism, which he represented in an admittedly unorthodox way that nonetheless won wide support, including that of a not insignificant number of other Christian clergymen?

In his eagerness to defend what he saw as the greatest social experiment ever, Johnson was undoubtedly less critical...