Mother Night

13: The Reverend Doctor Lionel Jason David Jones, D.D.S., D.D... .

I am indebted to the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals for the source material that makes it possible for me to include in this account a biography of Dr. Jones, publisher of The White Christian Minuteman.

Jones, though subject to no prosecution as a war criminal, has a very fat dossier. Leafing through that treasure house of souvenirs, I find these things to be true:

The Reverend Doctor Lionel Jason David Jones, D.D.S., D.D., was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1889, was raised as a Methodist

He was the youngest son of a dentist, the grandson of two dentists, brother of two dentists, and the brother-in-law of three dentists. He himself set out to be a dentist, but was expelled from the Dental School of the University of Pittsburgh in 1910, for what would now be diagnosed, most likely, as paranoia. In 1910, he was dismissed for simple scholastic failure.

The syndrome of his failure was anything but simple. His examination papers were quite probably the longest such papers ever written in the history of dental education, and probably the most irrelevant as well. They began, sanely enough, with whatever subject the examination required Jones to discuss. But, regardless of that subject, Jones managed to go from it to a theory that was all his own — that the teeth of Jews and Negroes proved beyond question that both groups were degenerate.

His dental work was of a high order, so the faculty hoped to see him outgrow his political interpretations of teeth. But his case grew worse, until his examinations became frantic pamphlets, warning all Protestant Anglo-Saxons to unite against Jewish-Negro domination.

When Jones began to detect proof of degeneracy in the teeth of Catholics and Unitarians, and when five loaded pistols and a bayonet were found under his mattress, Jones was finally given the old heave-ho.

Jones' parents disowned him, which is something my parents never quite did to me.

Penniless, Jones found work as an apprentice embalmer in the Scharff Brothers Funeral Home in Pittsburgh. He became manager of the home within two years. A year after that, he married the widowed owner, Hattie Scharff. Hattie was fifty-eight at the time, and Jones was twenty-four. The many investigators into Jones' life, unfriendly investigators almost to a man, have been bound to conclude that Jones really loved his Hattie. The marriage, which endured until the death of Hattie in 1928, was a happy one.

In fact, it was so happy, so whole, so self-sufficient a nation of two that Jones did almost nothing during that time by way of alerting the Anglo-Saxons. He seems to have been content to confine his remarks on racial matters to workroom jests about certain cadavers, jests that would have seemed workaday hi the most liberal of embalming establishments. And the years were golden, not only emotionally and financially, but creatively as well. Working with a chemist named Dr. Lomar Horthy, Jones developed Viverine, an embalming fluid, and Gingiva-Tru, a wonderfully life-like, gum-simulating substance for false teeth.

When Jones' wife died, Jones felt the need to be reborn. He was reborn a thing he had been latently all along. Jones became the sort of racial agitator who is spoken of as having crawled out from under a rock. Jones crawled out from under his rock in 1928. He sold his funeral home for eighty-four thousand dollars, and he founded The White Christian Minuteman.

Jones was wiped out by the stock market crash in 1929. His paper suspended publication after fourteen issues. The fourteen issues had been mailed free to every person in Who's Who. The only illustrations were photographs and diagrams of teeth, and every article was an explanation of some current events in terms of Jones' theories about dentition and race.

In the next-to-the-last issue, Jones billed himself on the masthead as, 'Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S.'

Penniless again, now forty years of age, Jones answered an ad in a funeral-home trade journal. An embalming school in Little Rock, Arkansas, needed a president. The ad was signed by the widow of the former president and owner.

Jones got the job, and the widow, too. The widow's name was Mary Alice Shoup. She was sixty-eight when Jones married her.

And Jones again became a devoted husband, a happy, whole, and quiet man.

The school he headed was named, straightforwardly enough, The Little Rock School of Embalming. It was losing eight thousand dollars a year. Jones took it out of the high-overhead field of embalming education, sold its real estate, and had it rechartered as The Western Hemisphere University of the Bible. The university held no classes, taught nothing, did all its business by mail. Its business was the awarding of doctorates in the field of divinity, framed and under glass, for eighty dollars a throw.

And Jones helped himself to a W.H.U.B. degree, out of open stock, so to speak. When his second wife died, when he brought out The White Christian Minuteman again, he appeared on the masthead as, The Reverend Doctor Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D.'

And he wrote and published at his own expense a book that combined not only dentistry and theology, but the fine arts as well. The name of the book was Christ Was Not a Jew. He proved his point by reproducing in the book fifty famous paintings of Jesus. According to Jones, not one painting showed Jewish jaws or teeth.

The first issues in the new series of The White Christian Minuteman were as unreadable as those of the old series. But then a miracle happened. The Minuteman jumped from four pages to eight. The make-up, the typography and the paper became snappy and handsome. Dental diagrams were replaced by newsy photographs, and the pages crackled with datelines and bylines from all over the world.

The explanation was simple — and obvious. Jones had been recruited and financed as a propaganda agent for Hitler's then — rising Third German Reich. Jones news, photographs, cartoons and editorials were coming straight from the Nazi propaganda mills in frankfurt, Germany.

It is quite possible, incidentally, that much of his more scurrilous material was written by me.

Jones continued as a German propaganda agent even after the United States of America entered the Second World War. He wasn't arrested until July in 1942, when he was indicted with twenty-seven others for:

Conspiring to destroy the morale and faith and confidence of the members of the military and naval forces of the United States and the people of the United States in their public officials and republican form of government; conspiring to seize upon and use and misuse the right of freedom of speech and of the press to spread their disloyal doctrines, intending and believing that any nation allowing its people the right of freedom of speech is powerless to defend itself against enemies masquerading as patriotic; and seeking to obstruct, impede, break down and destroy the proper functioning of its republican form of government under the guise of honest criticism; conspiring to render the Government of the United States bereft of the faith and confidence of the members of the military and naval forces and of the people, and thereby render that government powerless to defend the nation or the people against armed attack from without or treachery from within.

Jones was convicted. He was sentenced to fourteen years, served eight. When he was freed from Atlanta in 1950, he was a wealthy man. Viverine, his embalming fluid, and Gingiva-Tru, his counterfeit gum substance for false teeth, had both come to dominate their respective markets.

In 1955, he resumed publication of The White Christian Minuteman.

Five years after that, a lively elder statesman of seventy-one, an alert old man with no regrets, the Reverend Doctor Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., DJD., paid me a call.

Why should I have honored that with such a full-dress biography?

In order to contrast with myself a race-baiter who is ignorant and insane. I am neither ignorant nor insane.

Those whose orders I carried out in Germany were as ignorant and insane as Dr. Jones. I knew it.

God help me, I carried out their instructions anyway.