MISSIONARY FOR FREEDOM
The Life and Times of Walter Judd
Lee Edwards
New York: Paragon House, September 1990
306 pp., $21.95
In these days when antiheroes are celebrated by Hollywood, when the symbols of religion are desecrated by avant-garde “artists,” and when cynicism flourishes in high places, it is refreshing to reflect on the life of a genuine, religiously motivated hero free of cant and cynicism. Walter Judd is such a man - Christian missionary, principled politician, and passionate patriot. The inspiring portrait of this remarkable man who is not without flaws is now conveniently available in Lee Edwards' sympathetic portrait, Missionary for Freedom.
Born in Nebraska in 1898, Walter Judd worked his way through medical school, spent ten years as a Protestant missionary doctor in China in the turbulent 1930s, and twenty years as a U.S. congressman from Minnesota in the 1940s and 1950s. He is best known as a tireless anticommunist and an advocate of American support for Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist cause in China and Taiwan. But he was and is much more.
A man of enormous courage, Judd in 1937 stood firm and virtually alone as Japanese troops occupied the area where his mission hospital was located in China. He had earlier sent his wife and two daughters to safety in America. The brutal soldiers raped women of all ages, deliberately bombed civilian areas, and reintroduced opium to demoralize the population.
Although he enjoyed some protection as a physician and an American, the Japanese demanded that he sign a document absolving them of blame for destroying American property. According to them it was the fault of the Chinese for resisting. When he refused to sign, Judd was taken under guard to a room where several Chinese were strung up by their thumbs with their toes barely touching the floor and was asked to reconsider his refusal. He was left with the pain-wracked Chinese for six hours. “I wondered what I would do,” he remembered. “I didn't see how I could withstand such torture.” He had talked about being willing to give his life, if necessary, for Christ. Had his hour come? At last, a Japanese officer entered the room, looked at the American doctor for a moment, and then said slowly, “You can leave.” They never threatened him again.
Soon after he arrived in the Middle Kingdom, Judd, like so many other Americans, was captivated by China. He was convinced that a free and democratic China was the key to peace and stability in Asia and that Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader and, in his view the true heir to Sun Yat-sen, was capable of building such a China if he could get American political and economic support. Judd bitterly opposed Japanese aggression, the Chinese communists, and the sale of U.S. scrap iron and trucks to the Japanese.
When he returned to the States, he took this message to hundreds of American audiences. Between September 1938 and December 1940 he gave 1,400 speeches in forty states, often six in one day. As early as 1938, he made the crucial distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and insisted that Mao was intent on building a totalitarian regime. His
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