John O. Beaty

John Owen Beaty (December 22, 1890 – September 9, 1961) was an American academic, anti-communist, and antisemitic activist.

Biography Beaty was born in Crow, West Virginia. He studied for his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Virginia, and completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University in 1921. He taught English at Southern Methodist University (SMU), from 1919 (becoming a full professor in 1922) until his retirement in 1957, having been appointed by SMU's first president, Robert Hyer. Beaty served in active duty during World War II in the Military Intelligence Service, and became a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Texas Institute of Letters, the American Legion, and was president of the Conference of College Teachers of English.

He married Josephine Mason Powell in 1920; they had four children. He was a Baptist and a member of the Order of the White Cross, the Masonic Order, and the Woodmen of the World. After retirement he moved to Barboursville, Orange County, Virginia, and died in September 1961. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency described The Iron Curtain as a "violently anti-Semitic volume": The book, which denies that Jews stemming from East Europe are descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, questions Israel's bid for restitution from Germany and seeks to deny that the Nazis exterminated most of European Jewry. The bulk of East European Jews, according to Prof. Beaty, escaped ahead of the Nazis into Soviet Russia. Some of them today, he said, may be part of “the Jewish force on the Iranian frontier.” Others, he asserts, “form the hard core of the new ruling bureaucracy in satellite countries.” He also alleged that Israel's 1948 war of independence was Soviet-backed and displaced 880,000 Palestinians.

How to Capture a University asked, "Are the minds of our students to be guided by B'nai B'rith... or by Soviet Moscow... or by assorted devotees of the little world power which usurps the name of 'Israel'?"