17. Fellow Travelers Domestic and Foreign Add Their Bit
by James J. Martin
Serenely contemplating all this from the pages of the New Masses was Corliss Lamont, scion of the famed Wall Street banking family, but hardly its courier in his role as America's most famed Communist fellow traveler. In his long-quoted article of November 11, "What Americans Are Learning," Lamont proclaimed, "I believe that there has been a favorable turn in public opinion concerning Russia much more far-reaching and fundamental than the unfavorable one that took place subsequent to the Nazi-Soviet pact." Everyone had been misled about Russia between 1935 and 1941, said Lamont, and now were being set right again: "The American people were sold a false bill of goods on Russia by writers, tourists, diplomats, newspapers, and all sorts of commentators whose anti-Soviet prejudice was so bitter that they could not and would not recognize a fact when they saw one." He still was not sure that things might not deteriorate again, and though predicting that "in the future there will again take place an organized attempt to mislead public opinion in this country concerning the Soviet Union," he was convinced it would not succeed "if we as a people are able to learn sufficiently from the lessons of the recent past."(145) Ultimately it became a matter of what "lessons" were to be taught and learned, and how "recent" the era was to be from which these "lessons" were to be derived. In just a little over four years Lamont's worst fears had materialized with a vengeance. But at this moment he rode on a magic carpet of purest good will toward Stalinism.
The best was yet to come: the hushed eulogies of Stalin on the occasion of his Moscow speech on the 24th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolutionary assumption of power. Time's account was set in tones which might have been used to describe a movie actress, if not in the style made familiar in the Worker. This major four-page piece was accompanied by a two-page color map of the Soviet, and included a panegyric by none other than Churchill himself, quoted from a speech at Sheffield, wherein the Red chief was hailed by the British prime minister as "that great warrior, Stalin." The account included the introductory paragraphs of Stalin's speech. (146)
The New Masses did not like Time's treatment of Stalin, though their "news" story might easily have graced the Masses' editorial pages. However, the latter had run their own tribute to the great man and great event a week earlier,(147) featuring stirring accolades from ex-Ambassador Davies, the refugee French Marxist former minister of aircraft production in France, Pierre Cot,(148) the one- time Moscow propaganda magazine editor, Lion Feuchtwanger (about whom more later), and the American luminary H.W.L. Dana, along with selected Communist Party functionaries. Davies was quoted as saying, "I find the greatest satisfaction in the courage and idealism of the Soviet government and the Russian people in resisting Hitler" (the millions of Russians who had gone over to Hitler were not news in these days), while Cot relieved himself of the opinion that "Soviet Russia is actually the best fighter for the defense of civilization," by which he must have meant a more primitive one than prevailed among their German enemy.
Feuchtwanger elected to broaden the historical frontiers by claiming, "The fight of the Soviet Union against Hitlerism is the natural continuation of all the wars for freedom that the United States of America ever fought," though the most flattering encomium was delivered by Dana, the grandson of the American literary giant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A veteran of 14 visits to the Soviet in as many years, Dana terminated his fulsome declamation by quoting from the famous words of his grandfather which had been recently quoted as well by Roosevelt and Churchill, and in the line which read "Sail on, O Union strong and great!" Dana capitalized the word "Union" in such a way that no one might be confused as to which one he was referring.
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18. Vote of No Confidence from the Saturday Evening Post
by James J. Martin
In all the sweet twittering from above, there was only one harsh bellow from below, as H.L. Mencken might have written it. This was the remarkable full page editorial in the Saturday Evening Post, "Playing the Red," on November 8, 1941. It was one of the few tough ruminations on the likely outcome of the war as it was now shaping up. The editors called the partnership between the U.S. and Britain on one side and Stalin on the other "morally and politically false," involving both of the former in "shocking political insincerities." And, anticipating the Cold War of 1946 et seq., they asked rhetorically, should the war end with the Soviet Union "the paramount land power in Europe," "Having saved the world from Nazism, should we not go on and save it from Bolshevism?" The Cold Warriors of four years later and after always acted as though such inconvenient thinking had never been expressed this early. For the pro-war seers among the most ardent interventionist camp followers, the editors had still another irritating query:
We ask the revelationists-such as Secretary [of the Navy Frank] Knox, with his vision of a tenth of a millennium for an Anglo- American world, and Mr. [Supreme Court] Justice [Robert H.] Jackson, with his international order of the Golden Rule that shall come to pass when America has outstripped, as he says she must, "All the rest of the world in naval, air and perhaps military forces"-we ask them, what will they do with 180,000,000 Russians who may no more want our world order than we want theirs or Hitler's?
Some Practical Consequences of Soviet Aid Get Aired
But the war party had to have their war first before they took up the problems anticipated by the editors of the Post. The post-war era offered endless opportunities to maintain such foresight never took place, and to launch limitless schemes to obfuscate the situation with lies and evasions. The growing material complications and the impact of the war on the American socio-economic complex probably had generated enough momentum by now to render the situation out of control and incapable of being handled within the confines of cool extrapolation of its likely consequences.
For instance, it was remarkable how quickly the drive to furnish material assistance to the Soviet switched, from the comfortable assurance to the American general public that such would be paid for in cash, to putting Stalin on the Lend-Lease gravy train of unrequited blank checks, ultimately to be made good by public taxes, or simply added to the national debt. Even for the businessmen a line was developed to soften their presumably hard hearts, as it was obvious that a goodly part of U.S. aid to Russia was intended to make possible a formidable Communist capital buildup behind the Ural Mountains, Soviet territory west of this region being conceded to the invading Germans. U.S. News on November 14, 1941 ran a pointed piece on this subject. It described a deliberate "strategic retreat" of the Reds to this new concentration point, and the construction of vast industry there, assisted by "the interest-free lend-lease loan of $1,000,000,000 announced by the State Department." There was no more talk of Soviet payment from their funds on American deposit, or their allegedly vast caches of gold. The contribution to the war of this strategy was supposedly the part it all played in dangerously extending German supply lines, across an immense area systematically laid waste. By "leaving ruin in their wake," the Reds were rendering the region a total economic liability to its occupiers.(149) Once again this superb bit of Communist propaganda was making its double point, taking credit for wrecking their own land via a scorched-earth policy now, though retaining the option to blame the Germans for it later, and assessing immense reparations payments. This persuasive bit of brainwash for still-troubled American business and finance was decorated by a glamor picture of grinning "Soviet Artillery Cadets," little more than an assemblage of teen age boys. How this material was to reach Stalin was another matter.
Though much of the frenzied talk by interventionists about the need to repeal the Neutrality Acts in behalf of beleaguered Britain dominated the surface, there was a quiet strain in this same verbal onslaught concerned with the Soviet. Having no merchant fleet of any consequence and being far more distant than the United Kingdom, a logistical problem prevailed here of even greater magnitude than that which faced the suppliers of "bundles for Britain." The barriers against American merchant ships supplying belligerents had to go down if the aid promised to Stalin were to materialize in the USSR. The U.S. News played a revealing part in this matter as well. In its pro-and-con column on views on the subject,(150) it printed two vociferous pro-repeal votes from Gifford Pinchot, a venerable government bureaucrat whose tenure on the public payroll went back to the turn of the century, and the millionaire Cleveland industrialist Cyrus S. Eaton. In hailing the drive to repeal the Neutrality Act still in the way, Eaton singled out for special commendation three Vermont Republicans for their contribution thereto: Senator Warren Austin for introducing the resolution to repeal, Rep. Plumley for supporting the move to arm U.S. merchant ships, and Governor Willis for calling for a Republican Party caucus "to end obstruction of national defense." Eaton's concluding accolade to these three commended their actions as "encouraging signs that the traditional Republican foreign policy" "will again prevail in party councils." Eaton apparently was of the view that "traditional Republican foreign policy" and the existing recently-amended Roosevelt New Deal foreign policy were one and the same.
And, in an editorial invocation which blessed all these developments, David Lawrence announced his conviction that Hitler had already lost the war; his conquests had simply generated hate, Russia was now in arms against him and "the United States is on the way." Hitler, Lawrence was sure, must have become aware by this moment (November 14, 1941) that "the President of the United States, the head of a democratic state, has boldly loaned a billion dollars in supplies to Josef Stalin, the dictator of a totalitarian state." "Ideologies have been swept aside," and it now was not the time "to argue the merits or demerits of allies in war"; "God moves in strange ways his wonders to perform.''(151) Mr. Lawrence had discerned divine guidance in the ex- tending of lend-lease to Communist Russia. There would be decades for him after 1945 to wail and grumble about the awful threat of Stalinist Communism and its descendants to the very future of the galaxy, during which time he never again discerned the intervention of the Deity in behalf of his politics.
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19. The Origins of "Second Front" Talk in the West, and the Impact of Soviet Aid Production on American Labor and Business/ Businessmen
by James J. Martin
By this time, however, those perspiring for Stalin's safety were not entirely satisfied with the prospect of celestial intervention in his behalf, and were suggesting that such aid might be more promptly forthcoming if preceded by human action toward the same objective. A clamor had already risen, mainly in Britain, for a "second front" to be established somewhere in assistance to the floundering Red Army, which, though hailed by sustained and glittering eloquence in the English-speaking world, was still on the run. There apparently was a solid contingent in England still, who, despite the record of failing to supply Poland with any help at all prior to or during invasion by the Germans in September 1939, thought substantial military support could be furnished to Stalin. Those who disparaged this position in England in the late fall of 1941 were smeared as "Munich men," frightened by "fear of a Russian victory," by far the most contemptible attitude anyone might have in the view of the new legions of Communism's adulators, high and low alike, in the Motherland of Parliaments. One of them was not the new Supply Minister in the Churchill regime, Beaverbrook, who had impressed even Time with his "spectacular verbal leap into bed with Russia," and who was reported to be the principal voice clamoring for a British expeditionary force to be sent somehow to Stalin's assistance, "in the Ukraine or the Donetz Basin.''(152) Neither Beaverbrook nor Time nor anyone else suggested how this force was to be translated to such distant places, but nothing was said about consulting with David Lawrence on the matter. Some heavenly assistance might have been contracted for, perhaps.
Nevertheless, the atmosphere of geniality toward Stalin and the Reds continued to prevail, and the slow, piecemeal gains were more substantial than the impulsive and unrealizable projects which were hatched in more fevered minds. Diplomatically the story was one of uninterrupted success. In Washington, the 24th anniversary of the assumption of the Leninists to power in Russia was celebrated at a reception at the Soviet embassy that was hailed as one of the largest diplomatic functions ever held in the city,(153) to be followed shortly by the return of Stalin's "greatest diplomat," Maxim Litvinov, once more as the Ambassador of the Soviet Union to the U.S.A. His projected return to "the scene of his greatest diplomatic triumph," the negotiation of U.S. recognition of the Soviet in 1933, was looked upon with much satisfaction, while Time, for reasons ungiven, chose to call attention to "his name at birth," allegedly Max Wallach. (154)
Still other moves were considerably cloaked, especially the State Department's pro-Soviet pressure on Finland, still at war with Stalin in the late fall of 1941. Once hailed as "gallant little Finland," this unfortunate land was now the recipient of special malice for persisting in its hostility to the Russians. With Secretary of State Hull publicly testifying to his faith in the Soviet's commitment to "its full part in standing side by side with all liberty-loving people against the common menace,"(155) it seemed to be only good faith to work with them in crushing an active military enemy. The argument seemed to be that with the joint commitment to defeat Hitler, there should not be a limitation upon indirect Soviet ties, including mutual action against Finland, since its continued belligerence only worked in behalf of German welfare.(156)
On the domestic material side a mixture of tendencies, developments, both slow and rapid, and an accretion of significant facts, reflected related circumstances. But the overall "defense" program masked specific aspects. One of the best sources in which to examine the week-by-week development in the U.S. of an American-style system rivaling those of the enemy and designed to combat them was Lawrence's U.S. News. The disciplining and planning of industry and the increased state regulation of the economic system geared almost exclusively to the success of the national state in warfare are patently observable, and these did not take long to become institutionalized.
On July 4, 1941, Lawrence complained editorially, "The United States is on the threshold of national socialism," adding that "In- roads of national socialism are unchecked by either Republicans or Democrats who have hitherto defended our system of private initiative."(157) Three weeks later he had already seen the light and changed his tune. "Every issue is a Defense issue," he now announced, adding, "Every Defense item is actually a peacetime item, temporarily put to Defense use."(158) Peripherally he noted that nationwide, politicians were grumbling that their home areas were not getting enough "defense patronage." Lawrence soon had joined those who used "defense" to dissolve the difference between war and peace and within weeks of his remonstrance against these developments, had emerged as a suave advisor to such sectors of the business world which had not yet caught on to the consequences of what was taking place. Coaching businessmen to be alert and cash in on the vast conversion of industry to war production, he uttered as an aside, "Government isn't a respecter of individual interests, isn't too much concerned about individual hardships so long as its own purpose is served.''(159) This stood in strange contrast to his whooping enthusiasm for the political lace trimming and fancy filigree decorating the famed bogus "Atlantic Charter," one of the very few at the time of its alleged promulgation to take it seriously. But Lawrence was not misleading the business community when he described what was going on in the late months of 1941. Arthur E. Burns, economic advisor to the Works Progress Administration, estimated on October 31, 1941, that 700,000 people working in the non-defense sector had lost their jobs in the months of August and September alone.(160) On the other hand, 75% of the total membership in the CIO electrical workers union in mid-September were engaged in defense work. One was able to understand without wonder why its leader, youthful James B. Carey, was, as Time described him, "an earnest supporter of the Roosevelt foreign policy and closely identified with the defense program.''(161) U.S. defense spending in October, 1941 was already $50,000,000 a day, and $5,000,000,000 in various products and arms had already been sent to Britain, though there was no published breakdown of what part of this may have been transferred to the Soviet Union.(162) And all was catapulting at a pace relished by employers, marred only by a suggestion that same month by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., that profits should be limited to 6 per cent, a profit ceiling which was supposed to prevail in Hitler Germany as well, though the latter had nothing to do with the proposal by the former.(163)
It was obvious that profit margins had not the slightest relationship to such figures, though the public at large rarely saw anything substantial in the fact department relating to the subject. One such occasion was the issuance of a preliminary report by the House of Representatives Naval Affairs Committee early in December, a few days before the Pearl Harbor attack, that some U.S. ship- building companies were making 150% profits on naval building defense contracts. A followup report by the Office of Price Ad- ministration of one unnamed defense industry indicated that 86 of the 88 companies in this venture were making 6% or better, that 44 of the 88 were averaging 42.6% profits and up, and one of the 88 was achieving a 112% profit margin.(164) Senator David I. Walsh, affronted by such disclosures, was quoted as predicting "an awful day of reckoning" "when the U.S. public got the figures" on the total situation, though in retrospect this might have been interpreted as an attempt at humor. There never was a "day of reckoning," and the American public never "got the figures."
The evolution of "aid" to Stalin had expanded the vision of some of the leaders of American defense industry, getting their first glimpses of the staggering possibilities which lay in expansion throughout the globe. Russia at the time of its revolution, 1917-1922, was a dream which had quickened even the World War I generation of businessmen, industrialists and financiers.(165) And there had always been the fantasies built around China's "400 milllion customers," as the title of Carl Crow's book (1937) put it. The coming of a new war simply made it possible to erect even higher cloud castles upon the older ones. The spectacle which William Batt put together upon his return from the Soviet late in 1941 is in that class, Batt, president of the famous ball- bearing manufacturing concern, SKF, and recently appointed a director of the super-bureauracy created by Roosevelt to direct war production, the Office of Production Management (OPM), came back to America "as an outspoken advocate of the policy of bigger and better help for Russia," a vibrant profile in U.S. News proclaimed on November 21. Batt went on to describe the complete reversal on his previous views about Soviet industry, and Russian ability to use machine tools. He confessed to be vastly impressed by the technical competence of Russian mechanics, "ingenious, intelligent, and technically trained," a view which was contradicted by General John R. Deane, Roosevelt's trouble- shooting liaison man in the Soviet later, during the war years, who in his book Strange Alliance described an entire tire factory shipped from the U.S.A. to the USSR which the Russians failed to put together though working on it the whole war. Batt passed encomiums to the Reds all down the line: the officers were "able, confident and brave," and Stalin "intelligent and amazingly well informed" (fifteen years later Khrushchev and his colleagues berated Stalin as being personally responsible for the disasters of 1941-1942 through his abysmal personal ignorance). Batt concluded his amazing piece of special pleading by declaring that industrial management and organization seemed to be good, and that their inspection standards "compared favorably with our own." All this was placed before the readership as the judgment of a nationally known industrialist, now a defense official.(166) Perhaps it was all a preliminary device to make palatable the issuance of Special Allocation Order No. 1 by the OPM a few days later, which instructed 35 U.S. machine tool plants to place Stalinist orders ahead of even American and British requests, on the order of $10-$15 million for the next calendar year.(167) The U.S. was still not a belligerent.
The aid program for Stalin had moved ahead on both ad- ministrative and practical levels. On the latter, Time pictured a formidable collection of U.S. manufactures intended for the USSR, unloaded at a Persian Gulf port, the photographer having made sure that the labels of the Ford and Youngstown Sheet & Tube companies were prominently displayed American free enterprise was now demonstrably at work making sure of the survival of Stalinist Communism.
On the former, a complication ensued which once more broke open the old religious sore. At the conclusion of the paper work which detailed the arrangements concerning the U.S. aid program, a Kremlin dinner was thrown to celebrate. An unnamed U.S. official involved in the labors was a guest at the feast and was quoted as describing Stalin as "a nice old gentleman." But the explosion was created by Wallace Carroll, United Press correspondent in Moscow, who reported that Stalin proposed a toast to Roosevelt, which ended in the expression of the generalized entreaty, "May God help him in his task." Stalin's remarks were reported by Time to have been translated by the diplomat Oumansky, and certified to be correct.(169) Repercussions of this were muffled by the sensational Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii a few days later, preventing a repetition of the immense squabble precipitated by Roosevelt a few weeks earlier concerning the allegation of religious freedom in the USSR. But there were a few reverberations of this incident for some time thereafter, and incredulity was the principal reaction to this last effort at imputing godliness to Stalin prior to the formal belligerence of the U.S.
The Pearl Harbor disaster also diverted all but a few from another contemporary political event, the news that Willkie, famed corporation lawyer and 1940 presidential election Republican opponent of Roosevelt, had agreed to defend William Schneiderlnan, Russian-born secretary of the Communist Party in California, against a federal charge of having uttered a fraudulent oath of allegiance to the United States. Mentioned in Time in the issue which was dated the day after the Hawaii attack,(170) it caused a flush of pleasure in the New Masses of a day later, its lead editorial remarking, "The fact that a man of his [Willkie's] prestige and conservative outlook undertakes the defense of a leading Communist undoubtedly reflects the changed political climate in the country during the past few months."(171)
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20. Pearl Harbor Forces a Temporary Diversion in the Overall Drive to Assist the Soviet Union
by James J. Martin
But for a few days at least all political matters relating to Communism at home and abroad were dissolved in the national bellow of indignation over the Pearl Harbor affair, and a brigade of the choicest partisans of the Roosevelt regime began a two-fifths of a century offensive aimed at distracting national attention completely away from any suspicions of possible administration pre-knowledge of the coming attack, and fastening the blame for it all upon the military and naval commanders at Honolulu. This infamous enfilade blackened the character of these men but did not succeed in heading off a formidable amount of investigation and literature which did anything but entrench the desired result of this Roosevelt establishment.
Pearl Harbor made the fatalist argument come true. The varied forces ranging from pro-Communists of the 1934-1939 "popular front" to the fervid Anglophiles of 1939-1941 who had tirelessly argued that the entry of the U.S. into war with either Germany or Japan or both was "inevitable" were finally "vindicated," in their own mind, but in a way very much different from that expected. Their own propagandistic efforts to bring about this result as a matter of "conviction" and voluntary choice were a total failure. It was not "isolationism" which got America into the war. It was the inch-by-inch creeping intrusionism and "aid short of war" which created all the policy imperatives that slowly moved the country to a point where their threat to an adversary and the sus- tained pressure on that adversary finally produced the attack so dearly desired and needed by the administration's political warriors. A good case can be made for the view that war with Japan was not entirely unwelcome in the U.S.A. at any time. Decades of political and propaganda.hostility toward Japan on many levels in the U.S.A. preceded Pearl Harbor. Even men antagonistic to involvement in the European war after it broke out in 1939 did not feel the same way about mixing it up in the Pacific. Even the usually anti-war Senator George Curtis (R.-Neb.) was quoted by Newsweek as late as the end of October 1941 as saying "I'm not so sure that war with Japan would be a bad thing.... I believe we could lick them.... Our bombers could set the whole island (sic) ablaze in one night...."(172)
And contrary to the mountain of mendacious special pleading that flowed across the land afterward alleging unbelievable unpreparedness, the general belief prior to Pearl Harbor was that the country's defenses, and offensive strength, too, for that matter, were at a high pitch of development, ready for anything, even the obliteration of Japan itself, as Senator Norris believed. The public had been encouraged to feel that immense armaments and the best of war materiel were at hand, easily put to use in the destruction of any enemy. The fairy tale of innocent, unready America on the eve of the attack is not substantiated by what many millions of Americans read in nationally circulated periodicals for weeks prior to December 7, 1941.
Time had primed its millions of readers (readership surveys in the 1940s indicated that a publication's total reading audience might exceed its actual paid circulation by from 5 to 15 times that number) with repeated accounts of the bristling armor and fire power prevailing here. On November 10, 1941, it had referred ad- miringly to Roosevelt as the man who "was waging the first great undeclared war in U.S. history,''(173) and later in the month, on the occasion of his press conference following the sinking of the U.S. destroyer Reuben James by a German submarine while on convoy duty for the British in the North Atlantic, the editors concluded from the substance of FDR's talk that "the U.S. was far into the unknown waters of war."
In its issue of December 8, unfortunately on the stands after the attack had taken place, Time's editors confidently assured Americans, expecting war any minute, that "Everything was ready from Rangoon to Honolulu, every man was at battle stations."(174) They went on in a gloating mood, describing the vast American and British war machine which was ready to spring on the Japanese should they snap under Roosevelt's "war of nerves" and "undeclared war" and react militarily. Nothing was more opposite to the whine and snivel of innocence and outrage which promptly rose to the heavens from these same war anticipators a few days later.
A respectable compendium of such material could have been collected, including accounts which actually picked out Pearl Harbor as the site of the coming attack weeks before it happened. Hallett Abend, a widely read newspaper reporter on matters Japanese in the pre-war decade, in his November 18 article in Look, "How the U.S. Navy Will Fight Japan," which was exposed to a possible reading audience of about 12 million, launched even more inspiring misconceptions than did Time. Abend, who shared with Hugh Byas of the New York Times a record for being consistently wrong about Japan and filing repeatedly misleading material about affairs there, was ludicrously off the mark in this confident puff as well, seeding his piece with the promise of a Stalinist attack on Japan from Siberia as soon as the shooting began. The meat of his vaticination concerning the coming Pacific war was wrapped up in the following:
When the clash comes, the Japanese fleet will have to stay in home waters, to guard the islands of the Empire against naval raids. Our own fleet will cruise somewhere west of Hawaii, with scout planes far over the seas day and night to prevent surprise raids on the Pearl Harbor naval base or on our own West Coast cities.(175)
This is the kind of gargantuan misinformation to which Americans were exposed as late as three weeks before the attack. But it indicates that at least on the popular level Pearl Harbor was openly expected to be the point at which the war might or would begin. The fundamental line of the Roosevelt defense corps in the next quarter of a century was that the Washington establishment was totally unaware of such a possibility, and vaguely imagined the Japanese strike would be at Borneo or similarly irrelevant distant locations.
The ear-splitting barks of hostility toward the Japanese which rang out from all corners of American opinion, and especially from the long-believed contingent of radio and newspaper "old Japan hands," were remarkable in their barren thinness. Their desperate suggestions produced no Japanese casualties (the first in the U.S.A. were the cherry trees lining the tidal basin of Washington, D.C., cut down by pseudo-patriotic vandals), but their call for an obliterating victory never contemplated the consequences of the accompanying triumph of Asian Communism, an almost sure guarantee. Most of these "advisors" looked forward to nothing in Japan but an abyss of smoking ruins and corpses, and few of these seers were able to discern that a major revolution was under way in Asia, regardless of who won the war, which would stand any American or "Allied" victory in the area on its head in an extremely short time.(176) But the beams from a dimmer search- light were never played on American public opinion than those emanating from these cloudy beacons.
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21. Reactions and Second-Guessing Following Stalin's Avoidance of Involvement in the War Against Japan
by James J. Martin
Roosevelt took America to war with Stalin's enemies within four days of Pearl Harbor. This was not reciprocated by Stalin, who pointedly stayed at peace with Japan and became involved in the Pacific war for just a few hours at its conclusion in August 1945 when there were many political plums to gather resulting from the gross oversight of his Anglo-American war partners. The staggering importance of this Red policy got little or no play in U.S. communications, and such as emerged were very largely apologies for Stalin's decision. The New Masses within days of the U.S. declarations of war on Italy and Germany in December 1941 began a continuous drum roll for the establishment of a "second front" in Europe by Americans in assistance of Stalin. But this journal did not exhort Stalin to go to war with Japan and open a "second front" against that land from its Pacific Siberian bases. The persistence of peace with Japan on the part of Stalin also made impossible any other party to the war establishing a "second front" from Siberia, and effectively denied the region to the bombing planes of its "allies" as well.
It amazed a few observers how little comment was aroused in the U.S.A. when the USSR failed to go to war with Japan. The usual apology was that the Russians had their hands full with Hitler, and were fearful that the result of formal hostilities would be a big drive into Siberia by the Japanese. That the Reds in Siberia along the Korean, Manchurian and Chinese borders had fought many hundreds of battles with the Japanese in the previous decade was carefully neglected. All that was fed Americans was the notion of some antiseptic form of scrupulous state of peace existing in this region.
The U.S. News uttered a few quiet words on the subject a week and a half after Pearl, expressing the belief that Russian support was "vital, if the Allies are to attack Japan." The journal noted that Vladivostok was the nearest and likely most effective base from which an air attack might be raised, but conceding that without access, the chances of "avenging" Pearl Harbor were "slim."(177) A later discussion asserted that "A pact is needed binding all Allies to fight on all fronts until victory,''(178) but no Rooseveltian or Churchillian political magic ever moved Stalin a centimeter in this direction at any time.
It was generally conceded in American commentaries that Stalin had the freedom to stay out of the Pacific war, and no one ever mentioned the employment of any form of compulsion or pressure upon him to do differently, though Roosevelt held by far the most potent hand in this game, the threat of the withholding of lend-lease supplies until Stalin had become a full belligerent in the Pacific. It was never done, or even slightly hinted at as a possible move. The mouthpieces of comfortable affluence well exceeded the threadbare Communist organs in their solicitude for Stalin on this issue.
Time was perhaps the warmest and most sympathetic to the explanations as to why the USSR remained at peace with Japan after December 7, 1941. These were forthcoming from the new Stalinist ambassador to Washington, Litvinov, who boldly uttered harsh words at the combined enemy, describing them as a "vast conspiracy of international gangsters," but chose to see his master, Stalin, gingerly skirting the Far East contingent of these "gangsters," as engaging in eminently sound conduct in the maximization of the safety of his skin. As the author of the famous political cliché of the Popular Front, "Peace is indivisible," he certainly thought World War II was divisible. The Russians rarely admitted there was an Asiatic front in World War II. And Time supported the decision in substance by remaining uncritical of the hands-off-Japan decision of Stalin in separate commentaries on December 22, l941,(179) and January 19, 1942. Nor was there the slightest diminution of the pro-Stalinist wave of support which swept across the Anglo-American peoples during the next three and a half years of war as a result of Red refusal to become involved in a truly world war with its anxious "Allies." In the meantime most of the belligerence aimed at the Japanese came from American song writers. In the first three days after Pearl Harbor, some 260 song titles were registered, involving a mixture of patriotic and racial-slur stereotypes the latter mostly anti- Japanese. These and many more, before and after December 7, 1941, provoked the famed band leader, Paul Whiteman, to castigate the entire product musically to mid-January, 1942 as "dribble." Remarked the portly Whiteman, it was "enough to make a band leader lose weight."(180)
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22. The Dimensions of the Propaganda War as Waged by the Authors and Publishers
by James J. Martin
In examining the respective tasks facing American public opinion shapers and war propagandists, it becomes apparent that the selling of fear and hate of the enemy via negative messages (181) was vastly more simple than the chore involved in creating favorable and positive visions of an ally, especially in case that "ally" enjoyed the largely critical stance which had been the experience of the Soviet in the U.S. in its more than two dozen years of existence down to mutual belligerence in late 1941. Concerning the Japanese, the job could be done largely on the visceral level, and insulting and taunting songs were a very visible example of what might be employed. There was no corresponding mode for the salesmanship of devices productive of warm and appealing dispositions toward the USSR. There the processes demanded mainly rational discourse, at least for an introductory intermission, after which emotional messages might become employable after a time of commonly shared wartime hardships. It is for this reason that the earliest efforts and gestures had a warily exploratory flavor, for the most part, and acquired a confident and positive content some time later.
The book world trailed well behind that of magazine and newspaper journalism in the sales campaign in the West in behalf of Stalinism, a matter of timing and the nature of their different operational methods. The decade or more of heavy pro-Soviet salesmanship among authors which came to an end roughly about the time of the Russo-German pact in 1939 was followed by a confused interim of much contradictory effort and a strong tendency to shy away from more Stalinist accolades except among the devoted Party regulars and their most devoted and ardent fellow travelers, still a healthy contingent. The opening of the Russo- German phase on the war in mid-194l caught the industry unprepared to take full advantage of the situation. Only a handful of outright pro-Stalinist tracts were able to hit the market before Pearl Harbor, and they had to share the spotlight with tomes which were anything but friendly. The six months after Pearl was a time for reversing the gears and eventually launching a flood of pro-Communist volumes, which reached successively higher land-marks in each of the three years of war still remaining.
The two most blatant pro-Soviet tracts which managed to get produced and marketed early by major publishers were those by veteran Bolshevik adulators, Maurice Gershon Hindus' Hitler Cannot Conquer Russia (Doubleday) and Anna Louise Strong's (Mrs. Joel Shubin) The Soviets Expected It (Dial). These hurry-up jobs caught reviewers by surprise, and they were obviously not ready for them yet, even such committed ink and paper warriors as Clifton Fadiman of the New Yorker. He allotted both works very cool and skeptical reception, identifying Strong as a "well-known apologist" for the Soviet, but not Hindus, who was just as prominent in this category.(182) Foreign Affairs was rather quizzical about Hindus, while mildly calling attention to Strong's work as mainly a justification for Soviet foreign policy, contrary to the momentary consensus which thought Stalin's line had turned out to be an incalculable disaster. A weak and uninformative review of her book by Elizabeth Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune was delayed until early in January 1942, but it was fiercely dissected in the same paper six weeks earlier by Isabel M. Paterson, and a few days later by William Henry Chamberlain in the Saturday Review of Literature. Chamberlain, like Lyons a disaffected former admirer of the Bolshevik "experiment," called attention to Strong's party line interpretation of everything, remarking that hers was the least critical study of Russia and apology-for-Stalin since that published some years earlier by the "Red Dean of Canterbury," Hewlett Johnson, which indeed was in a special class by itself.
Chamberlin, who had just become the editor of a new magazine, the Russian Review, did not deal as harshly with Hindus' book in the New York Times as had Lyons in the American Mercury, but was reserved as to the outcome of the war in Eastern Europe. Like everyone else who wanted Hitler defeated without Stalin taking advantage of the consequences, Chamberlin was caught in the same bind. Doubting Hindus' cheerful confidence that there was no fear that Stalin would as Chamberlin put it, "exploit a victory to spread his brand of dictatorship over a great part of Europe beyond Russia's proper ethnological frontiers," he held up further judgment on Hindus' pro-Red tract. At the moment it did not appear that Stalin was in any position to defeat Hitler without immense help from the capitalist nations, so it did seem to be excessive to worry about this matter.
Another reviewer who did not handle Hindus too kindly was the Council on Foreign Relations regular Philip E. Mosely, in the Yale Review, though he fell short as well of Lyons' critical level. Hindus received the warmest treatment in the New York Herald Tribune, the alleged organ of New York plutocracy. His 300-page book, published less than three months after the outbreak of the Russo- German phase of the war, was hailed by Joseph B. Phillips, who added, of Hindus, "Of all the authors who have written about the Soviet Union, Mr. Hindus has been the most consistent and thorough investigator of the changes which the Bolshevik state has made in the mental and social makeup of the Russians," and was further commended by Lewis Gannett in the same newspaper a week later as the author of a new volume to add to his previously published Red Bread "and other good books on Russia."
Other major pro-Soviet books bearing 1941 imprints were too late to be paid much attention until the following year: Walter Duranty's The Kremlin and the People (Reynal and Hitchcock), Lucien Zacharoff's "We Made a Mistake"-Hitler (Appleton- Century), and the prize winner of the early era, Davies' Mission to Moscow (Simon & Schuster), a book so unabashedly Stalinist that the even-worse moving picture based on it drew chuckles from Stalin himself when he first viewed it. Billed by Foreign Affairs the following spring as "one of the best informed books to appear in recent years on Soviet Russia," the book was already profiting from the time lag and American belligerency since its publication. Duranty's book was heavily attacked by Louis Fischer, still another defectee from the pro-Red claque among the literary men. Though it was not as unsophisticated a piece of special pleading as that of Zacharoff, who tried to turn the Red Army's pell-mell retreat across Russia in the closing months of 1941 into a great victory, as had an earlier lot of writers who similarly succeeded in converting the British disaster at Dunkirk, in the late spring of 1940, into a stirring triumph.(183)
To be sure, there were works praising Stalin and Russian Communism coming out in 1941 that nearly matched the "Red Dean," but they were being published in England, and were unreviewed and unavailable in the U.S.A., such as the British Communist Party's spokesman Pat Sloan's How the Soviet State is Run (Lon- don: Lawrence), Maurice Dobb's Soviet Economy and the War (London: Routledge), and the Austrian Marxist refugee Erich Strauss' Soviet Russia (London: Lane), which Woolbert in Foreign Affairs a year after publication called "one of the better informed and more thoughtful books on Russia.''(184) But Americans were exposed primarily to British war writing in the form of speeches and journalism emanating from much better known public figures such as Julian Huxley's Democracy Marches (Harper), John Boynton Priestley's Out of the People (Harper) and the now Churchill- cabinet-minister Ernest Bevin's The Balance Sheet of the Future (McBride), all of whom seemed pre-occupied with the postwar consequences of the war, with their talk of future "world union" and "community of nations" in a "security club" as well as the opening the war was providing for advancing their own variety of a British welfare state soviet.(185)
A more stealthy kind of pro-Sovietism was always the negative line of attacking its enemies (the favorite cover of all Communists was the generalized mantle "anti-fascist"), one of 1941's prizes being Men of Europe by "Andre Simone," the pseudonym of one of Europe's most tireless and ubiquitous Comintern agents, Otto Katz. Well known in the U.S.A. for his Communist-line book on why France collapsed in 1940, his latest work, issued by the quasi- Communist publishing house, Modern Age Books, was a generalized attack on virtually every European politician not in the pro-Soviet orbit. An occasional reviewer such as Fadiman identified its firm Stalinist line, contradicted a few days later by the Herald Tribune's Joseph Barnes, who struggled manfully to disabuse the potential reader of the idea that "the political line of the book" was Communist. Barnes went along with the general position of not exposing the writer's real name and Comintern affiliation, which actually was not done until the following year in the U.S.A. But in the meantime he stretched the credulity of the people with any sophistication about foreign politics at all by pleading that Simone's bitter attack on all the critics of Stalin and his "appreciative" chapter on the Red dictator could not be interpreted as "in the Moscow line."(186) Once more a moneyed influential capitalist organ was supplying a service no openly Communist paper could ever have expected to make possible.
The release in America of books hostile to Communist Russia had slowed almost to a halt before the mid-1941 reversal of the trend of world politics in Eastern Europe. Only Lyons' Red Decade, more a report on pro-Soviet sympathizing by non- Communist Americans in the 1930s than an anti-Soviet work, drew much attention in the closing months, with major and mainly non-critical reviews by Bruce Bliven in the New Republic, Niebuhr in the Nation, Max Eastman in the New York Times, and Chamberlin in the Saturday Review, as well as Woolbert in Foreign AJnairs.(187) The serious attacks on Stalinist Russia in book form were limited, and mainly the work of non-Americans who had been there, voluntarily or otherwise, as well as being very hard to come by in the U.S.A. Notable among them were Anton Ciliga's The Russian Enigma (London: Routledge), a book which actually had been issued in 1940 and comprised the hostile impressions of a Yugoslav Communist who had resided in the USSR from 1926 to 1935. An even more inimical book was Joseph Ameel's Red Hell (London: Hale), the author's account of two decades' residence in the Workers' Fatherland, much of it in prison and penal gulags, which affronted the Foreign Affairs reviewer, about the only one in the U.S.A. His account was looked upon as "too lurid and prejudiced to be taken at face value,"(188) but no amount of luridity or prejudice in the many books by escapees from Hitler Germany was considered warranting a caveat in their cases: the sky was the limit in derogation of Nazi Germany.
About the only book generally available in the U.S.A. in the above class was Lilian T. Mowrer's Arrest and Exile (Morrow), the story of Olga Kochanska, one of the Poles deported to Russia after occupation of the eastern two-thirds of Poland by the Red Army in the fall of 1940. The review by Katharine Woods in the New York Times stressed Mme. Kochanska's scathing contempt for Russian Communism after experiencing it for awhile, though one might have questioned her dismissal of it all as insignificant. But even here an anti-Hitler lesson was inserted in the estimate, as it was the subject's opinion that Hitler should never have been allowed to "grow great" as a result of fear of Russian Bolshevism.(189)
Still another class of escapee literature regaling the American public in 1941 were such sagas as Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth (Macmillan), an account of his residence in French concentration camps for those who fled Spain after the demise of the Communist-led resistance against Franco,(190) and Lion Feuchtwanger's The Devil in France (Viking), a similar story of incarceration in French concentration camps after apprehension as an enemy alien in the summer of l940.(191) Still another was the German refugee Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom (Farrar and Rinehart). The former Frankfurt-born psychoanalyst, descended from a long line of rabbis, seemed to be interested, in this book, which became immensely influential in America, primarily in why people would abandon their "liberties" and "take refuge in a totalitarian regime" only in Germany,(192) choosing to ignore Stalinist Russia, many magnitudes more totalitarian than authoritarian Germany. The war call in all these was mainly subliminal, for the most part, however.
The forthright appeals to sally forth came mainly from American newspapermen and were more oriented toward a pro- British position, indicating that they had been in formation some time before mid-1941. The most influential of these were Leland Stowe's No Other Road to Freedom (Knopfl, a turgid brief by this Chicago Daily News foreign correspondent, known best for his later admissions of having fabricated the stories of Norway's fall in 1940 as the work of internal traitors, as well as his flustered post-war pro-Communist apologetics, and that of Joseph C. Harsch, Pattern of Conquest (Doubleday), the Christian Science Monitor's Berlin correspondent for the previous 18 months. More generalized was Pierre van Paassen's That Day Alone (Dial), a collection of semi-fictional yarns highly praised by leftist reviewers, especially Hindus, and bearing the main message of the unavoidability of a generalized postwar planned economy.(193) More strongly Anglophile-oriented were Forrest Davis' The Atlantic System (Reynal and Hitchcock) and H.R. Knickerbocker, Is Tomorrow Hitler's? (Reynal and Hitchcock). Davis, the one time New York Daily News rewrite man, was most appreciated by the well-entrenched elite Anglophile establishment, while Knicker- bocker, known even better as a radio than a newspaper journalist, became particularly involved in incensed attacks on American opponents of the Roosevelt war drive, heaping ferocious abuse on Lindbergh in particular. Still others concerned specialized attacks on external German programs, such as Smash Hitler's International (Greystone), by the improbable team of the psychological war specialist Edmond Taylor, the liberal economist Eliot Janeway, and the ardent apologist for both Russian and Chinese Communism, Edgar Snow.(194)
By comparison with all this, the publishing world exposed Americans to little literature involving a strategic war concept dealing with Japan. Nothing rivaling the Taylor-Janeway-Snow recipe for Germany came out in 1941, the last such being the New York Times cable editor Robert Aura Smith's Our Future in Asia (Viking) of the previous fall, an explicit summary of how Washington, London and Wall Street viewed the Far East, with its exhortation for a swift and presumably easy war against Japan to preserve the British colonial status quo especially in Southeast Asia. The 1941 fare varied from the breezy tourist-style Honorable Enemy (Duell, Sloan and Pearce) by Ernest O. Hauser to the bitter denunciation of Japan by the ancient Korean, Syngman Rhee, the "president of the provisional Korean Government in exile" since 1911, Japan Inside Out (Revell). In between there were the stiff establishment treatise by Paul M.A. Linebarger, The China of Chiang Kai-shek (Boston: World Peace Foundation), an idealization which Chiang himself was to obliterate with his own two books two years later, and a pair of volumes by supporters of China's still almost submerged-from-view brand of Communism. The message of T.A. Bisson's American Policy in the Far East, 1931-1941 (Institute of Pacific Relations) and Nym Wales' China Builds for Democracy (Modern Age Books) was anything but obscure. The latter author, in reality Helen Foster Snow, the wife of Edgar Snow, idealized "industrial cooperatives" in the Red- occupied areas of northwest China, while Bisson, a veteran apologist for Chinese Communism in both liberal and Communist papers, summarized much earlier writing for a Communist- dominated organization which was to become nationally known only after the anti-Communist reaction of the early Cold War set in a half dozen years later.(195)
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23. The Ante Rises After Pearl Harbor on Production and Appropriations for Stalin
by James J. Martin
With Pearl Harbor and full-fledged belligerency four days later, the end of a season of delicacy concerning matters Stalinist was just one of the consequences, even though the passage by the House of Representatives a week after the attack of a national defense appropriation bill for $8,243,839,031 brought from Time an almost apologetic tag that, after all, "only $78,000,000" of this vast sum was intended for Russian lend-lease.(196) For the British, American entry into the war was a life raft of indescribably vast dimensions, far more esteemed at this early moment for its part in this economic salvation department; British income taxes in the Pearl Harbor week were 50% of its workers' pay, and 95% of "big incomes.''(197) At this same time, Sir Kingsley Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was telling the House of Commons that Britain had already spent the equivalent of $33,200,000,000 to fight the war so far,(198) with the end far from in sight, the consequences of which were evident to the far-visioned. Julian Huxley, in New York City the same day, predicted that "The United States will be the most powerful country when the war is over, while Europe will be a mess.''(199) It was interesting to see how few political and ideological warriors cared about the outcome; there was a long and beautiful war to fight and experience, which no one wanted to deny himself through such ignoble artifices as the termination of hostilities via negotiation. As for another outcome of the war, one had to consult Rev. Charles E. Coughlin's editorial in his five-year- old weekly, Social Justice, an unmentionable source among the chic of the day. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Rev. Coughlin predicted, "Karl Marx will win this war."(200)
Davies' Book Mission to Moscow Sets the Tone on the Adulation of Soviet Communism for the Rest of the War
While noted public figures as diverse as Huxley, Caldwell, and Rev. Coughlin were ruminating presciently about the likely situation prevailing at war's end, there took place the first major literary advancement of Stalinist fortunes in American public consciousness, the publication of ex-Ambassador to Russia Davies' Mission to Moscow (Simon & Schuster). Out just two weeks after Pearl, it was the subject of at least three score stentorian reviews in as many weeks in the nation's largest and most prestigious periodicals and newspapers. Time led off shortly after Christmas, 1941 with a three and a half column review but handled as though the book were foreign news.(201) A few days later came Joseph Barnes's front page treatment in the Herald Tribune Books and identical placement of that of William Henry Chamberlin in the Times Book Review the same day, guaranteeing blanketing the Eastern portion of the country with massive and lengthy attention. A few days after that came that of Henry C. Wolfe in the Saturday Review, by which time the publishers had already run a half-page advertisement in the Herald Tribune Books which was heavily decorated with huzzas from 51 other major United States publications. Included in this triumphal spread were the following: "most competent, disinterested study of the Soviet Union" (Boston Globe); the best book on Russia "since the two-volume study by Sidney and Beatrice Webb" (Chicago Daily News); "a political document of the first importance as well as a piece of extraordinary sanity" (Chicago Sun-Times); "perhaps the most valuable book to be published on the subject of Russia in the past decade" (Houston Post); "Actually the first volume on Soviet Russia which will be taken seriously by all students of Soviet affairs" (Chicago Jewish Daily Courier); "the one book above all to read on Russia" (New York Times); and the following benediction from the Daily Worker: "Mr. Davies has supplanted a great deal of current misinformation about the USSR with realistic, clear-cut and objective reporting."(202)
Barnes's reviewer was as kindly as one might have been led to expect from him, in view of his substantial pedigree in handling things Soviet with a gentle touch. Wolfe hailed it as "One of the most significant books of our time,"(204) but the general shouting approval on all sides made Joseph Starobin's six-column effulgence in the New Masses almost an anti-climax.(205) There was little doubt that Davies' book had replaced among the Party (206) the up-to-then prize diplomatic volume by an American in the twentieth century, the 1933-1938 Diary of ex-Ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, lovingly edited by his far-leftist children. One strong asser- tion by Davies was given special attention by the New Masses, his declaration on page 434, "The bogy that a war would entail Communism in a defeated Germany and Central Europe is plain bunk." Another pregnant quotation from Davies was that by Wolfe in Saturday Review,(207) a reference to an unnamed Polish government figure who boasted prior to the September 1939 campaign, "within three weeks after the outbreak of war, Polish troops would be in Berlin." That they were there as prisoners of war was not the intent, for sure, though these were not days to call attention to Polish belligerent confidence in victory prior to hostilities; the total effort of "Allied" propaganda in the time following Pearl Harbor was to establish firmly the myth of a peaceful and utterly non-provoking Poland, overrun by a brutish German horde, in a one-sided act of "aggression."(208)
Few books published in the U.S.A. have been greeted by such an avalanche of reviewer approval in such a short time as Mission to Moscow. By the end of March 1942, the list of favorable testimonials was nothing short of sensational. The amazing thing was that it was criticized by anyone. Such as it was, unfriendly commentary on Davies' book gathered largely at one point, his acceptance without any reservation of the Stalinite explanation of the 1936-1938 massacres and mass jailings as a unified program of cleansing the USSR of German and Japanese collaborators and agents. Chamberlin had held back a little on this matter and also questioned Davies' "complete endorsement of Soviet foreign policy."(209) Even Time realized the problem here, and in its marathon vote of acclaim had demonstrated a little difficulty in accepting Davies, while projecting doubt on the earlier estimate of the Dewey Commission's write-off of the "purge" trials as frame- ups. The only harsh condemnation of Mission to Moscow was by Margaret Marshall in the Nation. But to appreciate why she was so appalled at Davies' defense of the purges, one had to know something of the history of the Nation in the same period, when it was torn apart into two camps as a result of conflict over this same matter.(210)
Though barely in the wartime embrace as "allies," Americans had tendered to the Russians a major propaganda triumph in the shape of a book written by a millionaire promoted lavishly by a major publisher and boosted in almost feverish language by nearly every organ of the heretofore scorned "capitalist" printed communications media. It was a task which could not have been achieved by a Communist Party machine in the Western Hemisphere even had it been a thousand times as large. Mission to Moscow went into five printings its first month, and for a time early in the American phase of formal participation in the war, it was hard to hear anyone talk about anything else. As an aid to assist the American young especially in learning to "love Russia," little compared to it for some time. Nothing ever approaching it by many light years ever appeared in Communist Russia, according the U.S.A. a similar favorable and affirmative image. The one-sided love affair could now be considered to be fairly and fully launched.
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Notes, 1-25
by James J. Martin
1. Cowley, "Marginalia," New Republic (July 12,1943),p. 50. In view of the havoc the Pakt caused among the New Republic's editors and contributors, it is very likely that some of them also joined the rush to the psychiatrists' couches.
Between August, 1939 and June, 1941 there did develop among outraged liberals a compensation mechanism in which was expressed the outward, formal rejection of Stalinist affections. During this time this distaste was represented by the spreading of the expression "Communazi" as a descriptive term for the forces of Stalin and Hitler, accused continuously of being in an "alliance." It grew in intensity after the collapse of France in June, 1940, then slackened noticeably in the early months of 1941, almost disappearing after June, 1941 and the start of theRusso-German war. There were comic and sometimes sour after effects of this "Communazi" episode and interlude, as liberals relapsed into old and comfortable postures with respect to Stalinist Russia. An example was the awkward publication timing of the autobiographical Opinions of Oliver Allston (E.P. Dutton), by one of liberalism's most hallowed literary figures, Van Wyck Brooks. Brooks admitted in this book to have found much that was admirable in Soviet Communism but had decided subsequent to the Pakt "to fight both Communists and Fascists." Dorothy Brewster, in her caustic review of this book in the Communist New Masses (December 30,1941, pp. 20-21), inquired rhetorically, "Was he [Brooks] fighting them both a short time ago when he sponsored the meeting called by the Council for Soviet Relations to celebrate the anniversary of the recognition by the U.S.A. of the USSR [November 17, 1933]?" Brooks was just one of a formidable battalion which wanted to have forgotten their 22 or so months of pique and resentment at Stalin's "betrayal," in August, 1939.
2. As Lawrence Dennis was wont to point out in the postwar era, in his news- letter Appeal to Reason, in the American South, as a general rule, the more racist the state, the more ferociously eager for combat with the Hitler regime it tended to be.
3. Part of the calculated program of synthetic patriotic ritual which was infused into everyday life in the U.S.A. accompanying this tidal wave of print and talk was the device of playing the Star Spangled Banner before the commencement of formal public gatherings, especially prior to the start of athletic contests. Thirty years after the end of World War Two it was still a preface to almost all such spectacles except perhaps dog races and wrestling matches. People were already complaining that it was being overdone in 1941, at which occasion Time commented, "The tune of The Star Spangled Banner, which has been the official national anthem for only a decade [1931],is an old British drinking song.... It was the club song of London's 18th Century Anacreontic Society. Called To Anacreon in Heaven, it was written by John Stafford Smith, the society's organist. Author Francis Scott Key, although believed to be tone-deaf, was apparently familiar with the original song." Time (December 22, 1941), p.56.
4. Throughout this study, the place of publication will be identified for all books other than those issued by publishers in New York City, which latter will be assumed by its omission.
5. Luce lent his prestige to young John F. Kennedy by signing the foreword to Kennedy's undergraduate thesis at Harvard, published under the title While England Slept (Wilfred Funk, 1940), and exploiting a persuasive line adopted by publicists both here and abroad. It became fashionable in the 1940s to write books alleging someone or other "slept" as a device to demonstrate ex post facto wisdom. Following the Kennedy essay came Denna F. Fleming's While America Slept: A Contemporary Analysis of World Events from the Fall of France to Pearl Harbor (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1944). Fleming was probably the most incandescent pro-war interventionist academician in the South, the equivalent to Frederick L. Schuman of Williams College. As a member of the Vanderbilt University faculty and a radio news commentator on Nashville, Tennessee's station WSM, Fleming was a formidable pedagogical warrior. Like many of them, once the war was over he went through a transformation into one of the most heart-rending pleaders for world peace and for understanding of the Stalinist world. It is unlikely anyone "slept" anywhere, but were mainly overtaken by events and the fortunes of war. The alleged nap of Americans in the 1930s does not hold up against the facts; a complaint in the year 1938, for example, was lodged against the export the previous year by the U.S. of munitions and warplanes which exceeded in dollar value the amount spent by the wartime Wilson regime on the tools of war for the entire World War I year of April 1917 to April 1918. See e.g., the critical editorial "Munitions Trade" in Colorado Springs Gazette, July 9, 1938, p. 4. There were $10,000,000,000 spent on arms in Britain during the premiership of Churchill's predecessor, Neville Chamberlain. This was a prodigious sum of money fifty or so years ago, when, for example, the minimum wage in the U.S.A. was thirty (30) cents an hour, and a fifth of the labor force was unemployed even at this rate. The above sum suggests that this can hardly be called "sleeping," when, in addition, the air was rent in the English-speaking world with one treatise after another excoriating the immense sums being spent on the production and trade in arms, world-wide. But to this day there can be heard a type of blatherskite trying to convince anyone willing to listen that at the outbreak of war in September 1939 the United Kingdom was milling around in muddled and confused disarmament. It was peculiar, amusing, and to some, depressing, that of the many newscasters, columnists and newspapermen and politicians pushed to the fore, from 1940 on, bawling to the world of their oracular powers in predicting and warning of trouble with Japan and Germany from 1931, if not earlier, not one displayed the faintest soothsaying ability on the much closer trouble with Russian and Chinese Communism. It may be argued that exhibiting propensities of this sort might have been dangerous in the era of the ascendancy of Hitler, for several reasons. Hostile sentiments about communism in the era of the Grand Amour with Stalin, the most one-sided political love affair in history, were most likely to be denounced as "spreading rumors planted by enemy agents." The people of the United States were still living with the consequences 40 years after it had become politically safe late in 1945.
The 1939-1945 era bustled and jostled in the U.S.A. with all manner of politicians, journalists and military analysts stridently claiming to have been the first to "recognize the Nazi peril"; some preferred to be seen as such well before the movement took shape in Germany. This contingent especially bloomed after Pearl Harbor, and there seemed to be some kind of correlation between having "early spotted the Hitler menace" and vaulting into big wartime jobs and ultimately in the postwar political machinery. But it was just peripherally embarrassing to them that none came forth as oracles and seers prophesying the "Commie peril," demonstrating near total blindness to a "Communist menace" until well after the Cold War had set in, whereupon belated wisdom in this sector became fashionable. But there were holdouts who did not become political giants in this capacity until after the Korean war had broken out in mid-1950.
a. See Foreign Affairs (October 1941), pp. 193-196 for the enthusiastic promotion of the books mentioned in this section. The reviewer of the journal's "Recent Books on International Relations" section was Robert Gale Woolbert.
7. Foreign Affairs January 1942), p. 377. Habe, originally Janos or Jean Bekessy, had an established pedigree for anti-Hitler politics. (See letter from Philip de Ronde, an ex-captain in the French Foreign Legion, to Time (November 10, 1941, pp. 4-5). Restored to political fragrance by the outcome of 1945, it was possible to read Habe-Bekessy's tiresome political sermons decades later in various of the world's journals. Lania was born Lazar Herrmann in Kharkov in 1896. Originally a Communist, he professed to have left them and become a Socialist in 1923. He claimed to have been an enemy of Hitler since 1924 and to have interviewed him at which time he admitted to knowing only two German words but claimed the ability to find Hitler's dialect, grammar and sentence structure defective, during his talk with him. See also Lania's Today We Are Brothers (Boston: Houghton Mif- flin, 1942). There will be substantial attention to both these propagandists subsequently.
In examining the propaganda literature attacking Hitler Germany, one is struck by the heavy percentage of authors who are either for a Soviet Communist alternative or one or another of half a dozen varieties of some other kind of Marxian socialism. As an economic system, there are no "free enterprise" critiques; almost every attack which does not reveal the author as a partisan of some species of Marxism is by a Jew of undiscernible political persuasion, whose position is understandable in view of Hitler's policies toward Jews. What would have been the reception worldwide of the Hitler regime had it not flourished its racial program in the manner it did has been the subject of substantial rumination over the decades. The percentage of Marxist or socialist critiques of Mussolini Italy and Japan is even higher than of Germany. When a search is conducted into what the people attacking Italy and Japan were for, it invariably ends at the front door of a Communist or socialist splinter group, if not directly in the fold of the Communist International. The literary adversaries of Japan either directly or indirectly voted for both a Red China and a Red Japan between 1931 and 1945. The exception in the case of Japan consisted of discomfited Englishmen alarmed at the simultaneous decay of the Empire in Asia at Japanese hands. They succeeded in getting half of what they sought in both Germany and the Far East. Had the Western "allies" been just a little more obtuse and myopic, they might have got the rest.
The issue in Italy remained in doubt still after more than three decades beyond war's end, although thanks to the "liberators" bringing back to Italy the Communists who had fled to Moscow in the 1920s during the Mussolini era, followed by a vigorous and unremitting offensive conducted thereafter, Italy in the postwar generation had Europe's largest Communist party outside Russia itself. It was characteristic of the behavior of Italy's returned Reds that their earliest act under the umbrella of their "democratic allies" was the repulsive murder of their adversary, Mussolini.
8. The political rehabilitation and refurbishment of Churchill, begun after Munich by pro-war sectors of both left and right in the Anglo Saxon world, embellished through the war in coalition with additional Tories and also American Anglophiles of non-leftist persuasion, was continued into the post-war period by a "conservative" movement which relished his return to venomous attacks on communism. But they conveniently overlooked his part in launching the Reds on their course of conquest through his impulsive and heedless all out support, 1941-43. His foot-dragging tactics thereafter were in harmony with all the other bad policy- making which had marked British leadership since Versailles, following which they had consistently done the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place. Churchill the journalistic opportunist would have been a better subject for scrutiny than the illusion of Churchill the ineffable statesman of the ages. Essential for any beginning attempts to produce some kind of balanced view of Churchill are Francis Neilson, The Churchill Legend (Appleton, Wis., C.C. Nelson, 1954) and Emrys Hughes, Winston Churchill, British Bulldog: His Career in War and Peace (Exposi- tion Press, 1955.)
Churchill's rushing into an alliance with Stalin may have appeared to have been a purely impulsive and heedless act, growing entirely from the fortunes of war and short range enthusiasms. It was the British military analyst General J.F.C. Fuller however who called attention several years later in his book The Conduct of War (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961) that Churchill had suggested an alliance with Stalin repeatedly prior to becoming wartime Prime Minister mentioned four such occasions in the first volume of his The Second World War, in March, 1938(p.213), September, 1938(p.229), May 4,1939(p.285), and May 19, 1939(p.293).
General Fuller commented further on Churchill's further wild swings of opinion change on the Soviet Union after his becoming First Lord of the Admiralty shortly after Britain declared war on Germany September 3, 1939 culminating in his bafflement by Stalin's invasion of and investment in half of Poland, the other half of the action begun by the Germans. Sir Winston's attempt to cover himself by remarking in The Second World War (Vol. 1, p. 351) that he "never had any illusion" about the Communists prompted Gen. Fuller to inquire rhetorically why he "had so ardently courted them" in the time before the war started.
And the culmination had occurred October 1, 1939 when Churchill had made his celebrated confession of being unable to predict Soviet behavior, it being "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." People for most of two generations were taught to sit back in awe at this literary hokum as though it were the purest of political wisdom, but Gen. Fuller suggested that Churchill could have learned by consulting "any work on Soviet foreign policy" in the fall of 1939 that it had not changed an iota in 20 years. Regardless of what Churchill was to say then or later, however, by his actions he came down on the side of those who preferred Central Europe to be dominated by Stalinism.
It is possible to argue that had the charlatans of Versailles created a smaller and more realistic Poland in the first place, the diplomatic crisis of 1939 and the war which ensued might never have happened. From another point of view however a clash between Germany and the Soviet Union would have come about later anyway since the main question which the Polish interlude just obscured momentarily was the ultimate location of control over Central Europe. That both Germany and the Soviet Union had serious territorial grievances against this "new" Poland can be considered merely a temporary digression and diversion.
9. Not everyone was mesmerized by Churchill's rhetoric. Following the loss of Singapore, the sinkings of the Prince of Wales and Repulse and the passage of a German flotilla through the Strait of Dover, Robert Willis, secretary of the London Trades Council, protested, "We must break loose from the stupefying magic of Churchill's oratory. Fine words don't win battles. Whenever we suffer a reverse and whenever news is bad, we are treated with a superb example of the mastery of the English language. The nation is being drugged by high sounding phrases." Quoted in Newsweek (February 23,1942),p.37.
10. Churchill's reckless decision to back Stalin completely, without the faintest vestige of a quid pro quo from Stalin, has produced a heated literature defensive of this act, but of little explanatory substance. There was nothing for the Reds to do but take advantage of it. Churchill's additional action begun in 1941, instructing a specially created organization to plan for a continent-wide operation "to coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage, to set Europe ablaze," as reported by William Stephenson in William Stevenson's A Man Called Intrepid (Ballantine ed., 1977,p.97), loosed in the world one of the most incredible episodes of foolish political mischief in all time. It was Churchill's bombers which "set Europe ablaze." His operation, which poured down money, explosives and automatic weapons upon the Stalinist underground and "resistance" by parachute drops for over four years in eleven countries set up a murderous political situation in each land. It had as its legacy a pro-Communist political infirmity which was likely to prevail for several generations after Churchill's passing.
That Churchill began to entertain second thoughts in 1943 and thereafter, and began to show signs of political wisdom is ex post facto acumen of the most hopeless sort. If Britons ever hoped to return to a status of importance in the affairs of Middle Europe after World War II as in the period 1919-1939, such hope was damaged beyond repair by Churchill's spinal cord reaction to Hitler's invasion of Russian-held Poland. It can be argued that Britain faced an insoluble dilemma and was doomed to expulsion from both Central European influence and Far Eastern preponderance regardless of which of the two contesting powers there were winners. It is obvious they faced this consequence if the Germans and Japanese won, and it was their classic choice of the man on a burning yacht in a typhoon, staying on and burning to death or jumping off and drowning. Churchill stayed on and the British Empire and influence were incinerated in a Red holocaust.
11. The standard apologia detailing the careful and cautious edging of Roosevelt and his principal advisors to a program of material assistance to Stalin in 1941 is William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 194g1941 (Harper, 1953), identified on its title page as "Published for the Council on Foreign Relations." (Chapters 17 and 25.) Professors of history at Harvard and Amherst, respectively, Langer and Gleason held high posts during the war with the redoubtable global espionage agency, the Office of Strategic Services, the direct ancestor of the modern CIA. They also held similar positions in the early CIA and were so identified when their book was published.
12. Especially informative on the matters described above are "Judex," Anderson's Prisoners (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940), and Ivor Montagu, The Traitor Class (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940), which contains much valuable information, though written from the point of view of the Central Committee of the CPGB. Ramsay's own account of his arrest and incarceration for over four years may be found in his book, The Nameless War (Devon, England: Britons, 5th rev. ed., 1968). On Ramsay's release from prison on September 26, 1944 see "Bold Etonian," Newsweek (October 9, 1944), pp. 60-61. Despite all that has been written, much still remains unclear about the arrests of Capt. Ramsey and Tyler Kent, a code clerk at the U.S. Embassy in London who intercepted secret dispatches between Roosevelt and Churchill confirming their illegal efforts to bring America into war against Germany. Kent made records of the incriminating messages, hoping eventually to make them public in the United States. He was arrested at his London apartment on May 20, 1940, and found guilty of violating the British Official Secrets Act in a closed trial. He spent the rest of the war in a British prison. [A copy of the trial record, including a listing of the hundreds of messages intercepted by Kent, as well as the intercepted diplomatic dispatches themselves, are at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The secret Roosevelt-Churchill exchange has been published in Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (Princeton Univ. Press, 1984; Warren F. Kimball, ed.) For Kent's own account see "The Roosevelt Legacy and The Kent Case," The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1983, pp. 173-203. See also: William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid, pp. 84-85.]
13. The above matters were quoted in Newsweek July 7, 1941), p. 11. An interesting aspect of the right-left coalition for war, but trying to stay clear of an alliance with the CPUSA, was the presence of Jay Lovestone, head of the CPUSA until 1928 when he had been removed by Stalin, as director of the Trade Union Division of the Committee to Defend America. Newsweek July 14, 1941), p. 10. Long after the war it was revealed that the Fight for Freedom Committee was a totally bogus organization, created out of whole cloth by British Intelligence and winked at by the Administration and its police agencies, used mainly to harass American anti-war groups and promote diversionary ruses to distract Americans from the multifarious British propaganda activities. See especially Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid, pp. 279, 324-25.
In retrospect, in terms of proportion, one of the ludicrous episodes of the propaganda war in America was the sight of the immense British propaganda enterprise and the octopus-like Communist apparatus, spending vastly-larger sums and employing a multitude of persons and mechanisms in press, radio and film, yelling in unison at the threadbare operations of Pro-German George Svlvester Viereck. A dozen major American publishers turned out a veritable Communist five-foot-shelf of books between 1933 and 1945, and enough pro-British books to fill an entire library. But the dozen or so pro-German or anti-interventionist products of Viereck's Flanders Hall firm were considered an equivalent by the pro-war propa- ganda machine, right and left alike. The long-delayed The German Report (Thomas Yoseloff, Publisher,1961) by O. John Rogge, unsuccessful both as prosecutor of the sedition case in 1944 and the defense counsel for the Communists in 1950, was still exaggerating the influence of Viereck at this late date.
14. In response to the Gallup Poll-question, "Do you think the U.S. should declare war on Germany and send our army and navy abroad to fight?" the September, 1939 "No" total was 94% of the respondees; in October, the "No" response was 95%, in December, 96.59%. In April 1940, after the invasion of Norway by the Ger- mans, the "No" response to this question was 96.3% and in June, 1940, after the collapse of France, it was 93% "No."
15. "War of the Dinosaurs," Time dune 30, 1941), p. 9.
16. "Lenin-Lease Bill," Time dune 30, 1941), p. 13. This issue of Time featured a cover picture of Stalin and one of his most ballyhooed generals, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko.
17, Even after 1945, new words were invented to describe Russia territorial grabs under Soviet auspices, while pro-Stalinist students of "imperialism" ground out millions of words describing this policy in conventional terminology as applied to everyone else.
18. "Looking the Other Way? The New Party Line," Time July 7, 1941), p. 12-13.
19. Time's contempt and meanness toward the Stalinists in America was reflected in numerous recollections of Communist detachment toward the war in the period of USSR neutrality and-the CPUSA's stance of anti-involvement. One of these was the reproduction of a bit of doggerel attributed to the U.S. Reds in the not very distant past:
Oh Franklin Roosevelt told the people how he felt
We almost believed him when he said,
'Oh I hate war And so does Eleanor
But we won't be safe till everybody's dead.' Time (July 7, 1941), p. 13.
Some recalled the bitter words of the CPUSA's leader, Earl Browder, a few months earlier when he was convicted for forging a U.S. passport; in the Daily Worker for February 25, 1941 he had remonstrated, "If my kind of crime rates four years in prison, what should be the punishment for Franklin Roosevelt, who got a third term [as president] on a false passport, a promise to keep America out of war? I think the supreme punishment for this crime will be written in history that he betrayed the peace and prosperity of the American people." It did not take Browder and his associates long to change that tune after June 22, 1941.
20. U.S. News duly 4, 1941), pp. 26-28, for all above citations by persons responding to this first poll published after the outbreak of the war in Poland between Germany and Russia. U.S. News billed itself on its cover every week as "The Only Magazine Devoted Entirely to Reporting, Interpreting and Forecasting the News of National Affairs." It established a frightfully bad record as a "forecaster." A slogan carried over Lawrence's weekly editorials, credited to George Washington, read: "In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened."
21. U.S. News July 11, 1941), pp. 32-33, for all above citations in this second installment of queries.
22. Newsweek (July 7, 1941], pp. 11-12 for ex-Pres. Hoover's remarks and those of the preceding participants in Newsweek's roundup of reaction to the new phase of the war. Sen. Taft was especially subjected to subsequent abuse for his views, but the criticism abated after the Cold War with the USSR set in after 1945 and the bills for this consequence of victory began to appear.
23. "Against Both Sides," Time (July 7,1941), p.9.
24. Washington Report, U.S. News July 25,1941), p.5.
25. "Back to the l6th Century," Time July 7,1941), p. 21.
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25. Notes, 26-100
by James J. Martin
26. New Masses (July 8,1941), p. 6. The New Masses was the only weekly journal presenting the "Marxist outlook on world events"; it also presented an undeviating Stalinist outlook at any given moment and was probably the most articulate reflector of Stalinist opinion in the U.S.A. during World War II among the journals which were frankly Moscow transmission belts. To many people, it and the Daily Worker constituted the totality of the Communist press here, but there were others of some importance, such as Soviet Russia Today, People's World, The Communist, (official organ of the CPUSA), Amerasia, and the Far Eastern Survey of the Institute of Pacific Relations, which were the two centers for the dispersal of Chinese Communist propaganda, for the most part, while Science and Society specialized mainly in Marxist theory. But there were at least three dozen other publications of far greater circulation, and incredibly more affluent, whose editors and contributors numbered several warmly pro-Soviet partisans of the pen, and whose output and influence were thousands of times more significant. On the other hand, it is not known that a single pro-American journal or writer existed or was produced in the Soviet Union during the entire war.
27. A careful reading of the business and finance sections of the nation's newspapers and magazines 1939-1945 will open up to one an aspect of World War II which is almost entirely lacking in what passes for the history of that time in most conventional tomes to this day.
28. "Soviet Ambassador Oumansky, Back in Favor in Washington's Social and Official Circles," U.S. News (July 11, 1941), p.41. Oumansky was the beneficiary of a sustained news picture campaign which made him appear almost winsome.
29. On Steinhardt and related matters, see "Life in the Capital," "People of the Week" and "Washington Whispers" columns in U.S. News duly 4,1941), pp.38, 40. Said the editors, "U.S. diplomatic advisers were almost unanimous in urging President Roosevelt to support Stalin as against Hitler, on the ground that Hitler was the real threat."
30. Letter from Paul Jones of Columbia, Ohio, in Time July 21,1941), p.4.
31. Newsweek (August 5,1941), p.25.
32. Christian Century July 9, 1941), pp.881-882.
33. Catholic Times and London Tablet quoted in Christian Century July 16,1941), p. 900.
34. "Catholics Will Not Join Hitler's Crusade," Christian Century July 16,1941), pp. 900-901. How British intelligence were able to recruit so many notable Catholics into their fraudulent "Fight for Freedom" organization is a matter worthy of respectful consideration as well as suspicion of their powers of discrimination.
35. New Masses (July 8,1941), p.21. On Col. Donovan's new post in the Roosevelt amateur spy and psychological warfare agency being created at this same moment, see below, note 181.
38. "Bishop Speaks," Time (July 14,1941), pp.42-43.
37. Catholic World July, 1941), p.395.
38.Catholic World (August, 1941), pp.515-516. The Pro Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 345
39. Maynard, "Catholics and the Nazis," American Mercury (October, 1941),pp. 399-400.
Rev. Gillis was affronted by Willkie's 180-degree turnabout on foreign policy, especially as represented by the latter's speech of June 18,1940: "I want to repeat what I have said on several occasions, that despite our sympathy for the Allied cause we must stay out of the war. In these times, when our hearts are confused, we must keep our heads clear. We do not intend to send men from this continent to fight in any war. We shall not serve the cause of democracy by becoming involved in the present war; we shall serve that cause only by keeping out of the war. It is the duty of the President of the United States to recognize the determination of the people to stay out of war and to do nothing by word or deed that will undermine that determination. No man has the right to use the great powers of the Presidency to lead the people indirectly into war; only the people through their elected representatives can make that awful decision; and there is no question as to their decision."
40."Cantuar and Commissars," Time (August 4,1941),p.28.
41."Hitler Attacks Stalin," Christian Century Uuly 2,1941),pp.855-856.
42.Editorial, Christian Century (July 9, 1941),p.875.
43.Holmes, "If Russia Wins," Christian Century Uuly 30,1941),pp.954-956.
44."Shall We Fight for Russia?" Christian Century (September 10, 1941),pp. 1104-1105. Wieman's letters in response to this (Christian Century, September 10, 1941,pp. 1114-1115, and September 24, 1941,p.1180) went into greater detail, which sounded like much domestic reform talk being heard in Britain at that moment; the U.S.A. could avoid going Communist only by massive post-war economic reform, and that could be achieved only by breaking down domestic hostility to Communism, the main barrier to reform. The latter could best be realized by joining with the USSR in the current war. This was amazing reasoning, in view of the utter absence of the slightest tendency to "go Communist" registered anywhere in the U.S.A. at that moment.
45. Newsweek (July 28,1941),p.26.
46. On reportage of Conant's speech see "Tepees and Propaganda," Time July 14,1941),pp.51-52. Time continued its booming of war mongers from the respectable side, and teased the chastened Communists continually. The most recent target after Conant's speech was the Red-lining head of the National Maritime Union, Joe Curran, and the NMU's about-face in now supporting the Anglo- Russian cause. "Hail A-Starboard," Time July 21,1941),p.17.
47. Newsweek (September 15,1941),p.28.
48. Newsweek {September 22,1941),p.24.
49. Time (December 29,1941),p.26.
50. On Caldwell's estimate of the war in Eastern Europe on his return from Russia four months later, see below. Caldwell and his wife, the famous photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, were in Moscow between May 1 and October 1, returning to the U.S.A. by way of Siberia just before the Pearl Harbor attack.
51. Straight, "For a Free World," New Republic (August 11, 1941), p. 182.
52. New Masses (August 12, 1941),p. 19. Other stirring testimonials of Prod Perry's sort were also published from the artist Max Weber and Emil Lengyel.
53. Christian Century (August 6,1941),pp.986-987. He returned to the fear- Communism theme in his report published in the issue of October 15, 1941,p. 1285.
54. "We have not heard that he is agitating for the intervention of Switzerland,his own country, as a belligerent," the editors concluded pointedly. Editorial, "Barth Says Britain's War Is Christian," Christian Century (September 17,1941),p. 113Z.
55. Kilpatrick, "Karl Barth and His Times," Christian Century (October 8,1941), pp.1235-37.
56. Editorial, "Is It a Holy War?" Christian Century (October 8, 1941), pp. 1230-32.
57. Christian Century (August 27,1941), p.1061.
58. Time (August 11, 1941), pp.9-10.
59. Time (August 11, 1941), pp 10-12.
60. Time (August 18,1941), p. ll.
61. Hopkins' visit was originally interpreted for its readers as a gesture to offer "moral support" to Stalin. U.S. News (August 8,1941), p.4; the editorial position was somewhat braver shortly thereafter.
62. On the above see "War Dramas, Old and New: Praise for Prowess of Soviet Troops," U.S. News (August 8, 1941), p. 17. On p. 40 of the same issue it was reported, "Harry Hopkins, in and out of Moscow, is dealing with matters involving delicate political relationships as well as matters of supply.... Some important officials in Washington are wondering if something Mr. Hopkins told him caused England's Prime Minister Churchill to say that U.S. was very near the verge of war."
63. "Role of Harry Hopkins in Forming a World-Wide Anti-Nazi Front," U.S. News (August 15,1941), pp.7-8.
64. U.S. News (August 15,1941), p.17. The preservation or restoration intact of the European colonial domination of Africa and East Asia also appeared to be taken for granted.
65. "Roosevelt-Churchill: Inside Story of Meeting," U.S. News (August 22,1941), pp.7-9, contained the material under the heading, "What it means to Russia." U.S. News (September 12,1941),p.5, reported the first U.S. tanker carrying gasoline to the Soviet had arrived in the Siberian port of Vladivostok.
The preaching fervor and deep religious faith of David Lawrence in the Roosevelt-Churchill "Atlantic Charter" laid out in a two-page editorial ("The Eight Points," U.S. News, August 22,1941,pp.18-l9),is one of the most painful things of the 1941 public opinion molding journalistic propaganda to retread, especially his profound conviction that it was unfailing evidence that the "Allies" planned a "peace without vengeance" and that the German government's warning to their people that they would be dismembered if defeated and that their economy would be locked up behind punitive walls could be dismissed as idle talk by Germans and all others as well. But the German propaganda to their people in 1941 as to their fate if vanquished came closer to actuality by at least a light year than did the vaporings of the "Atlantic Charter"; for five years after defeat their worst fears were realized. Had it not been for Anglo-American panic that the Russians might end up with all of Germany as a satellite, the punitive program in Germany after the war might have gone on indefinitely. When Lawrence burbled about "our humane peace terms," he created an embarrassment for the future of no small dimensions. But he was right in one prediction, when he declared, "We are to be part of the European orbit for generations to come."
It is indeed a tribute to the human powers for self-delusion that over 40 years after the event we still see books published which talk about the issuance of something called the "Atlantic Charter" and "signed" by Roosevelt and Churchill on a British warship off the coast of Newfoundland in August, 1941. What was originally a simple press release handed to a radio operator, and intended largely to be a diversion and concealment for what they had really talked about, quicklv became a noble document rivaling the Magna Carta, The Petition of Right, the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. That there was no such document was admitted as early as 1944 but writers by the hundreds since that time wearily attest to there being a stately position-paper supposedly outlining the reverent state of affairs which was to prevail in perpetuity once the enemy of 1941 had been annihilated and the planet redeemed in a vast bath of hot lead and blood.
66. U.S. News (September 26,1941),p.12.
67. U.S. News (October 10, 1941),p.6.
68. Fortune (August, 1941),pp.4S47,136-146.
69. Hopkins, "Hitler Won't Win," American Magazine (July, 1941),pp. 24-25, 123-124.
70. Hopkins, "The Inside Story of My Meeting With Stalin," American Magazine (December, 1941),pp.14-15,114-117. Political leadership of this kind largely explains the predicament of the West from mid-1945 on, but the beatification of Churchill in the Anglo-American press made criticism almost impossible. The ex post facto yarns about Churchill's attempts to recoup lost ground in 1943 and 1944 described a largely impossible situation.
71. Newsweek review in issue for September 1, 1941,p.42. That by Roosevelt in New York Herald Tribune Books (September 14,1941),p.4. Roosevelt repeated in his review Lyons' criticism of the New York Times and Herald Tribune "for having given space deliberately or gullibly to radical reviewers," when in a few weeks both were to expand upon this practice many magnitudes.
72. American Mercury (August, 1941),pp.135-143; Lyons was sure Stalin was going to be overthrown in a very short time.
73. American Mercury (November, 1941),pp.583-589.
74. Pp.5,20. Said Eastman, echoing Lyons, "Stalin is the weaker of two gangster- tyrants, and common sense demands that we support him in his resistance to Hitler."
75. New Masses (December 9, 1941),p.21.
76. Newsweek (September 8, 1941),p. 12. As a 100% creation of British intelligence services in the U.S.A., it must have been a little trying for the latter to gear up its fraudulent organization in this country against the Communists when at home Churchill and prominent people in his government were continuously huzzaing Stalin and the British home front was vociferously acclaiming all things Communist. But such difficulties were not discernible to the American public, the imposture having been executed so skillfully.
77. Newsweek (September 22,1941),p.9.
78. U.S. News (September 19,1941),p.13.
79. "Communist Muffling," Newsweek (September 15,1941),p.9.
80. There is ample evidence that the economic involvement of the U.S.A. in the war, 1940-1941, had as much to do with the steady involvement in the war as the economic aspect of Anglo-American affairs, 1915-1917 had with the entry into the war of that time, despite the steady efforts of a regiment of obscurantist academics to expunge this from the record.
81. Time (September 8,1941),p.10.
82. The first week of December, 1941 newspapers in the U.S.A. were printing pictures of weeping Russian peasants outside their burning homes, with the captions frankly ascribing such firings and the general destruction in the neighborhood to the Red Army. It was significant that no soldiers of either side appeared in these photographs, which suggested that the damage was being done to the home front far behind the battle lines. See the general approval of this destruction by the Red Army in Time (September 1, 1941), pp. 22-23. On Time's reproduction of Stalinist propaganda from Red Star as "news," see the issue for September 8, 1941, p. 15.
83. Time (September 22, 1941), p. 52. This effusion was accompanied by a cheap, subtle attack on the music of Richard Wagner, though this time there was no suggestion for the extirpation of German music. For the embarrassingly fulsome description of the first performance of this new Shostakovich symphony in the U.S.A. see below.
84. Time (September 29, 1941), p. 12. Oswald Garrison Villard reported that the Legion's vote was "under direct pressure from President Roosevelt, according to Gov. Heil of Wisconsin, who was at the convention." "The Military Outlook," Christian Century (October 8, 1941), pp. 1240-1241.
85. Christian Century (September 24, 1941), p. 1190.
86. Newsweek (September 29, 1941), p. 10.
87. Mowrer, "44 Ways to Beat Hitler," Look (September 23, 1941), p. 10. Look became part of the liberal press with a vengeance in 1941, and as the wartime '40s wore on, it, more than the liberal literary weeklies, became the special organ for the more spectacular trial balloons of the liberal correspondents, columnists and radio commentators. The Nation gradually became the forum for European left wing refugees more than of any other attitudinal group, while even such a staid agency of Eastern Anglo-American-controlled financial voices and its associated world politics as Foreign Affairs opened its pages more and more year by year to pro-war leftist liberals, especially from the fall of 1941 on, when the various impulses for interventionism began to grow together, regardless of their differing strategies and objectives.
88. "Iranian Aftermath," Time (September 15, 1941), pp. 21-22 89. Newsweek (September 1, 1941), p. 13
90. Time (September 15, 1941), p. 18.
91. New York Herald Tribune Books (November 23, 1941), p. 18. Cripps was the founder of the London leftist paper Tribune, which, along with Laski's Herald, were far more the sources of British collectivist, and, at the same time, pro-Soviet, ideas, than any of the organs associated with left partisan sects.
92. Look (September 9, 1941), p. 38.
93. "Biz Meets Facts," Time (July 21, 1941), pp. 73-74.
94. Villard, "This Global War," Christian Century (September 10, 1941) pp. 1108-09. A decade and a half later, Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. and Brent Bozell and their associates were tormenting these same liberals with this identical language and rhetoric, only this time in promoting a war against the liberals' erstwhile Communist "allies," even if it meant "burning out the farthest star." as. Villard, "The Military Outlook," Christian Century (October 8, 1941), pp. 1240-41.
95. On Dewey's views see Ruth Byrns, "John Dewey on Russia," CommonutZl (September 18, 1941), pp. 511-513.
97. See Prof. Childs' letter to the New York Times for January 11, 1942, reprinted in Frontiers of Democracy for March 15, 1942.
98. "Progressives for War," Time (July 7, 1941), p. 48.
99. "Switch," Time (October 13, 1941), pp. 6849. The colleges selected were Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Iowa, Chicago, Missouri, Minnesota, Northwestern and Stanford. The Pro-Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 349
100."Tanks and Thanks to Russia," Time (October 6,1941),p.25.
----------------------------------------------------
26. Notes, 101-211
by James J. Martin
101.For this question and replies below see issue of October 17,1941,pp.28-30.
102.U.S. News (October 10,1941),p.48.
103.On above see U.S. News (October 24,1941),pp.9,19.
104.U.S. News (November 28,1941),p.44.
105.See analysis in Newsweelc (October 6,1941),p.30.
106."Everybody for Freedom," Time (September 1, 1941),p.53. A liberal fixation in particular during the war of 1939-1945 was the tendency to use the term "clerico-fascist" in describing the European enemy states, and to accuse their leaders at the same time of trying to abolish religion. It was essential to this ploy to ignore utterly the subventions enjoyed by the Christian churches in Hitler Germany, the special position of the Roman Catholic church in Mussolini Italy, and the favored status of the Church in Slovakia under Msgr. Tiso, as well as in Hungary and Rumania, let alone what prevailed in Franco Spain, an enemy in the eyes of the Stalinist-oriented liberals everywhere. This was a studied working of both sides of the street; the Russian Orthodox Church was fully behind Stalin, but no liberal was inclined to describe Soviet Russia as a "clerico-fascist" state.
107. This was proposed by Serge Bolshakoff in the London journal The Month (September-October, 1941): "Bolshevism is a de facto religion though without God." Bolshakoff explained that its main doctrine was that matter is eternal and mind only its derivative, in essence a pantheism akin to that of the evolutionists of recent vintage.
108. In a widely circulated statistic resulting from a poll in 1941 it was estimated that religious preferences of the U.S. Armed Forces were as follows: Protestant: 59%; Catholic: 31%; Jewish: 2%. Those expressing no preference were 8%. This was compared with a U.S. church membership survey in 1936 in which the breakdown was 55% Protestant, 37% Catholic and 8% Jewish.
109. "Peace Without Platitudes," Time (October 13,1941),pp.4344,46. Time excerpted this from a somewhat longer work which was published under the same title in Fortune (January, 1942),pp.42-43,87-90. It was of interest that Dulles mentioned the Soviet Union only once in this lengthy treatise, in an aside referring to the war with Finland in 1939-1940. Otherwise his critique of the new world order he saw taking place and the one he preferred to take place both had no Soviet Russia in them. It might be noted that his preferred future was couched in more platitudes than the Roosevelt-Churchill proposal wrapped in the "Atlantic Charter." Dulles' utter repudiation of the balance-of-power concept was his most striking contribution.
110. Liberal social democrat Marxists in the U.S.A. were always circumspect in the selling of Tillich, with the accent always on his function as a theologian of sorts. His political pedigree was usually masked until well after the war. Such works of his as Die sozialistische Entscheidung (Offenbach-am-Main, 1948) rarely surfaced in America.
111. Neibuhr's intellectual turncoatism on the subject of war was as spectacular as that of MacLeish. As an editor of the journal The Worid Tomorrow in the first half of the 1930s Neibuhr was famous for statements hostile to ever participating again in any war which might break out anywhere. This journal, heavily dominated by socialist and pacifist clergymen, devoted extensive space in its issue of May 10, 1934, summarizing a poll of 20,870 clergymen of 12 religious bodies in the U.S.A., nearly 13,000 of whom responded that they were determined "not to sanction or participate in any future war," according to the summation by Kirby Page (p. 222.) Niebuhr's separate statement was quite in harmony with this view.
112. There was no book such as Rae Hamilton Abrams' Preachers Present Arms, the famous chronicle of clerical belligerence in World War One, after the end of World War Two. Though many had strong views on the subject, no class of educated persons exhibited less martial fervor during and after the war than the nation's clergy of all persuasions. This role was dominated by their long-time adversaries, the secular liberals, once determinedly pacifist, but steadily grown more affectionate for left-Marxist causes about the world. These latter easily out- distanced the bellicose divines of 1917-1918 in advocacy of American involvement in gore production, 1937-1945. Though there were a number of prominent clerical figures who lent their position and prestige to war propaganda, probably more English than Americans, there was little of the "holy war" aspect in their effort. Civilians dominated this latter emanation from the propaganda factories.
An outstanding characteristic, and probably the predominant one, of 20th cen- tury American liberalism, has been its notorious and almost comic selective indignation. Political policies and practices which have aroused deafening condemnation when employed by their enemies anywhere have been winked at, condoned and at times vociferously applauded when similarly put into effect by their friends. Minority control, total obliteration of civil rights, racist exclusion, sustained denial of majority rule, comprehensive terrorist suppression of rivals and adversaries, and the commission of mass murder and systematic political massacres, have all drawn their support and apologia or have been almost totally ignored for many decades. The identical programs, put into effect by enemies of liberalism, have excited a volume of disapprobation and condemnation which surely has been by decibel measurement heard in outer space.
113. Time (October 6, 1941), p. 77. The clever smearing of Quisling, for many years a prominent anti-Bolshevik in Norway, was probably the outstanding piece of character assassination achieved by Anglo-Russo-American propaganda in the entire war. Essential to any understanding of the magnitude of the savagery in- flicted on Quisling personally and his systematic defamation in every other respect is the book by Ralph Hewins, Quisling: Prophet Without Honor Cohn Day, 1966). Hewins was a chastened major perpetrator of the literary outrages on Quisling.
114. "Power Politics," Time (October 13, 1941), p. 11. The story was illustrated with a Talburt cartoon from the New York World Telegram depicting a beaming Stalin wearing a halo marked "from F.D.R." Some idea of how the spreading of the war to Russia had scrambled the situation for Catholics can be understood by a study of the refugee German Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein's "Christian World Revolution" in the January, 1942 Atlantic Monthly (pp. 104-111), a tortured think piece trying to make a case for Catholics against Hitler, knowing the vast anti- Communist U.S. Catholic position. The presence of Stalin on the side of the other- wise sainted "Allies" was a bone in the craw of the pro-war liberal Catholic, especially, for the entire war.
Loewenstein, who fled Germany early after the triumph of Hitler, established a formidable pedigree as an author of anti-Hitler works in England and the U.S.A., some of them lengthy tomes which argued an idealistic Catholic conservative line, and dwelt upon a "new Germany" to come once the Nazis were destroyed. Among these were The Tragedy of a Nation (London: Faber; New York: Macmillan, 1934) and After Hitler's Fall (London: Faber; New York: Macmillan, 1935). The first had an introduction by Henry Wickham Steed, and was used as a piece of anti-German propaganda by the English war party. Loewenstein found out after 1945 what kind of a Germany his Anglo-American hosts were interested in, and his views in the 1950s were far different as a consequence.
115. "Pointing to the Record," U.S. News (October 10, 1941), pp. 28-29.
116. U.S. News (October 17, 1941), p. 25; this entry repeated the Herald Tribune's criticism of "whitewashing the Kremlin," an indication that there were limits even to this major affluent Anglophile organ's accelerating receptivity to pro-Stalinist puffs.
117. "Are the Four Freedoms a Delusion?" Christian Century (October 15,1941), pp.1262-64.
118. "An Issue Without Substance," New Masses (October 14,1941),p.21.
119. Time (October 13,1941),pp.20-21, for the comment on the formation of the "Anti-Hitler Front." The Stockholm paper Aftonbladet in September, 1939 printed replies made by the Comintern to Swedish Communists querying on grand strategy, of which the following were especially significant:
Q. How can a world revolution be evolved rapidly?
A. By a long war, according to the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
Q. Is a European war apt to promote the interests of the Comintern?
A. Yes.
Q. Can a Russo-German pact promote the outbreak of war?
A. Yes.
This material was reprinted in Life magazine in the U.S.A. also in September, 1939.
120. Newsweek (October 13,1941),pp.54,59.
121. Time (October 20,1941),p.15. The feature story on Russian aid was on pp. 13-14 of this issue.
122. Time (October 27,1941),p.17. "Anti-fascist" propaganda long had it both ways. Hitler Germany and German-occupied lands in Europe were systematically described as a fearful animal cage in which no one made a move unless under observance by the German home state security police, the Gestapo. At the same time this propaganda reported on scores of books by escapees by every imaginable route, whose authors described additional thousands of escapees of every imaginable station of life.
123. Time (October 27,1941),pp.24-26.
124. Probably the earliest notice of the impending publication of Davies' book was in the "Turns with a Bookworm" column written by Isabel M. Paterson, in the New York Herald Tribune Books issue of October 26,1941,p.30.
125. New Masses (October 28,1941),p.5.
126. A nearly full page advertisement of this celebration was run in the New Masses (October 28,1941,p.25.
127. New Masses (November 4,1941),p.22, for this and above references.
128. Fortune (October, 1941),p.105. The people responding to this poll apparently were questioned in August, 1941. What the attitudinal situation was in the U.S.A. from December, 1941 to the end of August, 1945 has to be looked at from two perspectives. If one follows the book publishers, most by far of the magazines, newspapers, the polls and the radio, it was substantially to the left. But this was mainly deceptive, a thin icing over a vast national community in factories and in the armed forces, which was largely untouched by all of this. When their views were allowed to leak out under anonymous auspices and circumstances, they indicated anything but a desire for a stunning new style postwar leftist world. If anything this majority of the national community expressed a yearning for a return to the prewar situation as closely as it could be approximated. The transparent politics of the poll takers and the majority of the mouthpieces of radio and print seemed to act upon those holding to the former sentiment as a warning to remain in an underground.
129. Chamberlin, "America Faces the Iron Age," Christian Century (October 29, 1941),pp.1331-34. It is hard to find even a few lines of realistic political writing in the six months prior to U.S. involvement in World War II on the subject of Stalinist Russia and its stake and likely part in a world victorious over Germany, Italy and Japan. There are hundreds of pieces everywhere by people concerned with the future threat of Hitler to the U.S.A, much shuddering over the possibility of Nazi "domination of the world," but also almost as much synthetic advice on what had to be done to Germany when the British won the war. Scores of postwar visions contained only the Anglo-American powers, and never any Communists. One of the best indicators of this near-total discount of Russian Communism in the future was the long think-piece by Raoul de Roussy de Sales, a pet French propagandist of the moment, in his "Socialism and the Future," in the Atlantic Monthly (December, 1941, pp.694-704), largely an account of the vastly preferable collectivism of the Roosevelt New Deal to those represented by the various socialisms of more dogmatic sort, as the pattern for a future planetary order. Enthused de Roussy de Sales,
It may be that by siding with the democracies (much against his will) Stalin will eventually save the independence of his country and his own regime. But, even if he should sit among the victors, it will not be in the capacity of the head of Communism and world revolution, but as the national leader of the Russian people. I do not say that a joint victory of the United States, England and the USSR will mean necessarily the disap- pearance of Communist rule in Russia, but if there is to be a new interna- tional order after this war (provided it is not Hitler's) those who will give shape to this order are men like Roosevelt and Churchill or their suc- cessors-not Stalin. (p. 699)
The short-circuiting of this grandiose kind of dream, which was expressed in printed and oratorical form thousands of times, 1941-1945, when the "victors" finally "sat," was achieved with most of these same intellectual opinion-making prophets observing with mouths agape wondering what had happened. But the likes of de Roussy de Sales is what the wartime American intellectual was brought up on.
130. Editorial, "Canterbury Sees Moscow In a New Light," Christian Century (October 22,1941), pp.1291-92.
131. Editorial, Christian Century (November 12, 1941), pp. 1399-1401. On Niebuhr's turnaround from non-belligerent to warrior see note 111, above. One might profit from comparing the sophisticated differences between Niebuhr's statements in the prewar 1930s in such as The World Tomorrow, for example, and the more transparently pro-Soviet Nation.
132. Editorial, "Clergy Pod," Commonweal (October 31,1941), pp.37-38.
133. "Catholic Clergy Vote Against Wards Christian Century (October 29,1941), pp.1323-24.
134. Time (December 1, 1941), p. 44. There was a similar recruitment of interventionist preachers by Kenneth Leslie, editor of the Protestant Digest, a petition signed by 1000 Protestant clergymen, calling for increased aid to the "anti-Hitler" forces in the world. The increasingly pro-Stalinist orientation of this journal became the subject of steadily mounting attention in the closing two years of the war and after.
The clever Anglo-American propaganda ploy of selling their respective populaces on a war against only Hitler personally and the "Nazi tyranny" involved ineluctably a war for the mass destruction of millions of Germans who were not Nazis and were not particularly enchanted by Hitler. In this way was their basic Germanophobia concealed under high-sounding verbiage and empty, wordy "principles." In the same way the fiercely pro-war Communists and their ardent liberal allies had not the slightest compunction about the urban massacres by Allied saturation strategic bombing, which obliterated many German fellow Marxists. In reality their pretension about Marxist ideology was an utter fraud, in that they looked upon the annihilation of presumably blood-brother ideologues with considerable relish, and gloated over it thousands of times. The ultimate advantage of this concealed program of ethnic mass murder was postponed until that stage of victory was reached where atrocity propaganda came to the fore to guide postwar policy; the ascribing to the enemy of what has befallen him is the essence of successful atrocity propaganda.
135. Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid, p. 136.
136. It may be a long time before Americans see again the kind of personal courage demonstrated by Lindbergh in his campaign against the Roosevelt Administration's war-bound drive. Defenders of FDR who have perennially lamented their champion's abuse by the nation's press are hard put to produce anything to compare with the venomous attack on Lindbergh, which actually continued in one way or another for over 30 years, until his death in Hawaii in 1973. In the 1947-1957 period it became a verbal reflex of sobered liberals to complain heatedly of "guilt by association" in the numerous investigations of sustained pro- Stalinist activism on their part in the previous decade. Some might have remembered profitably the grossly malicious allegations by Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, that Lindbergh was acting in the best interests of Adolf Hitler by urging a policy of neutrality.
137. Time (September 8, 1941), pp. 12-13.
138. Time (August 11, 1941), p. 10.
139. "The Unsilenced," Time (September 8, 1941), pp. 12-13.
140. Time (October 6, 1941), pp. 18-20.
141. The evolution of thinking about the weekly newsmagazines as truthful, impartial and reliable sources is not the subject of this study. Much of their reputation along such lines accrued as a result of their phenomenal growth during World War II, by which times they were all mainly transmission belts for official governmental views and had engaged in extremely drastic self-censorship. In the immediate pre-war period they were ceaselessly shifting about, searching for stances from which to operate, though becoming weekly a more and more pro-official or "establishment" organ in each case, a situation which was undoubtedly inevitable, given their socioeconomic origins.
In the case of Time, which engaged in the most bald-faced efforts at posing as a detached observer of affairs, its protestation that it had no ax to grind was enough to tickle almost any political funny-bone. The exigencies of following the American Century line of its founder and owner, Henry Luce, produced much the same problems as those facing any ideological journal, though the results were more variable. Some weekly issues were detached and realistic, while others were such obvious propaganda for their pet views and causes that the management could have given away crowns and pounds to Pravda or Volkischer Beobachter and still have had them squirming with jealous admiration.
Time's politics were not entirely visible, but it appeared to yearn for a situation resulting from a homogenization of U.S. majority political parties, and the regrouping of them into two different bodies, the American Century supporters for global intervention indefinitely, and the wizened little remnant an "isolationist" sect, existing only to put up token opposition at elections, to give the illusion that operationally the country had not become a one-party state such as was abominated when seen elsewhere in the world.
In their June 9 issue the editors had declared that "every man is a propagandist, whether he knows it or not." When this was questioned by a correspondent as to whether this also applied to Time, the editors expanded upon it in this manner: "Time makes no claim to being unbiased and impartial," "But Time does set as its goal to be fair in reporting and never takes sides in partisan affairs." (July 14, 1941, pp. 2-3.) This howler was of course simply superb double-think; its side-taking in "partisan affairs" was already blatant and widely-recognized. A good example dealt with the matter of whether the country should support Roosevelt's obvious pro-war policies or not. The latter had long been tagged with the pejorative epithet "isolationist." And even Time recognized it was a traditional view of lengthy standing in the U.S.; "The doctrine of U.S. isolationism has a long and honorable past," it admitted (October 6, 1941, p. 19). But what irked the editors and owner at that moment was its effectiveness in frustrating the political and journalistic warriors and their many elite and affluent fellow travelers, in banking, business, industry and the universities.
It was bad enough to put up with labor figures, disaffected liberals and anti- communist leftists, influential pacifists such as Paul Comly French, the likes of Edmund Wilson, Norman Thomas and John L. Lewis, the Writers' Anti-War Bureau, the Keep America Out of War Congress, the Womens' League for Peace and Freedom, and many other related groups and personalities. Even more formidable and surely more effective were the America First Committee and the immensely influential newspaper groups headed by Col. Robert R. McCormick, Joseph Patterson and William Randolph Hearst, Sr.
Many found it riotously funny to see Time berating and belaboring the McCormick-Patterson-Hearst press as "news-slanting." In reporting foreign affairs, no one stood ahead of the American Century press when it came to "news- slanting" on U.S. foreign policy and international relations. Time was enlisted in the war on Germany and Japan long before the rest of the country, and steadily reported anti-war neutralist activity as though it were barely a non-criminal enterprise. As late as six days before the Pearl Harbor attack, Time had lambasted McCormick's extremely influential Chicago Tribune as "unsurpassed for furious bias since frontier journalism" (Dec. l, 1941; pp.60-64.) In this incredible piece of complex hypocrisy, Time omitted any criticism of the other two major Chicago newspapers, the blatantly pro-war tabloid owned by the millionaire Marshall Field, the Sun, and the Daily News, owned by Roosevelt's own Secretary of the Navy, the wealthy Col. Frank Knox, as equally guilty of "furious bias" on the same subject. Of course, Time itself was the most clearly identified printed source in the major periodical press in which "news-slanting" in behalf of the pro-war camp was recognizable policy; it probably did more with the verbal reflexes "isolationist" and "internationalist" (its preferred euphemism for "interventionist") of all organs of printed communication in the U.S.
142. Time (November 3, 1941), pp. 21-22.
143. Newsweek (November 3, 1941), p. 20.
144. See especially the lead editorial in the New Masses [November 11, 1941), p. 21, for one of these.
145. Lamont, "What Americans Are Learning," New Masses (November 11, 941), pp. 340.
146. See especially quotes on pages 19 and 31 in the November 17, 1941 issue of Time. In the first of these Time quoted from Hitler's speech in the second week of November in which he referred to Churchill as "the crazy drunkard who for years now has been ruling England." The reason for the almost offensively fulsome adulation of Stalin was not discernible, nor was it ever so. There were no counter- demonstrations of affection for England anywhere in Russia then, nor were there ever any. Fighting their own war for their own objectives, one might have understood that there was no compulsion among Russians to demonstrate "solidarity" with the English; the members of the non-Russian Comintern could be depended upon to engage in any public effusions of such sentiment thought necessary. At home in Moscow, all was business, Russian business. But if anything, there should have been recognition among Russians that English help was more important to them than any Russian help to the English. The latter was microscopic, other than the function the Eastern Front played in diverting part of the German air force from English targets; but even here the assistance was more imagined than real.
147. New Masses (November 11, 1941), p. 19, for quotations cited below.
148. Cot's political pedigree was expertly obfuscated by American liberals until the publication of his biography of Marx in the symposium The Torch of Freedom (Farrar and Rinehart, 1943), edited by Emil Ludwig and Henry B. Kranz. This revelation by Cot was sufficient to pinpoint his Front Populaire sentiments, if his occasional essays in The Protestant were insufficient illumination.
149. "What's Behind the Urals?" U.S. News (November 14, 1941), p. 19.
150. "The Yeas and the Nays," U.S. News (November 7, 1941), p. 49.
151. Lawrence, "Hitler Defeats Hitler," U.S. News (November 14, 1941), pp. 20-21. Lawrence was one of the most strident voices in the U.S.A. complaining why nothing had been done about "aggression" by Japan since 1931 and by Germany since 1933. He continued this well after the European war began. However, he was one of the very last to see Stalinist Russia a threat or an "aggressor." As a prognosticator of trouble in this quarter he had one of the poorest records in American journalism.
152. Time (November 10, 1941), pp. 29-30. Mass journalism tends to put its moguls into a position vis-a-vis the State where their conversion into commissar types is almost inevitable.
153. Newsweek (November 17, 1941), p. 22. Roosevelt sent the note pledging a billion dollars in lend-lease aid to the Reds on the 24th anniversary of Woodrow Wilson's severance of diplomatic relations with the Bolsheviks in 1917, and Litvinov (see note below), whom Wilson refused to accept as the first Red ambassador to the U.S., was appointed Stalin's new U.S. ambassador the same day, a matter of odd timing which called to mind to a few the 180-degree turn of U.S. liberalism on the Bolsheviks in a quarter of a century.
The ecstatic rehabilitation of Litvinov as a result of his restoration to good odor in the Soviet diplomatic bureaucracy with his appointment to America led to several kinds of rejoicing among the non-Communist fellow travelers and ardent well-wishers of the USSR in the U.S.A. One of the consequences was a re-raking over of the dramatic events of 1937-1939, as the Soviet ploy of "collective security" and the "popular front" collapsed, leading to the refusal of Americans to back Roosevelt in his "quarantine the aggressors" trial balloon of October, 1937, then the Munich agreement of September, 1938 and the diplomatic revolution of August, 1939, the immediate precursor but not necessarily the trigger of the hostilities which ensued the following month.
One of the most comprehensive was that by the veteran Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, whose pedigree as a friend of the USSR was outranked by very few. His lengthy commentary was delayed in publication ("He Who Got Slapped," Collier's, January 3, 1942, pp. 12, 39-40) but got an ex- posure before a subscriber total of nearly 3,000,000 Americans, and probably millions of others as well, something no Communist could have expected to achieve in a number of lifetimes. Inspired by the proceedings at the Nov. 7, 1941 Soviet Embassy reception on the 24th anniversary of the "Soviet National Birthday," Duranty, who had met Litvinov as far back as 1919, proceeded to lavish praise on the latter as the father of the whole "collective security" gambit between 1934 and 1939. Rejoicing that Americans were becoming so voluble in their praise of the Red Army's loudly advertised resistance to the German invasion, Duranty undertook to scold those who had abandoned the pro-Soviet positions earlier.
Duranty reasserted once more that the real victim of the Munich pact between the French and British, represented by Daladier (and Bonnet, the actual French diplomat on the scene) and Chamberlain, and the Germans, led by Hitler, was the Soviet Union, and the Czechs secondarily. Though the majority of even Communist-hating "conservatives" adopted the Red pejorative term "appeasement" (claimed to have been his invention by the British Communist Claude Cockburn) to describe Munich, a demonstration of political ignorance which must have kept Communists about the world laughing for the last 45 years, it should be pointed out that the Stalinists and their friends were considerably more astute in seeing the real dimensions of the Daladier-Chamberlain-Hitler proceedings in Munich. A vigorous assertion that the Munich operation was first of all an anti- Communist agreement was made by Charles A. Davila, former Rumanian minister to the U.S., some months later, but buried in the back pages of the Nation (July 25, 1942, p. 80.) It was the substance of Davila's view that had the "democracies" "stood" with the Czechs at Munich that the Red Army would have been in Central Europe in a matter of days. This could be divined by a straining of Duranty's prose as well. In his high acclaim of what he called Litvinov's "greatest speech" before the League of Nations at Geneva, Duranty pointed out that in essence it was "a fruitless attempt to convince the French and British delegates that Russia would adhere with all its influence, and force of arms if need be, to its pledge to aid Czechoslovakia." (emphasis added.) How any support for the Czechs could have been supplied by anyone except Stalin was not imagined then, and in view of what happened in Poland a year later, could hardly have been imagined by anyone later.
A loud and substantial part of the American Right in recent times has wanted it both ways; they have pushed for an unremitting anti-Communist program and at the same time have mouthed the Left revulsion for the Munich pact, using the same descriptive catcalls as the Communists and fellow travelers they pretend to abominate. (Somehow or other they have managed to overlook that in France with the exception of the political exotic Henri de Kerillis, the only opponents of Daladier on Munich in the Chamber of Deputies were the 75 Communists.)
Despite this long-standing verbal dust cloud, through which few have been able to peer, the French-British decision at Munich had much good to say for it. It was consistent with their Russian policy from at least 1933 as well, since "standing" with the Czechs would not only have opened the gates of Central Europe to the Red Army; such a decision would have placed them in accedence to old Soviet frontier rectification demands. By bellowing in unison with the Left over Munich, the Right, particularly that in America, have voted in favor of the Red Army being in 1938 where they eventually were, thanks to their American "allies," in 1945.
The major ingredient of the Cold War for nearly 40 years has consisted of ex post facto American remorse over this consequence, and the wearisome and only feebly successful rebuilding of a power concentrate in what is left of non-Communist Europe to match off against a Communist saturation of total power in Central and Eastern Europe, to which tacit approval was tendered long before Yalta. It may be that the Anglo-French position was hopeless, and that the small countries fabricated at Versailles and after, Iying between Germany and Russia, extending from Finland to the Black Sea, were doomed to either German or Russian interference. But on the face of it, Chamberlain and Daladier emerge as towering figures of wisdom compared to Churchill, Duff Cooper, Lord Halifax, Lord Lothian, Anthony Eden and Robert Vansittart, and the likes of Attlee, Cripps, Bevin, Shinwell and Morrison. Concessions to Germany resulted in undesirable consequences, but the former did not bring the Red Army into Central Europe, which is what the logic of the challenge to Germany called for. One can throw up barrels of stale propaganda accusations of German intentions to "conquer the world," but until pressured to do otherwise, the Anglo-French policies down to the end of March, 1939 still pitted German ambitions against those of the Soviet, allowing themselves a position to move about, at least relatively, as to their best interests. Once the commitment to support either the Germans or Russians was made, the outcome was predictable and often predicted: either a German- or Russian-dominated Central Europe. The long-range vision of the Churchill wing of British leadership is that they preferred Russian to German, and they promptly got it. Churchill's opening of the Cold War with his March, 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri is the perfect testament to his political myopia.
A related rumination of the time, and since reiterated in many hundreds of books and thousands of smaller pieces, is that if only the British and French and the American people had backed Roosevelt in his "quarantine" doctrine of October, 1937 (Actually fully developed by Stalinists a good 2 years before FDR's speech in Chicago), Hitler, intimidated, would have evaporated in fear, the Germans would have slunk home and cowered in their basements, and a Central Europe tailored to Anglo-Franco-American specifications and desires would have prevailed in perpetuity. This theme is always built on a foundation of theoretical statecraft from which the Soviet Union is always omitted. Therefore the possibility of a German-Russian agreement a la that of August, 1939, but occurring well before it, is breezily ignored and never considered. If being checked by a British policy turnabout in late March, 1939 led to the Pakt five months later, is there any reason that adoption of a similar line in October, 1937 might not have brought about a diplomatic revolution resembling the Pakt but, say, in March, 1938?
Again, the upholders of the above-mentioned strategy to "contain" Hitler wish not to confront the obvious: the Anglo-French and their moral supporters in America were through in Central Europe, and that it was a matter of whether they would support the Germans or the Russians in this region. The entry of the Americans directly in the situation as a consequence of the military events of 1944-1945 did not alter this at all. From a European point of view it has been a nuisance at best, and a replacement of an inept and impotent Anglo-French policy by one which has yet to be demonstrated to be very much better. American Cold War "containment" simply put the problem into suspended animation for a generation, and now going on to another. One might summarize the U.S.A. apologetic satirically as follows: it was a lovely, noble, righteous war; if only the Communists, with whom we were in such exalted wartime partnership, had not tried to gain anything out of the victory and allowed the spoils to accrue to their Western "partners," all would be well in the world.
154. "Mr. Wallach Goes to Washington," Time (November 17,1941), pp.23-24; "Litvinoff's Return," Time (December 8, 1941), p. 29. Still others identified Litvinoff as originally Moysheev Vallakh, the son of a Jewish bank clerk in Bialystok, Russia. His employment record, 1908-1918, prior to his emergence as a Bolshevik bureaucrat reputedly involved work as a clerk, draftsman, newspaper reporter and traveling salesman, supposedly for a corset manufacturer. Those who jeered at the German Foreign Minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, as a one-time wine salesman neglected to point out that one of their diplomat heroes had also spent much time on the road.
155. Associated Press report, in Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph, December 11,1941), p. Al. The steadily accelerating propaganda from pro-Soviet spokesmen in the U.S.A. of all kinds from 1941 on, stressing Soviet faithfulness to their given word, always skipped rapidly past the expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations on December 14,1939 for carrying on the war with Finland in the first place.
156. "There Goes Finland," Time (November 17,1941), p.15.
157. Lawrence, "'Loyal Opposition'-Where ?" U.S. News (July 4, 1941), pp. 18-19.
158. U.S. News (July 25,1941), inside back cover.
159.U.S. News (August 22,1941), p.23.
160.Colorado Springs Gazette, November 1,1941, p.4.
161.Time (September 15,1941), p.16.
162.Time (October 27, 1941), p. 13. In the summer of 1941 the National Resources Planning Board published a pamphlet titled "After Defense-What?" This suggested that this top-level think tank looked upon the flood of defense spending as a short term phenomenon, and that its unemployment blotter effect would be short lived, thus requiring a new impulse, unlike either the New Deal or "defense spending" to perform the function of putting Americans to work. That a succession of wars, followed by a succession of defense programs, would serve to postpone this problem, which the NRPB saw shaping up right away, did not cross the minds of the eminent economic savants.
l63. U.S. News (October 10, 1941), p.48. Roosevelt was reputed to be "greatly amused" at the "violently unfavorable" reaction to this proposal from "many Congressmen who once favored keeping the profits out of war." Another remarkable somersault had been performed by a sector of American opinion in five years, as it began to sink home what some of the economic consequences of gearing up the "arsenal of democracy" portended for local districts.
164. Time (December 8,1941), p.28.
165. One of the almost forgotten episodes of the earliest years of the Bolshevik upheaval was that associated with the mining engineer Washington B. Vanderlip, representing a mainly Los Angeles-based investor group seeking from Lenin a mining lease on Kamchatka. Vanderlip, who declared to Americans that the "Red terror" was simply propaganda and was not taking place, drew a remarkable amount of space in the American newspapers from October, 1920 on into 1922.
166. "What Mr. Batt Saw in Russia," U.S. News (November 21,1941), p.15, for above observations. The near-panic attached to "defense" beginning in the early summer of 1940 and the sharp turnaround from criticism to accolades for industrial war production was not without its problems. There was a largely concealed struggle between the incumbent New Deal bureaucrats of the top rank, reluctantly doffing domestic reform for planetary martial roles, and the newly perfumed industrial moguls recruited for the job of mass-producing billions of dollars of all kinds of weapons, sometimes referred to as the "dollar-a-year" men. These top executives entered quasi-government service presumably waiving federal compensation, though the immense revenue accruing to their companies via arms contracts seemed not to be a subject worth discussing publicly. The subject of dispute over the pressure to produce for Stalin was even more concealed, though it can be assumed to have had some influence in these conflicts over direction of policy. An interesting contemporary book over this fight at the top was Carlisle Bargeron's Confusion on the Potomac (Wilfred Funk), attacked in Foreign Affairs but otherwise reviewed in a commendatory way, even a year after publication (1942).
167. Time (November 24,1941), p.87. A week before the Pearl Harbor attack, an organization of American interventionists, the Associated Leagues for a Declared War, had named James W. Gerard, the U.S. ambassador to Germany during the early years of World War One, as their honorary chairman. Gerard took on the symbolic post, declaring that "the time had come to declare a state of war with Germany." Associated Press report, Colorado Springs Gazette, December 1,1941, p. 1. But the way things were going in terms of public disaffection for initiated belligerency, it might have been a very long wait for ex-Ambassador Gerard and the Associated Leagues had not the welcome assault by Japan a week later brought about the dearly-desired war declaration.
l68. Time (December 8,1941), p.25.
169. "Nice Old Gentleman," Time (December 1, 1941), p.25.
170. Time (December 8,1941), p.20.
171. New Masses (December 9, 1941), p. l9. Willkie's gratuitous volunteering of the opinion that the Communist Manifesto was "one of the great historical documents" earned him the criticism of Rep. Paul Schafer of Michigan on the floor of the House of Representatives. It was a strange testimonial to hear from the lips of a well-to-do corporation lawyer. The Pr>Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 359
171a. The largest part of the justification for American involvement in World War II has been ex post facto; on the basis of what happened after hostilities were joined, participation has been hailed as vindicated, and all ensuing and subsequent policies have been explained as the ultimate in rectitude.
This became progressively a convention, in the generation after the war, when repeated publication of information and previously suppressed documentation and memoirs revealed, for instance, that the pretense of neutrality on the part of the Roosevelt administration was a garment, not a tissue, of lies, and that it was an arm of Britain almost from the beginning of the war. In a similar way, the sustained revelation of mendacity all during the war was increasingly and often vociferously hailed as justified in view of the alleged monstrousness of the enemy's subsequent behavior. That little of this would have ever taken place had the war been terminated on a negotiated basis, as was possible on many occasions, is rarely if ever allowed to enter into the account. It is always a convenient rationalization to claim nobility for one's behavior at one moment by calling attention to specious factors at a later time which appear to give ersatz righteousness to the initiating action. The clever ploy of provoking a response, in order to justify what is done in reaction to it, and which was intended or hoped for to begin with, is hardly a novel device in the history of statecraft, however.
172. Sen. Norris quoted in Newsweek (October 27,1941), p.16. The opinion of Sen. Norris was actually quite widespread, and undoubtedly accounted to a serious degree for the intractability of the Administration toward Japan, and the unwillingness to negotiate anything; the attitude seemed to be that one does not have to compromise with weak inferiors. The widely read commentator on military and naval matters, Major George Fielding Eliot, urged war on Japan in his column, and in other writings; "We have but to stir a finger, and they will sustain such a defeat as they will not recover from this side of total ruin," is the way he confidently stated the matter. Roosevelt was known to have a very low opinion of Japan as a naval power, while liberal and Communist opinion makers vaulted back and forth on the subject, portraying Japan as an invincible juggernaut, especially threatening to Stalinist Siberia and the future of Communism in China, and, alternately, as a thin shell of superficial strength but with "feet of clay," easily destroyed by a Western military foray whenever the latter made up their mind to confront them. One should be aware of the incredible opportunities that lay in the hands of those interested in misleading and lying to the American public about Japan, in these times. Those non-Japanese Americans who had a real command of Japanese were estimated by Archibald MacLeish, the chief of the American propaganda services, to be only three of a total U.S.A. populace of nearly 135,000,000. The editors of Publishers Weekly were a little more generous in their estimate; they concluded there were about 100. See "Global War Demands New Skills in Foreign Languages," Publishers Weekly (September 26,1942), p.1192, for the quote from MacLeish, and their estimate. An absorbing summary of contemporary misconceptions about the Japanese is the section "Prodding Japan into War," in Porter Sargent's Getting US into War (Boston, 1941), pp.525-545.
173. Time (November 10,1941), p.13.
174. Time (December 8,1941), p. ll.
175. Abend, "How the U.S. Navy Will Fight Japan," Look (November 18,1941), pp.20-21.
Part of the over-confidence in the sureness of a swift victory in a mater of a few weeks over Japan in any likely war, which was almost universal (financial "experts" did not think Japan had enough money to fight more than two months), was a result of many decades of belief that Japanese industrial quality was extremely poor, partially due to the experience of seeing nothing but toys, Christmas tree ornaments and electric light bulbs in American shops. Many years of hilarious stories had gone around describing Japanese naval vessels as comic craft at best.
One of the great yarns which was retold with many novelty decorations concerned a Japanese dreadnought which allegedly turned turtle and sank upon its launching, because it had been faultily constructed from stolen plans previously tampered with by U.S. or British agents. This was revealed after Pearl Harbor to have been only a torpedo boat, the Tomoduru, which tipped over because of overloading with guns and torpedo tubes, when it had insufficient displacement, according to Time (December 22, 1941), p. 24.
176. An amazingly large number of people in public communications in the U.S. complacently expected that the prying loose of Japan from the British, French and Dutch colonies in the Far East would be followed a genial and uneventful restoration, after the entry of the U.S. into the Pacific-War, in the same way their colleagues dealing with the war in Europe expected pro-British or pro-French regimes to return to control of the region between Germany and Russia. Part of this mindless complacency was due to the widely-encouraged belief that the Western powers were deeply loved in the Orient by all except the Japanese, partially due to generations of Sinophile sentiments encouraged by missionaries, among other things. In harmony with this was an incredible piece in Time two weeks after the Pearl Harbor bombing, "How to Tell Your Friends From the Japs" (December 22, 1941, p. 33), which was worse than no tipsheet at all in aiding distinguishing one sub-racial group of Orientals from another.
The entry of the United States into World War II via the Pearl Harbor attack triggered another development which had bittersweet responses in both the business community and the consumer public: the machinery of price controls, rationing and many other nagging harassments which so bedevilled those subject to them and so elated those who made and administered them. Frustrated by the failure of domestic New Deal agencies to loose the controls upon the land, so dear to the controllers among the bureaucratic multitude employed in its police actions, the war brought about the regulators' dream. It now became high patriotic duty to govern and regulate the citizenry's tastes, and massive doses of sumptuary legislation soon flowed out, to the delight of the element made responsible for applying it. The agency primarily involved, the Office of Price Administration, soon became the most hated agency of the entire war, and was loaded down with the haughtiest and most insufferable people that the general populace had to put up with for the next five years. Particularly offensive to a growing number was its first chief, Leon Henderson, despite continuous efforts in the mass media to sell him as an economic giant. The glamor portrait in the U.S. News (May 8, 1942, pp. 14-15), titled "Leon Henderson, Boss of Our Economy," had many counterparts. Eventually he simply had to be replaced in the interests of domestic war morale and societal tranquillity, by a somewhat less abrasive personality, Chester Bowles.
Usually ignored were the army of underlings gathered around Henderson, delighted by the enhanced aura of their collective egos, and they may have done as much to annoy and infuriate the national community as their boss, if not more so. Most prominent of these was John Kenneth Galbraith, Henderson's deputy administrator, a one time professor of economics at Princeton University and an editor of Luce's business mouthpiece magazine, Fortune, in the mid-1930s. "Tall, towering" Galbraith, as U.S. News described him, had been in the OPA prior to Pearl, and was credited by Time (December 22, 1941, pp. 33-34) for swiftly instituting the legislation, apparently prepared well before, which made it virtually impossible for Americans to procure new automobile tires, just days after the Hawaii attack. Thus a new occupation was made possible for organized crime, and the Mafia sequestered many billions directing the national campaign of supplying those goods which the OPA managers decreed were not to be purchased legally by the citizenry, or which they were to have only in very limited supply. This story has yet to be told, though much of the lunacy of the program of price controls and rationing has been described with great effectiveness by Professor Fred Shannon in his America's Economic Growth (Macmillan, 1951). A notable list of future luminaries from the legal world and the economics professoriat worked at one time or another for the OPA, including future Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman and future President Richard M. Nixon.
177. U.S. News (December 19,1941), p.13.
178. "Far-Flung Strategy to Defeat Japanese," U.S. News (December 26,1941), p. 11. An amusing by-product of the abstention of Soviet Russia from the Pacific War was the reaction of some elements of the American Left which traditionally abominated the USSR, especially the Socialists long led by Norman Thomas. He insisted that the U.S.A. should have declared war on just Japan as a consequence of Pearl Harbor, and not given Stalin a windfall by going to war with his enemies in Europe as well, since he had not reciprocated by adding Japan to the Soviet war opponents. The New Masses was deeply offended by Thomas' proposition, and denounced him as a "Quisling Socialist." New Masses (January 6,1942), p. l9.
179. "Litvinoff's Problem," Time (December 22,1941), p. 14, contained the most succinct of the expert evasions of Stalin's newest ambassador to the U.S.A. on the absence of a two-front war in Soviet views of the world situation. (The continuous application by Stalinist flacks of the pejorative "gangster" to its enemies became somewhat wearying especially to the scattered and dispersed enemies of the regime, who considered that the nearest thing to a "gangster" regime in international politics, in terms of legitimacy, was that descended from Lenin and Trotsky and administered at that moment by Stalin.)
180. Wide World press service report, in Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph, January 18,1942, p. l. From a cultural point of view, the music of World War Two probably reached a new low in quality. From Russia came pretentious compositions which were mainly organized noise, while the output of the West, from both sides of the battle lines, consisted largely of senseless ditties or ballads so treacly sentimental that they were largely an incitation to desertion. As things turned out, there was a heavy reliance on the popular music and jazz of the West prior to the phase of American involvement, which even proved to be true in the case of the enemy in the Far East; dependence on recordings of earlier vintage was common- place on radio in most war sectors.
The effort of the music industry in the U.S.A. to produce quality propaganda songs was quite dismal (World War Two was not the singing war that World War One was). An incredibly bad pro-Stalinist song, "If That's Propaganda, Make the Most of It," was composed expressly for a Russian War Relief Benefit in the fall of 1941 by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin; Time published its Iyrics (November 3, 1941, p. Sl) while remarking that "Tin Pan Alley has now gone at least halfway to town for Russia." A tune with some of the entire war's silliest Iyrics, "Any Bonds Today," composed by Irving Berlin, was actually copyrighted by Treasury Secretary Morgenthau (Time, December 22, 1941, p. 55.) But the depths were plumbed by the Pearl Harbor attack, which resulted in the launching of the following: "They Asked For It," "You're a Sap, Mr. Jap," "The Japs Haven't a Chinaman's Chance," "The Sun Will Soon Be Setting for the Land of the Rising Sun," "We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again," "Remember Pearl Harbor," "So We'll Knock the Japs Right Into the Laps of the Nazis," "They Started Something But We're Gonna End It," "Let's Take a Rap At the Japs," "Taps for the Japs," "We're the Guys To Do It," "We've Got To Do a Job on the Japs, Baby," "Those Nasty, Nasty Nazis," and "We're Gonna Find a Fellow Who Is Yellow and Beat Him Red, White and Blue." Time (December 29,1941), p.46.
181. The Roosevelt regime's psychological warfare division was at work on Germany many weeks before involved formally in hostilities. Time's "The US Short Wave" (November 31, 1941, pp. 54-56) revealed that the ardent Stalinist sympathizer Lillian Hellman's more pro-Communist than anti-Nazi play Watch on the Rhine was being shortwaved overseas in a German translation via New York City's station WRUL. and that the ex-secretary to the ex-Ambassador to Moscow, Davies, one Stan P. Richardson, with the aid of Joseph Barnes, ex-foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and the Chicago journalist Edmond Taylor (author of Strategy of Terror) were at work on a comprehensive radio program of psychological war propaganda dovetailed closely to administration recipes. Taylor, who became a major figure in the amateur spy organization which straddled the world during the war, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the ancestor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has been memorialized at length in the book by R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (University of California Press, 1972).
Richardson, Barnes and Taylor were identified by Time as working under the Coordinator of Information, an office secretly created by Roosevelt in July, 1941, with a largely unvouchered budget and headed by a World War I veteran, William J. Donovan. The COI evolved into the OSS, probably the most over-rated agency in the history of espionage, and which did incalculable mischief detrimental to long- term U.S. interests in behalf of both European and Asian Communism. Its research chief in 1941 was James Phinney Baxter III, President of exclusive and costly Williams College, and it gradually recruited a legion of leftist liberal academics, journalists, ideologues and assorted upper and upper middle class off- spring of American moneyed Anglophiles, from the Little Ivy League colleges, in particular. This whole was heavily sprinkled by ferocious Marxist professionals of both domestic and European refugee backgrounds, and later a contingent of pro- fessional murderers and related vicious recruits from the ranks of the Mafia and other enclaves of American and European organized crime.
Fright is one of the most ancient political capers which has been perpetrated against people by their leaders since recorded history. It enjoyed an enormous vogue, 1933-1945, and was generously employed with considerable effect all during the war, especially. Americans went through three episodes in particular, in the 1940-1941 period, when.people in authority threatened them with invasion by the Germans first, then by the Germans and Japanese simultaneously, and then by just the Japanese. President Roosevelt had in his inaugural address in March, 1933 effectively utilized Henry David Thoreau's declaration, without giving the latter credit, to the effect that the only thing Americans had to fear was "fear itself." In his pronunciations on the European war in the last eighteen months before American involvement, however, FDR had not the slightest reservation in spreading fear in the hope of making political capital out of it, and driving the populace into the arms of the warrior interventionist segment of the total. He specialized in fright about the possible consequences of German actions. His predictions as to the dire circumstances of possible German moves never came within the slightest possibility of realization, but they helped overcome skeptical reservations widely held by those opposed to his interest in becoming a belligerent. The Luce publications cooperated spiritedly in putting his nightmares before the public. Life featured the trial balloon which involved the prediction of an invasion of both coasts by German and Japanese "hordes," and Time always put his threats of other kinds of trouble before its readers prominently and persuasively. Though nothing happened in 1940, the fright-threats got much worse in 1941.
In July a variant of the possibility of German paratroops descending upon Iowa was the scare that Hitler's forces would sweep across the many thousands of miles from Poland to the Pacific shores of Siberia and arrive in Vladivostok in days, to undertake an invasion of Alaska via Siberia, which was expected to be a swift German victory in the manner of Norway, presumably helped out with local traitors, apparently ("Another Norway," Time July 7,1941, p.14). This ploy was right in focus for Republican Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, long the proponent for a road from Seattle to Alaska. Now the drive for this began at a far more heated tempo, as an aid to promote the intensive militarization of the latter to forestall this possible debacle. Time was right with him.
Roosevelt was not satisfied with this, and in his speech to Congress later in the month, on which he was reported to have spent a large amount of time, he again suggested to that body that the U.S.A. was in "infinitely greater" danger at that moment than it had been in the summer of 1940, the time of the launching of some of the most incredible threats (Time, July 28,1941, p.7).
Still another venture in these turbulent currents was undertaken by the President. At the Navy League dinner in Washington at the end of October, 1941 he made public two famous "documents" he claimed he had come upon, the first a "secret map" purporting to show how Hitler planned to cut up Central and South America into five vassal states and the second another "secret" which was a plan "to abolish every religion in the world" and to replace them with "an international Nazi Church" with Hitler's Mein Kampf presumably replacing the Bible, and undoubtedly all of the other holy books about the planet. These were substantially fabrications of British intelligence, probably by leftist Germans in their employ, and planted upon a source delighted to try them out on his listeners. Time soberly reported these as fact. (Time, November 3,1941, p. ll.)
The big scare about a possible Japanese invasion of the entire West Coast was part of the hysteria following Pearl Harbor, and may have had more to do with distracted leadership other than Roosevelt. Part of this was accompanied by a rumor that an evacuation of the entire West back to a line in the Continental Divide slightly west of Denver was about to become policy, from which a last ditch stand was to be made. It may have caused the panic in Secretary of War Stimson's coterie which led to the order to round up the entire Japanese-American population for incarceration in concentration camps.
All this agitation and panic stands in strange contrast to the evaluation by Time eight years after the end of the war. In the lead article under "National Affairs" in the issue for October 18, 1953 the editors calculated, "distance prevented any European enemy from dreaming (sic) of forcing a decision on the U.S. by sending major forces to this country". The worst that the U.S. faced in World War II was the possibility that Europe and Asia, in the hands of its enemies, would be able slowly to weaken the U.S. or to force it to fight without allies on distant and unfavorable battlefields." Though no one can "force" another to go vast distances to fight, the last portion of the Time analysis sounded much like what the U.S.A., a "victor," ended up doing anyway in Korea and Vietnam.
182. On the reviews in this section: Fadiman reviews in New Yorker (October 4, 1941), p.86, and (December 6,1941), p.108. Woolbert's review in Foreign Affairs of Hindus in issue of January, 1942, p.384, but Strong review delayed until issue for October, 1942, p.783. Barnes review in New York Herald Tribune Books, January 11,1942, p.13. Chamberlin reviews in Saturday Review of Literature (December 20,1941), p.7, and New York Times Book Review, October 12,1941, pp.9,26. The Paterson critique was buried in the New York Herald Tribune Books, November 30, lD41, p. 34. Mosely review in Yale Review (December, 1941), pp. 394-396. Phillips' review in New York Herald Tribune Books, September 28, 1941, p. 6, while Gannett, long-established Herald Tribune critic and long-famed as one of the most combative liberals decorating the Nation, included his kindly estimate of Hindus in a roundup of current literature, "Books You May Be Reading This Fall," New York Herald Tribune Books, October 5,1941, p.2.
183. Foreign Affairs review of Davies given the top billing in the section devoted to World War Two books in issue for April, 1942, p. 571. Duranty reviewed in same issue, p. 578, while the Zacharoff book delayed until the October, 1942 issue, p.783.
184. Foreign Affairs (October, 1942), p. 782. These English imprints were frequently unnoticed anywhere except in Foreign Affairs, which usually devoted no more than a line or two in general description, as in the case of the Sloan essay, "An uncritical pro-Communist description of the structure and functioning of the Soviet Government." (April, 1942, p. 578.) Another London imprint of 1941 which went unnoticed in the U.S.A. was Kingsley Martin's Propaganda's Harvest (Kegan Paul). Strauss was identified cryptically as "formerly connected with the labor movement in Austria," but his arrival time in England was not mentioned.
185. These 1941 imprints generally received late reviews, all being mentioned in the April, 1942 Foreign Affairs, pp. 568-573. Included with them was the Air Ministry secretary, J.M. Spaight's The Battle of Britain (London: Bles), an account of the German air attack on the country and the Royal Air Force's counter-attack on Germany, a book which Americans might have learned a great deal from, but did not see.
186. Fadiman review in New Yorker (September 13,1941), p.74; Barnes review in New York Herald Tribune Books, September 21,1941), p.18. Even Woolbert in Foreign Affairs was repelled by Simone's latest work; his critical note appeared in the issue for January, 1942, p.381.
187. The reaction to Lyons' book was remarkably subdued in view of its poor timing as far as publication was concerned. Even in the liberal weeklies it was treated circumspectly, though both the author and most of the commentators on the book had records of previous enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks at one time or another. It appeared malapropos to just a few that a book criticizing enthusiasm for Soviet foreign politics should appear at just about the moment a general drive in that direction was about to get under way once more.
188. Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p. 578; review of Ciliga in issue of October, 1941, p. 202. Also published in 1941 was John Kenneth Turner's Challenge to Karl Marx (Reynal and Hitchcock), almost as awkward a book as that by Lyons. Turner was vigorously attacked by the British Marxist David W. Petegorsky in the New Republic (November 17,1941).
189. Woods review in New-York Times Book Review (November 2, 1941), p.10. These disillusionist books about the USSR in early wartime should be compared with the American classic of this sort, Proletarian Journey, by Fred Beal (1937).
190. Fadiman in the New Yorker compared Koestler's book to that of Aladar Kuncz, Black Monastery, published posthumously in 1934 by Harcourt Brace; the author was a Hungarian school teacher on vacation in France at the outbreak of World War I who was interned as an enemy alien and spent the war in French concentration camps.
191. The closing blow in behalf of Communism struck in Time prior to direct U.S. participation in World War Two involved a review of Feuchtwanger's book, published in the late fall of 1941 by Harold Guinzburg's Viking Press, and heavily promoted. A book largely devoted to Feuchtwanger's wailing about his experiences in a French concentration camp as an enemy alien, its review in Time would surely have earned the misinformation prize of the year had one been awarded. It included a breath-takingly dishonest description of the author as "a peace-loving contemplative Jew of 57" who allegedly "had no interest in politics."
Its anonymous author apparently concluded that no reader was familiar with the liberal, fellow-traveler and Communist press in America, to whom Feuchtwanger was a well-known and fiercely-controversial figure. Ignored was a then-recent fact: other than Corliss Lamont, Feuchtwanger had been the first person published by the New Masses in its issue of July 15,1941 of a group asked to comment on the significance of the just-erupted war between Germany and Russia. Nothing from the Soviet Foreign Office could have exceeded Feuchtwanger's incandescent Soviet sentiments.. He rejoiced that the "enemies of the USSR" who had "tried to hide the truth about the Soviet people" were now being unmasked, and that, thanks to the spreading of the war, "this malicious gossip" had been "shattered," and people everywhere were taking "a better look at the USSR" and recognizing the "nobility" of the Soviet Union and also "Stalin's speeches, with their bold and simple realism." Feuchtwanger was further comforted to note that "The recognition that the Soviet peoples fight for America's safety" was being "expressed in the statements of the American government," a curious distillation of official pronouncements not discerned by much of anyone else.
Ignored by Time's incredible reviewer was that Feuchtwanger had already run his whitewash of French Stalinism of 1938-40 past liberal reviewers, as an article early in 1941, and had earned a stinging denunciation from Dwight MacDonald, as "the number one world literary spokesman for the Stalin regime," in Common Sense. MacDonald had accompanied this with a lengthy string of quotations from the Communist literary magazine Das Wort when Feuchtwanger was editing it in Moscow in 1936-1937, including the latter's bitter attack on American liberals for questioning the vicious Moscow trials. Now posing as an enemy of totalitarianism and scribbling feverish anti-Hitler pro-war tracts, MacDonald insisted Feuchtwanger was a systematic peddler of falsehoods in the former department, and finished his deflating critique of this man who "had no interest in politics" by quoting from one of his Das Wort essays in 1937, in which Feuchtwanger had enthused, "One breathes again when one comes from this oppressive Western atmosphere of a counterfeit democracy and hypocritical humanism into the invigorating atmosphere of the Soviet Union." In view of this encomium to the Stalinist heaven on earth, there were those who wondered what Feuchtwanger was doing in the corrupt and degenerate America he so detested such a short time before. And it was reviews such as this which made some observers wonder why Time repeatedly issued scoffing disparagements of the Nation and New Republic as "pinko."
It was characteristic of Time to suppress basic information about the politics of persons subject to profiles in its pages as was the case with Feuchtwanger. At about the same time, in hailing the talents of the artist Anton Refregier, who had received $26,000 for the murals in the San Francisco Post Office under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration, Time omitted mention that Refregier, born in Moscow in 1905, and in the U.S.A. since 1921, was a veteran hero of the New Masses and Daily Worker editors; see report in Time (November 17,1941), p.54.
192. Woolbert review in Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p.568.
193. Woolbert described Stowe's book as "engrossing" in Foreign Affairs (January, 1942), pp.376-377; it was the first-listed in the section of wartime books. Stowe mentioned being sent to Europe in September, 1939 for the Chicago Daily News. Hindus' review of van Paassen in Saturday Review of Literature (November 18,1941), p.13; see also review of van Paassen by J.M. Minifie in New York Herald Tribune Books (October 19, 1941), p. 3, another kindly puff. Harsch was highly praised in Foreign Affairs January, 1942), p.377; van Paassen hailed in issue for October, 1941, p.778.
194. Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p.569, praised Davis' book as a "sound and timely" work dealing with the "Anglo-American entente for the control of the seas," not just the Atlantic, as the title suggested. Knickerbocker's work was pushed even more strongly by Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p. 571. Carrying a foreword by another nationally known warrior correspondent, John Gunther, the book got a similarly loud burst of praise from still another emotionally-involved foreign newsman, William L. Shirer, in the New York Herald Tribune Books, November 9, 1941, p.5. Shirer's rise to pre-eminence among the Herald Tribune's reviewers of World War Two books will be examined in detail subsequently. The Taylor-Janeway-Snow joint effort may have been the basis for a position paper for the coming Office of Strategic Services (OSS), outlining an American counter- offensive against Italo-German policies and propaganda.
However, this work was mainly ignored in favor of a nearly simultaneously published volume, The Spoil of Europe (Norton) dealing with much of the same subject. One of the mystery books of the war, it was credited to "Thomas Reveille," the alias cover for a refugee European who rejoiced in the real name of Rifat Tirana, an utter unknown, but guessed by some to be an Albanian Communist. Hired in a super-secret job in the Roosevelt pre-war war machine, he ground out this book which was preceded by a foreword by still another of the enthusiastic journalists for war, Raymond Gram Swing, and vociferously hailed by uncritical reviewers in all the choice sources, from Foreign Affairs through the prestigious dailies, as an insightful book into wartime Germany and its occupied regions in Europe. Reviewer after reviewer strained buttons in heaping praise on it, for reasons which will probably never be known. As a war call it had its merits, but as a description of the German economy and that of German-occupied Europe it had no particular virtue that could not be found in the estimates of Marxists and near- Marxists of the stamp of Franz Neumann, Max Werner, Fritz Sternberg and Gunter Reimann. Its message of a shaky and disintegrating economic nightmare prevailing in the Hitler-controlled areas of Europe encouraged the impulsive to think a war would be a sudden success if undertaken soon under American auspices. Its failure to indicate what really was going on, and that those anxious for martial endeavor in America faced a tough and resourceful enemy who was about to take on the whole world for another four destructive and bloody years, performed a mean chore utterly antagonistic to American interests. It fattened the illusions of eager interventionists into thinking they were facing a puff-ball which would pop in a few months, while concealing the real world, setting up the wrecking of Europe and the killing of many millions, and guaranteeing Stalinist Communism for tens of millions of others.
There were a few voices of complaint about its shortcomings but they were buried in scholarly works of limited circulation. Hailed by left-liberals, e.g., Swing in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1941, by Joseph Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune Books for August 31,1941, p.3, and described in Foreign Affairs (January, 1942, p.377) by Woolbert as "one of the most competent books to appear since the war began," it even panicked the normally skeptical William Henry Chamberlin, who declared that it was "extremely impressive because so well documented." This raised some eyebrows in Academe, and set some wondering what book Chamberlin was talking about, since the European history specialist E.C. Helmreich (in the American Political Science Review for December, 1941, p. 1177) had panned "Reveille" severely for his extremely weak documentation. Complained Helmreich, "there are virtually no footnotes," so that it was impossible to trace his quotations. Another Central European specialist, M.W. Fodor, pointed out serious weaknesses of The Spoil of Europe in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (January, 1942), p.178.
195. For brief comments on the above volumes see Foreign Affairs (January, 1942), p.386; (October, 1942), p.785. Hauser's book was the only one with general distribution. The others had influence mostly in the academic community. Another contribution in 1941 to the pro-Red literature on the Far East by Miss Wales (Mrs. Snow) was Kim San: The Life Story of a Korean Rebel (John Day), an edited collation which by and large failed to endear itself to reviewers. Rodney Gilbert in the New York Herald Tribune Books (November 16, 1941, p. 4) was repelled by the portrait which emerged, and which presumably entranced Miss Wales. The book's subject came across to Gilbert as "a daft, conceited, murderous little prig." Such sterling "anti-fascist revolutionaries" of Korean stamp were a little while in becoming celebrities among Americans of "advanced social consciousness."
196. Time (December 15, 1941, p. 74
197. Time (December 15, 1941), p.38.
198. Associated Press report, in Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph, December 16, 1941, p.10.
199.Huxley quoted in Time (December 15, 1941), p. 53. The Pro-Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 367
200. Social Justice (December 22,1941), p.4. Rev. Coughlin seemed to be echoing a view expressed by an almost polar political opposite, the novelist Erskine Caldwell, a short time before. Caldwell, with his wife, Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer famous for her "proletarian" portraits (especially the very worst she could find in the rural U.S. South, You Have Seen Their Faces), had spent from May 1 to October 1 in Moscow, and had returned to the U.S. via Siberia just before the Pearl Harbor incident. Speaking to an interviewer in Spokane, Washington on December 1, Caldwell declared, "Russia-not England or the United States-will win the war in the end." And he added as a closing caution, "If the Allied countries try to cheat Russia, they're going to regret it." Associated Press report, Colorado Springs Gazette, December 1,1941, p. l, and December 3, 1941, p.4.
201. Time (December 29, 1941), pp.23-24.
202. Quotations from publisher's advertisement, New York Herald Tribune Books, January 4, 1942, p. 8. The heavy space and attention given to Davies' book in this paper, endlessly referred to by Time as "the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune," may have puzzled some who might have identified such an appellation as an indication of powerful conservative leanings. What such persons needed was an education on the people who dominated the paper's book review pages, whose pro-Soviet special pleading already was substantial, and which was to accelerate at an impressive rate for the duration of the war.
203. New York Herald Tribune Books, January 4, 1942, p. l.
204. Saturday Review of Literature (January 10, 1942, p.5.
20S. New Masses (January 13, 1942), pp.20-22.
206. Davies' book was just as fiercely acclaimed among the affluent circles connected with Eastern capital as it was by the USCP, however. It drew enthusiastic approval and top billing in the April, 1942 issue of Foreign Affairs (p. 571) as well.
207. Wolfe's review was titled "No Radish," apparently intended to be complimentary to Davies and a testament to his sincere pro-Stalinism; the term "radish" had long applied to persons with superficial affection for Stalin but fundamentally opposed to him secretly ("red outside, white inside.") A similar cognomen, "beefsteak Nazis," had for years been applied to the legion of Marxists who voted against Hitler, 1930-1933, and then joined National Socialist organizations thereafter ("brown outside, red inside.")
208. There is no study of the voluminous literature by Poles in the 1919-1939 interim not only predicting but welcoming a war not only with Russia but with Germany, and confidently forecasting victory over both and a substantial enlargement of the geographical scope of the Polish state which would follow such victory.
209. Chamberlin review in New York Times Book Review (January 4, 1942), pp. to 15. The Times reported January 22 that a fifth printing, bringing the total of copies to 54,000 had already taken place.
210. Marshall review in Nation (January 31, 1942), p. 118. The Nation editors had already objected to the publisher's use in their advertisement of what appeared to be a testimonial from President Roosevelt for the book but which actually was a part of a letter FDR had written to Davies in 1940 when the latter had resigned as a special assistant to the State Department. Nation (January 24,1942), p.93. Simon & Schuster were not dismayed by this; in a display advertisement at the end of March, 1942 they featured prominently a tribute from Soviet Ambassador Litvinov. New York Times Book Review (March 29,1942), p.12.
211. Davies had hardly evacuated the political arena. In a profile in the U.S. News at the moment his book was selling in avalanche fashion (January 30, 1942, p.38), it was revealed, "Joseph E. Davies, whose dispatches written while he was U.S. Ambassador to Russia now are a best Seller, spends most of his time around the State Department these days." It went on to say, "He is working on problems of war refugees in many corners of the world." Nearly forty-five years after the precipitation of the German-Soviet war.... millionaires have become quite common in the U.S.A. and the influence of a very large number of them is minimal if perceptible. But in 1941 this was anything but the case, and the impact of American millionaires in mass communication and in the diplomatic and opinion-influencing circles, especially about public affairs and foreign relations, was pronounced and most often conclusive. When we talk of 1941 we talk of a time when many millions in the U.S.A. had no job at all, and when millions of others worked for $700-$900 a year at pay which ranged between 30 cents and 45 cents an hour. To be recognized as a millionaire in an economic climate such as this must be obvious to even the mentally arrested as enjoying a special status difficult to describe, and capable of having an impact on the total community of vast scope. One should keep this in mind while assaying the dimensions of this study.
Reprinted by permission of The Journal of Historical Review, P.O. Box 2739, Newport Beach, California 92659, United States of America.
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