Notes, 1-251. 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. Next Section | Previous Section | Back to Index |
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