26. Notes, 101-211
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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