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Pro-Red Orchestra In the U.S.A., 1941
Opinions and opinion makers in the USA
As the German-Russian War Begins on June 22, 1941, in the 22nd month of
World War Two, an event occurred as important in the history of the United
States and its relations with the rest of the world as the bombing attack
on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a little less than six months later. This was the
invasion by the German armies of Hitler's National Socialist Germany of
the portions of Eastern Poland occupied by the armies and political machinery
of Stalinist Communist Soviet Russia, and then on deeply into Russia itself.
Upon this act most of that portion of American opinion ranged to the left
of center joined in the war psychologically and emotionally, and spent much
of its energy from that point on in trying to induce general American sympathy
with the cause now heavily weighted in the direction of the interests of
Stalinist Communism and its global satellites and sympathetic forces and
concerns. A vast sea of printer's ink and a galactic volume of radio babble
engulfed the U.S.A. upon the outbreak of formal hostilities between Germany
and Russia, most of which concerned whether or not this country should aid
the forces of Josef Stalin against those of Adolf Hitler. Eight years of
towering and unremitting anti-Hitler propaganda in the U.S.A. had resulted
in reducing the pro-German elements in the land to a minority so small as
to be, in modern parlance, "statistically irrelevant."
One of the factors which conditioned this discussion was the persistence
of a powerful and probably dominant body of opinion opposed to becoming
involved in the war as a belligerent. It included an enormous contingent
of those who had always been hostile to Soviet Communism and which now were
more firmly convinced than ever before that abstention be demanded of the
national policy makers. Also included in the citizenry which had a rigid
position against collaboration with the Soviet Union were various sects
of the Left, particularly the Socialist Party, and the Social Democratic
Federation, the inheritors of the anti-Bolshevik faction of Russian Marxists
known in the time of the upheaval in Russia as the Mensheviki. Their company
was augmented by the anarchists and syndicalists, such as the I.W.W., tiny
fragments of the radical spectrum in the U.S.A. implacably opposed to Stalinism
on ideological, not nationalistic, grounds.
Still another source of anti-Red sentiment stemmed from those of all persuasions
who had been affronted by the diplomatic revolution performed in August
1939 by the joining of Russia and Germany at that time, which wrecked almost
a decade of fatuous, simple-minded gabble, both oral and printed, that such
an event was the most unlikely thing ever to take place. And yet another
sector of anti-Stalinism derived from the war fought against Finland by
Stalin's legions in 1940-41, many of whose camp having also become incensed
at the division of Poland between the Germans and the Soviet in September/October
1939, a fourth partition of that unhappy land. It required substantial powers
of forgetfulness on the part of sentimental partisans of the Poles, however,
whose belligerence and sabre-rattling, mainly with real sabres, had preceded
for a decade and a half their sudden and humiliating collapse before the
forces of two flanking lands. Polish warmongers had long predicted that
both could be beaten simultaneously by Polish arms, to be followed by the
recreation of a Polish state with boundaries close to those which allegedly
prevailed in the (earlier) days of glory.
Had Russian Communism's friends been as few in America as were those of
German National Socialism, there would not have been much of a story to
tell, and granted American entry into World War Two in the same manner it
eventually took place, the ultimate fighting of the war would have been
considerably different and an outcome and postwar consequence would have
ensued which would coincide with very little the world has seen in the last
40 years.
However, the Soviet Russian state enjoyed the support of a large and growing
contingent of admirers, well- wishers and lovers in America, including,
here as in most other countries in the world, an element so enamored of
Bolshevik Communism that they customarily and consistently placed Soviet
welfare and interests ahead of those of the land in which they lived. The
unique aspect of this mountainous propaganda in behalf of the welfare of
a foreign state was not the call for military cooperation with it to overcome
a common enemy but the widespread promotional efforts on behalf of its internal
programs, its domestic system and its philosophical and psychic foundations.
The Second World War was the high water mark of this phenomenon, unmatched
by anything similar in the history of the national state system, and still
a factor in world politics well over 60 years after the Russian Revolution.
During World War Two, the scope and impact of this immense multitude of
"loyal Russians" living elsewhere than in the Soviet Fatherland
added up to results of such immensity that their full effect still remains
to be chronicled properly. Part of what happened in the U.S.A. is the subject
of this book.
Hitler's attack on Stalin occurred at a moment when most of the politicians
in the U.S.A. were enlisted emotionally on the side of the British and French,
at war with Hitler since September,1939. Along with them were the largest
part of the management and those employed in the newspaper, magazine and
book publishing industries, motion picture production, and radio broadcasting
(television was in its infancy in 1941, confined mainly to brief local broadcasts
weekly in New York City.) Arrayed with them were an overwhelming majority
of the American populace, although their sentiment in favor of a victory
over the Germans did not extend to participation in the hostilities to the
same degree, over 80% indicating unwillingness to join in the war as belligerents
at about the time of the outbreak of the Russo-German phase of the war.
Stalin's involvement in June 1941 brought to an end a period of neutrality
which extended back to the outbreak of the war, preceded by the incredible
diplomatic pact of "non-aggression" between him and Hitler which
heralded the outbreak of hostilities between the Germans and Poles by a
week and a half. Committed to come to the aid of Poland by a clumsy bit
of diplomatic adventurism dating back to March 31, 1939, the British demonstrated
an incompetence which was outmatched only by their French collaborators
in declaring war on Germany, the succession of British defeats being dimmed
by the calamitous collapse of the French in June 1940, following which their
country was partially occupied and the remainder governed by a regime subservient
to German policies.
The Communist regime in Russia had always looked forward to a general war
in Europe which would find them playing the role of spectators exclusively.
The events of September 1939 to June 1941 were cut precisely to their specifications.
The principal price paid for this comfortable situation was a sharp decline
in the esteem of the countries involved against the Germans under Adolf
Hitler, not only the Franco-British belligerents, but also in militarily
uninvolved but emotionally enlisted America. After 15 years of diplomatic
isolation, the U.S. had recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, and there followed
a spectacular blossoming of pro-Communist propaganda and special pleading,
especially in American intellectual centers.
Beginning in 1935, the Stalin regime encouraged the creation of a political
alignment called the Popular Front, a sidling up to any other country or
to political forces in that country which would advance with the Reds a
common anti-German position. The local Communist parties in lands other
than Russia made this their principal enterprise, though the scope of the
Popular Front would have been exceedingly small had it not been for the
sympathetic collaboration of a substantial number of formal non-Communists
whose exploits and contributions to the Communist cause dwarfed those of
the formal Party activists. Many of these were deeply offended by discovering
on August 23, 1939, that the Popular Front was not the beginning of a perpetual
political alliance presaging the eventual triumph of the planetary proletarian
state, but a temporary phase in Russian foreign policy. As a consequence,
zeal for the protection of Communism in Stalin's Workers' Fatherland cooled
perceptibly between September 1939 and June 22, 1941. A very large part
of those previously involved went over to an anti-German position based
on British and French interests, a few joined the anti-interventionist cause,
a tiny handful continued to support Stalinism, which now espoused strict
neutrality, but many were so paralyzed by the betrayal represented by the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pakt that they ceased involvement in politics. Four years
later a New Republic editor, Malcolm Cowley, disclosed, "Psychiatrists
tell me that in some circles there was almost an epidemic of nervous breakdowns
after the Russo-German pact."
Virtually the only analysis of and literature on World War Two from Communists
which merits any attention is that produced during the period of Stalinist
neutrality, between September 1939 and June 1941. Prior to that time it
is mainly a crafty and carefully cultivated alarmist hysteria, calculated
to produce panic among the "democracies" and encourage alliances
with Soviet Russia in the "popular front" against the anti-communist
states. After 1941 it was mainly florid patriotic Soviet raving. But in
both instances the Stalinist ploy gathered a rich harvest of "conservatives"
(nearly fifty years after Munich, essentially an anti-communist action engineered
by Chamberlain and Daladier, right wingers were still mouthing the communist
derogation of it as "appeasement," one of the most successful
dupings of the Right by communist propaganda in seventy years.) It is significant
that the only sustained period of conservative criticism of communists during
1939-45 occurred in the 1939-41 lull when the latter chose to stand back
and watch what they correctly interpreted as a civil war among the capitalist
powers. All this ended with the entry of Stalinist Russia in the war. Most
of Communism's friends rapidly recuperated and were back at their familiar
stations, pleading for American involvement on Russian lines, a matter of
serious embarrassment to the Anglophile and Francophile warrior elements,
in the same way the Red sympathizers as neutralists had been an exasperation
to the anti-war and anti-involvement people between September 3, 1939 and
June 22, 1941.
Though Americans had been carefully nursed in their Germanophobia for more
than eight years by the radio, movies and the printed word, as well as by
pedagogical oratory from coast to coast, the job of making them belligerents
was not as easy as it might have appeared to be. Only in the areas most
heavily settled for three centuries by British stock, New England and the
South, was the eagerness for combat at the side of Britain preponderant.2
Elsewhere a vast selling job had to be done, and it was never successful.
The attack on Pearl Harbor and not intellectual conviction brought the overwhelming
mass of Americans into World War Two.
In essence then the Anglophile and Russophile warmongers were minorities,
but very active and persuasive ones, though their main impact was felt after
December 7, 1941. The former concealed their impatience for immersion in
the war behind calls for "defense of democracy" and "the
democratic way of life,"(3) in every enterprise available to propaganda,
including a flood of books. In the late summer such works as Professor Edward
Meade Earle's Against This Torrent (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press(4), Francis Hackett's What Mein Kampf Means to America (Reynal
& Hitchcock) and Henry R. Luce's The American Century (Farrar and
Rinehart) characterized the outpouring from this camp. But it was being
matched by a similar flow from leftists and pro-Communists, now that Hitler
and Stalin were at war, of the likes of Pierre van Paassen's The Time
is Now! (Dial Press), Ralph Ingersoll's America is Worth Fighting
For (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill), and Max Werner's Battle for the
World (Modern Age Books).
Luce and his formidable publishing empire of Time, Life and Fortune was
by far the most influential interventionist voice favoring teamwork with
Britain, and his American Century proposal for a joint straddling of the
world with Anglo-American power indefinitely had already had a dress rehearsal
before American readers months before Soviet Russia entered the war. Where
the sentiments and loyalties of many of his writers, reporters and editors
lay was another matter, as will be examined at length.
Still another stream of pro-war literature, sometimes subtle, and at other
times not so subtle, was represented by such massively promoted and widely
read works as William L. Shirer's Berlin Diary (Knopf) (Shirer's
political affections were not frankly laid out for some time), Douglas Miller's
heated tract, You Can't Do Business With Hitler (Boston: Little,
Brown), and the now disenchanted former pro-Soviet publicist Louis Fischer's
Men and Politics (Duell, Sloan and Pearce). These three titles had
been given top billing and frenetic praise in the house organ of the interventionist
Council on Foreign Relations' quarterly, Foreign Affairs, in the early fall
of 1941.
In the meantime, probably the oldest of the literary calls to war, the output
of refugees, continued its steady representation in U.S.A. bookstalls with
such examples of leftist anti-German central European journalist output
as A Thousand Shall Fall, by Hans Habe (Harcourt Brace), and The
Darkest Hour by Leo Lania (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).
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