In the meantime the scurrying about of diplomats and the on- going massive
movements of "defense" gave every indication that policy-making
and the initiative were in the hands of people seeking greater involvement,
not less. U.S. News described the accelerated scramble for "defense"
contracts in the height of the summer, accompanied by the pressure on small
business to abandon the consumer field and participate in the hustle. Few
were documenting the substantial unemployment occurring in small economic
enterprises as a result of the pro-"defense" preferential treatment
by the Government relative to raw materials procurement and related matters.
During the last six months of 1941, U.S. News spoke as though the U.S.A.
were already in the war, and repeatedly told businessmen that Roosevelt
was planning on a long one, lasting into 1946 at least.
Part of the indication of the go-ahead signal from Washington on aid to
Stalin was easily deduced from the sudden publicity to diplomats and their
rushing about in the newsmagazine. Especially significant was the attention
given to the resurrection of the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., Constantin
Oumansky, in disrepute and obscurity after the Pakt of 1939. His picture
and the story of his return to social and official favor were prominently
displayed in July. U.S. News even revealed that he and Under Secretary of
State Welles had secretly "joined forces" as far back as the previous
summer "in a dogged attempt to better U.S.-Soviet relations,"
and heaped praise on Welles, while describing Oumansky's frequent visits
to the State Department, for having persevered against former Ambassador
to Russia William C. Bullitt and kept the Administration from breaking relations
with Stalin.
That things had also taken a goodly switch toward the Soviet since the replacement
of Bullitt in Moscow grew obvious with a similar glamor treatment accorded
the new U.S. Ambassador to the Kremlin, Laurence A. Steinhardt, the wealthy
48-year-old nephew of Samuel Untermeyer, the latter sponsor of numerous
efforts to promote world-wide boycotts of and war on Hitler Germany since
1933. The U.S. News portrait pointedly dwelled on matters such as the above,
plus his membership in the past on ten boards of directors of corporations,
his fluency in five languages and his authorship of "numerous books
and articles." America's latest opulent presence in Stalin's court
and the Workers' Fatherland was even less a son of toil than his predecessors,
but it was exactly in character with what was to follow at home and abroad.
The main labors by far in the cementing of Roosevelt America and Stalin
Russia were to be tasks and achievements of America's moneyed and social
elite, not of its labor union members and economically marginal Marxist
intellectuals.
While the hubbub went on over how Communist Russia was to be viewed and
treated in this first month of the Russo-German war, other indications swiftly
surfaced supporting the conviction that Roosevelt was enlarging the scope
of American economic warfare against Germany and Japan and in behalf of
Britain and Stalin. Soviet assets in America had become once more available
to them, and a decision had already been made not to invoke the provisions
of the Neutrality Act against them, while the Ad- ministration was already
on record as promoting a favorable consideration of Soviet aid requests.
The reverse side of this warm glow toward Stalinist entreaties and the last-minute
succor of Churchill via the Lend-Lease assistance provided the previous
March were two dramatic acts of economic warfare against Japan in the U.S.A.
and against Germany and Italy in the Americas from Mexico south. The latter
took shape in an abrupt announcement in the form of Executive Order #8389
on July 17, a blacklist of 1800 German and Italian firms in 20 countries
of the Western Hemisphere, forbidding U.S.A. businesses to deal with them
except under the most rigidly regulated circumstances. This was a policy
step in preparation for some time, as the extensiveness of the operation
was revealed. The blacklisted firms filled 16 full columns of tiny type
in the New York Times on July 18, 1941 and the list was also supplied to
those involved in the form of a Federal Reserve Bank pamphlet, as well as
being published in the Federal Register. Moves of this sort were hardly
impulsive or capricious. The other move took place nine days later, and
was even less a hasty and flighty gesture: the announcement of the "freeze
order" affecting all Japanese assets in the U.S.A., and halting their
use. This long-planned directive consisted of 9 pages of neatly printed
materials, including regulations, amendments to existing orders and foreign
exchange license data, also distributed to the Federal Reserve Banks early
on July 26, 1941, an event later characterized as the "Japanese Pearl
Harbor," an economic calamity which hit Japan without the faintest
warning. Whether the invasion of Stalinist Europe by Germany a month earlier
accelerated these ominous announcements was not demonstrable, but the timing
was impressive.
The orchestration of the forces strongly favoring the salvation of Stalin
by mid-summer 1941 inspired a subscriber of Time to remark upon some obvious
parallels with the hysteria in favor of England a year earlier, speaking
of the imminence of an analogous campaign of "Bundles for Russia"
and suggesting "the probability of a song being composed about 'there
always being a Russia' and the recitation by Lynn Fontanne of the 'White
Cliffs of Omsk,' " a satirical re-structuring of the title of the lugubriously
sentimental popular song of that moment, The White Cliffs of Dover, so beloved
of emotional and nostalgic Anglophiles. That Time should print it indicated
a lingering bit of a sense of humor, not very noticeable in the ranks of
the pro-war set in those days, and utterly lacking in those deeply devoted
to the welfare of Russian Communism.(30) It was a time of mobilization
of all resources in America to this end, part of it consisting in the production
of their own propaganda. The most impressive contribution was the issuance
at the end of July of The Soviet Power by Hewlett Johnson, perhaps the most
widely read friend of Stalinist Russia whose native tongue was English.
It appeared in an edition of a million copies, and priced at five cents,(31)
obviously below cost of production, in order to maximize its audience; the
Communist propaganda apparat indicated it had been taking lessons from the
Jehovah's Witnesses.
Some Religious and Educational Leaders Respond to the Issue of Aid or No
Aid to Stalin Though the momentum was definitely with the aid-to-Stalin
elements in the early weeks of the Russo-German war, the talkers and the
opinion-makers were far from routed or silenced Especially troubled were
the religious spokesmen, in both the U.S.A. and England. Oswald Garrison
Villard, famed one-time owner of the even more famed liberal weekly The
Nation, who had been ousted from that journal a year before when the majority
of its editors had plumped for a strong pro-war course, had found a refuge
in the pages of the liberal Protestant but anti-involvement weekly Christian
Century. Three weeks after Hitler's armies started across Eastern Poland,
Villard predicted that "the warrior clergy" would pronounce a
pro-Soviet course as "divine intervention in behalf of Right, "
and now would be "as eager to embrace Stalin as they were but yesterday
to anathemize him." His piece "Our Moral Confusion"(32)
was a good statement of the dilemma this new phase of the war had created,
but there were differences among denominations and countries. The English
Catholic press, for example, was wholeheartedly behind Churchill in his
cooperation program with the Communists against Hitler, while trying to
qualify this position by declaring that "Russia's cause is not our
cause." This was the view of the Catholic Times, while the London Tablet
came out for the defeat of Hitler and Nazism, "a man and a system much
more efficient than Stalin's Communism."(33)
Their leaders were not nearly as vehement in support of this pro- gram as
were the U.S.A. Catholic spokesmen in favor of it, nor as critical of it
as were the U.S.A. anti-aid Catholic leaders. The division in America was
quite pronounced. Though the Catholic War Veterans were dead-set against
any aid to the Soviets, 15 outstanding prelates and laymen in the Fight
for Freedom Committee were for it. "We and the Soviet are temporarily
on the same side in the effort to resist a common enemy," was their
analysis of the issue. (34)
We have seen that a variety of prominent Catholics, clergy and laymen, were
not in the least shy in announcing their support of aid to Red Russia, when
interrogated by public-opinion samplers of the news weeklies. There were
others: Col. William J. Donovan, Rt. Rev. John A. Ryan of Catholic University,
and Michael Williams, editor of the Catholic counterpart to the Christian
Century, Commonweal. Even the New Masses took comfort in their testimonials
in behalf of helping the Reds against Hitler. (35)
But by far the most earnest of these was Bishop Joseph P. Hurley of St.
Augustine, Florida, whose emotional radio address in early July was heavily
excerpted by delighted Time. He ridiculed the notion that Hitler was fighting
an anti-Communist crusade in Eastern Europe, described the Germans as "Enemy
No. 1 of America and the world," favored Roosevelt deciding all by
himself when it was proper to take the U.S.A. into the war against them,
and did not find Soviet Communism the faintest present or future threat,
and never mentioned whatever an issue which bothered many other people,
the situation that would prevail in the world if Stalin won. From the context
of Bishop Hurley's declamation, it was improper, irrelevant and immaterial
to dwell on this latter speculation. (36)
The opposite of Bishop Hurley was Rev. James M. Gillis, editor of the influential
Catholic World, founded by the Paulist order at the end of the American
Civil War. There was no more implacable anti-war figure in America than
Fr. Gillis, though like most of those of this persuasion he execrated both
sides of the Russo- German conflict. He was confident that he represented
the majority in the U.S.A. "It is not a majority but a minority that
wants war or would welcome war as either necessary or just," he asserted
in the mid-summer 1941 struggle of opinions. Furthermore, as he identified
his adversary, "It is a highly articulate insolent aggressive minority."(37)
Where Fr. Gillis found the pro-war enthusiasts weakest was in their
avoidance of facing up to the consequences of supporting a Red victory in
Europe, or their casual confidence in the ease with which they thought they
could dispel the Soviets from the scene once Germany had been smashed:(38)
...make no mistake, there will be a showdown. None of your Willkies and
Knoxes and Stimsons and Conants seem to have visualized it, but it will
come. The showdown is always a "divvy" with allies in war as with
partners in crime.... No one is going to say to him [Stalin], when the time
for the divvy comes, "Good work, Joe old boy; and now be off with you,
back to Moscow."
In many ways the conflict among Catholic opinion makers as to the merits
of involvement in the war and support of Stalin was brought to a sharper
point by posing Fr. Gillis against the Catholic convert (1913) professor
Theodore Maynard, an ex-Protestant and English emigrant who had come to
the U.S.A. in 1909. His residual English patriotism was transparent in his
tussles with Fr. Gillis over the merits of becoming England's war partner.
Maynard was far less concerned over the spread of Communism than he was
over the German threat to Mother England, his sustained message in the Catholic
press, and in essays in the secular journals as well.
Maynard was quite aware of the formidability of Fr. Gillis as an adversary
in this battle of ideas. "Father Gillis is by all odds the ablest Catholic
editor of our time," Maynard conceded in the early fall of 1941. While
admitting substantial respect for Fr. Gillis and commending him for his
condemnation of all brands of totalitarianism, Maynard clung tenaciously
to a position very close to Bishop Hurley, giving a solid measure of psychic
support to the Soviet Union in its war with Germany, on the same grounds
that Germany was the "greatest enemy" of religion at the moment,
though he did not make clear that he was referring to official policy or
popular behavior, in which latter Maynard would surely have been backing
an untenable proposition.(39) Fr. Gillis ridiculed this view, insisting
on total abstention from the question.
Though Maynard was irked by Fr. Gillis' having made the Catholic World the
most "belligerently isolationist" of all the Catholic papers in
the country, he was probably as unhappy over his continuing policy of not
yielding a particle on the matter of Russian support. Implacably anti-Soviet,
Fr. Gillis did not relinquish this position regardless of the various maneuvering
that continued. Probably the most invulnerable morally of all the main figures
in the U.S.A. opposed to the war between 1939 and 1941, he continued his
adamant stand against involvement in a war which might be construed as a
beneficiary or contributor to the welfare of either side. In one monthly
editorial after another he continued castigating Stalinism, denouncing all
efforts to make the opportunistic circumstances which threw Communist Russia
and the Anglo-Americans together at war with Hitler and Mussolini the grounds
for rigging a political alliance. This continued to be his policy all through
the war, a courageous position which even veteran anti-Reds soft-pedaled
for some time after the Pearl Harbor attack, then went underground, or turned
about and began to write kindly pro-Red propaganda. All during World War
Two, the Catholic World boiled with editorial suspicions and disparagement
of Communist policy, abroad and at home.
A similar confrontation of opposites was observable in the non- Catholic
center, probably best illustrated by the positions of England's Archbishop
of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, and the redoubtable John Haynes Holmes,
the latter already on published record as an uncompromising anti-involvement
figure. Time, as in the case of Bishop Hurley, gave generous space to Dr.
Lang's reproaching of the Church of England for its misgivings about the
Churchill alliance with Stalin. Though reputed as an anti-Communist, Dr.
Lang at the end of July 1941 sounded like an incandescent fellow traveler.
In his view, Soviet Russia was "contending for the principles of national
freedom and independence for which the British Commonwealth and the United
States of America are standing," recommending that Britons "must
therefore wish every success to the valiant Russian armies and people in
their struggle and be ready to give them every possible help." Managing
to sound like a composite of Stalin and Churchill, Dr. Lang like the other
civilian warriors was troubled not in the least by contemplation of a Communist
victory and its import for Central and Eastern Europe.(40)
The basic position of the editors of the Christian Century was advanced
in a long editorial in the first issue after the outbreak of the war in
the East: "A Nazi victory must be prevented if that is possible. But
equally there must be no smashing victory for the Communists." They
conceded that the Russians would get help from the U.S.A., "but not
too much help." "For an overwhelming triumph, with Stalin at the
head of the Russian avalanche, would hold almost as great a threat as an
overwhelming victory for Hitler and his Nazis."(41) A week later
they expressed great confidence in the 'impossibility" of anyone here
arousing "American enthusiasm for the idea of participating as an ally
of Russia," especially after Finland had gone to war with the Reds;
they were sure nine out of ten Americans would delight "to see the
Finns march triumphantly into Leningrad."(42)
Rev. Holmes, whose spirited essays were featured by the Christian Century
on many occasions, did not share the editorial hope that some kind of moderation
and long-range statecraft would govern the aid-to-Stalin impulse which the
interventionists wanted to prevail, consequences unconsidered. In the last
issue in July 1941, he predicted that at the end of the European war, Stalin
would annex all of Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and part of Poland
which had been part of Cazarist Russia in 1914, East
Prussia, Mongolia, openly, and Manchuria by proxy, and would "insist,
under one form or another, on dominating the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and the Dardanelles." Rev. Holmes maintained
that was all guaranteed by Britain in signing the "co-belligerency
pact in Moscow," which at the same time "signed a blank check
to be filled in later by Russia." "After an immeasurably exhausting
effort to destroy Nazi totalitarianism, the world will have succeeded only
in putting in its place a more powerful, more widely extended, and therefore
more formidable Communist totalitarianism," he concluded.(43) Holmes,
favoring a "peace without victory," like Gillis, came astonishingly
close to the actual situation which came into existence between 1945 and
1948.
The most remarkable trial balloon concerning propaganda favoring aid to
Russia was launched by the Christian Century on August 13, 1941. In an extended
article titled "Join Russia in the War!" (pp. 1002-1004), Professor
Henry Nelson Wieman of the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a
prolific writer on the subject of the philosophy of theology, argued that
Russia was going to win the war anyway, and would "dominate Europe
and Asia." Thereafter it would cause unlimited trouble for the democracies
for having abstained, and would thus lead to an even larger war. His plan
involved eliminating this possibility by joining the current war in Russia's
favor. Furthermore, there would be substantial resulting domestic compensations;
"Mighty coercions toward community will begin to work if we enter this
war with Russia and do everything in our power to help her win." This
would not only mitigate postwar tension possibilities, but lead to peace.
Prof. Wieman suggested casually that there need be no fear of "military
conquest" on the part of anyone at the hands of the Soviets, since
they were not "imperialistic." Though he conceded that they would
try "to make all the world go Communist" by other means, it would
be possible to deprive them of the chance by massive reforms, providing
employment and material well-being.
A month later the editors responded in a two-page editorial, pounding Prof.
Wieman's avoidance of the religious issue entirely, condemned his plan unconditionally,
and observed that in view of "the record of tyranny which the rulers
of Russia have inscribed in the blood of their people during the past twenty-two
years," the difference in degree of tyranny between Germany and Russia
definitely lay "in favor of Germany, not Russia."(44)
Churchill's flat admission before the House of Commons on July 15 that the
British-Russian agreement to give mutual aid and to make no separate peace
was, "of course, an alliance, and the Russian people are now our allies,"
was given wide publicity here,(45) but this did not in any way discommode
the war-bound among the well-placed and the prestigious. James B. Conant,
President of Harvard, in a turgid speech before a convention of the National
Education Association, crammed with urgent pedagogical warriors, managed
to outdo Bishop Hurley in urging aid to Stalin and in eagerly calling for
entry into the war: "To the minds of some of us, the peril is so great
that the United States has no alternative but to enter the war against Nazi
power," exclaimed the head of America's most prestigious institution
of higher learning. Conant, making the usual disavowal of supporting either
Germans or Russians, concluded with the interventionist convention that
only the Germans were a threat.(46) As was expected, Time printed
most of his private war declaration, just a fragment of the hurricane of
similar material assaulting the ears and eyes of the general public.
After a month of the Russo-German war, the U.S. public was beginning to
show evidence of responding to the mainly one-way news interpretation and
pro-war conditioning which occupied most mass media. A Gallup poll claimed
72% desired a Red victory and only 4% one by the Germans. Those in favor
of a war declaration were alleged to have risen from 21% to 24%. Newsweek,
however, analyzing the mail on the issue received by 30 U.S. senators, found
it "evenly divided between isolationists, interventionists and middle
of the roaders," and that the volume was only l/5th of that which had
poured in during the debates over the Lend Lease bill earlier in the year.
The magazine further declared that the mail of Senators Burton K. Wheeler,
Walsh, Nye, Brooks, La Follette, Taft and Tobey was running 10-1 against
involvement in the war, while that of Senators Pepper, Lee and Barkley was
roughly 50-50 on the question.
The full spectrum of opinions on the subject had hardly been seen, however.
On July 31, 1941, British Aircraft Production Minister Lt. Col. John Theodore
Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon delivered a speech in Manchester in which he expressed
the hope that Russia and Germany would "exterminate" each other,
leaving Britain master of the Continent. New political fireworks displays
resulted. London's Marxist Daily Herald, appalled, announced that Churchill,
"astonished and angry," had given him a savage dressing-down,
"a sizzling and blistering affair, in which the colonel was left in
no doubt as to the gravity of his offense."(47) Churchill, however,
was in a jam, and ended up having to defend Moore-Brabazon in September
before Parliament, and was forced into a bitter exchange with fervent Stalinist
Willie Gallacher, the only Communist M.P. in the House of Commons.(48)
Sentiments close to those of Moore-Brabazon were expressed at about
the same time by a member of the United States Congress, who was contemptuously
referred to later by insulted Time as "little fox- faced Senator Harry
S. Truman"(49) [D.-Mo.).
The expressions of support for Stalin continued from a wide spread of opinion
makers into the first weeks of August, the issue of aid taking a dramatic
lurch in Soviet favor later in the month after the celebrated Roosevelt
Churchill meeting off the coast of Newfoundland and the issuance of the
"Atlantic Charter," which followed the equally important mission
of Roosevelt's ubiquitous assistant, Harry Hopkins. The Stalinist-line League
of American Writers, vociferously for war against Hitler until the August
1939 Pakt, and then scrupulously neutral during the period of Stalin's absence
from the fray, was quick to get re-involved with the German attack, and
issued a hectic public statement espousing Stalin's cause, characteristically
published by New Masses on August 5, 1941 (p.23), while calling attention
to having sent a copy of their manifesto to Erskine Caldwell, a vice- president
of the LAW, who was in Moscow at that moment.(50)
An even more pretentious declamation came from Michael Straight, editor
of the once firmly anti-involvement liberal New Republic but almost overnight
a convert to belligerency. He hailed the entry of Stalin into the war as
the turning point and suggested Hitler was "perhaps well on the way
of retreat." He further hailed the creation of the International Free
World Association in Washington, organized by refugee anti-Nazi politicians,
solidly to the left, from half a dozen countries, and saw as its principal
func- tion that of preparing war aims, and the "promise of a just and
lasting peace," still embarrassingly absent from the statements of
the "Allies." Impatient over American unwillingness to do big
things and indignant over the U.S.A.'s failure so far to "accept the
leadership that should be ours in the fight for a free world,"
Straight was grimly satisfied that the part America had earned in the next
peace conference was "scrubbing the floors.''(51)
And still another prestigious figure used the New Masses to broadcast his
enlistment. Harvard's philosophic light, Ralph Barton Perry, no longer the
subdued murmur of the U.S. News poll six weeks earlier, was calling loudly
in behalf of Soviet Russia as the most recent state whose "freedom"
was "threatened" by Hitler's armies. Russia was already "our
moral ally," trumpeted Prof. Perry, and he ended up calling for a world
pooling of military power to defeat Germany's attempt at "world domination."(52)
The Christian Century, still anxious to read the pulse of European Protestantism
correctly on the newest phase of the European war, managed to solicit conflicting
advice again in August 1941, this time from neutral Switzerland. A lengthy
letter from cor- respondent Denzil G.M. Patrick declared that the chief
reaction there was one of "relief" that the threat of the "bolshevization
of Europe" was much abated, and that the Swiss looked upon the mutual
weakening of both "tyrannies," their government not intending
to aid either. He also remarked upon the numbness of some Swiss following
the ferocity of the anti-religious efforts of the Soviets in the Baltic
states under the commissar Yaroslavsky and the machinery of the Stalinist
League of the Militant Godless.(53)
But the following month it published from the same country their reaction
to the famous Protestant theologian Karl Barth's A Letter to Great Britain
From Switzerland. This caused much consternation, Barth placing the
stamp of theological approval upon the civilian "resistance" to
the German armed forces and in substance making it a holy war. The editorial
remarked that they did not see that Barth was urging the Swiss to become
a belligerent, however.(54) Shortly thereafter the journal published
a lengthy think-piece on Barth by W.S. Kilpatrick, president of Cedarville
(Ohio) College, who had just returned from a year's study under Barth. Said
Kilpatrick, "Barth is politically a socialist today, although fearing
its potential materialism and distrusting its optimistic view of man."
Kilpatrick pointed out that the Nazis, who had cut short Barth's tenure
in a German university, had simply "requested him to absent himself,
and had even given him several months' pay in advance," while suppressing
his Marxist writings.(55) No one could recall the Soviet Union handling
a political adversary as gently and generously as this, even if a foreign
subject in residence there.
The editors followed this with a three-page editorial devoted to Barth,
avoiding challenging his politics, but concentrating on de- nouncing his
calling World War II a "holy" war, willed by God.(55) They
were willing, however, to recognize the war being called "righteous,"
which really was not that distant a stance from Barth, another of the legion
of World War I socialists and pacifists who turned around and reached astounding
heights of martial ferocity in .... 1939-1945.
In the meantime the religious scene continued reverberating with strong
statements for and against helping out Stalin. Late in August testimonials
in behalf of this cause were published here which came from both the Archbishops
of York and Canterbury, the English prelates skipping over the Red regime
with mild disapproval, while emphasizing the religiosity of the Russian
peopled (nothing was said that 99% of the Germans were identified with the
Roman Catholic or Lutheran faiths). Here, Dorothy Day, editor of the Catholic
Worker, denounced movement toward entry into the war, while speaking at
Williamstown, Mass., at a meeting of the Institute of Human Relations sponsored
by the National Con- ference of Christians and Jews. But Justice Frank Murphy
of the U.S. Supreme Court, speaking before the supreme council of the Catholic
Knights of Columbus in Atlantic City, N.J., declared that the Soviet Union
should have the support of all the world's democracies in its war with Hitler.
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