Despite the rising tide of contrived pro-Stalinist sympathy, there remained
pockets of obdurate opposition in the U.S., some of them anti-Stalinist
throughout the war, even during the period of ardent official pro-Sovietism
which reached its peak in 1943. Clerics, disaffected liberals with longstanding
reputations as critics of Bolshevism, and relapsed fellow travelers with
Lenin and Stalin made up most of the people involved in the public expression
of this hostility. Politicians, businessmen, and the highly placed socially
and culturally were noticeably absent from this contingent.
A particularly thorny case was that of the American Mercury, once the property
of H.L. Mencken, and, in 1941, after a number of changes, published by Lawrence
Spivak, later to become familiar as the moderator and host of the radio
and television show, "Meet the Press." Its new editor was Eugene
Lyons, a one time warm pro-Soviet foreign correspondent, whom Edmund Wilson
had once described as having "spent some of the best years of his life
whooping it up for the Soviets." Lyons now was as hostile as he had
ever been favorable, and set for the Mercury a curious editorial line, hostile
to Hitler, for involvement of the U.S.A. in the European war, but also probably
more hostile to Stalin than Hitler, presumably on the grounds that though
disliking both immensely, he felt that Hitler, having no friendly support
in the country, was less formidable in the editorial assault on dictatorial
systems. Tackling Stalin so resolutely was perhaps a tougher problem for
Lyons, in view of the snowballing of support for the Soviet. And how he
hoped to keep from benefiting Stalin by urging a pro-war course was not
explained at all.
Lyons had just published what was to prove a very influential book, The
Red Decade (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill) when the Reds went to war with
the Nazis. Its description of the meticulous and detailed penetration of
the U.S.A. by pro-Soviet influence and its spread through all the agencies
of American culture in the ten years or so prior to the outbreak of the
war in Europe in 1939 was to be a veritable reference work for a generation
after its publication. For the pro-Soviet-support elements of the Roosevelt
Administration it was an awkward book, published and reviewed at an awkward
time. Both Newsweek and the New York Herald Tribune had kind words for it
in September 1941, the latter review being by Nicholas Roosevelt.(71)
At about that time the August Mercury was being sold on the newstands,
which contained a fierce Lyons article, "The End of Joseph Stalin,"(72)
which anticipated his downfall at Hitler's hands, and which Lyons, though
very hostile to Hitler as well, thought was richly deserved. The piece included
a long catalog of the things Stalin had done which Lyons thought had made
Hitler possible. Lyons was still furious at the Red boss for having rejected
the "democratic allies" and signing the August 1939 Pakt with
Hitler. It was Lyons' thesis that an accommodating, abject and obsequious
Stalin had finally been spurned by the contemptuous Nazis. Much of this
was wishful thinking and ignored entirely the possibility that the war in
Eastern Europe grew out of Stalinist pressures on Hitler. Lyons' follow-up,
"Some Plain Talk on Russia,"(73) was a heated blast upon
the tendency to lump the Soviets with the Anglo-French-American democracies,
now that Britain and the U.S.A. were offering the Reds material aid. But
his striving to keep Anglo-American selfish interests in this matter in
the foreground was beginning to have an effect on his judgment. Lyons in
November 1941 thought that it was the height of impossibility to imagine
a future Red swamping of Europe. Britain and America could assist the Russians
wholeheartedly "without any fear of a Red tidal wave overwhelming Europe-because
they know that a decisive Russian victory is not even a remote possibility."
But he did expect another Moscow- Berlin pact between the now-warring former
non-belligerents, and suggested that no guarantee of any kind made by Stalin
to the Western powers was worth the paper it might be written on, adding
that Stalin's "adherence to the Anglo-American 'Atlantic Charter' is
a cynical joke," though from 1945 on there were many who thought the
behavior of the Charter's founders no less reprehensible.
A skilled recruit to Lyons' side, adding other dimensions to the frontal
attack on Communism, domestic and foreign, was another veteran one-time
well-wisher of the Bolsheviks, Max Eastman. Eastman's enthusiastic review
of Lyons' book was published by the New York Times on September 7, 1941.(74)
In an extrapolation on Lyons' book, Eastman's Mercury essay "Stalin's
American Power," which subsequently was reprinted by the far larger
circulation Readers Digest, enlarged upon the Red fronts in the U.S.A. and
their pushing of Russian foreign policy. But making frequent use of the
term "Communist conspiracy," once the main property of the Social
Democratic Federation's organ, the New Leader, Eastman confined himself
to largely ideological elements, and paid no attention to the burgeoning
pro-Sovietism discernible among the top business and professional layers
of American society. The small Communist press in the U.S.A. took much comfort
in steadily growing pro-Soviet sentiments there and elsewhere in the land,
the New Masses denoucing Eastman's as "a kind of digest of Lyons' indigestible
book," and "a miserably cheap attempt to throw dust into the eyes
of millions who at last see the Soviet Union with clarity."(75)
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