While the reportage on things Russian increased in warmth, the temperature
of pro-Red sympathy in America soared somewhat higher. Symptomatic of this
was the bellow for aid to Stalin which emanated from the American Legion
convention in Milwaukee at about this same time. Time for September 29 shimmered
with its eulogy of the Legion, rejoiced at its bellicosity toward Hitler
Germany and its fierce desire for war, along with approval of its almost
unanimous support for the creeping interventionism of Roosevelt. It even
voted for one of Roosevelt's latest hobby horses, permanent universal military
trainings.
Almost simultaneously with this were other indications surfacing in widely
separated places. The Christian Century quoted the Jackson, Mississippi
Daily News as calling upon all religious congregations in the state to expel
any ministers who were in opposition to the U.S. becoming involved in the
European war.(85) Apparently these anti-Communist Southern fundamentalists
were unperturbed by the thought of full enlistment in a war with Stalin
to make Europe one-half Red. In fact, there were elements which were of
the mind that this latter appellation was a dirty political word. That same
week the Toronto Globe and Mail, the city's morning paper, embarked on a
sortie to persuade other Canadian papers to join it in abandoning the word
"Red" as a term for Russians.(86) And a few days before,
war correspondent Edgar Ansel Mowrer, in an open letter to Roosevelt published
in the vigorously pro-war picture weekly Look, founded in 1937 and already
sporting a circulation of two million, urged him to clean out the "professional
Bolshephobes" from all government departments, since they were hindrances
who could not "honestly help us to destroy Fascism."(87) Nowhere
in the Communist press could anyone find a more ardent ideological call
than this.
To be sure, things seemed to be looking up for the Anglo- Russian cause
in September 1941. Their joint invasion of Iran had resulted in success,
hailed in Time as "Victors in the fortnight-old, 80-hour Iranian war."
Though Hitler's invasions of strategically- located neighbors were uniformly
billed as brutal aggressions, far softer and kinder verbiage was invented
to describe the same thing when undertaken by Stalin and Churchill. And
Time wound up its accolade by quoting from the New York Herald Tribune's
Russell Hill, who, at Kazan with Russian officers, drank bottoms- up toasts
to Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and "'reunion in Berlin.' (88)
Though the U.S. was still not a formal belligerent, May 1945 was brilliantly
forecast and anticipated.
In the meantime the assiduous promotion of still another wealthy pro-Stalinist,
England's Sir Richard Stafford Cripps, had begun, along with serious efforts
in liberal circles to bring H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw to the U.S.
to assist in helping "whip up enthusiasm for aid to Russia," as
Newsweek put it.(89)
Time's salute to Cripps, Ambassador to Moscow since the lonely days of 1940,
when the Stalinists had nothing but ridicule for England at war, included
a tribute to his being "One man who has really been right about World
War II," since "From its opening gun, he maintained that Britain's
interest and Russia's were the same," while calling attention to his
recent "paean to the Russian people."(90)
And when Eric Estorick's puff in book form, Stafford Cripps, Prophetic
Rebel (John Day), began to go the rounds a few weeks later, it was no
scrubby journal of the impoverished left that hailed it, but the alleged
tower of Republican strength, the Herald Tribune, at the hands of its warmly
pro-Soviet foreign editor, Joseph Barnes. It was Barnes who called attention
to this opulent Briton's eloquence in behalf of the Workers' Fatherland:
"Outside the Communist Party, itself, no other British leader,"
asserted Barnes, produced such speeches, "which were like and sounded
like Marxism."(91)
Not all the traffic was one-way in the burgeoning buildup of the Soviet
in the fall of 1941. The Roosevelt regime was increasingly embarrassed by
the continuation of the war between Finland and Russia, and dreaded non-interventionist
congressmen arguing against aid to Stalin on the grounds that Russians would
use American arms to shoot Finns. There were signs that a formidable residue
of anti-war reservations existed among the populace and that not all the
devices being used to work up war fever were effective. Pro-war Look was
chagrined to learn as a result of their poll of 15,000 moving picture exhibitors
at the end of the summer that "'Anti-Nazi' pictures-like 'Escape,'
'Underground' or 'Manhunt'-were rated least productive at the box office."(92)
But there were hundreds more like these to come in the future. A similar
conclusion was arrived at by the Gallup Audience Research Institute, headed
by David Ogilvy, whose report was released the third week of July 1941.
It concluded that there was no audience outside of New York City for anti-Hitler
and anti- Nazi pictures, and that all propaganda movies had thus far fizzled.(93)
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