And there were a few towering holdouts among the predominantly war-bound
liberal opinion-makers adding their discordant notes to the swelling chorus
of Soviet tributes to be heard on the American scene. Notable was Villard,
mainly reduced to a platform with the anti-war Christian Century, though
Common Sense and the Progressive were still open to views such as his. He
was deeply resentful of interventionist liberals now insisting that the
"aggressor" nations had to be defeated "even if it meant
the ruin of the whole world," though he thought that there was even
less chance of the U.S.A. entering the war by way of a formal declaration
than "before we became partners of the unspeakable Stalin."(94)
Of the growing emphasis on Russianism instead of Communism in the Soviet
Union Villard remarked, "It is a tribute to the skill with which the
Bolsheviks have pumped nationalistic and patriotic doctrines into the Russian
people that they are so willing to bleed to death for a government that
has murdered, exiled and imprisoned innumerable Russians for the sole offense
of opposing Josef Stalin's rule."(95)
Another redoubtable fixture in the anti-war liberal fold who stuck in the
collective craw of the interventionists, when it came to the subject of
enlisting their sentiments behind Stalin, was John Dewey. His consistent
coolness toward Stalin and his unwillingness to indulge in encomiums to
him as a result of the exigencies of the European war drew him repeated
scoldings, but his cautions about the dangers in idealizing Stalin due to
an excess of uncritical enthusiasm continued for several months after U.S.
entry into the war. He was sure this would lead to Americans having to pay
"too costly a price for Russia's cooperation."(96) Dewey's
antagonist on the faculty of Columbia Teacher's College was Prof. John L.
Childs, who uttered the standard liberal reproach to Dewey, fearful that
such an attitude would affront the Reds. Childs was one of the eloquent
exponents of sustained long-term pro-Soviet relations. He urged Americans
to "Let's cooperate with the Reds during and after the war," and
above all, he implored, "Let's not adopt a policy of isolating Russia
once the war is over."(97) Dewey's courage in sticking to his
views was all the more remarkable in that the organization with which he
was most prominently identified, the 10,000-member Progressive Education
Association, had early in July 1941 become the first organized group of
American educators to support an outright declaration for full American
participation in the world war, a manifesto which was also signed by 12
of the 14 editors of its journal, Frontiers of Democracy.(98)
The only sector of the academic and educational world comprised of students
which matched their mentors in belligerence were the newspaper editors of
the Ivy League and other elite colleges. In the twelve schools selected
for examination by Time in the early fall of 1941 they were deeply gratified
to notice a much more aggravated call for gore in their college newspaper
editorials, though this martial posture was hardly to be reflected in the
undergraduate enrollment or in any other level occupied by those in age
brackets which were likely to end up in the front lines.(99) This
social fact is what so incensed the intellectual leaders of the administration's
budding propaganda machine, especially the likes of the new Librarian of
Congress, Archibald MacLeish, a fervent and eloquent voice for world war,
and the performer of probably the most spectacular intellectual somersault
achieved by any American intellectual on the subject of war participation
in the short six years between 1935 and 1941. There certainly was no one
trying to square the strident warrior MacLeish of 1940-41 with the MacLeish
who answered a questionaire of the Modern Monthly in June 1935 in these
words: "I should do everything in my power to prevent the United States
going into war under any [MacLeish's emphasis] circumstances. There
is only one possible position against the menace of militarism: absolute
hostility. Any other is romantic." But MacLeish, in the eyes of the
stubborn remnant of anti-war liberals the outstanding intellectual turncoat
of the pre-war period, was just one of a legion who did much the same, to
be rewarded with lush posts, handsome remuneration, continuous fulsome praise
and sustained promotion into a succession of even more prominent post-war
careers.
While the small, quiet steps announcing each steady move toward cultural
totalitarianism took place, while the pretense was maintained that the "democracies"
and their new Communist "ally" were trying to overcome it, the
announcements of growing technical and industrial mobilization in its behalf
were to be found far closer to the front. Early in October 1941 Time devoted
a substantial account to an English Midlands tank factory whose labor force
stood and sang the Communist Internationale at the unveiling of a goodly
batch of tanks built for the Soviet Union, bearing the names of Marx and
many more recent Red bureaucrat "heroes of Soviet labor." Even
Time was a little abashed to report that the British Broadcasting Corporation's
broadcasts "sounded like Moscow radio" in its bawling propaganda
announcements of tanks and munitions output in the just-concluded "Tanks-for-
Russia" week in Great Britain.(100)
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