Some practical consequences of Soviet aid get aired
But the war party had to have their war first before they took up the problems
anticipated by the editors of the Post. The post-war era offered endless
opportunities to maintain such foresight never took place, and to launch
limitless schemes to obfuscate the situation with lies and evasions. The
growing material complications and the impact of the war on the American
socio-economic complex probably had generated enough momentum by now to
render the situation out of control and incapable of being handled within
the confines of cool extrapolation of its likely consequences.
For instance, it was remarkable how quickly the drive to furnish material
assistance to the Soviet switched, from the comfortable assurance to the
American general public that such would be paid for in cash, to putting
Stalin on the Lend-Lease gravy train of unrequited blank checks, ultimately
to be made good by public taxes, or simply added to the national debt. Even
for the businessmen a line was developed to soften their presumably hard
hearts, as it was obvious that a goodly part of U.S. aid to Russia was intended
to make possible a formidable Communist capital buildup behind the Ural
Mountains, Soviet territory west of this region being conceded to the invading
Germans. U.S. News on November 14, 1941 ran a pointed piece on this subject.
It described a deliberate "strategic retreat" of the Reds to this
new concentration point, and the construction of vast industry there, assisted
by "the interest-free lend-lease loan of $1,000,000,000 announced by
the State Department." There was no more talk of Soviet payment from
their funds on American deposit, or their allegedly vast caches of gold.
The contribution to the war of this strategy was supposedly the part it
all played in dangerously extending German supply lines, across an immense
area systematically laid waste. By "leaving ruin in their wake,"
the Reds were rendering the region a total economic liability to its occupiers.(149)
Once again this superb bit of Communist propaganda was making its double
point, taking credit for wrecking their own land via a scorched-earth policy
now, though retaining the option to blame the Germans for it later, and
assessing immense reparations payments. This persuasive bit of brainwash
for still-troubled American business and finance was decorated by a glamor
picture of grinning "Soviet Artillery Cadets," little more than
an assemblage of teen age boys. How this material was to reach Stalin was
another matter.
Though much of the frenzied talk by interventionists about the need to repeal
the Neutrality Acts in behalf of beleaguered Britain dominated the surface,
there was a quiet strain in this same verbal onslaught concerned with the
Soviet. Having no merchant fleet of any consequence and being far more distant
than the United Kingdom, a logistical problem prevailed here of even greater
magnitude than that which faced the suppliers of "bundles for Britain."
The barriers against American merchant ships supplying belligerents had
to go down if the aid promised to Stalin were to materialize in the USSR.
The U.S. News played a revealing part in this matter as well. In its pro-and-con
column on views on the subject,(150) it printed two vociferous pro-repeal
votes from Gifford Pinchot, a venerable government bureaucrat whose tenure
on the public payroll went back to the turn of the century, and the millionaire
Cleveland industrialist Cyrus S. Eaton. In hailing the drive to repeal the
Neutrality Act still in the way, Eaton singled out for special commendation
three Vermont Republicans for their contribution thereto: Senator Warren
Austin for introducing the resolution to repeal, Rep. Plumley for supporting
the move to arm U.S. merchant ships, and Governor Willis for calling for
a Republican Party caucus "to end obstruction of national defense."
Eaton's concluding accolade to these three commended their actions as "encouraging
signs that the traditional Republican foreign policy" "will again
prevail in party councils." Eaton apparently was of the view that "traditional
Republican foreign policy" and the existing recently-amended Roosevelt
New Deal foreign policy were one and the same.
And, in an editorial invocation which blessed all these developments, David
Lawrence announced his conviction that Hitler had already lost the war;
his conquests had simply generated hate, Russia was now in arms against
him and "the United States is on the way." Hitler, Lawrence was
sure, must have become aware by this moment (November 14, 1941) that "the
President of the United States, the head of a democratic state, has boldly
loaned a billion dollars in supplies to Josef Stalin, the dictator of a
totalitarian state." "Ideologies have been swept aside,"
and it now was not the time "to argue the merits or demerits of allies
in war"; "God moves in strange ways his wonders to perform.''(151)
Mr. Lawrence had discerned divine guidance in the ex- tending of lend-lease
to Communist Russia. There would be decades for him after 1945 to wail and
grumble about the awful threat of Stalinist Communism and its descendants
to the very future of the galaxy, during which time he never again discerned
the intervention of the Deity in behalf of his politics.
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