Postwar Steps to Communism

Westbrook Pegler

Enid Morning News/January 1, 1943

NEW YORK. Dec. 31.-As the American people yield their liberties to their government, the better to fight the dictators and the sooner to win the war with the least possible loss of American lives, that government becomes daily more impatient toward the very freedom which the Fourth of July orators used to refer to as the sacred heritage. Henry Wallace, the vice-president, has spoken slightingly of the Bill of Rights and now he proposes that after this war, when Soviet dictatorship will overrun the European continent, the United States and her allies supervise or inspect the school systems of the enemy countries “to undo, as far as possible, the diabolical work of Hitler and the Japanese war lords in poisoning the minds of the young.”

Mr. Wallace, who detests dictatorship in the enemy nations, rather admires the Russian dictatorship, not merely as a military ally, but also as a method of government, and as he continues to call for cooperation and mutuality all over the world after the war, he offers no valid assurance that the realistic Stalin and his helpers will desist from spreading communism in Europe. Stalin, himself, has given no such commitment and it would be worthless, in the light of our own experience in the United States, if he should.

Although Soviet Russia gave solemn promise to quit interfering in the domestic affairs of this nation in the treaty of recognition negotiated early in the new deal, that interference has continued down to present hour under the auspices of, and through the members of the Communist party, which has been denounced as an alien, anti-American influence by Attorney General Biddle and whose subservience to the Kremlin was frankly if incautiously recognized a few weeks ago by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Many tireless anti-Americans were present in the gathering before which Mr. Wallace disparaged the bill of rights.

This must mean only that the children of Europe, the next generation of fighters, will be taught Communism, including atheism, under the supervision or inspection of the guardian nations and that, as in Russia, and, indeed as in Germany and Italy today, the European people will exist for the state and the dictator’s purposes. That may be the inevitable next step but it is not necessary, nor is it assured that the people of the United States will agree to take a hand, even passively, in the inculcation of one poisonous philosophy to destroy another and, in effect, identical philosophy.

The alternative would seem to be for the United States to withdraw in isolation and armed preparedness to wait out the future. Mrs. Roosevelt recently expressed dissatisfaction with that freedom of Americans which permits a young man to become a doctor because he wants to, and to locate regardless of the community needs. This has the sound of something from the Communist arguments from Mein Kampf.

If Americans, through their government, are to supervise or inspect the teaching of the next generation of Europeans and of Japanese, and unpoison their minds, would Mr. Wallace do less than that for his own people? It seems very unlikely and unlike him and in considering this probability one must consider, too, that his idea of intellectual poison might conflict with the inherent American idea.

For American Communists, What Victory Will Bring

Westbrook Pegler

Enid Morning News/January 24, 1943

NEW YORK, Jan. 22.—Memory is short and most Americans seem to forget the aggressive campaign of the communists and their fellow travelers to cripple the United States during the life of the so-called non-aggression pact between Russia and Nazi Germany, the document which touched off this war, which terminated on June 22, 1941, when Hitler attacked Russia. Like the Nazis in our midst, the communists insisted that war was not, and could not become, the legitimate business of the United States. The communists and the Nazis however, had a common purpose to prevent the creation of military strength here. The sincere American noninterventionists on the other hand wanted to arm the country and train armies but hoped to be able to sit this one out.

On August 31, 1939, V. M. Molotov, the Russian commissar of foreign affairs, in a speech to the supreme soviet, published in pamphlet form for American distribution by the workers library of New York, said: “The nonaggression pact marks a turning point in the history of Europe and not only of Europe. Only yesterday, the German fascists were pursuing a foreign policy hostile to us. Yes, only yesterday we were enemies in the sphere of foreign relations. Today, however, the situation has changed and we are enemies no longer.

“The pact puts an end to the enmity between Germany and the USSR. The fact that our outlooks and political systems differ must not and cannot be obstacles to the establishment of good political relations. Only enemies of Germany and the USSR can strive to create enmity between the peoples of these countries.”

It will be seen that the detestation of fascism per se, and the furious determination to stamp it out because it is evil, was lacking in those days. Russia was willing to live and let fascism live as good neighbors. It was only when Hitler repudiated the pact and attacked that fascism suddenly became an intolerable evil of itself.

On November 13, 1939, Earl Browder, the general secretary of the American communist party and leader of the enormous conspiracy against this nation’s rearmament and military training program, made a speech in Madison Square Garden in which he said: “We communists clearly and boldly denounce the present war as an imperialistic one, on both sides, from which the people have nothing to gain but misery, starvation, oppression and death. We warn that the peoples who suffer from this war will not be patient but will prepare to take the decision into their own hands if our present ‘statesmen’ do not stop the war. We point out that in Europe this means that the war can have only the effect of placing the socialist revolution on the order of business as a practical question.”

Browder was not then as strongly opposed to fascism as an evil as to approve a war to obliterate it. Some American editors and statesmen lately have flinched from the possibility that communism may succeed fascism, from which it is indistinguishable, on continental Europe and mention of this possibility is deplored and even suppressed.

Yet on the word of the boss communist of the United States, the socialist revolution is now on the order of business in Europe. In another document issued by the New York communist publishing house in February, 1940, entitled “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier for Wall Street,” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote: “The best insurance to keep off the toboggan slide into war is an ultimatum to our government: ‘stay neutral; not a dollar for war.’ Starve the war; feed America first! We must hurry. Already President Roosevelt has started along the road that led Woodrow Wilson to war.”

The rest of the pamphlet is in the same vein and if these and many other documents of the same kind were published then had any effect at all, it was to retard the arming and training of the American fighters from whom a great cry was sent be up by the communists last summer however, when they were demanding to a second front in Europe, and to impair the production of weapons, planes and machines which the same communists now demand in unlimited and miraculous abundance for Russia, The lesson taught by this literature is that Russia’s war is a nationalistic fight for life, not a gallant defense of the freedom which fascism, like communism, strives to annihilate; that Russia does contemplate a communistic revolution in Europe when it is won and that the relationship between the United States and Russia is not one of political comradeship but of military alliance in a war against a common enemy of two distinct nations.

Blind Leaders of the Blind

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/December 28, 1931

What was accomplished by the late melancholious Hunger March on Washington, either for the Communists who organized it or for the hungry it was supposed to succor? I can see nothing whatever. The marchers even failed to get a rise out of the Washington police. They proved at the White House that men without either blocks of votes or wads of greenbacks in their pockets were not welcomed to the Presence, but that was known before. At the Capitol they insulted a sympathetic Mormon Senator—the Hon. Mr. King, of Utah—who offered very decently to help them, but failed to gain entrance to either House, and left nothing behind them save a bad smell. And on their journey their boorish manners disgusted everyone who tried to be polite to them, and alienated thousands of persons who, at the start, were disposed to view them in a very kindly way.

The truth is that the Communist movement in the United States is badly led, and is making little if any progress. In most other countries it has more or less intelligent leaders, and they formulate and carry out a more or less rational programme, but here it seems to have fallen into the hands of mere clowns. What they are after appears to be only personal publicity, and when they have got it they are satisfied. Every time they horn into a strike the poor strikers come quickly to grief, and every time they essay to “rescue” some victim of the capitalistic courts he is worse off at the end than he was at the start. Elsewhere in the world they get ardent support from large sections of the intelligentsia, but in the United States, forgetting the Sex Boys and a few despairing Liberals of the New Republic school, they get none.

I doubt that they have gained any appreciable number of new adherents since the depression began. When they announce a free feed, of course, many down-and-outs flock in, and when they propose grandly to seize a cotton mill, to empty a jail, or to legalize the marriage of colored field-hands to white ladies of the higher income-tax brackets they naturally provoke a certain amount of cheering. But it does not appear that the converts thus made are really inoculated with the glad juices of the Marxian gospel. And it surely does not appear that they stick.

What dubious progress the holy cause has made is probably due far more to the denunciations of the American Legion, the D. A. R. and other such bands of professional patriots than to the eloquence of the Communist evangelists themselves. There is a familiar type of inferior man, usually close to the borders of Moronia, who gets a thrill out of belonging to proscribed and apparently sinister organizations. The Ku Klux Klan fetched him in its day, and before it the A. P. A. He was numerous in the old Knights of Labor, in the I. W. W., and even in the Farmers’ Alliance. He is strongly attracted to the American Legion itself, especially in the States where it tries to run things, and is not unknown in the lower ranks of the Freemasons. Communism, in certain of its phases, naturally sets his blood to leaping, for its programme is very brave and gaudy, and it is greatly feared by many persons who should know better.

Unfortunately, there are other phases of it which quickly alarm him, once he hears of them. If he is a Southerner he can’t stomach its noisy (but not too serious) advocacy of racial equality, and whether Southerner or Northerner he is commonly greatly upset by its hostility to religion. Most of the tin-pot orders that preceded it laid heavy stress upon piety, and not a few of them—notably the Klan—had formal ecclesiastical approval. But Communism is flatly against not only the Pope but also the Methodist bench of bishops, and so the neophyte grows uneasy. During the late strikes in North Carolina the Bolshevik evangelists “converted” a large number of lintheads, but in a few months those lintheads were all reclaimed by their pastors, and some of them went to the length of issuing a manifesto protesting that they had been sound Baptists all the while, and in no doubt about Hell for an instant.

In brief, Communism collides with too many ineradicable American prejudices to prosper among us. The white native is horrified by some of its salient dogmas, and the colored brother begins to sicken as soon as he discovers that its promise to deliver him from Jim-Crowism is only a promise. Thus various bands of foreigners, mainly very ignorant, become the residuary legatees. But by American law and custom such foreigners have no rights, and in consequence they are unable to do more than make a noise. And because they are divided sharply, like the rest of us, by racial distrusts and animosities, even that noise is not very loud.

III

This is a pity, for Communism, whatever its deficiencies, is at least a very interesting idea, and it deserves to be presented by spokesmen of more dignity and authority, and in decent English. It is surely as sensible as the Single Tax, or the Direct Primary, or the Initiative and Referendum, or any of the other perunas that have been whooped up in the United States in recent years, openly and without protest. For one, I am disposed to believe that it is quite as sensible as democracy. But democracy is preached day in and day out by whole herds of eminent and respectable men, including even Presidents, whereas Communism has to depend for exposition upon greasy nobodies bawling from soap boxes, and aesthetes who arrived at it by way of carnal gin parties in Greenwich Village.

Thus it is condemned before it is heard, and its obvious usefulness as a means of scaring the bubbitti of the land is greatly hobbled and impeded. They yell pretty loudly, to be sure, even now, but their yells are all falsetto: there is no genuine alarm in them. Life would be much more amusing in the Republic if the Communist grand wizards could come to closer quarters with them, and blow hot blasts into their actual faces. Until the death of the late Victor Berger there was always a Socialist in Congress—usually only one, and invariably a very mild one. But though he was mild and alone, he often gave very good shows, and made the first pages. I’d like to see 30 or 10 Communists there, well organized and full of sin. Certainly he would do much better than the discordant windjammers who now posture as Progressives.

As things stand, Congress lacks any really effective Opposition. The Democrats and Republicans are simply two gangs of professional politicians fighting for jobs, and the Progressives are mainly idiots. A Communist bloc would be good for a circus two or three times a week. It would have the floor all the time, it would greatly upset. Lord Hoover and his friends, and it would do no real harm to anyone—save maybe to the rev. chaplains of the two Houses. Every day, reading the prayers of those holy men in the Congressional Record, I marvel that the Lord God Jehovah does not have at them with a thunderbolt. Well, what He neglects to do with the artillery of Heaven a Communist bloc might do very neatly with the weapons of rhetoric.

But we are in for no such luck. Communism among us remains a frowsy and puerile evangel, monopolized by humorless and incompetent men. If the professional patriots ceased bawling about it, it would scarcely be heard of at all. It has made no more impression on the American labor movement than Seventh Day Adventism or the New Thought. The unions that carry on in English are all violently against it, and it has failed dismally to organize the unorganized. The white serfs in the mines and cotton mills distrust it as unholy, and the colored brethren, too canny (save when they happen to be half-wit) to be fooled. Its fate seems to be fade into the limbo which enshrouds Greenbackism, Populism and the Single Tax.

Nor is there any sign that it is making better weather elsewhere—that is, outside Russia. It came a cropper in Italy so long ago as 1919, it failed soon afterward in Hungary, it has been going downhill steadily in England and Germany, in France it is sick unto death, and in Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia it shows no apparent progress. When Alphonse XIII was dethroned in Spain some of the monarchists bellowed that a Communist plot was to blame, but that was only the childish hooey that we are used to hearing from the D. A. R. As a matter of fact, Communists had little to do with the revolution, and the new government is anything but friendly to them.

There remains Russia. Is Communism a success in that unhappy land? Then democracy is also a success in Mississippi and Marine rule in Haiti. The Russians boast that they have no unemployment, but neither, in the rational sense, have they any employment: everyone simply struggles desperately for a bare and bad living. In precisely the same sense there is no unemployment among the flea-bitten share-croppers who plow the mud of Arkansas. The Bolsheviki now propose to educate their victims. If they ever really do so they will open the way for their own downfall. For the moment the Russian masses begin to read anything save government propaganda they will see how they have been swindled, and proceed to butcher their exploiters.

Roulette with Destiny

Dorothy Thompson

Indianapolis Star/January 20, 1940

THE ACTION of the United States Congress in the matter of the loan to Finland is simply incredible. In one of the most critical moments of history Congress has chosen to behave with supreme frivolity. in a moment when every small neutral in Europe is trembling in fear of an extension of undeclared war; when all Scandinavia fears a breakthrough of the Russian armies, and when Holland and Belgium fear an assault from Germany, the world’s greatest neutral has slapped Finland’s face in the most ostentatious way and in view of the whole earth.

Finland would never have applied for a loan had there been the slightest indication that it would be refused. The refusal is a staggering political blow. It is the greatest bloodless victory that Stalin has had thus far. It is, at the same time, aid and assistance to the most immoderate forces in Germany. The moderates have been trying to stay Hitler’s hand by telling him that another aggression against a neutral state would outrage all neutral countries, particularly the great United States.

Now the Congress has given notice that our outrage will only be expressed in sending a handsome wreath to the funeral, bearing the inscription, “He was an upright man and paid his debts.”

We will collect money from individuals to feed the innocent neutral victims of the Russian or German steam roller. Millions for bandages and food, but not 1 cent for a gun with which to defend yourself.

Save your money, friends. Dead men don’t eat.

We must bring ourselves to realize that every action taken by the United States government today has positive diplomatic and political effects, outside and inside the United States.

The international effect of Congress’s refusal to distinguish between declared wars among great powers and undeclared assaults on neutrals is to strengthen revolutionary gangsterism all over the world outside this country and inside it as well.

The Communist Daily Worker, the mouthpiece of the Soviet government, published right in New York and distributed to American workers, is jubilant this morning.

Does the American Congress not know that the very subversive elements for the investigation, of which Congress has already given millions to the Dies committee, are all rejoicing today?

The essential propaganda of the Christian Front and the Communist party and the German-American Bund, whose leaders are at this moment under indictment or already condemned for fraud or planned violence, is that there are war-mongering profiteers.

It is no concern of ours, according to them, whether Finland, Sweden, Norway, Holland, Switzerland, the solid, solvent nations embodying as deep a Western culture as exists—are cynically erased off the map tomorrow.

For in the welter of destruction and despair that will follow such collapse the gangster with the gun will be the sole rallying point. Meanwhile, in the United States, a bland and complacent feeling of security and isolation will have been created. The distinctions between right and wrong, between aggression and defense, between civilization and barbarism, will have been broken down. “If we lend money to the Finns we shall be dragged into war,” must be put alongside Earl Browder’s statement before the Dies committee that he would try to make a civil war in the United States if this country were ever in hostilities with the Soviet Union.

Does not the Congress see the connections between these things?

And where is the consistency in our policy? We refuse to recognize territorial changes brought about by force. We do not recognize Manchukuo or the Bohemian-Moravian state carved by Germany out of Czecho-Slovakia. We stand for the sanctity of treaties and the rule of international law. We have exacted from the nations of the world a solemn pledge not to resort to war as an instrument of national policy. We have lent money to China and refused to apply the neutrality act in the Far East. We have in all our words stood for order and recognition of law.

But if we turn down the loan to Finland we shall stand for international anarchy and hope that, by repressive measures at home, we can stop it from spreading here—while we give notice to the world that the United States is scared.

But this time I think Congress has made a mistake. It is wrong in gauging public opinion. The American people want to send substantial help to Finland with the object of helping Finland and all the other neutrals resist invasion. Conversation with any man you speak to in the street shows it. The people have a far better instinct than Congress has. They know that the earth is round and that if this anarchy spreads we shall suffer.

The behavior of Congress indicates, however, that the nation is at present without leadership and without policy. The party leadership has collapsed. The Republicans are not following anyone, and neither are the Democrats. There is no direction in foreign policy. Congress is not accepting the views of the Department of State. We are not, in short, being governed or being allowed to govern ourselves.

What happens from day to day depends upon how senators and congressmen have laid their bets on the political roulette wheels. This preposterous irresponsibility sows confusion abroad, breaks down the confidence of this nation and leaves us open to intermittent and inexplicable waves of fear.

This is unfortunate. We are not behaving like ourselves.

Evil Results of Potsdam

Dorothy Thompson

Fort Worth Star-Telegram/July 2o, 1946

Looking through my files I find that I have published since January 1944 more than a dozen columns predicting the results of the German policies that culminated in June 1945 in the Potsdam declaration.

These predictions included the warning that the radical truncation of Germany in the east would create an appalling food crisis and end in our sacrificing to support and feed our late enemies; that a deindustrialization program atop forced evacuation of millions of destitute Germans from detached areas into the Reich would erase reparations; that consent to wholesale removals of industrial machinery would bring widespread unemployment; and that the division of Germany into four zones under armies responsible only to their own governments and interests would tend to the permanent partition of Europe and the exacerbation of every difference between the Allies themselves.

Now Mr Byrnes, though he reiterates his loyalty to Potsdam, must in fact see that the policies, especially in view of the arbitrary interpretations of them by the USSR, mean the economic disintegration of Europe as well as Germany and a frightful charge on American taxpayers.

Well, I still cannot understand why anyone expected other results. For if there were a scrap of imagination, an iota of intellect, a modicum of historical perspective, a shred of democratic principle or even a whiff of morality operating at Potsdam it never was indicated.

Today even the few mitigating —and in the rest of the context impossible and insincere—directives of Potsdam are being subjected to conflicting interpretations by the various Allies.

“Agreement,” says the Potsdam declaration “has been reached at this conference on the political and economic principles of a coordinated Allied policy toward Germany.”

Bunk. There was not a single “principle” enunciated in the whole declaration which consisted merely of arbitrary directives.

“It is not the intention . . . to destroy or enslave the German people” but to “give them the opportunity to prepare for the eventual reconstruction of their life on a democratic and peaceful basis.” To this end “all democratic political parties with rights of assembly and political discussion shall be allowed throughout Germany.” (Ask the Social Democrats in the Russian zone about the application of this “principle.”)

“For the time being” (what is the meaning of “time being”?) “no central German government shall be established . . . but certain essential German administrative departments . . . shall be established in the fields of finance, transport, communications, foreign trade and industry.” (This is what Mr. Byrnes is demanding a year later.)

“During the period of occupation, Germany shall be treated as a single economic unit and to this end common policies shall be established in regard to mining, industrial production, agriculture, forestry, wages, prices, rationing imports and exports, currency, banking, central taxation and customs, reparations and removal of industrial war potential, transportation and communications.”

To date there is no “common” policy regarding any of these categories. Mr. Byrnes wants the power to create an agency to plan a policy, but Molotov says no.

The reparations “principles” were sui generis, respecting no system of accountancy and making no differentiations between private property and state responsibility. The USSR was permitted to remove from her zone whatever capital equipment she chose, guided only by the principle that she leave enough to enable the German people to “live without external assistance.” What is the meaning of “to live—”? Does it include newborn babies whose chances in some areas are about one in nine? And where is the economic “expert” who could accurately gauge the social effects of cutting huge chunks out of a highly integrated economy, an organic living thing that can bleed to death by only partial dismemberment?

Then the western Allies promised delivery to the USSR 15 per cent of such capital equipment “as is unnecessary for the German peace economy” against payments from the Russian zone of food, coal, potash, etc. and 10 per cent, with the same unassessable restriction against no compensation whatever. Most of the eastern food and coal isn’t even in the Russian zone; it was given outright to Poland. The Russians now say they still want $10,000,000,000 without any evidence that it is collectible even within the Potsdam terms. Reparations also were to be collected against German “external assets.” Russia now interprets as such assets properties seized by Hitler’s gang when it overran Europe—including the property of Jews! This of course means the ruin of “liberated” Austria

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