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This article is adapted from Chapter One of the forthcoming book, Hands Across the Volga: American Mass Communication and the Wartime Affair with the Soviet Union, 1941-1947.

Opinions and Opinion Makers in the USA •2,200字

As the German-Russian War Begins on June 22, 1941, in the 22nd month of World War Two, an event occurred as important in the history of the United States and its relations with the rest of the world as the bombing attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a little less than six months later. This was the invasion by the German armies of Hitler’s National Socialist Germany of the portions of Eastern Poland occupied by the armies and political machinery of Stalinist Communist Soviet Russia, and then on deeply into Russia itself.

Upon this act most of that portion of American opinion ranged to the left of center joined in the war psychologically and emotionally, and spent much of its energy from that point on in trying to induce general American sympathy with the cause now heavily weighted in the direction of the interests of Stalinist Communism and its global satellites and sympathetic forces and concerns. A vast sea of printer’s ink and a galactic volume of radio babble engulfed the U.S.A. upon the outbreak of formal hostilities between Germany and Russia, most of which concerned whether or not this country should aid the forces of Josef Stalin against those of Adolf Hitler. Eight years of towering and unremitting anti-Hitler propaganda in the U.S.A. had resulted in reducing the pro-German elements in the land to a minority so small as to be, in modern parlance, “statistically irrelevant.”

One of the factors which conditioned this discussion was the persistence of a powerful and probably dominant body of opinion opposed to becoming involved in the war as a belligerent. It included an enormous contingent of those who had always been hostile to Soviet Communism and which now were more firmly convinced than ever before that abstention be demanded of the national policy makers. Also included in the citizenry which had a rigid position against collaboration with the Soviet Union were various sects of the Left, particularly the Socialist Party, and the Social Democratic Federation, the inheritors of the anti-Bolshevik faction of Russian Marxists known in the time of the upheaval in Russia as the Mensheviki. Their company was augmented by the anarchists and syndicalists, such as the I.W.W., tiny fragments of the radical spectrum in the U.S.A. implacably opposed to Stalinism on ideological, not nationalistic, grounds.

Still another source of anti-Red sentiment stemmed from those of all persuasions who had been affronted by the diplomatic revolution performed in August 1939 by the joining of Russia and Germany at that time, which wrecked almost a decade of fatuous, simple-minded gabble, both oral and printed, that such an event was the most unlikely thing ever to take place. And yet another sector of anti-Stalinism derived from the war fought against Finland by Stalin’s legions in 1940-41, many of whose camp having also become incensed at the division of Poland between the Germans and the Soviet in September/October 1939, a fourth partition of that unhappy land. It required substantial powers of forgetfulness on the part of sentimental partisans of the Poles, however, whose belligerence and sabre-rattling, mainly with real sabres, had preceded for a decade and a half their sudden and humiliating collapse before the forces of two flanking lands. Polish warmongers had long predicted that both could be beaten simultaneously by Polish arms, to be followed by the recreation of a Polish state with boundaries close to those which allegedly prevailed in the (earlier) days of glory.

Had Russian Communism’s friends been as few in America as were those of German National Socialism, there would not have been much of a story to tell, and granted American entry into World War Two in the same manner it eventually took place, the ultimate fighting of the war would have been considerably different and an outcome and postwar consequence would have ensued which would coincide with very little the world has seen in the last 40 years.

However, the Soviet Russian state enjoyed the support of a large and growing contingent of admirers, well- wishers and lovers in America, including, here as in most other countries in the world, an element so enamored of Bolshevik Communism that they customarily and consistently placed Soviet welfare and interests ahead of those of the land in which they lived. The unique aspect of this mountainous propaganda in behalf of the welfare of a foreign state was not the call for military cooperation with it to overcome a common enemy but the widespread promotional efforts on behalf of its internal programs, its domestic system and its philosophical and psychic foundations. The Second World War was the high water mark of this phenomenon, unmatched by anything similar in the history of the national state system, and still a factor in world politics well over 60 years after the Russian Revolution.

During World War Two, the scope and impact of this immense multitude of “loyal Russians” living elsewhere than in the Soviet Fatherland added up to results of such immensity that their full effect still remains to be chronicled properly. Part of what happened in the U.S.A. is the subject of this book.

Hitler’s attack on Stalin occurred at a moment when most of the politicians in the U.S.A. were enlisted emotionally on the side of the British and French, at war with Hitler since September,1939. Along with them were the largest part of the management and those employed in the newspaper, magazine and book publishing industries, motion picture production, and radio broadcasting (television was in its infancy in 1941, confined mainly to brief local broadcasts weekly in New York City.) Arrayed with them were an overwhelming majority of the American populace, although their sentiment in favor of a victory over the Germans did not extend to participation in the hostilities to the same degree, over 80% indicating unwillingness to join in the war as belligerents at about the time of the outbreak of the Russo-German phase of the war. Stalin’s involvement in June 1941 brought to an end a period of neutrality which extended back to the outbreak of the war, preceded by the incredible diplomatic pact of “non-aggression” between him and Hitler which heralded the outbreak of hostilities between the Germans and Poles by a week and a half. Committed to come to the aid of Poland by a clumsy bit of diplomatic adventurism dating back to March 31, 1939, the British demonstrated an incompetence which was outmatched only by their French collaborators in declaring war on Germany, the succession of British defeats being dimmed by the calamitous collapse of the French in June 1940, following which their country was partially occupied and the remainder governed by a regime subservient to German policies.

The Communist regime in Russia had always looked forward to a general war in Europe which would find them playing the role of spectators exclusively. The events of September 1939 to June 1941 were cut precisely to their specifications. The principal price paid for this comfortable situation was a sharp decline in the esteem of the countries involved against the Germans under Adolf Hitler, not only the Franco-British belligerents, but also in militarily uninvolved but emotionally enlisted America. After 15 years of diplomatic isolation, the U.S. had recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, and there followed a spectacular blossoming of pro-Communist propaganda and special pleading, especially in American intellectual centers.

Beginning in 1935, the Stalin regime encouraged the creation of a political alignment called the Popular Front, a sidling up to any other country or to political forces in that country which would advance with the Reds a common anti-German position. The local Communist parties in lands other than Russia made this their principal enterprise, though the scope of the Popular Front would have been exceedingly small had it not been for the sympathetic collaboration of a substantial number of formal non-Communists whose exploits and contributions to the Communist cause dwarfed those of the formal Party activists. Many of these were deeply offended by discovering on August 23, 1939, that the Popular Front was not the beginning of a perpetual political alliance presaging the eventual triumph of the planetary proletarian state, but a temporary phase in Russian foreign policy. As a consequence, zeal for the protection of Communism in Stalin’s Workers’ Fatherland cooled perceptibly between September 1939 and June 22, 1941. A very large part of those previously involved went over to an anti-German position based on British and French interests, a few joined the anti-interventionist cause, a tiny handful continued to support Stalinism, which now espoused strict neutrality, but many were so paralyzed by the betrayal represented by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pakt that they ceased involvement in politics. Four years later a 新共和国 editor, Malcolm Cowley, disclosed, “Psychiatrists tell me that in some circles there was almost an epidemic of nervous breakdowns after the Russo-German pact.”[1]Cowley, “Marginalia,” New Republic (July 12,1943),p. 50. In view of the havoc the Pakt caused among the New Republic’s editors and contributors, it is very likely that some of them also joined the rush to the psychiatrists’ couches.

Between August, 1939 and June, 1941 there did develop among outraged liberals a compensation mechanism in which was expressed the outward, formal rejection of Stalinist affections. During this time this distaste was represented by the spreading of the expression “Communazi” as a descriptive term for the forces of Stalin and Hitler, accused continuously of being in an “alliance.” It grew in intensity after the collapse of France in June, 1940, then slackened noticeably in the early months of 1941, almost disappearing after June, 1941 and the start of theRusso-German war. There were comic and sometimes sour after effects of this “Communazi” episode and interlude, as liberals relapsed into old and comfortable postures with respect to Stalinist Russia. An example was the awkward publication timing of the autobiographical Opinions of Oliver Allston (E.P. Dutton), by one of liberalism’s most hallowed literary figures, Van Wyck Brooks. Brooks admitted in this book to have found much that was admirable in Soviet Communism but had decided subsequent to the Pakt “to fight both Communists and Fascists.” Dorothy Brewster, in her caustic review of this book in the Communist New Masses (December 30,1941, pp. 20-21), inquired rhetorically, “Was he [Brooks] fighting them both a short time ago when he sponsored the meeting called by the Council for Soviet Relations to celebrate the anniversary of the recognition by the U.S.A. of the USSR [November 17, 1933]?” Brooks was just one of a formidable battalion which wanted to have forgotten their 22 or so months of pique and resentment at Stalin’s “betrayal,” in August, 1939.

Virtually the only analysis of and literature on World War Two from Communists which merits any attention is that produced during the period of Stalinist neutrality, between September 1939 and June 1941. Prior to that time it is mainly a crafty and carefully cultivated alarmist hysteria, calculated to produce panic among the “democracies” and encourage alliances with Soviet Russia in the “popular front” against the anti-communist states. After 1941 it was mainly florid patriotic Soviet raving. But in both instances the Stalinist ploy gathered a rich harvest of “conservatives” (nearly fifty years after Munich, essentially an anti-communist action engineered by Chamberlain and Daladier, right wingers were still mouthing the communist derogation of it as “appeasement,” one of the most successful dupings of the Right by communist propaganda in seventy years.) It is significant that the only sustained period of conservative criticism of communists during 1939-45 occurred in the 1939-41 lull when the latter chose to stand back and watch what they correctly interpreted as a civil war among the capitalist powers. All this ended with the entry of Stalinist Russia in the war. Most of Communism’s friends rapidly recuperated and were back at their familiar stations, pleading for American involvement on Russian lines, a matter of serious embarrassment to the Anglophile and Francophile warrior elements, in the same way the Red sympathizers as neutralists had been an exasperation to the anti-war and anti-involvement people between September 3, 1939 and June 22, 1941.

Though Americans had been carefully nursed in their Germanophobia for more than eight years by the radio, movies and the printed word, as well as by pedagogical oratory from coast to coast, the job of making them belligerents was not as easy as it might have appeared to be. Only in the areas most heavily settled for three centuries by British stock, New England and the South, was the eagerness for combat at the side of Britain preponderant.[2]As Lawrence Dennis was wont to point out in the postwar era, in his news- letter Appeal to Reason, in the American South, as a general rule, the more racist the state, the more ferociously eager for combat with the Hitler regime it tended to be. Elsewhere a vast selling job had to be done, and it was never successful. The attack on Pearl Harbor and not intellectual conviction brought the overwhelming mass of Americans into World War Two.

In essence then the Anglophile and Russophile warmongers were minorities, but very active and persuasive ones, though their main impact was felt after December 7, 1941. The former concealed their impatience for immersion in the war behind calls for “defense of democracy” and “the democratic way of life,”[3]Part of the calculated program of synthetic patriotic ritual which was infused into everyday life in the U.S.A. accompanying this tidal wave of print and talk was the device of playing the Star Spangled Banner before the commencement of formal public gatherings, especially prior to the start of athletic contests. Thirty years after the end of World War Two it was still a preface to almost all such spectacles except perhaps dog races and wrestling matches. People were already complaining that it was being overdone in 1941, at which occasion Time commented, “The tune of The Star Spangled Banner, which has been the official national anthem for only a decade [1931],is an old British drinking song…. It was the club song of London’s 18th Century Anacreontic Society. Called To Anacreon in Heaven, it was written by John Stafford Smith, the society’s organist. Author Francis Scott Key, although believed to be tone-deaf, was apparently familiar with the original song.” Time (December 22, 1941), p.56. in every enterprise available to propaganda, including a flood of books. In the late summer such works as Professor Edward Meade Earle’s 对抗这场洪流 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press[4]Throughout this study, the place of publication will be identified for all books other than those issued by publishers in New York City, which latter will be assumed by its omission., Francis Hackett’s 我的奋斗对美国意味着什么 (Reynal & Hitchcock) and Henry R. Luce’s 美国世纪 (Farrar and Rinehart) characterized the outpouring from this camp. But it was being matched by a similar flow from leftists and pro-Communists, now that Hitler and Stalin were at war, of the likes of Pierre van Paassen’s 就是现在! (Dial Press), Ralph Ingersoll’s America is Worth Fighting For (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill), and Max Werner’s 世界之战 (Modern Age Books).

Luce and his formidable publishing empire of 时间, 生活运气 was by far the most influential interventionist voice favoring teamwork with Britain, and his American Century proposal for a joint straddling of the world with Anglo-American power indefinitely had already had a dress rehearsal before American readers months before Soviet Russia entered the war. Where the sentiments and loyalties of many of his writers, reporters and editors lay was another matter, as will be examined at length.[5]Luce lent his prestige to young John F. Kennedy by signing the foreword to Kennedy’s undergraduate thesis at Harvard, published under the title 英格兰睡觉时 (Wilfred Funk, 1940), and exploiting a persuasive line adopted by publicists both here and abroad. It became fashionable in the 1940s to write books alleging someone or other “slept” as a device to demonstrate 事后 wisdom. Following the Kennedy essay came Denna F. Fleming’s While America Slept: A Contemporary Analysis of World Events from the Fall of France to Pearl Harbor (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1944). Fleming was probably the most incandescent pro-war interventionist academician in the South, the equivalent to Frederick L. Schuman of Williams College. As a member of the Vanderbilt University faculty and a radio news commentator on Nashville, Tennessee’s station WSM, Fleming was a formidable pedagogical warrior. Like many of them, once the war was over he went through a transformation into one of the most heart-rending pleaders for world peace and for understanding of the Stalinist world. It is unlikely anyone “slept” anywhere, but were mainly overtaken by events and the fortunes of war. The alleged nap of Americans in the 1930s does not hold up against the facts; a complaint in the year 1938, for example, was lodged against the export the previous year by the U.S. of munitions and warplanes which exceeded in dollar value the amount spent by the wartime Wilson regime on the tools of war for the entire World War I year of April 1917 to April 1918. See e.g., the critical editorial “Munitions Trade” in Colorado Springs Gazette, July 9, 1938, p. 4. There were $10,000,000,000 spent on arms in Britain during the premiership of Churchill’s predecessor, Neville Chamberlain. This was a prodigious sum of money fifty or so years ago, when, for example, the minimum wage in the U.S.A. was thirty (30) cents an hour, and a fifth of the labor force was unemployed even at this rate. The above sum suggests that this can hardly be called “sleeping,” when, in addition, the air was rent in the English-speaking world with one treatise after another excoriating the immense sums being spent on the production and trade in arms, world-wide. But to this day there can be heard a type of blatherskite trying to convince anyone willing to listen that at the outbreak of war in September 1939 the United Kingdom was milling around in muddled and confused disarmament. It was peculiar, amusing, and to some, depressing, that of the many newscasters, columnists and newspapermen and politicians pushed to the fore, from 1940 on, bawling to the world of their oracular powers in predicting and warning of trouble with Japan and Germany from 1931, if not earlier, not one displayed the faintest soothsaying ability on the much closer trouble with Russian and Chinese Communism. It may be argued that exhibiting propensities of this sort might have been dangerous in the era of the ascendancy of Hitler, for several reasons. Hostile sentiments about communism in the era of the Grand Amour with Stalin, the most one-sided political love affair in history, were most likely to be denounced as “spreading rumors planted by enemy agents.” The people of the United States were still living with the consequences 40 years after it had become politically safe late in 1945.

The 1939-1945 era bustled and jostled in the U.S.A. with all manner of politicians, journalists and military analysts stridently claiming to have been the first to “recognize the Nazi peril”; some preferred to be seen as such well before the movement took shape in Germany. This contingent especially bloomed after Pearl Harbor, and there seemed to be some kind of correlation between having “early spotted the Hitler menace” and vaulting into big wartime jobs and ultimately in the postwar political machinery. But it was just peripherally embarrassing to them that none came forth as oracles and seers prophesying the “Commie peril,” demonstrating near total blindness to a “Communist menace” until well after the Cold War had set in, whereupon belated wisdom in this sector became fashionable. But there were holdouts who did not become political giants in this capacity until after the Korean war had broken out in mid-1950.

Still another stream of pro-war literature, sometimes subtle, and at other times not so subtle, was represented by such massively promoted and widely read works as William L. Shirer’s 柏林日记 (Knopf) (Shirer’s political affections were not frankly laid out for some time), Douglas Miller’s heated tract, You Can’t Do Business With Hitler (Boston: Little, Brown), and the now disenchanted former pro-Soviet publicist Louis Fischer’s Men and Politics (Duell, Sloan and Pearce). These three titles had been given top billing and frenetic praise in the house organ of the interventionist Council on Foreign Relations’ quarterly, Foreign Affairs, in the early fall of 1941.[6]See Foreign Affairs (October 1941), pp. 193-196 for the enthusiastic promotion of the books mentioned in this section. The reviewer of the journal’s “Recent Books on International Relations” section was Robert Gale Woolbert.

In the meantime, probably the oldest of the literary calls to war, the output of refugees, continued its steady representation in U.S.A. bookstalls with such examples of leftist anti-German central European journalist output as A Thousand Shall Fall, by Hans Habe (Harcourt Brace), and 最黑暗的时刻 by Leo Lania (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).[7]Foreign Affairs January 1942), p. 377. Habe, originally Janos or Jean Bekessy, had an established pedigree for anti-Hitler politics. (See letter from Philip de Ronde, an ex-captain in the French Foreign Legion, to Time (November 10, 1941, pp. 4-5). Restored to political fragrance by the outcome of 1945, it was possible to read Habe-Bekessy’s tiresome political sermons decades later in various of the world’s journals. Lania was born Lazar Herrmann in Kharkov in 1896. Originally a Communist, he professed to have left them and become a Socialist in 1923. He claimed to have been an enemy of Hitler since 1924 and to have interviewed him at which time he admitted to knowing only two German words but claimed the ability to find Hitler’s dialect, grammar and sentence structure defective, during his talk with him. See also Lania’s 今天我们是兄弟 (Boston: Houghton Mif- flin, 1942). There will be substantial attention to both these propagandists subsequently.

In examining the propaganda literature attacking Hitler Germany, one is struck by the heavy percentage of authors who are either for a Soviet Communist alternative or one or another of half a dozen varieties of some other kind of Marxian socialism. As an economic system, there are no “free enterprise” critiques; almost every attack which does not reveal the author as a partisan of some species of Marxism is by a Jew of undiscernible political persuasion, whose position is understandable in view of Hitler’s policies toward Jews. What would have been the reception worldwide of the Hitler regime had it not flourished its racial program in the manner it did has been the subject of substantial rumination over the decades. The percentage of Marxist or socialist critiques of Mussolini Italy and Japan is even higher than of Germany. When a search is conducted into what the people attacking Italy and Japan were for, it invariably ends at the front door of a Communist or socialist splinter group, if not directly in the fold of the Communist International. The literary adversaries of Japan either directly or indirectly voted for both a Red China and a Red Japan between 1931 and 1945. The exception in the case of Japan consisted of discomfited Englishmen alarmed at the simultaneous decay of the Empire in Asia at Japanese hands. They succeeded in getting half of what they sought in both Germany and the Far East. Had the Western “allies” been just a little more obtuse and myopic, they might have got the rest.

The issue in Italy remained in doubt still after more than three decades beyond war’s end, although thanks to the “liberators” bringing back to Italy the Communists who had fled to Moscow in the 1920s during the Mussolini era, followed by a vigorous and unremitting offensive conducted thereafter, Italy in the postwar generation had Europe’s largest Communist party outside Russia itself. It was characteristic of the behavior of Italy’s returned Reds that their earliest act under the umbrella of their “democratic allies” was the repulsive murder of their adversary, Mussolini.

Winston Churchill as a Factor Influencing Americans at the Outset, June 1941 •1,000字

By far the most spectacular and fateful extension of hands across the Volga occurred at the very start of the Russo-German war. Winston Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain, flung himself into the arms of Josef Stalin the very day the Red premier became involved in war with Hitler, a few hours after the German attack. Churchill, head of Britain’s war coalition government since May 1940[8]The political rehabilitation and refurbishment of Churchill, begun after Munich by pro-war sectors of both left and right in the Anglo Saxon world, embellished through the war in coalition with additional Tories and also American Anglophiles of non-leftist persuasion, was continued into the post-war period by a “conservative” movement which relished his return to venomous attacks on communism. But they conveniently overlooked his part in launching the Reds on their course of conquest through his impulsive and heedless all out support, 1941-43. His foot-dragging tactics thereafter were in harmony with all the other bad policy- making which had marked British leadership since Versailles, following which they had consistently done the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place. Churchill the journalistic opportunist would have been a better subject for scrutiny than the illusion of Churchill the ineffable statesman of the ages. Essential for any beginning attempts to produce some kind of balanced view of Churchill are Francis Neilson, 丘吉尔传奇 (Appleton, Wis., C.C. Nelson, 1954) and Emrys Hughes, Winston Churchill, British Bulldog: His Career in War and Peace (Exposi- tion Press, 1955.)

Churchill’s rushing into an alliance with Stalin may have appeared to have been a purely impulsive and heedless act, growing entirely from the fortunes of war and short range enthusiasms. It was the British military analyst General J.F.C. Fuller however who called attention several years later in his book 战争行为 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961) that Churchill had suggested an alliance with Stalin repeatedly prior to becoming wartime Prime Minister mentioned four such occasions in the first volume of his 第二次世界大战, in March, 1938(p.213), September, 1938(p.229), May 4,1939(p.285), and May 19, 1939(p.293).

General Fuller commented further on Churchill’s further wild swings of opinion change on the Soviet Union after his becoming First Lord of the Admiralty shortly after Britain declared war on Germany September 3, 1939 culminating in his bafflement by Stalin’s invasion of and investment in half of Poland, the other half of the action begun by the Germans. Sir Winston’s attempt to cover himself by remarking in The Second World War (Vol. 1, p. 351) that he “never had any illusion” about the Communists prompted Gen. Fuller to inquire rhetorically why he “had so ardently courted them” in the time before the war started.

And the culmination had occurred October 1, 1939 when Churchill had made his celebrated confession of being unable to predict Soviet behavior, it being “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” People for most of two generations were taught to sit back in awe at this literary hokum as though it were the purest of political wisdom, but Gen. Fuller suggested that Churchill could have learned by consulting “any work on Soviet foreign policy” in the fall of 1939 that it had not changed an iota in 20 years. Regardless of what Churchill was to say then or later, however, by his actions he came down on the side of those who preferred Central Europe to be dominated by Stalinism.

It is possible to argue that had the charlatans of Versailles created a smaller and more realistic Poland in the first place, the diplomatic crisis of 1939 and the war which ensued might never have happened. From another point of view however a clash between Germany and the Soviet Union would have come about later anyway since the main question which the Polish interlude just obscured momentarily was the ultimate location of control over Central Europe. That both Germany and the Soviet Union had serious territorial grievances against this “new” Poland can be considered merely a temporary digression and diversion.
, had managed to achieve two main things since then: the supervision of an unbroken string of disastrous military defeats, and the dazzling, if not the gassing, of the English speaking world with an incredible volume of turgid rhetoric. If l9th century declamatory talk could have won wars, World War Two would have ended in British victory a few weeks after it began.[9]Not everyone was mesmerized by Churchill’s rhetoric. Following the loss of Singapore, the sinkings of the Prince of Wales and Repulse and the passage of a German flotilla through the Strait of Dover, Robert Willis, secretary of the London Trades Council, protested, “We must break loose from the stupefying magic of Churchill’s oratory. Fine words don’t win battles. Whenever we suffer a reverse and whenever news is bad, we are treated with a superb example of the mastery of the English language. The nation is being drugged by high sounding phrases.” Quoted in Newsweek (February 23,1942),p.37.

On June 22, 1941, Churchill was on the world’s radios before the first day’s gunfire had ceased reverberating across Eastern Poland, repudiating over two decades of ferocious anti-Bolshevik oratory and journalistic writing, promising unstinted aid to Stalinist Russia and announcing a single war aim: the physical destruction of Adolf Hitler and his government. In view of the hapless British wartime performance and its even more dim promise, it was a desperate moment and Churchill’s eager grasping for what was surely a drowning man’s straw can be understood, since he had categorically ruled out ending the war by negotiation. But this unqualified transfer of the initiative to Stalin was also the act which guaranteed the swift expulsion of Britain from its centuries-old key spot in European balance of power manipulation, precipitated evaporation of its global empire, its reduction first to the status of a stationary American aircraft carrier off the coast of Europe, and then to a tottering and precarious second rate status in a steady forty-year decline upon achieving its most costly “victory” in its national history.[10]Churchill’s reckless decision to back Stalin completely, without the faintest vestige of a quid pro quo from Stalin, has produced a heated literature defensive of this act, but of little explanatory substance. There was nothing for the Reds to do but take advantage of it. Churchill’s additional action begun in 1941, instructing a specially created organization to plan for a continent-wide operation “to coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage, to set Europe ablaze,” as reported by William Stephenson in William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid (Ballantine ed., 1977,p.97), loosed in the world one of the most incredible episodes of foolish political mischief in all time. It was Churchill’s bombers which “set Europe ablaze.” His operation, which poured down money, explosives and automatic weapons upon the Stalinist underground and “resistance” by parachute drops for over four years in eleven countries set up a murderous political situation in each land. It had as its legacy a pro-Communist political infirmity which was likely to prevail for several generations after Churchill’s passing.

That Churchill began to entertain second thoughts in 1943 and thereafter, and began to show signs of political wisdom is 事后 acumen of the most hopeless sort. If Britons ever hoped to return to a status of importance in the affairs of Middle Europe after World War II as in the period 1919-1939, such hope was damaged beyond repair by Churchill’s spinal cord reaction to Hitler’s invasion of Russian-held Poland. It can be argued that Britain faced an insoluble dilemma and was doomed to expulsion from both Central European influence and Far Eastern preponderance regardless of which of the two contesting powers there were winners. It is obvious they faced this consequence if the Germans and Japanese won, and it was their classic choice of the man on a burning yacht in a typhoon, staying on and burning to death or jumping off and drowning. Churchill stayed on and the British Empire and influence were incinerated in a Red holocaust.

The tardiness of Stalin and his circle of Red functionaries in responding to Churchill’s generous offer of unstinted support reflected the discount to which British “aid” was subject, in view of the near-zero impact of such assistance supplied to Poland in its grave predicament in September 1939. Though Stalin got around to a radio address on July 3, 1941, welcoming the British to the Communist side in a “struggle” “for democratic liberties” in a “united front of the people standing for freedom and against enslavement,” which latter should have been grand news to the many millions in Stalin’s slave labor camps, he was too much of a realist to expect British military help or supplies in any great hurry.

The importance of the flight of Churchill to Stalin’s side was not the practical situation attending immediate material support. It was rather in the effect of this impulsive action on the sympathetic Roosevelt administration, which had to become involved under far more obstructive circumstances, namely, the national non-belligerence of the moment, and the national irritation with Communist-dominated labor unions and their record of industrial trouble-making during the period of Russian neutrality since September 1939. This had been a grave nuisance to the noninterventionist elements during the time. Now, Soviet eagerness for American intervention was to nag their adversaries, whether interested in the welfare of British or Russians. On the official side of the aid-to-the-Soviet question, the President had as close advisors in favor of such help a goodly collection. It included Secretaries of War and Navy Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox; former Ambassador to Russia Joseph E. Davies, now Special Assistant for War Emergency Problems and Policies to Secretary of State Cordell Hull; Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau; Sumner Welles, Acting Secretary of State; Ambassador to Russia Lawrence Steinhardt; Postmaster Frank C. Walker (as a prominent Catholic layman, Walker was especially useful in countering general Catholic opposition to involvement with Communist Russia); Colonel Philip R. Eaymonville, U.S. Military Attache in Moscow (Davies’ principal prop before he was replaced by Steinhardt); and especially Harry Hopkins, elevated from his job related to grubby New Deal welfare agencies to the glamorous post of Administrator of Lend-Lease, the aid-to-Britain program passed by Congress in March 1941 which made the U.S. a 事实上的 participant in World War Two.[11]The standard apologia detailing the careful and cautious edging of Roosevelt and his principal advisors to a program of material assistance to Stalin in 1941 is William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 194g1941 (Harper, 1953), identified on its title page as “Published for the Council on Foreign Relations.” (Chapters 17 and 25.) Professors of history at Harvard and Amherst, respectively, Langer and Gleason held high posts during the war with the redoubtable global espionage agency, the Office of Strategic Services, the direct ancestor of the modern CIA. They also held similar positions in the early CIA and were so identified when their book was published.

To be sure, when Churchill propelled England and the resources of the British Empire to the succor of Stalinist Russia, he had no political problem. The influential and powerful supporters of a conciliatory policy toward Germany in the 1930s associated with The Link, the Friends of Germany and the Anglo-German Fellowship had gone underground or joined in the “war effort,” battered by Stalinist propaganda as “appeasers” before and after the 1939 协议. (The British Stalinists had endured some abuse themselves, between August 1939 and June 1941. They had been particularly incensed at the gibe “Communazi” in that time.) The supporters of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and figures of the implacably anti-communist Right Club such as Captain A.H.M. Ramsay, a Member of Parliament, had been jailed by Churchill’s Ministry of Home Security headed by Sir John Anderson, under the terms of Regulation 18B. Anderson had even ordered the arrest and detention in special concentration camps starting May 12, 1940, of almost 75,000 German, Austrian, Italian and Czech refugees in England, despite their hatred of their home regimes and collaboration with the British. A ship, the Arandora Star, carrying 1200 of these internees to Canada, was torpedoed or struck a mine and sank off the coast of Ireland on July 3, 1940. Over half the passengers drowned.

And for a year England had been badgered by a large corps of private intelligence agents of the Ministry of Information, conducting the “Moral and Social Survey” of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, known colloquially as “[Duff] Cooper’s Snoopers,” a powerful depressant on expression of individual opinion. The wonder is that anyone in Britain opposed Churchill’s headlong dive to Stalin’s relief.[12]Especially informative on the matters described above are “Judex,” Anderson’s Prisoners (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940), and Ivor Montagu, 叛徒阶级 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1940), which contains much valuable information, though written from the point of view of the Central Committee of the CPGB. Ramsay’s own account of his arrest and incarceration for over four years may be found in his book, 无名之战 (Devon, England: Britons, 5th rev. ed., 1968). On Ramsay’s release from prison on September 26, 1944 see “Bold Etonian,” Newsweek (October 9, 1944), pp. 60-61. Despite all that has been written, much still remains unclear about the arrests of Capt. Ramsey and Tyler Kent, a code clerk at the U.S. Embassy in London who intercepted secret dispatches between Roosevelt and Churchill confirming their illegal efforts to bring America into war against Germany. Kent made records of the incriminating messages, hoping eventually to make them public in the United States. He was arrested at his London apartment on May 20, 1940, and found guilty of violating the British Official Secrets Act in a closed trial. He spent the rest of the war in a British prison. [A copy of the trial record, including a listing of the hundreds of messages intercepted by Kent, as well as the intercepted diplomatic dispatches themselves, are at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The secret Roosevelt-Churchill exchange has been published in Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (Princeton Univ. Press, 1984; Warren F. Kimball, ed.) For Kent’s own account see “罗斯福遗产和肯特案,” The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1983, pp. 173-203. See also: William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid,第84-85页。]

Initial Reaction of Interventionist Spokesmen and Press to the Soviet Entry into the European War •1,800字

The political situation facing Roosevelt’s war party was far more complicated and troublesome, there being no formal state of hostilities with anyone, and with a long campaign to provide “aid” to England just concluded, and with its opponents anything but happy over the state of affairs resulting. Adding Stalin to the candidates for assistance was a more formidable proposition. Major newspaper lineup on the issue continued approximately the same. The Hearst papers, typified by the New York Journal American, and the McCormick-Patterson interests, of which the Chicago 论坛, the Washington 时代先驱, and the New York 每日新闻 represented the principal voice, could be counted on to oppose flatly any material gestures toward Soviet Russia.

But the New York 先驱论坛报, the patrician voice of Eastern interventionist Republicanism, while managing to carry a sizable freight consisting of thinly disguised Stalinist spokesmen, suddenly discovered that objections to an alliance with Communist Russia to beat Hitler were based on “moralistic follies,” while its chief columnist spokesman, Walter Lippmann, the closest thing to Jove on the American journalistic scene, loosed some of his rumbling thunder on the subject, cautioning critics of aid to Stalin against releasing excessive “vaporings about democracy.”

America’s tiny Communist press could not come up with material as good as this. With spokesmen as far apart as the Chicago 论坛 和纽约 先驱论坛报, there was no sense to allegations by Republicans that the Democrats were the “war” party; a large number of both were on Roosevelt’s pro-war team. World War Two homogenized American politics. It put foreign policy more or less off the agenda thereafter, resulting in the “bi-partisanship” which prevailed regardless of the winners in the quadrennial elections. The war really created two new parties, supporting pro-involvement or anti-involvement in global international activities, and vastly disparate in size progressively after Pearl Harbor. What passed for “debate” among the world interventionist majority for thirty years descended to the level of whether five or seven units of artillery or one or two aircraft carriers should be sent to some distant land. There has been nothing in American history to match what has happened since 1942 in demonstrating dramatically the function of foreign policy as a reflection of domestic policy, and the essential control of the latter by the former.

With the entry of Communist Russia into the war against the Germans, most of America’s liberals and non-Communist Left took another ludicrous and wrenching opinion lurch. The venom behind the “Communazi” epithet quickly was neutralized in the warm flow of sympathy which was promptly forthcoming. They were aided by many self-recruited newcomers who joined them and helped build the big wave of pro-Stalinist sentiment which was still washing over the land when the falling-out occurred five years later. It might be said that not as many liberals and leftists were against aid to Russia as there were conservatives and rightists for such aid. The anti-aid liberals were grouped around the Keep America out of War Congress, and additional figures such as Norman Thomas and Eugene Lyons represented other factions hostile to pro-Soviet support. But other left organizations, such as the Legion for American Unity, the Union for Democratic Action, the Council on Soviet Relations and the Socialist Workers’ Party were examples of elements quick to back an aid program for Soviet Russia.

On the operational side, two of the principal interventionist pressure groups, ostensibly buttressed by influential conservatives, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and the Fight for Freedom Committee, both responded promptly to the Russo-German war by urging U.S. aid to the Communists. The former dropped “by Aiding the Allies” from its name, while stipulating that aid be given Stalin “without relaxing opposition to Communism.” The FFF soft-pedaled that approach and attacked the most formidable anti-interventionist group, the America First Committee, while posing to the latter a bogus choice, “Would you rather have the Nazis looking across the Bering Strait or Alaska?”[13]The above matters were quoted in Newsweek July 7, 1941), p. 11. An interesting aspect of the right-left coalition for war, but trying to stay clear of an alliance with the CPUSA, was the presence of Jay Lovestone, head of the CPUSA until 1928 when he had been removed by Stalin, as director of the Trade Union Division of the Committee to Defend America. Newsweek July 14, 1941), p. 10. Long after the war it was revealed that the Fight for Freedom Committee was a totally bogus organization, created out of whole cloth by British Intelligence and winked at by the Administration and its police agencies, used mainly to harass American anti-war groups and promote diversionary ruses to distract Americans from the multifarious British propaganda activities. See especially Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid, 279,324-25。

In retrospect, in terms of proportion, one of the ludicrous episodes of the propaganda war in America was the sight of the immense British propaganda enterprise and the octopus-like Communist apparatus, spending vastly-larger sums and employing a multitude of persons and mechanisms in press, radio and film, yelling in unison at the threadbare operations of Pro-German George Svlvester Viereck. A dozen major American publishers turned out a veritable Communist five-foot-shelf of books between 1933 and 1945, and enough pro-British books to fill an entire library. But the dozen or so pro-German or anti-interventionist products of Viereck’s Flanders Hall firm were considered an equivalent by the pro-war propa- ganda machine, right and left alike. The long-delayed The German Report (Thomas Yoseloff, Publisher,1961) by O. John Rogge, unsuccessful both as prosecutor of the sedition case in 1944 and the defense counsel for the Communists in 1950, was still exaggerating the influence of Viereck at this late date.
This was reminiscent of the ingeniously clever questions invented by George Gallup, head of the American Institute of Public Opinion, and an ardent pro-war activist, one of which was whether it was more important to defeat Hitler or to stay out of the war. When put this way, 70% supported the first clause, but when the same people were quizzed on a declaration of war, a larger percentage, 80%, flatly said no. (l4) Pollsters persisted in putting people on the spot this way by presenting two-part propositions, the first of which was ethical and the second practical politics, which introduced serious popular confusion between ends and means, insofar as these same pollsters stated the issues and allowed decisions based on these limitations. Thus either large interest group, for or against involvement, was equally free to quote the public response, and both were right. But the chips came down only when the interventionists quietly inserted the matter of aiding the Reds as part of the pro-war proposition. This invariably drew a formidable vote against involvement. As for the Communist Party, 145 delegates from 48 states met in New York City the last weekend of June 1941 to prepare a “peoples’ program,” which included a wild call for all-out aid. Churchill and the CPUSA were of one voice by July 4, 1941, whatever may have been their disparate objectives.

Such an alignment was purely coincidental to forces such as Churchill represented. 时间, which in magazine journalism stood for what the 先驱论坛报 did among the dailies, set the tone by simultaneously uttering huzzas for Stalin and Russia while The Pro-Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. while displaying nothing but contempt for domestic Stalinists. The German attack was ill-timed for the American newsweeklies, taking place on a Sunday. As a result, the issues of June 23 were already being distributed and could have nothing on this electrifying event, one of the half-dozen most important dates of the entire war. Therefore, the first comment was delayed until the issues of June 30.

By that date 时间 was able to make a deeper assessment of what was taking place, and thought the message written by Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles and read to the press, obviously with Pres. Roosevelt’s approval, not only amounted to a pledge to Stalin but used the language of a committed belligerent, regardless of the state of diplomatic realities. It did not bother 时间 that Welles filled the statement with verbiage such as “Hitler’s treacherous attack upon Soviet Russia,” and using such choice derogations as “dishonorable,” “deceitful,” “hostile,” “murderous,” “brutal,” “desperate,” and the like; as they concluded with satisfaction, “When the U.S. could officially use such terms” in describing the German action, “the U.S. was certainly at War.[15]“War of the Dinosaurs,” Time dune 30, 1941), p. 9.

A further article asserted that all of Washington was of the view that Communist Russia now had become at least technically a beneficiary of FDR’s $7 billion fund “to aid the allies of democracy,” while noting that Churchill had immediately sprung to Stalin’s defense. A minor problem existed here, since Churchill had become a recipient of U.S. military assistance only about three months before when the Administration’s hotly-contested Lend-Lease legislation was enacted. Therefore if this was now to become a “Lenin-Lease” program, it suggested to some that anything Churchill contributed to Stalin’s cause might first have to be derived from Roosevelt, in which case the U.S. would probably be the original source of all “aid” supplied to Communist Russia.[16]“Lenin-Lease Bill,” Time dune 30, 1941), p. 13. This issue of Time featured a cover picture of Stalin and one of his most ballyhooed generals, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko.

There is little doubt but that the involvement of Stalinist Russia in the war in the summer of 1941 put a substantial crimp in the interventionist propaganda line that the war was an unsullied conflict between “tyranny,” represented by Germany, and “freedom,” by its British adversaries. This was essentially the contention of the American Anglophiles, which to their embarrassment was now tirelessly mouthed by the Communists. It no longer was an imperialist war, and global materialist factors quickly vanished. Though Soviet Russia itself represented one of the most impressive feats of imperialism, the word had not been applied to the USSR by Reds or their allies since before Lenin’s death.[17]Even after 1945, new words were invented to describe Russia territorial grabs under Soviet auspices, while pro-Stalinist students of “imperialism” ground out millions of words describing this policy in conventional terminology as applied to everyone else. Now that they were a party to the conflict, all description of the war as a contest for mainly tangible objectives ceased, and the taking on of the moralistic terminology of the pro-British opinion-makers irked the latter substantially.

时间 on July 7 in its article “The New Party Line” was anything but conciliatory to the CPUSA, though in a parallel piece had kind words to say about the sudden resurrection of Soviet diplomat Constantine Oumansky to respectability. The magazine thought the CP leader William Z. Foster grotesque in declaring that “A victory for Russia will enormously strengthen democracy throughout the world,” while concluding that a Russian victory would primarily “strengthen U.S. Communists.” (l8) The job of 时间 and all the other agents of traditional British affiliations and sympathies was to get on with a war in which the assistance of Russia against Germany could be effected with as little reward or gain redounding to the Russians at its conclusion as possible. So, even at this early stage it was hands-across-the-Volga, but with a grimace of distaste. The wartime partnership between the U.S.A. and the USSR lay more than five months in the future, but its psychic consequences were apparent from the moment people and politicians began to talk of supporting Stalin in June 1941. Ultimately it gave this country the most uneasy and morally disturbing experience it has ever known in the history of her foreign affairs. With the exception of a few high-flying months in 1943 it must have been apparent to the respective contingents of pro-Stalinists of all social backgrounds and economic levels in this country that they were engaged in the salesmanship of a doomed product. The schizoids of 时间, with their continuous rebuffs of and sneers at the U.S. Communists[19]Time’s contempt and meanness toward the Stalinists in America was reflected in numerous recollections of Communist detachment toward the war in the period of USSR neutrality and-the CPUSA’s stance of anti-involvement. One of these was the reproduction of a bit of doggerel attributed to the U.S. Reds in the not very distant past:

Oh Franklin Roosevelt told the people how he felt

We almost believed him when he said,

‘Oh I hate war And so does Eleanor

But we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead.’ Time (July 7, 1941), p. 13.

Some recalled the bitter words of the CPUSA’s leader, Earl Browder, a few months earlier when he was convicted for forging a U.S. passport; in the Daily Worker for February 25, 1941 he had remonstrated, “If my kind of crime rates four years in prison, what should be the punishment for Franklin Roosevelt, who got a third term [as president] on a false passport, a promise to keep America out of war? I think the supreme punishment for this crime will be written in history that he betrayed the peace and prosperity of the American people.” It did not take Browder and his associates long to change that tune after June 22, 1941.
while glowing with favorable sentiment toward the Russian Reds, were symptomatic of other sectors of bedeviled American opinion makers. It was embarrassing to have to support the Soviet Union and simultaneously to have to suffer local Communists. From the propaganda point of view, what was to eventuate resulted in a unique war for the United States.

时间 presumed that there was no need to bring the populace into the picture, the issue involved being of stratospheric foreign affairs well beyond the limited capacities of the common citizenry to understand, the other two newsweeklies made a gesture at trying to determine what a sector of the general public thought about it all, even if they overwhelmingly sought the views of persons of some prominence while doing it.

The First Polls of American Political Personalities on the Pros and Cons of Aiding the Soviet Union •2,800字

美国新闻 (it did not add 世界报道 until 1950) exclaimed, “With Germany and Russia at grips along a vast frontier, and with the Administration’s announcement that any opposition to Hitler, no matter what its source, is of benefit to our own defense, this country faces a new problem in international relations.” It faced a new problem in internal relations, too: What did the people in general think of this loud huzza to Stalinist Russia from the Roosevelt regime? 美国新闻 sought to find out at least partially by polling public figures on the question “Should the U.S. aid Russia as a part of the American policy of aiding Great Britain?”

Wealthy Joseph E. Davies, late ambassador to Soviet Russia and the launching pad of more pro-Stalinist mischief than the entire Communist 仪器 in the U.S.A. combined were ever to achieve, responded, “My answer to your query is unqualifiedly, yes.” Senator Gerald P. Nye, famous for having conducted the investigation into the material profiteers from World War I five years earlier, replied in the negative as abruptly as Davies had in the positive: Nye believed that Roosevelt should “draw the line” against this further involvement.

Rep. Melvin J. Maas (R.-Minn.), minority member of the House of Representatives Committee on Naval Affairs, declared, “I do not believe that we should aid Russia. When you help one burglar to beat another, you are bound to be robbed yourself in the end anyway. Stalin and Communism are as great a menace as Hitler and Nazism. A shortsighted policy of expediency of the moment, such as aiding Stalin, may be the tragedy of tomorrow, loosing a greater destructive force in the world than that which now threatens us.”

The prophetic quality of Rep. Maas’s contribution was rarely bettered by others, though it was something pro-Stalinist figures abominated, and tried to make believe had never happened when the latter zealots for the Soviet were circling about, a little over four years later, trying to mobilize the land in the global Cold War against Stalin which Rep. Maas accurately predicted.

But there were far more to be put on the record by the 美国新闻 reportorial pollsters. Rep. A.J. May (D.-Ky.), Chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, sounded the case of the reluctantly repelled among the Administration’s supporters: “The complete crushing of Hitler and his regime is today’s paramount issue, and while the Communism of Russia is unthinkable and the enemy of human liberty, it is a stealthy force not yet turned loose in such vicious form and with such objectives of conquest as that of Nazism under Hitler. Therefore I am persuaded that first problems should come first, and we should aid Russia by aiding Britain.”

Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, the Royal Oak, Michigan, Catholic priest who had been a burr in Pres. Roosevelt’s hide for eight years with his radio orations and publications, confined himself to quoting Pope Pius XI, “‘Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any manner whatsoever,'” and Cardinal Hinsley of England, “‘Britain must not, cannot, ally herself to an atheistic dictatorship.'” Norman Thomas, four times Socialist Party candidate for President of the U.S.A., but an implacable political adversary of domestic and foreign Communism, expressed his sympathy with the Russian people but demurred from coming to Stalin’s succor: “I want no American boy to die to decide which of two cruel and perfidious dictators shall temporarily rule the European continent,” Thomas forcefully responded; “Therefore I want no attempt to send aid to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics at great cost to ourselves.”

But Rev. L.M. Birkhead, Director of the fiercely pro- interventionist Friends of Democracy, thought the fear of future Communist advancement a trivial thing: “The United States should give every possible aid to Russia in the present crisis,” while confidently predicting that after the defeat of Hitler, “the threat of Communism” “would no longer exist,” “for Russia will be exhausted by this war, win or lose.” No one polled the citizens of the twelve European capitals in the hands of the Red Army on the breezy confidence of Rev. Birkhead four years later, nor was it done while they still lay in the grips of Soviet Communism nearly forty years later. But in 1941 one of the “friends” of “democracy,” in the view of Rev. Birkhead and his front, was Stalinist Communism.

Some were evasive. Paul Hutchinson, editor of the very influential Protestant weekly 基督教世纪, thought that aid should be extended to Stalin only after an American defense force had been fully built up, while Ralph Barton Perry, the Harvard University philosopher who chaired the Harvard Group on National Defense, stepped aside and was willing to let the Roosevelt regime decide on the matter. Another of the formidable Eastern figures behind the Anglophile impulse, Frederic R. Coudert, also evaded the question.

As far as its press survey, the 美国新闻 thought the nation’s newspaper editors supported the idea the U.S. should aid the USSR, but of the 14 papers it quoted, only the New York was for immediate and limitless aid to the Reds regardless of consequences. It was noted however that the majority of the papers had a very restrained admiration of the Bolshevik regime, and tended to speak of helping “Russia,” not its political masters.[20]U.S. News duly 4, 1941), pp. 26-28, for all above citations by persons responding to this first poll published after the outbreak of the war in Poland between Germany and Russia. U.S. News billed itself on its cover every week as “The Only Magazine Devoted Entirely to Reporting, Interpreting and Forecasting the News of National Affairs.” It established a frightfully bad record as a “forecaster.” A slogan carried over Lawrence’s weekly editorials, credited to George Washington, read: “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”

Things moved so fast, and the overrunning of Soviet-held Poland and entry into Western Russia by the German forces in the three weeks after June 22, 1941 was so rapid, that hysteria among Stalin’s friends in the U.S.A. swelled dramatically, and the question of American aid to Russian Communism in its travails grew more prominently among those who charted public opinion. 美国新闻 continued its poll another week in July, soliciting positive and negative responses from another collection of the country’s notables, which managed to explore other dimensions of the issue and its likely results.

Speaking favorably in behalf of pro-Communist aid against Germany were Rev. Dr. St. George Tucker, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S., Rt. Rev. Joseph L. O’Brien, Pastor of St. Patrick’s Church in Charleston, S.C., Clark L. Eichelberger, Acting Chairman of the most powerful pro-war pressure group in the country, The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and Major General John F. O’Ryan, Commander of the 27th Division in World War I and sponsor of the equally interventionist Fight for Freedom Committee. In addition to these were Rev. Dr. Henry W. Hobson, Bishop for Southern Ohio for the Protestant Episcopal Church and Chairman of the FFF Committee, Rev. Owen A. Knox, Chairman of the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, Estelle M. Sternberger, Executive Director of World Peaceways, and James H. Sheldon, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Nonsectarian Anti-Nazi League, another deeply committed band of civilian warriors.

Rev. Dr. Tucker asserted, “It would seem to me a very wise and proper thing to do. As a matter of fact, I think our Government has already decided on this course. Father O’Brien was more explicit and saw principled virtue in aiding Stalin: “In the choice between Germany and Russia, the democracies are safe if they throw their full power and influence on the side of Russian ignorance and superstition to crush German intellectual materialism.” Eichelberger was strongly in the affirmative as well, “Not because Communism is deserving of any sympathy, but because the German attack upon Russia is part of the strategy of the Battle of Britain and part of Germany’s desire to dominate the world.” The unwearied assertion of the alleged German goal of world domination was a major aspect of the propaganda of the Committee to Defend the Allies. Gen. O’Ryan enthusiastically supported aid to Stalin, since the defeat of Hitler called for “the expedient cooperation with any of his enemies who will hasten his defeat,” an end which did not seem imminent, with Russian forces flying in retreat in Eastern Europe.

Dr. Hobson backed aid to the Soviet for a different reason, fearful of a quick German victory which he was sure would be followed by a westward drive by Hitler against America. Rev. Knox’s reason for backing aid was the following: “If we believe that democracy must be maintained by war and that England’s fight is our fight, there would appear to be little logic in doing anything less than giving Russia full support,” while Estelle Sternberger’s view was close to that of Rev. Dr. Tucker, that the Roosevelt regime was obviously favoring this course anyway. Sheldon not only vigorously supported aid to Stalin, claiming “the very life of democracy is at stake,” but used his response to cover a sideswiping blow at two obviously opposed public figures, the eminent aviator Charles A. Lindbergh and Senator Bennett Champ Clark (D.-Mo.), both of whom he claimed had fallen into Hitler’s “amazingly efficient propaganda trap.” Dr. Hobson had of course avoided all Stalinist propaganda traps.

J. Barnard Walter, Secretary of the Friends’ General Conference, issued an evasive generalization, declaring that “The one way the U.S. can help is to propose the kind of peace in which all peoples can unite with justice,” a course a light year away from that which FDR was traveling.

The others were in the unqualified “no” category; Frederick J. Libby, Executive Secretary of the National Council for the Prevention of War, John Haynes Holmes, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union, pastor of the Community Church in New York City and vice chairman of the Keep America Out of War Congress, Brig. Gen. Robert E. Wood, Chairman of the Board of Sears Roebuck Co., and Rev. Edward Lodge Curran, Pastor of St. Stephen’s Church in Brooklyn and Director of the Anti-War Crusade of the International Catholic Truth Society.

Libby’s flat negative was followed by extensive explanation:

Only a fleeting military expediency would prompt the United States to support Churchill in the coalition he has formed with the Communist dictator against the Nazi dictatorship. Such a tieup strips the last shreds of idealism from the Allied side of the war.

After pointing out that Churchill had made an agreement to fight at Stalin’s side until Hitler was defeated, and that this meant that neither could negotiate peace without the other’s consent, Libby observed that “This means that Stalin’s war aims become Britain’s war aims as well,” concluding with a harsh-tasting evaluation for interventionism:

If America ever joined this war now, we should be fighting, not for the “four freedoms,” but to restore Soviet tyranny over such little nations as Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Only the strictest neutrality is possible now for the United States, if it is to maintain its loyalty to democratic ideals. The hypocrisies of the [First] World War should not be repeated.

Rev. Holmes, a front rank member of America’s most influential opinion makers, was no less vehement:

No, the United States should not aid Russia. Why should we use our wealth and power to make the world safe for Communism? The idea that this is a war for democracy and civilization is now revealed as the perfect sham it has always been. It is a war for imperialistic power and for the mastery of the world by any nation that can get it.

General Wood, a founder of the most implacable anti-interventionist group, the America First Committee (though he was not identified with it in his statement), simply responded in a single sentence, “I do not think the United States should aid Russia as part of the American policy of aiding Great Britain,” but Fr. Curran adamantly declared: “decent nations who still enjoy the blessings of peace should lend no aid or comfort to the brawl.” He concluded: “The use of the Lend Lease law in favor or Communistic Russia by the President of the United States will generate the prompt and righteous indignation and opposition of all God-fearing, liberty-loving American citizens who denounce both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia as kindred branches of the same pagan stem.”[21]U.S. News July 11, 1941), pp. 32-33, for all above citations in this second installment of queries.

Four days earlier, Newsweek had added to the controversy by printing the reactions of several opponents of aid or involvement, which were as sharply hostile as those cited by 美国新闻. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, (D.-Mont.), one of the foremost opponents of the Roosevelt foreign policy as it veered toward involvement in the war buildups in Europe and Asia since 1937, remarked: “The death struggle between the armed Germany and Russia is a death struggle between the armed might of Nazism and Communism, and not an American war.” This view was echoed by John T. Flynn, veteran columnist for the liberal 新共和国 and feature writer for Collier’s magazine: “It never was our war, and it is less our war now than ever.” Senator Walter F. George (D.-Ga.), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed his “profound hope” that this country will not become an active participant in the present war,” a hope already dashed by its considerable involvement indirectly as a result of the Lend Lease Act of the previous March, though far from the shooting stage, to be sure. In its roundup of no-help-to-Russia notables, “新闻周刊” cited Sen. Clark as asking a Brooklyn crowd rhetorically if they could imagine “American boys being sent to their deaths singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ under the bloody emblem of the Hammer and Sickle.” The redoubtable Sen. Robert A. Taft (R.-Ohio) was quoted in the same collection of statements as seeing a positive aspect of allowing Stalin to go down: “The victory of Communism in the world would be far more dangerous to the United States than a victory of Fascism.”

Probably the most influential of the anti-aid figures was former President Herbert C. Hoover, and both “新闻周刊”时间 published statements by him in their July 7, 1941 issues. In the former, Hoover noted, “We now find ourselves promising aid to Stalin and his militant Communist conspiracy against the democratic ideals of the world,” an allusion to the Administration’s sympathetic moves in that direction beginning with the publication of the Welles statement. “Collaboration between Britain and Russia,” concluded Hoover, “makes the whole argument of our joining the war to bring the four freedoms to mankind a Gargantuan jest.”[22]Newsweek (July 7, 1941], pp. 11-12 for ex-Pres. Hoover’s remarks and those of the preceding participants in Newsweek’s roundup of reaction to the new phase of the war. Sen. Taft was especially subjected to subsequent abuse for his views, but the criticism abated after the Cold War with the USSR set in after 1945 and the bills for this consequence of victory began to appear. 时间 frontpaged this observation by FDR’s immediate predecessor in the White House and added his famous warning, “If we go further [than aid to Stalin] and join the war and we win, then we have won for Stalin the grip of Communism on Russia, and more opportunity for it to extend in the world.”[23]“Against Both Sides,” Time (July 7,1941), p.9. It has been a rare week in the over 40 years since Hoover uttered those words that the world has not seen them supported by world events.

Despite the prominence given to the views of public figures hostile to additional involvement in the war via aid to Russia in harmony with already announced British policy to go all out in this direction, there were all kinds of indicators that the Administration considered the spreading of the war advantageous to its own cautious edging- into hostilities. At the end of July 1941, 美国新闻 told its readers in tones just short of panic that “best informed U.S. officials” were convinced the Germans would reach their objectives in Russia by September 15.[24]Washington Report, U.S. News July 25,1941), p.5. To some this was over-kill in the propaganda department, for should Hitler attain his goals that soon, then there was little need to attempt aiding Stalin; the war in the East would be over long before any assistance arrived at the war front. Others were less disconcerted. 时间, still looking for a formula by which it could express its distaste for American Communists while hailing the Russian variety, conceded that the Soviet Union was “the weaker of two well-hated dictatorships,” yet denounced Hitler’s “crusade against Communism,” and backed aiding Stalin in his struggle as a protection of “democracy.”[25]“Back to the l6th Century,” Time July 7,1941), p. 21.

美国新闻 also enjoyed the discomfiture the opening of the war between the Germans and Russians caused to the Communist Party (CP) in America, forcing it to abandon its nearly two-year position of neutrality overnight, though there were signs that this abrupt turnaround was not unbearably painful, and was being achieved with skill. As early as July 8, 新群众, easily the most influential Communist journal in the U.S.A., printed a piece authored by Rep. Adolph A. Sabath (D.-Ill.) urging aid to the Soviet as a matter of concern to U.S. defense.[26] In general the stress was upon this issue, and not that of making the Russian Communist regime safe. From this point on it was a contest between the liberals and Communists as to which could make the most ringing appeal to American self-interest in saving Stalin.

Some Diplomatic and Economic Straws in the Wind •1,100字

In the meantime the scurrying about of diplomats and the on- going massive movements of “defense” gave every indication that policy-making and the initiative were in the hands of people seeking greater involvement, not less. 美国新闻 described the accelerated scramble for “defense” contracts in the height of the summer, accompanied by the pressure on small business to abandon the consumer field and participate in the hustle. Few were documenting the substantial unemployment occurring in small economic enterprises as a result of the pro-“defense” preferential treatment by the Government relative to raw materials procurement and related matters. During the last six months of 1941, 美国新闻 spoke as though the U.S.A. were already in the war, and repeatedly told businessmen that Roosevelt was planning on a long one, lasting into 1946 at least.[27]A careful reading of the business and finance sections of the nation’s newspapers and magazines 1939-1945 will open up to one an aspect of World War II which is almost entirely lacking in what passes for the history of that time in most conventional tomes to this day.

Part of the indication of the go-ahead signal from Washington on aid to Stalin was easily deduced from the sudden publicity to diplomats and their rushing about in the newsmagazine. Especially significant was the attention given to the resurrection of the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., Constantin Oumansky, in disrepute and obscurity after the 协议 of 1939. His picture and the story of his return to social and official favor were prominently displayed in July. 美国新闻 even revealed that he and Under Secretary of State Welles had secretly “joined forces” as far back as the previous summer “in a dogged attempt to better U.S.-Soviet relations,” and heaped praise on Welles, while describing Oumansky’s frequent visits to the State Department, for having persevered against former Ambassador to Russia William C. Bullitt and kept the Administration from breaking relations with Stalin.[28]New Masses (July 8,1941), p. 6. The New Masses was the only weekly journal presenting the “Marxist outlook on world events”; it also presented an undeviating Stalinist outlook at any given moment and was probably the most articulate reflector of Stalinist opinion in the U.S.A. during World War II among the journals which were frankly Moscow transmission belts. To many people, it and the Daily Worker constituted the totality of the Communist press here, but there were others of some importance, such as Soviet Russia Today, People’s World, The Communist, (official organ of the CPUSA), Amerasia, and the Far Eastern Survey of the Institute of Pacific Relations, which were the two centers for the dispersal of Chinese Communist propaganda, for the most part, while Science and Society specialized mainly in Marxist theory. But there were at least three dozen other publications of far greater circulation, and incredibly more affluent, whose editors and contributors numbered several warmly pro-Soviet partisans of the pen, and whose output and influence were thousands of times more significant. On the other hand, it is not known that a single pro-American journal or writer existed or was produced in the Soviet Union during the entire war.

That things had also taken a goodly switch toward the Soviet since the replacement of Bullitt in Moscow grew obvious with a similar glamor treatment accorded the new U.S. Ambassador to the Kremlin, Laurence A. Steinhardt, the wealthy 48-year-old nephew of Samuel Untermeyer, the latter sponsor of numerous efforts to promote world-wide boycotts of and war on Hitler Germany since 1933. The 美国新闻 portrait pointedly dwelled on matters such as the above, plus his membership in the past on ten boards of directors of corporations, his fluency in five languages and his authorship of “numerous books and articles.” America’s latest opulent presence in Stalin’s court and the Workers’ Fatherland was even less a son of toil than his predecessors, but it was exactly in character with what was to follow at home and abroad. The main labors by far in the cementing of Roosevelt America and Stalin Russia were to be tasks and achievements of America’s moneyed and social elite, not of its labor union members and economically marginal Marxist intellectuals.[29]On Steinhardt and related matters, see “Life in the Capital,” “People of the Week” and “Washington Whispers” columns in U.S. News duly 4,1941), pp.38, 40. Said the editors, “U.S. diplomatic advisers were almost unanimous in urging President Roosevelt to support Stalin as against Hitler, on the ground that Hitler was the real threat.”

While the hubbub went on over how Communist Russia was to be viewed and treated in this first month of the Russo-German war, other indications swiftly surfaced supporting the conviction that Roosevelt was enlarging the scope of American economic warfare against Germany and Japan and in behalf of Britain and Stalin. Soviet assets in America had become once more available to them, and a decision had already been made not to invoke the provisions of the Neutrality Act against them, while the Administration was already on record as promoting a favorable consideration of Soviet aid requests.

The reverse side of this warm glow toward Stalinist entreaties and the last-minute succor of Churchill via the Lend-Lease assistance provided the previous March were two dramatic acts of economic warfare against Japan in the U.S.A. and against Germany and Italy in the Americas from Mexico south. The latter took shape in an abrupt announcement in the form of Executive Order #8389 on July 17, a blacklist of 1800 German and Italian firms in 20 countries of the Western Hemisphere, forbidding U.S.A. businesses to deal with them except under the most rigidly regulated circumstances. This was a policy step in preparation for some time, as the extensiveness of the operation was revealed. The blacklisted firms filled 16 full columns of tiny type in the New York on July 18, 1941 and the list was also supplied to those involved in the form of a Federal Reserve Bank pamphlet, as well as being published in the 联邦纪事. Moves of this sort were hardly impulsive or capricious. The other move took place nine days later, and was even less a hasty and flighty gesture: the announcement of the “freeze order” affecting all Japanese assets in the U.S.A., and halting their use. This long-planned directive consisted of 9 pages of neatly printed materials, including regulations, amendments to existing orders and foreign exchange license data, also distributed to the Federal Reserve Banks early on July 26, 1941, an event later characterized as the “Japanese Pearl Harbor,” an economic calamity which hit Japan without the faintest warning. Whether the invasion of Stalinist Europe by Germany a month earlier accelerated these ominous announcements was not demonstrable, but the timing was impressive.

The orchestration of the forces strongly favoring the salvation of Stalin by mid-summer 1941 inspired a subscriber of 时间 to remark upon some obvious parallels with the hysteria in favor of England a year earlier, speaking of the imminence of an analogous campaign of “Bundles for Russia” and suggesting “the probability of a song being composed about ‘there always being a Russia’ and the recitation by Lynn Fontanne of the ‘White Cliffs of Omsk,'” a satirical re-structuring of the title of the lugubriously sentimental popular song of that moment, 多佛白崖, so beloved of emotional and nostalgic Anglophiles. That 时间 should print it indicated a lingering bit of a sense of humor, not very noticeable in the ranks of the pro-war set in those days, and utterly lacking in those deeply devoted to the welfare of Russian Communism.[30]Letter from Paul Jones of Columbia, Ohio, in Time July 21,1941), p.4. It was a time of mobilization of all resources in America to this end, part of it consisting in the production of their own propaganda. The most impressive contribution was the issuance at the end of July of 苏维埃政权 by Hewlett Johnson, perhaps the most widely read friend of Stalinist Russia whose native tongue was English. It appeared in an edition of a million copies, and priced at five cents,[31]Newsweek (August 5,1941), p.25. obviously below cost of production, in order to maximize its audience; the Communist propaganda 仪器 indicated it had been taking lessons from the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Some Religious and Educational Leaders Respond to the Issue of Aid or No Aid to Stalin •3,500字

Though the momentum was definitely with the aid-to-Stalin elements in the early weeks of the Russo-German war, the talkers and the opinion-makers were far from routed or silenced Especially troubled were the religious spokesmen, in both the U.S.A. and England. Oswald Garrison Villard, famed one-time owner of the even more famed liberal weekly 民族, who had been ousted from that journal a year before when the majority of its editors had plumped for a strong pro-war course, had found a refuge in the pages of the liberal Protestant but anti-involvement weekly 基督教世纪. Three weeks after Hitler’s armies started across Eastern Poland, Villard predicted that “the warrior clergy” would pronounce a pro-Soviet course as “divine intervention in behalf of Right, ” and now would be “as eager to embrace Stalin as they were but yesterday to anathemize him.” His piece “Our Moral Confusion”[32]Christian Century July 9, 1941), pp.881-882. was a good statement of the dilemma this new phase of the war had created, but there were differences among denominations and countries. The English Catholic press, for example, was wholeheartedly behind Churchill in his cooperation program with the Communists against Hitler, while trying to qualify this position by declaring that “Russia’s cause is not our cause.” This was the view of the 天主教时报, while the London 平板电脑 came out for the defeat of Hitler and Nazism, “a man and a system much more efficient than Stalin’s Communism.”[33]Catholic Times and London Tablet quoted in Christian Century July 16,1941), p. 900. But their leaders were not nearly as vehement in support of this pro- gram as were the U.S.A. Catholic spokesmen in favor of it, nor as critical of it as were the U.S.A. anti-aid Catholic leaders. The division in America was quite pronounced. Though the Catholic War Veterans were dead-set against any aid to the Soviets, 15 outstanding prelates and laymen in the Fight for Freedom Committee were for it. “We and the Soviet are temporarily on the same side in the effort to resist a common enemy,” was their analysis of the issue.[34]“Catholics Will Not Join Hitler’s Crusade,” Christian Century July 16,1941), pp. 900-901. How British intelligence were able to recruit so many notable Catholics into their fraudulent “Fight for Freedom” organization is a matter worthy of respectful consideration as well as suspicion of their powers of discrimination.

We have seen that a variety of prominent Catholics, clergy and laymen, were not in the least shy in announcing their support of aid to Red Russia, when interrogated by public-opinion samplers of the news weeklies. There were others: Col. William J. Donovan, Rt. Rev. John A. Ryan of Catholic University, and Michael Williams, editor of the Catholic counterpart to the 基督教世纪, 公益。 甚至 新群众 took comfort in their testimonials in behalf of helping the Reds against Hitler.[35]New Masses (July 8,1941), p.21. On Col. Donovan’s new post in the Roosevelt amateur spy and psychological warfare agency being created at this same moment, see below, note 181.

But by far the most earnest of these was Bishop Joseph P. Hurley of St. Augustine, Florida, whose emotional radio address in early July was heavily excerpted by delighted 时间. He ridiculed the notion that Hitler was fighting an anti-Communist crusade in Eastern Europe, described the Germans as “Enemy No. 1 of America and the world,” favored Roosevelt deciding all by himself when it was proper to take the U.S.A. into the war against them, and did not find Soviet Communism the faintest present or future threat, and never mentioned whatever an issue which bothered many other people, the situation that would prevail in the world if Stalin won. From the context of Bishop Hurley’s declamation, it was improper, irrelevant and immaterial to dwell on this latter speculation.[36]“Bishop Speaks,” Time (July 14,1941), pp.42-43.

The opposite of Bishop Hurley was Rev. James M. Gillis, editor of the influential 天主教世界, founded by the Paulist order at the end of the American Civil War. There was no more implacable anti-war figure in America than Fr. Gillis, though like most of those of this persuasion he execrated both sides of the Russo- German conflict. He was confident that he represented the majority in the U.S.A. “It is not a majority but a minority that wants war or would welcome war as either necessary or just,” he asserted in the mid-summer 1941 struggle of opinions. Furthermore, as he identified his adversary, “It is a highly articulate insolent aggressive minority.”[37]Catholic World July, 1941), p.395.

Where Fr. Gillis found the pro-war enthusiasts weakest was in their avoidance of facing up to the consequences of supporting a Red victory in Europe, or their casual confidence in the ease with which they thought they could dispel the Soviets from the scene once Germany had been smashed:[38]Catholic World (August, 1941), pp.515-516. The Pro Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 345

…make no mistake, there will be a showdown. None of your Willkies and Knoxes and Stimsons and Conants seem to have visualized it, but it will come. The showdown is always a “divvy” with allies in war as with partners in crime…. No one is going to say to him [Stalin], when the time for the divvy comes, “Good work, Joe old boy; and now be off with you, back to Moscow.”

In many ways the conflict among Catholic opinion makers as to the merits of involvement in the war and support of Stalin was brought to a sharper point by posing Fr. Gillis against the Catholic convert[1913] professor Theodore Maynard, an ex-Protestant and English emigrant who had come to the U.S.A. in 1909. His residual English patriotism was transparent in his tussles with Fr. Gillis over the merits of becoming England’s war partner. Maynard was far less concerned over the spread of Communism than he was over the German threat to Mother England, his sustained message in the Catholic press, and in essays in the secular journals as well.

Maynard was quite aware of the formidability of Fr. Gillis as an adversary in this battle of ideas. “Father Gillis is by all odds the ablest Catholic editor of our time,” Maynard conceded in the early fall of 1941. While admitting substantial respect for Fr. Gillis and commending him for his condemnation of all brands of totalitarianism, Maynard clung tenaciously to a position very close to Bishop Hurley, giving a solid measure of psychic support to the Soviet Union in its war with Germany, on the same grounds that Germany was the “greatest enemy” of religion at the moment, though he did not make clear that he was referring to official policy or popular behavior, in which latter Maynard would surely have been backing an untenable proposition.[39]Maynard, “Catholics and the Nazis,” American Mercury (October, 1941),pp. 399-400.

Rev. Gillis was affronted by Willkie’s 180-degree turnabout on foreign policy, especially as represented by the latter’s speech of June 18,1940: “I want to repeat what I have said on several occasions, that despite our sympathy for the Allied cause we must stay out of the war. In these times, when our hearts are confused, we must keep our heads clear. We do not intend to send men from this continent to fight in any war. We shall not serve the cause of democracy by becoming involved in the present war; we shall serve that cause only by keeping out of the war. It is the duty of the President of the United States to recognize the determination of the people to stay out of war and to do nothing by word or deed that will undermine that determination. No man has the right to use the great powers of the Presidency to lead the people indirectly into war; only the people through their elected representatives can make that awful decision; and there is no question as to their decision.”
Fr. Gillis ridiculed this view, insisting on total abstention from the question.

Though Maynard was irked by Fr. Gillis’ having made the 天主教世界 the most “belligerently isolationist” of all the Catholic papers in the country, he was probably as unhappy over his continuing policy of not yielding a particle on the matter of Russian support. Implacably anti-Soviet, Fr. Gillis did not relinquish this position regardless of the various maneuvering that continued. Probably the most invulnerable morally of all the main figures in the U.S.A. opposed to the war between 1939 and 1941, he continued his adamant stand against involvement in a war which might be construed as a beneficiary or contributor to the welfare of either side. In one monthly editorial after another he continued castigating Stalinism, denouncing all efforts to make the opportunistic circumstances which threw Communist Russia and the Anglo-Americans together at war with Hitler and Mussolini the grounds for rigging a political alliance. This continued to be his policy all through the war, a courageous position which even veteran anti-Reds soft-pedaled for some time after the Pearl Harbor attack, then went underground, or turned about and began to write kindly pro-Red propaganda. All during World War Two, the 天主教世界 boiled with editorial suspicions and disparagement of Communist policy, abroad and at home.

A similar confrontation of opposites was observable in the non- Catholic center, probably best illustrated by the positions of England’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, and the redoubtable John Haynes Holmes, the latter already on published record as an uncompromising anti-involvement figure. Time, as in the case of Bishop Hurley, gave generous space to Dr. Lang’s reproaching of the Church of England for its misgivings about the Churchill alliance with Stalin. Though reputed as an anti-Communist, Dr. Lang at the end of July 1941 sounded like an incandescent fellow traveler. In his view, Soviet Russia was “contending for the principles of national freedom and independence for which the British Commonwealth and the United States of America are standing,” recommending that Britons “must therefore wish every success to the valiant Russian armies and people in their struggle and be ready to give them every possible help.” Managing to sound like a composite of Stalin and Churchill, Dr. Lang like the other civilian warriors was troubled not in the least by contemplation of a Communist victory and its import for Central and Eastern Europe.[40]“Cantuar and Commissars,” Time (August 4,1941),p.28. 41.”Hitler Attacks Stalin,” Christian Century Uuly 2,1941),pp.855-856. 42.Editorial, Christian Century (July 9, 1941),p.875. 43.Holmes, “If Russia Wins,” Christian Century Uuly 30,1941),pp.954-956. 44.”Shall We Fight for Russia?” Christian Century (September 10, 1941),pp. 1104-1105. Wieman’s letters in response to this (Christian Century, September 10, 1941,pp. 1114-1115, and September 24, 1941,p.1180) went into greater detail, which sounded like much domestic reform talk being heard in Britain at that moment; the U.S.A. could avoid going Communist only by massive post-war economic reform, and that could be achieved only by breaking down domestic hostility to Communism, the main barrier to reform. The latter could best be realized by joining with the USSR in the current war. This was amazing reasoning, in view of the utter absence of the slightest tendency to “go Communist” registered anywhere in the U.S.A. at that moment.

The basic position of the editors of the 基督教世纪 was advanced in a long editorial in the first issue after the outbreak of the war in the East: “A Nazi victory must be prevented if that is possible. But equally there must be no smashing victory for the Communists.” They conceded that the Russians would get help from the U.S.A., “but not too much help.” “For an overwhelming triumph, with Stalin at the head of the Russian avalanche, would hold almost as great a threat as an overwhelming victory for Hitler and his Nazis.”[41] A week later they expressed great confidence in the ‘impossibility” of anyone here arousing “American enthusiasm for the idea of participating as an ally of Russia,” especially after Finland had gone to war with the Reds; they were sure nine out of ten Americans would delight “to see the Finns march triumphantly into Leningrad.”[42]

Rev. Holmes, whose spirited essays were featured by the 基督教世纪 on many occasions, did not share the editorial hope that some kind of moderation and long-range statecraft would govern the aid-to-Stalin impulse which the interventionists wanted to prevail, consequences unconsidered. In the last issue in July 1941, he predicted that at the end of the European war, Stalin would annex all of Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and part of Poland which had been part of Cazarist Russia in 1914, East Prussia, Mongolia, openly, and Manchuria by proxy, and would “insist, under one form or another, on dominating the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and the Dardanelles.” Rev. Holmes maintained that was all guaranteed by Britain in signing the “co-belligerency pact in Moscow,” which at the same time “signed a blank check to be filled in later by Russia.” “After an immeasurably exhausting effort to destroy Nazi totalitarianism, the world will have succeeded only in putting in its place a more powerful, more widely extended, and therefore more formidable Communist totalitarianism,” he concluded.[43] Holmes, favoring a “peace without victory,” like Gillis, came astonishingly close to the actual situation which came into existence between 1945 and 1948.

The most remarkable trial balloon concerning propaganda favoring aid to Russia was launched by the 基督教世纪 on August 13, 1941. In an extended article titled “Join Russia in the War!” (pp. 1002-1004), Professor Henry Nelson Wieman of the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a prolific writer on the subject of the philosophy of theology, argued that Russia was going to win the war anyway, and would “dominate Europe and Asia.” Thereafter it would cause unlimited trouble for the democracies for having abstained, and would thus lead to an even larger war. His plan involved eliminating this possibility by joining the current war in Russia’s favor. Furthermore, there would be substantial resulting domestic compensations; “Mighty coercions toward community will begin to work if we enter this war with Russia and do everything in our power to help her win.” This would not only mitigate postwar tension possibilities, but lead to peace. Prof. Wieman suggested casually that there need be no fear of “military conquest” on the part of anyone at the hands of the Soviets, since they were not “imperialistic.” Though he conceded that they would try “to make all the world go Communist” by other means, it would be possible to deprive them of the chance by massive reforms, providing employment and material well-being.

A month later the editors responded in a two-page editorial, pounding Prof. Wieman’s avoidance of the religious issue entirely, condemned his plan unconditionally, and observed that in view of “the record of tyranny which the rulers of Russia have inscribed in the blood of their people during the past twenty-two years,” the difference in degree of tyranny between Germany and Russia definitely lay “in favor of Germany, not Russia.”[44]

Churchill’s flat admission before the House of Commons on July 15 that the British-Russian agreement to give mutual aid and to make no separate peace was, “of course, an alliance, and the Russian people are now our allies,” was given wide publicity here,[45]Newsweek (July 28,1941),p.26. but this did not in any way discommode the war-bound among the well-placed and the prestigious. James B. Conant, President of Harvard, in a turgid speech before a convention of the National Education Association, crammed with urgent pedagogical warriors, managed to outdo Bishop Hurley in urging aid to Stalin and in eagerly calling for entry into the war: “To the minds of some of us, the peril is so great that the United States has no alternative but to enter the war against Nazi power,” exclaimed the head of America’s most prestigious institution of higher learning. Conant, making the usual disavowal of supporting either Germans or Russians, concluded with the interventionist convention that only the Germans were a threat.[46]On reportage of Conant’s speech see “Tepees and Propaganda,” Time July 14,1941),pp.51-52. Time continued its booming of war mongers from the respectable side, and teased the chastened Communists continually. The most recent target after Conant’s speech was the Red-lining head of the National Maritime Union, Joe Curran, and the NMU’s about-face in now supporting the Anglo- Russian cause. “Hail A-Starboard,” Time July 21,1941),p.17. As was expected, Time printed most of his private war declaration, just a fragment of the hurricane of similar material assaulting the ears and eyes of the general public.

After a month of the Russo-German war, the U.S. public was beginning to show evidence of responding to the mainly one-way news interpretation and pro-war conditioning which occupied most mass media. A Gallup poll claimed 72% desired a Red victory and only 4% one by the Germans. Those in favor of a war declaration were alleged to have risen from 21% to 24%. “新闻周刊”, however, analyzing the mail on the issue received by 30 U.S. senators, found it “evenly divided between isolationists, interventionists and middle of the roaders,” and that the volume was only l/5th of that which had poured in during the debates over the Lend Lease bill earlier in the year. The magazine further declared that the mail of Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Walsh, Nye, Brooks, La Follette, Taft and Tobey was running 10-1 against involvement in the war, while that of Senators Pepper, Lee and Barkley was roughly 50-50 on the question.

The full spectrum of opinions on the subject had hardly been seen, however. On July 31, 1941, British Aircraft Production Minister Lt. Col. John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon delivered a speech in Manchester in which he expressed the hope that Russia and Germany would “exterminate” each other, leaving Britain master of the Continent. New political fireworks displays resulted. London’s Marxist “每日先驱报”, appalled, announced that Churchill, “astonished and angry,” had given him a savage dressing-down, “a sizzling and blistering affair, in which the colonel was left in no doubt as to the gravity of his offense.”[47]Newsweek (September 15,1941),p.28. Churchill, however, was in a jam, and ended up having to defend Moore-Brabazon in September before Parliament, and was forced into a bitter exchange with fervent Stalinist Willie Gallacher, the only Communist M.P. in the House of Commons.[48]Newsweek {September 22,1941),p.24. Sentiments close to those of Moore-Brabazon were expressed at about the same time by a member of the United States Congress, who was contemptuously referred to later by insulted 时间 as “little fox-faced Senator Harry S. Truman”(D.-Mo.).[49]Time (December 29,1941),p.26.

The expressions of support for Stalin continued from a wide spread of opinion makers into the first weeks of August, the issue of aid taking a dramatic lurch in Soviet favor later in the month after the celebrated Roosevelt Churchill meeting off the coast of Newfoundland and the issuance of the “Atlantic Charter,” which followed the equally important mission of Roosevelt’s ubiquitous assistant, Harry Hopkins. The Stalinist-line League of American Writers, vociferously for war against Hitler until the August 1939 协议, and then scrupulously neutral during the period of Stalin’s absence from the fray, was quick to get re-involved with the German attack, and issued a hectic public statement espousing Stalin’s cause, characteristically published by 新群众 on August 5, 1941 (p.23), while calling attention to having sent a copy of their manifesto to Erskine Caldwell, a vice-president of the LAW, who was in Moscow at that moment.[50]On Caldwell’s estimate of the war in Eastern Europe on his return from Russia four months later, see below. Caldwell and his wife, the famous photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, were in Moscow between May 1 and October 1, returning to the U.S.A. by way of Siberia just before the Pearl Harbor attack.

An even more pretentious declamation came from Michael Straight, editor of the once firmly anti-involvement liberal 新共和国 but almost overnight a convert to belligerency. He hailed the entry of Stalin into the war as the turning point and suggested Hitler was “perhaps well on the way of retreat.” He further hailed the creation of the International Free World Association in Washington, organized by refugee anti-Nazi politicians, solidly to the left, from half a dozen countries, and saw as its principal function that of preparing war aims, and the “promise of a just and lasting peace,” still embarrassingly absent from the statements of the “Allies.” Impatient over American unwillingness to do big things and indignant over the U.S.A.’s failure so far to “accept the leadership that should be ours in the fight for a free world,” Straight was grimly satisfied that the part America had earned in the next peace conference was “scrubbing the floors.”[51]Straight, “For a Free World,” New Republic (August 11, 1941), p. 182.

And still another prestigious figure used the 新群众 to broadcast his enlistment. Harvard’s philosophic light, Ralph Barton Perry, no longer the subdued murmur of the 美国新闻 poll six weeks earlier, was calling loudly in behalf of Soviet Russia as the most recent state whose “freedom” was “threatened” by Hitler’s armies. Russia was already “our moral ally,” trumpeted Prof. Perry, and he ended up calling for a world pooling of military power to defeat Germany’s attempt at “world domination.”[52]New Masses (August 12, 1941),p. 19. Other stirring testimonials of Prod Perry’s sort were also published from the artist Max Weber and Emil Lengyel. 53. Christian Century (August 6,1941),pp.986-987. He returned to the fear- Communism theme in his report published in the issue of October 15, 1941,p. 1285.

基督教世纪, still anxious to read the pulse of European Protestantism correctly on the newest phase of the European war, managed to solicit conflicting advice again in August 1941, this time from neutral Switzerland. A lengthy letter from correspondent Denzil G.M. Patrick declared that the chief reaction there was one of “relief” that the threat of the “bolshevization of Europe” was much abated, and that the Swiss looked upon the mutual weakening of both “tyrannies,” their government not intending to aid either. He also remarked upon the numbness of some Swiss following the ferocity of the anti-religious efforts of the Soviets in the Baltic states under the commissar Yaroslavsky and the machinery of the Stalinist League of the Militant Godless.[53]

But the following month it published from the same country their reaction to the famous Protestant theologian Karl Barth’s A Letter to Great Britain From Switzerland. This caused much consternation, Barth placing the stamp of theological approval upon the civilian “resistance” to the German armed forces and in substance making it a holy war. The editorial remarked that they did not see that Barth was urging the Swiss to become a belligerent, however.[54]“We have not heard that he is agitating for the intervention of Switzerland,his own country, as a belligerent,” the editors concluded pointedly. Editorial, “Barth Says Britain’s War Is Christian,” Christian Century (September 17,1941),p. 113Z. Shortly thereafter the journal published a lengthy think-piece on Barth by W.S. Kilpatrick, president of Cedarville (Ohio) College, who had just returned from a year’s study under Barth. Said Kilpatrick, “Barth is politically a socialist today, although fearing its potential materialism and distrusting its optimistic view of man.” Kilpatrick pointed out that the Nazis, who had cut short Barth’s tenure in a German university, had simply “requested him to absent himself, and had even given him several months’ pay in advance,” while suppressing his Marxist writings.[55]Kilpatrick, “Karl Barth and His Times,” Christian Century (October 8,1941), pp.1235-37. No one could recall the Soviet Union handling a political adversary as gently and generously as this, even if a foreign subject in residence there.

The editors followed this with a three-page editorial devoted to Barth, avoiding challenging his politics, but concentrating on denouncing his calling World War II a “holy” war, willed by God.[56]Editorial, “Is It a Holy War?” Christian Century (October 8, 1941), pp. 1230-32. They were willing, however, to recognize the war being called “righteous,” which really was not that distant a stance from Barth, another of the legion of World War I socialists and pacifists who turned around and reached astounding heights of martial ferocity in …. 1939-1945.

In the meantime the religious scene continued reverberating with strong statements for and against helping out Stalin. Late in August testimonials in behalf of this cause were published here which came from both the Archbishops of York and Canterbury, the English prelates skipping over the Red regime with mild disapproval, while emphasizing the religiosity of the Russian peopled (nothing was said that 99% of the Germans were identified with the Roman Catholic or Lutheran faiths). Here, Dorothy Day, editor of the 天主教工人, denounced movement toward entry into the war, while speaking at Williamstown, Mass., at a meeting of the Institute of Human Relations sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. But Justice Frank Murphy of the U.S. Supreme Court, speaking before the supreme council of the Catholic Knights of Columbus in Atlantic City, N.J., declared that the Soviet Union should have the support of all the world’s democracies in its war with Hitler.

The Roosevelt Administration and Press Supporters Lean Toward Aid at the Time of the August 1941 Atlantic Conference •1,800字

While this agitated clash of opinions on the subject became more heated and pointed, it grew more obvious that the Roosevelt regime had made up its mind in favor of sustained and substantial material and military aid to Soviet Russia. The creep in that direction became a lope by mid-August 1941, a short time before the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting. The first dramatic signal was the attention given to the flight to Moscow from London by Harry Hopkins, much scrambled by the pro-New Deal press but ultimately admitted to have been in the interests of seeking out Stalin’s advice on how U.S. goods might be expedited to the Soviet.[58]Time (August 11, 1941), pp.9-10. It took place at about the same time Soviet Ambassador Oumansky led a Soviet military mission to an audience with FDR on the same subject, presumably with the behind-the-scenes guidance of Welles, the subject of a 时间 cover story on August 11, and credited with having virtually assured Oumansky that his Red regime could depend on a substantial supply of military assistance from America, “in its struggle against armed aggression.”[59]Time (August 11, 1941), pp 10-12.

时间的 lead story a week later, “Aid to Russia,” pinpointed FDR as responsible for the expediting of arms and planes to Stalin, presumably responding impulsively to a horror story of Russian desperation from his “analysts in the White House.” The account was graced by pictures of such Roosevelt confidants as Sam Rosenman and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.[60]Time (August 18,1941), p. ll.

David Lawrence’s 美国新闻 presented a somewhat similar story of the President’s personal initiative in forwarding substance to Stalin, as well as draping the Hopkins mission to Moscow in even more colorful and romantic prose than others.[61]Hopkins’ visit was originally interpreted for its readers as a gesture to offer “moral support” to Stalin. U.S. News (August 8,1941), p.4; the editorial position was somewhat braver shortly thereafter. Though addressing himself to U.S. businessmen, Lawrence demonstrated utter unconcern over Communism or Communists, saw nothing to worry about should Stalin win in Eastern Europe, and apparently thought the latter would retire modestly behind the Curzon Line once having repelled Hitler, to allow a joint- Franco-British politico-military experiment once more to mismanage Central Europe and the Balkans.

美国新闻 August 8 featured a genial portrait of FDR and summarized his press conference, less than 24 hours after Oumansky “had led a Russian military mission to his desk.” The article went on to say: “The President in his press conference authorized reporters to quote him as saying with regard to Russian resistance: ‘It is magnificent and frankly better than any military expert in Germany thought it would be.'” As to the payment problem, Roosevelt was quoted as saying that Russia was “on a strictly cash basis” with American suppliers, and that there was no sign that this would change, when he was questioned as to Russian qualification for Lend Lease largess. On the subject of how Hopkins got from London to Moscow, however, FDR was not talking to reporters.[62]On the above see “War Dramas, Old and New: Praise for Prowess of Soviet Troops,” U.S. News (August 8, 1941), p. 17. On p. 40 of the same issue it was reported, “Harry Hopkins, in and out of Moscow, is dealing with matters involving delicate political relationships as well as matters of supply…. Some important officials in Washington are wondering if something Mr. Hopkins told him caused England’s Prime Minister Churchill to say that U.S. was very near the verge of war.” 63. “Role of Harry Hopkins in Forming a World-Wide Anti-Nazi Front,” U.S. News (August 15,1941), pp.7-8.

For Hopkins the 美国新闻 saved special space a week later, exclaiming to its readers that his perambulations from Washington to London, then to Moscow and back once more to London, were part of an assignment to bring about a five-power “iron ring” around Germany, consisting of staggering population and resources preponderance. “U.S. collaboration with Russia” was already a fact, and Hopkins had gone there to extend it. The latter’s sensational rise from an obscure social worker to a world figure was explained as a consequence of Roosevelt’s “unusual confidence” in him.[63]

美国新闻 acted as a mere entity floating on this approved “wave of the future.” In its sampling of press editorials around the country it found already a “large majority of the editors favoring U.S. aid to Russia.” In its reproduction of nine major newspaper editorial turnarounds an Russian policy in less then two months in Lawrence’s businessman-oriented weekly, it could be seen that not one even imagined the possibility of Red victory. None looked a particle beyond victory over the Germans, or had the faintest idea of what might follow, nor did any imagine what kind of regime they expected to follow what they wanted to destroy. The nearest one could discern was some kind of sentiment that a vast desert of suspended animation would prevail indefinitely among the defeated nations and the numerous areas sure to be “liberated” from their control and influence.[64]U.S. News (August 15,1941), p.17. The preservation or restoration intact of the European colonial domination of Africa and East Asia also appeared to be taken for granted.

And in its extended spread on the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting a week after, on August 22, 美国新闻 called attention to the tidbit in the proceedings redounding to Stalin’s welfare, though he was not there, his contribution being brought there from Moscow by Hopkins. It was divined by Lawrence and his editorial assistants that American businessmen could expect American “large-scale help” to the Soviets, supplied “on the advice of the British Government.” Stalin was supposed to have been notified of this by letter at the conclusion of the Atlantic Charter meeting at sea. They were assured that there would be no problem of payment. Russia had $40 million on deposit in the U.S. and of course had “a large annual gold production which she can use in international trade.”[65]“Roosevelt-Churchill: Inside Story of Meeting,” U.S. News (August 22,1941), pp.7-9, contained the material under the heading, “What it means to Russia.” U.S. News (September 12,1941),p.5, reported the first U.S. tanker carrying gasoline to the Soviet had arrived in the Siberian port of Vladivostok.

The preaching fervor and deep religious faith of David Lawrence in the Roosevelt-Churchill “Atlantic Charter” laid out in a two-page editorial (“The Eight Points,” U.S. News, August 22,1941,pp.18-l9),is one of the most painful things of the 1941 public opinion molding journalistic propaganda to retread, especially his profound conviction that it was unfailing evidence that the “Allies” planned a “peace without vengeance” and that the German government’s warning to their people that they would be dismembered if defeated and that their economy would be locked up behind punitive walls could be dismissed as idle talk by Germans and all others as well. But the German propaganda to their people in 1941 as to their fate if vanquished came closer to actuality by at least a light year than did the vaporings of the “Atlantic Charter”; for five years after defeat their worst fears were realized. Had it not been for Anglo-American panic that the Russians might end up with all of Germany as a satellite, the punitive program in Germany after the war might have gone on indefinitely. When Lawrence burbled about “our humane peace terms,” he created an embarrassment for the future of no small dimensions. But he was right in one prediction, when he declared, “We are to be part of the European orbit for generations to come.”

It is indeed a tribute to the human powers for self-delusion that over 40 years after the event we still see books published which talk about the issuance of something called the “Atlantic Charter” and “signed” by Roosevelt and Churchill on a British warship off the coast of Newfoundland in August, 1941. What was originally a simple press release handed to a radio operator, and intended largely to be a diversion and concealment for what they had really talked about, quicklv became a noble document rivaling the Magna Carta, The Petition of Right, the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. That there was no such document was admitted as early as 1944 but writers by the hundreds since that time wearily attest to there being a stately position-paper supposedly outlining the reverent state of affairs which was to prevail in perpetuity once the enemy of 1941 had been annihilated and the planet redeemed in a vast bath of hot lead and blood.
The cash registers were ringing in the ears of all putative American suppliers to this unnamed Operation Life Raft for the salvation of Russian Communism by the more than two-decades- execrated “capitalists.” It promised to serve a similar purpose to segments of major American industrial and commercial enterprise, beginning to emerge from over a decade of economic slough under the aegis of a national government which was abandoning saving the domestic scene and about to embark on the far more exciting and encompassing task of saving the world. It was not long however before 美国新闻 amended its earlier advice on Russian payment procedure as furnished by the Administration to let its business subscribers know that the Soviet Union had been made the beneficiary of a $50 million “initial fund” provided by the Defense Supply Corporation under the U.S. Commerce Department.” In September and October 1941 a succession of stories im- pressed all concerned that the Reds were all that prevented the Germans from sweeping over the world, and they were in the field only if “U.S. and British supplies come.”[67]U.S. News (October 10, 1941),p.6.

The change in emphasis on the part of the spokesmen for intervention in the first two to three months of the war in Eastern Europe was quite spectacular, in view of the essentially Anglophile substance of what had preceded it for several years. The partisanship in behalf of Stalinist Russia not only added a new dimension to pro-war propaganda, it intruded into the American scene a competing loyalty which served to disturb the tenor of the war sentiment once the U.S.A. became a belligerent, and added an ingredient which soured and alienated the various “Allies” to such a degree that when they fell out almost upon achieving “victory,” the situation never did right itself.

A good example of events overtaking established positions was laid out in 时间的 monthly cousin in the publishing empire of Henry Luce, 运气. As a releasing point for combinations of the materialistic and the messianic-moral, it was a source which was almost impossible to top. It was the ultimate organ expressing the view that the future belonged to an Anglo-American combine, with the major decision-making power sure to lodge in the hands of the latter of this team. The Soviet as a major factor in a world victorious over the Germans and Japanese was unmentioned even as a dim possibility. Even in the pretentious and portentous position paper by Russell W. Davenport finally published in August, “This Would Be Victory,”[68]Fortune (August, 1941),pp.4S47,136-146. with its talk of a grandiose world “Area of Freedom” dominated by an “International Party,” the possibility of having to come to terms with the world Communist 仪器 was airily dismissed. Once the adversaries East and West were overcome (Davenport assumed U.S. entry into the war was inevitable and would soon occur), this “International Party” would “make common cause with all peoples willing and able to be free,” and “The advent of the USSR to our side, and other irrationalities of the European 沃尔普吉斯之夜, do not alter this essential principle.” Davenport believed the correct course was just to proceed serenely as if it had not happened.

The version of this vision intended for the common citizen was that of Hopkins the previous month in the four-million-circulation 美国杂志, a breezy and confident outline of eventual British victory, with the help of America and with two-thirds of the rest of the world also helping out. In this rather extended account, Hopkins managed to mention the Soviet Union only once, as a likely puppet of Hitler should the latter succeed in defeating the British.[69]Hopkins, “Hitler Won’t Win,” American Magazine (July, 1941),pp. 24-25, 123-124.

In his next 美国杂志 article, December 1941, Hopkins expatiated on his new job as Lend-Lease Administrator and his personal encounter with Stalin in Moscow. His narrative was an unbroken account of praise of Communist correctness, faithfulness and dependability. He described how Britain became Stalin’s partner in June in this way:[70]Hopkins, “The Inside Story of My Meeting With Stalin,” American Magazine (December, 1941),pp.14-15,114-117. Political leadership of this kind largely explains the predicament of the West from mid-1945 on, but the beatification of Churchill in the Anglo-American press made criticism almost impossible. The 事后 yarns about Churchill’s attempts to recoup lost ground in 1943 and 1944 described a largely impossible situation.

With the courage that is Churchill’s, he pledged Britain to Russia’s cause. And he did it boldly, without consulting anybody, without stopping to consider any possible political consequences. At Chequers [Churchill’s estate] he told me of it.

But the emphasis now was on Russia, not England. Published just before U.S. involvement in the war via the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan, Hopkins realized he had a public relations job on his hands, knowing of the intimidating majority against direct involvement in the war, and his concluding rhetorical query to a readership he knew wanted no part of the ineffable regime in Russia apparently was supposed to rouse a sense of horror upon contemplation of the alternative: “Ask yourself whom you want on the west shore of the fifty miles of sea which separates Asiatic Russia from Alaska. Whom do you want-Stalin or Hitler?” (No one commented that Hopkins was parroting the Fight for Freedom Committee word for word). Probably a majority of Americans had already make up their mind, under the constant pounding of the newspapers, radio and tireless Administration orators and their legions of auxiliaries in Academe and public affairs. The pro-aid- to-Russia position seemed to have swept the field at least three months before direct U.S. entry into the war. 财富的 poll the last week of September 1941 found 73.3% favoring assisting the Communists, but still showing only a small minority actually supporting a war declaration: 10.7%. Despite the sinuous prose of the most persuasive war-peddlers, Americans confronted by the various poll-takers were no more interested in full shooting involvement than they had been two years earlier.

The Main Pockets of Resistance to Supporting Stalin •900字

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 美国水星, 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 水星 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, 红色十年 (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 “新闻周刊” 和纽约 先驱论坛报 had kind words for it in September 1941, the latter review being by Nicholas Roosevelt.[71]Newsweek review in issue for September 1, 1941,p.42. That by Roosevelt in New York Herald Tribune Books (September 14,1941),p.4. Roosevelt repeated in his review Lyons’ criticism of the New York Times and Herald Tribune “for having given space deliberately or gullibly to radical reviewers,” when in a few weeks both were to expand upon this practice many magnitudes. 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]American Mercury (August, 1941),pp.135-143; Lyons was sure Stalin was going to be overthrown in a very short time. 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 协议 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]American Mercury (November, 1941),pp.583-589. 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]Pp.5,20. Said Eastman, echoing Lyons, “Stalin is the weaker of two gangster- tyrants, and common sense demands that we support him in his resistance to Hitler.” In an extrapolation on Lyons’ book, Eastman’s 水星 essay “Stalin’s American Power,” which subsequently was reprinted by the far larger circulation 读者文摘, 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 新领导人, 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 新群众 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]New Masses (December 9, 1941),p.21.

American Communists as a Complication in the Soviet Aid Debate •700字

To be sure, there were serious aspects of the domestic Communist issue for the war-bound involvement elements and the Administration, as well as for the Workers’ Fatherland. The salvation of Russian Communism did not rest with the CPUSA, whose only product was words, but with the producers of tanks, planes, guns and food, as well as a thousand other items useful in Stalin’s “war effort.” Any U.S. Communist activity of a propaganda or agitational nature that interfered with this undoubtedly would draw a prompt frown of disapproval from the Kremlin. The U.S. Communist press swing from peace to war overnight after June 22, 1941, was a most ludicrous lurch. The conversion of all their peace fronts to violent pro-war mobs, the return of “appeaser” to indicate the genuine peace forces remaining of 1935-39, and the disappearance of “warmonger” as a description of the Anglophiles still breathing belligerence, all hardly went unnoticed on the American scene. With the 日工 by the end of the third month of the Russo-German war praising West Point and glorifying army life, it was easy to note what was on their mind.

For the elements which had been for war all the time, it was now their time to watch for Communists “boring from within,” as it had been the problem of the “isolationists” and non-involvement committees and organizations between August 23, 1939, and June 22, 1941. The former had obstacles in going ahead with their goal of fighting a nice, clear-cut Anglo-American vs German war, with no Reds in it. The Fight For Freedom Committee was one of the first warrior civilian groups to put its members on the alert as to this difficulty.[76]Newsweek (September 8, 1941),p. 12. As a 100% creation of British intelligence services in the U.S.A., it must have been a little trying for the latter to gear up its fraudulent organization in this country against the Communists when at home Churchill and prominent people in his government were continuously huzzaing Stalin and the British home front was vociferously acclaiming all things Communist. But such difficulties were not discernible to the American public, the imposture having been executed so skillfully. “新闻周刊” told all on September 22 that the FBI was “still carefully checking on U.S. Communist activities,” though this must have been hard to do and not run afoul of the FDR camp’s involvement proclivities which dealt with generous pro-Stalinist assistance plans, all vigorously championed by domestic Reds as well.[77]Newsweek (September 22,1941),p.9.

The real mess however was in the ranks of labor. Communist strength in the roughly 7-year-old Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) promptly flexed its muscle. By mid- September 20 CIO unions were already demanding the U.S.A. go to war against Germany. And a curious arabesque was performed internally. The elements led by Sidney Hillman, pro-war and pro- FDR, known down to June 1941 as “the old right wing,” as 美国新闻 put it, and confronted by labor led by John L. Lewis, anti-war and anti-FDR, “the old left wing,” had by September 1941 changed identities.[78]U.S. News (September 19,1941),p.13. Lewis and his cohorts now were assembled under the “right wing” tag, and Hillman and his the contrary designation. The Communists in the CIO and the 日工 were now both berating Lewis as an “appeaser” and “isolationist” after having praised him for the identical stands during the period of Stalinist non-involvement in the European war. Labor-watchers now were of the view that the Communists were now trying to cuddle to Hillman, who was formally rejecting a working alliance with them, though finding their support of war policies comforting.

In mid-September 1941 also, Stalin obviously had far more on his mind than Anglophile American warmongers unhappy over the CPUSA infiltrating their simon-pure pro-war fronts. But Newsweek informed its readers at that moment that Stalin had “in- directly asked” the USCP to “quiet down,” and might even “publicly request it to dissolve formally,” in the interests of relieving “the strain which CP activities put on U.S.-Russian and British-Russian relations.” Hopkins was supposed to have suggested this course to Stalin.[79]“Communist Muffling,” Newsweek (September 15,1941),p.9. And in truth there really was no need for an American Communist Party now. Its chores were performed by many magnitudes beyond its capacity by the majority of the conventional press and radio in the U.S.A., bellowing mightily for support of Stalin in all ways, promotional assistance to a national administration already involved in massive planning toward the achievement of this goal.

时间, Corporate America, and ‘Culture’ Contribute to the Confusion •800字

In toting up the score of the forces favoring Russian Communism in its showdown with German National Socialism, one could not leave out the American industrial system as represented by its corporate giants, and their dramatically-swelling labor forces. There is a direct correlation between the steady decline of the energy and support of the non-interventionist position on the war during the last 15 months before direct American involvement, and the corresponding increasing economic stake of more and more Americans in the “defense” boom, during that same period. It was remarkably obvious in the last six months of that time span. The steady drifting away of supporters for neutrality can be less understood by reading their specious moralizing on why they had changed their minds than by noting the simultaneous stunning full page color advertisements of scores of major corporations hawking the new martial hardware being made within their walls. The wonder is that such an immense percentage of those polled in opinion surveys still opposed a declaration of war during this spell.[80]There is ample evidence that the economic involvement of the U.S.A. in the war, 1940-1941, had as much to do with the steady involvement in the war as the economic aspect of Anglo-American affairs, 1915-1917 had with the entry into the war of that time, despite the steady efforts of a regiment of obscurantist academics to expunge this from the record.

If psychic and spiritual enlistment in the war could be dated from June 1940 and 事实上的 involvement in the war as a belligerent from March 1941, it took the vast industrial mobilization in the period after the Russians joined the war to cement down this American participation. As the summer wore into the fall in 1941, the necessity of maintaining a scrupulous distinction as to which of the anti-German belligerents one was favoring steadily eroded away, and the American hand to Stalin began to stretch in every direction it might reach there. One could understand that Stalin was risking no palpable damage in ordering the CPUSA to scuttle its profile in this critical moment. Their help really was not needed, and the function of their press could easily be confined to echoing what was broadcast from Moscow. The pro-Soviet forces of non-Communist origin were demonstrating that they could handle the job of assistance to the Kremlin and the spreading of the positive virtues and the noble attributes of Stalinism all by themselves.

It was not, therefore, in the tiny editions and limited distribution of the Stalinist press in America that one read the cheering, dramatic story of the first string of tankers arriving in Stalin’s Siberian port of Vladivostok with immense cargoes of high octane gasoline from the U.S.A. for “battling Russia.” It was rather in the front pages of the millionaire-run three-quarters-of-a-million circulation 时间 on September 15, 1941. A week earlier its opinion-saturated “news” columns had declared that the U.S.A. was in “a virtual alliance — with Russia against Germany,”[81]Time (September 8,1941),p.10. and with China against Japan, though the latter did not specify whether we were allied with Chiang or Mao. With the gasoline delivery, Time assured its readers that “If not actively fighting Fascism, the U.S. was helping to fuel the fight against it.” No 新群众 editor could have stated it any better.

事实上, 时间 had begun printing material directly supplied by the Soviet newspaper 红星 weeks before, without the slightest warning that it might be the purest propaganda. And it expressed general sympathy with the Soviet stories of their massive destruction of Russian communities and industry, 90% of the area in some claims, as its armies retreated in the face of the advancing Germans, thus making possible propaganda exploitation of this scorched-earth policy, with a future claim being lodged for other self-serving purposes later, of charges that the same amount of damage had all been done by the Germans.[82]The first week of December, 1941 newspapers in the U.S.A. were printing pictures of weeping Russian peasants outside their burning homes, with the captions frankly ascribing such firings and the general destruction in the neighborhood to the Red Army. It was significant that no soldiers of either side appeared in these photographs, which suggested that the damage was being done to the home front far behind the battle lines. See the general approval of this destruction by the Red Army in Time (September 1, 1941), pp. 22-23. On Time’s reproduction of Stalinist propaganda from Red Star as “news,” see the issue for September 8, 1941, p. 15. It was one of many aspects of the war which found the eventual victors working both sides of the street with singular success. Though physically impossible, this contradictory story did wonders for pro-Stalinist sympathizers in the U.S.A.

For sure, the intense season of “heroic Russia” was nearly upon the American imagination, to be propelled at an increasing tempo shortly, until well after the Anglo-American and Stalinist “allies” had fallen out. And no facet of the cultural or psychic world was to be neglected in the accentuation of this campaign against the English-speaking sensibilities, music included. Late in September, 时间 told all that the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich had related that he was writing his Seventh Symphony, which would “‘attempt to depict the battle of Leningrad and tell the story of the city’s Home Guards.'”[83]Time (September 22, 1941), p. 52. This effusion was accompanied by a cheap, subtle attack on the music of Richard Wagner, though this time there was no suggestion for the extirpation of German music. For the embarrassingly fulsome description of the first performance of this new Shostakovich symphony in the U.S.A. see below. This endeavor was billed as the equivalent in this new war to Tschaikovsky’s 1812 序曲, though subsequent critics were to find the former an essay in subdued trash-can bashing by comparison with the celebrated Tschaikovsky composition.

New Voices in Behalf of Assistance to Stalin, at Home and Abroad •800字

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 training.[84]Time (September 29, 1941), p. 12. Oswald Garrison Villard reported that the Legion’s vote was “under direct pressure from President Roosevelt, according to Gov. Heil of Wisconsin, who was at the convention.” “The Military Outlook,” Christian Century (October 8, 1941), pp. 1240-1241.

Almost simultaneously with this were other indications surfacing in widely separated places. The 基督教世纪 quoted the Jackson, Mississippi 每日新闻 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]Christian Century (September 24, 1941), p. 1190. 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 环球邮报, 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]Newsweek (September 29, 1941), p. 10. And a few days before, war correspondent Edgar Ansel Mowrer, in an open letter to Roosevelt published in the vigorously pro-war picture weekly , 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]Mowrer, “44 Ways to Beat Hitler,” Look (September 23, 1941), p. 10. Look became part of the liberal press with a vengeance in 1941, and as the wartime ’40s wore on, it, more than the liberal literary weeklies, became the special organ for the more spectacular trial balloons of the liberal correspondents, columnists and radio commentators. The Nation gradually became the forum for European left wing refugees more than of any other attitudinal group, while even such a staid agency of Eastern Anglo-American-controlled financial voices and its associated world politics as Foreign Affairs opened its pages more and more year by year to pro-war leftist liberals, especially from the fall of 1941 on, when the various impulses for interventionism began to grow together, regardless of their differing strategies and objectives. 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 时间 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 时间 wound up its accolade by quoting from the New York 先驱论坛报‘s Russell Hill, who, at Kazan with Russian officers, drank bottoms- up toasts to Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and “reunion in Berlin.”[88]“Iranian Aftermath,” Time (September 15, 1941), pp. 21-22 89. Newsweek (September 1, 1941), p. 13 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 “新闻周刊” put it.[89] 时间‘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]Time (September 15, 1941), p. 18.

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 先驱论坛报, 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]New York Herald Tribune Books (November 23, 1941), p. 18. Cripps was the founder of the London leftist paper Tribune, which, along with Laski’s Herald, were far more the sources of British collectivist, and, at the same time, pro-Soviet, ideas, than any of the organs associated with left partisan sects.

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]Look (September 9, 1941), p. 38. 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]“Biz Meets Facts,” Time (July 21, 1941), pp. 73-74.

Continued Annoyance from Influential Anti-Soviet Liberal Personalities, While Pro-Aid Forces Gain in Academe •900字

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 基督教世纪虽然 常识进步 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]Villard, “This Global War,” Christian Century (September 10, 1941) pp. 1108-09. A decade and a half later, Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. and Brent Bozell and their associates were tormenting these same liberals with this identical language and rhetoric, only this time in promoting a war against the liberals’ erstwhile Communist “allies,” even if it meant “burning out the farthest star.” as. Villard, “The Military Outlook,” Christian Century (October 8, 1941), pp. 1240-41. 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]On Dewey’s views see Ruth Byrns, “John Dewey on Russia,” CommonutZl (September 18, 1941), pp. 511-513.

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]See Prof. Childs’ letter to the New York Times for January 11, 1942, reprinted in Frontiers of Democracy for March 15, 1942. 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, 民主的前沿.[98]“Progressives for War,” Time (July 7, 1941), p. 48.

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 时间 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]“Switch,” Time (October 13, 1941), pp. 6849. The colleges selected were Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Iowa, Chicago, Missouri, Minnesota, Northwestern and Stanford. The Pro-Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 349 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 questionnaire 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 任何 [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 时间 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 时间 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]“Tanks and Thanks to Russia,” Time (October 6,1941),p.25. 101.For this question and replies below see issue of October 17,1941,pp.28-30. 102.U.S. News (October 10,1941),p.48. 103.On above see U.S. News (October 24,1941),pp.9,19. 104.U.S. News (November 28,1941),p.44. 105.See analysis in Newsweelc (October 6,1941),p.30. 106.”Everybody for Freedom,” Time (September 1, 1941),p.53. A liberal fixation in particular during the war of 1939-1945 was the tendency to use the term “clerico-fascist” in describing the European enemy states, and to accuse their leaders at the same time of trying to abolish religion. It was essential to this ploy to ignore utterly the subventions enjoyed by the Christian churches in Hitler Germany, the special position of the Roman Catholic church in Mussolini Italy, and the favored status of the Church in Slovakia under Msgr. Tiso, as well as in Hungary and Rumania, let alone what prevailed in Franco Spain, an enemy in the eyes of the Stalinist-oriented liberals everywhere. This was a studied working of both sides of the street; the Russian Orthodox Church was fully behind Stalin, but no liberal was inclined to describe Soviet Russia as a “clerico-fascist” state.

October 1941 Polls Register a Gain in Aid-to-Stalin Sentiment •900字

The faddish aspect of this all-out help for Stalin was spreading in the U.S.A. at this moment as well, even provoking 美国新闻 to ask the following question of its readers: “Should U.S. Divert its Entire Arms Production to Britain and Russia for the Next Three Months?”[101] At a time when Americans were being whipsawed by pro-war propagandists into fears of imminent invasion themselves by the seemingly omnipresent and ubiquitous Germans, and the domestic “defense” agitation was indicating that elements of the newly conscripted American armed forces were conducting maneuvers in part with wooden and other play-style “weapons,” it posed a contradiction for the pro-war enthusiasts. The industrial system did not seem to be capable of providing the military of the main belligerents abroad and the U.S. too with all the martial hardware they required.

The responses of the prominent political, military and other personalities were indicative of some of the conflicts sweeping opinion at the time, nevertheless. Senators Capper of Kansas and Overton of Louisiana and Rep. Karl Mundt of South Dakota, of the Senate and House Foreign Affairs Committees, respectively, said no. But Capper and Mundt were for sending as much as could be spared to the British without undermining U.S. defense, while stipulating that of that total the recipients would have to decide how much was then to be sent to the Communists, “since Russia is an ally of Britain.” In the process, they cautioned, “let us not have Uncle Sam become the generalissimo of the war nor the bedmate of Communism.” Major General William H. Haskell, Commander of the 27th Infantry Division, also joined the “nays,” saying that the weapons were needed here first of all: “I feel it is of major importance to carry forward the training of our own armies.”

But James W. Gerard, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany prior to American entry into World War I, Rep. May of Kentucky, Chairman of the House Committee of Military Affairs, were for it, as well as Hiram Winternitz, Jr., President of Charles Dreifus Co., of Philadelphia. The latter insisted: “It seems to me that the diversion of practically all of our production of military goods for the next few months to Britain and Russia, particularly Russia, would be sound practice.” Also favoring this was Lewis G. Harriman, prominent Buffalo banker and president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He expressed himself in complete harmony with such a diversion, fearing that Russian loss to the Germans would delay and make immensely more difficult the ultimate victory of England, while sure the argument “that such help would make Russia itself presently a greater menace to us seems too remote to cause concern.” Dean Paul Andrews of the University of Syracuse College of Law favored the idea in principle but thought that the percentage of such allocations to Britain and Russia should be determined by technical people. Dean Andrews’ views were additionally agitated by his fear that the Germans were about to capture all of South America while disposing of the Soviet Union.

David Lawrence apparently was not as carried away with euphoria as some of the respondents to the 美国新闻 query concerning the desirability of shipping off the total of three months’ American war production to Russia, or to Britain as Stalin’s agent. One of their requests, that they acquire “large quantities of tools and machinery to equip new war industry east of the Ural Mountains,” temporarily got lodged in his craw, but not for long.[102] Though not too sure that aid to Russia involved a commitment to help the Bolsheviks develop long-term heavy industrial potential far from the war fronts (he did not take up the massive aid to the Soviet of this kind in the previous 25 years), his fears soon washed away, partially as a consequence of his October questionnaire and the mounting bad war news from the new Eastern Front. By October 24 美国新闻 was sure that two-thirds of the industry in Western Russia was already in Hitler’s grip, and editorially it declared with some agitation, “Russian industry in the Urals must be supported by an immense quantity of supplies from Britain and America if resistance is to continue.” Gratification was also expressed over a recent Roosevelt statement that vast supplies of war goods were underway to Russia, all promised by Hopkins at Moscow too be delivered by the end of October 1941.[103] And at the end of November its war industries executive readers must have been cheered to learn that “A large United States military mission” was being “quietly organized to go to Russia,” and would leave “soon,” for Archangel, to gather first hand information “about how this country can help Russia.”[104] The months of wary ruminations about the wisdom of direct involvement in Russia’s war fortunes were giving way to exactly the reverse, undoubtedly nurtured by the steadily growing involvement of the Roosevelt camp into matters which promised eventual belligerent status somewhere, and probably in several places.

Apparently a barrier to this scheme had been overcome in a short time since an early fall complaint had been circulated about Stalin’s reserve and secrecy, and his refusal to allow any U.S. or British observers anywhere near any of the fighting or almost anywhere else. Hence had come about the joint mission of U.S.A.’s Averell Harriman and Britain’s Lord Beaverbrook to seek for more frankness on Stalin’s part.[105] Of this noted visit, more later.

President Roosevelt Creates a Diversion Over the Religious Issue •1,600字

The only clashing noise in what was otherwise a symphony of effortless gliding on the part of the varied forces working in behalf of Stalinist Russia in the fall of 1941 across the United States grew out of the August 1941 Atlantic Charter and the consequences of Roosevelt adding the “point” dealing with freedom of religion. One of the first to capitalize on this was Soviet radio, commending this strategy, and joining to it the urging of the overthrow of the Germans at the earliest opportunity because Hitler was “menacing the very existence of Christianity.” This even cooled off ardently pro-Russian 时间, which did not think it appropriate for the Marxist regime to be hailing a force which they systematically attacked on the domestic Russian scene.[106] Even if one wished to insist that Bolshevism was a form of religion itself,[107]This was proposed by Serge Bolshakoff in the London journal The Month (September-October, 1941): “Bolshevism is a 事实上的 religion though without God.” Bolshakoff explained that its main doctrine was that matter is eternal and mind only its derivative, in essence a pantheism akin to that of the evolutionists of recent vintage. the Russian people as a whole hardly had abandoned their old ways, no matter what the Soviet government’s League of the Militant Godless maintained. Almost twenty years after the Leninist revolution had taken over, about one half of the total population was still of the Russian Orthodox faith.[108]In a widely circulated statistic resulting from a poll in 1941 it was estimated that religious preferences of the U.S. Armed Forces were as follows: Protestant: 59%; Catholic: 31%; Jewish: 2%. Those expressing no preference were 8%. This was compared with a U.S. church membership survey in 1936 in which the breakdown was 55% Protestant, 37% Catholic and 8% Jewish. The dramatic decline was in the number of churches, estimated in August 1941 to be down to 8,338 from 70,000 in 1917.

Not much had been said at the time the so-called “Four Freedoms” had been launched from the deck of the British battleship 威尔斯亲王 off Argentia, Newfoundland, which included the religious freedom concept. Even the noted Protestant layman John Foster Dulles, not a part of the Roosevelt regime, and mainly involved in labors in behalf of a group of prominent churchmen and laymen called the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, had nothing to say about it in particular when he drafted his famous negative dissection of the celebrated Eight Points of Churchill and Roosevelt. Dulles, a party to the American presence at Versailles in 1919, condemned the Churchill- Roosevelt vision of the postwar world as following “too closely the pattern of Versailles” and saw their August 1941 product as mainly a prop for a self-satisfied pro-status quo crowd, and a prelude to a new war when the one going on was over, not an outline for “the development of some international mechanism for effecting peaceful change,” which recalled the book he had published two years before, 战争,和平与变革 (Harper).[109]“Peace Without Platitudes,” Time (October 13,1941),pp.4344,46. Time excerpted this from a somewhat longer work which was published under the same title in Fortune (January, 1942),pp.42-43,87-90. It was of interest that Dulles mentioned the Soviet Union only once in this lengthy treatise, in an aside referring to the war with Finland in 1939-1940. Otherwise his critique of the new world order he saw taking place and the one he preferred to take place both had no Soviet Russia in them. It might be noted that his preferred future was couched in more platitudes than the Roosevelt-Churchill proposal wrapped in the “Atlantic Charter.” Dulles’ utter repudiation of the balance-of-power concept was his most striking contribution.

The mobilization of religion in the impending worldwide martial cataclysm was inevitable, but the maneuvering had been going on for years prior to 1941. Americans, with their separation-of- church-and-state tradition, knew nothing of the realities of the religious scene in Europe, and the propagandistic forces seeking to enroll their sentiments and sensibilities preferred to keep them that way. Few knew of the state relationships of the Russian Orthodox Catholic clergy, nor that the German congregations, roughly half Roman Catholic and half Lutheran, were the recipients of sizable subventions from the Hitler government, as they had been recipients from previous German regimes. For that matter, probably no more than a platoon of Americans realized that the clergy of the official state-supported church in northern Europe were actually public functionaries drawing the equivalent of civil service salaries, in American parlance. The emphasis in the propaganda war in the U.S. was entirely away from these facts and entirely upon emotional and denominational loyalties, with such overtones of general substance as were unavoidable, given the general knowledge of world affairs prevailing. One aspect of the latter involved the universal conviction in the U.S. that all organized religion was in a bad way in Soviet Russia, a regime with a formal policy of hostility to this and a corresponding policy of encouraging organized disbelief, in harmony with Marxist materialism, the Soviet state’s religion.

In the word war waged against Hitler and Mussolini, American liberals especially esteemed the descriptive epithet “clerico-fascist,” finding it useful also to apply to Franco Spain and to the breakaway Slovakian state headed by Monsignor Josef Tiso. This stands in strange contradiction to the simultaneous charge by the same propaganda voices that these hated dictators were trying to abolish religion. Though it was known that the Russian Orthodox Church leaders were fully behind Stalin, it struck them as painfully distasteful to have to apply the same criteria to their warmly esteemed Stalin, so one heard nothing about “clerico-fascist Russia.”

The relative detachment or apathy of most clergy in Europe was not a subject for much commentary after Russia joined the European war. The self-righteous militarism of the clergy everywhere in World War I was not repeated, most of such figures being found associating mainly with leftists in Europe and America, in the latter their numbers being also swelled by German and British expatriates. The likes of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich[110]Liberal social democrat Marxists in the U.S.A. were always circumspect in the selling of Tillich, with the accent always on his function as a theologian of sorts. His political pedigree was usually masked until well after the war. Such works of his as Die sozialistische Entscheidung (Offenbach-am-Main, 1948) rarely surfaced in America. and William Temple, Archbishop of York and Canterbury, typified the former, and the one-time Marxist enthusiast Reinhold Niebuhr standing out among church notables flourishing their verbal armament in the U.S.,[111]Neibuhr’s intellectual turncoatism on the subject of war was as spectacular as that of MacLeish. As an editor of the journal The Worid Tomorrow in the first half of the 1930s Neibuhr was famous for statements hostile to ever participating again in any war which might break out anywhere. This journal, heavily dominated by socialist and pacifist clergymen, devoted extensive space in its issue of May 10, 1934, summarizing a poll of 20,870 clergymen of 12 religious bodies in the U.S.A., nearly 13,000 of whom responded that they were determined “not to sanction or participate in any future war,” according to the summation by Kirby Page (p. 222.) Niebuhr’s separate statement was quite in harmony with this view. though the American warrior clergy in general were far more identified with secular ideological politics than with the pulpit.[112]There was no book such as Rae Hamilton Abrams’ Preachers Present Arms, the famous chronicle of clerical belligerence in World War One, after the end of World War Two. Though many had strong views on the subject, no class of educated persons exhibited less martial fervor during and after the war than the nation’s clergy of all persuasions. This role was dominated by their long-time adversaries, the secular liberals, once determinedly pacifist, but steadily grown more affectionate for left-Marxist causes about the world. These latter easily out- distanced the bellicose divines of 1917-1918 in advocacy of American involvement in gore production, 1937-1945. Though there were a number of prominent clerical figures who lent their position and prestige to war propaganda, probably more English than Americans, there was little of the “holy war” aspect in their effort. Civilians dominated this latter emanation from the propaganda factories.

An outstanding characteristic, and probably the predominant one, of 20th cen- tury American liberalism, has been its notorious and almost comic selective indignation. Political policies and practices which have aroused deafening condemnation when employed by their enemies anywhere have been winked at, condoned and at times vociferously applauded when similarly put into effect by their friends. Minority control, total obliteration of civil rights, racist exclusion, sustained denial of majority rule, comprehensive terrorist suppression of rivals and adversaries, and the commission of mass murder and systematic political massacres, have all drawn their support and apologia or have been almost totally ignored for many decades. The identical programs, put into effect by enemies of liberalism, have excited a volume of disapprobation and condemnation which surely has been by decibel measurement heard in outer space.
It became obvious to the clerical friends of Stalin, however, that the most profitable tactics consisted of negative material, which was the very largest part of “anti-fascism” at all times, even at the peak period of ardent admiration of Communist Russia, in 1943. It was easier to crow and gloat over failure among the Soviet’s enemies than it was to attempt to sell the view that there were positive and affirmative things happening in the Workers’ Fatherland, and which under the renewed patriotic pressure of the Stalinist machine, desperate for public support, was even becoming spoken of occasionally once more as “Mother Russia.” Such an occasion was the exultation, even in 时间, when it was claimed that the new premier of Norway under the German occupation, Vidkun Quisling, was able to get only 27 of Norway’s 700 Lutheran pastors to support Germany’s “crusade against Russia.”[113]Time (October 6, 1941), p. 77. The clever smearing of Quisling, for many years a prominent anti-Bolshevik in Norway, was probably the outstanding piece of character assassination achieved by Anglo-Russo-American propaganda in the entire war. Essential to any understanding of the magnitude of the savagery in- flicted on Quisling personally and his systematic defamation in every other respect is the book by Ralph Hewins, Quisling: Prophet Without Honor Cohn Day, 1966). Hewins was a chastened major perpetrator of the literary outrages on Quisling. A few days later, Roosevelt himself tossed a grenade into the middle of this essentially successful anti-Hitler and pro- Soviet campaign on the religious front by his casual remark during a press conference in the second week of October 1941 alleging the existence of religious freedom in Stalinist Russia.

Few remarks by Roosevelt before or after, during the war era, drew as much comment, including analyses, guesses and glosses as to its real intent, attacks, excuses and a rare defense. Walter Lippmann, one of FDR’s strongest journalistic supporters, delivered a harsh scolding, and Lippmann’s paper, the New York 先驱论坛报, called it “whitewashing the Kremlin.” 时间的 lead story was devoted to deep analysis of the act, ascribing political objectives to it all. Roosevelt was thought to have advanced this trial balloon, seeking to get the Russians to “guarantee religious liberty” in case they were not doing it in exchange for gaining a spot on the American Lend-Lease bandwagon. This in turn he was thought to exchange for the support of Pope Pius XII, thinking such a Russian concession might gain his endorsement of the “democracies” and Russian cause as “just,” soften up Eire to allow British and U.S. bases on its territory, create discomfiture among the Catholic populations of Italy and Germany, and get the support of U.S. Catholics behind the administration’s pro-Russian course. Thus, his motivation in their view had really nothing to do with religion at all.[114]“Power Politics,” Time (October 13, 1941), p. 11. The story was illustrated with a Talburt cartoon from the New York World Telegram depicting a beaming Stalin wearing a halo marked “from F.D.R.” Some idea of how the spreading of the war to Russia had scrambled the situation for Catholics can be understood by a study of the refugee German Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein’s “Christian World Revolution” in the January, 1942 Atlantic Monthly (pp. 104-111), a tortured think piece trying to make a case for Catholics against Hitler, knowing the vast anti- Communist U.S. Catholic position. The presence of Stalin on the side of the other- wise sainted “Allies” was a bone in the craw of the pro-war liberal Catholic, especially, for the entire war.

Loewenstein, who fled Germany early after the triumph of Hitler, established a formidable pedigree as an author of anti-Hitler works in England and the U.S.A., some of them lengthy tomes which argued an idealistic Catholic conservative line, and dwelt upon a “new Germany” to come once the Nazis were destroyed. Among these were 民族的悲剧 (London: Faber; New York: Macmillan, 1934) and After Hitler’s Fall (London: Faber; New York: Macmillan, 1935). The first had an introduction by Henry Wickham Steed, and was used as a piece of anti-German propaganda by the English war party. Loewenstein found out after 1945 what kind of a Germany his Anglo-American hosts were interested in, and his views in the 1950s were far different as a consequence.

美国新闻 gave lengthy attention to the brawl stirred up by the President, originally trying to make FDR look as good as possible and his critics as evil as possible,[115]“Pointing to the Record,” U.S. News (October 10, 1941), pp. 28-29. but in its summary a week later, it was conceded that a presidential gaffe of substantial proportions had occurred. After a broad sampling of the nation’s press, David Lawrence’s weekly organ conceded that a consensus indicated Roosevelt “showed poor judgment in making his in cautious remark about the Russian constitution and religious liberty.”[116]U.S. News (October 17, 1941), p. 25; this entry repeated the Herald Tribune’s criticism of “whitewashing the Kremlin,” an indication that there were limits even to this major affluent Anglophile organ’s accelerating receptivity to pro-Stalinist puffs.

新教徒 基督教世纪 scalded Roosevelt for his soothing pronouncement on religious freedom in Russia, and recalled his words before a Christian youth assembly in 1939 when he declared, how much he detested “the banishment of religion” from Russia. The editors also divined the intent of the statement as one of trying to woo Catholics in the U.S. to support his aid to Russia program, but insisted that “Instead of winning the Catholics, the President’s careless words have made them more than ever critical of his Russia policy.” Furthermore, the editors considered the presidential remark an adverse reflection upon his widely hailed “freedoms” in the Atlantic Charter: “The President gave the nation an opportunity to test his conception of one of these essential freedoms, and the test gave forth a hollow, empty sound.”[117]“Are the Four Freedoms a Delusion?” Christian Century (October 15,1941), pp.1262-64. 118. “An Issue Without Substance,” New Masses (October 14,1941),p.21. 119. Time (October 13,1941),pp.20-21, for the comment on the formation of the “Anti-Hitler Front.” The Stockholm paper Aftonbladet in September, 1939 printed replies made by the Comintern to Swedish Communists querying on grand strategy, of which the following were especially significant:

Q. How can a world revolution be evolved rapidly?

A. By a long war, according to the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

Q. Is a European war apt to promote the interests of the Comintern?

答:是的。

Q. Can a Russo-German pact promote the outbreak of war?

答:是的。

This material was reprinted in Life magazine in the U.S.A. also in September, 1939.

There was no doubt that the national mood, despite the stunning attack upon their sensibilities by a rising din of pro-war propaganda, was still quite alien to receptivity to puffs about another non-existent beauty supposedly existing in Soviet Russia. In this moment of disaster only the 新群众 came up with a supporting strike, a long three-column editorial in which Roosevelt’s prominent Catholic critics, such as Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen and Rev. Edmund A. Walsh, vice president of Georgetown University, were subjected to personal abuse. The Communist editors cited in warm approval the vociferous criticism of veteran pro-Soviet divines such as Paul Tillich, Kenneth Leslie, Pierre van Paassen and James Luther Adams, deploring “the attempt to create a religious issue regarding the USSR.” The editors concluded by returning to the offense, emphasizing their charge that Hitler Germany was attacking religion, and that any suppression of clergy or religious persecution in the Soviet Union were just “police measures taken by the government against reactionary clerics who secretly conspired against the Soviet regime.”[118]

Diplomatic Moves Toward Vastly Increased Military Aid to Stalin •800字

In the meantime, however, simultaneously with its losing effort on the pro-Soviet propaganda circuit, the administration was moving ahead rapidly and successfully in its military aid program for Stalin. The same issue of 时间 which unfolded the details of Roosevelt’s lighthearted encomium to religious freedom in the USSR described the famous meeting in Moscow of the U.S.A.’s Averell Harriman, Britain’s Lord Beaverbrook and Stalinist diplomat Molotov. No one saw the incongruity of the spectacle of two capitalist millionaires collaborating with a Bolshevik super-bureaucrat potentate dedicated to their destruction, in the creation of what 时间 hailed as an “Anti-Hitler Front,” even if the U.S.A. still was not formally in the war. (It was fifteen years later that Molotov described the start of World War Two as the result of a successful stunt by the Soviet Union in precipitating a civil war among the capitalist states.[119]

The preparation of this famous semi-summit meeting was well shielded from public attention, as were almost all pro-war maneuvers by the FDR regime, though a report on Harriman’s famous pledge of American backing for Stalin on September 29, 1941, was printed deep in the back pages of “新闻周刊” 在同一时刻 时间 was exulting over the Moscow meeting: “I am instructed to pledge you the very fullest support today, tomorrow and as long as the struggle lasts and until ultimate victory comes.”[120]Newsweek (October 13,1941),pp.54,59. It surely was obvious by now that capitalism and Communism had no trouble getting along in a time of trial, as later scholarship demonstrated took place at the very moment the Bolshevik revolution was precipitated.

It is amazing that hardly any mention took place of the administration extending to Stalin the benefits of Lend-Lease on the same terms as were enjoyed by Britain and Nationalist China, surely one of the most fateful events of World War II. A billion dollar credit was established on October 30, 1941, following the drawing up of the first Russian protocol in Moscow October 1. But most news sources in America spent their space on the growing warmness of the administration toward the Soviet, in non-material gestures, and a parallel program of glamorizing Stalin, which started at a strong clip in mid-autumn of 1941.

Roosevelt figured prominently in the sensational news from Moscow related to the extension of unlimited American aid to the Stalinist war machine. 时间 on October 20 highlighted his announcement that vast supplies were already on their way, and added something unexpected, a reproduction of FDR’s cordial personal letter to Stalin, which apparently the administration hoped to conceal. It actually was leaked by the German news agency, DNB, which was followed by what 时间 called a “wry admission” that it was authentic despite the source which revealed it.[121]Time (October 20,1941),p.15. The feature story on Russian aid was on pp. 13-14 of this issue. A great flurry over how it had been leaked out took place, with all hands in Washington and Moscow denying any part in divulging this secret.

It is significant that the letter was not transmitted to Stalin by an American worker with high regard for the Workers’ Fatherland, but by another millionaire, Ambassador Steinhardt, to Harriman, and then to the Red premier, whom few in these agitated days any longer chose to call a “dictator,” a word now reserved only for the leaders of the enemy. This letter summarized the attitudes of the admirers of the Red Army in particular, closing with the fervent promise of material support: “I would like to express my great confidence that your armies will be victorious in the end over Hitler and to assure you of the greatest determination to afford the necessary material assistance.”

This letter should have left no doubt whatever in the minds of all Americans as to where their President stood now, and it is mystifying that so little was done with this by the opponents of involvement in the war. Obsessed with actual moves committing the U.S.A. to direct involvement in the shooting, they neglected to size up the full implications of what went on in Moscow in October 1941. And despite the increasingly ominous buildup of pro-belligerence in the Pacific, one could hardly consider the U.S.A. under Roosevelt a non-participant in what was happening in Eastern Europe. 时间 gave top billing the following week to a survey of the impressions of the Soviet Union by the U.S. mission “headed by slick, handsome William Averell Harriman,” whose associates as well as himself were described as “eagle-eyed fact- minded men.” Among their observations was reported their impressions of Communist censorship, which they thought made that of the Germans “look like children playing with paper dolls,” a statement which actually seriously undermined several years of horror stories by German emigres in America. The meat of this new message was a recommendation from them that “a real agreement or treaty of alliance with Great Britain and Russia” be drawn up as soon as it was “politically possible.”[122]Time (October 27,1941),p.17. “Anti-fascist” propaganda long had it both ways. Hitler Germany and German-occupied lands in Europe were systematically described as a fearful animal cage in which no one made a move unless under observance by the German home state security police, the Gestapo. At the same time this propaganda reported on scores of books by escapees by every imaginable route, whose authors described additional thousands of escapees of every imaginable station of life.

Culture, Big Names, and the Well-Placed Lend Their Assistance to the Building Pro-Soviet Bandwagon •1,000字

October, the symbolic month of the Bolshevik revolution, was memorialized in many ways in America. The main feature of an assault on the citizenry in behalf of Russia was the glamorization of Stalin in interventionist organs. On the 27th 时间 ran a long and ludicrously sentimental portrait of the Red chief. This piece was accompanied by a cover portrait of “Good Old Joe” by the artist Artzybasheff, and an ingenious attempt to whitewash Stalin for his diplomatic coup with Germany in August 1939.[123]Time (October 27,1941),pp.24-26. 时间‘s political retouching of that event credited it to his “peasant cunning,” though granting that he was rudely upset by Hitler in June 1941 “before he was ready,” which suggested that Hitler had anticipated a Russian attack on Germany by his action Meanwhile, the publishing world that same week quietly mulled over the news that still another effort in behalf of the USSR by a millionaire lay in the offing: a book by ex-ambassador Joseph E. Davies, in which the latter was said to have extolled Stalin as a predictor of “singular accuracy” on current events,[124]Probably the earliest notice of the impending publication of Davies’ book was in the “Turns with a Bookworm” column written by Isabel M. Paterson, in the New York Herald Tribune Books issue of October 26,1941,p.30. while advancing an apology for and explanation of the 1936-38 purge trials which was guaranteed to stun the world of political analysis.

While the big-ticket items relating to overall Communist comfort and welfare were being handled and arranged by upper-level capitalist opulents, the 新群众 brought up the rear in the culture department. The day after 时间's cover story on Stalin, the Communist weekly published a cable from Shostakovich in which he announced that he was still at work on his Seventh Symphony “in the midst of battle.”[125]New Masses (October 28,1941),p.5. And the whole period was fittingly climaxed by a stirring Russian War Relief Benefit[126]A nearly full page advertisement of this celebration was run in the New Masses (October 28,1941,p.25. staged at New York City’s Madison Square Garden which managed to include elements of almost the whole spectrum of pro-Sovietism in the neighborhood. Among the speakers were Walter Duranty, whose genial pro-Soviet cables had long been featured in the New York , the fervent French “anti-fascist” refugee, Genevieve Tabouis, Andrei Gromyko, Soviet charge d’affaires in the city, and Clark Eichelberger, national chairman of the fiercely pro-war Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. The principal attraction however was ex-Ambassador Davies, delivering his first public address since returning from Moscow. Speaking to this overflow “Testimony for Unity,” Davies delivered a stirring pro- Soviet speech which among other things defended the Soviet on the recent religious issue. Particularly impressive was his vindication, according to the New Masses report, “of much in Soviet policy that has been distorted and vilified in recent years.”[127]New Masses (November 4,1941),p.22, for this and above references.

Even the lavish resources of the Luce publishing empire’s upper-level business-oriented 运气 magazine were mobilized in this month to advancing a nation-wide pro-Sovietism. Its October Survey was devoted to trying to prove that Americans at large were swallowing their fear and dislike of Communism, and that a great majority were in favor of aiding the Reds against Hitler, and asserting that 20% were already willing to accept the USSR “as a full partner.”[128]Fortune (October, 1941),p.105. The people responding to this poll apparently were questioned in August, 1941. What the attitudinal situation was in the U.S.A. from December, 1941 to the end of August, 1945 has to be looked at from two perspectives. If one follows the book publishers, most by far of the magazines, newspapers, the polls and the radio, it was substantially to the left. But this was mainly deceptive, a thin icing over a vast national community in factories and in the armed forces, which was largely untouched by all of this. When their views were allowed to leak out under anonymous auspices and circumstances, they indicated anything but a desire for a stunning new style postwar leftist world. If anything this majority of the national community expressed a yearning for a return to the prewar situation as closely as it could be approximated. The transparent politics of the poll takers and the majority of the mouthpieces of radio and print seemed to act upon those holding to the former sentiment as a warning to remain in an underground. The poll, conducted as others before by Elmo Roper, concluded that in general the U.S. was “incurably conditioned against Communism,” and that even the Red military performance as reported in America had not deterred 35.1% of the respondents from replying in the affirmative to the poll statement, “The Russian Government and the German Government are equally bad,” and that 4.6% had said that the former was worse. But 32% were of the opinion the Stalinists were “slightly better” and 8.5% declared they were “far better” than the Hitlerites.

Despite all this, nearly 30% were in favor of deporting or jailing “Communist sympathizers” here in the U.S., and 54% were for close surveillance of same, recommending prohibition of pro-Communist “agitating and organizing,” preparatory to rounding them up “if necessary.” But at the same time, 73.3% were willing to help the Soviet bring about the defeat of Hitler, with 22% of this group willing to accept Stalin “as a full partner” with Great Britain in this fight. It was deplorable that Roper did not include a question dealing with American response to the likely outcome of a Communist victory in Europe, which such a commanding majority of those polled obviously were voting for.

It was significant that Roper, in discussing socio-economic status, indicated that the percentage of the “wealthy” was somewhat more in favor than the general average when questioned as to “cooperation with Stalin and for accepting him as a partner.” And once more that part of the populace located in the South Atlantic states, the consistently most belligerent sector of the country since the outbreak of the war in 1939, demonstrated their zeal for gore by exceeding all other regions in their enthusiasm for joining with Stalin, 32.7%

The rush to join the pro-Stalinist bandwagon on the part of the opulent and well-placed in the U.S. in the fall of 1941 involved an impressive number of people, with perhaps the best known of their persuasion, the defeated Republican standard-bearer in the 1940 election, Wendell Willkie, not endorsing this choice. However, having swiftly abandoned his campaigning oratory in favor of non-intervention for exactly the opposite within weeks of defeat, his enthusiasm for defense of the enemies of the Germans indicated to critics that sooner or later he was sure to accompany the others in climbing aboard the Moscow Express. William Henry Chamberlin summarized the moral problem facing Willkie in a curt piece in the non-interventionist 基督教世纪:

We cannot, so Mr. Willkie tells us, maintain the American way of life unless we also maintain the British way, the Chinese way, the Greek way. So far as I know, Mr. Willkie has remained silent on the somewhat delicate point of whether the American way of life is also dependent on the maintenance of the Stalinite way … or the Chinese brand of Communism.[129]Chamberlin, “America Faces the Iron Age,” Christian Century (October 29, 1941),pp.1331-34. It is hard to find even a few lines of realistic political writing in the six months prior to U.S. involvement in World War II on the subject of Stalinist Russia and its stake and likely part in a world victorious over Germany, Italy and Japan. There are hundreds of pieces everywhere by people concerned with the future threat of Hitler to the U.S.A, much shuddering over the possibility of Nazi “domination of the world,” but also almost as much synthetic advice on what had to be done to Germany when the British won the war. Scores of postwar visions contained only the Anglo-American powers, and never any Communists. One of the best indicators of this near-total discount of Russian Communism in the future was the long think-piece by Raoul de Roussy de Sales, a pet French propagandist of the moment, in his “Socialism and the Future,” in the Atlantic Monthly (December, 1941, pp.694-704), largely an account of the vastly preferable collectivism of the Roosevelt New Deal to those represented by the various socialisms of more dogmatic sort, as the pattern for a future planetary order. Enthused de Roussy de Sales,

It may be that by siding with the democracies (much against his will) Stalin will eventually save the independence of his country and his own regime. But, even if he should sit among the victors, it will not be in the capacity of the head of Communism and world revolution, but as the national leader of the Russian people. I do not say that a joint victory of the United States, England and the USSR will mean necessarily the disap- pearance of Communist rule in Russia, but if there is to be a new interna- tional order after this war (provided it is not Hitler’s) those who will give shape to this order are men like Roosevelt and Churchill or their suc- cessors-not Stalin. (p. 699)

The short-circuiting of this grandiose kind of dream, which was expressed in printed and oratorical form thousands of times, 1941-1945, when the “victors” finally “sat,” was achieved with most of these same intellectual opinion-making prophets observing with mouths agape wondering what had happened. But the likes of de Roussy de Sales is what the wartime American intellectual was brought up on.

Chamberlain and the others studying Willkie got their answer a little over a year later with the publication of the book by Willkie, 一个世界.

Echoes of the Religious Dust-Up Reverberate •700字

基督教世纪 was far more exercised by the increasing belligerence of key churchmen in behalf of Stalin than they were by the steady movement of big capitalists to his succor in the war with the Germans. Singled out for special reproach were the Archbishop of Canterbury in Britain and prestigious Reinhold Niebuhr in the U.S. Repelled by the former’s flattering estimate of the Reds in late October, the editors remarked disparagingly, “It is slightly nauseating to hear those who have never been able to find words hard enough to express their opinion of the Soviets now cooing compliments, and almost, if not quite, conferring benedictions.”[130]Editorial, “Canterbury Sees Moscow In a New Light,” Christian Century (October 22,1941), pp.1291-92. The editors had not taken up the new fashion of fawning on an old enemy turned into an “ally” via the fortunes of war.

In Niebuhr’s case, they were dealing with someone whose long campaign in behalf of Marx and Mars had undergone some modification; the former had been replaced by the Deity. In the magazine Christianity and Crisis, newly formed mainly to accommodate the war cries of a class of divine not previously noted for truculence toward Stalin, Niebuhr had registered the growing insolence of this kind of warrior parson with a ferocious editorial which attacked neutrality in any war as immoral. On November 12 the 基督教世纪 ran one of its most lengthy and memorable editorials in decades, a five-column incensed raking of Niebuhr probably unmatched in any journal before. Its summary of his message was calculated to create serious qualms among the Men of God in the seminaries whose first allegiance had always been to the Prince of Peace:

It is the baldest apologetic for war that has appeared in either secular or religious contemporary writing. It is not merely an apologetic for this war and for America’s participation in it, but for war in general. Under its thesis the United States would become responsible for participation in any war waged anywhere in the world.[131]Editorial, Christian Century (November 12, 1941), pp. 1399-1401. On Niebuhr’s turnaround from non-belligerent to warrior see note 111, above. One might profit from comparing the sophisticated differences between Niebuhr’s statements in the prewar 1930s in such as The World Tomorrow, for example, and the more transparently pro-Soviet Nation.

It would appear that Rev. Niebuhr had written a manifesto which far more than not set the course for U.S. foreign policy which by and large is still in effect over 40 years later. It was a message for soldiers, money, business and industry, and politicians, not clergymen. Rev. Niebuhr, a not-so-closet-Marxist, was another of their most eloquent and articulate voices who saw no serious conflict in the way of planetary cooperation between Stalinist Russia and the new form of corporate state taking shape rapidly in the U.S.A.

But the green light for war participation did not shine down all the avenues of organized religion. Though several Catholic leaders in prominent positions had endorsed Roosevelt’s pro- intervention drive, it was a view hardly shared with the parish priesthood, who dealt with people and not with the symbols of power. A poll of 34,616 Catholic priests which was responded to by 13,155 of them revealed that 91.5% were opposed to a shooting war outside the Western Hemisphere for Americans (only 6.7% were for it), and that 90.5% opposed any aid to the “Communist Russian government” (7% favored it). The liberal and pro-war Catholic weekly 公益 was very unhappy about the results,[132]Editorial, “Clergy Pod,” Commonweal (October 31,1941), pp.37-38.Commonweal’s opposite number, the anti-war Protestant 基督教世纪, confined itself to observing: “The President’s sedulous wooing of Catholic approval does not seem to have produced very gratifying results.”[133]“Catholic Clergy Vote Against Wards Christian Century (October 29,1941), pp.1323-24.

Part of the impact of this thundering voice of disapproval was negated a month later. The last week of November 1941 a statement by ten Bishops and Archbishops on the administrative board of the National Catholic Welfare Conference contained a vaguely pro-interventionist pronouncement which contributed in a minor way to refurbishing the Communist aid cause. Utilizing the clever ploy fashioned by Woodrow Wilson in 1918 in setting up a distinction between the peoples and political systems of Germany and Russia, in this new case, it seemed to be sufficient grounds, in the view of the prelates, to enable Catholics “to back U.S. aid to Russia” and not feel seriously in error while so doing. 时间 called it “a prime example of ecclesiastical double talk,” but since it supported a policy heatedly promoted by the editors, the magazine was far from displeased by it all.[134]Time (December 1, 1941), p. 44. There was a similar recruitment of interventionist preachers by Kenneth Leslie, editor of the Protestant Digest, a petition signed by 1000 Protestant clergymen, calling for increased aid to the “anti-Hitler” forces in the world. The increasingly pro-Stalinist orientation of this journal became the subject of steadily mounting attention in the closing two years of the war and after.

The clever Anglo-American propaganda ploy of selling their respective populaces on a war against only Hitler personally and the “Nazi tyranny” involved ineluctably a war for the mass destruction of millions of Germans who were not Nazis and were not particularly enchanted by Hitler. In this way was their basic Germanophobia concealed under high-sounding verbiage and empty, wordy “principles.” In the same way the fiercely pro-war Communists and their ardent liberal allies had not the slightest compunction about the urban massacres by Allied saturation strategic bombing, which obliterated many German fellow Marxists. In reality their pretension about Marxist ideology was an utter fraud, in that they looked upon the annihilation of presumably blood-brother ideologues with considerable relish, and gloated over it thousands of times. The ultimate advantage of this concealed program of ethnic mass murder was postponed until that stage of victory was reached where atrocity propaganda came to the fore to guide postwar policy; the ascribing to the enemy of what has befallen him is the essence of successful atrocity propaganda.

Fellow Travelers Domestic and Foreign Add Their Bit •700字

Serenely contemplating all this from the pages of the 新群众 was Corliss Lamont, scion of the famed Wall Street banking family, but hardly its courier in his role as America’s most famed Communist fellow traveler. In his long-quoted article of November 11, “What Americans Are Learning,” Lamont proclaimed, “I believe that there has been a favorable turn in public opinion concerning Russia much more far-reaching and fundamental than the unfavorable one that took place subsequent to the Nazi-Soviet pact.” Everyone had been misled about Russia between 1935 and 1941, said Lamont, and now were being set right again: “The American people were sold a false bill of goods on Russia by writers, tourists, diplomats, newspapers, and all sorts of commentators whose anti-Soviet prejudice was so bitter that they could not and would not recognize a fact when they saw one.” He still was not sure that things might not deteriorate again, and though predicting that “in the future there will again take place an organized attempt to mislead public opinion in this country concerning the Soviet Union,” he was convinced it would not succeed “if we as a people are able to learn sufficiently from the lessons of the recent past.”[145]Lamont, “What Americans Are Learning,” New Masses (November 11, 941), pp. 340. Ultimately it became a matter of what “lessons” were to be taught and learned, and how “recent” the era was to be from which these “lessons” were to be derived. In just a little over four years Lamont’s worst fears had materialized with a vengeance. But at this moment he rode on a magic carpet of purest good will toward Stalinism.

The best was yet to come: the hushed eulogies of Stalin on the occasion of his Moscow speech on the 24th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolutionary assumption of power. 时间's account was set in tones which might have been used to describe a movie actress, if not in the style made familiar in the 工人. This major four-page piece was accompanied by a two-page color map of the Soviet, and included a panegyric by none other than Churchill himself, quoted from a speech at Sheffield, wherein the Red chief was hailed by the British prime minister as “that great warrior, Stalin.” The account included the introductory paragraphs of Stalin’s speech.[146]See especially quotes on pages 19 and 31 in the November 17, 1941 issue of Time. In the first of these Time quoted from Hitler’s speech in the second week of November in which he referred to Churchill as “the crazy drunkard who for years now has been ruling England.” The reason for the almost offensively fulsome adulation of Stalin was not discernible, nor was it ever so. There were no counter- demonstrations of affection for England anywhere in Russia then, nor were there ever any. Fighting their own war for their own objectives, one might have understood that there was no compulsion among Russians to demonstrate “solidarity” with the English; the members of the non-Russian Comintern could be depended upon to engage in any public effusions of such sentiment thought necessary. At home in Moscow, all was business, Russian business. But if anything, there should have been recognition among Russians that English help was more important to them than any Russian help to the English. The latter was microscopic, other than the function the Eastern Front played in diverting part of the German air force from English targets; but even here the assistance was more imagined than real.

新群众 不喜欢 时间's treatment of Stalin, though their “news” story might easily have graced the Masses’ editorial pages. However, the latter had run their own tribute to the great man and great event a week earlier,[147]New Masses (November 11, 1941), p. 19, for quotations cited below. featuring stirring accolades from ex-Ambassador Davies, the refugee French Marxist former minister of aircraft production in France, Pierre Cot,[148]Cot’s political pedigree was expertly obfuscated by American liberals until the publication of his biography of Marx in the symposium The Torch of Freedom (Farrar and Rinehart, 1943), edited by Emil Ludwig and Henry B. Kranz. This revelation by Cot was sufficient to pinpoint his Front Populaire sentiments, if his occasional essays in The Protestant were insufficient illumination. the one-time Moscow propaganda magazine editor, Lion Feuchtwanger (about whom more later), and the American luminary H.W.L. Dana, along with selected Communist Party functionaries. Davies was quoted as saying, “I find the greatest satisfaction in the courage and idealism of the Soviet government and the Russian people in resisting Hitler” (the millions of Russians who had gone over to Hitler were not news in these days), while Cot relieved himself of the opinion that “Soviet Russia is actually the best fighter for the defense of civilization,” by which he must have meant a more primitive one than prevailed among their German enemy.

Feuchtwanger elected to broaden the historical frontiers by claiming, “The fight of the Soviet Union against Hitlerism is the natural continuation of all the wars for freedom that the United States of America ever fought,” though the most flattering encomium was delivered by Dana, the grandson of the American literary giant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A veteran of 14 visits to the Soviet in as many years, Dana terminated his fulsome declamation by quoting from the famous words of his grandfather which had been recently quoted as well by Roosevelt and Churchill, and in the line which read “Sail on, O Union strong and great!” Dana capitalized the word “Union” in such a way that no one might be confused as to which one he was referring.

Vote of No Confidence from the Saturday Evening Post •300字

In all the sweet twittering from above, there was only one harsh bellow from below, as H.L. Mencken might have written it. This was the remarkable full page editorial in the 星期六晚邮报, “Playing the Red,” on November 8, 1941. It was one of the few tough ruminations on the likely outcome of the war as it was now shaping up. The editors called the partnership between the U.S. and Britain on one side and Stalin on the other “morally and politically false,” involving both of the former in “shocking political insincerities.” And, anticipating the Cold War of 1946 等等., they asked rhetorically, should the war end with the Soviet Union “the paramount land power in Europe,” “Having saved the world from Nazism, should we not go on and save it from Bolshevism?” The Cold Warriors of four years later and after always acted as though such inconvenient thinking had never been expressed this early. For the pro-war seers among the most ardent interventionist camp followers, the editors had still another irritating query:

We ask the revelationists — such as Secretary [of the Navy Frank] Knox, with his vision of a tenth of a millennium for an Anglo-American world, and Mr. [Supreme Court] Justice [Robert H.] Jackson, with his international order of the Golden Rule that shall come to pass when America has outstripped, as he says she must, “All the rest of the world in naval, air and perhaps military forces” — we ask them, what will they do with 180,000,000 Russians who may no more want our world order than we want theirs or Hitler’s?

Some Practical Consequences of Soviet Aid Get Aired •800字

But the war party had to have their war first before they took up the problems anticipated by the editors of the 帖子. 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. 美国新闻 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]“What’s Behind the Urals?” U.S. News (November 14, 1941), p. 19. 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. 美国新闻 played a revealing part in this matter as well. In its pro-and-con column on views on the subject,[150]“The Yeas and the Nays,” U.S. News (November 7, 1941), p. 49. 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]Lawrence, “Hitler Defeats Hitler,” U.S. News (November 14, 1941), pp. 20-21. Lawrence was one of the most strident voices in the U.S.A. complaining why nothing had been done about “aggression” by Japan since 1931 and by Germany since 1933. He continued this well after the European war began. However, he was one of the very last to see Stalinist Russia a threat or an “aggressor.” As a prognosticator of trouble in this quarter he had one of the poorest records in American journalism. 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.

The Origins of ‘Second Front’ Talk in the West, and the Impact of Soviet Aid Production on American Labor and Business/Businessmen •2,100字

By this time, however, those perspiring for Stalin’s safety were not entirely satisfied with the prospect of celestial intervention in his behalf, and were suggesting that such aid might be more promptly forthcoming if preceded by human action toward the same objective. A clamor had already risen, mainly in Britain, for a “second front” to be established somewhere in assistance to the floundering Red Army, which, though hailed by sustained and glittering eloquence in the English-speaking world, was still on the run. There apparently was a solid contingent in England still, who, despite the record of failing to supply Poland with any help at all prior to or during invasion by the Germans in September 1939, thought substantial military support could be furnished to Stalin. Those who disparaged this position in England in the late fall of 1941 were smeared as “Munich men,” frightened by “fear of a Russian victory,” by far the most contemptible attitude anyone might have in the view of the new legions of Communism’s adulators, high and low alike, in the Motherland of Parliaments. One of them was not the new Supply Minister in the Churchill regime, Beaverbrook, who had impressed even 时间 with his “spectacular verbal leap into bed with Russia,” and who was reported to be the principal voice clamoring for a British expeditionary force to be sent somehow to Stalin’s assistance, “in the Ukraine or the Donetz Basin.”[152]Time (November 10, 1941), pp. 29-30. Mass journalism tends to put its moguls into a position vis-a-vis the State where their conversion into commissar types is almost inevitable. Neither Beaverbrook nor 时间 nor anyone else suggested how this force was to be translated to such distant places, but nothing was said about consulting with David Lawrence on the matter. Some heavenly assistance might have been contracted for, perhaps.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere of geniality toward Stalin and the Reds continued to prevail, and the slow, piecemeal gains were more substantial than the impulsive and unrealizable projects which were hatched in more fevered minds. Diplomatically the story was one of uninterrupted success. In Washington, the 24th anniversary of the assumption of the Leninists to power in Russia was celebrated at a reception at the Soviet embassy that was hailed as one of the largest diplomatic functions ever held in the city,[153]Newsweek (November 17, 1941), p. 22. Roosevelt sent the note pledging a billion dollars in lend-lease aid to the Reds on the 24th anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s severance of diplomatic relations with the Bolsheviks in 1917, and Litvinov (see note below), whom Wilson refused to accept as the first Red ambassador to the U.S., was appointed Stalin’s new U.S. ambassador the same day, a matter of odd timing which called to mind to a few the 180-degree turn of U.S. liberalism on the Bolsheviks in a quarter of a century.

The ecstatic rehabilitation of Litvinov as a result of his restoration to good odor in the Soviet diplomatic bureaucracy with his appointment to America led to several kinds of rejoicing among the non-Communist fellow travelers and ardent well-wishers of the USSR in the U.S.A. One of the consequences was a re-raking over of the dramatic events of 1937-1939, as the Soviet ploy of “collective security” and the “popular front” collapsed, leading to the refusal of Americans to back Roosevelt in his “quarantine the aggressors” trial balloon of October, 1937, then the Munich agreement of September, 1938 and the diplomatic revolution of August, 1939, the immediate precursor but not necessarily the trigger of the hostilities which ensued the following month.

One of the most comprehensive was that by the veteran Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, whose pedigree as a friend of the USSR was outranked by very few. His lengthy commentary was delayed in publication (“He Who Got Slapped,” Collier’s, January 3, 1942, pp. 12, 39-40) but got an ex- posure before a subscriber total of nearly 3,000,000 Americans, and probably millions of others as well, something no Communist could have expected to achieve in a number of lifetimes. Inspired by the proceedings at the Nov. 7, 1941 Soviet Embassy reception on the 24th anniversary of the “Soviet National Birthday,” Duranty, who had met Litvinov as far back as 1919, proceeded to lavish praise on the latter as the father of the whole “collective security” gambit between 1934 and 1939. Rejoicing that Americans were becoming so voluble in their praise of the Red Army’s loudly advertised resistance to the German invasion, Duranty undertook to scold those who had abandoned the pro-Soviet positions earlier.

Duranty reasserted once more that the real victim of the Munich pact between the French and British, represented by Daladier (and Bonnet, the actual French diplomat on the scene) and Chamberlain, and the Germans, led by Hitler, was the Soviet Union, and the Czechs secondarily. Though the majority of even Communist-hating “conservatives” adopted the Red pejorative term “appeasement” (claimed to have been his invention by the British Communist Claude Cockburn) to describe Munich, a demonstration of political ignorance which must have kept Communists about the world laughing for the last 45 years, it should be pointed out that the Stalinists and their friends were considerably more astute in seeing the real dimensions of the Daladier-Chamberlain-Hitler proceedings in Munich. A vigorous assertion that the Munich operation was first of all an anti- Communist agreement was made by Charles A. Davila, former Rumanian minister to the U.S., some months later, but buried in the back pages of the Nation (July 25, 1942, p. 80.) It was the substance of Davila’s view that had the “democracies” “stood” with the Czechs at Munich that the Red Army would have been in Central Europe in a matter of days. This could be divined by a straining of Duranty’s prose as well. In his high acclaim of what he called Litvinov’s “greatest speech” before the League of Nations at Geneva, Duranty pointed out that in essence it was “a fruitless attempt to convince the French and British delegates that Russia would adhere with all its influence, and force of arms if need be, to its pledge to aid Czechoslovakia.” (emphasis added.) How any support for the Czechs could have been supplied by anyone except Stalin was not imagined then, and in view of what happened in Poland a year later, could hardly have been imagined by anyone later.

A loud and substantial part of the American Right in recent times has wanted it both ways; they have pushed for an unremitting anti-Communist program and at the same time have mouthed the Left revulsion for the Munich pact, using the same descriptive catcalls as the Communists and fellow travelers they pretend to abominate. (Somehow or other they have managed to overlook that in France with the exception of the political exotic Henri de Kerillis, the only opponents of Daladier on Munich in the Chamber of Deputies were the 75 Communists.)

Despite this long-standing verbal dust cloud, through which few have been able to peer, the French-British decision at Munich had much good to say for it. It was consistent with their Russian policy from at least 1933 as well, since “standing” with the Czechs would not only have opened the gates of Central Europe to the Red Army; such a decision would have placed them in accedence to old Soviet frontier rectification demands. By bellowing in unison with the Left over Munich, the Right, particularly that in America, have voted in favor of the Red Army being in 1938 where they eventually were, thanks to their American “allies,” in 1945.

The major ingredient of the Cold War for nearly 40 years has consisted of 事后 American remorse over this consequence, and the wearisome and only feebly successful rebuilding of a power concentrate in what is left of non-Communist Europe to match off against a Communist saturation of total power in Central and Eastern Europe, to which tacit approval was tendered long before Yalta. It may be that the Anglo-French position was hopeless, and that the small countries fabricated at Versailles and after, Iying between Germany and Russia, extending from Finland to the Black Sea, were doomed to either German or Russian interference. But on the face of it, Chamberlain and Daladier emerge as towering figures of wisdom compared to Churchill, Duff Cooper, Lord Halifax, Lord Lothian, Anthony Eden and Robert Vansittart, and the likes of Attlee, Cripps, Bevin, Shinwell and Morrison. Concessions to Germany resulted in undesirable consequences, but the former did not bring the Red Army into Central Europe, which is what the logic of the challenge to Germany called for. One can throw up barrels of stale propaganda accusations of German intentions to “conquer the world,” but until pressured to do otherwise, the Anglo-French policies down to the end of March, 1939 still pitted German ambitions against those of the Soviet, allowing themselves a position to move about, at least relatively, as to their best interests. Once the commitment to support either the Germans or Russians was made, the outcome was predictable and often predicted: either a German- or Russian-dominated Central Europe. The long-range vision of the Churchill wing of British leadership is that they preferred Russian to German, and they promptly got it. Churchill’s opening of the Cold War with his March, 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri is the perfect testament to his political myopia.

A related rumination of the time, and since reiterated in many hundreds of books and thousands of smaller pieces, is that if only the British and French and the American people had backed Roosevelt in his “quarantine” doctrine of October, 1937 (Actually fully developed by Stalinists a good 2 years before FDR’s speech in Chicago), Hitler, intimidated, would have evaporated in fear, the Germans would have slunk home and cowered in their basements, and a Central Europe tailored to Anglo-Franco-American specifications and desires would have prevailed in perpetuity. This theme is always built on a foundation of theoretical statecraft from which the Soviet Union is always omitted. Therefore the possibility of a German-Russian agreement a la that of August, 1939, but occurring well before it, is breezily ignored and never considered. If being checked by a British policy turnabout in late March, 1939 led to the Pakt five months later, is there any reason that adoption of a similar line in October, 1937 might not have brought about a diplomatic revolution resembling the Pakt but, say, in March, 1938?

Again, the upholders of the above-mentioned strategy to “contain” Hitler wish not to confront the obvious: the Anglo-French and their moral supporters in America were through in Central Europe, and that it was a matter of whether they would support the Germans or the Russians in this region. The entry of the Americans directly in the situation as a consequence of the military events of 1944-1945 did not alter this at all. From a European point of view it has been a nuisance at best, and a replacement of an inept and impotent Anglo-French policy by one which has yet to be demonstrated to be very much better. American Cold War “containment” simply put the problem into suspended animation for a generation, and now going on to another. One might summarize the U.S.A. apologetic satirically as follows: it was a lovely, noble, righteous war; if only the Communists, with whom we were in such exalted wartime partnership, had not tried to gain anything out of the victory and allowed the spoils to accrue to their Western “partners,” all would be well in the world.
to be followed shortly by the return of Stalin’s “greatest diplomat,” Maxim Litvinov, once more as the Ambassador of the Soviet Union to the U.S.A. His projected return to “the scene of his greatest diplomatic triumph,” the negotiation of U.S. recognition of the Soviet in 1933, was looked upon with much satisfaction, while 时间, for reasons ungiven, chose to call attention to “his name at birth,” allegedly Max Wallach.[154]“Mr. Wallach Goes to Washington,” Time (November 17,1941), pp.23-24; “Litvinoff’s Return,” Time (December 8, 1941), p. 29. Still others identified Litvinoff as originally Moysheev Vallakh, the son of a Jewish bank clerk in Bialystok, Russia. His employment record, 1908-1918, prior to his emergence as a Bolshevik bureaucrat reputedly involved work as a clerk, draftsman, newspaper reporter and traveling salesman, supposedly for a corset manufacturer. Those who jeered at the German Foreign Minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, as a one-time wine salesman neglected to point out that one of their diplomat heroes had also spent much time on the road.

Still other moves were considerably cloaked, especially the State Department’s pro-Soviet pressure on Finland, still at war with Stalin in the late fall of 1941. Once hailed as “gallant little Finland,” this unfortunate land was now the recipient of special malice for persisting in its hostility to the Russians. With Secretary of State Hull publicly testifying to his faith in the Soviet’s commitment to “its full part in standing side by side with all liberty-loving people against the common menace,”[155]Associated Press report, in Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph, December 11,1941), p. Al. The steadily accelerating propaganda from pro-Soviet spokesmen in the U.S.A. of all kinds from 1941 on, stressing Soviet faithfulness to their given word, always skipped rapidly past the expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations on December 14,1939 for carrying on the war with Finland in the first place. it seemed to be only good faith to work with them in crushing an active military enemy. The argument seemed to be that with the joint commitment to defeat Hitler, there should not be a limitation upon indirect Soviet ties, including mutual action against Finland, since its continued belligerence only worked in behalf of German welfare.[156]“There Goes Finland,” Time (November 17,1941), p.15.

On the domestic material side a mixture of tendencies, developments, both slow and rapid, and an accretion of significant facts, reflected related circumstances. But the overall “defense” program masked specific aspects. One of the best sources in which to examine the week-by-week development in the U.S. of an American-style system rivaling those of the enemy and designed to combat them was Lawrence’s 美国新闻. The disciplining and planning of industry and the increased state regulation of the economic system geared almost exclusively to the success of the national state in warfare are patently observable, and these did not take long to become institutionalized.

On July 4, 1941, Lawrence complained editorially, “The United States is on the threshold of national socialism,” adding that “In-roads of national socialism are unchecked by either Republicans or Democrats who have hitherto defended our system of private initiative.”[157]Lawrence, “‘Loyal Opposition’-Where ?” U.S. News (July 4, 1941), pp. 18-19. Three weeks later he had already seen the light and changed his tune. “Every issue is a Defense issue,” he now announced, adding, “Every Defense item is actually a peacetime item, temporarily put to Defense use.”[158]U.S. News (July 25,1941), inside back cover. 159.U.S. News (August 22,1941), p.23. 160.Colorado Springs Gazette, November 1,1941, p.4. 161.Time (September 15,1941), p.16. 162.Time (October 27, 1941), p. 13. In the summer of 1941 the National Resources Planning Board published a pamphlet titled “After Defense-What?” This suggested that this top-level think tank looked upon the flood of defense spending as a short term phenomenon, and that its unemployment blotter effect would be short lived, thus requiring a new impulse, unlike either the New Deal or “defense spending” to perform the function of putting Americans to work. That a succession of wars, followed by a succession of defense programs, would serve to postpone this problem, which the NRPB saw shaping up right away, did not cross the minds of the eminent economic savants. Peripherally he noted that nationwide, politicians were grumbling that their home areas were not getting enough “defense patronage.” Lawrence soon had joined those who used “defense” to dissolve the difference between war and peace and within weeks of his remonstrance against these developments, had emerged as a suave advisor to such sectors of the business world which had not yet caught on to the consequences of what was taking place. Coaching businessmen to be alert and cash in on the vast conversion of industry to war production, he uttered as an aside, “Government isn’t a respecter of individual interests, isn’t too much concerned about individual hardships so long as its own purpose is served.”[159] This stood in strange contrast to his whooping enthusiasm for the political lace trimming and fancy filigree decorating the famed bogus “Atlantic Charter,” one of the very few at the time of its alleged promulgation to take it seriously. But Lawrence was not misleading the business community when he described what was going on in the late months of 1941. Arthur E. Burns, economic advisor to the Works Progress Administration, estimated on October 31, 1941, that 700,000 people working in the non-defense sector had lost their jobs in the months of August and September alone.[160] On the other hand, 75% of the total membership in the CIO electrical workers union in mid-September were engaged in defense work. One was able to understand without wonder why its leader, youthful James B. Carey, was, as 时间 described him, “an earnest supporter of the Roosevelt foreign policy and closely identified with the defense program.”[161] U.S. defense spending in October, 1941 was already $50,000,000 a day, and $5,000,000,000 in various products and arms had already been sent to Britain, though there was no published breakdown of what part of this may have been transferred to the Soviet Union.[162] And all was catapulting at a pace relished by employers, marred only by a suggestion that same month by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., that profits should be limited to 6 per cent, a profit ceiling which was supposed to prevail in Hitler Germany as well, though the latter had nothing to do with the proposal by the former.[163]

It was obvious that profit margins had not the slightest relationship to such figures, though the public at large rarely saw anything substantial in the fact department relating to the subject. One such occasion was the issuance of a preliminary report by the House of Representatives Naval Affairs Committee early in December, a few days before the Pearl Harbor attack, that some U.S. ship- building companies were making 150% profits on naval building defense contracts. A followup report by the Office of Price Ad- ministration of one unnamed defense industry indicated that 86 of the 88 companies in this venture were making 6% or better, that 44 of the 88 were averaging 42.6% profits and up, and one of the 88 was achieving a 112% profit margin.[164]Time (December 8,1941), p.28. Senator David I. Walsh, affronted by such disclosures, was quoted as predicting “an awful day of reckoning” “when the U.S. public got the figures” on the total situation, though in retrospect this might have been interpreted as an attempt at humor. There never was a “day of reckoning,” and the American public never “got the figures.”

The evolution of “aid” to Stalin had expanded the vision of some of the leaders of American defense industry, getting their first glimpses of the staggering possibilities which lay in expansion throughout the globe. Russia at the time of its revolution, 1917-1922, was a dream which had quickened even the World War I generation of businessmen, industrialists and financiers.[165]One of the almost forgotten episodes of the earliest years of the Bolshevik upheaval was that associated with the mining engineer Washington B. Vanderlip, representing a mainly Los Angeles-based investor group seeking from Lenin a mining lease on Kamchatka. Vanderlip, who declared to Americans that the “Red terror” was simply propaganda and was not taking place, drew a remarkable amount of space in the American newspapers from October, 1920 on into 1922. And there had always been the fantasies built around China’s “400 milllion customers,” as the title of Carl Crow’s book [1937] put it. The coming of a new war simply made it possible to erect even higher cloud castles upon the older ones. The spectacle which William Batt put together upon his return from the Soviet late in 1941 is in that class, Batt, president of the famous ball- bearing manufacturing concern, SKF, and recently appointed a director of the super-bureauracy created by Roosevelt to direct war production, the Office of Production Management (OPM), came back to America “as an outspoken advocate of the policy of bigger and better help for Russia,” a vibrant profile in U.S. News proclaimed on November 21. Batt went on to describe the complete reversal on his previous views about Soviet industry, and Russian ability to use machine tools. He confessed to be vastly impressed by the technical competence of Russian mechanics, “ingenious, intelligent, and technically trained,” a view which was contradicted by General John R. Deane, Roosevelt’s troubleshooting liaison man in the Soviet later, during the war years, who in his book 奇怪的联盟 described an entire tire factory shipped from the U.S.A. to the USSR which the Russians failed to put together though working on it the whole war. Batt passed encomiums to the Reds all down the line: the officers were “able, confident and brave,” and Stalin “intelligent and amazingly well informed” (fifteen years later Khrushchev and his colleagues berated Stalin as being personally responsible for the disasters of 1941-1942 through his abysmal personal ignorance). Batt concluded his amazing piece of special pleading by declaring that industrial management and organization seemed to be good, and that their inspection standards “compared favorably with our own.” All this was placed before the readership as the judgment of a nationally known industrialist, now a defense official.[166]“What Mr. Batt Saw in Russia,” U.S. News (November 21,1941), p.15, for above observations. The near-panic attached to “defense” beginning in the early summer of 1940 and the sharp turnaround from criticism to accolades for industrial war production was not without its problems. There was a largely concealed struggle between the incumbent New Deal bureaucrats of the top rank, reluctantly doffing domestic reform for planetary martial roles, and the newly perfumed industrial moguls recruited for the job of mass-producing billions of dollars of all kinds of weapons, sometimes referred to as the “dollar-a-year” men. These top executives entered quasi-government service presumably waiving federal compensation, though the immense revenue accruing to their companies via arms contracts seemed not to be a subject worth discussing publicly. The subject of dispute over the pressure to produce for Stalin was even more concealed, though it can be assumed to have had some influence in these conflicts over direction of policy. An interesting contemporary book over this fight at the top was Carlisle Bargeron’s Confusion on the Potomac (Wilfred Funk), attacked in Foreign Affairs but otherwise reviewed in a commendatory way, even a year after publication (1942). Perhaps it was all a preliminary device to make palatable the issuance of Special Allocation Order No. 1 by the OPM a few days later, which instructed 35 U.S. machine tool plants to place Stalinist orders ahead of even American and British requests, on the order of $10-$15 million for the next calendar year.[167]Time (November 24,1941), p.87. A week before the Pearl Harbor attack, an organization of American interventionists, the Associated Leagues for a Declared War, had named James W. Gerard, the U.S. ambassador to Germany during the early years of World War One, as their honorary chairman. Gerard took on the symbolic post, declaring that “the time had come to declare a state of war with Germany.” Associated Press report, Colorado Springs Gazette, December 1,1941, p. 1. But the way things were going in terms of public disaffection for initiated belligerency, it might have been a very long wait for ex-Ambassador Gerard and the Associated Leagues had not the welcome assault by Japan a week later brought about the dearly-desired war declaration. The U.S. was still not a belligerent.

The aid program for Stalin had moved ahead on both administrative and practical levels. On the latter, 时间 pictured a formidable collection of U.S. manufactures intended for the USSR, unloaded at a Persian Gulf port, the photographer having made sure that the labels of the Ford and Youngstown Sheet and Tube companies were prominently displayed.[168] American free enterprise was now demonstrably at work making sure of the survival of Stalinist Communism.

On the former, a complication ensued which once more broke open the old religious sore. At the conclusion of the paper work which detailed the arrangements concerning the U.S. aid program, a Kremlin dinner was thrown to celebrate. An unnamed U.S. official involved in the labors was a guest at the feast and was quoted as describing Stalin as “a nice old gentleman.” But the explosion was created by Wallace Carroll, United Press correspondent in Moscow, who reported that Stalin proposed a toast to Roosevelt, which ended in the expression of the generalized entreaty, “May God help him in his task.” Stalin’s remarks were reported by 时间 to have been translated by the diplomat Oumansky, and certified to be correct.[169]“Nice Old Gentleman,” Time (December 1, 1941), p.25. Repercussions of this were muffled by the sensational Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii a few days later, preventing a repetition of the immense squabble precipitated by Roosevelt a few weeks earlier concerning the allegation of religious freedom in the USSR. But there were a few reverberations of this incident for some time thereafter, and incredulity was the principal reaction to this last effort at imputing godliness to Stalin prior to the formal belligerence of the U.S.

The Pearl Harbor disaster also diverted all but a few from another contemporary political event, the news that Willkie, famed corporation lawyer and 1940 presidential election Republican opponent of Roosevelt, had agreed to defend William Schneiderlnan, Russian-born secretary of the Communist Party in California, against a federal charge of having uttered a fraudulent oath of allegiance to the United States. Mentioned in Time in the issue which was dated the day after the Hawaii attack,[170]Time (December 8,1941), p.20. it caused a flush of pleasure in the 新群众 of a day later, its lead editorial remarking, “The fact that a man of his[Willkie’s] prestige and conservative outlook undertakes the defense of a leading Communist undoubtedly reflects the changed political climate in the country during the past few months.”[171]New Masses (December 9, 1941), p. l9. Willkie’s gratuitous volunteering of the opinion that the Communist Manifesto was “one of the great historical documents” earned him the criticism of Rep. Paul Schafer of Michigan on the floor of the House of Representatives. It was a strange testimonial to hear from the lips of a well-to-do corporation lawyer. The Pr>Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 359

Pearl Harbor Forces a Temporary Diversion in the Overall Drive to Assist the Soviet Union •1,200字

But for a few days at least all political matters relating to Communism at home and abroad were dissolved in the national bellow of indignation over the Pearl Harbor affair, and a brigade of the choicest partisans of the Roosevelt regime began a two-fifths of a century offensive aimed at distracting national attention completely away from any suspicions of possible administration pre-knowledge of the coming attack, and fastening the blame for it all upon the military and naval commanders at Honolulu. This infamous enfilade blackened the character of these men but did not succeed in heading off a formidable amount of investigation and literature which did anything but entrench the desired result of this Roosevelt establishment.

Pearl Harbor made the fatalist argument come true. The varied forces ranging from pro-Communists of the 1934-1939 “popular front” to the fervid Anglophiles of 1939-1941 who had tirelessly argued that the entry of the U.S. into war with either Germany or Japan or both was “inevitable” were finally “vindicated,” in their own mind, but in a way very much different from that expected. Their own propagandistic efforts to bring about this result as a matter of “conviction” and voluntary choice were a total failure. It was not “isolationism” which got America into the war. It was the inch-by-inch creeping intrusionism and “aid short of war” which created all the policy imperatives that slowly moved the country to a point where their threat to an adversary and the sustained pressure on that adversary finally produced the attack so dearly desired and needed by the administration’s political warriors. (171B)

A good case can be made for the view that war with Japan was not entirely unwelcome in the U.S.A. at any time. Decades of political and propaganda.hostility toward Japan on many levels in the U.S.A. preceded Pearl Harbor. Even men antagonistic to involvement in the European war after it broke out in 1939 did not feel the same way about mixing it up in the Pacific. Even the usually anti-war Senator George Curtis (R.-Neb.) was quoted by “新闻周刊” as late as the end of October 1941 as saying “I’m not so sure that war with Japan would be a bad thing…. I believe we could lick them…. Our bombers could set the whole island (原文) ablaze in one night….”[172]Sen. Norris quoted in Newsweek (October 27,1941), p.16. The opinion of Sen. Norris was actually quite widespread, and undoubtedly accounted to a serious degree for the intractability of the Administration toward Japan, and the unwillingness to negotiate anything; the attitude seemed to be that one does not have to compromise with weak inferiors. The widely read commentator on military and naval matters, Major George Fielding Eliot, urged war on Japan in his column, and in other writings; “We have but to stir a finger, and they will sustain such a defeat as they will not recover from this side of total ruin,” is the way he confidently stated the matter. Roosevelt was known to have a very low opinion of Japan as a naval power, while liberal and Communist opinion makers vaulted back and forth on the subject, portraying Japan as an invincible juggernaut, especially threatening to Stalinist Siberia and the future of Communism in China, and, alternately, as a thin shell of superficial strength but with “feet of clay,” easily destroyed by a Western military foray whenever the latter made up their mind to confront them. One should be aware of the incredible opportunities that lay in the hands of those interested in misleading and lying to the American public about Japan, in these times. Those non-Japanese Americans who had a real command of Japanese were estimated by Archibald MacLeish, the chief of the American propaganda services, to be only three of a total U.S.A. populace of nearly 135,000,000. The editors of Publishers Weekly were a little more generous in their estimate; they concluded there were about 100. See “Global War Demands New Skills in Foreign Languages,” Publishers Weekly (September 26,1942), p.1192, for the quote from MacLeish, and their estimate. An absorbing summary of contemporary misconceptions about the Japanese is the section “Prodding Japan into War,” in Porter Sargent’s Getting US into War (Boston, 1941), pp.525-545.

And contrary to the mountain of mendacious special pleading that flowed across the land afterward alleging unbelievable unpreparedness, the general belief prior to Pearl Harbor was that the country’s defenses, and offensive strength, too, for that matter, were at a high pitch of development, ready for anything, even the obliteration of Japan itself, as Senator Norris believed. The public had been encouraged to feel that immense armaments and the best of war materiel were at hand, easily put to use in the destruction of any enemy. The fairy tale of innocent, unready America on the eve of the attack is not substantiated by what many millions of Americans read in nationally circulated periodicals for weeks prior to December 7, 1941.

时间 had primed its millions of readers (readership surveys in the 1940s indicated that a publication’s total reading audience might exceed its actual paid circulation by from 5 to 15 times that number) with repeated accounts of the bristling armor and fire power prevailing here. On November 10, 1941, it had referred admiringly to Roosevelt as the man who “was waging the first great undeclared war in U.S. history,”[173]Time (November 10,1941), p.13. and later in the month, on the occasion of his press conference following the sinking of the U.S. destroyer Reuben James by a German submarine while on convoy duty for the British in the North Atlantic, the editors concluded from the substance of FDR’s talk that “the U.S. was far into the unknown waters of war.”

In its issue of December 8, unfortunately on the stands after the attack had taken place, 时间的 editors confidently assured Americans, expecting war any minute, that “Everything was ready from Rangoon to Honolulu, every man was at battle stations.”[174]Time (December 8,1941), p. ll. They went on in a gloating mood, describing the vast American and British war machine which was ready to spring on the Japanese should they snap under Roosevelt’s “war of nerves” and “undeclared war” and react militarily. Nothing was more opposite to the whine and snivel of innocence and outrage which promptly rose to the heavens from these same war anticipators a few days later.

A respectable compendium of such material could have been collected, including accounts which actually picked out Pearl Harbor as the site of the coming attack weeks before it happened. Hallett Abend, a widely read newspaper reporter on matters Japanese in the pre-war decade, in his November 18 article in , “How the U.S. Navy Will Fight Japan,” which was exposed to a possible reading audience of about 12 million, launched even more inspiring misconceptions than did 时间。 Abend, who shared with Hugh Byas of the New York a record for being consistently wrong about Japan and filing repeatedly misleading material about affairs there, was ludicrously off the mark in this confident puff as well, seeding his piece with the promise of a Stalinist attack on Japan from Siberia as soon as the shooting began. The meat of his vaticination concerning the coming Pacific war was wrapped up in the following:

When the clash comes, the Japanese fleet will have to stay in home waters, to guard the islands of the Empire against naval raids. Our own fleet will cruise somewhere west of Hawaii, with scout planes far over the seas day and night to prevent surprise raids on the Pearl Harbor naval base or on our own West Coast cities.[175]Abend, “How the U.S. Navy Will Fight Japan,” Look (November 18,1941), pp.20-21.

Part of the over-confidence in the sureness of a swift victory in a mater of a few weeks over Japan in any likely war, which was almost universal (financial “experts” did not think Japan had enough money to fight more than two months), was a result of many decades of belief that Japanese industrial quality was extremely poor, partially due to the experience of seeing nothing but toys, Christmas tree ornaments and electric light bulbs in American shops. Many years of hilarious stories had gone around describing Japanese naval vessels as comic craft at best.

One of the great yarns which was retold with many novelty decorations concerned a Japanese dreadnought which allegedly turned turtle and sank upon its launching, because it had been faultily constructed from stolen plans previously tampered with by U.S. or British agents. This was revealed after Pearl Harbor to have been only a torpedo boat, the Tomoduru, which tipped over because of overloading with guns and torpedo tubes, when it had insufficient displacement, according to Time (December 22, 1941), p. 24.

This is the kind of gargantuan misinformation to which Americans were exposed as late as three weeks before the attack. But it indicates that at least on the popular level Pearl Harbor was openly expected to be the point at which the war might or would begin. The fundamental line of the Roosevelt defense corps in the next quarter of a century was that the Washington establishment was totally unaware of such a possibility, and vaguely imagined the Japanese strike would be at Borneo or similarly irrelevant distant locations.

The ear-splitting barks of hostility toward the Japanese which rang out from all corners of American opinion, and especially from the long-believed contingent of radio and newspaper “old Japan hands,” were remarkable in their barren thinness. Their desperate suggestions produced no Japanese casualties (the first in the U.S.A. were the cherry trees lining the tidal basin of Washington, D.C., cut down by pseudo-patriotic vandals), but their call for an obliterating victory never contemplated the consequences of the accompanying triumph of Asian Communism, an almost sure guarantee. Most of these “advisors” looked forward to nothing in Japan but an abyss of smoking ruins and corpses, and few of these seers were able to discern that a major revolution was under way in Asia, regardless of who won the war, which would stand any American or “Allied” victory in the area on its head in an extremely short time.[176]An amazingly large number of people in public communications in the U.S. complacently expected that the prying loose of Japan from the British, French and Dutch colonies in the Far East would be followed a genial and uneventful restoration, after the entry of the U.S. into the Pacific-War, in the same way their colleagues dealing with the war in Europe expected pro-British or pro-French regimes to return to control of the region between Germany and Russia. Part of this mindless complacency was due to the widely-encouraged belief that the Western powers were deeply loved in the Orient by all except the Japanese, partially due to generations of Sinophile sentiments encouraged by missionaries, among other things. In harmony with this was an incredible piece in Time two weeks after the Pearl Harbor bombing, “How to Tell Your Friends From the Japs” (December 22, 1941, p. 33), which was worse than no tipsheet at all in aiding distinguishing one sub-racial group of Orientals from another.

The entry of the United States into World War II via the Pearl Harbor attack triggered another development which had bittersweet responses in both the business community and the consumer public: the machinery of price controls, rationing and many other nagging harassments which so bedevilled those subject to them and so elated those who made and administered them. Frustrated by the failure of domestic New Deal agencies to loose the controls upon the land, so dear to the controllers among the bureaucratic multitude employed in its police actions, the war brought about the regulators’ dream. It now became high patriotic duty to govern and regulate the citizenry’s tastes, and massive doses of sumptuary legislation soon flowed out, to the delight of the element made responsible for applying it. The agency primarily involved, the Office of Price Administration, soon became the most hated agency of the entire war, and was loaded down with the haughtiest and most insufferable people that the general populace had to put up with for the next five years. Particularly offensive to a growing number was its first chief, Leon Henderson, despite continuous efforts in the mass media to sell him as an economic giant. The glamor portrait in the U.S. News (May 8, 1942, pp. 14-15), titled “Leon Henderson, Boss of Our Economy,” had many counterparts. Eventually he simply had to be replaced in the interests of domestic war morale and societal tranquillity, by a somewhat less abrasive personality, Chester Bowles.

Usually ignored were the army of underlings gathered around Henderson, delighted by the enhanced aura of their collective egos, and they may have done as much to annoy and infuriate the national community as their boss, if not more so. Most prominent of these was John Kenneth Galbraith, Henderson’s deputy administrator, a one time professor of economics at Princeton University and an editor of Luce’s business mouthpiece magazine, Fortune, in the mid-1930s. “Tall, towering” Galbraith, as U.S. News described him, had been in the OPA prior to Pearl, and was credited by Time (December 22, 1941, pp. 33-34) for swiftly instituting the legislation, apparently prepared well before, which made it virtually impossible for Americans to procure new automobile tires, just days after the Hawaii attack. Thus a new occupation was made possible for organized crime, and the Mafia sequestered many billions directing the national campaign of supplying those goods which the OPA managers decreed were not to be purchased legally by the citizenry, or which they were to have only in very limited supply. This story has yet to be told, though much of the lunacy of the program of price controls and rationing has been described with great effectiveness by Professor Fred Shannon in his America’s Economic Growth (Macmillan, 1951). A notable list of future luminaries from the legal world and the economics professoriat worked at one time or another for the OPA, including future Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman and future President Richard M. Nixon.
But the beams from a dimmer search-light were never played on American public opinion than those emanating from these cloudy beacons.

Reactions and Second-Guessing Following Stalin’s Avoidance of Involvement in the War Against Japan •800字

Roosevelt took America to war with Stalin’s enemies within four days of Pearl Harbor. This was not reciprocated by Stalin, who pointedly stayed at peace with Japan and became involved in the Pacific war for just a few hours at its conclusion in August 1945 when there were many political plums to gather resulting from the gross oversight of his Anglo-American war partners. The staggering importance of this Red policy got little or no play in U.S. communications, and such as emerged were very largely apologies for Stalin’s decision. The 新群众 within days of the U.S. declarations of war on Italy and Germany in December 1941 began a continuous drumroll for the establishment of a “second front” in Europe by Americans in assistance of Stalin. But this journal did not exhort Stalin to go to war with Japan and open a “second front” against that land from its Pacific Siberian bases. The persistence of peace with Japan on the part of Stalin also made impossible any other party to the war establishing a “second front” from Siberia, and effectively denied the region to the bombing planes of its “allies” as well.

It amazed a few observers how little comment was aroused in the U.S.A. when the USSR failed to go to war with Japan. The usual apology was that the Russians had their hands full with Hitler, and were fearful that the result of formal hostilities would be a big drive into Siberia by the Japanese. That the Reds in Siberia along the Korean, Manchurian and Chinese borders had fought many hundreds of battles with the Japanese in the previous decade was carefully neglected. All that was fed Americans was the notion of some antiseptic form of scrupulous state of peace existing in this region.

美国新闻 uttered a few quiet words on the subject a week and a half after Pearl, expressing the belief that Russian support was “vital, if the Allies are to attack Japan.” The journal noted that Vladivostok was the nearest and likely most effective base from which an air attack might be raised, but conceding that without access, the chances of “avenging” Pearl Harbor were “slim.”[177]U.S. News (December 19,1941), p.13. A later discussion asserted that “A pact is needed binding all Allies to fight on all fronts until victory,”[178]“Far-Flung Strategy to Defeat Japanese,” U.S. News (December 26,1941), p. 11. An amusing by-product of the abstention of Soviet Russia from the Pacific War was the reaction of some elements of the American Left which traditionally abominated the USSR, especially the Socialists long led by Norman Thomas. He insisted that the U.S.A. should have declared war on just Japan as a consequence of Pearl Harbor, and not given Stalin a windfall by going to war with his enemies in Europe as well, since he had not reciprocated by adding Japan to the Soviet war opponents. The New Masses was deeply offended by Thomas’ proposition, and denounced him as a “Quisling Socialist.” New Masses (January 6,1942), p. l9. but no Rooseveltian or Churchillian political magic ever moved Stalin a centimeter in this direction at any time.

It was generally conceded in American commentaries that Stalin had the freedom to stay out of the Pacific war, and no one ever mentioned the employment of any form of compulsion or pressure upon him to do differently, though Roosevelt held by far the most potent hand in this game, the threat of the withholding of lend-lease supplies until Stalin had become a full belligerent in the Pacific. It was never done, or even slightly hinted at as a possible move. The mouthpieces of comfortable affluence well exceeded the threadbare Communist organs in their solicitude for Stalin on this issue.

时间 was perhaps the warmest and most sympathetic to the explanations as to why the USSR remained at peace with Japan after December 7, 1941. These were forthcoming from the new Stalinist ambassador to Washington, Litvinov, who boldly uttered harsh words at the combined enemy, describing them as a “vast conspiracy of international gangsters,” but chose to see his master, Stalin, gingerly skirting the Far East contingent of these “gangsters,” as engaging in eminently sound conduct in the maximization of the safety of his skin. As the author of the famous political cliche of the Popular Front, “Peace is indivisible,” he certainly thought World War II was divisible. The Russians rarely admitted there was an Asiatic front in World War II. And 时间 supported the decision in substance by remaining uncritical of the hands-off-Japan decision of Stalin in separate commentaries on December 22, l941,[179]“Litvinoff’s Problem,” Time (December 22,1941), p. 14, contained the most succinct of the expert evasions of Stalin’s newest ambassador to the U.S.A. on the absence of a two-front war in Soviet views of the world situation. (The continuous application by Stalinist flacks of the pejorative “gangster” to its enemies became somewhat wearying especially to the scattered and dispersed enemies of the regime, who considered that the nearest thing to a “gangster” regime in international politics, in terms of legitimacy, was that descended from Lenin and Trotsky and administered at that moment by Stalin.) and January 19, 1942. Nor was there the slightest diminution of the pro-Stalinist wave of support which swept across the Anglo-American peoples during the next three and a half years of war as a result of Red refusal to become involved in a truly world war with its anxious “Allies.” In the meantime most of the belligerence aimed at the Japanese came from American song writers. In the first three days after Pearl Harbor, some 260 song titles were registered, involving a mixture of patriotic and racial-slur stereotypes the latter mostly anti- Japanese. These and many more, before and after December 7, 1941, provoked the famed band leader, Paul Whiteman, to castigate the entire product musically to mid-January, 1942 as “dribble.” Remarked the portly Whiteman, it was “enough to make a band leader lose weight.”[180]Wide World press service report, in Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph, January 18,1942, p. l. From a cultural point of view, the music of World War Two probably reached a new low in quality. From Russia came pretentious compositions which were mainly organized noise, while the output of the West, from both sides of the battle lines, consisted largely of senseless ditties or ballads so treacly sentimental that they were largely an incitation to desertion. As things turned out, there was a heavy reliance on the popular music and jazz of the West prior to the phase of American involvement, which even proved to be true in the case of the enemy in the Far East; dependence on recordings of earlier vintage was common- place on radio in most war sectors.

The effort of the music industry in the U.S.A. to produce quality propaganda songs was quite dismal (World War Two was not the singing war that World War One was). An incredibly bad pro-Stalinist song, “If That’s Propaganda, Make the Most of It,” was composed expressly for a Russian War Relief Benefit in the fall of 1941 by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin; Time published its Iyrics (November 3, 1941, p. Sl) while remarking that “Tin Pan Alley has now gone at least halfway to town for Russia.” A tune with some of the entire war’s silliest Iyrics, “Any Bonds Today,” composed by Irving Berlin, was actually copyrighted by Treasury Secretary Morgenthau (Time, December 22, 1941, p. 55.) But the depths were plumbed by the Pearl Harbor attack, which resulted in the launching of the following: “They Asked For It,” “You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap,” “The Japs Haven’t a Chinaman’s Chance,” “The Sun Will Soon Be Setting for the Land of the Rising Sun,” “We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again,” “Remember Pearl Harbor,” “So We’ll Knock the Japs Right Into the Laps of the Nazis,” “They Started Something But We’re Gonna End It,” “Let’s Take a Rap At the Japs,” “Taps for the Japs,” “We’re the Guys To Do It,” “We’ve Got To Do a Job on the Japs, Baby,” “Those Nasty, Nasty Nazis,” and “We’re Gonna Find a Fellow Who Is Yellow and Beat Him Red, White and Blue.” Time (December 29,1941), p.46.

The Dimensions of the Propaganda War as Waged by the Authors and Publishers •2,700字

In examining the respective tasks facing American public opinion shapers and war propagandists, it becomes apparent that the selling of fear and hate of the enemy via negative messages[181]The Roosevelt regime’s psychological warfare division was at work on Germany many weeks before involved formally in hostilities. Time’s “The US Short Wave” (November 31, 1941, pp. 54-56) revealed that the ardent Stalinist sympathizer Lillian Hellman’s more pro-Communist than anti-Nazi play Watch on the Rhine was being shortwaved overseas in a German translation via New York City’s station WRUL. and that the ex-secretary to the ex-Ambassador to Moscow, Davies, one Stan P. Richardson, with the aid of Joseph Barnes, ex-foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and the Chicago journalist Edmond Taylor (author of Strategy of Terror) were at work on a comprehensive radio program of psychological war propaganda dovetailed closely to administration recipes. Taylor, who became a major figure in the amateur spy organization which straddled the world during the war, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the ancestor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has been memorialized at length in the book by R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (University of California Press, 1972).

Richardson, Barnes and Taylor were identified by Time as working under the Coordinator of Information, an office secretly created by Roosevelt in July, 1941, with a largely unvouchered budget and headed by a World War I veteran, William J. Donovan. The COI evolved into the OSS, probably the most over-rated agency in the history of espionage, and which did incalculable mischief detrimental to long- term U.S. interests in behalf of both European and Asian Communism. Its research chief in 1941 was James Phinney Baxter III, President of exclusive and costly Williams College, and it gradually recruited a legion of leftist liberal academics, journalists, ideologues and assorted upper and upper middle class off- spring of American moneyed Anglophiles, from the Little Ivy League colleges, in particular. This whole was heavily sprinkled by ferocious Marxist professionals of both domestic and European refugee backgrounds, and later a contingent of pro- fessional murderers and related vicious recruits from the ranks of the Mafia and other enclaves of American and European organized crime.

Fright is one of the most ancient political capers which has been perpetrated against people by their leaders since recorded history. It enjoyed an enormous vogue, 1933-1945, and was generously employed with considerable effect all during the war, especially. Americans went through three episodes in particular, in the 1940-1941 period, when.people in authority threatened them with invasion by the Germans first, then by the Germans and Japanese simultaneously, and then by just the Japanese. President Roosevelt had in his inaugural address in March, 1933 effectively utilized Henry David Thoreau’s declaration, without giving the latter credit, to the effect that the only thing Americans had to fear was “fear itself.” In his pronunciations on the European war in the last eighteen months before American involvement, however, FDR had not the slightest reservation in spreading fear in the hope of making political capital out of it, and driving the populace into the arms of the warrior interventionist segment of the total. He specialized in fright about the possible consequences of German actions. His predictions as to the dire circumstances of possible German moves never came within the slightest possibility of realization, but they helped overcome skeptical reservations widely held by those opposed to his interest in becoming a belligerent. The Luce publications cooperated spiritedly in putting his nightmares before the public. Life featured the trial balloon which involved the prediction of an invasion of both coasts by German and Japanese “hordes,” and Time always put his threats of other kinds of trouble before its readers prominently and persuasively. Though nothing happened in 1940, the fright-threats got much worse in 1941.

In July a variant of the possibility of German paratroops descending upon Iowa was the scare that Hitler’s forces would sweep across the many thousands of miles from Poland to the Pacific shores of Siberia and arrive in Vladivostok in days, to undertake an invasion of Alaska via Siberia, which was expected to be a swift German victory in the manner of Norway, presumably helped out with local traitors, apparently (“Another Norway,” Time July 7,1941, p.14). This ploy was right in focus for Republican Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, long the proponent for a road from Seattle to Alaska. Now the drive for this began at a far more heated tempo, as an aid to promote the intensive militarization of the latter to forestall this possible debacle. Time was right with him.

Roosevelt was not satisfied with this, and in his speech to Congress later in the month, on which he was reported to have spent a large amount of time, he again suggested to that body that the U.S.A. was in “infinitely greater” danger at that moment than it had been in the summer of 1940, the time of the launching of some of the most incredible threats (Time, July 28,1941, p.7).

Still another venture in these turbulent currents was undertaken by the President. At the Navy League dinner in Washington at the end of October, 1941 he made public two famous “documents” he claimed he had come upon, the first a “secret map” purporting to show how Hitler planned to cut up Central and South America into five vassal states and the second another “secret” which was a plan “to abolish every religion in the world” and to replace them with “an international Nazi Church” with Hitler’s Mein Kampf presumably replacing the Bible, and undoubtedly all of the other holy books about the planet. These were substantially fabrications of British intelligence, probably by leftist Germans in their employ, and planted upon a source delighted to try them out on his listeners. Time soberly reported these as fact. (Time, November 3,1941, p. ll.)

The big scare about a possible Japanese invasion of the entire West Coast was part of the hysteria following Pearl Harbor, and may have had more to do with distracted leadership other than Roosevelt. Part of this was accompanied by a rumor that an evacuation of the entire West back to a line in the Continental Divide slightly west of Denver was about to become policy, from which a last ditch stand was to be made. It may have caused the panic in Secretary of War Stimson’s coterie which led to the order to round up the entire Japanese-American population for incarceration in concentration camps.

All this agitation and panic stands in strange contrast to the evaluation by Time eight years after the end of the war. In the lead article under “National Affairs” in the issue for October 18, 1953 the editors calculated, “distance prevented any European enemy from dreaming (sic) of forcing a decision on the U.S. by sending major forces to this country”. The worst that the U.S. faced in World War II was the possibility that Europe and Asia, in the hands of its enemies, would be able slowly to weaken the U.S. or to force it to fight without allies on distant and unfavorable battlefields.” Though no one can “force” another to go vast distances to fight, the last portion of the Time analysis sounded much like what the U.S.A., a “victor,” ended up doing anyway in Korea and Vietnam.
was vastly more simple than the chore involved in creating favorable and positive visions of an ally, especially in case that “ally” enjoyed the largely critical stance which had been the experience of the Soviet in the U.S. in its more than two dozen years of existence down to mutual belligerence in late 1941. Concerning the Japanese, the job could be done largely on the visceral level, and insulting and taunting songs were a very visible example of what might be employed. There was no corresponding mode for the salesmanship of devices productive of warm and appealing dispositions toward the USSR. There the processes demanded mainly rational discourse, at least for an introductory intermission, after which emotional messages might become employable after a time of commonly shared wartime hardships. It is for this reason that the earliest efforts and gestures had a warily exploratory flavor, for the most part, and acquired a confident and positive content some time later.

The book world trailed well behind that of magazine and newspaper journalism in the sales campaign in the West in behalf of Stalinism, a matter of timing and the nature of their different operational methods. The decade or more of heavy pro-Soviet salesmanship among authors which came to an end roughly about the time of the Russo-German pact in 1939 was followed by a confused interim of much contradictory effort and a strong tendency to shy away from more Stalinist accolades except among the devoted Party regulars and their most devoted and ardent fellow travelers, still a healthy contingent. The opening of the Russo- German phase on the war in mid-194l caught the industry unprepared to take full advantage of the situation. Only a handful of outright pro-Stalinist tracts were able to hit the market before Pearl Harbor, and they had to share the spotlight with tomes which were anything but friendly. The six months after Pearl was a time for reversing the gears and eventually launching a flood of pro-Communist volumes, which reached successively higher land-marks in each of the three years of war still remaining.

The two most blatant pro-Soviet tracts which managed to get produced and marketed early by major publishers were those by veteran Bolshevik adulators, Maurice Gershon Hindus’ 希特勒无法征服俄罗斯 (Doubleday) and Anna Louise Strong’s (Mrs. Joel Shubin) 苏联人预料到了 (Dial). These hurry-up jobs caught reviewers by surprise, and they were obviously not ready for them yet, even such committed ink and paper warriors as Clifton Fadiman of the 纽约客. He allotted both works very cool and skeptical reception, identifying Strong as a “well-known apologist” for the Soviet, but not Hindus, who was just as prominent in this category.[182]On the reviews in this section: Fadiman reviews in New Yorker (October 4, 1941), p.86, and (December 6,1941), p.108. Woolbert’s review in Foreign Affairs of Hindus in issue of January, 1942, p.384, but Strong review delayed until issue for October, 1942, p.783. Barnes review in New York Herald Tribune Books, January 11,1942, p.13. Chamberlin reviews in Saturday Review of Literature (December 20,1941), p.7, and New York Times Book Review, October 12,1941, pp.9,26. The Paterson critique was buried in the New York Herald Tribune Books, November 30, lD41, p. 34. Mosely review in Yale Review (December, 1941), pp. 394-396. Phillips’ review in New York Herald Tribune Books, September 28, 1941, p. 6, while Gannett, long-established Herald Tribune critic and long-famed as one of the most combative liberals decorating the Nation, included his kindly estimate of Hindus in a roundup of current literature, “Books You May Be Reading This Fall,” New York Herald Tribune Books, October 5,1941, p.2. 外交事务 was rather quizzical about Hindus, while mildly calling attention to Strong’s work as mainly a justification for Soviet foreign policy, contrary to the momentary consensus which thought Stalin’s line had turned out to be an incalculable disaster. A weak and uninformative review of her book by Elizabeth Barnes in the New York 先驱论坛报 was delayed until early in January 1942, but it was fiercely dissected in the same paper six weeks earlier by Isabel M. Paterson, and a few days later by William Henry Chamberlain in the 星期六文学评论. Chamberlain, like Lyons a disaffected former admirer of the Bolshevik “experiment,” called attention to Strong’s party line interpretation of everything, remarking that hers was the least critical study of Russia and apology-for-Stalin since that published some years earlier by the “Red Dean of Canterbury,” Hewlett Johnson, which indeed was in a special class by itself.

Chamberlin, who had just become the editor of a new magazine, the 俄罗斯评论, did not deal as harshly with Hindus’ book in the New York Times as had Lyons in the 美国水星, but was reserved as to the outcome of the war in Eastern Europe. Like everyone else who wanted Hitler defeated without Stalin taking advantage of the consequences, Chamberlin was caught in the same bind. Doubting Hindus’ cheerful confidence that there was no fear that Stalin would as Chamberlin put it, “exploit a victory to spread his brand of dictatorship over a great part of Europe beyond Russia’s proper ethnological frontiers,” he held up further judgment on Hindus’ pro-Red tract. At the moment it did not appear that Stalin was in any position to defeat Hitler without immense help from the capitalist nations, so it did seem to be excessive to worry about this matter.

Another reviewer who did not handle Hindus too kindly was the Council on Foreign Relations regular Philip E. Mosely, in the 耶鲁大学评论, though he fell short as well of Lyons’ critical level. Hindus received the warmest treatment in the New York 先驱论坛报, the alleged organ of New York plutocracy. His 300-page book, published less than three months after the outbreak of the Russo- German phase of the war, was hailed by Joseph B. Phillips, who added, of Hindus, “Of all the authors who have written about the Soviet Union, Mr. Hindus has been the most consistent and thorough investigator of the changes which the Bolshevik state has made in the mental and social makeup of the Russians,” and was further commended by Lewis Gannett in the same newspaper a week later as the author of a new volume to add to his previously published 红面包 “and other good books on Russia.”

Other major pro-Soviet books bearing 1941 imprints were too late to be paid much attention until the following year: Walter Duranty’s 克里姆林宫和人民 (Reynal and Hitchcock), Lucien Zacharoff’s “We Made a Mistake” — Hitler (Appleton- Century), and the prize winner of the early era, Davies’ 莫斯科代表团 (Simon and Schuster), a book so unabashedly Stalinist that the even-worse moving picture based on it drew chuckles from Stalin himself when he first viewed it. Billed by 外交事务 the following spring as “one of the best informed books to appear in recent years on Soviet Russia,” the book was already profiting from the time lag and American belligerency since its publication. Duranty’s book was heavily attacked by Louis Fischer, still another defectee from the pro-Red claque among the literary men. Though it was not as unsophisticated a piece of special pleading as that of Zacharoff, who tried to turn the Red Army’s pell-mell retreat across Russia in the closing months of 1941 into a great victory, as had an earlier lot of writers who similarly succeeded in converting the British disaster at Dunkirk, in the late spring of 1940, into a stirring triumph.[183]Foreign Affairs review of Davies given the top billing in the section devoted to World War Two books in issue for April, 1942, p. 571. Duranty reviewed in same issue, p. 578, while the Zacharoff book delayed until the October, 1942 issue, p.783.

To be sure, there were works praising Stalin and Russian Communism coming out in 1941 that nearly matched the “Red Dean,” but they were being published in England, and were unreviewed and unavailable in the U.S.A., such as the British Communist Party’s spokesman Pat Sloan’s How the Soviet State is Run (Lon- don: Lawrence), Maurice Dobb’s 苏联经济与战争 (London: Routledge), and the Austrian Marxist refugee Erich Strauss’ 苏维埃俄罗斯 (London: Lane), which Woolbert in 外交事务 a year after publication called “one of the better informed and more thoughtful books on Russia.”[184]Foreign Affairs (October, 1942), p. 782. These English imprints were frequently unnoticed anywhere except in Foreign Affairs, which usually devoted no more than a line or two in general description, as in the case of the Sloan essay, “An uncritical pro-Communist description of the structure and functioning of the Soviet Government.” (April, 1942, p. 578.) Another London imprint of 1941 which went unnoticed in the U.S.A. was Kingsley Martin’s Propaganda’s Harvest (Kegan Paul). Strauss was identified cryptically as “formerly connected with the labor movement in Austria,” but his arrival time in England was not mentioned. But Americans were exposed primarily to British war writing in the form of speeches and journalism emanating from much better known public figures such as Julian Huxley’s 民主游行 (Harper), John Boynton Priestley’s 走出人民 (Harper) and the now Churchill-cabinet-minister Ernest Bevin’s 未来资产负债表 (McBride), all of whom seemed pre-occupied with the postwar consequences of the war, with their talk of future “world union” and “community of nations” in a “security club” as well as the opening the war was providing for advancing their own variety of a British welfare state soviet.[185]These 1941 imprints generally received late reviews, all being mentioned in the April, 1942 Foreign Affairs, pp. 568-573. Included with them was the Air Ministry secretary, J.M. Spaight’s 不列颠之战 (London: Bles), an account of the German air attack on the country and the Royal Air Force’s counter-attack on Germany, a book which Americans might have learned a great deal from, but did not see.

A more stealthy kind of pro-Sovietism was always the negative line of attacking its enemies (the favorite cover of all Communists was the generalized mantle “anti-fascist”), one of 1941’s prizes being 欧洲男人 by “Andre Simone,” the pseudonym of one of Europe’s most tireless and ubiquitous Comintern agents, Otto Katz. Well known in the U.S.A. for his Communist-line book on why France collapsed in 1940, his latest work, issued by the quasi-Communist publishing house, Modern Age Books, was a generalized attack on virtually every European politician not in the pro-Soviet orbit. An occasional reviewer such as Fadiman identified its firm Stalinist line, contradicted a few days later by the Herald Tribune’s Joseph Barnes, who struggled manfully to disabuse the potential reader of the idea that “the political line of the book” was Communist. Barnes went along with the general position of not exposing the writer’s real name and Comintern affiliation, which actually was not done until the following year in the U.S.A. But in the meantime he stretched the credulity of the people with any sophistication about foreign politics at all by pleading that Simone’s bitter attack on all the critics of Stalin and his “appreciative” chapter on the Red dictator could not be interpreted as “in the Moscow line.”[186]Fadiman review in New Yorker (September 13,1941), p.74; Barnes review in New York Herald Tribune Books, September 21,1941), p.18. Even Woolbert in Foreign Affairs was repelled by Simone’s latest work; his critical note appeared in the issue for January, 1942, p.381. Once more a moneyed influential capitalist organ was supplying a service no openly Communist paper could ever have expected to make possible.

The release in America of books hostile to Communist Russia had slowed almost to a halt before the mid-1941 reversal of the trend of world politics in Eastern Europe. Only Lyons’ Red Decade, more a report on pro-Soviet sympathizing by non- Communist Americans in the 1930s than an anti-Soviet work, drew much attention in the closing months, with major and mainly non-critical reviews by Bruce Bliven in the 新共和国, Niebuhr in the Nation, Max Eastman in the New York , and Chamberlin in the 周六评论, as well as Woolbert in Foreign AFFairs.[187]The reaction to Lyons’ book was remarkably subdued in view of its poor timing as far as publication was concerned. Even in the liberal weeklies it was treated circumspectly, though both the author and most of the commentators on the book had records of previous enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks at one time or another. It appeared malapropos to just a few that a book criticizing enthusiasm for Soviet foreign politics should appear at just about the moment a general drive in that direction was about to get under way once more. The serious attacks on Stalinist Russia in book form were limited, and mainly the work of non-Americans who had been there, voluntarily or otherwise, as well as being very hard to come by in the U.S.A. Notable among them were Anton Ciliga’s 俄罗斯谜 (London: Routledge), a book which actually had been issued in 1940 and comprised the hostile impressions of a Yugoslav Communist who had resided in the USSR from 1926 to 1935. An even more inimical book was Joseph Ameel’s 红地狱 (London: Hale), the author’s account of two decades’ residence in the Workers’ Fatherland, much of it in prison and penal gulags, which affronted the 外交事务 reviewer, about the only one in the U.S.A. His account was looked upon as “too lurid and prejudiced to be taken at face value,”[188]Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p. 578; review of Ciliga in issue of October, 1941, p. 202. Also published in 1941 was John Kenneth Turner’s 挑战马克思 (Reynal and Hitchcock), almost as awkward a book as that by Lyons. Turner was vigorously attacked by the British Marxist David W. Petegorsky in the New Republic (November 17,1941). but no amount of luridity or prejudice in the many books by escapees from Hitler Germany was considered warranting a 警告 in their cases: the sky was the limit in derogation of Nazi Germany.

About the only book generally available in the U.S.A. in the above class was Lilian T. Mowrer’s 逮捕和流放 (Morrow), the story of Olga Kochanska, one of the Poles deported to Russia after occupation of the eastern two-thirds of Poland by the Red Army in the fall of 1940. The review by Katharine Woods in the New York stressed Mme. Kochanska’s scathing contempt for Russian Communism after experiencing it for awhile, though one might have questioned her dismissal of it all as insignificant. But even here an anti-Hitler lesson was inserted in the estimate, as it was the subject’s opinion that Hitler should never have been allowed to “grow great” as a result of fear of Russian Bolshevism.[189]Woods review in New-York Times Book Review (November 2, 1941), p.10. These disillusionist books about the USSR in early wartime should be compared with the American classic of this sort, Proletarian Journey, by Fred Beal (1937).

Still another class of escapee literature regaling the American public in 1941 were such sagas as Arthur Koestler’s 地球浮渣 (Macmillan), an account of his residence in French concentration camps for those who fled Spain after the demise of the Communist-led resistance against Franco,[190]Fadiman in the New Yorker compared Koestler’s book to that of Aladar Kuncz, Black Monastery, published posthumously in 1934 by Harcourt Brace; the author was a Hungarian school teacher on vacation in France at the outbreak of World War I who was interned as an enemy alien and spent the war in French concentration camps. and Lion Feuchtwanger’s 法国的魔鬼 (Viking), a similar story of incarceration in French concentration camps after apprehension as an enemy alien in the summer of l940.[191]The closing blow in behalf of Communism struck in Time prior to direct U.S. participation in World War Two involved a review of Feuchtwanger’s book, published in the late fall of 1941 by Harold Guinzburg’s Viking Press, and heavily promoted. A book largely devoted to Feuchtwanger’s wailing about his experiences in a French concentration camp as an enemy alien, its review in Time would surely have earned the misinformation prize of the year had one been awarded. It included a breath-takingly dishonest description of the author as “a peace-loving contemplative Jew of 57” who allegedly “had no interest in politics.”

Its anonymous author apparently concluded that no reader was familiar with the liberal, fellow-traveler and Communist press in America, to whom Feuchtwanger was a well-known and fiercely-controversial figure. Ignored was a then-recent fact: other than Corliss Lamont, Feuchtwanger had been the first person published by the New Masses in its issue of July 15,1941 of a group asked to comment on the significance of the just-erupted war between Germany and Russia. Nothing from the Soviet Foreign Office could have exceeded Feuchtwanger’s incandescent Soviet sentiments.. He rejoiced that the “enemies of the USSR” who had “tried to hide the truth about the Soviet people” were now being unmasked, and that, thanks to the spreading of the war, “this malicious gossip” had been “shattered,” and people everywhere were taking “a better look at the USSR” and recognizing the “nobility” of the Soviet Union and also “Stalin’s speeches, with their bold and simple realism.” Feuchtwanger was further comforted to note that “The recognition that the Soviet peoples fight for America’s safety” was being “expressed in the statements of the American government,” a curious distillation of official pronouncements not discerned by much of anyone else.

Ignored by Time’s incredible reviewer was that Feuchtwanger had already run his whitewash of French Stalinism of 1938-40 past liberal reviewers, as an article early in 1941, and had earned a stinging denunciation from Dwight MacDonald, as “the number one world literary spokesman for the Stalin regime,” in Common Sense. MacDonald had accompanied this with a lengthy string of quotations from the Communist literary magazine Das Wort when Feuchtwanger was editing it in Moscow in 1936-1937, including the latter’s bitter attack on American liberals for questioning the vicious Moscow trials. Now posing as an enemy of totalitarianism and scribbling feverish anti-Hitler pro-war tracts, MacDonald insisted Feuchtwanger was a systematic peddler of falsehoods in the former department, and finished his deflating critique of this man who “had no interest in politics” by quoting from one of his Das Wort essays in 1937, in which Feuchtwanger had enthused, “One breathes again when one comes from this oppressive Western atmosphere of a counterfeit democracy and hypocritical humanism into the invigorating atmosphere of the Soviet Union.” In view of this encomium to the Stalinist heaven on earth, there were those who wondered what Feuchtwanger was doing in the corrupt and degenerate America he so detested such a short time before. And it was reviews such as this which made some observers wonder why Time repeatedly issued scoffing disparagements of the Nation and New Republic as “pinko.”

It was characteristic of Time to suppress basic information about the politics of persons subject to profiles in its pages as was the case with Feuchtwanger. At about the same time, in hailing the talents of the artist Anton Refregier, who had received $26,000 for the murals in the San Francisco Post Office under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration, Time omitted mention that Refregier, born in Moscow in 1905, and in the U.S.A. since 1921, was a veteran hero of the New Masses and Daily Worker editors; see report in Time (November 17,1941), p.54.
Still another was the German refugee Erich Fromm’s 逃离自由 (Farrar and Rinehart). The former Frankfurt-born psychoanalyst, descended from a long line of rabbis, seemed to be interested, in this book, which became immensely influential in America, primarily in why people would abandon their “liberties” and “take refuge in a totalitarian regime” only in Germany,[192]Woolbert review in Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p.568. choosing to ignore Stalinist Russia, many magnitudes more totalitarian than authoritarian Germany. The war call in all these was mainly subliminal, for the most part, however.

The forthright appeals to sally forth came mainly from American newspapermen and were more oriented toward a pro-British position, indicating that they had been in formation some time before mid-1941. The most influential of these were Leland Stowe’s 没有其他通往自由的道路 (Knopf), a turgid brief by this Chicago Daily News foreign correspondent, known best for his later admissions of having fabricated the stories of Norway’s fall in 1940 as the work of internal traitors, as well as his flustered post-war pro-Communist apologetics, and that of Joseph C. Harsch, 征服模式 (Doubleday), the Christian Science Monitor’s Berlin correspondent for the previous 18 months. More generalized was Pierre van Paassen’s 孤独的那一天 (Dial), a collection of semi-fictional yarns highly praised by leftist reviewers, especially Hindus, and bearing the main message of the unavoidability of a generalized postwar planned economy.[193]Woolbert described Stowe’s book as “engrossing” in Foreign Affairs (January, 1942), pp.376-377; it was the first-listed in the section of wartime books. Stowe mentioned being sent to Europe in September, 1939 for the Chicago Daily News. Hindus’ review of van Paassen in Saturday Review of Literature (November 18,1941), p.13; see also review of van Paassen by J.M. Minifie in New York Herald Tribune Books (October 19, 1941), p. 3, another kindly puff. Harsch was highly praised in Foreign Affairs January, 1942), p.377; van Paassen hailed in issue for October, 1941, p.778. More strongly Anglophile-oriented were Forrest Davis’ 大西洋系统 (Reynal and Hitchcock) and H.R. Knickerbocker, 明天是希特勒的吗? (Reynal and Hitchcock). Davis, the one time New York 每日新闻 rewrite man, was most appreciated by the well-entrenched elite Anglophile establishment, while Knicker- bocker, known even better as a radio than a newspaper journalist, became particularly involved in incensed attacks on American opponents of the Roosevelt war drive, heaping ferocious abuse on Lindbergh in particular. Still others concerned specialized attacks on external German programs, such as Smash Hitler’s International (Greystone), by the improbable team of the psychological war specialist Edmond Taylor, the liberal economist Eliot Janeway, and the ardent apologist for both Russian and Chinese Communism, Edgar Snow.[194]Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p.569, praised Davis’ book as a “sound and timely” work dealing with the “Anglo-American entente for the control of the seas,” not just the Atlantic, as the title suggested. Knickerbocker’s work was pushed even more strongly by Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p. 571. Carrying a foreword by another nationally known warrior correspondent, John Gunther, the book got a similarly loud burst of praise from still another emotionally-involved foreign newsman, William L. Shirer, in the New York Herald Tribune Books, November 9, 1941, p.5. Shirer’s rise to pre-eminence among the Herald Tribune’s reviewers of World War Two books will be examined in detail subsequently. The Taylor-Janeway-Snow joint effort may have been the basis for a position paper for the coming Office of Strategic Services (OSS), outlining an American counter- offensive against Italo-German policies and propaganda.

However, this work was mainly ignored in favor of a nearly simultaneously published volume, 欧洲的宠儿 (Norton) dealing with much of the same subject. One of the mystery books of the war, it was credited to “Thomas Reveille,” the alias cover for a refugee European who rejoiced in the real name of Rifat Tirana, an utter unknown, but guessed by some to be an Albanian Communist. Hired in a super-secret job in the Roosevelt pre-war war machine, he ground out this book which was preceded by a foreword by still another of the enthusiastic journalists for war, Raymond Gram Swing, and vociferously hailed by uncritical reviewers in all the choice sources, from Foreign Affairs through the prestigious dailies, as an insightful book into wartime Germany and its occupied regions in Europe. Reviewer after reviewer strained buttons in heaping praise on it, for reasons which will probably never be known. As a war call it had its merits, but as a description of the German economy and that of German-occupied Europe it had no particular virtue that could not be found in the estimates of Marxists and near- Marxists of the stamp of Franz Neumann, Max Werner, Fritz Sternberg and Gunter Reimann. Its message of a shaky and disintegrating economic nightmare prevailing in the Hitler-controlled areas of Europe encouraged the impulsive to think a war would be a sudden success if undertaken soon under American auspices. Its failure to indicate what really was going on, and that those anxious for martial endeavor in America faced a tough and resourceful enemy who was about to take on the whole world for another four destructive and bloody years, performed a mean chore utterly antagonistic to American interests. It fattened the illusions of eager interventionists into thinking they were facing a puff-ball which would pop in a few months, while concealing the real world, setting up the wrecking of Europe and the killing of many millions, and guaranteeing Stalinist Communism for tens of millions of others.

There were a few voices of complaint about its shortcomings but they were buried in scholarly works of limited circulation. Hailed by left-liberals, e.g., Swing in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1941, by Joseph Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune Books for August 31,1941, p.3, and described in Foreign Affairs (January, 1942, p.377) by Woolbert as “one of the most competent books to appear since the war began,” it even panicked the normally skeptical William Henry Chamberlin, who declared that it was “extremely impressive because so well documented.” This raised some eyebrows in Academe, and set some wondering what book Chamberlin was talking about, since the European history specialist E.C. Helmreich (in the American Political Science Review for December, 1941, p. 1177) had panned “Reveille” severely for his extremely weak documentation. Complained Helmreich, “there are virtually no footnotes,” so that it was impossible to trace his quotations. Another Central European specialist, M.W. Fodor, pointed out serious weaknesses of The Spoil of Europe in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (January, 1942), p.178.

By comparison with all this, the publishing world exposed Americans to little literature involving a strategic war concept dealing with Japan. Nothing rivaling the Taylor-Janeway-Snow recipe for Germany came out in 1941, the last such being the New York cable editor Robert Aura Smith’s 我们在亚洲的未来 (Viking) of the previous fall, an explicit summary of how Washington, London and Wall Street viewed the Far East, with its exhortation for a swift and presumably easy war against Japan to preserve the British colonial status quo especially in Southeast Asia. The 1941 fare varied from the breezy tourist-style 尊贵的敌人 (Duell, Sloan and Pearce) by Ernest O. Hauser to the bitter denunciation of Japan by the ancient Korean, Syngman Rhee, the “president of the provisional Korean Government in exile” since 1911, 日本由内而外 (Revell). In between there were the stiff establishment treatise by Paul M.A. Linebarger, The China of Chiang Kai-shek (Boston: World Peace Foundation), an idealization which Chiang himself was to obliterate with his own two books two years later, and a pair of volumes by supporters of China’s still almost submerged-from-view brand of Communism. The message of T.A. Bisson’s American Policy in the Far East, 1931-1941 (Institute of Pacific Relations) and Nym Wales’ 中国为民主而建 (Modern Age Books) was anything but obscure. The latter author, in reality Helen Foster Snow, the wife of Edgar Snow, idealized “industrial cooperatives” in the Red- occupied areas of northwest China, while Bisson, a veteran apologist for Chinese Communism in both liberal and Communist papers, summarized much earlier writing for a Communist- dominated organization which was to become nationally known only after the anti-Communist reaction of the early Cold War set in a half dozen years later.[195]For brief comments on the above volumes see Foreign Affairs (January, 1942), p.386; (October, 1942), p.785. Hauser’s book was the only one with general distribution. The others had influence mostly in the academic community. Another contribution in 1941 to the pro-Red literature on the Far East by Miss Wales (Mrs. Snow) was Kim San: The Life Story of a Korean Rebel (John Day), an edited collation which by and large failed to endear itself to reviewers. Rodney Gilbert in the New York Herald Tribune Books (November 16, 1941, p. 4) was repelled by the portrait which emerged, and which presumably entranced Miss Wales. The book’s subject came across to Gilbert as “a daft, conceited, murderous little prig.” Such sterling “anti-fascist revolutionaries” of Korean stamp were a little while in becoming celebrities among Americans of “advanced social consciousness.”

The Ante Rises After Pearl Harbor on Production and Appropriations for Stalin •300字

With Pearl Harbor and full-fledged belligerency four days later, the end of a season of delicacy concerning matters Stalinist was just one of the consequences, even though the passage by the House of Representatives a week after the attack of a national defense appropriation bill for $8,243,839,031 brought from 时间 an almost apologetic tag that, after all, “only $78,000,000” of this vast sum was intended for Russian lend-lease.[196]Time (December 15, 1941, p. 74 For the British, American entry into the war was a life raft of indescribably vast dimensions, far more esteemed at this early moment for its part in this economic salvation department; British income taxes in the Pearl Harbor week were 50% of its workers’ pay, and 95% of “big incomes.”[197]Time (December 15, 1941), p.38. At this same time, Sir Kingsley Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was telling the House of Commons that Britain had already spent the equivalent of $33,200,000,000 to fight the war so far,[198]Associated Press report, in Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph, December 16, 1941, p.10. with the end far from in sight, the consequences of which were evident to the far-visioned. Julian Huxley, in New York City the same day, predicted that “The United States will be the most powerful country when the war is over, while Europe will be a mess.”[199]Huxley quoted in Time (December 15, 1941), p. 53. The Pro-Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 367 It was interesting to see how few political and ideological warriors cared about the outcome; there was a long and beautiful war to fight and experience, which no one wanted to deny himself through such ignoble artifices as the termination of hostilities via negotiation. As for another outcome of the war, one had to consult Rev. Charles E. Coughlin’s editorial in his five-year-old weekly, Social Justice, an unmentionable source among the chic of the day. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Rev. Coughlin predicted, “Karl Marx will win this war.”[200]Social Justice (December 22,1941), p.4. Rev. Coughlin seemed to be echoing a view expressed by an almost polar political opposite, the novelist Erskine Caldwell, a short time before. Caldwell, with his wife, Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer famous for her “proletarian” portraits (especially the very worst she could find in the rural U.S. South, 你看过他们的脸), had spent from May 1 to October 1 in Moscow, and had returned to the U.S. via Siberia just before the Pearl Harbor incident. Speaking to an interviewer in Spokane, Washington on December 1, Caldwell declared, “Russia-not England or the United States-will win the war in the end.” And he added as a closing caution, “If the Allied countries try to cheat Russia, they’re going to regret it.” Associated Press report, Colorado Springs Gazette, December 1,1941, p. l, and December 3, 1941, p.4.

Davies’ Book, 莫斯科代表团, Sets the Tone on the Adulation of Soviet Communism for the Rest of the War •1,000字

While noted public figures as diverse as Huxley, Caldwell, and Rev. Coughlin were ruminating presciently about the likely situation prevailing at war’s end, there took place the first major literary advancement of Stalinist fortunes in American public consciousness, the publication of ex-Ambassador to Russia Davies’ 莫斯科代表团 (Simon and Schuster). Out just two weeks after Pearl, it was the subject of at least three score stentorian reviews in as many weeks in the nation’s largest and most prestigious periodicals and newspapers. Time led off shortly after Christmas, 1941 with a three and a half column review but handled as though the book were foreign news.[201]Time (December 29, 1941), pp.23-24. A few days later came Joseph Barnes’s front page treatment in the Herald Tribune Books and identical placement of that of William Henry Chamberlin in the Times Book Review the same day, guaranteeing blanketing the Eastern portion of the country with massive and lengthy attention. A few days after that came that of Henry C. Wolfe in the Saturday Review, by which time the publishers had already run a half-page advertisement in the Herald Tribune Books which was heavily decorated with huzzas from 51 other major United States publications. Included in this triumphal spread were the following: “most competent, disinterested study of the Soviet Union” (Boston Globe); the best book on Russia “since the two-volume study by Sidney and Beatrice Webb” (Chicago Daily News); “a political document of the first importance as well as a piece of extraordinary sanity” (Chicago Sun-Times); “perhaps the most valuable book to be published on the subject of Russia in the past decade” (Houston Post); “Actually the first volume on Soviet Russia which will be taken seriously by all students of Soviet affairs” (Chicago Jewish Daily Courier); “the one book above all to read on Russia” (New York Times); and the following benediction from the Daily Worker: “Mr. Davies has supplanted a great deal of current misinformation about the USSR with realistic, clear-cut and objective reporting.”[202]Quotations from publisher’s advertisement, New York Herald Tribune Books, January 4, 1942, p. 8. The heavy space and attention given to Davies’ book in this paper, endlessly referred to by Time as “the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune,” may have puzzled some who might have identified such an appellation as an indication of powerful conservative leanings. What such persons needed was an education on the people who dominated the paper’s book review pages, whose pro-Soviet special pleading already was substantial, and which was to accelerate at an impressive rate for the duration of the war.

Barnes’s reviewer was as kindly as one might have been led to expect from him, in view of his substantial pedigree in handling things Soviet with a gentle touch. Wolfe hailed it as “One of the most significant books of our time,”[204]Saturday Review of Literature (January 10, 1942, p.5. but the general shouting approval on all sides made Joseph Starobin’s six-column effulgence in the New Masses almost an anti-climax.[205]New Masses (January 13, 1942), pp.20-22. There was little doubt that Davies’ book had replaced among the Party[206]Davies’ book was just as fiercely acclaimed among the affluent circles connected with Eastern capital as it was by the USCP, however. It drew enthusiastic approval and top billing in the April, 1942 issue of Foreign Affairs (p. 571) as well. the up-to-then prize diplomatic volume by an American in the twentieth century, the 1933-1938 Diary of ex-Ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, lovingly edited by his far-leftist children. One strong assertion by Davies was given special attention by the New Masses, his declaration on page 434, “The bogy that a war would entail Communism in a defeated Germany and Central Europe is plain bunk.” Another pregnant quotation from Davies was that by Wolfe in Saturday Review,[207]Wolfe’s review was titled “No Radish,” apparently intended to be complimentary to Davies and a testament to his sincere pro-Stalinism; the term “radish” had long applied to persons with superficial affection for Stalin but fundamentally opposed to him secretly (“red outside, white inside.”) A similar cognomen, “beefsteak Nazis,” had for years been applied to the legion of Marxists who voted against Hitler, 1930-1933, and then joined National Socialist organizations thereafter (“brown outside, red inside.”) a reference to an unnamed Polish government figure who boasted prior to the September 1939 campaign, “within three weeks after the outbreak of war, Polish troops would be in Berlin.” That they were there as prisoners of war was not the intent, for sure, though these were not days to call attention to Polish belligerent confidence in victory prior to hostilities; the total effort of “Allied” propaganda in the time following Pearl Harbor was to establish firmly the myth of a peaceful and utterly non-provoking Poland, overrun by a brutish German horde, in a one-sided act of “aggression.”[208]There is no study of the voluminous literature by Poles in the 1919-1939 interim not only predicting but welcoming a war not only with Russia but with Germany, and confidently forecasting victory over both and a substantial enlargement of the geographical scope of the Polish state which would follow such victory.

Few books published in the U.S.A. have been greeted by such an avalanche of reviewer approval in such a short time as 前往莫斯科的任务。 By the end of March 1942, the list of favorable testimonials was nothing short of sensational. The amazing thing was that it was criticized by anyone. Such as it was, unfriendly commentary on Davies’ book gathered largely at one point, his acceptance without any reservation of the Stalinite explanation of the 1936-1938 massacres and mass jailings as a unified program of cleansing the USSR of German and Japanese collaborators and agents. Chamberlin had held back a little on this matter and also questioned Davies’ “complete endorsement of Soviet foreign policy.”[209]Chamberlin review in New York Times Book Review (January 4, 1942), pp. to 15. The Times reported January 22 that a fifth printing, bringing the total of copies to 54,000 had already taken place. Even Time realized the problem here, and in its marathon vote of acclaim had demonstrated a little difficulty in accepting Davies, while projecting doubt on the earlier estimate of the Dewey Commission’s write-off of the “purge” trials as frame- ups. The only harsh condemnation of Mission to Moscow was by Margaret Marshall in the Nation. But to appreciate why she was so appalled at Davies’ defense of the purges, one had to know something of the history of the Nation in the same period, when it was torn apart into two camps as a result of conflict over this same matter.[210]Marshall review in Nation (January 31, 1942), p. 118. The Nation editors had already objected to the publisher’s use in their advertisement of what appeared to be a testimonial from President Roosevelt for the book but which actually was a part of a letter FDR had written to Davies in 1940 when the latter had resigned as a special assistant to the State Department. Nation (January 24,1942), p.93. Simon and Schuster were not dismayed by this; in a display advertisement at the end of March, 1942 they featured prominently a tribute from Soviet Ambassador Litvinov. New York Times Book Review (March 29,1942), p.12.

Though barely in the wartime embrace as “allies,” Americans had tendered to the Russians a major propaganda triumph in the shape of a book written by a millionaire promoted lavishly by a major publisher and boosted in almost feverish language by nearly every organ of the heretofore scorned “capitalist” printed communications media. It was a task which could not have been achieved by a Communist Party machine in the Western Hemisphere even had it been a thousand times as large. 莫斯科代表团 went into five printings its first month, and for a time early in the American phase of formal participation in the war, it was hard to hear anyone talk about anything else. As an aid to assist the American young especially in learning to “love Russia,” little compared to it for some time. Nothing ever approaching it by many light years ever appeared in Communist Russia, according the U.S.A. a similar favorable and affirmative image. The one-sided love affair could now be considered to be fairly and fully launched.

尾注 •18,800字

[1] Cowley, “Marginalia,” New Republic (July 12,1943),p. 50. In view of the havoc the Pakt caused among the New Republic’s editors and contributors, it is very likely that some of them also joined the rush to the psychiatrists’ couches.

Between August, 1939 and June, 1941 there did develop among outraged liberals a compensation mechanism in which was expressed the outward, formal rejection of Stalinist affections. During this time this distaste was represented by the spreading of the expression “Communazi” as a descriptive term for the forces of Stalin and Hitler, accused continuously of being in an “alliance.” It grew in intensity after the collapse of France in June, 1940, then slackened noticeably in the early months of 1941, almost disappearing after June, 1941 and the start of theRusso-German war. There were comic and sometimes sour after effects of this “Communazi” episode and interlude, as liberals relapsed into old and comfortable postures with respect to Stalinist Russia. An example was the awkward publication timing of the autobiographical Opinions of Oliver Allston (E.P. Dutton), by one of liberalism’s most hallowed literary figures, Van Wyck Brooks. Brooks admitted in this book to have found much that was admirable in Soviet Communism but had decided subsequent to the Pakt “to fight both Communists and Fascists.” Dorothy Brewster, in her caustic review of this book in the Communist New Masses (December 30,1941, pp. 20-21), inquired rhetorically, “Was he [Brooks] fighting them both a short time ago when he sponsored the meeting called by the Council for Soviet Relations to celebrate the anniversary of the recognition by the U.S.A. of the USSR [November 17, 1933]?” Brooks was just one of a formidable battalion which wanted to have forgotten their 22 or so months of pique and resentment at Stalin’s “betrayal,” in August, 1939.

[2] As Lawrence Dennis was wont to point out in the postwar era, in his news- letter Appeal to Reason, in the American South, as a general rule, the more racist the state, the more ferociously eager for combat with the Hitler regime it tended to be.

[3] Part of the calculated program of synthetic patriotic ritual which was infused into everyday life in the U.S.A. accompanying this tidal wave of print and talk was the device of playing the Star Spangled Banner before the commencement of formal public gatherings, especially prior to the start of athletic contests. Thirty years after the end of World War Two it was still a preface to almost all such spectacles except perhaps dog races and wrestling matches. People were already complaining that it was being overdone in 1941, at which occasion Time commented, “The tune of The Star Spangled Banner, which has been the official national anthem for only a decade [1931],is an old British drinking song…. It was the club song of London’s 18th Century Anacreontic Society. Called To Anacreon in Heaven, it was written by John Stafford Smith, the society’s organist. Author Francis Scott Key, although believed to be tone-deaf, was apparently familiar with the original song.” Time (December 22, 1941), p.56.

[4] Throughout this study, the place of publication will be identified for all books other than those issued by publishers in New York City, which latter will be assumed by its omission.

[5] Luce lent his prestige to young John F. Kennedy by signing the foreword to Kennedy’s undergraduate thesis at Harvard, published under the title 英格兰睡觉时 (Wilfred Funk, 1940), and exploiting a persuasive line adopted by publicists both here and abroad. It became fashionable in the 1940s to write books alleging someone or other “slept” as a device to demonstrate 事后 wisdom. Following the Kennedy essay came Denna F. Fleming’s While America Slept: A Contemporary Analysis of World Events from the Fall of France to Pearl Harbor (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1944). Fleming was probably the most incandescent pro-war interventionist academician in the South, the equivalent to Frederick L. Schuman of Williams College. As a member of the Vanderbilt University faculty and a radio news commentator on Nashville, Tennessee’s station WSM, Fleming was a formidable pedagogical warrior. Like many of them, once the war was over he went through a transformation into one of the most heart-rending pleaders for world peace and for understanding of the Stalinist world. It is unlikely anyone “slept” anywhere, but were mainly overtaken by events and the fortunes of war. The alleged nap of Americans in the 1930s does not hold up against the facts; a complaint in the year 1938, for example, was lodged against the export the previous year by the U.S. of munitions and warplanes which exceeded in dollar value the amount spent by the wartime Wilson regime on the tools of war for the entire World War I year of April 1917 to April 1918. See e.g., the critical editorial “Munitions Trade” in Colorado Springs Gazette, July 9, 1938, p. 4. There were $10,000,000,000 spent on arms in Britain during the premiership of Churchill’s predecessor, Neville Chamberlain. This was a prodigious sum of money fifty or so years ago, when, for example, the minimum wage in the U.S.A. was thirty (30) cents an hour, and a fifth of the labor force was unemployed even at this rate. The above sum suggests that this can hardly be called “sleeping,” when, in addition, the air was rent in the English-speaking world with one treatise after another excoriating the immense sums being spent on the production and trade in arms, world-wide. But to this day there can be heard a type of blatherskite trying to convince anyone willing to listen that at the outbreak of war in September 1939 the United Kingdom was milling around in muddled and confused disarmament. It was peculiar, amusing, and to some, depressing, that of the many newscasters, columnists and newspapermen and politicians pushed to the fore, from 1940 on, bawling to the world of their oracular powers in predicting and warning of trouble with Japan and Germany from 1931, if not earlier, not one displayed the faintest soothsaying ability on the much closer trouble with Russian and Chinese Communism. It may be argued that exhibiting propensities of this sort might have been dangerous in the era of the ascendancy of Hitler, for several reasons. Hostile sentiments about communism in the era of the Grand Amour with Stalin, the most one-sided political love affair in history, were most likely to be denounced as “spreading rumors planted by enemy agents.” The people of the United States were still living with the consequences 40 years after it had become politically safe late in 1945.

The 1939-1945 era bustled and jostled in the U.S.A. with all manner of politicians, journalists and military analysts stridently claiming to have been the first to “recognize the Nazi peril”; some preferred to be seen as such well before the movement took shape in Germany. This contingent especially bloomed after Pearl Harbor, and there seemed to be some kind of correlation between having “early spotted the Hitler menace” and vaulting into big wartime jobs and ultimately in the postwar political machinery. But it was just peripherally embarrassing to them that none came forth as oracles and seers prophesying the “Commie peril,” demonstrating near total blindness to a “Communist menace” until well after the Cold War had set in, whereupon belated wisdom in this sector became fashionable. But there were holdouts who did not become political giants in this capacity until after the Korean war had broken out in mid-1950.

[6] See Foreign Affairs (October 1941), pp. 193-196 for the enthusiastic promotion of the books mentioned in this section. The reviewer of the journal’s “Recent Books on International Relations” section was Robert Gale Woolbert.

[7] Foreign Affairs January 1942), p. 377. Habe, originally Janos or Jean Bekessy, had an established pedigree for anti-Hitler politics. (See letter from Philip de Ronde, an ex-captain in the French Foreign Legion, to Time (November 10, 1941, pp. 4-5). Restored to political fragrance by the outcome of 1945, it was possible to read Habe-Bekessy’s tiresome political sermons decades later in various of the world’s journals. Lania was born Lazar Herrmann in Kharkov in 1896. Originally a Communist, he professed to have left them and become a Socialist in 1923. He claimed to have been an enemy of Hitler since 1924 and to have interviewed him at which time he admitted to knowing only two German words but claimed the ability to find Hitler’s dialect, grammar and sentence structure defective, during his talk with him. See also Lania’s 今天我们是兄弟 (Boston: Houghton Mif- flin, 1942). There will be substantial attention to both these propagandists subsequently.

In examining the propaganda literature attacking Hitler Germany, one is struck by the heavy percentage of authors who are either for a Soviet Communist alternative or one or another of half a dozen varieties of some other kind of Marxian socialism. As an economic system, there are no “free enterprise” critiques; almost every attack which does not reveal the author as a partisan of some species of Marxism is by a Jew of undiscernible political persuasion, whose position is understandable in view of Hitler’s policies toward Jews. What would have been the reception worldwide of the Hitler regime had it not flourished its racial program in the manner it did has been the subject of substantial rumination over the decades. The percentage of Marxist or socialist critiques of Mussolini Italy and Japan is even higher than of Germany. When a search is conducted into what the people attacking Italy and Japan were for, it invariably ends at the front door of a Communist or socialist splinter group, if not directly in the fold of the Communist International. The literary adversaries of Japan either directly or indirectly voted for both a Red China and a Red Japan between 1931 and 1945. The exception in the case of Japan consisted of discomfited Englishmen alarmed at the simultaneous decay of the Empire in Asia at Japanese hands. They succeeded in getting half of what they sought in both Germany and the Far East. Had the Western “allies” been just a little more obtuse and myopic, they might have got the rest.

The issue in Italy remained in doubt still after more than three decades beyond war’s end, although thanks to the “liberators” bringing back to Italy the Communists who had fled to Moscow in the 1920s during the Mussolini era, followed by a vigorous and unremitting offensive conducted thereafter, Italy in the postwar generation had Europe’s largest Communist party outside Russia itself. It was characteristic of the behavior of Italy’s returned Reds that their earliest act under the umbrella of their “democratic allies” was the repulsive murder of their adversary, Mussolini.

[8] The political rehabilitation and refurbishment of Churchill, begun after Munich by pro-war sectors of both left and right in the Anglo Saxon world, embellished through the war in coalition with additional Tories and also American Anglophiles of non-leftist persuasion, was continued into the post-war period by a “conservative” movement which relished his return to venomous attacks on communism. But they conveniently overlooked his part in launching the Reds on their course of conquest through his impulsive and heedless all out support, 1941-43. His foot-dragging tactics thereafter were in harmony with all the other bad policy- making which had marked British leadership since Versailles, following which they had consistently done the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place. Churchill the journalistic opportunist would have been a better subject for scrutiny than the illusion of Churchill the ineffable statesman of the ages. Essential for any beginning attempts to produce some kind of balanced view of Churchill are Francis Neilson, 丘吉尔传奇 (Appleton, Wis., C.C. Nelson, 1954) and Emrys Hughes, Winston Churchill, British Bulldog: His Career in War and Peace (Exposi- tion Press, 1955.)

Churchill’s rushing into an alliance with Stalin may have appeared to have been a purely impulsive and heedless act, growing entirely from the fortunes of war and short range enthusiasms. It was the British military analyst General J.F.C. Fuller however who called attention several years later in his book 战争行为 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961) that Churchill had suggested an alliance with Stalin repeatedly prior to becoming wartime Prime Minister mentioned four such occasions in the first volume of his 第二次世界大战, in March, 1938(p.213), September, 1938(p.229), May 4,1939(p.285), and May 19, 1939(p.293).

General Fuller commented further on Churchill’s further wild swings of opinion change on the Soviet Union after his becoming First Lord of the Admiralty shortly after Britain declared war on Germany September 3, 1939 culminating in his bafflement by Stalin’s invasion of and investment in half of Poland, the other half of the action begun by the Germans. Sir Winston’s attempt to cover himself by remarking in The Second World War (Vol. 1, p. 351) that he “never had any illusion” about the Communists prompted Gen. Fuller to inquire rhetorically why he “had so ardently courted them” in the time before the war started.

And the culmination had occurred October 1, 1939 when Churchill had made his celebrated confession of being unable to predict Soviet behavior, it being “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” People for most of two generations were taught to sit back in awe at this literary hokum as though it were the purest of political wisdom, but Gen. Fuller suggested that Churchill could have learned by consulting “any work on Soviet foreign policy” in the fall of 1939 that it had not changed an iota in 20 years. Regardless of what Churchill was to say then or later, however, by his actions he came down on the side of those who preferred Central Europe to be dominated by Stalinism.

It is possible to argue that had the charlatans of Versailles created a smaller and more realistic Poland in the first place, the diplomatic crisis of 1939 and the war which ensued might never have happened. From another point of view however a clash between Germany and the Soviet Union would have come about later anyway since the main question which the Polish interlude just obscured momentarily was the ultimate location of control over Central Europe. That both Germany and the Soviet Union had serious territorial grievances against this “new” Poland can be considered merely a temporary digression and diversion.

[9] Not everyone was mesmerized by Churchill’s rhetoric. Following the loss of Singapore, the sinkings of the Prince of Wales and Repulse and the passage of a German flotilla through the Strait of Dover, Robert Willis, secretary of the London Trades Council, protested, “We must break loose from the stupefying magic of Churchill’s oratory. Fine words don’t win battles. Whenever we suffer a reverse and whenever news is bad, we are treated with a superb example of the mastery of the English language. The nation is being drugged by high sounding phrases.” Quoted in Newsweek (February 23,1942),p.37.

[10] Churchill’s reckless decision to back Stalin completely, without the faintest vestige of a quid pro quo from Stalin, has produced a heated literature defensive of this act, but of little explanatory substance. There was nothing for the Reds to do but take advantage of it. Churchill’s additional action begun in 1941, instructing a specially created organization to plan for a continent-wide operation “to coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage, to set Europe ablaze,” as reported by William Stephenson in William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid (Ballantine ed., 1977,p.97), loosed in the world one of the most incredible episodes of foolish political mischief in all time. It was Churchill’s bombers which “set Europe ablaze.” His operation, which poured down money, explosives and automatic weapons upon the Stalinist underground and “resistance” by parachute drops for over four years in eleven countries set up a murderous political situation in each land. It had as its legacy a pro-Communist political infirmity which was likely to prevail for several generations after Churchill’s passing.

That Churchill began to entertain second thoughts in 1943 and thereafter, and began to show signs of political wisdom is 事后 acumen of the most hopeless sort. If Britons ever hoped to return to a status of importance in the affairs of Middle Europe after World War II as in the period 1919-1939, such hope was damaged beyond repair by Churchill’s spinal cord reaction to Hitler’s invasion of Russian-held Poland. It can be argued that Britain faced an insoluble dilemma and was doomed to expulsion from both Central European influence and Far Eastern preponderance regardless of which of the two contesting powers there were winners. It is obvious they faced this consequence if the Germans and Japanese won, and it was their classic choice of the man on a burning yacht in a typhoon, staying on and burning to death or jumping off and drowning. Churchill stayed on and the British Empire and influence were incinerated in a Red holocaust.

[11] The standard apologia detailing the careful and cautious edging of Roosevelt and his principal advisors to a program of material assistance to Stalin in 1941 is William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 194g1941 (Harper, 1953), identified on its title page as “Published for the Council on Foreign Relations.” (Chapters 17 and 25.) Professors of history at Harvard and Amherst, respectively, Langer and Gleason held high posts during the war with the redoubtable global espionage agency, the Office of Strategic Services, the direct ancestor of the modern CIA. They also held similar positions in the early CIA and were so identified when their book was published.

[12] Especially informative on the matters described above are “Judex,” Anderson’s Prisoners (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940), and Ivor Montagu, 叛徒阶级 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1940), which contains much valuable information, though written from the point of view of the Central Committee of the CPGB. Ramsay’s own account of his arrest and incarceration for over four years may be found in his book, 无名之战 (Devon, England: Britons, 5th rev. ed., 1968). On Ramsay’s release from prison on September 26, 1944 see “Bold Etonian,” Newsweek (October 9, 1944), pp. 60-61. Despite all that has been written, much still remains unclear about the arrests of Capt. Ramsey and Tyler Kent, a code clerk at the U.S. Embassy in London who intercepted secret dispatches between Roosevelt and Churchill confirming their illegal efforts to bring America into war against Germany. Kent made records of the incriminating messages, hoping eventually to make them public in the United States. He was arrested at his London apartment on May 20, 1940, and found guilty of violating the British Official Secrets Act in a closed trial. He spent the rest of the war in a British prison. [A copy of the trial record, including a listing of the hundreds of messages intercepted by Kent, as well as the intercepted diplomatic dispatches themselves, are at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The secret Roosevelt-Churchill exchange has been published in Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (Princeton Univ. Press, 1984; Warren F. Kimball, ed.) For Kent’s own account see “罗斯福遗产和肯特案,” The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1983, pp. 173-203. See also: William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid,第84-85页。]

[13] The above matters were quoted in Newsweek July 7, 1941), p. 11. An interesting aspect of the right-left coalition for war, but trying to stay clear of an alliance with the CPUSA, was the presence of Jay Lovestone, head of the CPUSA until 1928 when he had been removed by Stalin, as director of the Trade Union Division of the Committee to Defend America. Newsweek July 14, 1941), p. 10. Long after the war it was revealed that the Fight for Freedom Committee was a totally bogus organization, created out of whole cloth by British Intelligence and winked at by the Administration and its police agencies, used mainly to harass American anti-war groups and promote diversionary ruses to distract Americans from the multifarious British propaganda activities. See especially Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid, 279,324-25。

In retrospect, in terms of proportion, one of the ludicrous episodes of the propaganda war in America was the sight of the immense British propaganda enterprise and the octopus-like Communist apparatus, spending vastly-larger sums and employing a multitude of persons and mechanisms in press, radio and film, yelling in unison at the threadbare operations of Pro-German George Svlvester Viereck. A dozen major American publishers turned out a veritable Communist five-foot-shelf of books between 1933 and 1945, and enough pro-British books to fill an entire library. But the dozen or so pro-German or anti-interventionist products of Viereck’s Flanders Hall firm were considered an equivalent by the pro-war propa- ganda machine, right and left alike. The long-delayed The German Report (Thomas Yoseloff, Publisher,1961) by O. John Rogge, unsuccessful both as prosecutor of the sedition case in 1944 and the defense counsel for the Communists in 1950, was still exaggerating the influence of Viereck at this late date.

[14] In response to the Gallup Poll-question, “Do you think the U.S. should declare war on Germany and send our army and navy abroad to fight?” the September, 1939 “No” total was 94% of the respondees; in October, the “No” response was 95%, in December, 96.59%. In April 1940, after the invasion of Norway by the Germans, the “No” response to this question was 96.3% and in June, 1940, after the collapse of France, it was 93% “No.”

[15] “War of the Dinosaurs,” Time dune 30, 1941), p. 9.

[16] “Lenin-Lease Bill,” Time dune 30, 1941), p. 13. This issue of Time featured a cover picture of Stalin and one of his most ballyhooed generals, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko.

[17] Even after 1945, new words were invented to describe Russia territorial grabs under Soviet auspices, while pro-Stalinist students of “imperialism” ground out millions of words describing this policy in conventional terminology as applied to everyone else.

[18] “Looking the Other Way? The New Party Line,” Time July 7, 1941), p. 12-13.

[19] Time’s contempt and meanness toward the Stalinists in America was reflected in numerous recollections of Communist detachment toward the war in the period of USSR neutrality and-the CPUSA’s stance of anti-involvement. One of these was the reproduction of a bit of doggerel attributed to the U.S. Reds in the not very distant past:

Oh Franklin Roosevelt told the people how he felt

We almost believed him when he said,

‘Oh I hate war And so does Eleanor

But we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead.’ Time (July 7, 1941), p. 13.

Some recalled the bitter words of the CPUSA’s leader, Earl Browder, a few months earlier when he was convicted for forging a U.S. passport; in the Daily Worker for February 25, 1941 he had remonstrated, “If my kind of crime rates four years in prison, what should be the punishment for Franklin Roosevelt, who got a third term [as president] on a false passport, a promise to keep America out of war? I think the supreme punishment for this crime will be written in history that he betrayed the peace and prosperity of the American people.” It did not take Browder and his associates long to change that tune after June 22, 1941.

[20] U.S. News duly 4, 1941), pp. 26-28, for all above citations by persons responding to this first poll published after the outbreak of the war in Poland between Germany and Russia. U.S. News billed itself on its cover every week as “The Only Magazine Devoted Entirely to Reporting, Interpreting and Forecasting the News of National Affairs.” It established a frightfully bad record as a “forecaster.” A slogan carried over Lawrence’s weekly editorials, credited to George Washington, read: “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”

[21] U.S. News July 11, 1941), pp. 32-33, for all above citations in this second installment of queries.

[22] Newsweek (July 7, 1941], pp. 11-12 for ex-Pres. Hoover’s remarks and those of the preceding participants in Newsweek’s roundup of reaction to the new phase of the war. Sen. Taft was especially subjected to subsequent abuse for his views, but the criticism abated after the Cold War with the USSR set in after 1945 and the bills for this consequence of victory began to appear.

[23] “Against Both Sides,” Time (July 7,1941), p.9.

[24] Washington Report, U.S. News July 25,1941), p.5.

[25] “Back to the l6th Century,” Time July 7,1941), p. 21.

[28] New Masses (July 8,1941), p. 6. The New Masses was the only weekly journal presenting the “Marxist outlook on world events”; it also presented an undeviating Stalinist outlook at any given moment and was probably the most articulate reflector of Stalinist opinion in the U.S.A. during World War II among the journals which were frankly Moscow transmission belts. To many people, it and the Daily Worker constituted the totality of the Communist press here, but there were others of some importance, such as Soviet Russia Today, People’s World, The Communist, (official organ of the CPUSA), Amerasia, and the Far Eastern Survey of the Institute of Pacific Relations, which were the two centers for the dispersal of Chinese Communist propaganda, for the most part, while Science and Society specialized mainly in Marxist theory. But there were at least three dozen other publications of far greater circulation, and incredibly more affluent, whose editors and contributors numbered several warmly pro-Soviet partisans of the pen, and whose output and influence were thousands of times more significant. On the other hand, it is not known that a single pro-American journal or writer existed or was produced in the Soviet Union during the entire war.

[27] A careful reading of the business and finance sections of the nation’s newspapers and magazines 1939-1945 will open up to one an aspect of World War II which is almost entirely lacking in what passes for the history of that time in most conventional tomes to this day.

[28] “Soviet Ambassador Oumansky, Back in Favor in Washington’s Social and Official Circles,” U.S. News (July 11, 1941), p.41. Oumansky was the beneficiary of a sustained news picture campaign which made him appear almost winsome.

[29] On Steinhardt and related matters, see “Life in the Capital,” “People of the Week” and “Washington Whispers” columns in U.S. News duly 4,1941), pp.38, 40. Said the editors, “U.S. diplomatic advisers were almost unanimous in urging President Roosevelt to support Stalin as against Hitler, on the ground that Hitler was the real threat.”

[30] Letter from Paul Jones of Columbia, Ohio, in Time July 21,1941), p.4.

[31] Newsweek (August 5,1941), p.25.

[32] Christian Century July 9, 1941), pp.881-882.

[33] Catholic Times and London Tablet quoted in Christian Century July 16,1941), p. 900.

[34] “Catholics Will Not Join Hitler’s Crusade,” Christian Century July 16,1941), pp. 900-901. How British intelligence were able to recruit so many notable Catholics into their fraudulent “Fight for Freedom” organization is a matter worthy of respectful consideration as well as suspicion of their powers of discrimination.

[35] New Masses (July 8,1941), p.21. On Col. Donovan’s new post in the Roosevelt amateur spy and psychological warfare agency being created at this same moment, see below, note 181.

[36] “Bishop Speaks,” Time (July 14,1941), pp.42-43.

[37] Catholic World July, 1941), p.395.

[38] Catholic World (August, 1941), pp.515-516. The Pro Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 345

[39] Maynard, “Catholics and the Nazis,” American Mercury (October, 1941),pp. 399-400.

Rev. Gillis was affronted by Willkie’s 180-degree turnabout on foreign policy, especially as represented by the latter’s speech of June 18,1940: “I want to repeat what I have said on several occasions, that despite our sympathy for the Allied cause we must stay out of the war. In these times, when our hearts are confused, we must keep our heads clear. We do not intend to send men from this continent to fight in any war. We shall not serve the cause of democracy by becoming involved in the present war; we shall serve that cause only by keeping out of the war. It is the duty of the President of the United States to recognize the determination of the people to stay out of war and to do nothing by word or deed that will undermine that determination. No man has the right to use the great powers of the Presidency to lead the people indirectly into war; only the people through their elected representatives can make that awful decision; and there is no question as to their decision.”

[40] “Cantuar and Commissars,” Time (August 4,1941),p.28. 41.”Hitler Attacks Stalin,” Christian Century Uuly 2,1941),pp.855-856. 42.Editorial, Christian Century (July 9, 1941),p.875. 43.Holmes, “If Russia Wins,” Christian Century Uuly 30,1941),pp.954-956. 44.”Shall We Fight for Russia?” Christian Century (September 10, 1941),pp. 1104-1105. Wieman’s letters in response to this (Christian Century, September 10, 1941,pp. 1114-1115, and September 24, 1941,p.1180) went into greater detail, which sounded like much domestic reform talk being heard in Britain at that moment; the U.S.A. could avoid going Communist only by massive post-war economic reform, and that could be achieved only by breaking down domestic hostility to Communism, the main barrier to reform. The latter could best be realized by joining with the USSR in the current war. This was amazing reasoning, in view of the utter absence of the slightest tendency to “go Communist” registered anywhere in the U.S.A. at that moment.

[45] Newsweek (July 28,1941),p.26.

[46] On reportage of Conant’s speech see “Tepees and Propaganda,” Time July 14,1941),pp.51-52. Time continued its booming of war mongers from the respectable side, and teased the chastened Communists continually. The most recent target after Conant’s speech was the Red-lining head of the National Maritime Union, Joe Curran, and the NMU’s about-face in now supporting the Anglo- Russian cause. “Hail A-Starboard,” Time July 21,1941),p.17.

[47] Newsweek (September 15,1941),p.28.

[48] Newsweek {September 22,1941),p.24.

[49] Time (December 29,1941),p.26.

[50] On Caldwell’s estimate of the war in Eastern Europe on his return from Russia four months later, see below. Caldwell and his wife, the famous photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, were in Moscow between May 1 and October 1, returning to the U.S.A. by way of Siberia just before the Pearl Harbor attack.

[51] Straight, “For a Free World,” New Republic (August 11, 1941), p. 182.

[52] New Masses (August 12, 1941),p. 19. Other stirring testimonials of Prod Perry’s sort were also published from the artist Max Weber and Emil Lengyel. 53. Christian Century (August 6,1941),pp.986-987. He returned to the fear- Communism theme in his report published in the issue of October 15, 1941,p. 1285.

[54] “We have not heard that he is agitating for the intervention of Switzerland,his own country, as a belligerent,” the editors concluded pointedly. Editorial, “Barth Says Britain’s War Is Christian,” Christian Century (September 17,1941),p. 113Z.

[55] Kilpatrick, “Karl Barth and His Times,” Christian Century (October 8,1941), pp.1235-37.

[56] Editorial, “Is It a Holy War?” Christian Century (October 8, 1941), pp. 1230-32.

[57] Christian Century (August 27,1941), p.1061.

[58] Time (August 11, 1941), pp.9-10.

[59] Time (August 11, 1941), pp 10-12.

[60] Time (August 18,1941), p. ll.

[61] Hopkins’ visit was originally interpreted for its readers as a gesture to offer “moral support” to Stalin. U.S. News (August 8,1941), p.4; the editorial position was somewhat braver shortly thereafter.

[62] On the above see “War Dramas, Old and New: Praise for Prowess of Soviet Troops,” U.S. News (August 8, 1941), p. 17. On p. 40 of the same issue it was reported, “Harry Hopkins, in and out of Moscow, is dealing with matters involving delicate political relationships as well as matters of supply…. Some important officials in Washington are wondering if something Mr. Hopkins told him caused England’s Prime Minister Churchill to say that U.S. was very near the verge of war.” 63. “Role of Harry Hopkins in Forming a World-Wide Anti-Nazi Front,” U.S. News (August 15,1941), pp.7-8.

[64] U.S. News (August 15,1941), p.17. The preservation or restoration intact of the European colonial domination of Africa and East Asia also appeared to be taken for granted.

[65] “Roosevelt-Churchill: Inside Story of Meeting,” U.S. News (August 22,1941), pp.7-9, contained the material under the heading, “What it means to Russia.” U.S. News (September 12,1941),p.5, reported the first U.S. tanker carrying gasoline to the Soviet had arrived in the Siberian port of Vladivostok.

The preaching fervor and deep religious faith of David Lawrence in the Roosevelt-Churchill “Atlantic Charter” laid out in a two-page editorial (“The Eight Points,” U.S. News, August 22,1941,pp.18-l9),is one of the most painful things of the 1941 public opinion molding journalistic propaganda to retread, especially his profound conviction that it was unfailing evidence that the “Allies” planned a “peace without vengeance” and that the German government’s warning to their people that they would be dismembered if defeated and that their economy would be locked up behind punitive walls could be dismissed as idle talk by Germans and all others as well. But the German propaganda to their people in 1941 as to their fate if vanquished came closer to actuality by at least a light year than did the vaporings of the “Atlantic Charter”; for five years after defeat their worst fears were realized. Had it not been for Anglo-American panic that the Russians might end up with all of Germany as a satellite, the punitive program in Germany after the war might have gone on indefinitely. When Lawrence burbled about “our humane peace terms,” he created an embarrassment for the future of no small dimensions. But he was right in one prediction, when he declared, “We are to be part of the European orbit for generations to come.”

It is indeed a tribute to the human powers for self-delusion that over 40 years after the event we still see books published which talk about the issuance of something called the “Atlantic Charter” and “signed” by Roosevelt and Churchill on a British warship off the coast of Newfoundland in August, 1941. What was originally a simple press release handed to a radio operator, and intended largely to be a diversion and concealment for what they had really talked about, quicklv became a noble document rivaling the Magna Carta, The Petition of Right, the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. That there was no such document was admitted as early as 1944 but writers by the hundreds since that time wearily attest to there being a stately position-paper supposedly outlining the reverent state of affairs which was to prevail in perpetuity once the enemy of 1941 had been annihilated and the planet redeemed in a vast bath of hot lead and blood.

[66] U.S. News (September 26,1941),p.12.

[67] U.S. News (October 10, 1941),p.6.

[68] Fortune (August, 1941),pp.4S47,136-146.

[69] Hopkins, “Hitler Won’t Win,” American Magazine (July, 1941),pp. 24-25, 123-124.

[70] Hopkins, “The Inside Story of My Meeting With Stalin,” American Magazine (December, 1941),pp.14-15,114-117. Political leadership of this kind largely explains the predicament of the West from mid-1945 on, but the beatification of Churchill in the Anglo-American press made criticism almost impossible. The 事后 yarns about Churchill’s attempts to recoup lost ground in 1943 and 1944 described a largely impossible situation.

[71] Newsweek review in issue for September 1, 1941,p.42. That by Roosevelt in New York Herald Tribune Books (September 14,1941),p.4. Roosevelt repeated in his review Lyons’ criticism of the New York Times and Herald Tribune “for having given space deliberately or gullibly to radical reviewers,” when in a few weeks both were to expand upon this practice many magnitudes.

[72] American Mercury (August, 1941),pp.135-143; Lyons was sure Stalin was going to be overthrown in a very short time.

[73] American Mercury (November, 1941),pp.583-589.

[74] Pp.5,20. Said Eastman, echoing Lyons, “Stalin is the weaker of two gangster- tyrants, and common sense demands that we support him in his resistance to Hitler.”

[75] New Masses (December 9, 1941),p.21.

[76] Newsweek (September 8, 1941),p. 12. As a 100% creation of British intelligence services in the U.S.A., it must have been a little trying for the latter to gear up its fraudulent organization in this country against the Communists when at home Churchill and prominent people in his government were continuously huzzaing Stalin and the British home front was vociferously acclaiming all things Communist. But such difficulties were not discernible to the American public, the imposture having been executed so skillfully.

[77] Newsweek (September 22,1941),p.9.

[78] U.S. News (September 19,1941),p.13.

[79] “Communist Muffling,” Newsweek (September 15,1941),p.9.

[80] There is ample evidence that the economic involvement of the U.S.A. in the war, 1940-1941, had as much to do with the steady involvement in the war as the economic aspect of Anglo-American affairs, 1915-1917 had with the entry into the war of that time, despite the steady efforts of a regiment of obscurantist academics to expunge this from the record.

[81] Time (September 8,1941),p.10.

[82] The first week of December, 1941 newspapers in the U.S.A. were printing pictures of weeping Russian peasants outside their burning homes, with the captions frankly ascribing such firings and the general destruction in the neighborhood to the Red Army. It was significant that no soldiers of either side appeared in these photographs, which suggested that the damage was being done to the home front far behind the battle lines. See the general approval of this destruction by the Red Army in Time (September 1, 1941), pp. 22-23. On Time’s reproduction of Stalinist propaganda from Red Star as “news,” see the issue for September 8, 1941, p. 15.

[83] Time (September 22, 1941), p. 52. This effusion was accompanied by a cheap, subtle attack on the music of Richard Wagner, though this time there was no suggestion for the extirpation of German music. For the embarrassingly fulsome description of the first performance of this new Shostakovich symphony in the U.S.A. see below.

[84] Time (September 29, 1941), p. 12. Oswald Garrison Villard reported that the Legion’s vote was “under direct pressure from President Roosevelt, according to Gov. Heil of Wisconsin, who was at the convention.” “The Military Outlook,” Christian Century (October 8, 1941), pp. 1240-1241.

[85] Christian Century (September 24, 1941), p. 1190.

[86] Newsweek (September 29, 1941), p. 10.

[87] Mowrer, “44 Ways to Beat Hitler,” Look (September 23, 1941), p. 10. Look became part of the liberal press with a vengeance in 1941, and as the wartime ’40s wore on, it, more than the liberal literary weeklies, became the special organ for the more spectacular trial balloons of the liberal correspondents, columnists and radio commentators. The Nation gradually became the forum for European left wing refugees more than of any other attitudinal group, while even such a staid agency of Eastern Anglo-American-controlled financial voices and its associated world politics as Foreign Affairs opened its pages more and more year by year to pro-war leftist liberals, especially from the fall of 1941 on, when the various impulses for interventionism began to grow together, regardless of their differing strategies and objectives.

[88] “Iranian Aftermath,” Time (September 15, 1941), pp. 21-22 89. Newsweek (September 1, 1941), p. 13

[90] Time (September 15, 1941), p. 18.

[91] New York Herald Tribune Books (November 23, 1941), p. 18. Cripps was the founder of the London leftist paper Tribune, which, along with Laski’s Herald, were far more the sources of British collectivist, and, at the same time, pro-Soviet, ideas, than any of the organs associated with left partisan sects.

[92] Look (September 9, 1941), p. 38.

[93] “Biz Meets Facts,” Time (July 21, 1941), pp. 73-74.

[94] Villard, “This Global War,” Christian Century (September 10, 1941) pp. 1108-09. A decade and a half later, Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. and Brent Bozell and their associates were tormenting these same liberals with this identical language and rhetoric, only this time in promoting a war against the liberals’ erstwhile Communist “allies,” even if it meant “burning out the farthest star.” as. Villard, “The Military Outlook,” Christian Century (October 8, 1941), pp. 1240-41.

[95] On Dewey’s views see Ruth Byrns, “John Dewey on Russia,” CommonutZl (September 18, 1941), pp. 511-513.

[97] See Prof. Childs’ letter to the New York Times for January 11, 1942, reprinted in Frontiers of Democracy for March 15, 1942.

[98] “Progressives for War,” Time (July 7, 1941), p. 48.

[99] “Switch,” Time (October 13, 1941), pp. 6849. The colleges selected were Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Iowa, Chicago, Missouri, Minnesota, Northwestern and Stanford. The Pro-Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 349

[100] “Tanks and Thanks to Russia,” Time (October 6,1941),p.25. 101.For this question and replies below see issue of October 17,1941,pp.28-30. 102.U.S. News (October 10,1941),p.48. 103.On above see U.S. News (October 24,1941),pp.9,19. 104.U.S. News (November 28,1941),p.44. 105.See analysis in Newsweelc (October 6,1941),p.30. 106.”Everybody for Freedom,” Time (September 1, 1941),p.53. A liberal fixation in particular during the war of 1939-1945 was the tendency to use the term “clerico-fascist” in describing the European enemy states, and to accuse their leaders at the same time of trying to abolish religion. It was essential to this ploy to ignore utterly the subventions enjoyed by the Christian churches in Hitler Germany, the special position of the Roman Catholic church in Mussolini Italy, and the favored status of the Church in Slovakia under Msgr. Tiso, as well as in Hungary and Rumania, let alone what prevailed in Franco Spain, an enemy in the eyes of the Stalinist-oriented liberals everywhere. This was a studied working of both sides of the street; the Russian Orthodox Church was fully behind Stalin, but no liberal was inclined to describe Soviet Russia as a “clerico-fascist” state.

[107] This was proposed by Serge Bolshakoff in the London journal The Month (September-October, 1941): “Bolshevism is a 事实上的 religion though without God.” Bolshakoff explained that its main doctrine was that matter is eternal and mind only its derivative, in essence a pantheism akin to that of the evolutionists of recent vintage.

[108] In a widely circulated statistic resulting from a poll in 1941 it was estimated that religious preferences of the U.S. Armed Forces were as follows: Protestant: 59%; Catholic: 31%; Jewish: 2%. Those expressing no preference were 8%. This was compared with a U.S. church membership survey in 1936 in which the breakdown was 55% Protestant, 37% Catholic and 8% Jewish.

[109] “Peace Without Platitudes,” Time (October 13,1941),pp.4344,46. Time excerpted this from a somewhat longer work which was published under the same title in Fortune (January, 1942),pp.42-43,87-90. It was of interest that Dulles mentioned the Soviet Union only once in this lengthy treatise, in an aside referring to the war with Finland in 1939-1940. Otherwise his critique of the new world order he saw taking place and the one he preferred to take place both had no Soviet Russia in them. It might be noted that his preferred future was couched in more platitudes than the Roosevelt-Churchill proposal wrapped in the “Atlantic Charter.” Dulles’ utter repudiation of the balance-of-power concept was his most striking contribution.

[110] Liberal social democrat Marxists in the U.S.A. were always circumspect in the selling of Tillich, with the accent always on his function as a theologian of sorts. His political pedigree was usually masked until well after the war. Such works of his as Die sozialistische Entscheidung (Offenbach-am-Main, 1948) rarely surfaced in America.

[111] Neibuhr’s intellectual turncoatism on the subject of war was as spectacular as that of MacLeish. As an editor of the journal The Worid Tomorrow in the first half of the 1930s Neibuhr was famous for statements hostile to ever participating again in any war which might break out anywhere. This journal, heavily dominated by socialist and pacifist clergymen, devoted extensive space in its issue of May 10, 1934, summarizing a poll of 20,870 clergymen of 12 religious bodies in the U.S.A., nearly 13,000 of whom responded that they were determined “not to sanction or participate in any future war,” according to the summation by Kirby Page (p. 222.) Niebuhr’s separate statement was quite in harmony with this view.

[112] There was no book such as Rae Hamilton Abrams’ Preachers Present Arms, the famous chronicle of clerical belligerence in World War One, after the end of World War Two. Though many had strong views on the subject, no class of educated persons exhibited less martial fervor during and after the war than the nation’s clergy of all persuasions. This role was dominated by their long-time adversaries, the secular liberals, once determinedly pacifist, but steadily grown more affectionate for left-Marxist causes about the world. These latter easily out- distanced the bellicose divines of 1917-1918 in advocacy of American involvement in gore production, 1937-1945. Though there were a number of prominent clerical figures who lent their position and prestige to war propaganda, probably more English than Americans, there was little of the “holy war” aspect in their effort. Civilians dominated this latter emanation from the propaganda factories.

An outstanding characteristic, and probably the predominant one, of 20th cen- tury American liberalism, has been its notorious and almost comic selective indignation. Political policies and practices which have aroused deafening condemnation when employed by their enemies anywhere have been winked at, condoned and at times vociferously applauded when similarly put into effect by their friends. Minority control, total obliteration of civil rights, racist exclusion, sustained denial of majority rule, comprehensive terrorist suppression of rivals and adversaries, and the commission of mass murder and systematic political massacres, have all drawn their support and apologia or have been almost totally ignored for many decades. The identical programs, put into effect by enemies of liberalism, have excited a volume of disapprobation and condemnation which surely has been by decibel measurement heard in outer space.

[113] Time (October 6, 1941), p. 77. The clever smearing of Quisling, for many years a prominent anti-Bolshevik in Norway, was probably the outstanding piece of character assassination achieved by Anglo-Russo-American propaganda in the entire war. Essential to any understanding of the magnitude of the savagery in- flicted on Quisling personally and his systematic defamation in every other respect is the book by Ralph Hewins, Quisling: Prophet Without Honor Cohn Day, 1966). Hewins was a chastened major perpetrator of the literary outrages on Quisling.

[114] “Power Politics,” Time (October 13, 1941), p. 11. The story was illustrated with a Talburt cartoon from the New York World Telegram depicting a beaming Stalin wearing a halo marked “from F.D.R.” Some idea of how the spreading of the war to Russia had scrambled the situation for Catholics can be understood by a study of the refugee German Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein’s “Christian World Revolution” in the January, 1942 Atlantic Monthly (pp. 104-111), a tortured think piece trying to make a case for Catholics against Hitler, knowing the vast anti- Communist U.S. Catholic position. The presence of Stalin on the side of the other- wise sainted “Allies” was a bone in the craw of the pro-war liberal Catholic, especially, for the entire war.

Loewenstein, who fled Germany early after the triumph of Hitler, established a formidable pedigree as an author of anti-Hitler works in England and the U.S.A., some of them lengthy tomes which argued an idealistic Catholic conservative line, and dwelt upon a “new Germany” to come once the Nazis were destroyed. Among these were 民族的悲剧 (London: Faber; New York: Macmillan, 1934) and After Hitler’s Fall (London: Faber; New York: Macmillan, 1935). The first had an introduction by Henry Wickham Steed, and was used as a piece of anti-German propaganda by the English war party. Loewenstein found out after 1945 what kind of a Germany his Anglo-American hosts were interested in, and his views in the 1950s were far different as a consequence.

[115] “Pointing to the Record,” U.S. News (October 10, 1941), pp. 28-29.

[116] U.S. News (October 17, 1941), p. 25; this entry repeated the Herald Tribune’s criticism of “whitewashing the Kremlin,” an indication that there were limits even to this major affluent Anglophile organ’s accelerating receptivity to pro-Stalinist puffs.

[117] “Are the Four Freedoms a Delusion?” Christian Century (October 15,1941), pp.1262-64. 118. “An Issue Without Substance,” New Masses (October 14,1941),p.21. 119. Time (October 13,1941),pp.20-21, for the comment on the formation of the “Anti-Hitler Front.” The Stockholm paper Aftonbladet in September, 1939 printed replies made by the Comintern to Swedish Communists querying on grand strategy, of which the following were especially significant:

Q. How can a world revolution be evolved rapidly?

A. By a long war, according to the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

Q. Is a European war apt to promote the interests of the Comintern?

答:是的。

Q. Can a Russo-German pact promote the outbreak of war?

答:是的。

This material was reprinted in Life magazine in the U.S.A. also in September, 1939.

[120] Newsweek (October 13,1941),pp.54,59.

[121] Time (October 20,1941),p.15. The feature story on Russian aid was on pp. 13-14 of this issue.

[122] Time (October 27,1941),p.17. “Anti-fascist” propaganda long had it both ways. Hitler Germany and German-occupied lands in Europe were systematically described as a fearful animal cage in which no one made a move unless under observance by the German home state security police, the Gestapo. At the same time this propaganda reported on scores of books by escapees by every imaginable route, whose authors described additional thousands of escapees of every imaginable station of life.

[123] Time (October 27,1941),pp.24-26.

[124] Probably the earliest notice of the impending publication of Davies’ book was in the “Turns with a Bookworm” column written by Isabel M. Paterson, in the New York Herald Tribune Books issue of October 26,1941,p.30.

[125] New Masses (October 28,1941),p.5.

[126] A nearly full page advertisement of this celebration was run in the New Masses (October 28,1941,p.25.

[127] New Masses (November 4,1941),p.22, for this and above references.

[128] Fortune (October, 1941),p.105. The people responding to this poll apparently were questioned in August, 1941. What the attitudinal situation was in the U.S.A. from December, 1941 to the end of August, 1945 has to be looked at from two perspectives. If one follows the book publishers, most by far of the magazines, newspapers, the polls and the radio, it was substantially to the left. But this was mainly deceptive, a thin icing over a vast national community in factories and in the armed forces, which was largely untouched by all of this. When their views were allowed to leak out under anonymous auspices and circumstances, they indicated anything but a desire for a stunning new style postwar leftist world. If anything this majority of the national community expressed a yearning for a return to the prewar situation as closely as it could be approximated. The transparent politics of the poll takers and the majority of the mouthpieces of radio and print seemed to act upon those holding to the former sentiment as a warning to remain in an underground.

[129] Chamberlin, “America Faces the Iron Age,” Christian Century (October 29, 1941),pp.1331-34. It is hard to find even a few lines of realistic political writing in the six months prior to U.S. involvement in World War II on the subject of Stalinist Russia and its stake and likely part in a world victorious over Germany, Italy and Japan. There are hundreds of pieces everywhere by people concerned with the future threat of Hitler to the U.S.A, much shuddering over the possibility of Nazi “domination of the world,” but also almost as much synthetic advice on what had to be done to Germany when the British won the war. Scores of postwar visions contained only the Anglo-American powers, and never any Communists. One of the best indicators of this near-total discount of Russian Communism in the future was the long think-piece by Raoul de Roussy de Sales, a pet French propagandist of the moment, in his “Socialism and the Future,” in the Atlantic Monthly (December, 1941, pp.694-704), largely an account of the vastly preferable collectivism of the Roosevelt New Deal to those represented by the various socialisms of more dogmatic sort, as the pattern for a future planetary order. Enthused de Roussy de Sales,

It may be that by siding with the democracies (much against his will) Stalin will eventually save the independence of his country and his own regime. But, even if he should sit among the victors, it will not be in the capacity of the head of Communism and world revolution, but as the national leader of the Russian people. I do not say that a joint victory of the United States, England and the USSR will mean necessarily the disap- pearance of Communist rule in Russia, but if there is to be a new interna- tional order after this war (provided it is not Hitler’s) those who will give shape to this order are men like Roosevelt and Churchill or their suc- cessors-not Stalin. (p. 699)

The short-circuiting of this grandiose kind of dream, which was expressed in printed and oratorical form thousands of times, 1941-1945, when the “victors” finally “sat,” was achieved with most of these same intellectual opinion-making prophets observing with mouths agape wondering what had happened. But the likes of de Roussy de Sales is what the wartime American intellectual was brought up on.

[130] Editorial, “Canterbury Sees Moscow In a New Light,” Christian Century (October 22,1941), pp.1291-92.

[131] Editorial, Christian Century (November 12, 1941), pp. 1399-1401. On Niebuhr’s turnaround from non-belligerent to warrior see note 111, above. One might profit from comparing the sophisticated differences between Niebuhr’s statements in the prewar 1930s in such as The World Tomorrow, for example, and the more transparently pro-Soviet Nation.

[132] Editorial, “Clergy Pod,” Commonweal (October 31,1941), pp.37-38.

[133] “Catholic Clergy Vote Against Wards Christian Century (October 29,1941), pp.1323-24.

[134] Time (December 1, 1941), p. 44. There was a similar recruitment of interventionist preachers by Kenneth Leslie, editor of the Protestant Digest, a petition signed by 1000 Protestant clergymen, calling for increased aid to the “anti-Hitler” forces in the world. The increasingly pro-Stalinist orientation of this journal became the subject of steadily mounting attention in the closing two years of the war and after.

The clever Anglo-American propaganda ploy of selling their respective populaces on a war against only Hitler personally and the “Nazi tyranny” involved ineluctably a war for the mass destruction of millions of Germans who were not Nazis and were not particularly enchanted by Hitler. In this way was their basic Germanophobia concealed under high-sounding verbiage and empty, wordy “principles.” In the same way the fiercely pro-war Communists and their ardent liberal allies had not the slightest compunction about the urban massacres by Allied saturation strategic bombing, which obliterated many German fellow Marxists. In reality their pretension about Marxist ideology was an utter fraud, in that they looked upon the annihilation of presumably blood-brother ideologues with considerable relish, and gloated over it thousands of times. The ultimate advantage of this concealed program of ethnic mass murder was postponed until that stage of victory was reached where atrocity propaganda came to the fore to guide postwar policy; the ascribing to the enemy of what has befallen him is the essence of successful atrocity propaganda.

[135] Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid, p.页。 136. XNUMX。

[136] It may be a long time before Americans see again the kind of personal courage demonstrated by Lindbergh in his campaign against the Roosevelt Administration’s war-bound drive. Defenders of FDR who have perennially lamented their champion’s abuse by the nation’s press are hard put to produce anything to compare with the venomous attack on Lindbergh, which actually continued in one way or another for over 30 years, until his death in Hawaii in 1973. In the 1947-1957 period it became a verbal reflex of sobered liberals to complain heatedly of “guilt by association” in the numerous investigations of sustained pro- Stalinist activism on their part in the previous decade. Some might have remembered profitably the grossly malicious allegations by Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, that Lindbergh was acting in the best interests of Adolf Hitler by urging a policy of neutrality.

[137] Time (September 8, 1941), pp. 12-13.

[138] Time (August 11, 1941), p. 10.

[139] “The Unsilenced,” Time (September 8, 1941), pp. 12-13.

[140] Time (October 6, 1941), pp. 18-20.

[141] The evolution of thinking about the weekly newsmagazines as truthful, impartial and reliable sources is not the subject of this study. Much of their reputation along such lines accrued as a result of their phenomenal growth during World War II, by which times they were all mainly transmission belts for official governmental views and had engaged in extremely drastic self-censorship. In the immediate pre-war period they were ceaselessly shifting about, searching for stances from which to operate, though becoming weekly a more and more pro-official or “establishment” organ in each case, a situation which was undoubtedly inevitable, given their socioeconomic origins.

In the case of Time, which engaged in the most bald-faced efforts at posing as a detached observer of affairs, its protestation that it had no ax to grind was enough to tickle almost any political funny-bone. The exigencies of following the American Century line of its founder and owner, Henry Luce, produced much the same problems as those facing any ideological journal, though the results were more variable. Some weekly issues were detached and realistic, while others were such obvious propaganda for their pet views and causes that the management could have given away crowns and pounds to Pravda or Volkischer Beobachter and still have had them squirming with jealous admiration.

Time’s politics were not entirely visible, but it appeared to yearn for a situation resulting from a homogenization of U.S. majority political parties, and the regrouping of them into two different bodies, the American Century supporters for global intervention indefinitely, and the wizened little remnant an “isolationist” sect, existing only to put up token opposition at elections, to give the illusion that operationally the country had not become a one-party state such as was abominated when seen elsewhere in the world.

In their June 9 issue the editors had declared that “every man is a propagandist, whether he knows it or not.” When this was questioned by a correspondent as to whether this also applied to Time, the editors expanded upon it in this manner: “Time makes no claim to being unbiased and impartial,” “But Time does set as its goal to be fair in reporting and never takes sides in partisan affairs.” (July 14, 1941, pp. 2-3.) This howler was of course simply superb double-think; its side-taking in “partisan affairs” was already blatant and widely-recognized. A good example dealt with the matter of whether the country should support Roosevelt’s obvious pro-war policies or not. The latter had long been tagged with the pejorative epithet “isolationist.” And even Time recognized it was a traditional view of lengthy standing in the U.S.; “The doctrine of U.S. isolationism has a long and honorable past,” it admitted (October 6, 1941, p. 19). But what irked the editors and owner at that moment was its effectiveness in frustrating the political and journalistic warriors and their many elite and affluent fellow travelers, in banking, business, industry and the universities.

It was bad enough to put up with labor figures, disaffected liberals and anti- communist leftists, influential pacifists such as Paul Comly French, the likes of Edmund Wilson, Norman Thomas and John L. Lewis, the Writers’ Anti-War Bureau, the Keep America Out of War Congress, the Womens’ League for Peace and Freedom, and many other related groups and personalities. Even more formidable and surely more effective were the America First Committee and the immensely influential newspaper groups headed by Col. Robert R. McCormick, Joseph Patterson and William Randolph Hearst, Sr.

Many found it riotously funny to see Time berating and belaboring the McCormick-Patterson-Hearst press as “news-slanting.” In reporting foreign affairs, no one stood ahead of the American Century press when it came to “news- slanting” on U.S. foreign policy and international relations. Time was enlisted in the war on Germany and Japan long before the rest of the country, and steadily reported anti-war neutralist activity as though it were barely a non-criminal enterprise. As late as six days before the Pearl Harbor attack, Time had lambasted McCormick’s extremely influential Chicago Tribune as “unsurpassed for furious bias since frontier journalism” (Dec. l, 1941; pp.60-64.) In this incredible piece of complex hypocrisy, Time omitted any criticism of the other two major Chicago newspapers, the blatantly pro-war tabloid owned by the millionaire Marshall Field, the Sun, and the Daily News, owned by Roosevelt’s own Secretary of the Navy, the wealthy Col. Frank Knox, as equally guilty of “furious bias” on the same subject. Of course, Time itself was the most clearly identified printed source in the major periodical press in which “news-slanting” in behalf of the pro-war camp was recognizable policy; it probably did more with the verbal reflexes “isolationist” and “internationalist” (its preferred euphemism for “interventionist”) of all organs of printed communication in the U.S.

[142] Time (November 3, 1941), pp. 21-22.

[143] Newsweek (November 3, 1941), p. 20.

[144] See especially the lead editorial in the New Masses (November 11, 1941), p. 21, for one of these.

[145] Lamont, “What Americans Are Learning,” New Masses (November 11, 941), pp. 340.

[146] See especially quotes on pages 19 and 31 in the November 17, 1941 issue of Time. In the first of these Time quoted from Hitler’s speech in the second week of November in which he referred to Churchill as “the crazy drunkard who for years now has been ruling England.” The reason for the almost offensively fulsome adulation of Stalin was not discernible, nor was it ever so. There were no counter- demonstrations of affection for England anywhere in Russia then, nor were there ever any. Fighting their own war for their own objectives, one might have understood that there was no compulsion among Russians to demonstrate “solidarity” with the English; the members of the non-Russian Comintern could be depended upon to engage in any public effusions of such sentiment thought necessary. At home in Moscow, all was business, Russian business. But if anything, there should have been recognition among Russians that English help was more important to them than any Russian help to the English. The latter was microscopic, other than the function the Eastern Front played in diverting part of the German air force from English targets; but even here the assistance was more imagined than real.

[147] New Masses (November 11, 1941), p. 19, for quotations cited below.

[148] Cot’s political pedigree was expertly obfuscated by American liberals until the publication of his biography of Marx in the symposium The Torch of Freedom (Farrar and Rinehart, 1943), edited by Emil Ludwig and Henry B. Kranz. This revelation by Cot was sufficient to pinpoint his Front Populaire sentiments, if his occasional essays in The Protestant were insufficient illumination.

[149] “What’s Behind the Urals?” U.S. News (November 14, 1941), p. 19.

[150] “The Yeas and the Nays,” U.S. News (November 7, 1941), p. 49.

[151] Lawrence, “Hitler Defeats Hitler,” U.S. News (November 14, 1941), pp. 20-21. Lawrence was one of the most strident voices in the U.S.A. complaining why nothing had been done about “aggression” by Japan since 1931 and by Germany since 1933. He continued this well after the European war began. However, he was one of the very last to see Stalinist Russia a threat or an “aggressor.” As a prognosticator of trouble in this quarter he had one of the poorest records in American journalism.

[152] Time (November 10, 1941), pp. 29-30. Mass journalism tends to put its moguls into a position vis-a-vis the State where their conversion into commissar types is almost inevitable.

[153] Newsweek (November 17, 1941), p. 22. Roosevelt sent the note pledging a billion dollars in lend-lease aid to the Reds on the 24th anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s severance of diplomatic relations with the Bolsheviks in 1917, and Litvinov (see note below), whom Wilson refused to accept as the first Red ambassador to the U.S., was appointed Stalin’s new U.S. ambassador the same day, a matter of odd timing which called to mind to a few the 180-degree turn of U.S. liberalism on the Bolsheviks in a quarter of a century.

The ecstatic rehabilitation of Litvinov as a result of his restoration to good odor in the Soviet diplomatic bureaucracy with his appointment to America led to several kinds of rejoicing among the non-Communist fellow travelers and ardent well-wishers of the USSR in the U.S.A. One of the consequences was a re-raking over of the dramatic events of 1937-1939, as the Soviet ploy of “collective security” and the “popular front” collapsed, leading to the refusal of Americans to back Roosevelt in his “quarantine the aggressors” trial balloon of October, 1937, then the Munich agreement of September, 1938 and the diplomatic revolution of August, 1939, the immediate precursor but not necessarily the trigger of the hostilities which ensued the following month.

One of the most comprehensive was that by the veteran Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, whose pedigree as a friend of the USSR was outranked by very few. His lengthy commentary was delayed in publication (“He Who Got Slapped,” Collier’s, January 3, 1942, pp. 12, 39-40) but got an ex- posure before a subscriber total of nearly 3,000,000 Americans, and probably millions of others as well, something no Communist could have expected to achieve in a number of lifetimes. Inspired by the proceedings at the Nov. 7, 1941 Soviet Embassy reception on the 24th anniversary of the “Soviet National Birthday,” Duranty, who had met Litvinov as far back as 1919, proceeded to lavish praise on the latter as the father of the whole “collective security” gambit between 1934 and 1939. Rejoicing that Americans were becoming so voluble in their praise of the Red Army’s loudly advertised resistance to the German invasion, Duranty undertook to scold those who had abandoned the pro-Soviet positions earlier.

Duranty reasserted once more that the real victim of the Munich pact between the French and British, represented by Daladier (and Bonnet, the actual French diplomat on the scene) and Chamberlain, and the Germans, led by Hitler, was the Soviet Union, and the Czechs secondarily. Though the majority of even Communist-hating “conservatives” adopted the Red pejorative term “appeasement” (claimed to have been his invention by the British Communist Claude Cockburn) to describe Munich, a demonstration of political ignorance which must have kept Communists about the world laughing for the last 45 years, it should be pointed out that the Stalinists and their friends were considerably more astute in seeing the real dimensions of the Daladier-Chamberlain-Hitler proceedings in Munich. A vigorous assertion that the Munich operation was first of all an anti- Communist agreement was made by Charles A. Davila, former Rumanian minister to the U.S., some months later, but buried in the back pages of the Nation (July 25, 1942, p. 80.) It was the substance of Davila’s view that had the “democracies” “stood” with the Czechs at Munich that the Red Army would have been in Central Europe in a matter of days. This could be divined by a straining of Duranty’s prose as well. In his high acclaim of what he called Litvinov’s “greatest speech” before the League of Nations at Geneva, Duranty pointed out that in essence it was “a fruitless attempt to convince the French and British delegates that Russia would adhere with all its influence, and force of arms if need be, to its pledge to aid Czechoslovakia.” (emphasis added.) How any support for the Czechs could have been supplied by anyone except Stalin was not imagined then, and in view of what happened in Poland a year later, could hardly have been imagined by anyone later.

A loud and substantial part of the American Right in recent times has wanted it both ways; they have pushed for an unremitting anti-Communist program and at the same time have mouthed the Left revulsion for the Munich pact, using the same descriptive catcalls as the Communists and fellow travelers they pretend to abominate. (Somehow or other they have managed to overlook that in France with the exception of the political exotic Henri de Kerillis, the only opponents of Daladier on Munich in the Chamber of Deputies were the 75 Communists.)

Despite this long-standing verbal dust cloud, through which few have been able to peer, the French-British decision at Munich had much good to say for it. It was consistent with their Russian policy from at least 1933 as well, since “standing” with the Czechs would not only have opened the gates of Central Europe to the Red Army; such a decision would have placed them in accedence to old Soviet frontier rectification demands. By bellowing in unison with the Left over Munich, the Right, particularly that in America, have voted in favor of the Red Army being in 1938 where they eventually were, thanks to their American “allies,” in 1945.

The major ingredient of the Cold War for nearly 40 years has consisted of 事后 American remorse over this consequence, and the wearisome and only feebly successful rebuilding of a power concentrate in what is left of non-Communist Europe to match off against a Communist saturation of total power in Central and Eastern Europe, to which tacit approval was tendered long before Yalta. It may be that the Anglo-French position was hopeless, and that the small countries fabricated at Versailles and after, Iying between Germany and Russia, extending from Finland to the Black Sea, were doomed to either German or Russian interference. But on the face of it, Chamberlain and Daladier emerge as towering figures of wisdom compared to Churchill, Duff Cooper, Lord Halifax, Lord Lothian, Anthony Eden and Robert Vansittart, and the likes of Attlee, Cripps, Bevin, Shinwell and Morrison. Concessions to Germany resulted in undesirable consequences, but the former did not bring the Red Army into Central Europe, which is what the logic of the challenge to Germany called for. One can throw up barrels of stale propaganda accusations of German intentions to “conquer the world,” but until pressured to do otherwise, the Anglo-French policies down to the end of March, 1939 still pitted German ambitions against those of the Soviet, allowing themselves a position to move about, at least relatively, as to their best interests. Once the commitment to support either the Germans or Russians was made, the outcome was predictable and often predicted: either a German- or Russian-dominated Central Europe. The long-range vision of the Churchill wing of British leadership is that they preferred Russian to German, and they promptly got it. Churchill’s opening of the Cold War with his March, 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri is the perfect testament to his political myopia.

A related rumination of the time, and since reiterated in many hundreds of books and thousands of smaller pieces, is that if only the British and French and the American people had backed Roosevelt in his “quarantine” doctrine of October, 1937 (Actually fully developed by Stalinists a good 2 years before FDR’s speech in Chicago), Hitler, intimidated, would have evaporated in fear, the Germans would have slunk home and cowered in their basements, and a Central Europe tailored to Anglo-Franco-American specifications and desires would have prevailed in perpetuity. This theme is always built on a foundation of theoretical statecraft from which the Soviet Union is always omitted. Therefore the possibility of a German-Russian agreement a la that of August, 1939, but occurring well before it, is breezily ignored and never considered. If being checked by a British policy turnabout in late March, 1939 led to the Pakt five months later, is there any reason that adoption of a similar line in October, 1937 might not have brought about a diplomatic revolution resembling the Pakt but, say, in March, 1938?

Again, the upholders of the above-mentioned strategy to “contain” Hitler wish not to confront the obvious: the Anglo-French and their moral supporters in America were through in Central Europe, and that it was a matter of whether they would support the Germans or the Russians in this region. The entry of the Americans directly in the situation as a consequence of the military events of 1944-1945 did not alter this at all. From a European point of view it has been a nuisance at best, and a replacement of an inept and impotent Anglo-French policy by one which has yet to be demonstrated to be very much better. American Cold War “containment” simply put the problem into suspended animation for a generation, and now going on to another. One might summarize the U.S.A. apologetic satirically as follows: it was a lovely, noble, righteous war; if only the Communists, with whom we were in such exalted wartime partnership, had not tried to gain anything out of the victory and allowed the spoils to accrue to their Western “partners,” all would be well in the world.

[154] “Mr. Wallach Goes to Washington,” Time (November 17,1941), pp.23-24; “Litvinoff’s Return,” Time (December 8, 1941), p. 29. Still others identified Litvinoff as originally Moysheev Vallakh, the son of a Jewish bank clerk in Bialystok, Russia. His employment record, 1908-1918, prior to his emergence as a Bolshevik bureaucrat reputedly involved work as a clerk, draftsman, newspaper reporter and traveling salesman, supposedly for a corset manufacturer. Those who jeered at the German Foreign Minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, as a one-time wine salesman neglected to point out that one of their diplomat heroes had also spent much time on the road.

[155] Associated Press report, in Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph, December 11,1941), p. Al. The steadily accelerating propaganda from pro-Soviet spokesmen in the U.S.A. of all kinds from 1941 on, stressing Soviet faithfulness to their given word, always skipped rapidly past the expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations on December 14,1939 for carrying on the war with Finland in the first place.

[156] “There Goes Finland,” Time (November 17,1941), p.15.

[157] Lawrence, “‘Loyal Opposition’-Where ?” U.S. News (July 4, 1941), pp. 18-19.

[158] U.S. News (July 25,1941), inside back cover. 159.U.S. News (August 22,1941), p.23. 160.Colorado Springs Gazette, November 1,1941, p.4. 161.Time (September 15,1941), p.16. 162.Time (October 27, 1941), p. 13. In the summer of 1941 the National Resources Planning Board published a pamphlet titled “After Defense-What?” This suggested that this top-level think tank looked upon the flood of defense spending as a short term phenomenon, and that its unemployment blotter effect would be short lived, thus requiring a new impulse, unlike either the New Deal or “defense spending” to perform the function of putting Americans to work. That a succession of wars, followed by a succession of defense programs, would serve to postpone this problem, which the NRPB saw shaping up right away, did not cross the minds of the eminent economic savants.

[l63] U.S. News (October 10, 1941), p.48. Roosevelt was reputed to be “greatly amused” at the “violently unfavorable” reaction to this proposal from “many Congressmen who once favored keeping the profits out of war.” Another remarkable somersault had been performed by a sector of American opinion in five years, as it began to sink home what some of the economic consequences of gearing up the “arsenal of democracy” portended for local districts.

[164] Time (December 8,1941), p.28.

[165] One of the almost forgotten episodes of the earliest years of the Bolshevik upheaval was that associated with the mining engineer Washington B. Vanderlip, representing a mainly Los Angeles-based investor group seeking from Lenin a mining lease on Kamchatka. Vanderlip, who declared to Americans that the “Red terror” was simply propaganda and was not taking place, drew a remarkable amount of space in the American newspapers from October, 1920 on into 1922.

[166] “What Mr. Batt Saw in Russia,” U.S. News (November 21,1941), p.15, for above observations. The near-panic attached to “defense” beginning in the early summer of 1940 and the sharp turnaround from criticism to accolades for industrial war production was not without its problems. There was a largely concealed struggle between the incumbent New Deal bureaucrats of the top rank, reluctantly doffing domestic reform for planetary martial roles, and the newly perfumed industrial moguls recruited for the job of mass-producing billions of dollars of all kinds of weapons, sometimes referred to as the “dollar-a-year” men. These top executives entered quasi-government service presumably waiving federal compensation, though the immense revenue accruing to their companies via arms contracts seemed not to be a subject worth discussing publicly. The subject of dispute over the pressure to produce for Stalin was even more concealed, though it can be assumed to have had some influence in these conflicts over direction of policy. An interesting contemporary book over this fight at the top was Carlisle Bargeron’s Confusion on the Potomac (Wilfred Funk), attacked in Foreign Affairs but otherwise reviewed in a commendatory way, even a year after publication (1942).

[167] Time (November 24,1941), p.87. A week before the Pearl Harbor attack, an organization of American interventionists, the Associated Leagues for a Declared War, had named James W. Gerard, the U.S. ambassador to Germany during the early years of World War One, as their honorary chairman. Gerard took on the symbolic post, declaring that “the time had come to declare a state of war with Germany.” Associated Press report, Colorado Springs Gazette, December 1,1941, p. 1. But the way things were going in terms of public disaffection for initiated belligerency, it might have been a very long wait for ex-Ambassador Gerard and the Associated Leagues had not the welcome assault by Japan a week later brought about the dearly-desired war declaration.

[l68] Time (December 8,1941), p.25.

[169] “Nice Old Gentleman,” Time (December 1, 1941), p.25.

[170] Time (December 8,1941), p.20.

[171] New Masses (December 9, 1941), p. l9. Willkie’s gratuitous volunteering of the opinion that the Communist Manifesto was “one of the great historical documents” earned him the criticism of Rep. Paul Schafer of Michigan on the floor of the House of Representatives. It was a strange testimonial to hear from the lips of a well-to-do corporation lawyer. The Pr>Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 359

[171a] The largest part of the justification for American involvement in World War II has been ex post facto; on the basis of what happened after hostilities were joined, participation has been hailed as vindicated, and all ensuing and subsequent policies have been explained as the ultimate in rectitude.

This became progressively a convention, in the generation after the war, when repeated publication of information and previously suppressed documentation and memoirs revealed, for instance, that the pretense of neutrality on the part of the Roosevelt administration was a garment, not a tissue, of lies, and that it was an arm of Britain almost from the beginning of the war. In a similar way, the sustained revelation of mendacity all during the war was increasingly and often vociferously hailed as justified in view of the alleged monstrousness of the enemy’s subsequent behavior. That little of this would have ever taken place had the war been terminated on a negotiated basis, as was possible on many occasions, is rarely if ever allowed to enter into the account. It is always a convenient rationalization to claim nobility for one’s behavior at one moment by calling attention to specious factors at a later time which appear to give ersatz righteousness to the initiating action. The clever ploy of provoking a response, in order to justify what is done in reaction to it, and which was intended or hoped for to begin with, is hardly a novel device in the history of statecraft, however.

[172] Sen. Norris quoted in Newsweek (October 27,1941), p.16. The opinion of Sen. Norris was actually quite widespread, and undoubtedly accounted to a serious degree for the intractability of the Administration toward Japan, and the unwillingness to negotiate anything; the attitude seemed to be that one does not have to compromise with weak inferiors. The widely read commentator on military and naval matters, Major George Fielding Eliot, urged war on Japan in his column, and in other writings; “We have but to stir a finger, and they will sustain such a defeat as they will not recover from this side of total ruin,” is the way he confidently stated the matter. Roosevelt was known to have a very low opinion of Japan as a naval power, while liberal and Communist opinion makers vaulted back and forth on the subject, portraying Japan as an invincible juggernaut, especially threatening to Stalinist Siberia and the future of Communism in China, and, alternately, as a thin shell of superficial strength but with “feet of clay,” easily destroyed by a Western military foray whenever the latter made up their mind to confront them. One should be aware of the incredible opportunities that lay in the hands of those interested in misleading and lying to the American public about Japan, in these times. Those non-Japanese Americans who had a real command of Japanese were estimated by Archibald MacLeish, the chief of the American propaganda services, to be only three of a total U.S.A. populace of nearly 135,000,000. The editors of Publishers Weekly were a little more generous in their estimate; they concluded there were about 100. See “Global War Demands New Skills in Foreign Languages,” Publishers Weekly (September 26,1942), p.1192, for the quote from MacLeish, and their estimate. An absorbing summary of contemporary misconceptions about the Japanese is the section “Prodding Japan into War,” in Porter Sargent’s Getting US into War (Boston, 1941), pp.525-545.

[173] Time (November 10,1941), p.13.

[174] Time (December 8,1941), p. ll.

[175] Abend, “How the U.S. Navy Will Fight Japan,” Look (November 18,1941), pp.20-21.

Part of the over-confidence in the sureness of a swift victory in a mater of a few weeks over Japan in any likely war, which was almost universal (financial “experts” did not think Japan had enough money to fight more than two months), was a result of many decades of belief that Japanese industrial quality was extremely poor, partially due to the experience of seeing nothing but toys, Christmas tree ornaments and electric light bulbs in American shops. Many years of hilarious stories had gone around describing Japanese naval vessels as comic craft at best.

One of the great yarns which was retold with many novelty decorations concerned a Japanese dreadnought which allegedly turned turtle and sank upon its launching, because it had been faultily constructed from stolen plans previously tampered with by U.S. or British agents. This was revealed after Pearl Harbor to have been only a torpedo boat, the Tomoduru, which tipped over because of overloading with guns and torpedo tubes, when it had insufficient displacement, according to Time (December 22, 1941), p. 24.

[176] An amazingly large number of people in public communications in the U.S. complacently expected that the prying loose of Japan from the British, French and Dutch colonies in the Far East would be followed a genial and uneventful restoration, after the entry of the U.S. into the Pacific-War, in the same way their colleagues dealing with the war in Europe expected pro-British or pro-French regimes to return to control of the region between Germany and Russia. Part of this mindless complacency was due to the widely-encouraged belief that the Western powers were deeply loved in the Orient by all except the Japanese, partially due to generations of Sinophile sentiments encouraged by missionaries, among other things. In harmony with this was an incredible piece in Time two weeks after the Pearl Harbor bombing, “How to Tell Your Friends From the Japs” (December 22, 1941, p. 33), which was worse than no tipsheet at all in aiding distinguishing one sub-racial group of Orientals from another.

The entry of the United States into World War II via the Pearl Harbor attack triggered another development which had bittersweet responses in both the business community and the consumer public: the machinery of price controls, rationing and many other nagging harassments which so bedevilled those subject to them and so elated those who made and administered them. Frustrated by the failure of domestic New Deal agencies to loose the controls upon the land, so dear to the controllers among the bureaucratic multitude employed in its police actions, the war brought about the regulators’ dream. It now became high patriotic duty to govern and regulate the citizenry’s tastes, and massive doses of sumptuary legislation soon flowed out, to the delight of the element made responsible for applying it. The agency primarily involved, the Office of Price Administration, soon became the most hated agency of the entire war, and was loaded down with the haughtiest and most insufferable people that the general populace had to put up with for the next five years. Particularly offensive to a growing number was its first chief, Leon Henderson, despite continuous efforts in the mass media to sell him as an economic giant. The glamor portrait in the U.S. News (May 8, 1942, pp. 14-15), titled “Leon Henderson, Boss of Our Economy,” had many counterparts. Eventually he simply had to be replaced in the interests of domestic war morale and societal tranquillity, by a somewhat less abrasive personality, Chester Bowles.

Usually ignored were the army of underlings gathered around Henderson, delighted by the enhanced aura of their collective egos, and they may have done as much to annoy and infuriate the national community as their boss, if not more so. Most prominent of these was John Kenneth Galbraith, Henderson’s deputy administrator, a one time professor of economics at Princeton University and an editor of Luce’s business mouthpiece magazine, Fortune, in the mid-1930s. “Tall, towering” Galbraith, as U.S. News described him, had been in the OPA prior to Pearl, and was credited by Time (December 22, 1941, pp. 33-34) for swiftly instituting the legislation, apparently prepared well before, which made it virtually impossible for Americans to procure new automobile tires, just days after the Hawaii attack. Thus a new occupation was made possible for organized crime, and the Mafia sequestered many billions directing the national campaign of supplying those goods which the OPA managers decreed were not to be purchased legally by the citizenry, or which they were to have only in very limited supply. This story has yet to be told, though much of the lunacy of the program of price controls and rationing has been described with great effectiveness by Professor Fred Shannon in his America’s Economic Growth (Macmillan, 1951). A notable list of future luminaries from the legal world and the economics professoriat worked at one time or another for the OPA, including future Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman and future President Richard M. Nixon.

[177] U.S. News (December 19,1941), p.13.

[178] “Far-Flung Strategy to Defeat Japanese,” U.S. News (December 26,1941), p. 11. An amusing by-product of the abstention of Soviet Russia from the Pacific War was the reaction of some elements of the American Left which traditionally abominated the USSR, especially the Socialists long led by Norman Thomas. He insisted that the U.S.A. should have declared war on just Japan as a consequence of Pearl Harbor, and not given Stalin a windfall by going to war with his enemies in Europe as well, since he had not reciprocated by adding Japan to the Soviet war opponents. The New Masses was deeply offended by Thomas’ proposition, and denounced him as a “Quisling Socialist.” New Masses (January 6,1942), p. l9.

[179] “Litvinoff’s Problem,” Time (December 22,1941), p. 14, contained the most succinct of the expert evasions of Stalin’s newest ambassador to the U.S.A. on the absence of a two-front war in Soviet views of the world situation. (The continuous application by Stalinist flacks of the pejorative “gangster” to its enemies became somewhat wearying especially to the scattered and dispersed enemies of the regime, who considered that the nearest thing to a “gangster” regime in international politics, in terms of legitimacy, was that descended from Lenin and Trotsky and administered at that moment by Stalin.)

[180] Wide World press service report, in Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph, January 18,1942, p. l. From a cultural point of view, the music of World War Two probably reached a new low in quality. From Russia came pretentious compositions which were mainly organized noise, while the output of the West, from both sides of the battle lines, consisted largely of senseless ditties or ballads so treacly sentimental that they were largely an incitation to desertion. As things turned out, there was a heavy reliance on the popular music and jazz of the West prior to the phase of American involvement, which even proved to be true in the case of the enemy in the Far East; dependence on recordings of earlier vintage was common- place on radio in most war sectors.

The effort of the music industry in the U.S.A. to produce quality propaganda songs was quite dismal (World War Two was not the singing war that World War One was). An incredibly bad pro-Stalinist song, “If That’s Propaganda, Make the Most of It,” was composed expressly for a Russian War Relief Benefit in the fall of 1941 by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin; Time published its Iyrics (November 3, 1941, p. Sl) while remarking that “Tin Pan Alley has now gone at least halfway to town for Russia.” A tune with some of the entire war’s silliest Iyrics, “Any Bonds Today,” composed by Irving Berlin, was actually copyrighted by Treasury Secretary Morgenthau (Time, December 22, 1941, p. 55.) But the depths were plumbed by the Pearl Harbor attack, which resulted in the launching of the following: “They Asked For It,” “You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap,” “The Japs Haven’t a Chinaman’s Chance,” “The Sun Will Soon Be Setting for the Land of the Rising Sun,” “We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again,” “Remember Pearl Harbor,” “So We’ll Knock the Japs Right Into the Laps of the Nazis,” “They Started Something But We’re Gonna End It,” “Let’s Take a Rap At the Japs,” “Taps for the Japs,” “We’re the Guys To Do It,” “We’ve Got To Do a Job on the Japs, Baby,” “Those Nasty, Nasty Nazis,” and “We’re Gonna Find a Fellow Who Is Yellow and Beat Him Red, White and Blue.” Time (December 29,1941), p.46.

[181] The Roosevelt regime’s psychological warfare division was at work on Germany many weeks before involved formally in hostilities. Time’s “The US Short Wave” (November 31, 1941, pp. 54-56) revealed that the ardent Stalinist sympathizer Lillian Hellman’s more pro-Communist than anti-Nazi play Watch on the Rhine was being shortwaved overseas in a German translation via New York City’s station WRUL. and that the ex-secretary to the ex-Ambassador to Moscow, Davies, one Stan P. Richardson, with the aid of Joseph Barnes, ex-foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and the Chicago journalist Edmond Taylor (author of Strategy of Terror) were at work on a comprehensive radio program of psychological war propaganda dovetailed closely to administration recipes. Taylor, who became a major figure in the amateur spy organization which straddled the world during the war, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the ancestor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has been memorialized at length in the book by R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (University of California Press, 1972).

Richardson, Barnes and Taylor were identified by Time as working under the Coordinator of Information, an office secretly created by Roosevelt in July, 1941, with a largely unvouchered budget and headed by a World War I veteran, William J. Donovan. The COI evolved into the OSS, probably the most over-rated agency in the history of espionage, and which did incalculable mischief detrimental to long- term U.S. interests in behalf of both European and Asian Communism. Its research chief in 1941 was James Phinney Baxter III, President of exclusive and costly Williams College, and it gradually recruited a legion of leftist liberal academics, journalists, ideologues and assorted upper and upper middle class off- spring of American moneyed Anglophiles, from the Little Ivy League colleges, in particular. This whole was heavily sprinkled by ferocious Marxist professionals of both domestic and European refugee backgrounds, and later a contingent of pro- fessional murderers and related vicious recruits from the ranks of the Mafia and other enclaves of American and European organized crime.

Fright is one of the most ancient political capers which has been perpetrated against people by their leaders since recorded history. It enjoyed an enormous vogue, 1933-1945, and was generously employed with considerable effect all during the war, especially. Americans went through three episodes in particular, in the 1940-1941 period, when.people in authority threatened them with invasion by the Germans first, then by the Germans and Japanese simultaneously, and then by just the Japanese. President Roosevelt had in his inaugural address in March, 1933 effectively utilized Henry David Thoreau’s declaration, without giving the latter credit, to the effect that the only thing Americans had to fear was “fear itself.” In his pronunciations on the European war in the last eighteen months before American involvement, however, FDR had not the slightest reservation in spreading fear in the hope of making political capital out of it, and driving the populace into the arms of the warrior interventionist segment of the total. He specialized in fright about the possible consequences of German actions. His predictions as to the dire circumstances of possible German moves never came within the slightest possibility of realization, but they helped overcome skeptical reservations widely held by those opposed to his interest in becoming a belligerent. The Luce publications cooperated spiritedly in putting his nightmares before the public. Life featured the trial balloon which involved the prediction of an invasion of both coasts by German and Japanese “hordes,” and Time always put his threats of other kinds of trouble before its readers prominently and persuasively. Though nothing happened in 1940, the fright-threats got much worse in 1941.

In July a variant of the possibility of German paratroops descending upon Iowa was the scare that Hitler’s forces would sweep across the many thousands of miles from Poland to the Pacific shores of Siberia and arrive in Vladivostok in days, to undertake an invasion of Alaska via Siberia, which was expected to be a swift German victory in the manner of Norway, presumably helped out with local traitors, apparently (“Another Norway,” Time July 7,1941, p.14). This ploy was right in focus for Republican Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, long the proponent for a road from Seattle to Alaska. Now the drive for this began at a far more heated tempo, as an aid to promote the intensive militarization of the latter to forestall this possible debacle. Time was right with him.

Roosevelt was not satisfied with this, and in his speech to Congress later in the month, on which he was reported to have spent a large amount of time, he again suggested to that body that the U.S.A. was in “infinitely greater” danger at that moment than it had been in the summer of 1940, the time of the launching of some of the most incredible threats (Time, July 28,1941, p.7).

Still another venture in these turbulent currents was undertaken by the President. At the Navy League dinner in Washington at the end of October, 1941 he made public two famous “documents” he claimed he had come upon, the first a “secret map” purporting to show how Hitler planned to cut up Central and South America into five vassal states and the second another “secret” which was a plan “to abolish every religion in the world” and to replace them with “an international Nazi Church” with Hitler’s Mein Kampf presumably replacing the Bible, and undoubtedly all of the other holy books about the planet. These were substantially fabrications of British intelligence, probably by leftist Germans in their employ, and planted upon a source delighted to try them out on his listeners. Time soberly reported these as fact. (Time, November 3,1941, p. ll.)

The big scare about a possible Japanese invasion of the entire West Coast was part of the hysteria following Pearl Harbor, and may have had more to do with distracted leadership other than Roosevelt. Part of this was accompanied by a rumor that an evacuation of the entire West back to a line in the Continental Divide slightly west of Denver was about to become policy, from which a last ditch stand was to be made. It may have caused the panic in Secretary of War Stimson’s coterie which led to the order to round up the entire Japanese-American population for incarceration in concentration camps.

All this agitation and panic stands in strange contrast to the evaluation by Time eight years after the end of the war. In the lead article under “National Affairs” in the issue for October 18, 1953 the editors calculated, “distance prevented any European enemy from dreaming (sic) of forcing a decision on the U.S. by sending major forces to this country”. The worst that the U.S. faced in World War II was the possibility that Europe and Asia, in the hands of its enemies, would be able slowly to weaken the U.S. or to force it to fight without allies on distant and unfavorable battlefields.” Though no one can “force” another to go vast distances to fight, the last portion of the Time analysis sounded much like what the U.S.A., a “victor,” ended up doing anyway in Korea and Vietnam.

[182] On the reviews in this section: Fadiman reviews in New Yorker (October 4, 1941), p.86, and (December 6,1941), p.108. Woolbert’s review in Foreign Affairs of Hindus in issue of January, 1942, p.384, but Strong review delayed until issue for October, 1942, p.783. Barnes review in New York Herald Tribune Books, January 11,1942, p.13. Chamberlin reviews in Saturday Review of Literature (December 20,1941), p.7, and New York Times Book Review, October 12,1941, pp.9,26. The Paterson critique was buried in the New York Herald Tribune Books, November 30, lD41, p. 34. Mosely review in Yale Review (December, 1941), pp. 394-396. Phillips’ review in New York Herald Tribune Books, September 28, 1941, p. 6, while Gannett, long-established Herald Tribune critic and long-famed as one of the most combative liberals decorating the Nation, included his kindly estimate of Hindus in a roundup of current literature, “Books You May Be Reading This Fall,” New York Herald Tribune Books, October 5,1941, p.2.

[183] Foreign Affairs review of Davies given the top billing in the section devoted to World War Two books in issue for April, 1942, p. 571. Duranty reviewed in same issue, p. 578, while the Zacharoff book delayed until the October, 1942 issue, p.783.

[184] Foreign Affairs (October, 1942), p. 782. These English imprints were frequently unnoticed anywhere except in Foreign Affairs, which usually devoted no more than a line or two in general description, as in the case of the Sloan essay, “An uncritical pro-Communist description of the structure and functioning of the Soviet Government.” (April, 1942, p. 578.) Another London imprint of 1941 which went unnoticed in the U.S.A. was Kingsley Martin’s Propaganda’s Harvest (Kegan Paul). Strauss was identified cryptically as “formerly connected with the labor movement in Austria,” but his arrival time in England was not mentioned.

[185] These 1941 imprints generally received late reviews, all being mentioned in the April, 1942 Foreign Affairs, pp. 568-573. Included with them was the Air Ministry secretary, J.M. Spaight’s 不列颠之战 (London: Bles), an account of the German air attack on the country and the Royal Air Force’s counter-attack on Germany, a book which Americans might have learned a great deal from, but did not see.

[186] Fadiman review in New Yorker (September 13,1941), p.74; Barnes review in New York Herald Tribune Books, September 21,1941), p.18. Even Woolbert in Foreign Affairs was repelled by Simone’s latest work; his critical note appeared in the issue for January, 1942, p.381.

[187] The reaction to Lyons’ book was remarkably subdued in view of its poor timing as far as publication was concerned. Even in the liberal weeklies it was treated circumspectly, though both the author and most of the commentators on the book had records of previous enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks at one time or another. It appeared malapropos to just a few that a book criticizing enthusiasm for Soviet foreign politics should appear at just about the moment a general drive in that direction was about to get under way once more.

[188] Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p. 578; review of Ciliga in issue of October, 1941, p. 202. Also published in 1941 was John Kenneth Turner’s 挑战马克思 (Reynal and Hitchcock), almost as awkward a book as that by Lyons. Turner was vigorously attacked by the British Marxist David W. Petegorsky in the New Republic (November 17,1941).

[189] Woods review in New-York Times Book Review (November 2, 1941), p.10. These disillusionist books about the USSR in early wartime should be compared with the American classic of this sort, Proletarian Journey, by Fred Beal (1937).

[190] Fadiman in the New Yorker compared Koestler’s book to that of Aladar Kuncz, Black Monastery, published posthumously in 1934 by Harcourt Brace; the author was a Hungarian school teacher on vacation in France at the outbreak of World War I who was interned as an enemy alien and spent the war in French concentration camps.

[191] The closing blow in behalf of Communism struck in Time prior to direct U.S. participation in World War Two involved a review of Feuchtwanger’s book, published in the late fall of 1941 by Harold Guinzburg’s Viking Press, and heavily promoted. A book largely devoted to Feuchtwanger’s wailing about his experiences in a French concentration camp as an enemy alien, its review in Time would surely have earned the misinformation prize of the year had one been awarded. It included a breath-takingly dishonest description of the author as “a peace-loving contemplative Jew of 57” who allegedly “had no interest in politics.”

Its anonymous author apparently concluded that no reader was familiar with the liberal, fellow-traveler and Communist press in America, to whom Feuchtwanger was a well-known and fiercely-controversial figure. Ignored was a then-recent fact: other than Corliss Lamont, Feuchtwanger had been the first person published by the New Masses in its issue of July 15,1941 of a group asked to comment on the significance of the just-erupted war between Germany and Russia. Nothing from the Soviet Foreign Office could have exceeded Feuchtwanger’s incandescent Soviet sentiments.. He rejoiced that the “enemies of the USSR” who had “tried to hide the truth about the Soviet people” were now being unmasked, and that, thanks to the spreading of the war, “this malicious gossip” had been “shattered,” and people everywhere were taking “a better look at the USSR” and recognizing the “nobility” of the Soviet Union and also “Stalin’s speeches, with their bold and simple realism.” Feuchtwanger was further comforted to note that “The recognition that the Soviet peoples fight for America’s safety” was being “expressed in the statements of the American government,” a curious distillation of official pronouncements not discerned by much of anyone else.

Ignored by Time’s incredible reviewer was that Feuchtwanger had already run his whitewash of French Stalinism of 1938-40 past liberal reviewers, as an article early in 1941, and had earned a stinging denunciation from Dwight MacDonald, as “the number one world literary spokesman for the Stalin regime,” in Common Sense. MacDonald had accompanied this with a lengthy string of quotations from the Communist literary magazine Das Wort when Feuchtwanger was editing it in Moscow in 1936-1937, including the latter’s bitter attack on American liberals for questioning the vicious Moscow trials. Now posing as an enemy of totalitarianism and scribbling feverish anti-Hitler pro-war tracts, MacDonald insisted Feuchtwanger was a systematic peddler of falsehoods in the former department, and finished his deflating critique of this man who “had no interest in politics” by quoting from one of his Das Wort essays in 1937, in which Feuchtwanger had enthused, “One breathes again when one comes from this oppressive Western atmosphere of a counterfeit democracy and hypocritical humanism into the invigorating atmosphere of the Soviet Union.” In view of this encomium to the Stalinist heaven on earth, there were those who wondered what Feuchtwanger was doing in the corrupt and degenerate America he so detested such a short time before. And it was reviews such as this which made some observers wonder why Time repeatedly issued scoffing disparagements of the Nation and New Republic as “pinko.”

It was characteristic of Time to suppress basic information about the politics of persons subject to profiles in its pages as was the case with Feuchtwanger. At about the same time, in hailing the talents of the artist Anton Refregier, who had received $26,000 for the murals in the San Francisco Post Office under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration, Time omitted mention that Refregier, born in Moscow in 1905, and in the U.S.A. since 1921, was a veteran hero of the New Masses and Daily Worker editors; see report in Time (November 17,1941), p.54.

[192] Woolbert review in Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p.568.

[193] Woolbert described Stowe’s book as “engrossing” in Foreign Affairs (January, 1942), pp.376-377; it was the first-listed in the section of wartime books. Stowe mentioned being sent to Europe in September, 1939 for the Chicago Daily News. Hindus’ review of van Paassen in Saturday Review of Literature (November 18,1941), p.13; see also review of van Paassen by J.M. Minifie in New York Herald Tribune Books (October 19, 1941), p. 3, another kindly puff. Harsch was highly praised in Foreign Affairs January, 1942), p.377; van Paassen hailed in issue for October, 1941, p.778.

[194] Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p.569, praised Davis’ book as a “sound and timely” work dealing with the “Anglo-American entente for the control of the seas,” not just the Atlantic, as the title suggested. Knickerbocker’s work was pushed even more strongly by Foreign Affairs (April, 1942), p. 571. Carrying a foreword by another nationally known warrior correspondent, John Gunther, the book got a similarly loud burst of praise from still another emotionally-involved foreign newsman, William L. Shirer, in the New York Herald Tribune Books, November 9, 1941, p.5. Shirer’s rise to pre-eminence among the Herald Tribune’s reviewers of World War Two books will be examined in detail subsequently. The Taylor-Janeway-Snow joint effort may have been the basis for a position paper for the coming Office of Strategic Services (OSS), outlining an American counter- offensive against Italo-German policies and propaganda.

However, this work was mainly ignored in favor of a nearly simultaneously published volume, 欧洲的宠儿 (Norton) dealing with much of the same subject. One of the mystery books of the war, it was credited to “Thomas Reveille,” the alias cover for a refugee European who rejoiced in the real name of Rifat Tirana, an utter unknown, but guessed by some to be an Albanian Communist. Hired in a super-secret job in the Roosevelt pre-war war machine, he ground out this book which was preceded by a foreword by still another of the enthusiastic journalists for war, Raymond Gram Swing, and vociferously hailed by uncritical reviewers in all the choice sources, from Foreign Affairs through the prestigious dailies, as an insightful book into wartime Germany and its occupied regions in Europe. Reviewer after reviewer strained buttons in heaping praise on it, for reasons which will probably never be known. As a war call it had its merits, but as a description of the German economy and that of German-occupied Europe it had no particular virtue that could not be found in the estimates of Marxists and near- Marxists of the stamp of Franz Neumann, Max Werner, Fritz Sternberg and Gunter Reimann. Its message of a shaky and disintegrating economic nightmare prevailing in the Hitler-controlled areas of Europe encouraged the impulsive to think a war would be a sudden success if undertaken soon under American auspices. Its failure to indicate what really was going on, and that those anxious for martial endeavor in America faced a tough and resourceful enemy who was about to take on the whole world for another four destructive and bloody years, performed a mean chore utterly antagonistic to American interests. It fattened the illusions of eager interventionists into thinking they were facing a puff-ball which would pop in a few months, while concealing the real world, setting up the wrecking of Europe and the killing of many millions, and guaranteeing Stalinist Communism for tens of millions of others.

There were a few voices of complaint about its shortcomings but they were buried in scholarly works of limited circulation. Hailed by left-liberals, e.g., Swing in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1941, by Joseph Barnes in the New York Herald Tribune Books for August 31,1941, p.3, and described in Foreign Affairs (January, 1942, p.377) by Woolbert as “one of the most competent books to appear since the war began,” it even panicked the normally skeptical William Henry Chamberlin, who declared that it was “extremely impressive because so well documented.” This raised some eyebrows in Academe, and set some wondering what book Chamberlin was talking about, since the European history specialist E.C. Helmreich (in the American Political Science Review for December, 1941, p. 1177) had panned “Reveille” severely for his extremely weak documentation. Complained Helmreich, “there are virtually no footnotes,” so that it was impossible to trace his quotations. Another Central European specialist, M.W. Fodor, pointed out serious weaknesses of The Spoil of Europe in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (January, 1942), p.178.

[195] For brief comments on the above volumes see Foreign Affairs (January, 1942), p.386; (October, 1942), p.785. Hauser’s book was the only one with general distribution. The others had influence mostly in the academic community. Another contribution in 1941 to the pro-Red literature on the Far East by Miss Wales (Mrs. Snow) was Kim San: The Life Story of a Korean Rebel (John Day), an edited collation which by and large failed to endear itself to reviewers. Rodney Gilbert in the New York Herald Tribune Books (November 16, 1941, p. 4) was repelled by the portrait which emerged, and which presumably entranced Miss Wales. The book’s subject came across to Gilbert as “a daft, conceited, murderous little prig.” Such sterling “anti-fascist revolutionaries” of Korean stamp were a little while in becoming celebrities among Americans of “advanced social consciousness.”

[196] Time (December 15, 1941, p. 74

[197] Time (December 15, 1941), p.38.

[198] Associated Press report, in Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph, December 16, 1941, p.10.

[199] Huxley quoted in Time (December 15, 1941), p. 53. The Pro-Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. 367

[200] Social Justice (December 22,1941), p.4. Rev. Coughlin seemed to be echoing a view expressed by an almost polar political opposite, the novelist Erskine Caldwell, a short time before. Caldwell, with his wife, Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer famous for her “proletarian” portraits (especially the very worst she could find in the rural U.S. South, 你看过他们的脸), had spent from May 1 to October 1 in Moscow, and had returned to the U.S. via Siberia just before the Pearl Harbor incident. Speaking to an interviewer in Spokane, Washington on December 1, Caldwell declared, “Russia-not England or the United States-will win the war in the end.” And he added as a closing caution, “If the Allied countries try to cheat Russia, they’re going to regret it.” Associated Press report, Colorado Springs Gazette, December 1,1941, p. l, and December 3, 1941, p.4.

[201] Time (December 29, 1941), pp.23-24.

[202] Quotations from publisher’s advertisement, New York Herald Tribune Books, January 4, 1942, p. 8. The heavy space and attention given to Davies’ book in this paper, endlessly referred to by Time as “the arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune,” may have puzzled some who might have identified such an appellation as an indication of powerful conservative leanings. What such persons needed was an education on the people who dominated the paper’s book review pages, whose pro-Soviet special pleading already was substantial, and which was to accelerate at an impressive rate for the duration of the war.

[203] New York Herald Tribune Books, January 4, 1942, p. l.

[204] Saturday Review of Literature (January 10, 1942, p.5.

[205] New Masses (January 13, 1942), pp.20-22.

[206] Davies’ book was just as fiercely acclaimed among the affluent circles connected with Eastern capital as it was by the USCP, however. It drew enthusiastic approval and top billing in the April, 1942 issue of Foreign Affairs (p. 571) as well.

[207] Wolfe’s review was titled “No Radish,” apparently intended to be complimentary to Davies and a testament to his sincere pro-Stalinism; the term “radish” had long applied to persons with superficial affection for Stalin but fundamentally opposed to him secretly (“red outside, white inside.”) A similar cognomen, “beefsteak Nazis,” had for years been applied to the legion of Marxists who voted against Hitler, 1930-1933, and then joined National Socialist organizations thereafter (“brown outside, red inside.”)

[208] There is no study of the voluminous literature by Poles in the 1919-1939 interim not only predicting but welcoming a war not only with Russia but with Germany, and confidently forecasting victory over both and a substantial enlargement of the geographical scope of the Polish state which would follow such victory.

[209] Chamberlin review in New York Times Book Review (January 4, 1942), pp. to 15. The Times reported January 22 that a fifth printing, bringing the total of copies to 54,000 had already taken place.

[210] Marshall review in Nation (January 31, 1942), p. 118. The Nation editors had already objected to the publisher’s use in their advertisement of what appeared to be a testimonial from President Roosevelt for the book but which actually was a part of a letter FDR had written to Davies in 1940 when the latter had resigned as a special assistant to the State Department. Nation (January 24,1942), p.93. Simon and Schuster were not dismayed by this; in a display advertisement at the end of March, 1942 they featured prominently a tribute from Soviet Ambassador Litvinov. New York Times Book Review (March 29,1942), p.12.

[211] Davies had hardly evacuated the political arena. In a profile in the U.S. News at the moment his book was selling in avalanche fashion (January 30, 1942, p.38), it was revealed, “Joseph E. Davies, whose dispatches written while he was U.S. Ambassador to Russia now are a best Seller, spends most of his time around the State Department these days.” It went on to say, “He is working on problems of war refugees in many corners of the world.” Nearly forty-five years after the precipitation of the German-Soviet war…. millionaires have become quite common in the U.S.A. and the influence of a very large number of them is minimal if perceptible. But in 1941 this was anything but the case, and the impact of American millionaires in mass communication and in the diplomatic and opinion-influencing circles, especially about public affairs and foreign relations, was pronounced and most often conclusive. When we talk of 1941 we talk of a time when many millions in the U.S.A. had no job at all, and when millions of others worked for $700-$900 a year at pay which ranged between 30 cents and 45 cents an hour. To be recognized as a millionaire in an economic climate such as this must be obvious to even the mentally arrested as enjoying a special status difficult to describe, and capable of having an impact on the total community of vast scope. One should keep this in mind while assaying the dimensions of this study.

(从重新发布 JHR, Fall 1985, pp. 261-368 经作者或代表的许可)
 
•标签: 第二次世界大战 
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