Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  Notably, the trashing of FDR was not permanent: once the president joined sides with Joseph Stalin to fight the Nazis, he was the toast of American Communists. CPUSA twisted and turned based on instructions from the Comintern.

  In addition, the shabby treatment of FDR included slashing from inside as well as outside: covert Communist operatives sought to penetrate the Roosevelt administration at the same time that their comrades were attacking the new president and his policies in their protests and publications.

  And then there was the peculiar relationship between the president and hardened Communist Party operatives like Earl Browder.

  In short, the matter of Communists and the Roosevelt administration is a multifaceted one.

  The 1932 Presidential Campaign

  One might think that in the 1932 election, American Communists would see the decidedly left-leaning Franklin Roosevelt as the lesser of two evils, surely preferable to Republican Herbert Hoover.1 That was not the case. CPUSA and many of its members began attacking FDR months before a single American cast a ballot.

  The extent of the Communist assault on Roosevelt in 1932 is evident in multiple files from the Soviet Comintern archives on CPUSA.2 CPUSA seemed proud of its efforts aimed at then–New York governor Roosevelt, eagerly reporting its successes to the comrades at the Comintern. Of course, the reporting to the Comintern was the secretive component of the effort. The shots at FDR, in contrast, were done quite openly.

  This was particularly clear in an August 6, 1932, press release distributed by CPUSA, which alerted journalists to a coming damning series of articles on the major party presidential candidates: FDR, Hoover, and even Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas, who was too far to the right for CPUSA's tastes. The first of the articles, the press release announced, would focus on FDR. It would be no less than a five-thousand-word treatise that, CPUSA helpfully offered, newspapers could choose to run as a single article or in several installments.3

  Circulated by CPUSA's Information Bureau, the press release was sent to America's newspapers, large and small. It stated:

  WATCH FOR THIS SERIES OF ARTICLES!!!

  To the Editor: We shall shortly release for publication in your paper a series of articles disclosing the inner machinery of the three political parties of the ruling classes, Republican, Democrat, and Socialist.

  The first of the series will be on Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. The article will be about 5,000 words in length and can be published in 5 separate installments or in one printing, if you are a weekly.

  The articles will contain material previously unpublished, factual in nature, and will be of great interest to your readers. The chapters in the Roosevelt series will be titled:

  1. Who is Roosevelt?

  2. Roosevelt as Imperialist

  3. Roosevelt and Tammany

  4. Roosevelt and the Power Companies

  5. Roosevelt and Labor

  —Information Bureau

  In answer to the first question—who is Roosevelt?—CPUSA had the answer in short order: He was a corrupt imperialist from Tammany Hall, in bed with the “Power Companies.” He didn't give a damn about the little guy. He was a Wall Street kingpin in the pocket of Big Business.

  The guys and gals at CPUSA crafted a little “Campaign Song” for the 1932 presidential race, one that continued the attack.4 It went like this:

  Tweedle dee, tweedle dum, tweedle doodle

  Elephant, donkey, and poodle

  Hoover, Roosevelt, Thomas

  Whatever you want they'll promise

  Prosperity, bunk, and booze,

  Heads they win, tails we lose

  Tweedle dee, tweedle dum, tweedle doodle

  Elephant, donkey, and poodle

  The fakers are playing the same old game,

  The difference is only in the name

  But workers’ and farmers’ Communist votes

  Will prove that they are tired of being the goats

  Whether Franklin Roosevelt was the bunker or boozer is not completely clear, but he was no doubt deemed a faker.

  Assailing FDR and the New Deal

  Roosevelt was elected president in a landslide in November 1932. To liberals and traditional Democrats everywhere, he was more than just a new face at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was a kind of political savior at the most desperate time in their lives. It was the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in American history, marked by saw soup lines, dust bowls, closed shops, bank panics, skyrocketing unemployment (the rate reached an unprecedented 25 percent), and plummeting national morale. So for countless Americans—not only Democrats—Roosevelt's emergence was a lifeline.

  But that was not how American Communists saw it. They wasted no time assailing the new president and his New Deal.

  FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. Less than two months later, the Communists seized the opportunity to denounce the new president as a fascist. Yes, a fascist— and at a time when the world was hardly ignorant of fascism. This was no small charge.

  Communists routinely—and loudly—employed this obviously unjustified, over-the-top language throughout their literature at the time. Once again, CPUSA proudly shipped copies of such vulgar nonsense to the Comintern, as if to brag to the masters in Moscow that the good comrades on the American front were doing their best to undermine the new U.S. “regime.” The examples that follow are drawn exclusively from the Comintern archive, and are a mere sliver of what is available in those files. CPUSA was so prolific in its demonization of FDR that an entire book would be needed to lay out all the exhibits.

  May Day, which was also International Workers Day, was a major event for the Communists. CPUSA used this day to carry out its anti-FDR campaign on many fronts, not only on the streets of New York or San Francisco—the usual suspects—but also in smaller towns in the Heartland. For example, the Communists scheduled a May Day event at the courthouse in Terre Haute, Indiana. The flier promoting the occasion (see page 114) proclaimed to workers and farmers that this May Day would be “an inspiration for a UNITED FRONT of all impoverished masses against the Hunger, Forced Labor, Terror and War Government of the Roosevelt McNutt Dictatorship.” (Paul McNutt was the Democratic governor of Indiana.)

  FDR had been in power for less than two months, but somehow it was clear to Communist Americans that he was pursuing a terrorist dictatorship seeking war and forced labor. What was more, the flier announced, Roosevelt was deploying “the humiliating tactics of relief agencies.” FDR, it seemed, was not seeking relief for the downtrodden suffering under the Great Depression; he was out to humiliate them.

  The Roosevelt administration would have been amazed that it was being so harshly criticized for such good intentions, and so rapidly into the presidency. Strangely, too, its method—an unprecedented expansion of central government—was the kind of thing that Communists usually would hail. No presidential administration had ever moved so far to the left, and so quickly, but it was not enough for the comrades.

  In the next line in the Terre Haute flier, the Communists squeezed in a short reminder of the tragic case of the Scottsboro Boys. In 1931 a group of African-American teenagers were wrongly accused of gang raping two white girls, and nearly lynched. After the boys were convicted by all-white juries and sentenced to death, the American Communists vigorously exploited this miscarriage of justice. To the Communists, the alarming case not only indicated that America was racist (in contrast to the USSR) but was even related to the new Democratic administration in Washington. The Terre Haute flier included this line: “DEMAND The release of the 9 Scottsboro Negro Boys, Victims of vicious frame-up and an out-standing example of hatred of master for slave, intensified by the lingering smell of the Slave market and Auction Block.” Somehow the Scottsboro boys were linked to the new policy of “Forced Labor” (mentioned twice in the flier) and the “Auction Block” of FDR's new America.5

  The Communists led May Day celebrations all across America, from Terre Haute to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsy
lvania, to Rockford, Illinois, from St. Louis to Philadelphia to Chicago. Newspaper ads promoting the events took the opportunity to bludgeon the new Democratic administration.

  One ad, plugging a May 1 workers’ “celebration” at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in San Francisco, insisted that “Roosevelt's ‘New Deal’ far from bringing relief to Labor, has turned out to be a program which includes forced labor for the unemployed at a wage scale of $1.00 a day.” Listing a host of FDR's alleged economic crimes, the ad claimed that Roosevelt's policies had only “reduc[ed] our real wages yet farther.”6 (See page 116.)

  But this Democratic Party reptile was not only seeking “forced labor,” the comrades assured. He and his “capitalist class” were “preparing to plunge us into a new WORLD WAR.” It was Woodrow Wilson all over again—only worse.

  According to the Communist ad, these capitalists were conspiring “hand in hand with this brutal program of hunger and war”—that is, FDR's New Deal. The real “danger” was that America would launch a merciless attack on, of all places, the Soviet Union.

  This is stunning to read today. CPUSA was portraying FDR—who had been president for only a matter of weeks—as a warmonger bent on wreaking havoc on the poor USSR. The claims were nothing short of ridiculous. Keep in mind, this was 1933, more than eight years before the United States was compelled to enter the Second World War after being attacked by Imperial Japan. And when the United States did finally enter the fight, it did not attack the Soviet Union; the two countries were part of an alliance against the Axis powers.

  The Communists’ May Day ad then likened FDR's vicious America to Hitler's fascist Germany by invoking the supposedly harsh American tactics against striking “pea pickers” in California. For good measure the Communists threw in a reference to the Scottsboro case.

  The message was clear: America was speeding toward fascism, with a nefarious capitalist ruling class that was targeting the Soviet Union. By the reckoning of the Reds, the United States of 1933 was a diabolical place—very unlike Stalin's Russia (where the Great Purge was getting under way). The ad closed: “Comrades, Brothers: Let us unite our ranks for a fight to the finish against this horrible system which has doomed over half of our class to conditions of semi-starvation, which is sapping the very life of Labor!”

  And who found themselves among the “comrades” and “brothers” united in the “ranks”? The dupes.

  Among the more than seventy endorsing groups, unions, and civics clubs listed at the bottom half of the ad, a few were predictable: the Communist Party, the John Reed Club, the Young Communist League, not to mention Corliss Lamont's Friends of the Soviet Union. But many more “comrades” and “brothers” were rather benign organizations, certainly non-Communist. The Asbestos Workers, No. 6; Painters, No. 19; Plumbers Local, No. 442; Roofers Local, No. 40; Millwrights, No. 766; the Lettish Society—these and other groups had been duped. They innocently thought they were joining some friends likewise concerned about wages and the Great Depression. But their “friends,” they discovered when this ad ran, had other motives, based on loyalties far away.

  The roofers and painters and Lettish Society would be more careful next time around. Their antennae would be raised for the next May Day. By then, however, the Communists would have a whole new gathering of suckers to sign on as fellow endorsers.

  “Headlong Towards Fascism”

  In that advertisement for the San Francisco rally can be seen the template for fliers and ads the Communists distributed around America for May Day 1933. In promotional material for a demonstration in Chicago's Union Park, Communists decried “the Roosevelt forced labor camps” (this at a time when real forced labor camps existed in the Soviet Union). The Union Park rally spelled out FDR's alleged warmongering: “Billions of dollars are being spent for war. Yet our relief is out.”

  It didn't matter that there was not a kernel of truth to these claims; these were the kind of irresponsible falsehoods spun by CPUSA offices. An ad announcing a May Day event in St. Louis was similarly irresponsible, calling FDR a “fascist dictator.”

  Yet another ad, this one promoting a May Day parade and mass meeting in Minneapolis, was as transparent as it was brutal. (See page 119.) Under the giant heading “DEMONSTRATE Against HUNGER, FASCISM, WAR,” the ad accused the New Deal of seeking “a total abolition of the workers’ right to strike,” of having “viciously attacked” unions, and of developing “the biggest war construction program ever known in the United States.” “ALL THIS WAS DONE,” screamed the flier, “AS THE CAPITALIST WAY OUT OF THE CRISIS. ALL THIS SHOWS HOW THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT IS MOVING HEADLONG TOWARDS FASCISM AND WAR.”

  The ad ended with this final demand by “the workers of Minneapolis”: “For the Defense of the Soviet Union and Soviet China.”7

  To the Communists, Roosevelt was so unlike their iconic leader, Lenin. It was a comparison they made continually, well beyond May Day 1933. Throughout America in January 1934, the comrades held “Lenin Memorial Meetings” to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of their beloved leader. As one flier declared, it had been Lenin alone, “the greatest leader,” who showed “the only road to freedom,” not only for workers but also for the racially oppressed, especially blacks in the segregated South. (See page 120.) FDR was a grim departure from Lenin, given the “whole Roosevelt program of preparation for fascism and war.” That program did not “set aside one cent for unemployment insurance”; rather, it spent “billions” for “battleships, war planes and munitions for a war in which we will be asked to shoot down workers so Wall Street can make more profits.”8

  Working Women of the World, Unite!

  Aside from fliers and meetings and memorials, the Communists kept up the propaganda campaign against FDR in their publications. One such publication prominent in the Comintern's holdings was The Working Woman, which billed itself as the “magazine for working women, farm women, and working class housewives.” CPUSA pushed to make The Working Woman its leading American publication for women. Its writers took special aim at women in the Roosevelt administration, and particularly Mrs. Roosevelt, who was not left-leaning enough for CPUSA.

  A case in point was the January 30, 1934, issue, copies of which CPUSA dutifully sent to the Comintern. The lead story, titled “Mrs. Roosevelt's ‘Sweet’ Promises,” mocked Eleanor Roosevelt's “boasted relief” as phony “sweet charity,” a series of broken promises.9 It slammed two New Deal projects, one at Bear Mountain, New York, and another in Morgantown, West Virginia, as mere “publicity stunt[s] for the Roosevelts.” The article, by reporter Sadie Van Veen, even zinged highly friendly voices from the administration, like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins10 and top FDR adviser Harry Hopkins, who, said Van Veen, joined Eleanor and the rest of the Roosevelt crew in a display of “contemptible hypocrisy.”

  The Working Woman followed that story with such touching female-friendly pieces as an update on the health of the aged mother of Comintern general secretary Georgi Dimitroff and a glowing review of Clara Zetkin's Reminiscences of Lenin, including praise for the late despot's “warm smile,” “keen joy” for workers, “clear thinking,” and “masterly eloquence.”

  The magazine also included a preview of International Women's Day on March 8, 1934, a day that Comrade Lenin and the Comintern had established in 1919. This preview, written by The Working Woman’s Anna Damon, blasted the New Deal as the “Raw Deal”—the “new chains of slavery being forged by the ‘liberal’ Roosevelt administration.” The future, said Damon, was not in the “Roosevelt program of hunger and war”; no, she averred, the “Soviet Union shows the way.”

  With Franklin and Eleanor desiring “hunger and war,” was there any American who understood the right model for the United States? Who understood that the New Deal was really the Raw Deal, and that FDR's National Recovery Administration (NRA) was not about recovery but about rip-off?

  The Working Woman did find one source in America who deserved to be commended: Clarence Darrow.


  Darrow, the great atheist lawyer who took on William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes Monkey Trial, had also defended Ben Gitlow and other Communist Party members in a historic case protecting their right to be Communists in America—back during the “fascist” days of Woodrow Wilson. The Communist movement adored Darrow, for his advocacy on behalf of atheism as much as for his defense of Communism. Now he earned praise from The Working Woman for taking on the Roosevelt administration. Darrow chaired a commission that studied the NRA's operation. His resulting report, The Working Woman raved, “tells more truth about the N.R.A. than Miss [Frances] Perkins does. It says what the Communists have been saying from the beginning.”11