Dupes
Page 17
In truth, the American League Against War and Fascism was one of the most notorious and subversive Communist-front organizations. It was organized in New York City from September 29 to October 1, 1933, emerging the same year that Hitler and FDR entered office.2 The group was anti-Hitler, anti-FDR, and pro-Stalin. It cleverly adopted a public platform that stood against Hitler, fascism, and war, perfect for appealing to non-Communist liberals. The Religious Left, in particular, would be prime ground for duping, eagerly supplying speakers and marchers for the league's rallies.
The March 1936 memo carefully emphasized the need to ensure that the message of the Communist Party was expressed at these meetings, even as they were carried out under the name of peace organizations. It was imperative to get out the pro-Soviet message while extending the umbrella of “peace.”
The Central Committee told the comrades to watch their Daily Worker over the next few days, as it would carry a statement from the Central Committee “calling for demonstrations and mass meetings on April 7th.” CPUSA's district organizers did as they were told.
Which Side to Fight For?
There were compelling exceptions to this stance of “peace,” as seen in another remarkable CPUSA document in the Comintern archives, titled “WHAT ARE WE TO DO IN CASE OF WAR?”3 This internal party memo, dated September 9, 1938, conceded that there were “several possibilities in the alignment of states in any coming war”—a war which at that point was exactly one year away. Notably, the document never mentioned the United States, perhaps out of fear that the document might get into the hands of U.S. officials, though it no doubt included America among the “capitalist states” it mentioned.
And therein came a bracing (albeit not surprising) declaration: “If only capitalist (and, therefore, necessarily Imperialist) states are at war,” said the document, “it is obvious that the communist slogan of the proletariat turning their guns against their own bourgeoisie is the only correct one.” And what if the USSR was at war with the capitalist states? The document explained, “If Russia, the Workers’ State, has to defend itself against capitalist aggression, this slogan is even more urgently necessary for the workers in the capitalist states.”
In other words, if America, a “capitalist-imperialist” state, went to war with Russia, then American Communists should take up arms against their own “bourgeoisie.” The goal, according to the CPUSA document, was always to establish “a workers’ state in any one of the capitalist countries,” a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat in their respective countries.” The USSR would be the supreme overseer of that state, of that dictatorship.
It was the Revolution first. It was Communism first. It was Russia first. It was never America first, as America's principles and its Constitution were antithetical to those of Soviet Communism and the Bolshevik Revolution.
For decades, anti-Communists openly expressed their fear that American Communists would side with the Soviet Union if it came to blows with the United States. As CPUSA documents such as this one reveal, those fears were hardly misplaced.
The American “Peace” Mobilization
Publicly, CPUSA's message was quite different. The party and its front groups made “peace” the focus of their campaign. That way, the Communist Party could attract a lot of peace-loving, non-Communist liberals to their rallies, at which it promoted Soviet foreign-policy objectives, of course. This push got more intense, and scared up more recruits, as Hitler began his sweep through Europe in the late 1930s.
The most insidious manifestation of this effort was the organization known as the American Peace Mobilization. This group was exposed as a Communist front only later, after World War II, thanks to investigative work by President Truman's attorney general, Tom Clark, and by the House Committee on Un- American Activities. The House committee would dub the American Peace Mobilization “one of the most seditious organizations which ever operated in the United States,” “one of the most notorious and blatantly Communist fronts ever organized in this country,” and an “instrument of the Communist Party line.”4 That is precisely correct. The American Peace Mobilization was created in the summer of 1940, after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, to sway American opinion against going to war against Nazi Germany. Because Stalin was (at that point) in a pact with Hitler, the American Peace Mobilization sought to stop America from resisting Nazi Germany or even from aiding Western allies who were desperately defending themselves against Hitler's hellacious assault. Consequently, the American Peace Mobilization protested Lend-Lease, a Roosevelt administration policy to provide U.S. aid to Britain and other embattled allies in their resistance to the Nazi onslaught. The Communist-front organization did this even as British citizens faced Germany's widespread, intentional bombing of noncombatants. The Communists hid behind the high-road claim that they simply favored “peace,” the better to attract genuine peace activists and isolationists.
Of course, the American Peace Mobilization concealed its true intentions at the time. Today, however, we can discover the scope of its ambitions from documents in the Comintern archives—documents not available even to the fine investigators in Attorney General Clark's office or on the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
One such document is an April 2, 1941, memo prepared by Comrade “T. Ryan.”5 Tim Ryan, born Francis Waldron (1905–1961), was a major Comintern operative active in the Communist Party all over the world, from New York to Washington to Manila to Peking. He moved to Moscow in the 1920s, but in 1938 the Comintern sent him back to America to serve as a key player in CPUSA's national leadership, and as a central liaison to the Soviet leadership. Later, in 1946, he would replace Earl Browder—another major Comintern agent/operative—as general secretary of CPUSA.6 Typical of Communist operatives of that era, he went by at least a couple of names: Tim Ryan was his Comintern/Soviet name; in America he went by yet another name, Eugene Dennis.7
Ryan/Dennis prepared his April 2, 1941, memo for Comintern general secretary Georgi Dimitroff. Typed, six pages in length, the document offered a candid, revealing explanation of the purposes and roots of the American Peace Mobilization. (See page 142.) It opened by stating flatly that the American Peace Mobilization “was organised on the initiative of our Party in Chicago in September, 1940 at a national anti-war conference representing approximately 12 million working people,” ranging from “the progressive labor, youth, farm and Negro movements” to “Progressive Protestant church organisations.”8 The American Peace Mobilization was organized, wrote Ryan/Dennis, to oppose “the imperialist character of the war and the policies of the Roosevelt administration,” and to “popularise on a wide scale the need of establishing friendly relations between the USA and the USSR.” To his Soviet superiors, Ryan/Dennis marveled at the party's success in organizing this coalition, especially the ability to attract a “committee of 800 progressive Protestant ministers.”
Ryan/Dennis and his comrades particularly sought out the turn-the-other-cheek Christian Left—innocent, trusting liberals who took up Jesus's mandate that “Blessed are the peacemakers”—at least when working for a cause embraced by the Left. These sheep were delivered into the mouths of wolves.
Christian Dupes
The American Peace Mobilization was agitating and getting headlines almost from the moment it was founded. This is evident in one of the earliest news clips on the group, a very brief October 11, 1940, article in the Washington Post, aptly titled “Peace Group Assails Roosevelt,” where the American Peace Mobilization denounced the “semi-Fascist” character of FDR's appointments to the “entire selective service machinery.”9 This was a strident position—perhaps too aggressive for the front group. Someone within the mobilization stepped up to muzzle the big mouths, reminding them to stay on message: the group's focus was the war/peace issue. (The comrades would generate plenty of other opportunities to call FDR a fascist.)
The group organized another major meeting just two months after the September 1940 Chicago conference that Ryan/Dennis noted in his m
emo. Held in Chicago the weekend of November 9–10, this assembly employed another popular Communist front issue, racial discrimination; it was dubbed the 1st Illinois Conference of the National Negro Congress. The YMCA played the role of sucker, offering its building, on the corner of 38th and Wabash streets, as the host site.10
Listed on the letterhead for the event were national officers for American Peace Mobilization like Max Yergan—a well-known YMCA figure and a Communist11—and John P. Davis, as well as endorsers like Frank Marshall Davis (discussed at length later in this book). The Religious Left was again a major target, with local religious leaders going along for the ride. Especially important were black pastors from the community, such as the Reverend Mary G. Evans, an active pastor who left the African Methodist Episcopal church in the early 1930s to join the Community Church Movement and became pastor of Cosmopolitan Community Church in 1932. Evans was among what has been called the “African Diaspora.”12 Likewise adding their names as endorsers were union representatives such as Henry Roberts, president of the Federation of Hotel Waiters, No. 356; John J. Ryan, an organizer for the Transport Workers Union; and Peter Davis of the PWOC (Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee) division of the CIO.
The fliers for the November 9–10, 1940, event at the Wabash YMCA protested, “Negroes and the whole American population are being called upon to ‘sacrifice for national defense.’” Black Americans, the conference organizers urged, should not send their money, their bodies, or their bonds to support this “wave of war hysteria” by FDR and his cronies. They should not be “bludgeoned into situations against their best interest.” The powers-that-be in Washington were pining for “another war,” contrary to the interests and well-being of the poor masses.
The Communists’ argument that young black men were being prepared to die in an unjust war perpetrated by white politicians would be rehearsed again and again in the decades to come. For example, liberal African-American leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Congressman Charles Rangel (NY-Democrat) would protest the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War making almost precisely the same case. CPUSA and its front group honed this tactic as early as 1940.
The number of Religious Left figures involved in the Communist-initiated American Peace Mobilization was remarkable. Some were open Communists, some closet communists, some non-Communist liberals, some dupes. Amid the grand schemers who were doing the duping was a much larger group of victims from across multiple denominations. Particularly vulnerable were folks from the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Quakers, and especially the Episcopal Church.
The American Peace Mobilization seemed to draw more individuals from the Episcopalian denomination than any other. In March 1958 a team of researchers led by J. B. Matthews, the ex-Communist who became one of America's foremost experts on the movement, and Archibald Roosevelt, the son of President Theodore Roosevelt, released a report on Episcopalian “rectors” who were active participants in the mobilization. The report identified many participants, including Frank Ban-croft, Richard T. S. Brown, Eliot White, Charles Coker Wilson, and the vigorously active Walter Mitchell. Mitchell, the bishop of Arizona, was prominent in Communist organs like the Daily Worker, the Chicago Star, and Daily People's World. His name appeared in such publications upwards of thirty times in this period, including twice early in 1941 for his work for the American Peace Mobilization.13
The American Peace Mobilization got much press at the time. And while those clips are today conveniently forgotten, especially among the people in the pews at the mainline Protestant denominations, they are alive and well in the Soviet Comintern files on CPUSA. CPUSA had incredible success recruiting these dupes, and proudly sent details of this successful campaign to its masters at the Comintern.
Duping the Press: The New York Times’s “Group of Clergymen”
The comrades in the “peace” mobilization also generated their share of dupes among reporters. The New York Times was particularly susceptible.
On January 10, 1941, the Times ran an article deceptively titled “Clergymen Group Charges War Aim.”14 The piece discussed a letter sent to FDR by a “group of clergymen” representing “religious denominations” throughout the country. This purported peace epistle claimed that the president's foreign policy “will inevitably lead to war and the destruction of democracy.” The “clergymen,” reported the Times, had asked the president “to put an end to what we deem is an aggressive, militant foreign policy.” Prompted by their closet comrades, they argued that Roosevelt's policies were “aggressive” and “militant,” and in fact constituted an “unjust war.”
Of course, this argument was preposterous. Pearl Harbor was nearly a year away when the clergymen sent their letter to FDR. The “militant” policies they decried were nothing more than aid to Britain. The Communists must have been amazed that this unbelievable position could attract the support of “progressive” clergy—as well as serious attention by the nation's top newspaper. The Times went so far as to publish the entire text of the “peace” mobilization's “appeal.” Meanwhile, the word “communism” or “communist” was not found in the Times’s article. The Gray Lady was completely duped.
Two weeks later, a much smarter Washington Post did a piece on the American Peace Mobilization, with special focus on whether it was a Communist front. The Post reporter, Edward T. Folliard, noted that among the sixteen sponsors of a recent “working conference for peace” run by the mobilization, there were “several well-known Communists or Communist sympathizers.”15
Had this article run in, say, 1955, liberals in Washington might have denounced the Post reporter as a McCarthyite Red-baiter—a loathsome anti-Communist. But that phenomenon was down the road. For now, it was 1941, well before the Left dismissed every claim of Communist infiltration. A world war was on the horizon.
Though the Post’s Folliard did good work, he missed the elephant in the room. The main source he quoted was American Peace Mobilization executive secretary Fred V. Field, described in the article as “a bespectacled young man with a Harvard accent,” who cheerfully laughed off charges of Communist infiltration. Folliard did not mention that Field's middle initial, “V.,” stood for “Vanderbilt,” as Field's grandmother was a member of the fabulously wealthy Vanderbilt dynasty.16 More importantly, the Post story did not point out that this millionaire Ivy Leaguer was himself a devout Communist, and quite the rabble-rouser.
Field was a contributor to the New Masses and Daily Worker, and founder of the subversive publication Amerasia. Worst of all, he had been executive secretary of the odious American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR).
IPR was an international group, a sort of think tank, with affiliates in ten countries. It had many members and contacts within the U.S. government, in addition to American colleges, newspapers, and foundations. IPR was arguably one of the most destructive entities of the entire 1940s, causing enormous damage in Asia and China in particular, actively working for the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek's government and its replacement with Mao Tse-tung and the Red Chinese. IPR's officers, contributors, and members included some of the worst spies, subversives, dupes, and questionable characters of the entire Cold War, including the infamous Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, Laurence Duggan, Owen Lattimore, and Alger Hiss—plus, naturally, Corliss Lamont.17 As the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Committee on Un-American Activities would later affirm, “Members of the small core of officials and staff members who controlled IPR were either Communist or pro-Communist,” and both CPUSA and Soviet officials considered IPR “an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda and military intelligence.”18
In 1940 Fred Field had resigned as executive secretary at IPR in order to assume leadership of the American Peace Mobilization. But he helped keep IPR afloat with his own money—that is, Vanderbilt money—and would return to the organization after the American Peace Mobilization had done its work. More accurately, he would return to IPR after the mobilization fi
nished flip-flopping on “peace,” based on whether Stalin was allied with or against Hitler.19
So when the Post did its January 1941 article on the American Peace Mobilization, Fred Field was a closet Communist, although his sympathies were hardly a secret. Eventually he would openly admit that he was a Communist. He made that admission only well after Lauchlin Currie and Owen Lattimore nearly succeeded in placing the zealous Moscow apparatchik in a major job with U.S. military intelligence, which would have made Field a top Soviet agent.20
The Washington Post reported none of this on Fred Field. Nonetheless, Folliard had begun the digging on the American Peace Mobilization. This reporter, in particular, was now on guard, and a few months later he would do another article exploring whether the group was a Communist front.21
The same cannot be said for the New York Times.22
“Let Our Foreign Policy Wage Peace!”
With only mild scrutiny coming from the press, the American Peace Mobilization pulled off some impressive public displays from early April to late June 1941. In New York City it engineered several demonstrations and one large rally, and in Washington it staged demonstrations at the Capitol and picketed the White House.
In advance of a major demonstration in New York City held April 5–6, 1941, the mobilization sent out a formal statement addressed “To all Friends of Peace and Liberty.” (See page 148.) The statement warned “fellow Americans” that they were in great danger. Americans, it seemed, were being duped—not by Communists but by the villainous FDR.