Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  For blowing the whistle, Gitlow earned the enmity of the Comintern and its American hacks. In an October 1939 confidential memo to the Executive Committee of the Comintern, Pat Toohey, CPUSA's representative in Moscow, wrote a summary of Gitlow's congressional testimony and denounced Gitlow to his Soviet comrades as a “stool-pigeon and provocateur.”28 (See page 241.)

  Toohey concluded his report by reassuring his bosses in Moscow that Gitlow's revelations would do little to harm the international Communist propaganda effort. He pointed out that “the anti-Soviet and reactionary forces” were trying to use testimony such as Gitlow's “as a shield behind which they are striving to draw the USA into the imperialist war.” But, Toohey said confidently, “The ranks of the Party are apparently holding firm.… The membership is responding fine. With the exception of three desertions (two writers, one lower trade union functionary) the enemies of the Party can find no members to denounce the Party.”

  Of course, the Communists needed more than the party to hold firm; they also needed their dupes to continue naïvely supporting the Marxist-Leninist cause.

  A Tutorial from Professor Schlesinger

  Once again, however, it must be stressed that not all liberals were duped by the Communists. And among Cold War liberals, few did better early work warning their brethren about Soviet Communism than Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the later John F. Kennedy/“Camelot” court composer, longtime Harvard professor, partisan Democrat, liberal's liberal, and son of the esteemed—and earlier mentioned—Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.

  Early in the Truman years, the junior Schlesinger endeavored to educate those who disputed the fact that Lenin and Stalin saw the United States, as leader of the capitalist world, as unappeasably hostile—as a country with which conflict was inevitable. In his writing, the professor instructed Americans that this Leninist logic had always prevailed among the Soviets, and would continue to do so into the postwar world, regardless of what America's president did or failed to do. In fact, according to Schlesinger, nothing the United States could have done in 1944–45 in particular “would have abolished this mistrust, required and sanctified as it was by Marxist gospel—nothing short of the conversion of the United States into a Stalinist despotism.”29

  Schlesinger's most trenchant, widely read admonition to this effect was his excellent July 1946 piece for Life magazine.30 At that point, he was in his first year as an associate professor of history at Harvard.

  “For better or for worse,” the article began, “the Communist Party of the U.S. is here to stay.” CPUSA, Schlesinger said, pointing to its headquarters on Twelfth Street in New York City, “controls an active and disciplined following through the country.… Communists are working overtime to expand party influence.”

  To describe this unique threat, the professor used religious metaphors, as he commonly did in his writings on the USSR.31 The party's appeal, he said, “is essentially the appeal of a religious sect—small, persecuted, dedicated, stubbornly convinced that it alone knows the path to salvation.” To understand the Communists, he explained, one must think of them in terms “not of a normal political party, but in terms of the Jesuits, the Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses.”

  Once the Communist was fully committed, his “world becomes totally the world of the party.” Baptized into the faith, Communists voluntarily cut off nonparty friendships and activities. One CPUSA acolyte quoted by Schlesinger, explaining why he made the party the beneficiary of his insurance policy, said, “The reason I did that was, in the first place, I am not married and have nobody to leave anything like that to, and in the second place the Communist Party is more in the world to me than anything else.” This total assimilation of the individual to the party, said Schlesinger, brings “consecration.” Like members of a “religious order,” CPUSA members “become so involved socially and psychologically that the threat of expulsion strikes them as excommunication would a devout Catholic. It is enough to keep them in line long after they begin to develop intellectual doubts about the infallibility of Russia.”

  The professor also wrote that members of the Communist Party in America served as “the unquestioning servants of the Soviet Union.” CPUSA, Schlesinger noted, was for a long time billed as the American section of the Communist International, and he pointed out that it “has always received directives and in the past some funds from the U.S.S.R. via courier.”

  Schlesinger's arguments were entirely correct, but it was stunning to see such claims coming from a liberal Harvard professor in perhaps America's leading mainstream news magazine, Life. The allegation that CPUSA received not only marching orders from the USSR but also money—100 percent accurate, as we now know—was the kind of charge that many liberals ascribed to reactionary right-wingers, to “dumb” anti-Communists. In fact, Schlesinger was showing himself to be very well-informed, down to the details.

  The party's activities, the professor contended, “will be turned on and off as the interests of an external power dictate.” Schlesinger wrote that American Communists’ goals were Moscow's goals: “In its own eyes the party has two main commitments: to support and advance the U.S.S.R., and to promote the establishment of socialism in the U.S. The second is necessarily subordinate to the first because Communists regard the preservation of the workers’ state in Russia as indispensable to the spread of socialism through the world.”

  From the start, wrote Schlesinger, the party's operations were “conspiratorial, its activities largely clandestine.” The Harvard professor added that the Communist Party felt “justified in using any methods to advance the cause.” Here Schlesinger noted that the testimony of Harold Laski was especially telling, “since Communists can hardly write him off as a red-baiter or reactionary.” Quite right: recall that Laski was one of those “liberal” academics listed with the senior Schlesinger in the 1920 Communist Party document cited in Chapter 3. Laski said: “The Communist parties outside Russia act without moral scruples, intrigue without any sense of shame, are utterly careless of truth, sacrifice without any hesitation.… The result is a corruption, both of the mind and of the heart, which is alike contemptuous of reason and careless of truth.” These Communists, said Schlesinger, would substitute “any external standard for the truth.” Indeed, they were sneaky liars: “The Communists spread their infection of intrigue and deceit wherever they go.”

  Schlesinger noted that the party worked through both secret members and fellow travelers, and that underground cells operating under party direction had become active in Washington in the 1930s. The professor then dropped a bombshell: some of these surreptitious party members “name several congressmen as reliable from the party point of view.” More so, he added, “well-known Communist sympathizers are on the staffs of some senators and congressional committees.”

  This was quite a charge, at multiple levels. The liberal Ivy League historian's (accurate) portrayal of Communist penetration in Washington was precisely what the much-vilified Senator Joe McCarthy later alleged.

  “The great present field of Communist penetration is the trade unions,” added Schlesinger. The party had made “particular headway” among Hollywood intellectuals, “who find in the new faith a means of resolving their own frustration and guilt.” “Second only to the unions,” he added, “is the drive to organize the Negroes,” with CPUSA busy “sinking tentacles into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.”

  Professor Schlesinger identified another Communist objective: the party sought to infiltrate “groups of liberals organized for some benevolent purpose, and because of the innocence, laziness and stupidity of most of the membership, perfectly designed for control by an alert minority.”

  These liberals were, of course, the dupes. In Schlesinger's description, they were not only naïve but also “lazy” and “stupid.”

  As that characterization suggests, Schlesinger was deeply troubled by what Communists were doing to unsuspecting dupes among his fellow liberals. He warned th
at it was to the American Left that Communism presented “the most serious danger.” The methods of American Communists “are irreconcilable with honest cooperation, as anyone who has tried to work with them has found out the hard way. Communists have succeeded in hiding their true face from American liberals.” These covert Red troops were engaged in a “massive attack on the moral fabric of the American left.”

  Dr. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. got it right. Unfortunately, many of his colleagues in the academy, and in the broader American Left, failed to heed his warnings. In the coming years, in fact, they would dismiss or attack anyone who made such claims. The Communists, therefore, continued to make victims of American liberals. The duping went on.

  Duped No More: Paul H. Douglas Gets Religion

  Another professor and partisan liberal Democrat who refused to be duped in this period was Paul H. Douglas. He, too, had been listed in that 1920 letter targeting “liberal” professors, along with the senior Schlesinger and Harold Laski.

  By the time the Cold War started, it had been twenty years since Douglas made his Potemkin Progressive tour of the Soviet Motherland in July 1927. Of all those progressives who had been enchanted during that Soviet tour and their six-hour wine-and-dine session with Stalin, Douglas was perhaps the most ambivalent. His initial impressions were not those of a Corliss Lamont. And in the intervening years, he had headed more in the direction of William Bullitt and John Dewey.

  What happened?

  At first Douglas actually headed farther to the left. His experience in academia, as a professor at the University of Chicago, radicalized him. By 1932, five years after his sojourn to the Soviet Union, Douglas had found even FDR too conservative for his tastes. He cast his presidential ballot that year for the Socialist Party candidate, Norman Thomas.

  Slowly but surely, though, Douglas gravitated to Roosevelt and the New Deal. As he moved closer to the center (though he would always be on the left), he found reasons to question the esteem in which FDR and other liberals held Stalin. (His wife, Dorothy Wolff, remained to the far left; the couple ended up divorcing.)32 Douglas was becoming an anti-Communist liberal Democrat, much like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

  The experience of combat seems to have jolted Douglas. In 1942 the fifty-year-old academic came out from behind his desk and enlisted in the Marines as a private, eager to serve his country in World War II. The professor became a war hero, twice earning the Purple Heart in the Pacific theater, including at the Battle of Okinawa. The labor economist was shot and grazed by shrapnel as he carried a flamethrower to the frontlines and uncovered and ignited Japanese enemy caves.

  Douglas survived to emerge a staunch defender of America in the global war that followed the fight against Nazism: the Cold War. By 1947, he was an advocate of President Truman's containment policy, to the point that in 1950 he supported American military intervention in the Korean Peninsula to halt the spread of Communism in Asia. He was deeply concerned with the fall of China to Mao in 1949 and now even second-guessed U.S. recognition of the USSR, which he and his progressive comrades had lobbied for two decades earlier.

  By 1948, Dr. Douglas set aside his lecture notes and made a bid for the U.S. Senate, running as a Democrat in the state of Illinois. He won. He was sworn into office in January 1949, with his new wife, Emily Taft Douglas—a soul mate of more sensible politics—at his side.

  America would soon hear much more from Paul H. Douglas. This was a very different man from the one who had traversed Potemkin villages in 1927. Here was a liberal who desired to be duped no more.

  Misplaced Loyalties

  The Cold War was in full force. While liberals’ loyalties lay with their president, Communists’ loyalties lay with their dictator. Thus America's Communists saw no choice but to undermine Harry Truman; after all, the Democratic president was trying to counter the Soviet Union—their true motherland.

  Truman's case offers this book's repeated reminder: To this day, many liberals do not understand that Communists were not their friends. The Communists used them, and viewed them as gullible, even stupid, and often deserving of contempt for their naïveté—a level of naïveté that never ceased to amaze the KGB.

  In short order, America's comrades, with the handy enlistment of their dupes, would be taking to the streets and their typewriters to take down Harry Truman. Among them was a fellow named Frank Marshall Davis.

  13

  DREAMS FROM FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS

  By 1949 the Cold War was raging, as Joseph Stalin's broken promises at Yalta fell like dominoes throughout Eastern Europe. It was obvious to any reasonable American, Democrat or Republican, that the Soviets had started the Cold War. But the Communists did diligent propaganda work blaming America, and hoping to win dupes to their side. They flawlessly followed the pattern described by the KGB's General Pacepa.

  An excellent illustration of this process was Frank Marshall Davis, who in 1949 began writing a regular column—“Frankly Speaking”—for the Communist organ of Hawaii, the Honolulu Record. Raised in Kansas and Chicago, Davis moved to Hawaii in the late 1940s. He is a fascinating case to consider, given that his success depended on dupes. Even today he can count on dupes to cover for him, to ridicule his anti-Communist detractors as the equivalent of UFO conspiracy nuts, because he had a profound effect on the American politician who represents the hopes and aspirations of Democrats, who came out of nowhere to become the political phenomenon of our time: President Barack Obama.

  As we move through this book's chronology, I will show where and when Davis and Obama forged their relationship. I will also show how liberals have grown more defensive about charges that Davis was a Communist, since they want to ensure that Obama is not publicly linked with a pro-Soviet Marxist mentor. As this chapter will show, it was clear by 1949–50 that Davis, if he was not a member of CPUSA, was at least a small “c” communist and was wildly pro-Soviet. And if somehow, despite all those indications, Davis was not a communist, he was flatly the single greatest dupe in this book.

  Enter Hawaii

  The stage for this drama, this rendezvous with history, was Hawaii.

  Off the beaten path of established Cold War history was the Soviet interest in Hawaii before the territory became part of the United States (it didn't become a state until 1959). Moscow did its best to keep this ambition under wraps, as did CPUSA, which aided and abetted Stalin in the endeavor.

  On February 17, 1935, the Anglo-American Secretariat of the Comintern held a meeting in Moscow on the “Hawaiian Question.” (The briefing on this meeting is another document with us today thanks to the archival digging of Herb Romerstein.)1 Among the seventeen attendees at the meeting, the two most important players were “I. Mingulin,” the head of the Anglo-American Secretariat, and William Schneiderman, alias “Sherman,” an American agent of the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB. Schneiderman was the CPUSA's representative in Moscow; his job was to pass information between the two sides, delivering marching orders from the Soviet Communist Party to the American Communist Party.2 At the meeting, Mingulin conveyed the Comintern's order that a Communist Party apparatus be set up in Hawaii. Schneiderman was to draft the message to CPUSA on the Hawaiian question, which he did that day.3 Later he would be made head of the Communist Party of California, the closest American port of interest to the Hawaiian theater of operations.

  Hawaii landed on the Soviets’ radar because the islands were becoming increasingly significant to U.S. foreign policy. The Soviet aim in Hawaii was as anti-American as imaginable. This is immediately apparent in a follow-up document, dated July 7, 1935, titled simply “Letter to the CPUSA on Hawaii,” and written by Comintern officials.4 The document shows how Communists saw the world upside down: Though Hawaiians had already made attempts to become part of the United States of America, and would eventually get statehood, the Communist letter opened by arguing that the alleged “growing discontent of the masses of the population in the Hawaiian Islands” was the result of “the regime of colonial oppressio
n and the exploitation of American imperialism with its policy of militarisation of the Hawaiian Islands.”5

  The Communists had already used this charge of “imperialism” and “exploitation” in China in the 1920s, and it would become a Communist battle cry throughout the Cold War, from Cuba to Vietnam to El Salvador and beyond. They continually used the refrain, and non-Communist liberals could always be counted on to join the chorus.

  To take advantage of the alleged discontent among the Hawaiian masses, Comintern officials said it was “essential” that American Communists “give every possible assistance to the development of the mass revolutionary movement in Hawaii, so that the foundations will be laid for the formation of a Communist Party as the leader of the emancipation movement in Hawaii.” True emancipation of Hawaii, in their eyes, would be a Communist Hawaii, one that was a satellite in the Soviet orbit, and that would serve as a strategic base for the further spread of Marxism-Leninism into Asia.