Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  Davis condemned the “thought control police,” referring not to the Soviet system of NKVD oppressors but to a supposed American operation. By this he meant “the bi-partisans”—the Truman administration and the Republican Congress—whose policies were “aimed against such Negroes as Paul Robeson, who think American democracy could learn about race relations from Russia, against such labor leaders as Harry Bridges who oppose Taft-Hartley and the imperialistic Marshall plan, and against such pastors as Dr. Melish, who believe the Soviet Union and the U.S. can live peacefully in the same world. This is pro-fascist ideology, pure and simple.”

  The seventy-four-year-old Melish was being vilified, Davis claimed. The bishop had relieved Melish of his duties as rector of New York's Episcopal Holy Trinity Church after forty-five years of service. Why? “Because he believed in applied Christianity, and because he and his son, the Rev. William Howard Melish, assistant rector, refused to join in the anti-Communist hysteria.”

  Davis also praised the son of the blessed father: “Long before V-J Day, the Rev. Melish, with the blessings and advice of his ageing father, began working toward friendly postwar relations between the Soviet Union and the U.S. He saw that the future of the world would largely be shaped by how these two powerful wartime allies got along in peace. He believed it was up to the Christian church to lead in this field.”

  In fact, William Howard Melish was so extreme that his father looked like a conservative Republican by comparison. To sugarcoat the politics of the radical son would be even more difficult. But Davis would try.

  Davis noted that in 1946 William Howard Melish had become chairman of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship (NCASF). He did not mention that this was a Communist front group, an active organization within CPUSA— indeed, the American Communist Party had created the organization in 1943. NCASF picked up objectives previously undertaken by party-controlled groups like the American Council of Soviet Relations and Corliss Lamont's Friends of the Soviet Union. (This constant changing of names was a standard Comintern concealment tactic.)

  The U.S. Congress later investigated NCASF and reported that the majority of its national officers and board of directors—that is, people who held positions like that of William Howard Melish—tended to be “functionaries and members of the Communist Party.” Congress added that the organization's views were “invariably and markedly pro-Soviet and, except during the war years, anti–United States Government.” The “primary purpose” of NCASF, the report stated, was to “advance and promote the objectives of the Soviet Union for the Communist Party behind a facade of being independent of the Party and interested only in developing friendship between the Soviet Union and the United States.”44

  Davis also failed to inform his readers that William Howard Melish's name frequently appeared in such publications as Soviet Russia Today and the Daily Worker, and on numerous Communist petitions,45 and that Melish had recently started a column for New Masses. Ironically, that column began just about the same time that Matt Wayne—the suspected pseudonym of Arthur Miller—launched his column in New Masses. Melish and Arthur Miller, incidentally, were friends and neighbors in Brooklyn.46

  Omitting all those facts, Davis reported instead that the NCSAF was “nonpolitical,” and that the persecuted Dr. Melish became chairman of the organization “shortly before the nation announced, in effect, that it was out to conquer the globe for Big Business by thrusting the Truman Doctrine into the international arena.”

  Significantly, Davis noted that Melish was one of the committee of six clergy and two laymen who visited Yugoslavia and returned to make a “factual report giving the lie to the persecution propaganda surrounding the arrest and conviction of Archbishop Stepinac.”

  This remark will enrage any reader familiar with the Stepinac case, which was a very real and very vicious case of Communist persecution of a saintly man (decades later the Catholic Church declared him a martyr and beatified him). Stepinac was the victim of a classic Communist show trial—no question.47 For Melish and his group not to know better was an example of either dupery or mendacity; for Davis, it was most likely the latter.

  In the world of Davis and his comrades, the show trial and subsequent imprisonment of Archbishop Stepinac did not qualify as genuine persecution of a church official, but the supposedly harsh treatment of Dr. Melish somehow did.

  Sensing he had a worthy campaign issue at hand, Davis in his next column again turned reality upside down, portraying Communism as friendly to Christianity, and anti-Communism as un-Christian. In “Challenge to the Church,” published on September 29, 1949, he quoted extensively from a letter by “Benjamin D. Shaw, noted New York churchman.”48 He was so impressed with Shaw's letter that he wrote, “I wish every minister, every churchman, every Christian could read the entire statement.” In one section that Davis cited, Shaw imagined Judgment Day, where anti-Communist Christians would be called to account for their attacks on Christ-loving Communists: “On your Judgment Day, when the Lord will ask you for an account of your stewardship, will you have to say, ‘Lord, they were a pack of wolves’? If God will then ask you, ‘My son, did you do all you could to humanize these wolves, to Christianize them, to teach them My Way?’ will your answer be, ‘Lord I was too busy Redbaiting’?”

  Davis likewise trumpeted Shaw's claim that “the Christian churches, and the Catholic church in particular, are making a grievous error in their shortsighted belief that the major enemy of Christianity is Communism.” Not only was Soviet Russia not antireligious, Shaw said, but it had saved the world from Hitler's “anti-Christian paganism.” Christians everywhere should be thanking Stalin.

  The late Lenin would have been astonished to learn Communism was not a “major enemy of Christianity”—or he would have thanked Davis and Shaw profusely for their propaganda work.

  Davis Emboldened

  As the fall of 1949 came around, Frank Marshall Davis must have been buoyed by global Communism's huge gains. While the Truman administration and Republican Congress were aghast at the “twin shocks” of 1949—the advent of the Soviet atomic bomb and the loss of China to Mao—CPUSA was delirious with success. Ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers had lamented that by leaving Communism, “I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side.”

  Davis grew more confident with the pen, making even more outlandish assertions. Before, he had floated the idea that anti-Communism was a form of racism. Now, in his November 24, 1949, column, he tried to link anti-Communism with the KKK. “For many years the Ku Klux Klan has been virtually inactive,” he wrote. “But recently the groups have come alive.…They are trying at present to unite all under a single leadership with the slogan of ‘Fight Communism to Maintain White Supremacy.’ …To reaction, any attempt to change the status quo of discrimination is Communistic.” A couple of columns later, on December 8, 1949, he said that “if you fight too hard for civil rights … you are likely to be branded a Communist.”

  Davis was constructing a clever defense for himself—an early, Cold War, Communist version of the race card. He was sending a signal that anyone who accused him of being a Communist should be prepared to be denounced as a white-hooded racist looking to stop him from advancing civil rights. “I, personally, have no intention of letting the cry of ‘communism’ sidetrack me from my goal of complete civil rights as guaranteed by the Constitution,” he vowed. “The fight for absolute equality will continue.… I want civil rights for all people, and I shall not rest until that goal is achieved.”

  That was not his only goal, however. In the crucial year to come—which brought the race for the enormously powerful hydrogen bomb and a costly hot war on the Korean Peninsula—Frank Marshall Davis had much else in store.

  Big Business, Bad Truman, and the H-Bomb

  Davis had big issues on his mind as 1950 began. In his January 26 column—titled “Free Enterprise or Socialism?”—he painted a stark picture of an America on the verge of another Great Depression, the fault of a
“virtual dictatorship of Big Business.” He took special aim at General Motors, which he said would soon monopolize the entire auto industry. If he had the power to do so, he would have nationalized GM. And not just GM. He concluded the column by saying that in the face of “still rising unemployment and a mounting depression, the time draws nearer when we will have to decide to oust the monopolies and restore a competing system of free enterprise, or let the government own and operate our major industries.” Given that he declared that “the backbone of free enterprise” had already been broken, it was pretty clear what option Davis was endorsing.

  Soon Davis was taking up another weighty issue: America's potential manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. The prospects for the “super” bomb, the far more destructive successor to the atomic bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a bracing thought for everyone. No one wanted to see the world erupt in a horrific nuclear war.

  The American decision to pursue the H-bomb was especially troublesome to Communists, since it would mean a quick one-up on the Soviets, who by 1949 had reached effective parity with the United States after stealing enough Manhattan Project secrets to build their own atomic bomb. That pilfering was made possible by precisely the kind of clandestine Communist infiltration that concerned anti-Communists—and that Davis and CPUSA were hoping to convince duped liberals did not exist.

  In America, Truman administration officials debated whether to pursue the hydrogen bomb; in Moscow, Stalin had no hesitation. President Truman ultimately decided to take the advice of science advisers like physicist Edward Teller and seek the H-bomb because he had been told that Stalin was seeking the weapon; in other words, his chief motivation was to get it before the Soviets did. This decision sent Communists scrambling to another propaganda campaign. It didn't matter that Stalin was hastily pursuing the H-bomb himself; the Soviets and their comrades framed Truman's strategic choice as yet another form of American belligerence. Their goal was to manipulate mass opinion, and especially to mobilize duped liberal “peace activists” into joining them in their protests against the “hell-bomb.” It was an ideal propaganda point.

  Davis took up the task right on cue with a brazen February 9, 1950, piece, “Onward with the Hydrogen Bomb.” Referring to his native America, he wrote, “Never before in history has there been a nation that proclaimed more loudly its love of peace and yet used its might to lash peace from the door. When we dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, we believed the world was ours. Having defeated the Axis powers on the battlefront, we were ready to show the Russians who was boss of this world.”

  Here was a flagrant example of another Communist flip-flop on World War II, based entirely on where Moscow stood at any given time. In truth, the United States had dropped the bomb on Japan not to be “boss of this world” but to force Japan to surrender and to end World War II. At Potsdam in July 1945, Truman had actually informed Stalin that the United States had “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Winston Churchill later wrote that Stalin “seemed to be delighted” by the news, and Truman recalled that the Soviet leader said he hoped the United States would make “good use of it against the Japanese.”49 The dropping of the bomb spared not only U.S. Marines but also the Red Army; they were saved from a massive land invasion that would have left millions dead, including huge numbers of Russian boys.

  Davis ignored this history. Instead, he contended that America at the end of World War II, ungrateful for the Soviets’ help in “curb[ing] the greatest threat to civilization the world had ever known,” turned on the good Soviet leadership, unable to satiate its lust for violence. But Americans were aware “that Russia had lost an estimated 20,000,000 people fighting the Nazis,” meaning, Davis claimed, that Truman and his “dividend diplomats” had to gin up crises involving the USSR: “If Molotov coughed, it threatened our ‘security’ in Iran. If Vishinsky laughed, we were ‘endangered’ in Korea.” It was an American “propaganda barrage” of manufactured crises.

  In contrast to the hypocritical Americans—who claimed “we love peace” while “rattling our atom bombs,” Davis said—stood the genuinely peace-loving Soviets. The columnist wrote: “But we, too, love peace, said the men in the Kremlin.” Davis appealed to readers’ sympathies by highlighting the Soviets’ postwar plight while showcasing their supposed magnanimity. Again speaking for Moscow (something he apparently had no difficulty doing), he wrote: “Your [America's] productive capacity was unscathed and came out of the war greater than ever before in the whole history of mankind. It will take us years to restore the losses sustained by Russian industry from the German blitz; let's get together, talk this thing out and settle our differences amicably so that we can all go about the business of making the world safe forever from another war. Peace we want above all else, said Uncle Joe in messages to America.”

  While the Soviet tyrant was cuddly “Uncle Joe” in Davis's rendering, America was full of fat-cat capitalists, warmongering generals, and desperate politicians who “recoiled in horror” at Moscow's appeals for peace. Without a “brink-of-war economy,” the column declared, America's “giant corporations” couldn't get “fat contracts to make materials of war and products for the anti-Communists of Europe.” “No, real peace is an expensive luxury that the big stockholders and professional soldiers can't afford.”

  And Davis was not finished. He wrote that President Truman and America's “dividend diplomats wrung their hands” when they found out “the Russians had the atomic bomb.” The American people—and presumably the peace-loving Soviets—“breathed more easily,” recognizing that “maybe there would be peace at last” now that neither the United States nor the USSR “would start anything for fear of retaliation by the other.”

  Ah, but “ours is a resourceful land,” Davis said. “Unless we have a threat better than the other fellow's, the crisis making business might go bankrupt, thus forcing us to cut our war budget, and you know what that would do to the incomes of the poor millionaires. Therefore, we will create a hydrogen bomb to shake at Russia, and then we can keep on making shiny new crises on a mass production basis.”

  And what would happen if the Soviets developed their own hydrogen bomb? “We shall have reached anoth er stalemate, and the boys will have to think up a weapon guaranteed to destroy everything—that is, everything, not marked with the Stars and Stripes—in one global explosion.”

  What Davis wrote in this and other columns was so thoroughly in keeping with the official Soviet line that it defies imagination that liberals, then and today, could claim he was unfairly maligned as even a small “c” communist. In fact, given how closely he followed the Communist Party line, it seems inconceivable that he was not receiving orders from the party in some form, either from CPUSA officials or from erstwhile Comintern apparatchiks. Otherwise, somehow, by pure coincidence, he was mimicking the Soviet line without error, and without shame.

  Frank's Enemies

  In the columns that followed through 1950, Davis directed his strongest outbursts at anti-Communist members of Congress—such as Republican senators Karl Mundt of South Dakota and Homer Ferguson of Michigan, and Republican congressman Richard Nixon of California, whom he labeled “the three dictators” in a March 23, 1950, piece—and groups like the American Legion (March 16 column) and the CIO labor union (numerous columns). Meanwhile he praised the ACLU and Americans for Democratic Action, and defended Harry Bridges and his ILWU against the “witch-hunters” (columns of March 30, April 6, April 20, and May 11). And, of course, he bent over backwards to characterize the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a racist organization and anti-Communists generally as raving racists (April 13, April 20, April 27, May 18, and June 8).

  One other Davis piece is worthy of special attention: a May 18, 1950, article on West Germany. This Davis missive illustrates where Moscow stood on postwar Germany and the shameless way in which American Communists followed the line. The American Communists’ position on Germany has been too easily forgotten.
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  After World War II, the Soviets wanted a prostrate, permanently divided Germany. This objective was driven by two chief motivations: (1) that Germany would not again rise to attack Russia—an understandable motivation that prevailed even in the mind of Mikhail Gorbachev into the late 1980s50—and, (2) equally important, that a devastated Germany might turn to Communism. On the latter, recall that Stalin, in his August 1939 speech to the Central Committee, had hoped that one result of a “great war” in Europe would be a “Sovietized” Germany. This explains the Berlin Blockade of 1948–49. Stalin now had East Germany in the Soviet camp, but he wanted West Germany there as well. As a result, Communists around the world launched a systematic campaign to demonize West Germany.

  Hopping into the fray was Frank Marshall Davis. Davis had been pushing the unbelievable Moscow line that the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites were “democracies,” an absurd but common tactic by Communists throughout the Cold War (and in Castro's Cuba even today). Now he employed a corollary tactic, and even taller tale, by contending that nations allied with the United States in its resistance to Communism were not democracies. In this case, his target was West Germany; the May 18 column was mockingly titled “Our New ‘Democratic’ Partner.”

  Davis began: “We have the amazing spectacle of the foreign ministers of the United States, Great Britain and France formally announcing that Western Germany is being brought in as a full fledged partner in the alliance of the ‘western democracies’ against Russia. If there had been a sincere effort to democratize Western Germany, I would feel much better about it.” He offered no evidence whatsoever for the claim that American officials were insincere about democratizing West Germany.