Dupes

  71. See Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Solzhenitsyn Speaks to the West, 17.

  72. Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, 15.

  73. Nicolas Werth, “The Dirty War,” in Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, 103–4.

  74. See Douglas Brown, Doomsday 1917: The Destruction of Russia's Ruling Class (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1975), 174; and George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 463–68.

  75. See Robert Conquest's Congressional testimony, “The Human Cost of Soviet Communism,” in Document No. 92–36, 92nd Congress, 1st session, U.S. Senate, Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, July 16, 1971, 5–33.

  76. For only one example on Lenin specifically preaching the words “mass terror” (to Zinoviev), see Lenin, “To G. Zinoviev,” June 20, 1918, Sochineniya (Works), 4th ed., (Moscow: State Publishing House for Political Literature, 1951), 275.

  77. Leggett, The Cheka, 103.

  78. For transcripts of Lenin directives, see Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 1, 3, 8–11, 13–16, 46, 50, 55–56, 61, 63, 69, 71, 116–21, 127–29, and 150–55.

  79. In The Red Terror in Russia, published in Berlin in 1924, the Russian historian and socialist Sergei Melgunov cited Latsis, one of the first leaders of the Cheka, as giving this order to his thugs on November 1, 1918. This quote has been cited by a number of sources. Most recently, see Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, 8. Among other sources that cite this quote, see Brown, Doomsday 1917, 173; and Leggett, The Cheka, 463–68.

  80. I have written a very brief summary of this view: Paul Kengor, “A Manifesto on the Communist Manifesto,” April 2010, posted at the website of the Center for Vision & Values, www.visandvals.org.

  81. See Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes (Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 435; and Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), 296–97.

  82. Ibid. This famous Hughes poem is titled “Goodbye Christ.”

  Chapter 2: Woodrow Wilson: “Utter Simpleton”

  1. Among others, see John Milton Cooper, Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 9.

  2. A recent scathing conservative indictment is the best-selling book by Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 78–120. Goldberg makes his best case on pages 106–18.

  3. Arthur S. Link, director of the Wilson papers at Princeton, said that throughout his life Wilson, a Presbyterian elder with a superb command of Reformed theology, “drew his greatest strength from the sources of Christian faith.” He read the Bible daily. “It was no accident,” said Link, that Wilson “never thought about public matters, as well as private ones, without first trying to decide what faith and Christian love commanded in the circumstances.”

  4. See the Public Presidential Papers of Woodrow Wilson, including: “Address to Congress,” delivered to Joint Session, December 4, 1917, vol. 17, 8403; Cablegrams, January 13, 1919, vol. 17, 8685; “Statements on Russia,” vol. 17, 8589–92; “Remarks to Democratic Committee,” February 28, 1919, vol. 55, 320; “Seventh Annual Message to Congress,” read (not delivered because of illness) to Congress, December 2, 1919, vol. 18, 8819; Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, “Note of State Department on Polish Situation,” August 10, 1920, vol. 18, 8864–66; and Acting Secretary of State Norman H. Davis, “Note to League of Nations” (Urging International Neutrality Towards Soviet Russia), January 18, 1921, vol. 18, 8910.

  5. Wilson, “A Report of an Interview by William Waller Hawkins,” Public Papers of President Woodrow Wilson, September 27, 1920, vol. 66, 154.

  6. Wilson, “Remarks to Democratic Committee,” Public Papers of President Woodrow Wilson, February 28, 1919, vol. 55, 320.

  7. Colby, “Note of State Department on Polish Situation,” 8866.

  8. Wilson, “An Address in Kansas City,” Public Papers of President Woodrow Wilson, September 6, 1919, vol. 63, 73.

  9. Ibid.

  10. This is recorded by Dr. Cary Grayson in his diary entry for Sunday, March 10, 1919, which is published in the Public Papers of President Woodrow Wilson, vol. 55, 471. The diary is held in the Grayson Collection at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library.

  11. Wilson's 1886 piece for the prestigious Political Science Quarterly, titled “The Study of Administration,” is credited with launching an entire subfield of political science: public administration. When I taught public administration, this was the first reading in the course; it is often the lead article in readers used in public administration courses. Wilson's dissertation, Congressional Government, was for more than a century a landmark work in the field.

  12. I've seen numbers ranging as high as twenty thousand U.S. troops. For two modern sources that cite roughly ten thousand, which is a conservative estimate, see Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Seventh Edition; and Walter G. Moss, A History of Russia, vol. 2 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1997).

  13. Robert J. Maddox, The Unknown War with Russia (New York: Presidio Press, 1978).

  14. Another gem is Lenin's March 12, 1922, “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” published in Lenin's Collected Works, vol. 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 227–36.

  15. Here I'm quoting from the translation of the speech published in the October 1919 issue of Communist Labor, published on page 2 as “The Tactics of the Communists, By Nicolai Lenin.” It is housed in the Comintern Archives on CPUSA, Reel 1, Delo 24, Fond 515.

  16. Quoted by Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 395.

  17. Lenin said this in a December 6, 1920, speech to the Moscow Organization of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (RCPB), a transcript of which is published in Lenin, Collected Works, Fourth Edition, translated from Russian (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 449.

  18. “Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publication (and Appendices), revised and published December 1, 1961, to supersede Guide published on January 2, 1957 (including Index),” Washington, DC, 198.

  19. Flier contained in Comintern Archives on CPUSA, Reel 1, Delo 26, Fond 515.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Conrad Cherry, God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 288.

  22. Anton Pannekork, “Bolshevism and Democracy,” Communist Labor, May 15, 1920. This article is housed in the Comintern Archives on CPUSA, Reel 1, Delo 24, Fond 515.

  23. Flier contained in Comintern Archives on CPUSA, Reel 1, Delo 26, Fond 515.

  24. James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (New York: Touchstone Books, 1995), 29.

  25. See Comintern Archives on CPUSA, Reel 1, Delo 24, Fond 515. The February 25, 1920, issue was vol. 2, no. 3.

  26. “Alexander Mitchell Palmer,” Encyclopedia of World Biography ([City?]: Thomson Gale, 2004). Listing at Encyclopedia.com was retrieved on September 11, 2009.

  27. The article is reprinted in its entirety in “Investigation of Communist Activities in the New York City Area—Part 5,” Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, 83rd Congress, 1st Session, July 6, 1953 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1953), 2240–42.

  Chapter 3: Potemkin Progressives

  1. On the archives, see, in particular, Pipes, The Unknown Lenin.

  2. The investigation was done in the 1950s and was published in December 1961. It is referenced many times in the course of this book.

  3. For discussion and some examples, see Hollander, Political Pilgrims, 18, 108, 153, 354, 388–89, 395, and 399. The example on pages 388–89 is particularly good. Political Pilgrims is a seminal work on the phenomenon of Western intellectuals who traveled to, and bought into the myths peddled by, the Soviet Union and other Communist states.
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  4. H. G. Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1984), 215, 667, 687–89. Wells made several trips to the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s. See H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921), 160–62.

  5. This meeting took place in July 1931. Shaw, who by then was in his seventies, visited the USSR for ten days. See George Bernard Shaw, The Rationalization of Russia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1964), 112. This book (134 pages in length) resulted from Shaw's lectures and interviews upon his return from the USSR and from an unfinished manuscript that he intended to complete. Harry M. Geduld picked up the manuscript and published it along with an introduction. The book was also published in 1977 by Greenview Press.

  6. We know this not because Shaw admitted it in his book, but because Lady Astor, who was also present at the meeting with Stalin, asked the dictator how long he was going to continue killing people. Stalin's response was precisely along the lines of Shaw's explanation.

  7. Shaw, The Rationalization of Russia, 73, 80–81, 109, 132n.

  8. Ibid., 76.

  9. Shaw wrote this in a letter to the editor of the Manchester Guardian, published March 2, 1933. He was the author and lead signatory of the letter, followed by twenty other signers. As the letter stated, Shaw and the other twenty had all been “recent visitors to the USSR.”

  10. Shaw, The Rationalization of Russia, 80.

  11. Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Chronicle 1: The Green Stick (New York: Quill, 1982), 244.

  12. Malcolm Muggeridge, The Sun Never Sets (New York: Random House, 1940), 79.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, 211–13.

  15. Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress, Reel 302, Delo 3968, Fond 515.

  16. Some accounts say that he graduated in 1913.

  17. See Will Brownell and Richard N. Billings, So Close to Greatness: A Biography of William C. Bullitt (New York: Macmillan, 1987); and Francis P. Sempa, “William C. Bullitt: Diplomat and Prophet,” American Diplomacy, February 2003.

  18. Brownell and Billings, So Close to Greatness, 63.

  19. Ibid., 69.

  20. Ibid., 87–88.

  21. Sempa, “William C. Bullitt: Diplomat and Prophet.”

  22. This is from a very strange, often contradictory, editorial titled “For and Against the Bolsheviki,” The New Republic, April 6, 1918, 280–82.

  23. Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000), 261.

  24. Brownell and Billings, So Close to Greatness, 142–4 4.

  25. Douglas was profiled in Amity Shlaes's bestselling book The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). His name also appears in newly opened Soviet Comintern archives on CPUSA.

  26. Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress, Reel 1, Delo 25, Fond 515.

  27. “Latimer” also appears in the same Comintern collection as “J Latimer.” I was able to narrow down “Latimer” to three or four most likely candidates, but was unable to confirm the precise identity. It would not be right, of course, to speculate or share those names.

  28. E-mail correspondence with Herb Romerstein, November 26, 2009.

  29. CPUSA in the Comintern Archives, Reel 1, Delo 25, Fond 515.

  30. This is precisely how the listing reads in the document. It should, of course, state simply, “University of Iowa.”

  31. In the 1920s Roger Baldwin was pro-Soviet and worked closely with the Communist Party and its members, but didn't join the party. The Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 was his wake-up call, as it was for many liberals. He began purging Communists from the ACLU national board. After World War II, Baldwin became very anti-Communist and even shared information with the FBI. He, too, is a remarkable story of political redemption when it came to Communism.

  32. In a July 1953 report by the House Committee on Un-American Activities regarding Communist activities in the New York City area, there are more references to Harry Ward than any other figure—twice as many as the next most-cited figure, CPUSA leader Earl Browder. “Investigation of Communist Activities in the New York City Area—Part 5,” Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, 83rd Congress, 1st Session, July 6, 1953 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1953), 2284, 2291.

  33. Kennedy wrote this in a July 3, 1945, letter while working as a young postwar journalist in Europe. See Deirdre Henderson, ed., Prelude to Leadership: The European Diary of John F. Kennedy, Summer 1945 (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1995), 23–24, 96.

  34. Most of the biographical information on Douglas cited here can be found in two books: Paul H. Douglas, In the Fullness of Time (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1971); and Roger Biles, Crusading Liberal: Paul H. Douglas of Illinois (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). Also helpful is a biographical essay by John Keohane, which is available online at the library database of the University of Chicago. See also The Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress: 1774–Present (available online).

  35. Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, 47–73.

  36. On this, see my paper “Red Herring: The Great Depression and the American Communist Party,” October 2008, posted at the website of the Center for Vision and Values.

  37. Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, 76.

  38. Sylvia R. Margulies, Pilgrimage to Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1968); and Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, 399.

  39. Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, 76.

  40. Ibid., 77.

  41. Documents available in “Archives of the Communist Party and Soviet State,” collection in the Hoover Institution Archives, FOND 89, “Communist Party of the Soviet Union on Trial,” compiled by Lora Soroka. These letters are coded as Reel 1.1006, opis 49, (21) (22) (23).

  42. Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, 77.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Ibid., 78.

  45. Ibid., 77.

  46. Ralph de Toledano, Spies, Dupes, and Diplomats (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1952), 190.

  47. See Corliss Lamont, The Illusion of Immortality (New York: Continuum, 1990), vii–xiii. This is the fifth edition of the work, originally published in 1935. The book was his dissertation at Columbia, finished in 1932.

  48. Corliss Lamont's precise title and role with Friends of the Soviet Union is difficult to determine. Various sources list different titles. For instance, an obituary published by the Independent (London) called Lamont “a sometime chairman of the Friends of the Soviet Union.” (John Gregory, “Obituary: Corliss Lamont,” Independent, May 12, 1995.) The titles are complicated by the fact that the name of the organization itself, and its related organizations and even apparent umbrella organization, were constantly changing. For example, the New York Times obituary on Lamont described him as “head” of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, whereas others sources (including the Web-based politicalgraveyard.com) list him as “president” of the council. (Robert D. McFadden, “Corliss Lamont Dies at 93,” New York Times, April 28, 1995.) A July 23, 1938, edition of the Daily Worker, excerpted as “Exhibit No. 1” in a 1944 congressional report, called Lamont “head of the American Friends of the Soviet Union,” whereas “Exhibit No. 2,” which was a simple listing of the officers and national board of the “American Council on Soviet Relations,” listed him as “national chairman.” (“Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States,” prepared and released by the Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC, 82nd Congress, 2nd Session, 1944, 365–66.) All of these titles for Lamont varied along with the ever-shifting titles of the organizations themselves, the names of which always seemed to change ever so slightly (and suspiciously). Either way, Lamont was one of the principal leaders of Friends of the Soviet Union.

  49. “Guide to Subv
ersive Organizations and Publications (and Appendices), revised and published December 1, 1961, to supersede Guide published on January 2, 1957 (including Index),” 77.

  50. William Z. Foster, Toward Soviet America (New York: International Publishers, 1932), 272–73.

  51. The copy of the magazine that I'm citing is the January 1932 edition. The degree to which Sinclair was duped is quite remarkable. I intend to detail Sinclair's dupery in another work.

  52. Countless examples of those letters are today available for reading in the Comintern Archives on CPUSA.

  53. CPUSA in the Comintern Archives, Reel 259, Delo 3366, Fond 515.

  54. Corliss and Margaret Lamont, Russia Day by Day: A Travel Diary (New York: Covici-Friede Publishers, 1933).

  55. The Lamonts mentioned a travel agency called “Open Road,” on which I was unable to find information. The interpreters are identified as “Mrs. Lydia Diederichs” and “Mrs. Frankel.” Likewise, I could not find any information on these two people.