The truth about the Commies –
Communists backed Roosevelt after he freed Earl Browder
And then New Deal gave its blessing to Mrs. Browder’s residence in U.S.
By Frederick Woltman, Scripps-Howard staff writer
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a series of articles describing how American Communists, by utilizing their technique of infiltration, have burrowed into American unions, kidnapped the American Labor Party in New York, dominated the CIO Political Action Committee and made strong inroads into the New Deal administration.
Washington –
It was after the American Communists got orders to drop their sabotage of this country’s defense preparations and back his administration that President Roosevelt released their leader, Earl Browder, from Atlanta Prison.
And, with the Communists riding high on the fourth term bandwagon, a New Deal board recently legalized the residence here of his wife, Mrs. Raissa Browder, an important Communist in her own right. It acted despite adverse recommendations by the War and Navy Departments and the FBI.
The steps against the Browder couple – the passport fraud conviction and the deportation order – were taken while the Communists operated under different orders. Then, as their contribution to the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact, the orders were to scuttle America’s defense plans.
Skilled in quick shifts
These shifts from anti- to pro-administration were nothing new to the Communists after 25 years of dancing to the tune of a foreign master.
Today, playing Pied Piper for the Roosevelt-Truman ticket, they are telling the American people how to vote. And they’re warning them, in Browder’s words, that a Roosevelt defeat and a Dewey victory will destroy world unity and plunge Europe “into the most devastating civil war.”
Four years ago, their headquarters, the Communist International in Moscow, put on another record.
War preparations opposed
Its American loudspeaker, the Communist Party’s 1940 national convention, resolved “to combat the imperialistic policies and acts of the President, the State Department and Congress to spread the war and involve the United States in it… oppose all war loans and credits… not a cent, not a gun, not a man for war preparations.”
“Betrayer of the worker,” and “Servant of Wall Street” were a few of the epithets the Communists threw at Sidney Hillman, now their current favorite and teammate in the CIO Political Action Committee.
Of the seven presidential campaigns since the Communists were first organized in America, this will be their first to support a major party candidate. The honor, of which President Roosevelt is the beneficiary, represents more than simple repayment for his goodwill gesture to the Browders.
Moscow’s policies followed
The Communists today, as always, accept as commands the necessities of Russia’s foreign policy. Stalin right now is anxious to make the Tehran agreements stick. So, Browder and the Communists, according to their official newspaper, The Daily Worker, “start from the premise that the accord reached at Tehran constitutes the greatest turning point in world history.”
In their eagerness to reelect the President, they’ve scrapped the class struggle temporarily, cloaked themselves in an ill-fitting garb of 100 percent Americanism and conveniently put among mothballs the revolutionary creed on which they were raised and nurtured. They don’t like to recall:
The statement of William Z. Foster, Browder’s predecessor, in 1930, that “you cannot cure unemployment except by the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a Soviet government in the United States…”
‘The enemy of religion’
The declaration at the same time by Robert Minor, who acted as a stand-in for Browder while the latter was in prison:
The Communist Party is the party of the working class, leading the workers in the class struggle and recognizing that all of history is made up of the struggle which has never been solved and never can be solved without violence.
And Mr. Browder’s own pontification, in 1935, that “the Communist Party is the enemy of religion” and the more the masses “participate in the revolution, the less likelihood is there of the church becoming an essential feature of the new social setup.”
During the many years they enthusiastically flaunted their revolutionary beliefs, the comrades made wholesale use of forged passports for their pilgrimages to the party mecca, Moscow. Two party officials served terms, including Charles Krumbein, now treasurer of the newly-named Communist Political Association.
Browder too confident
Browder, convinced he was protected by the statue of limitations, openly admitted he had traveled on other persons’ passports, altered to suit him.
Subsequently, he got four years for perjury. The party denounced the Roosevelt administration for “political persecution” and deified Browder as “the first victim of the second imperialist war." It demanded his release to “lead the fight for peace in America.”
France fell, the Battle of Britain reached its peak, and still Browder was a “martyr to the warmongers.”
Then the Nazis invaded Russia and the American Communists switched. Now they demanded that their imprisoned leader be freed “so that his great talents may be used to help organize the forces of the people in a mighty crusade to annihilate German Fascism.”
With Pearl Harbor, the cry became “all out for national unity.” Among the first out was Browder, his sentence reduced from four years to 14 months.
His release, declared President Roosevelt, would “have a tendency to promote national unity and alley any feeling which may exist in some minds that the unusually long sentence was by way of penalty imposed upon him because of his political views.”