The truth about the Commies –
Even Army and Navy forced to drop ban against Communists
Reds given important war posts in spite of previous sabotaging of defense efforts
By Frederick Woltman, Scripps-Howard staff writer
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the sixth and last 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 –
Not even the Army or Navy were left inviolate by the Roosevelt administration in its policy of coddling America’s Communists after the latter got orders to stop sabotaging America’s defense program in the summer of 1941.
The coddling process reached a high point last spring when the Navy Department scrapped the efficient and specialized “Communist desk” of the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Officer-experts, who had learned to spot the difference between a Communist, whose allegiance lies outside the United States, and, say, an honest union leader or a Socialist, were dispersed to new assignments, chiefly foreign. The “Communist desks” were dissolved, and in at least one naval district headquarters – New York – some invaluable files were ordered destroyed.
There were reports that the Army had also started to destroy its Communist files.
Communist gets war post
A striking example of this new policy came to light when Navy, as well as Army, Intelligence subsequently cleared for an important, secret war job a well-known Communist who had previously been dropped by the Office of Strategic Services after an investigation by the FBI.
Although barred from federal employment as a Communist, Leonard Mins is now working for a government war contractor, Walter Dorwin Teague, and is in charge of compiling a Navy manual on the closely-guarded techniques of operating anti-aircraft and other artillery.
Only three years ago, Mins, who has held many party posts since the 1920s, was marching in the Communists’ May Day parade, under banners denouncing the “imperialist war,” Lend-Lease aid to Britain, Selective Service and this country’s rearmament plans.
Dropped from the Teague job when the Provost Marshal’s office questioned his loyalty, Mins was cleared in a War Department hearing and ordered reinstated. The Navy concurred.
Reds fight Hatch Act
Almost immediately after President Roosevelt opened the gates of Atlanta Prison for Earl Browder, America’s Red mahatma, the Communists started putting the heat on federal agencies to lighten up on the Hatch Act which prohibits Communists and Nazis from holding federal office.
The U.S. Civil Service Commission, which conducts the government’s “loyalty” investigations, has been subjected to steady pressure from the small, Communist-led CIO Federal Workers Union, which was combating “loyalty” checks by the FBI, the Navy and the Army as well.
Last November, after conferences with the union, the Civil Service Commission hamstrung its own investigators by drastically restricting their freedom to inquire about the Communist affiliations of job applicants.
It was the Federal Workers Union which announced the new policy and the union announcement was sent out even before the Commission sent revised regulations to its 600 investigators.
Wartime ban rescinded
The union report praised the Commission and triumphantly promised its members that “quick and clear action” would be taken against federal investigators who violated the new policy.
The Communists achieved one of their greatest triumphs when the administration ordered the Navy to rescind a wartime emergency ban on Communist radio operators in the Merchant Marine.
During the Hitler-Stalin pact, high Navy officials were worried about filling these key posts aboard ships carrying Lend-Lease goods to Great Britain. The American Communications Association, one of the CIO’s most tightly controlled Communist unions which has never deviated from the party’s dictates, was placing its own operators aboard the ships.
At the same time, with Hitler ravaging Europe, the union officially joined the Communists’ sabotage measures against our defense preparations. The official ACA News of Feb. 17, 1940, parroting the Browder party’s pronouncements said:
Keep America out of war. The only war in which we should participate is the war to wipe out the causes that lead to unemployment.
Opposed national defense
That June 22, it added: “We examine with suspicion the expenditures of billions for battleships.”
Joseph Selly, international ACA president, reported a six-week tour of the South in the ACA News in this message:
America speaks and here’s what it says… We don’t want any part of war. Don’t give us any baloney about “patriotism” and “national defense” being reasons for dropping our demands. We know plenty about patriotism – a lot of our fathers, brothers, husbands and sweethearts went to the last war “to make the world safe for democracy,” and what did they get… We hear a lot of words spoken about “necessary sacrifices” and “national unity”…
Congress passed a Navy-sponsored bill authorizing the Secretary of the Navy to keep Nazi, Communist, Fascist and Japanese operators off U.S. vessels. Some 40 Communists were dropped after investigation, along with a number of Nazis.
Navy changed policy
With the invasion of Russia and the change of party line, the pressure campaign started with a blast. According to the July 12, 1942 Daily Worker, the Communist paper now edited by Earl Browder:
The ACA almost tore the roof of the Navy Department off with its protests… and the Navy Department had a change of heart.
The Secretary of the Navy, the late Frank Knox, called a conference of high officers and told them the Communists had to be reinstated. They were, almost immediately and with backpay.
Secretary Knox was asked the reason for this reversal of policy. He replied, according to the testimony before a Congressional committee of Adm. Stanford C. Hooper (Ret.), one of those present: “That is a command from the White House and you have to obey it as well as I do.”
THE END