Election 1944: The truth about the Commies

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 17, 1944)

The truth about the Commies –
Communists switched to Roosevelt after Hitler invaded Russia

Up to that time they sabotaged our war efforts and tried to keep America from arming
By Frederick Woltman, Scripps-Howard staff writer

EDITOR’S NOTE: 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. Today, these Communists stand as the greatest menace to American democracy.

The Scripps-Howard newspaper assigned Frederick Woltman, a staff writer, to ascertain and present the facts about the Communists in a series of articles of which this is the first.

Washington –
But for Hitler’s invasion of Russia, President Roosevelt today would be without the support of the American Communists. Instead, these self-proclaimed superpatriots would be silenced and languishing behind prison bars and the stockades of internment camps.

Sidney Hillman’s CIO Political Action Committee would lack a substantial bloc of its noisiest tub-thumpers and many of its most diligent $1-for-Roosevelt collecting unions would be leaderless.

The Communists’ current strategy of moving in on the Democratic Party under the guise of a “political association” might never have been contrived.

Sabotaged defense efforts

Until the very night Hitler tore up his mutual non-aggression pact with Stalin and turned his armies westward, America’s Communist Party, including its trade-union and other satellites, was engaged in a sabotage drive against the national defense efforts.

For 21 months, from Aug. 23, 1939, to June 22, 1941, as their contribution to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Communists resorted to every tactic known to world Communism to undermine America’s frantic, last-minute attempts to build a defense wall against the Nazi horde.

To them, the war was merely a “second imperialist struggle,” and President Roosevelt was a “warmonger” and “dictator.”

Earl Browder, major-domo of Communism’s American outlet, said on Sept. 8, 1940:

Roosevelt is leading the march, and scattering the wreck of even the limited democracy of the American Constitution along the way.

On Jan. 13, 1941, Browder & Co., now first-class passengers on the Roosevelt bandwagon, warned:

The destruction of the capitalist world is being carried out under the direction of Hitler and Churchill, of Mussolini and Pétain of France and the Mikado – and not of Roosevelt.

Daily Worker joined in

Through party pronouncements, the Daily Worker, the Communist-led unions and its various fronts, such as the American People’s Mobilization, the American Communists:

• Bitterly denounced Selective Service as “a spearhead of the attacks on our democracy;” popularized the anti-Allied slogan, “The Yanks Are Not Coming;” and, while America’s youth was enlisting to defend their country, gleefully chanted:

Remember when the AAA
Killed a million hogs a day?
Instead of hogs – it’s men today
Plow the fourth one under!
Plow under, plow under
Every fourth American boy!

• Attacked the 1941 defense budget as “a Wall Street conspiracy against the American people.”

• Fought Lend-Lease, the arming of merchant ships and the arms mass-production program, which they tried to frighten the American people into believing had maimed and killed “thousands of workers.”

They reached the apex of anti-defense propaganda in a picket line around the White House which ended on the day of Russia’s invasion.

The high point of physical sabotage came with a series of defense industry strikes, culminating in the North American Aviation walkout at Inglewood, California. This was called a few weeks before Germany started war on Russia, which resulted in an instantaneous flipflop among the American comrades.

When the Communists defied the government at Inglewood and the President had to send in troops to protect the patriotic workers, it became evident that the sands were running out for them.

Strike resembled ‘insurrection’

The Attorney General, now Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, called the North American Aviation affair “more nearly… an insurrection than a labor strike.”

He added:

The distinction between loyal labor leaders and those who are following the Communist Party line is easy to observe. Disloyal men who have wormed their way into the labor movement do not want settlements; they want strikes. That is the Communist Party line…

Yet another administration official, terming the Communist strike leadership “irresponsible and subversive,” had this to say:

This defiance is a challenge that goes to the roots of the entire democratic system – and the efforts of this democracy to preserve itself.

Made peace with Hillman

This was the voice of Sidney Hillman, then associate director general of the Office of Production Management. William Z. Foster, now vice president of the Communist Political Association, blasted back that the “Hillman line of policy” was leading down the path “toward the surrender of the trade unions outright to the greed and autocracy of the warmongers and profiteers.”

The Communists and Mr. Hillman have since made their peace.

They joined forces to capture the American Labor Party in New York State; and, more recently to put across the fourth-term program of his CIO-PAC.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 18, 1944)

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.”

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 19, 1944)

The truth about the Commies –
Communists scornful of free elections and American democracy

But they suddenly fall in love with U.S. institutions to reelect Roosevelt
By Frederick Woltman, Scripps-Howard staff writer

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third in a series of articles describing how American Communists, by utilizing their technique of infiltration, have burrowed into American unions, kidnaped the American Labor Party in New York, dominated the CIO Political Action Committee and made strong inroads into the New Deal administration.

Washington –
Scorn of free elections, contempt for American democracy and a cynical tolerance for Fascism, when expedient, have marked the serpentine history of the Communists whose American führer, Earl Browder, is throwing his party behind Sidney Hillman’s CIO Political Action Committee and the fourth-term campaign.

For the purpose of reelecting President Roosevelt, the Browderites have suddenly fallen in love with America’s institutions – or so they say. It wasn’t always so.

Last May 20, Browder, whose four-year federal prison sentence had been commuted by President Roosevelt after 14 months, predicted that Mr. Roosevelt’s retirement at the end of three terms “would be a disaster for our country.”

Constitution too rigid

He deplored “our rigid Constitution” which requires elections “at set intervals.” A presidential election this year, he warned, “would put a dangerous strain on the national unity.” Nevertheless, he manfully surrendered to the fact of free elections and pitched in.

In 1936, however, with the New Deal at its zenith, he yearned not in Roosevelt but for revolution. Then he urged that:

For the workers to win a real democracy for themselves they must organize the dictatorship of the proletariat against the capitalists. Just as the capitalists enjoy democracy among themselves by suppressing the toilers, so can the latter enjoy democracy only by suppressing the capitalist class.

In “this land of bourgeois democracy,” said Browder then, the “ruling class” has “openly declared” it will “abolish all civil liberties and establish a Fascist dictatorship.” He added: “Under the Roosevelt administration, big strides in this direction were taken.”

USSR true ‘democracy’

To Browder then there was no difference between “the cold mask of Hoover… and the professional smile of Roosevelt.”

The Browder party’s three-time presidential candidate, William Z. Foster, let the cat out of the bag less than a year ago. In the Nov. 9, 1943 Daily Worker (Earl Browder, editor), Foster revealed the Communists’ true opinion of America. He said:

The USSR… has always been a democracy, the most advanced one anywhere. The Socialist democracy of the Soviet Union operates upon an altogether higher plane than that of any capitalist country.

Now the Browder brigade is claiming the respectful attention of America’s voters on the grounds the Communists have always been in the forefront of the resistance to fascism.

They hide the fact that in Europe, while the Fascists were pushing into power, the Communists haggled over questions of party regularity while, at the same time, resisting cooperation with sincerely pro-democratic and anti-Fascist parties, lest their own pristine red garments be soiled.

Condoned Italian split

In Italy, as Mussolini neared premiership, the fourth Moscow Congress of the Communist International in December 1922 spoke approvingly of the split which divided the Italian Communist from the democratic parties and helped bewilder the Italian people:

The split… was an absolute necessity… we do not regret the split… because the young, weak Communist Party of Italy has, nevertheless, saved the honor of the revolutionary class.

Their honor untarnished, Mussolini marched to power.

In Germany, with the experience of Italy behind them, the Communists showed even less concern over the threat of Hitler and the rising Nazi Party. They regarded the anti-Nazi Social Democrats as the greater menace.

Aided Hitler’s rise

“The task of the Communist Party of Germany,” the Comintern ordered on Dec. 1, 1932 (less than 60 days before Hitler took power), “remains as before – to direct the chief blow, at the present stage, against Social Democracy.”

At the same time, in his book, Toward Soviet America, William Z. Foster expressed the current Communist denial of any difference between Hitlerism and Democracy: “The Reichstag is only a democratic sham to hide the almost naked Fascist dictatorship.”

He added:

All the capitalist “democracies,” the United States included, are only the dictatorships of the bourgeoisie, marked with hypocritical democratic pretenses.

Policies changed suddenly

After the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis became a threat to Russia in 1936, the Communist parties began to talk about “preserving the democracies.” No one screamed louder for their country to stand up against Germany than the French Communists.

They supported the general mobilization as war threatened and among those called up was Maurice Thorez, general-secretary of the Communist Party and the Earl Browder of France. Appearing in uniform before the Chamber of Deputies, he backed France’s first war moves.

Thereafter, Russia’s non-aggression pact with Germany became public. The Communists everywhere turned anti-war. Thorez deserted. His party demanded that France accept Hitler’s terms.

Thorez fled to Moscow. Last month, Gen. Charles de Gaulle refused him readmittance to French soil.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 20, 1944)

The truth about the Commies –
PAC was invented by Communists and first outlined in Red paper

Daily Worker told of plan as ‘new departure in trade union life’
By Frederick Woltman, Scripps-Howard staff writer

Washington –
It was the American Communists who set the pattern of Sidney Hillman’s CIO Political Action Committee, President Roosevelt’s loudest backer in the fourth-term campaign.

Just two months before Mr. Hillman established his veto power at the Democratic National Convention and “Clear it with Sidney” became a national expression, Earl Browder, Communist leader, laid down the dictum that the old-line Democratic and Republican Party leaderships could no longer be trusted.

Browder thundered last May 20:

This election must not be left in the hands of the old party machines of professional politicians, The extraordinary emergency in which our country finds itself calls for an extraordinary manner of handling the election, that it may be transformed from a threat against national unity into a means of uniting the nation on a higher level.

We must slap down the loud-mouthed demagogue, expose the wily maneuver, retire the old machine politicians to the background, and begin to bring forward a new type of people’s leadership.

The Political Action Committee filled the bill.

Today the Political Action Committee’s busiest and noisiest segment of mass support comes from the Communist Party which, despite its nominal demise, has now reached the high point of 25 years of Communist political activity.

The Communists’ pattern for the Political Action Committee was invented more than a year before the Browder speech. The first announcement appeared in The Daily Worker (Earl Browder, editor) of March 13, 1943, which described it as “a new departure in trade union life that has historic potentialities.”

It was the creation of community political action councils by the Communist-controlled Greater New York Industrial Union Council – now PAC’s official New York branch.

“National CIO leaders are watching closely…” said the Worker.

Reds going into action

These community councils became the election district vote-corralling machine of the New York CIO, for years the political sounding board of the Communists. Now it knew how to translate into vote-getting political action its earlier resolutions demanding the release of Browder from federal prison, the premature opening of a second front, the election of local Communist candidates and the support of other Red-inspired programs.

“CITY CIO ROLLS UP BIG GUNS FOR COUNTERATTACK IN POLITICAL ARENA,” said the Communist Worker, adding this “marked labor’s emergence for the first time here as an organized group in politics.”

Five months afterwards, July 7, 1943, the national CIO Executive Board created a national “Political Action Committee” which proceeded to extend the New York idea throughout the nation.

Communists on board

Ten of the board members were New York Communist union leaders represented in the New York Council; at least eight others were Communists from elsewhere, according to a Congressional report.

In appointing the eight-member Political Action Committee board, CIO President Philip Murray was careful to avoid Communist names. Only one of them was president of a Communist-led union, the United Electrical and Radio Workers, CIO. Fifteen ex-New Deal officials were put in charge of operations.

As the Political Action Committee’s general counsel and his own right bower, Mr. Hillman selected John Abt whose wife, Jessica Smith, has for years been a leading Communist apologist as editor of Soviet Russia Today. Mr. Abt’s sister is Marion Bachrach, executive secretary of the Council for Pan-American Democracy. This is a Communist Front organization headed by Frederick V. Field who, as executive secretary of the notorious American Peace Mobilization, led the anti-national defense picket line around the White House until the day Russia was invaded.

Browderites sparking campaign

Not content with paving the way for “political action,” the Communist Political Association, Browder’s new name for his party, is throwing all its resources and propaganda skill into the Political Action Committee’s fourth-term campaign.

In New York City, the Browderites teamed up with the Political Action Committee to capture the Republican as well as the Democratic and American Labor Party nominations for their sole spokesman in Congress, Rep. Vito Marcantonio. By marshalling thousands of doorbell ringers, they furnished the manual labor; the Political Action Committee gave $5,000.

In the Political Action Committee’s national campaign, Mr. Hillman has continued to accept the vigorous and effective cooperation of the official Communists, as well as their union followers. In industrial centers throughout the country, they furnish a large share of the drive behind the Political Action Committee’s presidential campaign.

While denying any Communist control of the Political Action Committee, Mr. Hillman has not repudiated their assistance.

Disregards own warning

Nor has Mr. Hillman followed his own tearful warning against collaboration with the Communists made at the CIO National Convention in Atlantic City, Nov. 20, 1940. Then he said:

Now I would not be doing the right thing if I would not tell you that from our experience in 30 years, I know that there are elements who cannot participate in the democratic processes… Their loyalty is to an organization outside of this organization. I don’t have to call them by name; whether their orders come from Rome, Berlin or Moscow, it is the same.

I say to you that we must warn our young membership not to be misled by the fine speeches they will make, by the confessions of loyalty… these people are a menace to the labor movement…

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 21, 1944)

The truth about the Commies –
Communists kidnapped American Labor Party with help of Hillman

Dubinsky and others resigned rather than follow Red direction of union political group
By Frederick Woltman, Scripps-Howard staff writer

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fifth in a series of articles describing how American Communists, by utilizing their technique of infiltration, haver 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 –
Sidney Hillman, generalissimo of the CIO’s political action venture on behalf of a fourth term, handed the Communists their greatest political weapon in 25 years of unproductive left-wing conniving.

He gave them, lock stock and barrel, a major political party, New York’s American Labor Party, which has been able to swing a balance of power in the state representing the largest bloc of electoral votes in the country.

In kidnapping the American Labor Party in New York State, Mr. Hillman and the Communists learned a lesson and secured a pattern which was easily expanded into a national program by the CIO Political Action Committee.

This Hillman maneuver represented the Political Action Committee’s introduction into power politics. To the Communists, already delighted with the opportunity to hide behind false fronts, it furnished a readymade political machine without the handicap of the Communist label.

Took over party

To Mr. Hillman, it supplied a valuable rehearsal for his current nationwide campaign to reelect President Roosevelt.

“Clear everything with Sidney” was an injunction which paid big dividends to the Communists last March.

Here was a party organized in 1936 by the Empire State’s leading trade unionists and capable of mustering nearly half a million votes. The Communists for years had been trying to capture the American Labor Party. Communist headquarters, unable to rally enough votes to keep the party emblem on the ballot, directed its members to register in the American Labor Party.

Then Mr. Hillman, in his first move as commander-in-chief of the Political Action Committee, made a deal with the Communist clique of the Labor Party. In the March 1944 party primary, the Communists took over the basic units and state committee of the party, allowing Mr. Hillman to accept the state chairmanship.

**Daily Worker’s instructions

Today Browder’s newly-named Communist Political Association works Officially with and through the American Labor Party. Indeed, The Daily Worker, official Communist organ edited by Browder, issues such instructions to the Communist stalwarts as follows:

What You Can Do to Help Reelect President Roosevelt:
Report to your nearest American Labor Party or Communist Political Association headquarters and volunteer your services as a registration candidate.

Mr. Hillman dismisses as “a red herring” any imputation of Communist influence in the Political Action Committee. But he did not come through the American Labor Party scrap untainted. On the contrary, some of the Political Action Committee’s own leaders as well as other trade unionists pinned the Red banner right on him.

Dubinsky accuses Hillman

Said David Dubinsky, founder of the labor party and its principal backer until the Hillman-Communist victory:

I regard the former American Labor Party as a Communist Labor party, and am therefore withdrawing… Mr. Hillman can act as a front for the Communists; I never did and never will…

Himself a supporter of President Roosevelt, Mr. Dubinsky, president of the AFL International Ladies Garment Workers Union, has since taken the non-Communist leadership out of the American Labor Party and organized a Liberal Party. While now working for the Roosevelt-Truman ticket, the new party refuses to co-operate or associate with Mr. Hillman.

A high CIO official, Samuel Wolchok, president of the United Retail and Wholesale Employees and a member of the CIO executive board, scathingly attacked Mr. Hillman’s alliance with the Communists. He declared:

While in sympathy with the CIO Political Action Committee on a nationwide basis, I am unalterably opposed to Mr. Hillman’s use of its machinery to foist a new form or organization on the New York American Labor Party which, far from uniting its membership, will inevitably lead to its utter disruption.

Thirty others revolt

Thirty more CIO officials and Political Action Committee backers revolted against Mr. Hillman and called in vain for him “to abandon the campaign he is waging for the election of Communist candidates” to American Labor Party office. They added that “joining hands with the Communists” is “not only wrong in principle but dangerous politically.”

One CIO official, Sam Baron, manager of the CIO Textile Workers’ New York office, resigned his union position, charging that Mr. Hillman had set up “a political dictatorship” in the textile union “in his desire to attain national political leadership.”

Mr. Hillman, he charged, had “compelled” every textile official to back up the Hillman-Communist coalition although “not one… had any sympathy for it.”

Mr. Baron added:

Any attempt to compel individuals to follow the dictates of a political boss, even though he comes from the ranks of labor, is fraught with danger. Political freedom is one of our most precious possessions. It antedates Mr. Hillman…

Mr. Hillman weathered this opposition. The Communists acquired a new party for themselves in New York State. And both, now, have turned to the greener fields of national politics.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 22, 1944)

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

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 24, 1944)

The truth about the Commies –
Fifth column trying to swing election for first time in history

Washington’s warning against foreign influence now more timely than ever
By William Henry Chamberlin, written for the Scripps-Howard Service

EDITOR’S NOTE: William Henry Chamberlin was assistant managing editor of The Philadelphia Press and, later, assistant book editor of The New York Tribune. From 1922 to 1934, he served as Moscow correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor and subsequently as its Far Eastern correspondent.

One of this country’s foremost authorities on the Soviet system and totalitarianism in general, Mr. Chamberlin wrote the outstanding history of the Russian Revolution. His book, Soviet Russia, published in 1930, was a sympathetic account of the Russian system; after the government-induced famine in Russia, he became highly critical of the Stalin regime and wrote Russia’s Iron Age and, more recently, Collectivism – A False Utopia.

Cambridge, Massachusetts –
“History and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” – George Washington, in his farewell address.

These words of the father of our country are especially worth remembering today. Because a foreign fifth column, for the first time in our history, is trying to swing a presidential election. The all-out Communist support for the fourth term admits of no other interpretation. There has never been anything like this before because no American party or group has been willing to serve as the obedient instrument of the policies of a foreign power.

The great and sinister significance of this development has been obscured for many Americans because there has been a good deal of confusion and misunderstanding about the true nature of the Communist threat to American institutions and the American way of life.

Roosevelt not a Communist

Only a crackpot or an ignoramus would assert that Mr. Roosevelt is personally a Communist or that the New Deal, with all its defects, could fairly be likened to the dictatorial regime in the Soviet Union.

There would be no need for concern about Communists if they were only a group of American citizens interested in promoting radical political and economic change. Under our Constitution they and any other group have a right to do this, so long as they employ legal and peaceful means.

What makes the Communists dangerous, what makes their intervention as the allies of one of the major parties in a close presidential race objectionable, is their unmistakable status as a Soviet fifth column in this country. No amount of glib sophistry can alter the factual evidence on this point.

Moscow’s policies followed

The Communists keep time by the Kremlin clock. They change their “party line” in precise rhythm with the shifts and exigencies of Stalin’s foreign policy. Before the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 1939, the American Communists were vehement advocates of militant American intervention to “stop Hitler.” Immediately after the conclusion of the pact they became extreme isolationists and did everything in their power to obstruct aid to the Allies and national defense preparations.

Then, after Russia was attacked by Hitler on June 22, 1941, not after America was attacked at Pearl Harbor, they were transformed again into all-out interventionists. Early this year, toeing the line with other Communist parties, in response to a signal from Moscow after the Tehran Conference, they abruptly repudiated all the basic political and economic ideas they had been preaching for the last quarter-century.

After posing as radical revolutionists, they professed overnight enthusiasm for “free enterprise” and the “two-party system.” Instead of putting up their führer, Earl Browder, as presidential candidate they became cheerleaders for the fourth term.

Browder gives himself away

Browder himself recently let the cat out of the bag in an indiscreet speech in New York. In contrast to his usual conventional claim that Communists are 100 percent Americans, without a trace of foreign affiliation, the Communist boss threatened this country with dire consequences if an outspoken anti-Communist, Thomas E. Dewey, should be elected. Browder’s precise words are worth quoting and filing for reference:

It [Dewey’s election] would be a message to our great ally, the Soviet Union, which is predominantly led by Communists, that America disapproves in principle of cooperation between the two countries, accepted it only as an unfortunate necessity of war and was determined to bring it to an end as soon as possible… it would be a call from America to France, Italy, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland to break up their existing national unity formations, to drive out the Communists from their public life and to drive out all those who want to cooperate with the Communists.

Amazing implications

Consider the amazing implications of this extravagant statement. It attributes to the Soviet government a “love me, love my Communists” attitude which would make international relations on a basis of dignity and equality impossible. It suggests that opposition to Communism should be a permanent disqualification for an American President.

Browder threw off a rather transparent mask in this speech. He revealed himself not as an American citizen voting according to American considerations, but as a partner in a vast international movement that is a formidable instrument of Russian power politics. Should the American people accept this reasoning, “Clear everything with Sidney” would have to be enlarged and supplemented by “Clear everything with Browder” and “Clear everything with Stalin.”

The Communist record in electing avowed Communist candidates to public office has been such a fiasco as to be funny. But the Communist record in penetrating into the leadership of trade unions, in obtaining well-known names for “innocents’ organizations,” in pushing members and sympathizers into government departments and agencies, is not funny at all. It has been ominously successful.

Would suppress criticism

Communists have already been trying to exploit our wartime association with Russia in order to suppress in this country any objective discussion of Soviet foreign policies and internal conditions. They act on the assumption that America is already one of the Soviet Republics, where there can be no discussion of Stalin and his regime except in terms of worshipful praise.

This psychology has become sufficiently prevalent to cause the summary firing of Alexander Barmine, former Soviet diplomat, naturalized American citizen and employee of the Office of Strategic Services, immediately after he had published an expose of the new Communist tactics in the Readers’ Digest. One can imagine how the arrogance of the Communists and their behind-the-scenes influence in government agencies will swell if, after Nov. 7, they can preen themselves as having been the decisive element in a close election.

Skilled in infiltration

Nov. 7, the date of the election, is also the 27th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. On the eve of that revolution, there were only about 200,000 Communists in Russia. By shrewd appraisal of mass moods, relentless discipline, ruthless crushing of all opposition they built up the most powerful totalitarian state in the world, a state with international tentacles. in the form of fifth-column Communist parties, in every large country.

One of the leading candidates in this election has attracted the cheers, the other the jeers of the Communists. It is for the voters to decide which is better qualified to carry out foreign and domestic policies inspired by purely American considerations, without benefit of foreign political influences and ideologies.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 25, 1944)

Eastman: Communists playing party politics now in hope of revolt later

10,000 conspirators against U.S. government digging in now for future crisis
By Max Eastman, written for the Scripps-Howard newspapers

EDITOR’S NOTE: Max Eastman, at present roving editor of Reader’s Digest, is perhaps best known as translator of Leon Trotsky’s mammoth History of the Russian Revolution and author of a study of humor, Enjoyment of Laughter. He taught philosophy at Columbia University before leaving to edit The Masses and later The Liberator. Well known as a poet and philosopher, Mr. Eastman, after spending several years in the Soviet Union, published the first accounts of the internal fight within the Russian Communist Party which ultimately led to the famous Moscow trials and purges.

Cambridge, Massachusetts –
It sounds like horse sense to say: “What do 100,000 Communists amount to in a country of 140 million? As long as they are working for the things we want, why not use them?

People who talk this way think they are hardheaded. They think they are realists. They think they have had too much experience to get excited over a bogey.

The fact is they are provincial. They lack the experience which would enable them to form an intelligent judgment about this subject.

The Communist movement is not a propaganda league, an electoral party, an effort of persuasion, a campaign to win 140 million people to Communism.

The Communist movement is a conspiracy to seize power.

Care only for power

Its purpose is to destroy by force, and with a bloody purge, the democratic form of government and the system of free enterprise on which it rests. The Communists have only an incidental interest in propaganda or persuasion. They don’t care whether the American people are won to Communism or not. They are opposing Communism themselves now because they find this the easiest way to get their members, accomplices and dupes into key positions. They care only about power. They are a mafia, not a political party – least of all an “educational association.”

The thing should be stated this way: 100,000 American citizens have been organized into a compact, disciplined, fanatical league to destroy the American Republic by any means, moral or immoral, that may come to hand. If a person had a hard knowledge of that fact, he would not be so glib about “using” these conspirators where they can be helpful.

John Wilkes Booth was a brilliant actor, but you wouldn’t have advocated using him in Ford’s Theater, if you had known his underlying purpose. There’s as little reason why any man loyal to the American Republic should employ a Communist, or an accomplice of Communists (a fellow traveler) in any governmental position, or any position of power or influence anywhere in the land.

Planning for crisis

Another thing our soft, ignorant and provincial “realists” don’t understand: Communists are not conspiring to seize power now. They know as well as you do the juvenile folly of that. They are planning to seize power in a nationwide crisis.

Everybody knows that crises will come. There are enough unsolved problems – economic, social, racial – even if the Communists were not busily stirring them up. The world is in a turbulent condition, and the United States is not immune to turbulence, Some of us forget this, but the Communists never forget it. They inherited from Karl Marx a long-range view of history. And, according to that view, trouble is about all there is to history. Periods of tranquility are illusions – at best they are transitions from one violent crisis of social struggle to another.

Communism is a conspiracy to seize power when we are in trouble.

Confront that fact, and you will no longer be casual about “using the Communists” where they can be used. We have passed through crises and we can pass through others with our free institutions intact, if their personnel is loyal.

Enemies of democracy

But if those institutions are rotten-spotted with people who have crawled in there with the express purpose of helping them to crumble when a crisis comes, then we will not survive. That is the hard fact. That is realism. That is horse sense.

Another way of saying it is this: You can’t back democracy and Communism. If you are loyal to one, you spurn the other. Every trained Communist has in mind the day of armed war against democracy. Every believer in democracy, if he has political intelligence, takes an attitude of militant resistance to Communism.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 26, 1944)

Lyons: Ignoring Communism as campaign issue is dangerous policy

Subversive groups aided by tendency to underestimate totalitarian conspiracies
By Eugene Lyons, written for the Scripps-Howard newspapers

EDITOR’S NOTE: Eugene Lyons, until recently editor of the American Mercury, is best known for the autobiography of his disillusionment with Soviet Russia, Assignment in Utopia, which he wrote after serving for six years as United Press correspondent to Moscow. Born in Russia, he came to America as a child, later wrote for various newspapers. After serving as an Army private in 1918, Mr. Lyons subsequently edited Soviet Russia Pictorial and was assistant director of TASS, the official Soviet newswire service, from 1923 to 1927. At present, he is editor of a new magazine, Pageant, the first issue of which will be published next month.

New York –
No intelligent voters can overlook the fact that Communist influence in the government, in labor and in American life is generally an important issue in this campaign.

Whether it is an issue important enough to outweigh other vital considerations in voting is for the individual citizen to determine.

But to pretend that the Communist issue is minor, or that it is a “red herring” dragged into the fight by Republicans, is just dangerous nonsense. The tendency to shrug off and underestimate the force of totalitarian conspiracies, whether Fascist or Communist, is one of the strongest advantages enjoyed by anti-democratic groups in democratic countries.

France, Germany good examples

Not until France collapsed did the world see how the Communist-inspired Popular Front government had undermined the stamina of that nation. Not until the Nazis came to power did the democratic elements in Germany realize their tragic blunder in discounting Nazism in the years when it seemed a minor crackpot affair.

The same kind of self-delusion is evident in our country today in relation to the rapidly-growing Communist penetration of American life. It is apparent in the silly optimism with which so many Americans assert that the Communists after all are just a handful; that they have dropped their Communist ideas anyhow; that their influence is exaggerated.

To begin with, the Communist issue in this campaign was not injected by the Republicans. It was injected by the Communists and their fellow travelers themselves – not in words, of course, but in actions.

Led 4th-term movement

Long before Democratic strategists had come out frankly for the fourth term, demands that President Roosevelt be drafted were being shouted by every Communist publication and every Communist-controlled organization in the land.

The united front of the Browder groups and the Communist wing of the CIO which blossomed into the Political Action Committee under Sidney Hillman did more to put the Communist issue in the forefront than any move by Republicans.

Most important, there is the notorious fact that the New Deal administration has been honeycombed with open and disguised Communists through most of its career.

Issue not invented

The issue thus did not have to be invented or inflated. It has been there, large as life, all the time. Indeed, the Republicans have played down the issue rather than exaggerated it – when one contemplates the ammunition that they have somehow ignored.

I suspect that some Republicans are as complacent as the Democrats about the whole matter, and for the same reason: Ignorance of the real magnitude of the Communist movement and how far it has already affected our political life, our schools, our literature, our labor unions, our entertainment and even our churches. At bottom, I suspect, the Republicans share the widespread illusion that because the Communist underground is numerically small it is not a real challenge.

For nearly a decade we have had, in effect, a Popular Front government. It has functioned through what might be described as interlocking directorates – through thousands of big and little officials serving in the government and at the same time supporting an array of Communist-front organizations.

Two groups interwoven

Look at the activities of any of these organizations – the League for Peace and Democracy, the American Peace Mobilization (which pushed isolationist propaganda until June 1941), the Workers Alliance, the National Maritime Union, the American Youth Congress, the Lawyers Guild, the Daughters of the American Depression, the American Negro Congress, the American Writers Congress, the so-called Friends of Spanish Democracy, etc.

Not one of these pulled a mass meeting or manifesto or picket line without the public blessings of some New Dealers.

In writing a history of the Communist movement in our country, in 1941, I found that after 1935, the record became in large part a history of the New Deal. So much of the personnel and the ideologies had merged that it was not easy to tell precisely where one left off and the other took over.

GOP ignoring real facts

The Republicans have failed dismally to bring this picture into such clear focus that the Americans could see and comprehend. They have contented themselves with slogans about “clearing everything with Sidney” when a mountain of concrete facts about a concrete situation covering nearly a decade was at their disposal.

But the Republican failure does not cancel the reality. Communism is not an issue “dragged in” by the Republicans. It’s an issue they found waiting and failed to exploit because they, too, tend to underestimate it.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 27, 1944)

Barmine: Communists support Roosevelt to push own future program

Democrats warned to fear subversive groups bearing votes – for cost will be heavy
By Alexander Barmine

EDITOR’S NOTE: Alexander Barmine, 44, fought in the Russian Army during the last war, and graduated from the Soviet General Staff College in 1923 as brigadier general. As a foreign trade office representative, he subsequently saw dictatorships supplant democracies in Europe, Asia and Africa. In 1933-34, he was president of Auto-Moto-Export the Soviet Union’s central trust for exporting all products of its auto, aviation and armament industries. While serving as charge d’affaires in Athens in 1937, he broke with the Soviet regime. resigned and found refuge in Paris. He came to the United States in 1940 and worked in a metal factory, entered the U.S. Army as a private in 1942 and subsequently became an American citizen. An article by him on “The New Communist Conspiracy” appears in the current Reader’s Digest.

New York –
**Despite President Roosevelt’s declaration that he does not welcome Communist support, the Communist leaders are continuing to back him for a fourth term in order to advance their long-range plans.

In his speech of Jan. 20 last, Earl Browder, Communist leader, complained:

The American people ae so ill-prepared for any deep-going change in the direction of socialism…

Browder meant ill-prepared for the Russian brand of socialism. He recognized that new means must be found for edging the American people into a state better prepared for totalitarian trends. The “indispensable man” idea – the permanent or semi-permanent leader idea – was made to order for the furtherance of their totalitarian aims.

Their next objective, ambitious though it may seem now, is the capture of the machinery of the Democratic Party.

Strategy described

They are extremely active among Americans of foreign extraction. Through Communist-influenced foreign language papers, they hammer home the idea that anyone exercising his right to vote against the party in power is disrupting American wartime unity.

Capture by a small group of camouflaged Communists of the American Labor Party, representing half a million New York State votes, was a successful test of strength and technique. In the same way they have captured many CIO unions. These captures were essentially tryouts.

Through their ally, Sidney Hillman, the Communists are delivering these captured. votes to the Democratic Party. But the Democrats should beware of this “gift.” The ultimate cost will be heavy.

PAC intends to stay

At first, the CIO Political Action Committee declared that its only purpose was to get out votes for this election, bu. Sidney Hillman has now announced that the Political Action Committee will be maintained after the elections.

With the key positions in the Political Action Committee occupied by Communists and fellow travelers, there has been established what may become a balance of power in the Democratic Party. If this balance of power can be established and maintained, the Democratic Party will be headed for oblivion or ultimate totalitarian domination.

Since January 1944, the Communists have proclaimed themselves to be enthusiastic supporters of democracy, capitalism and free enterprise, just as in June 1941, they became overnight “patriotic Americans.”

Browder quoted

In his Jan. 10 speech, Browder said:

We may compromise and do, on a hundred other questions, including the basic one of postponing all radical proposals for changing the social and economic system.

Postponing until when? Browder did not say. But Stalin has said. In his Foundations of Leninism, he wrote:

A revolutionist may sponsor a reform because he sees in it a means for linking up constitutional action, because he feels he can make use of it as a screen behind which he can strengthen his clandestine work, whose aim is to educate and prepare the masses for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

Stalin’s advice cited

In a speech to the Comintern’s American Commission on May 6, 1929, Stalin said:

The American Communist Party is one of the few Communist parties in the world upon which history has laid tasks of a decisive character from the point of view of the world revolutionary movement… when a revolutionary crisis develops in America, that will be the beginning of the end of world capitalism as a whole. It is essential that the American Communist Party should be capable of meeting that historical moment fully prepared… every effort and every means must be employed in preparing for that, comrades.

In the light of this, it becomes clear that by “postponement” Browder meant until the Communists in America have got enough power to again come out into the open or “until a crisis develops in America.”

‘They stoop to conquer’

The Communists know they are certain to encounter desperate opposition when Americans awaken to the fact that their liberties are being threatened. That is why the Communists are stooping to conquer the respectable old Democratic Party, which they detest as thoroughly as they do the Republican Party.

The plot may sound fantastic to the American voter who takes as a matter of course his political liberty and his right to freedom to vote under a two-party system. But the program is neither fantastic nor impractical to the totalitarian planners.

Europe offers too many examples of what happened to democracies which were contemptuous of warnings such as are now being sounded in America. To ignore them is to flirt with disaster.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 28, 1944)

Waldman: Communist menace hides behind claim of numerical weakness

Movement dropped party identification rather than expose itself by registration
By Louis Waldman, written for the Scripps-Howard newspapers

EDITOR’S NOTE: Louis Waldman, for many years a leader in the Socialist movement, was one of the Socialist assemblymen expelled from the New York Legislature after the last war despite the backing of such eminent Americans as former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Born in the Ukraine in 1892, he came to America in 1909, received an engineering degree at Cooper Union and later a law degree at New York University. He was New York state chairman of the Socialist Party and twice its candidate for the New York governorship. After leaving the Socialist Party, he helped found the American Labor Party. Attorney for labor unions, Mr. Waldman recently published his autobiography, Labor Lawyer.

New York –
“The Bolshevik bogey is a creation of Dr. Goebbels,” Earl Browder scoffs, assuring us that the American Communist Party has been dissolved and that the Communists no longer advocate revolutionary socialism – that, in fact, their influence is so slight that they cannot be considered a menace. Besides, they now lend their influence to the furtherance of “free enterprise.”

Why this sudden conversion and why the indulgence in self-ridicule? Well, to prove that the Communist issue in this campaign is spurious.

It has become customary, and even fashionable, in some liberal and labor circles, to denounce any criticism of totalitarian personalities and tendencies as “Red-baiting.” Further, ‘the idea that such an anti-democratic organization as the “numerically small” Communist Party can constitute a threat is laughed at. And to expose as Communist-controlled the various fronts through which they extend their influence, is damned as “playing into the hands of the reactionaries.”

Fraud on people

In my opinion, the question of the position and power of the Communists in America today is one of public welfare, not a question of partisan politics.

No greater fraud has ever been perpetrated on the American people than that of selling them the idea that the number of Communists is so small and their influence so slight as to be insignificant.

As evidence supporting their confession of weakness, the Communists and their apologists frequently point to the fact that in the New York State elections in 1942, their candidate for governor, Israel Amter, failed to get the 50,000 votes required by law to keep the name of the party on the ballot.

Feared registration

Is this portrait true end realistic? In 1938, Amter, as Communist candidate for Congressman-at-large, received well over 100,000 votes in the state. In 1941, the Communist, Peter Cacchione, was elected councilman from BrookIyn. His vote in that single borough was large enough to give the party legal standing were that vote recorded for their candidate for governor.

But they did not want to continue as an independent political party because that would have meant that the Communists, or, at least some of them, would have had to register. Registration leaves a record, and they want no record. Their identities were now to be concealed in order to hide their penetration into trade unions, into government, into high bureaucratic positions, into the American Labor Party, into the school system and into the various front organizations, including the CIO-Political Action Committee.

The Communist Political Association prefers to be the holding company of its many political, cultural and fraternal subsidiaries. By interlocking directorates and management arrangements through so-called “research” and other services, the holding company can wield control and shape policy, without tipping its hand.

Public entitled to facts

The American public is entitled, to know the facts about the Communist holding company, and the fronts created to attain power.

And is its influence insignificant when in the largest city in the country, the Communists control nearly one-fifth of the members of the city council?

In spite of Sidney Hillman’s denials, the Communists control the American Labor Party, which polled over 400,000 votes in New York State. Two hundred trade union leaders and liberals who know the makeup of this party because they were formerly in control of it, in a statement on March 29 last, declared:

It appears quite evident that the Browder-Marcantonio-Hillman vote in the primary equals the full Communist strength polled in former elections… The Communists have feverishly sought a new party front. With the aid of Mr. Hillman, they have it now in the captured American Labor Party. It is now the Communist-Labor Party.

Many unions captured

Many labor unions, national in scope, have been captured by the Communists, and they dominate a large number of locals within international unions not under their control.

The actual number of members of the Communist Party is no criterion of their future power. When the civil war began in Spain in 1936, there were far fewer Communists there than in the United States in 1944. But in one year of crisis, the Communists gained dominance over all the other parties in the Loyalist government. The tactic through which they achieved this power was the popular front.

That is not likely to happen in the United States – not yet – because our democratic traditions, our love of freedom, are too deeply rooted. But complacency has its price. The infiltration of Communists into our trade unions and into political and cultural organizations brings in its train an acceptance of a totalitarian way of thinking that is more alarming than their numerical growth.

Dangerous trends defended

We are urged to accept as “inevitable” certain trends and tendencies which, in the view of many honest liberals, are a threat to our American democracy and to our fundamental values:

• The contempt for the parliamentary process of social change; the attack by impatient liberals on our “reactionary” Congress – elected by the people.

• The easy acceptance of the “leadership principle” in all our institutions.

• The alarming increase of government by executive order, by decree and directive.

• The trend toward trial by administrative tribunals.

• The vesting of wider and wider discretionary powers in administrative agencies and bureaus.

• The gradual but continuing entrenchment of a bureaucratic elite heading an all-powerful state.

• The complacency of liberals toward the use of the “emergency” legislative device, the appeal to panic, to fear, as a means of inducing acceptance of emergency measures.

• The mislabeling of political and intellectual wares in the public marketplace of ideas: concealment. behind “democratic fronts,” of ideas and groups that are in essence totalitarian.

Threaten political setup

These trends, accelerated by the war, create a social “climate” alien to democracy in which totalitarian policies, tactics and organizations get themselves accepted and defended. Unless they are recognized for what they are, and checked or reversed, they will come to dominate the American political scene.

Domestic affairs are inseparable from foreign affairs. American Communists are interested mainly in foreign affairs. Their primary concern is not to fight for the interests of American labor, but for the national interests of Russia. The Communists hope that they can use their influence here for a more pro-Soviet foreign policy.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 30, 1944)

Waldman: Communists backing PAC and New Deal to further own aims

Real objective of ‘united front’ is to capture Democratic Party
By Louis Waldman, written for the Scripps-Howard newspapers

EDITOR’S NOTE: Louis Waldman, long a leader in the Socialist movement, was New York state chairman of the Socialist Party and twice its candidate for the New York governorship. After leaving the Socialist Party, he helped found the American Labor Party. Mr. Waldman recently published his autobiography, Labor Lawyer.

New York –
The enthusiasm of Earl Browder, the Communist, for the united front in America, as expressed in the CIO Political Action Committee and the American Labor Party, is not inspired by the New Deal, which he once damned as Fascist; his purpose is to gain the widest influence on American public opinion so he can serve his Communist aims more effectively.

The Political Action Committee is merely one of many devices of the “United Front” tactic of the Communists to accomplish their aims. Other “fronts” created by them have disappeared for the present to merge into this one “United Front.”

The same trade unions, groups and individuals which control the American Labor Party in New York control PAC. When the call was issued by the PAC for the organization of the congressional district as the major unit, it followed the setup so characteristic of the various Communist-sponsored united front organizations.

Organization outlined

CIO leaders were told:

These Congressional district committees should include, wherever possible, representatives of the American Federation of Labor, Railroad Brotherhoods, farm organizations, such as the National Farmers’ Union, church groups, women’s groups, consumer organizations, professional organizations and other community organizations.

The real organizing strength of the PAC lies in the CIO local unions and their central bodies in the principal cities. Like the CIO council in New York City, these city central organizations are largely Communist-controlled. Yet there are many even in the CIO unions who don’t like the alliance with the Communists. Many labor leaders have said privately what they would not say publicly: “We have to do along with the PAC whether we like it or not.” They say that anybody in PAC knows where the strength lies.

As in the American Labor Party, the Communists are the doorbell ringers, the distributors of leaflets, the active workers in the job of getting citizens to register and vote. They organize meetings, and all the other activities of a well-oiled political machine. They do it under party discipline, and they’re good.

During my 30 years in the American liberal, labor and Socialist movement, I know of no organization except the Communists which concealed its true aims. All the other radical parties have come before the public openly advocating this or that reform or social change, to be accepted or rejected on its merits.

By this means of public education, the Socialist and the labor movement have secured gains. Many of the reforms for which we have worked have been enacted into law. And both major parties have accepted, in the main, the necessity of continuing these reforms. This is the American way. It is not the Communist way.

Democratic Party threatened

Their “dissolution” of the American Communist Party, following the “dissolution” of the Comintern, was a tactical move, dictated by their policy of concealment. Their capture of the American Labor Party in New York gave them a perfect camouflage. Now through the PAC they will try to capture the Democratic Party.

As totalitarians and revolutionists, the Communists could get nowhere. As “progressives” supporting the New Deal they are effective. To them, electing Mr. Roosevelt is secondary. Their real purpose is to capture the labor movement and, if possible, the Democratic Party. Their whole aim is power.

All those who are now accepting Communist support feel certain that they can handle their totalitarian collaborators. They are smart politicians who can “use” the Communists and fellow travelers, and discard them when their usefulness is ended – so they think. But the political cemeteries are filled with such “smart” politicians.

Fascism usual reaction

It is part of the technique of Communists to leave no alternative, no choice of a “middle way.” The rise of Communism in Europe provoked a Fascist reaction, and if Communism becomes a threat in America, we may be forced to choose between these two totalitarian extremes.

The Communists celebrate, this year, the 25th anniversary of their party, now veiled as an “Educational Association.” During these 25 years, these totalitarians have never once entered into a united front in good faith. Never once have they failed to betray their allies. Sidney Hillman will not succeed where John L. Lewis, and before him Norman Thomas, Leon Blum, Chiang Kai-shek, and a long list of others, have failed.