Opinions and opinion makers in the USA as the German-Russian war begins

On June 22, 1941, in the 22nd month of World War Two, an event occurred as important in the history of the United States and its relations with the rest of the world as the bombing attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a little less than six months later. This was the invasion by the German armies of Hitler's National Socialist Germany of the portions of Eastern Poland occupied by the armies and political machinery of Stalinist Communist Soviet Russia, and then on deeply into Russia itself. Upon this act most of that portion of American opinion ranged to the left of center joined in the war psychologically and emotionally, and spent much of its energy from that point on in trying to induce general American sympathy with the cause now heavily weighted in the direction of the interests of Stalinist Communism and its global satellites and sympathetic forces and concerns.

A vast sea of printer's ink and a galactic volume of radio babble engulfed the U.S.A. upon the outbreak of formal hostilities between Germany and Russia, most of which concerned whether or not this country should aid the forces of Josef Stalin against those of Adolf Hitler. Eight years of towering and unremitting anti-Hitler propaganda in the U.S.A. had resulted in reducing the pro-German elements in the land to a minority so small as to be, in modern parlance, "statistically irrelevant."

One of the factors which conditioned this discussion was the persistence of a powerful and probably dominant body of opinion opposed to becoming involved in the war as a belligerent. It included an enormous contingent of those who had always been hostile to Soviet Communism and which now were more firmly convinced than ever before that abstention be demanded of the national policy makers. Also included in the citizenry which had a rigid position against collaboration with the Soviet Union were various sects of the Left, particularly the Socialist Party, and the Social Democratic Federation, the inheritors of the anti-Bolshevik faction of Russian Marxists known in the Time of the upheaval in Russia as the Mensheviki. Their company was augmented by the anarchists and syndicalists, such as the I.W.W., tiny fragments of the radical spectrum in the U.S.A. implacably opposed to Stalinism on ideological, not nationalistic, grounds.

Still another source of anti-Red senTiment stemmed from those of all persuasions who had been affronted by the diplomatic revolution performed in August 1939 by the joining of Russia and Germany at that Time, which wrecked almost a decade of fatuous, simple-minded gabble, both oral and printed, that such an event was the most unlikely thing ever to take place. And yet another sector of anti-Stalinism derived from the war fought against Finland by Stalin's legions in 1940-41, many of whose camp having also become incensed at the division of Poland between the Germans and the Soviet in September & October 1939, a fourth partition of that unhappy land. It required substantial powers of forgetfulness on the part of senTimental partisans of the Poles, however, whose belligerence and sabre-rattling, mainly with real sabres, had preceded for a decade and a half their sudden and humiliating collapse before the forces of two flanking lands. Polish warmongers had long predicted that both could be beaten simultaneously by Polish arms, to be followed by the recreation of a Polish state with boundaries close to those which allegedly prevailed in the [earlier] days of glory.

Had Russian Communism's friends been as few in America as were those of German National Socialism, there would not have been much of a story to tell, and granted American entry into World War Two in the same manner it eventually took place, the ultimate fighting of the war would have been considerably different and an outcome and postwar consequence would have ensued which would coincide with very little the world has seen in the last 40 years. However, the Soviet Russian state enjoyed the support of a large and growing contingent of admirers, well- wishers and lovers in America, including, here as in most other countries in the world, an element so enamored of Bolshevik Communism that they customarily and consistently placed Soviet welfare and interests ahead of those of the land in which they lived. The unique aspect of this mountainous propaganda in behalf of the welfare of a foreign state was not the call for military cooperation with it to overcome a common enemy but the widespread promotional efforts on behalf of its internal programs, its domestic system and its philosophical and psychic foundations.

The Second World War was the high water mark of this phenomenon, unmatched by anything similar in the history of the national state system, and still a factor in world politics well over 60 years after the Russian Revolution. During World War Two, the scope and impact of this immense multitude of "loyal Russians" living elsewhere than in the Soviet Fatherland added up to results of such immensity that their full effect still remains to be chronicled properly. Part of what happened in the U.S.A. is the subject of this book.

Hitler's attack on Stalin occurred at a moment when most of the politicians in the U.S.A. were enlisted emotionally on the side of the British and French, at war with Hitler since September,1939. Along with them were the largest part of the management and those employed in the newspaper, magazine and book publishing industries, motion picture production, and radio broadcasting [television was in its infancy in 1941, confined mainly to brief local broadcasts weekly in New York City.] Arrayed with them were an overwhelming majority of the American populace, although their senTiment in favor of a victory over the Germans did not extend to participation in the hostilities to the same degree, over 80% indicating unwillingness to join in the war as belligerents at about the Time of the outbreak of the Russo-German phase of the war.

Stalin's involvement in June 1941 brought to an end a period of neutrality which extended back to the outbreak of the war, preceded by the incredible diplomatic pact of "non-aggression" between him and Hitler which heralded the outbreak of hostilities between the Germans and Poles by a week and a half. Committed to come to the aid of Poland by a clumsy bit of diplomatic adventurism dating back to March 31, 1939, the British demonstrated an incompetence which was outmatched only by their French collaborators in declaring war on Germany, the succession of British defeats being dimmed by the calamitous collapse of the French in June 1940, following which their country was partially occupied and the remainder governed by a regime subservient to German policies.

The Communist regime in Russia had always looked forward to a general war in Europe which would find them playing the role of spectators exclusively. The events of September 1939 to June 1941 were cut precisely to their specifications. The principal price paid for this comfortable situation was a sharp decline in the esteem of the countries involved against the Germans under Adolf Hitler, not only the Franco-British belligerents, but also in militarily uninvolved but emotionally enlisted America.

After 15 years of diplomatic isolation, the U.S. had recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, and there followed a spectacular blossoming of pro-Communist propaganda and special pleading, especially in American intellectual centers. Beginning in 1935, the Stalin regime encouraged the creation of a political alignment called the Popular Front, a sidling up to any other country or to political forces in that country which would advance with the Reds a common anti-German position. The local Communist parties in lands other than Russia made this their principal enterprise, though the scope of the Popular Front would have been exceedingly small had it not been for the sympathetic collaboration of a substantial number of formal non-Communists whose exploits and contributions to the Communist cause dwarfed those of the formal Party activists. Many of these were deeply offended by discovering on August 23, 1939, that the Popular Front was not the beginning of a perpetual political alliance presaging the eventual triumph of the planetary proletarian state, but a temporary phase in Russian foreign policy. As a consequence, zeal for the protection of Communism in Stalin's Workers' Fatherland cooled perceptibly between September 1939 and June 22, 1941. A very large part of those previously involved went over to an anti-German position based on British and French interests, a few joined the anti-interventionist cause, a tiny handful continued to support Stalinism, which now espoused strict neutrality, but many were so paralyzed by the betrayal represented by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pakt that they ceased involvement in politics. Four years later a New Republic editor, Malcolm Cowley, disclosed, "Psychiatrists tell me that in some circles there was almost an epidemic of nervous breakdowns after the Russo-German pact." [1]

Virtually the only analysis of and literature on World War Two from Communists which merits any attention is that produced during the period of Stalinist neutrality, between September 1939 and June 1941. Prior to that Time it is mainly a crafty and carefully cultivated alarmist hysteria, calculated to produce panic among the "democracies" and encourage alliances with Soviet Russia in the "popular front" against the anti-communist states. After 1941 it was mainly florid patriotic Soviet raving. But in both instances the Stalinist ploy gathered a rich harvest of "conservatives" [nearly fifty years after Munich, essentially an anti-communist action engineered by Chamberlain and Daladier, right wingers were still mouthing the communist derogation of it as "appeasement," one of the most successful dupings of the Right by communist propaganda in seventy years.] It is significant that the only sustained period of conservative criticism of communists during 1939-45 occurred in the 1939-41 lull when the latter chose to stand back and watch what they correctly interpreted as a civil war among the capitalist powers. All this ended with the entry of Stalinist Russia in the war. Most of Communism's friends rapidly recuperated and were back at their familiar stations, pleading for American involvement on Russian lines, a matter of serious embarrassment to the Anglophile and Francophile warrior elements, in the same way the Red sympathizers as neutralists had been an exasperation to the anti-war and anti-involvement people between September 3, 1939 and June 22, 1941. Though Americans had been carefully nursed in their Germanophobia for more than eight years by the radio, movies and the printed word, as well as by pedagogical oratory from coast to coast, the job of making them belligerents was not as easy as it might have appeared to be. Only in the areas most heavily settled for three centuries by British stock, New England and the South, was the eagerness for combat at the side of Britain preponderant. [2] Elsewhere a vast selling job had to be done, and it was never successful. The attack on Pearl Harbor and not intellectual conviction brought the overwhelming mass of Americans into World War Two.

In essence then the Anglophile and Russophile warmongers were minorities, but very active and persuasive ones, though their main impact was felt after December 7, 1941. The former concealed their impatience for immersion in the war behind calls for "defense of democracy" and "the democratic way of life," [3] in every enterprise available to propaganda, including a flood of books. In the late summer such works as Professor Edward Meade Earle's Against This Torrent [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press [4], Francis Hackett's What Mein Kampf Means to America [Reynal & Hitchcock] and Henry R. Luce's The American Century [Farrar and Rinehart] characterized the outpouring from this camp. But it was being matched by a similar flow from leftists and pro-Communists, now that Hitler and Stalin were at war, of the likes of Pierre van Paassen's The Time is Now! [Dial Press], Ralph Ingersoll's America is Worth Fighting For [Indianapolis:Bobbs Merrill], and Max Werner's Battle for the World [Modern Age Books].

Luce and his formidable publishing empire of Time, Life and Fortune was by far the most influential interventionist voice favoring teamwork with Britain, and his American Century proposal for a joint straddling of the world with Anglo-American power indefinitely had already had a dress rehearsal before American readers months before Soviet Russia entered the war. Where the senTiments and loyalties of many of his writers, reporters and editors lay was another matter, as will be examined at length. [5]

Still another stream of pro-war literature, someTimes subtle, and at other Times not so subtle, was represented by such massively promoted and widely read works as William L. Shirer's Berlin Diary [Knopf] [Shirer's political affections were not frankly laid out for some Time], Douglas Miller's heated tract, You Can't Do Business With Hitler [Boston: Little, Brown], and the now disenchanted former pro-Soviet publicist Louis Fischer's Men and Politics [Duell, Sloan and Pearce]. These three titles had been given top billing and frenetic praise in the house organ of the interventionist Council on Foreign Relations' quarterly, Foreign Affairs, in the early fall of 1941. [6]

In the meanTime, probably the oldest of the literary calls to war, the output of refugees, continued its steady representation in U.S.A. bookstalls with such examples of leftist anti-German central European journalist output as A Thousand Shall Fall, by Hans Habe [Harcourt Brace], and The Darkest Hour by Leo Lania [Boston: Houghton Mifflin].[7]

By far the most spectacular and fateful extension of hands across the Volga occurred at the very start of the Russo-German war. Winston Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain, flung himself into the arms of Josef Stalin the very day the Red premier became involved in war with Hitler, a few hours after the German attack. Churchill, head of Britain's war coalition government since May 1940 [8], had managed to achieve two main things since then: the supervision of an unbroken string of disastrous military defeats, and the dazzling, if not the gassing, of the English speaking world with an incredible volume of turgid rhetoric. If l9th century declamatory talk could have won wars, World War Two would have ended in British victory a few weeks after it began. [9]

On June 22, 1941, Churchill was on the world's radios before the first day's gunfire had ceased reverberating across Eastern Poland, repudiating over two decades of ferocious anti-Bolshevik oratory and journalistic writing, promising unstinted aid to Stalinist Russia and announcing a single war aim: the physical destruction of Adolf Hitler and his government. In view of the hapless British warTime performance and its even more dim promise, it was a desperate moment and Churchill's eager grasping for what was surely a drowning man's straw can be understood, since he had categorically ruled out ending the war by negotiation. But this unqualified transfer of the initiative to Stalin was also the act which guaranteed the swift expulsion of Britain from its centuries-old key spot in European balance of power manipulation, precipitated evaporation of its global empire, its reduction first to the status of a stationary American aircraft carrier off the coast of Europe, and then to a tottering and precarious second rate status in a steady forty-year decline upon achieving its most costly "victory" in its national history. [10]

The tardiness of Stalin and his circle of Red functionaries in responding to Churchill's generous offer of unstinted support reflected the discount to which British "aid" was subject, in view of the near-zero impact of such assistance supplied to Poland in its grave predicament in September 1939. Though Stalin got around to a radio address on July 3, 1941, welcoming the British to the Communist side in a "struggle" "for democratic liberties" in a "united front of the people standing for freedom and against enslavement," which latter should have been grand news to the many millions in Stalin's slave labor camps, he was too much of a realist to expect British military help or supplies in any great hurry.

The importance of the flight of Churchill to Stalin's side was not the practical situation attending immediate material support. It was rather in the effect of this impulsive action on the sympathetic Roosevelt administration, which had to become involved under far more obstructive circumstances, namely, the national non-belligerence of the moment, and the national irritation with Communist-dominated labor unions and their record of industrial trouble-making during the period of Russian neutrality since September 1939. This had been a grave nuisance to the noninterventionist elements during the Time. Now, Soviet eagerness for American intervention was to nag their adversaries, whether interested in the welfare of British or Russians.

On the official side of the aid-to-the-Soviet question, the President had as close advisors in favor of such help a goodly collection. It included Secretaries of War and Navy Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox; former Ambassador to Russia Joseph E. Davies, now Special Assistant for War Emergency Problems and Policies to Secretary of State Cordell Hull; Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau; Sumner Welles, Acting Secretary of State; Ambassador to Russia Lawrence Steinhardt; Postmaster Frank C. Walker [as a prominent Catholic layman, Walker was especially useful in countering general Catholic opposition to involvement with Communist Russia]; Colonel Philip R. Eaymonville, U.S. Military Attache in Moscow [Davies' principal prop before he was replaced by Steinhardt]; and especially Harry Hopkins, elevated from his job related to grubby New Deal welfare agencies to the glamorous post of Administrator of Lend-Lease, the aid-to-Britain program passed by Congress in March 1941 which made the U.S. a de facto participant in World War Two. [11]

To be sure, when Churchill propelled England and the resources of the British Empire to the succor of Stalinist Russia, he had no political problem. The influential and powerful supporters of a conciliatory policy toward Germany in the 1930s associated with The Link, the Friends of Germany and the Anglo- German Fellowship had gone underground or joined in the "war effort," battered by Stalinist propaganda as "appeasers" before and after the 1939 Pakt. [The British Stalinists had endured some abuse themselves, between August 1939 and June 1941. They had been particularly incensed at the gibe "Communazi" in that Time.] The supporters of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and figures of the implacably anti-communist Right Club such as Captain A.H.M. Ramsay, a Member of Parliament, had been jailed by Churchill's Ministry of Home Security headed by Sir John Anderson, under the terms of Regulation 18B. Anderson had even ordered the arrest and detention in special concentration camps starting May 12, 1940, of almost 75,000 German, Austrian, Italian and Czech refugees in England, despite their hatred of their home regimes and collaboration with the British. A ship, the Arandora Star, carrying 1200 of these internees to Canada, was torpedoed or struck a mine and sank off the coast of Ireland on July 3, 1940. Over half the passengers drowned.

And for a year England had been badgered by a large corps of private intelligence agents of the Ministry of Information, conducting the "Moral and Social Survey" of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, known colloquially as ''[Duff] Cooper's Snoopers," a powerful depressant on expression of individual opinion. The wonder is that anyone in Britain opposed Churchill's headlong dive to Stalin's relief. [12]

The political situation facing Roosevelt's war party was far more complicated and troublesome, there being no formal state of hostilities with anyone, and with a long campaign to provide "aid" to England just concluded, and with its opponents anything but happy over the state of affairs resulting. Adding Stalin to the candidates for assistance was a more formidable proposition. Major newspaper lineup on the issue continued approximately the same. The Hearst papers, typified by the New York Journal American, and the McCormick-Patterson interests, of which the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Times-Herald, and the New York Daily News represented the principal voice, could be counted on to oppose flatly any material gestures toward Soviet Russia.

But the New York Herald Tribune, the patrician voice of Eastern interventionist Republicanism, while managing to carry a sizable freight consisting of thinly disguised Stalinist spokesmen, suddenly discovered that objections to an alliance with Communist Russia to beat Hitler were based on "moralistic follies," while its chief columnist spokesman, Walter Lippmann, the closest thing to Jove on the American journalistic scene, loosed some of his rumbling thunder on the subject, cautioning critics of aid to Stalin against releasing excessive "vaporings about democracy." America's tiny Communist press could not come up with material as good as this.

With spokesmen as far apart as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Herald Tribune, there was no sense to allegations by Republicans that the Democrats were the "war" party; a large number of both were on Roosevelt's pro-war team. World War Two homogenized American politics. It put foreign policy more or less off the agenda thereafter, resulting in the "bi-partisanship" which prevailed regardless of the winners in the quadrennial elections. The war really created two new parties, supporting pro-involvement or anti-involvement in global international activities, and vastly disparate in size progressively after Pearl Harbor. What passed for "debate" among the world interventionist majority for thirty years descended to the level of whether five or seven units of artillery or one or two aircraft carriers should be sent to some distant land. There has been nothing in American history to match what has happened since 1942 in demonstrating dramatically the function of foreign policy as a reflection of domestic policy, and the essential control of the latter by the former.

With the entry of Communist Russia into the war against the Germans, most of America's liberals and non-Communist Left took another ludicrous and wrenching opinion lurch. The venom behind the "Communazi" epithet quickly was neutralized in the warm flow of sympathy which was promptly forthcoming. They were aided by many self-recruited newcomers who joined them and helped build the big wave of pro-Stalinist senTiment which was still washing over the land when the falling-out occurred five years later.

It might be said that not as many liberals and leftists were against aid to Russia as there were conservatives and rightists for such aid. The anti-aid liberals were grouped around the Keep America out of War Congress, and additional figures such as Norman Thomas and Eugene Lyons represented other factions hostile to pro-Soviet support. But other left organizations, such as the Legion for American Unity, the Union for Democratic Action, the Council on Soviet Relations and the Socialist Workers' Party were examples of elements quick to back an aid program for Soviet Russia.

On the operational side, two of the principal interventionist pressure groups, ostensibly buttressed by influential conservatives, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and the Fight for Freedom Committee, both responded promptly to the Russo-German war by urging U.S. aid to the Communists. The former dropped "by Aiding the Allies" from its name, while stipulating that aid be given Stalin "without relaxing opposition to Communism." The FFF soft-pedaled that approach and attacked the most formidable anti-interventionist group, the America First Committee, while posing to the latter a bogus choice, "Would you rather have the Nazis looking across the Bering Strait or Alaska?" [13] This was reminiscent of the ingeniously clever questions invented by George Gallup, head of the American Institute of Public Opinion, and an ardent pro-war activist, one of which was whether it was more important to defeat Hitler or to stay out of the war. When put this way, 70% supported the first clause, but when the same people were quizzed on a declaration of war, a larger percentage, 80%, flatly said no. [14] Pollsters persisted in putting people on the spot this way by presenting two-part propositions, the first of which was ethical and the second practical politics, which introduced serious popular confusion between ends and means, insofar as these same pollsters stated the issues and allowed decisions based on these limitations. Thus either large interest group, for or against involvement, was equally free to quote the public response, and both were right. But the chips came down only when the interventionists quietly inserted the matter of aiding the Reds as part of the pro-war proposition. This invariably drew a formidable vote against involvement. As for the Communist Party, 145 delegates from 48 states met in New York City the last weekend of June 1941 to prepare a "peoples' program," which included a wild call for all-out aid. Churchill and the CPUSA were of one voice by July 4, 1941, whatever may have been their disparate objectives.

Such an alignment was purely coincidental to forces such as Churchill represented. Time, which in magazine journalism stood for what the Herald Tribune did among the dailies, set the tone by simultaneously uttering huzzas for Stalin and Russia while The Pro-Red Orchestra in the U.S.A. [15].... displaying nothing but contempt for domestic Stalinists. The German attack was ill-timed for the American newsweeklies, taking place on a Sunday. As a result, the issues of June 23 were already being distributed and could have nothing on this electrifying event, one of the half-dozen most important dates of the entire war. Therefore, the first comment was delayed until the issues of June 30.

By that date Time was able to make a deeper assessment of what was taking place, and thought the message written by Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles and read to the press, obviously with Pres. Roosevelt's approval, not only amounted to a pledge to Stalin but used the language of a committed belligerent, regardless of the state of diplomatic realities. It did not bother Time that Welles filled the statement with verbiage such as "Hitler's treacherous attack upon Soviet Russia," and using such choice derogations as "dishonorable," "deceitful," "hostile," "murderous," "brutal," "desperate," and the like; as they concluded with satisfaction, "When the U.S. could officially use such terms" in describing the German action, "the U.S. was certainly at War. [15]

A further article asserted that all of Washington was of the view that Communist Russia now had become at least technically a beneficiary of FDR's $7 billion fund "to aid the allies of democracy," while noting that Churchill had immediately sprung to Stalin's defense. A minor problem existed here, since Churchill had become a recipient of U.S. military assistance only about three months before when the Administration's hotly-contested Lend-Lease legislation was enacted. Therefore if this was now to become a "Lenin-Lease" program, it suggested to some that anything Churchill contributed to Stalin's cause might first have to be derived from Roosevelt, in which case the U.S. would probably be the original source of all "aid" supplied to Communist Russia. [16]

There is little doubt but that the involvement of Stalinist Russia in the war in the summer of 1941 put a substantial crimp in the interventionist propaganda line that the war was an unsullied conflict between "tyranny," represented by Germany, and "freedom," by its British adversaries. This was essentially the contention of the American Anglophiles, which to their embarrassment was now tirelessly mouthed by the Communists. It no longer was an imperialist war, and global materialist factors quickly vanished. Though Soviet Russia itself represented one of the most impressive feats of imperialism, the word had not been applied to the USSR by Reds or their allies since before Lenin's death. [17] Now that they were a party to the conflict, all description of the war as a contest for mainly tangible objectives ceased, and the taking on of the moralistic terminology of the pro-British opinion-makers irked the latter substantially. Time on July 7 in its article "The New Party Line" was anything but conciliatory to the CPUSA, though in a parallel piece had kind words to say about the sudden resurrection of Soviet diplomat Constantine Oumansky to respectability. The magazine thought the CP leader William Z. Foster grotesque in declaring that "A victory for Russia will enormously strengthen democracy throughout the world," while concluding that a Russian victory would primarily "strengthen U.S. Communists.'' [18] The job of Time and all the other agents of traditional British affiliations and sympathies was to get on with a war in which the assistance of Russia against Germany could be effected with as little reward or gain redounding to the Russians at its conclusion as possible. So, even at this early stage it was hands-across-the-Volga, but with a grimace of distaste. The wartime partnership between the U.S.A. and the USSR lay more than five months in the future, but its psychic consequences were apparent from the moment people and politicians began to talk of supporting Stalin in June 1941. Ultimately it gave this country the most uneasy and morally disturbing experience it has ever known in the history of her foreign affairs. With the exception of a few high-flying months in 1943 it must have been apparent to the respective contingents of pro-Stalinists of all social backgrounds and economic levels in this country that they were engaged in the salesmanship of a doomed product. The schizoids of Time, with their continuous rebuffs of and sneers at the U.S. Communists [19] while glowing with favorable sentiment toward the Russian Reds, were symptomatic of other sectors of bedeviled American opinion makers. It was embarrassing to have to support the Soviet Union and simultaneously to have to suffer local Communists. From the propaganda point of view, what was to eventuate resulted in a unique war for the United States.

While Time presumed that there was no need to bring the populace into the picture, the issue involved being of stratospheric foreign affairs well beyond the limited capacities of the common citizenry to understand, the other two newsweeklies made a gesture at trying to determine what a sector of the general public thought about it all, even if they overwhelmingly sought the views of persons of some prominence while doing it.

The United States News [it did not add World Report until 1950] exclaimed, "With Germany and Russia at grips along a vast frontier, and with the Administration's announcement that any opposition to Hitler, no matter what its source, is of benefit to our own defense, this country faces a new problem in international relations." It faced a new problem in internal relations, too: What did the people in general think of this loud huzza to Stalinist Russia from the Roosevelt regime? U.S. News sought to find out at least partially by polling public figures on the question "Should the U.S. aid Russia as a part of the American policy of aiding Great Britain?"

Wealthy Joseph E. Davies, late ambassador to Soviet Russia and the launching pad of more pro-Stalinist mischief than the entire Communist apparat in the U.S.A. combined were ever to achieve, responded, "My answer to your query is unqualifiedly, yes." Senator Gerald P. Nye, famous for having conducted the investigation into the material profiteers from World War I five years earlier, replied in the negative as abruptly as Davies had in the positive: Nye believed that Roosevelt should "draw the line" against this further involvement.

Rep. Melvin J. Maas [R.-Minn.], minority member of the House of Representatives Committee on Naval Affairs, declared, "I do not believe that we should aid Russia. When you help one burglar to beat another, you are bound to be robbed yourself in the end anyway. Stalin and Communism are as great a menace as Hitler and Nazism. A shortsighted policy of expediency of the moment, such as aiding Stalin, may be the tragedy of tomorrow, loosing a greater destructive force in the world than that which now threatens us."

The prophetic quality of Rep. Maas's contribution was rarely bettered by others, though it was something pro-Stalinist figures abominated, and tried to make believe had never happened when the latter zealots for the Soviet were circling about, a little over four years later, trying to mobilize the land in the global Cold War against Stalin which Rep. Maas accurately predicted.

But there were far more to be put on the record by the U.S. News reportorial pollsters. Rep. A.J. May [D.-Ky.], Chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, sounded the case of the reluctantly repelled among the Administration's supporters: "The complete crushing of Hitler and his regime is today's paramount issue, and while the Communism of Russia is unthinkable and the enemy of human liberty, it is a stealthy force not yet turned loose in such vicious form and with such objectives of conquest as that of Nazism under Hitler. Therefore I am persuaded that first problems should come first, and we should aid Russia by aiding Britain."

Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, the Royal Oak, Michigan, Catholic priest who had been a burr in Pres. Roosevelt's hide for eight years with his radio orations and publications, confined himself to quoting Pope Pius XI, " 'Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any manner whatsoever,'" and Cardinal Hinsley of England, " 'Britain must not, cannot, ally herself to an atheistic dictatorship.'"

Norman Thomas, four times Socialist Party candidate for President of the U.S.A., but an implacable political adversary of domestic and foreign Communism, expressed his sympathy with the Russian people but demurred from coming to Stalin's succor: "I want no American boy to die to decide which of two cruel and perfidious dictators shall temporarily rule the European continent," Thomas forcefully responded; "Therefore I want no attempt to send aid to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics at great cost to ourselves."

But Rev. L.M. Birkhead, Director of the fiercely pro- interventionist Friends of Democracy, thought the fear of future Communist advancement a trivial thing: "The United States should give every possible aid to Russia in the present crisis," while confidently predicting that after the defeat of Hitler, "the threat of Communism" "would no longer exist," "for Russia will be exhausted by this war, win or lose." No one polled the citizens of the twelve European capitals in the hands of the Red Army on the breezy confidence of Rev. Birkhead four years later, nor was it done while they still lay in the grips of Soviet Communism nearly forty years later. But in 1941 one of the "friends" of "democracy," in the view of Rev. Birkhead and his front, was Stalinist Communism.

Some were evasive. Paul Hutchinson, editor of the very influential Protestant weekly Christian Century, thought that aid should be extended to Stalin only after an American defense force had been fully built up, while Ralph Barton Perry, the Harvard University philosopher who chaired the Harvard Group on National Defense, stepped aside and was willing to let the Roosevelt regime decide on the matter. Another of the formidable Eastern figures behind the Anglophile impulse, Frederic R. Coudert, also evaded the question.

As far as its press survey, the U.S. News thought the nation's newspaper editors supported the idea the U.S. should aid the USSR, but of the 14 papers it quoted, only the New York Times was for immediate and limitless aid to the Reds regardless of consequences. It was noted however that the majority of the papers had a very restrained admiration of the Bolshevik regime, and tended to speak of helping "Russia," not its political masters. [20]

Things moved so fast, and the overrunning of Soviet-held Poland and entry into Western Russia by the German forces in the three weeks after June 22, 1941 was so rapid, that hysteria among Stalin's friends in the U.S.A. swelled dramatically, and the question of American aid to Russian Communism in its travails grew more prominently among those who charted public opinion. U.S. News continued its poll another week in July, soliciting positive and negative responses from another collection of the country's notables, which managed to explore other dimensions of the issue and its likely results.

Speaking favorably in behalf of pro-Communist aid against Germany were Rev. Dr. St. George Tucker, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S., Rt. Rev. Joseph L. O'Brien, Pastor of St. Patrick's Church in Charleston, S.C., Clark L. Eichelberger, Acting Chairman of the most powerful pro-war pressure group in the country, The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and Major General John F. O'Ryan, Commander of the 27th Division in World War I and sponsor of the equally interventionist Fight for Freedom Committee. In addition to these were Rev. Dr. Henry W. Hobson, Bishop for Southern Ohio for the Protestant Episcopal Church and Chairman of the FFF Committee, Rev. Owen A. Knox, Chairman of the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, Estelle M. Sternberger, Executive Director of World Peaceways, and James H. Sheldon, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Nonsectarian Anti-Nazi League, another deeply committed band of civilian warriors.

Rev. Dr. Tucker asserted, "It would seem to me a very wise and proper thing to do. As a matter of fact, I think our Government has already decided on this course. Father O'Brien was more explicit and saw principled virtue in aiding Stalin: "In the choice between Germany and Russia, the democracies are safe if they throw their full power and influence on the side of Russian ignorance and superstition to crush German intellectual materialism." Eichelberger was strongly in the affirmative as well, "Not because Communism is deserving of any sympathy, but because the German attack upon Russia is part of the strategy of the Battle of Britain and part of Germany's desire to dominate the world." The unwearied assertion of the alleged German goal of world domination was a major aspect of the propaganda of the Committee to Defend the Allies. Gen. O'Ryan enthusiastically supported aid to Stalin, since the defeat of Hitler called for "the expedient cooperation with any of his enemies who will hasten his defeat," an end which did not seem imminent, with Russian forces flying in retreat in Eastern Europe.

Dr. Hobson backed aid to the Soviet for a different reason, fearful of a quick German victory which he was sure would be followed by a westward drive by Hitler against America. Rev. Knox's reason for backing aid was the following: "If we believe that democracy must be maintained by war and that England's fight is our fight, there would appear to be little logic in doing anything less than giving Russia full support," while Estelle Sternberger's view was close to that of Rev. Dr. Tucker, that the Roosevelt regime was obviously favoring this course anyway. Sheldon not only vigorously supported aid to Stalin, claiming "the very life of democracy is at stake," but used his response to cover a sideswiping blow at two obviously opposed public figures, the eminent aviator Charles A. Lindbergh and Senator Bennett Champ Clark [D.-Mo.], both of whom he claimed had fallen into Hitler's "amazingly efficient propaganda trap." Dr. Hobson had of course avoided all Stalinist propaganda traps.

J. Barnard Walter, Secretary of the Friends' General Conference, issued an evasive generalization, declaring that "The one way the U.S. can help is to propose the kind of peace in which all peoples can unite with justice," a course a light year away from that which FDR was traveling.The others were in the unqualified "no" category; Frederick J. Libby, Executive Secretary of the National Council for the Prevention of War, John Haynes Holmes, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union, pastor of the Community Church in New York City and vice chairman of the Keep America Out of War Congress, Brig. Gen. Robert E. Wood, Chairman of the Board of Sears Roebuck Co., and Rev. Edward Lodge Curran, Pastor of St. Stephen's Church in Brooklyn and Director of the Anti-War Crusade of the International Catholic Truth Society.

Libby's flat negative was followed by extensive explanation:

After pointing out that Churchill had made an agreement to fight at Stalin's side until Hitler was defeated, and that this meant that neither could negotiate peace without the other's consent, Libby observed that "This means that Stalin's war aims become Britain's war aims as well," concluding with a harsh-tasting evaluation for interventionism:

Rev. Holmes, a front rank member of America's most influential opinion makers, was no less vehement:

General Wood, a founder of the most implacable anti-interventionist group, the America First Committee [though he was not identified with it in his statement], simply responded in a single sentence, "I do not think the United States should aid Russia as part of the American policy of aiding Great Britain," but Fr. Curran adamantly declared: "decent nations who still enjoy the blessings of peace should lend no aid or comfort to the brawl." He concluded: "The use of the Lend Lease law in favor or Communistic Russia by the President of the United States will generate the prompt and righteous indignation and opposition of all Godfearing, liberty-loving American citizens who denounce both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia as kindred branches of the same pagan stem." [21]

Four days earlier, Newsweek had added to the controversy by printing the reactions of several opponents of aid or involvement, which were as sharply hostile as those cited by U.S. News. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, [D.-Mont.], one of the foremost opponents of the Roosevelt foreign policy as it veered toward involvement in the war buildups in Europe and Asia since 1937, remarked: "The death struggle between the armed Germany and Russia is a death struggle between the armed might of Nazism and Communism, and not an American war." This view was echoed by John T. Flynn, veteran columnist for the liberal New Republic and feature writer for Collier's magazine: "It never was our war, and it is less our war now than ever." Senator Walter F. George [D.-Ga.], Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed his "profound hope" that this country will not become an active participant in the present war," a hope already dashed by its considerable involvement indirectly as a result of the Lend Lease Act of the previous March, though far from the shooting stage, to be sure. In its roundup of no-help-to-Russia notables, Newsweek cited Sen. Clark as asking a Brooklyn crowd rhetorically if they could imagine "American boys being sent to their deaths singing 'Onward Christian Soldiers' under the bloody emblem of the Hammer and Sickle." The redoubtable Sen. Robert A. Taft [R.-Ohio] was quoted in the same collection of statements as seeing a positive aspect of allowing Stalin to go down: "The victory of Communism in the world would be far more dangerous to the United States than a victory of Fascism."

Probably the most influential of the anti-aid figures was former President Herbert C. Hoover, and both Newsweek and Time published statements by him in their July 7, 1941 issues. In the former, Hoover noted, "We now find ourselves promising aid to Stalin and his militant Communist conspiracy against the democratic ideals of the world," an allusion to the Administration's sympathetic moves in that direction beginning with the publication of the Welles statement. "Collaboration between Britain and Russia," concluded Hoover, "makes the whole argument of our joining the war to bring the four freedoms to mankind a Gargantuan jest." [22] Time frontpaged this observation by FDR's immediate predecessor in the White House and added his famous warning, "If we go further [than aid to Stalin] and join the war and we win, then we have won for Stalin the grip of Communism on Russia, and more opportunity for it to extend in the world."[23] It has been a rare week in the over 40 years since Hoover uttered those words that the world has not seen them supported by world events.

Despite the prominence given to the views of public figures hostile to additional involvement in the war via aid to Russia in harmony with already announced British policy to go all out in this direction, there were all kinds of indicators that the Administration considered the spreading of the war advantageous to its own cautious edging into hostilities. At the end of July 1941, U.S. News told its readers in tones just short of panic that "best informed U.S. officials" were convinced the Germans would reach their objectives in Russia by September 15.[24] To some this was over-kill in the propaganda department, for should Hitler attain his goals that soon, then there was little need to attempt aiding Stalin; the war in the East would be over long before any assistance arrived at the war front. Others were less disconcerted. Time, still looking for a formula by which it could express its distaste for American Communists while hailing the Russian variety, conceded that the Soviet Union was "the weaker of two well-hated dictatorships," yet denounced Hitler's "crusade against Communism," and backed aiding Stalin in his struggle as a protection of "democracy."[25]

U.S. News also enjoyed the discomfiture the opening of the war between the Germans and Russians caused to the Communist Party [CP] in America, forcing it to abandon its nearly two-year position of neutrality overnight, though there were signs that this abrupt turnaround was not unbearably painful, and was being achieved with skill. As early as July 8, New Masses, easily the most influential Communist journal in the U.S.A., printed a piece authored by Rep. Adolph A. Sabath [D.-Ill.] urging aid to the Soviet as a matter of concern to U.S. defense. [26] In general the stress was upon this issue, and not that of making the Russian Communist regime safe. From this point on it was a contest between the liberals and Communists as to which could make the most ringing appeal to American self-interest in saving Stalin.

In the meantime the scurrying about of diplomats and the on-going massive movements of "defense" gave every indication that policy-making and the initiative were in the hands of people seeking greater involvement, not less. U.S. News described the accelerated scramble for "defense" contracts in the height of the summer, accompanied by the pressure on small business to abandon the consumer field and participate in the hustle. Few were documenting the substantial unemployment occurring in small economic enterprises as a result of the pro-"defense" preferential treatment by the Government relative to raw materials procurement and related matters. During the last six months of 1941, U.S. News spoke as though the U.S.A. were already in the war, and repeatedly told businessmen that Roosevelt was planning on a long one, lasting into 1946 at least. [27]

Part of the indication of the go-ahead signal from Washington on aid to Stalin was easily deduced from the sudden publicity to diplomats and their rushing about in the newsmagazine. Especially significant was the attention given to the resurrection of the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., Constantin Oumansky, in disrepute and obscurity after the Pakt of 1939. His picture and the story of his return to social and official favor were prominently displayed in July. U.S. News even revealed that he and Under Secretary of State Welles had secretly "joined forces" as far back as the previous summer "in a dogged attempt to better U.S.-Soviet relations," and heaped praise on Welles, while describing Oumansky's frequent visits to the State Department, for having persevered against former Ambassador to Russia William C. Bullitt and kept the Administration from breaking relations with Stalin. [28]

That things had also taken a goodly switch toward the Soviet since the replacement of Bullitt in Moscow grew obvious with a similar glamor treatment accorded the new U.S. Ambassador to the Kremlin, Laurence A. Steinhardt, the wealthy 48-year-old nephew of Samuel Untermeyer, the latter sponsor of numerous efforts to promote world-wide boycotts of and war on Hitler Germany since 1933. The U.S. News portrait pointedly dwelled on matters such as the above, plus his membership in the past on ten boards of directors of corporations, his fluency in five languages and his authorship of "numerous books and articles." America's latest opulent presence in Stalin's court and the Workers' Fatherland was even less a son of toil than his predecessors, but it was exactly in character with what was to follow at home and abroad. The main labors by far in the cementing of Roosevelt America and Stalin Russia were to be tasks and achievements of America's moneyed and social elite, not of its labor union members and economically marginal Marxist intellectuals. [29]

While the hubbub went on over how Communist Russia was to be viewed and treated in this first month of the Russo-German war, other indications swiftly surfaced supporting the conviction that Roosevelt was enlarging the scope of American economic warfare against Germany and Japan and in behalf of Britain and Stalin. Soviet assets in America had become once more available to them, and a decision had already been made not to invoke the provisions of the Neutrality Act against them, while the Administration was already on record as promoting a favorable consideration of Soviet aid requests.

The reverse side of this warm glow toward Stalinist entreaties and the last-minute succor of Churchill via the Lend-Lease assistance provided the previous March were two dramatic acts of economic warfare against Japan in the U.S.A. and against Germany and Italy in the Americas from Mexico south. The latter took shape in an abrupt announcement in the form of Executive Order #8389 on July 17, a blacklist of 1800 German and Italian firms in 20 countries of the Western Hemisphere, forbidding U.S.A. businesses to deal with them except under the most rigidly regulated circumstances. This was a policy step in preparation for some time, as the extensiveness of the operation was revealed. The blacklisted firms filled 16 full columns of tiny type in the New York Times on July 18, 1941 and the list was also supplied to those involved in the form of a Federal Reserve Bank pamphlet, as well as being published in the Federal Register. Moves of this sort were hardly impulsive or capricious. The other move took place nine days later, and was even less a hasty and flighty gesture: the announcement of the "freeze order" affecting all Japanese assets in the U.S.A., and halting their use. This long-planned directive consisted of 9 pages of neatly printed materials, including regulations, amendments to existing orders and foreign exchange license data, also distributed to the Federal Reserve Banks early on July 26, 1941, an event later characterized as the "Japanese Pearl Harbor," an economic calamity which hit Japan without the faintest warning. Whether the invasion of Stalinist Europe by Germany a month earlier accelerated these ominous announcements was not demonstrable, but the timing was impressive.

The orchestration of the forces strongly favoring the salvation of Stalin by mid-summer 1941 inspired a subscriber of Time to remark upon some obvious parallels with the hysteria in favor of England a year earlier, speaking of the imminence of an analogous campaign of "Bundles for Russia" and suggesting "the probability of a song being composed about 'there always being a Russia' and the recitation by Lynn Fontanne of the 'White Cliffs of Omsk,' " a satirical re-structuring of the title of the lugubriously sentimental popular song of that moment, The White Cliffs of Dover, so beloved of emotional and nostalgic Anglophiles. That Time should print it indicated a lingering bit of a sense of humor, not very noticeable in the ranks of the pro-war set in those days, and utterly lacking in those deeply devoted to the welfare of Russian Communism.[30] It was a time of mobilization of all resources in America to this end, part of it consisting in the production of their own propaganda. The most impressive contribution was the issuance at the end of July of The Soviet Power by Hewlett Johnson, perhaps the most widely read friend of Stalinist Russia whose native tongue was English. It appeared in an edition of a million copies, and priced at five cents,[31] obviously below cost of production, in order to maximize its audience; the Communist propaganda apparat indicated it had been taking lessons from the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Though the momentum was definitely with the aid-to-Stalin elements in the early weeks of the Russo-German war, the talkers and the opinion-makers were far from routed or silenced. Especially troubled were the religious spokesmen, in both the U.S.A. and England. Oswald Garrison Villard, famed one-time owner of the even more famed liberal weekly The Nation, who had been ousted from that journal a year before when the majority of its editors had plumped for a strong pro-war course, had found a refuge in the pages of the liberal Protestant but anti-involvement weekly Christian Century. Three weeks after Hitler's armies started across Eastern Poland, Villard predicted that "the warrior clergy" would pronounce a pro-Soviet course as "divine intervention in behalf of Right, " and now would be "as eager to embrace Stalin as they were but yesterday to anathemize him." His piece "Our Moral Confusion"[32] was a good statement of the dilemma this new phase of the war had created, but there were differences among denominations and countries. The English Catholic press, for example, was wholeheartedly behind Churchill in his cooperation program with the Communists against Hitler, while trying to qualify this position by declaring that "Russia's cause is not our cause." This was the view of the Catholic Times, while the London Tablet came out for the defeat of Hitler and Nazism, "a man and a system much more efficient than Stalin's Communism."[33] But their leaders were not nearly as vehement in support of this program as were the U.S.A. Catholic spokesmen in favor of it, nor as critical of it as were the U.S.A. anti-aid Catholic leaders. The division in America was quite pronounced. Though the Catholic War Veterans were dead-set against any aid to the Soviets, 15 outstanding prelates and laymen in the Fight for Freedom Committee were for it. "We and the Soviet are temporarily on the same side in the effort to resist a common enemy," was their analysis of the issue. [34]

We have seen that a variety of prominent Catholics, clergy and laymen, were not in the least shy in announcing their support of aid to Red Russia, when interrogated by public-opinion samplers of the news weeklies. There were others: Col. William J. Donovan, Rt. Rev. John A. Ryan of Catholic University, and Michael Williams, editor of the Catholic counterpart to the Christian Century, Commonweal. Even the New Masses took comfort in their testimonials in behalf of helping the Reds against Hitler. [35]

But by far the most earnest of these was Bishop Joseph P. Hurley of St. Augustine, Florida, whose emotional radio address in early July was heavily excerpted by delighted Time. He ridiculed the notion that Hitler was fighting an anti-Communist crusade in Eastern Europe, described the Germans as "Enemy No. 1 of America and the world," favored Roosevelt deciding all by himself when it was proper to take the U.S.A. into the war against them, and did not find Soviet Communism the faintest present or future threat, and never mentioned whatever an issue which bothered many other people, the situation that would prevail in the world if Stalin won. From the context of Bishop Hurley's declamation, it was improper, irrelevant and immaterial to dwell on this latter speculation.[36]

The opposite of Bishop Hurley was Rev. James M. Gillis, editor of the influential Catholic World, founded by the Paulist order at the end of the American Civil War. There was no more implacable anti-war figure in America than Fr. Gillis, though like most of those of this persuasion he execrated both sides of the Russo-German conflict. He was confident that he represented the majority in the U.S.A. "It is not a majority but a minority that wants war or would welcome war as either necessary or just," he asserted in the mid-summer 1941 struggle of opinions. Furthermore, as he identified his adversary, "It is a highly articulate insolent aggressive minority."[37]

Where Fr. Gillis found the pro-war enthusiasts weakest was in their avoidance of facing up to the consequences of supporting a Red victory in Europe, or their casual confidence in the ease with which they thought they could dispel the Soviets from the scene once Germany had been smashed:[38]

In many ways the conflict among Catholic opinion makers as to the merits of involvement in the war and support of Stalin was brought to a sharper point by posing Fr. Gillis against the Catholic convert [1913] professor Theodore Maynard, an ex-Protestant and English emigrant who had come to the U.S.A. in 1909. His residual English patriotism was transparent in his tussles with Fr. Gillis over the merits of becoming England's war partner. Maynard was far less concerned over the spread of Communism than he was over the German threat to Mother England, his sustained message in the Catholic press, and in essays in the secular journals as well.

Maynard was quite aware of the formidability of Fr. Gillis as an adversary in this battle of ideas. "Father Gillis is by all odds the ablest Catholic editor of our time," Maynard conceded in the early fall of 1941. While admitting substantial respect for Fr. Gillis and commending him for his condemnation of all brands of totalitarianism, Maynard clung tenaciously to a position very close to Bishop Hurley, giving a solid measure of psychic support to the Soviet Union in its war with Germany, on the same grounds that Germany was the "greatest enemy" of religion at the moment, though he did not make clear that he was referring to official policy or popular behavior, in which latter Maynard would surely have been backing an untenable proposition.[39] Fr. Gillis ridiculed this view, insisting on total abstention from the question.

Though Maynard was irked by Fr. Gillis' having made the Catholic World the most "belligerently isolationist" of all the Catholic papers in the country, he was probably as unhappy over his continuing policy of not yielding a particle on the matter of Russian support. Implacably anti-Soviet, Fr. Gillis did not relinquish this position regardless of the various maneuvering that continued. Probably the most invulnerable morally of all the main figures in the U.S.A. opposed to the war between 1939 and 1941, he continued his adamant stand against involvement in a war which might be construed as a beneficiary or contributor to the welfare of either side. In one monthly editorial after another he continued castigating Stalinism, denouncing all efforts to make the opportunistic circumstances which threw Communist Russia and the Anglo-Americans together at war with Hitler and Mussolini the grounds for rigging a political alliance. This continued to be his policy all through the war, a courageous position which even veteran anti-Reds soft-pedaled for some time after the Pearl Harbor attack, then went underground, or turned about and began to write kindly pro-Red propaganda. All during World War Two, the Catholic World boiled with editorial suspicions and disparagement of Communist policy, abroad and at home.

A similar confrontation of opposites was observable in the non- Catholic center, probably best illustrated by the positions of England's Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, and the redoubtable John Haynes Holmes, the latter already on published record as an uncompromising anti-involvement figure. Time, as in the case of Bishop Hurley, gave generous space to Dr. Lang's reproaching of the Church of England for its misgivings about the Churchill alliance with Stalin. Though reputed as an anti-Communist, Dr. Lang at the end of July 1941 sounded like an incandescent fellow traveler. In his view, Soviet Russia was "contending for the principles of national freedom and independence for which the British Commonwealth and the United States of America are standing," recommending that Britons "must therefore wish every success to the valiant Russian armies and people in their struggle and be ready to give them every possible help." Managing to sound like a composite of Stalin and Churchill, Dr. Lang like the other civilian warriors was troubled not in the least by contemplation of a Communist victory and its import for Central and Eastern Europe.[40]

The basic position of the editors of the Christian Century was advanced in a long editorial in the first issue after the outbreak of the war in the East: "A Nazi victory must be prevented if that is possible. But equally there must be no smashing victory for the Communists." They conceded that the Russians would get help from the U.S.A., "but not too much help." "For an overwhelming triumph, with Stalin at the head of the Russian avalanche, would hold almost as great a threat as an overwhelming victory for Hitler and his Nazis."[41] A week later they expressed great confidence in the 'impossibility" of anyone here arousing "American enthusiasm for the idea of participating as an ally of Russia," especially after Finland had gone to war with the Reds; they were sure nine out of ten Americans would delight "to see the Finns march triumphantly into Leningrad."[42]

Rev. Holmes, whose spirited essays were featured by the Christian Century on many occasions, did not share the editorial hope that some kind of moderation and long-range statecraft would govern the aid-to-Stalin impulse which the interventionists wanted to prevail, consequences unconsidered. In the last issue in July 1941, he predicted that at the end of the European war, Stalin would annex all of Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and part of Poland which had been part of Cazarist Russia in 1914, East Prussia, Mongolia, openly, and Manchuria by proxy, and would "insist, under one form or another, on dominating the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and the Dardanelles." Rev. Holmes maintained that was all guaranteed by Britain in signing the "co-belligerency pact in Moscow," which at the same time "signed a blank check to be filled in later by Russia." "After an immeasurably exhausting effort to destroy Nazi totalitarianism, the world will have succeeded only in putting in its place a more powerful, more widely extended, and therefore more formidable Communist totalitarianism," he concluded.[43] Holmes, favoring a "peace without victory," like Gillis, came astonishingly close to the actual situation which came into existence between 1945 and 1948.

The most remarkable trial balloon concerning propaganda favoring aid to Russia was launched by the Christian Century on August 13, 1941. In an extended article titled "Join Russia in the War!" [pp. 1002-1004], Professor Henry Nelson Wieman of the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a prolific writer on the subject of the philosophy of theology, argued that Russia was going to win the war anyway, and would "dominate Europe and Asia." Thereafter it would cause unlimited trouble for the democracies for having abstained, and would thus lead to an even larger war. His plan involved eliminating this possibility by joining the current war in Russia's favor. Furthermore, there would be substantial resulting domestic compensations; "Mighty coercions toward community will begin to work if we enter this war with Russia and do everything in our power to help her win." This would not only mitigate postwar tension possibilities, but lead to peace. Prof. Wieman suggested casually that there need be no fear of "military conquest" on the part of anyone at the hands of the Soviets, since they were not "imperialistic." Though he conceded that they would try "to make all the world go Communist" by other means, it would be possible to deprive them of the chance by massive reforms, providing employment and material well-being.

A month later the editors responded in a two-page editorial, pounding Prof. Wieman's avoidance of the religious issue entirely, condemned his plan unconditionally, and observed that in view of "the record of tyranny which the rulers of Russia have inscribed in the blood of their people during the past twenty-two years," the difference in degree of tyranny between Germany and Russia definitely lay "in favor of Germany, not Russia."[44]

Churchill's flat admission before the House of Commons on July 15 that the British-Russian agreement to give mutual aid and to make no separate peace was, "of course, an alliance, and the Russian people are now our allies," was given wide publicity here,[45] but this did not in any way discommode the war-bound among the well-placed and the prestigious. James B. Conant, President of Harvard, in a turgid speech before a convention of the National Education Association, crammed with urgent pedagogical warriors, managed to outdo Bishop Hurley in urging aid to Stalin and in eagerly calling for entry into the war: "To the minds of some of us, the peril is so great that the United States has no alternative but to enter the war against Nazi power," exclaimed the head of America's most prestigious institution of higher learning. Conant, making the usual disavowal of supporting either Germans or Russians, concluded with the interventionist convention that only the Germans were a threat.[46] As was expected, Time printed most of his private war declaration, just a fragment of the hurricane of similar material assaulting the ears and eyes of the general public.

After a month of the Russo-German war, the U.S. public was beginning to show evidence of responding to the mainly one-way news interpretation and pro-war conditioning which occupied most mass media. A Gallup poll claimed 72% desired a Red victory and only 4% one by the Germans. Those in favor of a war declaration were alleged to have risen from 21% to 24%. Newsweek, however, analyzing the mail on the issue received by 30 U.S. senators, found it "evenly divided between isolationists, interventionists and middle of the roaders," and that the volume was only l/5th of that which had poured in during the debates over the Lend Lease bill earlier in the year. The magazine further declared that the mail of Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Walsh, Nye, Brooks, La Follette, Taft and Tobey was running 10-1 against involvement in the war, while that of Senators Pepper, Lee and Barkley was roughly 50-50 on the question.

The full spectrum of opinions on the subject had hardly been seen, however. On July 31, 1941, British Aircraft Production Minister Lt. Col. John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon delivered a speech in Manchester in which he expressed the hope that Russia and Germany would "exterminate" each other, leaving Britain master of the Continent. New political fireworks displays resulted. London's Marxist Daily Herald, appalled, announced that Churchill, "astonished and angry," had given him a savage dressing-down, "a sizzling and blistering affair, in which the colonel was left in no doubt as to the gravity of his offense. [47] Churchill, however, was in a jam, and ended up having to defend Moore-Brabazon in September before Parliament, and was forced into a bitter exchange with fervent Stalinist Willie Gallacher, the only Communist M.P. in the House of Commons.[48] Sentiments close to those of Moore-Brabazon were expressed at about the same time by a member of the United States Congress, who was contemptuously referred to later by insulted Time as "little fox-faced Senator Harry S. Truman" [49] [D.-Mo.].

The expressions of support for Stalin continued from a wide spread of opinion makers into the first weeks of August, the issue of aid taking a dramatic lurch in Soviet favor later in the month after the celebrated Roosevelt-Churchill meeting off the coast of Newfoundland and the issuance of the "Atlantic Charter," which followed the equally important mission of Roosevelt's ubiquitous assistant, Harry Hopkins. The Stalinist-line League of American Writers, vociferously for war against Hitler until the August 1939 Pakt, and then scrupulously neutral during the period of Stalin's absence from the fray, was quick to get re-involved with the German attack, and issued a hectic public statement espousing Stalin's cause, characteristically published by New Masses on August 5, 1941 [p.23], while calling attention to having sent a copy of their manifesto to Erskine Caldwell, a vice- president of the LAW, who was in Moscow at that moment.[50]

An even more pretentious declamation came from Michael Straight, editor of the once firmly anti-involvement liberal New Republic but almost overnight a convert to belligerency. He hailed the entry of Stalin into the war as the turning point and suggested Hitler was "perhaps well on the way of retreat." He further hailed the creation of the International Free World Association in Washington, organized by refugee anti-Nazi politicians, solidly to the left, from half a dozen countries, and saw as its principal function that of preparing war aims, and the "promise of a just and lasting peace," still embarrassingly absent from the statements of the "Allies." Impatient over American unwillingness to do big things and indignant over the U.S.A.'s failure so far to "accept the leadership that should be ours in the fight for a free world," Straight was grimly satisfied that the part America had earned in the next peace conference was "scrubbing the floors.''[51]

And still another prestigious figure used the New Masses to broadcast his enlistment. Harvard's philosophic light, Ralph Barton Perry, no longer the subdued murmur of the U.S. News poll six weeks earlier, was calling loudly in behalf of Soviet Russia as the most recent state whose "freedom" was "threatened" by Hitler's armies. Russia was already "our moral ally," trumpeted Prof. Perry, and he ended up calling for a world pooling of military power to defeat Germany's attempt at "world domination."[52]

The Christian Century, still anxious to read the pulse of European Protestantism correctly on the newest phase of the European war, managed to solicit conflicting advice again in August 1941, this time from neutral Switzerland. A lengthy letter from cor- respondent Denzil G.M. Patrick declared that the chief reaction there was one of "relief" that the threat of the "bolshevization of Europe" was much abated, and that the Swiss looked upon the mutual weakening of both "tyrannies," their government not intending to aid either. He also remarked upon the numbness of some Swiss following the ferocity of the anti-religious efforts of the Soviets in the Baltic states under the commissar Yaroslavsky and the machinery of the Stalinist League of the Militant Godless.[53]

But the following month it published from the same country their reaction to the famous Protestant theologian Karl Barth's A Letter to Great Britain From Switzerland. This caused much consternation, Barth placing the stamp of theological approval upon the civilian "resistance" to the German armed forces and in substance making it a holy war. The editorial remarked that they did not see that Barth was urging the Swiss to become a belligerent, however.[54] Shortly thereafter the journal published a lengthy think-piece on Barth by W.S. Kilpatrick, president of Cedarville [Ohio] College, who had just returned from a year's study under Barth. Said Kilpatrick, "Barth is politically a socialist today, although fearing its potential materialism and distrusting its optimistic view of man." Kilpatrick pointed out that the Nazis, who had cut short Barth's tenure in a German university, had simply "requested him to absent himself, and had even given him several months' pay in advance," while suppressing his Marxist writings.[55] No one could recall the Soviet Union handling a political adversary as gently and generously as this, even if a foreign subject in residence there.

The editors followed this with a three-page editorial devoted to Barth, avoiding challenging his politics, but concentrating on denouncing his calling World War II a "holy" war, willed by God.[56] They were willing, however, to recognize the war being called "righteous," which really was not that distant a stance from Barth, another of the legion of World War I socialists and pacifists who turned around and reached astounding heights of martial ferocity in of 1939-1945.

In the meantime the religious scene continued reverberating with strong statements for and against helping out Stalin. Late in August testimonials in behalf of this cause were published here which came from both the Archbishops of York and Canterbury, the English prelates skipping over the Red regime with mild disapproval, while emphasizing the religiosity of the Russian peopled [57][nothing was said that 99% of the Germans were identified with the Roman Catholic or Lutheran faiths]. Here, Dorothy Day, editor of the Catholic Worker, denounced movement toward entry into the war, while speaking at Williamstown, Mass., at a meeting of the Institute of Human Relations sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. But Justice Frank Murphy of the U.S. Supreme Court, speaking before the supreme council of the Catholic Knights of Columbus in Atlantic City, N.J., declared that the Soviet Union should have the support of all the world's democracies in its war with Hitler.

While this agitated clash of opinions on the subject became more heated and pointed, it grew more obvious that the Roosevelt regime had made up its mind in favor of sustained and substantial material and military aid to Soviet Russia. The creep in that direction became a lope by mid-August 1941, a short time before the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting.

The first dramatic signal was the attention given to the flight to Moscow from London by Harry Hopkins, much scrambled by the pro-New Deal press but ultimately admitted to have been in the interests of seeking out Stalin's advice on how U.S. goods might be expedited to the Soviet.[58] It took place at about the same time Soviet Ambassador Oumansky led a Soviet military mission to an audience with FDR on the same subject, presumably with the behind-the-scenes guidance of Welles, the subject of a Time cover story on August 11, and credited with having virtually assured Oumansky that his Red regime could depend on a substantial supply of military assistance from America, "in its struggle against armed aggression."[59]

Time's lead story a week later, "Aid to Russia," pinpointed FDR as responsible for the expediting of arms and planes to Stalin, presumably responding impulsively to a horror story of Russian desperation from his "analysts in the White House." The account was graced by pictures of such Roosevelt confidants as Sam Rosenman and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.[60]

David Lawrence's U.S. News presented a somewhat similar story of the President's personal initiative in forwarding substance to Stalin, as well as draping the Hopkins mission to Moscow in even more colorful and romantic prose than others.[61] Though addressing himself to U.S. businessmen, Lawrence demonstrated utter unconcern over Communism or Communists, saw nothing to worry about should Stalin win in Eastern Europe, and apparently thought the latter would retire modestly behind the Curzon Line once having repelled Hitler, to allow a joint-Franco-British politico-military experiment once more to mismanage Central Europe and the Balkans.

U.S. News August 8 featured a genial portrait of FDR and summarized his press conference, less than 24 hours after Oumansky "had led a Russian military mission to his desk." The article went on to say: "The President in his press conference authorized reporters to quote him as saying with regard to Russian resistance: 'It is magnificent and frankly better than any military expert in Germany thought it would be.'" As to the payment problem, Roosevelt was quoted as saying that Russia was "on a strictly cash basis" with American suppliers, and that there was no sign that this would change, when he was questioned as to Russian qualification for Lend Lease largess. On the subject of how Hopkins got from London to Moscow, however, FDR was not talking to reporters. [62]

For Hopkins the U.S. News saved special space a week later, exclaiming to its readers that his perambulations from Washington to London, then to Moscow and back once more to London, were part of an assignment to bring about a five-power "iron ring" around Germany, consisting of staggering population and resources preponderance. " U.S. collaboration with Russia" was already a fact, and Hopkins had gone there to extend it. The latter's sensational rise from an obscure social worker to a world figure was explained as a consequence of Roosevelt's "unusual confidence" in him.[63]

U.S. News acted as a mere entity floating on this approved "wave of the future." In its sampling of press editorials around the country it found already a "large majority of the editors favoring U.S. aid to Russia." In its reproduction of nine major newspaper editorial turnarounds an Russian policy in less then two months in Lawrence's businessman-oriented weekly, it could be seen that not one even imagined the possibility of Red victory. None looked a particle beyond victory over the Germans, or had the faintest idea of what might follow, nor did any imagine what kind of regime they expected to follow what they wanted to destroy. The nearest one could discern was some kind of sentiment that a vast desert of suspended animation would prevail indefinitely among the defeated nations and the numerous areas sure to be "liberated" from their control and influence.[64]

And in its extended spread on the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting a week after, on August 22, U.S. News called attention to the tidbit in the proceedings redounding to Stalin's welfare, though he was not there, his contribution being brought there from Moscow by Hopkins. It was divined by Lawrence and his editorial assistants that American businessmen could expect American "large-scale help" to the Soviets, supplied "on the advice of the British Government." Stalin was supposed to have been notified of this by letter at the conclusion of the Atlantic Charter meeting at sea. They were assured that there would be no problem of payment. Russia had $40 million on deposit in the U.S. and of course had "a large annual gold production which she can use in international trade."[65] The cash registers were ringing in the ears of all putative American suppliers to this unnamed Operation Life Raft for the salvation of Russian Communism by the more than two-decades-execrated "capitalists." It promised to serve a similar purpose to segments of major American industrial and commercial enterprise, beginning to emerge from over a decade of economic slough under the aegis of a national government which was abandoning saving the domestic scene and about to embark on the far more exciting and encompassing task of saving the world. It was not long however before U.S. News amended its earlier advice on Russian payment procedure as furnished by the Administration to let its business subscribers know that the Soviet Union had been made the beneficiary of a $50 million "initial fund" provided by the Defense Supply Corporation under the U.S. Commerce Department."[66] In September and October 1941 a succession of stories impressed all concerned that the Reds were all that prevented the Germans from sweeping over the world, and they were in the field only if "U.S. and British supplies come."[67]

The change in emphasis on the part of the spokesmen for intervention in the first two to three months of the war in Eastern Europe was quite spectacular, in view of the essentially Anglophile substance of what had preceded it for several years. The partisanship in behalf of Stalinist Russia not only added a new dimension to pro-war propaganda, it intruded into the American scene a competing loyalty which served to disturb the tenor of the war sentiment once the U.S.A. became a belligerent, and added an ingredient which soured and alienated the various "Allies" to such a degree that when they fell out almost upon achieving "victory," the situation never did right itself.

A good example of events overtaking established positions was laid out in Time's monthly cousin in the publishing empire of Henry Luce, Fortune. As a releasing point for combinations of the materialistic and the messianic-moral, it was a source which was almost impossible to top. It was the ultimate organ expressing the view that the future belonged to an Anglo-American combine, with the major decision-making power sure to lodge in the hands of the latter of this team. The Soviet as a major factor in a world victorious over the Germans and Japanese was unmentioned even as a dim possibility. Even in the pretentious and portentous position paper by Russell W. Davenport finally published in August, "This Would Be Victory,"[68] with its talk of a grandiose world "Area of Freedom" dominated by an "International Party," the possibility of having to come to terms with the world Communist apparat was airily dismissed. Once the adversaries East and West were overcome [Davenport assumed U.S. entry into the war was inevitable and would soon occur], this "International Party" would "make common cause with all peoples willing and able to be free," and "The advent of the USSR to our side, and other irrationalities of the European Walpurgisnacht, do not alter this essential principle." Davenport believed the correct course was just to proceed serenely as if it had not happened.

The version of this vision intended for the common citizen was that of Hopkins the previous month in the four-million-circulation American Magazine, a breezy and confident outline of eventual British victory, with the help of America and with two-thirds of the rest of the world also helping out. In this rather extended account, Hopkins managed to mention the Soviet Union only once, as a likely puppet of Hitler should the latter succeed in defeating the British.[69]

In his next American Magazine article, December 1941, Hopkins expatiated on his new job as Lend-Lease Administrator and his personal encounter with Stalin in Moscow. His narrative was an unbroken account of praise of Communist correctness, faithfulness and dependability. He described how Britain became Stalin's partner in June in this way:[70]

But the emphasis now was on Russia, not England. Published just before U.S. involvement in the war via the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan, Hopkins realized he had a public relations job on his hands, knowing of the intimidating majority against direct involvement in the war, and his concluding rhetorical query to a readership he knew wanted no part of the ineffable regime in Russia apparently was supposed to rouse a sense of horror upon contemplation of the alternative: "Ask yourself whom you want on the west shore of the fifty miles of sea which separates Asiatic Russia from Alaska. Whom do you want-Stalin or Hitler?" [No one commented that Hopkins was parroting the Fight for Freedom Committee

word for word]. Probably a majority of Americans had already make up their mind, under the constant pounding of the newspapers, radio and tireless Administration orators and their legions of auxiliaries in Academe and public affairs. The pro-aid-to-Russia position seemed to have swept the field at least three months before direct U.S. entry into the war. Fortune's poll the last week of September 1941 found 73.3% favoring assisting the Communists, but still showing only a small minority actually supporting a war declaration: 10.7%. Despite the sinuous prose of the most persuasive war-peddlers, Americans confronted by the various poll-takers were no more interested in full shooting involvement than they had been two years earlier.

Despite the rising tide of contrived pro-Stalinist sympathy, there remained pockets of obdurate opposition in the U.S., some of them anti-Stalinist throughout the war, even during the period of ardent official pro-Sovietism which reached its peak in 1943. Clerics, disaffected liberals with longstanding reputations as critics of Bolshevism, and relapsed fellow travelers with Lenin and Stalin made up most of the people involved in the public expression of this hostility. Politicians, businessmen, and the highly placed socially and culturally were noticeably absent from this contingent.

A particularly thorny case was that of the American Mercury, once the property of H.L. Mencken, and, in 1941, after a number of changes, published by Lawrence Spivak, later to become familiar as the moderator and host of the radio and television show, "Meet the Press." Its new editor was Eugene Lyons, a one time warm pro-Soviet foreign correspondent, whom Edmund Wilson had once described as having "spent some of the best years of his life whooping it up for the Soviets." Lyons now was as hostile as he had ever been favorable, and set for the Mercury a curious editorial line, hostile to Hitler, for involvement of the U.S.A. in the European war, but also probably more hostile to Stalin than Hitler, presumably on the grounds that though disliking both immensely, he felt that Hitler, having no friendly support in the country, was less formidable in the editorial assault on dictatorial systems. Tackling Stalin so resolutely was perhaps a tougher problem for Lyons, in view of the snowballing of support for the Soviet. And how he hoped to keep from benefiting Stalin by urging a pro-war course was not explained at all.

Lyons had just published what was to prove a very influential book, The Red Decade [Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill] when the Reds went to war with the Nazis. Its description of the meticulous and detailed penetration of the U.S.A. by pro-Soviet influence and its spread through all the agencies of American culture in the ten years or so prior to the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939 was to be a veritable reference work for a generation after its publication. For the pro-Soviet-support elements of the Roosevelt Administration it was an awkward book, published and reviewed at an awkward time. Both Newsweek and the New York Herald Tribune had kind words for it in September 1941, the latter review being by Nicholas Roosevelt.[71] At about that time the August Mercury was being sold on the newstands, which contained a fierce Lyons article, "The End of Joseph Stalin,"[72] which anticipated his downfall at Hitler's hands, and which Lyons, though very hostile to Hitler as well, thought was richly deserved. The piece included a long catalog of the things Stalin had done which Lyons thought had made Hitler possible.

Lyons was still furious at the Red boss for having rejected the "democratic allies" and signing the August 1939 Pakt with Hitler. It was Lyons' thesis that an accommodating, abject and obsequious Stalin had finally been spurned by the contemptuous Nazis. Much of this was wishful thinking and ignored entirely the possibility that the war in Eastern Europe grew out of Stalinist pressures on Hitler. Lyons' follow-up, "Some Plain Talk on Russia,"[73] was a heated blast upon the tendency to lump the Soviets with the Anglo-French-American democracies, now that Britain and the U.S.A. were offering the Reds material aid. But his striving to keep Anglo-American selfish interests in this matter in the foreground was beginning to have an effect on his judgment. Lyons in November 1941 thought that it was the height of impossibility to imagine a future Red swamping of Europe. Britain and America could assist the Russians wholeheartedly "without any fear of a Red tidal wave overwhelming Europe-because they know that a decisive Russian victory is not even a remote possibility." But he did expect another Moscow- Berlin pact between the now-warring former non-belligerents, and suggested that no guarantee of any kind made by Stalin to the Western powers was worth the paper it might be written on, adding that Stalin's "adherence to the Anglo-American 'Atlantic Charter' is a cynical joke," though from 1945 on there were many who thought the behavior of the Charter's founders no less reprehensible.

A skilled recruit to Lyons' side, adding other dimensions to the frontal attack on Communism, domestic and foreign, was another veteran one-time well-wisher of the Bolsheviks, Max Eastman. Eastman's enthusiastic review of Lyons' book was published by the New York Times on September 7, 1941.[74] In an extrapolation on Lyons' book, Eastman's Mercury essay "Stalin's American Power," which subsequently was reprinted by the far larger circulation Readers Digest, enlarged upon the Red fronts in the U.S.A. and their pushing of Russian foreign policy. But making frequent use of the term "Communist conspiracy," once the main property of the Social Democratic Federation's organ, the New Leader, Eastman confined himself to largely ideological elements, and paid no attention to the burgeoning pro-Sovietism discernible among the top business and professional layers of American society. The small Communist press in the U.S.A. took much comfort in steadily growing pro-Soviet sentiments there and elsewhere in the land, the New Masses denoucing Eastman's as "a kind of digest of Lyons' indigestible book," and "a miserably cheap attempt to throw dust into the eyes of millions who at last see the Soviet Union with clarity."[75]

To be sure, there were serious aspects of the domestic Communist issue for the war-bound involvement elements and the Administration, as well as for the Workers' Fatherland. The salvation of Russian Communism did not rest with the CPUSA, whose only product was words, but with the producers of tanks, planes, guns and food, as well as a thousand other items useful in Stalin's "war effort." Any U.S. Communist activity of a propaganda or agitational nature that interfered with this undoubtedly would draw a prompt frown of disapproval from the Kremlin. The U.S. Communist press swing from peace to war overnight after June 22, 1941, was a most ludicrous lurch. The conversion of all their peace fronts to violent pro-war mobs, the return of "appeaser" to indicate the genuine peace forces remaining of 1935-39, and the disappearance of "warmonger" as a description of the Anglophiles still breathing belligerence, all hardly went unnoticed on the American scene. With the Daily Worker by the end of the third month of the Russo-German war praising West Point and glorifying army life, it was easy to note what was on their mind.

For the elements which had been for war all the time, it was now their time to watch for Communists "boring from within," as it had been the problem of the "isolationists" and non- involvement committees and organizations between August 23, 1939, and June 22, 1941. The former had obstacles in going ahead with their goal of fighting a nice, clear-cut Anglo-American vs German war, with no Reds in it. The Fight For Freedom Committee was one of the first warrior civilian groups to put its members on the alert as to this difficulty.[76] Newsweek told all on September 22 that the FBI was "still carefully checking on U.S. Communist activities," though this must have been hard to do and not run afoul of the FDR camp's involvement proclivities which dealt with generous pro-Stalinist assistance plans, all vigorously championed by domestic Reds as well.[77]

The real mess however was in the ranks of labor. Communist strength in the roughly 7-year-old Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO] promptly flexed its muscle. By mid- September 20 CIO unions were already demanding the U.S.A. go to war against Germany. And a curious arabesque was performed internally. The elements led by Sidney Hillman, pro-war and pro- FDR, known down to June 1941 as "the old right wing," as U.S. News put it, and confronted by labor led by John L. Lewis, anti- war and anti-FDR, "the old left wing," had by September 1941 changed identities.[78] Lewis and his cohorts now were assembled under the "right wing" tag, and Hillman and his the contrary designation. The Communists in the CIO and the Daily Worker were now both berating Lewis as an "appeaser" and "isolationist" after having praised him for the identical stands during the period of Stalinist non-involvement in the European war. Labor-watchers now were of the view that the Communists were now trying to cuddle to Hillman, who was formally rejecting a working alliance with them, though finding their support of war policies comforting.

In mid-September 1941 also, Stalin obviously had far more on his mind than Anglophile American warmongers unhappy over the CPUSA infiltrating their simon-pure pro-war fronts. But Newsweek informed its readers at that moment that Stalin had "in- directly asked" the USCP to "quiet down," and might even "publicly request it to dissolve formally," in the interests of relieving "the strain which CP activities put on U.S.-Russian and British-Russian relations." Hopkins was supposed to have suggested this course to Stalin.[79] And in truth there really was no need for an American Communist Party now. Its chores were performed by many magnitudes beyond its capacity by the majority of the conventional press and radio in the U.S.A., bellowing mightily for support of Stalin in all ways, promotional assistance to a national administration already involved in massive planning toward the achievement of this goal.

In toting up the score of the forces favoring Russian Communism in its showdown with German National Socialism, one could not leave out the American industrial system as represented by its corporate giants, and their dramatically-swelling labor forces. There is a direct correlation between the steady decline of the energy and support of the non-interventionist position on the war during the last 15 months before direct American involvement, and the corresponding increasing economic stake of more and more Americans in the "defense" boom, during that same period. It was remarkably obvious in the last six months of that time span. The steady drifting away of supporters for neutrality can be less understood by reading their specious moralizing on why they had changed their minds than by noting the simultaneous stunning full page color advertisements of scores of major corporations hawking the new martial hardware being made within their walls. The wonder is that such an immense percentage of those polled in opinion surveys still opposed a declaration of war during this spell.[80]

If psychic and spiritual enlistment in the war could be dated from June 1940 and de facto involvement in the war as a belligerent from March 1941, it took the vast industrial mobilization in the period after the Russians joined the war to cement down this American participation. As the summer wore into the fall in 1941, the necessity of maintaining a scrupulous distinction as to which of the anti-German belligerents one was favoring steadily eroded away, and the American hand to Stalin began to stretch in every direction it might reach there. One could understand that Stalin was risking no palpable damage in ordering the CPUSA to scuttle its profile in this critical moment. Their help really was not needed, and the function of their press could easily be confined to echoing what was broadcast from Moscow. The pro-Soviet forces of non-Communist origin were demonstrating that they could handle the job of assistance to the Kremlin and the spreading of the positive virtues and the noble attributes of Stalinism all by themselves.

It was not, therefore, in the tiny editions and limited distribution of the Stalinist press in America that one read the cheering, dramatic story of the first string of tankers arriving in Stalin's Siberian port of Vladivostok with immense cargoes of high octane gasoline from the U.S.A. for "battling Russia." It was rather in the front pages of the millionaire-run three-quarters-of-a-million circulation Time on September 15, 1941. A week earlier its opinion- saturated "news" columns had declared that the U.S.A. was in "a virtual alliance-with Russia against Germany,"[81] and with China against Japan, though the latter did not specify whether we were allied with Chiang or Mao. With the gasoline delivery, Time assured its readers that "If not actively fighting Fascism, the U.S. was helping to fuel the fight against it." No New Masses editor could have stated it any better.

In fact, Time had begun printing material directly supplied by the Soviet newspaper Red Star weeks before, without the slightest warning that it might be the purest propaganda. And it expressed general sympathy with the Soviet stories of their massive destruction of Russian communities and industry, 90% of the area in some claims, as its armies retreated in the face of the advancing Germans, thus making possible propaganda exploitation of this scorched-earth policy, with a future claim being lodged for other self-serving purposes later, of charges that the same amount of damage had all been done by the Germans.[82] It was one of many aspects of the war which found the eventual victors working both sides of the street with singular success. Though physically impossible, this contradictory story did wonders for pro-Stalinist sympathizers in the U.S.A.

For sure, the intense season of "heroic Russia" was nearly upon the American imagination, to be propelled at an increasing tempo shortly, until well after the Anglo-American and Stalinist "allies" had fallen out. And no facet of the cultural or psychic world was to be neglected in the accentuation of this campaign against the English-speaking sensibilities, music included. Late in September, Time told all that the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich had related that he was writing his Seventh Symphony, which would " 'attempt to depict the battle of Leningrad and tell the story of the city's Home Guards.'"[83] This endeavor was billed as the equivalent in this new war to Tschaikovsky's 1812 Overture, though subsequent critics were to find the former an essay in subdued trash-can bashing by comparison with the celebrated Tschaikovsky composition.

While the reportage on things Russian increased in warmth, the temperature of pro-Red sympathy in America soared somewhat higher. Symptomatic of this was the bellow for aid to Stalin which emanated from the American Legion convention in Milwaukee at about this same time. Time for September 29 shimmered with its eulogy of the Legion, rejoiced at its bellicosity toward Hitler Germany and its fierce desire for war, along with approval of its almost unanimous support for the creeping interventionism of Roosevelt. It even voted for one of Roosevelt's latest hobby horses, permanent universal military trainings. [84]

Almost simultaneously with this were other indications surfacing in widely separated places. The Christian Century quoted the Jackson, Mississippi Daily News as calling upon all religious congregations in the state to expel any ministers who were in opposition to the U.S. becoming involved in the European war.[85] Apparently these anti-Communist Southern fundamentalists were unperturbed by the thought of full enlistment in a war with Stalin to make Europe one-half Red. In fact, there were elements which were of the mind that this latter appellation was a dirty political word. That same week the Toronto Globe and Mail, the city's morning paper, embarked on a sortie to persuade other Canadian papers to join it in abandoning the word "Red" as a term for Russians.[86] And a few days before, war correspondent Edgar Ansel Mowrer, in an open letter to Roosevelt published in the vigorously pro-war picture weekly Look, founded in 1937 and already sporting a circulation of two million, urged him to clean out the "professional Bolshephobes" from all government departments, since they were hindrances who could not "honestly help us to destroy Fascism."[87] Nowhere in the Communist press could anyone find a more ardent ideological call than this.

To be sure, things seemed to be looking up for the Anglo- Russian cause in September 1941. Their joint invasion of Iran had resulted in success, hailed in Time as "Victors in the fortnight-old, 80-hour Iranian war." Though Hitler's invasions of strategically- located neighbors were uniformly billed as brutal aggressions, far softer and kinder verbiage was invented to describe the same thing when undertaken by Stalin and Churchill. And Time wound up its accolade by quoting from the New York Herald Tribune's Russell Hill, who, at Kazan with Russian officers, drank bottoms-up toasts to Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and "'reunion in Berlin.' [88] Though the U.S. was still not a formal belligerent, May 1945 was brilliantly forecast and anticipated.

In the meantime the assiduous promotion of still another wealthy pro-Stalinist, England's Sir Richard Stafford Cripps, had begun, along with serious efforts in liberal circles to bring H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw to the U.S. to assist in helping "whip up enthusiasm for aid to Russia," as Newsweek put it.[89] Time's salute to Cripps, Ambassador to Moscow since the lonely days of 1940, when the Stalinists had nothing but ridicule for England at war, included a tribute to his being "One man who has really been right about World War II," since "From its opening gun, he maintained that Britain's interest and Russia's were the same," while calling attention to his recent "paean to the Russian people."[90]

And when Eric Estorick's puff in book form, Stafford Cripps, Prophetic Rebel [John Day], began to go the rounds a few weeks later, it was no scrubby journal of the impoverished left that hailed it, but the alleged tower of Republican strength, the Herald Tribune, at the hands of its warmly pro-Soviet foreign editor, Joseph Barnes. It was Barnes who called attention to this opulent Briton's eloquence in behalf of the Workers' Fatherland: "Outside the Communist Party, itself, no other British leader," asserted Barnes, produced such speeches, "which were like and sounded like Marxism."[91]

Not all the traffic was one-way in the burgeoning buildup of the Soviet in the fall of 1941. The Roosevelt regime was increasingly embarrassed by the continuation of the war between Finland and Russia, and dreaded non-interventionist congressmen arguing against aid to Stalin on the grounds that Russians would use American arms to shoot Finns. There were signs that a formidable residue of anti-war reservations existed among the populace and that not all the devices being used to work up war fever were effective. Pro-war Look was chagrined to learn as a result of their poll of 15,000 moving picture exhibitors at the end of the summer that "'Anti-Nazi' pictures-like 'Escape,' 'Underground' or 'Manhunt'-were rated least productive at the box office."[92] But there were hundreds more like these to come in the future. A similar conclusion was arrived at by the Gallup Audience Research Institute, headed by David Ogilvy, whose report was released the third week of July 1941. It concluded that there was no audience outside of New York City for anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi pictures, and that all propaganda movies had thus far fizzled at the box-office.[93]

And there were a few towering holdouts among the predominantly war-bound liberal opinion-makers adding their discordant notes to the swelling chorus of Soviet tributes to be heard on the American scene. Notable was Villard, mainly reduced to a platform with the anti-war Christian Century, though Common Sense and the Progressive were still open to views such as his. He was deeply resentful of interventionist liberals now insisting that the "aggressor" nations had to be defeated "even if it meant the ruin of the whole world," though he thought that there was even less chance of the U.S.A. entering the war by way of a formal declaration than "before we became partners of the unspeakable Stalin."

[94] Of the growing emphasis on Russianism instead of Communism in the Soviet Union Villard remarked, "It is a tribute to the skill with which the Bolsheviks have pumped nationalistic and patriotic doctrines into the Russian people that they are so willing to bleed to death for a government that has murdered, exiled and imprisoned innumerable Russians for the sole offense of opposing Josef Stalin's rule."[95]

Another redoubtable fixture in the anti-war liberal fold who stuck in the collective craw of the interventionists, when it came to the subject of enlisting their sentiments behind Stalin, was John Dewey. His consistent coolness toward Stalin and his unwillingness to indulge in encomiums to him as a result of the exigencies of the European war drew him repeated scoldings, but his cautions about the dangers in idealizing Stalin due to an excess of uncritical enthusiasm continued for several months after U.S. entry into the war. He was sure this would lead to Americans having to pay "too costly a price for Russia's cooperation." [96] Dewey's antagonist on the faculty of Columbia Teacher's College was Prof. John L. Childs, who uttered the standard liberal reproach to Dewey, fearful that such an attitude would affront the Reds. Childs was one of the eloquent exponents of sustained long-term pro-Soviet relations. He urged Americans to "Let's cooperate with the Reds during and after the war," and above all, he implored, "Let's not adopt a policy of isolating Russia once the war is over."[97] Dewey's courage in sticking to his views was all the more remarkable in that the organization with which he was most prominently identified, the 10,000-member Progressive Education Association, had early in July 1941 become the first organized group of American educators to support an outright declaration for full American participation in the world war, a manifesto which was also signed by 12 of the 14 editors of its journal, Frontiers of Democracy.[98]

The only sector of the academic and educational world comprised of students which matched their mentors in belligerence were the newspaper editors of the Ivy League and other elite colleges. In the twelve schools selected for examination by Time in the early fall of 1941 they were deeply gratified to notice a much more aggravated call for gore in their college newspaper editorials, though this martial posture was hardly to be reflected in the undergraduate enrollment or in any other level occupied by those in age brackets which were likely to end up in the front lines.[99] This social fact is what so incensed the intellectual leaders of the administration's budding propaganda machine, especially the likes of the new Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, a fervent and eloquent voice for world war, and the performer of probably the most spectacular intellectual somersault achieved by any American intellectual on the subject of war participation in the short six years between 1935 and 1941. There certainly was no one trying to square the strident warrior MacLeish of 1940-41 with the MacLeish who answered a questionaire of the Modern Monthly in June 1935 in these words: "I should do everything in my power to prevent the United States going into war under any [MacLeish's emphasis] circumstances. There is only one possible position against the menace of militarism: absolute hostility. Any other is romantic." But MacLeish, in the eyes of the stubborn remnant of anti-war liberals the outstanding intellectual turncoat of the pre-war period, was just one of a legion who did much the same, to be rewarded with lush posts, handsome remuneration, continuous fulsome praise and sustained promotion into a succession of even more prominent post-war careers.

While the small, quiet steps announcing each steady move toward cultural totalitarianism took place, while the pretense was maintained that the "democracies" and their new Communist "ally" were trying to overcome it, the announcements of growing technical and industrial mobilization in its behalf were to be found far closer to the front. Early in October 1941 Time devoted a substantial account to an English Midlands tank factory whose labor force stood and sang the Communist Internationale at the unveiling of a goodly batch of tanks built for the Soviet Union, bearing the names of Marx and many more recent Red bureaucrat "heroes of Soviet labor." Even Time was a little abashed to report that the British Broadcasting Corporation's broadcasts "sounded like Moscow radio" in its bawling propaganda announcements of tanks and munitions output in the just-concluded "Tanks-for- Russia" week in Great Britain.[100]

The faddish aspect of this all-out help for Stalin was spreading in the U.S.A. at this moment as well, even provoking U.S. News to ask the following question of its readers: "Should U.S. Divert its Entire Arms Production to Britain and Russia for the Next Three Months?' [101] At a time when Americans were being whipsawed by pro-war propagandists into fears of imminent invasion themselves by the seemingly omnipresent and ubiquitous Germans, and the domestic "defense" agitation was indicating that elements of the newly conscripted American armed forces were conducting maneuvers in part with wooden and other play-style "weapons," it posed a contradiction for the pro-war enthusiasts. The industrial system did not seem to be capable of providing the military of the main belligerents abroad and the U.S. too with all the martial hardware they required.

The responses of the prominent political, military and other personalities were indicative of some of the conflicts sweeping opinion at the time, nevertheless. Senators Capper of Kansas and Overton of Louisiana and Rep. Karl Mundt of South Dakota, of the Senate and House Foreign Affairs Committees, respectively, said no. But Capper and Mundt were for sending as much as could be spared to the British without undermining U.S. defense, while stipulating that of that total the recipients would have to decide how much was then to be sent to the Communists, "since Russia is an ally of Britain." In the process, they cautioned, "let us not have Uncle Sam become the generalissimo of the war nor the bedmate of Communism." Major General William H. Haskell, Commander of the 27th Infantry Division, also joined the "nays," saying that the weapons were needed here first of all: "I feel it is of major importance to carry forward the training of our own armies."

But James W. Gerard, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany prior to American entry into World War I, Rep. May of Kentucky, Chairman of the House Committee of Military Affairs, were for it, as well as Hiram Winternitz, Jr., President of Charles Dreifus Co., of Philadelphia. The latter insisted: "It seems to me that the diversion of practically all of our production of military goods for the next few months to Britain and Russia, particularly Russia, would be sound practice." Also favoring this was Lewis G. Harriman, prominent Buffalo banker and president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He expressed himself in complete harmony with such a diversion, fearing that Russian loss to the Germans would delay and make immensely more difficult the ultimate victory of England, while sure the argument "that such help would make Russia itself presently a greater menace to us seems too remote to cause concern." Dean Paul Andrews of the University of Syracuse College of Law favored the idea in principle but thought that the percentage of such allocations to Britain and Russia should be determined by technical people. Dean Andrews' views were additionally agitated by his fear that the Germans were about to capture all of South America while disposing of the Soviet Union.

David Lawrence apparently was not as carried away with euphoria as some of the respondents to the U.S. News query concerning the desirability of shipping off the total of three months' American war production to Russia, or to Britain as Stalin's agent. One of their requests, that they acquire "large quantities of tools and machinery to equip new war industry east of the Ural Mountains," temporarily got lodged in his craw, but not for long".[102] Though not too sure that aid to Russia involved a commitment to help the Bolsheviks develop long-term heavy industrial potential far from the war fronts [he did not take up the massive aid to the Soviet of this kind in the previous 25 years], his fears soon washed away, partially as a consequence of his October questionaire and the mounting bad war news from the new Eastern Front. By October 24 U.S. News was sure that two-thirds of the industry in Western Russia was already in Hitler's grip, and editorially it declared with some agitation, "Russian industry in the Urals must be supported by an immense quantity of supplies from Britain and America if resistance is to continue." Gratification was also expressed over a recent Roosevelt statement that vast supplies of war goods were underway to Russia, all promised by Hopkins at Moscow too be delivered by the end of October 1941.[103] And at the end of November its war industries executive readers must have been cheered to learn that "A large United States military mission" was being "quietly organized to go to Russia," and would leave "soon," for Archangel, to gather first hand information "about how this country can help Russia.''[104] The months of wary ruminations about the wisdom of direct involvement in Russia's war fortunes were giving way to exactly the reverse, undoubtedly nurtured by the steadily growing involvement of the Roosevelt camp into matters which promised eventual belligerent status somewhere, and probably in several places.

Apparently a barrier to this scheme had been overcome in a short time since an early fall complaint had been circulated about Stalin's reserve and secrecy, and his refusal to allow any U.S. or British observers anywhere near any of the fighting or almost anywhere else. Hence had come about the joint mission of U.S.A.'s Averell Harriman and Britain's Lord Beaverbrook to seek for more frankness on Stalin's part.[105] Of this noted visit, more later.

The only clashing noise in what was otherwise a symphony of effortless gliding on the part of the varied forces working in behalf of Stalinist Russia in the fall of 1941 across the United States grew out of the August 1941 Atlantic Charter and the consequences of Roosevelt adding the "point" dealing with freedom of religion. One of the first to capitalize on this was Soviet radio, commending this strategy, and joining to it the urging of the overthrow of the Germans at the earliest opportunity because Hitler was "menacing the very existence of Christianity." This even cooled off ardently pro-Russian Time, which did not think it appropriate for the Marxist regime to be hailing a force which they systematically attacked on the domestic Russian scene.[106] Even if one wished to insist that Bolshevism was a form of religion itself,[107] the Russian people as a whole hardly had abandoned their old ways, no matter what the Soviet government's League of the Militant Godless maintained. Almost twenty years after the Leninist revolution had taken over, about one half of the total population was still of the Russian Orthodox faith.[108] The dramatic decline was in the number of churches, estimated in August 1941 to be down to 8,338 from 70,000 in 1917.

Not much had been said at the Time the so-called "Four Freedoms" had been launched from the deck of the British battleship Prince of Wales off Argentia, Newfoundland, which included the religious freedom concept. Even the noted Protestant layman John Foster Dulles, not a part of the Roosevelt regime, and mainly involved in labors in behalf of a group of prominent churchmen and laymen called the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, had nothing to say about it in particular when he drafted his famous negative dissection of the celebrated Eight Points of Churchill and Roosevelt. Dulles, a p