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  This was a stunning statement. No doubt, had a Republican president so characterized his liberal opponents, it would have prompted liberal journalists and historians to forever tag the president a Red-baiting reprobate. In Wilson's case, however, the comments have been conveniently sunk into a historical black hole.

  That is likewise true for another arresting assertion by Wilson. Dr. Cary Grayson, Wilson's esteemed friend, physician, and adviser, recorded an expression of Wilson's concerns about Bolshevism that also reflected the great progressive's highly regressive views of ethnic minorities. In a diary entry of March 10, 1919, Grayson noted that Wilson feared “the American negro returning from abroad … would be our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America.” As evidence, Wilson pointed to a single anecdotal example of a “negro laundress,” a “negress,” who was demanding a higher wage than she had been offered. From this one case, reported to him personally, the liberal icon projected a pandemic of “negro”-imported Bolshevism.10

  Despite his inherent bigotries and misplaced analogies, Wilson's characterization of Bolshevism in and of itself was not some ill-informed rant. Quite the contrary, Wilson was arguably America's best-educated president, with a law degree from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins. In addition to practicing law, he taught for years at such prestigious institutions as Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton—he also served as college president of the last—and he published landmark journal articles and books that remain seminal works in their fields even today.11 The well-read, scholarly Wilson studied Bolshevism with a discerning eye. He was not given to childish delusions about Marxism-Leninism. He knew the bad guys were bad guys, and that a genuine liberal should not support or defend them.

  President Wilson backed up his anti-Bolshevik rhetoric with action. He wanted Bolshevism out of power, and was willing to dedicate American force to help make it happen. In the Russian Civil War he aided the “White” Menshavik forces fighting the “Red” Bolsheviks. He supported a naval blockade of a Red-controlled area inside the USSR, and even joined a multinational Western coalition in sending troops—including a huge contingent of more than ten thousand American boys12—to fight the Bolsheviks. So intense (and forgotten) was Wilson's sustained military action against the Bolsheviks that historian Robert Maddox has called it America's “Unknown War with Russia.”13

  Wilson was a man of the liberal Left who understood the vicious hazard posed by these men of the Communist Left. He knew that Communism was a terrible threat to all of humanity.

  And that is why Communists, from Chicago to New York to Moscow, despised Wilson.

  Lenin on Wilson

  Vladimir Lenin's words were always remarkably militant, and President Woodrow Wilson was hardly exempted from the dictator's caustic tongue and pen.14

  In an August 1918 letter to American workers, Lenin employed bloodcurdling language to describe the American system, economy, culture, form of government, way of life, and president. Lenin counted Wilson among the slanderous “vultures,” “bloodsuckers,” “scoundrels,” “sharks,” “modern slave-owners,” and wallowers in “filth and luxury” who held Americans on the verge of “pauperism.” Wilson was among those “bandits” who ensured that “every dollar” Americans earned was “stained with blood.”

  Just in case it was not completely clear that Lenin was calling out Wilson in particular, the Russian leader took explicit aim at the American president. Of the liberal's liberal, the great internationalist, the Bolshevik gangster wrote: “I am not surprised that Wilson, the head of the American multimillionaires and servant of the capitalist sharks, has thrown [socialist leader Eugene] Debs into prison. Let the bourgeoisie be brutal to the true internationalists, to the true representatives of the revolutionary proletariat! The more fierce and brutal they are, the nearer the day of the victorious proletarian revolution.” It was in this same letter—this direct appeal to the worker-troops of the United States of America—that Lenin pledged that violence would be necessary: “The truth is that no revolution can be successful unless the resistance of the exploiters is crushed.”

  It was nothing at all for the Communists to call for President Wilson's head on a platter. Such an unapologetically violent missive provides still more evidence that it was absurd to defend the Communist Party in America—wholly dedicated to Lenin—as just another political party.

  Lenin also mocked Wilson's “empty phrases about the ‘great importance’ of ‘democracy.’” In his October 1919 “Greeting to the German, Italian, and American Communists,” which was reprinted in American Communist publications that fall, Lenin declared that such “designations” of “democracy” were mere empty designs of “the exploiters” and the “Philistines” and the “petty bourgeois.” This, and Wilsonianism generally, had to be resisted, said Lenin, so that “victory will be ours.” The leader of the worldwide revolution concluded: “The victory of Communism is inevitable.”15

  Lenin had expressed all of these sentiments together the previous year, in November 1918, when he warned that “Anglo-French and American imperialism will inevitably strangle the independence and freedom of Russia unless worldwide socialist revolution, unless world-wide Bolshevism, conquers.”16

  Was Wilson up to the task of stopping this inevitable Communist takeover of America and the world? No, not in Lenin's mind. The highly educated American president was too stupid, the Bolshevik said. Lenin told a meeting of activists in December 1920 that this “greatest state in the world,” standing before them as a grand prize in waiting, was led by a president who was “an utter simpleton.”17

  America's Comrades

  Of course, the Communists at home, being subservient to their masters in Moscow, saluted the red flag. That meant that they also shook their fist at Woodrow Wilson and the American flag.

  Consider the case of Communist editor Louis C. Fraina, who dedicated the first edition of Revolutionary Age, printed in Boston on July 5, 1919, to the overthrow of the U.S. government and “the annihilation of the fraudulent democracy of the parliamentary system.”18 Who was Fraina's target at the moment? The administration of the great liberal Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

  Similarly, a 1920 flier produced by the United Communist Party (see page 45) called for not only a boycott of the 1920 election in America but an actual “overthrow” of the American “capitalist government” and the establishment of a “Soviet government.” The party widely disseminated this flier and other materials that unflinchingly urged this mission; there was nothing secret about the Communists’ objectives.

  Such fliers were not only found on buildings, in mailboxes, and on doorsteps throughout America in 1920 but also on the desks of the Comintern in Moscow. In fact, this exact flier today resides in the Comintern Archives on CPUSA.19 America's comrades were reporting their noble efforts to their bosses in Moscow. They wanted Lenin's men to know they were working hard for the USSR—working hard on the American front, against America itself, just as Lenin wanted.

  As revealed in official United Communist Party proclamations (also sent to the Comintern),20 the comrades’ ultimate goal was to “STAND BY SOVIET RUS-SIA”—not by the United States, but by Russia. (See page 46.) Bolshevik Russia was their country, their love, their home—not Woodrow Wilson's America.

  Worse, bemoaned the party, was that Wilson's America opposed Russia in solidarity with the allegedly murderous minions of England, France, and Poland. Yes, innocent Bolshevik Russia was under relentless assault from vicious, imperialist-driven Poland. The party was irate that Wilson's America, Lloyd George's England, and Clemenceau's France were sending “their armies,” money, and munitions to “Polish bandits.”

  Wilson's “Stupid” Dream

  Another reason American Communists so stridently objected to President Wilson was his faith. The Marxists sneered that Wilson thought he was doing the “Lord's” work in seeking to establish the League of Nations.

  Lord? The Communists knew where to lo
ok for supreme authority and inspiration—to Vladimir Lenin. They would do Lenin's work. And a rich area in that mission field was to demonize Woodrow Wilson's loftiest ambition.

  Wilson's dream was the League of Nations. Today it is common for conservatives to beat up Wilson for establishing this international “peace” organization, the precursor to the United Nations. But it was the far Left that first attacked him for this effort.

  The League of Nations was the crowning touch on Wilson's historic “Fourteen Points,” the principles for which, he said, the Great War was fought. Establishing the league was deeply personal for him; doing so would fulfill his lifelong ambition to leave his mark on history. His relentless campaign for Senate approval of American membership in the league, against staunch Republican opposition, was so physically and mentally debilitating that it arguably killed him.

  And yet Wilson steamed ahead, filled with the spirit, as the devout five-point Calvinist saw his effort as sanctified and predestined by Providence. He believed the League of Nations was God's will. Wilson intoned:

  The stage is set, the destiny is closed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.21

  The Communists saw this clatter as “stupid,” as they did any “superstitious” belief in a deity. They perceived it as spiritual pabulum, as “Wilson the simpleton” at his most simplistic, at his pious worst. The godless already had a vampiric reaction to the God-fearing. And now Wilson was endeavoring to create a world based on democratic freedom—the antithesis of the world for which the comrades were crusading.

  Wilson famously wanted to “make the world safe for democracy.” American Communists framed Wilson's talk of democracy as bunk, since it was not Bolshevik “democracy.” For real democracy, opined Anton Pannekork in the May 15, 1920, edition of Communist Labor, the official organ of the Communist Labor Party of America, the world should look to Soviet Russia. “The question of Democracy appears to be a great and debatable one,” wrote Pannekork in a piece titled “Bolshevism and Democracy.” Yet, said Pannekork, toeing the Party line, it was not debatable as to which country and leader shone forth the guiding light; it was Lenin and his Russia, not Wilson and his America. Wrote Pannekork: “There is no people in the world today (except the Russian people) which has the right to decide its fate.”22

  The United Communist Party of America drove home this message in fliers it circulated before the 1920 elections. One of them noted that the “main issue” between Republicans and Democrats was whether the United States should join the League of Nations. The “big international banking interests” and the “industrial capitalists,” America's comrades said, were behind Wilson's crusade. The Communist Party said that the political debate over the league amounted to “a fight between two groups of capitalist interests,” neither of which would ever “improve the conditions under which [Americans] live and work.”23

  Wilson's entire prospect was so ridiculous, concluded America's Marxist-Leninists, that Americans should boycott the 1920 elections.

  Thus, Woodrow Wilson's indefatigable effort to launch the League of Nations, with America as a member, was another liberal cause vilified by the Communists.

  Wilson and “The Fighting Quaker”

  Even as Lenin and his fellow Communists around the world baldly stated their violent, expansionist ambitions, the Communist Party accused the Wilson administration of overreacting to the Communist threat. That Communist line in the 1920s became the party line among liberals/progressives in America, and remains a common view even today.

  The principal target for the Left has been Wilson's controversial attorney general, Alexander Mitchell Palmer.

  The vigorous Palmer was in his late forties when he served Wilson as the nation's fifty-first attorney general from March 1919 to March 1921. Palmer was a progressive from the old school: a moralist, a social reformer, a pacifist, a Christian (he was a Quaker). Elected to Congress in 1908, he had pushed a number of major progressive causes, from the abolition of child labor to the advancement of women's suffrage. He became a star in the Democratic Party constellation, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1912 and 1916 and a member of the Democratic National Committee from 1912 to 1920.

  Palmer was close to Wilson personally and, even more so, ideologically. Both men had been very much against American entry into World War I. Wilson, in 1916, had stumped on a platform to keep America out of the war, but ultimately changed course after Germany provoked the United States through a series of complicated international incidents. Eventually, Wilson sought and secured war authorization from Congress in April 1917.

  For his part, Palmer remained opposed to the war, committed to his Quaker convictions. He refused Wilson's offer to be secretary of war. Instead, after the war, Palmer took the position of attorney general. One of his first postwar acts was to release some ten thousand aliens of German ancestry whom the Wilson administration had seized during the war out of suspicion that they harbored loyalties to the kaiser.

  By then, in 1919, it was no longer Germany but the Communists who threatened the American way of life. As would be the case after World War II, it was a Democratic president and his administration that fingered the threat and developed strategies to counter it, with American Communists crying foul and seeking out liberals to join the chorus.

  Likewise posing a danger was the rising anarchist movement. The Wilson administration struggled to make distinctions between anarchists and Communists and to respond appropriately. The attorney general's office was at the tip of the spear.

  In April 1919, only weeks into Palmer's tenure as attorney general, anarchists sent a booby-trapped bomb to his home. The bomb was intercepted and defused, but a few months later they successfully exploded another bomb on his porch. It killed one of the plotters but failed to injure Palmer, his wife, or his child, who were home in bed at the time.

  “The Fighting Quaker,” as Palmer became known, was ready to fight back. He and Wilson saw the anarchists as part of a witches’ brew of radical-Left elements endangering America. He was particularly concerned about Red activity during May Day 1920. With the encouragement—in fact, mandate—of his president, Palmer began wiretapping suspected indigenous threats and rounding them up. More than ten thousand people were arrested, and some were deported.

  The reaction to the “Palmer Raids” was multifaceted. Traditional Democrats applauded his actions, whereas many liberals decried what they saw as a flagrant abuse of civil liberties. No doubt, some “suspects” were wrongly suspected, and treated quite harshly and unfairly, but others were genuinely dangerous and anti-American. One can debate each and every case of alleged sedition, from smaller names to bigger fish like Emma Goldman, but there is no debate that some anarchists were assembling and exploding bombs, or that the leadership of the Communist Party in America was hell-bent on overthrowing the U.S. government. Both Palmer and Wilson understood that the Communists in particular were “revolutionists,” as the Reds’ own bombastic literature stated unequivocally, and that they were absolutely dedicated to the USSR.

  Palmer did show some mercy. He had asked Wilson to pardon the great socialist Eugene Debs. The Quaker viewed his request as, among other things, an act of compassion toward a man of declining health. The liberal president angrily refused, reportedly shouting, “Never!”24

  But the Communists showed no such mercy toward Palmer. The Reds detested him. From the start they had used their publications to blast the attorney general, and the attacks became even more intense once he began seeking to hold them accountable for their obvious advocacy of violence and antigovernment activity. They published caricatures of Palmer as a stomping, bloodthirsty American Indian, carrying a long, sharp knife in his left hand and hoisting a
dripping, bloody scalp in his right hand. (See page 51.) That picture, splashed across the February 25, 1920, issue of Communist Labor, was sent to the Comintern.25 The American comrades surely hoped to impress their mentors in Moscow with their dedicated demonization of Palmer.

  In truth, Palmer had never killed anyone. Lenin was doing the killing. Palmer himself had been targeted for murder, as had his wife and child. To the Communists, however, it was the attorney general who was unhinged.

  And how is Palmer remembered today? Not as victim but as victimizer.

  For example, the popular reference website Encyclopedia.com features several entries on Palmer, including one from The Encyclopedia of World Biography that begins: “As U.S. attorney general, Alexander Mitchell Palmer (1872–1936) was instrumental in creating the ‘red scare’ of internal Communist subversion after World War I.”26

  Note that Palmer is described not as one who early on recognized the subversive intent of Communists in America and around the world, but instead as progenitor in a long line of “scare” mongers. Note, too, that this is the very first line of the entry, clearly signaling that Palmer unfairly maligned Communists.