Dupes Page 7

  It is no accident that “Red scare” gets attached to Palmer's name. From the outset of the American Communist threat, the Left accused major government officials who looked into the legitimate problem of subversion and infiltration, of overreaching, of paranoia, and of drumming up “inordinate” fears of Communism. Most famously, Senator Joe McCarthy was accused of fomenting a “Red scare” in the 1950s, but before McCarthy, there was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Congressman Martin Dies (Texas Democrat), and, yes, Attorney General Palmer and President Woodrow Wilson. The Left has characterized just about every major pursuit of the Marxist menace as an unsavory, regrettable “Red scare” by paranoid U.S. government officials—Democrats and Republicans.

  To cite merely one case in point, consider Dr. Harry F. Ward, a liberal Methodist preacher, seminary professor, ACLU founder, and dupe of dumbfounding proportions. Writing in Protestant Digest in January 1940, long before Senator McCarthy descended on the scene, Reverend Ward admonished the liberal faithful of the perils of “anti-communism,” which was being employed “under the leadership of [Congressman] Dies in a new red hunt” that promised to be even “more ruthless than that of Mitchell Palmer.” Practically any anti-Communism was deemed ruthless, and every new attempt was worse than its vulgar predecessor.27

  As demonstrated by the case of Palmer and his president, Woodrow Wilson, this was the Left's line from day one of the American Communist movement. The Communists could count on liberals to push that line, even against Democratic presidents and administrations.

  The Eternal Villain

  Woodrow Wilson was the first in a long line of liberal Democratic presidents whom the Communists attacked ferociously. They wasted no time finding their eternal villain: the anti-Communist blowing the whistle.

  Thus began the peculiar situation of American liberals defending Communist subversives against investigations by anti-Communists even as the Communists blistered the liberals/progressives. The bizarre dynamic of anti-anti-Communism, which has infected liberals from the very beginning, has mangled their ability to best react to the extremists on their far left.

  President Wilson was an exception to this rule—a progressive who understood that the Communists were not the friends of liberals. Some of his inheritors understood that, too, but far too many did not—and never have.

  POTEMKIN PROGRESSIVES

  From the very start of their movement, Communists looked to liberals for assistance—that is, to liberals they could dupe. The strategy began in late 1919, with the founding of their party in Chicago, and picked up full force in 1920–21, the final stretch of Woodrow Wilson's presidency.

  Liberal dupery by Communists lasted throughout the history of the Soviet Union, but it was never as widespread or successful as in the 1920s and 1930s. This should not be a surprise. The 1920s was the first full decade for the Soviet Communist Party, the Communist Party in America, the Comintern, and Communist parties around the world. In the early 1920s Stalin had not yet taken the helm, and many leftists had been hoodwinked into thinking that Lenin was a friendly fellow—despite what should have been obvious from his writings and public statements.1 Of course, even in the late 1920s, once the brutal Stalin had fully assumed power, many liberals were still being taken, seeing him, too—unbelievably—as a jovial chum.

  To some liberals of the day, the brave new world being charted by the men in Moscow seemed like it might dovetail with the growing progressive movement in the United States, which had taken off in the first decades of the twentieth century. There was a sense among many liberals/progressives—ubiquitous in their writings at the time—that they and the Soviets were traveling along a similar path, “fellow travelers” on a shared road toward a better world based on the collective, on redistribution of wealth, on public ownership of “the means of production,” on a devotion to the state and central planning. No matter what their goal, progressives almost always looked to the federal government for resolution. Such thinking made progressives particularly easy prey for Communists, especially through front groups, which the Communists created for the specific purpose of deceiving the broader public. It is instructive that when the U.S. Congress later published its major investigation of front groups, titled “Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications,” many of the organizations featured the word “Progressive” in their names. Those groups originated in this period.2

  No dummies, the statists running the USSR saw a giant opportunity. They invited progressives to the Soviet Union and, among other forms of propaganda, subjected them to carefully managed tours of “Potemkin villages.” In the late eighteenth century, Russian official Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin had purportedly constructed fake settlements in the Crimea to impress Catherine II during her visit there. The Communists embraced this tactic as a way to convince visitors that Communism was producing a glorious new world. The Soviets built not only villages but, more often, showplace buildings, factories, and farms. Just as important was what they prevented visitors from seeing.3 Through this artful stagecraft the Soviets manipulated legions of gullible Westerners. I call these dupes “Potemkin Progressives.”

  Potemkin Progressives were usually people of impact—educators, academics, journalists, union organizers. The Soviet strategy was not to convince the duped to sign up as Soviet citizens and stay, but rather to send them back home to the non-Communist world raving about Lenin, Stalin, and the alleged grand achievements of Bolshevik Russia. Many of these Western elites did precisely that.

  “I've never met a man more candid, fair, and honest,” marveled author H. G. Wells after meeting with Stalin in 1934, at the start of the Great Purge. “Everyone trusts him.” Wells had likewise been impressed by Lenin, whom he called a “frank,” “refreshing,” and “amazing little man” who had “almost persuaded me to share his vision.”4

  Wells's fellow socialist, playwright George Bernard Shaw, was fully persuaded, piping up with an even more outrageous assessment after meeting with Stalin: “We cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when our most enterprising neighbor [the Soviet Union] … humanely and judiciously liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for honest men.”5

  That shameful, deadly serious statement was an almost verbatim regurgitation of the line Stalin had fed him as justification for Soviet mass murder.6 Shaw praised not only the dictator's “utilitarian killing” but also the henchmen who pulled the triggers, such as Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky.7 Shaw's repeated rationalizations of Bolshevik manslaughter, which he deemed necessary to fulfill the USSR's “gifted” “economic conscience,” were unconscionable.8 He defended purges. He dismissed reports of famine as a “lie” and as “inflammatory irresponsibility”—as no less than a “slander” of Stalin's Five-Year Plan.9 Most remarkably, he backed the willful extermination of the intelligentsia—a “persecution,” said Shaw, that “was, I think, justified at the time.”10

  Shaw was not alone. Some of the very brightest of the West's feted intellectuals were taken in by Stalin's gaze and faux villages. There to observe the curious spectacle of these Potemkin Progressives was Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist and commentator. Muggeridge would become an intellectual giant of the twentieth century and, most unlike Shaw, one of the century's illustrious converts to Christianity. At this time, Muggeridge was a man of the Left, but, true to his curmudgeon nature, he was not taken by anyone, least of all Soviet handlers. He was bewildered by the credulity of his friends, of whom he recorded:

  They are unquestionably one of the wonders of the age, and I shall treasure till I die as a blessed memory the spectacle of them travelling with radiant optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands about squalid, over-crowded towns, listening with unshakable faith to the fatuous patter of carefully trained and indoctrinated guides, repeating like schoolchildren a multiplication table, the bogus statistics and mindless slogans endlessly intoned to them.11

  Elsewhere Muggeridge wrote:

  T
here were earnest advocates of the humane killing of cattle who looked up at the massive headquarters of the OGPU [the successor to the Cheka as the Soviet secret police] with tears of gratitude in their eyes, earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented when the necessity of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was explained to them, earnest clergymen who walked reverently through anti-God museums and reverently turned the pages of atheistic literature, earnest pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across Red Square and bombing planes darken the sky, earnest town-planning specialists who stood outside overcrowded ramshackle tenements and muttered: “If only we had something like this in England!”12

  “The almost unbelievable credulity of these mostly university-educated tourists,” Muggeridge added, “astonished even Soviet officials used to handling foreign visitors.”13

  Muggeridge noted that the common bond among these Western visitors was not nationality but that they were all “progressives.” He recorded: “These fellow passengers provided my first experience of the progressive elite from all over the world who attached themselves to the Soviet regime, resolved to believe anything they were told by its spokesmen.” He noted that they were mostly academics and writers, and “all upholders of progressive causes and members of progressive organizations,” ecstatic about playing a part in this “drama of the 20th century. Ready at any moment to rush on to stage, cheering and gesticulating … a Western version of the devotees of Krishna who throw themselves under the wheels of the great Juggernaut.”14

  For all their acclaimed cynicism, these Western intellectuals, these high-minded progressives, were putty in the hands of Bolshevik molders and shapers—precisely as Lenin had predicted.

  The Soviets practiced this Potemkin manipulation so frequently that it is not unusual to peruse documents from the Comintern Archives on CPUSA and encounter memos from Communist officials spelling out strategies for influencing specific officials via these tours. Consider a July 8, 1936, missive from Sam Darcy, CPUSA's representative to the Comintern (using his code name, “Randolph”) to “Comrade Shvernik” at Comintern headquarters in Moscow. The purpose, as expressed in the title of the memo, was to influence two American union officials visiting the USSR. The letter began, “The above two American trade union officials [Joseph Schlossberg and David Dubinsky] are coming to the USSR and should be given special attention.” The confidential letter noted that both Americans “are on the whole friendly to the USSR.” The memo ended, “I propose they be received by Comrade Shvernik and the trade unions and every effort made to influence them.”15 (See page 57.)

  The “influence” here was not the coercion that Stalin employed against millions of suffering souls captive to the prison nation he was erecting; rather, it was the sweet, seductive lie of the Potemkin village, with its cakes and pies, teeming caviar, booming factories, fine ballets and museums. This was standard operating procedure.

  Oftentimes, the dupes came by the literal boatload, as the naïve shoved themselves onto ships like the SS President Roosevelt and SS Europa, launched from New York City en route to the workers’ paradise. When we look back at these fellow travelers, it is often hard to tell whether the duped were liberals, communists, liberals becoming communists, or some other variant of progressives/leftists. Moreover, while some of the passengers were plainly duped, sometimes for life, others did not take the bait; still others redeemed themselves later, learning valuable life lessons put to good use in the service of opposing Moscow as stalwart anti-Communist Democrats.

  What is clear is that the manipulation was done on an incredible scale, with sweeping success, and with many victims, each a fascinating and sad story in itself. The scale was so vast, in fact, that it would be impossible to limit the cases to a single chapter. Among the schools of suckers swirling in the waters, this chapter focuses on three individuals, covered chronologically according to their voyages to the Motherland: William C. Bullitt, Paul H. Douglas, and Corliss Lamont. All three men will resurface later in this book, with two of them experiencing remarkable turnabouts, moving so far as to warn Democratic presidents about the Communist menace.

  These case studies serve as cautionary tales as well as (in two instances) hopeful examples of personal and political redemption.

  William C. Bullitt: Man of “Deep Wisdom and Liberality”

  Among the first to set sail for the red horizons of Russia was William Christian Bullitt. Born on January 25, 1891, to a wealthy, high-society family in Philadelphia, Bullitt studied at Yale, where he earned Phi Beta Kappa honors and was voted “most brilliant” in his 1912 class.16 That latter achievement, no small feat for any year at Yale, was particularly notable given the steep competition in 1912, a class that included Averill Harriman and Cole Porter.17 Initially, Bullitt followed the family tradition by pursuing law, enrolling at Harvard Law School, but he withdrew upon the untimely death of his father.

  After leaving Harvard, he traveled to Europe, where he had summered as a child. He became fluent in French and German—and in the left-wing politics that dominated European culture. He drank up the Marxism that prevailed among the continent's chattering classes.

  In Europe, Bullitt put his Yale mind and connections to work, becoming a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1915. In The New Republic, editor Walter Lippmann christened him “the sharpest of the American correspondents” covering the Great War.18

  Through that war coverage Bullitt became close to some of President Woodrow Wilson's most influential advisers, including Colonel Edward House. This led to a prestigious appointment: as an assistant secretary of state in December 1917, only weeks after the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution. The young man was rising quickly. By the time of the Versailles Conference in 1919 he was advising President Wilson. It was at Versailles that Bullitt's growing adoration for Bolshevism became clear to Wilson.

  As a member of Wilson's staff, Bullitt pushed hard for recognition of Russia—very, very hard. Like many other liberals/progressives of the era, Bullitt saw the Soviet state as nothing less than the future itself, and wanted the U.S. government to recognize the regime. President Wilson, however, did not share the infatuation of many of his progressive friends. He rebuffed Bullitt's requests to recognize the Soviet state. Devastated, the young State Department official resigned.

  “Enthusiastic Supporter of the Bolshevik Experiment”

  When it came to matters Bolshevik, William Bullitt felt that President Wilson's staff needed “men of deep wisdom and liberality,” such as himself, to understand the fine efforts that Moscow was undertaking on behalf of all humanity.19 He was quite disappointed that Wilson did not appreciate the utopia laid out before them. How could this erudite president of Ivy League pedigree be so shallow? After all, stressed Bullitt, Vladimir Lenin was a “genial” man of “large humor and serenity.” The Bolshevik godfather and his Communist Party were “strong politically and morally.”20

  How did Bullitt come to this naïve thinking about the Soviets?

  First and foremost, there was the stilted experience of Bullitt's many trips abroad, including to Lenin's Russia. In March 1919 he was dispatched to Russia on a special diplomatic mission that included a week and a half of meetings with high-level Soviet officials, meaning he was wined and dined in the best, select places, and got nowhere near an accurate representation of life in the real Soviet Russia. He met with the likes of diplomat Maxim Litvinov, Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin, and, on March 14, Lenin himself. The meeting with Lenin apparently made Bullitt swoon. After this trip Bullitt became, in the apt description of diplomatic historian Francis Sempa, “among the first Americans and Westerners to be hoodwinked by Soviet leaders.”21

  It did not help that Bullitt had been accompanied by The New Republic’ s Lincoln Steffens and the well-known Swedish Marxist Karl Kilbom. He could not have picked two worse travel companions. Kilbom was already a true believer, and Steffens was even more gullible than Bullitt. Steffens's magazine, The
New Republic, which became the political bible of the Left, was filled with gibberish on Soviet Russia. The magazine dubbed the Russian Revolution “one of the great enterprises in the history of human liberation.”22 Recall, too, that it was Steffens who, upon his return from Russia, scribbled that he had seen “the Future,” and that Russia would “save the world.” Steffens was moved to verse: “I would like to spend the evening of my life watching the morning of a new world.”

  Thus, William Bullitt made his Soviet foray with friends who were not exactly dubious of Bolshevism. Not surprisingly, he was duped. He became so enamored with the Soviet Union and such a bleeding-heart Red that he divorced his first wife in 1923 and in 1924 married Louise Bryant, the widow of Marxist playboy John Reed. Reed, the namesake of the infamous Communist John Reed Clubs, was (like Charles Ruthenberg) buried under the wall of the Kremlin as a foreign Communist hero.

  By the 1920s Bullitt had unmistakably become “an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik experiment,” in the words of historians Douglas Brinkley and Townsend Hoopes.23 Now outside the Wilson administration and far removed from the Republican administrations that followed, he continued—like so many other progressives in the 1920s—to fight for U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union. Even after Lenin died, Bullitt's enthusiasm for the Soviet system and its “genial,” “moral” leaders—including the newly elevated Joseph Stalin—remained undiminished.