Dupes Read online

  When a new Democratic administration came to power under Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, Bullitt was rewarded for his patience and dedication to Soviet Russia. Incredibly, in November 1933, FDR appointed this giddy member of Stalin's fan club as America's first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.

  What an extraordinary accomplishment for the forty-two-year-old Bullitt. And what an extraordinarily naïve decision by an American president. It remains unclear what, or who, compelled FDR to pick a man of such insatiable Soviet sympathies as America's ambassador to the USSR.

  And it was only a short time before Bullitt's new boss did what Bullitt and his fellow “men of liberality” had been urging for more than a decade: he recognized Russia. The president thrilled progressives everywhere. William Bullitt was their boy.

  And he was not only their boy. Bullitt celebrated with a dinner date with Joseph Stalin. This date was more intimate than any he had shared with Lenin. It was December 30, 1933, and the author of the Great Purge wined and dined Bullitt. At the end of a lovely evening together, FDR's new ambassador bade Stalin goodnight with a tender kiss on the cheek; the doting despot dutifully reciprocated.24

  When some anti-Communists charged that Bill Bullitt and Joe Stalin were “in bed” together, they were closer to the truth than even they realized. It was a budding Russian romance. Or so it seemed. Bullitt's fling was more puppy love than a lasting marriage. His path ahead would take some surprising turns. Neither Bullitt nor his friends and foes could possibly see it then, but he was about to learn some hard lessons regarding the country and dictator he loved. They were lessons gleaned from a longer, deeper look at the real Russia, not the quick head fake of a Potemkin illage tour.

  William Christian Bullitt had a Saul-like conversion ahead of him.

  Paul H. Douglas: An Early Target

  A likewise compelling story is that of Paul H. Douglas.25

  Paul Howard Douglas was born a Quaker in Salem, Massachusetts, on March 26, 1892. The young man of New England stock made his way to graduate school at Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in 1915 and a doctorate in economics in 1921, en route to becoming a longtime college professor. Also in 1915, he married Dorothy Wolff, a non-Quaker (Jewish), who likewise earned a Ph.D. from Columbia. The politics of both Paul and Dorothy were staunchly on the left; Dorothy would drift even further in that direction as time went on. The two would divorce in 1930 after having four children together.

  As will be abundantly evident in the pages ahead, Columbia was home to an inordinate number of not mere progressives but committed Marxists. That toxic Columbia milieu of extreme-Left politics infected the mind of the young Douglas. It would take decades, including two wars, one hot, one cold—plus hot wars within the Cold War—to goad the lifelong Democrat away from the Columbia perspective.

  But that was later. For now, Paul Douglas was on the Reds’ radar.

  A List of “Liberal” Professors

  Among the first indications that Communists targeted Douglas is a fascinating December 2, 1920, letter that today resides in the Comintern Archives.26 The letter was sent by “Paul Stolt,” executive secretary of the “National Office” of the United Communist Party, to a recipient identified only as “Latimer,” which was typical of the cryptic surnames used by the Communist movement.27 (Even the fuller “Paul Stolt” was a pseudonym.)28 The cover page of the four-page letter includes only two sentences: “Some time ago we received word from the Comint [Comintern] that they wanted the names and addresses of ‘liberal’ college professors in this country, so as to be able to send them literature for college libraries. Such a list is enclosed.” (See page 63.)

  Within the archives, the letter rests amid other party documents that stress the importance of disseminating Communist literature inside the United States—the better to educate the masses.29 The letter is written in that spirit. Clearly, the Communists thought these professors could help place their materials in American college libraries—places of study for the nation's youth, who were long a hot target for Marxists. Given the brevity of the cover letter, it is unclear whether the party saw these academics as potentially helpful because they were civil libertarians, progressives, liberals who were soft on Communism, liberals who were easily duped, or some combination thereof. At least some were pro-Communist, though none jump off the page as leading Communist Party members.

  Seventy-eight academics are listed in the pages that follow Stolt's cover letter. They cover a wide range of institutions, from Smith College to Swarthmore to Vassar to Wellesley to Amherst, from Bates to Brown to Bryn Mawr. Cornell University won the most mentions. The most common cities of residence for the professors were New York City, Chicago, Berkeley, and Boston/Cambridge. And “social justice” professors from such institutions of the Religious Left as General Theological Seminary, Mount Holyoke, Trinity College, and Union Theological Seminary received a disproportionate share.

  Some of the names on the list are recognizable to this day, ninety years later:

  Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. In the document, Dr. Schlesinger is listed as “A. M. Schlesinger—University of Iowa City. Iowa [sic].”30 This refers to the late, esteemed Schlesinger (1888–1965), father of the equally renowned Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917–2007) and husband of the noted feminist Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger. Schlesinger received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia. He first taught at Ohio State University and, as the letter suggests, briefly at the University of Iowa (1919–1922), before landing at the faculty of Harvard, where he became an institution.

  Harry F. Ward. Ward, listed with Union Theological Seminary in New York City, was not only a staunch liberal but also one of the best-known fellow travelers of the Communist Party among clergymen. A Methodist minister, Ward, at the time of this letter, was working with Roger Baldwin to establish the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was launched that same year. The ACLU's Baldwin was an atheist initially enamored with Soviet Communism, as was evident in his 1928 book Liberty under the Soviets, which was based on his two month Potemkin-village tour of the USSR in 1927. Ward and Baldwin were such extraordinary cases of dupery throughout the 1920s—though Baldwin, to his credit, turned around considerably later31—that they merit a book in and of themselves, and cannot be given due justice here. Put simply, the Reverend Ward may well have been the single greatest sucker in the entire history of the American Religious Left.32

  Irving Fisher. Fisher (1867–1947) is listed with Yale University, where he became a recognized economist. After getting his Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1891 (reportedly the first doctorate Yale awarded in economics), Fisher went on to serve in a number of fields, including mathematics—and eugenics. He once served as secretary of the American Eugenics Society.

  Harold Laski. Designated on the list as “Harold J. Laski—Cambridge, Mass,” Laski was on his way to becoming one of the most influential socialists of the twentieth century. He ended up as a major player in British politics and a longtime professor at the London School of Economics (1926–1950). One of Laski's famous students was a young American named John F. Kennedy, who enrolled in Laski's course in the summer of 1935. JFK, a hawkish anti-Communist Democrat, referred to Laski as a “radical of the left,” a “discontented spirit,” and a man “filled with bitterness” and “great venom.”33

  Also on the list is Paul Douglas.

  He is identified as “Paul H. Douglas—University of Washington, Seattle, Wash.” (See page 65.) It is telling that the Communists knew Douglas's proper location. Between 1915 and 1920 he had moved six times, shifting throughout the country to various academic posts; he was at the University of Washington for only a very short time (1919–1920).34 In short, Stolt and Latimer knew Douglas before he had become an academic star (he would make his name at the University of Chicago later in the 1920s). They almost certainly knew him from his time at Columbia in the 1910s.

  Aboard the SS Useful Idiot

  In July 1927, six and a half years after being place
d on this Communist Party list, Douglas set off for the USSR on the ultimate progressive voyage. A mix of progressives, varying sorts of liberals, and (mostly closet) communists traveled aboard the aptly titled SS President Roosevelt, named for the first progressive president, Teddy Roosevelt. The human cargo was replete with professors, union officials, left-wing journalists (including contributors to The New Republic and The Nation), ACLU staff, and members of the “social justice” Christian Left from such institutions as Yale Divinity School and Mount Holyoke College. Among the professoriate on the expedition, economists and teachers of education dominated. Predictably, Columbia University served up more passengers than any other college, including not only Douglas but also economist Rexford Guy Tugwell, Carlos Israels of Columbia's School of Law, and George Counts of Columbia Teachers College, an earnest disciple of Professor John Dewey.35

  Too often today, professors teach their students that it was the Great Depression that compelled American interest in Communism.36 In reality, American Communism was launched, and attracted hordes of elite admirers, well before the Great Depression—in fact, during one of the most prosperous decades in American history, the 1920s. The trip that Paul Douglas and his fellow political pilgrims took aboard the SS President Roosevelt is a case in point. They could hardly have pointed to fears of depression as the reason for their soul-searching in Lenin land; at the time of their voyage, the unemployment rate was a stellar 3.3 percent, and the stock market was solid.37 They had no good excuse for their impressionability.

  The Soviets worked hard to take advantage of their gullibility. As author Sylvia Margulies reported some forty years later, the Comintern was secretly involved in planning the SS President Roosevelt trip from the beginning, instructing the Communist Party in America on which individuals to send along. Soviet officials arranged not only stops at Potemkin villages but also interviews with innumerable Soviet conspirators.

  Unfortunately, neither Douglas nor Rex Tugwell nor most of the others seemed to have any idea of the level of Communist involvement, at home or in the USSR.38 They were primed to be duped, so much so that the SS President Roosevelt ought to be posthumously rechristened the SS Useful Idiot.

  “Useful Things” for Useful Idiots

  One of the most dramatic examples of liberal dupery in Communist history occurred during this 1927 voyage. As Amity Shlaes chronicled in her bestselling book The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, the dupery was done by no less than Joseph Stalin.

  Stalin met with the Potemkin Progressives from the SS President Roosevelt on September 9, 1927, at 1 p.m.39 This was no quick meet-and-greet. The dictator and his guests chatted for more than six hours. Clearly, Stalin saw this as an investment worth his precious time, well worth a break from bludgeoning kulaks.

  During the meeting, Paul Douglas and company tepidly asked the dictator about the matter of religion. Did a Communist have to be an atheist? Yes, Stalin said—but at the very moment he answered, church bells began ringing across the street. The dupes all laughed, while Stalin smiled, as if, Shlaes wrote, “to signal the tolerance he could not articulate officially.”40

  Though the bells elicited a chuckle from Stalin's guests, the truth of Soviet intolerance of religion would have shocked them. That intolerance was so vast, petty, and intrusive that it actually extended as far as, yes, the ringing of church bells. Stalin and his officials worked feverishly to silence those bells, as documents from the Soviet archives reveal.41 For example, from January to February 1930, Soviet official Alexander Likhachev exchanged a series of letters with Ivan Tovstukha, personal secretary to Stalin, in which they examined the ongoing “problem” of the ringing of church bells in villages. Such noise had already been strictly prohibited. As usual, however, the Bolsheviks had to grapple with the stubborn faith of Orthodox Christians. Likhachev and Tovstukha discussed removing the church bells and recasting them into more “useful things.” But in the end, the Communist regime chose to do what it did best: destroy. The bells were rolled down steeples and smashed into shards or blown up.

  Of course, church bells were hardly the only target of the Soviet regime. In one of the letters between Likhachev and Tovstukha, the good comrades considered the transformation of the glorious Cathedral of Christ the Savior, an eyesore to the atheists that stood just a few blocks away from the Kremlin. Czar Alexander I had dedicated the church in gratitude to Divine Providence for saving Russia from Napoleon in 1812. It was the pride of Russia, with Michelangelo like artwork adorning the towering ceilings. Yet Stalin, like Lenin before him, found all this reverence “stupid.” He envisioned morphing the historic cathedral into a museum, maybe a museum to atheism, as had been done with many Russian churches since the 1920s, one of the pet initiatives of Lenin's League of the Militant Godless.

  Stalin grew tired of the debate over what to do with the cathedral. In December 1931 he had the ornate structure dynamited and reduced to rubble. In its place, he planned to erect a sacred Palace of Soviets. Fittingly, however, the central planners could never get the project off the ground. They ultimately converted the mess into a large municipal swimming pool.

  Despite what was really happening outside the walls of the Kremlin, Stalin charmed his American callers during their marathon meeting in September 1927. As the afternoon progressed, Paul Douglas and his group chatted and laughed, and ate—sausage, cheese, caviar. The caviar was so thick that the progressives gobbled it up on sandwiches, as crackers offered an insufficiently small platform. They did so as the proletariat outside scoured the earth for potatoes and turnips.42

  When the visitors tried to leave, a gracious Stalin urged them to stay, and then posed some questions of his own, which were transcribed by official Soviet note takers. Just a few days later Pravda published the amiable exchange.43 For Moscow, this meant a double propaganda effect from the visit: not only did the Soviets publish the dialogue in their government-controlled press, but also the progressives filed pleasant dispatches in the American media when they returned home.

  At the end of the long session, Paul Douglas stared off at a bust of Karl Marx in the corner of the room, apparently somewhat unsettled by the experience. Stalin, the master of manipulation, seemed to sense this whiff of ambivalence among one of his Potemkin Progressives.

  Douglas suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder. He spun around and saw Generalissimo Stalin, who cracked a joke about whether Marx had worn a necktie.44 The progressive friends all shared a parting laugh. It had been a delightful afternoon.

  Paul Douglas's Skepticism

  Many of the American visitors left Moscow satisfied. These hopeful progressives could not wait to get home to spread the gospel about the exciting new world they had encountered in Mother Russia. They would give Stalin what he wanted.

  But as Amity Shlaes noted, “Several of the travelers sensed that they had been used to an extent they had not foreseen.”

  Paul Douglas was one who emerged skeptical. He argued with one of his duped colleagues about the recollection they were jointly composing for publication back home. Douglas felt his partner was painting a far-too-rosy scenario.45 He was not so comfortable putting his name atop a whitewash.

  Douglas was not quite as taken with the Soviet Union as many of his comrades. His unease was a bellwether of things to come.

  Corliss Lamont: The Soviets’ Gushing Admirer

  Emblematic of the hopelessly naïve was Corliss Lamont. Unlike Paul Douglas and William Bullitt, Lamont never veered from the pro-Soviet path.

  Lamont was the son of wealthy New York banker Thomas W. Lamont, chairman and partner at J. P. Morgan, and a giant of Wall Street.46 Born in Englewood, New Jersey, in March 1902, this blueblood attended the elite prep school Phillips Exeter Academy before heading off to Harvard, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1924. He then spent a year studying at Oxford. Ultimately, like many progressives of his day (including Paul Douglas), he settled in New York City and landed at Columbia University, a fateful turn. At Columbia
he imbibed Marxism and atheism, as well as progressive philosophy from John Dewey and colleagues, who were busy reshaping America not through its political institutions but through education.

  Lamont earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia in 1932. He turned his dissertation into a book titled The Illusion of Immortality (1935); it became an immediate atheist classic and is still in print.47 That book launched him as a leading “humanist” of the twentieth century. He also emerged as a vocal advocate for American civil liberties, becoming a director of the ACLU.

  During this same period Lamont became enamored with the Great Experiment in Moscow.

  It is difficult (and controversial) to assess whether Lamont was himself a communist, and if so, to what degree—nothing has ever shown that he joined CPUSA, for instance. What is undeniable is that he was pro-Communist, supporting both Communist causes and the USSR itself.

  Indeed, he was a prototype Potemkin Progressive.