Dupes Read online

Corliss and Friends

  One of the clearest examples of Corliss Lamont's pro-Soviet work was his leadership role in one of the worst Communist front groups, Friends of the Soviet Union, which—unbeknownst to the American public at the time—had been created by the Communist Party in America.48 Originally called Friends of Soviet Russia, the group went through a slight name change in 1929 under orders from the Comintern. That same mandate from the Comintern also directed the group to push the U.S. government to recognize, and support, the USSR.49 That push for diplomatic recognition attracted many progressives to the group, just as the Communists who controlled the group knew it would.

  Friends of the Soviet Union was headquartered in New York City, at 80 East 11th Street. The organization's masthead carried this slogan: “HAIL the glorious achievements of the workers and peasants of the U.S.S.R.—where STARVATION AND UNEMPLOYMENT HAVE BEEN ABOLISHED.” (See page 70.) The group also published a propaganda work called Soviet Russia Today. A simple glance at the inside cover of the magazine shows that the organization was thoroughly penetrated by Marxists. The short list of contributing editors featured names and photos of such usual suspects as Maxim Gorky, Theodore Dreiser, Anna Louise Strong, Karl Radek, and longtime CPUSA head and hard-line Soviet loyalist William Z. Foster—who in 1932 openly professed, “The American Soviet government will join with the other Soviet governments in a world Soviet Union.”50

  Other notable contributing editors to the magazine included non-Communist liberals/progressives such as the writer Upton Sinclair. (See page 72.) Sinclair, who was an extraordinary dupe, somehow managed to avoid ever seeing the correspondence that the national offices of Friends of the Soviet Union sent to locals in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere.51 In these letters, correspondents openly greeted each other as “comrade.”52

  As a nonofficer, Sinclair might be excused for such ignorance. But it is difficult to claim ignorance for Corliss Lamont, who was not only a leader of the group but often its keynote speaker at events like its first national “Soviet Union Day,” held in New York City on December 17, 1933.53 (See page 73.)

  Where did Corliss Lamont really stand?

  Russia Day by Day

  One thing is certain: like atheistic humanism, the USSR became one of Corliss Lamont's loves. In 1932 he and his wife, Margaret—comrades-in-arms-and-marriage—shoved off for the earthly utopia that was the Soviet Union. The pair put their experiences to paper and in 1933 published a book called Russia Day by Day.54 It was Corliss Lamont's first published work, even before The Illusion of Immortality.

  The goal of Russia Day by Day, as the Lamonts stated in the opening paragraph, was to provide a work of “value for persons who are interested in the Soviet, especially those planning to go there for the first time.” They hoped the book would both inspire and guide wayfarers to the USSR. It was tailor-made for Potemkin Progressives.

  Russia Day by Day is a work that needs to be seen to be believed. Page after page features examples of how horribly the Lamonts were duped.

  The Lamonts set sail for the workers’ paradise from New York on July 1, 1932, aboard the SS Europa, along with 250 other passengers. Their book was not exactly transparent as to who was managing the trip, other than to point to “group tours” engineered by “travel agencies” or by “experienced American travelers in Russia.” Nor did the book say anything about the “interpreters” supplied to the Lamonts.55

  Upon their arrival in Leningrad on July 11, the Lamonts wrote, they were whisked from spot to spot in “brand-new” and “big shiny” Lincoln Eight limousines. Presumably, this was not the typical method of transportation for the Russian proletariat. The Lamonts—true limousine liberals—acknowledged that “some of the Americans object strongly and assert that this is the naïve Soviet way of trying to impress visitors,” but then they quickly dismissed the possibility. Such was the tone of their book from the outset.

  The Lamonts downplayed practically every criticism of the USSR. At each stop in Bolshevik Russia, they found more “evidence” of American “misperception.” This started with the moment the Soviet secret police rifled through their bags. Lamont, the noted champion of American civil liberties, simply shrugged at the search. The “dreaded G.P.U.,” he and his wife wrote, did not look “either formidable or ferocious”; rather, the secret police were “courteous and efficient,” and “good-natured.”

  Of course, some negatives were undeniable, even to the Lamonts. In 1932 poverty and starvation were everywhere in the Soviet Union—even a blind man would recognize it. The Lamonts’ handlers, no matter how much they strove to stage every encounter and control every move, could not avoid scenes of desperation. And, indeed, the Lamonts noted that one of their “first impressions of Leningrad is that a considerable amount of begging is going on.” They glimpsed a ragged woman on a house-step holding a tiny baby in one arm and pleading for food with the other. So much for the USSR's having “abolished” starvation, as Corliss Lamont's organization the Friends of the Soviet Union claimed.

  Yet the Lamonts blissfully accepted the explanation of their interpreter/handler, who said “that most of these beggars are people who are too lazy to work, since every Russian can get a job if he wants to.” They further justified the situation to readers by explaining that the deprivation had been “bequeathed by the Tsarist regime.” All that starvation left over from the czars “cannot be completely eliminated all at once,” the Lamonts said. But the Bolsheviks had made progress: the Lamonts claimed that Czar Nicholas had left a trail of one million “professional beggars” but that this figure was now down to just forty thousand.

  This was the first of innumerable Soviet statistics that the Lamonts cited unquestioningly. On this, at least two noteworthy corrections are in order: First, this report of forty thousand beggars contradicted the Lamonts’ own claim, made later in the book, that there was “no unemployment” in the USSR—unless begging was considered a form of employment. Second, had any nation in human history achieved such a dramatic reduction in begging, it would have been an astounding achievement. But the inconvenient truth—unmentioned by the Lamonts—was that as a result of Stalin's policies, forty thousand people were starving to death practically every two weeks in the Ukraine alone.

  Corliss and Margaret Lamont were just like the Potemkin Progressives Malcolm Muggeridge spoke of, “repeating like schoolchildren” the Soviets’ “bogus statistics.”

  Smelly Saints

  Many Potemkin Progressives of this period shrugged off the Soviet repression of religion, claiming that it wasn't as bad as simple-minded American anti-Communists made it out to be. The Lamonts went further in Russia Day by Day: they not only failed to condemn the Soviet hatred of God and persecution of worshipers but actually seemed to affirm it.

  The Lamonts’ militant atheism shines through in their book, particularly in its later stages. They laughed scornfully at the “trivial religious mumbo-jumbo” they encountered. Chronicling their visit to one chapel, the couple dispassionately recorded how the house of worship was being torn down: “The workmen hack away unconcernedly, burying their picks with nonchalance in the head of Jesus or in the face of an apostle.” The Lamonts also noted approvingly that the Bolsheviks’ anti-religion museum inside St. Isaac's Cathedral in Leningrad mocked every imaginable aspect of religious life: “the fragments of the true cross, the bottles of the holy tears, and so on.” More than once the couple ridiculed the Russian Orthodox Church's teaching that the bodies of some saints resisted decomposition, divinely protected on earth even in death. They took pains to show that the remains of saints “crumble away after all.” Of the corpse of one “old priest-saint” they saw on display, they wrote, “The profound smell of it and the numerous worm-holes in the face and hands do not indicate that the Lord has been watching over his body with any particular care.”

  On July 14, the Lamonts ventured to the Leningrad headquarters of the Union of Militant
Atheists, where they were impressed by a “very alert” young atheist. They noted approvingly that the Soviet propaganda work “against God” was “always tied up with other superstitions such as the idea of immortality.” Their agreeable atheist host sent them off by proudly presenting husband and wife with the “Militant Atheist insignia,” an official button of the “Atheists Union.” The Lamonts consented.

  Many God-fearing liberals like Paul Douglas and William Bullitt were ultimately appalled by what they saw in the Soviet assault on religion. Malcolm Muggeridge was so horrified by what he witnessed (in 1932, the same year as the Lamonts’ trip) that his experience put him on the road to becoming a leading Christian convert and apologist.56 But Corliss Lamont and his wife embraced the Soviets’ anti-religion campaigns.

  At the Foot of Lenin

  As soon as the Lamonts arrived in Moscow via their limousine, they headed for their source of spiritual sustenance: Lenin's Tomb. The plate at the foot of the tomb declared the former Soviet leader to be “the immortal one”—a statement that Corliss Lamont, soon to publish The Illusion of Immortality, did not lampoon or even acknowledge. Though Lenin had been dead and encased in a glass box for more than eight years, the Lamonts saw no signs of corruptibility, as they had with the decaying saints. They recorded: “Lenin's face is strong, calm, and refined in the fundamental sense. His hand rests on a red pillow and his hands, clasped on his chest in a tranquil way, appear delicate and intellectual.”

  The secular pilgrims expressed their devotion to Lenin—indeed, their love for the deceased leader. They “want[ed] to stop” and gaze longingly at Lenin's body, but they had to “keep moving.” They ached for more. One trip was simply “not enough,” so they got in line again. They paid “homage,” “taking strength from [Lenin's] impersonally beautiful and resolute face,” which seemed “perfectly natural and wholly desirable.”

  “Collective Nurseries” and “Factory Kindergartens”

  The Lamonts also admired the Soviets’ treatment of children. They especially appreciated how Soviet boys and girls were separated from their mothers, since that separation “liberated” moms to perform “activities of real significance.” The Lamonts praised the mass youth group Young Pioneers; Komsomol, the Communist Party youth organization; “collective nurseries”; “factory kindergartens”; and communes. Most stunning, they found “charming” the sight of uniformed, androgynous children—boys and girls alike had their heads shaved—marching in formation, singing in unison under banners.

  At one commune, the Lamonts were enamored with the children freed from their mothers and their “bourgeois toys.” They were overwhelmed when the kids humored them with a question. “The comrades of the commune are very loath to let us go,” reported the teary-eyed couple, “and only do so after we have sung with them the [Communist] Internationale, all three verses.”

  The Lamonts apparently had no trouble with the lyrics.

  The couple also wrote of a strange “Children's Village” where four-year-old boys and girls—“left by their mothers for the day in the care of qualified nurses”—participated in a “mimic war” against dastardly capitalists, replete with firecrackers, fake guns, gas masks, a pretend gas attack that scared even the “shivering” police dogs on hand, and “damnable smoke” everywhere.

  The Lamonts asked the obvious question: “Is this a pernicious militarization of young boys and girls?” The civil-liberties heroes, though, were quick to set the record straight. The Soviet government, they explained, needed to “teach its citizens, young and old, how to defend themselves against foreign attack.” Besides, “most other governments, it may be said, do not spend much time or money on peace propaganda,” as did (allegedly) the Soviet government. In other words, the Bolsheviks, in the minds of the Lamonts, struck a perfect balance in teaching children about war and peace. The authors then began a long discourse on how and why “the sincerity of the Soviet's desire for peace can hardly be questioned.”

  “A Tremendous Positive Factor for Peace”

  Practically nothing escaped the attention—or praise—of the Lamonts. They covered birth control and legalized abortion (here the Soviets were way ahead of American liberals); John Dewey and Karl Marx; the supposedly incomparable reporting of Anna Louise Strong and the New York Times’ s Walter Duranty; “no unemployment”; science “fast triumphing over superstition”; racial prejudice that had “all but disappeared”; divorce and mental health; rapidly diminishing problems of prostitution and “homosexualism”; “jolly” women's prisons where “some of the prisoners act as guards”; priest-less Red funerals; a solemn visit to John Reed's grave; a governing “true international spirit”; the flourishing of “minority languages and cultures”; and marvelous Five-Year Plans.

  The Lamonts challenged the view that Russians were unhappy under the Soviets. In fact, they reported—repeating what their tour guide had told them—there were folks everywhere, from Romania to Finland, dying to cross the border to enter Russia. And the Lamonts informed readers that the Comintern was “a tremendous positive factor for peace in the world as a whole.”

  The Lamonts’ tour took them from city to city throughout the USSR. They wrapped up their stage-managed journey in late August, as they boarded the SS Lenin en route to Yalta on the Crimea. It was a fitting site, though the couple could not have known it: Yalta would be the site where, in the final months of World War II, the major powers set up the postwar division of Europe that laid the groundwork for the Cold War. In another chilling portent the Lamonts could not have comprehended, they disembarked at Yalta seven years to the day before the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which precipitated World War II.

  After wrapping up their tour of the USSR, the Lamonts headed to Poland. They left the Soviet Union on September 1, 1932—exactly seven years before the Germans, newly allied with the USSR through the Hitler-Stalin Pact, invaded Poland, thus launching World War II. Once the Lamonts got to Poland their tone shifted from ebullient to sour. They no longer gave everything the benefit of the doubt. No, they perceived the Polish soldiers as haughty and brutish—so unlike the gentle, affable souls in the Soviet secret police. For the first time in the entire book, the Lamonts at long last utter the word “dictatorship”—in regard to Poland.

  “The New World”

  As the Lamonts steamed back to America aboard the SS Europa, they relaxed for a friendly card game. They felt their hearts “fill with envy” at a pack of “Soviet antireligious playing cards” presented by one of their travel mates, purchased back in the city of Rostov. The deck included “satires of the four main religions of Russia: Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Mohammedan, and Buddhist.” The cards featured priests and nuns “shown up as hypocrites who eat, drink, and live in luxury; and who cast glances of suppressed desire at each other and everyone else.” It was a rollicking fun card game.

  Once in New York, Corliss and Margaret Lamont reflected that things in the USSR had been “much more comfortable than expected.” This was not, they concluded, because they had been driven to Potemkin villages in limousines, fed caviar and wine, and manipulated by Soviet handlers. No, they assured their readers that “no person” ready for an “expedition to Russia” should fear simply being “‘ shown’ special apartments, people, and villages dressed up to impress the tourist mind.” “So as far we know,” they told their readers, “we were permitted to see everything we wanted to see and had time to see.…As someone else has said, you see in Russia what the Russians want you to see, but they want you to see everything.”

  What the Lamonts saw, in sum, was “a great deal of happiness”—a “new human nature.” They ended their book with, in effect, a plea for more duped American progressives to visit more Potemkin villages: “The new world of the twentieth century is the Soviet Union. And no one who is seriously interested in the progress of the human spirit can afford to miss it.”

  Big Fish

  The Kremlin must have been positively elated with the Lamonts’ chronicle of
the Soviet Union. The Comintern itself could not have produced a better book. The Soviet Department of Agitprop could not have commissioned anything as important as this piece of wild Soviet propaganda composed by a respected professor at an Ivy League school for mass American consumption.

  Was Corliss Lamont a communist? Reading Russia Day by Day makes it extremely difficult to believe that he was not. Yet let us accept the claims of liberals, made for more than three-quarters of a century, that he was a man of the Left, nothing more.

  If that is the case, then we must conclude that Corliss Lamont was a dupe of staggering proportions. And if some hidden file or document one day emerges to reveal that he was secretly a Communist Party member, then it is his liberal stalwart defenders who were duped. Whatever the truth, there is a lot of duping in this picture.

  Russia Day by Day was hardly Lamont's last encomium to the experiment in Moscow. He was not done being duped.

  Nor was his alma mater, Columbia University, which offered up another esteemed progressive from the Teachers College and the pragmatist school of the Philosophy Department, another professor to assert the unbelievable—another sucker for the Soviet experiment. This sucker would be the biggest fish of them all.

  JOHN DEWEY: THE KREMLIN'S FAVORITE EDUCATOR

  To Moscow, one of the most important dupes among those boatloads of Americans who came to witness the Soviets’ grand experiment was the renowned John Dewey, a progressive pillar and icon. Dewey—educator, philosopher, professor, reformer—was a liberal's man for all seasons. His impact on education and philosophy, most notably during his long tenure at Columbia University, is difficult to overstate. His influence has been felt for more than a century, as he inspired sweeping changes in education, from K–12 to higher education, especially involving the training of college students to become public-school teachers. He is the father of modern public education.