IX. The Eight Points

ChapterIX THE EIGHT POINTS "SPEECH IS A FACULTY given to man to conceal his thoughts." In our day the semanticists have taken this witticism of Talleyrand and turned it into a cult. It started with the psychologists,but at the altar of Korzybski an assortment of educators, sociologists and even economists now worship, often with mixed motives. They have invented a special jargon and publish a quarterly magazine to keep the faithful up to date. Many thoughts about language which were banal to Aristotle and Cicero are now dressed up in the new esoteric vocabulary and exploited as re cently discovered profundities. Then, by eschewing all objective definition and subjectivising the meaning of words as the tools of language, they propagate a kind of linguistic nihilism which, in its theoretical conclusions,would almost eradicate speech as a means of communication of ideas. The semanticists could no doubt prove, by their methods, that such a document as the Atlantic Charter means nothing, or could mean anything. It contains words such as "aggrandize ...

ment," "freely," "right," "access," and "threaten," which, they would say, have no determinate meaning at all but are like rub ber, stretchable at will. However, the moral responsibility of il lustrious men, such as presidents and prime ministers, who take 128 THE EIGHT POINTS 129 it upon themselvesto make pronouncementsand pledgesto the public, cannot be dissolved by showing that they used rubber words. Obviously, they had a purpose in speaking, not to them selves,but to the public. The question we must ask ourselves is: What did they expect most of the people who would hear their message to think it meant? Or what is the minimum meaning which attaches to the words in common parlance? The words of such men beget belief and generate action. They know that. The onus of any latent ambiguity is upon them. The criteria of interpretation must be looked for in the prevailing modes of thought of the receptive public.

It appears from the eyewitness account of Sumner Welles that no little time was spent at the Atlantic Conference trying to say things in a way which would seem, on the surface, to con vey a certain meaning but which would not really have that meaning. The problem was complicated by a desire to have phrases mean different things in different parts of the world. Thus Rooseveltand WeUes wanted the impression to emerge, at least in the United States, that there was to be a general abandon ment by all,·including the British Empire, of monopolies of raw materials and trade discriminations, while Churchill, with his eye on public opinion in England and the Commonwealth, was adamant to exempt··imperial preference without making the exemption so explicit that the American people would detect it. Roosevelt wished the American people, and others, too, to feel assured that the populations to be liberated would include not only Germany's victims but all subjugated peoples every where, while Churchill, on the other hand, nurtured in his own mind a much narrower interpretation which it was inexpedient to spell out in the Charter but which he subsequently reported to the House of Commons. According to Elliott Roosevelt's ac count, the two men not only chose to give the words they adopted these two meanings respectively,but they were also quite aware 130 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER of the divergence and yet allowed the fiction of complete mutual agreement to prevail. The Australian historian Chester Wilmot, in his monumental history of the war, The Struggle for Europe, has examined this point with care and has concluded that Elliott Roosevelt's report in this instance is accurate.! So we have here a curious variation on the theme of having one's cake and eating it, too.

Any man possessedof a fair wit and a facility with words can develop the art of the double-entendre. From Aristophanes through Shakespeare, Moliere, Oscar Wilde, and Noel Coward, to the gag writers of radio and television, it has been, in varying degrees of polish, an indispensable tool of comedy. But to achieve mastery of the hidden double-entendre was reserved for great statesmen and diplomats. The team of Roosevelt,WeUes,Church ill, Cadogan, and Hopkins, with their five heads together, was not unequal to the task. This more subtle form of wordplay is not of the stuff of comedy, however. It usually occurs in the more tragic plots. We proceed to examine the eight points of the Charter. But first, there arises the question: Were Churchill and Roosevelt, when they brewed this potion of words, purporting to speak for their respective countries or only for themselves? In the one case they would be placing their countries' honor on the table. In the other, nothing would be committed but their own personal reputations.

Churchill's first draft of the Charter was hazy.2 There was a one-sentence Preamble, which began: "The President of the United States and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, represent ing His Majesty's Government .... " Plainly, they were present in their officialcapacities. The sentence went on to say that these two men "... deem it right to make known certain principles which they both accept for guidance in the framing of their pol icy ana on which they base their hopes for a better future for the THE EIGHT POINTS 131 world."The "they"refersto the Presidentand the PrimeMinis ter. "Their policy" is not necessarily national policy in their dem ocratic countries. Churchill's language was cautious. Roosevelt changed this. The Preamble finally adopted read thus: "The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's Gov ernment in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries [italics added] on. which they base their hopes for a better future for the world." This left no doubt. The .two men were not voicing personal feelings.

They were, they said, enunciating the national policies of their respective countries~ TheU nited States of America was one of thefew nationsof the world which had not long since exhausted· its moral credit. It had refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles because that malig nant document had violated principle and pledge; it had disas sociated itself from stubborn refusal of the French and the Eng lish ever to honor the general disarmament clause of that treaty; it was not a party to the incredibly stupid policy of hatred, repres sion, and vindictiveness which had, in the twenties and early thirties, flaunted a cold ring of bayonets all around a disarmed Germany, stifled her trade, trampled upon her sovereignty, and humiliated her proud people, made a fiasco of the disarmament conference in Geneva in 1932, and, by the inexorable law of action and reaction, helped to assure the advent of a Hitler.

Woodrow Wilson's celebrated Fourteen Points had been scrapped as soon as the Germans had laid down their arms at the end of World War I, but the United States had renounced this perfidy of the victorious nations. Furthermore, the United States, as the Poles"the Czechs, the Lithuanians, and others well knew, was, of all the great powers, the most sincere champion of the right of self-determination. So it was a shining reputation 1,32 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER for honorable conduct, his country's esteem in the eyes of friends and foes,which Franklin D. Roosevelt was willing to throw into this new jeopardy. The importance of this to the future of America as a moral force in the world cannot be overestimated. Sumner Welles wrote that the Atlantic Charter was "the officialpronouncement of the policies of the two governments." It was "valid in its bind ing effiect," and it was "notice to the world by the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United King dom, that in accordance with their constitutional authority to speak for their countries and their governments, the two nations which they represented UJould adhereto the great principles set forth in the declaration."3 If this be so, the Atlantic Charter was a gigantic moral COIn· mitment made to a world on the threshold .of enormous travail and sacrifices.Welles cited no clause of the American Constitu tion as giving the President authority to bind the United States in this manner. Whether he had the authority or not, Roosevelt arrogated it to himself, and the world took his words to be a pledge by the United States.

Then on September 29, 1941,in what must surely rank as one of the most macabre frauds of history, Commissar of Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov, the notorious Janus-faced collabo rator with von Ribbentrop in arranging the partition of Poland, was ushered into St. James's Palace to vow allegiance, on behalf of the Soviet dictatorship, to the eight points of the Atlantic Charter. The ceremony was later repeated in.Washington, D.C., for the better convenience of the American press. It would have been no more a mockery had Adolf Hitler, for a prize of fifty thousand tanks and twenty-five thousand airplanes, scribbled his signature on a paper saying that he was dedicated to the sacred Judaic laws of. the Talmud. Eventually, the plenipoten tiaries of more than thirty nations trooped in to subscribe to the THE EIGHT POINTS 133 Atlantic Charter. It thus became a multilateral international pact.

FIRST POINT First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other. This was in the original draft prepared by Churchill. This draft was handed to Mr. Welles by Sir Alexander Cadogan on Sunday morning, August 10, the day after the conference began. According to Churchill's account, President Roosevelt had told him on Saturday that "he thought it would be well if we could draw upa joint declaration laying down certain broad principles which should guide our policies along the same road." One would think the idea had not been broached before. "Wishing to follow up this most helpful suggestion," writes Mr. Churchill, "I gave him the next day, August 10, a tentative outline of such a declaration."4 This casual introduction is in line with Churchill's rather too obvious anxiety to play down the Atlantic Charter in his mem oirs. (It was already a dead letter when he wrote them.) How ever, Harry Hopkins' version of the matter was different, for according to Sherwood, who had Hopkins' private notes before him,Mr. Churchill knew before he saw President Roosevelt that the issuance·to the world of a joint declaration was one of the purposes, if not the only purpose, of staging such a spectacular rendezvous. On the trip across the Atlantic on the Prince of Wales, Harry and the Prune Minister did more than play back gammon. Sherwood records: "They discussed the phraseology of the Atlantic Charter which the Prime Minister was to present to the President.,,5 The First Point of Churchill's tentative draft was never changed. On the surface, it is unexceptionable. Territorial ag grandizement by annexation is·surely covered. The more subtle kind, by the imposition of puppet rulers in nominally autono134 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER mous countries, is not specificallymentioned but should at least come under the catch-all alternative, "or other."

The basic hypocrisy of the First Point lies deeper. Costly as modern wars are, they inevitably aggrandize the victor in some ways at the expenseof a powerful enemy who is utterly crushed. Surely Mr. Churchill, looking into the future, could foresee that if the German merchant marine were swept from the seas for a decade,the shipping industry of Britain would capture much of the tonnage formerly carried in German bottoms and that the Cunard and·White Star lines would enjoy a more thriving pas.. senger business if North German Lloyd and Hamburg-Ameri ... can were to be eliminated from the picture for many years after the war..Would not British Overseas Airways be aggrandized by the obliteration of all commercial aviation in a beaten and occupied Germany? Would Britain's markets in Asia, Africa, and South America he more secure in the years to come if the rising competition of upstart Japan were done to death, either by slow economic strangulation or by defeat in war?

Regardless of any moral posturing and pretensions of high motives,a war which eliminates, even temporarily, a strong com... petitor in the markets of the world and in the commerce on the seas and ·in the air aggrandizes the victor vis-a-visthat enemy. How had. Britain won her commercial position from the fif... teenth century to the twentieth? By wars in which she had knocked down each competitor who raised a head-the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the Germans. The Germans in the twen tieth century, however, would not stay down, and the Japanese were in ascendance in Asia, where British imperialism was an old story. Both were good sailors and efficientindustrialists and lived in overpopulated countries. Sharp commercial rivalry with Britain was inevitable. Future historians would record that in the first half of the twentieth century, the issue was settled by war, not by fair and open competition in the market place, just THE EIGHT POINTS 135 as in the sixteenthand eighteenthcenturiesthe Anglo-Spanish wars, and in the seventeenth century the Anglo-Dutch wars, had determined the commercial supremacies of those days.

President Woodrow Wilson, speaking in 1919, expressed the opinion that all modern wars are of. this nature. "Is there· any man or woman," he said, "let me say is there any child, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern.world is in... dustrial .and commercial rivalry? This was an industrial and commercial war." Sigmund Freud would no doubt have con... sidered this an oversimplification, for he found the seed of war deeply embedded in human psychology and probably ineradica ble.6 Nor is it likely that the economic exegesis which a dis traught and disillusioned Wilson permitted himself to embrace in 1919 would have satisfied Jonathan Swift, who called war "that mad game the world so loves to play." Be that as it may, to pretend that a war involving Great Britain, Germany, and Japan, all three of· them dependent on foreign trade for their standard of living and all rivals for the markets of the world, would not bring serious dislocations of economic power.and ag grandize the victors in relation to the vanquished is to indulge in fantasy.

When Mr. Churchill drafted the First Point of the Atlantic Charter, he said only that his country "seeks" no aggrandize ... ment, territorial or other. A man might just as well say, when he shakes his neighbor's plum tree, that he is not seeking the plums that by chance fall into his open basket. SECOND POINT Second,they desire to see no territorialchangesthat do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned. This was in the original Churchill draft and was not changed .. It was the golden promise to peoples whose lands and homes were coveted by others. The words are: "no territorial changes."

THE ATLANTIC CHARTER There are·no exceptions.This could only be understood to be an assurance to Germans, Poles, and all other peoples that their nations would not be forcibly dismembered. "Freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned." Surely this meant that countries would not be carved up by a few men sitting around a table. It meant that families would not be up rooted from the farms and dwellings which they and their an cestorshad possessedfor generations and set adrift on the roads. It meant that nationalities would not be put under alien domina tion, without even being asked their wishes. Such barbarities were renounced. The idea of plebiscitesin disputed areas is implicit~ It was not the dickering of contending governments or the predispositions of such men as Roosevelt,Churchill, or Stalin that would prevail in any revision of the map of Europe, but only the wishes of the peoples concerned.

All of this was clear in the .language used. It had to be,for Roosevelt could never sell this war to the American people if they were not told that this war, unlike previous wars of Europe, would not end in that fruitless shoving aroundof unwilling pop ulations and callqus penciling of new lines on maps which in the past had made each war but a prelude to another war. Any equivocation on this point might have been fatal to his and Churchill's purpose, so they made a solemn pledge before the world. This war was to end in perhaps the most.terrifying peace in all history. The mass deportation of millions of innocent civil ians, the partitions, the spoliation and plunder, and the destruc tion of moral and spiritual values were to be on an unprece dentedscale: r 'the world was to be leftwith no alternative hut to prepare for a new holocaust. What took place at Teheran and Yalta, along with the procedures adopted there, we shall exam ine in detail later. The ancient kings of the Assyrian Empire, THE EIGHT POINTS 137 from Ashurnazirpal, who ascended the throne of Nineveh in 884 B.C., to Ashurbanipal, who devastated Elam in 645 B.C., had made mass deportation a routine procedure of conquest. Other prototypes for the practices that were adopted at the end of Warld War II, including the systematic looting, the seizure of territory, the hanging of the leaders of the vanquished countries, and the imposition of alien cultures and puppet officials, were not lacking in the long annals of warfare. In the Atlantic Char ter, however, President Roosevelt and 'Prime Minister Churchill renounced in advance most of these excesses,which a more en lightened Christian civilization had come to look upon as atroc ities. It was an age of democracy, and-or so they solemnly pro...

claimed-"the wishes of the people concerned" were to be con sulted. The choice of the precatory word "desire" in the Second Point ("..• they desire to see no territorial changes .•.•") offers no loophole. The war was but a test of military strength. The vic tors would have overwhehning superiority at its conclusion, so that their will and their desire could be the same. The only im ponderable was their sincerity, or the lack of it. (Actually, as we shall see, the Second Point was thrown in the wastebasket by Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Russians-by tacit understanding early in the war and by firm agreement long before the war ,vas over.) THIRD POINT Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sover eign rights and. self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them. The original Churchill draft read differently: Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; they are only concerned to THE ATLANTIC CHARTER defend the rights of freedom of speech and thought without which such choice must be illusory.

Why was this second clause cut out when it got into American hands? Concern for freedom of speech and thought is at the heart of the American political creed. Sumner WeUes gives a curious reason for the elimination. He says "it was more than doubtful that the American Congress would at that moment have approved a pledge by the government of the United States to 'defend .the rights of freedom of speech and thought' when those rights were abrogated in every Axis country.,,8 WeUesmust indeed have been hard put to think up a respecta ble reason when, several years after the event, he stooped to this bit of dissembling. In the first place, the Atlantic Charter was not intended to be submitted to the Congress for approval, nor was it. As Sherwood confides, Roosevelt "was taking no chances on that."9 In the second place, the rights of freedom of speech and thought were not only being abrogated "in every Axis country," as Welles choosesto put it, but had never even existed, and were laughed at with official contempt, in Soviet Russia, which the Rooseveltadministration was undertaking to build up to be the dominant military power in Europe. In the third place, if the word "defend" was too strong at the moment, as implying warlike action, such an expression as "endeavor to further," as adopted in the Fourth Point of the Charter, could have been substituted. Instead, Roosevelt did not permit freedom of speech and thought to be mentioned at all.

The real reason is' easy to surmise. President Roosevelt and WeIlesknew that as far as the Atlantic Charter was concerned, two of the President's much-touted· "four freedoms". had to' be thrown overboard. Or, as the SaturdayEvening Post quipped in its September 27, 1941, issue, Roosevelt left Washington with his four freedoms and "came back with only two." Every literate THE EIGHT POINTS 139 personin the world,exceptthe most ignorantor credulousand those blinded by.an emotional affinity for Communism, knew that freedom of speech and-freedom of thought were nonexistent in Soviet Russia,the new ally. Therefore, to bring the subject up at all would create an embarrassment. Too many people might be prodded to ask: "If freedom of speech and thought is what this war is all about, why was Harry Hopkins rushed .over to Moscow to cuddle up to Stalin, and why are vast quantities of American weapons and supplies going to be put into the hands of this voracious dictator, who has trampled on every freedom which Americans hold dear ?" The incongruity of the situation would approach the ludicrous. The hypocrisy of the pose being struck at the conference might show through, so the reference was deleted completely. That it had been included in the first draft and then cut out was never divulged by Roosevelt,and· by Welles only long after the war was over.

In its place, Roosevelt himself inserted the clause "and they hope that self-government may be restored to those from whom it has been forcibly removed." The next morning, Mr. Churchill suggested putting in the words "sovereign rights and" before "self...government," and thus was the final text arrived at. The meaning was sufficientlyfuzzy from the British point of view, for.the conceptions of "sovereign rights" and "self government" might be quite contradictory if ever applied to such ·places as Hong Kong, British Honduras, British Guiana, and British Africa. Thus did President Roosevelt eliminate language which was relatively clear but embarrassing and insert a clause which could he useful for his purposes if misinterpreted, which it would be in the United States. As we know from Hull, Hopkins, and Elliott Roosevelt, the President's mind, when he wrote the clause, was not only on Germany's successesbut also on the colonial powers of the world, with their far-flung empires built upon conquest 140 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER of indigenous peoples in. Asia, Africa, South America, and the islands of the seas. He wanted the American people to see in it a manifesto of liberation everywhere and for all. This was essen tial if t.he war was to he sanctified in American eyes to the point of justifying an all...out effort. According to Elliott Roosevelt,his father felt very strongly about Western colonialism.10 He knew the Prime Minister was not with him on this issue,but he did not tell that to his people at home.

The first clause of the sentence, it is to be noted, refers to "all peoples." The second clause, still within the context of "all peo ples," would restore sovereign rights and self-government to "those who have been forcibly deprived of them." There. are no limitations of geography or nationality or time. Yet Churchill had his own mental reservations, as Rooseveltknew. These were later confided to a worried House of Commons on September 9, when the Prime Minister said: "At the Atlantic meeting we had in mind the restoration of the sovereignty . . . of the states . . . now under the Nazi yoke." This, he insisted, was "quite a sepa... rate problem" from the question of self-government for the "re gions and peoples that owe allegiance to the British Crown." This statement was for British consumption and was given little publicity in the United States. With that breezy vagueness at which he excelled, the Prime Minister did not particularize the "we" ("... we had in mind .

. . . "). He could, of course, have meant himself and· Sir Alex... ander Cadogan, who was with him at the Atlantic meeting, but it is doubtful that his listeners put this interpretation on his words, for he was speaking of the Charter, which was a joint declaration with President Roosevelt. But if he meant the· pronoun "we" to include the President, he was stretching the fact. Sumner Welles, Elliott Roosevelt, and Harry Hopkins contra... dict him here by direct testimony, and the memoirs of Cordell Hull, who conversed with Roosevelt on the subject, support THE EIGHT POINTS 141 their recollections. Chester Wilmot's very objective history of the war states that ~e President "had no such limited view•... Roosevelt was thinking not only of the occupied countries of Europe but also of colonial peoples throughout the world."!! So while Churchill was singing one song in England, Roose velt was carrying a different tune in the United States. "We of the United Nations," he said in his Washington's Birthday speech the following February, "are agreed on certain broad principles in the kind of peace we seek. The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the tuhole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-deter mination of nations and peoples, and the four freedoms-free dom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear."12 When he uttered these words, Mr. Roosevelt knew there was a flat disagreement between himself and Mr. Churchill with re gard to the applicability of the Atlantic Charter "to the whole world." He was continuing to propagate the fiction of a sincere mutual understanding which he knew had never existed, just as Mr. Churchill had done in England. Who was trying to fool whom? Surely neither of these seasoned politicians, who had chewed over the subject together on a first-name basis in the Admiral's cabin on the cruiser Augusta, thought he was fooling the other. Elliott Roosevelt, who had listened in, relates, with evident relish, that each knew exactly where the other stood. We can only conclude that the Washington's Birthday speech was conceived to fool the American public.* In this speech, Roosevelttook another extraordinaryliberty.

. :It: Sherwoodstatesthat this speechhad beenannounced at leastthree weeks in advance, adding, "It had alwaysbeen Steve Early's practice to build up the radio audiencefor the President's speecheswith plenty of advance publicityand he did this extraordinarly well." Roosevelt and Hopkins, 950.

142 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER He spoke of freedom of speech and freedoln of religion as though they were covered by the Atlantic Charter. Actually, they had been conspicuously omitted. The Charter n1entioned only freedom from "fear" and "want." But by this tin1e the United States was in the war, and in order to assure sufficient public backing for the vast gifts which the Roosevelt adminis tration was going to make to Russia during the ensuing years, a nation-wide campaign of propaganda, or of what Aldous Hux ley has labeled "emotional engineering," had been set in motion. This was to condition American thinking to the fantasy that the Soviet government was a liberal democracy which nurtured the same freedoms that all Americans treasured. By this time a Rus sian signature had been put on a paper saying ,that the Soviet Union adhered to the principles of the Charter. Mr. Roosevelt now found it expedient to pretend that the Charter contained a provision on freedom of speech and religion, which it did not.

As a matter of fact, President Roosevelt started to plow this field even before the United States was in the war. The omission of any reference to freedom of speech and freedom of thought or religion in the Atlantic Charter had proved to be ,a blunder. In clusion would have caused smiles, perhaps, but exclusion left a gaping hole. No sooner had the President returned to Washing ton from his epoch-making conference with Mr. Churchill than a wisecrack began to reverberate and reach his ears: two of the four freedoms had got lost somewhere out in the Atlantic. Reli gious circles were especially shocked" and some of their spokes men did not conceal their suspicion that the two freedoms had been dropped overboard out of tenderness for the susceptibil ities of atheistic Communism. Mr. Roosevelt was not one to let an issue of this kind dissipate his gains. His decision was a bold one, and it illustrates his ex treme confidence in himself and his low opinion of the intel lectual alertness of his countrymen. He would, simply make be lieve that the Atlantic Charter covered freedom of speech and THE EIGHT POINTS 143 freedom of religion. He would talk that way. People not given to reading would take his word for it, while. others, who read only superficially, might be bemused into some such syllogizing as this: The Charter is a good thing and looks toward a good world; freedom of speech and freedom of religion are certainly good; therefore they are covered by the Charter, especially if Mr. Roosevelt,who ought to know, saysthey are. Then he would follow up this verbal sleight of hand with a phantasm. He would conjure up a new Soviet Union, complete with all four freedoms, for the delectation of the American people.

Harry Hopkins, of course, was so entangled emotionally in the burgeoning Russophilism of the Roosevelt administration that he was deeply chagrined by the widespread lack of enthusi asm, in the United States, for the Soviet dictatorship. He was restlessand ill humored at this period, but he considered the task ahead to be simply one of manipulating public opinion. A job of emotional engineering had to be done. Early in September, he wrote a private letter to Brendan Bracken, a member of the British cabinet, in which he said: Weare having some difficultywith our public opinion with regard to Russia. The American people don't take aid to Russia easily. The whole Catholic population is opposed to it, all the Nazis, all the Ital ians and a lot of people who sincerely believe that Stalin is a great menace to the world. Still I think it will come out all right in the end.13 By this time, the clandestine infiltration of the agencies of the federal government by the Communist party had gone far.14 In the Party's work, everything was now subordinated to the neces sities of Russian foreign policy. Borkenau describes the strategy thus: From 1941 onwards the communists were assigned tasks such as in filtrating at the centre into the policy-making bodies and intelligence services of America and Britain. Even during the Popular Front 144 THE ATLANTIC CHAltTER phase, the communists had learned to conceal their basic political aims. Now-and this was the decisive novelty-they proceeded to conceal, as far as possible, the political identity of their personnel. It was the last consequence of Leninism, of the theory that a closely selected party must lead the country without allowing the masses a share in deciding upon the course to be taken.15 A Roosevelt intimate was Secretary of the Treasury Morgen thau, whose right-hand man and advisor on foreign affairs was Harry Dexter White. The names of Lee Pressman, David Wein traub, John J. Abt, Nathan Witt, Alger Hiss, and Victor Perlo opened many doors. Lauchlin Currie was a confidential admin istrative assistant of the President. He wrote his letters on White House stationery. Communist cells had been spawned in the State, Treasury, Commerce, and other departments. The bur geoning war bureaucracy brought to Washington, side by side with loyal Americans, a horde of crypto-apostates and schelners whose deepest allegiance was to a foreign power and ideology.

These people, who were part of a conspiratorial network of sub... version, were in positions which enabled them to advise Cabinet members and write their speeches, colonize key committees of Congress and write Congressional reports, and prepare news releases. Already the espionage rings which were to be exposed in the revelations of later years were busy. Harry Hopkins was not wrong in his prediction that the "difficulty with our public opinion with regard to Russia" would "come out all right in the end." America had her guard down. When President Roosevelt reported the Atlantic Charter to Congress in September, his message obliquely mentioned free dom of religion, although the Charter did not. He still shied away. from the embarrassing words "freedom of speech." In stead, he spoke of "freedom of information," without defining it. His choice of this odd phrase, which is alien to American us age but which has a special significance in Marxian political THE EIGHT POINTS 145 terminology, escaped the attention of most commentators, but the Saturday Evening Post, in its September 27 issue,and certain other publications made a point of it. What did Mr. Roosevelt mean by the phrase? Why were the well-known terms "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" no longer good enough for him? In Communist and other totalitarian societies,the dis semination of news is controlled by the government. This output is called "information." The only freedom possessedby the in dividual citizen is to receive the information sanctioned by the government in its official or controlled organs of publication.

This is very different from the concept of freedom of speech and press which is rooted in Anglo-American institutions. After gingerly tossing in the expression "freedom of informa... tion" on this occasion, Mr. Roosevelt did not toy with it again. He proceeded to bear down on the subject of religion. We now know that what had been bothering him and Harry Hopkins ever since they came back from the Atlantic Conference was the problem of reconciling the facts with the pretense that the war was a showdown between what Winston Churchill had euphe... mistically called "the good forces and the evil forces" of the world. It would be difficult to erasefrom the minds of all church... men and the devout of all faiths the revilement of religion in the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Had not religion been called the "opiate" and the "poison" of the people? There was only one thing to do: draw a curtain over the past and try to persuade the doubters, by reiteration and ruse, that religion was protected and flourishing in the Soviet Union. It was decided that the President would have a few carefully chosen wordsonthe subjectto drop strategicallyinto the publicitymill at a press conference. In addition, Averell Harriman was dis...

patched to Moscow.His primary assignment was to discuss with Stalin the delivery of American weapons and supplies, but an important secondary purpose was to induce the Russians to make THE ATLANTIC CHARTER some kind of a statement, for publicity purposes in the United States, sympathetic to religion. At his press conference of September 30, when a reporter asked about religion in Russia, Mr. Roosevelt was ready for him. "Go and read Article 124 of the Russian Constitution," he said. But he did not tell what Article 124 provided. Instead, with that facility for unobtrusive evasion which was always one of his strongest forensic assets, he went on to say that Russia's provi sions concerning religion are "essentially what is the rule in this country; only we don't put it quite the same way." A precisian might prefer to call this a suggestio falsi rather thana lie. One given to colloquial descriptiveness would surely call it a "whopper." Mr. Roosevelt could not have believed what he said. Not two years before, he had told the American Youth Congress how much he detested "the banishment of religion"

from Russia.16 (That was during the period of the Berlin-Mos cow alliance, when it served Mr. Roosevelt's bellicose purposes to throw some mud on Hitler's ally, as well as on Hitler him self.) However, as Mr. Rooseveltno doubt knew, not one American in ten thousand had a copy of the Russian Constitution or had accessto one. Few libraries possessedit. Most newspapers printed his remarks and let it go at that. The effect was the deception of a large portion of the American public. Some alert and courageous publications were horrified at this. The magazine Christian Century, which did manage to find a copy of the Russian Constitution, asked: Is Roosevelt trying to soothe the American conscience by deceiving it?17 The Russian Constitution was known to be a dead letter. It was mere window dressing for a despotism which held individual civil rights as nothing. Furthermore, Article 124 was heavily weighted against religion, not in favor of it. Indeed, the evident objective of that amazing verbiage is the ultimate extinction of religion. First it THE EIGHT POINTS 147 purports to guarantee the right to perform religious rites; then it guarantees freedom to propagandize, but only against ,reli...

gion! Propaganda and instruction are reserved exclusively for the atheists. Even more important is the law governing "reli gious associations.."This outlaws most of the practices considered basic in civilized countries for the cultivation of the religious life. In Moscow, Averell Harriman had some success in getting a statement out of the Russians for publicity purpos,es.This was not as easy as one might have supposed. Saying nice things about religion was not on the list of recommended activities in the Soviet Union; furthermore, the whole idea of having to cater to public opinion in this way was abhorrent, if not incomprehensi ble. "Throughout the week in Russia," Harriman wrote in his confidential notes, "1 took every occasion (and I believe covered most of the members of the Soviet delegation, including of course Stalin and Molotov) of explaining the American politicalsitua tion and public opinion regarding Russia, particularly in relation to the religious subject, and urged that both statements and ac tion be taken to indicateto Americathat the Sovietswere willing to allow freedom of worship not only in letter but in fact."

Stalin did not tell Harriman that there was religious freedom in Russia or that he believed there should be. In fact, he said nothing. But he did nod his head, which Harriman took to mean "a willingness to set! that something was done." Finally, through Oumansky, there came an assurance "that the Soviets did allow religious worship and would reduce restrictions and would have the necessary publicity."ls This was in itself a confession. If the right to worship existed, what were the "restrictions"? And why were the restriGtions only to be "reduced"? These details were irrelevant to the pur pose of Harriman's assignment, which was not to reform the Soviet Union but to arrange for a publicity statement which would be useful to President Roosevelt in what Harriman had 148 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER explained to Stalin as "the American political situation." He recorded his successful accomplishment of his assignment with this note: "He [Oumansky] promised the last time I saw him at the American Embassy Friday, October 3, categorically with out qualification that the President's public statement on reli gion would be responded to by a high Soviet officialin a manner to obtain maximum publicity in the United States."19 Actually, Harriman was not taken in. He was quite aware that the pretensions about to be broadcast throughout the United States were sham. He knew a fraud was to be perpetrated on the American people, for he wrote a confidential memorandum which recorded his own disbelief. "In spite of all comments and assurances," he wrote, "I leave with the impression that all the Soviets intend to do is to give lip service and to create certain instances which would give an impression of relaxation without really changing their present practices."2o Apparently, Harriman made a conscientious effort to ascer tain the true status of religion in Russia. He heard conflicting reports regarding the amount of worship, the percentage of churches in the villages that were open, and the attendance.

However, he found everybody in agreement that worship was engaged in only by "older people," chiefly women, and never by Communists. He wrote in his memorandum: "Religion to the @o111munistsis superstition and against the Communist phi losophy, and its organized form dangerous in developing anti Communist political groups. It is of course a grave offense for anyone to teach the youth under sixteen religious philosophy." He was convinced that in spite of the "lip service" to freedom which might be given for the purpose of the publicity handout to America, religious worship would continue to be tolerated "only under closest G.P.U. scrutiny.u In Harriman's words: "The Communists will unquestionably continue anti-religious education of the youth up to sixteen years without allowing reliTHE EIGHT POINTS 149 giouseducation.Religiousworshipperswill be restrictedin eco nomic or politicaladvancementeven if they are no longer per secuted. Priests or clergymen will be closely watched as will everybody with whom they have intimate contact."21 It was of this police regime, ideologically dedicated to the sup pression of religion, that President Rooseveltwas speaking when he said in his press conference that Russia's provisions concern ing religion "are essentiallywhat is the rule in this country; only we don't put it quite the same way."

There can be no doubt that the inner circle of the Roosevelt administration knew the truth from the many sources available to them. Unfortunately, the contents of the Harriman memo randum quoted above were not divulged to the American people (until many years later). In fairness to Harriman, it may be ob served that his duty was to report to his chief, the President. However, no one could have compelled him to play even the least role in this business if his conscience had rebelled. Fraus est celare fraudem. ("It is a fraud to conceal a fraud.") During the next two months, Mr. Roosevelt's phantasm was taking robust shape. A constant stream of propaganda went forth-to press, pulpit, school, luncheon club, radio. The Soviet Union was given a clean bill of health. It, so the line ran, allowed religious freedon1, as we do. The findings of President Roose velt's emissary, Mr. Harriman, to the contrary were, of course, kept secret, and the most was made of the prearranged publicity which emanated from Moscow, although it was known to be sham.

By December 15, Roosevelt's audacity was so unrestrained that he permitted himself to impute to the entire world, with the exception of Germany, Italy, and Japan, a tender regard for all the principles of the American Bill of Rights.22 This must indeed have surprised many people in the far-flung magistracies of the world, in the diverse dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchTHE ATLANTIC CHARTER ies, caliphates, and lingering feudalisms which comprised the greater part of the land surface of the earth. Surely it must have brought a smile to the lips of Joseph Stalin, who, like Lenin, as Franz Borkenau tells us, always "regarded democracy as the worst enemy.,,23 It was the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the Bill of Rights as part of the Constitution of the United States. Speaking over the combined radio stations of the nation, Roosevelt said: Indeed, prior to 1933, the essential validity of the Bill of Rights was accepted everywhere, at least in principle. Even today, with the excep tion of Germany, Italy and Japan, the peoples of the whole wodd in all probability four-fifths of them-support its principles, its teach ing and its glorious results.

On the contrary, the American Bill of Rights is grounded upon certain philosophic assumptions, concerning the relationship of Man to his God and to the State, which are in violent conflict with patterns of thought which have prevailed in most regions of the world from ancient times to the present. Mr. Roosevelt must have known that the Bill of Rights contained many principles-in limitation of the powers of the State-which were flatly rejected in many nations other than the three he mentioned. Anyone with a mediocre knowledge of the laws and mores of the peoples of the world could have named in two minutes a score of examples which would belie the President's words. But by this time, what F. J. P. Veale, in his book Advance to Barbarism, calls "that mental and moral paralysis" engen.. dered by the war, had already begun to set in. Such extrava.. gancies as this latest one of Mr. Roosevelt passed with surpris. ingly little challenge, even in the academic or so-called intellec tual circles, where one might have expected them to arouse doubts about either the rationality or the sincerity of the speaker and to provoke an effort to set the facts straight before the peaTHE EIGHT POINTS 151 pIe. Unfortunately, future generations were to pay heavily in blood and resources for the distortions with which Franklin D.

Roosevelt was enabled to torpify the thinking of the American people at this juncture. Just as fatuous, and indeed more reckless, was the peroration of this speech. "We covenant with each other before all the world," he intoned in a high allargando,"that having taken up arms in the defense of liberty, we will not lay them down before liberty is once again secure in the world we live in." If this gra tuitous and unilateral commitment were to be taken literally, it could only mean that Mr. Roosevelt was sentencing his people to perpetual warfare. Of course liberty had never been "secure in the world we live in." It was certain not to be after this war, which was to open the floodgates of Europe and Asia to Com.. munism. 24 By the time of the Washington's Birthday speech in February, 1942, America was in a frenzy of wartime excitement. Few people checked Roosevelt's words when, as we have seen, he went the full way and made a palpable misrepresentation of the contents of the Atlantic Charter and the degree of mutual agree ment between himself and Winston Churchill on the scope of its applicability: We of the United Nations are agreed on certain principles in the kind of peace we seek. The Atlantic Charter appliesnot only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peo ples, and the four freedoms-freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedomfrom want, and freedomfrom fear.

One must search far to find a Presidential utterance so lacking in integrity. Prime Minister Churchill had insisted to Mr. Roose velt when they drew up the Atlantic Charter that it was not to apply to the whole world, and he had later emphasized this point 152 THE ATLANTIC CHARTER in his report to Parliament. The Atlantic Charter did not em brace the four freedoms; Roosevelt himself had cut out two of them which were in an earlier draft. And one of the "United Nations"-one of the largest, in fact, and the one which would be the most aggrandized by victory in the war-had been vir tually bribed by Roosevelt's emissary into making a fraudulent announcement of devotion to religious freedom for publicity purposes in the United Statesan announcement which was known to be a sham and which had been so described by the em issary himself in his confidential report. Thus far we have focused mainly on the tacked-together "res toration" clause of the Third Point. We have seen what was originally suggested by Churchill and eliminated by Roosevelt and what Roosevelt later pretended it contained, although it did not. The other clause,which was never changed, proclaimed "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they willlive."

"All peoples" must include the German people. However, the Sixth Point pledged "the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny," by which was meant the National Socialist government of the German Reich. Some English critics quickly pointed out that the majority of Germans had chosen Nazism, or National So cialism, and were loyal to it. Which point of the Charter was to prevail? Such magazines as Contemporary Review and Twen tieth Century were displeased with the Third Point because it contradicted the Sixth Point; German commentators were shocked at the Sixth Point because it contradicted the Third Point. To a German or an Italian, the discrepancy was obvious. The Charter was double talk. In fairness to Churchill, it should be emphasized that in his original draft of the Charter, he had tried to qualify the Third Point, perhaps to reconcile it with the Sixth, by adding the words "they are only concerned to defend the rights of freedom THE EIGHT POINTS 153 of speech and thought without which such choice [of the form of government desired] must be illusory." But Roosevelt would not have these words in the Charter. They could be brought to bear against the Soviet form of government as well as against the Nazi. The result was that both the illusion and the contradic tion remained.

Their tongues "dropped manna:~ in Milton's phrase, "but all was'false and hollow." There was no intention to ask the Tan ganyikans whether British mandate was "the form of govern ment" under which they would choose to live or the indigenous Algerians whether they were happy to be absorbed into the French Republic. Nor was it contemplated to poll the Ukrain ians or the Estonians on remaining in the Soviet Union or the eastern Poles on joining it. As their future actions proved, Roosevelt and Churchill re spected the right of some peoples only-not "all peoples"-to choose their form of government. For millions of people in Eu rope and elsewhere, these two men, along with Stalin, soon presumed to make the choice themselves. But when the Atlantic Charter was "held aloft" as a "beacon"-as Sumner Welles put it-the American people were expected to take its words liter ally. Roosevelt's speech on Washington's Birthday demanded faith in all it said and even more. It is not surprising that a bril liant English lawyer, in a book to which Dean lnge of St. Paul's contributed the Foreword, has bluntly described the Atlantic Charter as "a collection of dishonest verbiage."25 FOURTH and FIFTH POINTS Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obli gations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access,on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.