II. "The Hand Maidens and Heralds of Communism"

II. "The Hand Maidens and Heralds of Communism" AMERICAN Socialists, whose program has been taken over in the United States by Americans for Democratic Action, the left wing of the Democratic Party, are the main reserve forces of the revolutionary movement in which communist cadres con stitute the vanguard. Adlai Stevenson, a political idol of the ADA, received 27,311,316 votes for President in 1952. The revolutionary thought-perversion...technique has worked so effectively that many Americans sincerely...believethat only ignorant or malicious persons confuse socialism.-with...commu nism. They are deceived by tactical-differences between Social ists and Communists who often attack each other violently. It is true that there are many varieties of Socialists, just as there are Communists who profess abhorrence of the Soviet Union, such as the Titoites in Yugoslavia and the Lovestoneites and Trotskyites in this country. On one question, however, all So cialists and all Communists are united, and that is their com mOll-hatred of the American.iree-enterprise economic system, and of the constitutional..republican-form.ef government under which it has flourished.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain once characterized Britain's Fabian Socialists, the leaders of the Labor Party, as "the hand maidens and heralds of commu nism." This was not a··mere Churchillian figure of speech.. As long ago as 1848, Marx and Engels declared in The Commu nist Manifesto: "The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and politi cal order of things." In the 1930's the Communists supported the New Deal. They form popular front coalitions with the 24 THE TWENTY-YEAR REVOLUTION socialists and other revolutionary elements in their struggle to overthrow the existing order. Even while attacking the Social ists for tactical reasons, they infiltrate and seek to give direction to socialist movements. In an article on socialism in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Prof. G. D. H. Cole, a leading theoretician and historian of the British Labor Party, declares: "The distinction between socialism, as represented by the various Socialist and Labor parties of Europe and the New World, and communism, as represented by the Russians and the minority groups in other countries, is one of tactics.-and·-strategy rather than of;..-()bjec tive. Communism is indeed only socialism pursued by revolu tionary means and making its revolutionary method a canon of faith.... "

The-identity-of communist and socialis~bjectives.ewas ac knowledged by the late dictator Stalin himself, in August, 1946, according to the official report of a British good will mission to Moscow when the Labor Party was in power and Clement Attlee was prime minister. This report, included in the annual report of the Labor Party's executive committee and published May 9, 1947, said: "After a general discussion Mr. Stalin said. he was gratified to know that two great countries were traveling in the socialist-airection. In the Soviet Union, the Russians were traveling to-socialism in the Russian-..-way, whereas' Britaia-was going in the roundabout-British way, to which there was an aside that 'we' had a habit of getting there. He felt that in both countries we could reach the socialist ob jective. They (the Russians) recognized that though socialism could be obtained by other methods than through the soviets, they believed that theirs was the shortest, even if the most dif ficult way, and that it may be accomplished by bloodshed.

Britain had the opportunity of a more peaceful approach to socialism than they had in Russia and, although by the British method the change might be without violence, the process would be much longer. "Mr. Stalin said he was glad to receive the assurance that the British people desired friendship and understanding with "HAND MAIDENS AND HERALDS OF COMMUNISM" 25 Russia and that it would be amazing if there was no friendship between the two peoples-particularly so now that we both had the same-aim, the achievementof-socialism."1 The affinity of American "liberals" for the British Socialists was impressively demonstrated in May, 1953, when Attlee at tacked the American Constitution and was in turn denounced by SenatorMcCarthy.Attlee, addressingthe House of Com mons, said the American Constitution was "framed for an iso lationist state." He expressed contempt for the separation of powers in the American government by insinuating that Presi dent Eisenhower could not speak with authority, because of the constitutional prerogatives of the Senate, at a proposed con ference with Prime Minister Malenkov of the Soviet Union.

"One sometimes wonders who is more powerful, the President or Senator McCarthy," Attlee remarked. The left wingers did not seem to resent Attlee's gratuitous slur on the American Constitution, but their imprecations on "McCarthyism" rose to a crescendo after the Wisconsin senator had assailed Attlee. In a single issue, in fact on the same page, the New York Times of May 25 reported denunciations of Mc Carthy by four different groups: ADA, B'nai B'rith, Freedom House, and the communist-controlled National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. New York's Senator Herbert H. Lehman, a pillar of the ADA, issued an ultimatum to President Eisenhower: he must either stop trying to achieve unity in the Republican Party by appeasing "McCarthyism," or sacrifice the unity of "the free world." Twelve clergymen in Boston, mem bers of the Back Bay Ministers' Association, took it upon them selves to offer an apology to Queen Elizabeth and Attlee for McCarthy's remarks in the Senate.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels stated that communist ends can be attained "only by the forcible overthrow of all existingsocialconditions."To bring about conditionsin which a violent revolution can be successful, however, they ad vocated a gradual, or creeping revolution. They declared: "The 1. New York Times, May 10, 1947.

26 THE TWENTY-YEAR REVOLUTION first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish democ racy." "The proletariat," Marx and Engels wrote, "will use its po litical supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie (property owners), to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat or ganized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of produc tive forces as rapidly as possible. "Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untena ble, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip them selves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production."

Marx and Engels advocated the following IO-point program to effect the revolution: 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state· capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.

"HAND MAIDENS AND HERALDS OF COMMUNISM" 27 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of child factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industric:~l production, etc. In a notable speech in Chicago on November 10, 1952, Ad miral Ben Moreell, wartime boss of the navy's tremendous con struction program and now chairman of the board of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company, declared that since Marx enun ciated his doctrine "we Americans have adopted, in varying degrees, practically his entire program." Admiral Moreell noted that the federal government already owns 24 per cent of all the land within the continental limits of the United States and is steadily increasing its holdings. The present federal income tax, he said, is in complete accord with the communist plan to "wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie." As for the third plank in the Communist Manifesto, Admiral Moreell re called that one of the du Ponts had recently died, leaving an estate of $75,000,000, of which·$56,000,000 or approximately 75 per cent, was paid out in inheritance taxes. Following is a summary of his remarks respecting other points in the commu nist program: 4. In the last war, the United States confiscated the prop erty of American citizens of the Japanese race, who received a pitifully small percentage of its real worth after the war.

5. The trends of our federal reserve system and government controls of credit and interest rates appear to be exactly what Marx had in mind. 6. Our Federal Conlmunications Commission and Inter state Commerce Commission seem to have made a good start toward achievement of point six of the communist program. Federal loans and-Bubsidie~-for highways, bridges, steamship lines, truck lines, air lines, airports, etc., are added evidences of government encroachment in the transportation field. 7. Many factories and other instruments of production are owned by the government. Federal, state and local governments c{ own 23.8 per cent of all the electric power generating capacity "in the United States.

28 THE TWENTY-YEAR REVOLUTION 8. The Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps under the New Deal made a good begin ning on point eight. A bill favored by President Truman and passed by the House of Representatives in May, 1946, author ized the President in an "emergency" to draft workers, labor leaders and management into the army following the seizure of production facilities involved in a strike or lockout. The Senate eliminated the draft provisions after Senator Taft CR., 0.) had denounced them as a blueprint for dictatorship. 9. The notorious Brannan plan for aid to both farmers and consumers, as well as the entire system of basing agriculture subsidies on "parity," thus linking fartn prices to industrial wages, are in accord with the Communist proposal for a "com bination of agriculture with manufacturing industries." 10. It is clear that Marx intended that government opera tion of the schools should be exclusive. The federal government is moving into this field with its aid to education program.

In his pamphlet, Keynes, Foster and Marx, Earl Browder lists 22 policies and practices of the federal government which "concentrate in the hands of the state the guiding reins of the national economy" and "express the growth of state capital ism." All of these factors "contribute to immediate progress, as well as to the ultimate socialist revolution," Browder declares. Browder sets forth "the essential features of the program which has the support of the labor movement and the progres sive majority of the country, and which the Socialists (Com munists, Marxists), can equally support without compromis ing their socialist goal, but on the contrary, advancing it-the program which, therefore, can be made the basis of a fighting coalition of progressivism and socialism." Browder's program is substantially identical with the official policy declaration adopted by the ADA at their sixth annual convention in Wash ington, D. C., in June, 1953. Following is a comparison of a few of the essential points in the two programs.

Browder: "Consolidation and extension of the labor move ment ... the legal and practical abolition of all discriminations "HAND MAIDENS AND HERALDS OF COMMUNISM" 29 against racial 'and other groups; the close alliance of labor, toil ing farmers, and other progressives.... " ADA: "We believe a strong democratic labor movement is essential to the effective functioning of democracy. . . . We therefore recommend the repeal of the Taft-Hartley law and the enactment of legislation embodying the fair and equitable principles of the Wngneract. We urge that the basic rightsem bodied in the Wagner act be extended to farm labor.... We support legislation ... to eliminate segregation and other forms of discrimination in housing, education, employment, transpor tation, recreation and other forms of life." Browder: "... living standards must constantly rise ... full use of all forms of economic and political struggle to advance wages and incomes of toiling groups, to put legal minimum floors under the conditions of those least able to defend them selves; rent controls, price controls, shorter work-week laws, protection of women and children.... "

ADA: "A rising level of real wages within the framework of full employment is possible and desirable.... With continu ous full employment we can, within a decade, lift our national output to 500 billion dollars, provide more than 10 million ad ditional jobs, increase the American standard of living by 25 per cent, greatly reduce poverty and underprivilege.... We favor government support of farm prices at levels sufficient to yield an equitable share of the national income. . . . We favor measures to underwrite a minimum standard diet for low-in come families.... We favor immediate steps to increase the income-earning and productive ability of 2,000,000 submar ginal farm families.... We favor the enactment of stand-by authority by which the President could impose appropriate economic controls." Browder: "Steady expansion of the social security system to provide improving insurance against the hazards to employ ment, health, old age, and for the protection of all helpless groups."

30 THE TWENTY-YEAR REVOLUTION ADA: "... every American has a right to public protection from personal socio-economic catastrophe resulting from sick ness, disability, unemployment, or age.... " Browder: "Steady expansion of government support to mass housing programs for lower income levels . . . public works and highway construction . . . limited only by the availability of labor." ADA: "Middle-income housing through government guar antees to promote private low interest loans to individuals, housing cooperatives and public agencies; continued support of low-rent public housing; controls on rents where the housing shortage is critical; enlarged slum clearance and redevelop ment programs to prevent the appalling decay of our cities and towns." And so on-parallels between the two programs can be mul tiplied almost at will. Socialism has indeed conquered the minds of many Americans. Some Socialists maintain that individual liberties such as Americans enjoy under the constitution can be preserved in a socialist society, but others frankly advocate what they call "so cial discipline." In The Coming Victory of Democracy, Thomas Mann declares, "A reform of freedom is necessary which will make of it something very different from the freedom of our fathers and grandfathers, the epoch of bourgeois liberalism.

Now we need something different from 'laissez-faire, laissez aller,' for freedom cannot survive on such a basis.... Freedom has been driven out of liberalism-driven out by deepest an guish ... freedom must be restored through social discipline." Mann's book was translated from the German by Agnes E. Meyer, wife of the publisher of the Washington Post. The text was a lecture which Mann delivered on a coast-to-coast tour in 1938. A notable parallel is the following passage from the 1953 yearbook of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, a department of the National Education Asso"HAND MAIDENS AND HERALDS OF COMMUNISM" 31 ciation: "The individualist social theory of the founding fathers is being supplemented by new forms of social organization and social control. Our free enterprise, which is still the determinant of our economy, and not infrequently of our national and inter national policy, is nevertheless being modified by our societal welfare concept. . . . This trend toward a balance between the welfa.re of the individual and the welfare of the society is in conflict with earlier assumptions. It is a trend which we can not ignore."

After four years of socialism in Britain, the authoritative Economist of London, in its issue of November 5, 1949, pro nounced, this verdict: "When Mr. Churchill, in the course of the last general election, predicted that the principles of Labor Socialism must inevitably lead to the creation of a British Ge stapo, he was widely derided. It begins to look as if the country owes Mr. Churchill an apology. It is happening here." In Life magazine, April 7, 1947, Prof. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., national co-chairman of ADA, declared: "The existence of Franklin Roosevelt relieved American liberals for a dozen years of the responsibility of thinking for themselves." While they gave their minds a rest, the revolution crept on.