III. Communism and the New Deal

III. Communism and the New Deal Loevents which launched the creeping revolution and al ready have profoundly altered the course of history occurred shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath of office on March 4, 1933, swearing to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." One was Roosevelt's establishment of diplomatic relations with the SovietUnion, fountain-head of world revolution, whose leaders had affirmed their determination to overthrow consti tutional government in the United States and replace it with a communist regime. The four previous occupants of the White House since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917-Wilson, Hard ing, Coolidge, and Hoover-had refused to recognize the Soviet Union. The other event was the influx of thousands of Communists and Marxian Socialists into the federal government. In a letter to Roosevelt dated November 16, 1933, Maxim Litvinov, then Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, solemnly pledged his government "to refrain from interfering in any man ner in the internal affairs of the United States" and to restrain all persons and organizations under Moscow's control "from any act overt or covert liable in any way whatsoever to injure the tranquility, prosperity, order or security" of the United States.

How serious was Litvinov when he gave this pledge? The question was answered before the House Committee on Un American Activities by D. H. Dubrowsky, former head of the Russian Red Cross. Only a few minutes after he had left the White House with Roosevelt's recognition agreement in his pocket, Litvinov met Dubrowsky, Boris Skvirsky, attache of COMMUNISM AND THE NEW DEAL 33 the Soviet embassy, and Peter A. Bogdanov, chairman of the board of directors of the Amtorg Trading Corporation. Du browsky testified that Litvinov vigorously rubbed his hands and gave this gleeful account of the negotiations: "Well, it's all in the bag. They wanted us to recognize the debts we owed them and I promised we were going to negotiate. But they did not know we weregoingto negotiateuntil doomsday.The nextone was a corker; they wanted us to promise freedom of religion in the Soviet Union, and I promised that, too. I was very much prompted to offer that I would personally collect all the Bibles and ship them over."

When Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union, the United States government had incontestable evidence from the high est possible source-dictator Stalin himself-that the American Communist Party was dominated by the Communist Interna tional with headquarters in Moscow, and that it had been as signed the task of destroying capitalism in the United States. This was set forth in two speeches by Stalin on "The American Communist Party," one given before the American commission of the presidium of the ECCI (Executive Committee, Commu nist International), on May 6, 1929, the other before the pre sidium of the ECCI, on May 14, 1929. The speeches were published by the central committee of the American Commu nist Party but were recalled from circulation because of their incriminating character. However, copies were and still are on file in the State Department and all the intelligence agencies in Washington.

The American Communist Party was then involved in a fac tional dispute between one group headed by William Z. Foster and another led by Jay Lovestone. An American delegation was summoned to Moscow for a settlement of the dispute, which ended in defeat for the Lovestoneites. Some members of the American delegation argued that the decision of the presid ium of the ECCI would destroy the American Communist Party. To this Stalin replied: "No, comrades, the American Communist Party will not perish. Only one small factional 34 THE TWENTY-YEAR REVOLUTION group will perish if it continues to be stubborn, if it does not submit to the will of the Comintern, if it continues to adhere to its errors." Stalin predicted a revolutionary crisis in the United States which would be the beginning of the end of world capitalism, and assigned this task to the American Communist Party: "It is essential that the American Communist Party should be ca pable of meeting that historical moment fully prepared and of assuming the leadership of the impending class struggle in America .... For that end we must work in' order to forge real revolutionary cadres and a real revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, capable of leading the many millions of the Ameri can working class toward the revolutionary class struggle."

Shortly after Roosevelt's election in 1932, Justice Frank furter, then a professor in the Harvard Law School, informed friends that recognition of the Soviet Union was "in the bag." He boasted that in this matter he had the new administration in his vest pocket. 1 Frankfurter, who was born in Vienna in 1882 and came to the United States at the age of twelve, had aided and abetted communist propaganda campaigns since World War I by de fending Mooney and Billings, the California dynamiters, the I.W.W. conspirators deported from Bisbee, Arizona, and Sacco and Vanzetti, the Massachusetts radicals who were executed for murder. Frankfurter was secretary and counsel of President Wilson's mediation committee which investigated the Mooney Billings case and the LW.W. deportations. Theodore Roose velt, in a letter to Frankfurter, declared: "Your report is as thoroughly misleading a document as could be written on the subject. No official, writing on behalf of the President, is to be excused for failure to know and clearly to set forth that the I.W.W. is a criminal organization .... No human being in his senses doubts that the men deported from Bisbee were bent on destruction and murder."

Frankfurter was one of the three justices of the Supreme 1. Dr. J. B. Matthews, in The American Mercury (June, 1953).

COMMUNISM AND THE NEW DEAL 35 Court who dissented from a majority decision denying a stay of execution for the Rosenbergs. In the Sacco-Vanzetti case, he wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, insinuating that the jury was "picked" and making other charges that were de scribed as "baseless and worthy only.of unscrupulous yellow journalism" by John H. Wigmore, renowned Dean of North western University Law School. Dean Wigmore, writing in the Boston Transcript, said the facts were "demonstrative of the cruel and libelous falsity of the whole tenor of the plausible pundit's article" in The Atlantic Monthly. All of this is set forth in the record of the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on Frankfurter's nomination to be a Su preme Court justice in January, 1939. He was the only nomi nee in the court's history to come before the Senate committee accompanied by counsel (Dean Acheson), and the only one of whom it occurred to the senators to ask: "Are you a Com munist, or have you ever been one?"

When questioned by Senator McCarran (D., Nev.) and Senator King (D., Utah), Frankfurter disappeared behind a smokescreen of tergiversation, refusing to say whether he agreed with the doctrine advocated by his English friend, Professor Laski, in a pamphlet called Communism. He also evaded Sena tor King's question whether he believed in "the ideology of Marx or Trotsky." Finally it occurred to the subcommittee chairman, Senator Neely (D., W. Va.), a New Dealer, that Frankfurter's nomination might not be confirmed by the Sen ate if he stood on such answers, so he asked the 64-dollar ques tion in a tone that demanded a forthright reply: "Are you a Communist or have you ever been one?" The "plausible pun dit" meekly replied that he was not and never had been one. Through Frankfurter's influence in the Roosevelt adminis tration, the legal divisions of almost every department and agency of the government were staffed in whole or in part with graduates of the Harvard Law School who were dubbed "the happy hot dogs" by the late General Hugh Johnson, first NRA administrator. Johnson said that Frankfurter was "the most in fluential single individual in the United States."

36 THE TWENTY-YEAR REVOLUTION The late George N. Peek, first administrator of the AAA, declared in his book Why Quit Our Own: "1 only know that in the legal division were formed the plans which eventually turned the AAA from a device to aid the farmers into a device to introduce the collectivist system of agriculture into this coun try. This was due to Jerome Frank-probably acting as spear head. He was a lawyer who had practiced in Chicago and New York and had come to Washington, so he told me, at the re quest of Felix Frankfurter." Peek also wrote: "The Socialists, or more strictly, the collectivists, seemed-for nothing was in the open-to be headed by Felix Frankfurter, Rexford G. Tug well, and Jerome Frank." Frank, now a federal judge, was general counsel of the AAA. He had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was one of the few Frankfurter proteges not from Harvard. How ever, the assistant general counsel of the AAA was a Harvard Law School man, Alger Hiss, a Soviet underground agent, who testified at his perjury trial in 1949 that Frankfurter sponsored him for a government appointment. Frankfurter testified as a character witness for Hiss.

While Harvard supplied most of the revolutionary lawyers for the New Deal, Columbia University contributed the largest quota of Marxian economists. Chief of these was Professor Tugwell, one of Roosevelt's leading braintrusters, who began as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. The purpose of the Marxian infiltration was to carry out a revolution by subverting government policy to collectivist ends. As early as 1928, in an article headed "Some Measures in Transition" and published in a book titled, The Socialism of our Times, Stephen A. Raushenbush declared: "One good man with his eyes, ears and wits about him, inside the department whether it be the interior, where the oil scandal started and the Boulder Dam bill received most active support, or the Treas ury, where the taxation scandals breed and the government tax policies originate-can do more to perfect the technique of con trol over industry than a hundred men outside." Raushenbush COMMUNISM AND THE NEW DEAL 37 later was associated with Hiss on the staff of a Senate munitions investigating committee headed by former Senator Gerald P.

Nye of North Dakota. By dubbing munitions makers "mer ... chants of death," Hiss, as counsel of this committee, sought to drive the Du Ponts, and other companies with vast facilities for research and development, out of national defense production, thus weakening the United States as a potential enemy of the Soviet Union. Most of the New Deal Marxists believed that a revolution could be carried out without bloodshed, by means of federal taxing and spending policies, government competition with pri vate industry, and laws that would hamstring business while aggrandizing labor unions (the proletariat) as a broad base for the perpetuation of political power. This was the doctrine of the British Fabian Socialists. However, New Deal extremists were prepared to counte nance violence if it should become necessary to accomplish their objectives. In an address before the American Economic Society in Washington in 1932 Professor Tugwell said: "There is no denying that the contemporary situation in the United States has explosive possibilities. The future is becoming visible in Russia; the present is bitterly in contrast; politicians, theor ists, and vested interests seem to conspire ideally for the prov ocation to violence of a long patient people. No one can pretend to know how the release of this pressure is likely· to come. Perhaps our statesmen will give way, or be more or less gently removed from duty; perhaps our Constitution and stat utes will be revised; perhaps our vested interests will submit to control without too violent resistance. It is difficult to believe that any of these will happen; it seems incredible that we may have a revolution. Yet the new kind of economic machinery we have in prospect cannot function in our economy."

The late Dr. William A. Wirt, famous as the originator of the Gary system of public education and superintendent of schools at Gary, Indiana, for many years, caused a furor early in 1934 when he wrote letters to various friends and later testi fied before a House investigating committee about a dinner 38 THE TWENTY-YEAR REVOLUTION party he attended in the Virginia home of his former secre tary, Miss Alice Barrows. Also present at the dinner were Laurence Todd, Washington correspondent of Tass, the So viet press agency, and several minor New Deal officials. At the house committee hearing, Wirt quoted one of the dinner guests as saying: "We believe we have Roosevelt in the middle of a stream and that the current is so strong that he cannot turn back or escape from it. We believe that we can keep Mr. Roosevelt there until we are ready to supplant him with a Stalin. We all think Mr. Roosevelt is only the Kerensky of the revolution. "

New Dealers derided Dr. Wirt as a lunatic fringer. Represent ative John J. O'Connor (D., N. Y.), a member of the investi gating committee, later confessed: "I took a leading part as prosecutor and inquisitor. What a tossing around Dr. Wirt did get! Little did we know that most of the happenings which Dr. Wirt said the plotters had predicted would come to pass." (On June 23, 1953, Miss Barrows, then seventy-three years old, was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and asked whether she had ever been a Communist. Availing herself of the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination, she refused to answer.) Whittaker Chambers, a leader in the Soviet underground ap paratus in Washington from 1934 until he repudiated commu nism in 1938, confirms Dr. Wirt's charge about the attitude of the revolutionaries toward the New Deal. In his book Witness, Chambers relates that all the New Dealers he knew were Com munists or near Communists who regarded the New Deal as an instrument for gaining their· revolutionary ends, and not as an end in itself. For some time Chambers himself thought of the New Deal as a benevolent reform movement, but he later realized, he recalls, that it was "a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing tradi tions but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation." It was a revolution by "book keeping and lawmaking," rather than violence, but a revolution COMMUNISM AND THE NEW DEAL 39 is always an affair of force, however the force may disguise itself, according to Chambers.

This courageous, Dostoevskian genius, whose testimony ef fected the downfall of Alger Hiss, tells the story of the amazing Ware cell in the government, which was one of at least four Soviet espionage rings known to have operated in Washington, only two of which have been exposed.2 The Ware group, or ganized by the late Harold Ware, son of Ella Reeve (Mother Bloor), was, according to Chambers, "one of the most formi dable little fifth columns in history, whose influence for evil, widening outward long after he was dead, would also be felt in the crash of China and the Carthaginian mangling of Eu rope." When J. Peters, Hungarian boss of the communist under ground, took Chambers to Washington, he made this exultant comment: "Even in Germany under the Weimar Republic the party did not have what we have here." The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee received infor mation about the Ware group from Chambers, Nathaniel Weyl, another ex-Communist, and a third witness whose testimony was not published. The subcommittee's report of August 24, 1953, sets forth the names of its leaders, and the jobs they held, beginning in 1933, as follows: Nathan Witt. Attorney, AAA; assistant general counsel, NLRB; secretary, NLRB (invoked Constitutional privilege against self-in crimination) .

Lee Pressman. Assistant general counsel, AAA; general counsel, WPA; general counsel, Resettlement Administration; general coun sel, CIO (admitted Communist Party membership before House Un-American Activities Committee). John J. Abt. Attorney, AAA; assistant general counsel, WPA; special counsel, SEC; chief counsel, La Follette Civil Liberties Com mittee; special assistant to the Attorney General (invoked privi lege). Charles Kramer. AAA staff; National Youth Administration; La 2. Senate Internal SecuritySubcommitteeReport, August 24, 1953.

40 THE TWENTY-YEAR REVOLUTION Follette Committee; NLRB; Senate Committee on War Mobiliza tion; Senate Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education (in voked privilege) . Henry H. Collins, Jr. NRA; Soil Conservation Service; Labor De partment; House Committee on Interstate Migration; Senate Com mittee on Small Business; Senate Subcommittee on Technological Mobilization; captain, major in military service; State Department displaced persons program; Intergovernmental Committee on Refu gees (invoked privilege) . Victor Perla. NRA; HOLC; Commerce Department; OPA; WPB; Treasury Department (invoked privilege) . Harold Ware. Consultant to Department of Agriculture. (De ceased.) Alger Hiss. Assistant to general counsel, AAA; counsel to Senate Munitions Committee; staff of Solicitor General of United States; special assistant to director, office of Far Eastern Affairs, Depart ment of State; Director, Office of Special Political Affairs, Depart ment of State; Secretary General, U.N. conference (denied Com munist Party membership).

Donald Hiss. Attorney, PWA; assistant solicitor, Department of Labor; assistant to legal counsel, Department of State (denied Com munist Party membership) . Some or all of the Ware Group leaders had charge of sepa rate secret cells of from 12 to 15 members each, most of them employes of the government. Chambers says there must have been 75 underground Communists in the Ware group alone. Under Peters' direction, Chambers took Hiss away from the Ware group and organized a separate apparatus. Next to Hiss, who later went to the State Department, the most important member of this group was the late Harry D. White, the Treas ury Department's leading monetary expert, who became As sistant Secretary of the Treasury and was one of Elizabeth Bentley's espionage sources during the war. Chambers en deavored to recruit Laurence Duggan, who was in the State Department and later became chief of the Latin American division, but was unsuccessful because Duggan already be longed to another underground apparatus. During the Hiss COMMUNISM AND THE NEW DEAL 41 case, Duggan was killed by a fall from his New York office window, several days after he had been questioned by FBI agents. Chambers relates that Hiss tried to recruit another State Department official, Noel Field, but was unsuccessful. Cham bers learned from Peters that Field already belonged to an apparatus headed by Hede Gumperz (Hede Massing). Field later disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. Still another State Department official, Henry Julian Wadley, in the Trade Agree ments Division, was successfully recruited and he later con fessed his work for the underground apparatus at the Hiss trials.

In 1939, after his desertion from the communist under ground, Chambers desired to tell what he knew about it to the American government. Isaac Don Levine, editor of Plain Talk magazine, endeavored to arrange an interview with President Roosevelt, but was unsuccessful. However, Levine did arrange a meeting with Adolf A. Berle, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State, and Chambers told his story to Berle on September 2, 1939. Months later, Chambers reports, Levine told him that Berle had taken the information to President Roosevelt, who had laughed about it. When Berle was insistent, the President told him in words which Chambers deemed it necessary to para phrase for publication to "go jump in a lake." On August 31, 1948, Berle testified before the House Un American Activities Committee that in 1944 he had had a fight with a pro-Soviet group in the State Department, headed by Dean Acheson and Alger Hiss, and that he "got trimmed in that fight." Berle said he was transferred to Brazil and his pub lic career soon ended.

President Roosevelt was himself no Communist. He knew nothing about communism, and therefore was not repelled by it. Members of his official family have reported that he rarely read a book and that when he did it was a whodunit, a treatise on stamp collecting, or a tale about war at sea. Frances Perkins, 42 THE TWENTY-YEAR REVOLUTION in The Roosevelt I Knew, says the President was "simple" in his judgment of others. Although a Roosevelt idolater, she im plies that Sidney Hillman and his communist collaborators· in the labor unions used the President for revolutionary purposes. "The degree to which the PAC and other political activities in the labor movement could have been relied upon as a perma nent support for Roosevelt is open to question," Miss Perkins writes. Roosevelt collaborated with the Communists because they held the balance of power in New York State, through their control of the American Labor Party, and were a major factor in other populous states, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michi gan, Indiana and Illinois, because of their influence in the CIO.

There was almost as much truth as humor in a remark once made by H. L. Mencken: "If Roosevelt thought cannibalism would get votes, he would immediately start fattening up a mis sionary in the White House backyard." In 1934, the Communist Party received instructions from Moscow to abandon its policy of maintaining separate unions in the Trade Union Unity League and to penetrate the Ameri can Federation of Labor. The TUUL was dissolved and its communist members marched into the AFL unions. The pur pose of this infiltration was set forth in a resolution adopted by the central committee of the American Communist Party in January, 1935, which said the influx of "hundreds of thousands of new workers" from the mass production industries into the AFL would open up "new and greater possibilities of revolu tionary mass work." The resolution said the Communist Party's main task would be the mobilization of union members for "the class struggle" and "the leadership of strikes."

The communist program to organize the workers in the steel, automobile and other heavy industries resulted in a split be tween William Green, president of the AFL, and John L. Lewis, who took his United Mine Workers out of the AFL and or ganized a new group of unions called the Congress of Industrial COMMUNISM AND THE NEW _DEAL 43 Organizations (CIO). In his book The Trojan Horse in Amer ica, Representative Martin Dies (D., Tex.), former chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, declares that Roosevelt strongly favored immediate organization of the work ers in the basic industries on a mass scale. The President sent for Green, who said it could not be done as quickly as Roose velt wanted it done. Then he sent for Lewis, who welcomed an opportunity, with the government's help, to organize the mass production industries. His only difficulty was that he lacked trained organizers. The Communist Party met this need with from 5,000 to 10,000 trained organizers from the TUUL unions, who had received expert instruction in the theory and tactics of class warfare. Lewis later broke with the CIO and said it was dominated by the Communists.

In 1938, the Dies committee held public hearings on com munism in the CIO. Before the hearings began, Dies conferred with Lewis and Lee Pressman in Lewis' office. Lewis refused to appear or send a representative to testify. He assured Dies that charges about communism in the CIO were inspired by selfish interests who were seeking to discredit trade unionism. Dies tells about this conference in his book, published in 1940. Not unti11951, however, when he opened his successful cam paign to return to congress, did Dies say anything about a con ference with President Roosevelt at the time the hearings were started in 1938. In his 1951 campaign speeches he declared that Roosevelt, in the presence of the late Senator Sheppard (D., Tex.), told him that Lewis was disturbed about the com mittee's plans to hold hearings for the purpose of disclosing communism in the CIO.Dies said the President told him he could not "go forward with this investigation" because it would antagonize the CIO and harm the Democratic Party in many congressional districts in the fall elections. When Dies refused to call off the hearings, Roosevelt warned him that he would destroy his prospects for "a very bright political career."

Dies went ahead with the hearings. John P. Frey, president of the AFL metal trades department, identified 280 CIO or44 THE TWENTY-YEAR REVOLUTION ganizers as members of the Communist Party. Joseph Zack, director of the Communist Party's labor activities from 1919 to 1934, testified that when the CIa was organized 11 unions controlled by Communists were taken out of the AFL. The conlmittee received sworn testimony identifying more than half of the CIa directors as Communist Party members, former melnbers or fellow travelers. Earl Browder, head of the party, testified that about 50,000 Communists were active in trade unions, two thirds of them in the CIa and one third in the AFL. In 1940, when Roosevelt was elected to a third term, his support of the Communists paid off handsomely. In New York State, the straight Republican vote for Willkie (3,027,477) was 192,978 greater than the straight Democratic vote for Roosevelt, but with the aid of the American Labor Party Roose velt received a total of 3,251,918. He also carried such indus trial states as Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where the CIa was strong. The American Labor Party demonstrated its power in New York in 1942, when it withheld its support from the Democratic candidate for governor, Bennett, and Dewey was elected. In 1944, the Democratic vote for Roosevelt in New York state (2,478,598) was less than the Republican vote for Dewey (2,987,647), but the Communist-controlled American Labor Party vote (496,405) and that of the Liberal Party (329,235) raised Roosevelt's total to 3,304,238.

At the Democratic convention in 1944, when Vice President Wallace thought he had a commitment from the President to support his candidacy for renomination, Robert E. Hannegan, the national chairman, got a letter from Roosevelt saying he would be glad to have either Senator Harry S. Truman or Jus tice Douglas as his running mate. And the President, according to Arthur Krock of the New York Times, instructed Hannegan to "clear everything with Sidney." The party of Jefferson had been reduced to such a low estate that a Russian-born revolu tionist held a veto power over the nomination of a candidate COMMUNISM AND THE NEW DEAL 45 who was destined to succeed Roosevelt as president of the United States. In a letter dated September 19, 1949, which was inserted in the record of a Senate judiciary subcommittee appointed to hold hearings on immigration legislation in 1950, former Rep resentativeO'Connor declared that he often saw Browder in the White House during the period 1933-39. O'Connor, who was chairman of the House Rules Committee and a leader of the administration during that period, said Browder was espe cially active at the White House during the president's cam paign in 1938 to purge Democratic senators who had fought his demand to pack the United States Supreme Court in 1937.

In fact, O'Connor wrote, "Browder directed operations from the White House, from which he telephoned instructions from time to time." In May, 1942, Roosevelt ordered Browder released from the federal penitentiary at Atlanta, where he had served one year and two months of a four year sentence for passport fraud. The President said Browder's release would "have a tendency to promote national unity and allay any feeling which may exist in some minds that the·unusually long sentence was by way of penalty imposed him because of his political views." Both the President and Mrs. Roosevelt interested themselves in the case of Mrs. Browder, who was in this country illegally and was facing deportation to her native Russia. Finally, in 1941, an order for Mrs. Browder's deportation was vacated and she was permitted to leave the country voluntarily and re enter legally on a visa issued by the American consulate in Montreal. Representative Velde (R., Ill.) told the house on March 21, 1953, that this was "one of the most flagrant viola tions of our laws that has ever come to my notice."

In 1939, Mrs. Roosevelt put pressure on Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State, to reverse a previous ruling excluding Hans Eisler, German communist musician, from the United States. Hans Eisler is a brother of the Gerhart Eisler who 46 THE TWENTY-YEAR REVOLUTION jumped bail and escaped from this country a few years ago and later became propaganda commissar of the Soviet puppet re gime in East Germany. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote to Welles on February 7, 1939: "This Eisler case seems a hard nut to crack. What do you suggest?" The nut was cracked by permitting Eisler to obtain an American visa in Mexico City. Diplomatic relations with an implacable enemy; subversion of national policies by collectivist legal and economic "experts"; willful toleration of communist infiltration into the govern ment; active encouragement of such infiltration into the labor unions; reliance upon the Communists for political support: these were some of the innovations of the New Deal "bloodless revolution." What happened to our economic system is the sub ject of our next chapter.