SOCIAL DEMOCRACY VERSUS STALINISM
Prosperity, Propaganda and Treachery

Ethnic nationalism, accompanied by Marxist ideology and Leninist (or some other version of) state socialist doctrine, now arose to challenge all assumptions about the ascendancy of social democracy as the solution to the problems of poverty and oppression. Churchill, one may recall, had reacted indignantly to Roosevelt's assertions that justice demanded release of the world's peoples from Old World colonial or imperial rule. In one sense, Churchill was right when he asserted that few of these peoples were prepared to establish participatory government upon deliverance from external domination. For thousands of years they had been subjected to rule by either an indigenous or a foreign elite -- the marriage of the knowledge bearers (i.e., the priestcraft) and warrior-oppressors become kings and landed aristocracies. The overwhelming majority of people around the world had few political rights to speak of. They owned neither land nor other property, were mostly illiterate and taught to be intolerant of those different from themselves. A void was developing as Old World powers withdrew or were pushed out. The introduction of state socialism -- despite the promises of leaders -- accomplished little more than instituting indigenously-headed totalitarian regimes. In other cases, colonial regimes were replaced by militarily-imposed dictatorships backed by landed oligarchies. Tragically, all that Truman and his successors demanded from these regimes in order to command U.S. assistance and protection was that these new nation-states should oppose communism. The protection of human rights as a bench mark of the legitimacy of government lost all meaning in the atmosphere of the Cold War. Where there was also the potential for enormous profits, particularly by extraction of natural resources at nominal cost, tyrants and despots had no trouble finding friends in high places.

This was also a time of serious self-delusion on the part of the architects of Liberalism. Conditions in the United States were far from stable. The war had, to be sure, raised the standard of well-being for millions of Americans, minorities included. Even as industry scaled back in response to curtailed military spending, an atmosphere of optimism prevailed. People everywhere felt the world had been changed forever and for the better. Expectations for the future were high. When broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow first returned to the United States from Britain in the Fall of 1945, he was astonished by the degree to which his countrymen had already put the war behind them. The most thoughtful Americans were thinking and talking about the nation's role in the brave new world; most, however, thought about making up for lost time. Those with the longest memories, remembering the hardships experienced during the decades of unbridled industrial-landlordism, remained skeptical. Many had adopted the ideals of democratic socialism and were actively engaged in politics. Some had drifted into the ranks of the communists, attracted to the Soviet experiment by cleansed reports of the new workers paradise under construction there. Millions of workers, most of whom would have vehemently denied any socialist or communist sympathies, considered their interests and those of the trades unions as one in the same. Americans of middle and upper income were, on the other hand, more confident than ever in the Democracy, believing the U.S. was poised for great things on the world stage. "There is more news, more discussion of public issues, more controversy on the air here than in any European country,"[28] Murrow broadcast to his listeners. Anti-communist paranoia and the insecurity bred by close self-examination had not yet descended over the public face the U.S. presented to the world. Yet, in the urban centers and rural countryside, the cycle of poverty had not been broken. Racism and other forms of intolerance and prejudice remained divisive societal problems destined to intensify and spread across the land.

Hard-core progressives, New Dealers, communists, anarchists, socialists and cooperative individualists realized that the socio-political problems plaguing the U.S. had not been solved by the war. MacArthur's chances for achieving structural reforms in Japan were, in some respects, greater than had he attempted the same things in his own country. Now, Truman faced the added burden of the U.S. taking on global responsibilities and commitments without the benefit of clear principles as a guide. Murrow, his own views hardened by close association with the British and other Europeans, worried over the attitudes of U.S. policy makers. "It isn't so much that the men who are conducting our affairs are vicious or irresponsible; they simply fail to appreciate the importance of issues that they are deciding in an altogether offhand manner,"[29] wrote Murrow. Despite the evidence coming out of the Soviet Union, for example, Roosevelt and Truman both held on to a naive belief that Stalin provided a moderating influence over ideological zealots within the Soviet leadership. Not until early 1946 did Truman begin to fully appreciate the depth to which Stalin lived by a code of self-aggrandizement and moral detachment. Stalin in power virtually guaranteed Soviet imperialism thinly disguised in Marxist rhetoric. In this atmosphere, Murrow forecast that "in a couple of years we're going to be begging the Germans to take up arms."[30] As for the Japanese, MacArthur's constitution and purges ensured that militarists would - for the foreseeable future -not be in a position to acquire the means to intervene (or directly assist the United States) in the global arena.

Talk in the U.S. now shifted from reconstruction assistance to rearming the Western social democracies for an eventual war in which the Soviet Union would be the primary adversary. As Murrow predicted, the rapid recovery of the German economy and acceptance of German membership in the community of social democracies suddenly became an important element in U.S. foreign policy. Truman's removal of Henry Morgenthau from the cabinet on the eve of Pottsdam had already sent a strong message to the Germans -- and to the Soviets. Morgenthau was considered an extremist who wanted to strip Germany and Japan of their industrial potential and turn them into producers of agricultural commodities. As Truman began to grasp the true dimension of Soviet postwar intentions, he felt he had to break from the faction advocating the permanent demilitarization of Germany. With Morgenthau gone, only the presence of Henry Wallace in the cabinet stood in the way of consensus around the ascending conventional wisdoms. There would be no Rooseveltian détente with the Soviets; yet, neither would Truman risk war or a direct confrontation by moving troops into regions bordering the Soviet sphere of influence. For his own part, Stalin was initiating a high stakes gamble. Soviet military success had been heavily dependent on U.S. assistance. Stalin's own ruthlessness virtually guaranteed the people of the Soviet Union could never achieve sufficient strength to challenge the West; yet, as Zbigniew Brzezinski concludes, to those who survived, the deaths of some forty million people was the price required to firmly establish communism:

These mass murders were part and parcel of the construction of the Soviet system. That system emerged, took shape institutionally, congealed bureaucratically, and developed its own sense of status as these mass killings took place. But the remarkable aspect of this process was that despite these atrocities Stalin succeeded in generating a real sense of accomplishment within the Soviet elite and in a large part of the new Soviet urban population. He did so by identifying his policies, and himself, with a reconstruction of Soviet society that involved massive industrialization and urbanization, all labeled as the construction of socialism. Thus, for many Soviet citizens, the Stalinist era was one of some social advancement, of a great historical leap forward, and even of a genuinely proud sense of patriotic accomplishment.[31]

None of this was particularly clear in the years Truman formulated a U.S. response to Stalin's challenge. Until well into the 1950s and mutual possession of the nuclear deterrent, war with the United States (and Britain) could have only one result -- the destruction of the Soviet empire and the communist regime. While Stalin ostensibly recognized just how powerful an adversary the United States would be in any all-out war, his physical and mental condition was reportedly deteriorating and causing even more irrational behavior than previously. "Stalin was developing a cerebro-arterial condition which added significantly to the risk of war by caprice,"[32] writes historian Roy Douglas. Long-term Soviet interests should have dictated a policy of benign cooperation, accelerating the removal of U.S. troops from the European continent while Soviet economic power expanded. Stalin's espionage network informed him that U.S. demobilization would continue without regard for any Soviet actions, which gave him the encouragement he needed to act unilaterally. Khrushchev describes the fear and intrigue that paralyzed the Soviet Union's inner circle under Stalin:

All of us around Stalin were temporary people. As long as he trusted us to a certain degree, we were allowed to go on living and working. But the moment he stopped trusting you, Stalin would start to scrutinize you until the cup of his distrust overflowed. Then it would be your turn to follow those who were no longer among the living.[33]

Stalin understood he was surrounded by enemies. Within the Soviet Union he had the power to remove them at will. Facing the military and industrial power of the United States required an altogether different and judicious application of statecraft. In 1946, the United States was certainly the world's most productive and (at least for the moment) militarily strong nation -- sole possessor of atomic weapons, its systems of production modern and efficient, its prestige around the world temporarily untarnished. Yet, within the government, among business leaders, academia and labor, there was no consensus around which to move the nation into global leadership. The war had done nothing to dampen the broad differences in socio-political philosophy and policy concerns directing the activism of diverse interest groups. All were determined to see their particular ends achieved by manipulating the system; and, just as the war fought by the Anglo-American colonists in the eighteenth century pressured leaders to expand the Democracy, unpropertied workers and minorities were about to pressure the haves for a greater (if still far less than a just) share of the wealth generated under industrial landlordism. At the same time, the merger of mainstream Democrats and Republicans around the agenda of Liberalism -- increasingly intolerant of anyone advocating positions beyond incremental changes to the status quo -- did nothing to quiet the determination of either hard-line extremists or sincere reformers.

In the face of the disintegrating U.S.-Soviet relationship, the Roosevelt-era coalitions that had made the New Deal possible and given his administration an increasingly-free hand during the war were also breaking apart. Former Roosevelt confidants, such as Henry Wallace, Joseph E. Davies and Felix Frankfurter, opposed decisions they viewed as a betrayal of Roosevelt's noble objectives in U.S. foreign policy. In May of 1945, Sumner Welles went on radio to broadcast his dismay that exchanges with the Soviets had become increasingly strident.

Two views of the future co-existed for a time while the drama unfolded. The One World view lingered on in the face of mounting evidence that nation-states would never willingly relinquish their claims to sovereignty, even those who shared similar socio-political systems. Others were convinced that only by constant vigilance and military preparedness could the social democracies thwart Soviet expansionism. In the United States, Henry Wallace became leader of those in the first group who continued to share Roosevelt's faith in the United Nations as an instrument for forging a democratic global community. For a time, Truman shared Wallace's desire to see Roosevelt's vision become reality. Soviet intransigence and unilateral action gradually forced Truman to adopt a new strategy for the assertion of U.S. power. By the middle of 1946, Truman realized he could no longer govern with Henry Wallace in his cabinet and asked for the Commerce Secretary's resignation. By removing Wallace from the cabinet, Truman demonstrated he had joined with hard-liners in the Congress and the State Department. Wallace then became available to take over leadership of the disenchanted, offering a viable, ostensibly Progressive alternative to the proponents of the new Liberalism.

Wallace's New Deal pedigree should have endeared him to socialists; ironically, that did not prove to be the case. Norman Thomas, for one, was highly critical of Wallace's naive attitude toward the Soviets. Thomas also thought that Wallace had while serving as Secretary of Agriculture exhibited little in the way of human compassion toward agricultural workers, whose subsistence wages and terrible working conditions rivaled those permitted to exist in Old World colonies and countries dominated by landed oligarchies (that is, by agrarian landlordism). Thus, despite Wallace's break with mainstream Democrats -- and support for Wallace from some socialists and many communist sympathizers -- Norman Thomas would once again run in 1948 as the Socialist Party candidate for the Presidency. Nor did Wallace receive support or encouragement from many of the nation's opinion makers. Walter Lippmann, as early as 1946, criticized Wallace as not having sufficient "intellectual resources to decide the issues and the emotional steadfastness and stability to endure responsibility."[34] One must note for perspective that Lippmann had, by this time, abandoned his own position on the need for a postwar U.S.-Britain-Soviet Union alliance. In his new frame of mind, he tagged Wallace as a pacifist; yet, he also felt that hard-liners in the Administration were setting themselves up for the enormous and unrealistic obligation of becoming the global anticommunist police force.

In numerous other ways, the disintegration of alliance into Cold War tested the Democracy of the United States even more dramatically than the mass unemployment of the 1930s. For one thing, Truman, his own Secretary of State and the U.S. Congress were fighting over how to deal with international control of atomic energy. The bomb, which had been developed by an international team using U.S. finances, was claimed by the U.S. as sole possessor. Robert M. Hutchins, who had been instrumental in bringing many of the world's top physicists to the University of Chicago to work on the Manhattan Project, condemned the use of the bomb against the Japanese and warned that the nation's scientific community was fast becoming little more than a tool of government policy. In September of 1945 he brought together a large number of scientists and other intellectuals for a conference on the future control and use of atomic energy. On grounds of national security, the military tried to stop the conference even though there was no press and no record taken of the proceedings. The nuclear scientists, led by Vannevar Bush and J. Robert Oppenheimer, were pushing strongly for international control by a commission established within the United Nations. A proposal to this effect was in fact prepared by Bush at the direction of James Byrnes, approved by Truman (then by Clement Attlee and Mackenzie King as well). When the proposal reached the U.S. Congress, Senator Vandenberg and others in the Congress demanded that the Soviets agree to international inspection before any sharing of information take place. Many in the Congress were already convinced by Soviet actions in Poland and Germany that only firmness and hard negotiations would demonstrate to the Soviets that further aggression would not be tolerated. Their problem, of course, was that demobilization rendered the U.S. military incapable of any effective action. Moreover, the political backlash of keeping millions of men in uniform to counter Soviet moves was too great a risk for even the hard-liners to take. The only practical means of counterbalancing conventional Soviet power was to maintain a monopoly over the secrets of the atomic bomb. No one knew with any certainty how far along the nuclear program of the Soviet Union had come. They were gambling that Stalin would not have the bomb for at least another five years.

In the midst of this escalating crisis, Truman experienced a serious confrontation with Secretary of State James Byrnes over how to treat the Soviets. The hard-line view had among its champions John Foster Dulles, who accompanied Byrnes to the London meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in October of 1945. Dulles had come to the conclusion that the Soviets took for granted that the U.S. would do nothing to directly challenge Soviet empire-building and, therefore, saw no reason to compromise:

The Soviet thesis was that future peace required agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union. If these two great powers did agree, they argued, then peace was assured. If they fell out, then war was probable. Therefore, the argument went on, the United States, in the interest of peace, must do whatever the Soviet Union demanded as the price of agreement. If the United States did not, those who represented it would be "warmongers."[35]

Time at first seemed to be on the side of the Soviets. British resources for sustaining military readiness were nonexistent. The U.S. citizenry was anxious to put the war behind and still looked upon the Soviet Union with awe and in friendship. Yet, with pressure from Dulles, Byrnes refused to acquiesce to any Soviet demands conveyed by Molotov. Dulles later recalled that: "At that moment our postwar policy of 'no appeasement' was born; and, on the whole, it has been adhered to ever since."[36] What brought Byrnes into conflict with Truman was that Byrnes, as Secretary of State, thought that as the man on the spot he was in the best position to judge how to deal with the Soviets. His failure to yield to Truman's direction widened the breach in their relationship after a December meeting of foreign ministers in Moscow. As Truman himself later recalled: "Byrnes had asked that the White House arrange for him to address the American people over all the networks so that he might report on the results of the conference. What those results were I did not yet know."[37] Confronted by Truman, Byrnes assured him this disregard for the Presidency had not been intentional and would never happen again -- and it did not. Nonetheless, Truman made up his mind that as soon as George Marshall returned from China, where he had been sent on a fact-finding mission, Marshall would be brought aboard to replace Byrnes as Secretary of State.

Hard-liners in the United States seemed more than vindicated when, in February of 1946, Stalin announced that there could be no peace so long as capitalism continued to exist anywhere in the world. Communists in the West, as well as many pacifists, attempted to rationalize Stalin's threats as merely representing an economic challenge. Most others accepted the Soviet leader's words at face value, as a declaration of a war of attrition that at some point -- when the Soviets felt sufficiently strong -- would turn from cold to hot. Adding to the fears of those who held socio-political and economic power around the globe was the willingness of communists and communist sympathizers to work at the direction of the Soviet intelligence services. The non-communist world was about to learn a great deal about Stalinist methods and the pervasiveness of moral relativism as a code of behavior among Soviet leaders. Scholars and other researchers are only just beginning to get to the bottom of who was working for whom during the perilous decades just ended. The collapse of state socialism as a totalitarian system is gradually opening the files of the Soviet regimes to detailed scrutiny. In the United States, the secrets of the national security state and of evils perpetrated under the guise of protecting the Democracy have also begun to be opened to public analysis.

Clearly, many individuals have much to answer for. To be fair, however, there was much during the postwar years about which to be paranoid. We now know as well that the Soviet Union was in many ways extremely vulnerable to both internal disruption and external pressure. The U.S. was, however, neither prepared nor disposed to take advantage. Moreover, because U.S. government officials rapidly adopted anti-communism as a national ethos, all foreign policy decisions made thereafter succumbed to the same type of moral relativism employed by Soviet leaders -- with several clear differences. A free and energetic press could in the United States gather facts, report on them, reach conclusions and convey this information to the U.S. public - should it choose to do so. The key was to somehow maintain the independence of the press from the control of vested interests. Moreover, the checks and balances inherent in the U.S. constitutional system -- along with organized citizen protest -- constantly challenged the decisions of elected and appointed officials. Stalin, on the other hand, relied on the totality of state control and the unflinching loyalty of his secret police to prevent either criticism or the expression of independent thought. Yet, in spite of evidence that life under Stalinist state socialism was for most people harsh and brutal, Marxist ideology and rhetoric captured the hearts and minds of peoples around the globe no longer willing to endure foreign domination or traditional forms of oppression.

Fearful of what might happen to their own business interests, U.S. industrialists and their lobbyists set out to defend the status quo against any upheaval in socio-political arrangements. The stage was set for an endless series of challenges to entrenched socio-political systems, with the U.S. government consistently taking the side of factions committed to the destruction of liberty, the preservation of monopoly privilege and -- as a terrifying commentary of the times -- the establishment of totalitarian police states, so long as they were anti-communist.

The atrocities of the Soviet gulag were less well known to peoples struggling for sovereignty than the seemingly endless oppression experienced under colonialism, imperialism or agrarian and industrial landlordism. Intellectuals demonstrated they were more than willing to defend Soviet extremism as an unfortunate but brief stage out of which Marxism would emerge to bring communitarian bliss. What many eventually began to realize was that the trauma of the Soviet gulag established none of the cooperative socio-political arrangements associated with ideological Marxism. With the publication in 1947 of Russia's Europe,[38] written by the head of the U.S. Office of War Information in Turkey, American intellectuals learned of the full extent of Soviet atrocities and wholesale looting in Eastern Europe. One response was that Reinhold Niebuhr, Chester Bowles and others came together to form Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) to advance the progressive agenda independent of communist influence. "Its task," Bowles later wrote, "would be to spell out and support democratic liberal principles but, as an organization, to remain aloof from either political party, throwing its weight behind candidates it felt might be most effective in carrying out its objectives; anti-Communist but left of center."[39] Labor also moved to purge its leadership of communists and any traces of revolutionary zeal, its membership wanting nothing more than steady work at a salary high enough to support a family, make the payments on a home mortgage and automobile loan and leave something left over for leisure. Truman became the architect of Liberalism, and Liberalism (financed by the tremendous pool of individual savings) promised to provide all that and more to the majority of American households.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has today left the peoples of the surviving independent nation-states to struggle toward democratic socialism or social democracy, under threat of totalitarian and neo-fascist takeovers. Without adoption of the socio-political arrangements associated with cooperative individualism, the prospects for these societies to escape a return of despotic regimes is not very good. We in the United States can provide very little true guidance, as we ourselves have not yet demonstrated a full appreciation for the structural changes required for the Democracy to yield a fully just society, one in which there is full employment and a high level of nurturing for all citizens.

A small number of cooperative individualists from the U.S., Britain and elsewhere have opened a dialogue with some of the more receptive and thoughtful people in Russia, the Baltic states and other nations within the former Soviet bloc. Only time will tell if the wisdom contained in the principles of cooperative individualism are sufficiently powerful to take root in those societies. For those under Soviet domination after 1945, there could be no real hope of incremental reform toward the type of social democracy evolving in Western Europe. Even after Stalin's death in 1953 and the emergence of Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Communist Party, the totalitarian aspects of Soviet rule could not be purged from the system. Sidney Hook, commenting in 1966 on the endemic nature of Soviet oppression, wrote that, "so long as a minority one-party dictatorship exists, without a legal opposition, without a free press and judiciary, the central role of terror may be re-established."[40] Khrushchev, after all, had himself survived the Stalinist era only by demonstrating unflinching loyalty. With Stalin dead, his survival and that of many others depended upon the removal of Lavrenty Beria and those who served Beria in the interior ministry's state police apparatus. The move by Khrushchev and others to distance themselves from Stalin's legacy began with the arrest of Beria by General Zhukov and culminated in February of 1956 with Khrushchev standing before the most powerful men in the Soviet Union, many of whom still adhered to Stalinism, and attacking Stalin personally for the systematic corruption of Leninist principles and the murder of people guilty of nothing except possessing a sincere dedication to the Bolshevik path to socialism. Khrushchev's former adviser, Fedor Burlatsky, argues that in the context of his times, Khrushchev went about as far as one could go to right the wrongs inflicted on his people by the Stalinist cult:

With our new political experience, we can see all the failings in Khrushchev's analysis and conclusions. He condemned tyranny, but retained authoritarian power. He renounced the cult of personality, but to a considerable extent preserved the system which had conceived it. ...[41]

Solzhenitsyn, who had served with distinction in the Soviet military and then been sent to the work camps for criticizing Stalin in a private letter, later observed that Khrushchev was not even able to remove from the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. many of the sadistic justices who served Stalin. "[L]ike all the starts made under Khrushchev, this effort, too, which had been so active at first, was soon abandoned ... before it got far enough to produce an irreversible change."[42] Burlatsky emerges from the Soviet experience very much in agreement with Sidney Hook's conclusion that Khrushchev's "dictatorship [was] not only incompatible with any genuine democratic theory, it flout[ed] every basic political principle of classical Marxism."[43] What Burlatsky had hoped for -- "a complete and unconditional Leninist renaissance"[44] -- never materialized because the Soviet leaders, Khrushchev included, had no faith in the inevitability of evolutionary socialism. The economic power inherent in U.S. socio-political institutions did not escape them, either. If they were to be successful as revolutionaries, communists in the West would have to dominate organized labor and use their power to bring the collapse of industrial landlordism. Given the unprecedented performance of the U.S. economy and the growing determination to resist the global advance of communism, this would be no small undertaking nor one without significant risks.

In the West, the views expressed by Sidney Hook were already becoming fairly typical of those held by intellectuals, scientists, labor leaders, public officials and even industrialists whose flirtations with communism had arisen in response to a deep dissatisfaction with industrial landlordism and with the incremental nature of reforms imposed on blatantly unjust socio-political institutions. The irony is that they had chosen to support a socio-political system destined to take humanity further away from rather than closer to the just society. There are, indeed, many ironies in the acceptance by so many individuals of state socialism as a superior socio-political system. Many extraordinarily creative individuals -- artists, writers and film makers -- as well as highly educated professionals were drawn to the promise communism seemed to offer as a cure for periodic mass unemployment and wrenching poverty. Even so, at its peak in 1944 only around eighty thousand U.S. citizens had joined the Communist Political Association (CPA), then headed by Earl Browder. Marxists, such as Harvard University professor Granville Hicks had gravitated to this communist organization because of its moderate stances and apparent commitment to democratic processes. By far, the largest number of activists came to communism by way of the trades unions. Dalton Trumbo, who joined the CPA in 1943 after years on its fringe as an activist in Hollywood's various talent guilds, described the attraction as a response to the desperate "hope for the possibility of making a better sort of world."[46] The novelist Howard Fast, who worked in Britain during the Second World War for the U.S. Office of War Information, had overcome extreme poverty in his rise to fame as a writer. As a very young man, Fast was also intrigued by the promise of communism. After achieving some modest success as a writer, however, he grew fearful of Stalinist oppression and severed his contacts with those he knew in the communist movement, renewing his association with communists only when the war against fascism once again ignited his humanitarian instincts.

There is one aspect of Fast's life I find quite ironic; namely, his familiarity with the writings Thomas Paine, the substance of which he rejected as an insufficient call to arms. His fictionalized account of Paine's life was published in 1943, and one finds in Fast's exchange between the character Anacharsis Clootz and Paine the author's acceptance of the collectivist ideal:

You are an old man, Paine, so even the remarkably simple becomes greatly involved. You are a republican, and I am, to coin a phrase for our times, a proletarian. You believe in the democratic method through representation, and I believe in the same method through the will of the masses. You say, let the people rule; I say the same thing; we are after the same thing, only in different ways. I believe that your way is hopeless, part of the past; but otherwise we are the same, and the dictatorship, which this Republic ... is fast becoming, does not want us.[47]

More recently, socialist Michael Foot described Paine (more accurately, in my view) as "the most far-seeing Englishman of the eighteenth century" and "the major prophet of democracy and representative government, the much-vaunted creed of our Western world."[48] If we are to really aspire to the just society, Paine must be broadly understood and universally taught. He accepted no conventional wisdom without scrutiny. We must do no less.

The failure of Howard Fast to recognize wisdom at such close proximity is difficult to understand. Yet, he was far from being alone in his failure to appreciate the fundamental importance of cooperative individualism in directing the proper relationships between individuals, between individuals and groups and between individuals and the State. He was joined in his misguided endeavor by sincere individuals such as Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Dalton Trumbo and F. Scott Fitzgerald. They were looking for utopia and thought they discovered in communism the way there. Experience had taught another great writer, Ernest Hemingway, to be wary of the State and the promises of those who sought power to decide for others how society ought to be constructed. In 1934 Hemingway explained his politics to the Russian author Ivan Kashkeen:

...I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. First I would look after myself and do my work. Then I would care for my family. Then I would help my neighbor. But the state I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation. ...I believe in the absolute minimum of government.[49]

If the appeal of communism failed to reach the individualistic Hemingway, the others seemed more than willing to subordinate whatever sense of self-reliance and self-responsibility they possessed for what appeared on the surface to be human progress. Howard Fast later wrote that his indoctrination into communism turned him into "a sort of priest" and that he went through "a great deal of pain and suffering and some time in prison before [he] learned that you cannot buy freedom by constricting freedom."[50]

Libertarians and others who also think in terms that equate freedom with liberty are referred by this writer to Mortimer Adler's warning that the condition of liberty demands that freedom be constrained by justice; that is, our actions must not result in the exercise of criminal license or the taking of unwarranted economic license. Individuals or groups must be prevented, to the extent reasonably possible, from acting in ways that infringe on the personal liberty of others. When they do, justice must be swift but fair. Where the State distributes privilege in the form of economic licenses, justice also demands that the full exchange value of such licenses (as determined by competitive bidding in the market) is collected by government and either used to pay for citizen-requested public services or distributed to all citizens as a social dividend. To the extent societies adopt these measures their citizens will feel the benefits of living under just law.

U.S., Canadian and British communists, in particular, were stunned after the war by Soviet attempts to take direct control of their organizations. In the United States, Earl Browder was ousted and replaced by Eugene Dennis, who proved far more willing to take his direction from Moscow. For a time, Howard Fast and his idealistic comrades kept reminding themselves -- despite all that occurred around them -- that theirs was "the party that had organized the French Resistance and fought the Nazis to the death and taught the world a new lesson in courage and honor, the party that had created the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and never stinted at the price placed on freedom."[51] Not only did they run headlong into the terrible disclosures of Stalinist atrocities, now their livelihoods were under attack from communist hunters. Fast came under investigation in 1946, was indicted for contempt of the Congress, and eventually spent three months in prison. Subpoenas emanated from the House Committee on Un-American Activities in rapid fire succession. Even Ayn Rand, whose anti-collectivist novel Anthem[52] had just been published, was called upon to testify. Surveying the scores of witnesses brought before the Committee, Bruce Cook concludes, that "[e]xcept for [John Howard] Lawson, Dalton Trumbo was probably the Committee's least cooperative and most "unfriendly" witness."[53] In hindsight, the heroics displayed by Trumbo and others may have been an unnecessary response to the Committee's feeble attacks on the Democracy. This is a judgment call, of course. Their willingness to sacrifice their economic well-being in defense of principle is admirable. We, today, might ask ourselves how we would respond to a similar attack on our liberty based on our beliefs and associations. Among In the end it was Stalin who assured that communism's appeal in the West would be narrow and short-lived. The emergence of radical fundamentalist groups - the new "true believers" - present a very different challenge, particularly to those of us who are committed to peaceful, incremental change. We face the decision of having to sacrifice liberty for security, even if that security is only marginally improved. The real challenge is to somehow convince those who engage in random violence against broad populations that these actions will yield nothing good and will, perhaps, destroy much of the progress made by transnationals to rid the world of the vestiges of colonialism and imperialism. What radical fundamentalists want is sovereignty and unbridled power to rule over people and territory, demanding adherence to their own form of moral relativism in much the same way Bolshevik's sought to impose a regime of relations counter to the natural cooperative instincts displayed by people in everyday intercourse.

One of the most damaging defections from the Communist Party in the United States occurred in 1945 when Louis F. Budenz, managing editor of the Daily Worker, broke with the party after ten years. Trained in the law and heavily involved in labor organization, Budenz knew virtually everything there was to know about the communist organization in the United States. Three years after breaking with the Communist Party, Budenz detailed his own journey into and then out of the communist apparatus:

The immediate reason I became a Communist party member was the adoption of the People's Front policy at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in the summer of 1935. ...[W]hen Georgi Dimitrov, speaking for Stalin at the Seventh Congress, stated that the Communists in each country should have due regard for their respective national traditions, I became converted to the necessity of joining the party.

...I then believed that the Soviet dictatorship, when established over the world, would lead to emancipation of the workers and to a "higher stage of democracy." ...

It was only after ten years of active Red leadership, when I could no longer evade the incontestable fact that the Soviet dictatorship was bent on world conquest by armed minority bands in each country, and could lead only to world slavery, that I broke with the party.[54]

The story Budenz eventually told was thoroughly chilling. The communists, he revealed, had taken full advantage of the benign neglect practiced by the U.S. government in the arena of intelligence gathering. Budenz had actually been sought out by Harry Hopkins following the announcement of Stalin's pact with Hitler -- Hopkins relying on Budenz's nationalism -- in an effort to learn something of Stalin's intentions. It is almost incomprehensible to recall that on the eve of the Second World War the U.S. had almost no intelligence gathering capability and even less appreciation for the critical role assigned to espionage and subversion by totalitarian governments. One consequence was that throughout the 1930s and well into the Second World War Soviet agents thoroughly compromised the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Hardly anyone in the Roosevelt camp even remotely considered the Soviet Union as a potential threat or future enemy. To many of them, communism combined some of the cornerstones that had served the Democracy for so long with elements of the New Deal. Bolshevism represented a sort of half-way house between decadent Old Worldism and the Democracy. Even visits to the Soviet Union or knowledge of Stalin's purges failed to shake their optimistic views.

All during the 1930s the Soviets continued to recruit agents from among the ranks of U.S. communists. Whittaker Chambers, a communist journalist, was recruited for espionage work in 1932 and sent to Moscow for training. Upon his return, Chambers worked as a courier between the head of the communist group in Washington, D.C. and various U.S. officials. Chambers is remembered today in the context of his testimony against Alger Hiss, naming Hiss as a primary source of U.S. State Department secrets and certain military information. Hiss (who died in 1996) always maintained his innocence (and the evidence against him continues to be analyzed and debated, awaiting more complete disclosure of documents held in files compiled by various Soviet agencies). Hiss had close working relationships -- and maintained friendships -- with a rather large number of New Dealers who (in the 1930s) did not hide their sympathy with and approval of Soviet domestic policies. He and they were interventionists; some were social democrats; some were democratic socialists; some were Marxists; a few were lured deep into the Communist Party apparatus. The evidence is there that communist penetration of the U.S. government existed, but there is no evidence that this penetration was broad. When revealed, however, the impact on public confidence was enormous. Henry Julian Wadleigh, an economist in the State Department, admitted to the F.B.I. that he had delivered documents to Whittaker Chambers. Economist Harry Dexter White, an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, was also implicated but denied any involvement. Additionally, Soviet agents instituted a program of disinformation and subterfuge designed to take advantage of shifting U.S. sentiments toward events in Europe. Budenz revealed, for instance, that a communist named Frederick Vanderbilt Field was chosen to head the communist-created American Peace Mobilization. Field was already a close associate of various officials in the U.S. State Department, including Alger Hiss. This was only one of countless front organizations created to attract non-communist sponsorship and financial support. Even when early supporters found out that an organization was dominated by communists and withdrew, U.S. communists were strengthened and nurtured by funds received under false pretenses. This proved extremely easy, since the communists were able to operate essentially without fear of prosecution by the U.S. government. Not until 1939 was the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (the FBI) given responsibility for national security investigations. Even then, FBI efforts were hampered by State Department interference that prevented prosecution of Soviet agents during the wartime alliance.

The Soviets were also operating similarly in Britain. Out of the Cambridge University Socialist Society, which was communist-dominated during the 1930s, came a small cadre of highly effective agents. One was Harold A.R. (Kim) Philby, who had become sympathetic to Marxism while studying economics with the Marxist professor Maurice Dobb. Philby eventually entered the British intelligence service and began passing on information to Soviet agents. He had made the intellectual and emotional leap from democratic socialist to communist while still at university, then embarked on a deliberate career as a Soviet agent. Five years after finally defecting, he endeavored to explain himself to those in the West who might be interested:

It cannot be so very surprising that I adopted a Communist viewpoint in the thirties; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made that choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course. It is reasonable to ask why. ...

It seemed to me, when it became clear that much was going badly wrong in the Soviet Union, that I had three possible courses of action. First, I could give up politics altogether. This I knew to be quite impossible. ...Second, I could continue political activity on a totally different basis. But where was I to go? The politics of the Baldwin-Chamberlain era struck me then, as they strike me now, as much more than the politics of folly. The folly was evil. I saw the road leading me into the political position of the querulous outcast ... railing at the movement that had let me down, at the God that had failed me. This seemed a ghastly fate, however lucrative it might have been.

The third course of action open to me was to stick it out, in the confident faith that the principles of the Revolution would outlive the aberration of individuals, however enormous. It was the course I chose, guided partly by reason, partly by instinct. ...

...My persisting faith in Communism does not mean that my views and attitudes have remained fossilised for thirty-odd years. They have been influenced and modified, sometimes rudely, by the appalling events of my lifetime. I have quarrelled with my political friends on major issues, and still do so. There is still an awful lot of work ahead; there will be ups and downs. Advances which, thirty years ago, I hoped to see in my lifetime, may have to wait a generation or two. But, as I look over Moscow from my study window, I can see the solid foundations of the future I glimpsed at Cambridge.[55]

Philby, and many others who traveled similar paths, failed to understand that the just society cannot be established by unjust means. Systematic denial and subversion of human rights cannot result in a society where cooperation thrives. In the 1930s, however, none of this was broadly understood or accepted. Only those who continued to find their inspiration in the works of Henry George, now constituting a dwindling Remnant of what had been a vibrant social and political movement, presented a reasoned, systemic alternative to Old World decadence and industrial landlordism. Unfortunately, a significant group of those reformers who believed in democratic socialism also looked to the Soviet Union as the only bulwark against the fascist destruction of civilization.


European communists who managed to escape from their homelands ahead of German conquests also assisted British communists in the service of the Soviet Union. The physicist Klaus Fuchs was a German communist who sought refuge in England in 1933. After completing his doctorate, Fuchs was called upon to work on the atomic bomb project. And, from early 1942 on, he delivered progress reports on the bomb to Soviet agents in Britain and then the United States. Another European physicist, an Italian emigre to Canada named Bruno Pontecorvo, also contributed significantly to the body of knowledge passed on to the Soviets. Eventually, cracks appeared in the Soviet espionage apparatus, so that well before the Cold War began in earnest, the depth of Soviet espionage in the West surfaced. Early in 1945, Frank Bielaski, a director with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, discovered that the principals of the journal Amerasia had obtained literally hundreds of secret files and documents from various sources in the U.S. government. Amerasia's editor, Philip Jaffe, along with John S. Service and Emmanuel S. Larsen of the State Department and several journalists were arrested for espionage. None were convicted, however, because the evidence was deemed to have been obtained illegally. Later in the year, a cipher clerk working for one of the Soviet intelligence organizations in Ottawa, Canada defected. Information provided by this individual, Igor Gouzenko, demonstrated to Canadian, British and U.S. officials that communists had successfully infiltrated their respective national security organizations and were delivering top secret information to Moscow. From the information obtained through Gouzenko, a significant number of individuals were arrested, including Allan Nunn May, a British scientist working on the atomic bomb project. More than twenty Soviet nationals were forced to leave Canada. Officials in the U.S. received their first glimpse of just how deeply the Soviets had penetrated the government when a Soviet courier, Elizabeth Bentley, decided she had had enough and sought refuge with the FBI. Her statements implicated Presidential counsel Lauchlin Currie as well as Harry Dexter White. Sensitive information even had been obtained, she added, out of Walter Lippmann's private files, delivered by his secretary. Another important source identified by Bentley was Major Duncan Lee, an assistant to William Donovan in the OSS. There were numerous others.

All this and more Elizabeth Bentley testified to in 1948 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Later testimony by Whittaker Chambers corroborated much of what Elizabeth Bentley had disclosed and also strengthened the connection between Harry Dexter White and the communist underground. White denied any association with Chambers or other U.S. communists; strengthening his denials was the fact that nowhere in his earlier years had he been active in the socialist or communist movements. He studied economics at Harvard University under Frank W. Taussig, taught neo-classical economics and not bothered much about politics. In 1932, he and Currie (also an economist) collaborated on a paper advancing a number of Keynesian-like anti-depression policies. Then, in 1934, White was invited by economist Jacob Viner of the University of Chicago to join him at the Treasury Department to undertake "a comprehensive survey of our monetary and banking legislation and institutions."[56] Chambers testified that communists within the Treasury Department gradually played on White's general approval of Soviet central planning and his romanticized view of what the communist experiment might accomplish. There was never any conclusive proof presented that White had betrayed the financial or military secrets of his country; yet, White himself provided a very clear picture of his state of mind when -- after serving for so long in the Executive branch of government under Roosevelt and Truman -- in the 1948 election he supported Henry Wallace for the Presidency. When White was called before the House Committee on August 13, 1948, he emphatically denied any association with the communist movement. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, in their recent account of Soviet espionage, simply repeat as fact what Chambers and Bentley said about White's duplicity. After White's death, I.F. Stone characterized White as "the product of a free society, and too independent in his thinking to tread anybody's line." For good measure, Stone added that "in dealing with the Russians as with the British he was not at all disposed to let them ... take the shirt off Uncle Sam's back."[57]

What evidence there is of White's involvement seems even more circumstantial than that presented against Hiss. Nathan Silvermaster, who White knew well and earlier had been with the Farm Security Administration and then Board of Economic Warfare, was identified by Elizabeth Bentley as her direct superior. One can imagine that Silvermaster and White exchanged views on economic systems and political questions with some degree of openness. There is no documented evidence that out of this relationship White passed on confidential or secret information to Silvermaster. White died of a massive heart attack in August of 1948. His long-time friend and intellectual colleague Lauchlin Currie left the United States in 1949 to become director of the International Bank Mission to Colombia. Mystery continues to surround some of the actions of these individuals and the extent to which they were actively involved in the communist movement. Researchers will certainly fill in some of the gaps as they gain access to KGB and other Soviet archives as well as those of the United States and Britain.

A key question on the minds of U.S. citizens loyal to the Democracy, too many of whom were now willing to give up some of their liberty in exchange for greater security, was just how much damage had been caused by the delivery of so much information to the Soviets. One thing was certain, no known communist or person openly sympathetic to communist ideology could be permitted to continue to work in any sensitive government position. Alger Hiss made things easy for Truman by taking it upon himself to resign his position with the State Department; he moved on to become President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Others whose associations and loyalty to the Democracy came under question were forced to leave government service under Executive Order 9835. Historian Francis Thompson, examining the President's efforts to put the loyalty issue to rest, concludes that "Truman's unschematic, populist mind apparently led him, at first, to oversimplify a very complex problem."[59] The sides were quickly being drawn, and those in either group with financial resources were determined to influence and control public opinion. One question was how the major broadcasting networks would treat the subject of subversive elements being uncovered in the U.S. government.

Edward R. Murrow, only recently made news director for CBS, was determined to separate fact from propaganda in the coming battles between proponents of national security interests and those determined to protect intellectual freedom and civil liberties (or, in some cases, their own true affiliations and ideology). One of his first steps was to create the program CBS Views the Press, which focused public attention on the use by certain publishers of fabrication and unsubstantiated charges to advance their own political agendas. Murrow's provocative type of broadcast journalism was, however, also subjected to attack by proponents of the national security state. A small but very vocal and powerful group of ultra-nationalists now advanced an agenda defining as subversion and -- by extension -- treason the expression of ideas inconsistent with or critical of existing socio-political arrangements and institutions. On October 27, 1947, Murrow went on the offensive:

A certain number of people have been accused either of being Communists or of following the Communist line. Their accusers are safe from the laws of slander and libel. Subsequent denials are unlikely ever to catch up with the original allegation. ...

Certain government agencies, such as the State Department and the Atomic Energy Commission, are confronted with a real dilemma. They are obligated to maintain security without doing violence to the essential liberties of the citizens who work for them. That may require special and defensible security measures. But no such problem arises with instruments of mass communication. In that area there would seem to be two alternatives: either we believe in the intelligence, good judgment, balance and native shrewdness of the American people, or we believe that government should investigate, intimidate and finally legislate. The choice is as simple as that.

The right of dissent -- or, if you prefer, the right to be wrong -- is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That's the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail toward totalitarianism.[60]

Murrow's insight was keen. Other thoughtful individuals were equally as troubled by the paranoia spreading among ultra-nationalist anti-communists. They recalled that both Mussolini and Hitler had come to power by subversion of democratic processes and constitutional protections of individual liberty. On the other hand, a very legitimate concern existed regarding communists who might run for and obtain public office. Were they not committed to work for Soviet interests and against the Democracy? Murrow believed the Democracy to be more than sufficiently strong to withstand any inroads by communists working in the open. There were conditions. Liberalism would have to overcome the stresses of racial inequality and the rural poverty of agricultural workers, coal miners and other tragically disadvantaged groups. Murrow warned that the U.S. must live the ideals of social democracy -- becoming "the example of a nation strong, tolerant and stable where men may live in dignity under established law, where civil liberties are secure and where economic security is expanding ..."[61] I.F. Stone, whose writing was representative of what is generally called the radical-left, wrote in 1947 that the "country seemed blessed, but its people seemed blind. ...[T]hat America was unappreciative of its blessings and heedless of its responsibilities, the responsibility of the more fortunate for the less, the duty of the strong toward the weak, the obligation of the rich toward the poor."[62] Both Murrow and Stone sensed that Americans were tired of subordinating their own welfare to that of people in the Old World. Now that they had done their part to defend their country, they expected Old World leaders to take responsibility for revamping their own societies under democratic principles and institutions. A postwar boom in the United States would ensure that at least a considerable majority of the population would end up on the path toward relative economic security.

In the minds of the Remnant -- the unrepentant old-style conservatives, individualists and the even fewer cooperative individualists -- the country seemed headed down a long and disastrous road along which individual liberties would be sacrificed to expediencies. Frank Chodorov (now writing and publishing analysis from modest offices in New York City) warned his small readership against buying into the anti-communist panic. "The commies don't count," he declared from the wilderness. "That miserable crew of Moscow-led slaves have neither the strength nor the skill to push themselves into a position of predominance. They present no competitive force. But they may, and probably will, hasten centralization by creating a fear of it."[63] The challenge was on.