"We, the governments of Great Britain and
the United States, in the name of India, Burma,
Malaya, Australia, British East Africa, British
Guiana, Hong Kong, Siam, Singapore, Egypt,
Palestine, Canada, New Zealand, Northern Ireland,
Scotland, Wales, as well as Puerto Rico, Guam,
the Philippines, Hawaii, Alaska, and the Virgin
Islands, hereby declare most emphatically,
that this is not an imperialist war." Thus,
went a skit put on in the United States in
the year 1939 by the Communist party.
Two years later, Germany invaded Soviet Russia,
and the American Communist party, which had
repeatedly described the war between the Axis
Powers and the Allied Powers as an imperialist
war, now called it a "people's war" against
Fascism. Indeed, almost all Americans were
now in agreement-capitalists, Communists,
Democrats, Republicans, poor, rich, and middle
class-that this was indeed a people's war.
Was it?
By certain evidence, it was the most popular
war the United States had ever fought. Never
had a greater proportion of the country participated
in a war: 18 million served in the armed forces,
10 million overseas; 25 million workers gave
of their pay envelope regularly for war bonds.
But could this be considered a manufactured
support, since all the power of the nation
not only of the government, but the press,
the church, and even the chief radical organizations-was
behind the calls for all-out war? Was there
an undercurrent of reluctance; were there
unpublicized signs of resistance?
It was a war against an enemy of unspeakable
evil. Hitler's Germany was extending totalitarianism,
racism, militarism, and overt aggressive warfare
beyond what an already cynical world had experienced.
And yet, did the governments conducting this
war England, the United States, the Soviet
Union-represent something significantly different,
so that their victory would be a blow to imperialism,
racism, totalitarianism, militarism, in the
world?
Would the behaviour of the United States during
the war in military action abroad, in treatment
of minorities at home-be in keeping with a
"people's war"? Would the country's wartime
policies respect the rights of ordinary people
everywhere to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness? And would post war America,
in its policies at home and overseas, exemplify
the values for which the war was supposed
to have been fought?
These questions deserve thought. At the time
of World War II, the atmosphere was too dense
with war fervour to permit them to be aired.
For the United States to step forward as a
defender of helpless countries matched its
image in American high school history textbooks,
but not its record in world affairs. It had
opposed the Haitian revolution for independence
from France at the start of the nineteenth
century. It had instigated a war with Mexico
and taken half of that country. It had pretended
to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then
planted itself in Cuba with a military base,
investments, and rights of intervention. It
had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and
fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos.
It had "opened" Japan to its trade with gunboats
and threats. It had declared an
Open-Door-Policy in China as a means of assuring
that the United States would have opportunities
equal to other imperial powers in exploiting
China. It had sent troops to Peking with other
nations, to assert Western supremacy in China,
and kept them there for over thirty years.
While demanding an Open Door in China, it
had insisted (with the Monroe Doctrine and
many military interventions) on a Closed Door
in Latin America-that is, closed to everyone
but the United States. It had engineered a
revolution against Colombia and created the
"independent" state of Panama in order to
build and control the Canal. It sent five
thousand marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter
a revolution, and kept a force there for seven
years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic
for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops
there for eight years. It intervened for the
second time in Haiti in 1915 and kept troops
there for nineteen years. Between 1900 and
1933, the United States intervened in Cuba
four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama
six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras
seven times. By 1924 the finances of half
of the twenty Latin American states were being
directed to some extent by the United States.
By 1935, over half of U.S. steel and cotton
exports were being sold in Latin America.
Just before World War I ended, in 1918, an
American force of seven thousand landed at
Vladivostok as part of an Allied intervention
in Russia, and remained until early 1920.
Five thousand more troops were landed at Archangel,
another Russian port, also as part of an Allied
expeditionary force, and stayed for almost
a year. The State Department told Congress:
"All these operations were to offset effects
of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia."
In short, if the entrance of the United States
into World War II was (as so many Americans
believed at the time, observing the Nazi invasions)
to defend the principle of non-intervention
in the affairs of other countries, the nation's
record cast doubt on its ability to uphold
that principle.
What seemed clear at the time was that the
United States was a democracy with certain
liberties, while Germany was a dictatorship
persecuting its Jewish minority, imprisoning
dissidents, whatever their religion, while
proclaiming the supremacy of the Nordic "race."
However, blacks, looking at anti-Semitism
in Germany, might not see their own situation
in the U.S. as much different. And the United
States had done little about Hitler's policies
of persecution. Indeed, it had joined England
and France in appeasing Hitler throughout
the thirties. Roosevelt and his Secretary
of State, Cordell Hull, were hesitant to criticize
publicly Hitler's anti-Semitic policies; when
a resolution was introduced in the Senate
in January 1934 asking the Senate and the
President to express "surprise and pain" at
what the Germans were doing to the Jews, and
to ask restoration of Jewish rights, the State
Department "caused this resolution to be buried
in committee," according to Arnold Offner
(American Appeasement).
When Mussolini's Italy invaded Ethiopia in
1935, the U.S. declared an embargo on munitions
but let American businesses send oil to Italy
in huge quantities, which was essential to
Italy's carrying on the war. When a Fascist
rebellion took place in Spain in 1936 against
the elected socialist-liberal government,
the Roosevelt administration sponsored a neutrality
act that had the effect of shutting off help
to the Spanish government while Hitler and
Mussolini gave critical aid to Franco. Offner
says:
THE UNITED STATES WENT BEYOND EVEN THE LEGAL
REQUIREMENTS OF ITS NEUTRALITY LEGISLATION.
HAD AID BEEN FORTHCOMING FROM THE UNITED STATES
AND FROM ENGLAND AND FRANCE, CONSIDERING THAT
HITLER'S POSITION ON AID TO FRANCE WAS NOT
FIRM AT LEAST UNTIL NOVEMBER 1936, THE SPANISH
REPUBLICANS COULD WELL HAVE TRIUMPHED. INSTEAD,
GERMANY GAINED EVERY ADVANTAGE FROM THE SPANISH
CIVIL WAR.
Was this simply poor judgment, an unfortunate
error? Or was it the logical policy of a government
whose main interest was not stopping Fascism
but advancing the imperial interests of the
United States? For those interests, in the
thirties, an Anti-Soviet policy seemed best.
Later, when Japan and Germany threatened U.S.
world interests, a pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi policy
became preferable. Roosevelt was as much concerned
to end the oppression of Jews as Lincoln was
to end slavery during the Civil War; their
priority in policy (whatever their personal
compassion for victims of persecution) was
not minority rights, but national power.
It was not Hitler's attacks on the Jews that
brought the United States into World War II,
any more than the enslavement of 4 million
blacks brought Civil War in 1861. Italy's
attack on Ethiopia, Hitler's invasion of Austria,
his takeover of Czechoslovakia, his attack
on Poland-none of those events caused the
United States to enter the war, although Roosevelt
did begin to give important aid to England.
What brought the United States fully into
the war was the Japanese attack on the American
naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December
7, 1941. Surely it was not the humane concern
for Japan's bombing of civilians that led
to Roosevelt's outraged call for war-Japan's
attack on China in 1937, her bombing of civilians
at Nan king, had not provoked the United States
to war. It was the Japanese attack on a link
in the American Pacific Empire that did it.
So long as Japan remained a well-behaved member
of that imperial club of Great Powers who-in
keeping with the Open-Door-Policy were sharing
the exploitation of China, the United States
did not object. It had exchanged notes with
Japan in 1917 saying "the Government of the
United States recognizes that Japan has special
interests in China." In 1928, according to
Akira Iriye (After Imperialism,), American
consuls in China supported the coming of Japanese
troops. It was when Japan threatened potential
U.S. markets by its attempted takeover of
China, but especially as it moved toward the
tin, rubber, and oil of Southeast Asia, that
the United States became alarmed and took
those measures which led to the Japanese attack:
a total embargo on scrap iron, a total embargo
on oil in the summer of 1941.
As Bruce Russet says (No Clear and Present
Danger): "Throughout the 1930s the United
States government had done little to resist
the Japanese advance on the Asian continent,"
But: "The Southwest Pacific area was of undeniable
economic importance to the United States-at
the time most of America's tin and rubber
came from there, as did substantial quantities
of other raw materials."
Pearl Harbor was presented to the American
public as a sudden, shocking, immoral act.
Immoral it was, like any bombing but not really
sudden or shocking to the American government.
Russett says: "Japan's strike against the
American naval base climaxed a long series
of mutually antagonistic acts. In initiating
economic sanctions against Japan, the United
States undertook actions that were widely
recognized in Washington as carrying grave
risks of war."
Putting aside the wild accusations against
Roosevelt (that he knew about Pearl Harbor
and didn't tell, or that he deliberately provoked
the Pearl Harbor raid these are without evidence),
it does seem clear that he did as James Polk
had done before him in the Mexican war and
Lyndon Johnson after him in the Vietnam war-he
lied to the public for what he thought was
a right cause. In September and October 1941,
he misstated the facts in two incidents involving
German submarines and American destroyers.
A historian sympathetic to Roosevelt, Thomas
A. Bailey, has written:
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT REPEATEDLY DECEIVED THE
AMERICAN PEOPLE DURING THE PERIOD BEFORE PEARL
HARBOR. HE WAS LIKE THE PHYSICIAN WHO MUST
TELL THE PATIENT LIES FOR THE PATIENT'S OWN
GOOD BECAUSE THE MASSES ARE NOTORIOUSLY SHORT
SIGHTED AND GENERALLY CANNOT SEE DANGER UNTIL
IT IS AT THEIR THROATS.
One of the judges in the Tokyo War Crimes
Trial after World War II, Radha Binod Pal,
dissented from the general verdicts against
Japanese officials and argued that the United
States had clearly provoked the war with Japan
and expected Japan to act. Richard Minear
(Victors' Justice) sums up Pal's view of the
embargoes on scrap iron and oil, that "these
measures were a clear and potent threat to
Japan's very existence." The records show
that a White House conference two weeks before
Pearl Harbor anticipated a war and discussed
how it should be justified.
A State Department memorandum on Japanese
expansion, a year before Pearl Harbor, did
not talk of the independence of China or the
principle of self-determination. It said:
OUR GENERAL DIPLOMATIC AND STRATEGIC POSITION
WOULD BE CONSIDERABLY WEAKENED-BY OUR LOSS
OF CHINESE, INDIAN AND SOUTH SEAS MARKETS
(AND BY OUR LOSS OF MUCH OF THE JAPANESE MARKET
FOR OUR GOODS, AS JAPAN WOULD BECOME MORE
AND MORE SELF-SUFFICIENT) AS WELL AS BY INSURMOUNTABLE
RESTRICTIONS UPON OUR ACCESS TO THE RUBBER,
TIN, JUTE, AND OTHER VITAL MATERIALS OF THE
ASIAN AND OCEANIC REGIONS.
Once joined with England and Russia in the
war (Germany and Italy declared war on the
United States right after Pearl Harbor), did
the behaviour of the United States show that
her war aims were humanitarian, or centred
on power and profit? Was she fighting the
war to end the control by some nations over
others or to make sure the controlling nations
were friends of the United States? In August
1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met off the
coast of Newfoundland and released to the
world the Atlantic Charter, setting forth
noble goals for the post war world, saying
their countries "seek no aggrandizement, territorial
or other," and that they respected "the right
of all peoples to choose the form of government
under which they will live." The Charter was
celebrated as declaring the right of nations
to self-determination.
Two weeks before the Atlantic Charter, however,
the U.S. Acting Secretary of State, Sumner
Welles, had assured the French government
that they could keep their empire intact after
the end of the war: "This Government, mindful
of its traditional friendship for France,
has deeply sympathized with the desire of
the French people to maintain their territories
and to preserve them intact." The Department
of Defence history of Vietnam (The Pentagon
Papers) itself pointed to what it called an
"ambivalent" policy toward Indochina, noting
that "in the Atlantic Charter and other pronouncements,
the U.S. proclaimed support for national self-determination
and independence" but also "early in the war
repeatedly expressed or implied to the French
an intention to restore to France its overseas
empire after the war."
In late 1942, Roosevelt's personal representative
assured French General Henri Giraud: "It is
thoroughly understood that French sovereignty
will be re-established as soon as possible
throughout all the territory, metropolitan
or colonial, over which flew the French flag
in 1939." (These pages, like the others in
the Pentagon Papers, are marked "TOP SECRET-Sensitive.")
By 1945 the "ambivalent" attitude was gone.
In May, Truman assured the French he did not
question her "sovereignty over Indochina."
That fall, the United States urged Nationalist
China, put temporarily in charge of the northern
part of Indochina by the Potsdam Conference,
to turn it over to the French, despite the
obvious desire of the Vietnamese for independence.
That was a favour for the French government.
But what about the United States' own imperial
ambitions during the war? What about the "aggrandizement,
territorial or other" that Roosevelt had renounced
in the Atlantic Charter?
In the headlines were the battles and troop
movements: the invasion of North Africa in
1942, Italy in 1943, the massive, dramatic
Cross Channel invasion of German -occupied
France in 1944, the bitter battles as Germany
was pushed back toward and over her frontiers,
the increasing bombardment by the British
and American air forces. And, at the same
time, the Russian victories over the Nazi
armies (the Russians, by the time of the Cross-Channel
Invasion, had driven the Germans out of Russia,
and were engaging 80 percent of the German
troops). In the Pacific, in 1943 and 1944,
there was the island by island move of American
forces toward Japan, finding closer and closer
bases for the thunderous bombardment of Japanese
cities.
Quietly, behind the headlines in battles and
bombings, American diplomats and businessmen
worked hard to make sure that when the war
ended, American economic power would be second
to none in the world. United States business
would penetrate areas that up to this time
had been dominated by England. The Open-Door
Policy of equal access would be extended from
Asia to Europe, meaning that the United States
intended to push England aside and move in.
That is what happened to the Middle East and
its oil. In August 1945, a State Department
officer said that "a review of the diplomatic
history of the past 35 years will show that
petroleum has historically played a larger
part in the external relations of the United
States than any other commodity." Saudi Arabia
was the largest oil pool in the Middle East.
The ARAMCO oil corporation, through Secretary
of the Interior Harold Ickes, got Roosevelt
to agree to Lend Lease aid to Saudi Arabia,
which would involve the U.S. government there
and create a shield for the interests of ARAMCO.
In 1944 Britain and the U.S. signed a pact
on oil agreeing on "the principle of equal
opportunity," and Lloyd Gardner concludes
(Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy) that
"the Open-Door Policy was triumphant throughout
the Middle East."
Historian Gabriel Kolko, after a close study
of American wartime policy (The Politics of
War), concludes that "the American economic
war aim was to save capitalism at home and
abroad." In April 1944, a State Department
official said: "As you know, we've got to
plan on enormously increased production in
this country after the war, and the American
domestic market can't absorb all that production
indefinitely. There won't be any question
about our needing greatly increased foreign
markets."
Anthony Sampson, in his study of the international
oil business (The Seven Sisters), says:
BY THE END OF THE WAR THE DOMINANT INFLUENCE
IN SAUDI ARABIA WAS UNQUESTIONABLY THE UNITED
STATES. KING IBN SAND WAS REGARDED NO LONGER
AS A WILD DESERT WARRIOR, BUT AS A KEY PIECE
IN THE POWER-GAME, TO BE WOOED BY THE WEST.
ROOSEVELT, ON HIS WAY BACK FROM YALTA IN FEBRUARY
1945, ENTERTAINED THE KING ON THE CRUISER
QUINCY, TOGETHER WITH HIS ENTOURAGE OF FIFTY,
INCLUDING TWO SONS, A PRIME MINISTER, AN ASTROLOGER
AND FLOCKS OF SHEEP FOR SLAUGHTER.
Roosevelt then wrote to Ibn Sand, promising
the United States would not change its Palestine
policy without consulting the Arabs. In later
years, the concern for oil would constantly
compete with political concern for the Jewish
state in the Middle East, but at this point,
oil seemed more important.
With British imperial power collapsing during
World War II, the United States was ready
to move in. Hull said early in the war:
LEADERSHIP TOWARD A NEW SYSTEM OF INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONSHIPS IN TRADE AND OTHER ECONOMIC
AFFAIRS WILL DEVOLVE VERY LARGELY UPON THE
UNITED STATES BECAUSE OF OUR GREAT ECONOMIC
STRENGTH. WE SHOULD ASSUME THIS LEADERSHIP,
AND THE RESPONSIBILITY THAT GOES WITH IT,
PRIMARILY FOR REASONS OF PURE NATIONAL SELF-INTEREST.
Before the war was over, the administration
was planning the outlines of the new international
economic order, based on partnership between
government and big business. Lloyd Gardner
says of Roosevelt's chief adviser, Harry Hopkins,
who had organized the relief programs of the
New Deal: "No conservative outdid Hopkins
in championing foreign investment, and its
protection."
The poet Archibald MacLeish, then an Assistant
Secretary of State, spoke critically of what
he saw in the post war world: "As things are
now going, the peace we will make, the peace
we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil,
a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace,
in brief . . . without moral purpose or human
interest"
During the war, England and the United States
set up the International Monetary Fund to
regulate international exchanges of currency;
voting would be proportional to capital contributed,
so American dominance would be assured. The
International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development was set up, supposedly to help
reconstruct war-destroyed areas, but one of
its first objectives was, in its own words,
"to promote foreign investment."
The economic aid countries would need after
the war was already seen in political terms:
Averell Harriman, ambassador to Russia, said
in early 1944: "Economic assistance is one
of the most effective weapons at our disposal
to influence European political events in
the direction we desire,"
The creation of the United Nations during
the war was presented to the world as international
cooperation to prevent future wars. But the
U.N. was dominated by the Western imperial
countries- the United States, England, and
France-and a new imperial power, with military
bases and powerful influence in Eastern Europe
the Soviet Union. An important conservative
Republican Senator, Arthur Vandenberg, wrote
in his diary about the United Nations Charter:
THE STRIKING THING ABOUT IT IS THAT IT IS
SO CONSERVATIVE FROM A NATIONALIST STANDPOINT.
IT IS BASED VIRTUALLY ON A FOUR-POWER ALLIANCE.
THIS IS ANYTHING BUT A WILD-EYED INTERNATIONALIST
DREAM OF A WORLD STATE. I AM DEEPLY IMPRESSED
(AND SURPRISED) TO FIND HULL SO CAREFULLY
GUARDING OUR AMERICAN VETO IN HIS SCHEME OF
THINGS.
The plight of Jews in German-occupied Europe,
which many people thought was at the heart
of the war against the Axis, was not a chief
concern of Roosevelt. Henry Feingold's research
(The Politics of Rescue) shows that, while
the Jews were being put in camps and the process
of annihilation was beginning that would end
in the horrifying extermination of 6 million
Jews and millions of non- Jews, Roosevelt
failed to take steps that might have saved
thousands of lives. He did not see it as a
high priority; he left it to the State Department,
and in the State Department anti-Semitism
and a cold bureaucracy became obstacles to
action.
Was the war being fought to establish that
Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic
supremacy over "inferior" races? The United
States' armed forces were segregated by race.
When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary
in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the
European theatre, the blacks were stowed down
in the depths of the ship near the engine
room, as far as possible from the fresh air
of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the
slave voyages of old.
The Red Cross, with government approval, separated
the blood donations of black and white. It
was, ironically, a black physician named Charles
Drew who developed the blood bank system.
He was put in charge of the wartime donations,
and then fired when he tried to end blood
segregation. Despite the urgent need for wartime
labor, blacks were still being discriminated
against for jobs. A spokesman for a West Coast
aviation plant said: "The Negro will be considered
only as janitors and in other similar capacities.
Regardless of their training as aircraft workers,
we will not employ them." Roosevelt never
did anything to enforce the orders of the
Eair Employment Practices Commission he had
set up.
The Fascist nations were notorious in their
insistence that the woman's place was in the
home. Yet, the war against Fascism, although
it utilized women in defence industries where
they were desperately needed, took no special
steps to change the subordinate role of women.
The War Manpower Commission, despite the large
numbers of women in war work, kept women off
its policymaking bodies. A report of the Women's
Bureau of the Department of Labor, by its
director, Mary Anderson, said the War Manpower
Commission had "doubts and uneasiness" about
"what was then regarded as a developing attitude
of militancy or a crusading spirit on the
part of women leaders."
In one of its policies, the United States
came close to direct duplication of Fascism.
This was in its treatment of the Japanese-Americans
living on the West Coast. After the Pearl
Harbor attack, anti- Japanese hysteria spread
in the government. One Congressman said: "I'm
for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska
and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration
camps. ... Damn them! Let's get rid of them!"
Franklin D. Roosevelt did not share this frenzy,
but he calmly signed Executive Order 9066,
in February 1942, giving the army the power,
without warrants or indictments or hearings,
to arrest every Japanese-American on the West
Coast-110,000 men, women, and children-to
take them from their homes, transport them
to camps far into the interior, and keep them
there under prison conditions. Three-fourths
of these were Nisei-children born in the United
States of Japanese parents and therefore American
citizens. The other fourth the Issei, born
in Japan-were barred by law from becoming
citizens. In 1944 the Supreme Court upheld
the forced evacuation on the grounds of military
necessity. The Japanese remained in those
camps for over three years.
Michi Weglyn was a young girl when her family
experienced evacuation and detention. She
tells (Years of Infamy) of bungling in the
evacuation, of misery, confusion, anger, but
also of Japanese-American dignity and fighting
back. There were strikes, petitions, mass
meetings, refusal to sign loyalty oaths, riots
against the camp authorities. The Japanese
resisted to the end.
Not until after the war did the story of the
Japanese-Americans begin to be known to the
general public. The month the war ended in
Asia, September 1945, an article appeared
in Harper's Magazine by Yale Law Professor
Eugene V. Rostow, calling the Japanese evacuation
"our worst wartime mistake." Was it a "mistake"-or
was it an action to be expected from a nation
with a long history of racism and which was
fighting a war, not to end racism, but to
retain the fundamental elements of the American
system?
It was a war waged by a government whose chief
beneficiary- despite volumes of reforms-was
a wealthy elite. The alliance between big
business and the government went back to the
very first proposals of Alexander Hamilton
to Congress after the Revolutionary War. By
World War II that partnership had developed
and intensified. During the Depression, Roosevelt
had once denounced the "economic royalists,"
but he always had the support of certain important
business leaders. During the war, as Bruce
Catton saw it from his post in the War Production
Board: "The economic royalists, denounced
and derided had a part to play now."
Catton (The War Lords of Washington) described
the process of industrial mobilization to
carry on the war, and how in this process
wealth became more and more concentrated in
fewer and fewer large corporations. In 1940
the United States had begun sending large
amounts of war supplies to England and France.
By 1941 three-fourths of the value of military
contracts were handled by fifty- six large
corporations. A Senate report, "Economic Concentration
and World War II," noted that the government
contracted for scientific research in industry
during the war, and although two thousand
corporations were involved, of $1 billion
spent, $400 million went to ten large corporations.
Management remained firmly in charge of decision
making during the war, and although 12 million
workers were organized in the CIO and AFL,
labor was in a subordinate position. Labor-
management committees were set up in five
thousand factories, as a gesture toward industrial
democracy, but they acted mostly as disciplinary
groups for absentee workers, and devices for
increasing production. Catton writes: "The
big operators who made the working decisions
had decided that nothing very substantial
was going to be changed."
Despite the overwhelming atmosphere of patriotism
and total dedication to winning the war, despite
the no-strike pledges of the AFL and CIO,
many of the nation's workers, frustrated by
the freezing of wages while business profits
rocketed skyward, went on strike. During the
war, there were fourteen thousand strikes,
involving 6,770,000 workers, more than in
any comparable period in American history.
In 1944 alone, a million workers were on strike,
in the mines, in the steel mills, in the auto
and transportation equipment industries.
When the war ended, the strikes continued
in record numbers- 3 million on strike in
the first half of 1946. According to Jeremy
Brecher (Strike!), if not for the disciplinary
hand of the unions there might have been "a
general confrontation between the workers
of a great many industries, and the government,
supporting the employers."
In Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, according
to an unpublished manuscript by Marc Miller
("The Irony of Victory: Lowell During World
War II"), there were as many strikes in 1943
and 1944 as in 1937. It may have been a "people's
war," but here was dissatisfaction at the
fact that the textile mill profits grew 600
percent from 1940 to 1946, while wage increases
in cotton goods industries went up 36 percent.
How little the war changed the difficult condition
of women workers is shown by the fact that
in Lowell, among women war workers with children,
only 5 percent could have their children taken
care of by nursery schools; the others had
to make their own arrangements.
Beneath the noise of enthusiastic patriotism,
there were many people who thought war was
wrong, even in the circumstances of Fascist
aggression. Out of 10 million drafted for
the armed forces during World War II, only
43,000 refused to fight. But this was three
times the proportion of C.O.'s (conscientious
objectors) in World War 1. Of these 43,000,
about 6,000 went to prison, which was, proportionately,
four times the number of C.O.'s who went to
prison during World War I. Of every six men
in federal prison, one was there as a C.O.
Many more than 43,000 refusers did not show
up for the draft at all. The government lists
about 350,000 cases of draft evasion, including
technical violations as well as actual desertion,
so it is hard to tell the true number, but
it may be that the number of men who either
did not show up or claimed C.O. status was
in the hundreds of thousands-not a small number.
And this in the face of an American community
almost unanimously for the war.
Among those soldiers who were not conscientious
objectors, who seemed willing fighters, it
is hard to know how much resentment there
was against authority, against having to fight
in a war whose aims were unclear, inside a
military machine whose lack of democracy was
very clear. No one recorded the bitterness
of enlisted men against the special privileges
of officers in the army of a country known
as a democracy. To give just one instance:
combat crews in the air force in the European
theatre, going to the base movies between
bombing missions, found two lines-an officers'
line (short), and an enlisted men's line (very
long). There were two mess halls, even as
they prepared to go into combat: the enlisted
men's food was different—worse—than the
officers'.
The literature that followed World War II,
James Jones's From Here to Eternity, Joseph
Heller'sCatch-22, and Norman Mailer's The
Naked and the Dead captured this GI anger
against the army "brass." In The Naked and
the Dead, the soldiers talk in battle, and
one of them says: "The only thing wrong with
this Army is it never lost a war."
TOGLIO WAS SHOCKED. "YOU THINK WE OUGHT TO
LOSE THIS ONE?"
RED FOUND HIMSELF CARRIED AWAY. "WHAT HAVE
I AGAINST THE GODDAM JAPS? YOU THINK I CARE
IF THEY KEEP THIS FUCKIN JUNGLE? WHAT'S IT
TO ME IF CUMMINGS GETS ANOTHER STAR?"
"GENERAL CUMMINGS, HE'S A GOOD MAN," MARTINEZ
SAID.
"THERE AIN'T A GOOD OFFICER IN THE WORLD,"
RED STATED.
There seemed to be widespread indifference,
even hostility, on the part of the Negro community
to the war despite the attempts of Negro newspapers
and Negro leaders to mobilize black sentiment.
Lawrence Wittner (Rebels Against War) quotes
a black journalist: "The Negro . . . is angry,
resentful, and utterly apathetic about the
war. 'Fight for what?' he is asking. 'This
war doesn't mean a thing to me. If we win
I lose, so what?'" A black army officer, home
on furlough, told friends in Harlem he had
been in hundreds of bull sessions with Negro
soldiers and found no interest in the war.
A student at a Negro college told his teacher:
"The Army Jim Crows us. The Navy lets us serve
only as mess-men. The Red Cross refuses our
blood. Employers and labor unions shut us
out. Lynching’s continue. We are disenfranchised,
Jim Crowed, spat upon. What more could Hitler
do than that?" NAACP leader Walter White repeated
this to a black audience of several thousand
people in the Midwest, thinking they would
disapprove, but instead, as he recalled: "To
my surprise and dismay the audience burst
into such applause that it took me some thirty
or forty seconds to quiet it."
In January 1943, there appeared in a Negro
newspaper this "Draftee's Prayer":
DEAR LORD, TODAY
I GO TO WAR:
TO FIGHT, TO DIE,
TELL ME WHAT FOR?
DEAR LORD, I'LL FIGHT,
I DO NOT FEAR,
GERMANS OR JAPS;
MY FEARS ARE HERE.
AMERICA!
But there was no organized Negro opposition
to the war. In fact, there was little organized
opposition from any source. The Communist
party was enthusiastically in support. The
Socialist party was divided, unable to make
a clear statement one way or the other.
A few small anarchist and pacifist groups
refused to back the war. The Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom said: "war between
nations or classes or races cannot permanently
settle conflicts or heal the wounds that brought
them into being." The Catholic Worker wrote:
"We are still pacifists."
The difficulty of merely calling for "peace"
in a world of capitalism, Fascism, Communism-
dynamic ideologies, aggressive actions-troubled
some pacifists. They began to speak of "revolutionary
nonviolence." A. J. Muste of the Fellowship
of Reconciliation said in later years: "I
was not impressed with the sentimental, easy
going pacifism of the earlier part of the
century. People then felt that if they sat
and talked pleasantly of peace and love, they
would solve the problems of the world." The
world was in the midst of a revolution, Muste
realized, and those against violence must
take revolutionary action, but without violence.
A movement of revolutionary pacifism would
have to "make effective contacts with oppressed
and minority groups such as Negroes, share-croppers,
industrial workers."
Only one organized socialist group opposed
the war unequivocally. This was the Socialist
Workers Party. The Espionage Act of 1917,
still on the books, applied to wartime statements.
But in 1940, with the United States not yet
at war, Congress passed the Smith Act. This
took Espionage Act prohibitions against talk
or writing that would lead to refusal of duty
in the armed forces and applied them to peacetime.
The Smith Act also made it a crime to advocate
the overthrow of the government by force and
violence, or to join any group that advocated
this, or to publish anything with such ideas.
In Minneapolis in 1943, eighteen members of
the Socialist Workers party were convicted
for belonging to a party whose ideas, expressed
in its Declaration of Principles, and in the
Communist Manifesto, were said to violate
the Smith Act. They were sentenced to prison
terms, and the Supreme Court refused to review
their case.
A few voices continued to insist that the
real war was inside each nation: Dwight Macdonald's
wartime magazine Politics presented, in early
1945, an article by the French worker-philosopher
Simone Weil:
WHETHER THE MASK IS LABELLED FASCISM, DEMOCRACY,
OR DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT, OUR GREAT
ADVERSARY REMAINS THE APPARATUS-THE BUREAUCRACY,
THE POLICE, THE MILITARY. NOT THE ONE FACING
US ACROSS THE FRONTIER OR THE BATTLE LINES,
WHICH IS NOT SO MUCH OUR ENEMY AS OUR BROTHERS'
ENEMY, BUT THE ONE THAT CALLS ITSELF OUR PROTECTOR
AND MAKES US ITS SLAVES. NO MATTER WHAT THE
CIRCUMSTANCES, THE WORST BETRAYAL WILL ALWAYS
BE TO SUBORDINATE OURSELVES TO THIS APPARATUS,
AND TO TRAMPLE UNDERFOOT, IN ITS SERVICE,
ALL HUMAN VALUES IN OURSELVES AND IN OTHERS.
Still, the vast bulk of the American population
was mobilized, in the army, and in civilian
life, to fight the war, and the atmosphere
of war enveloped more and more Americans.
Public opinion polls show large majorities
of soldiers favouring the draft for the post
war period. Hatred against the enemy, against
the Japanese particularly, became widespread.
Racism was clearly at work. Time magazine,
reporting the battle of Iwo Jima, said: "The
ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps
he is human. Nothing indicates it."
So, there was a mass base of support for what
became the heaviest bombardment of civilians
ever undertaken in any war: the aerial attacks
on German and Japanese cities. One might argue
that this popular support made it a "people's
war." But if "people's war" means a war of
people against attack, a defensive war-if
it means a war fought for humane reasons instead
of for the privileges of an elite, a war against
the few, not the many-then the tactics of
all-out aerial assault against the populations
of Germany and Japan destroy that notion.
Italy had bombed cities in the Ethiopian war;
Italy and Germany had bombed civilians in
the Spanish Civil War; at the start of World
War II German planes dropped bombs on Rotterdam
in Holland, Coventry in England, and elsewhere.
Roosevelt had described these as "inhuman
barbarism that has profoundly shocked the
conscience of humanity."
These German bombings were very small compared
with the British and American bombings of
German cities. In January 1943, the Allies
met at Casablanca and agreed on large-scale
air attacks to achieve "the destruction and
dislocation of the German military, industrial
and economic system and the undermining of
the morale of the German people to the point
where their capacity for armed resistance
is fatally weakened." And so, the saturation
bombing of German cities began-with thousand
-plane raids on Cologne, Essen, Frankfurt,
Hamburg. The English flew at night with no
pretence of aiming at "military" targets;
the Americans flew in the daytime and pretended
precision, but bombing from high altitudes
made that impossible. The climax of this terror
bombing was the bombing of Dresden in early
1945, in which the tremendous heat generated
by the bombs created a vacuum into which fire
leaped swiftly in a great firestorm through
the city. More than 100,000 died in Dresden.
(Winston Churchill, in his wartime memoirs,
confined himself to this account of the incident:
"We made a heavy raid in the latter month
on Dresden, then a centre of communication
of Germany's Eastern Front")
The bombing of Japanese cities continued the
strategy of saturation bombing to destroy
civilian morale; one night time firebombing
of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. And then, on August
6, 1945, came the lone American plane in the
sky over Hiroshima, dropping the first atomic
bomb, leaving perhaps 100,000 Japanese dead,
and tens of thousands more slowly dying from
radiation poisoning. Twelve U.S. navy fliers
in the Hiroshima city jail were killed in
the bombing, a fact that the U.S. government
has never officially acknowledged, according
to historian Martin Sherwin (A World Destroyed).
Three days later, a second atomic bomb was
dropped on the city of Nagasaki, with perhaps
50,000 killed.
The justification for these atrocities was
that this would end the war quickly, making
unnecessary an invasion of Japan. Such an
invasion would cost a huge number of lives,
the government said-a million, according to
Secretary of State Byrnes; half a million,
Truman claimed was the figure given him by
General George Marshall. (When the papers
of the Manhattan Project-the project to build
the atom bomb- were released years later,
they showed that Marshall urged a warning
to the Japanese about the bomb, so people
could be removed and only military targets
hit.) These estimates of invasion losses were
not realistic, and seem to have been pulled
out of the air to justify bombings which,
as their effects became known, horrified more
and more people. Japan, by August 1945, was
in desperate shape and ready to surrender.
New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin
wrote, shortly after the war:
THE ENEMY, IN A MILITARY SENSE, WAS IN A HOPELESS
STRATEGIC POSITION BY THE TIME THE POTSDAM
DEMAND FOR UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER WAS MADE
ON JULY 26.
SUCH THEN, WAS THE SITUATION WHEN WE WIPED
OUT HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI.
NEED WE HAVE DONE IT? NO ONE CAN, OF COURSE,
BE POSITIVE, BUT THE ANSWER IS ALMOST CERTAINLY
NEGATIVE.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey,
set up by the War Department in 1944 to study
the results of aerial attacks in the war,
interviewed hundreds of Japanese civilian
and military leaders after Japan surrendered,
and reported just after the war:
BASED ON A DETAILED INVESTIGATION OF ALL THE
FACTS AND SUPPORTED BY THE TESTIMONY OF THE
SURVIVING JAPANESE LEADERS INVOLVED, IT IS
THE SURVEY'S OPINION THAT CERTAINLY PRIOR
TO 31 DECEMBER 1945, AND IN ALL PROBABILITY
PRIOR TO 1 NOVEMBER 1945, JAPAN WOULD HAVE
SURRENDERED EVEN IF THE ATOMIC BOMBS HAD NOT
BEEN DROPPED, EVEN IF RUSSIA HAD NOT ENTERED
THE WAR, AND EVEN IF NO INVASION HAD BEEN
PLANNED OR CONTEMPLATED.
But could American leaders have known this
in August 1945? The answer is, clearly, yes.
The Japanese code had been broken, and Japan's
messages were being intercepted. It was known
the Japanese had instructed their ambassador
in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with
the Allies. Japanese leaders had begun talking
of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor
himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945,
that alternatives to fighting to the end be
considered. On July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori
Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: "Unconditional
surrender is the only obstacle to peace."
Martin Sherwin, after an exhaustive study
of the relevant historical documents, concludes:
"Having broken the Japanese code before the
war, American Intelligence was able to-and
did-relay this message to the President, but
it had no effect whatever on efforts to bring
the war to a conclusion."
If only the Americans had not insisted on
unconditional surrender- that is, if they
were willing to accept one condition to the
surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure
to the Japanese, remain in place-the Japanese
would have agreed to stop the war.
Why did the United States not take that small
step to save both American and Japanese lives?
Was it because too much money and effort had
been invested in the atomic bomb not to drop
it? General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan
Project, described Truman as a man on a toboggan,
the momentum too great to stop it. Or was
it, as British scientist P. M. S. Blackett
suggested (Fear, War, and the Bomb), that
the United States was anxious to drop the
bomb before the Russians entered the war against
Japan?
The Russians had secretly agreed (they were
officially not at war with Japan) they would
come into the war ninety days after the end
of the European war. That turned out to be
May 8, and so, on August 8, the Russians were
due to declare war on Japan, but by then the
big bomb had been dropped, and the next day
a second one would be dropped on Nagasaki;
the Japanese would surrender to the United
States, not the Russians, and the United States
would be the occupier of post war Japan. In
other words, Blackett says, the dropping of
the bomb was "the first major operation of
the cold diplomatic war with Russia." Blackett
is supported by American historian Gar Alperovitz
(Atomic Diplomacy), who notes a diary entry
for July 28, 1945, by Secretary of the Navy
James Forrestal, describing Secretary of State
James F. Byrnes as "most anxious to get the
Japanese affair over with before the Russians
got in."
Truman had said, "The world will note that
the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
a military base. That was because we wished
in this first attack to avoid, insofar as
possible, the killing of civilians." It was
a preposterous statement. Those 100,000 killed
in Hiroshima were almost all civilians. The
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey said in its
official report: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
chosen as targets because of their concentration
of activities and population."
The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki
seems to have been scheduled in advance, and
no one has ever been able to explain why it
was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium
bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium
bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki
victims of a scientific experiment? Martin
Shenvin says that among the Nagasaki dead
were probably American prisoners of war. He
notes a message of July 31 from Headquarters,
U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces, Guam, to the
War Department:
REPORTS PRISONER OF WAR SOURCES, NOT VERIFIED
BY PHOTOS, GIVE LOCATION OF ALLIED PRISONER
OF WAR CAMP ONE MILE NORTH OF CENTRE OF CITY
OF NAGASAKI. DOES THIS INFLUENCE THE CHOICE
OF THIS TARGET FOR INITIAL CENTREBOARD OPERATION?
REQUEST IMMEDIATE REPLY.
The reply: "Targets previously assigned for
Centreboard remain unchanged."
True, the war then ended quickly. Italy had
been defeated a year earlier. Germany had
recently surrendered, crushed primarily by
the armies of the Soviet Union on the Eastern
Front, aided by the Allied armies on the West.
Now Japan surrendered. The Fascist powers
were destroyed.
But what about fascism-as idea, as reality?
Were its essential elements-militarism, racism,
imperialism-now gone? Or were they absorbed
into the already poisoned bones of the victors?
A. J. Muste, the revolutionary pacifist, had
predicted in 1941: "The problem after a war
is with the victor. He thinks he has just
proved that war and violence pay. Who will
now teach him a lesson?"
The victors were the Soviet Union and the
United States (also England, France and Nationalist
China, but they were weak). Both these countries
now went to work—without swastikas, goose-stepping,
or officially declared racism, but under the
cover of "socialism" on one side, and "democracy"
on the other, to carve out their own empires
of influence. They proceeded to share and
contest with one another the domination of
the world, to build military machines far
greater than the Fascist countries had built,
to control the destinies of more countries
than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been
able to do. They also acted to control their
own populations, each country with its own
techniques-crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated
in the United States—to make their rule
secure.
The war not only put the United States in
a position to dominate much of the world;
it created conditions for effective control
at home. The unemployment, the economic distress,
and the consequent turmoil that had marked
the thirties, only partly relieved by New
Deal measures, had been pacified, overcome
by the greater turmoil of the war. The war
brought higher prices for farmers, higher
wages, enough prosperity for enough of the
population to assure against the rebellions
that so threatened the thirties. As Lawrence
Wittner writes, "The war rejuvenated American
capitalism." The biggest gains were in corporate
profits, which rose from $6.4 billion in 1940
to $10.8 billion in 1944. But enough went
to workers and farmers to make them feel the
system was doing well for them.
It was an old lesson learned by governments:
that war solves problems of control. Charles
E. Wilson, the president of General Electric
Corporation, was so happy about the wartime
situation that he suggested a continuing alliance
between business and the military for "a permanent
war economy."
That is what happened. When, right after the
war, the American public, war-weary, seemed
to favour demobilization and disarmament,
the Truman administration (Roosevelt had died
in April 1945) worked to create an atmosphere
of crisis and cold war. True, the rivalry
with the Soviet Union was real—that country
had come out of the war with its economy wrecked
and 20 million people dead, but was making
an astounding comeback, rebuilding its industry,
regaining military strength. The Truman administration,
however, presented the Soviet Union as not
just a rival but an immediate threat.
In a series of moves abroad and at home, it
established a climate of fear a hysteria about
Communism which would steeply escalate the
military budget and stimulate the economy
with war-related orders. This combination
of policies would permit more aggressive actions
abroad, more repressive actions at home.
Revolutionary movements in Europe and Asia
were described to the American public as examples
of Soviet expansionism thus recalling the
indignation against Hitler's aggressions.
In Greece, which had been a right-wing monarchy
and dictatorship before the war, a popular
left-wing National Liberation Front (the EAM)
was put down by a British army of intervention
immediately after the war. A right-wing dictatorship
was restored. When opponents of the regime
were jailed, and trade union leaders removed,
a left-wing guerrilla movement began to grow
against the regime, soon consisting of 17,000
fighters, 50,000 active supporters, and perhaps
250,000 sympathizers, in a country of 7 million.
Great Britain said it could not handle the
rebellion, and asked the United States to
come in. As a State Department officer said
later: "Great Britain had within the hour
handed the job of world leadership to the
United States."
The United States responded with the Truman
Doctrine, the name given to a speech Truman
gave to Congress in the spring of 1947, in
which he asked for $400 million in military
and economic aid to Greece and Turkey. Truman
said the U.S. must help "free peoples who
are resisting attempted subjugation by armed
minorities or by outside pressures."
In fact, the biggest outside pressure was
the United States. The Greek rebels were getting
some aid from Yugoslavia, but no aid from
the Soviet Union, which during the war had
promised Churchill a free hand in Greece if
he would give the Soviet Union its way in
Rumania, Poland, Bulgaria. The Soviet Union,
like the United States, did not seem to be
willing to help revolutions it could not control.
Truman said the world "must choose between
alternative ways of life." One was based on
"the will of the majority distinguished by
free institutions"; the other was based on
"the will of a minority terror and oppression
the suppression of personal freedoms." Truman's
adviser Clark Clifford had suggested that
in his message Truman connect the intervention
in Greece to something less rhetorical, more
practical "the great natural resources of
the Middle East" (Clifford meant oil), but
Truman didn't mention that.
The United States moved into the Greek civil
war, not with soldiers, but with weapons and
military advisers. In the last five months
of 1947, 74,000 tons of military equipment
were sent by the United States to the right-wing
government in Athens, including artillery,
dive bombers, and stocks of napalm. Two hundred
and fifty army officers, headed by General
James Van Fleet, advised the Greek army in
the field. Van Fleet started a policy—standard
in dealing with popular insurrections of forcibly
removing thousands of Greeks from their homes
in the countryside, to try to isolate the
guerrillas, to remove the source of their
support.
With that aid, the rebellion was defeated
by 1949. United States economic and military
aid continued to the Greek government. Investment
capital from Esso, Dow Chemical, Chrysler,
and other U.S. corporations flowed into Greece.
But illiteracy, poverty, and starvation remained
widespread there, with the country in the
hands of what Richard Barnet (Intervention
and Revolution) called "a particularly brutal
and backward military dictatorship."
In China, a revolution was already under way
when World War II ended, led by a Communist
movement with enormous mass support. A Red
Army, which had fought against the Japanese,
now fought to oust the corrupt dictatorship
of Chiang Kai-shek, which was supported by
the United States. The United States, by 1949,
had given $2 billion in aid to Chiang Kai-shek's
forces, but, according to the State Department's
own White Paper on China, Chiang Kai-shek's
government had lost the confidence of its
own troops and its own people. In January
1949, Chinese Communist forces moved into
Peking, the civil war was over, and China
was in the hands of a revolutionary movement,
the closest thing, in the long history of
that ancient country, to a people's government,
independent of outside control.
The United States was trying, in the post
war decade, to create a national consensus
excluding the radicals, who could not support
a foreign policy aimed at suppressing revolution
of conservatives and liberals, Republicans
and Democrats, around the policies of cold
war and anti- Communism. Such a coalition
could best be created by a liberal Democratic
President, whose aggressive policy abroad
would be supported by conservatives, and whose
welfare programs at home (Truman's "Fair Deal")
would be attractive to liberals. If, in addition,
liberals and traditional Democrats could-the
memory of the war was still fresh- support
a foreign policy against "aggression," the
radical-liberal bloc created by World War
II would be broken up. And perhaps, if the
Anti-Communist mood became strong enough,
liberals could support repressive moves at
home which in ordinary times would be seen
as violating the liberal tradition of tolerance.
In 1950, there came an event that speeded
the formation of the liberal-conservative
consensus Truman's undeclared war in Korea.
Korea, occupied by Japan for thirty-five years,
was liberated from Japan after World War II
and divided into North Korea, a socialist
dictatorship, part of the Soviet sphere of
influence, and South Korea, a right-wing dictatorship,
in the American sphere. There had been threats
back and forth between the two Koreas, and
when on June 25, 1950, North Korean armies
moved southward across the 38th parallel in
an invasion of South Korea, the United Nations,
dominated by the United States, asked its
members to help "repel the armed attack."
Truman ordered the American armed forces to
help South Korea, and the American army became
the U.N. army. Truman said: "A return to the
rule of force in international affairs would
have far-reaching effects. The United States
will continue to uphold the rule of law."
The United States' response to "the rule of
force" was to reduce Korea, North and South,
to a shamble’s, in three years of bombing
and shelling. Napalm was dropped, and a BBC
journalist described the result:
In front of us a curious figure was standing,
a little crouched, legs straddled, arms held
out from his sides. He had no eyes, and the
whole of his body, nearly all of which was
visible through tatters of burnt rags, was
covered with a hard-black crust speckled with
yellow pus. He had to stand because he was
no longer covered with a skin, but with a
crust-like crackling which broke easily. I
thought of the hundreds of villages reduced
to ash which I personally had seen and realized
the sort of casualty list which must be mounting
up along the Korean front.
Perhaps 2 million Koreans, North and South,
were killed in the Korean war, all in the
name of opposing "the rule of force."
As for the rule of law Truman spoke about,
the American military moves seemed to go beyond
that. The U.N. resolution had called for action
"to repel the armed attack and to restore
peace and security in the area." But the American,
armies, after pushing the North Koreans back
across the 38th parallel, advanced all the
way up through North Korea to the Yalu River,
on the border of China-which provoked the
Chinese into entering the war. The Chinese
then swept southward and the war was stalemated
at the 38th parallel until peace negotiations
restored, in 1953, the old boundary between
North and South.
The Korean war mobilized liberal opinion behind
the war and the President. It created the
kind of coalition that was needed to sustain
a policy of intervention abroad, militarization
of the economy at home. This meant trouble
for those who stayed outside the coalition
as radical critics. Alonzo Hamby noted (Beyond
the New Deal) that the Korean war was supported
by The New Republic, by The Nation, and by
Henry Wallace (who in 1948 had run against
Truman on a left coalition Progressive party
ticket). The liberals didn't like Senator
Joseph McCarthy (who hunted for Communists
everywhere, even among liberals), but the
Korean war, as Hamby says, "had given McCarthyism
a new lease on life."
The left had become very influential in the
hard times of the thirties, and during the
war against Fascism. The actual membership
of the Communist party was not large-fewer
than 100,000 probably-but it was a potent
force in trade unions numbering millions of
members, in the arts, and among countless
Americans who may have been led by the failure
of the capitalist system in the thirties to
look favourably on Communism and Socialism.
Thus, if the Establishment, after World War
II, was to make capitalism more secure in
the country, and to build a consensus of support
for the American Empire, it had to weaken
and isolate the left.
Two weeks after presenting to the country
the Truman Doctrine for Greece and Turkey,
Truman issued, on March 22, 1947, Executive
Order 9835, initiating a program to search
out any "infiltration of disloyal persons"
in the U.S. government. In their book The
Fifties, Douglas Miller and Marion Nowack
comment:
THOUGH TRUMAN WOULD LATER COMPLAIN OF THE
"GREAT WAVE OF HYSTERIA" SWEEPING THE NATION,
HIS COMMITMENT TO VICTORY OVER COMMUNISM,
TO COMPLETELY SAFEGUARDING THE UNITED STATES
FROM EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL THREATS, WAS IN
LARGE MEASURE RESPONSIBLE FOR CREATING THAT
VERY HYSTERIA. BETWEEN THE LAUNCHING OF HIS
SECURITY PROGRAM IN MARCH 1947 AND DECEMBER
1952, SOME 6.6 MILLION PERSONS WERE INVESTIGATED.
NOT A SINGLE CASE OF ESPIONAGE WAS UNCOVERED,
THOUGH ABOUT 500 PERSONS WERE DISMISSED IN
DUBIOUS CASES OF "QUESTIONABLE LOYALTY." ALL
OF THIS WAS CONDUCTED WITH SECRET EVIDENCE,
SECRET AND OFTEN PAID INFORMERS, AND NEITHER
JUDGE NOR JURY. DESPITE THE FAILURE TO FIND
SUBVERSION, THE BROAD SCOPE OF THE OFFICIAL
RED HUNT GAVE POPULAR CREDENCE TO THE NOTION
THAT THE GOVERNMENT WAS RIDDLED WITH SPIES.
A CONSERVATIVE AND FEARFUL REACTION COURSED
THE COUNTRY. AMERICANS BECAME CONVINCED OF
THE NEED FOR ABSOLUTE SECURITY AND THE PRESERVATION
OF THE ESTABLISHED ORDER.
World events right after the war made it easier
to build up public support for the Anti-Communist
crusade at home. In 1948, the Communist party
in Czechoslovakia ousted non-Communists from
the government and established their own rule.
The Soviet Union that year blockaded Berlin,
which was a jointly occupied city isolated
inside the Soviet sphere of East Germany,
forcing the United States to airlift supplies
into Berlin. In 1949, there was the Communist
victory in China, and in that year, also,
the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic
bomb. In 1950 the Korean war began. These
were all portrayed to the public as signs
of a world Communist conspiracy.
Not as publicized as the Communist victories,
but just as disturbing to the American government,
was the upsurge all over the world of colonial
peoples demanding independence. Revolutionary
movements were growing—in Indochina against
the French; in Indonesia against the Dutch;
in the Philippines, armed rebellion against
the United States.
In Africa, there were rumblings of discontent
in the form of strikes. Basil Davidson (Let
Freedom Come) tells of the longest recorded
strike (160 days) in African history, of 19,000
railwaymen in French West Africa in 1947,
whose message to the governor general showed
the new mood of militancy: "Open your prisons,
make ready your machine guns and cannon. Nevertheless,
at midnight on 10 October, if our demands
are not met, we declare the general strike."
The year before in South Africa, 100,000 gold
mine workers stopped work, demanding ten shillings
(about $2.50) a day in wages, the greatest
strike in the history of South Africa, and
it took a military attack to get them back
to work. In 1950, in Kenya, there was a general
strike against starvation wages.
So it was not just Soviet expansion that was
threatening to the United States government
and to American business interests. In fact,
China, Korea, Indochina, the Philippines,
represented local Communist movements, not
Russian fomentation. It was a general wave
of anti- imperialist insurrection in the world,
which would require gigantic American effort
to defeat: national unity for militarization
of the budget, for the suppression of domestic
opposition to such a foreign policy. Truman
and the liberals in Congress proceeded to
try to create a new national unity for the
post war years with the executive order on
loyalty oaths, Justice Department prosecutions,
and Anti-Communist legislation.
In this atmosphere, Senator Joseph McCarthy
of Wisconsin could go even further than Truman.
Speaking to a Women's Republican Club in Wheeling,
West Virginia, in early 1950, he held up some
papers and shouted: "I have here in my hand
a list of 205—a list of names that were
made known to the Secretary of State as being
members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless
are still working and shaping policy in the
State Department." The next day, speaking
in Salt Lake City, McCarthy claimed he had
a list of fifty-seven (the number kept changing)
such Communists in the State Department. Shortly
afterward, he appeared on the floor of the
Senate with photo static copies of about a
hundred dossiers from State Department loyalty
files. The dossiers were three years old,
and most of the people were no longer with
the State Department, but McCarthy read from
them anyway, inventing, adding, and changing
as he read. In one case, he changed the dossier's
description of "liberal" to "communistically
inclined," in another form "active fellow
traveller" to "active Communist," and so on.
McCarthy kept on like this for the next few
years. As chairman of the Permanent Investigations
Sub-Committee of a Senate Committee on Government
Operations, he investigated the State Department's
information program, its Voice of America,
and its overseas libraries, which included
books by people McCarthy considered Communists.
The State Department reacted in panic, issuing
a stream of directives to its library centres
across the world. Forty books were removed,
including The Selected Works of Thomas Jefferson,
edited by Philip Foner, and The Children's
Hour by Lillian Hellman. Some books were burned.
McCarthy became bolder. In the spring of 1954
he began hearings to investigate supposed
subversives in the military. When he began
attacking generals for not being hard enough
on suspected Communists, he antagonized Republicans
as well as Democrats, and in December 1954,
the Senate voted overwhelmingly to censure
him for "conduct . . .unbecoming a Member
of the United States Senate." The censure
resolution avoided criticizing McCarthy's
Anti-Communist lies and exaggerations; it
concentrated on minor matters on his refusal
to appear before a Senate Subcommittee on
Privileges and Elections, and his abuse of
an army general at his hearings.
At the very time the Senate was censuring
McCarthy, Congress was putting through a whole
series of Anti-Communist bills. Liberal Hubert
Humphrey introduced an amendment to one of
them to make the Communist party illegal,
saying: "I do not intend to be a half patriot.
Either Senators are for recognizing the Communist
Party for what it is, or they will continue
to trip over the niceties of legal technicalities
and details."
The liberals in the government were themselves
acting to exclude, persecute, fire, and even
imprison Communists. It was just that McCarthy
had gone too far, attacking not only Communists
but liberals, endangering that broad liberal-conservative
coalition which was considered essential.
For instance, Lyndon Johnson, as Senate minority
leader, worked not only to pass the censure
resolution on McCarthy but also to keep it
within the narrow bounds of "conduct unbecoming
a Member of the United States Senate" rather
than questioning McCarthy's anti-Communism.
John F. Kennedy was cautious on the issue,
didn't speak out against McCarthy (he was
absent when the censure vote was taken and
never said how he would have voted). McCarthy's
insistence that Communism had won in China
because of softness on Communism in the American
government was close to Kennedy's own view,
expressed in the House of Representatives,
January 1949, when the Chinese Communists
took over Peking. Kennedy said:
MR SPEAKER, OVER THIS WEEKEND WE HAVE LEARNED
THE EXTENT OF THE DISASTER THAT HAS BEFALLEN
CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES. THE RESPONSIBILITY
FOR THE FAILURE OF OUR FOREIGN POLICY IN THE
FAR EAST RESTS SQUARELY WITH THE WHITE HOUSE
AND THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE.
THE CONTINUED INSISTENCE THAT AID WOULD NOT
BE FORTHCOMING UNLESS A COALITION GOVERNMENT
WITH THE COMMUNISTS WAS FORMED, WAS A CRIPPLING
BLOW TO THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT.
SO, CONCERNED WERE OUR DIPLOMATS AND THEIR
ADVISERS, THE LATTIMORES AND THE FAIRBANKS
[BOTH SCHOLARS IN THE FIELD OF CHINESE HISTORY,
OWEN LATTIMORE A FAVOURITE TARGET OF MCCARTHY,
JOHN FAIRBANK, A HARVARD PROFESSOR], WITH
THE IMPERFECTION OF THE DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM
IN CHINA AFTER 20 YEARS OF WAR AND THE TALES
OF CORRUPTION IN HIGH PLACES THAT THEY LOST
SIGHT OF OUR TREMENDOUS STAKE IN A NON-COMMUNIST
CHINA.
THIS HOUSE MUST NOW ASSUME THE RESPONSIBILITY
OF PREVENTING THE ONRUSHING TIDE OF COMMUNISM
FROM ENGULFING ALL OF ASIA.
When, in 1950, Republicans sponsored an Internal
Security Act for the registration of organizations
found to be "Communist-action" or "Communist-front,"
liberal Senators did not fight that head-on.
Instead, some of them, including Hubert Humphrey
and Herbert Lehman, proposed a substitute
measure, the setting up of detention centres
(really, concentration camps) for suspected
subversives, who, when the President declared
an "internal security emergency," would be
held without trial. The detention-camp bill
became not a substitute for, but an addition
to, the Internal Security Act, and the proposed
camps were set up, ready for use. (In 1968,
a time of general disillusionment with anti-Communism,
this law was repealed.)
Truman's executive order on loyalty in 1947
required the Department of Justice to draw
up a list of organizations it decided were
"totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive
. . . or as seeking to alter the form of government
of the United States by unconstitutional means."
Not only membership in, but also "sympathetic
association" with, any organization on the
Attorney General's list would be considered
in determining disloyalty. By 1954, there
were hundreds of groups on this list, including,
besides the Communist party and the Ku Klux
Klan, the Chopin Cultural Centre, the Cervantes
Fraternal Society, the Committee for the Negro
in the Arts, the Committee for the Protection
of the Bill of Rights, the League of American
Writers, the Nature Friends of America, People's
Drama, the Washington Bookshop Association,
and the Yugoslav Seaman's Club.
It was not McCarthy and the Republicans, but
the liberal Democratic Truman administration,
whose Justice Department initiated a series
of prosecutions that intensified the nation's
Anti-Communist mood. The most important was
the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
in the summer of 1950.
The Rosenbergs were charged with espionage.
The major evidence was supplied by a few people
who had already confessed to being spies,
and were either in prison or under indictment.
David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg,
was the key witness. He had been a machinist
at the Manhattan Project laboratory at Los
Alamos, New Mexico, in 1944-1945 when the
atomic bomb was being made there and testified
that Julius Rosenberg had asked him to get
information for the Russians. Greenglass said
he had made sketches from memory for his brother-in-law
of experiments with lenses to be used to detonate
atomic bombs. He said Rosenberg had given
him half of the cardboard top to a box of
Jell-O, and told him a man would show up in
New Mexico with the other half, and that,
in June 1945, Harry Gold appeared with the
other half of the box top, and Greenglass
gave him information he had memorized.
Gold, already serving a thirty-year sentence
in another espionage case, came out of jail
to corroborate Greenglass's testimony. He
had never met the Rosenbergs, but said a Soviet
embassy official gave him half of a top to
a box of Jell-O, and told him to contact Greenglass,
saying, "I come from Julius." Gold said he
took the sketches Greenglass had drawn from
memory and gave them to the Russian official.
There were troubling aspects to all this.
Did Gold cooperate in return for early release
from prison? After serving fifteen years of
his thirty-year sentence, he was paroled.
Did Greenglass under indictment at the time
he testified-also know that his life depended
on his cooperation? He was given fifteen years,
served half of it, and was released. How reliable
a memorizer of atomic information was David
Greenglass, an ordinary level machinist, not
a scientist, who had taken six courses at
Brooklyn Poly Technical Institute and flunked
five of them? Gold's and Greenglass's stories
had first not been in accord. But they were
both placed on the same floor of the Tombs
prison in New York before the trial, giving
them a chance to coordinate their testimony.
How reliable was Gold's testimony? It turned
out that he had been prepared for the Rosenberg
case by four hundred hours of interviews with
the FBI. It also turned out that Gold was
a frequent and highly imaginative liar. He
was a witness in a later trial where defense
counsel asked Gold about his invention of
a fictional wife and fictional children. The
attorney asked: "you lied for a period of
six years?" Gold responded: "I lied for a
period of sixteen years, not alone six years."
Gold was the only witness at the trial to
connect Julius Rosenberg and David Greenglass
to the Russians. The FBI agent who had questioned
Gold was interviewed twenty years after the
case by a journalist. He was asked about the
password Gold was supposed to have used-"Julius
sent me." The FBI man said:
GOLD COULDN'T REMEMBER THE NAME HE HAD GIVEN.
HE THOUGHT HE HAD SAID: I COME FROM - OR SOMETHING
LIKE THAT. I SUGGESTED, "MIGHT IT HAVE BEEN
JULIUS?"
THAT REFRESHED HIS MEMORY.
When the Rosenbergs were found guilty, and
Judge Irving Kaufman pronounced sentence,
he said:
I BELIEVE YOUR CONDUCT IN PUTTING INTO THE
HANDS OF THE RUSSIANS THE A-BOMB YEARS BEFORE
OUR BEST SCIENTISTS PREDICTED RUSSIA WOULD
PERFECT THE BOMB AS ALREADY CAUSED THE COMMUNIST
AGGRESSION IN KOREA WITH THE RESULTANT CASUALTIES
EXCEEDING 50,000 AMERICANS AND WHO KNOWS BUT
THAT MILLIONS MORE OF INNOCENT PEOPLE MAY
PAY THE PRICE OF YOUR TREASON.
He sentenced them both to die in the electric
chair.
Morton Sobell was also on trial as a co-conspirator
with the Rosenbergs. The chief witness against
him was an old friend, the best man at his
wedding, a man who was facing possible perjury
charges by the federal government for lying
about his political past. This was Max Elitcher,
who testified that he had once driven Sobell
to a Manhattan housing project where the Rosenbergs
lived, and that Sobell got out of the car,
took from the glove compartment what appeared
to be a film can, went off, and then returned
without the can. There was no evidence about
what was in the film can. The case against
Sobell seemed so weak that Sobell's lawyer
decided there was no need to present a defence.
But the jury found Sobell guilty, and Kaufman
sentenced him to thirty years in prison. He
was sent to Alcatraz, parole was repeatedly
denied, and he spent nineteen years in various
prisons before he was released.
FBI documents subpoenaed in the 1970s showed
that Judge Kaufman had conferred with the
prosecutors secretly about the sentences he
would give in the case. Another document shows
that after three years of appeal a meeting
took place between Attorney General Herbert
Brownell and Chief Justice Fred Vinson of
the Supreme Court, and the chief justice assured
the Attorney General that if any Supreme Court
justice gave a stay of execution, he would
immediately call a full court session and
override it.
There had been a worldwide campaign of protest.
Albert Einstein, whose letter to Roosevelt
early in the war had initiated work on the
atomic bomb, appealed for the Rosenbergs,
as did Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and
the sister of Bartolomeo Vanzetti. There was
an appeal to President Truman, just before
he left office in the spring of 1953. It was
turned down. Then, another appeal to the new
President, Dwight Eisenhower, was also turned
down.
At the last moment, Justice William O. Douglas
granted a stay of execution. Chief Justice
Vinson sent out special jets to bring the
vacationing justices back to Washington from
various parts of the country. They cancelled
Douglas's stay in time for the Rosenbergs
to be executed June 19, 1953. It was a demonstration
to the people of the country, though very
few could identify with the Rosenbergs, of
what lay at the end of the line for those
the government decided were traitors.
In that same period of the early fifties,
the House Un-American Activities Committee
was at its heyday, interrogating Americans
about their Communist connections, holding
them in contempt if they refused to answer,
distributing millions of pamphlets to the
American public: "One Hundred Things You Should
Know About Communism" ("Where can Communists
be found? Everywhere"). Liberals often criticized
the Committee, but in Congress, liberals and
conservatives alike voted to fund it year
after year. By 1958, only one member of the
House of Representatives (James Roosevelt)
voted against giving it money. Although Truman
criticized the Committee, his own Attorney
General had expressed, in 1950, the same idea
that motivated its investigations: "There
are today many Communists in America. They
are everywhere in factories, offices, butcher
shops, on street corners, in private business
and each carries in himself the germs of death
for society."
Liberal intellectuals rode the Anti-Communist
bandwagon. Commentary magazine denounced the
Rosenbergs and their supporters. One of Commentary's
writers, Irving Kristol, asked in March 1952:
"Do we defend our rights by protecting Communists?"
His answer: "No."
It was Truman's Justice Department that prosecuted
the leaders of the Communist party under the
Smith Act, charging them with conspiring to
teach and advocate the overthrow of the government
by force and violence. The evidence consisted
mostly of the fact that the Communists were
distributing Marxist-Leninist literature,
which the prosecution contended called for
violent revolution. There was certainly not
evidence of any immediate danger of violent
revolution by the Communist party. The Supreme
Court decision was given by Truman's appointee,
Chief Justice Vinson. He stretched the old
doctrine of the "clear and present danger"
by saying there was a clear and present conspiracy
to make a revolution at some convenient time.
And so, the top leadership of the Communist
party was put in prison, and soon after, most
of its organizers went underground.
Undoubtedly, there was success in the attempt
to make the general public fearful of Communists
and ready to take drastic actions against
them imprisonment at home, military action
abroad. The whole culture was permeated with
Anti-Communism. The large-circulation magazines
had articles like "How Communists Get That
Way" and "Communists Are After Your Child."
The New York Times in 1956 ran an editorial:
"We would not knowingly employ a Communist
party member in the news or editorial departments
because we would not trust his ability to
report the news objectively or to comment
on it honestly. An FBI informer's story about
his exploits as a Communist who became an
FBI agent" I Led Three Lives" was serialized
in five hundred newspapers and put on television.
Hollywood movies had titles like I Married
a Communist and I Was a Communist for the
FBI. Between 1948 and 1954, more than forty
Anti-Communist films came out of Hollywood.
Even the American Civil Liberties Union, set
up specifically to defend the liberties of
Communists and all other political groups,
began to wilt in the cold war atmosphere.
It had already started in this direction back
in 1940 when it expelled one of its charter
members, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, because she
was a member of the Communist party. In the
fifties, the ACLU was hesitant to defend Corliss
Lamont, its own board member, and Owen Lattimore,
when both were under attack. It was reluctant
to defend publicly the Communist leaders during
the first Smith Act trial, and kept completely
out of the Rosenberg case, saying no civil
liberties issues were involved.
Young and old were taught that anti-Communism
was heroic. Three million copies were sold
of the book by Mickey Spillane published in
1951, One Lonely Night, in which the hero,
Mike Hammer says: "I killed more people tonight
than I have fingers on my hands. I shot them
in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of
it. They were Commies red sons of bitches
who should have died long ago." A comic strip
hero, Captain America, said: "Beware, commies,
spies, traitors, and foreign agents! Captain
America, with all loyal, free men behind him,
is looking for you." And in the fifties, schoolchildren
all over the country participated in air raid
drills in which a Soviet attack on America
was signalled by sirens: the children had
to crouch under their desks until it was "all
clear."
It was an atmosphere in which the government
could get mass support for a policy of rearmament.
The system, so shaken in the thirties, had
learned that war production could bring stability
and high profits. Truman's anti-Communism
was attractive. The business publication Steel
had said in November 1946-even before the
Truman Doctrine that Truman's policies gave
"the firm assurance that maintaining and building
our preparations for war will be big business
in the United States for at least a considerable
period ahead."
That prediction turned out to be accurate.
At the start of 1950, the total U.S. budget
was about $40 billion, and the military part
of it was about $12 billion. But by 1955,
the military part alone was $40 billion out
of a total of $62 billion.
In 1960, the military budget was $45.8 billion—9.7
percent of the budget. That year John F. Kennedy
was elected President, and he immediately
moved to increase military spending. In fourteen
months, the Kennedy administration added $9
billion to defence funds, according to Edgar
Bottome (The Balance of Terror).
By 1962, based on a series of invented scares
about Soviet military build-ups, a false "bomber
gap" and a false "missile gap," the United
States had overwhelming nuclear superiority.
It had the equivalent, in nuclear weapons,
of 1,500 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs, far
more than enough to destroy every major city
in the world-the equivalent, in fact, of 10
tons of TNT for every man, woman, and child
on earth. To deliver these bombs, the United
States had more than 50 intercontinental ballistic
missiles, 80 missiles on nuclear submarines,
90 missiles on stations overseas, 1,700 bombers
capable of reaching the Soviet Union, 300
fighter-bombers on aircraft carriers, able
to carry atomic weapons, and 1,000 land-based
supersonic fighters able to carry atomic bombs.
The Soviet Union was obviously behind it had
between fifty and a hundred intercontinental
ballistic missiles and fewer than two hundred
long-range bombers. But the U.S. budget kept
mounting, the hysteria kept growing, the profits
of corporations getting defence contracts
multiplied, and employment and wages moved
ahead just enough to keep a substantial number
of Americans dependent on war industries for
their living.
By 1970, the U.S. military budget was $80
billion and the corporations involved in military
production were making fortunes. Two-thirds
of the 40 billion spent on weapons systems
was going to twelve or fifteen giant industrial
corporations, whose main reason for existence
was to fulfil government military contracts.
Senator Paul Douglass, an economist and chairman
of the Joint Economic Committee of the Senate,
noted that "six-sevenths of these contracts
are not competitive. In the alleged interest
of secrecy, the government picks a company
and draws up a contract in more or less secret
negotiations."
C. Wright Mills, in his book of the fifties,
The Power Elite, counted the military as part
of the top elite, along with politicians and
corporations. These elements were more and
more intertwined. A Senate report showed that
the one hundred largest defence contractors,
who held 67.4 percent of the military contracts,
employed more than two thousand former high-ranking
officers of the military.
Meanwhile, the United States, giving economic
aid to certain countries, was creating a network
of American corporate control over the globe,
and building its political influence over
the countries it aided. The Marshall Plan
of 1948, which gave $16 billion in economic
aid to Western European countries in four
years, had an economic aim: to build up markets
for American exports. George Marshall (a general,
then Secretary of State) was quoted in an
early 1948 State Department bulletin: "It
is idle to think that a Europe left to its
own efforts would remain open to American
business in the same way that we have known
it in the past."
The Marshall Plan also had a political motive.
The Communist parties of Italy and France
were strong, and the United States decided
to use pressure and money to keep Communists
out of the cabinets of those countries. When
the Plan was beginning, Truman's Secretary
of State Dean Acheson said: "These measures
of relief and reconstruction have been only
in part suggested by humanitarianism. Your
Congress has authorized and your Government
is carrying out, a policy of relief and reconstruction
today chiefly as a matter of national self-interest."
From 1952 on, foreign aid was more and more
obviously designed to build up military power
in non-Communist countries. In the next ten
years, of the $50 billion in aid granted by
the United States to ninety countries, only
$5 billion was for non-military economic development.
When John F. Kennedy took office, he launched
the Alliance for Progress, a program of help
for Latin America, emphasizing social reform
to better the lives of people. But it turned
out to be mostly military aid to keep in power
right-wing dictatorships and enable them to
stave off revolutions.
From military aid, it was a short step to
military intervention. What Truman had said
at the start of the Korean war about "the
rule of force" and the "rule of law" was again
and again, under Truman and his successors,
contradicted by American action. In Iran,
in 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency succeeded
in overthrowing a government which nationalized
the oil industry. In Guatemala, in 1954, a
legally elected government was overthrown
by an invasion force of mercenaries trained
by the CIA at military bases in Honduras and
Nicaragua and supported by four American fighter
planes flown by American pilots. The invasion
put into power Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas,
who had at one time received military training
at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The government that the United States overthrew
was the most democratic Guatemala had ever
had. The President, Jacobo Arbenz, was a left
of centre Socialist; four of the fifty-six
seats in the Congress were held by Communists.
What was most unsettling to American business
interests was that Arbenz had expropriated
234,000 acres of land owned by United Fruit,
offering compensation that United Fruit called
"unacceptable." Armas, in power, gave the
land back to United Fruit, abolished the tax
on interest and dividends to foreign investors,
eliminated the secret ballot, and jailed thousands
of political critics.
In 1958, the Eisenhower government sent thousands
of marines to Lebanon to make sure the pro-American
government there was not toppled by a revolution,
and to keep an armed presence in that oil-rich
area.
The Democrat Republican, liberal-conservative
agreement to prevent or overthrow revolutionary
governments whenever possible whether Communist,
Socialist, or anti-United Fruit-became most
evident in 1961 in Cuba. That little island
90 miles from Florida had gone through a revolution
in 1959 by a rebel force led by Fidel Castro,
in which the American-backed dictator, Fulgencio
Batista, was overthrown. The revolution was
a direct threat to American business interests.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbour Policy
had repealed the Platt Amendment (which permitted
American intervention in Cuba), but the United
States still kept a naval base in Cuba at
Guantanamo, and U.S. business interests still
dominated the Cuban economy. American companies
controlled 80 to 100 percent of Cuba's utilities,
mines, cattle ranches, and oil refineries,
40 percent of the sugar industry, and 50 percent
of the public railways.
Fidel Castro had spent time in prison after
he led an unsuccessful attack in 1953 on an
army barracks in Santiago. Out of prison,
he went to Mexico, met Argentine revolutionary
Che Guevara, and returned in 1956 to Cuba.
His tiny force fought guerrilla warfare from
the jungles and mountains against Batista's
army, drawing more and more popular support,
then came out of the mountains and marched
across the country to Havana. The Batista
government fell apart on New Year's Day 1959.
In power, Castro moved to set up a nationwide
system of education, of housing, of land distribution
to landless peasants. The government confiscated
over a million acres of land from three American
companies, including United Fruit.
Cuba needed money to finance its programs,
and the United States was not eager to lend
it. The International Monetary Fund, dominated
by the United States, would not loan money
to Cuba because Cuba would not accept its
"stabilization" conditions, which seemed to
undermine the revolutionary program that had
begun. When Cuba now signed a trade agreement
with the Soviet Union, American-owned oil
companies in Cuba refused to refine crude
oil that came from the Soviet Union. Castro
seized these companies. The United States
cut down on its sugar buying from Cuba, on
which Cuba's economy depended, and the Soviet
Union immediately agreed to buy all the 700,000
tons of sugar that the United States would
not buy.
Cuba had changed. The Good Neighbour Policy
did not apply. In the spring of 1960, President
Eisenhower secretly authorized the Central
Intelligence Agency to arm and train anti-Castro
Cuban exiles in Guatemala for a future invasion
of Cuba. When Kennedy took office in the spring
of 1961 the CIA had 1,400 exiles, armed and
trained. He moved ahead with the plans, and
on April 17, 1961, the CIA-trained force,
with some Americans participating, landed
at the Bay of Pigs on the south shore of Cuba,
90 miles from Havana. They expected to stimulate
a general rising against Castro. But it was
a popular regime. There was no rising. In
three days, the CIA forces were crushed by
Castro's army.
The whole Bay of Pigs affair was accompanied
by hypocrisy and lying. The invasion was a
violation—recalling Truman's "rule of law"
of a treaty the U.S. had signed, the Charter
of the Organization of American States, which
reads: "No state or group of states has the
right to intervene, directly or indirectly,
for any reason whatever, in the internal or
external affairs of any other state."
Four days before the invasion-because there
had been press reports of secret bases and
CIA training for invaders President Kennedy
told a press conference: ". . . there will
not be, under any conditions, any intervention
in Cuba by United States armed forces." True,
the landing force was Cuban, but it was all
organized by the United States, and American
war planes, including American pilots, were
involved; Kennedy had approved the use of
unmarked navy jets in the invasion. Four American
pilots of those planes were killed, and their
families were not told the truth about how
those men died.
The success of the liberal-conservative coalition
in creating a national Anti-Communist consensus
was shown by how certain important news publications
cooperated with the Kennedy administration
in deceiving the American public on the Cuban
invasion. The New Republic was about to print
an article on the CIA training of Cuban exiles,
a few weeks before the invasion. Historian
Arthur Schlesinger was given copies of the
article in advance. He showed them to Kennedy,
who asked that the article not be printed,
and The New Republic went along.
James Reston and Turner Catledge of the New
York Times, on the government's request, did
not run a story about the imminent invasion.
Arthur Schlesinger said of the New York Times
action: "This was another patriotic act, but
in retrospect I have wondered whether, if
the press had behaved irresponsibly, it would
not have spared the country a disaster." What
seemed to bother him, and other liberals in
the cold war consensus, was not that the United
States was interfering in revolutionary movements
in other countries, but that it was doing
so unsuccessfully.
Around 1960, the fifteen-year effort since
the end of World War II to break up the Communist-radical
upsurge of the New Deal and wartime years
seemed successful. The Communist party was
in disarray-its leaders in jail, its membership
shrunken, its influence in the trade union
movement very small. The trade union movement
itself had become more controlled, more conservative.
The military budget was taking half of the
national budget, but the public was accepting
this.
The radiation from the testing of nuclear
weapons had dangerous possibilities for human
health, but the public was not aware of that.
The Atomic Energy Commission insisted that
the deadly effects of atomic tests were exaggerated,
and an article in 1955 in the Reader's Digest
(the largest-circulation magazine in the United
States) said: "The scare stories about this
country's atomic tests are simply not justified."
In the mid-fifties, there was a flurry of
enthusiasm for air-raid shelters; the public
was being told these would keep them safe
from atomic blasts. A government consultant
and scientist, Herman Kahn, wrote a book,
On Thermonuclear War, in which he explained
that it was possible to have a nuclear war
without total destruction of the world, that
people should not be so frightened of it.
A political scientist named Henry Kissinger
wrote a book published in 1957 in which he
said: "With proper tactics, nuclear war need
not be as destructive as it appears."
The country was on a permanent war economy
which had big pockets of poverty, but there
were enough people at work, making enough
money, to keep things quiet. The distribution
of wealth was still unequal. From 1944 to
1961, it had not changed much: the lowest
fifth of the families received 5 percent of
all the income; the highest fifth received
45 percent of all the income. In 1953, 1.6
percent of the adult population owned more
than 80 percent of the corporate stock and
nearly 90 percent of the corporate bonds.
About 200 giant corporations out of 200,000
corporations one tenth of 1 percent of all
corporations controlled about 60 percent of
the manufacturing wealth of the nation.
When John F. Kennedy presented his budget
to the nation after his first year in office,
it was clear that, liberal Democrat or not,
there would be no major change in the distribution
of income or wealth or tax advantages. New
York Times columnist James Reston summed up
Kennedy's budget messages as avoiding any
"sudden transformation of the home front"
as well as "a more ambitious frontal attack
on the unemployment problem." Reston said:
HE AGREED TO A TAX BREAK FOR BUSINESS INVESTMENT
IN PLANT EXPANSION AND MODERNIZATION. HE IS
NOT SPOILING FOR A FIGHT WITH THE SOUTHERN
CONSERVATIVES OVER CIVIL RIGHTS. HE HAS BEEN
URGING THE UNIONS TO KEEP WAGE DEMANDS DOWN
SO THAT PRICES CAN BE COMPETITIVE IN THE WORLD
MARKETS AND JOBS INCREASED. AND HE HAS BEEN
TRYING TO REASSURE THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY
THAT HE DOES NOT WANT ANY COLD WAR WITH THEM
ON THE HOME FRONT.
THIS WEEK IN HIS NEWS CONFERENCE HE REFUSED
TO CARRY OUT HIS PROMISE TO BAR DISCRIMINATION
IN GOVERNMENT-INSURED HOUSING, BUT TALKED
INSTEAD OF POSTPONING THIS UNTIL THERE WAS
A "NATIONAL CONSENSUS" IN ITS FAVOUR.
DURING THESE TWELVE MONTHS, THE PRESIDENT
HAS MOVED OVER INTO THE DECISIVE MIDDLE GROUND
OF AMERICAN POLITICS.
On this middle ground, all seemed secure.
Nothing had to be done for blacks. Nothing
had to be done to change the economic structure.
An aggressive foreign policy could continue.
The country seemed under control. And then,
in the 1960s, came a series of explosive rebellions
in every area of American life, which showed
that all the system's estimates of security
and success were wrong.
