Communism Comes to America

by Jonathan Goodwin
Bionic Mosquito

Freedom Betrayed, by Herbert Hoover

As previously discussed, Hoover believes it best for the United States to stay out of the war. He believed it best for Hitler and Stalin to fight each other, while America stood as a shining example of freedom, freedom that would be harmed were the U.S. to enter the conflict.

In a nation-wide address on June 29, 1941, Hoover stated:

We know…Hitler’s hideous record of brutality, of aggression, and as a destroyer of democracies….

…now we find ourselves promising aid to Stalin and his militant Communist conspiracy against the whole democratic ideals of the world…it makes the whole argument of our joining the war to bring the four freedoms to mankind a gargantuan jest….

Then as now, it seems the reasons used to justify entering a war are fluid. The only constant is the desire to enter war.

If we go further and join the war and we win, we have won for Stalin the grip of Communism on Russia and more opportunity for it to extend in the world….

To align American ideals alongside Stalin will be as great a violation of everything American as to align ourselves with Hitler.

While making comparisons between the two evils that were Hitler and Stalin is dangerous, it could be suggested that Hoover was, in fact, being magnanimous in this comparison of the two leaders. From Patrick Buchanan’s book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War:

As historian John Lewis Gaddis writes, “[T]he number of deaths resulting from Stalin’s policies before World War II…was between 17 and 22 million,” a thousand times the number of deaths attributed to Hitler as of 1939….

In addition to Hoover’s concerns about joining one side or the other in the conflict between fascism and communism, he had concerns about the communist influence in America.

On October 10, 1933, eight months after taking office, Mr. Roosevelt dispatched a message to President Kalinin of the Soviet All-Union Central Executive Committee suggesting that Russia send a representative to Washington to negotiate recognition….The recognition of Russia touched off an era of uninhibited growth and activity for the Communists in the United States.

According to Congressman Dies, then Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities:

…I opened hearings…in August [1938] and I got a telephone call from the White House to come….”Well,” the President said, “You know, all this business about investigating Communists is a serious mistake….” He stated, in effect, to me that he didn’t want Communism investigated. He wanted me to confine my efforts to Nazism….

Then, in another conversation with Roosevelt in December, 1941, Dies told Roosevelt that “the Communists were using those 2,000 persons inside this Government and they were stealing everything in the world they wanted and had access to.”

Hoover goes on to identify dozens of individuals in the government that he says are affiliated with the Communists. These individuals are in high positions in Labor, atomic energy, military research labs, the OSS, and many other departments in the Executive branch.

Finally he outlines dozens of Communist “front” organizations, involved in political activities and civil rights; dozens at work in colleges and universities; arts, sciences, letters and professions; religious organizations; and many others.

Hoover describes one Sidney Hillman, head of the Political Action Committee, the purpose of this group being to defeat Congressional and Presidential candidates. Mr. Hillman was born in Russia, and apparently participated in early revolutionary activities there. He came to the United States in 1907, and in 1922 was a member of the Communist Party.

Sidney Hillman became so politically powerful that at the 1944 Democratic National Convention, Mr. Roosevelt, when the question of the choice of Vice President arose, issues his famous order to “Clear it with Sidney.”

Dies was accused by Roosevelt of seeing “a Red under your bed every night.” Maybe so. Hoover seems quite convinced that Roosevelt too easily joined up with Staling, too easily opened the door for recognition of Russia, and had (if not allowed) too many “communist infiltrators” into the government.

Enough has been written elsewhere about this idea of communists in the Roosevelt administration. I can add nothing to this. I will only comment that I can find no satisfactory explanation as to why the U.S. sided with Stalin as opposed to Hitler – to say nothing of why side with either. In 1938, writing of Roosevelt and the New Deal, Garet Garrett wrote in The Revolution Was:

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

At the end of the first year, in his annual message to the Congress, January 4, 1934, President Roosevelt said: "It is to the eternal credit of the American people that this tremendous readjustment of our national life is being accomplished peacefully."

I cannot say why Roosevelt chose Stalin over Hitler. It seems clear why he had to pick a side: in war, the state grows only more powerful. And after almost ten years of government-caused depression, a distraction seemed necessary.

Hoover, even at the time that these events were transpiring, spoke out strongly against Roosevelt’s choice – desiring the United States to arm to the teeth for defense of the Western Hemisphere, but to stay out of the war in Europe and Asia. This would certainly have been to the benefit of the United States and to the world.

Reprinted with permission from the Bionic Mosquito.

March 22, 2012

Copyright © 2012 Bionic Mosquito