Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

It is still impossible to make any real assessment of the influence of Communists, either in government or out of it, in the period of 1949-1950 with which we are now concerned; this is equally true of the earlier years, going back to 1933, with which most of the charges and countercharges made in 1949 were concerned. The chief reason for this is that secrecy, which still prevails, was used by both sides to portray, by selective publicity, a false picture. Falsehood, manipulation, selection, and distortion of evidence were prevalent on both sides, and were used especially by the anti-Communists, not because they were less addicted to the truth than Communists, but because they, on the offensive, were the ones who were raising the issues, and exposing the evidence. Apparently, these anti-Communists, including the press, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), felt that a good cause justified shoddy or misleading methods.

The Communist Party of the United States (CPUS),like others throughout the world, was always, from its founding in 1919, a tightly disciplined body of conspirators whose primary allegiance was to the Soviet Union and whose secondary aim, after the preservation of the Soviet Union itself, was to establish a similar regime in the United States. Tactics varied from year to year, and the party line shifted with changing political and world conditions without, however, ever abandoning these two goals. In 1935, with the threat of Fascism spreading through the world, the Communist International (Comintern) adopted a “Popular Front” tactic which was, essentially, a temporary alliance of all non-Fascist groups to oppose Nazi aggression and to support the Soviet Union against German attack. In this period the Communist Party of the United States was a relatively open group, with openly available headquarters and telephone numbers, and with a good deal of cooperation and free exchange through a broad spectrum of political and social activities, and cooperation from the political Center to the extreme political Left. There was, at that time, widespread disillusionment with the existing structure of society because of enormous unemployment, pervasive poverty, and bourgeois paralysis in the face of economic stagnation and Fascist aggression. Communist insistence that something be done about these things won widespread sympathy, even in circles which were totally non-Communist. The Communists themselves took full advantage of this atmosphere by establishing Communist front and fellow-traveler organizations of all kinds, and the distinction between party members and fellow travelers became very free, confused, and blurred. The Communist command system, however, remained fully aware of who were devoted to their permanent goals and who were not, and retained general control, under cover, of all organizations they regarded as important.

This ambiguous situation of Left-wing fellowship began to break down in 1938-1940 as the complete dominance of Soviet national selfishness within Communist parties everywhere became evident, at first in Spain, later in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, and in the Soviet-Finnish War the following winter.

For the American Communist Party the chief turning point here was the enactment of the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1940. The United States Communist Party broke its affiliation with the Comintern and instead established a secret link between the Comintern and the United States party, chiefly through Gerhart Eisler (who was finally deported in 1949 and became an official of the East German Communist regime). In 1943 the Comintern itself was officially dissolved by the Soviet Government, although secretly it continued to exist. As part of this same process, in a sort of wartime common front, the United States party itself was dissolved in 1944 and reappeared at once as the Communist Political Association. Earl Browder, who personified the Popular Front tactic of the 1930’s, continued as the head of the Political Association and the common-front tactic until July 1945, when he was removed as a traitor to the Marxist-Leninist ideology and replaced by William Z. Foster. At the same time, the Communist Party of the United States was reestablished to pursue a more aggressive and narrower policy.

The abandonment of the United Front approach in 1945 was a gross tactical error which almost totally destroyed the party in the next fifteen years. It had been ordered from Moscow through the French Communist leader, Jacques Duclos, and was, like other mistakes of the Kremlin at the same time, based on a totally mistaken conception of what the postwar world would be like. This misconception was firmly rooted in the greater misconceptions of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and assumed (1) that there would be a postwar economic depression; (2) that the United States would relapse into isolationism; and (3) that the United States and Europe, especially Britain, would engage in an imperialist rivalry for markets and economic advantages. Just as the new Soviet foreign policy prepared to exploit this anticipated chaos, so the CPUS was reorganized to profit from the same chaos. Instead, it committed suicide.

This collapse of the CPUS from 75,000 members with ample funds in 1945 to less than 3,000 members with hardly a dime fifteen years later was assisted by the actions of the United States government, the attacks of party members who were leaving it in droves, and the efforts of ex-members, political leaders, and intellectual bellwethers to strike at the CPUS in substitute for their inability to strike at the USSR. Many of these virtuous warriors were fighting for their convictions, but at least an equally large number were fighting for their personal profit or their personal partisan advantage. In this effort to win personal advantage from a worthy struggle, leadership was taken by some of the ex-Communists, the FBI, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

These anti-Communists, some of them professionals, tried to demonstrate that the CPUS, by its penetration into the Federal government under the New Deal, into labor unions or education, and into entertainment, especially Hollywood, had gravely endangered the nation. On the whole, from the perspective of decades, these charges, concerned with the period before 1945, seem grossly exaggerated. On the other hand, the making of these charges in the period 1947-1955 was very damaging to the country. The influence of Communists, within or outside government, had been slight. It is, for example, almost impossible to find a single motion picture, book, or play which can be identified as having had influence in leading Americans to feel favorably toward a Communist system for this country. It is even difficult to find examples of such an effort. On the other hand, it is possible to find examples of books which gave a too favorable impression of the Soviet Union, just as it is possible to find favorable books on any country, including Tibet, Perón’s Argentina, Castro’s Cuba, or Trujillo’s Dominican Republic. Some of these favorable books on the USSR, such as Lord and Lady Passfield’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935) or Albert Rhys Williams’s The Soviets (A Book-of-the-Month Club recommendation in 1937), undoubtedly had influence in establishing an unduly favorable picture of Soviet life, but their influence could not in any way compare, in strengthening Communism in the United States, with the influence in that direction exercised by the breakdown of the capitalist laissez-faire economy in 1929-1939, or with the failure of the democratic countries to stand up to Fascist aggression in Germany, Italy, and Spain in that same decade.

Espionage is another matter, but this is more from the nature of espionage than the nature of Communism, except for the very significant fact that the ideological appeal of Communism to the half educated makes it possible for the Soviet Union to obtain secrets without financial payments. In general, the nature of espionage is totally ignored by most people, and this ignorance was only increased by the activities of the anti-Communist spy agitations of the 1949-1954 period. All past history shows that espionage has been generally successful and intelligence has been generally a failure. By this I mean that no country had much success in keeping secrets, in the twentieth as in all earlier centuries, but neither has any other country had much success in evaluating or in interpreting the secrets it obtained. The so-called “surprises” of history have emerged not because other countries did not have the information but because they refused to believe it. The date of Hitler’s attack on the West in May 1940 had been given to the Netherlands by the German Counterintelligence Office as soon as it was decided; the Western countries refused to believe it. The same was true of every one of Hitler’s surprises. Stalin was given the date of the German attack on the Soviet Union by a number of informants, including the United States Department of State, but he refused to believe. Both the Germans and the Russians had the date of D-Day, but ignored it. The United States had available all the Japanese coded messages, knew that war was about to begin, and that a Japanese fleet with at least four large carriers was loose (and lost) in the Pacific, yet Pearl Harbor was a total surprise. This last point was so hard to believe, once the evidence was available, that the same groups who were howling about Soviet espionage in 1948-1955 were also claiming that President Roosevelt expected and wanted Pearl Harbor. Both these beliefs, if they were believed, were based on gigantic ignorance and misconceptions about the nature of intelligence.