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

Straight continued to work for Wallace for President, and The New Republic remained the center of the movement for almost four more months, but something had changed. While he was still working for Wallace as President and allowing the Communists into the project, he was simultaneously doing two other things: working openly, and desperately, to prevent the new third party from campaigning on any level other than the presidential, by blocking everywhere he could Communist efforts to run third-party candidates for state or congressional offices in competition with the Democrats; much less publicly, he worked with his anti-Communist friends in labor, veteran, and liberal groups to prevent endorsement of the Wallace candidacy. As a consequence, the Communists were destroyed and eventually driven out of such organizations, notably from the CIO-PAC (the great political alignment of labor and progressive groups). As David Shannon wrote in The Decline of American Communism (1959), “The Communists’ support of Wallace shattered the ‘left-center’ coalition in the CIO; for the Communist unions, the Wallace movement was the beginning of the end. The coalition began to dissolve almost immediately after Wallace’s announcement.” What this means is that Wallace’s campaign to defeat Truman destroyed completely the remaining vestiges of the Popular Front movement of the 1930’s, drove the Communists out of the unions and all progressive political groups, and drove the Communist unions out of the labor movement of the country. This ended Communism as a significant political force in the United States, and the end was reached by December 1948, long before McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover or HUAC did their work. The men who achieved this feat were Wallace and Straight, although it is still not completely clear if they recognized what they were doing.

During the winter of 1947-1948, Lew Frank recognized that he was incapable of handling the complex issues raised in Wallace’s many speeches. Accordingly, he joined a “Communist research group” which met in the Manhattan home of the wealthy “Wall Street Red,” Frederick Vanderbilt Field. The chief members of this group, probably all Communists, were Victor Perlo and David Ramsay. This pair drew up for Wallace an attack on the Marshall Plan and an alternative Communist plan for European reconstruction, which was published in The New Republic on January 12, 1948, was presented by Wallace to the Marshall Plan “Hearings” of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on February 24th, but was subsequently repudiated by Straight. In the three months following the Perlo article, Straight was busy sawing off the limb on which Wallace now sat with the Communists. He discharged from The New Republic payroll all those who were working for the campaign rather than for the magazine, and the office on East Forty-ninth Street once again settled down to publishing a “liberal” weekly. In protest at this reversal, his managing editor, Edd Johnson, resigned.

If Mike Straight planned to do what he did do to the Communists in 1946-1948, that is, to get them out of progressive movements and unions, he pulled off the most skillful political coup in twentieth century American politics. It is not clear that he did plan it or intend it. But as a very able and informed man, he must have had some motivation when he began, in 1947, the effort which he knew might defeat Truman in 1948. While the evidence is not conclusive, there are hints that another, more personal, motive might have been involved, at least partly, in building up the Wallace threat to Truman’s political future. It concerns the Whitney family interest in overseas airlines.

The Whitney family were deeply involved in airlines. Sonny Whitney was a founder of Pan-American Airlines and chairman of its board of directors from its establishment in 1928 until he went to military service in 1941. Mike’s brother, Air Commodore Whitney Willard Straight, C.B.E., was even more deeply involved on the British side. Big brother Whitney (born in 1912) had been in civil aviation in England from the age of twenty-two, and by 1946-1949, was not only a director of the Midland Bank, one of the world’s greatest financial institutions, but was also a director of Rolls-Royce and of BOAC, as well as chairman of the board of directors of BEA (British European Airways). In the years following the end of the war, a violent struggle was going on, within aviation circles and the United States government, over the future of American transocean air services. Before the war, these had been a monopoly of Pan-Am; now, at the end of the war, the struggle was over how the CAB would divide up this monopoly and what disposition would be made of the enormous air-force investment in overseas bases. Apparently the White House was not cooperative in these matters at first, but late in 1947 C. V. Whitney was made, by presidential interim appointment, Assistant Secretary of the new Department of the Air Force and, eighteen months later, after Truman’s inauguration, was made Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics. This was the most important post concerned with civil aviation in any Federal department. The connection, if any, between these appointments and Mike Straight’s original support and later abandonment of Wallace has never been revealed.

The associations between Wall Street and the Left, of which Mike Straight is a fair example, are really survivals of the associations between the Morgan Bank and the Left. To Morgan all political parties were simply organizations to be used, and the firm always was careful to keep a foot in all camps. Morgan himself, Dwight Morrow, and other partners were allied with Republicans; Russell C. Leffingwell was allied with the Democrats; Grayson Murphy was allied with the extreme Right; and Thomas W. Lamont was allied with the Left. Like the Morgan interest in libraries, museums, and art, its inability to distinguish between loyalty to the United States and loyalty to England, its recognition of the need for social work among the poor, the multipartisan political views of the Morgan firm in domestic politics went back to the original founder of the firm, George Peabody (1795-1869). To this same seminal figure may be attributed the use of tax-exempt foundations for controlling these activities, as may be observed in many parts of America to this day, in the use of Peabody foundations to support Peabody libraries and museums. Unfortunately, we do not have space here for this great and untold story, but it must be remembered that what we do say is part of a much larger picture.

Our concern at the moment is with the links between Wall Street and the Left, especially the Communists. Here the chief link was the Thomas W. Lamont family. This family was in many ways parallel to the Straight family. Tom Lamont had been brought into the Morgan firm, as Straight was several years later, by Henry P. Davison, a Morgan partner from 1909. Lamont became a partner in 1910, as Straight did in 1913. Each had a wife who became a patroness of Leftish causes, and two sons, of which the elder was a conventional banker, and the younger was a Left-wing sympathizer and sponsor. In fact, all the evidence would indicate that Tom Lamont was simply Morgan’s apostle to the Left in succession to Straight, a change made necessary by the latter’s premature death in 1918. Both were financial supporters of liberal publications, in Lamont’s case The Saturday Review of Literature , which he supported throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s, and the New York Post , which he owned from 1918 to 1924.

The chief evidence, however, can be found in the files of the HUAC which show Tom Lamont, his wife Flora, and his son Corliss as sponsors and financial angels to almost a score of extreme Left organizations, including the Communist Party itself. Among these we need mention only two. One of these was a Communist-front organization, the Trade Union Services, Incorporated, of New York City, which in 1947 published fifteen trade-union papers for various CIO unions. Among its officers were Corliss Lamont and Frederick Vanderbilt Field (another link between Wall Street and the Communists). The latter was on the editorial boards of the official Communist newspaper in New York, the Daily Worker , as well as its magazine, The New Masses, and was the chief link between the Communists and the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1928-1947. Corliss Lamont was the leading light in another Communist organization, which started life in the 1920’s as the Friends of the Soviet Union, but in 1943 was reorganized, with Lamont as chairman of the board and chief incorporator, as the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.