Circa1865

“When truth was a luxury, any careless word or act would be seen as an attack on the state’s monopoly of truth.”

Changing Place Names to Honor the Demi-god

“Soon after Lenin’s death the dubious practice of had grown of giving the names of the party faithful and state figures to towns, regions, factories, educational facilities, theaters and so on. It had become the norm for state-run newspapers to help implement these desires of Party leadership. Trotsky himself had received a request from the citizens of Kochetovka, Zosimov District, Tambov Province, who had requested permission to call our village “Trotskoe,” in honor of our leader and inspirer of the Red Army, Trotsky.

By early 1925, Stalin had agreed to Molotov’s proposal to perpetuate his name by printing his collected works. After this it was decided to rename the town, province and railway station of Tsaritsyn to “Stalingrad.” The factories, parks, newspapers, ships and palaces of culture bearing his name would now embody his claim to eternity.

By the end of the 1920s there was virtually no district where Stalin’s name had not been adopted by one administrative, production or cultural body or another. By this means the people were surreptitiously imbued with the idea of the exceptional role that Stalin played in the nation’s destiny. The glorification of the Leader would be heard in every routine press report or speech by which the local “leader” would see that some of the glory was reflected upon himself.

The impression was inevitably gained that, having given up belief in God in heaven, the people were creating his replacement on earth. By August or 1931 and before the personal cult of Stalin had reached its zenith, there were attempts to immortalize Stalin in works of political biography. Everything he said, wrote or formulated was immutable, true, and in no need of actual evidence. In other words, Stalin was a demi-god – an all-wise man whose intellect was capable of answering all questions of the past, understanding the present and peering into the future.”

(Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, Dimitri Volkogonov, Prima Publishing, 1991)

By the end of 1941 over 800 tanks and 873 combat aircraft had been delivered to Russia. In May 1942 Stalin’s Foreign Minister Molotov arrived in Washington to sign a mutual aid agreement with Roosevelt for $1 billion of war materiel.

When the Future of Mankind Was at Stake

“Entire factories have also been exported to the Soviet Union. Among them were a tire plant, an aluminum rolling mill, and two pipe-fabricating mills. Plants have also been built or were under construction for the manufacture of wall board, nitric acid and hydrogen gas. A block-signal system designed to increase the carrying capacity of existing facilities was installed on Soviet railways. Various projects for the provision of electric power were also approved by the US government.

Under Lend-Lease, General Electric and Westinghouse developed a “power-train” which proved to be extremely effective in putting idle Russian plants to work. As soon as local utilities are functioning again, the train moves on to “spark” another area. Some sixty-odd trains have been supplied and the Soviets have put them to good use.

Both factories and power trains fitted into the scheme of helping the Soviets to help themselves. It took ingenuity and imagination and guts to fulfill the needs of our Soviet ally during those grim days when the future of mankind was at stake.”

(Lend-Lease is a Two-Way Benefit, Francis Flood, National Geographic Magazine, June 1943, pp. 506)

The long American descent into Marxism is reminiscent of the 1920’s Soviet Union as the Bolsheviks consolidated their revolution and restructured culture and society.  In the late 1920s the term “cultural revolution” was redefined to mean aggressive class war, considering it anti-revolutionary to accept cultural change as a peaceful, evolutionary process. Stalinists adopted this class warfare, as opposed to class conciliation, official Party policy.

Further, in education, “credentialism” became official policy as non-Party indoctrinated faculty were purged, library shelves examined for books by anti-revolutionary authors, and research grants awarded only for ideologically pure scholarship.

Soviet Cultural Revolution in Education, 1928-1931

“The Fifteenth [Communist] Party Congress held in December 1927 had called for the mobilization of economic resources on behalf of industrialization . . . and a greater share of resources for educational programs.

The new political climate affected educational institutions and policies  . . . [as it] touched off a vast wave of purges at all levels of the educational system, which [conservatives] tried in vain to halt. At institutions of higher learning widespread purges of faculty and students were accompanied by drives to enhance ideological purity.

At Smolensk State University the Cultural Revolution was launched in the spring of 1929. Party organs forced the replacement of key administrators with trusted Party figures and ordered the new leadership to improve the social composition of the student body, to communize the leading organs and scientific workers of the university, and to create conditions “which would aid to the maximum the task of training cadres of real builders of socialism.”

Party members now dominated the governing board of the university as well as the faculty of social sciences . . . [and were encouraged] to press forward with expulsions of “socially alien and hostile students and reactionary scientific workers.” Further purges of “reactionary” faculty followed.

Massive expulsions of students of intelligentsia and bourgeois origins took place . . . to increase the representation of students with proletarian background. The extension of rabfaks [worker’s faculty] designed to prepare poorly educated workers for entrance into the university and the effort to recruit students of designated social background or political affiliation to fill assigned quotas began to have a dramatic impact on educational statistics.”

(Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, Sheila Fitzpatrick, editor, Indiana University Press, 1984, excerpts pp. 89-92)

The following excerpt is from Senator Hubert Humphrey’s account of his interview with Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev in 1959. Though claiming to be staunchly anti-communist, Humphrey in 1944 endorsed and promoted the fusion of the Farmer-Labor party with Democrats, as well accepting the support of “Stalinists and other assorted radicals who dominated the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] in Minneapolis at this time.” Humphrey was also admired by Roosevelt’s pro-Soviet vice president, Henry Wallace.

Two Views of Freedom

“I told [Krushchev] that a lot of young and vigorous Democrats . . . were coming up and that things would be very different after the 1960 elections. “Mr. Premier,” I said, “you and your system have been living on borrowed time. You have just had it easy with the Republicans. Just wait until the Democrats come in. You want economic competition? We’ll run you right out of Gorki Park.”

[Then] Krushchev made the most interesting statement of the whole interview. “They are old-fashioned, they are reactionary,” he said of the communes. “We tried that right after the revolution. It just doesn’t work. That system is not nearly so good as the state farms and the collective farms. You know Senator, what those communes are based on? They are based on that principle, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” You know that won’t work. You can’t get production without incentive.”

[We] got into a debate about over the nature of capitalism and “socialism” (meaning Soviet Communism). I told him that he was sadly misinformed about as to how American capitalism really works and he told me Americans “just plain don’t understand us.” His remarks included a remarkable statement of the Communist idea of freedom:

“In the USSR there is freedom.” Krushchev said, “In the capitalist world there is freedom of enterprise, freedom just to take care of yourself. In the USSR freedom means every member taking care of all the others. The citizen of the USSR regards the country’s welfare as his own welfare.  This needs to be understood. As a religious man believes in God, so does a citizen of a socialist country depend on the welfare of the country as a whole. You believe in God and you believe that your welfare is in the hands of God. We believe the individual’s welfare is the welfare of the state and is in the hands of the state.”

(My Marathon Talk with Russia’s Boss, Hubert Humphrey, LIFE, January 12, 1959, pg. 86)

Confronted with a Democratic party platform nearly identical to theirs, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in early 1944 formally dissolved as a political party and perennial CPUSA presidential candidate Earl Browder announced his support of President Roosevelt for a fourth term. Browder’s vice-presidential running mate in 1936 and 1940 was James W. Ford, the first black man on a presidential ticket.

Democrats Adopt Soviet Bill of Rights

[The] historic Democratic party is no more, that it has been transformed into a labor party so completely that there is nothing left of it but the name.  The process by which [the] transformation . . . was brought about had its beginnings during the period of “crisis government” established by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his “brain trust” in 1933.  Measures having far-reaching application and effect were drafted by the President’s “advisors” and were jammed through Congress, frequently without most of the members having an opportunity to read them.

Mr. Roosevelt had been elected in 1932 by an electoral majority of eight to one . . . In such circumstances, Congress practically abdicated. It became literally a “rubber stamp” Congress. And Republican Senators and Representatives, with the majority of their constituents supporting President Roosevelt, were careful not to show too much opposition to measures which he favored.  That’s why is was so easy to junk the Democratic platform of 1932 and to enact so many measures that violated the most fundamental principles of the historic Democratic party without protest from Southern Democrats, and even with their support.

One sequence [of the transformation] began during the period from 1935 to 1937, or at the very height of what Eugene Lyons has called “The Red Decade,” when it was fashionable in certain circles in New York, Los Angeles and Washington to glorify all things Russian and to affect a “revolutionary” attitude toward all existing institutions in the United States. It was a time when literally dozens of organizations with high-sounding names were set up in this country by the Communists to attract innocent “fellow travelers” and when The Daily Worker undertook to popularize the slogan “Communism is the Americanism of the Twentieth Century.”

In February, 1935, Joseph Stalin announced that the Russian Constitution would be democratized; in June, 1936, the first draft of the new Soviet Constitution was completed and published, [and adopted December 5, 1936].  It was promptly translated into English and by February, 1937, copies of it in the form of a five-cent pamphlet were available throughout this country.  It immediately became the leading topic of discussion among the so-called “liberals” in the United States.

[The] Soviet Bill of Rights . . . guarantees every citizen a job . . . the right to material security in old age and also in case of illness and loss of capacity to toil . . . [and] “The equal rights of citizens of the USSR, independent of their nationality and race, in all fields of economic, state, cultural and public-political life is unalterable law.  Any direct or indirect limitation of rights, or conversely, any establishment of direct or indirect preferences of citizens dependent on their racial and national membership, as well as all preaching of national exclusiveness, or hate and contempt, is punishable by law.”

[In late January, 1944] President Roosevelt revealed that the [New Deal] was being replaced by a streamlined post-war program.  Here is what President Roosevelt said:

“As our nation had grown in size and stature, however – as our industrial economy expanded – [our previous life and liberty] political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident.

We have accepted, so to speak, a second bill of rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all – regardless of station, race or creed.  Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or mines of the nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;  The right of every business man, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;  The right of every family to a decent home; The right of adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment;  The right to a good education.” 

The striking resemblance which this whole passage bears to the . . . Soviet Bill of Rights need not be dwelt upon.

 In his message to Congress on September 6, 1945, President Truman said: “The objectives for our domestic economy which we seek in long-range plans were summarized by the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt over a year and a half ago in the form of an Economic Bill of rights.  Let us make the attainment of those rights the essence of post-war American economic life.”

Notably, he issued a “salute to labor” on Labor Day, 1946, and more recently on June 28, 1947 . . . he discussed the subject in an address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at Lincoln Memorial in Washington. In his “salute to labor,” President Truman said:

“Labor, perhaps more than any other group, has consistently supported [FDR’s] “Economic Bill of Rights.” We must now move forward to full achievement of these objectives: useful and remunerative jobs for all; income high enough to provide adequate food, clothing and recreation; freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopoly; adequate health protection; more effective social security measures, and educational opportunities for all.”

In his more recent address to the [NAACP], by coupling these “economic” rights with other civil rights, he stated clearly . . . that it is the responsibility of the federal government to guarantee and to enforce these new rights. “The extension of civil rights today means not protection of the people AGAINST the government, but protection of the people BY the government.”

(The South’s Political Plight, Peter Molyneaux, Calhoun Clubs of the South, Inc., 1948, pp. 56-57, 67-70, 75-77, 81-84,)

In Woodrow Wilson’s call for a declaration of war against Germany, he spoke of freedom of the seas yet was silent on Britain’s blockade of Europe. He also proclaimed self-determination as a great principle while declaring Irish independence as irrelevant and avoiding the question of Southern self-determination 56 years earlier in his own country. Senator Robert LaFollette wrote of Wilson: “I sometimes think the man has no sense of things that penetrate below the surface.  With him, the rhetoric of a thing is the thing itself.  Words, phrases, felicity of expression and a blind egotism have been his stock in trade.”

The Covenant with Power

 “If the United States had refused to intervene in 1917, would a German victory in 1918 have been a better historical alternative? The answer is debatable.

What would have happened if Wilson had taken William Jennings Bryan’s advice and practiced real rather than sham neutrality? Without the backing of American weaponry, munitions and loans, the Allies would have been forced to abandon their goal of the knockout blow. The war might have ended in 1916 with a negotiated peace based on a mutual admission that the conflict had become a stalemate.  As a genuine neutral, Wilson might have even have persuaded both sides to let him be a mediator.

Lloyd George’s argument – that unless the United States intervened, Wilson would have no place at the peace table – was specious at best. Both sides would have needed America’s wealth and industrial resources to rebuild their shattered economies.

A victorious Germany would have no need of political adventurers such as Adolf Hitler. Nor would this counterfactual Germany have inserted the Bolsheviks into Russia and supported them with secret-service money.  Lenin and Trotsky might have agitated in a political vacuum in Switzerland unto a crabbed old age. The war created the collapse that gave Bolshevism its seventy-year reign of blood and terror.

Perhaps the best way to look at Woodrow Wilson’s tragically flawed intervention in World War I is, in the words of the historian Lloyd C. Gardner, as a covenant with power. Painfully, with mistakes aplenty, the United States recognized that power is at the heart of history.

At the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson discovered limitations to America’s power . . . [especially those that] lay in the prime illusion of idealism – the expectation that noble words can easily be translated into meaningful realities.

Woodrow Wilson struggled with his inadvertent covenant with power. Like Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus and jailed [thousands] of dissenters during the Civil War, Wilson tolerated a brutally realistic government of the home front.”

(The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I, Thomas Fleming, Basic Books, 2003, excerpts pp. 480-482)

The Marquis of Wellesley is reported to have said that the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo was unfortunate for England; having put down a power she might have controlled, she raised up a power that she would be unable to control.

Unleashing Uncontrollable Power

 “I firmly believe that if the coming vote in Congress on the repeal of the Neutrality Act carries, it will be our last chance to vote on the question of keeping out of war and that our representative form of government will be doomed. It will probably require another revolution to reestablish it . . .

Now we are linked to the bear than walks like a man; a ruthless, murderous Stalin than can send his best friend before a firing squad with utter complacency. So that’s our ally.

Do you think you want to team up with that kind of monster? Do you want your country to spend its substance in a fight to make the world safe for communism? That’s what we would be doing by coming to the aid of Russia . . .”

Rep. Anton Johnson (R. Illinois). From radio address, inserted in Congressional Record, Oct. 15, 1941, p. a4937.

(The Illustrious Dunderheads, Rex Stout, editor, Alfred A. Knopf, 1942)

Shortly after the Bolshevik revolution and consolidation of power in Russia came the Great Depression and the opportunity for a charismatic American politician to introduce his own version of a planned economy, fiat money and social programs funded by deficit financing.

American Welfare State  

“My father was a true liberal as it was defined prior to World War II. He was also a highly regarded and respected liberal, in the forefront of his profession of journalism. At that time, most of those in the newspaper field were staunch supporters of the Constitution as originally adopted; that is, they believed that the role of the federal government was quite limited. And they also believed in the free enterprise system. There were few leftists in their midst.

Since then the term “liberal” has undergone a radical change in meaning, and now means almost the reverse of what it meant when my father was practicing his profession before World War II. Under the present-day meaning of the word “liberal” my father would now be called a conservative. In addition to his strong views about the superior qualities of the free enterprise system and the need for a diminished role for the federal government, he was a firm believer in high standards of morality for the family, and for the communities in which the families lived and raised their children.

In his later years he was subject to heavy criticism, much of it slanderous, but I never heard anyone questioning his integrity. In his search for the truth as a journalist, he had great respect for all obtainable facts and information required for reaching judgmental decisions.

The passage in 1913 of the Constitutional Amendment to tax income greatly increased the power of the federal government to control and regulate the economy, but the exercise of this power was quite modest until the New Deal and World War II. This power, together with the gigantic demands of the war, resulted in an enormous involvement of the federal government in the total economy of the nation.

And with it came much more sympathy by the general public and the media for socialistic and planned governmental programs. Support for these programs also prospered in colleges, universities, and religious groups. The Welfare State was beginning to get a firm foothold on our shores.”

(Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays of John T. Flynn, Gregory P. Pavlik, editor, Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1996, excerpt pp. v-vi)

Robert A. Taft, son of William Howard Taft, was the last prominent Republican who might be considered a classical liberal and conservative Republican. Another would not appear until Barry Goldwater in the mid-1960s, and no more to this day. For the 1952 presidential election, he was cast aside by the Republican Party to make way for Dwight Eisenhower, a career military man with no political ideals or experience.

Though a constant critic of Roosevelt’s assumption of powers not granted to the executive, it is difficult to understand how Taft could state that he was an admirer of Abraham Lincoln, who began in earnest the erosion of constitutional principles and whom FDR emulated.

America’s Slide Toward Totalism

“By the time Bob Taft was elected to Congress, the New Dealers’ admiration for the Soviet experiment had diminished markedly, yet there remained the possibility that the United States might slide, almost unwittingly, toward totalist politics.

The maintenance of ordered freedom being the root of Taft’s politics, he never ceased to warn the American public against the erosion of constitutional principles, and he never was deterred by ridicule.

“The trend of thought on forms of government throughout the entire world,” Taft insisted, “has been pushing all peoples consciously or unconsciously away from democracy to different forms of totalitarianism. In Europe, democratic ideals were crushed between the dynamic dogmas of Communism and Fascism.

In the United States, we often lose sight of the real nature of the principles on which freedom depends, in our desire to remake our world according to the popular method of the day – methods formulated for the most part by European socialists.”

The American people had perceived by 1938, he said, that this tendency was most perilous; but the coming of the war diverted public attention from such fundamental concerns. So in speech upon speech, during the Second World War, Taft prodded Americans into vigilance against the encroachment of collectivist ideas and measures at home. Some of the basic principles of American politics already had been damaged, he declared in 1941:

“We have seen during the past twelve years a steady increase in government regulation of business and of the individual, and we have seen, through courts which are hardly independent of the executive, a constant tendency to increase the powers of the federal government over the States, and the powers of the Executive over the individual.”

He saw his prediction[s] fulfilled:

“In our efforts to protect the freedom of this country against aggression from without, we are in a situation today where we must constantly be on guard against the suppression of freedom in the United States itself . . . Unfortunately the [Roosevelt] administration, more than any other in the history of the country, is utterly unscrupulous in its demand for more power . . .”

(The Political Principles of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk and James McClellan, Fleet Press Corporation, 1967, excerpts pp. 62-64)

Of the many reasons that war occurred in 1861, trade and sovereignty were two of the most prominent. On the first, Northern editorial opinion changed dramatically after the new Confederate States government enacted a virtual free-trade 10% tariff which would have bankrupted Northern ports and industry; the second was the question of the federal agent of the sovereign States waging war upon its creators. In the years prior to the war, Manhattan banks were lending money at modest interest to planters expanding fields for cultivation — and New England mills eagerly accepted slave-produced cotton.  Since 1865, Northern capitalists and their allies in the three branches have had a free hand in federal monetary policy and trade.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Trade and Sovereignty

“The heart of the trade debate is not income or prices but sovereignty. The free trade agreements entered into by the United States not only violate our Constitution – a small thing, perhaps, since our own government does that very thing every day – but they also erode sovereignty.

This is obvious from the global apparatus of rigged trade established by NAFTA and GATT, but of the World Trade Organization set up in the last round of GATT alarmed even some knee-jerk free-traders. The WTO is a secret organization whose meetings are closed to the press, and it has a right to settle trade disputes between the US and other nations and the power to enforce its decisions.

When it comes right down to it, the free-traders believe that men and women are not really French or American, not really Christians or devil-worshippers; they are only rational producers and consumers, rootless hedonists and utility-maximizers who could just as well be born from a test tube as from a mother’s womb. They acknowledge no social ties except that of the contract for mutual exploitation. Concepts like “loyalty” and “treason” are as alien to them as they were to Red capitalists like Armand Hammer.

The big-money boys of the capitalist West (in and out of government) have changed their rivals but not their attitudes. They will sell arms to both sides in an African civil war and poison gas to Saddam Hussein; and if a tin-pot dictator bankrupts his country buying fighter planes, computer systems and one-way railroads, the New York banks will be happy to give him a loan backed by the World Bank and the American taxpayer.

In the good old days, American conservatives had to do battle with an evil globalist ideology called communism. They had their difference but they agreed on what they were against.

Today, they are confronted by a different globalism, the ideology of free trade and open borders and world government. If our conservative Republicans refuse to stand up to this menace, then the only way they are going to get into the White House is by buying a ticket and taking the tour.”

(Selling the Golden Cord, Thomas Fleming, Chronicles, July 1998, excerpts pp. 12-13)