“AMERICAN
REDS” – Documentary or Distortumentary? Shown
on PBS 2016
Rev.
by Hugh Murray
The
American Communist Party is probably the 3rd most influential
political organization of 20th century America. In October 2016 Milwaukee Public Television
telecast a 1 ½ hour documentary produced and written by Richard Wormser. Its scope was to cover the history of the
Communist Party, USA, from its origins at the end of WWI up to the late 1950s
and beyond. Over a million Americans at some
point joined the American CP (hereafter, for Communist Party), and the
organization had considerable influence on many areas of American life in the
1930s and 40s. Interviewed are party
activists and leaders, some of whom died several years before the film project
was completed. Also interviewed were
historians, interspersed with headlines of the day, magazine covers, posters,
old newsreels, and even occasional cartoon recreations of incidents described
by the participants. By 1960 it was
estimated that the CP had only 10,000 members, and many of them were undercover
FBI agents.
The
filmmakers hope that this documentary will be used in schools and universities
to help enlighten students about the CP.
I contend that the CP was among the most influential political
organizations in American history, which greatly altered American life and
world affairs. But I also maintain that
the Wormser documentary distorts history and is essentially dishonest about
major aspects of the incredibly influential CPUSA.
One
activist interviewed at length (perhaps more than any other in this program)
was Steve Nelson, who was born in what is today, Croatia in 1903 to Hungarian
parents. He arrived in America in 1919,
and was soon working in Pennsylvania slaughter houses and other
non-professional jobs. He looks and
sounds like a typical American blue-collar worker. For the documentary Nelson describes his
efforts to organize laborers into various unions at times when unions were
barely legal. Nelson relates one
incident when, after his arrest, he was
interrogated by police. They beat
him. One hit his jaw so hard that Nelson
passed out with that question. A cartoon
recreated the scene. In the late 1930s
Nelson, along with 3,200 other radical Americans, joined the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade, part of the Communist-sponsored International Brigades to defend
Republican Spain against Francisco Franco and his fascist rebels. Nelson expresses sorrow at the loss of
comrades who fell in the fight. The
narrator even interviews Nelson’s adult daughter, who remembers that as a child
she was told not to discuss certain topics at home because the family was aware
that their home was bugged. No word is
said, but the implication is – how horrible that in America children were not
free to discuss things at home because the government was listening in.
In
the case of Steve Nelson, the government was indeed listening in. But never does the documentary indicate what
the government heard in Nelson’s Oakland abode.
Thanks to the release of various government documents, we now know, and
thanks to authors like Diana West, Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel
(hereafter R & B), we can readily discover the workings of the Nelson
household. For example, in March 1943
the FBI bug revealed that Nelson met with atomic scientist Joseph
Weinberg. Nelson instructed
Weinberg to gather and send him
information from other Party members working with him on the atomic bomb
project at the Univ. of California, Berkeley.
Nelson also told Weinberg to inform the comrades working there to
destroy their CP membership books, and refrain from using liquor.(R & B, The Venona Secrets, p. 255)
In
April 1943 Nelson received another visitor, a member of the Soviet Embassy in
Washington DC. The Soviet official
instructed the America Communist to establish an espionage network in the
American atomic program. The Soviet
counted out specific amounts of cash to fund the project, and told Nelson where
he should place reliable Communists for this “special work” in conveying to the
Soviets what the Americans were discovering in the US atomic program.(p. 259)
When
in 1980 Nelson was interviewed by two sympathetic academics, Nelson assured
them, “I never had any links with Soviet espionage in the United States.”(p.
259) And what about any such links in
Spain? Because of the release of the
Venona documents, we now know that Nelson lied.
We have known this for over a decade.
But the 2016 documentary ignores Nelson’s treason to portray a poster-boy
worker and sympathetic CP activist whose privacy was invaded by an oppressive
FBI.
The
documentary shows old newsreels of American CP leader Earl Browder addressing
large crowds at Party conventions. The
narrator even interviews Browder’s granddaughter. What the filmmakers overlook is that Browder,
leader of the CPUSA from 1931 until 1945, was also vetting American party
members to provide spies for Soviet intelligence agencies. Even after Browder’s expulsion from the CP
(when French CP leader Jacques Duclos wrote criticizing Browder’s policies,
undoubtedly at the behest of Stalin), Browder continued his connections with
the Soviet spy groups. But expelled from
the CP as a heretic, he quickly lost his old dentist, his accountant, and
others. Clearly, they were members of
the CP. Realistically, the CP was like a
cult, and anyone expelled, any heretic, was to be shunned, ostracized,
smeared. Of course, in the USSR,
heretics were gulaged or executed. While
the film stresses the pressure on Communists during the McCarthy era to quit the
Party and become “regular Americans,” it does not emphasize enough the
same conformist pressure by the CP upon
its own members to be politically correct (a phrase invented by the Communist
movement), and avoid all heresy and heretics.
In
their book on the Venona files, Romerstein and Breindel drew conclusions relevant to Browder and all
CP leaders. Breindel and Romerstein write:
“It might have been ‘common sense’ not to use CPUSA members and leaders in
espionage, but that is precisely what happened.
Venona shows that most of the agents working for the NKVD during WWII
were members of the Communist Party, some were Party officials. The top leadership…not only was aware…but it
also provided the Party members to the Soviets.”(259)
The
telecast does mention espionage and the anti-Communist feeling that rose
following WWII. But the filmmakers
de-emphasize the former while exaggerating the latter. Just watching the film, one might conclude
that the Rosenbergs were executed in 1952 because of anti-Communist
hysteria. The narrator interviews Bettina
Aptheker, daughter of Herbert, who was a prolific author, noted historian of
Black history, and fierce defender and open member of the CP. Bettina tells the camera she recalls how her
parents took her – she was about 8 - to Union Square where she thought about
100,000 stood, hoping there would be a reprieve for the convicted atomic spies.
But when news of their electrocutions
rippled through the crowd, she saw her father cry for the first time, and her
mother turned ashen. But we now know the
Rosenbergs were guilty. They were
convicted, and, even in our Constitution, the punishment for treason is death. So why the emotions? Did the crowd really believe the Rosenbergs
innocent? Or did they believe it was moral
and proper to give atomic secrets to the Soviets? And therefore, the Rosenbergs should not be
punished.
What
is missing from the film are the conclusions of historians like Breindel and
Romerstein, based on revelations of the Venona codes and the opening of some
files in Moscow. The R and B interpretation
is far less flattering to the American CP.
Those authors maintain that the American CP, like all CPs, was established
with a legal and an illegal organization, and that the Soviets were to use the
various CPs to recruit those who could provide intelligence and/or those
powerful enough to influence major decisions to favor Soviet policy. This very important aspect of all CPs tends
to be skipped over in Wormser’s docufilm, except when discussing anti-Communist
hysteria.
This
documentary is more influenced by the title of Vivian Gornick’s 1979 book, The Romance of American Communism. The film dwells on struggles to organize
unions and build the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the struggle to save
the Scottsboro boys and end lynching of Blacks in the South in the 1930s, the
struggle to prevent evictions during the Depression with the Unemployed
Councils, the struggle for higher wages, for women’s rights to equal pay, even to
help consumers through a consumers’ union.
By the mid-1930s, the CP often led groups in the fight against fascism,
opposing Hitler’s expansion, opposing Franco’s rebels in Spain, opposing
Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. The
American CP helped fill the Lincoln Brigade in Spain. But with Franco’s victory, Italy’s victory,
the Western appeasement of Hitler at Munich and the dismemberment of
Czechoslovakia, Stalin had second thoughts.
In
August 1939 The non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Communist
Soviet Union was signed. Thereafter, the
Communists maintained the chief threat to peace came from the imperialist
nations, Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, all with empires. Germany and the USSR would be peaceful
neighbors. Of course, in September 1939
Germany invaded Poland from the West with its blitzkrieg, and a few weeks later
the Soviets invaded from the East. Soon
after, there was no more Poland. And the
non-aggression pact allowed Stalin to aggress against Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, and part of Romania. The
Wormser film skips over this period when the American CP suddenly opposed Pres.
Roosevelt and his pro-Allied, pro-war policies.
The Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger sang, mocking those who feared
Japanese “spies.” For the film to stress
the CP’s opposition to war during this period would tarnish the image of the CP
as a leader in anti-fascism. So the film
ignores the CPs attacks on Roosevelt, Churchill, and American re-armament. When Hitler’s Germany led a European attack
on the USSR in summer 1941, the CP changed its line overnight. One day the Communists were picketing the
White House with signs, “The Yanks Are Not Coming,” and the next day they were
urging FDR to intervene in the European war against Nazi Germany.
Strangely
omitted from the documentary is one of the most important and lasting of the
CPs contributions to American society.
This was the Progressive Party (hereafter PP) campaign of Henry Wallace
for President in 1948 – especially its campaign in the South. I have argued elsewhere that the PP of 1948
was the civil right movement of that decade.
The campaign manager was Paul Robeson, a Black who had been an
all-American football player at Rutgers in the 19teens, an attorney, a baritone
soloist, a star of several British films, and finally a star of Broadway
playing Othello. In the early 1940s, he
was one of the most famous Blacks in the US.
He encouraged young Blacks in the South to change things through
organizations like “snick,” the Southern Negro Youth Congress. In 1948 at a SNYC conclave in Birmingham for
the PP, Police Commish. Bull Connor arrested the VP candidate of the PP, US
Sen. Glen Taylor of Idaho, because Taylor entered through the Negro entrance of
the building. Henry Wallace himself, a
former VP under Pres. Roosevelt, campaigning in the South that year, refused to
speak at segregated venues. When he
spoke at open-air rallies, Wallace was
sometimes greeted by segregationists hurling rotten tomatoes. W E B Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP decades
before, was a prominent supporter of the PP.
When he made his view public, the NAACP fired him, and thereafter that
organization essentially became a Democratic Party front- group. The PP made strenuous efforts in the South to
get Blacks registered to vote and even run for office. Many of the names promoting the PP in the
South would re-emerge a decade later, people like Daisy Bates. This does not mean that all involved in the
PP campaign were Communists, but the CP provided many of the resources and
skills for the new PP. These included
what the Truman Administration would label as front groups, like the SNYC, the
Civil Rights Congress, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, etc. Most of these organizations would dissolve by
the early 1950s because once on Truman’s Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations,
members could be fired, isolated, and persecuted.
But some of
the people who were Progressives would emerge again in the next decade or
so. Everyone knows the story of Rosa
Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott.
But few are aware that she trained to protest before she refused to
yield her seat on the bus. Parks had
trained at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which was a popular-front
institution. Communists were
welcome. Indeed, photos were taken of
leading Communists with Parks and others at the school like Rev. Martin Luther
King. King would later hire a Communist
in King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council, and King was very close to
Stanley Levison, whom the FBI assumed was a financial leader and secret member
of the CPUSA. And “snick” was reborn as
the Students Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (now SNCC). Why does the film eschew discussion of an
area where the CP did contribute to American history? I suspect Wormser did not want to tarnish the
image of the civil rights movement.
The liberal
historians interviewed for this film obviously dislike Sen. Joseph
McCarthy. These historians give credit
to liberal Democrat President Harry Truman
for purging Communists from the federal civil service. But Truman, and Republican Dwight Eisenhower,
both invoked Executive Privilege to expand Presidential powers and deny
important records to Congressional committees like that chaired by Sen.
McCarthy, investigating Communist influence in government. The committees were denied access to files
that might have provided evidence of treason in the government. Denied the essential information by
Presidential decrees, Congress was frustrated in its investigations, and
sometimes Communist agents continued to operate and foil American policy
objectives. Truman and Eisenhower were
more determined to expose and fire whistleblowers who were talking to
McCarthy’s investigators than in weeding out and firing Soviet agents in the
Federal bureaucracy. Despite Harry
Truman’s assurance, Alger Hiss was no “red herring;”Hiss was a Soviet spy. Eisenhower deflected criticism by firing some
1,200 “security risks,” but almost all were homosexuals; very few if any were
engaged in treason. Truman had used this
tactic on a smaller scale. Furthermore,
McCarthy and his aides, Roy Cohn and David Schine, were pilloried by the
“tolerant” liberal media, and in Congress itself, liberal Republican Sen. Flanders
of Vermont, made a speech comparing McCarthy to Hitler and clearly implying that
the Wisconsin Senator and Cohn and Schine were all homosexuals.(M. Stanton
Evans, Blacklisted by History, 586)
Were there decisions
made in the US State Dept. and Treasury Dept. and possibly other departments by
Communists that effectively denied financial and military aid to the legitimate
government of China under Chiang Kai-Shek?
Some in the American bureacucracy demanded that before Chiang receive US
aid, he would have to join in a coalition government with Mao and the
Communists. Chiang had once tried that,
and was determined not to do so again, believing it would inevitably result in a
Maoist take-over. Thus, while the US did
little to help Chiang’s Nationalists, at the same time, Stalin was providing
materiel to Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists. Might the outcome of the Chinese civil war have
been different had the US aided Chiang more?
And the related question, might the outcome have been different had
there been a purge of Soviet agents from the American State and Treasury Departments?
At the
trial of the Rosenbergs, Judge Irving Kaufman declared that their treason in providing
American atomic secrets to the Soviets made the Korean War possible. There is no doubt atomic spies in the West
hastened the development of Stalin’s bombs.
And once he had the atomic weapon, Stalin acceded to North Korea’s Kim
Il-Sung’s request to invade the southern half of the peninsula. A bloody war ensued, a war that might not
have occurred if Stalin had not developed (with help from Western spies) a
Soviet nuclear weapon. The Korean War, was
a consequence of treason by Western Communists like the Rosenbergs.
A greater
purge of Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Branch might have prevented the
collapse of Nationalist China on the mainland.
But far from helping, in 1950 Trumans’s State Department urged the
assassination of Chiang Kai-Shek! Indeed,
there were 2 plots by the Americans to kill Chiang earlier during WWII under
Democrat Pres. Roosevelt. (M. Stanton
Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s
Secret Agents, 153-54) The old Republican question of “Who lost
China?” was not merely political rhetoric.
Communists
did try to alleviate the suffering of the Great Depression. The Unemployment Councils did stop some
evictions. The International Workers
Order did help immigrants adjust to American life, while providing insurance
policies. But the CP- dominated IWO also
acquired the names, places and dates of birth of its members, and some of this
information was later used by Soviet intelligence. The CIO encouraged unions beyond the narrow
skilled and craft organizations of the AFL, and millions of workers benefitted
as a consequence. And the head of the
CIO, Miners’ union chief John L. Lewis, credited Communist organizers in
forging the CIO. The CP not only saved
the Scottsboro boys, its methods of combining a good court-room defense with
agitation and propaganda outside the legal arena, led to two important US
Supreme Court victories in the 1930s – when the high court was quite
conservative on racial issues. Moreover,
the CPs approach would be adopted and is now commonly followed in today’s
racial disputes. The CP efforts to end
segregation and gain civil rights are probably its most successful effort in
America. But its most successful
activities internationally were its supplying information to Stalin’s
dictatorship. The atomic spies – and
Steve Nelson should be included among them – changed the balance of power in
world politics. It is possible Communist
operatives in the American State and Treasury Dept.s helped Mao and Communism
win China – another change in the world balance of power.
The
American CP vetted its own members to find who could best serve Soviet
intelligence agencies. (They did not
have to be atomic scientists. during
WWII, the American Ambassador to the USSR, William Stanley, was stationed in
Moscow. At one point he discussed his
views on the USSR with a group of American journalists working in the Soviet
capital. He complained that American aid
to the Soviets was being repackaged so Soviet citizens did not know the goods
were coming from America. They were
packaged to appear as Soviet-made goods.
Among the American journalists to whom Ambassador Stanley confided was
Janet Ross. Stanley had no idea that
Ross was also a member of the American CP.
He revealed his suspicion of Stalin; she forwarded the information to
the Sovets who relayed it to the American Reds, who got the word to an
operative in Roosevelt’s White House.
Within a few weeks Ambassador Stanley was no longer the American
Ambassador to Moscow.[R & B, 441-44] )
It was not all spying; it was also using influence, not to promote
American interests, but to expand those of the Soviets.
One cannot
discuss the CP rallies, its skills and bravery in union organizing, and in
defying segregation, etc., without discussing how American CP leaders took
Moscow money, how the leadership scouted Party members seeking a right fit to
place “reliable” Party members in “special work” to supply Soviet intelligence
with information. According to Breindel
and Romerstein, in the decoded Venona files, when the NKVD refers to an
American Red, the NKVD calls the Communist a “countryman.” By its own terminology, American Communists
were no longer “Americans,” but fellow countrymen of the Soviets. Though Americans, their loyalty was then to
the USSR. This is not really explored in
the Wormser film.
The film has been shown on Public
Television, and First Run Features advertises the documentary, emphasizing its
educational value. Here are some of the
fields that might be interested in the film:” - Educational Interests- African-American Studies, American Studies, Business, Civil Rights, Cold War Era, Communication, Conflict Resolution, Economics, Globalization, History (U.S.), History (World), Human Rights, Jewish Studies, Labor Studies, Law & Legal Studies, Literature, Media Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Urban Studies, Vietnam, World War II.
The
advert continues:” Professors of both U.S. and social history will find a valuable
teaching tool in American Reds. The program provides a perspective
on the past that few Americans are aware of while raising a number of key
issues concerning social change, idealism, ideology, and the nature of our
economic and political system that continue to remain vital issues in
contemporary America.
"'American Reds' is a valuable primer into the tragic turn of events that
betrayed the hopes and aspirations of everyday working people during the great
confrontation between capitalism and communism in the early 20th century. It's
an important addition to public television's mission to throw light on obscured
corners of our history and on the forgotten people lost in the shadows." -
Bill Moyers
I totally disagree
with Moyers and the website’s ad.
Unfortunately, this documentary distorts, omits, spins. It omits information that has been available
since at least 2002. This film should
NOT be used in classes unless there is additional material or lecturers to
counter the film’s one-sided, dishonest presentation. Not only is the documentary about American
Reds, it is an example of American Red propaganda. Wormser’s film is not a documentary, it is a
distortumentary.