AMERICAN REDS - DISTORTED DOCUMENTARY

“AMERICAN REDS” – Documentary or Distortumentary?   Shown on PBS 2016

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            The American Communist Party is probably the 3^rd most influential political organization of 20^th 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.