Freedom4um

Status: Not Logged In; Sign In

History
See other History Articles

Title: Communists Should Not Teach in American Colleges - 1949
Source: The University of Washington - Educational Forum - Vo.13 No.
URL Source: [None]
Published: May 6, 1949
Author: Raymond B. Allen
Post Date: 2016-11-06 01:27:31 by Uncle Bill
Keywords: The, Killers Have, Taken, Over
Views: 104
Comments: 3

Communists Should Not Teach in American Colleges

By Raymond B. Allen
President of the University of Washington, Seattle
Published in: EDUCATIONAL FORUM (vol. 13, no. 4), May 1949.

The question of whether a member of the Communist Party should be allowed to teach in an American college is by no means a simple one. Despite the fact that many persons in educational circles appear to find easy answers to this question, those of us who have examined the question most carefully perhaps find the answers more difficult.

The general outlines of the examination of this problem in the recent cases at the University of Washington are probably well enough known that they need not be reviewed in detail here. Suffice it to say that the question was surveyed from every angle and with every facility available to the administration and faculty of the University of Washington. The decision, while it may not be fully satisfactory to everyone concerned, is in my opinion the most thoroughly considered and best documented study of the relationship between Communism and higher education yet attempted in America.

Out of this long and painstaking examination I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that members of the Communist Party should not be allowed to teach in American colleges. I am now convinced that a member of the Communist Party is not a free man. Freedom, I believe is the most essential ingredient of American civilization and democracy. In the American scheme educational institutions are the foundation stones upon which real freedom rests. Educational institutions can prosper only as they maintain free teaching and research. To maintain free teaching and research the personnel of higher education must accept grave responsibilities and duties as well as the rights and privileges of the academic profession. A teacher must, therefore, be a free seeker after the truth. If, as Jefferson taught, the real purpose of education is to seek out and teach the truth wherever it may lead, then the first obligation and duty of the teacher is to be a free man. Any restraint on the teacher's freedom is an obstacle to the accomplishment of the most important purposes of education.

This kind of freedom, without restraint from any quarter, is the keystone of the unparalleled progress with which America and the American way of life have faced the world. The justification for this kind of freedom, especially as it relates to teaching and research, may be seen in the great accomplishments of our classrooms and laboratories. In my own lifetime, for instance, I have seen the free minds of scholarly men solve most of the mysteries of travel in the air. I have also seen free research evolve a whole new science of electronics that has revolutionized menÕs ability to communicate with one another. As a medical man I have seen free research wipe out some of the most hideous diseases that have afflicted mankind down through the centuries. Even my young children have seen free and scholarly men unlock and control the vast and frightening power of the atom. In the past decade, all of us have seen the virility of a free people win out in a death struggle with the slave-states of Germany, Italy and Japan, only now to be faced again by another and perhaps more vicious adversary. These accomplishments I submit are some of the material fruits of freedom in scholarship and teaching.

The freedom that America prizes so much, then, is a positive and constructive concept. It starts, of course, by maintaining a freedom from restraint. Its greatest glory, however, derives from freedom considered in a more positive sense; that is, a freedom "for," a freedom to accomplish. In this best sense, freedom is not only a right and a privilege, but a responsibility which must rest heavily upon the institutions of freedom upon which we depend for the progress and virility of our way of existence.

This kind of freedom, I submit, is not allowed the membership the Communist Party. I have come to this conclusion painfully and reluctantly through a long series of hearings and deliberations. In my opinion these careful studies by faculty and administrative agencies of the University of Washington have proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that a member of the Communist Party is not a free man, that he is instead a slave to immutable dogma and to a clandestine organization masquerading as a political party. They have shown that a number of the Communist Party has abdicated control over his intellectual life.

The real issue between Communism and education is the effect of Communist Party membership upon the freedom of the teacher and upon the morale and professional standards of the profession of teaching. Many would have us believe that it is an issue of civil liberty. This, I believe, it is not. No man has a constitutional right to membership in any profession, and those who maintain that he has are taking a narrow, legalistic point of view which sees freedom only as a privilege and entirely disregards the duties and responsibilities that are correlative with rights and privileges. The lack of freedom permitted the Communist has a great deal more than a mere passing or academic bearing upon the duties of a teacher.

This bearing, I think, can best be illustrated by a number of questions which I have asked many times and for which I have yet to receive satisfactory answers. Imagine, if you can, a biologist who is unable freely to accept or reject the Mendelian law of heredity. Imagine, instead, a so-called scientist committed by his political affiliations to acceptance of the immutable Lysenko doctrine on the inheritance of human traits. Since I am not a geneticist I obviously should not and will not attempt to judge between these scientific theories. I would point out, however, that the Communist is committed by the party line to the latter point of view. He must accept the Lysenko doctrine and has no freedom to accept or reject either that theory or any other despite the weight of scientific evidence that supports the Mendelian law and has brought it general acceptance among geneticists throughout the world. It makes no difference here, it seems to me, whether Mendel or Lysenko is right. The issue here involved is, instead, that the Communist has no freedom to accept or reject on the basis of his own experience or thinking. Instead, his mind is chained to that theory which is written into Communist Party dogma.

Or to bring the matter closer home imagine, if you can, a social scientist unable freely to accept or reject the Marshall Plan for aid to the war-stricken countries of Europe and Asia. I will attempt no argument on the virtues or the shortcomings of the Marshall Plan, but I will suggest that the scholar has an obligation to maintain his own freedom to evaluate the Marshall Plan along with other controversial proposals in the present troubled world scene on the basis of his own experience and reasoning. Yet, according to the record of our hearings at the University of Washington, this kind of freedom is not permitted members of the Communist Party who proclaim the right to serve on our faculty. Again the Communist Party member is chained to a party dogma.

Imagine, if you can, a philosopher who has committed himself by membership in a political party to support universal military training in Russia and to oppose the same principal in the United States. Is this freedom? I say it is not. Yet this is the weird reasoning of one of the men recently dismissed from the institution I have the honor to head. This man, I maintain, is asserting a freedom which he has denied himself.

For these reasons, I believe a member of the Communist Party is not a free man. His lack of freedom disqualifies him from professional service as a teacher. Because he is not free, I hold that he is incompetent to be a teacher. Because he asserts a freedom he does not possess, I hold that he is intellectually dishonest to his profession. Because he has failed to be a free agent, because he is intolerant of the beliefs of others and because education cannot tolerate organized intolerance, I hold that he is in neglect of his most essential duty as a teacher. For these reasons I believe that Communism is an enemy of American education and that members of the Communist Party have disqualified themselves for service as teachers.

Professor Sidney Hook, Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at New York University, puts it all very succinctly in his recent article in the New York Times magazine (February 27, 1949): "What is relevant is that their (the Communist Party members') conclusions are not reached by a free inquiry into the evidence. To stay in the Communist Party they must believe and teach what the party line decrees."

II.

The University of Washington's action in dismissing members of the Communist Party from its faculty has been widely criticized as an abridgment of academic freedom. Academic freedom in my opinion, however, has been strengthened and not violated by this action. As Professor Hook puts it in the article referred to above: "A professor occupies a position of trust, not only in relation to the university and his student, but to the democratic community which places its faith and hope in the processes of education ('If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,' wrote Jefferson, 'it expects what never was and what never will be'). Academic freedom, therefore, carries with it duties correlative with rights. No professor can violate them under the pretext that he is exercising his freedom."

Academic freedom in its positive and constructive sense is essential to sound education. That this freedom must be maintained in any university worthy of the name is beyond question. But, I insist, academic freedom consists of something more than merely an absence of restraints placed upon the teacher by the institution that employs him. It demands as well an absence of restraints placed upon him by his political affiliations, by dogmas that stand in the way of a free search for truth, or by rigid adherence to a "party line" that sacrifices dignity, honor, and integrity to the accomplishment of political ends. Men, and especially the teacher and the scholar, must be free to think and discover and believe, else there will be no new thought, no discovery, and no progress. But these freedoms, are barren if their fruits are to be hidden away and defined. Men must be free, of course, but they must also be free, and willing, to stand up and profess what they believe so that all may hear. This is an important, if not the most important, part of our American heritage of freedom. It is this American heritage of freedom that must be cherished and sustained by our institutions of education if they are to survive.

The University of Washington's answer to the tenure cases left on its doorstep by a legislative investigating committee means that whatever violence may have been done to the principles of academic freedom by its dismissal of members of its staff, was done not by action of the University but, instead, by the actions of the individuals involved and by their affiliation with an organization whose dogmas prevented them from being free seekers after truth. The University has maintained that freedom to seek the truth, unhampered by any agency outside the mind of the individual, is the first obligation of any scholar or teacher. It maintains that any such restraint upon the freedom of the teacher puts in jeopardy not only his own freedom, but that of the rest of the University as well and especially that of honest liberals and indigenous radicals who certainly perform an essential function in the American university. The University of Washington always has and will continue to assert the right of honest nonconformist thought on the part of its faculty members. Its action in these cases, in my opinion, is a strong defense of liberal and radical thinking which is independent of party dogma and dictation.

It will be recalled that six members of the University faculty were involved in the recent tenure hearings. Three of these faculty members were dismissed by the Board of Regents on the basis of recommendations by the President of the University and the findings of a faculty committee on tenure and academic freedom. Two of the dismissals were based upon a belated admission of membership in the Communist Party. Dismissal action in the third case was taken, with the concurring recommendation of the faculty committee, because of "an ambiguous relationship to the Communist Party" and for violation of certain aspects of the administrative code of the University.

Perhaps more important to the principles of academic freedom was the disposition of the three other cases in which faculty members were charged with violation of the UniversityÕs administrative code and whose cases were heard by the same academic tribunal. These cases were muddied, it is true, by the fact that the men involved were former members of the Communist Party, and a certain element of censure was involved in the Regents' action because of this past membership. However, in each of these three cases, the individual involved, while admitting past membership in the Party, denied present membership and thus asserted his freedom from restraint by Communist dogma. In each of these all agencies concerned, including the Faculty Committee, the President of the University, and the Board of Regents, refused to take punitive action despite the fact that the individuals involved are well to the left of center in their political thinking and, in one case at least, asserted an intellectual belief in Marxist philosophy.

My recommendation to the Regents in the latter case, and I should point out that this recommendation was upheld by the Board of regents, makes the following assertion: "Such philosophies (intellectual Marxism), honestly held and divorced from the dogmas of the Communist Party are something quite different from active and secret membership in the Party. I think it is necessary that we maintain a place in the University for the holding of such philosophies, regardless of how strongly we may disagree with them, the only condition being that they not be subject to dictation from outside the mind of the holder. To close the University's doors to honest, nonconformist thought would do violence to the principles of academic freedom that we must maintain at all costs."

Thus, the University's position has been not that it wished to prescribe "the truth" but instead that it insisted that members of its faculty be free to seek the truth and be not restricted in this search by any agency other than the intellectual faculties of the individual himself.

The University's insistence upon academic freedom goes beyond the traditionally held concept that academic freedom can be abridged only by the institution and asserts that members of the faculty must likewise be free from other restraints that may restrict their freedom.

III.

It is perhaps unnecessary to do so, but so much misinformation on the University of Washington cases has been disseminated and unfortunately encouraged in some quarters that it may be worthwhile here to clear up one or two points at which misunderstanding have occurred.

First of all, re-emphasis needs to be given to the fact that the University of Washington has attempted only to determine the effect of Communist Party membership on qualifications for the teaching profession. No effort has been made to examine the legality or illegality of the Communist Party. Despite efforts to confuse this issue, the University has not attempted, indeed has made every effort to avoid, a compromise of the basic civil rights of the individuals involved. Every effort was made throughout the lengthy proceedings to be scrupulously fair and to observe full due process, in accordance with the American and Anglo-Saxon traditions, in order to provide safeguards against summary or capricious administrative action. Due process in this instance is spelled out in an established and recognized administrative code, written, approved and accepted by the full faculty of the University. Under the provisions of this code, respondents in these cases were represented by counsel of their own choice, there was no restriction upon their right of producing or questioning evidence, and all other traditions of Anglo-Saxon procedure were observed to the letter. Full and fair hearings were provided by all individuals and agencies participating in the decision, and I am happy to report that there has been no complaint from any informed quarter that the procedure was in any sense a "witch hunt" or an infringement of basic American rights.

Secondly, it should be re-emphasized that the Regents' action in dismissing two members of the faculty for membership in the Communist Party had support in the findings of the Faculty Committee which first heard the cases. This contradicts assertions that have been widely made that the Faculty Committee's recommendations were disregarded in the President's recommendations and in the Regents' action. This is distinctly not the case.

The Faculty Committee's findings in the cases of Dr. Phillips and Mr. Butterworth (the two faculty members dismissed for present Communist Party membership) consisted of four minority opinions. Three members of the eleven-member committee, in two opinions, recommended directly that Phillips and Butterworth be dismissed; three others recommended in a joint opinion that they be retained. The fourth minority opinion, signed by the five other members of the committee, while it did not directly recommend dismissal, clearly stated its agreement as a matter of policy with the opinions recommending severance and explained its failure to join in this recommendation on the ground that its members "would thereby assume a policy-making function beyond our powers." This minority group of five (making a majority of eight of the eleven members of the committee) went on to say: "We believe that it is time that a policy be laid down, by some competent authority, whether it be the faculty as a whole, the President, the Regents, or the Legislature, so as to put this vexed subject upon a basis that cannot be misunderstood.

Thus, the majority committee finding was that Communist Party membership is disqualifying for a teacher and that a policy to this effect should be established. The recommendations of the President and the action of the Board of Regents did establish a policy in line with this finding of the Faculty Committee. Thus no one can charge in good faith and on the basis of fact that the University of Washington acted on in the absence of "due process" and in disregard of the customary of usages and expectations of the teaching profession. Likewise, no one can charge in good faith and on the basis of facts that the University took action in these cases in contradiction to or in disregard of the Faculty Committee findings.

IV.

Essentially the issue posed by the presence of Communists on our faculties is much larger than that merely between Communism and free education. My position that Communists are not qualified to be teachers grows out of my belief that freedom has little meaning apart from the integrity of the men and women who enjoy that freedom. The larger issue is the issue of the integrity of the teacher and, beyond that, the corporate integrity of education as a whole. Certainly no one will argue that an educational institution, can have greater integrity than that of the individuals who make it up. The Communist Party, with its concealed aims and objectives, with its clandestine methods and techniques, with its consistent failure to put its full face forward, is a serious reflection upon the integrity of educational institutions that employ its members and upon a whole educational system that has failed to take the Communist issue seriously.

Individual faculty members have a duty and a responsibility to defend the corporate integrity of scholarship and teaching. The atomistic, over-specialized qualities of present day education are perhaps the most serious problems facing the profession today. Education seems to lack a common denominator of concept and belief around which to rally its potentially great strength. In my opinion, however, this lack of a central rallying point for the forces of education is more apparent that real. Education does have such a common denominator. It is education's free and unfettered search for truth. This freedom, it seems to me, is our most precious asset and should be defended at all costs. Without it education as a whole is without orientation. There is strong evidence that this is not a problem of education alone, but of our whole western civilization as well. As a society we have failed to some extent at least to find a common core of objectives, ideals, and an action program about which our way of life may go forward to greater strength and progress. In this view Communism is but one, perhaps minor, aspect of a larger problem that we as a people must face if our democratic society is to survive. Thus Communism assumes a different proportion. It is important because it represents in stark outline the lack of essential integrity which is democracy's most serious enemy. Without this integrity and the responsibility it entails, freedom is folly itself. Without responsible freedom, democracy and all we hold dear lacks meaning and the possibility of achievement. We as a people have chosen to live by the hopeful, positive tenets of freedom. Communism is the antithesis and the negation of these tenets. Communism would substitute a doctrine of fear, of little faith and would submerge the human spirit to the vicious ends of a crass materialism. Free education and its endless search for truth cannot gain by association with this doctrine of fear and hate and inhumanity. The American idea and the idea behind free education, and to my mind the two are inseparable, are "the last best hope on earth." In the final analysis, both rest upon the dignity, the integrity, and the goodwill of free men. As Americans and as educators, it is our responsibility to cherish and sustain this dignity, this integrity, this goodwill and this freedom.

The classroom has been called "the chapel of democracy." As the priests of the temple of education, members of the teaching profession have a sacred duty to remove from their ranks the false and robot prophets of Communism or of any other doctrine of slavery that seeks to be in, but never of, our traditions of freedom.

Never before has this country needed as it does today the leadership of thoroughly trained men and women. We must have leaders inspired from their earliest years with the ideals of true democracy. Education is our first line of defense. In the conflict of principle and policy which divides the world today, America's hope, our hope, the hope of the world, is in education. Through education alone can we combat the tenets of communism.

"The unfettered soul of free man offers a spiritual defense unconquered and unconquerable. We may not know what is behind the Iron Curtain, but we do know that the intelligence of the people in the embattled democracies of Europe, who live in front of the Iron Curtain, is the world's best hope for peace today."
- PRESIDENT TRUMAN


Why have we failed to teach America's kids about the horrors of communism?

RADICAL SON

"The situation in the universities was appalling. The Marxists and socialists who had been refuted by historical events were now the tenured establishment of the academic world. Marxism had produced the bloodiest and most oppressive regimes in human history -but after the fall, as one wit commented, more Marxists could be found on the faculties of American colleges than in the entire former Communist bloc."

"The American Historical Association was run by Marxists, as was the professional literature association, whose field had been transformed into a kind of pseudosociology of race-gender-class oppression. When Peter [Collier] and I were undergraduates in the Fifties, the mission of the university had been described by its guardians as 'the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.' It was now officially recast in radical terms as that of 'social transformation.' "

"With no trace of embarrassment, Richard Rorty, one of the most prominent figures in academic philosophy, even boasted that 'the power base of the Left in America is in the universities,' by which he meant not the students (who were generally apathetic if not conservative), but the faculties, administrations, and departments, who tried to recruit students to their political agendas."

Republican Professors? Sure, There's One

NEA Resource Text Guide In Regards To The Extreme Right - Where Do Your Kids Go To School?

MASTERLINK TO EDUCATION THREADS


"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural Being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future."
Taken from an address given at a childhood education seminar in 1973 by Professor Chester M. Pierce of educational psychiatry at Harvard University representing the Association for Childhood Education International.

"The battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith. ....The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new--the rotting corpse of Christianity and the new faith of Humanism."
"A Religion for a New Age," The Humanist - January/February 1983, p. 26.

"Fundamental, Bible believing people do not have the right to indoctrinate their children in their religious beliefs because we, the state, are preparing them for the year 2000, when America will be part of a one-world global society and their children will not fit in."
Peter Hoagland - Nebraska State Senator


In its inquiry, BUSINESS WEEK reviewed a mountain of documentation and interviewed traders, brokerage executives, investors, regulators, law-enforcement officials, and prosecutors. It also interviewed present and former associates of the Wall Street Mob contingent. Virtually all spoke on condition of anonymity, with several Street sources fearing severe physical harm--even death--if their identities became known. One, a former broker at a Mob-run brokerage, says he discussed entering the federal Witness Protection Program after hearing that his life might be in danger. A short-seller in the Southwest, alarmed by threats, carries a gun.


Published in Washington, D.C.. . . . . . . . Vol. 13, No. 37 -- Oct. 6-13, 1997 . . . . . . . . www.insightmag.com

We Told You So


By Stephen Goode

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, hard proof confirms that the Communist Party U.S.A. was active in espionage and clandestine activities. Liberals steadfastly claimed it wasn't true.

What amazes me is that it is far worse than I thought," Hoover In-stitution research fellow Arnold Beichman tells Insight, emphasizing every word. Beichman, author of books such as Anti-American Myths: Their Causes and Consequences, is talking about the amount of espionage and clandestine activity carried out by American members of the Communist Party in the United States from the time it was founded in 1919 and during the next seven decades. "It's worse than we ever expected -- the extent of it. No one knew."
. . . . Now we do, at least to some extent. In 1995 Emory University professor Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes of the Library of Congress and Russian archivist Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov published The Secret World of American Communism, a collection of 92 documents that Klehr, a political scientist, accidentally stumbled across on a visit to Russia.
. . . . Those 92 documents show beyond a doubt that the perception many Americans had in the 1950s that "American communism was a Soviet weapon in the Cold War" was well-founded and not a fantasy spawned by right-wing paranoia, as many on the left charged. Some of the documents show Communists clandestinely active in the federal government during the 1940s and 1950s, just as Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy said time and again. And other documents prove that Moscow regularly funded Communist Party activity in the United States.
. . . . Additional information about American communism has followed. Early in spring 1998, Klehr and Haynes will publish a second volume of documents and commentary titled The Soviet World of American Communism, Klehr tells Insight, and other volumes will follow covering topics such as the Communist Party's role in mainstream politics in America, the party's relationship to its many intellectual supporters and the activities of American Communists in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.
. . . . New data are beginning to be gleaned, too, from the more than 2,000 so-called Venona intercepts (see sidebar), long held secret by the National Security Agency but recently declassified and made available to the public.
. . . . And investigators have been at work on other aspects of American Communist activity. Reporter Michael Chapman, writing this summer in the weekly conservative tabloid Human Events, outlined the Communist Party connections of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb." Chapman plans to turn the story into a book about the man who directed the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II and later was chief adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission.
. . . . Among other discoveries, in June Chapman came across a photograph of Oppenheimer in an exhibit at the KGB museum in Moscow. The subject of the exhibit? Soviet memorabilia on "leading atomic espionage agents and espionage documents." Oppenheimer's image was displayed by KGB historians along with a photograph of another nuclear physicist, convicted Communist spy Klaus Fuchs, and a shot of a Manhattan Project laboratory site.
. . . . Thanks to the work of Klehr, Haynes, Chapman and others, it is clear that American Communists maintained a secret underground organization, a fact long denied by many historians of communism in America. It also is clear that American Communists actively assisted Soviet intelligence efforts in the United States and elsewhere, another fact long denied by many historians. And it is more clear than ever that Josef Stalin had his obedient American admirers.
. . . . Even with so much information now readily available, investigators such as Klehr tell Insight that what has come to light in recent years is "only the tip of the iceberg," and much, much more is to come.
. . . . The revelations are all the more surprising because of Communist secrecy and the desire of many party members to remain unknown. Whittaker Chambers, the former Communist Party member, wrote in his book Witness of the need to learn the truth about Communist activity: "Those who insist plaintively on evidence against a force whose first concern is that there shall be no evidence against it, must draw what inferences they please."
. . . . In Witness, Chambers warned against another aspect of American communism -- the protection it received from the "best" of society: academics, intellectuals, journalists and sundry others. "The forces of enlightenment" continually are at work "pooh-poohing the communist danger and calling every allusion to it a witch-hunt," wrote Chambers, who was himself the brunt of much left-wing mudslinging.
. . . . The standard myth about the American Communist Party, perpetrated by revisionist historians and much of the media, is that its members overwhelmingly were idealistic men and women who sought justice and an end to human suffering. The truth is otherwise. The Communist Party, USA, or CPUSA, had a sizable cadre of members whose chief loyalty was to the Soviet Union and its leadership and who acted according to those loyalties. As the Hoover Institution's Beichman notes: "We ultra-right, fascist and everything-else-they-called-us scoundrels were more right than anybody else."
. . . . So what do we now know?
. . . . * Emory University's Klehr, a longtime student of the CPUSA, says what amazed him most about the recent influx of data "was the extent to which the leadership was involved in espionage and covert activities." It's "breathtaking, the risks they took," says Klehr, speaking about men such as Earl Browder, Eugene Dennis and Gus Hall -- general secretaries of the American Communist Party who each (with the exception of Browder later in life) were completely subservient to Moscow.
. . . . Humorless as the Reds tended to be, some of these revelations are hilarious. Documents reveal that when Browder, who headed the CPUSA from 1929 to 1945, traveled to China once in the 1930s to meet Chinese Communists, he was greeted with signs welcoming "the Earl of Browder."
. . . . * The new documents show that American journalists such as John J. Spivak, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edmund Stevens and Agnes Smedley were active in communist affairs -- a fact suspected but never so fully verified as now. The case of Smedley is especially interesting because as recently as 1988 a biography, Agnes Smedley, Life and Times of an American Radical, described her as a "freelance revolutionary" unconnected with the Communist Party, to which she most certainly was connected.
. . . . * The new documents "lend support," in Klehr's words, to the already substantial evidence that shows the presence of Communists in a number of New Deal Washington government agencies. Revisionist historians have described this Communist presence as nothing more than "Marxist study groups." The new evidence, however, doesn't permit such a benign interpretation. Of particular interest are the Ware cell in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and several advisers to Wisconsin Sen. Robert LaFollette's Civil Liberties subcommittee of the Senate Education and Labor Committee.
. . . . * Revisionist historians and the left long have denounced such figures as Benjamin Gitlow and Louis Budenz as dishonest and unreliable when it came to testimony both men gave after they left the party about their activities as CPUSA members. But far from unreliable and dishonest, the new documents show that both Gitlow and Budenz told the truth about CPUSA activity in the United States.
. . . . This is true, too, of the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, who turned herself in to the FBI in 1945 and in 1948 confessed before a Senate committee to Communist Party membership and being a Soviet spy. Bentley cited 40 people by name -- Communists all and federal employees, Bentley said -- with whom she had worked in Washington as a party activist.
. . . . The media quickly portrayed her as flaky and unreliable. Newsweek dismissed her as a "New England spinster ... wearing slinky black silk." (The parallels with Clinton accuser Paula Corbin Jones are striking. The press used Bentley's dowdiness to render her flaky in the public eye. Jones' "big hair" has been joked about, as has her alleged residence in a trailer park, which evidently makes her flakiness an indisputable fact.)
. . . . Nonetheless, the new evidence --and particularly the very recent release of the Venona intercepts -- makes it clear that Bentley, too, was telling the truth, says Klehr.
. . . . * And what of Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb"? As Chapman notes in Human Events, when the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, revoked Oppenheimer's security clearance in 1954, Oppenheimer's supporters cried foul and accused the AEC of "McCarthyism."
. . . . The AEC charged that there was "substantial evidence of Dr. Oppenheimer's association with communists, communist functionaries and communists who did engage in espionage." His defenders denied the charges.
. . . . But Chapman says that former KGB official Yuri Kolesnikov told him in Moscow this summer that "Oppenheimer and other top scientists cooperated with us." They weren't Soviet agents, Kolesnikov said. But they "gave us information about the atom bomb," first because they were fearful that Hitler might defeat the Soviet Union in World War II and later because Oppenheimer and the other scientists wanted to create a balance of power between the United States, which had the bomb, and the USSR, which didn't.
. . . . Interestingly, as recently as Sept. 14, Theodore Hall, now 71 but in 1944 a 19-year-old physicist at Los Alamos, explained to the Associated Press that his motives in contacting a Soviet agent near the end of World War II was that he "was worried about the dangers of an American monopoly of atomic weapons." Hall's activities are discussed in Bombshell, a book on atomic-spy conspirators to be published in October.
. . . . Chapman argues that evidence shows Oppenheimer's close association with Communists from the mid-1930s on, from Oppenheimer's wife Kitty and younger brother Frank to figures such as Steve Nelson, a Yugoslav-born and naturalized American who was a central figure in clandestine Communist Party activity in the U.S.
. . . . It is of interest that Emory University's Klehr believes his discovery of the American Communist Party documents in Russia was fortuitous and might not have happened. "I don't think the officials knew what was in the archive where I found the documents," he says, noting that official Russia now knows about the archive and, as a result, "a number of the documents have been reclassified and are no longer available."
. . . . Asked to what extent the Communist underground network influenced American policy, Klehr responds with one of history's great "what if's." In this case, it's what if Henry Wallace had become president of the United States, which he would have had FDR died a year earlier. Wallace served as vice president during FDR's third term and later ran for president on the Progressive ticket in 1948 with Communist Party support.
. . . . Klehr notes that Wallace once mentioned that if he'd been president he would have made Laurence Duggan, a State Department specialist on Latin America, his secretary of state and, for his treasury secretary, Wallace said he would have chosen Harry Dexter White, a highly placed treasury official influential in deciding post-World War II American economic policy.
. . . . Both Duggan and White were communists whose politics long were suspected or known but about whose party activities more is being learned, says Klehr. Duggan and White's elevation to a Wallace Cabinet never happened, of course. But that their names were bandied by a former U.S. vice president as possibilities for top posts underlines their closeness to power and the role secret Communists had come to play in Washington affairs.
. . . . Will the recent revelations about the CPUSA change minds? Probably not everyone's, the experts say. Some still believe in Alger Hiss' innocence, for example, even though the evidence is overwhelming that Hiss was guilty. There even are staunch defenders of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who say the couple wrongly was executed for atomic espionage.
. . . . And American academics seem particularly prone to harbor notions of the basic rightness of communism. Just last year, Miami University of Ohio historian Robert W. Thurston published Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-41, which purported to prove that Stalin's terror wasn't so very terrible after all -- that far fewer people than originally believed had been arrested and far fewer put to death.
. . . . The argument was, of course, vulnerable to ridicule and was devastatingly attacked by a fellow historian, Adam Hochschild, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. Among the book's many defects to which Hochschild pointed, none was more telling than a map in Thurston's book of the infamous Kolyma district of Siberia where historians have located more than 120 Soviet "labor" camps. Thurston locates only one such camp on his map of Kolyma. Thus continues the effort to make communism palatable, despite substantial evidence to the contrary.
. . . . There's another side to the recent revelations about Communist activity in America, beyond its impressive size and variety. Beichman captures this side when he notes that other than the numbers and extent, what strikes him is "the mediocrity of people involved. What small-minded types they were." Even Arthur Koestler didn't tell it all in his classic anti-Communist novel Darkness At Noon, Beichman says. "All those lives totally wasted."


SECRET VENONA INTERCEPTS

By Tiffany Danitz

. . . . Unsealed in l995, the Venona intercepts are a testament to the lives and times of U.S. Army cryptanalysts who relentlessly pursued ways to break the Soviets' secret codes during World War II and the Cold War.
. . . . Like any type of investigative work, deciphering the messages darting between Moscow and the Soviet missions in Washington and New York was grueling, repetitive work with rare "hits," according to Cecil Phillips, 72, who was responsible for a break that led to unraveling numerous KGB messages.
. . . . The top-secret decoding work that eventually indicted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the husband-and-wife spies who were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, occurred in the "Russian room" at Arlington Hall, a wartime Washington spy tank.
. . . . The atmosphere during the early 1940s was charged with secrecy. "Even others at Arlington Hall did not know that we were working on the Russian problem," explains Phillips. "We locked up the dictionaries at night and no one ever spoke of what we were doing."
. . . . There has been criticism of the Venona project because the United States was tracking Russian messages at a time when the countries were allies. But Phillips says he and his colleagues believed that their work had extreme significance.
. . . . Phillips, then a 19-year-old cryptanalyst, had just arrived in Washington after a long train ride from Asheville, N.C., when he began working at Arlington Hall in 1943. The young man had been recruited by the Army as a result of a brilliant performance on an IQ test. The recruitment officer asked, "How would you like to go to Washington to be a cryptologer?" Phillips jumped at the offer. It was May Day 1944 when he made the discovery that enabled the United States to decode KGB communications.
. . . . KGB agents worked with onetime-use code pads. Each message they received had an indicator at the start which told the agent where to go in the code pad to begin decoding the message. Then Phillips noted an unusual pattern of the number six -- which proved to be the first case in which a code-pad key had been reused. This opened a door for linguist Meredith Gardner to reconstruct the KGB code.
. . . . It was an important breakthrough. A Dec. 20 message contained the list of leading scientists working on the Manhattan Project. The FBI was contacted and it sent Agent Robert Lamphere in autumn 1948 to work with Gardner. From that point on the Soviet espionage rings began to reveal themselves.
. . . . Although the analysts had no idea they were working with espionage at the time, Phillips says that eventually he figured they were snooping on a spy network. "I realized the Rosenbergs were arrested and that part of the information came from us. There was a feeling among some in government that [Sen. Joseph] Mc-Carthy was right, but for the wrong reasons. There was a lot of suspicion that McCarthy and others were trying to get people they didn't like by accusing them of being Communists," he says.
. . . . But Venona revealed hundreds of deliberate espionage operatives. "The government was riddled with Communist spies," Phillips says, adding, "They were everywhere: in defense, Treasury and every part of the government. They had access to everything, to top American technology ... there wasn't anything they didn't know."
. . . . In fact, the Russians even were in Arlington Hall. Venona's chief Russian linguist, William Weisband, was a Soviet agent, according to Phillips. "I don't think there was any question that he was a KGB spy. I knew him very well. He had carte blanche to move around and full access to everything we were doing. He managed to cultivate the senior officers and was in an extremely good position to collect information," says Phillips.
. . . . Arlington Hall, where proof was obtained confirming Soviet infiltration of the American government, no longer exists. Today, the old headquarters building houses classes for American diplomats, and a portion of the land was given to the National Guard to coordinate state and federal administration.


WITNESS TO A LYNCH MOB (1 image)

Post Comment   Private Reply   Ignore Thread  


TopPage UpFull ThreadPage DownBottom/Latest

#1. To: All (#0)

BTTT

Press 1 for English, Press 2 for English, Press 3 for deportation

Uncle Bill  posted on  2019-04-14   20:18:54 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: All (#1)

COMMUNISTS SHOULD NOT TEACH IN ANY SCHOOL IN AMERICA

WAKE UP AMERICANS

Press 1 for English, Press 2 for English, Press 3 for deportation

Uncle Bill  posted on  2020-01-09   0:02:01 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#3. To: All (#2)

BTTT

Press 1 for English, Press 2 for English, Press 3 for deportation

Uncle Bill  posted on  2020-01-20   4:03:24 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


TopPage UpFull ThreadPage DownBottom/Latest