From the four corners of the land, as well as from the pink and Red
There was no reason for meeting at sea save the purely spectacular features which Roosevelt always loved. The dramatic effect of the meeting was very great. It made a thunderous radio story and massive headlines. But, as was so characteristic of Roosevelt, the great declaration of principles was a mere incident of the meeting. The purpose was wholly military. Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt sent for all the representatives in America of these occupied countries and said to them: "Be assured, gentlemen, that the restoration of the countries occupied by Germany and suffering under the Axis yoke is my greatest concern, which is shared in like degree by Mr. Churchill. We promise that all will be done to insure the independence of these countries." Churchill was present. He turned to the Polish Ambassador and said: "We will never forget what glorious Poland has done and is doing nor what heroic Greece and Holland have done in this war. I hope I need not add that Great Britain has set herself the aim of restoring full independence and freedom to the nations that have been overrun by Hitler." These reassurances were to be repeated many times with varying oratorical flourishes. And as for the "Atlantic Charter," which was nothing more than a screen to hide what had actually been done at Placentia Bay, a handsome copy of it was made, bearing the names of Churchill and Roosevelt, and placed on exhibition in the National Museum in Washington, where crowds viewed it with reverence as one of the great documents of history. . On November 27, just ten days before the attack, the President told Secretary Stimson, who wrote it in his diary, that our course was to maneuver the Japanese into attacking us. This would put us into the war and solve his problem. The Board of Economic Warfare was created to control the export of all materials seeking private export and to look after the procurement of all materials essential to the war effort, except arms and munitions. Vice President Wallace was named chairman of the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW). There was an element of "cloak and dagger" in this institution. It was at war with Hitler and Hirohito in the markets of the world. It bought things we needed. But it also bought, where necessary, things we did not need in order to preclude the enemy getting them. This was called "preclusive" buying. It issued thousands of export licenses every day. It was quite a bureau and it bulged with bureaucrats. At the top, next to Wallace, was a somewhat cheaper edition of Wallace YD an authentic New Deal bureaucrat, if there ever was one. He was Milo Perkins, executive director. Perkins was a man with a soul YD one of those souls that keeps making a lot of noise inside his body. He went in for art and music and finally Theosophy. The New Republic said of him that "for nine years at nine every Sunday morning, he donned his priestly robes, took along his sons and acolytes and preached to a congregation of fifty people." By 1943 the BEW had 200 economic commandos in the field fighting Hitler in the market places of the world and around 3,000 in Washington directing their weird operations Although this outfit spent $1,200,000,000, no law ever authorized it, and the Senate never confirmed the appointment of Wallace or Perkins. The President "grabbed the torch" and created it by edict. Of course, a great legion of economic soldiers had to have a chief economist. How they picked him I do not know. But these two great geopolitical warriors YD Wallace and Perkins YD came up with a gentleman named Dr. Maurice Parmalee, born in Constantinople. Parmalee wrote another book labeled "Bolshevism, Fascism and the Liberal Democratic State." In this he renders it feasible to introduce a planned social economy much more rapidly than has been the case in the U.S.S.R. ...The superficial paraphernalia of capitalism can be dispensed with more quickly than in the Soviet Union." But the doctor had strayed into much lighter fields of literature. He had also written a book called "Nudism in Modern Life" which is secluded in the obscene section of the Library of Congress. In it the doctor revealed his interest in a science called Gymnosophy, a cult of the old gymnosophists who it seems were ancient Hindu hermit philosophers who went around with little or no clothing. "these gymnosophist nudist colonies furnish excellent opportunities for experiments along socialist lines ... Customary nudity is impossible under existing undemocratic, social and economic and political organization." A new chief economist was brought in YD Dr. John Bovingdon. Bovingdon was no fool. He went to Harvard and graduated with honors, which is more than Mr. Roosevelt did. But he, too, was one of those free spirits of the wandering winds who had managed to live for a while in the Orient, three years in Europe and England, two years in Russia and for smaller terms in 22 other countries. His Harvard class reunion book said he "engaged in art activities, painting on fabrics, poetry, dancing, acting, consultant on the Moscow Art Theater, oneYDman commercial monodrama programs, weaving, sandalYDmaking" and so on. In 1931 the police in Los Angeles raided a Red pageant for a Lenin Memorial which Bovingdon was staging. The experience shook Mr. Bovingdon terribly and he went to Russia. He got a job in Moscow as a director of the International Theatre. He worked as a journalist in the world of free Russian speech, wrote radio scripts and plays. He decided to return to the United States to make us understand Russia. In January, 1938, he appeared in Long Beach, California, at the town's first "Communist Party celebration on the 14th anniversary of Lenin's death." By what curious movement of the stars did these weird ideological brothers turn up on posts of the greatest importance in the councils of the New Deal? As fast as one was pushed out another moved in. It could not be by chance, since this happened in practically every important bureau. {Can you say 'conspiracy?...sure you can... - sog} These two strange birds were not isolated cases. The UnYDAmerican Activities Committee gave Wallace a list of 35 Communists in the BEW. That information was merely brushed aside with some insulting smear against the Committee. It mattered not what the New Dealer touched, it became a torch to be grabbed, it became an instrument for use in his adventures in social engineering, and after June, 1941 when Hitler turned on his partner Stalin, these bureaus became roosting places for droves of Communist termites who utilized their positions as far as they dared to advance the interests of Soviet Russia and to help "dispense with the superficial paraphernalia of capitalism" in this country under cover of the war. By no means a basically bad person, he was congenitally incapable of resisting the destructive personal effects of power. *** sog *** purlieus of New ork and Chicago and every big city, came the molders of the Brave New World. *** sog *** They put their busy fingers into everything. They dictated women's styles, the shapes of women's stockings; they told butchers how to carve a roast; they limited the length of Santa Claus' whiskers in department stores. At one time there was an almost complete breakdown of food distribution throughout the United States. The paper work required of an ordinary small merchant was so extensive that it was practically impossible to comply with. These rules and regulations became so irksome that people ignored them. Then the OPA set up a nationwide network of courts before which citizens could be hauled up and tried for breaking laws enacted by OPA bureaucrats. If convicted, they could, under OPA rulings, have their ration cards taken away from them YD sentenced to starve. One may talk about the profits of war, but there were in truth little profits for honest men because the government YD and rightly YD during the war drained away in drastic taxes most of the profits. In the financing and supervision of the war effort from Washington practically every fiscal crime was committed. And the plain evidence of that is before us in the bill for the war. Few realize how vast it was. For the mind, even of the trained financier, begins to lose its capacity for proportion after the figures pass beyond the limit of understandable billions. The war cost I reckon at 363 billion dollars. Chapter Eight - The Thought Police 1. If there is one department of human struggle which the radical revolutionist understands and loves it is the war that is waged on the mass mind; the war that is carried on with poisons distilled in the mind to produce bias and hatred. It would be strange indeed if we did not find some of the practitioners of this dark art from New ork and some of the offYDscourings of Europe's battered revolutionary emigres numerously entrenched in that thoroughly unYDAmerican institution during the war which was known as the OWI YD the Office of War Information. It began with a thing called the Office of Facts and Figures. a drove of writers and journalists whose souls were enlisted in the great crusade to bring on the Brave New World of the Future. It was in fact an agency for selling Roosevelt's Third New Deal and Roosevelt himself to the people under the guise of "maintaining public morale" and conducting "psychological warfare." , OWI spent $68,000,000 and had 5,561 agents scattered all over the world. But OWI had other tasks than selling America to the Arabs. It was also busy selling Russia to the Americans. The chief of the Foreign Language Section of OWI was a young gentleman 28 years old who had spent his entire life on New ork's East Side, who spoke no foreign language and yet had the decision on whether news should be released to Europe or not. Anybody who disagreed with his high admiration for our Soviet ally was labeled a fascist. There was another child wonder YD 23 years old YD who was the Russian expert of the OWI and who saw to it that nothing went out that was displeasing to the objectives of our noble ally YD including grabbing ugoslavia. OWI's broadcasts to Poland ended not with the Polish national anthem but with a song adopted by the Polish emigres in Moscow who were known as Stalin's "Committee of Liberation." The expert in charge of the Polish section was actually born in Poland, but left there and spent the rest of his life in France where he was notorious as a Communist. He fraternized with the Vichy government while Hitler and Stalin were pals, but when Hitler invaded Russia he came to America and quickly became OWI's expert in explaining American democracy to the people of Poland.51 The deputy director of the Pacific and Far Eastern Area was a British subject until he got a government job in Washington in 1942. While running this important bureau for OWI, he wrote a play which was produced at Hunter College. Burton Rascoe, reviewing it, said: "Its most conspicuous purpose is to idealize the Red Army in China, to defame the Chungking government under Chiang KaiYDshek and to ridicule the political, social and educational ideas of the vast majority of the American people."52 The men, material, cable and wireless time used up by OWI were immense. It ran 350 daily radio programs and had a daily cableYDwireless output of 100,000 words. It was the world's largest pamphlet and magazine publisher and a big movie producer, sending shorts to every country in the world. It sent out 3,500 transcribed recordings a month and turned out 50 movie shorts a year. The content of most of this material was pure drivel. All of this work was not just naive. OWI printed 2,500,000 pamphlets called "The Negro in the War,"54 with pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt, the Negroes' friends, in preparation for the fourthYDterm campaign. It printed a handsome volume called "Handbook of the United States"55 and gave a British firm the right to publish it. This gave a history of America, with the story from Leif Ericson's discovery up to 1932 in four and oneYDhalf pages. The rest of the history was devoted to Roosevelt and his New Deal. This was in 1944 and a national election was coming and England was jammed with American soldiers who could vote. It had a department that supplied the pulp paper magazines with direction and suggestions on how to slant mystery and love stories. Western story writers were told how to emphasize the heroism of our allies YD you know which one. Writers were told to cast their soap operas with silent, dogged Britons, faithful Chinese and honest Latins. They must portray Japanese as having set out to seize our Western seaboard and the sly and treacherous characteristics of the Jap must be contrasted with the faithfulness of the Chinese. They suggested that Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu be turned into a Jap instead of a Chinese. When the war began the government, recognizing the need for protecting our military operations from leaks through careless or uninformed press reporting, organized the Office of Censorship headed by Byron Price, an able official of the Associated Press. To this bureau was given the power to monitor all communications. It set up a censorship organization which all publishers and broadcasters voluntarily cooperated with. It worked admirably and Mr. Price won the unstinted approval of the press for his capable and tactful, yet firm, handling of this difficult problem. No other government agency had any authority whatever to engage in this activity. And it was never intended that anybody should have the power to attempt to interfere with the rights of citizens to discuss with freedom all political questions, subject only to the obligation not to divulge information that would aid the enemy or defeat our military operations. Nevertheless, the OWI and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took upon themselves the power to carry on the most extensive propaganda among, and the most dangerous interference with, the foreignYDlanguage broadcasting stations. Of course the ordinary American official was hardly aware of the opportunities this kind of thing gave to those who had political or ideological axes to grind. It was important to see that nothing subversive and nothing that would adversely affect the war effort was used. And for this purpose the Office of Censorship was admirably equipped and managed. But the FCC decided that it would take a hand, not merely in monitoring the stations but in literally directing and controlling them. The OWI similarly arrived at the same conclusion. It also set up a division for dealing with the problems of the foreignYDborn through radio. Mr. Eugene L. Garey, chief counsel of the Congressional Select Committee Investigating the FCC, speaking of these conditions said: "From the record thus far made it appears that, in one foreign language broadcasting station in New ork City, the program director, the announcer, the script writer, the censor, and the monitor of the ItalianYDlanguage programs are all aliens or persons owing their positions to the Office of War Information, with the approval of the FCC. "The situation thus portrayed is not peculiar to this single station, or to this one city. Information in our possession indicates that the same situation prevails generally in the foreign language stations throughout the country. Every such key position in each of the three radio stations presently under investigation are found to be similarly staffed. These staffs select the news, edit the script, and announce the program. The program, in turn, is censored by them, monitored by them, and is presented under the direction of a program director of similar character. "From these apparently unrelated facts the picture must be further developed. "OWI had the men and the material. It had the proper dye to color the news. It also had the desire to select and censor the news. What it lacked was the power, or perhaps more accurately stated, even the color of power, to carry their designs into effect. Hence the need to enlist the Federal Communications Commission in its purpose. "True it is that the Federal Communications Commission had no such lawful power, but the Federal Communications Commission did have the power to license and hence the power to compel obedience to its directions. The record now shows their unlawful use of this power. "Working together in a common purpose, the Federal Communications Commission and the Office of War Information have accomplished a result that compels pause YD and presents the solemn question of 'Whither are we going?' "A division called the War Problems Division was created by the Federal Communications Commission, and a staff of attorneys began to function. "This division was not a regulatory body. It was not formed to instruct, or supervise, or to correct. It was formed for the avowed purpose of unlawfully liquidating all of the radio personnel in the foreignYDlanguage field that did not meet with its favor. A real gestapo was created and a lawless enterprise was launched. "It is suggested that we accept this unlawful situation as a benevolent expedient of the moment, but no such purpose as we find here disclosed, however benevolently cloaked, can justify the practices we find. All tyranny begins under the guise of benevolence. "The voices of these aliens go into our homes, and the unwary are led to believe that they speak with authority and official approval. They even censor our Christmas and Easter religious programs, and tell us what music we may hear. The FCC is alarmed about whether we will react properly to news furnished by our national news agencies. Apparently we can still read the news in our press, but we can only hear what these aliens permit us to. What next medium of communications will receive the benevolent attention of these misguided zealots? Obviously, the press. "These interpreters of our national policy YD these slanters of our news YD these destroyers of free speech YD are alien in birth, alien in education, alien in training and in thought. "And still these are the people who are permitted to mold our thoughts YD to tell us what America's war aims and purposes are. These people are in position to color, to delete, or to slant, as they see fit, in accordance with their own peculiar alien views and ideologies. "Persons are being accused of being proYDfascist, and that without proof and without trial. Persons suspected of being proYDfascist, and without proof, have been removed from the air and replaced by wearers of the Black Shirt ... "If the radio can thus be controlled in August, 1943, there is nothing to prevent the same control from slanting our political news and nothing to prevent the coloring of our war aims and purposes when peace comes."57 In the presence of a government which had enlarged its power over the lives and the thoughts and opinions of citizens and which did not hesitate to use that power, the whole citizenry was intimidated. Editors, writers, commentators were intimidated. Men whose opinions did not conform to the reigning philosophy were driven from the air, from magazines and newspapers. While American citizens who were moved by a deep and unselfish devotion to the ideals of this Republic YD however wrongYDheaded that may be in the light of the new modes of "freedom" YD were forced into silence, the most blatant and disruptive revolutionary lovers of the systems of both fascism and Communism and that illegitimate offspring of both YD Red fascism YD were lording it over our minds. All this was possible for one reason and one reason only YD because the President of the United States countenanced these things, encouraged them and in many cases sponsored them, not because he was a Communist or fascist or held definitely to any political system, but because at the moment they contributed to his own ambitions. When a nation is at war, its leaders are compelled by the necessities of practical administration to use every means at hand to sell the war to the people who must fight it and pay for it. As part of that job it is usual to include the leader himself in the package. He is therefore portrayed in heroic proportions and colors in order to command for his leadership the fullest measure of unity. War, as we have seen, puts into the hands of a leader control over the instruments of propaganda and opinion on an everYDincreasing scale. In our day the press, the radio, the movies, even the schoolroom and the pulpit are mobilized to justify the war, to magnify the leader and to intimidate his critics. The citizen who is hardy enough to question the official version of the leader and his policies may find himself labeled as a public enemy or even as a traitor. Hence as the war proceeds, amidst all the trappings which the art of theater can contribute, it is possible to build up a vast fraud, with an everYDmounting torrent of false news, false pictures, false eulogies and false history. After every war many years are required to reduce its great figures to their just proportions and to bring the whole pretentious legend back into focus with truth. the public was treated to the royal spectacles off the coast of Newfoundland aboard the Augusta, at Quebec, Casablanca, Moscow, Cairo, Teheran and finally at alta. Eloquent communiques pretended to inform the people of what had been agreed on. We now know that these communiques told us little of what had happened; that the whole story lay, for long, behind a great curtain of secrecy; that much YD though not all YD has now been painfully brought to light and that what stands revealed is a story very different from that heroic chronicle of triumphs with which we were regaled at the time. As Roosevelt saw it, Stalin was his great target. He began by completely deceiving himself about Stalin. First of all, he decided he must cultivate Stalin's good will and to do this he convinced himself he must sell Stalin to our people. Accordingly the instruments of propaganda which he could influence YD the radio and the movies and to a considerable degree, the press YD were set to work upon the great task. Under the influence of this benevolent atmosphere the Reds in New ork and their compliant dupes, the fellowYDtravelers, swarmed into Washington and presently were sitting in positions of power or influence in the policyYDmaking sections of the government. Joe Davies had been induced to go to Moscow, wrote his notorious "Mission to Moscow," a jumble of obvious fictions which were later transferred to the screen several times exaggerated and shot into millions of minds in movie houses. We know now from the election returns of 1944 that the Reds had in their hands enough support to have turned the tide against Roosevelt. In New ork State, for instance, Roosevelt won its 47 electoral votes by a majority of 317,000. But he got 825,000 votes from the Red American Labor Party dominated by the Communists, which had also nominated him, and the American Liberal Party made up of the pinks, which also nominated him. Without these votes he would have lost the state. He dared not defy these two powerful groups. On the other hand, he was in a very deep hole with the votes of the Polish, Lithuanian, Serbian and other Baltic and Balkan peoples living in America who were citizens. He had betrayed the Poles, the Serbs and the Baltic peoples. But he had managed to keep it dark. Somehow he must avoid any publication of the truth until after the election. They made a decision at Quebec which has up to this moment paralyzed utterly the making of a stable peace in Europe and is pregnant with consequences so terrible for the future that the mind draws away from them in consternation. Secretary Hull said: "This was a plan of blind vengeance ... It failed to see that in striking at Germany it was striking at all Europe." The proposals "that the mines be ruined was almost breathtaking in its implications for all Europe." Beyond all this, of course, was our dignity as a civilized people. The barbarians could sweep into enemy countries and ravage their fields, burn their cities and murder their leaders. This is a job from which a civilized people must recoil if they have not lost their souls. Roosevelt agreed to the Morgenthau Plan to destroy German industry and to reduce Germany to a country primarily agricultural and pastoral. Secretaries Hull and Stimson did not know anything about it until four days after it was done. e the contents of the Morgenthau Plan leaked to the papers and Roosevelt became alarmed at the violence of the reaction, a fine evidence of the fundamentally decent nature of the majority of Americans. In the end the President was persuaded to get out of this appalling agreement so far as destroying the mines of the Ruhr were concerned. But Stimson declares "the same attitude remained," and the whole world now knows of the frightful wreckage that was carried on in Germany and the blow to the economy of all Europe that was delivered in the name of "blind vengeance" and immortal hatred. The administration was now the hopeless prisoner of these demanding and ruthless radical labor leaders, who had shown their ability to elect or defeat the Democratic party, who had filled all the departments and bureaus with their agents and who had insinuated their experts into the CIO labor unions and their propagandists into the radio, the movies and all the great instruments of communication and opinion YD a fact which Mr. Roosevelt's successors would have to face when the war ended. What had become of the Atlantic Charter? On December 20, 1944, the President at a press conference was asked about the Charter which he and Churchill had signed. His reply literally bowled over the correspondents. There was not and never had been a complete Atlantic Charter signed by him and Churchill, he replied. Then where is the Charter now, he was asked. He replied: "There wasn't any copy of the Atlantic Charter so far as I know." It was just a press release. It was scribbled on a piece of paper by him and Churchill and Sumner Welles and Sir Alexander Cadogan. It was just handed to the radio operator aboard the British and American warships to put on the air as a news release. Further inquiry revealed that Stephen Early had handed it out on his own with the signatures of Churchill and Roosevelt attached. And over on the wall of the National Museum in Washington, beautifully framed and illuminated after the manner of an ancient document YD like Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence YD was the great Atlantic Charter itself, with the signatures of Roosevelt and Churchill. Daily visitors stood before it as before some great historic document. John O'Donnell, of the New ork Daily News, asked the curator where he got it. He answered that it came from the Office of War Information. They had "loaned" the precious document to the National Museum. By inquiry at the OWI YD that prolific fountain of phony news YD O'Donnell learned that OWI had gotten it up and affixed the names of Roosevelt and Churchill. They had printed 240,000 copies of it. O'Donnell went back to the Museum with this information. And lo! the great Charter was gone. An attendant told him it had been ordered off the wall twenty minutes before. Thus ended the story of this wretched fraud. The fake document which was never signed and was nothing more than a publicity stunt to conceal the real purposes of the Atlantic meeting had been slain by its chief sponsor and, of course, all its highYDsounding professions, after Teheran, had become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. On January 20, 1945, Roosevelt was sworn in as President of the United States for a fourth term. Three days later he left Norfolk on the heavy cruiser Quincy for what was to be his last act in the hapless drama of peace.
participants (1)
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Linda Reed--PCC West Campus CSC