WHERE THE NEWS ENDS

CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY

Where the News Ends By William Henry Chamberlin "Served Her Right" JUSTICE HAS FINALLY caught up with Anna Louise Strong. Paradoxically enough this occurred through an act of crude...

...The vole against the Barkley • ruling was 46 to 41...
...Either these tales were the crafty inventions of a spy or the Soviet regime was guilty of conduct which would go far to discredit the fairy tales...
...There were a good many people of Polish origin in her audience, and they riddled her with sharp and pointed questions...
...The first thought of the more or less literate voter is bound to be that we need a new line-up of political parties...
...Most of the men sent to Washington had given a good performance or gave promise of giving one...
...As Eugene Lyons suggests, she was subject to occasional pricks of conscience in her role of perpetual cover-up girl for acts of cruelty, brutality and oppression...
...1 received letters from an old Moscow resident in California and from another in London, both whooping with delight over the news...
...It will take years to remold our party system in such a way as to get the progressives on one side and the conservatives on the other...
...Oh," she said, "anyone who knew something about birds came in and gave a course on ornithology...
...It is humiliating to know that we tolerate a political system which gives us such irrational and unrepresentative results...
...When the people elected him that is one of the things for which they voted- But 2'.\ Republican Senators, men like Wherry, Bricker and Capehart, forgot all about Abraham Lincoln and voted against civil rights...
...Strong was that her .energy (even in the sixties) was out of all proportion to her gift of reflection and analysis, But perhaps when the grifci organization which »he had served so ftftthf ully as apologist locked her up she did have time t%xreflection and even for repentance...
...A switch of only three votes in favor of the civil rights program would have carried the day...
...Oumansky was the perfect type of "Sovhoor," servile to superiors, bumptiously arrogant to inferiors and the most complete pathological liar one could imagine...
...What these men have clone is such a shameful thing that they can never defend it in the open debate of an election campaign...
...I recall one occasion in Moscow when she was holding forth to a group of admiring foreign tourists about a "collective farm university" which she Viad discovered in the backwoods somewhere...
...They can be operated on to good effect...
...One marked characteristic of Anna Louis...
...AN EDITORIAL— How to Defeat the Filibuster THE LINE-UP of Senators on Vice President Barkley's filibuster ruling gives the intelligent citizen ample food for thought...
...But the general verdict of those who knew her when They learned of the action of the Soviet author ities in arresting and expelling her with the tin can of "American spy" fastened to her was a hearty and enthustiac: "Served her right...
...Not a few Russian born Americans, after listening to her siren songs, very probably sold their possessions and went back to Russia, only to find that it was much easier to get in than to get out a second time...
...the Poles who died in the Warsaw uprising, the Chinese victims of Red terror...
...As chief censor and head of the press department in Moscow, he had achieved a height of personal unpopularity among foreign newspapermen rare even among holders of those ungrateful offices...
...She painted Soviet-dominated North Korea (only in her version it wasn't Soviet-dominated) as a paradise and South Korea as hell on earth...
...Perhaps she realized the significance of the fact that only her American passport saved her from being butchered on the spot or consigned to the living death of a concentration camp...
...She immediately invented a mass migration from South to North Korea—something no other eyewitness in Korea ever observed...
...Eugene Lyons beat me in a race to offer comment in The New Leader...
...It will be better to get our social legislation now and deal with bi-partisan reactionaries two years hence...
...If enough of them can be defeated in 1950, we can end such nightmares of frustration as filibuster and all that it stands for...
...Perhaps she saw in imagination the reproachfyl faces of the innumerable people she had slandered and betrayed and lied about in her ignoble career: the Russian intellectuals, and peasants, and priests and others in slave labor camps...
...The civil rights program was an important part of President Truman's platform...
...VERY PROBABLY I give her too much credit for an ability to overcome a lifelong addiction to totalitarian narcotics...
...When they come up for reelection the members of the AF of L and the ClO, plus progressive voters of both poilical parties, will find it possible to retire them to the circles of private life...
...The idea that "Amazon Anna," as a Moscow wag christened her, in appreciation of her formidable bulk, was an American spy is laughable to anyone who knows her psychology, career and record...
...The poor gullible dupes including readers of The Daily Worker, which recommended her for a Pulitzer Prize, who believed her fairy tales, now face a painful dilemma...
...In the last election the voters showed a capabiity for fine distinctions...
...AS A HUMAN BEING Anna Louise Strong was not objectionable as Oumansky...
...Paradoxically enough this occurred through an act of crude totalitarian injustice...
...It is too great a sacrifice to pay for such a victory...
...This is, however, hardly a practical political plan to deal with the present crisis...
...Indeed I doubt whether any action of the MVD has aroused so much enthusiasm among those who are normally its severe critics...
...But it was certainly a superb stroke of ironic retribution that the MVD should inflict on her the punishment from which she was exempt in a free and liberal society...
...IT MUST be said (hat in the face of our present crisis the leaders of the Negro organizations are displaying fine statesmanship...
...But the 2'A Republicans who voted against civil rights, against giving the Negroes a fair break, come from the North...
...If the administration leaders were to insist on a fight to the finish on the floor of the Senate, the rent-control laws would lapse at the end of this month and the whole country — including the Negro population—would suffer from this legislative crime...
...The name of Cojistantinc Oumansky, then Soviet Ambassad<<rto the United States, was mentioned and touched off among the assembled journalists who knew him a stream of explosive vituperation suggestive of the effects of a spark tossed among firecrackers...
...Her ability to think out partyline explanations and excuses was fantastic...
...But the harm she wrought was very great I suppose she ranked with that incredible charlatan, the Dean of Canterbury, as a widely read author and indefatigable lecturer...
...She possessed a glib, persuasive platform manner calculated to convince unsophisticated Americans that in] Russia, China, Korea and other faraway lands black was white and rice versa I think she bears the responsibility for the misery and ruin of many lives...
...This question had never occurred to her...
...The time has passed when a member of Congress can do his voting behind a cloud and run a sucessful campaign on a general wave of party enthusiasm...
...This exuberant unanimity of opinion records a press conference which took place some ten years ago with an American diplomat of considerable Soviet Russian experience...
...I ONCE SHARED a lecture platform with her...
...One of the tourists, with no thought of irony, humbly inquired: "And who were the teachers, Miss Strong...
...IN THE ELECTION of 1950 it is probable that not much can be done to change the senatorial delegation from the Southern states...
...During the campaign he constantly Hammered away for it...
...Negroes have the same interest as all other citizens in rent control, housing, health, education and social security...
...But it was supported by 16 Republicans and opposed by 23 Democrats...
...But within two years - and without any basic reform—the voters can give President Truman the support which lie needs...
...A good proportion of them will come up for re-election two years hence...
...but she was equal to the occasion...
...I put the question to her why the movement of migration had been so overwhelmingly a one-way movement, from North to South, rather than the other direction...
...The Repubican supporters of the fiibuster are mostly hold-overs...
...Here was a decision by a member of the Democratic administration designed to advance the program of President Truman...
...She did not make out so well when she tried to sell her picture of the "New Poland" as a triumph ol democracy to an audience in WilkesHarre...
...After the newsmen hod finished their highly uncensored expression of opinion the diplomat summed up as follows the sense of the meeting: "I do think he is the Number One . . . (here he used a very, very undiplomatic expression) 1 have ever known anywhere...

Vol. 32 • March 1949 • No. 12


 
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