Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
Where the News Ends By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN Another Sacco-Vanzetti Case MANY years ago I was discussing the Saccp-Vantetti case with a Russian radical intellectual in Moscow. "That is just...
...Let us line our citizens up...
...It is possible (but scarcely probable) that large numbers of Californians are eager to exchange their easy suburban life for the hard, all-year work of semi-arid, sub-tropical fanning, but right now too many of them are in the armed services and in war industry...
...The avowed purpose is to fit these men to go back into their communities and spread propaganda devised to suit the purposes of the military leaders who established the institution...
...Here I am running on and on about something which, we agreed, has nothing to do with the current food shortages in Southern California...
...It seems to me that it is...
...The situation there, revealed by James A. Wechsler in PM, is such as to arouse the fears of any patriotic citizen...
...But all the time he is trying to exhibit a mythical monster called Marxism as a common enemy to be fought along with fascism...
...If they succeed in enacting their program into law, the cens» figures of 1960 will record a real tragedy...
...People will say—Congressmen will say: "We must win the war...
...Perhaps the execution was prompted by a desire to complete what the Gestapo had already carried so far: the decimation of the intellectual leadership of the Polish masses...
...There is good basis for the hope that the action of the Postmaster General will be overruled...
...There should be an easy answer to that one...
...He says over and over again that unless we furnish jobs for all...
...Yet today, there has been a subtle shift in the political psychology of several leaders of the Allied forces, and ?? are no longer fighting an anaV fascist war but a war against Germany...
...Since hundreds of millions of our non-Christian Allies are fighting with us for democracy, calling our objective "democratic Christian" is more than undiplomatic...
...Wallace has, no doubt, the beat of intentions...
...As 1 result, tens of thousands of farmei-ownen have been able to stay on their places and now can proudly say that they own—free of mart, gages—land which, had they been left to tbe mercy of the bankers, they would have bad to leave long ago...
...I hope I have made that very plain...
...Without freedom of discussion, there can be no democracy...
...John Maynard Keynes and other wellknown foreigners were among the guests...
...While no word of this was permitted to appear in the controlled newspapers, rumors got about among the foreign visitors and the propaganda purpose of the cclcbiation was decidedly put into reverse gear...
...P. P. Ryabushinsky and Vishnegradsky had both died in Paris years before the "plot" was supposedly hatched, years before Professor Ramzin...
...It is highly suggestive of the old superior white-imperialistic attitude...
...No, indeed...
...EDITORIAL COMMENT FIGHT ON THIS MOUND •PHIS is what we want...
...i. The case is now being carried into the courts...
...To the Editor: Please find encloeed cheek...
...An irresponsible emigre in Paris had made a speech to the effect that the graduates of the Alexander lycee, a famous Russian middle - school located near Leningrad, were carrying on their work in Russia...
...then there will be time for such luxuries...
...provision for education...
...J Yes, but for whom ? -,"ficefleeff" From Miss ELIZABETH H...
...Christian philosophy...
...taining more excellent and...
...But, as was proved by detailed testimony, Abramovich had been resting at a German country resort and attending an International Socialist Congress at Brussels during the whole of the period when he was supposedly making his phantom conspiratorial trip to Germany...
...But in weaving such fearful meanings around a word, he may be laying the groundwork for a future demagogue who will be far from innocent or harmless...
...The parallel is a complete one...
...In spite of all this, the good neighbors seem reluctant...
...They...
...Sacramento has no solution...
...If bat editors of The Militant are prevented from publishing, then every American journal ? ? danger or may soon be in danger...
...The enemies of the family-size farm are tat banker-farmers, the factory farmers, who an represented in Washington by the so-calhd farm bloc...
...ti ons...
...California may soon suffer for lack of food...
...The presentation of criticisms of our social and economic system cannot be made to appear what Justice Holmes called a "clear and present danger...
...This officer attacks "most of our educators, many of our clergy and a certain proportion of our press" for "advanced thinking...
...There was the case of the Industrial Party in 1930, when the defendants solemnly confessed that they> had plotted to overthrow the Soviet Government and set up a counterrevolutionary regime, headed by P. P. Ryabushinsky as Premier and Vishnegradsky as Finance Minister...
...There was the all too revealing testimony of the former Kremlin physician, Levin, that he carried out poisonings by order of Yagoda, former head of the G.P.U., because he feared that Yagoda would exterminate his whole family if he disobeyed...
...If the reports of it are correct, the institution should be promptly closed...
...This was utilized as an excuse for arresting every graduate of the lycrc whn could be found, executing a number and sending "the rest into exile...
...Anti-administration propagandists have short memories...
...You remember that early last spring, before the crops were harvested, one hundred and twelve thousand Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes and resettled in desert locations on the far side of the Sierras...
...The larger loss wffl be in the production of the sort of independent men and women who have gone each year fron the farms to the cities...
...After giving details about the way in which the citizens are writing, speaking and thinking, the Colonel goes on: "The remedy for this condition is outside our province as Army officers, although some day, if the conditions get bad enough, the Army may be forced by public opinion to take over the direction of many activities now considered to be beyond the province of the military*" Lectures are given to show how easy it would be for the military authorities to take over the various departments of civilian life...
...And there was that curious "visit" of Pyatakov by airplane to Trotsky in Norway, in which Payatakov miraculously reached Trotsky's house in far less time than an automobile would have required to cover the distance, while the director of the airport asserted that no airplane had arrived at the alleged time of the visit...
...Hardly-had he made his classification when he hastened to remark that this "Christian" philosophy is shared by Mohammedans, Jews, Hindus and Confucians...
...Let the campaign start now...
...k · · · f|*HE ruthlessness of the totalitarian state has * its stupidity, as well as its efficiency...
...They could easily discover that in 1900 nearly 64 per cent.of our agriculturists operated farms which they owned, and that by 1885 the figure had dropped to 57...
...It was then explained that these measures were taken mainly for the "protection" of the American Japanese...
...What does it matter that many millions of idealistic men g»T* their lives to halt fascism ? Spain ? Franco is a man in pee* and we need to play power ?·*· ltics...
...One often sees them wearing their country's uniform and guarding strategic points in coastal areas...
...Then there was the trial of former Mensheviki and co-operative movement leaders and Leftist intellectuals where some of the defendants testified to meeting Rafael Abramovich in Russia...
...Perhaps these men were treated as.pawns in the increasingly acrimonious dispute over the future disposition of the former Polish Eastern provinces...
...This is the sort of measure that is pulled and mawled about and postponed...
...You will understand, of course, that the little matter I am about to mention has no connection with the shortages just mentioned...
...Let any enemies of progress declare themselves and make any arguments which they can devise...
...The bullets that ended their lives should bury that Illusion...
...But now it is suddenly-discovered that the federal bureaucrats have been undermining it all along—and that now they have the mines ready to spring...
...Whoever it war wt* was driving father and the boys off the fan*, ? was no bureaucrat sitting in Washington...
...From SIMON BRQNSON To the Editor: Isn't it time for us to restate some political fundamentals about the war...
...This "new bill of * rights...
...And there was Krestinsky, who denied all his previous testimony when he first appeared before the court, then confessed everything after he had been removed from the courtroom and presumably subjected to appropriate pressure...
...w*V had to deal with men in power at France...
...It is not free unless the smallest sect, the matt perverse clique, has the same freedom as the largest and most respectable group...
...Only power counts...
...Taking the word in its etymological and customary sense, this would mean returning these Americans to their birthplaces...
...As it is so plain to everyone that we don't need these too diligent citizens and are quite capable of doing our own farming, if we wanted to, there is talk of repatriating them after the war...
...It is sufficiently obvious that their success as food producers would not make them disliked or envied in any quarter...
...The Los Angeles markets, famous for their abundance and variety, now show little but empty shelves and counters...
...How many are against it...
...Any resemblance to a concentration camp is, of course, purely coincidental...
...The G.P.U...
...Despite the obvious staging of the proceed^ ings, the collusion between prosecutor and defendants, there were enough discrepancies in the trials of the old Bolsheviks to arouse the strongest suspicions...
...who was cast for the role of chief of this phantom party had testi'ied to talking with Ryabushinsky in Paris...
...If the weather of 1943 is too hot or too cold, too dry or too wet, it is clear that Washington will have to bear the blame...
...Any public official may be allowed a good deal of leeway in his soarings into the realms of social theory, but two angles of Mr...
...If this is no longer at ideological war, one need not ha*» any ideological compunctions...
...The implications of this are plain...
...Let us spend the time between now and November, 1944, tagging people with yes or no labels...
...w , "And we can honestly protest against such cruelty and injustice now...
...Or perhaps no one has ever taken the trouble to introduce them to the United States census...
...But in the present embarass-ment we will do the handsome thing and pay carfare both ways plus American wages in return for seasonal assistance...
...but—always—this mythical Marxism looms there ahead as a fearsome enemy...
...During almost all of the time the Republicans were in charge of oar national destinies and the free ente-pn* system was allowed full play as far as Wash...
...This Fort Leavenworth school drives straight against our oldest and deepest tradition...
...The western democracies and Russia are, the speaker hopes, to "come to a satisfactory understanding...
...This is what we want...
...Analysis of the rosters shows that almost all of those given the benefit of instruction at the expense of American taxpayers are anti-New Deal and anti-labor...
...discover with very slight expenditure of «???* that in 1900 the number of tenant farmer, amounted to 35 per cent, and that by 193$ j{ had grown to 42...
...It occurs to me purely by accident...
...But they had been spared the stifling, morally corrupting atmosphere of hypocritical "repentances" and "retractions" that bi-oke the old Bolshevik leaders morally before the final ordeal of the trials...
...The ridiculousness of the third classification the Vice-President "recognized himself...
...If every Socialist in Europe recognizes the stern lesson of this execution, and draws the inescapable conclusion that every effort must be made not only to overthrow the Gestapo but also to see that the Gestapo is not replaced by the G.P.U...
...It is they who are trying through Congressional sniping to cut down the appn> priations which make the services of the Department of Agriculture available to the little man on the land...
...H. CHENEY ? otKe" Editor: All of us out here in...
...There are, according to the Iowa thinker, three great philosophies in the world today...
...All the ills of nature or of human nature are grist for the political mill...
...The New Leader next week will analyze the Truman report.] HENRY WALLACE AS PHILOSOPHER IN his address on Monday, Vice-President * Wallace got considerably beyond his depth...
...Where are...
...Of course not...
...democracy will fail...
...I recall an instance of this kind in 192...
...The New Leader proposes this program of production and security as the platform for the presidential and congressional campaign of 1944...
...It dam not turn citizens from our ideals or toward those of the enemy...
...What of the thousands of Frenchmen who refused to ?? down their arms and work fW Nazi Germany...
...There is no prospect of adoption of any important part of this program of the National Resources Planning Board before the end of the present administration...
...Congress will take no action now...
...The latest point of attack is the classic problem of the family-size farm...
...They died in the finest tradition of the heroic pioneers of the Russian revolutionary movement, of the Decabrieti and the men and women of the Narodnaya Volya...
...Victory for Whom...
...The purposes of this effort appear clearly in an address by Lt...
...The Great White Father in Washington must help us...
...here had been negligent in checking up on...
...would have been put on good behavior at least for the period of the celebration...
...And discussion is not free unless advocates of all ideas not definitely subversive or disloyal are allowed free expression...
...Net only will the food production during the we years be tragically cut...
...The reeuhj have been so good that interest is coming h on time and the principal is being repaid at the rate of many millions each month...
...There is one of the defendants, Holzmann, asserting that he met Trotsky's son/'Sedov in the Hotel Bristol at Copenhagen*'' But the only hotel of that name in Copenhagen had been closed many years before the alleged meeting took place...
...Most of these bewildered people are, strange to relate, native American citizens, baptized Christians supporting Methodist, Baptist, etc, churches, speaking no language but American English, seeking nothing except the chance to compete in that "pursuit of happiness" (and wealth) which the Constitution grants to every citizen...
...How many are for this program...
...IT is to the glory of the memory of Erlich and * Alter that in their case there were no phoney "confessions...
...SUPPRESSION OF THE MIUT4JIT THE suppression of The Militant, organ of * the Socialist Workers Party, by the Pest Office Department is clearly an act whim cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered conducive to the more effective conduct of the war...
...One of these is, of course, fascism, and the other two are Marxism and "the democratic...
...To the promoters of the idea, however, it means sending them overseas to a country nearly as alien to them as it is to us...
...Isn't the pattern easy new" What's wrong with Franco, ** with Vichy, and later with the Italian generals, with the Gern»** Junkers All for victory...
...stage-managers of the trial had been using an old Baedeker...
...This institution, established by Lieutenant General ? re hon ?. Somervell, Chief of the Army Services of Supply, has already graduated three classes, each consisting of about 86 students...
...ington was concerned...
...The bill includes the right to work and to receive fair pay...
...On the contrary, it selected just this time for one of its most cruel acts of terrorism...
...ARMY PROPAGANDA IT is the business of Congress to look into the purposes of the training school maintained by the United States Army at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas...
...Now there is a new Soviet Sacco-Vanzetti, case, the killing of the veteran Polish Socialists Erlich and Alter by sentence of the military tribunal which has already extermin-nated so thoroughly the old guard of the Bolshevik Party...
...The ideas advocated by the editors of this journal are general, theoretical, abstract...
...Los Angeles, Calif...
...So help me, I must be growing senile...
...Anton Ciliga, Yugoslav former Communist who endured a long apprenticeship in Soviet jails and places of exile, testifies that he learned from Victor Serge, another political prisoner, that N. N. Sukhanov, one of the principal defendants in the Menshevik trial, was protesting in the Verkhne-Uralsk prison that he had not been released, according to promise, after giving false testimony...
...10.00 for your fine paper e»a> taining so many most exosBsat, articles...
...For our part, let us marshal our forces to make the meaning of this program clear from one end of the country to the other...
...you going to recruit one hundred and twelve thousand farmers...
...The intelligent workers of 1...
...emigre obituaries...
...The adoption of this program would start us immediately on tile way to larger production of wealth and happier ways of living...
...This enlarged social security program introduced by President Roosevelt following National Planning Board recommenda...
...It is no longer an hv ternational civil war, as the former New Leader columnist Wfflt . Schlamm put it in his book Tkm Second War for Independence, $ is now a war between America and Great Britain against Germany...
...In 1939 and 1940 we believed that we were fighting a eat against Nazism, against Nashua as a social system and all that it represented...
...Wallace's thought point in dangerous directions...
...Their aim is enlarge...
...But I must say that we feel just a little bit like hypocrites when we sign resolutions protesting against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti—and do not and cannot say a word about our Russian Saccos and Van-zettiS, the immediate victims of the G.P.U...
...Absent from the "settlements" are the younger unmarried men who, like other citizens, have been taken into the armed services...
...If they are incorrect, a Congressional investigation would soon reveal their inacotrfacy...
...The long passage about Marxism, to put the matter bluntly, is far too reminiscent of Adolf Hitler...
...Killing two Polish citizens might have seemed an emphatic means of serving notice on the Polish Government that no nonsense about the 1939 frontier would be tolerated...
...The improbability that two idealistic Italian radicals would have committed crimes of common banditry is m a t ch e d and overmatched by the cynical suggestion that two veteran Socialists, both of them Jews, were agents of Hitler, It will be an interesting touchstone of the honesty and humanity of some of our so-called leftist publicists to see whether they devote to .the present crime as much attention and find for it as strong words of condemnation as they found for the Sacco-Vanzetti execution in-1927...
...Yet the discredit which the Soviet regime has sustained by this arbitrary killing, just in the labor and Jewish circles that greeted most warmly the role of the Russian army and the Russian people in stopping the onward march "o'f Hitler's conquests must outweigh any advantage in terms of power-politics...
...York and everywhere must...
...It is a quite novel situation for which the local chambers of commerce, Rotary, Kiwanis and similar patriotic associations are too obviously unprepared...
...Probably the G.P.U...
...Anyone who was tactless enough to trespass on such forbidden ground would be shouted down as Jap-lover and a traitor...
...To urn end, the Farm Security Administration hat lent several hundred millions...
...tical articles than ever hefete...
...The students are handpieked by military officers, and their expenses are defrayed by the Army...
...That is just the sort of case that always stirred the indignation and sympathy of our intelligentsia, which was overwhelmingly radical and liberal in spirit, in pie-Soviet times," he said...
...Its graduates are to carry on—not in some conquered foreign land—but here in our own country...
...In the rush of excitement over the President's post-war program and security proposals, the report of the Truman Committee, issued this week, hss been generally overlooked...
...Did you never hear of our good neighbors to the south?/ We are not yet neighborly enough to want them to come up here and settle down...
...One might have imagined that the G.P.U...
...If there is one thing that is set as a part of the American system it is that the military arm can never control the civil...
...F. E. Gillette, delivered at the school and later published...
...One day their paternal government cautiously issues a few permits and on the following day, for no reason at all, cancels them...
...No well-conducted newspaper, no responsible radio commentator would dream of suggesting anything of the sort...
...THE FATE OF THE FAMILY FARM IT may be good politics to blame the Roosevelt administration for everything that goes wrong...
...The two-hundredth anniversary of the Academy of Science was being celebrated...
...profits for large-scale cultivators of the sol who depend on wage-labor...
...In closing, let me reiterate, with all the emphasis which I can summon, there is absolutely no connection between the local food shortage and the expulsion of the Japano-American farmers...
...Or is it...
...With that kind of judicial morality prevailing, who can say that any defendant might not be induced to testify falsely by just this kind of pressure...
...It does not tend to discourage loyal service in our Army or Navy...
...Perhaps it is a. psychological law that the potential savagery of a system which gives the individual no protection against arbitrary arrest and execution must burst out periodically, even when this Works to the detriment of the regime...
...The program includes care of mothers, care of children...
...It has been revealed, also, that guards and barbed wire help for increased protection...
...LETTERS TO THE ? DITO R California Deported Its 'Japs/ New Food-Accidentally-RunsShort From VV...
...They are fseli for refusing ?? be patriotic...
...What lends tragic irony to the killing of Erlich and Alter is that both had worked for a basis of agreement between the Communists and the Social Democracy...
...For this is a "civil orientation" school...
...They had lived and worked in a country where conditions were far from ideal, where political freedom and economic justice were still a far-off dream...
...Erlich and Alter will not have died in vain...
...Never unto the New Deal Department at Agriculture got down to business was um' concerted and intelligent drive made to pat the owner of the family-size farm on his fast Secretary Wickard and the men about ?5 have calculated that the surest way to mcreest production of food and fiber is to giv* tat . owner-farmer enough help so that he can gat i the most out of his land and his labor...
...We do hot know what was the motivation of the decision to kill Erlich and Alter...
...I DEFORE some intuitionist of the Joseph Davies type pops up with a nice story of how Erlich and Alter were wigwagging signals to Hitler as to how to take Stalingrad, and how their execution saved the .day just in the nick of time, it would be worthwhile to call the roll of a few of the more glaring and obvious evidences of fraud in Soviet political trials...
...This institution, so central to American democracy, has been disappearing ever since anyone can remember...
...Wallace acknowledges that economically the ideals of democracy have not been realized...
...He is himself applying Marxian criticism to our social institutions...
...There is no need to bring up the fact that these clever but unwanted citizens were for the most part clever farmers, orchardists, truck-gardeners, stock-raisers, marketmen, etc...
Vol. 26 • March 1943 • No. 11
