MORE HARMFUL THAN SPIES
DALLIN, DAVID J.
East and West More Harmful Than Spies By David J. Dallin WERE the Soviet definitions of "spies" and "foreign agents" accepted in this country, Senator Joseph P. McCarthy would have won his...
...But a lot of them will be there, and they will have fun...
...The story of August Ciaessens and his progress up from laugh-making ties in with events of the past 40 years...
...So, humble and filled with the desire to learn, August Ciaessens registered for his first bout with formal learning...
...In Russia today, any one who in his heart approves any act of a non-Communist government is a foreign agent or a spy...
...They fitted in precisely with his deep-down Christian notions of love and service and mutual help...
...I have a particular reason for writing about August Ciaessens at this time...
...Since they sit like children at opposite ends of a swing the State Department will be riding high as the Senator goes down...
...Some of the greatest scholars from the universities were giving courses there...
...As reader and student he is tireless...
...But it was sudd awry found that ideas on economics and government could be put across without them So ran the first chapter of a success story...
...Both are narrow, unintelligent and essentially dishonest men...
...They were incapable of fighting Soviet Communism with the same devotion, fire, dynamism they had deployed against Nazism a short while before...
...Instead he presented "just" fellow-travellers, sincere dupes, badly informed and badly influenced government officials, public figures, and college professors...
...August was soon his star pupil, and when teacher failed to appear the East Side humorist often filled in for him...
...This sober-looking young man had an astonishing gift for making people laugh...
...The Communists speak of themselves as socialists...
...Night after night down on the East Side he' would accompany the Socialist speakers, would carry their boxes, and distribute the leaflets to the shifting crowds...
...In those days there were mighty orators operating from soapboxes...
...So is Frederic Schuman, another professor named by Sen...
...Often he has toured the South...
...McCarthy will lose, and automatically the State Department will win...
...The second chapter saw our hero at the door of the Hand School on East 19th Street...
...Owen Lattimore as a professor is doing more harm than as an adviser of the State Department...
...Instantly the people took this man to their hearts...
...That modest appeal was the beginning of a career...
...In his devotion to his fellowmen, in his innate kindness, in his broad humanitarianism, August Ciaessens well represents the soul of this movement...
...as head of the speech department...
...The socialist movement always has been and is now carried on by fine, devoted, honorable, civilized human beings...
...All the dialects and bodily quirks of New York's multi-national population he could reproduce with meticulous exactness...
...When Kirkpatrick left New York, Algernon Lee broke all the rules by appointing the soapbox Ph.D...
...East and West More Harmful Than Spies By David J. Dallin WERE the Soviet definitions of "spies" and "foreign agents" accepted in this country, Senator Joseph P. McCarthy would have won his case with ease...
...August, naturally, did not aspire to teach the mysteries of economics and politics...
...The State Department is part of a nation...
...They call the ruthless Soviet government a socialist state...
...IN THIS RESPECT the public wrath should not be aimed exclusively at the State Department...
...They can't all squeeze into the Hotel Commodore dining room in New York on April 22, when a dinner will be tendered to Gus...
...They have simply been remnants of a world that disappeared in 1945—along with all their so-called "anti-Fasoist" (actually pro-Communist) concepts, their pro-Soviet actions, and their sympathetic attitude toward he "agrarian reformers" in China...
...They followed the Commander-in-Chief of the war years and repeated his mistakes . Along with him they won the war—and were proud of their achievements...
...He is at home in economics, anthropology, psychology, biology...
...Unless this is done, the storm has been in vain...
...The Soviet danger, in its real magnitude, puzzled them...
...At last, in desperaiton, he turned to the patient little man who would never have dared to set himself up as orator or teacher...
...But he could help...
...A new spirit is necessary in the political life of the nation— a new dynamism, and a new leadership...
...A politically wrong statement is a crime in Russia...
...Neither the chiefs of this division, nor the carefully selected "advisers" d la Owen Lattimore, were traitors or spies...
...The great excitement shaking the country may turn out beneficial, but only if it leads to a general renaissance, a reorientation and bold rejection of obsolete slogans, concepts and men...
...on this basis hundreds of men and women in Russia and the satellites have been executed, and hundreds of thousands have trod the road to prison ana slave labour...
...THEN, ONE NIGHT, the thing that was bound to happen did happen...
...He was only a laugh-maker...
...Public figures, writers, columnists, professors of the same peculiar "anti-Fascist" brand still occupy positions of importance...
...They are no better and no worse than their likes in governmental agencies...
...They were rather the result of blunders, misinformation, confusion, blindness—not of crimes, spies, and agents provocateurs, but of human shortcomings on a tremendous scale...
...The man's thirst for knowledge is insatiable...
...He promised a cavalcade of spies, top spies, key spies, master spies...
...He was human...
...THAT WAS THE START of August Claes-* sens' career as labor educator...
...All that wae lacking was the flood of big words...
...August Ciaessens was introduced to hold the crowd with useless and unsocialist stories until the great orator should arrives But a crowd always recognizes its own...
...Within the skin of his not over-sized body he carried a whole theatrical troupe...
...It will be too bad if this is the only effect of the present storm...
...Nor were they due, on the other hand, to natural or historically irresistible forces...
...As time has gone on his repertory of speeches and ideas has expanded...
...No day goes by without enlightening exploration in some field of learning...
...His education started in the most democratic way possible...
...The chairman was in despair...
...The fact is that the present elite of the State Department was educated, trained and successfully employed before 1945, mainly during the war years...
...I want to do what I can to keep the word socialist and the record of the socialist movement separate from the ruthlessness, the lying, the barbarism of the Communists here and everywhere...
...This applies to a number of other college prof-more dealing with Russian affairs, whose names are familiar to every intelligent man in this country...
...You can jet tickets by writing to the Ciaessens Dinner Committee, 7 East 15th Street, New York 3, N. Y...
...In this capacity he has covered the country...
...And all the stories in the world were stored in his mind...
...Scores of times he has swung to the Pacific Coast...
...THE STATE DEPARTMENT is now in the hroes of a major crisis, as a direct result of certain failures in foreign affairs, mainly in the Far East...
...One wonders whether other divisions of the Department have been any better staffed to fit the new environment...
...it cannot perform miracles alone...
...In their colleges they freely dispense lies and treason, helping to educate potential foreign agents and real spies...
...August was peddling his leaflets...
...He wae funny...
...A man namer George R. Kirkpatrick taught what was called "public speaking...
...The great speaker —it happened to be Sol Fieldman—failed to appear...
...Soon he had more engagements than he could fill...
...The Soviet conception of espionage has never been accepted in the West, and that is why Senator McCarthy is bound to lose his case...
...This is the most important task today, not the search for mysterious spies...
...They were incapable of quickly adapting themselves, as Winston Churchill did, to the new situation...
...The Home Front Success Story By WUllam E. Bohn FORTY YEARS AGO there appeared in the New York Gail a two-line advertisement: "Entertainment furnished for private parties by August Ciaessens...
...From street-corner speakers he soaked up the ideas of socialism...
...The new situation caught them unawares...
...All along, these leaders and lieutenants of American foreign policy specialized in fighting Nazism and Fascism...
...He has served as teacher in countless local unions all over the East...
...Why concentrate on a few officials and leave out this important sector of public affairs...
...The Communist brand of reaction was an ally, and to many of them even a sincere and dear ally...
...And a good broom is necessary to sweep out the last remnants of the "cryptos," the very smell of the "gallant ally" from schools, from universities, from national magazines, from every important post in the administration...
...In the universities where he has spoken on socialism and trade unionism, this man, who has never had any academic training, has made countless friends among the professors...
...a Soviet citizen who publicly or privately protests that Americans aren't warmongering or that Tito is fighting for the inSependence of a Communist Yugoslavia, will be sentenced for a criminal act...
...He put his thought into simple words which they could easily take in...
...Perhaps the Far Eastern Division was more archaic than the others, but essentially it was all the same...
...And, to the suprise of the chairman, there was no laek of serious thought...
...Someone remarked recently that if all those who have laughed at Ous Ciaessens' jokes could get together, they would fill Central Park...
...They were slow to grasp it and even slower to draw conclusions from it...
...These failures, it will be recognized, are not due to secret Soviet agents pulling the wires of American policies...
...Algernon Lee and Bertha H. Mailly were starting the first American educational institution for working people...
Vol. 33 • April 1950 • No. 15
