The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT The New Leaders Thirtieth Birthday By William E. Bohn The New Leader celebrated its thirtieth birthday on February 24. We began our existence by pulling hard for Robert La Follette...
...But that is the plainest fact of our history...
...So far as totalitarianism is concerned, we have been fighting it, with our limited facilities, throughout our thirty years...
...As a liberal journal, we had long been advocating reforms...
...This was the period--from about 1932 to the Hitler-Stalin Pact--when Communism was on the make in America...
...It may seem pointless now to shout: "We told you so...
...In both areas, our admonitions fell on deaf ears...
...These thirty years are worth thinking about...
...Mussolini was riding high...
...We had done our best to explain that America had to fight Hitler...
...Most Americans were against Fascism, but they thought it was too far away to be dangerous to us...
...The Congressmen are trying to make life miserable for a few local Communists, ex-Communists or may-have-been Communists...
...It was at this time that the fellows now being hauled before Congressional committees lost faith in democracy and allied themselves with Moscow...
...From 1932 onward, our people and their leaders in Washington were ready to try almost any experiment which gave promise of helping them rise out of the Depression...
...I fancy I hear some reader say: "Well, what about now...
...We must have a message for men's minds, including the minds of the Russian people, if we are to win without war...
...To us it was clear that, when the Stalinites got ready to expand, they would offer a threat to us as well as to the rest of the world...
...Poverty and unemployment furnished the opportunity...
...Looking over the files of our paper for those years is an exciting diversion...
...The outside world was almost completely ignorant about what Communism was or what effect it would have on international affairs...
...When The New Leader was getting its start, it had but lately become clear that Russia had turned Communist for good...
...They were on the inside practically everywhere--except on The New Leader...
...And now enemies abroad were ready to strike...
...The Pentagon is making the necessary preparations for a possible military clash with Communism...
...There were Communists or fellow-travelers in every university, publication and Government office, among the followers of every art or craft, and, of course, in nearly every trade union...
...From 1924 to 1929, America was living innocently in a paradise of prosperity...
...But the measures which were hastily thrown together under the aegis of the New Deal required more criticism than we had space to give...
...Hitler was getting ready to take over...
...We were told by responsible statesmen that the problems of capitalist production had been solved...
...We are now fighting a full-scale war of ideas...
...But we also knew--and wrote from the start that Communism would be our enemy after Hitler was defeated...
...While the Bolsheviks were preparing to conquer the world--were even shouting about their intentions--America was asleep to significant developments both at home and abroad...
...It was as if we were drifting toward a dangerous cataract but were all so hypnotized that we could not hear the voices of those who saw the impending peril...
...Lenin had passed away a month before, and Stalin was getting set to take his place with the intention of remaking his great country in his own image...
...Stalin was biding his time, but his men were always a big factor in world affairs...
...Any Americans who want to help cannot do better than to help The New Leader...
...In the biggest type which we could command, we were shouting two sorts of warnings...
...As for the Communists, this was their heyday...
...My answer is that our job has hardly begun...
...In almost every respect, The New LEADER was swimming against the stream...
...It was generally believed that we had reached a happy tableland of prosperity where the word "depression" would merely suggest unpleasant memories of a distant past...
...Fear and suspicion became as grotesquely exaggerated as confidence had been during the earlier time...
...Then came the Second World War...
...In the first place, we tried to alert our readers to what was happening in Russia...
...So great has been the change that young people of 1954 can hardly imagine what life was like in 1924...
...Suddenly, the faith of millions in our productive machinery was shattered...
...Then came the economic crash, and, for a decade, we lived in a world no less strange but different...
...But that still leaves the biggest sector of the anti-totalitarian front uncovered...
...With all these committees getting after the Communists, isn't your job pretty well done...
...We began our existence by pulling hard for Robert La Follette in the days when the words Progressive party meant what they said...
...In the second place, we drew attention when we could to signs of approaching economic collapse...
...This sort of battle can only be waged by people who know what it is all about...
...It was a strange period...
...Fascism was being called "the wave of the future," but for millions of Americans Communism came nearer to fitting the description...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 9
