Where the News Ends:
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin The Atmosphere of Yalta Days IT SEEMS very far away now. But little more than a decade ago the United States was in the throes of a honeymoon...
...Government officials who had not renounced their critical views of Communism found it expedient to meet anti-Communist commentators quietly and inconspicuously...
...Snow turned up such fabulous figures as "collective farmers" who told him that "compared to old Russia, it is heaven compared to hell" and "we are beginning to have a wonderfully rich life...
...Immediately after the first details of Yalta were published, I attended a dinner with a typical group of Americans, mostly teachers and professional people, in an average American city...
...The journalist with Communist sympathies had a field day...
...There happened to be in the group a woman from Estonia, who had escaped the country before the Soviet takeover...
...Therefore, they did not realize how monstrous it was to hand millions of human beings over to Soviet rule, or to return to death or concentration camps Soviet citizens who had escaped abroad...
...Walter Lippmann is cited for his comment that Davies's Mission to Moscow and Wendell Willkie's superficial One World, written under the inspiration of Joseph Barnes, were the two finest available analyses of the Soviet Union...
...This, I feel, is open to question...
...Between 1943 and 1945, for instance, the source of information on Soviet conditions for readers of the Saturday Evening Post was Edgar Snow, whose earlier work, Red Star Over China, was appropriately reviewed in a Far Eastern publication as "Pink Snow Over China...
...An introduction to such a study is provided by Paul Willen's article, "Who 'Collaborated' With Russia...
...The influence of the Government on public opinion is always and inevitably greater in war than in peace...
...But all the others greeted the news enthusiastically...
...Soviet spy rings enjoyed easy access to Government secrets...
...Along with these and other excellent exposures, Mr...
...These Americans were not Communists or fellow-travelers...
...She and I knew that Yalta was a disgrace, signalizing the extinction of freedom in Eastern Europe for a long time...
...And it was the policy of the Roosevelt Administration, working through the OWI and other agencies, to create a favorable and quite inaccurate picture of Soviet realities...
...Willen recalls Joseph E. Davies with his airy brush-off of the purges of the Thirties as just a clean-up of "fifth-columnists...
...his writings were eagerly published in the most conservative mass-circulation magazines...
...No picture of America's Soviet honeymoon is complete without references to the proSoviet apologetics in the influential broadcasts of Raymond Gram Swing and in the Atlantic Monthly...
...But little more than a decade ago the United States was in the throes of a honeymoon with the Soviet Union...
...they had simply been kept in ignorance of the facts about the Soviet regime...
...One hopes that some day there will be an adequate documented study of this strange episode in the misleading of American public opinion...
...The Roosevelt, Administration cannot escape responsibility for misleading American public opinion merely because so many editors, professors, clergymen and politicians were willing to go along...
...Pillars of local communities flocked into organizations which have subsequently appeared on the Attorney - General's subversive list...
...One remarked: "Isn't it splendid that Stalin has pledged himself to uphold the Atlantic Charter...
...Willen's article contains some omissions of detail and a general conclusion with which I am inclined to dissent...
...This old-fashioned monthly, among other things, accepted the notorious proCommunist Anna Louise Strong as its leading expert on the Soviet Union and Communist Poland...
...Willen seems to reach the conclusion that, because almost everyone was guilty of propagandist "collaboration" with Soviet dictatorship during the war, no one was really guilty...
...originally published in the Antioch Review and now circulated as a reprint by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom...
...This honeymoon wrought incalculable harm to American national interests and to the cause of freedom throughout the world...
...Willen's revelations should produce some red faces in some respectably conservative editorial offices...
...Life magazine published a special edition on the Soviet Union, the quality of which might be judged from the reference to the NKVD as "a national police similar to the FBI," with the meritorious job of "tracking down traitors...
...Authors, movie magnates, lecturers, masscirculation publications, influential radio commentators labored mightily to create an imaginary picture of the Soviet Union as a great misunderstood democracy—a little rough, perhaps, but sound at the core and really very like the United States...
...The widespread effort to conceal the nature of the Soviet system softened up American public opinion to accept with complacency the infamous Yalta agreement of 1945...
...Her husband, less fortunate, had been caught and executed...
Vol. 38 • April 1955 • No. 14
