The Rise and Fall of the Popular Front
TYLER, GUS
The Rise and Fall of the Popular Front The Liberal Civil War: Fraternity and Fratricide on the Left By Jim Tuck University Press of America. 289 pp. $59.00. Reviewed by Gus Tyler Former...
...The author quotes, too, General Douglas MacArthur's declaration that "today the free people of the world unite in salute to that great [Red] Army and great nation that so nobly strives with us for victory, liberty and freedom...
...The first was firmly nonor anti-Communist...
...Thus Bennett Cerf, president of Random House, proposed in 1942 that any book critical of the Soviet Union be withdrawn from circulation...
...America was embracing the Soviet Union and, in return, the American Communists were embracing America with well-timed rhetoric...
...The Milwaukee Journal ran an editorial entitled "La Follette Is Destructive...
...cat's-paws...
...Nevertheless, for half a dozen years it lived a rather obscure existence...
...The expectation was that capitalist America would learn from the Soviets how to act in a more collective manner, while the Soviets would learn from America how to behave more democratically...
...When they told this to the organization's executive director, Hannah Dorner, she responded: "If the ICC program is like the Communist line, that is purely coincidence...
...Tuck aptly observes that "business tycoons, DAR presidents and American Legion commanders were just as ecstatic about the Soviet dictator [Stalin] as Americans of more liberal inclinations...
...Finally, the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia, and continued enslavement of the Baltic States, made it obvious to Americans that the Kremlin wanted to rule the world and that the Communist parties of the world were its instruments...
...and Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina...
...In the euphoric moment when the Allies (including the Soviet Union) conquered Hitler, many saw the elements of a new world...
...To anyone of any age interested in the lessons of history, though...
...Apparently he was expecting the capitalist societies of the West to say, "Thank you for ridding the world of the Communists...
...Many of its founders began to leave because its program seemed to be little more than an echo of the Communist catechism...
...A biographical note describes him as "politically active" and as having been "president of the only overseas chapter of Americans for Democratic Action...
...He said he was "no more prepared to commit the United States to enforcing British rule over India, Burma or Malta" than he was "to commit my country to enforcing Russian domination over Poland, Romania, Austria, the Balkans, or any of the nations in the Baltic States...
...On Election Day Wallace got only 1,157,326 votes, less than the upstart Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond polled...
...Meanwhile, the Wallace challenge convincedmore conservative Democratic voters that Truman was not beholden to the Communists...
...Tuck gives much of the credit for Truman's victory to ADA...
...The UDA's ranks boasted the likes of Reinhold Niebuhr, the liberal theologian...
...Instead, the threat of Nazi domination of the world propelled the United States into World War II just a fewmonths after Franklin D. Roosevelt's passionate "I hate war" statement to the American people...
...At the same time, he notes a series of events that turned Americans against the USSR and its U.S...
...Congressman Andrew Biemiller of Milwaukee...
...When "Young Bob," as he was called, ran for re-election to the Senate, he lost to none other than Joseph R. McCarthy—who, in the course of his campaign, said: "Stalin's proposal for world disarmament is a great thing and he must be given credit for being sincere about it...
...If you happen to have been a participant in the confrontation, you will cheer or jeer Tuck's tale, depending on which side you were on...
...To everyone's surprise...
...Tuck almost seems to be unhappy that there are hardly any Communists or fellow-travelers around to quarrel with...
...Few were fooled...
...Rather, it was an extension of the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), launched in May 1941 by Socialist Party members who rejected the pacifism of their leader, Norman Thomas, and favored active intervention by the United States in the War against Hitler...
...Although ADA is rightly depicted as an uncompromising foe of Communists, whether in the USSR or the U.S., it was not set up for the sole or even secondary purpose of shooting them down...
...The Luce publications explained away the brutal Soviet secret police, the NKVD, as a "national police similar to the FBI" whose job was "tracking down traitors...
...A. Philip Randolph, the civil rights leader and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters...
...And Truman—despite the Progressive breakaway on the Left and the Dixiecrat breakaway on the Right—defeated the shoo-in candidate, Republican Thomas E. Dewey...
...In several cases, leaders like Joe Curran of the National Maritime Union and Mike Quill of the Transport Workers abandoned their Communist association...
...The years immediately preceding World War II, the War years themselves, and the early postwar years were marked by a series of unexpected and unsettling developments...
...One of them, the Independent Citizens Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP), pursued the intellectual elite...
...But under no circumstances would ADA form a third party, as the PCA did when it became the backbone of Wallace's White House bid...
...Certainly that brings his grand theme— the rise and fall of the Communist-inclined Progressive Party in the 1940s, and the role of the ADA in combating it—full circle...
...Reviewed by Gus Tyler Former national board member...
...the second was created as well as run by Communists and reliable feilow travelers...
...One of those who dared to defy this amen chorus in praise of the Soviet Union was the son of "Fighting Bob" La Follette, Robert M. La Follette Jr., and he paid a heavy political price...
...Indeed, if anything, the Truman candidacy probably was helped by the Wallace and Thurmond defections...
...To younger generations, the story of an internecine battle among people of a bygone period who were equally dedicated in their own minds to achieving a world of peace, plenty and freedom will probably appear a bit bizarre, and totally irrelevant...
...In a sense, the book may be a sort of Apologiapro Vita Sua, and, en passant, a complement to his previous volume, McCarthyism and the Hearst Press, an assault on those who made a career and religion out of Redbaiting...
...Two years after its birth, however, the ICCASP started running out of steam...
...To many liberals that sounded right, especially when they contemplated Truman, the hack, as the alternative...
...Thurmond's protest and the Dixiecrat walkout convinced many liberals that Truman would not be beholden to the Southern segregationist wing of his party...
...As Frank Kingdon, a key figure in the PCA, put it: "There is only one man who can take FDR's place and that man is Henry A. Wallace...
...A special New York Congressional election seemed to heighten Wallace's prospects...
...Tuck makes no pretense of being a neutral observer...
...In addition, Truman was the beneficiary of a united labor vote...
...For people of goodwill, Communist and non-Communist, joining hands in a common cause was the thing to do at the time...
...the other, the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC), targeted hoi polloi...
...The Great Depression had shaken the faith of many people in the democratic way of life...
...Then, out of the blue, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union...
...Communism," intoned Communist Party chief Earl Browder, "is 20th century Americanism...
...Now the United States found itself in alliance with a Soviet Union that it had not recognized until FDR reversed the policy in 1933, that it had condemned for joining Hitler in partitioning Poland, and that it condemned again for the unprovoked invasion of Finland...
...Tuck might have ended his diligently researched work with the 1948 election...
...The Kremlin, for instance, rejected the Marshall Plan and pressured its affiliate parties around the globe to oppose this move to put Europe back on its feet...
...Judging by their letterheads, one had good reason to believe that here was a "wave of the future" in the making...
...That conclusion is not implied by the author, but it may be inferred by the insightful reader...
...In fact, liberals within the Administration and around the country felt Truman was a bumbling, boss-controlled, barely literate, run-of-the-mill pol who clearly could not fill FDR's shoes...
...What stirred the UDA to reach out for a wider political base in 1947 was its low esteem for President Harry S. Truman...
...The Liberal Civil War should have a strong appeal: It presents a classic case of how ideologies shape events and events shape ideologies—and of how misleading the passions of a particular moment can be for even the best and the brightest...
...ICCASP's membership kept falling and its debts kept rising...
...His stinging criticism took the form of an attack on both British and Soviet imperialism...
...The Wisconsin State Journal charged La Follette with "vituperation and abuse" against Russia and England...
...But he concludes with two chapters that detail the breakdown of the Popular Front after Henry Wallace was decisevely trounced, and the eventual decline of what he calls The Liberal Civil War into sporadic bickering...
...Wallace, who had been FDR's Vice President, was touted as the logical inheritor of his mantle...
...As the 1948 election approached, the new ADA looked in vain for an alternative candidate the Democratic Party might accept, such as Senator Paul H. Douglas of Illinois or Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas...
...Columnist Westbrook Pegler, no friend of liberals, let alone Communists, predicted he would draw about 8 million votes...
...And, of course, the two would live (or coexist) happily ever after...
...Toward the end of 1946 they launched the PCA, largely by merging the ICCASP with the NCPAC, and before long it became the base for Henry Wallace's presidential campaign on the Progressive Party line...
...To love Uncle Joe also came to mean that all others must love him—or else...
...It is this wishful moment—from the War's end (1945) to Henry A. Wallace's campaign for President on the Progressive Party line (1948)—that provides the background for Tuck's story...
...Our longtime foe was our newfound friend...
...It looked as if two contiguous continents, from the British Isles to the island nation of Japan, would soon be in the hands of this diabolic duumvirate...
...The protagonists in the drama are two organizations —Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA...
...The NCPAC, inaugurated the same year, could cite among its founders CIO president Philip Murray, James Patton of the National Farmers' Union, Elmer Benson, former Farmer-Labor Governor of Minnesota, and civil rights leaders Robert C. Weaver and Bishop R. R. Wright Jr...
...They envisioned a future where massive discontent would give rise to dictatorships—whether Fascist or Communist—with an ultimate Armageddon in a contest between the twin tyrannies...
...Americans for Democratic Action This is a fast-paced, informative account of an era when what the author calls "Popular Front [read pro-Communist] liberals" and "Cold War [read anti-Communist] liberals" clashed head-on...
...As a result, he looked like a vital, or perhaps revitalized, center...
...Some ADAers even briefly promoted DEM, the Draft Eisenhower Movement...
...The Progressive Citizens of America, founded in 1946, was the outgrowth of two organizations that sought to capitalize on the widespread acceptance of, even affection for, the Soviet Union and, by association, the Communist Party...
...The contest took place in a solidly Democratic Bronx district, but the candidate of the American Labor Party, which had been taken over by the Communists, won...
...Like the old war horse he is, he appears to miss the smell of the gunpowder...
...The Communists decided that they needed a new face...
...Even enemies of Wallace now saw him as a formidable contender...
...Besides the unions linked from the beginning with ADA, others lined up behind him that had originally been in the NCPAC and were members of the Communist-inspired World Federation of Trade Unions...
...Hitler and Stalin entered into a j oint effort to invade and dismember Poland...
...The ICCASP, established in 1944, the year FDR ran for a fourth term, could point to a list of sponsors running from Albert Einstein to Frank Sinatra, from the Van Dorens to Orson Welles, from Bette Davis and Agnes de Mille to Lillian Hellman and Paul Robeson, from Max Lerner to Harold Ickes...
...At the 1948 Democratic National Convention he supported Hubert H. Humphrey's civil rights plank...
...The Soviet Union also tried to grab Greece, and would have succeeded if the United States, under Truman, had not resisted with diplomatic and military action...
Vol. 82 • March 1999 • No. 3
