Revised Reds

Q: Is there any possibility, as has been often suggested, of the Soviet Union entering into an agreement with Germany?

A: ... There is about as much chance of such an agreement as of Earl Browder being elected president of the American Chamber of Commerce.

So spake Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party in the U. S., when he was questioned at the Institute of Public Affairs in Charlottesville, Va. last July 5. Comrade Browder up to last week's end had not been elevated by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. That the U. S. S. R. and Nazi Germany had made up, a shaken world knew.

Befuddled, appalled, embarrassed were Earl Browder and his U. S. Comrades. The Party press went first into a silence, then into a great writhing (see p. 32). Back to Manhattan from vacation hastened Comrade Browder to set the capitalist press aright .in his.ninth-floor eyrie. Said he with aplomb: 1) "The announcement of the Pact has done no injury whatsoever to the Communist Party cause here. I know my Party"; 2) the Soviet Union and the Communist Party in the U. S. have neither abandoned nor compromised their fight on world Fascism; 3) the Pact constitutes "a distinct contribution to world peace"; 4) when disclosed in toto, the agreement would leave Russia a way out if Germany turned aggressor. (Until last week, U. S. Communists supposed that Germany already was an aggressor.)

Next day Mr. Browder's Daily Worker, along with his apologia, printed the text of a treaty minus escape, complete with commitments against further alliances aimed at either Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. From then until week's end, the Daily Worker mirrored the dilemma into which Comrade Stalin had pitched Communist Parties of all nations. Its editorialists and columnists preached continued distrust of Nazi Hitler, continued cooperation with anti-Fascist men of goodwill, even a continued boycott of German goods which Soviet Russia was now pledged to buy. As a faithful organ of Soviet doctrine in the U. S., it also had to reprint Pravda's inspired injunction to the Russian people: "An end is being put to hostility between Germany and the U. S. S. R. . . ."

Masquerade Ended? Such eminent and veteran haters of Stalinist Communism as Socialist Norman Thomas proclaimed a final exposure of Stalinist hypocrisy, approaching dissolution of the Communist Party in the U. S. They counted without the Party's resilient internal structure, its genius for rationalization. Its first week in gyration produced no public defections of bigwig Reds, no convincing evidence of mass withdrawals even among its Jewish members. Chiefly evident were changes in the Party's U. S. "line." Hitherto the emphasis was on opposition to Fascism; now it was on Peace (but not, in the Party organs, "at any price"). By bedding with Hitler, Joseph Stalin was shown to have done him a fatal favor (PACT SPLITS AXIS WAR ALLIANCE, headlined the Daily Worker). That Russia had replaced Japan in the Axis, the Communists perforce denied.

Fading Front. What happens to the minuscule (90,000 members) U. S. Communist Party as such is of more interest than import to the U. S. people at large. What happened last week to its ardently nurtured Popular Front was funny to many, painful to many. On the theory that democratic governments and peoples could be usefully linked in a world front against Fascism to save the imperiled U. S. S. R., Communists in 1935 postponed the revolution, began to woo. They fashioned a domestic program so broad that no liberally minded citizen or group could oppose all of it all the time, thus were able to claim vast support for "collective security." One stanch unit of the U. S. Front was (and is) the American League for Peace and Democracy. Last year 15,000-odd Manhattanites paraded for it. Last week, the League marshaled only 4,200 (including famed Artist Rockwell Kent).

A stanch individual in the Popular Front was Columnist Heywood Broun, whose American Newspaper Guild was well up front. Last week Heywood Broun recorded his anguish: ". . . The Soviet has here and now contributed to the might and menace of Hitler. . . . Fascism is still deadly, but the popular front now becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible. . . . The masquerade is over. The dominoes are dropped and it now becomes possible to look at the faces of the various ones who pretend to be devoted to the maintenance of democracy."

For a whole legion of non-Communist but hitherto sympathetic pinkos, the New Republic and the Nation deplored "Stalin's Munich," Hitler's "colossal diplomatic victory." For thousands of citizens who had contributed to the Front simple libertarian goodwill, there was no outlet save a murmur of disillusion over the land. For millions of suspicious isolationists the worst opinion of the Reds was merely confirmed. Famed Editor William Allen White's son William L. reported from Emporia: ". . . No one in Kansas was stunned this morning, and we are doing business as usual. . . . It's much simpler now that the dictatorships are arranged in one neat pile."

Communists striving to patch up their Front reflected that they had lost ground during previous alterations of their "line," had always regained it. One who cynically conceded that all might not be lost to them was the Baltimore Stin's Henry Mencken, who was disillusioned long ago. Noting the widespread pain of the pinks, he opined: "The will to believe is not cured by a single sellout, nor even by a dozen on end. It is a chronic affliction, and as intractable as gout, the liquor habit, or following the horses. The American pinks have had it for a long time and they will carry it to the grave, and even let us hope, beyond."

The U. S. press in its dissection of the Communists all but ignored the plight of Fritz Kuhn's German-American Bundsters, who have long been nourished on Red bait. Fritz Kuhn took the line that Earl Browder used: what happened in Europe made no difference to Nazis in the U. S.

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