Mr. and Mrs. James R. Getz Archives and Special Collections
Donnelley and Lee Library, Lake Forest College
An Exhibit
Bolshevists, Communism, and American Anti-Communism, 1917-1960:
An Exhibit Mounted in Honor of Labor Day, September 7, 2009
And Continuing through October
By Guest Curator Jason Mulak (Case 2)
and Archivist and Librarian for Special Collections Arthur H. Miller (Case 3);
All caption texts by Arthur H. Miller, with editing assistance by Shema Bhujel '12.
On Labor Day 2009 U.S. unemployment is at its highest level (nearly 10%) since the early days of the Reagan administration, 1981-84. Illinois's and Chicago's unemployment rates are higher and the September 8, 2009 Chicago Tribune reports that over 15% are unemployed in Rockford, an industrial community an hour west of Chicago. Midwestern states generally, the traditional industrial heart of the U.S., have seen plants closing in unprecedented numbers and even higher cases of unemployment. If simple answers to complex questions elude Americans this Labor Day, it is worth readdressing some of the old concerns about distribution of wealth, not just locally or nationally, but globally. As always, Labor Day remains a question, not an answer, and it is fitting that this academic institution dedicated to questions remains in session on this important and historic day.
Case 2. Bolshevism, Lenin and Stalin by Jason Mulak
Jason Mulak is a lilbrary and information science master's student at Dominican University, River Forest, and a resident of Deerfield.
One.
In March 1917, the overthrow of the Russian Tsar by competing revolutionary reform elements led to a power vacuum in Russia. Then in November 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution or coup installed a radical Marxist regime. In theory this placed the workers in power, over both the Russian aristocracy and the middle class, business owners and intellectuals.
Karl Marx (1818-1883), a German economist who had worked in England for most of his life, advocated the overthrow of the capitalist system by the workers. This upheaval would lead to the creation of a new order by and for the workers, Marx calling the workers' class the proletariat. According to Marx and Fredrich Engels (1820-1895) in their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party..., the workers in a capitalist system, did not own the means of production, but had to sell their labor power for a wage or salary. Across Europe and the U.S., and especially in the late nineteenth century in Chicago, there had been an ongoing, but not civil enough discussions (strikes in Chicago especially in 1877, 1886 [Haymarket Affair], and 1894) between the owners of businesses, what Marx called the bourgeoisie, and their employees, the proletariat. The question was: who would set the terms of employment: the hours, the wages, the conditions, etc.? The Chicago workers believed that their employers had too much authority in these matters given their inputs, perhaps little understood then: the raw materials, land, buildings, equipment, and management (sales, marketing, planning, organization, finance, etc.).
Much was done in Chicago to improve the conditions for workers (settlement houses, better housing, etc.) by the end of that century and continuing on to World War I . But the discussions between the businessmen and their employees had not concluded or they had not yet arrived at a new consensus when the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution took place. As a result, many upper and middle class Americans (and Chicagoans in particular) were alarmed at the violent turn of affairs in Russia in 1919. They were concerned that revolutionary ideas of class conflict and worker rule would spread here.
Several modern studies in the Library’s General Collection document the circumstances of the Bolshevik or Soviet revolution in Russia, from the more distant vantage point in time of the 1970s and after. These include:
Howard Acton, et al. Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914-1921.
Shiela Fitzpatrick. The Russian Revolution, new ed.
Alexander Rabinowitch. The Bolshevists come to Power: the Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd.
Bertram D. Wolf. Three Who Made a Revolution… (New York: Dial, 1961). This is open to a double-page spread of photographs from the period.
Two.
Joseph Medill Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News (1919-1946), collected a number of books about developments in mid twentieth century Russia/U.S.S.R. Chicago-born Patterson (1879-1946) had been a after study at Groton and Yale a Socialist at the beginning of the twentieth century. He had written a novel (Little Brother of the Rich, 1908), plays ("dope," "The Fourth Estate," etc.) and several articles in popular magazines attacking the unfairness of the wealth of upper class Americans gained at the expense of the workers. Later, Patterson became disenchanted with the notion that the Socialist Party and Socialism (and later on Communism) was a solution to the problem of the distribution of wealth. He took over co-pulbisher status for the Chicago Tribune in 1910 with his cousin, Robert R. McCormick, and then founded the New York Daily News in 1919.
The color frontispiece illustration to Dennis Wheatley’s 1937 Red Eagle: The Story of the Russian Revolution... (London: Hutchinson), from among Patterson’s books now in Special Collections, reflects Bolshevist revolutionary fervor.
Three.
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) emerged as the iconic leader of this revolution, and he was soon followed after 1924 by Josef Stalin (1878-1953), who removed other Soviet leaders such as Leon Trotsky. Several modern studies in the General Collection cover this long leadership era:
Robert Service. Lenin: A Biography shows period photos here of Lenin and Stalin.
Other recent studies include:
Charles Bettelheim. Class Struggles in the U.S.S.R., 1917-1923.
David Brandenberger. National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture…, 1931-1956.
Simon Montefiore. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.
Christopher Read. From Tsars to Soviets…, 1917-1921.
Four.
Two pre-World War II primary sources on Lenin from Special Collections are:
Maxim Gorky. Days With Lenin.
We Have Met Lenin.
Six (no Five).
Two Patterson-library 1930s titles are:
W. G. Krivitsky. In Stalin’s Secret Service… (1939).
Elias Tobenkin. Stalin’s Ladder (1933), and showing a tipped-in, signed typed one-page letter to Patterson from the author.
Case 3. Communism and Anti-Communism in the U.S. by Arthur H. Miller
Seven.
Princess Julia (Grant) Cantacuzene (1876-1975), granddaughter of General and President U.S. Grant and niece of Chicago grand dame Bertha Honore (Mrs. Potter) Palmer, in 1899 married an aristocratic Russian official. Soon after the Revolution, Julia Cantacuzene returned to the U.S. and published in 1919 a Chicago-related witness’s first-hand account of the rise of Bolshevism and of class warfare in Russia.
Known to Chicagoans and a regular visitor here, her account helped galvanize elite U.S. opinion against the radical regime. Her 1919 book, Revolutionary Days… was republished in the annual series of Lakeside Classics (R.R. Donnelley & Sons printing firm) in 1999. It still is exciting reading by a witness with whom Americans even today can identify. She apinted a scary picture of Bolshevist terror.
Eight.
The U.S. Red Scare of 1919-1920, the reactionary effort to suppress revolutionary tendancies in this country, swept Lake Forest College’s acting president and philosophy professor,Henry Wilkes Wright, out of office, the College, and the U.S.; he finished his career on the faculty of the liberal University of Manitoba, Canada. Wright had stated in a Lily Reid Holt Chapel convocation that, in effect, all faculty were not Bolshevists and this was reported in the College’s Stentor, April 1919. (See 30 Miles North… [2000], the College’s history.) Shown here though is a more general modern study of the U.S. Red Scare or Scares,
Regin Schmidt. Red Scare:…
Nine.
There was an actual Communist Party in the U.S. during this period. A first-hand, insider account of these activities in the 1920s, of the emergence of “Trotskyism,” and of the efforts to radicalize African-Americans, a group of workers notably cut off then from most of the benefits of their labor, is provided in...
James P. Cannon. The First Ten Years of American Communism (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1962).
Cannon was an active and articulate spokesperson for the Communist movement in the U.S., perhaps especially in the early 1920s when the difficult post-war economy held down growth and worker progress. In a speech at the First Workers Convention, 1921, Cannon tried to put some backbone in the discouraged leadership: "The task is before us. We have a labor movement that is completely discouraged and demoralized. We have an organized labor movement that is unable on any front to put up an effective struggle against the drive of destruction organized by the masters." Of course, the party leaders had good reason to be disheartened: "Yes, reaction is in full sway in America. Many of our finest spirits, our bravest boys, our best fighters, wear their lives away in the penitentiaries of America." The Red Scare had worked. The answer, according to Cannon, was unity, and to get beyond petty squabbles over differences in theories. This is the leadership the party must offer American workers, Cannon, declared: "We want to make it, consequently, a party of action, a centralized party, a fighting party. These are our slogans, comrades. If we will follow them, we will build up an organization to which the disheartened and demoralized workers of America will rally." These speches are online from a collection of Cannon's works. They give the character of what role he played in the early days after the Russian Revolution and the Red Scare that followed in this country, as described in his First Ten Years....
This 1962 first edition of The First Ten Years... was transferred to the Lake Forest College library’s Special Collections from the Chicago Historical Society (now History Museum) in the 1980s.
Ten.
North Shore matron Elizabeth Dilling (1894-1966), was a leading anti-Communist author and lecturer in the 1930s. She was also against Jews, Gandhi, etc. Her 1934 who’s who of radicals book, The Red Network... caused a big stir attacking the pro-Soviet leanings of the Roosevelt administration, but she and her book reflected the upper middle class's extreme discomfort with the threat of the spread of Communism in the mid twentieth century. According to William L. Wunder in a 2008 posting, Dilling "filled a significant void between the Red Scare of 1919 and the McCarthyism of the early 1950's." However, in 1944 she was put on trial for sedition. Gift of Arthur D. Dubin ASTP '47.
Eleven.
The U.S. House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was a major voice between 1938 and 1960 for anti-Communist opinion, though after the mid-1950s its approach increasingly fell on deaf ears. Here are two pamphlets from as late as 1960:
Communist Target --Youth: Communist Infiltration and Agitation.
Northern California District of the Communist Party: Structure – Objectives – Leadership.
Twelve.
Portrait photograph of the Chicago Tribune editorial chief, writer and correspondent and also Highland Park resident Clifford Raymond (1875-1950). According to the Tribune's October 22, 1950 extended obituary, Raymond joined the Tribune as a reporter in 1898, before the death of legendary publisher Joseph Medill. In 1909 he began writing editorials and became chief editorial writer in April 1939. After forty-four years with the newspaper, he retired in 1942.
Thirteen.
In 1937, Raymond covered for the Tribune the independent “Commission of Inquiry” of Leon Trotsky, the Soviet leader exiled by Stalin in the late 1920s. In August 1936, a show trial in Moscow sentenced Trotsky to death (in absentia), who then was living with Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo in a suburb of Mexico City. In April 1937 there took place there an independent “Commission of Inquiry”. On display is a page (9) detailing the Soviet approach of the era, from Raymond’s copy of the typescript (the last of five volumes) of the inquiry discussions, given to the library by Raymond's friend, Arthur D. Dubin ASTP ’47.
Raymond sent several dispatches back to Chicago, which were published in the Tribune, and gave a day-by-day account of this colorful airing of a Soviet family feud, and further solidifying Chicago Tribune circulation district opinion against Stalin’s U.S.S.R. and the leader's methods. Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico in 1940. The Mexican inquiry covered by Raymond would have contributed to Midwestern reluctance to support Stalin in his struggles with the Nazis. America First was founded on the North Shore to keep the U.S. out of the European 1939-41 conflict and from aiding Stalin.
Fourteen.
This yellowed page from the October 22, 1950 Chicago Tribune obituary of Raymond quotes this former Tribune editorial chief’s anti-Communist opinions. In his obituary in the Tribune in 1950, using his July 30, 1941 editorial, "If Russia Wins," following Hitler's invasion of the U.S.S.R., Raymond paints a grim picture for the U.S., between a rock and hard place. He acknowledges that Britain's urgent need to distract Hitler meant that Churchill had to aid Russia; the U.S. to take pressure off Britain also aided Stalin.
But what if Hitler is defeated and an unchecked Russian army heads westward? Raymond is concerned about Stalin's troops "coming west with the hammer and sickle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the class war, and the liquidation of the bourgeoisie" [the owner, captialist class] (Tribune, October 22, 1950, Part I, 4). A victorious Stalin would invite the remnants of Communism in western countries from before the 1917 Revolution "all to rise." Thus, "[n]o one should indulge in any dreamy speculation of the deliverance of Europe under the protection of the great liberal powers if Stalin is the controller of new forces dominating the continent." Raymond opines that Churchill understands the threat while Roosevelt does not: "The Red ally of today might be the Red terror of tomorrow." This 1941 editorial is quoted at length in his 1950 obituary, at the height of the early Cold War between the west and the U.S.S.R., after the scenario Raymond had laid out nine years earlier had been played out on the by-then-divided European continent. It would be another forty years until this division broke up, as the U.S.S.R. self-destructed.
Gift of Arthur D. Dubin.
Fifteen and Sixteen.
These are two late 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee publications:
International Communism (the Communist Mind).
The Communist Conspiracy, Part I.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower allowed everybody to exercise their freedom of speech on subjects relating to the Communist threat. But as a skilled and experienced military leader he kept the U.S. out of foreign military excursions beyond its means.
Seventeen.
Eisenhower’s CIA chief Allen Dulles wrote this 1959 address, The Challenge of Soviet Power. Dulles highlighted the superiority of the West’s industrial might, and ended by asking his audience (manufacturers) how they could help to meet the challenge. It would be President Ronald Reagan’s missile defense bluff in the 1980s, more than military involvements by his predecessors, that would finally push the weakening Soviet state over the edge into collapse.
Conclusion: Labor Day a Question More Than an Answer?
At the same time he was crushing the Soviet threat, Reagan undertook to diminish the power of labor unions as means for the workers to negotiate effectively with the owners over the distribution of profits from production. Still, have strong U.S. labor unions played a role in the transfer of jobs overseas to countries where workers have less opportunity to bargain for their fair share? Or have the owners of the means of production transferred work overseas, to an extent that they have seriously weakened the consumer power of well-paid workers? Have short-term, de-centralized micro-economic strategies had unintended aggregate macro-economic effects? If ninety years ago the prospect of a global redistribution of wealth was a fear in the midwest, how are global corporate and governmental policies today redistributing the work itself and its fruits, thereby impacting the health and well-being of industries, Its workers and of the larger economy in the U.S.?
The opinions expressed are those of the author of these captions only, and not of the College, its faculty, students, or trustees. They are meant to encourage discussion from the perspective of history as seen in some of these documents and artifacts.
Arthur H. Miller
September 6, 2009