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http://spectator.org/34799_dreams-frank-marshall-davis/

The Chicago Crew

DURING THIS post–World War II period, when his Communist agitation was at its peak, Frank Marshall Davis became involved in seemingly every Communist front in Chicago—and there were plenty of them.

Among them was the Abraham Lincoln School, located on the top floor of a building in the heart of Chicago’s Loop. Davis first hooked up with the school in 1944, the same year Congress correctly listed it as “Communist.” Run by well-known Party members like Davis’ good friend William L. Patterson, the school was notorious for its Marxist instruction. The Chicago Tribune labeled it the “little Red school house.” Davis taught a history of jazz course there. More than that, he served on the board of directors.

Davis was also intimately familiar with the Citizens’ Committee to Aid Packing-House Workers. A surviving April 12, a member and among the small group of journalistically inclined individuals who comprised the group’s publicity committee. Joining him in both capacities was Vernon Jarrett.

Jarrett would become a major name in Chicago and known nationally. He wrote syndicated columns for the Chicago Tribune before joining the Chicago Sun-Times, on whose editorial board he later served. When Jarrett died in May 2004, he was hailed in a Washington Post obit titled “Vernon Jarrett, 84; Journalist, Crusader.”

The Post’s tribute neglected to note that in his youth Jarrett was elected to the Illinois Council of American Youth for Democracy, the CPUSA youth wing, at the group’s 1946 national convention. He also wrote for the left-wing Chicago Defender. In any or all of those capacities, Jarrett would have met Frank Marshall Davis.

In April 1948, Jarrett and Davis put their minds together for the Packing-House Committee and their pens to joint service defending Chicago’s oppressed proletariat. “The duty of this Committee,” declared their statement “is to give publicity to…the plight of the workers.”

Today, their political heirs put their minds to joint service at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In 1983, Jarrett’s son, Dr. William Robert Jarrett, married a young woman named Valerie Bowman. Valerie Bowman became Valerie Jarrett, who today is Barack Obama’s top adviser. (See my profile of her, “Letting Obama Be Obama,” TAS, July/August 2011.)

If that’s not eerie enough, there is another connection between Valerie Jarrett’s and Obama’s political ancestors. His name was Robert R. Taylor, and Davis worked with him at a CPUSA/ Comintern “antiwar” rally in Chicago in November 1940. The group behind the rally was the hideous American Peace Mobilization, later described by Congress as “one of the most seditious organizations which ever operated in the United States.” This “instrument of the Communist Party line” was “one of the most notorious and blatantly Communist fronts ever organized in this country.” The goal of the American Peace Mobilization was to keep the U.S. out of World War II, because, at the time, Hitler was allied with Stalin via the Hitler-Stalin pact. And so, the good comrades at CPUSA saluted the red flag. Davis and Taylor worked together on an event billed as “Negroes and National Defense.”

Robert Taylor was the first African American head of the Chicago Housing Authority. He also appears in the major 1944 congressional report “Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States.”

Taylor was the maternal grandfather of Valerie Jarrett.

The Canter Family—and David Axelrod

COLLABORATING WITH Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is David Axelrod, who, in another bizarre twist of political fate, likewise has roots in this same Chicago crowd and period. (See my profile, “David Axelrod, Lefty Lumberjack,” TAS, March 2012.)

Architect of Obama’s “hope and change” message and presidential campaigns, Axelrod is a native New Yorker who, like Obama and Frank Marshall Davis, found his political and professional calling in Chicago. In the 1970s, while Obama was being mentored in Hawaii by Davis, Axelrod was being mentored in Chicago by people with connections back to that same Chicago crew.

Axelrod had enrolled at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1972, majoring in political science and writing for the student newspaper. He soon secured a nice job as a very young political columnist for the Hyde Park Herald. Through his work at the Herald, Axelrod met David Canter and Don Rose. Canter and Rose mentored Axelrod and helped set him on a path that led to Barack Obama and the White House.

David Canter was the son of Harry Jacob Canter. Harry had been secretary of the Boston Communist Party. In 1930, he ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Communish Party ticket. Harry was so progressive that in 1932 he received a special invitation to Stalin’s USSR, which he eagerly accepted, bringing along his entire family. Fluet in Russian, he taught printing techniques to the Bolsheviks, translating major volumes of Lenin’s writings.

In 1937, Harry and family suddenly left Moscow and landed in Chicago. Close to Harry not just biologically but ideologically was his son, David Simon Canter, born in Boston in 1923, and nurtured in the USSR under Stalin’s collectivization, mass wealth redistribution, and five-year plans.

Like Axelrod, whom he would mentor, David Canter attended the University of Chicago, writing for the college newspaper and other publications. He eventually edited the Packinghouse Workers Union newsletter.

David’s surviving son, Marc, recalls “all sorts of wild memories of being the son of one of the organizers of the meatpackers union. Don’t get me started!” David Canter’s politics, like his father’s, became especially bold—and pro-Soviet. He was eventually subpoenaed to testify before the Democrat-run House Committee on Un-American Activities, where he refused to answer any questions about past or present membership in the Communist Party.

The committee was especially interested in an operation called Translation World Publishers. The committee had evidence that “the Soviet Government advanced to Translation World Publishers…the sum of $2,400” for a specific set of books to be produced.

The committee concluded that Translation World Publishers was “an outlet for the distribution of Soviet propaganda,” was “subsidized by Soviet funds and was created by known Communists to serve the propaganda interests of the USSR.” Canter, according to the committee, had thereby failed to comply with the provisions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. To clarify: This is the same Canter who directly mentored David Axelrod.

Frank Marshall Davis would have met the Canters in any number of functions. At the Abraham Lincoln School, Harry taught the Monday evening class, 8:45–10:15 p.m., titled “Wartime Trade Union Problems.” Further, the Canter family was very Much acquainted with and appeared in Davis’ Chicago Star.

To cite a couple of examples, Harry Canter is listed in the April 28, 1947, edition, wishing “May Day Greetings” along with other “Friends” of the Star. The May 15, 1948, “Inside Labor” column spotlighted Canter, who was a candidate for delegate to the International Typographical Union’s 90th convention, as a “leader in the fight against the Taft-Hartley Act” who “calls himself a ‘non-partisan Independent-Progressive.’” That would be a progressive who happened to have run CPUSA in Boston and worked in Moscow as a Soviet translator and editor.

Davis eventually sold his Chicago Star in 1948 to something called the Progressive Publishing Company. A look at the officers and stockholders for the company revealed the usual suspects, including Harry Canter, secretary of the four-man board of directors.

Again, the overlapping orbits are fascinating. The ghosts of Chicago’s frightening political past are alive and well in Washington today.

Davis Called to Testify

WHEN FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS sold the Star in 1948, he suddenly made his way to Hawaii, a move almost certainly dictated by the Party. There, as his declassified 600-page FBI file shows, his bread would be buttered by Harry Bridges’ Communist- controlled International Longshore and Warehouse Union. The ILWU bankrolled a Communist newspaper called the Honolulu Record, for which Davis immediately began writing a regular column that lasted through 1957. Those columns picked up where Davis left off at the Star, with the same incendiary pro-Soviet themes and Party agitprop.

It is no surprise that these columns at the Honolulu Record, on top of everything Davis had written for the Star and elsewhere, were read not so much by Joe Sixpack but by the boys in Washington. The Democrats running the committees at the U.S. Capitol wanted to talk to Davis. Things reached a critical mass in late 1956, when Davis was summoned to Washington to testify on a decade and a half of work and association with Communists, Communist fronts, and Communist causes.

Liberals today—including the leading Obama biographers— try to portray Frank Marshall Davis as a benign civil rights fighter who was an unfair victim of McCarthyism, of ol’ Tail Gunner Joe and his rapid Republican smear-mongers. To the contrary, Davis did not deal with Joe McCarthy; it was Democrats, especially those on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who pursued him and his friends. Democrats who controlled the U.S. Senate included intense anti-Communists like John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Pat McCarran (D-Nev.), and, among others, Thomas Dodd (D-Conn.), father of recent Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.). Most ironic, the Republican who questioned Davis was Utah Senator Arthur Watkins, the nation’s top anti-McCarthyite. It was Watkins who was the namesake of the 1954 Watkins Committee, the special Senate committee that censured Joe McCarthy.

In other words, Davis was hardly being questioned by McCarthyites.

Interestingly, though the Democrats targeted Davis, and he them, in the end, Davis would seek to blend in among them. After all of his blistering attacks on their party, Frank Marshall Davis hopped in bed with the Democrats—but only to use them, just as he and fellow Communists had long exploited the “progressive” label. With Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party having collapsed, Hawaii’s Reds changed their tactics. They went underground and concentrated instead on infiltrating the Democratic Party, even running their members in local elections to seize delegate positions. One of those who not only urged this tactic but was himself elected to a Democratic precinct was Frank Marshall Davis.

For America’s Reds, it was the start of a long march to operate within the Democratic Party, transforming it from the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy to the party of Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

When Davis Met Obama

ALAS, IT WAS IN HAWAII that Frank Marshall Davis eventually influenced Barack Obama, beginning in 1970 and continuing throughout Obama’s adolescence. It was Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who introduced the pair, seeking in Davis the father figure and role model that Obama lacked at home.

That initial introduction was witnessed by a woman named Dawna Weatherly-Williams, a friend and nextdoor neighbor to Davis, so close that she called him “Daddy.” It had been eagerly anticipated by all sides, suggesting the potential that Davis rightly saw in Barack. “Frank was also a great listener, which may be why Barack liked him, too,” Weatherly-Williams told Obama biographer David Remnick. “I am sure he influenced Barack more than Barack is saying. About social justice, about finding out more about life, about what’s important, about how to use your heart and your mind.”

Davis already knew Stanley Dunham. “He knew Stan real well,” Weatherly-Williams told Toby Harnden of the London Telegraph. “They’d play Scrabble and drink and crack jokes and argue. Frank always won and he was always very braggadocio about it too. It was all jocular. They didn’t get polluted drunk. And Frank never really did drugs, though he and Stan would smoke pot together.”

Here we see the distinctly non-Rockwellian upbringing of the young Obama, which, reportedly, featured two elderly male influences smoking pot while they received Social Security and advocated socialism and Communism.

Weatherly-Williams informed the Telegraph that Davis was introduced to Obama “in 1970,” and Harnden wrote that the young Obama spent the previous three years in Indonesia with his mother and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro. If this timeline is accurate, which it appears to be, then Obama knew Frank Marshall Davis not merely for a few years but a full decade—i.e., throughout the entirety of his adolescence.