I thought Gramps was a commie in his own right. That his furniture store stateside was a front, and that they moved to Seattle so that Stanley Ann could attend the most “red” high school in the nation.
It was no accident that his buddy Frank Davis happened to be a commie.
July 08, 2008
What Barack Obama learned from the Communist Party
By Andrew Walden
Family Ties
Obama’s grandparents, Stanley Armour Dunham and his wife Madelyn are another piece of the puzzle. Key details come from interviews in The Chicago Tribune and Seattle Times.
Done bouncing around Kansas, California and Texas in the years after World War Two, Stanley and Madelyn in 1955 picked up and relocated 2,000 miles from Texas to Seattle. The next year they relocated to Mercer Island specifically so their daughter, Obama’s future mother, Stanley Ann Dunham could attend Mercer Island high school.
One year earlier, Mercer Island schools had distinguished themselves in a way which might have caused others to avoid them. The Chicago Tribune explains,
“In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board, John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party.”
After intense debate, Stenhouse decided not to resign from the school board according to an April 11, 1955 account in Time Magazine.
Stenhouse was not the only leftist connected to the school. The Seattle Times explains:
“One respite (from Americans Stanley Ann Dunham looked down on) was found in a wing of Mercer Island High called “anarchy alley.” Jim Wichterman taught a wide-open philosophy course that included Karl Marx. Next door, Val Foubert taught a rigorous dose of literature, including Margaret Mead’s writings on homosexuality.”
Those classes prompted what Wichterman, now 80 and retired in Ellensburg, called “mothers’ marches” of parents outraged at the curriculum.
Dunham thrived in the environment, Wichterman said.
“As much as a high-school student can, she’d question anything: What’s so good about democracy? What’s so good about capitalism? What’s wrong with communism? What’s good about communism?” Wichterman said. “She had what I call an inquiring mind.”
She also showed her politics, wearing a campaign button for Adlai Stevenson. And despite flirting with atheism, she went to services at East Shore Unitarian church, a left-leaning congregation in Bellevue.
The Chicago Tribune mentions a description of the Dunham’s chosen church as “The Little Red Church on the Hill”. According to its own website, East Shore Unitarian Church got that name because of, “Well-publicized debates and forums on such controversial subjects as the admission of ‘Red China’ to the United Nations....” The fact that Mercer Island’s John Stenhouse, according to his 2000 obituary, once served as church president might also have contributed to the “red” label.
Obama often says his mother’s “parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists....” At best, Obama was twisting the facts. Describing his grandfather in Dreams (p17), Obama writes:
“In his only skirmish into organized religion, he would enroll the family in the local Unitarian Universalist congregation....”
(snip)
The Hawai`i to which Stanley Armour led his family was an even greater sanctuary than tiny Mercer Island. The 1950s had been a bad decade for mainland Communists but in Hawai`i things were looking up. Gerald Horne explains:
“Smith Act trials ... swept the nation from New York City in 1949 when the entire CPUSA leadership was placed on trial, then jailed, to Honolulu where a similar trial occurred in 1952....the response in Honolulu when tens of thousands of workers went on strike when labor and CP leaders were convicted of Smith Act violations in 1953 — a response totally unlike the response on the mainland.”
The Hawai`i district of the International Longshore Workers Union was headed by Communist Party member Jack Hall, one of the Hawai`i Smith Act defendants. The ILWU international union was headed by Communist Party member Harry Bridges. The ILWU controlled the Hawai`i Democratic Party. The “revolution of 1954” elections put Hawai`i Democrats in control of the Territorial Legislature ending 52 years of rule by the Republican “Haole-Hawaiian alliance.”
Introducing Black Moods, editor John Edgar Tidwell recounts Davis’ numerous Communist Party affiliations and then writes:
“I believe the actual reason for his departure for Hawai`i is rooted in his capitulation to the government pressure of McCarthyism. Davis’s move should not be misconstrued as either a retreat from the struggle for social justice and racial equality or an abrogation of social responsibility; he merely changed the venue, the site of conflict.”
Arriving in Honolulu in 1948, Frank Marshall Davis was almost immediately at the center of all the action. Dr Kathryn Waddell Takara writes:
“Davis’s initial contacts with Hawai`i all had extremely strong ILWU ties. Paul Robson’s own Hawai`i acquaintances, which he passed on to Davis, insured that “when I came over, one of the first things that I got involved with — well, I met all the ILWU brass, Jack Hall and all of them, and I went — they had both of us over to various functions for them — Harriet Bouslog (ILWU lawyer recruited by Bridges who defended the Smith Act case) was also a good friend” (Davis 1986a, 5:29-30). Davis soon realized that he had arrived at a very important moment in Hawai`i labor history. The huge International Longshoreman’s Workers Union (ILWU) strike was imminent, pitting labor against the Big Five. For Davis, this was the kind of political ferment and struggle between the powerful and powerless that he thrived upon....”
These contacts were arranged by leading Communist Party members on the mainland. Takara writes:
“Davis himself recalls that even before he left for Hawai’i, “(Paul Robeson) and (Harry) Bridges who was head of the ILWU and the CIO in the Pacific Region, suggested that I should get in touch with the Honolulu Record and see if I could do something for them.”
Years later, Obama would trace Davis’ steps in reverse, leaving Honolulu on a journey which, after college, would lead him to Davis’ old stomping grounds in Chicago where he signed on as a community organizer with a group modeled on the teachings of one-time Communist Party fellow traveler Saul Alinsky. Just as Davis quickly made contacts in Honolulu, Obama would launch his first Illinois Senate race with key backing from former fugitive Weatherman terrorists Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn and Rev Jeremiah Wright.
Obama won the State Senate seat in 1996 after being hand-picked by the outgoing incumbent, Alice Palmer. Palmer was an executive board member of the US Peace Council, US affiliate of the World Peace Council, a communist front group founded by Stalin in 1948 and funded by the USSR. She attended the Peace Council’s 1983 international meeting in communist-ruled Prague, Czechoslovakia. Palmer headed the Black Press Institute. An article the Black Press Institute submitted to the CPUSA newspaper Peoples Daily World, described Palmer in 1986 attending the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and coming away “favorably impressed”.
The Honolulu Record was founded and edited from 1948-58 by Koji Ariyoshi a Smith Act defendant and Communist Party member who worked with Mao Zedong in China during WW2. It was financed by payments from all Hawai`i ILWU locals. The Record played an integral role in the transformation of organized labor into political power resulting in the Democrats’ takeover of the Hawai`i territorial legislature.
Two years after the Record folded, the Dunhams arrived in Honolulu. They quickly became friends with Frank Marshall Davis.
(snip)
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/07/what_barack_obama_learned_from.html