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When Progressives Colluded With the Kremlin in a Presidential Election
Frontpagemagazine ^ | August 15, 2018 | Paul Kengor

Posted on 08/15/2018 5:37:52 AM PDT by SJackson

How close America came to being officially pro-Moscow.

Reprinted from Spectator.org.

How many ways have progressives worked with the Kremlin over the years? The examples are legion. When I was researching my book Dupes, the biggest challenge was sifting through all the self-described “progressive” individuals or organizations to figure out which were closet communists cloaked as liberals, and whether they collaborated with Moscow. When Congress in 1961 published its major investigation of communist front-groups, titled, “Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications,” one of the most popular title listings in the massive index was “Progressive.”

Progressive here, progressive there, progressive everywhere.

In fact, if you want a case of collusion between an American political party and Moscow in a presidential election, forget sniffing around 2016. Go back to 1948, where progressives created the smelly blueprint.

That year, the Progressive Party ran for president one Henry A. Wallace.

Wallace had been FDR’s vice president and was America’s preeminent dupe to Marxist-Leninists. He was horribly pro-Soviet. One of the stupidest things FDR did (and that’s saying something) was to make Wallace his vice president. Wallace’s public remarks defending Stalin’s USSR were so bad that Democrats demanded he be expelled as FDR’s running mate in 1944, even as FDR’s ideologically unhinged wife, Eleanor, protected him.

FDR merely moved Wallace, retaining him as secretary of commerce in another of FDR’s departments penetrated by communists and Soviet agents of influence. (Long before that, in 1933, FDR had made Wallace secretary of agriculture, which was so infiltrated that the worst of all Depression-era government communist cells — the Ware Cell — operated out of it.)

Harry Truman mercifully replaced Wallace. It would have been devastating for America and the world if Wallace, rather than Truman, had been the sitting vice president ready to replace FDR upon the New Dealer’s death in April 1945. That is one huge bullet that history dodged.

Nonetheless, Wallace still managed to work directly with Moscow. The great Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis notes that “there is Soviet documentation that Wallace was regularly reporting to the Kremlin in 1945 and 1946 while he was in the Truman administration.”

Many good historians have shown that connection, particularly Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev in their 1999 work, The Haunted Wood, though more material has since emerged from archives. One of the best historians who has followed Wallace is Ron Radosh, himself an ex-communist, who in a January 2017 piece for the Daily Beast tried to remind modern progressives of what their earlier namesakes had done in 1948. Radosh wrote this devastating assessment of Wallace:

In October of 1945, while he was still secretary of Commerce, Wallace secretly met in Washington, D.C. with Anatoly Gorsky, the station chief of the NKGB (forerunner of the KGB). KGB files show that Wallace told Gorsky that he wanted to share the secrets of the a-bomb with the Soviets, complained that Truman was being influenced by an “anti-Soviet group” in government that wanted the Anglo-Saxon bloc to have dominance in the world, and that he hoped that the Soviet Union could help Wallace’s “smaller group significantly.”

For a member of the President’s Cabinet asking the Soviets to intervene to help his side win an internal battle within the administration was more than indiscreet. It was the action of a willing tool of Moscow.

Radosh’s point is crucial. Here, Wallace was acting not as an unwitting, clueless dupe, but as a willing, fully aware accomplice.

Radosh notes that if Wallace had received the Democratic Party nomination for vice president in 1944 (instead of Truman), he would have made the infamous Harry Dexter White his secretary of the treasury and given a major White House position to another Soviet spy, Laurence Duggan. The decoded Venona papers revealed that Moscow hoped that Duggan would aid the USSR “by using his friendship [with Wallace for] extracting … interesting information.”

Thankfully, President Truman fired Wallace. The final straw for Truman was an awful speech Wallace delivered at Madison Square Garden favoring the recognition of Soviet areas of influence. American communists loved the speech. “He did this while Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was in Europe, negotiating with the Soviets,” writes Radosh. “Byrnes immediately told Truman that if not repudiated immediately, Wallace’s words would be taken as policy and would undermine Byrnes’ attempts to modify Soviet behavior.”

Truman canned Wallace. This made Wallace a martyr and even greater hero to the American far left.

Moscow’s Man in Washington

As the Cold War erupted, Henry Wallace erupted — for the side of Moscow. In October 1947, as members of the Hollywood Ten — every single one of which was a Communist Party member — were called to Washington to testify to their infatuation with Stalin’s state, Wallace joined forces with the communist front-group, the Progressive Citizens of America, in jointly calling for the abolition of House Committee on Un-American Activities. This thrilled American communists; they further realized they had a dutiful pal.

Wallace became a poster boy for the Daily Worker. “Has America gone crazy?” the Daily Worker approvingly quoted Wallace denouncing the House committee hearings. “Is the Un-American Activities Committee evidence that America is travelling the road to fascism?” The former vice president urged his fellow Americans that they “must destroy” the committee. If they did not, the evil “HUAC” would “destroy many of the foundations of democracy and Christianity.”

Yes, “HUAC” would do that, not communism or the USSR. The admirer of the Soviet experiment was worried about threats to democracy and Christianity — in America, that is, by our Congress, not the Politburo.

Wallace adhered to the Soviet-CPUSA line on all the major foreign-policy issues of the day, blasting the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, and defending Moscow’s stance everywhere from Berlin to Prague. It was easy to predict where Wallace would stand on an issue. One simply had to see where Stalin stood.

And so, America’s reds and pinkos and fellow travelers knew that they had their boy for the presidential election of 1948. They swarmed to Wallace. Wallace attracted a dedicated mix of closet communists and progressive dupes, with the latter including a glistening parade of oblivious Hollywood celebrities ranging from Katharine Hepburn to Gene Kelly, who were rolled again and again by communist Hollywood screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson.

To be clear, Henry Wallace himself was not a member of the Communist Party, but communists throughout America rallied to him as someone they could count on more than any other candidate. The comrades placed their hopes in Wallace in 1948. In the groundbreaking book, The Secret World of American Communism, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov described it well: “In 1948 Communists threw all of their strength into Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign and supported the Progressive Party as a Popular Front alternative to the Democrats.”

The extent to which that is true is overwhelming. The list of hardcore communists who flocked to Wallace and sought to control him was thousands upon thousands, and could not begin to be summarized here.

Among the direct Soviet agents working for Wallace was Lee Pressman, who, we now know, had the KGB codename “Vig.” He covertly assisted Soviet intelligence (both the KGB and GRU) for a decade-and-a-half. Publicly, Pressman put on another face. He masqueraded as a proud “progressive,” joining Wallace’s presidential campaign and becoming the principal author of Wallace’s pro-Soviet platform.

Another was Victor Perlo, namesake of the infamous Perlo Group that penetrated the Roosevelt administration, especially the Department of Commerce. Perlo served the Motherland with dedicated Soviet hands such as Frank Coe, Harold Glasser, Charles Kramer, and Harry Dexter White. Perlo was hired as an economist for the Progressive Party and was instrumental in developing the party’s 1948 platform.

There were so many of the Pressman-Perlo mold in the Wallace fold. Anyone with any knowledge of the Wallace campaign knows of the extraordinary level of communist penetration and control.

Reprinted from Spectator.org.

How many ways have progressives worked with the Kremlin over the years? The examples are legion. When I was researching my book Dupes, the biggest challenge was sifting through all the self-described “progressive” individuals or organizations to figure out which were closet communists cloaked as liberals, and whether they collaborated with Moscow. When Congress in 1961 published its major investigation of communist front-groups, titled, “Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications,” one of the most popular title listings in the massive index was “Progressive.”

Progressive here, progressive there, progressive everywhere.

In fact, if you want a case of collusion between an American political party and Moscow in a presidential election, forget sniffing around 2016. Go back to 1948, where progressives created the smelly blueprint.

That year, the Progressive Party ran for president one Henry A. Wallace.

Wallace had been FDR’s vice president and was America’s preeminent dupe to Marxist-Leninists. He was horribly pro-Soviet. One of the stupidest things FDR did (and that’s saying something) was to make Wallace his vice president. Wallace’s public remarks defending Stalin’s USSR were so bad that Democrats demanded he be expelled as FDR’s running mate in 1944, even as FDR’s ideologically unhinged wife, Eleanor, protected him.

FDR merely moved Wallace, retaining him as secretary of commerce in another of FDR’s departments penetrated by communists and Soviet agents of influence. (Long before that, in 1933, FDR had made Wallace secretary of agriculture, which was so infiltrated that the worst of all Depression-era government communist cells — the Ware Cell — operated out of it.)

Harry Truman mercifully replaced Wallace. It would have been devastating for America and the world if Wallace, rather than Truman, had been the sitting vice president ready to replace FDR upon the New Dealer’s death in April 1945. That is one huge bullet that history dodged.

Nonetheless, Wallace still managed to work directly with Moscow. The great Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis notes that “there is Soviet documentation that Wallace was regularly reporting to the Kremlin in 1945 and 1946 while he was in the Truman administration.”

Many good historians have shown that connection, particularly Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev in their 1999 work, The Haunted Wood, though more material has since emerged from archives. One of the best historians who has followed Wallace is Ron Radosh, himself an ex-communist, who in a January 2017 piece for the Daily Beast tried to remind modern progressives of what their earlier namesakes had done in 1948. Radosh wrote this devastating assessment of Wallace:

In October of 1945, while he was still secretary of Commerce, Wallace secretly met in Washington, D.C. with Anatoly Gorsky, the station chief of the NKGB (forerunner of the KGB). KGB files show that Wallace told Gorsky that he wanted to share the secrets of the a-bomb with the Soviets, complained that Truman was being influenced by an “anti-Soviet group” in government that wanted the Anglo-Saxon bloc to have dominance in the world, and that he hoped that the Soviet Union could help Wallace’s “smaller group significantly.”

For a member of the President’s Cabinet asking the Soviets to intervene to help his side win an internal battle within the administration was more than indiscreet. It was the action of a willing tool of Moscow.

Radosh’s point is crucial. Here, Wallace was acting not as an unwitting, clueless dupe, but as a willing, fully aware accomplice.

Radosh notes that if Wallace had received the Democratic Party nomination for vice president in 1944 (instead of Truman), he would have made the infamous Harry Dexter White his secretary of the treasury and given a major White House position to another Soviet spy, Laurence Duggan. The decoded Venona papers revealed that Moscow hoped that Duggan would aid the USSR “by using his friendship [with Wallace for] extracting … interesting information.”

Thankfully, President Truman fired Wallace. The final straw for Truman was an awful speech Wallace delivered at Madison Square Garden favoring the recognition of Soviet areas of influence. American communists loved the speech. “He did this while Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was in Europe, negotiating with the Soviets,” writes Radosh. “Byrnes immediately told Truman that if not repudiated immediately, Wallace’s words would be taken as policy and would undermine Byrnes’ attempts to modify Soviet behavior.”

Truman canned Wallace. This made Wallace a martyr and even greater hero to the American far left.

Moscow’s Man in Washington

As the Cold War erupted, Henry Wallace erupted — for the side of Moscow. In October 1947, as members of the Hollywood Ten — every single one of which was a Communist Party member — were called to Washington to testify to their infatuation with Stalin’s state, Wallace joined forces with the communist front-group, the Progressive Citizens of America, in jointly calling for the abolition of House Committee on Un-American Activities. This thrilled American communists; they further realized they had a dutiful pal.

Wallace became a poster boy for the Daily Worker. “Has America gone crazy?” the Daily Worker approvingly quoted Wallace denouncing the House committee hearings. “Is the Un-American Activities Committee evidence that America is travelling the road to fascism?” The former vice president urged his fellow Americans that they “must destroy” the committee. If they did not, the evil “HUAC” would “destroy many of the foundations of democracy and Christianity.”

Yes, “HUAC” would do that, not communism or the USSR. The admirer of the Soviet experiment was worried about threats to democracy and Christianity — in America, that is, by our Congress, not the Politburo.

Wallace adhered to the Soviet-CPUSA line on all the major foreign-policy issues of the day, blasting the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, and defending Moscow’s stance everywhere from Berlin to Prague. It was easy to predict where Wallace would stand on an issue. One simply had to see where Stalin stood.

And so, America’s reds and pinkos and fellow travelers knew that they had their boy for the presidential election of 1948. They swarmed to Wallace. Wallace attracted a dedicated mix of closet communists and progressive dupes, with the latter including a glistening parade of oblivious Hollywood celebrities ranging from Katharine Hepburn to Gene Kelly, who were rolled again and again by communist Hollywood screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson.

To be clear, Henry Wallace himself was not a member of the Communist Party, but communists throughout America rallied to him as someone they could count on more than any other candidate. The comrades placed their hopes in Wallace in 1948. In the groundbreaking book, The Secret World of American Communism, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov described it well: “In 1948 Communists threw all of their strength into Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign and supported the Progressive Party as a Popular Front alternative to the Democrats.”

The extent to which that is true is overwhelming. The list of hardcore communists who flocked to Wallace and sought to control him was thousands upon thousands, and could not begin to be summarized here.

Among the direct Soviet agents working for Wallace was Lee Pressman, who, we now know, had the KGB codename “Vig.” He covertly assisted Soviet intelligence (both the KGB and GRU) for a decade-and-a-half. Publicly, Pressman put on another face. He masqueraded as a proud “progressive,” joining Wallace’s presidential campaign and becoming the principal author of Wallace’s pro-Soviet platform.

Another was Victor Perlo, namesake of the infamous Perlo Group that penetrated the Roosevelt administration, especially the Department of Commerce. Perlo served the Motherland with dedicated Soviet hands such as Frank Coe, Harold Glasser, Charles Kramer, and Harry Dexter White. Perlo was hired as an economist for the Progressive Party and was instrumental in developing the party’s 1948 platform.

There were so many of the Pressman-Perlo mold in the Wallace fold. Anyone with any knowledge of the Wallace campaign knows of the extraordinary level of communist penetration and control.



TOPICS: Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: fdr; progressives; progressivism; wallace

1 posted on 08/15/2018 5:37:52 AM PDT by SJackson
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To: SJackson
Henry Wallace as President in 1945: That is one huge bullet that history dodged.

And thank God history was still dodging in 2016.

2 posted on 08/15/2018 6:53:41 AM PDT by katana (We're all part of a long episode of "The Terrific Mr. Trump")
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To: SJackson

The Soviets were financing the American Communist party.

When the Soviet Union fell, I’m guessing China took over subsidizing Leftists, which is why the Left now hates Russia, and never mentions Chinese subversion.


3 posted on 08/15/2018 7:11:53 AM PDT by PapaBear3625 ("It rubs the rainbow on it's skin or it gets the diversity again!")
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To: SJackson

Harry Hopkins was FDR’s right hand man, and he was as pro-soviet as any American.


4 posted on 08/15/2018 8:34:28 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (Journalism promotes itself - and promotes big government - by speaking ill of society.)
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To: MadMax, the Grinning Reaper

Paul Kengor ping.


5 posted on 08/15/2018 1:03:41 PM PDT by Fedora
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To: All

BUMP for later reading...


6 posted on 08/16/2018 7:05:31 AM PDT by MplsSteve
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To: SJackson

Anyone notice the name of Obama’s mentor?


7 posted on 08/19/2018 9:05:32 PM PDT by TBP (Progressives lack compassion and tolerance. Their self-aggrandizement is all that matters.)
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