Part One

In analyzing the more recent history of socialism, a good place to start is Henry Wallace’s Third Party movement in 1948, the Progressive Party.

Elena Kagan’s controversial “Final Conflict” thesis on socialism was written in 1981 when she was 21 years old. Professor Harvey Klehr, an expert on the socialist and communist movements, told me that while he sensed “a lurking sympathy” in the document for the left-wing of the Socialist Party, he didn’t find a “red flag” that would derail her nomination. Kagan’s thesis covered the rise and fall of the socialist movement in New York City from 1900-1933.

Clearly, however, the socialist movement has risen again, under the cover of the “progressive” tradition that includes not only the President who appointed Kagan but her backers at the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP).

The embrace of Kagan by this movement is the real “red flag.” But Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) has noted in an editorial the “free ride” that Kagan has received in her confirmation hearings, as Republican senators have mostly “played dead” and the major media have acted as “compliant shills” for the nomination. Yet, as noted by IBD, Kagan has a radical record that includes:

• Twisting scientific findings in order to protect the grisly practice of partial-birth abortion.
• Banning military recruiters at Harvard Law School to please radical homosexual activists.
• Arguing as solicitor general that books, and maybe pamphlets, too, might not be worthy of First Amendment protection.
• Seeming to agree that it would be constitutional for the federal government to tell people what to eat.

As we have seen with Van Jones, who has been rehired by CAP, it is today fashionable in left-wing or “progressive” circles to be a socialist and even communist revolutionary. This wasn’t always the case.

Jones resigned his White House job after the scrutiny into his Marxist background and membership in STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) was threatening to implicate Obama and Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett in his hiring. It recently came out that Obama favored Jarrett for the U.S. Senate seat he vacated after his election to the presidency.

The open collaboration with Jones by CAP represents a sharp break with the anti-communist liberals, once a major force in the progressive movement and the Democratic Party, who had rejected any ties or associations with supporters of totalitarianism and communist dictatorships.

During the 1980s, for example, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates, including the American Institute for Free Labor Development, actively fought the communists, especially in Latin America. This stance was dropped after John Sweeney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, became president of the AFL-CIO in 1995.

CAP’s so-called “Campus Progress” affiliate has continued this break with the anti-communist liberal tradition by running a very sympathetic interview in 2008 with Weather Underground terrorist Mark Rudd. The Weather Underground was a Cuban-trained Communist gang, led by Obama associates William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, that waged violence and murder in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. The group killed Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell on February 16, 1970.

In analyzing the more recent history of socialism, a good place to start is Henry Wallace’s Third Party movement in 1948, the Progressive Party. Wallace was not an insignificant figure, having been vice president in Franklin Roosevelt’s third term.

In his report, “From Henry Wallace to William Ayers—the Communist and Progressive Movements,” Herbert Romerstein points out that while Wallace wasn’t a communist, the party was under Communist Party USA (CPUSA) control. “The Communists even reassigned some of their members from Soviet espionage to run the Progressive Party,” he says. The CPUSA was funded by Moscow and was so obedient to the Soviet line that it backed the Hitler–Stalin pact.

Picking up where Kagan’s thesis leaves off, Romerstein notes that Earl Browder, who headed the Communist Party in the 1930s until 1945, had boasted in 1960 about the success of the communists under his leadership. Browder had said:

“Entering the 1930’s as a small ultra-left sect of some 7,000 members, remnant of the fratricidal factional struggle of the 1920’s that had wiped out the old ‘left wing’ of American socialism, the CP rose to become a national political influence far beyond its numbers (at its height it never exceeded 100,000 members), on a scale never before reached by a socialist movement claiming the Marxist tradition. It became a practical power in organized labour, its influence became strong in some state organizations of the Democratic Party (even dominant in a few for some years), and even some Republicans solicited its support. It guided the anti-Hitler movement of the American League for Peace and Democracy that united a cross-section of some five million organized Americans (a list of its sponsors and speakers would include almost a majority of Roosevelt’s Cabinet, the most prominent intellectuals, judges of all grades up to State Supreme Courts, church leaders, labour leaders, etc.). Right-wing intellectuals complained that it exercised an effective veto in almost all publishing houses against their books, and it is at least certain that those right-wingers had extreme difficulty getting published.”

In this context, a far more questionable treatment of the socialist or “progressive” movement can be found in a lengthy report issued by the Center for American Progress entitled “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America.”

Curiously, it ignores Henry Wallace and his communist-dominated Progressive Party.

A Curious Omission
I asked John Halpin, who wrote much of the CAP report and also co-authored The Power of Progress with John Podesta, CAP president, about this omission. He replied:

“Henry Wallace received fewer votes than Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948 and carried no states. Nearly all progressive and liberal support went to Harry Truman. Wallace was a decent man and his work on agriculture and his stands on ending segregation and fighting for racial equality were admirable. However, because of his foreign policy stands and his naive approach to Communist influence in the party, most of the major progressive and liberal voices of the time—including Eleanor Roosevelt, John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Reinhold Niebuhr—gathered within Americans for Democratic Action, an explicitly anti-Communist, pro-civil rights organization. Long term, Wallace’s 1948 campaign had no real impact on progressives.”

But while the Dixiecrats faded from the scene, the “progressives” did not. This is a critical point.

Noted historian and author David Pietrusza confirms this, telling me:
“Following their humiliating 1948 defeat, Wallace’s Progressives refused to surrender. They instead embarked upon a ‘Long March’ that led to their ideological heirs’ capture of the modern Democratic Party. A key milestone in their re-birth was 1968. That year, Democrats turned against Truman-JFK-LBJ Cold War policies. That same year, former Progressive Party national convention delegate Senator George McGovern emerged as the heir to the martyred Robert Kennedy. Four years later, McGovern captured the Democratic nomination and re-wrote party national convention rules to cement the transformation of his party’s leftward drift. The Obama victory of 2008, and the personnel and policies of his administration, largely translate into a victory for Henry Wallace’s ideological heirs, not for Truman’s. The Truman-style Democrat is largely extinct.”

Halpin’s reference to Wallace’s “naive approach to Communist influence in the party” suggests recognition that communism was and is a danger and that Wallace was not sufficiently alert to this problem. But is this the case with the modern-day progressive movement? CAP’s employment of Van Jones—and rehiring, after details about his communist background had emerged—suggests it is not.

The non-communists like Wallace who tolerated communists became known as “fellow travelers” or dupes. The Communists used such people to influence non-communist Americans in the trade union movement and the Democratic Party.

Romerstein notes, “Two secret Communist Party members became Democratic members of the United States Congress. They were John Bernard from Minnesota and Hugh DeLacy from Washington State. A ‘friend of the Party’ was Vito Marcantonio, who was elected to Congress first as a Republican, then as a Democrat, and finally as a candidate of the Communist Party controlled American Labor Party in New York.”

DeLacy’s memorial service was attended by Rep. Leon Panetta, now the director of the CIA under Obama, who had paid tribute to DeLacy and his wife as “lifelong activists for social justice.”

Bringing the history of socialism and communism up to the present time, Romerstein has explained how the “New Left” of the 1960s and 70s included Communists involved in such groups as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its terrorist offspring, the Weather Underground. Later, some of these Marxists would emerge in the group called “Progressives for Obama,” which included Carl Davidson, formerly of SDS, and Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose Chicago branch had backed Obama from the start.

Van Jones worked closely with the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), a Communist Party spin-off group. Several members of his STORM group traveled to Cuba in 1999 as part of the notorious Venceremos Brigade, organized with the active involvement of the Weather Underground.

Karen Nussbaum, a top official of the AFL-CIO, participated in one of those trips to Cuba. But when I asked her about it, after she made a presentation at the 2009 Campaign for America’s Future conference, the leading “progressive” organization in the U.S, she turned and walked away.

The Vietnam Betrayal
As documented by several Congressional committees, the Communists also manipulated or controlled the major anti-Vietnam War organizations, using liberals, “progressives” and socialists as fellow travelers.

This was critical because the Communists could not win the war on the battlefield. In addition to media figures such as Walter Cronkite, who turned the enemy’s defeat in the 1968 Tet Offensive into a victory for the communists, Hanoi was depending on the anti-war protests to force a U.S. military withdrawal.

The strategy worked.

As leftist Danny Schechter wrote, in the introduction to North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap’s book How We Won the War, “Throughout the war, the Vietnamese cultivated the active political support of peoples and governments throughout the world… Politically, the Vietnamese always believed in the importance of the anti-war movement…They encouraged it as best they could, knowing that creating a climate of opinion hostile to the war would be one important way of ending it. In the end, their victory was accelerated by Congress’ refusal to vote more aid. That refusal was a response to a climate of public opinion which the anti-war movement helped to forge.”

Perhaps the most significant example of the support for the North Vietnamese was displayed by Tom Hayden, who was caught with a June 4, 1968, letter to “Dear Col. Lao,” a North Vietnamese official, which ended, “Good fortune! Victory!” Hayden, once married to “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, would later emerge as a member of “Progressives for Obama.”

Meanwhile, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communists reorganized, with many of them establishing the CCDS. Not as widely known, however, is the fact that a secret member of this group was Barbara Lee, who would become a member of the U.S. Congress, leader of the congressional Progressive Caucus and leader of the congressional Black Caucus. She would be honored in 2009 as a “progressive” champion by the Campaign for America’s Future.

Van Jones spoke to a 2006 CCDS fundraiser. Another figure active in the CCDS was Harry Hay, the former Communist Party member who founded the modern gay rights movement.

Part Two

The alleged “failure of American radicalism,” perhaps appropriate for a paper that covers 1900-1933 and written in 1981, is not so apparent these days.

As a student, Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was so interested in the socialist movement that she wrote a thesis about its history in New York City from 1900-1933. But the history of the Progressive Party, which ran FDR’s former vice president Henry Wallace as its presidential candidate in 1948, helps bring the subject up to date and explains the current direction of the Democratic Party.

The Progressive Party was controlled by the Communist Party but efforts to work through the democratic process did not die out with its election defeat in 1948. Communists and “progressives” then targeted the Democratic Party for a takeover from within.
A semi-official history, in the form of the book, Gideon’s Army, was written by Curtis MacDougall, a professor of journalism at Northwestern University who also wrote Interpretative Reporting, a standard text in journalism schools for more than 50 years. MacDougall, who wrote critically (even in his journalism textbook) about efforts to expose communist influence in the U.S. Government, was himself a Progressive Party activist and candidate.

Not surprisingly, MacDougall’s influence was felt not only on generations of journalists, but on his own son, A. Kent McDougall, who was acknowledged in the 1972 edition of Interpretative Reporting as then being with the New York office of the Wall Street Journal and lending “valuable assistance” in its preparation. Kent came out openly as a Marxist after working at the Journal, where he said he inserted positive stories about Marxist economists and “the left-wing journalist I.F. Stone.” Stone, it turned out, was a Soviet agent of influence.

MacDougall’s 319-page FBI file, released to this journalist, revealed that he had a close association with the Chicago Star, a newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, and many different CPUSA front organizations. But the Star connection deserves special comment. The executive editor of the Chicago Star was none other than Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member who would later become President Barack Obama’s childhood mentor in Hawaii and was active in the Hawaii Democratic Party.

In 1948, notes historian David Pietrusza, Davis’s Chicago-based paper, the Chicago Star, wholeheartedly backed Henry Wallace. That summer, he adds, the Progressive Party “apparatus” converted the paper into the Illinois Standard, thus enabling Davis to relocate to Hawaii on the advice of fellow Progressive Party activist Paul Robeson. Robeson, it turned out, was a secret member of the Communist Party.

It is significant that MacDougall’s history of the Progressive Party, Gideon’s Army, was published by Italian-born American Communist Carl Marzani, who served a prison term for perjury in falsely denying, while employed by the State Department, that he was a Communist Party member. His publishing house, Marzani and Munsell, was subsidized by the Soviet KGB.

However, the history of the “progressive tradition” issued by the Center for American Progress (CAP) ignores all of this. It claims:

“With the rise of the contemporary progressive movement and the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, there is extensive public interest in better understanding the origins, values, and intellectual strands of progressivism.

“Who were the original progressive thinkers and activists? Where did their ideas come from and what motivated their beliefs and actions? What were their main goals for society and government?

“The new Progressive Tradition Series from the Center for American Progress traces the development of progressivism as a social and political tradition stretching from the late 19th century reform efforts to the current day.”

Unfortunately, this series ignores the role of the Progressive Party of 1948 and the Communist Party influence in it.

The book, The Power of Progress, written by CAP President John Podesta (with John Halpin), is a bit more open and honest. It does mention the communist influence in the Progressive Party, noting the “perceived tolerance of communists within the 1948 Progressive Party” and quoting leading liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger as saying that “the political tolerance of an illiberal creed like communism, coupled with progressives’ earlier isolationism, could not hold during a time of ideological struggle with a spreading Soviet empire.”

But the use of the word “perceived” is interesting.

It is important to note that Podesta apparently does not regard communism as an “illiberal creed.” After all, Podesta strongly defended communist Van Jones, before and after he was fired by the White House.

Podesta’s book goes on to say that “The practical application of many of these fiercely anti-communist positions quickly became problematic for many progressives” because of the loyalty reviews ordered by President Truman and “the overt Red-baiting of Joe McCarthy and [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover…” The loyalty reviews were designed to make sure that government employees were loyal Americans and not sympathetic to communism.

Why the use of the term “fiercely” anti-communist? Can one be too strongly opposed to an ideology that has resulted in 100 million deaths?

Also notice how Democratic President Harry Truman has become a villain in the Podesta narrative, sharing equal billing with the “Red-baiting” Senator McCarthy and the FBI director. Such a formulation displays the ideological shift in the Democratic Party.

This is more evidence of how modern “progressives” have broken with the anti-communist liberal tradition.

The Van Jones Scandal
This attitude explains not only why Obama-friendly progressives associate openly with characters such as Van Jones but why the Obama Administration is virtually silent on the human rights violations and the pro-terrorist foreign policy of the Marxist Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela.

Podesta notes in matter-of-fact language that “President Truman adopted a strong stance against communist expansion, first with the Truman Doctrine, which offered economic and military support to Greece and Turkey in repelling Soviet ambitions, and shortly thereafter with the Marshall Plan, which provided $13 billion to help rebuild the economies of Europe and prevent the rise of communism still in ruin from the war.”

But Podesta writes critically when he says that the “hard line of liberal thinking”—that, is, liberal anti-communism—took the form of “Vowing never to bend to communist aggression anywhere in the world” and President Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Podesta writes this as if he had been willing to consign Vietnam to the communist camp from the beginning. Not only that, but he writes that the liberal anti-communists “firmly rejected the belief that there could be any acceptance of domestic communism within the larger liberal project.”

This, then, is quite explicit and revealing. Judging by Podesta’s embrace of communist Van Jones, it is clear that he—and CAP—currently accept communists as being part of “the larger liberal project.”

This helps explain why a CAP history of the progressive tradition would ignore the lasting influence of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party and how communists continue to work and operate in the “progressive” movement and even influence their hero, President Obama.
Far beyond mere tolerance, however, the communists ran Henry Wallace as the Progressive Party candidate for President in the1948 presidential election. A 1948 Communist Party election manifesto declared that “…in 1948 we Communists join with millions of other Americans to support the Progressive ticket to help win the peace. The Communist Party will enter its own candidates only in those districts where the people are offered no progressive alternatives to the twin parties of Wall Street.”

Romerstein explains:
“In reality, many Communist Party operatives were in control of the Progressive Party. Before it was even formed the Communist Party merged two of its front organizations, the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NC-PAC) and the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts and Sciences, to form the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), which became the organizing tool for the Wallace campaign.”

Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s 1981 thesis at Princeton University was titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933.” However, she wrote that “In our own times, a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States.” This appears to be a comment on modern-day America, at least as it was in 1981.

Kagan’s verdict, of course, depends on how you define “socialist.” The modern socialist movement calls itself “progressive.”

Kagan’s thesis is well-researched and interesting, but only to a point. Professor Harvey Klehr told me:

“I scanned through Kagan’s undergraduate thesis. It is very well-written and well-organized, a very impressive piece of undergraduate writing. It is also pretty sound academically. She considers a variety of answers to the question that has perplexed lots of scholars like myself—and radicals—why no successful radical movement in America? Looking at the fate of the SP [Socialist Party] in NY is an interesting take on the problem and I thought her account was reasonably convincing. She seems to have used appropriate sources — although the footnotes were not attached to the version you sent, so I can’t tell exactly which ones she consulted. But it sounds as if she was pretty thorough.

“Although it is not pervasive, I sensed a lurking sympathy for the ‘left-wing’ of the SP, as representing a more militant and pure opposition to the depredations of the manufacturers and the inequities of the system. She acknowledges, however, the faults and flaws of both factions and makes clear that the Communists’ own disastrous policies helped destroy the radical movement in the ILGWU [International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union]. The conclusion bemoans the lack of unity that destroyed this radical movement and hints that that is one of the major factors in the failure of American radicalism. Not surprising coming from a 21-year-old college student.

“So, I would give her a pretty good grade for an impressive piece of scholarship for an undergrad. And, I don’t see anything here like a ‘red flag’ in regard to her present situation.”

Clearly, the “red flag” is not a 1981 college paper but why she is being pushed for a seat on the Supreme Court in 2010. The alleged “failure of American radicalism,” perhaps appropriate for a paper that covers 1900-1933 and written in 1981, is not so apparent these days.

Consider that, after his resignation from his White House job, Podesta declared that Van Jones “is an exceptional and inspired leader who has fought to bring economic and environmental justice to communities across our country.” When Jason Mattera staged an ambush interview and confronted Podesta about hiring Jones, Podesta replied, “Van Jones is trying to make this country a better place.”

If Podesta, who ran Obama’s transition team with Valerie Jarrett, is serious about these comments, then the “progressive” movement has become something that represents a sharp break with the liberal anti-communist tradition. It is no wonder that CAP doesn’t want the public to understand how communists once dominated the “progressive” movement and still manipulate it to this day.

From the AIM Syndicate, 4455 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Ste. 330, Washington, DC 20008; www.aim.org. Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org