Fabian Freeway by Rose L. Martin

Author:Rose L. Martin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781610166003
Published: 1966-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Soon afterwards a Naval Intelligence Unit in New York City, set up to control Communist espionage and propaganda, was dissolved by the Bureau of the Budget,97 which had been transferred from the Treasury to the White House by an historic Executive Order of 1939. Instructions were issued requiring Army Intelligence to destroy its files on Communists, similar to the demand made by Woodrow Wilson after World War I. Only prompt action by members of Congress saved the Army records from destruction in World War II.

If some members of Roosevelt’s wartime Cabinet held no brief for the Presidential policy of being kind to Communists, and if most government officials were either unaware of it or accepted it with mental reservations, the same could not be said for the President’s more intimate circle. FDR’s strict concept of personal loyalty required that any individual whom he fully trusted must see eye to eye with him on matters he considered basic. And once having adopted an idea, he regarded it as peculiarly his own, often forgetting the source from which it came.

Roosevelt believed, for instance, that by giving Stalin everything he asked for during the war, no matter how excessive the request, the proletarian dictator would be bound by some principle of noblesse oblige to cooperate loyally in setting up a postwar world of peace and plenty. How did FDR know this? He had a hunch! And besides, Harry “The Hop” Hopkins had told him so.98

This is not to say that Roosevelt was himself a Communist, as has sometimes been loosely suggested. Having been trained and dominated for a good many years by Fabian Socialist advisers, perhaps he simply demonstrated the same protective attitude towards Soviet Russia and its agents as did those British Fabians whose road in the end has always led toward Moscow. Only convinced Fabian Socialists and liberals at the very pinnacle of political power in Washington could do for the Soviet Communists what they were unable to do for themselves, both at home and abroad.

Hitler’s invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941 had aroused intense but mixed emotions among Anglo-American Fabians. If it restored fraternal bonds previously strained by the Stalin-Hitler pact, the joy of feeling together again99 was shadowed by anxiety for the future of the Soviet Union. As usual, American liberals and progressives, who shunned the Socialist name while faithfully playing the game, echoed the sentiments of their British tutors with a special urgency of their own. They could hardly wait to pour out the products of American industry and skill in defense of the threatened Socialist Fatherland.

On July 27, FDR dispatched Hopkins as his confidential messenger to Stalin with an immediate offer of Lend-Lease aid, even though Soviet Russia was not yet an Ally of the United States. At that time public opinion in America was strongly opposed to this country’s entering the war, and few persons outside the President’s official family realized the extent of his private commitments, not only to Churchill but also to Stalin.

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