White World Order, Black Power Politics (The United States in the World) by Robert Vitalis

Author:Robert Vitalis [Vitalis, Robert & Vitalis, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2015-10-26T18:30:00+00:00

Idol of the Tribe

In 1930, at age 20, the self-described politically naïve New Yorker set out for Hawaii, Manila, and ultimately Shanghai (“the farthest that it was possible to get away from where I was”) to try his hand at journalism. In China, Isaacs soon became friends with a revolutionary named Frank Glass, a Birmingham-born Trotskyist who had helped found and split with the South African Communist Party. Isaacs soon joined the side of the communists in their “struggle against the Kuomintang and the imperialists” by starting an English-language newspaper in Hankow, the China Forum. The 1930s was a decade of violent repression of Stalinists and Trotskyists, and Isaacs became a target of Chiang Kai-shek’s government, the British authorities, U.S. military intelligence, and the American consul general, although the extraterritoriality provisions then in force afforded him protection that was denied his Chinese comrades. In 1934, he split with his party backers, turned the press over to Glass and the other Trotskyists, and moved to Beijing to research his explosive history of the Stalinist betrayal of the revolutionary forces in the 1920s, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, which came out in 1938, with an introduction by Trotsky himself.4

Isaacs and his wife Viola returned to the United States in 1935, where he remained active in Trotskyist circles (the U.S. Workers Party, later the Socialist Workers Party), while working in New York for Havas, the French news agency that had employed him in Shanghai. His extracurricular activities included running the party paper, Socialist Appeal, and writing for it and other venues using an expanded set of pseudonyms. Perhaps unaware of these details, his longtime MIT colleague Lucian Pye later mischaracterized Isaacs’s years in the sectarian trenches as a “period of withdrawal from activism.” Then again, having once helped Vietnamese Communist Ho Chi Minh escape from Shanghai, Isaacs’s battles with Brooklyn socialists and his assessment of the prospects of proletarian revolution might seem tame by comparison. He told the FBI that he quit the party in 1940. U.S. cultural historian Alan Wald says that until then, Isaacs remained loyal to the Cannon faction, that is, those who followed Trotsky’s line on support for the German-allied Soviet Union in wartime in a moment that had split the party.5

Isaacs stumbled a bit in his new and presumably unblinkered persona of a writer for CBS radio and, briefly, Lockheed before he joined Newsweek in 1943. He headed back to the Pacific in 1944 as a war correspondent and after the war continued to write on Southeast Asia among other assignments, until he resigned from the magazine in December 1949. Although he had passed a wartime U.S. army counterintelligence investigation, his reporting had won him a host of new official enemies. The Kuomintang banned him from China in 1945. And Isaacs got it right (or spoke from experience) about General Patrick Hurley (“a strange old man”), FDR’s envoy to the alleged democrat Chiang Kai-shek (a “racketeer, extortionist, and executioner”), in his 1947 book No Peace in Asia,

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