The “Rot Of Power”

June 4, 1997

This is a sequel to the March 5 “Musing” about Lord Acton and his famous and accurate adage that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, plus his succeeding sentence that “Great Men are almost always Bad Men.”

The “rot of power” is a phrase used by Howard Fast in his book, BEING RED (1990, Houghton Mifflin). Howard Fast was a member of the Communist Party, U.S.A. from 1944 to 1957. His memoir is a gripping story of his idealism, activism, disappointments, persecution and prosecution by those of power in our government; and then his bitter disillusion with the Communist Party, from which he resigned in 1957.

In those years, I had some cause to know a small measure of such feelings so I resonated to his recollections. Whatever else one might say about Howard Fast, he can write! This edition of BEING RED lists forty-six other books he has written. Probably the best known are FREEDOM ROAD and SPARTACUS. I’m grateful to Rose for lending me her copy of BEING RED.

Howard Fast deals with the anti-communist hysteria in our nation following World War II. It was so easy to forget that without the Soviet Union’s courageous and costly battles against the Nazi invading armies the end of WWII in Europe might have been agonizingly prolonged. The Nazi failure to conquer the Soviets was vital, particularly in the siege of Stalingrad; followed by the capture/surrender of the German armies led by General Von Paulus, and including as I recall it, about 20 of his Generals.

If these Nazi divisions had been available to defend the Western Front and help repel the Allied invasion on D-Day, it is quite reasonable to assume that the lives of immeasurable thousands more American, British, Canadian and other Allied troops would have been killed, maimed or captured. But there was little gratitude expressed in our nation for that.

Instead there were the slanders, bullying and unsubstantiated charges by the likes of McCarthy, Cohn, Rankin, and Parnell Thomas, which ruined the careers and lives of persons who refused to bow and scrape before the “Un-American” committees. J. Edgar Hoover was the “shadow dictator”. Activities he initiated or approved along with Senator McCarthy and his ilk caused fear to spread like an unchecked virus throughout our land.

Troilus says to Cressida (Act III Sc. 2):

“Fears make devils of cherubims;
They never see truly.”

That insight was amply demonstrated in those difficult years.

There was bizarre comedy occasionally in the midst of lies and slanders. Historian Walter LaFeber, reporting on Senator McCarthy’s attacks on experienced foreign service officers, noted that James Byrnes, former Secretary of State, tried to defend one victim, saying, “since the officer was reared in the State of Georgia he could not be expected to have any Communist tendencies.” (The historian also notes, “it didn’t work.” - THE AMERICAN AGE, p. 504)

The trial of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee members in 1947 embodies the savage paranoia of the times. During the Spanish Civil War, a physician, a citizen of the U.S.A., organized medical services for the Republican forces fighting dictator Franco, including ambulance service and shipments of medical supplies from New York to Spain. Fast writes, (p.144):

“When Spain fell to Franco, Dr. Barsky returned to private practice in New York, but he could not and would not sever his connection with the Spanish Republicans, so many of whom had escaped Franco by crossing the Pyrenees into southern France, and as soon as the war in Europe ended, Dr. Barsky went to Toulouse and arranged for the purchase of an abandoned convent which would then be turned into an excellent hospital. Arrangements were made with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee to operate the hospital and to distribute food and medicine among the Spanish refugees.” The funds were raise in America under the aegis of the Joint Anti-Fascist Committee; the appeal being named the Spanish Refugee Appeal.

Because the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee refused to give the names of other members and donors to the Congressional Un-American Committee, Fast and ten others, three women and seven men, were indicted for conspiracy and contempt of Congress. The Judge immediately threw out the conspiracy charge. But they were convicted on the contempt charge because they would not tell the names of friends and supporters of the Spanish Refugee Appeal. They were sentenced to three months in Federal prison, which they served.

This is just one instance of a multitude of violations of constitutional rights by congressional committees.

Disillusion came to Howard Fast also from the cause he had believed and served at great personal cost. He began to have doubts about the rigid orthodoxy of the “party line” and about conditions in the Soviet Union. A speech by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 confirmed that under Stalin, there were mass repressions and killings, anti-Semitic actions, including killings of Jews. The Stalin crimes, revealed by Khrushchev stunned Party “faithful”, particularly in the United States. The Communist Party dwindled to almost complete ineffectiveness in the U.S.

Howard Fast resigned from the Communist Party in 1957 and immediately became almost a “non-person”to those still obedient to the “party line.”

For an insight into those years, I recommend BEING RED. If you doubt Howard Fast's story because he was a Communist Party member for thirteen years, read other accounts of those troubled, fear-ridden years.

I end these remarks with the conclusion with which Fast ends his book. Fast and his wife, Bette, traveled to Europe in 1957 on the Queen Mary. Also aboard was Ambassador Fedorenko of the Soviet Union. He sought out Howard Fast for a long conversation to find out what had happened to the Communist Party [of the] U.S. They talked and talked.

Finally, Fast asked Fedorenko, “You’ve thrown a lot of questions at me. Will you answer one question of mine?”

“If I can.”

“Then tell me, Ambassador Fedorenko, when your country, united with China, could have kept the peace forever, why did you split?”

“His answer if fixed in my memory for as long as I shall live. ‘Fast’ he said to me, ‘Why should you imagine that the people who rule my country are less stupid than the people who rule yours?’”

Then I thought of something that Albert Camus wrote (“Bread and Freedom”, p. 89)

“After all, if freedom had always to rely on governments to encourage her growth, she would probably be still in her infancy or else definitely buried with the inscription, ‘another angel in heaven.’”