Statism and Narrative

Narrative is a powerful force in human society. People naturally pay closer attention to narratives than to mere recitations of facts. People remember narratives better than they remember disjointed lists of data.

Emotions often engage in a narrative. Curiosity is aroused. Who’s the ‘good guy’? Who’s the ‘bad guy’? What will happen next?

Those who wish to instill ethical principles into their listeners know the power of a story. So do politicians who are promoting an ideology or who are seeking to get elected.

Historians understand the centrality of narrative. History is, essentially and necessarily, narrative. The business of historians is often to sort out and compare competing narratives.

While some have speculated about ‘doing history without narrative,’ most efforts in such a direction have floundered. They seem to strive for something which is practically impossible, if not absolutely so. Jonah Goldberg writes:

The brain was wired to take in information via stories. (It helps if they’re sung and rhyme a lot, but that’s a topic for another day.) Every important lesson of your life comes with a story.

Narrative will be implemented by both sides of serious ideological debates. Those who would assign the bulk of power and authority to the government, and who see the government as providing the solution for most problems, are often called ‘statists.’

To justify the inevitable reductions of individual political liberty, statists employ narratives. The paternalistic government, which benignly taxes and regulates, rescues citizens from a variety of crises and emergencies. Goldberg continues:

Ever since Hegel or maybe Plato, statists have been telling a story about government in which government itself is the hero in an epic struggle.

It became necessary for the government, and for the statist on behalf of the government, to find a continuous supply of problems and disasters so that the government can once again reveal itself to be the deliverer, and so that the government can once again justify regulating the life of the individual and imposing taxes.

The American political vocabulary of twentieth and early twenty-first centuries does not do justice to the problem of statism. Talk of ‘Republicans’ and ‘Democrats’ - talk of ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ - doesn’t capture what’s at stake.

The question about statism is the question about whether we look to the government as a provider and rescuer, or whether we look to society itself, and the individuals and groupings within society, as a source of creativity and inventiveness, as the engine for constructive effort.

For Hegel, the state was the mechanism by which God worked out His will. For Marx, the State was an expression of cold immutable forces.

In historical development, Marxism and the various types of socialism which it spawned moved from seeing the government as the means to seeing the government as the end. Some versions of communism, in the early and mid-nineteenth century, aimed for the eventual dissolution of government, once it had been used to attain communal ownership of nearly everything: a sort of ‘anarcho-communism.’

But a larger segment of socialists eventually moved to a vision of the government as absorbing everything, owning everything, and regulating everything. “For the socialists who followed, control of the state was a kind of” desideratum, “but over time it became the hero itself.”

The narrative of the statist, then, incorporates the government as hero, and therefore must find the government to be an embodiment of ethical principles. Heroes, after all, are the good guys. When the typical statist of the early twenty-first century

talks about the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, the physical manifestation of that pie-eyed treacle is always government.

Statist narratives, therefore, are stories of how the government has not only rescued its citizens, but done so in a morally noble manner. Statist histories of the past, analyses of the present, and speculations about the future follow this formula.

There is no room, in the statist narrative, for a hero who is not in some way linked to the government. There is no room for private citizens who freely assemble to form a social effort apart from the government to address any problem.

As Jonah Goldberg phrases it, when the statists of the early twenty-first century

talk about the progress we’ve made as a society, the hero is always the state (and the heroic individuals who bent it to their will). It doesn’t matter that the market, non-state institutions, and heroic individuals tend to solve most of the problems in life; the government is always shoehorned in as the indispensable author of beneficence.

What remains, then, it to examine competing narratives.

Take, for example, the statist narrative about women’s rights. The Progressivist movement would have the reader believe that women were rescued from abject servitude by the federal government, which enacted the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. It was the benevolence of the centralized state which launched women into political equality, according to this narrative.

Yet a different narrative can be assembled from the available data. Quite aside from the point that it was the individual state legislatures, not the national government, which ratified the amendment is the point that women were already voting long before the amendment was even proposed. Women began voting in Wyoming in 1869, Colorado in 1893, in Idaho in 1896, in Utah in 1896, and in Montana in 1914. This trend continued until women were voting in 41 out of 48 states before the amendment was ratified. It was evident that the few ‘holdout’ states would soon follow the others.

Another statist narrative alleges that the ordinary citizens were saved from monopolies, trusts, and ‘robber baron’ industrialists when the federal government undertook to disperse these large commercial holdings. The statist narrative further alleges that the large corporations would inflict high prices on consumers who had no choice but to buy from a monopoly.

The competing economic narrative points out, first, that large holdings like Standard Oil achieved large market shares by offering low, not high prices to consumers. Second, Standard Oil never had 100% of the market share and so was never a true monopoly, and in fact faced competition throughout its existence which forced it to keep its prices to consumers low. Third, far from being invincible bastions of power, these industrialist empires, like Vanderbilt’s corner on the railroad market, often lasted only a few years, before competition reshaped the economic landscape: railroad dominance shifted from Vanderbilt to J.P. Morgan. The federal government’s efforts at “trust busting” were ineffectual and largely symbolic: Standard Oil was past its peak, and had been steadily losing market share, by the time the statists intervened to “save” the consumers from purported danger it posed.

A third common statist narrative tells us that FDR’s ‘New Deal’ rescued ordinary Americans from the depths of the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s high rates of taxation, massive national debt, wage-and-price controls, and make-work programs were the necessary steps to save Americans from poverty.

The competing liberty-based narrative tells us that the Great Depression was impervious to FDR’s efforts - it was in fact worse in 1937 than in 1932 - and Roosevelt’s efforts were in some cases shockingly irrational. Thousands of hogs were butchered and the meat thrown away, while families hungered: the New Deal’s attempt to ‘jump start’ consumer demand for agricultural products. The massive efforts of WWII masked, but did not end, the Great Depression. It was after the war that three factors coalesced to finally put the nation’s economy back onto a steady footing: a reduction in government spending, a reduction in taxation, and efforts to pay down the national debt. It was the postwar downsizing of government which ultimately laid the specter of the Great Depression to rest.

We see, then, that for each statist narrative, there is a competing narrative which is based on liberty and on the independence of the individual, instead of on the statist’s desire to see power centralized in a national government. Although abstract principle of ideology may ultimately be more attractive to pure reason, it is narrative which often decides the practical political perceptions of both the people and the historians.

Coolidge's Foreign Policy

The foreign policy of Calvin Coolidge might be described as located between the extremes of isolationism and internationalism. He saw the need for American engagement, and oversaw Frank Kellogg and Charles Dawes as they developed the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Dawes Plan, respectively.

Yet Coolidge knew that the nation was weary after Woodrow Wilson had dragged it through WWI and the ensuing diplomatic entanglements of Versailles and the League of Nations. Wilson had been elected on a platform of keeping America out of the war, but he’d ultimately been unable to resist the attraction of the extraordinary powers which he would exercise as a wartime leader.

Therefore, Coolidge engaged diplomatically, but did not commit the United States militarily or in any way which, like the League of Nations, would compromise its national sovereignty.

The years of the Coolidge administration included significant foreign policy challenges, from efforts to ameliorate the problematic provisions of the Versailles Treaty, to the disconcerting awareness of Japan’s growing militaristic nationalism; from emergence of the Soviet Union as it replaced the Czarist dynasty to the irruption of civil war in China as the communists sought power.

There were, naturally, critics: some saw Coolidge as too engaged, and there was a vocal isolationist minority who doubted his decisions. But the voters overwhelming affirmed Coolidge and returned him to office, manifesting the will of the majority. Historian David Greenberg writes:

He ultimately declined to recognize the Communist government of the Soviet Union, and his policy toward the internal strife and rising anti-Western sentiment in China was uncertain and reactive. Coolidge, however, was no isolationist. Rather, his cautious temperament disinclined him from making bold ventures. He governed, moreover, at a moment when the public has lost its patience for the swashbuckling of a Roosevelt or the internationalism of a Wilson. Indeed, the president’s critics on foreign affairs were mainly those men who distrusted his internationalist forays altogether, from the Dawes Plan in his first term to his efforts to join the World Court in his second. He was fighting isolationism, not carrying its banner.

The voters seemed to like Coolidge’s foreign policy because, on the one hand, he avoided the extremes of isolationism and Wilsonian adventurism, and other the other hand, he engaged diplomatically while firmly maintaining national sovereignty.

The DNC Gets Messy

If you heard “the Democratic National Convention was a real disaster!” and if you know much about American History, you might think of the year 1968. At that time, the DNC was so chaotic that George McGovern and Richard Daley were shouting obscenities at each other.

(McGovern was a Senator from South Dakota who was seeking the party’s nomination; Daley was the mayor of Chicago. The party nominated Hubert Humphrey as its presidential candidate.)

The Democratic Party was divided into various factions which did not get along well with each other. The extremists in the party were organized into groups like ‘Yippies’ and ‘Hippies,’ and started violent riots in some of Chicago’s city parks which were located a few miles away from the building in which the convention was held.

But 1968 wasn’t the only year in which the Democratic National Convention was turbulent - or even seething.

In 1924, the Democratic Party was sharply divided on several questions. The bulk of the party continued to embrace Woodrow Wilson’s racist segregation program, but one faction, seeing that the Republicans had benefitted from the votes of African-American citizens, wanted the party to embrace racial equality.

The party was also split on economic matters. Wilson’s administration had imposed the onerous and hated income tax. Should the DNC embrace tax cuts?

The disputes at the convention became so heated that some of them were deemed inappropriate for the airwaves. Modern media made themselves felt: extensive radio coverage embarrassed the Democratic Party, as its internal fights were presented to the listening public.

The DNC finally nominated John Davis as its presidential candidate. Long losing the 1924 general election, Davis would gain notoriety by defending segregation in front of the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education. Historian David Greenberg writes:

Ten days and a record 102 ballots passed with no resolutions. The nation again listened on radio, but this time fascination curdled into horror as the deadlock persisted, with ugly rhetoric abounding. The Democrats retained a censor to keep any offensive speech off the airwaves, but to spare themselves public revulsion, they would have had to censor the convention itself. Finally, on the 103rd ballot, they settled on John W. Davis, a West Virginia native, a former solicitor general and ambassador to Great Britain, and a corporate lawyer whose firm, Davis, Polk, held prestige with the white-shoe class but not the rank and file. Despite denouncing the Klan over the summer, he was sufficiently retrograde on racial politics to appeal to the party’s white supremacists. (Davis would end his career in 1954 defending segregation before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education). To run with Davis, the Democrats selected Nebraska governor Charles Bryan, the younger brother of their thrice-failed presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, creating the bizarre coupling of a Wall Street insider with a scourge of Wall Street.

The DNC, after airing its collective dirty laundry on national radio, was a fragmented coalition, barely able to feign the semblance of unity, presenting an unpalatable platform. The voting citizens could be forgiven if they also suspected that there was a lack of sincerity behind any presentation of a platform, given the internal divisions which would prevent united or cohesive support.

President Calvin Coolidge was swept back into office in November 1924 with a landslide. Even if the DNC had managed to unite itself and present a united front to the public, it still probably would have lost.

While the aura of racism clung to the DNC, Coolidge solidly refused to endorse the Ku Klux Klan, and in fact, Coolidge mocked the KKK with one of his election slogans, urging the Klan to calm itself in the words, ‘Keep Kool with Koolidge.’

Wilson’s plans for a “League of Nations” and a world government seemed, to the voters, to entangle the United States in too many foreign disputes, and to possibly infringe on national sovereignty. The DNC did not seem to offer a clear departure from Wilsonianism. Coolidge offered a foreign policy which engaged other nations diplomatically, but did not commit U.S. resources to a distant situations, and which maintained American sovereignty over American territory.

On the domestic front, voters were tired of high income taxes and regulated commerce. Coolidge offered a clear message about a free market: the citizens would be able to keep the largest share of their earning instead of having them confiscated in the form of taxes, and would be able to buy and sell as they pleased with fewer regulations.

The lessons of 1924 were, then, twofold: First, Coolidge’s vision of a free market, of racial equality, and of fewer international commitments for America was a wildly popular vision. Second, a political party could not afford to allow its intramural conflicts to spill out into the public via the convention.

The keen-eyed historian will see a number of parallels between 1924 and 1968.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, parties reconfigured their decision-making so that the candidates, and in large measure the platforms, were chosen prior to the convention.

Conventions thus became ceremonial unveilings of the candidates and platforms, rather than the workshop in which they were made. Contemporary convention are largely symbolic, a sort of “eye candy” to launch national campaigns.

Political party conventions prior to, perhaps, 1975, and certainly prior to 1950, were more actively involved in choosing candidates and shaping platforms.

Modern electronic media have decisively shaped and reshaped political conventions. A convention, e.g., in the year 1904, could discuss and negotiate the details of a platform, and be relatively certain that the details of such discussion would never reach the eyes or ears of the public.

Multinational Experiences

Frances Slanger was born in Poland in 1913. But there was no country on the map named ‘Poland’ in that year!

The territory labeled ‘Poland’ had disappeared from the map in 1795, when it was divided into three parts and given to Russia, Prussia, and Austria. As a political state, Poland ceased to exist.

As a cultural nation, the Poles certainly continued to exist: they spoke Polish, and preserved and carried forward their musical, culinary, literary, and artistic traditions. The Poles, millions of them, were people without a country.

Dominated by Russia over a century, the Poles had no individual political liberty. The Russian nobility also occasionally had a nasty anti-Jewish side. Frances Slanger was born into a society in which there was no right to vote.

She was born with the name Friedel Yachet Schlanger, which she changed when she came with her parents to the United States in 1920. As Jews, they enjoyed freedom in the U.S., where they could buy a piece of land and do with it as they pleased, or where they could voice whatever political opinions they might have.

Delighted that she had so many options to explore, Frances decided to study nursing. Graduating in Boston, she worked for two years in a hospital there. As Vice President Dick Cheney writes,

Born in Lodz, Poland, in 1913, Frances, together with her mother and sister, secured passage on a ship bound for America in 1920. They were Jews hoping to escape persecution and build a better life. As a young girl, Frances sold fruit on the streets of Boston with her father and dreamed of becoming a nurse. In 1937 she graduated from Boston City Hospital’s School of Nursing.

By this time, the world’s attention was focused on the horrific events of WWII in Europe, North America, and the Pacific. Frances wanted to make a difference and bring liberty to people in oppressed parts of the world. She joined the Army Nurse Corps.

The western Allies had invaded Europe on June 6, D-Day. Frances arrived “as a part of the 2d Platoon, 45th Field Hospital” on June 10, 1944.

Lieutenant Frances Slanger and three other U.S. Army nurses waded ashore on D-Day plus four. Over the next five weeks they cared for more than three thousand wounded and dying soldiers. In her tent one night, as she thought about all she had seen, Frances wrote a letter to Stars and Stripes honoring the American GI.

The soldiers of the United States were called ‘GI’ because everything they wore, and all the equipment they used, was “government-issued.”

The newspapers Stars and Stripes was published for soldiers and was quite popular among them. Frances wrote her letter one October evening, in her tent, in Belgium, as her unit continued to advance eastward across western Europe.

In addition to nursing, Frances dreamed of becoming a published author. The letter which Frances wrote was published, and became a famous tribute to American soldiers. In her letter, she wrote:

To every GI wearing an American uniform - for you we have the greatest admiration and respect. Such soldiers stay with us only a short time - for 10 days or two weeks. But we have learned a great deal about the American soldier and the stuff he is made of. The wounded don’t cry. Their buddies come first. They show such patience and determination. The courage and fortitude they show is awesome to behold.

Addressing the soldiers directly, she wrote, “we wade ankle-deep in mud; you have to lie in it.”

The 45th Field Hospital advanced across much of Europe. On October 21, 1944, Frances died in Belgium near the German border. Vice President Cheney continues:

Frances did not live to see her letter published. She was killed the next night when a German shell ripped through her tent.

After her death, her letter became famous, and is still read today as a salute to American soldiers. This letter was, however, not the only famous passage she wrote. She had carefully copied this passage into her scrapbook:

There was a dream that men could one day speak their thoughts. There was a hope that men could stroll through the streets unafraid. There was a prayer that each could speak to his own God. That dream, that hope, that prayer became America.

Born in Russian-dominated Poland, she died in Europe working to liberate France and Germany from Nazi domination. But she internalized and exemplified American concepts: the value of the individual human, and the value of liberty.

She lived, and died, with the goal of freeing people from oppression: whenever and wherever governments shackle the people with regulations, people like Frances arrive to champion the cause of liberty.

Assessing the Damage Done by Soviet Spies

In the grand tradition about freedom of belief, people in Western Civilization instinctively tend to tolerate a diversity of political parties. This tendency, however, can be exploited by those who wish to destroy this civilization and its tendencies.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was founded and succeeded in attracting significant numbers of members.

There was, however, a fundamental deception in the establishment of this organization: while it called itself a ‘party,’ it was not a political party in the sense that the ‘Democratic Party’ or the ‘Republican Party’ or even the ‘Libertarian Party’ are parties.

The CPUSA was, in fact, organized to instigate, in its own words, a ‘violent revolution’ to overthrow the United States government, to abolish the liberties and rights of U.S. citizens, to establish a communist dictatorship, and to do all of this by whatever means necessary, including loss of human life.

By claiming to be a political party, the CPUSA was concealing the fact that it was terrorist organization. It was ready to commit acts of sabotage and assassination. It did commit acts of espionage and disinformation. The CPUSA functioned as a branch of the Soviet military and as part of the Soviet intelligence community.

One Soviet agent, Alger Hiss, managed to start a career for himself in the State Department, and eventually rose to such high levels that he was giving face-to-face foreign policy guidance to the President of the United States. Hiss was, however, advising the president to act, not in the interests of the citizens of the United States, but rather to act in ways which would benefit the Soviet Union.

How did a confirmed Soviet spy obtain a secure position inside the United States government? The Assistant Secretary of State, Adolph Berle, attempted to alert the State Department to Hiss’s activity, but to no avail. As historian William F. Buckley writes,

Responsible officials, both in the State Department and in the White House, were twice informed about Alger Hiss. Mr. Adolph A. Berle relayed Mr. Whittaker Chambers’ report on Hiss to his superiors in 1939. In 1943, Chambers spoke with the FBI, who presumably submitted the information to the State Department. There was either a conspiracy of silence among those officers who knew the information about Hiss, or else they were so persuaded by pro-Communist propaganda, much of it of their own making, that they simply did not think it made much difference whether or not Hiss was a Communist. The last is less astounding if one recalls the celebrated statement of the influential Mr. Paul Appleby, of the Bureau of the Budget: “A man in the employ of the government has just as much right to be a member of the Communist Party as he has to be a member of the Democratic or Republican Party.”

The Soviet intelligence agencies could not have made such substantial inroads inside the United States government without the presence of those civil servants who either were knowingly and willingly aiding the international communist conspiracy, or were convinced that it was ‘no big deal.’

Sadly, it was a big deal, for the millions who died in China after the communist takeover in 1949, for those who died in the Korean war, for those who died in the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and for those who died in the Prague Spring of 1968.

History as Remembering

Can you remember something that happened before you were born? An event at which you were not present?

Scholars sometimes call this ‘historical memory’ or ‘collective memory.’ It is a powerful societal force.

Imagine three different people living in the United States: their various ancestors didn’t enter the country until after 1835. One is an African-American, one is an Asian-American, and one is a European-American. Yet all three can say that “we” rebelled against British tyranny in 1776.

While “historical memory” empowers individual citizens to use the ‘we’ in this way, it does not require them to abandon their own particular ethnic heritage.

This acquisition of historical memory is only one of many important reasons for studying history, as historian Wilfred McClay notes:

The study of the past makes the most sense when it is connected to a larger, public purpose, and is thereby woven into the warp and woof of our common life. The chief purpose of a high school education in American history is not the development of critical thinking and analytic skills, although the acquisition of such skills is vitally important; nor is it the mastery of facts, although a solid grasp of the factual basis of American history is surely essential; nor is it the acquisition of a genuine historical consciousness, although that certainly would be nice to have too, particularly under the present circumstances, in which historical memory seems to run at about 15 minutes, especially with the young.

The etymological meaning of ‘remember’ is to become part of something. By learning, rehearsing, and internalizing the country’s story, a citizen becomes part of the country, and the country becomes part of the citizen.

The success or failure of the effort to instill a collective memory into students, while retaining and celebrating their peculiar ethnic heritages, will ultimately be the success or failure of the country, and of civilization.

Not only knowing, but also perceiving one’s self to be a part of, the national narrative empowers the individual to see himself as heir to grand notions like rights and privileges, but also as inheriting duties, obligations, and responsibilities. This collective memory is necessary to human society.

The chief purpose of a high school education in American history is as a rite of civic membership, an act of inculcation and formation, a way in which the young are introduced to the fullness of their political and cultural inheritance as Americans, enabling them to become literate and conversant in its many features, and to appropriate fully all that it has to offer them, both its privileges and its burdens. To make its stories theirs, and thereby let them come into possession of the common treasure of its cultural life. In that sense, the study of history is different from any other academic subject. It is not merely a body of knowledge. It also ushers the individual person into membership in a common world, and situates them in space and time.

One cause, then, for an individual’s feeling of alienation is the failure of the educational system to help him overcome distances, not only of time and space, but also of race and gender, to identify with the national narrative.

It is possible, desirable, and necessary for social well-being that the ‘we’ of collective memory cross lines of race and gender: an African-American can look at a portrait of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence and say ‘we.’ A European-American can look at Frederick Douglas or W.E.B. DuBois and say ‘we.’ A woman can look at George Patton or Douglas MacArthur and say ‘we.’ A man can look at Amelia Earhart or Susan B. Anthony and say ‘we.’

Yet the educational system cannot instill this historical memory alone. This is a larger project, requiring intentional participation of parents, neighborhoods, clubs, teams, performing arts groups, etc. It is a grand task, requiring society’s various networks.

America's Schizophrenic China Policy

Starting in the 1920s, China was engaged in a civil war. Mao’s communists hoped to gain control of the country from the nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek.

(‘Mao Zedong’ is sometimes transliterated as ‘Mao Tse-tung’ and ‘Chiang Kai-shek’ is sometimes rendered as ‘Jiang Jieshi.’)

Between 1927 and 1937, the nationalists introduced democratic reforms to increase political liberty in China. Free and fair elections made Chiang president. For this reason, the United States and other western allies were inclined to support the nationalists during China’s civil war.

The USSR, however, supported Mao. If the communists took control of China, it would work with the Soviet Union to intimidate and dominate smaller regional powers, and impose communism on those weaker countries.

Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, found a way to decrease American support for Chiang. A network of communist agents, operating inside the United States, could disseminate misinformation about the situation in China, and influence both policymakers and public opinion against Chiang.

This espionage network operated behind the cover of a ‘front’ organization - a group with a seemingly innocent purpose, hiding the real activity of its members. This organization was the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). Allegedly a think-tank of academics and journalists, it connected Soviet operatives. Historian Willmoore Kendall writes:

The IPR was in considerable part responsible for the proposal, finally put forward by the United States, that Chiang Kai-shek form a United Front coalition government with the Communists. Chiang, to be sure, knew from the first that the coalition in question would be only a first stage in an eventual Communist takeover of China: he resisted the proposal at every turn, and only under constant pressure from Washington officials, who were in turn being prodded by the IPR, was in induced to yield, little by little, on first one point of substance, then another. During the celebrated China civil war truce engineered by ambassador George Marshall, for example, Chiang found himself stripped of nearly all forms of military assistance (he was refused ammunition for the very weapons the United States had placed in his hands). “I was informed by the Chinese Government officials that they had ceased to receive war equipment manufactured in the United States,” General Chennault subsequently testified. “When I inquired why, they said that General Marshall had forbidden its shipment from American-held islands and from the United States.” The Chinese Communists, of course, made the most of the truce - to built up their army with equipment that the Soviets had captured from the Japanese-Manchurian army and turned over to them.

The results of the IPR’s influence were inconsistent and contradictory policies. The United States, supporting Chiang, gave him weapons, but then later refused to give him the ammunition for those weapons.

To defend China, the United States sent General Claire Chennault and his famous Flying Tiger group of fighter pilots; some of the most skilled air combat specialists, they fought for China starting in 1941. Yet American policy was soon content to allow China to fall into the hands of the communists, who executed millions of Chinese and subjugated the rest under a harsh tyranny.

The Soviets succeeded, therefore, in using the IPR as a tool to weaken American support for Chiang, and to eventually ensure Mao’s victory and the establishment of a bloody dictatorship in China.