A Brief Chance to View the Soviets Critically

Until June 1941, the USSR and the Nazis were allies. The “Hitler-Stalin Pact” was the name given to the treaty which solidified the friendship between the two nations.

Also called the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” or the “Nazi-Soviet Pact,” the agreement showed the rest of the world that these two regimes were essentially brutal socialist dictatorships who were happy to work with each other to inflict misery on the rest of the world.

Americans saw this team as a serious threat. The Soviet government was Hitler’s friend, and was also planting its operations inside the United States.

The Communist Party in America, known as the CPUSA, was not an independent organization, but rather an agency of the USSR. The CPUSA was not a political party, advocating platforms and nominating candidates, but rather a terrorist organization, which explicitly stated that it sought the “violent” revolution which would overthrow the government of the United States.

In the political jargon of the era, ‘Brown’ referred to the Nazi party, and ‘Red’ referred to the Soviet Socialist government, as historian Stan Evans writes:

While it lasted, the spectacle of Brown and Red dictatorships in common harness spurred Congress to decisive action, including stern new laws that treated the two as equal dangers. Foremost among these measures was the Hatch Act, adopted in 1939 and further toughened in 1940, which outlawed the hiring or retention of federal workers who advocated the “overthrow of our constitutional form of government,” a rote phrase officially said to mean members of the Communist Party. In May 1941, Congress would adopt a bill of even broader scope, requiring scrutiny of federal workers involved with any “subversive” group whatever. This was Public Law 135, directing that the FBI investigate “the employees of every department, agency and independent establishment of the federal government who are members of subversive organizations or advocate the overthrow of the Federal government,” and report back to Congress.

When the partnership between the Nazis and the Soviet Socialists came to an end in June 1941, Stalin quickly joined the western Allies against the Nazis. This required the United States to set aside its knowledge that Stalin had planted an espionage network in America.

Certain elements inside the U.S. government - elements which had already turned a blind eye to Soviet infiltration in the 1930s - again deliberately ignored growing activity on the part of various Soviet intelligence agencies inside the United States.

While cooperation with the USSR may have been necessary to defeat the Nazis, this cooperation led some to drop their guard concerning Stalin’s intent to undermine the U.S. government.

Between August 1939, when the alliance between the Nazis and the Soviet Socialists was formed, and June 1941, when it ended, there was a period of time when U.S. intelligence agencies could view the USSR and its espionage network more critically.

Prior to that time, and after that time, there were various political influences which prevented a major effort to stop Soviet spy network inside the United States.

Soviet Spies Shape U.S. Policy

Between 1919 and 1990/1991, one of the chief ways in which the Soviet Union made its presence in America felt was an organization known as the CPUSA: The Communist Party USA. The smaller part of this organization was visible to the public: its rallies and conventions, its print publications.

The larger part of the CPUSA was invisible: secret memberships, clandestine meetings, encrypted messages to and from Moscow. “Among important features of the Communist apparatus,” write historians Stan Evans and Herb Romerstein, “was its interactive, global nature: the degree to which it collaborated with its sponsors/paymasters in the Kremlin and pro-Red forces in other countries.”

The USSR, through a vast and often successful propaganda effort, portrayed “the CPUSA as a well-meaning indigenous outfit.” In fact, it was a terrorist organization.

The group acted in multiple ways. On the one hand, it was “a domestic menace.” As such, it sought, in its own words, a “violent” revolution: it hoped for a “coup d’état or revolution in the streets, as happened in Russia.” This resulted in “the prosecution of its leaders for violation of the Smith Act.”

Historians debate “whether there was any realistic chance of similar dire events occurring in a U.S. context.” There probably wasn’t.

On the other hand, a more serious threat was posed by “the CP’s far more important Cold War role as fifth-columnist agent of a hostile foreign power.” The CPUSA was better at espionage than at whipping up the masses to overthrow the U.S. government.

The CPUSA’s covert operations fell into several categories. First, there was “spying — the theft of military or diplomatic secrets.” Second, there was “the overarching Communist goal of influencing U.S. policy in favor of the Soviet interest.” A third task was using the group’s hidden influence to shape the media’s reporting about the Soviet Union.

The visible CPUSA was laughably small, and some segments of the public dismissed the organization as harmless lunatics. But, although it did not succeed in overthrowing the U.S. federal government, it did inflict real damage when it influenced U.S. policy makers: bungled responses to Soviet aggression cost lives in several countries.

The CPUSA’s action led directly to the deaths of innocent civilians.

Effective Spying Requires Patience

Although textbooks often define the ‘Cold War’ as lasting from the end of WW2 until the fall of the USSR in 1990/1991, the years from 1917 until 1945 were also significant for the widespread Soviet espionage effort inside the United States.

As soon as Lenin took power in November 1917, the USSR began to think about its opportunities to spread communism inside other nations, although this would not begin until Soviets consolidated their power over Russia by eliminating resistance during the Russian Civil War, which lasted from November 1917 until October 1922.

(The communist takeover is cited as the ‘October Revolution’ because the Russian calendar in 1917 was not synchronized with western Europe and North America. Although the Russian Civil War ended in 1922, guerilla bands continued to offer resistance in the following years.)

By 1919, the Soviets had strengthened their hold on Russia enough that they could begin sponsoring subversive activities in other nations. After infiltrating various labor unions, they organized the Seattle General Strike of that year.

An entire major American city was held hostage for several days, with thousands of citizens being held captive in their houses when the strike leaders declared a curfew, and the freedom of movement eliminated when only strike leaders were allowed to drive on the city’s streets.

Decades before the traditional starting-point of the Cold War, Soviet agents were able to disrupt daily life for thousands of people in North America.

The USSR was patient in its quest to impose dictatorships on other countries. The planting of spies can take years. Once enlisted with one of the Soviet intelligence agencies, operatives often did no espionage for several years, and worked simply on gaining good reputations and access to sensitive information in their places of employment, as historian Stan Evans writes:

Communist penetration of the American government was a long-term process that ebbed and flowed but never ceased entirely. As with other infiltration targets, such as schools, media outlets, civic groups, or labor unions, the purposes were several: to influence policies and programs, make propaganda, disrupt or sabotage things from time to time, and — where chance presented — engage in “intelligence”-gathering operations, otherwise known as spying.

Until 1939, the Soviets enjoyed two decades in which they could plant spies inside the United States with relative ease. But then came a year-and-a-half long period in which the USSR accidentally showed its nature.

During the time when Hitler and Stalin were allies, it was clear that the Soviets and the Nazis were quite comfortable together. This alerted Americans to the dangers of Soviet Socialism.

As noted, such infiltration at the official level developed mostly in two phases — one in the depression years, the other during World War II. The net effect of these twin incursions was a sizable Communist presence on the federal payroll, far greater than most histories have suggested. However, in the trough between the rising waves (August 1939 – June 1941), the Hitler-Stalin pact exploded, shattering the Communist Party’s anti-Nazi image and setting back the penetration effort that prospered in the 1930s. Though these losses would later be recouped, events during the heyday of the pact would have profound effects long after it had ignominiously ended. ended. The seeds of conflict over U.S. security policies for years to come would be sown in the wild zigzags and contradictions of this era.

When the alliance between the Nazis and the Soviet Communists came to a sudden end in 1941, the Soviets worked to repair their image, and slowly convince the United States that the USSR would be a faithful ally.

Both the United States government and the public struggled with cognitive dissonance as they worked to harmonize the incompatible images of Soviet Socialism being both an ally to the genocidal Nazis and an ally to the free nations of western Europe and North America.

Inside the U.S. government, there would be a split between those who trusted the Soviets and were willing to work un-skeptically with them, and those who felt that Americans should keep an eye on the USSR’s underground spy operations in North America. This tension would continue during WW2, but was kept out of sight because of the wartime need to cooperate with the Soviets.

When the war ended, this tension became more visible, and the emergence of skepticism toward Soviet Socialism, along with the awareness of its espionage activities inside the United States, marks the traditional beginning of the Cold War.

Puritans: Victims of Inaccurate Historians?

In the Capitol rotunda, visitors see an 1843 painting by artist Robert Weir. It shows the Puritans, some of the earliest permanent settlers in North America.

Viewers are surprised to see them dressed in rainbow of colors - garments are yellow and red, green and beige, blue and purple. The image is historically accurate - and the Puritans were not always dressed in black and white.

Diaries, journals, and letters described such colorful clothing. Commercial records recorded transactions of colored and dyed cloth.

The Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. They are not to be confused with the Pilgrims, who settled at Plymouth in 1620. As their name indicates, the Puritans hoped to “purify” the Church of England: to improve and reform it, returning it to what they perceived to be the original and foundational concepts of the faith.

In the case of the Puritans, “purifying” the faith did not mean the introduction of strict rules, but rather an emphasis on joy in daily life.

Happy people wearing brightly colored clothes - this might not correspond to the cliches and stereotypical images of the Puritans which modern media present. How did these cheerful people get a reputation for being “drab, glum and pleasure-hating,” as Mark O’Keefe phrases it?

Through distorted versions of history, people seeking freedom from restrictions placed on their expression of religion came to be seen as

religious zealots whose idea of fun was burning someone falsely accused as a witch, or narrow-minded prudes best described by the adjective they spawned: “puritanical.”

Take the witches as an example. Fewer witches were accused or tried in North America than in Europe, both in absolute numbers and as a percent of the population. Yet the Puritans get the blame, much more so than Enlightenment-era Europeans. Why this misconception?

Part of the answer is popular fiction. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850 and adapted several times into film, is a perennial favorite, as is Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a 1953 play adapted for the cinema.

While dramatically powerful, neither work is accurate. Historian Richard Godbeer notes that

Most of my students are quite surprised by what I have to say about Puritan sex and Puritan life in general because they bring preconceptions they've absorbed.

Novels and theatrical works are entertaining, powerful, and emotionally moving, but they often do not reflect the actual evidence about the events as they occurred. Yet because of their dramatic force, the images they present remain in the collective consciousness, despite the fact that such images conflict with data about the people and places in question.

Exemplifying the Zeitgeist of the 1920s, H.L. Mencken began using the word ‘puritanism’ in a negative sense - in contrast to the upbeat image associated, until 1850 or a bit later, with the Puritans.

Colorful clothing, dancing, music, beer, wine, and a healthy dose of romantic attraction between men and women - these are the characteristics of how the Puritans actually lived. The images handed to viewers by the media are simply sadly wrong.

Changing Strategies Without Changing Goals?

For the first century and a half of the nation’s existence, the United States saw its military as existing primarily to protect the lives, liberties, and properties of its citizens. To be sure, there were arguably occasional departures from that maxim, but they were in any case small in scale and rare in occurrence.

It is possible to see the Cold War as a departure from previous patterns of American strategic thought. During the Cold War, policymakers embraced the idea that it was in the service of American interests, indeed essential to American interests, that militant socialism not dominate various other countries around the planet: the vocabulary of ‘domino effect’ and ‘rollback’ and ‘containment’ emerged.

The conflicts in Vietnam and Korea demonstrate a willingness, not found a century earlier, to use significant amounts of American military power in distant lands in engagements which did not directly protect American lives or soil. The indirect threat present in these locations, it was argued, would eventually be as dangerous as any direct threat.

During the Cold War, strategy was conceived in the broadest possible terms, and not limited to military action. The contest was not between two armies, but rather between two ideologies, and as such, this contest would incorporate economic, artistic, athletic, and scientific competition.

This understanding of the Cold War, according to historian Russell Weigley, instantiates the theoretical work of Carl von Clausewitz:

During the Cold War and especially after the Korean War, belief that the United States was involved in a protracted conflict with international Communism led to a departure from historic habits and to an effort to form a national strategy for the employment of American power in defense and promotion of the country’s political values and interests. The new national strategy would be not merely a military strategy but an all-inclusive planning for the use of the nation’s total resources to defend and advance the national interests, encompassing military strategy and Clausewitz’s use of combats along with other means.

Weigley goes on to argue that, prior to the Cold War era, strategic thought was a field of work in which few Americans engaged, in which little work was done, and in which serious analysis was rare.

The strategic work that was done prior to the Cold War was narrower in scope, and limited to a military understanding of strategy. Broader theoretical work, like that of Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu, was rare:

This determination to conceive and to act upon a national strategy prompted a flow of writing and criticism concerned with strategy, including its military aspects, that was unprecedented in American history. Although by the 1970s the bipolar confrontation between the United States and Soviet Russian Communism that produced the new interest in strategy and a new concern for a broad national strategy had given way to more complex power relationships, the perils of unstable world politics, an unstable balance of nuclear force, and “wars of national liberation” are more than ample to perpetuate strategic thought and writing as a thriving American industry.

Military policy and foreign relations changed after 1945 in a way which made them not merely different in content, but in concept, from the diplomatic and military engagements of the previous century.

This question presents itself: is it possible to embrace this significant change in strategy, indeed this change in the nation’s understanding of its role among the other nations of the world, and simultaneously remain true to the founding principles of the United States - remain true to the notion of individual political liberty as central and essential? This question lies behind aspects of the debate between ‘isolationists’ and ‘internationalists,’ although framing the debate with those two words oversimplifies the question.

Can America play a large role in the world without sacrificing its commitment to personal freedom in the realms of political expression, religion, and property rights?

Stopping the Barbary Coast Terrorists: Getting Inside the Attacker's Mind

Shortly after declaring and defending its independence, the United States faced a series of threats. Some of them came from the imperialist ambitions of the major European powers.

Other threats came from a loose alliance of Muslims states known collectively as the ‘Barbary Coast.’ Libya, Tunisia, Algiers, and Morocco engaged in an extensive seafaring piracy operation, which seized ships, confiscated cargo, and either sold the crews into slavery or executed them.

Under President George Washington, the United States began to develop its naval power to meet this threat, as Russell Weigley writes:

In response to the European part of these threats, Congress voted in 1794 to rehabilitate coastal fortifications of the Revolutionary era and to erect new ones to protect sixteen principal ports and harbors. Explicitly in response to the Barbary pirates, Congress voted a navy of six frigates, but with the proviso that the building of the frigates should be suspended if the United States made peace with the Regency of Algiers. The Federalist Congressmen who sponsored the latter measure and the Federalist War Department which administered it may have had more than the Algerines in mind, however, for the Washington administration laid down six cruisers designed to meet in more than equal combat the best British or French vessels of their class, including three frigates rated at forty-four guns which would be superior to any European warships save line-of-battle ships. On March 15, 1796, President Washington had to inform Congress that the peace with Algiers contemplated by the Naval Act of 1794 had been attained - the United States having consented to pay a satisfactory amount of tribute - but Federalist advocates of a strong government and respectable armed forces were able to win Congressional approval for completing three of the frigates anyway, United States and Constitution, 44 guns, and Constellation, 38.

The treaty with Algiers, however, proved to be a sham. As soon as it was signed, the Algerians developed clear and deliberate plans to violate the treaty and resume the enslavement and execution of United States citizens.

It would fall to Washington’s successors - Adams and Jefferson - to confront the Barbary Coast attackers. The U.S. government was alarmed that Americans were still dying in ritualized Islamic beheadings.

A flexible response - the ability to change the plans and deployments of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps - was needed to face these dangers, as Mark Levin writes:

The Founders recognized that America had to be strong politically, economically, culturally, and militarily to survive and thrive in a complex, ever-changing global environment not only in their time but for all time. History bears this out. After the Revolutionary War, the Founders realized that the Confederation was inadequate to conduct foreign affairs, since each state was free to act on its own. There could be no coherent national security policy, because there was no standing army and each state ultimately was responsible for its own defense. The nation’s economy was vulnerable to pirates who were terrorizing transatlantic shipping routes and thereby inhibiting trade and commerce. And the British and Spanish empires were looming threats.

Jefferson and Adams had extensive experience in diplomacy, and had met ambassadors from Muslim states before becoming presidents. They understood that negotiating with the Barbary Coast states would be a general waste of effort.

Adams and Jefferson knew to ignore the words of the Barbary Coast diplomats; they would say whatever it took to achieve their interests, with no intention of abiding by any agreement, written or spoken. The Americans studied the history and culture of these states, even the Qur’an, to better understand their attackers.

The American leaders had studied enough to ‘get inside’ the thought processes of the Islamic governments, as Dennis Prager writes:

The primary, if not only, reason Jefferson had a copy of the Koran was to try to understand the Koran and Islam in light of what the Muslim ambassador from Tripoli had told him and John Adams. When asked why Tripoli pirates were attacking American ships and enslaving Americans, the Muslim ambassador explained that Muslims are commanded to do so by the Koran.

Jefferson wrote that the Tripoli ambassador told him that “it was written in their Koran that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman [Muslim] who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to Paradise.”

Under the presidency of Jefferson, then, the United States negotiated by a show of military force. This proved to be the only way to stop the butchering of American sailors, and the sale of American sailors into slavery.

North American Indians: Points of First Contact

The history of interactions between the Indians (or ‘Native Americans’) and those who came from other parts of the world is long and complex. For an understanding of the cultures indigenous to North America, records of the first contacts between Indians and early explorers offer unique data.

These moments of first contact show us Indian behavior before they had any experience - good or bad - with those from the outside. Later moments of contact were based on experiences, and so show an Indian culture which had already changed inasmuch as it had begun to form a conceptualized notion of who these outsiders were.

After years of contact, Indian culture had changed significantly, e.g., their use of horses and beads.

Historians must always return, then, to the points of first contact to gain the most pristine evidence of Indian culture.

A note on terminology is also in order: in the twenty-first century, many Indian groups have rejected terminology like ‘Native Americans’ and prefer to be called ‘Indians.’ This is manifest, e.g., among the Cherokees of North Carolina in their tribal councils and museums.

One record of first contact describes an encounter between Indians and a French explorer. These Indians had neither met, seen, nor heard of people from outside North America, so this meeting was a true first contact.

At the shipwreck Museum located at Whitefish Point in Michigan, the curator notes:

In 1610 the young French interpretor Etienne Brule entered into the vast uncharted wilderness of the Great Lakes area. Sent to explore and learn the ways of the Indians, he was considered the first European to penetrate this region. Always moving and never forming a true alliance, he was later turned on by the Hurons who had him bound, tortured, quartered and eaten.

It is not clear whether the curator intends the comment that Brule ‘never’ formed ‘a true alliance’ to be some justification for, or amelioration of, cannibalism.

In any case, the Frenchman had stumbled upon a society formed by human sacrifice, frequent tribal warfare, and cannibalism. His murder was unprovoked.

This, then, is a glimpse into the way Indian culture functioned prior to any effects which outside contact may have had upon it. The Encyclopedia Britannica reports that

The details of his death remain uncertain, but according to several accounts, he was killed and eaten by the Hurons, his adoptive tribe, whose lore thereafter attributed a prolonged “curse” to his murder.

More than a century later, Juan Nentvig was the first European encountered by Indians around what is now Mexico and the southwestern United States. As an example of first contact, he documented the treatment of women among the Indians. They were treated as animals and as property.

By the time of events such as the conflicts at Wounded Knee and at Little Bighorn, Indian culture had changed significantly because of its interaction with Europeans, Africans, and Asians. The Indians of the second half of the nineteenth century were observably different than those who lived prior to any contact from the outside world.

Those who inhabited North America prior to the widespread settling of Europeans would have regarded Geronimo and his colleagues at the 1898 ‘Indian Congress’ in Omaha as utterly foreign.

The most reliable data about indigenous North American cultures comes, then, from points of first contact.