Before JFK, There Was Henry Wallace

[Lori Spencer]

9 minutes ago, David Josephs said:

And the book "The Wise Men" is something not to miss if foreign policy formation and execution is of interest.  Although written with a somewhat elitist slant, I found it a wonderful insight into the decades post WWII.

Looks like a great read, thanks for the recommendation. I just scored a new paperback copy on Amazon for $13. The price was right! 📕 

[Paul Rigby]

Two great podcasts from Burt Cohen's Keeping Democracy Alive series:

 

Henry Wallace: One of our greatest Americans. Who?

February 12, 2013

The Cold War and Red Baiting of the 50s. America’s war in Vietnam. Civil rights and women’s equality. All would have been far different had the Democratic machine not replaced FDR’s vice president Henry Wallace with their own choice Harry Truman at the 1944 party convention. Wallace opposed imperialism and sought good relations with revolutionary movements throughout the world. Though practically unknown today, according to Petrer Dreier, author of The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century, Wallace was was truly one of our greats. If only…

https://keepingdemocracyalive.com/henry-a-wallace-one-of-our-greatest-americans-who/

An actual coup in America: Democrats in 1944

August 3, 2017

In the long held American tradition of opposition to colonialism and a government serving the common good, FDR’s vice president Henry A Wallace was an outstanding visionary. Then a corrupt political machine performed a bloodless coup at the 1944 Democratic convention. Just as his name was to be placed in nomination (he easily had the votes to win) the gavel was brought down and the convention instantly adjourned despite a huge outcry from the floor. Had Wallace remained as VP, he would have become president instead of Truman. American University History Professor Peter Kuznick explains the incredibly significance of this act to the next seventy years of American history. There would have been no atomic bombs dropped and no Vietnam War, had Wallace’s name simply been placed in nomination. The difference was about nine seconds. Listen in and learn.

https://keepingdemocracyalive.com/actual-coup-america-democrats-1944/

 

 

[David Josephs]

Peace was within our grasp

Extracts from US President Roosevelt’s speech to the US Congress on the Yalta Conference, March 1st 1945.

[David Josephs]

8 minutes ago, Lori Spencer said:

Looks like a great read, thanks for the recommendation. I just scored a new paperback copy on Amazon for $13. The price was right! 📕 

Sweet!

Of all the men, McCloy amazed me with his ability to be at the center of virtually everything important in government post WWII.

John Jay McCloy (March 31, 1895 – March 11, 1989, was a Wall Street lawyer and banker who served as Assistant Secretary of War during World War II, where he made many major decisions. After the war he served as president of the World Bank, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, and chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. He later became a prominent United States presidential advisor, served on the Warren Commission, and was a member of the foreign policy establishment group of elders called "The Wise Men."

---

 

The State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC, "swink") was a United States federal government committee created in December 1944 to address the political-military issues involved in the occupation of the Axis powers following the end of World War II.

SWNCC was an important precursor to the National Security Council, and represents perhaps the most successful integration of military and civilian assets in the history of U.S. foreign policy. As a result, it has received renewed scrutiny in the wake of the Iraq War as the U.S. government attempts to overhaul its interagency national security system.[1]

During World War II, interagency coordination had been largely informal and mediated by president Roosevelt, but recognizing the need for deeper integration, the Secretary of State, Secretary of War, and Secretary of the Navy began holding weekly meetings to work through shared problems. However, the so-called "Committee of Three" had no specific mandate or authority, and this weakness became apparent as the war moved toward its conclusions and the details of occupation planning began to occupy the various departments.

As soon as he became Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius sent a letter to War Secretary Henry Stimson and Navy Secretary James Forrestal proposing that they create a jointly managed secretariat to plan the occupations and achieve full integration of U.S. foreign policy. The secretariat was headed by Roosevelt favorite, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy.

[Paul Rigby]

One of the lines of attack upon Wallace concerned his championship of Nicholas Roerich:

 

The New Deal And The Guru

https://www.americanheritage.com/new-deal-and-guru

J. Samuel Walker

March 1989 (V40 N2)

Early in 1934 Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace appointed Nicholas Roerich, a renowned painter and a self-proclaimed guardian of world peace and culture, to lead a scientific expedition to North China and Manchuria, to search for drought-resistant grasses that might revive the Dust Bowl. By the time the project ended, in 1935, the eccentric artist had compromised America’s diplomatic position in Asia, embarrassed the Roosevelt administration, humiliated Wallace, and damaged the careers of several botanists. And he had not advanced the cause of combating the drought in the United States.

The episode—one of the most bizarre in the history of the New Deal—began with Henry Wallace’s infatuation with Roerich’s mystical philosophy. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1874, Roerich had studied painting, drawing, and archeology in various academies, and had become president of the Society for Encouragement of Fine Arts in Russia and a noted theater designer—he created the sets and costumes for the epochal 1913 Nijinsky premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. He emigrated from Russia a short time after the Bolshevik Revolution, apparently by his own choice, and after a brief stay in England moved to the United States, arriving in New York City in 1920.

At first Roerich had a hard time here, living modestly while selling paintings and designing stage sets. But then Louis L. Horch, a wealthy New York broker, and his wife, Nettie, became greatly impressed by Roerich and spent large sums settling Roerich’s debts and financing his activities. Roerich claimed he had the ability to communicate with the spiritual sphere through “automatic writings.” With his eyes covered, the artist could record thoughts and instructions from another world—on one occasion he received specific directions on how to raise funds to build a museum in New York to display Roerich’s work.

In 1925 Roerich went off to India and Tibet to paint a “great panoramic series of works” and to translate “original manuscripts, folk lore, and artistic material of these countries.” At Horch’s expense he traveled widely in Asia for four years. While there, he generated so much turmoil that the British Foreign Office labeled him an “unbalanced individual.” He claimed to have discovered a manuscript in a Tibetan monastery proving that Christ had lived and preached in India as a young man. He also made a mysterious trip to the Soviet Union, where he apparently conferred with government officials. Subsequently he wrote books praising the Soviet system and describing both Christ and Buddha as communists, but the United States State Department found no convincing evidence that linked him “in any way with communist movements.” At any rate, he eventually severed his ties with Russia in favor of a fantastic scheme to create an autonomous state under his leadership in Siberia.

While Roerich was traveling in Asia, a writer named Frances Grant who admired him wrote adulatory articles and pamphlets. Her efforts, along with his genuine artistic ability, helped win him an enviable international reputation as a painter. Horch, meanwhile, worked at building a museum for Roerich’s work. Between 1923 and 1929 Horch erected at 103rd Street and Riverside Drive in New York a twenty-nine story apartment house whose bottom floors constituted the Roerich Museum, with exhibit space for more than a thousand of the artist’s paintings. Horch served as president of the museum and Grant as vice-president. Roerich returned to the United States to speak at the museum’s dedication but neglected to thank the architects, builders, or contributors, or even Horch, for their efforts on his behalf. He also insisted on the addition of stained-glass windows and an expensive change in the wallpaper, which Horch carried out.

With his museum established and his fame growing, Roerich turned to a new project. He called for an international agreement to protect cultural monuments and artistic treasures, particularly during wartime. In 1929 he and several associates formally drafted a treaty that they hoped would gain worldwide acceptance. It became known as the Roerich Pact. They also adopted a “Banner of Peace”—a red circle surrounding three spheres on a field of white, representing the common bonds of culture, spirit, and humanity that transcended the divisions among people. Delegates from more than twenty countries attended conferences to discuss the pact in Bruges, Belgium, in 1931 and 1932, but they failed to take any action on it. The U.S. Department of State found the pact “futile, weak, and unenforceable,” but after Roosevelt took office, his endorsement of the treaty and Henry Wallace’s aggressive advocacy of it eventually prevailed over the State Department’s opposition.

Wallace was himself somewhat mystically inclined. He was a brilliant plant geneticist, who had developed the first hybrid corn for commercial use, and a respected economist, whose writings on farm problems had made him a leading agricultural spokesman—Roosevelt once referred to him as “Old Man Common Sense”—but he also exhibited a prominent strain of fervent idealism. He was an intensely religious man who disdained “the wishy-washy goodygoodness and the infantile irrelevancy” of conventional Christianity. He viewed the Depression as an opportunity for a spiritual reformation; the “fundamental cure” for it, Wallace believed, entailed “changing the human heart,” a renunciation of selfishness and greed.

Continued at link

[Michael Griffith]

I think it is very sad and perplexing to see anyone, in 2023, minimizing the scale and horror of Soviet brutality and aggression, given all that we now know. 

It is simply not true that no one knew about Soviet atrocities and repression until after WW II. That is fiction. Many people knew, but liberal Democrats, from FDR on down, did not want to hear it. 

At his conferences with Stalin, FDR shamefully handed over tens of millions of people to Soviet tyranny. The full depth of FDR's betrayal of human rights is discussed in painful detail, with the benefit of new period documents, in Dr. Sean McMeekin's book 2021 book Stalin's War: A New History of World War II. 

People who cherish freedom can thank God that FDR wasn't still president in 1945 when the Soviets tried to get Truman to let them occupy all of Korea, to occupy part of Japan, and to join in the occupation of mainland Japan. To his great credit, Truman said no. 

It was bad enough that the Soviets, thanks to FDR's shameful concessions, were able to literally rape Manchuria and to set up a brutal Marxist regime in North Korea (similar to the one they and the Chinese later set up in North Vietnam). 

Perhaps we should consider what Henry Wallace, to his enormous credit, wrote in his 1952 article "Where I Was Wrong":

       Before 1949 I thought Russia really wanted and needed peace. After 1949 I became more and more disgusted with the Soviet methods and finally became convinced that the Politburo wanted the Cold War continued indefinitely, even at the peril of accidentally provoking a hot war.

       In this article I shall speak frankly of some of the circumstances which have caused me to revise my attitude.

       Among the fist were the shocking revelations of the activities of Russia's atomic spies. This plus the testimony of American ex-Communists convinced me that Russia had been getting information illegally to which neither she nor any other nation was entitled.

       Next, I was deeply moved by reports of friends who had visited Czechoslovakia shortly after the Communist took control. In the summer of 1949, a member of the Progressive Party visited Czechoslovakia and reported the dispossession of relatives whose only crime was to own a small business. No one, I was told, could amount to anything who was not an outspoken critic of the U.S. and capitalism. Only Moscow-trained Communists were allowed in positions of authority.

       As I look back over the past 10 years, I now feel that my greatest mistake was in not denouncing the Communist take-over of Czechoslovakia of 1948. . . .

       More and more I am convinced that Russian Communism in its total disregard of truth, in its fanaticism, its intolerance and its resolute denial of God and religion is something utterly evil. (Henry A. Wallace (1952) on the Ruthless Nature and Utter Evil of Soviet Communism: Cold-War Era God-That-Failed Weblogging (typepad.com)

[Paul Rigby]

48 minutes ago, Michael Griffith said:

I think it is very sad and perplexing to see anyone, in 2023, minimizing the scale and horror of Soviet brutality and aggression, given all that we now know. 

 

And I find it appalling that anyone, in 2023, would seek to minimize the scale and horror of American brutality and aggression across the globe given all that we now know.

Fortunately, not all American conservatives are as blind as you to the massacres perpetrated by as policy by the US:

The Korean War Atrocities No One Wants to Talk About

For decades they covered up the U.S. massacre of civilians at No Gun Ri and elsewhere. This is why we never learn our lessons.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-korean-war-atrocities-no-one-wants-to-talk-about/

Jim Bovard

Jun 26, 2020 (12:01 AM)

June 25th was the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers fought bravely in that war, and almost 37,000 were killed. But the media is ignoring perhaps the war’s most important lesson: the U.S. government has almost unlimited sway to hide its own war crimes. 

During the Korean War, Americans were deluged with official pronouncements about how the U.S. military was taking all possible steps to protect innocent civilians. Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the U.S. was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that, “war crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.”

In 1999, forty-six years after the cease fire in Korea, the Associated Press exposed a 1950 massacre of Korean refugees at No Gun Ri. U.S. troops drove Koreans  out of their village and forced them to remain on a railroad embankment. Beginning on July 25, 1950, the refugees were strafed by U.S. planes and machine guns over the following three days. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were killed. The 1999 AP story was widely denounced by American politicians and some media outlets as a slander on American troops.

The Pentagon promised an exhaustive investigation. In January 2001, the Pentagon released a 300-page report purportedly proving that the No Gun Ri killings were merely “an unfortunate tragedy” caused by trigger-happy soldiers frightened by approaching refugees.

President Bill Clinton announced his “regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri.” In a January 2001 interview, Clinton was asked why he used “regret” instead of “apology.” He declared, “I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the government had participated in something that was terrible.” Clinton specified that there was no evidence of “wrongdoing high enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the government was responsible.”

In 2005, Sahr Conway-Lanz, a Harvard University doctoral student, discovered a letter in the National Archives from the U.S. ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, sent to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the day the No Gun Ri massacre commenced. Muccio summarized a new policy from a meeting between U.S. military and South Korean officials: “If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing  they will be shot.” The new policy was radioed to Army units around Korea on the morning the No Gun Ri massacre began.  The U.S. military feared that North Korean troops might be hiding amidst the refugees. The Pentagon initially claimed that its investigators never saw Muccio’s letter but it was in the specific research file used for its report.

Conway-Lanz’s 2006 book Collateral Damage quoted an official U.S. Navy history of the first six months of the Korean War stating that the policy of strafing civilians was “wholly defensible.” An official Army history noted: “Eventually, it was decided to shoot anyone who moved at night.” A report for the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge justified attacking civilians because the Army insisted that “groups of more than eight to ten people were to be considered troops, and were to be attacked.”

In 2007, the Army recited its original denial: “No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field.” But the Associated Press exposed more dirt from the U.S. archives: “More than a dozen documents—in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are ‘fair game,’ for example, and order them to ‘shoot all refugees coming across river’—were found by the AP in the  investigators’ own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army’s 300-page public report.”

A former Air Force Pilot told investigators that his plane and three others strafed refugees at the same time of the No Gun Ri massacre; the official  report claimed “all pilots interviewed … knew nothing about such orders.” Evidence also surfaced of other massacres like No Gun Ri. On September 1, 1950, the destroyer USS DeHaven, at the Army’s insistence, “fired on a seaside refugee encampment at Pohang, South Korea. Survivors say 100 to 200 people were killed.”

Slaughtering civilians en masse became routine procedure after the Chinese Army intervened in the Korean war in late 1950. U.S. Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur spoke of turning North Korean-held territory into a “desert.” The U.S. military eventually “expanded its definition of a military target to any structure that could shelter enemy troops or supplies.” In a scoring method that foreshadowed the Vietnam war body counts, Air Force press releases touted the “square footage” of “enemy-held buildings” that it flattened. General Curtis LeMay summarized the achievements: “We burned down every town in North Korea… and some in South Korea, too.” A million civilians may have been killed during the war, and a South Korean government Truth and Reconciliation Commission uncovered many previously unreported atrocities.

The Pentagon strategy on Korean War atrocities succeeded because it left truth to the historians, not the policymakers. The facts about No Gun Ri finally slipped out—ten presidencies later. Even more damaging, the Rules of Engagement for killing Korean civilians were covered up until after four more U.S. wars. If U.S. policy for slaying Korean refugees had been exposed during that war, it might have curtailed similar killings in Vietnam (many of which were not revealed until decades after the war).

Former congressman and decorated Korean War veteran Pete McCloskey warned, “The government will always lie about embarrassing matters.” The same shenanigans permeate other U.S. wars. The secrecy and deceit surrounding U.S. military interventions has had catastrophic consequences in this century. The Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify attacking Iraq in 2003, and it was not until 2016 that the U.S. government revealed documents exposing the Saudi government’s role in financing the hijackers (15 of 19 were Saudi citizens). The Pentagon covered up the vast majority of U.S. killings of Iraqi civilians until Bradley Manning and Wikileaks exposed them in 2010. There is likely reams of evidence of duplicity and intentional slaughter of civilians in U.S. government files on its endlessly confused and contradictory Syrian intervention.

When politicians or generals appear itching to pull the U.S. into another foreign war, remember that truth is routinely the first casualty. The blood of civilian victims of U.S. wars is the political version of disappearing ink. But the kinfolk and neighbors of those victims could pursue vengeance regardless of whether cover-ups con the American people.

James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Public Policy Hooligan. He is also a USA Today columnist. Follow him on Twitter @JimBovard.

Get off your high horse: America is to democracies what Jack the Ripper was to the care of fallen women. You extirpate them wherever you find them.

 

[Michael Griffith]

Here is an interesting, balanced article on Henry Wallace:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/14/uncommon-man

[W. Niederhut]

It's an interesting thread, and one that should provoke a lot of thought and critique about the course of the Cold War after WWII.

Wallace was naively idealistic in the 1940s about Stalinism, but we can also speculate about how the post-WWII course of Soviet imperialism may have differed in the absence of Anglo-American Cold War hostility toward the Soviet Union.

And let's be honest.  The Anglo-American Cold Warriors-- including Churchill and the Wall Street lawyers who established the CIA-- were mainly concerned about controlling and exploiting the natural resources of the Third World (including those of Iran, Indonesia, Africa, and Latin America, et.al.)

In the cases of Korea and Vietnam, did our military interventions against communism justify the eight million casualties we caused with our bombing campaigns, biological, and chemical weapons-- 3 million Koreans, 1 million Chinese, and 4 million Southeast Asians?

Would the Korean Peninsula, like Vietnam, have eventually evolved into a prosperous economy, like that of Red China, in the absence of American military intervention?

James DiEugenio has broached this subject in terms of the revised Domino Theory-- i.e., that people can now order Domino's Pizzas in Vietnam.

"Not a Pax Americana imposed by American arms"-- Walter Lippman's American Century-- but as Henry Wallace said, "a century of the common man."

 

[James DiEugenio]

I just read a little on Operation Unthinkable.

Churchill must have been in one of his drunken stupors when he thought this up. 

The Germans could not defeat Russia with about 100 divisions of the Wehrmacht.  The largest land invasion in history. Almost 3 million men.

And Churchill was going to do it with 80 divisions?

It is a good thing he was overruled by the general staff.  Because Russia would have owned all of Germany when the inevitable defeat came.

Edited January 13, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

I just read a little on Operation Unthinkable.

Churchill must have been in one of his drunken stupors when he thought this up. 

The Germans could not defeat Russia with about 100 divisions of the Wehrmacht.  The largest land invasion in history. Almost 3 million men.

And Churchill was going to do it with 80 divisions?

It is a good thing he was overruled by the general staff.  Because Russia would have owned all of Germany when the inevitable defeat came.

I read somewhere that Churchill also wanted to nuke the Soviet Union after WWII.  Can't recall the source.

[James DiEugenio]

Are you serious?  🤮

 

I think this is why that when FDR died, Stalin thought Churchill might have been in on it.

[W. Niederhut]

3 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Are you serious?  🤮

 

I think this is why that when FDR died, Stalin thought Churchill might have been in on it.

 

Winston Churchill discussed ordering nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union in 1951 | Daily Mail Online