Liars (31 page)

Edward M. House, a leading adviser to Woodrow Wilson, touted Mussolini as a “beneficent dictator,” proclaiming, “Italy has such a government now functioning under
the able and courageous Mussolini.” And one of Franklin Roosevelt's prized advisers, Rexford Guy Tugwell, praised Italian fascism as “the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating
piece of social machinery I've ever seen.”

Perhaps no vicious authoritarian received more elite progressive praise than “Uncle Joe” Stalin, the iron-fisted thug and accomplished con artist who charmed dim-witted Westerners while murdering his opponents in the Soviet Union and otherwise running the Russian economy into the ground.

Franklin Roosevelt's own vice president, Henry Wallace, who would have moved into the Oval Office had he not been replaced on a whim by Harry S. Truman in 1944, was one of the most notorious Soviet apologists in American history. “Even at his most murderous, as with the purge trials of the 1930s,” one Wallace chronicler reported, “Stalin was defended by Wallace, who swallowed the party line that the dictator's execution of hundreds of people was a necessary anti-fascist
action against a Hitler-backed fifth column.”

There was also the infamous Walter Duranty, Moscow bureau chief for the
New York Times
, who won a Pulitzer Prize for parroting Stalinist propaganda. In one of his (many) notorious “reports” from the Soviet Union, Duranty denied the deaths of thousands of Soviet
citizens resulting from Stalin-imposed starvations: “There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be,”
he wrote in the
Times
on November 15, 1931. When other reporters began spreading the news of the famine, Duranty was asked what he'd write. He responded: “Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the
entire matter is exaggerated.” Meanwhile, peasants in Ukraine, the
Weekly Standard
reported, “were
dying at a rate of 25,000 a day.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, a correspondent and contemporary of Duranty's, labeled him “the greatest liar of any journalist
I have met in fifty years of journalism.” Muggeridge went on to summarize the thinking of progressives of the day—the fools who were intent on romanticizing communism and ignoring obvious signs of its evil:

“Wise old
[
George Bernard
]
Shaw, high-minded old
[
Henri
]
Barbusse, the venerable
[
Sidney and Beatrice
]
Webbs,
[
André
]
Gide the pure in heart and
[
Pablo
]
Picasso the impure, down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, driveling dons and very special correspondents like Duranty, all resolved, come what might, to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook nothing, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thorough-going, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth could be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good liberal causes
to which they had dedicated their lives.

In 2003, the
New York Times
decided to “investigate” whether Duranty's Pulitzer Prize should be revoked. Did it rescind the award and apologize to the country? Of course not. The
Times
did what progressives always do:
let the lies stand.

A
t the time of this writing, more than a hundred years since the progressive movement first took root in America (though, as we've seen, its roots elsewhere go far deeper), Barack Obama—the progressive heir to men such as Woodrow and Teddy and Franklin and Lyndon—is preparing to leave office, having successfully presided over the “fundamental” transformation of America that he had long promised.

Fighting to replace Obama is Hillary Clinton, a self-proclaimed progressive, and the Republicans determined to stop her.

Or are they?

Ah, yes, the Republicans. The party that once stood for self-reliance and independence has been invaded and perverted by faux-conservatives—and even some legitimate progressives—who don't mind expanding government as long as their own power and perks are preserved. It's getting harder and harder (and, in some cases, impossible) to tell the political parties apart.

The Republican Party is, however, still home to a few staunch constitutionalists, such as Senator Ted Cruz, who understand that our
founding documents serve as a road map. Throughout history, these documents have allowed us to course-correct ourselves and to be sure that despite the inevitable gyrations, we ultimately stand on the side of freedom.

It's also home to a few staunch authoritarians, such as Donald Trump, who has used fear and anger to transfix legions of otherwise good and faithful conservatives. He has evinced this in the bullying tone of his rhetoric, the bullying nature of his “policies” (if they can be called that), and the bullying tactics employed by his campaign.

Trump's goal is not to shrink government back to a more constitutionally appropriate size; he would much prefer to preside over a massive government as though he were an all-powerful CEO of a massive corporation. He doesn't want to reduce government, he just wants to run it more efficiently.

Trump, a defender of the human-extinction platform of
Planned Parenthood, a
contributor to the Clintons, Jimmy Carter, and
even Walter Mondale, is a Trojan horse from the progressive movement being rolled into the GOP.

How did it come to this? Who could have seen the day coming when America would be on the precipice of a complete progressive revolution?

At least one man did. He was a Harvard-educated economist who was active in progressive politics from the Wilson administration all the way to Johnson's Great Society. He was one of the most important political thinkers most people have probably never heard of.

You've already heard his name earlier in this book: Stuart Chase.

Boston

Autumn 1911

A gust of wind sent a chill through the already-crisp fall air, rustling the almost barren trees in Copley Square. The piles of leaves that had already fallen were gathered up by the sharp winds and swirled
around the feet of those who found themselves walking through this busy Boston hub—including one wiry young man who was striding across the Square toward the Boston Public Library.

Stuart Chase walked with his shoulders hunched, not only against the cold but seemingly weighed down by the problems that plagued his mind. On the surface, everything appeared to be going well for him. He was twenty-two, almost twenty-three, and had already achieved a lot for himself.

Chase had been educated at fine schools,
including MIT (his father's alma matter) and Harvard, from which he had graduated just a year before. He had a decent job working at his father's accounting firm, but something inside Chase hungered for more than debits, credits, and dusty old ledgers.

Here was a man who was coming of age at a heady time. And he knew it. He felt a similar enthusiasm for this new era among his contemporaries at Harvard, such as progressive journalist Walter Lippmann and Communist writer John Reed.
ⁱ
The three schoolmates were all active in socialist groups at Harvard, such as the
Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS), which was founded in New York City in 1905 with the “
influence and guidance” of Fabian socialists.

There was a movement growing that sought not just to solve the social problems of the age but also to advance society to ensure that these problems would never reoccur. Young Chase imbibed books like
Progress and Poverty
that had predicted a revolution. He worried deeply that the world would go down the wrong path during the coming change in the new twentieth century and that humanity would need a strong hand to push it onto the right path. Stirring in Chase was the feeling that he had
to do something about it.

The winds of change, as much as the cold Boston breeze, propelled
him as he crossed Dartmouth Street and scurried up the library steps. He paused before entering the library and looked at the inscription above the entrance:
BUILT BY THE PEOPLE AND DEDICATED TO THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING.

Built by the people.

Chase remembered from Boston lore that architect Charles McKim had called his Renaissance Revival masterpiece a “palace of the people.” Did “the people” appreciate it? he wondered. Moreover, could “the people” to whom this great edifice was dedicated ever be trusted to take their society down the right path?

He entered the library and breathed a little easier. This was where he felt most at home, a place he went to get away from the drudgery of accounting work and to educate himself about the great problems of the age.

Chase's footsteps echoed off the rounded ceiling of Bates Hall, whose high windows let in generous, bright sunlight for the readers at the long tables below, as he made his way to his inner sanctum: the economics section. There, among the tomes by men who sought to define the massive system of capital in which his father's accounting business was a mere cog, Chase sat down at a secluded table, pulled out a pen and some paper, and began to write.

So many are the roads and lanes and byways that branch from this open portal. I look back and see the straight, calm thoroughfare that has led me here. I look forward and stand dazed and blinded before the myriad ways that lead to ultimate darkness or light. Now I must choose my own path . . . from among the many and follow it in all faith and trust until experience bids me seek another. The world always turns aside to let one pass who
knows where they are going.

Chase knew exactly where he was going—and how the world would turn aside to let progressives like him lead it.

♣

The passage by Chase may
read at first as if written by a young man who felt he was destined for great things, but upon closer inspection, it's easy to see evidence of something deeper: fear, specifically fear of the unknown. Chase seemed positively overwhelmed by all “the roads and lanes and byways” before him, especially in contrast to the “straight, calm thoroughfare” that was his relatively privileged upbringing. Far from confident about the path he would take, he was “dazed and blinded” and feared making the wrong choice between the “ultimate darkness or light.” Chase realized that not only did
he
have to make the right choice between “ultimate darkness or light,” but all of mankind would have to make that choice as well.

This was a choice that could not be left up to chance. He realized that in order to conquer this fear of the unknown, to make sure that everyone was not “dazed and blinded,” he had to get involved. He had to help
make
the world turn aside.

As a result, Chase threw himself into progressive causes. By 1917, a profile in the journal of the Co-operative League of America noted that he was “active in various progressive movements,” including the Fabian Club of Boston and the Massachusetts Single Tax League. The profile also revealed that he was “connected as an officer with the Massachusetts Birth Control League.” (“Birth control” at that time was, of course,
a thin veneer for eugenics.)

With the help of his father, Chase joined the administration of progressive hero Woodrow Wilson, serving as an investigator
with the Federal Trade Commission. His beat was the Chicago meatpacking industry, a favorite target of progressives ever since Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle
had been published beginning in 1905. Chase was subsequently fired after members of the U.S. Senate discovered he had organized socialist activities while on government business investigating meatpackers in Chicago. They denounced him as a
“Red
accountant” who had
“inflated” government data to make the industry look bad.

Chase was already learning that the ends justified the means, even when those means were illegal.

After losing his position in the Wilson administration, Chase dabbled in progressive circles and
wrote books on economics, but he was mostly adrift until the summer of 1927, when he took a trip along with other economists as part of the “
First American Trade Union Delegation” to the Soviet Union. Chase, with his lifelong socialist sympathies, must have jumped at the chance to see the grand socialist experiment up close. By that time, Lenin and Trotsky were both gone and Stalin was in charge, but that hardly mattered.

Apparently, Stalin did not disappoint. Historian Amity Shlaes recounts that despite only meeting with the Soviet dictator for six hours, the American delegation was “
bowled over.” It was part of a general fascination with totalitarian regimes among American progressive thinkers at the time. Shlaes explains that these scholars would travel abroad, and then “they come back and you see them . . . implementing things they learned from fascist Italy or from
the world of Stalin.” Shlaes notes: “The influence of these European entities from Russia to Italy was not parenthetical.” As they advanced in their careers, “these people were not working for Moscow, but they were
influenced by Moscow.”

In 1931, Chase made the acquaintance of a man whose destiny would intertwine with his own: Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the time they met, Roosevelt was serving as governor of New York, while Chase had yet another book coming out that argued for greater government intervention in the private sector and more central economic planning (to be supported, of course, by
increased federal spending). It was a look toward the future, and the book ended with Chase putting a question to his readers: “Why should Russians have all the fun
remaking a world?”