A land with fifty-two square feet of flooring as the space quota for the individual citizens of crowded cities and with turbulent community kitchens where vigilant housewives tie down the lids of their cooking-utensils so that venomous competitors cannot use them as cuspidors, is not a paradise, but a paradox. If this land, where the proportion of social diseases is higher than in any other civilized country, be Utopia; if this country, where multi-divorced women change their husbands with the seasons, where the lowest level of marriage morals in modern history has been reached, — if this be the ideal, then the American proletariat must be excused when it exclaims: "Give us our bourgeoisie!" Yet these conditions were recorded by eye-witnesses at the height of Communism's triumph in U.S.S.R., Soviet Russia, press-agented by propaganda and publicized by preachers, as it tried to strangle conventional matrimony.
It may be objected that the Russian upheaval strictly concerns the Russians and that we are separated from Moscow and Leningrad by too much land and water to have Soviet influences leave their mark on our political philosophies. But the world of this new age is not so large that it permits social explosions to blast away the foundations of law and order in Europe without having the tremors reverberate on this side of the Atlantic. Besides, if this convulsion were restricted to the Russians, the hazards of contagion might not be alarming; but the exaltation of the Red banner in China, the communist uprising in Spain, the startling growth of radicalism in France, the revolutionary advance in Mexico, — and now the 1939 German-Russian alliance with the Communist conquests of vast areas in Poland show that in this age of world-consciousness movements of such tremendous proportions cannot be boxed behind the barriers of national boundaries.
On September 9, 1928, Pravda, official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, admitted: "The world-wide nature of our program is not mere talk, but an all-embracing and blood-soaked reality. It cannot be otherwise.... Our ultimate aim is world Communism; our fighting preparations are for world revolution, for the conquest of power on a world-wide scale, and for the establishment of a world proletarian dictatorship. Therefore the program of the Communist Internationale is obligatory on all its sections."
These statements, although denied by some American radicals, are not overdrawn. The Congressional committee investigating un-American activities, before it adjourned its first session on July 12, 1934, heard testimony to the effect that in December, 1933, the Third Internationale in, Moscow adopted resolutions favoring "the revolutionary way out, the overthrow of capitalism throughout the world." A month later, January, 1934, the executive committee of the Communist Party in the United States, concurring in the purpose of this resolution, reprinted it verbatim. And the Communist Party, in a recent convention, adopted a parallel resolution. — All this in the face of the pledge that no propaganda would be carried on in our country given by the Soviet authorities to President Roosevelt as a condition of American recognition!
How American Communists want to capture the United States is openly disclosed in these undisguised threats taken from Why Communism by M. J. Olgin, head of the Jewish Bureau of the Communist Party in the United States, quoted from Volume 1 of the Dies Committee Report (p. 302):
"We Communists do not say to the workers that they have to begin the civil war today or tomorrow. We say that the civil war is the inevitable outcome of long and arduous struggles against the capitalists and their state and that these struggles must be made the every-day practice of the working classes.... The overthrow of the state power, and with it the capitalist system, grows out of the every-day struggles of the workers. One is historically inseparable from the other....
"There comes a time when large sections of the population say that this simply cannot go on. The Government seems to be entirely unable to cope with the political and social difficulties. The belief of the population in the wisdom and all-powerfulness of the 'men higher up' is shaken. The confidence of the masses in their own strength is growing apace. The struggles of the masses meanwhile become broader and deeper.... The clearer the class-consciousness of the workers, the more steeled they are in fighting, the better the revolutionary leadership they have developed, the more capable are they to deal the final blows.... A time comes when there is a demoralization above, a growing revolt below, the morale of the army is also undermined. There are actual insurrections; the army wavers. Panic seizes the rulers. A general uprising begins.
"Workers stop work, many of them seize arms by attacking arsenals. Many had armed themselves before.... Street fights become frequent. Under the leadership of the Communist Party the workers organize revolutionary committees to be in command of the uprising. There are battles in the principal cities. Barricades are built and defended. The workers fighting have a decisive influence with the soldiers. Army units begin to join the revolutionary fighters.... Armed workers and soldiers and marines besiege the principal governmental offices, invade the residence of the President and his Cabinet members, arrest them, declare the old régime abolished, and establish their own power."
We have gages for the numerical strength developed by this agitation in our country. The Congressional Committee Investigating Communist Activities, Hamilton Fish, Jr., chairman, reported to the House of Representatives on January 17, 1932, that, while it could find only 12,000 Communists who regularly paid dues to their organizations, evidence shows that there are from 500,000 to 600,000 communist workers and sympathizers within the United States, including several hundred thousand under voting age in the youth movement. The report claims: "A conservative estimate in New York City alone, including the Young Communist League and the Young Pioneers, would not be far from 100,000." If the Fish Committee’s 1932 figure of 12,000 Communists in good standing is correct, then American Communists have experienced more than a 100 percent increase within two years; for at the 1934 national convention Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party in the United States, declared that the number of active members had increased to 24,500. He admitted that there were "500,000 Communists in other organizations occasionally under communistic leadership, although not directly affiliated."
The increase in the next two years, from 1934 to 1936, was even greater and brought the total of the enrolled members paying dues up to 40,000. The most startling growth, however, was yet to come; for in April, 1939, an unprecedented figure for the Communist Party’s paying members had been reached — 75,000! Remember that within seven years the number of officially enrolled Communists has increased over 500 per cent!
It must not be forgotten that there are relatively few Republicans and Democrats who make financial contributions to their party, and that the Kerensky government was overthrown by revolutionists whose number was small when compared with the strength developed by the Communist Party in the United States today. There are now several times as many people affiliated with the Communist Party and its allied movements in our country as in Russia before the bloody communist rebellion began its butchery.
Testifying on August 16, 1938, before the Dies Committee on the Investigation of un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, Walter S. Steele of the National Republic claimed on the basis of extended studies that the un-American forces in the United States (and he referred particularly to Communism) "have attained a membership and direction of over 6,500,000." Mr. Steele asserted: "We will show you that the 75,000 composing the members of the Communist Party ... are but a small portion of all the Communist forces in the United States and that they have a direct following and influence of over 800,000 in the New York district alone."
Evidence submitted to the Dies Committee lists more than fifty international Communist organizations in foreign countries that have sections in America. While Congress was told in 1934 that Communism in the United States was divided into twenty-eight districts, in 1938 the number had grown to thirty-five because of increase in membership. Each of these thirty-five districts is divided into sub-districts, sections, as they are called. For instance, New York City has eighteen Communist Party sections.
In their study World Revolutionary Propaganda, Harold D. Lasswell and Dorothy Blumenstock present a detailed picture of radical activity in Chicago. We learn, for example, that in addition to regular public meetings Communists organized, or participated in, 2,088 Chicago mass demonstrations during the five years from 1929 to 1934. Expenses of the party in that city sky-rocketed from $15,500 in 1930 to $64,200 in 1934. In dollars per member, Chicago Communists contributed on the average $20.36 in 1930 and $26.96 in 1934.
Much of the strength developed by these radical forces comes from groups organized for communistic aims, although not integral parts of the Communist Party. The Dies Committee Report (Vol. 1, p. 328) lists by name 640 national organizations which, it is claimed, "are affiliated, allied with, or carry, some phases of Communist Party line in the United States or are cooperating in various ways with the movement as a whole.” These 640 are organizations operating among the employed and unemployed, sport groups, cultural groups, legal aid movements, and atheist organizations. They seek to influence particularly the laboring men, the foreign-born, the Chinese, the Filipinos, the Jews, the Negroes, the newspaper workers, war veterans, sailors, farmers, radio workers, stockyard workers, WPA groups, teachers, and others considered of vital importance for the social revolution. They direct their efforts especially toward the stage, the dance, circulating-libraries, music, gymnastics, soccer, and other recreation.
Radicals avidly read the Daily Worker, the official organ of the party, which features the activities of the Communist Internationale and encourages the labor uprisings in coal-mining areas, textile districts, and other fields of industry. This New York City daily claims in soliciting advertising accounts that "through the organization it influences it covers 800,000 industrial workers in the metropolitan area." It is sold on more than 4,000 news-stands in Greater New York. Altogether, according to the Dies Committee Report (p. 345):
"There are published in the United States over 600 regular Communist and pro-Communist line publications, 482 or more in the English language and approximately 100 in foreign languages. In addition, some 100 regularly issued publications are printed in English as well as in other languages in Russia and sent to the Communist centers in the United States for general distribution.... Add to these the millions of copies of books and pamphlets published and circulated by the Reds in the United States, to say nothing of the millions of agitational handbills, and you may have at least a vague idea of the world's largest monopolized press and propaganda mill, directed at the undermining of American institutions and ideals in the hope that a ‘Soviet America' may some day be shackled upon our people.”
At its 1938 convention the Communist Party of the United States resolved to distribute 15,000,000 pieces of literature in our country during that year.
Large editions of Stalin's recent book on Lenin and Bolshevism were sold in the United States, chiefly through party book-shops. These distributing agencies, found in all principal cities, cooperate with publishing houses owned and operated by communist forces. A vivid picture of the restless publication activity on the part of Communists is portrayed in Propaganda Analysis for March, 1939 (quoted by permission of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Inc.): "Pamphlets, books, newspapers, magazines, and leaflets on Communism pour from the presses by the hundreds, reaching perhaps millions. Last year, with the newspaper business so bad that 29 papers were forced to shut down, the Communist Party nevertheless was able to launch two new dailies. There are communist magazines for children, like the Young Pioneer, communist books, for children, like Fairy Tales for Workers’ Children, translated from the German of Hermina zur Muhlen; there are communist magazines for women, communist magazines on health, communist dailies, weeklies, and monthlies in two dozen foreign languages, including Chinese. In hundreds of factories, offices, and shops Communists surreptitiously issue little printed, mimeographed, or multigraphed papers, which deal primarily with unionization, wages, and hours, and what the boss did last week that was so reprehensible, — papers like the Educational Vanguard, published by the Communists at Columbia University; New Times, published by the Communists on the New York Times; High Time, published. by the Communists on Time, Fortune and Life.”
Propaganda activity, glorifying the achievements of Communism, is developed within the National Guard, the Army and Navy of the United States, relief agencies, and veterans' organizations — all with the avowed purpose of stimulating revolt against law and order, creating class hatred, and alienating American sailors and soldiers from our system of government. Airplanes have scattered inflammatory appeals over Army corps camps. Navy yard projects have been sabotaged.
The extent to which Communists were able to secure some of the high positions in labor unions, notably the CIO, was emphasized before the Dies Committee. That group of investigators was told that the Communist Party "failed to secure a stronghold in the American trade-union movement until the CIO was organized. Since then the Communist Party has become a definite factor in the American labor movement.... The industrial and political program of the CIO has the hearty endorsement of the Communist Party.... Violent industrial disturbances in connection with the automobile and the steel strike were fostered by Communist leaders and members.... Communists are presidents or other prominent officers of CIO organizations.... Some 280 organizers in CIO unions, under salary, are members of the Communist Party." (Vol. 1, pp. 95, 96.) "The Communist Party has acquired more power in the last three years — a thousand fold compared with what it had until it was able to use the CIO.” (Vol. 1, P. 143.)
One of the outstanding achievements of Communist agitation during recent years has been the systematic capture of pivotal positions in the Federal Government. On September 26, 1939, Chairman Dies declared in an Associate Press dispatch that "the Roosevelt administration had asked the Justice Department to begin ‘purging' about 2,850 ‘known Communists' who hold key government positions." Still people persist in maintaining that Communism is not a menace, when admittedly almost 3,000 of its adherents and agitators can secure strategic positions in the administration of the Government!
Included in the 640 communistically inclined organizations are sixty-two youth movements. In 1936 the Young Communist League counted about 10,000 members. By April, 1939, its roster had increased to 20,000.
Until recently the subversive youth activities were restricted to the twin socialistic organizations, the League for Industrial Democracy and the Young People's Socialists' League, and to two communist groups, the National Student League and the Young Communist League. After the breakdown in 1929 the lean years following offered a strong impetus to radical agitation among the youth. In 1934 the first American Youth Congress (AYC) was captured by Norman Thomas and Earl Browder with such brilliant strategy that the American Youth Communist League gleefully reported this incident to the Young Communist Internationale at Moscow in 1935. Once in control of the AYC, the communist powers allegedly influenced Senator Lundeen to introduce a bill asking for $500,000,000 annually (in the opinion of experts it would demand no less than $3,500,000,000 every year), from which young people would be paid fifteen dollars a week for nominal work. Affiliated at present with the AYC are the Young Communist League, the Youth Section of the American League for Peace and Democracy, the Youth Division of the International Workers' Order, the Youth Division of the National Negro Congress, the Workers' Alliance (these five organizations are also officially affiliated with the Communist Party), the American Student Union (controlled by Communists and Socialists), the Young People's Socialist League (a Socialist Party affiliate), the National Student Federation, and the YWCA National Industrial Council. The last two are the only non-radical bodies in the AYC. But the AYC has a sister organization, the ASU, the American Student Union, organized in 1935 for the purpose of fighting Fascism and war. Originally Socialist, it has constantly turned farther to the Left.
Hundreds of Communist schools, vital to the propaganda of the movement, are conducted throughout the United States, where young Reds are instructed in the revolutionary ideals. The outstanding Communist institute in the United States is the Workers' School, New York City. This is the intellectual headquarters not only for many schools in Greater New York but also for scores of other strategically located training-grounds. The claim that 10,000 students of the Soviet system are enrolled in these classes is probably not exaggerated, because the Philadelphia school alone lists ^approximately one thousand students." Particularly prominent in the Red educational program are the Communist camps in our country, often conducted under the auspices of the Parent and Children's Camp Association, Inc.
Christianity Today, November, 1931, reports: “Within fifty miles of Boston, Massachusetts, thirty-two Soviet Sunday schools function, where children are instructed in atheism. In Pittsburgh a Soviet Sunday school, with an average attendance of 700, is said to meet every Sunday. In these gatherings the children are taught to hate God, Christ, and the Bible — openly." Thousands of Red song-books are circulated, burlesquing such hymns as “Onward, Christian Soldiers." “Give us one generation of small children to train to manhood and womanhood, and we will set up the Bolshevist form of the Soviet government." This claim of Mrs. Marion E. Sproul, a Boston school-teacher, has become more than a slogan for American Communists. It is admittedly their avowed purpose.
"America will be communistic by 1962." Authority for this radical and dated prophecy is Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, formerly dean of Brown University and president of Amherst College. Speaking before the Rhode Island Philosophical Society, he predicted that this change will come "because we want it and not because of violence." Looking to American colleges as the mainspring for radical currents, Dr. Meiklejohn found "enough ardent Communists on every college faculty to present this minority point of view to the students." Now, if Dr. Meiklejohn were an irresponsible radical, we might laugh off this prediction as an alarmist exaggeration. But when we stop to think that he has received honorary degrees from Amherst, Williams, Mount Holyoke, Brown, Allegheny, Vermont, and California, we will not minimize his pronouncements.
Communism does enjoy academic support at the universities of Chicago, Wisconsin, Washington, California, Harvard, Columbia, and at other colleges. In these schools the support is not limited to a few left-wing students. The former president of Wisconsin University is quoted as insisting: "I have said, and still say, a student has as much right to be a Communist as he has to be a Presbyterian or a Baptist." Reporting on this tolerance, the Brunette Committee, investigating communistic activities at State educational institutions, told the Wisconsin Senate (September 21, 1935): "Your Committee found that for several years past the university was being advertised extensively as an ultraliberal institution, in which communistic teachings were encouraged and where avowed Communists were allowed to spread their doctrines on the campus with the permission and connivance of the administration of the university. Your Committee investigated these reports and found that they were true to the extent that they were a matter of common knowledge. Meetings of local chapters of national and international communistic societies were held in university halls.... That it [the alleged sufferance of communistic influences] was not a true picture of the great mass of the professors, instructors, and students who carried on in spite of un-American influences speaks volumes for the good sense and patriotism of the people of this State."
Dr. William F. Russell, dean of Columbia Teachers' College, (according to a United Press dispatch of February 19, 1939) told a Philadelphia audience that "students of Columbia are being paid $3.00 a day by Moscow to attend school and to agitate.... They have convinced many students that they must join a union for the protection of their interests, and in the union they are inculcated with communistic propaganda."
On October 10, 1935, Langston Hughes appeared as a speaker at a University of Minnesota convocation exercise. Hughes, reputedly an atheist and an acknowledged Communist, is a Negro poet whose poems are now published by the International Workers’ Order, Inc. His lines, entitled Good-by, Christ, and another poem, Christ in Alabama, are the depth of blasphemy. His revolutionary verses Good Morning, Revolution are ultra-Red. Within two and a half years, in addition to Hughes, the University of Minnesota students heard, in convocation speeches and otherwise. Earl Browder, Norman Thomas, and Sherman Dryer, all radicals.
Harry Elmer Barnes, radical, atheistic professor at Smith College, told a New York audience: "A hundred years from now Communism may be regarded as more important as a secular religion than as a political and economic force. Perhaps Russia is several jumps ahead of such humanists as Holmes, Potter, and myself. Communism is the great secular religion, with Marx instead of Jahweh (Jehovah), Lenin in place of Jesus, Trotzky in place of St. Paul, and Stalin in place of St. Peter." (New York Herald-Tribune, March 17, 1930.)
The radical spirit has invaded even our high schools. School authorities in Oklahoma City, who investigated rumors alleging the existence of a secret cult in local high schools and adjacent colleges, revealed some startling facts. They discovered in December, 1938, that two high-school students, eighteen and nineteen years old, were leaders, "commissars," of the secret society, which has enrolled twenty-four boys and nine girls. The group had a definitely formulated platform with this pronouncement on sex and marriage: "We talk sex freely in our mixed group. We believe in more sex education and equality for both sexes. We would change the marriage laws to make it easier to get married and easier to separate." Significantly, both "commissars" were known to the police in other respects. They had previously been arrested when it was found that the car in which they were riding contained two high-powered rifles, two automatic pistols, and burglar tools. However, they were released without any formal charge. One of them was arrested and fined two months later on a charge of larceny. The other "commissar" lives with his mother, since his parents are separated. They both boast: "Science has proved much of the Bible to be false and its teachings untenable. We are not going to be stopped by the school board or our paterts, because we know we are right." This is no schoolboy prank; for the local authorities have regarded it as so serious that they have issued special appeals. Nor is Oklahoma City an isolated spot in this respect. The same spirit has cropped out in various places throughout the country.
The storm troops of American Sovietism are recruited from the radical clergy. Earl Browder, communist leader, writes: "You may be interested in knowing that we have preachers, preachers active in churches, who are members of the Communist Party. There are churches in the United States where the preachers preach Communism from their pulpits." (Quoted in Isms, p. 192.)
The Christian Century comments editorially: "With a swiftness that few outsiders have yet suspected huge sections of American Protestantism, under the spur of present economic conditions, are shifting to the left. More radical talk and talk more radical is to be heard this summer in gatherings under church auspices than in the councils of any other organizations save only the professedly radical groups."
The Christian Register of October 8, 1931, under the editorial caption "Ministers Russian Sympathizers," glories in this clerical support: "No one who studies the religious press steadily and carefully can doubt that American Protestantism has gone over in its sympathy to the Russian experiment and the basic idea of the Russian philosophy.... Let us thank the Protestant press for the change and the spoken word of the ministers in the pulpits and in all sorts of gatherings."
The zeal with which the formidable array of ministerial protagonists have endorsed the externals of Socialism may be epitomized in the utterances of John Haynes Holmes, pastor of the Community Church in New York City, who reached the clerical climax in the assertion (St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 8, 1929): "While the Communists have been described as the arch-destroyers of civilization, I will wager my life that, when one hundred years have passed and competent historians have read the records of these men, they will say that they were the greatest group of statesmen that have ever appeared since the group that organized the United States of America."
Those who cannot discern the "blessings" of Communism should not be charged with poor sportsmanship if they are not disposed to accept Mr. Holmes's wager. In the twenty-first century, of which he prophesies, when the sins of the Red father have been visited on the children of the third and fourth generations, these Soviet atrocities will be cursed by millions; for the foundation of the whole system is built on moldy piles, the infidel disregard of divine ordinances. In no part of its entire revolutionary doctrine is this more evident than in the official attitudes toward marriage.
Here Communism appears in its close relation to radical Socialism. Many otherwise well-informed people believe that there is a sharp cleavage between Socialism and Communism. For them the Socialist is a more or less dreamy, humanitarian idealist who entertains vague notions about the distribution of wealth, while the Communist is an uncouth destructionist, next in kin to the Anarchist and the Nihilist. In reality, however, Socialism is the inevitable stepping-stone to Communism, and the marriage and the social laws of Soviet Russia are of course nothing but the application of Marxian principles. Hepworth Dixon, who has spent considerable time in the study of the communistic endeavor, admits: "That you cannot have Socialism without introducing Communism is the teaching of all experience, whether the trials have been made on a large scale or a small scale, in the Old World or in the New." (Spiritual Wives, Vol. II, p. 209.) Labor Age (May, 1931, p. 2), a Socialist organ of our country, brings this unabashed comment under an article entitled "Defending the Soviet Union": "It is surprising that some who call themselves Socialists should be filled with buts and its and ands in connection with the Soviet Union. They are affronted because ‘the social revolution’ did not come in according to a prescribed plan. It should have been led by a lawyer in a cut-away coat, full of ballots and legalisms. Instead it came from the workers and the soldiers, under the sickle and hammer.... The American workers must be prepared for the attempt at armed conflict.... It is up to the radicals to keep the workers on their toes against any disturbance of the Soviet Union by capitalist attacks." In a similar strain Miss Ethel Mannin, British novelist, writing in the New Leader of February 5, 1932, declares: "As a Marxian Socialist I believe in the inevitability of an economic revolution. But I also believe that, if a bloody revolution were forced upon us of social necessity, as it was forced upon Russia in the grip of the Czarist régime, the bulk of left-wing Socialists, whether they call themselves Communists or not, would not hesitate to fight in the most literal sense of the term." — In the light of these utterances we recognize that Communism and radical Socialism are separated by the technicality of different names. The dictum of Lenin, high priest of Red ruin, remains: "That which is generally called Socialism is termed by Marx the first or lower phase of communistic society."
Both radical Socialism and Communism regard matrimony as a purely human institution, an evil outgrowth of the private-property system. In primitive ages woman, we are told, was the common possession of all men. Those were the days of true Communism. But when the specter of private property intruded its forbidding form into this "paradise,” capitalism demanded some form of marriage. The stronger the emphasis on personal ownership became, the more restrictive the laws and customs of marriage. With this theory, Socialism and Communism are definitely committed to the dissolution of the bourgeois family and the elimination of all moral questions in marital relations. Marriage laws are capitalistic; women are enslaved by matrimony; men are arbitrarily restricted by its bonds. Emancipation must come.
These thoughts are voiced in almost endless repetition in the radical literature. The well-known Socialist Davidson (Gospel of the Poor, p. 149) writes: “Marriage as we know it is only one of the many unwholesome fungi that grow out of the reeking, rotting corpus of private property.” E. Belford Bax asserts: "There are few points on which the advanced radical and Socialist are more completely in accord than in their theoretical hostility to the modem legal monogamic marriage.” (Outlook for the New Standpoint p. 151.) M. Gabriel Deville, prominent French Socialist, explains: "Marriage is a regulation of property, a business contract before being a union of persons, and its utility grows out of the economic structure of a society which is based upon individual appropriation. By giving guarantees to the legitimate children and insuring to them the paternal capital, it perpetuates the domination of the caste and monopolizes the productive forces.... When property is transformed, and only after that transformation, marriage will lose its reason for existence, and boys and girls may then freely and without fear of censure listen to the wants and promptings of their nature.” (Quoted by Lecky in Democracy and Liberty, Vol. II, p. 348 f.) Oscar Wilde maintained ("The Fall of Man under Socialism,” in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1891): "Socialism annihilates the family life; for instance, with the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the program.” Prof.Karl Pearson prophesies: "Because we hold Socialism will ultimately survive as the only tenable moral code, we are convinced that our present marriage customs and present marital law alike must soon collapse. Women must have economic independence." August Bebel, oracle of Socialism, wrote a prodigious volume, entitled in its English translation Woman under Socialism, in which he asks (p. 344 f.): "If a Goethe and a George Sand — to take these two from the many who have acted and are acting like them — live according to the inclination of their hearts, ... why condemn in others that which done by a Goethe or a George Sand becomes the subject of ecstatic admiration?" He champions the free-love marriage, the easy divorce, and the complete emancipation of woman from all obligations to the home. He challenges: "Man and woman being animals, can we talk of matrimony or indissoluble bonds? Plainly, no. The woman remains always free, as the man remains always free."
Similar tendencies among American Socialists are evident in their utterances. Dr. Margaret Daniels, member of the Students’ Council of the National Woman’s Party and of the Inez Milholland Industrial Committee, addressing a Mid-Western conference of her party in Detroit, declared: "Banish the home altogether and do away with legal marriage, and both women and men would be free to pursue their careers. The responsibility of a home, the support of a wife and children, are a great burden on a man. This idea of protection for women is a handicap; a woman should be a human being first, free and independent." When asked what would become of the children. Dr. Daniels replied: "Oh, the state would take care of them. You see all women are not natural mothers. Motherhood today is thrust on many women who positively hate their children. The women who are natural mothers should be the progenitors of the race, and the state should support them and their children during the years when the children require a mothers care. A society in which men and women could mate freely and in which women would be economically independent would be healthy." All these scurrilous libels of holy matrimony are repeating the dicta of their masters voice, the verdict of Karl Marx in his communistic Manifesto (1848). In this basic epitome of radicalism Marx indicts "the bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parent and child," as "disgusting" and exclaims: "Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. The bourgeois family will vanish ... with the vanishing of capital."
If this were merely loathsome theory, it could be dismissed as just another sordid, impracticable hypothesis. But we have actual evidence that theory has developed into practice. In Ming, The Morality of Modern Socialism, a section of chapter 3 bears the title "Free Love Actually in Practice," and it shows in incontestable presentation the reign of lust which this radicalism provokes. Typical is the free-love union of Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor with Edward Aveling. Thrown together through cooperative work in behalf of atheism and Socialism, they soon lived together, although Aveling was a married man. When his legal wife died, he discarded Marx's daughter, and Eleanor committed suicide. In 1906, when the Russian Socialist Maxim Gorky sought refuge on our hospitable shores, he was accompanied by Madame Andreiva, who was not his legal wife. This was too much for the better society of our country, and Gorky and his paramour were ostracized. But a kindred spirit, protesting against this discrimination, demanded indignantly in the Toledo Socialist: "Wherein lay Maxim Gorky's fault? What is the height and front of this most serious offending? It is not far to seek. By placing a woman not his legally wedded wife in an accredited position, acknowledging her before the world as his intimate and beloved, he struck an unforgivable blow at that most sacred and most dismal of human relations, the bourgeois marriage.”
The most drastic demonstration of communistic antagonism toward marriage is the revolutionary program introduced in Russia. As a fundamental requisite, marriage is entirely divorced from the religious and moral sphere, since the proletariat must be trained to spurn all religious prejudices. Marriage therefore becomes merely a matter of registration; and Soviet education is in principle dedicated to the cultivation of "amorality." In consequence, every semblance of the permanency of wedlock is studiously removed, so that the Soviet states have become the centers for the easiest divorces that civilized history has known. A typical divorce hearing is reviewed by Ralph W. Barnes, Moscow correspondent of the New York Herald-Tribune, in these sketchy lines: "Divorce in Russia is easier than buying a railroad ticket, because it doesn't cost so much. You can be married in the morning, divorced in the afternoon, and married again the next morning, five minutes being occupied in obtaining the divorce. When a wife divorces a husband, the first the husband usually knows about it is when a post-card arrives from the marriage and divorce bureau announcing the fact. Alimony is unknown there. Recently the government has become alarmed at the divorce rate, and it is now trying to persuade young couples to marry, establish homes, and stay married. There might be a great many more divorces than there are if it weren't for the overcrowding. Often a whole family lives in a single room, and if a wife gets a divorce, she may have to go on living in the same room with her former husband, simply because she can find no other place to go." (October 22, 1934.)
Similarly the ties that bind parents and children together, these "survivals of private property abuse," are to be loosened and then discarded. Public nurseries must take care of infants and children while the mothers contribute to successive five-year plans. Home life, which in the Soviet mind symbolizes the last stand of capitalism, is to be stripped of its attractiveness. Community barracks have been built. Two or three families are forced into quarters that were originally intended for one, with an actual space allowance definitely allocated to each person. The direct consequence, it is anticipated, will be an unmixed aversion to home life, and the last line trenches of capitalism will have been taken.
Woman, merely a chattel under the old régime, is scheduled to reach an absolute par with male competitors in business, in politics, in industry, and in education. The Russian wife, we are assured, is to be the truly emancipated woman, the embodiment of the most fanatical feminist creed. Children particularly must be trained to assimilate the communist ideals. Religion is to be torn out of their hearts and the extremist notions of communistic sex theories inculcated.
With these theories codified into formal legislation, many of them practiced for a decade and a half, skeptical investigators are entitled to ask for a summary of results. The survey presents a revolting orgy of animal lust, almost unbelievable consequences of a moral collapse, which may be tabulated in this catalog of horror:
1) In all civilized countries Russia has been stigmatized by the unenviable preeminence of having the largest number of girls who become unmarried mothers between the ages of twelve and fifteen.
2) Russian childhood has become a hideous symptom of the Soviet destruction of the family. Dr. Ivan Ilyin, formerly professor at the University of Moscow, in The Book of the Need of Russian Christianity, drew this horrible picture, which, in spite of recent improvements, shows how disastrous Communism may be: "Out of confiscation, out of impoverishment, out of civil war, out of hunger, out of epidemics of disease, and especially out of the destruction of marriages and family life a peculiar social stratum of neglected children has come into existence in Soviet Russia, Several million of these unfortunate little martyrs, boys and girls from the age of six to eighteen years, wander like Gypsies over the countryside. Without parents, without homes, clothed in rags, filthy, infested with lice, prostituted, infected with venereal diseases, deadening their consciences with cocaine and other drugs, they make their livelihood by begging, by robbing, and by stealing. The government does not know what to do with them. Some 75 to 80 per cent of these children are from the families of farmers and laborers. Unable to cope with conditions, they are dying in need and in misery, but the gaps in their ranks are always filled again by children newly cast off. Their number is estimated at a tremendously high figure by the well-known communistic leader Bucharin. A small number of these children are being cared for in communistic children's homes, where they are introduced to the joys and happiness of education for future Communism.”
How a cutthroat attack on Christ is being waged in the unequal battle of Soviet elders against their bewildered children is told by Joseph Duie, former Belgian consul in Russia and representative of the Nansen Mission for the Relief of Famine Sufferers in Southwest Russia, in his Moscow Unmasked:
"Communism in Russia has led to the spreading of depravity, anarchy, and immorality in forms unknown before in the history of humanity. Here is a typical scene of which I was a witness in the village school at the station Tichoretsckaya, 171 versts (102 miles) from Rostov. I was to be present at an inspection of the children in the school. As I knew the place well, I arrived at the school much earlier than the appointed hour, getting there at 9:30 in the morning. I therefore went straight to the class where the lessons had commenced. Before the teacher's table stood a boy of eight or nine years of age, and facing him were the secretary, of the Communistic Party and the teacher of the school. The following dialog took place between them:
"Teacher: ‘Vanya [John], tell me, do you pray to god? (The Communists use only a small g for God.)
"Child:. "Yes, Comrade Teacher, I pray to god.'
"Teacher: ‘Does your god give you what you ask him?'
“The child is silent, not knowing what to say.
"Teacher: 'If you want to, ask god now for him to give you bread since you are hungry.’
"Child: "Yes, I am very hungry.’
"Teacher: ‘Pray, then, to god; for who knows, maybe Christ will give you bread.’
"After some hesitation the child goes down on his knees, makes the sign of the cross with his little hands, and bows his head to the ground (which is the custom of the Greek Church), as taught in his own home. It was touching to see the warm and simple faith of the child. The vultures, who are watching him, after a few minutes interrupt his prayer, saying, ‘Now, Vanya, has your god given you bread?’
"The child with tears in his eyes, not understanding their real motives and puzzled in his mind, replies, ‘No, god has not given me bread.’
"Teacher: “Now, where is your god? But instead of asking bread from him, it would be better if you ask from the Comrade Communist and see what Comrade will give you. The hungry child listens and submissively says, ‘Please, Comrade, give me bread.
"Communist: ‘If you had done this in the first place, I would have given you bread at once, but you turned to god. Have you ever seen him? No, because he does not exist.' Then he took white bread from his leather jacket and gave it to the child. I could not bear this scene any longer; so I left the school without waiting for the official inspection, and with tears in my eyes I returned to Rostov. Russian children are forced to remain in the hands of such teachers of transgression."
Duie also cites a notorious sex questionnaire officially circulated in Russian secondary schools, attended by children from fourteen to seventeen years of age. He presents abstracts from a book read by Soviet children of even more tender years which prove to be nothing less than a series of vile suggestions and even more despicable illustrations.
3) The respect for parenthood has frequently vanished in a corresponding degree. This characterizes even the highest circles of Sovietism. Thus we are told that Stalin's aged mother, who till her death remained a staunch church member, had stipulated in her will that 9,000 rubles be set aside to pay for her Christian burial. Stalin, however, disregarded her wishes altogether, appropriated the money, and had her body cremated. Before her death she had expressed the request that not the communistic symbol but the cross of Christ mark her last resting-place. Stalin again followed his own obsessions and placed her ashes in an unmarked grave.
4) The idealism of love has become atrophied. Hideous pictures of perversions are drawn by Seibert (Red Russia, p. 179), who for four years occupied responsible positions as newspaper correspondent.
5) Marriage has become a mockery. According to the Moscow Pravda, again, the scheming Russian peasant can marry a vigorous young girl in the spring, when the farm chores are heavy, and divorce her in the fall, when the harvest has been garnered, thus avoiding the expense of supporting her over the winter. There is no legal compulsion to register a marriage and no legal handicap upon free-love affairs. These outrages have become too intolerable even for Communists. Mme. Passynkova, former member of the Soviet Central Executive Committee, voiced this protest: "There must be some standard. In fact, men and women have now lost all restraint. Many a man has twenty wives. Each one has a child. These are impossible conditions. What can you take from such a man for the support of his children? You can't very well take his hide off. And so the children are thrown into the street to add to the number of homeless little ones." (New York Times, December 27, 1925.) — These conditions have not improved in the last decade; for the St. Louis Star-Times (October 12, 1935) brings this International News Service dispatch from Moscow: "Life has been just one wife after another for I. S. Lapkin.... During the days of his marital exploits, Lapkin was an official of a steel-construction works. Authorities charged him not only with using his position to embezzle 7,000 rubles, but also with forcing women employees of the works to marry him. Those who rebuffed him, police said, were summarily dismissed. It was his custom to divorce each bride a few days after the wedding, the police claimed." The Pravda, as quoted by the New York Herald-Tribune, protests: "Today a man eats his breakfast, goes to the movies, gets married, pays his trade-union dues, gets a divorce, — just a string of ordinary events in a single day. A wedding is not considered an important event. It is like going to lunch. Need one be surprised at the large number of operations to prevent birth? Often a woman is afraid to have a child because she has no confidence in her husband. She is his third wife, and how does she know he will not return from his vacation with a fourth wife?"
6) In some months more divorces have been issued than marriage registrations. For instance, the Red Gazette, official journal of Leningrad, stated that during the months of January and February, 1928, 6,896 marriages and 5,007 divorces were registered in that city. In March, 1928, the number of divorces in Moscow exceeded the marriage registrations. (Cf. Colton, The XYZ of Communism, p. 244.) No "grounds for divorce" exist in the new Russia. The cause for legal separation is a matter of private concern or caprice.
7) Russian home-life will soon be but a fading memory if the war waged against marriage is not completely halted. Professor Ilyin (o.c.), writes: "This compulsory quartering in the homes of others and putting of additional roomers into already occupied rooms makes orderly and pleasant family life impossible. Crowded together as in jail, one overhears everything of other people’s business and is himself overheard. There is no privacy. One is compelled to live with rough, strange, obscene people.... Confined space, overcrowding, noise, humming and buzzing on all sides, everywhere disorder, filth, vexation and enmity, gossip and political arguments. It is also reported in communistic papers that, where five or six women use at the same time a kitchen-stove in common, out of pure envy and malice they spit into one another's pots of food, so that as protection against such outrages the women never leave the pots uncovered or open on the hearth, but close them tightly, with the lids fastened with strings."
8) Devastating disease is ruining the vital constitution of die hardy Slavs. Marxism has sown to the wind and is reaping the whirlwind of social diseases. Illegal operations are legalized and, in consequence, during the year 1926 and the first half of 1927 in Leningrad alone some 33,000 requests for the Soviet permission to undergo such operations were made, and 28,000 of these were officially granted. (The Red Gazette, quoted in Colton, o.c., p. 244.) In a copyrighted Science Service article, Marjorie Van de Water describes the plight of Russian youth and says that the mentally ill in Russia are much younger than in the United States. Notable in Russian hospitals and asylums is the large number of patients between twenty and twenty-nine. They are, of course, those who have been victimized by the uprising against morality, which reached its height about ten years ago.
Under this reversion to barbarity we can understand that there has been a recoil in Russia from these atrocious attempts to socialize woman. Members of the League of Young Communists complained in Communist Youth Pravda, their official organ, that the communist activities absorbed so much time that little interest remains for the home, a condition which provoked a flood of letters particularly from young wives. (New York Times, October 2, 1934.) Answering these letters, one of the most prominent Bolsheviki, Emelyan Yaroslavsky, used the columns of the same paper to set forth "an ideal of marriage strikingly like that of the most respectable bourgeois society." Harold Denny, New York Times correspondent, on October 18, 1934, reviews Yaroslavsky's homily in favor of lasting marriage and describes his position as almost as firm as that of "a good churchman, inveighing against ties lightly assumed and lightly cast aside."
Indeed, Joseph Stalin has now placed underscored emphasis on home influence and has mobilized the membership of the Communist Party and of the young Communist League for systematic support of morals and family life in Russia. On May 8, 1935, the American press printed the Soviet dictator's new program, starting with this key-note pronouncement: “The existence of the family must be recognized and provided for."
Evidence of the extent of this back-to-the-home movement in Russia is furnished by an Associated Press summary from Moscow (November 29, 1935): “Early ideas of reconstructing society around the state at the expense of the family have been cast aside in the Soviet Union. Under the old system, parents, after bringing children into the world, were to he left free of the main responsibilities of their care so they could devote themselves to other duties. Soviet authorities contend that an exaggerated idea of this experiment gained circulation abroad. They do not, however, deny that energetic measures have become necessary to make the family the institution they now want it to be. A whole series of regulations has been enacted recently with this purpose in mind. Parents have been given to understand that they must look to their children's education, must answer for their conduct, and cannot escape duties of maintenance.... One of the most revolutionary of Soviet revamping measures, placed in effect only a few weeks ago, changed the divorce system. In the past either party to a marriage could obtain a divorce by going to a neighborhood registry office and making known his intentions. The divorce was registered, then the other party was notified that the bonds had been severed. Divorce still can be obtained by either party regardless of the opinion of the other, but now the other party must first be notified."
Even many who are not guided by the standards of Christian morality will find the program of Soviet amorality fundamentally impracticable. Theodor Seibert's Red Russia shows in this instance the failure of Communism's empty theorization. "On a train journey in Siberia I was sitting opposite a young Communist, a provincial, who after the Russian manner talked politics to me for about twenty-four hours almost without pause. A considerable proportion of this exhausting harangue was devoted to denouncing the institution of marriage. My interlocutor was an enthusiastic champion of free love, supporting it by arguments some of which were anticapitalist and others biological ... The objections I ventured to raise were brushed aside with the aid of Marxian dialectic. In the end I ceased to argue with the fanatic. Imagine, then, my astonishment when, shortly before we reached our destination, he said with a contented smile: 'We shall be in Irkutsk in a few minutes. I do hope my wife will be at the station.’
"’What? Your wife? You are married, then?'
“Oh, yes. I’ve been married five years, and we've two strapping boys. The elder, writes my wife, keeps on asking for Father.”
“’Look here, my friend, how on earth do you square your family happiness with your revolutionary views concerning love and marriage?'
"’Readily enough. I grew up under the old system and became imbued with its prejudices and erroneous ideals. I love my wife, am faithful to her on the whole, and I am devoted to my children. But the next generation will be quit of all these bourgeois sentimentalisms, just as it will have lost the taste for vodka.’”
Applied Marxism leads to delusion and distress. It can never guarantee happiness. The unofficial rumors circulated in the high circles of Moscow, which, however, shun official publication because of the fatal consequences, persist in the theory that Nadejda Halliluieva, wife of Stalin, Russia's dictator, died in the Kremlin by her own hand while Moscow lay hushed in the vodka stupor of the morning after the fifteenth anniversary of the revolution. Equally persistent rumors make the cause for this suicide the Soviet man of steel's consistent application of Soviet marriage theories. A telltale newspaper dispatch from Madrid announced the death of Senorita Carmen Rodriguez, Spanish, radical feminist. As the author of five books advocating birth control and the most extreme theories on marriage and the family, she abandoned Marxism as a philosophy of life that was too tame for her broader doctrines. Of course, she disavowed marriage — until she met a Catalan politician, with whom a romance developed, altogether against her own theories and the fanaticism of her mother. While Senorita Carmen slept on the night of June 8, 1933, her mother, Dona Aurora, to whom she had dedicated her radical publications, placed an automatic revolver at her daughters head and pulled the trigger.
It is disconcerting to note that economic unrest helps the march of Communism in our own country. Greedy capitalists continue to disregard the rights of the laborer, to exploit their employees in industrial servitude, and in this way to add fuel to the fires of unrest. It is not without profound significance that the libraries of the nation record an unprecedented interest in the writings of Marx and Veblen. In a conservative city like St. Louis the public library reports an extraordinary demand for books on Socialism and Communism during recent years. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch for February 3, 1933, said: "An increase from 25- to 50-per-cent circulation of the works of Karl Marx and other classical Socialists in the last year was reported to Dr. Arthur Bostwick, head of the public library, by branch librarians in a weekly meeting yesterday. One librarian estimated the increase at her branch at 75 per cent. ... Thomas's As I See It was one of the six most-read non-fiction works in July.... Some librarians observed that readers were disposed to pass from Thomas and other recent writers straight back to Marx.... Dr. Bostwick remarked that the increase was an interesting indication, since 'people read about what they're thinking about.'" Pastors have become radical doctrinaires, picketing textile mills or public utility plants, and using any time that is left to preach revolt. Misguided laymen are pleading, as the much discussed recent Laymen's Foreign Mission Inquiry did, that "Socialism should be appreciated and Communism studied by our foreign missionaries." Professional agitators interpret this objective in its revolutionary consequences, as Professor C. C. Webber, secretary of the World Fellowship of Reconciliation, did when he appeared before the student-body of Colgate Rochester Divinity School (Baptist) on December 10, 1933, and declared that "missionaries should establish birth-control clinics, so that workers can control the population of the world." Well-prepared approach is made to the young people of our industrial centers, and the youth of the rural section is told that low-priced hogs and corn are symbols of capitalistic chaos. Special drives seek to enlist the support of college students and the intelligentsia; and in lines stronger than ever before the charms of Communism are being drawn before the wide and wondering eyes of a discontented age. William Z. Foster, Communist labor leader, viewing his entire life with the background of present-day Russian Sovietism, writes in the concluding chapter of his autobiographical Pages from a Worker's Life: "What a tremendous advance the situation in the Soviet Union of 1939 is over that of 1921! Socialism is victorious on every front despite the bitter resistance of its enemies at home and abroad.... The Socialist sun is in the ascendant, and more and more the Soviet Union is becoming the beacon-light of hope to the oppressed toilers of the world."
The program of radicalism is marked for doom. Within this generation — and this statement springs not from prophetic gift, but from the measure of forecast shadows — the Soviet nightmare will be subjected to such drastic revisions that its flaming red will have been bleached. Dr. William Durant, American Liberal, who returned from a protracted visit to the Red Republic before the scheduled time because Mrs. Durant felt she would go mad if she had to witness the suffering any longer, said that the Russian marriage and divorce system is Biologically unsound and will not last ten years."
The rising tide of radicalism may not be checked in our own country until America has experienced an exhibition of the socialistic annihilation of morals. That end is inevitable; for over the gate that marks the entrance to the communist Utopia of disillusion, far above such gaudy Marxian epigrams as: "Religion is the opiate of the people,” the verdict of everlasting truth has chiseled this perpetual warning: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here."