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HiPointDem

(20,729 posts)
Sun Jan 13, 2013, 04:17 AM Jan 2013

Alternate history: Wallace (FDR VP) & the destruction of the CP

Oliver Stone has a TV show which is promoting an alternate history something like this clip: FDR's first VP was progressive, backed unions, but was shoved out of the picture to make way for the more malleable Truman...

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=3881§ion=Article

I thought this comment was interesting, because I'd always wondered about which side Michael Straight was really playing for:

There’s an interesting discussion of Wallace in Caroll Quigley’s book, Tragedy and Triumph. Quigley discusses his theory that the New Republic’s support for Wallace was a sort of false flag operation to split the Communist Party from the left. Quigley writes “Wallace’s campaign to defeat Truman destroyed completely the remaining vestiges of the Popular Front movement of the 1930?s, drove the Communists out of the unions and all progressive political groups, and drove the Communist unions out of the labor movement of the country. This ended Communism as a significant political force in the United States, and the end was reached by December 1948, long before McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover or HUAC did their work.”

Mike Straight, publisher of the New Republic sponsored Wallace and brought the Communists aboard, and then “jumped off the train,” splitting the Communists and the left away from the rest of the Democrats. According to Quigley:

“While he was still working for Wallace as President and allowing the Communists into the project, he was simultaneously doing two other things: working openly, and desperately, to prevent the new third party from campaigning on any level other than the presidential, by blocking everywhere he could Communist efforts to run third-party candidates for state or congressional offices in competition with the Democrats; much less publicly, he worked with his anti-Communist friends in labor, veteran, and liberal groups to prevent endorsement of the Wallace candidacy.

As a consequence, the Communists were destroyed and eventually driven out of such organizations, notably from the CIO-PAC (the great political alignment of labor and progressive groups).”


Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/untold-history-the-coup-against-wallace-and-what-might-have-been.html#jCTutAqpvEjkLHlQ.99

Michael Whitney Straight:

Michael Whitney Straight, (September 1, 1916 – January 4, 2004) was an American magazine publisher, novelist, patron of the arts, a member of the prominent Whitney family, and a confessed spy for the KGB.

While a student at Cambridge University in the mid-1930s, Straight became a Communist Party member and a part of an intellectual secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles. Straight worked for the Soviet Union as part of a spy ring whose members included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, and KGB recruiter Anthony Blunt...

After returning to the United States in 1937, Straight worked as a speechwriter for President Franklin Roosevelt and was on the payroll of the Department of the Interior. Beginning in 1938, Straight carried on a covert relationship with Iskhak Akhmerov, the KGB spy. In 1940, Straight went to work in the Eastern Division of the U.S. State Department.

He served in the United States Army Air Forces beginning in 1942 as a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot and, at war's end, took over as publisher of his family-owned The New Republic magazine, where he hired former U.S. Vice President and future Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace as the magazine's editor. (NR endorsed Truman in 1948). Straight left the magazine in 1956 and began writing novels...His second wife was Nina G. Auchincloss Steers, a half-sister of the writer Gore Vidal and a stepsister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Whitney_Straight
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