From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 17, 24 April 1950, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The lead atricle in last week’s Labor Action discussed Truman’s appointment of John Foster Dulles as Republican overseer of Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy and cited several of the hard (but true) reflections on Dulles made by the Fair Deal and liberal elements in the course of the senatorial fight in New York State in 1949. We here add more of the material toward an understanding of Dulles as presented by the same spokesmen for the administration which has how elevated him to policy maker.
“The defeat of Mr. Dulles [is] a matter of impelling necessity,” said Lehman in that campaign. Why? Presumably to prevent this double-dyed reactionary from exercising his influence for evil in the Senate. Having succeeded in keeping him out, Lehman’s boss Truman lifts him to the position of exercising his influence – not on one vote in the Senate – but in helping to determine the administration’s policy itself on the most crucial field today.
Louis Hollander, state CIO president, said that Dulles was “spelling out reaction.” Truman has presented him with the State Department alphabet for the purpose.
In a radio address George Meany, secretary-treasurer of AFL, described Dulles as “a corporation lawyer and spokesman for the most reactionary and anti-labor corporations in the U.S.” according to the N.Y. Times for October 15. At a Carnegie Hall meeting on the 24th, FDR Jr. charged that as late as 1941 Dulles had been a contributor to the America First Committee. At another meeting, the same liberal Fair Dealer charged that “Nothing would please the Russians more than a U.S. Senate made up of 96 John Foster Dulleses.”
The Russians should be mighty pleased now at Truman’s gift to their propaganda.
Harold L. Ickes, quoted last week, also pointed out that Gerald L.K. Smith had come out for Dulles. State CIO president Hollander wrote, in a letter to all New York State locals, that “every reactionary in the World ... is watching this election and hoping for victory for Dulles.” Lehman, who had accused Dulles of playing the part of a bigot in the campaign, exclaimed in a speech: "I shall never yield to the ghastly philosophy preached by my opponent and other reactionary leaders.”
Dulles is now ensconced where he can make sure that the country’s policies in the world square with his "ghastly philosophy." For practical purposes, it does not turn out to be fundamentally different from the administration’s philosophy of imperialism.
Toward the end of that 1949 campaign, Lehman went gunning for Dulles precisely on the foreign policy question. The Republican was being boosted as an international “expert,” with all kinds of know-how in international dealings.
On November 1 Lehman reported in a speech:
“Less than six months before the oubreak of the European war in 1939, in a speech which that great liberal Republican Wendell Willkie described as ‘the most persuasive speech on the wrong side of the subject I have ever read,’ he [Dulles] had this to say, and I quote: ‘There is no reason to believe that any totalitarian states, separately or collectively, would attempt to attack the U.S. or could do so successfully ... Only hysteria entertains the idea that Germany, Italy or Japan contemplates war upon us.’”
He quoted Dulles as having said in 1939 that “democracy is, of course, a luxury”, and “if war were to occur our democracy would vanish.”
In a speech the next day Lehman added further information, dealing with the book Dulles published in 1939, War, Peace and Change:
“His book was dedicated to the thesis that the world was divided into two groups: the static nations, among whom he counted the U.S., Britain and France; and the dynamic nations, which included Germany, Italy and Japan. The dynamic nations, he said, were characterized by certain admirable qualities: ‘energy, industry, clean living, thrift, efficiency, intelligence, willingness to forego present ease in the interests of future gains.’”
And Lehman pointed out correctly the main thesis of Dulles’ book: appeasement and concessions to the “dynamic” totalitarianisms as the road to peace, Munichism.
Lehman might also have pointed out that a section of Dulles’ book (pages 44–48) is a long apology for the breaking of treaties and international obligations. Dulles, of course, has a justification of the Nazis’ policies in view.
No one need draw the conclusion that Dulles was “pro-Nazi” politically. He deplored Nazism, naturally, though one cannot help drawing the conclusion from his book that he thought that Nazism was acting fundamentally in the interests of Germany, which for Dulles would mean – in the interests of German people “as a whole.” Hence his appeasement policy. After all, why get so wrought up when a foreign capitalist class does what “we” might some day have to do in similar circumstances, much as the necessity may be deplored?
Various opponents of Dulles denounced his as a “frank reactionary.” The emphasis should be on the first word. This frank reactionary (even according to his own lights, and “honest” one) is now a top leader of the West’s not-so-frank course of reactionary imperialism against the equally reactionary imperialism of Stalinist Russia.
Last updated on 7 January 2024