MACHINA

by Sebastian Marshall

  “It is not a Communist Party campaign, despite the closeness with which he has hewn to the Kremlin’s Party Line” – well, it’s good they cleared that up, lest all that Russian Communist money, labor, and resources lead us to mistakenly think he was on the Moscow’s payroll, or something.

  (If you think the current election is a sign of the apocalypse, studying past elections might make you feel better. America typically functions pretty well, almost regardless of its President.)

  ***

  MAKING A WASTELAND AND CALL IT PEACE

  In Agricola, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote of a foreign chieftain raging against Rome,

  “Where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.”

  This was Henry Morgenthau’s Plan – it’s called the Morgenthau Plan, actually – for defeated Germany.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan

  Morgenthau… well, you should try to understand him, sooner or later.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgenthau_Jr.

  The world was more interesting and the frontiers of government and politics less settled then. This is a man who believed passionately in social insurance and higher and more progressive taxes… while passionately opposing deficit spending.

  It’s a rare mix: in favor of socialized risk in old age and disability, in favor of high taxes, against deficit spending.

  I suppose I ought to put my cards on the table; people will try to infer my politics and opinions, so I might as well just state them outright.

  Henry Wallace strikes me as either a hypocritical barbarian, a naive tool, or a childishly emotional man; my past remarks aside, if he had been President of the United States, it might have been an unmitigated disaster.

  Meanwhile, the Wallace/Truman shakeup can partially be laid at the door of Henry Morgenthau. The Morgenthau Plan was a terrible idea in very many ways.

  And yet, I think Henry Morgenthau had a genius for administration, a great mind for finance, a good eye for talent and government, he was a strong humanitarian in many cases, and he had a great mind for diplomacy – his blundering on the Morgenthau Plan was the exception to the norm.

  “The original proposal outlined three steps:

  1. Germany was to be partitioned into two independent states.

  2. Germany's main centers of mining and industry, including the Saar Protectorate, the Ruhr and Upper Silesia were to be internationalized or annexed by neighboring nations.

  3. All heavy industry was to be dismantled or otherwise destroyed.”

  The Plan was pretty brutal.

  “Reparations, in the form of recurrent payments and deliveries, should not be demanded. Restitution and reparation shall be effected by the transfer of existing German resources and territories, e.g. … by forced German labor outside Germany…”

  (That’s not a selective quotation; the whole thing is rather draconian.)

  The Plan leaked. Of course.

  Wikipedia –

  *Churchill was not inclined to support the proposal, saying "England would be chained to a dead body."

  *Anthony Eden expressed his strong opposition to the plan and, with the support of some others, was able to get the Morgenthau Plan set aside in Britain.

  *The Washington Post urged a stop to helping Dr. Goebbels: if the Germans suspect that nothing but complete destruction lies ahead, then they will fight on.

  *The Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey complained in his campaign that the Germans had been terrified by the plan into fanatical resistance, "Now they are fighting with the frenzy of despair."

  *General George Marshall complained to Morgenthau that German resistance had strengthened.

  *Hoping to get Morgenthau to relent on his plan for Germany, President Roosevelt's son-in-law Lt. Colonel John Boettiger who worked in the War Department explained to Morgenthau how the American troops who had had to fight for five weeks against fierce German resistance to capture the city of Aachen had complained to him that the Morgenthau Plan was "worth thirty divisions to the Germans." Morgenthau refused to relent.

  Indeed, when the war was lost for Germany, but before the country had fully surrendered, American leadership had debated whether the Germans needed to be given the “Carthaginian Solution” – named after how Rome destroyed Carthage in the Third Punic War, killing all the men, enslaving the women and children, and destroying all of the buildings. (Legend has it that the Romans then salted the earth so crops would never grow again, but this is almost certainly untrue. The Romans badly needed farmland in North Africa.)

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthaginian_peace#Modern_use

  ***

  CONVERGENCE

  So, it's an understatement to say that a lot was going on in the 1940's.

  At the end of the mess, Truman becomes VP, then President, and the world is radically different as a result.

  The causality is hard to put one’s finger on, at first, and certainly it's not so simple.

  But I think we can point to Truman getting the nod as VP – and eventually becoming one of the most important Presidents in shaping America as a world power, second only to perhaps FDR – as largely a result of two things.

  1. The general impression that a President Wallace with Morgenthau as a top advisor would lead to a longer war struggle and directly or indirectly leading to many concessions and weakness towards the Russians, and,

  2. Perhaps more importantly, the feeling that Wallace wasn’t “part of the club” with some very important stakeholders in the Democratic Party.

  One final quote from that 1948 Atlantic piece:

  “Dismissed by Roosevelt from the BEW [Board of Economic Warfare] post along with Jones at the climax of that battle, Wallace took on more than ever, in the eyes of many liberals, the aspect of a crusading Galahad. But the machine politicians of the Democratic Party, who gagged when Roosevelt forced Wallace down their throats as Vice-Presidential candidate in the 1940 convention, had by this time determined he was a political liability. With the approach of the 1944 convention it was clear they had persuaded the President of this also.”

  I find Wikipedia to be rather surprisingly reliable when it comes to dates, battles, casualty levels, basic timelines and so forth.

  But I find it to be very hit-or-miss on analysis. The Atlantic gets much closer to it.

  The idea that Wallace was “too liberal” does not ring at all true to me.

  Yes, he had good liberal credentials. So did Truman. But they had different liberal credentials.

  In the USSR, the Stalinists and Trotskyites duked it out for total control – Stalin’s side won, obviously, and Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico when one of Stalin’s NKVD agents drove a climber’s ice pick into Trotsky’s head.

  In the United States, the battle was between what The Atlantic calls the “machine politicians” and Wallace’s… umm... “… not a Communist Party … despite the closeness with which he has hewn to the Kremlin’s Party line…”

  Wallace might have been nuts – even his own close associates and fellow-travelers don’t have many good things to say about him – but this is probably not what did him in.

  It was not even necessarily his support for the Morgenthau Plan and the retributive pastoralization of Germany. While it’s largely uncontroversial that the leak of the Plan cost a lot of Allied lives and prolonged the war, the Axis were largely beaten already anyways. It’s possible they would have fought longer if Wallace had been President when FDR died, but they couldn’t have fought that much longer either way; it was over.

  No, the belligerent and conflicted personality of Wallace would not have done him in, nor necessarily his support for policies which caused the war to be prolonged… it was that he didn’t take or recognize some of the bosses in the Party.

  The convergence of these things is what did Wallace in – he was nearly nominated as Vice President multiple times, but fell a little short each time. Taking better care of a few more allies, being a l
ittle more courteous, being a little more flexible on foreign policy, or taking care of the interests of a big part of the core of the party that felt neglected by him and felt he favored the Moscow clique more than the local boys that made the Party up.

  ***

  NEXT CHAPTER: THE COLD WAR STARTS

  Why didn’t President Truman know about the Atomic Bomb?

  Because he was a consolation from FDR to the “machine bosses” – Truman was one of theirs.

  He turned out, shockingly, to be one of the greatest statesmen in American history.

  A calm and quiet Eleanor said, “Harry, the president is dead.” He asked if there was anything he could do for her, to which she replied, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”

  Temporal Control #10: Analysis and Power

  THIS MAN IS YOUR FRIEND. HE FIGHTS FOR FREEDOM.

  There is a famous series of American propaganda posters from the 1940’s:

  They all read the same –

  “This man is your FRIEND. He fights for FREEDOM.”

  In the center of the poster would be a picture of one of the American allies: one reads “Englishman” and he’s carrying a precision rifle. Another reads “Canadian” and the soldier is smiling while wearing a beret. The Chinese poster has a soldier wearing the traditional Nationalist Chinese uniform and hat; the “Dutch Sailor” looks a little bit sloppy and fat, but otherwise a nice guy. The Austrian looks almost American-ish in something like a cowboy hat.

  The Russian soldier is carrying a sniper rifle, wearing a metal helmet.

  On the metal helmet the Soviet red star is emblazoned with hammer and sickle.

  He’s smiling, too. But he’s one of very few of the poster photos where the soldier is not looking at the camera. He stares off into space.

  How long did it take to find that particular man and how many tries did it take to get that poster right?

  It probably took quite a while. Russians don’t smile like that.

  ***

  LONG LIVE GREAT STALIN, HURRAH!

  You can find the speech online at many Marxist sites. If you’re interested in Cold War history, it’s potentially worth reading – Google it if you want to read it. The USSR published an official version just four years after the speech was made; it’s easy to find. The official version opens:

  “SPEECH DELIVERED BY J. V. STALIN

  AT A MEETING OF VOTERS OF THE

  STALIN ELECTORAL DISTRICT, MOSCOW

  FEBRUARY 9, 1946”

  The full text – I’ve added nothing to it, the comments about cheering/etc were in the official version – here is how it begins. The bold at the end is mine –

  “The Chairman :

  Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin has the floor.

  (Comrade Stalin's appearance in the rostrum was greeted by the voters with loud cheers lasting several minutes. The entire audience in the Bolshoi Theatre rose to its feet to greet Comrade Stalin. There were continuous cries of "Cheers for great Stalin!" "Long live great Stalin, Hurrah!" "Cheers for our beloved Stalin!" )

  Comrade Stalin :

  Comrades!

  Eight years have passed since the last elections to the Supreme Soviet. This has been a period replete with events of a decisive nature. The first four years were years of intense labour on the part of Soviet people in carrying out the Third Five-Year Plan. The second four years covered the events of the war against the German and Japanese aggressors -- the events of the Second World War. Undoubtedly, the war was the main event during the past period.

  It would be wrong to think that the Second World War broke out accidentally, or as a result of blunders committed by certain statesmen, although blunders were certainly committed. As a matter of fact, the war broke out as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism.”

  You are, of course, not living in 1946. You have hindsight.

  This speech is not so shocking to us now; of course, we know what would happen next.

  Our ancestors did not have such hindsight.

  You must remember – it’s very easy to forget, but critically important to remember that even in the final closing days of the war, General Secretary Joseph Stalin was promising a new world order to the Western Allies, a truly “United Nations” led by the moral force of the victorious Americans, British, French, Chinese, and Russians.

  “This man is your FRIEND. He fights for FREEDOM.”

  Franklin Roosevelt – that great titan of a man, almost superhuman in his mental powers most of the time – was in fading health when he met Stalin and Churchill for the Yalta Conference.

  Yalta had been only one year earlier, in February 1945.

  Various members of the German high command – fragmented and disintegrating – had begged and pleaded with the Americans and English to conditionally surrender to the Western Allies only.

  Stalin persuaded, cajoled, begged, pled, bluffed, threatened – and in the end, promised full cooperation in a new United Nations – if only the Western Allies would ensure that the Soviet share of the victory would be theirs; no mere conditional surrender of the Axis criminals.

  “This man is your FRIEND. He fights for FREEDOM.”

  Roosevelt agreed.

  In May 1945, in one of the most striking and powerful images of the war, the Soviet Red Banner flew over the Reichstag, Hitler and his closest cronies dead by suicide in a subterranean bunker, the ruins – literally ruins – of Berlin in flames below.

  The blood price had been high. 10 million Soviet soldiers had been killed in combat, over 10 million Soviet civilians had died… but perhaps, the brutal carnage complete, a world with peace and prosperity and cooperation would reign.

  And then, the speech.

  After a half-decade of loudly singing the praises of America and England, Stalin shifts course –

  “It would be wrong to think that the Second World War broke out accidentally, or as a result of blunders committed by certain statesmen, although blunders were certainly committed. As a matter of fact, the war broke out as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism.”

  It was a declaration of war.

  ***

  DIPLOMATIC CABLES

  George F. Kennan is the single most important American you’ve never heard of.

  And in that winter of ’46, a chill went through his spine.

  It’s happening again.

  Kennan had loved Russia. He had hated Germany. He had correctly hated Germany; he witnesses the German brutalities firsthand when stationed in Berlin… he had correctly hated Germany even before the Germans arrested him after declaring war on the United States, and held him for six months.

  He endorsed the Lend Lease agreement, but he had grown cautious of the Russians.

  Stalin’s Great Purges were the final nail in the coffin of Kennan’s unmitigated love for Russia. Kennan had studied the Tsar’s system of exile and the corruption of Russia, and learning these things, it had cooled him slightly… but he still believed, perhaps, until Stalin started killing his old friends and colleagues on trumped-up charges of sabotage, accusing Old Bolsheviks of collaborating with the Nazis, having his agents torture and rip out people’s teeth and fingernails until they’d confess in a show trial…

  … and those crimes had been defended, almost endorsed by the American Ambassador to the USSR, Joseph Davies, while they were happening.

  To understand how Franklin Roosevelt could mis-read the Soviet situation so badly, you need to understand Ambassador Joseph Davies.

  Wikipedia: Joseph E. Davies –

  “Davies was appointed Ambassador to the Soviet Union by Franklin D. Roosevelt and served from 1936 to 1938. His appointment was made in part based on his skills [ … and on] his longtime friendship with FDR since the Woodrow Wilson days and for his political loyalty to Roosevelt.


  Davies had been asked by FDR to evaluate the strength of the Soviet Army, its government and its industry and to find out if possible which side the Russians would be on in the "coming war.”