The "Get-Us-Home" movement of the American troops at the end of 1945 and beginning of 1946, together with the powerful strike wave that swept the country at that time, forced Wall Street to postpone the date for the Third World War which it had projected at the close of World War II. As I pointed out last week, the American people dismantled the forces needed to carry out a successful attack on the Soviet Union when it stood weakened and devastated from the Nazi assault.
Wall Street had to make a fresh start. First of all, it had to secure its home base. This meant above all convincing the American people of the necessity of going to war against the Soviet Union. To win a war of such scope, the minimum requirement is a people thoroughly convinced of its justice and inevitability. If possible, their enthusiasm must be aroused. To drive the American people into such a conflict would most certainly prove suicidal. They must be led. This was the major problem facing America's 60 ruling families.
The capitalist class in our time, however, is capable of leading only a certain kind of people — a people that is thoroughly housebroken. They are not able to lead masses accustomed to think for themselves, concerned about preserving their liberties and willing to fight for their rights. In fact, to the capitalists, masses of that cast of mind are not only thoroughly undependable in wars of conquest but a deadly danger, particularly if they have powerful organizations such as trade unions.
Thus to overcome the unfavorable position they found themselves in in 1946, the strategists of the capitalist class set out to achieve two main goals in the United States: (1) Try to convince the American people that the Soviet Union is an aggressor power like Nazi Germany, plotting to attack America; (2) Try to stamp out freedom of thought and hamstring the unions.
The first aim dovetailed with a vast armaments program, which in turn could help stave off depression. The second aim, of course, fitted in neatly with the open shop sentiments of the big corporations. And both aims coincided with the need to satisfy the ravenous hunger for profit-taking with which the capitalists were troubled after feeding at the public trough during the war years.
Anti-union legislation culminated in the Taft-Hartley Law and an epidemic of similar slave-labor measures on the statute books of the states. The drive against freedom of thought began with Truman's "loyalty" decrees and rapidly mushroomed into the worst witch-hunt America has ever seen. The end result was the ominous rise of McCarthyism.
Truman's "loyalty" order was promulgated in 1947.
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For six years the drive on civil liberties has continued. It has made deep inroads into freedom of thought in America but has not yet succeeded in its final aim of breaking up the independent outlook of the masses. The Taft-Hartley Law likewise has made organizing difficult, particularly in the South, but the unions still remain intact. In fact they now have a membership of some 17,000,000.
The corporations have made impressive gains in imposing the speed-up, containing the struggle for better living conditions, hounding the militants, and so on. But accounts have not yet been settled with the unions. Big Business now appears to think that it may take more than the witch-hunt and union-busting legislation to discipline the union membership and make the country safe for another war. It may take a bit of depression and an accompanying strong-arm assault. But to engage in that battle with labor —a most dangerous battle for the capitalists— would require postponement of World War III.
The alternative is to try to buy off the union leadership and a considerable segment of the working class as Roosevelt did in World War II. That course, however, seems to have been ruled out by the Morgans, Rockefellers, etc. That was one reason why they wanted Eisenhower in the White House instead of Stevenson.
Let us now turn to the effort to enthuse the American people with the prospect of an atomic war on the Soviet Union. The principal vehicle for this has been the powerful propaganda machine at the disposal of the capitalist class. The warmly praised ally of World War II was converted into "the enemy." The crimes of Stalinism, accommodatingly covered up during the war years, were hustled into the limelight. The press, the radio, the pulpit and later TV began an even more sustained campaign than that waged against Nazi Germany. The moralists joined in the attack —many of them with what turned out to be the best credentials, former sycophancy in the camp of Stalinism.
The grist for this mill was provided by the State Department. Rejecting all overtures of the Kremlin for a deal, it abruptly cut off lend-lease to the USSR despite the desperate needs of the Soviet people. Winston Churchill, then the most admired and respected statesman of the western capitalist world, was brought to Fulton, Missouri, where in March 1946 he laid down the line against the Soviet Union in a saber-rattling speech.
Provocative actions were organized, such as maneuvers by the armed forces in Antarctic and Arctic under conditions obviously simulating those in the Soviet Union in winter. A whole series of diplomatic incidents were touched off, all designed to display the Soviet Union as an "aggressor" power, although it is not, since its economic foundations do not require it to follow the policy of imperialist expansion at all.
With the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, the "cold war" opened up full scale, with occasional scares of possible hot war as in 1948 at the time it appeared the Communist Party might win the elections in Italy.
All this led up to June 1950 when civil war broke out in Korea. The Truman administration seized on this pretext to plunge America into the conflict.
The Korean war appeared to give American Big Business the final clinchers in its war preparations: an excuse to convert a huge sector of the economy into war production, an excuse to vastly expand the armed forces and stockpiles of armaments, an excuse to get into a conflict which had every prospect of expanding into a general conflict in which the Soviet Union would be sucked in.
Above all, it seemed to be a perfect means for finally convincing the American people about the justice and inevitability of war with the Soviet Union.
But this war, which appeared to offer such a favorable opening for carrying out the sinister plans of American Big Business, turned into its opposite.
The fighting capacity of the North Koreans shocked America's rulers. And when the Chinese Armies took up the challenge that Gen. MacArthur flung at the Yalu river, it quickly became apparent that Wall Street had taken on far more than it bargained for. Truman's "police action" turned into a war of completely unexpected scope. In another article we will discuss the forces American imperialism ran into; right now we are interested in what happened to the effort to use Korea to psychologize the American people about fighting abroad.
Korea turned out to be the most unpopular war in American history. This is admitted by every serious observer. It became a key issue in American politics. It helped bring a landslide defeat to the Democratic Party.
One of the big factors in Eisenhower's victory was the hope many people had that he would bring the fighting to an end, a hope that was fostered by Eisenhower's promise to go to Korea personally. No doubt at that time, Eisenhower and his backers had already considered the advisability of ending the Korean adventure.
Even Stevenson had to recognize on the eve of the election that it was necessary to say something about ending the war in Korea. Of course, what he said was too little and too late to save the Democrats.
The popular opposition to the war in Korea is a tremendous new fact in American politics. The Pentagon and its spokesmen indicate their awareness of it by their openly expressed fears about a new "Get-Us-Home" movement among the American troops.
The Korean war, which was undoubtedly a long step toward World War III, thus had contradictory effects. While enabling Wall Street to step up its military preparations for global conquest, it ended by inducing war weariness at home. The grass-roots bitterness over this "police action" is a new complication that America's capitalist rulers dare not overlook in deciding whether to start World War III soon or to postpone it.