This is the latest installment in a weekly series of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, who has just released a major book revealing how communists, from Moscow to New York to Chicago, have long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, is based on an unprecedented volume of declassified materials from Soviet archives, FBI files, and more, and is being hailed as groundbreaking. Big Peace’s own Peter Schweizer calls it the “21st century equivalent” to Whittaker Chambers’ classic Witness.
Last week, Kengor considered Frank Marshall Davis, a mentor to a young man named Barack Obama. This week, we continue that examination of Davis.
Big Peace: Last week, Dr. Kengor, we looked at Frank Marshall Davis. You showed how and where, precisely, Davis was not only a communist but an actual party member. In your book, Dupes, you even include his actual Communist Party number. You told us that you also found all of Davis’s weekly columns from 1949 and 1950 for the Honolulu Record, the CPUSA organ in Hawaii. Tell us what those articles say.
Kengor: The articles are nothing short of breathtaking. I’m a student of this period, having written and taught about it for years. When I started reading these columns by Davis, my mind was open on the question of whether he was a communist—I hadn’t seen the Senate and FBI documents yet. But as I started reading them, I immediately recognized how they were, column after column, line by line, the precise party line of CPUSA, Moscow, Stalin, and the international communist movement.
Big Peace: You say that these columns “trashed” Harry Truman.
Kengor: They trashed Harry Truman, the sitting president, and a Democrat. In fact, they eviscerated the entirety of Truman’s administration and all its actions. Davis was brutal, smearing Truman as a fascist, a racist, an imperialist, a colonialist. He alleged that the Truman administration was bringing the Nazis back to power in Berlin.
Davis also said many of these same things about George Marshall, Truman’s secretary of state, and the Marshall Plan specifically, which, in truth, was an act of unparalleled generosity.
Davis framed all of this as part of a master plan, even a kind of master-race plan—given his claims about America’s alleged desires to “give” Germany back to the Nazis—to re-enslave and re-colonize the world. “I have watched with growing shame for my America,” Davis wrote in a May 1949 piece, “as our leaders have used our golden riches to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world.”
I know this seems unbelievable. Knowing that, we published photos of these columns in the book, so you can see for yourself. If you have the book, this particular article is on page 257.
Big Peace: This was the communist line. Did anyone swallow it?
Kengor: Not many did, thankfully. But the communists gave it one hell of a shot. This was the line publicly taken by Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, when Stalin ordered him to storm out of the Paris summit when the Marshall Plan was being fleshed out.
Communists worldwide were forced to try to push this line. In fact, many knew it was too unbelievable. Yet, those whose loyalties were, first and foremost, to the USSR, followed the “master’s voice,” as George Kennan characterized their subservience. One of them was Frank Marshall Davis.
So, as soon as I saw these articles by Davis, I knew I was dealing with a pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin communist. If not, then I knew he would be the single biggest dupe in my book. I held out judgment on that until I found the documents from the Senate and FBI showing he was a party member.
Big Peace: We also see in these writings from Davis a strongly anti-colonial streak.
Kengor: Yes. My friend and colleague, Dinesh D’Souza, has traced what he terms Obama’s anti-colonial “rage” to Obama’s father. If anything, I would argue that such thinking by Obama would be more traceable to Frank Marshall Davis. I argued this in a recent piece for American Spectator.
Big Peace: To reiterate, Frank Marshall Davis’s targets were Democrats.
Kengor: In this period, yes. It’s interesting that liberals today find their demon in Joe McCarthy—it’s always the anti-communist who is their demon, and never the pro-communist—who they denounce for attacking Truman and George Marshall. In fact, Joe McCarthy’s worst criticisms of Truman and Marshall were mild compared to those of Davis.
Big Peace: In your book, you quote or cite probably close to a hundred columns by Frank Marshall Davis. Which others should we know about it?
Kengor: Among the most hideous are the ones where Davis writes of Truman’s “program for World War III,” Truman’s “aggression” against Stalin, Truman’s “fascism, American style,” Truman’s lusting for the hydrogen bomb in order to “show the Russians who was boss of the world,” and Truman’s alleged desire to “rule Russia.” Those are on pages 261 to 272 of the book. That’s how Davis framed Truman while Stalin was gobbling up Europe.
This was typical outrageous Soviet propaganda, and from a man who was a mentor to our current president.
Big Peace: Speaking of whom, give us an example from Davis’s columns that gets closer to what President Obama has done since taking office, given that Obama isn’t trying to “rule Russia,” for example.
Kengor: There are a lot of them, from Davis preaching government healthcare, wealth redistribution, bashing Wall Street, advocating all kinds of nationalizations, trumpeting the public sector over the private sector, lambasting profits, excoriating the “tentacles of big business,” you name it. But one that haunts me is a piece I read by Frank Marshall Davis from January 26, 1950, titled “Free Enterprise or Socialism?”
There, Davis targeted GM. Davis was enraged that General Motors, this “gigantic company,” had “made a profit last year of $600,000,000.” He felt that the federal government needed to get a hold of GM. He characterized GM as a “monopoly,” mainly because of this success, which infuriated Davis. He wrote: “the time draws nearer when we will have to decide to oust the monopolies and restore a competing system of free enterprise, or let the government own and operate our major industries.”
Davis concluded the piece by asserting, “Before too long, our nation will have to decide whether we shall have free enterprise or socialism.”
Big Peace: Of course, we know what has happened with GM under President Obama.
Kengor: Exactly. Don’t tell me this stuff from Frank Marshall Davis is irrelevant. Of course, in their heart of hearts, liberals and Democrats know it’s relevant, which is why they avoid it like the plague. The liberal, pro-Obama press cannot, and will not, touch this stuff from Frank Marshall Davis. It must be buried. It must.
This may be the only case, in the history of presidential biography, where a mentor to the president is deliberately ignored, or sugarcoated and distorted beyond and resemblance to actual reality. It’s stunning to behold.
Big Peace: How does this tie to the theme of your book, which is about being duped? Has Obama duped Americans? Did Frank Marshall Davis dupe Americans?
Kengor: Davis definitely tried to dupe Americans, doing what the communists always did: He concealed his real intentions and real loyalties, which were to Moscow, and pretended he was a good, old-fashioned progressive/liberal. It didn’t work very well back in the 1940s and 1950s, where the Democrats of his day immediately figured him out. What’s fascinating is that only now, from the grave, is he successfully generating dupes by the legions. He’s doing that via the liberals in our media, who refuse to even examine his communist background, instead portraying him as a stalwart civil-rights crusader who fought McCarthyism.
Why are those “journalists” taking that position? To protect Obama, of course. In that sense, they’re dupes. They are protecting, unwittingly, yet again, Davis and the perverse, destructive causes he once held dear.
Big Peace: Has Obama duped Americans?
Kengor: Yes, but not necessarily in precisely the same way. Both Davis and Obama were and are from the far left, politically, with Davis obviously to the farthest extreme. Obama ran in November 2008 not as the “most liberal member of the Senate,” as National Journal rightly ranked him, but as a sensible moderate favoring merely “change.” The traditional Democrats—who historically voted for the kind of Democrats that summoned Frank Marshall Davis to Washington to testify under oath—and moderates and independents who voted for Obama thinking they were getting another “Jack Kennedy” or a give-‘em-hell-Harry-Truman Democrat, were fools. Sorry to be so blunt, but that’s the truth.
Big Peace: Let’s pick up with that theme next week, Professor Kengor. There’s another group in your book that relates to this question of the November 2008 election and who voted for Obama. Who is that?
Kengor: We’ll look at the group, “Progressives for Obama,” formed prior to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. The names on that list reads like a Who’s Who list of the ‘60s radicals called to testify before the House Committee on Internal Security, which, again, was run by Democrats. Or, once again, if you just can’t wait, you’ll need to rush out and buy the book.
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