A Socialist on the High Court? Part Two
The Progressive Party was controlled by the Communist Party but efforts to work through the democratic process did not die out with its election defeat in 1948. Communists and “progressives” then targeted the Democratic Party for a takeover from within.
By Cliff Kincaid at AIM
As a student, Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was so interested in the socialist movement that she wrote a thesis about its history in New York City from 1900-1933. But the history of the Progressive Party, which ran FDR’s former vice president Henry Wallace as its presidential candidate in 1948, helps bring the subject up to date and explains the current direction of the Democratic Party.
The Progressive Party was controlled by the Communist Party but efforts to work through the democratic process did not die out with its election defeat in 1948. Communists and “progressives” then targeted the Democratic Party for a takeover from within.
A semi-official history, in the form of the book, Gideon’s Army, was written by Curtis MacDougall, a professor of journalism at Northwestern University who also wrote Interpretative Reporting, a standard text in journalism schools for more than 50 years. MacDougall, who wrote critically (even in his journalism textbook) about efforts to expose communist influence in the U.S. Government, was himself a Progressive Party activist and candidate.
Not surprisingly, MacDougall’s influence was felt not only on generations of journalists, but on his own son, A. Kent McDougall, who was acknowledged in the 1972 edition of Interpretative Reporting as then being with the New York office of the Wall Street Journal and lending “valuable assistance” in its preparation. Kent came out openly as a Marxist after working at the Journal, where he said he inserted positive stories about Marxist economists and “the left-wing journalist I.F. Stone.” Stone, it turned out, was a Soviet agent of influence.
MacDougall’s 319-page FBI file, released to this journalist, revealed that he had a close association with the Chicago Star, a newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, and many different CPUSA front organizations. But the Star connection deserves special comment. The executive editor of the Chicago Star was none other than Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member who would later become President Barack Obama’s childhood mentor in Hawaii and was active in the Hawaii Democratic Party.
In 1948, notes historian David Pietrusza, Davis’s Chicago-based paper, the Chicago Star, wholeheartedly backed Henry Wallace. That summer, he adds, the Progressive Party “apparatus” converted the paper into the Illinois Standard, thus enabling Davis to relocate to Hawaii on the advice of fellow Progressive Party activist Paul Robeson. Robeson, it turned out, was a secret member of the Communist Party.
It is significant that MacDougall’s history of the Progressive Party, Gideon’s Army, was published by Italian-born American Communist Carl Marzani, who served a prison term for perjury in falsely denying, while employed by the State Department, that he was a Communist Party member. His publishing house, Marzani and Munsell, was subsidized by the Soviet KGB.
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