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From New International, Vol.4 No.7, July 1938, p.223.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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Reviewing Traitors in American History, James Oneal (New Leader, June 11, 1938) compares its author, Earl Browder, to the old Alabama romancer, Ovid Bolus, Esq., whose “genius for lying was encyclopediacal. It embraced all subjects without distinction or partiality. The truth was too small for him”. |
THOMAS CONWAY, an Irish general in Washington’s army, and other officers were involved in a scheme that “centered in the assassination of Washington and his closest comrades,” says Browder, just as “the Trotsky-Bukharin plot centered on the assassination of Stalin and his closest co-workers.”
One who writes such stuff is either an ignoramus, a faker, or both. The facts are that Washington had lost a number of battles and General Gates had won one, whereupon Conway got the idea of having Washington replaced by Gates. The matter became public, Conway and a few of his cronies were discredited, but there is no evidence whatever of any plot to murder Washington or anybody else.
Why Browder did not add that Washington executed Conway, Gates and several others must always remain a “Marxian” mystery. He might just as well have had these officers executed and added one fiction to another.
Browder also writes that in 1797 Congress impeached Senator Blount of Tennessee “for treasonable conspiracy”, but the “traitor found protection in the Senate of which he was a member”.
This is another falsehood. “Congress” did not impeach Blount. It was the Senate that only not impeached him but expelled him from that body but Browder has the Senate protecting him! Before Blount could be tried on charges he was elected to the Tennessee Legislature where he was able to defy the Federal authorities. Had he lived in Bolshevik Russia he would have been “tried” in the communist press and then been sent to a firing squad ...
He quotes Claude G. Bowers to prove that the Federalist “conspirators were planning an armed coup d’état” in 1803. Bowers wrote: “IF a resort to arms were necessary it was HOPED that Hamilton would agree to become commander-in-chief.” Thus we learn that on the basis of an “IF” and a “HOPE” a conspiracy was being planned! So we are entitled to shudder that the Federalists followed a course like that of the dirty “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” in the Soviet Union.
The more we follow “history” the more we are thrilled. He sees part of the “treason” in the smuggling across the Canadian frontier during the second war with Great Britain by way of New York, Vermont and Lake Champlain. The fact that smuggling included New York, a state that supported the war, suggests nothing to our “historian”. The smuggling merely means not “conspiracy” or “treason” but that the economic motive of profitable trade proved stronger than “patriotism” for contractors and thousands of farmers, traders and merchants?
We get a fearful shudder and are drawn closer to Stalin’s slaughterhouse, however, when Browder writes that “It was wholesale treason in the American Army that opened up the national capital, Washington, to the British Army”.
Where did he get this extraordinary information? From any government records, any private correspondence of those who “opened up the national capital” or any other reliable documentary material? No. It is pure fiction. Browder gets it out of a vacuum. In brief, the man lies.
He turns to Aaron Burr’s intrigues and produces another dreadful bed-time story. It is known that Burr had at one time thought of seizing the government, but his main intrigues had reference to the West. However, Browder writes: “In the Burr conspiracy were involved many of the highest army officers, judges of the US Courts, Senators and Congressmen, federal and state officials of all sorts, and the whole leadership of the Federalist party at one time or another.”
Where did Stalin’s commissar get the evidence to warrant writing that paragraph? There is none. He simply plunged into his consciousness and transformed phantoms into facts.
Browder is indignant over Burr’s harboring the idea of seizing the government, but he has forgotten M. Olgin, his fellow communist, author of a pamphlet urging American workers to engage in general strikes and armed insurrections, finally seizing Washington by force, arresting the President and members of his cabinet and establishing a Bolshevik dictatorship. What’s the difference between Burr and Olgin, Mr. Browder? And what’s the difference between Burr and you, considering that the former was a notorious liar whose word could not be trusted even by his most intimate friends?
Browder sums up his delightful fiction by saying that during 38 years the US Government “had to deal with tens of thousands of traitors in a population of three to six millions”. Writing for bourgeois dandies who dream of barricades in their parlors, Browder serves them such tripe for lunch. Needless to say, the above statement is also gross falsification.
He crowns this edifice of fiction by saying that “the original conception of democracy” in the United States was the “single party” and that the one-party regime was abolished by amending the Constitution after “more than a quarter century of independence!” Thus we learn that the communist dictatorship is also merely following an early American pattern!
* * *
THE press reports that the authorities in Rhode Island are pressing charges against the communist party for having used the American flag for commercial purposes by reproducing it, allegedly in violation of the law, on the cover of one of its agitational pamphlets. This time we take the side of the Stalinists, and that firmly. They are the only ones who really need to wave the American flag to prove their patriotism, and therefore deserve special dispensation!
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