From Labor Action, Vol. 14 no. 16, 17 April 1950, pp. 1 & 8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The meaning of bipartisan politics was spotlighted in a bright and crude glare this past week. President Truman appointed John Foster Dulles to be the Republican overseer of the administration’s foreign policy, as a “consultant” to the State Department.
It has come to be taken for granted even in labor and liberal circles that this should be so. “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” We’re in a cold war and everyone has to rallya round the flag, “Partisan politics” is a luxury we can’t afford. – So goes the theory.
The theory and practice of bipartisanship is not beginning with the appointment of Dulles, to be sure. No new principles are being introduced by the appointment. But those well-intentioned people who accept bipartisanship as a necessary accompaniment of “defense of democracy” and other excellent things ought to be brought up short.
We address ourselves to the Fair Deal laborites in whose eyes the Truman administration represents progress or even liberalism, while the bad, bad Republicans represent reaction, Taft-Hartleyism and points right. They divide political policy and even liberalism itself into two watertight compartments: domestic policy and foreign policy – and never the twain shall meet.
Now one thing is clear: bipartisanship in foreign policy means that the good Democrats and the bad Republicans must have the same foreign policy. This means in practice: the Democratic Fair Deal must follow a foreign policy satisfactory to the Republicans. Still more specifically: the Republicans shall have the right to exercise a veto on Fair Deal foreign policy. And the veto is to be swung by John Foster Dulles.
What kind of foreign policy is this which satisfies the Fair Deal’s urgent cry for bipartisanship? For it is Truman and the Fair Deal which has taken the initiative in wooing the opposition into the arrangement. The Republicans, as the men who are out of power and thirsting to find an issue to get in, have been understandably reluctant and restive: it deprives them of a stick to beat the administration, in spite of the fact that no important difference in line exists. But “politics stops at the water’s edge” and even office-hungry Republicans must be “patriotic” when the “interests of the country” are involved. That, again, is the theory.
John Foster Dulles is a bipartisan patriot and has been suitably rewarded. U.S. foreign policy is his foreign policy as much as it is Truman’s or Acheson’s. So let us take a closer look at this man to whom America’s role in the world is tailored.
Who is John Foster Dulles?
He is a “tight-lipped calculating Wall Streeter” who “makes Taft look pink by comparison.”
We’re not quoting from LABOR ACTION. Those are the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., on October 10, 1949. What is the nature of this American foreign policy, with its Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, Point Four and all, which is satisfactory to the gentleman so described?
Try it again: who is John Foster Dulles?
He is “a spokesman for entrenched Republican reaction, a man who has stubbornly opposed every social advance of our time ... and a man who spoke for and represented powerful Nazi-dominated cartels.”
That is not a Kremlin-inspired slander against him. Those:are the words of the New York State chairman of the Fair Deal ’ghrty itself, Paul E. Fitzpatrick, on October 28, 1949. What is this American “defense of democracy throughout the world” which is at the same time right up the alley of such a man? Can it have anything to do with any “social advance of our time”?
Take another: who is John Foster Dulles?
He is an “old-fashioned Republican reactionary whose concern is only for the rich and the well-born ... he knows nothing and is little concerned with the hopes and aspirations of the plain people of New York State.”
And that was CIO President Philip Murray on November 5, 1949. How can the Fair Deal world mission, which is all progressiveness and light to Murray and his fellow bigwigs of the CIO, be reconciled with unanimity with this man? Does Murray think Dulles is any more concerned with the plain people of England or France or Germany or Greece than he is with the plain people of the state which rejected him for the U.S. Senate under Murray’s urging?
We have scarcely begun to cite the opinions of this newly adopted architect of Washington’s angelic role in international affairs which are held by the same people who, in the other compartment of their minds, insist that we must all get behind the Commander in Chief of the West’s cold war.
Dulles and his ilk “represents biff business, monopoly, Wall Street and the financial interests. The issues are clearcut.” – Oh no, Mr. W.P. Kennedy, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen! How. “clearcut” are your issues when the devil with the cloven hoof who tried to get into one seat in the Senate suddenly sprouts wings in a position of immeasurably more power than is possessed by one senator’s vote?
“The Ku Klux Klan, the political hoodlums, are for Mr. Dulles – they enthusiastically endorse him.” That was October 31, 1949, Mr. Harold L. Ickes! What has Fair Deal world politics got to do with political hoodlumism and the Ku Klux Klan mind now?
“He has denounced everything the AFL stands for with scare words such as ‘statism’ and ‘Marxist socialism.’ ... That could, be Stalin or Hitler talking, but it isn’t; it’s John Foster Rulles, the supposedly great statesman.” – That’s the director of the AFL’s Labor League for Political Education, Joseph D. Keenan on October 5, 1949. Is there an AFL worker in the house who will ask Keenan: Can this man represent anything labor stands for or should stand for in this country’s relations with the peoples of the world?
The appointment of John Foster Dulles is bipartisanship in practice. Dulles took the job explicitly only on the basis that he have a hand not only in carrying out and putting across policies formulated by the State Department but that he also “be allowed to help formulate policy” to a greater extent than did even Senator Vandenberg. His appointment explains the meaning of the theory that “politics stops at the water’s edge.”
But political differences do NOT stop at the water’s edge. This may be a wish on the part of certain elements but it is not a fact. The struggle – of which we are plentifully told by Americans for Democratic Action, the Liberal Party and the liberal-labor “statesmen” of the CIO and AFL – between progress and reaction, between the interests of the people and the interests of those who would turn the clock back, is even more relevant to world issues than it is.to domestic issues.
The U.S., holding the pursestrings of the capitalist West can throw its weight against the British people’s desire for socialist change, or it can try to block it – and Dulles has made no bones about his own opinion.
The U.S. can support reaction in Greece or throw its weight on the side of the people – and it has in fact been doing the former.
The U.S. can use economic aid to Europe as a weapon to bludgeon the people back to “free enterprise,” as it has in fact been doing with its Marshall Plan. The U.S. can use its control over Germany to present the people with the choice of recartelization and renazification on the one hand and the arms of Stalin on the other – as it has been doing. And so on.
So the wheeze that “politics stops at the water’s edge” does not, in fact, correspond with any reality. The same lines of difference are there as in domestic politics. What then is the basis of Democratic-Republican bipartisanship In this field?
To see this, let’s leave for a while the liberal-labor myth of the general progressiveness of Fair Deal politics. Let us look at Dulles’ appointment in the light of another view, the socialist view.
The aim of Washington in world politics is not the general welfare of the peoples of the world and of democracy. It is fighting a back-to-the-wall struggle for the defense of the capitalist profit system in the world, not only against the monstrous totalitarianism of Moscow, which is a rival contender for world oppression, but also against the people’s desire for socialist democracy.
It aims to organize the whole capitalist world for the greater glory of Wall Street, not because of a Napoleon complex or simple desire for power and sway, but because its capitalist economy needs this to survive. Based upon its capitalist, ruling class at home, it recognizes its friends only among the weakened and demoralized capitalist leaders abroad – but abroad in particular this means: it recognizes its friends only in the extreme reaction.
At home, the capitalist class can permit itself the luxury of scrapping over differences of approach WITHIN their own ranks on how best to preserve the system. As against rival ruling classes abroad, the basic interests of U.S. imperialism need a united front. Bipartisanship is the face of American imperialist policy.
With which view can John Foster Dulles’ new role be best squared? With the liberal-labor idea that a dyed-in-the-wool, blown-in-the-bottle, guaranteed unshrinkable, rockribbed reactionary can act as the formulator and collaborator in policies,aimed at world democracy – or with the Independent Socialist view that Truman and Dulles are perfectly justified in getting together (from their own points of view) because the needs of imperialism are the common denominator of foreign politics for both?
There are no two ways about it for us. The theory of bipartisanship is squarely based on U.S. imperialism, and the practice of bipartisanship means – Dulles.
This is the inevitable line of U.S. capitalism on the basis of which Stalinist expansion has been making hay. This is Washington’s gift to the Kremlin, one of a series of gifts.
Dulles is not an unknown character in Europe. The Stalinists have seen to that for their own nefarious purposes. And here, for once, they need not lie! For what important lies could they tell which are more telling than the characterizations of Dulles so truthfully made in the 1949 campaign by the Fair Dealers and liberal-labor men themselves?
What the European people are looking for, in various ways, is an atlernative to both captialist imperialism and Russian imperialism. The Truman-Dulles cartel offers them more of the same old world of which they have had their bellyful. Only the goal, the fight, the hope for a new world of socialist democracy can open the road to progress and peace.
Last updated on 7 January 2024