THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ---Episode 14

Mid--East Oil and the Sagas of Postwar Palestine and Germany

   In early 1947, Great Britain announced that with its retrenchment in Greece and Turkey, it would terminate its mandate over Palestine and refer the problem to the United Nations without recommending a solution.  In May, the Soviets surprised U.S. officials when Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko unfurled the Soviet position before the UN General Assembly. Citing the horrors of the Holocaust, the fact that both Jews and Arabs had historical claims to the land, and the ways in which British malfeasance had exacerbated tensions between them, Gromyko said, the Soviets preferred a binational or federal state. However, if that weren't possible, they would support a two-state solution, which the Jewish militants greatly preferred and the Arabs adamantly opposed. In late 1947, the United Nations, despite fierce Arab opposition, endorsed the partition of Palestine into two independent states. The Soviets supported this solution ; the British and the Arabs opposed it; and the United States equivocated but finally came on board. Arab violence flared in Palestine as soon as the partition vote was announced. 

ON MAY 14, 1948, THE STATE OF ISRAEL PROCLAIMED ITS EXISTENCE. Eleven minutes later, the United States offered diplomatic recognition. Hours later, the Arab nations launched a full-scale war, hoping to eliminate the new nation before it got off the ground. Relying heavily on Soviet and Czech weapons, the badly outnumbered Israelis defeated the Arabs in the initial six-month war. In recognizing Israel, Truman defied the advice of Marshall, Forrestal, and corporate executive Robert Lovett, who feared a break with U.S. oil-producing friends in the region. They also feared losing U.S. and British access to Middle Eastern bases from which to attack the Soviet Union if war broke out. During a meeting in the Oval Office on May 12, Clark Clifford had laid out the moral and strategic case for recognition. He envisioned Israel as an invaluable U.S. ally in a volatile region. General George Marshall vehemently countered Clifford's arguments and insisted that they were based on domestic political considerations : Truman's hope of winning the Jewish vote. MARSHALL BLUNTLY TOLD TRUMAN THAT IF HE RECOGNIZED ISRAEL, HE WOULD NOT VOTE FOR HIM IN THE 1948 ELECTION. 

There was some truth to Marshall's contention. Truman was certainly aware of the domestic political implications of his actions. "In all of my political experience," he told a friend, "I don't ever recall the Arab vote swinging a close election." And Truman was in a very close election in 1948, one in which every vote counted. But Truman, despite his frequent anti-Semitic comments and contempt for Jewish activists, was also motivated by a sincere concern for Jews' suffering in the Holocaust.

Marshall had advocated a trusteeship over Palestine under UN auspices that would keep the Jews and Arabs in the same country. He and others also worried about the close ties between Israel and the Soviet Union, whose legal recognition of Israel had followed closely behind that of the United States on May 15. U.S. intelligence reported Soviet influence with the Irgun and the Stern Gang and took note of the influx of Jewish Communists into the region. The United States and Great Britain, trying not to antagonize the Arabs completely, placed an embargo on arms shipments to both sides and the United States maneuvered to preempt UN resolutions condemning Arab aggression. U.S. policy makers, fearing Soviet military intervention either unilaterally or as part of an international peacekeeping force, pushed for a quick resolution. 

Despite Ibn Saud's threats to cancel the concession to Aramco, which Texaco and Standard Oil of California had established in Saudi Arabia, the United States was not overly concerned about Arab retaliation. An early-July State Department report found that, excluding Iran, the Middle East supplied only 6 percent of Western oil supplies and that the loss could be absorbed "without substantial hardship to any group of consumers." 

Although Israel signed armistice agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria in 1949, the Arabs' bitterness over the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East persists to this day and the issues that caused the 1948 war remain unresolved. The situation was exacerbated by a massive refugee problem, as many Arabs fled from what would become Israel ---some following the advice of Arab leaders and some driven out by the Israelis. The refugee problem, after more than sixty years, remains a constant source of tension in the region. 

MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 13

IN 1947, THE UNITED STATES PLANTED THE SEEDS THAT BLOSSOMED INTO A POWERFUL WAR MACHINE

In July, 1947, following five months of hearings and heated debate, Congress passed the greatest military reform in U.S. history. The National Security Act created the National Military Establishment [later called the Department of Defense], consisting of the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, headed by a secretary of defense, and a Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS] . Truman appointed the anti-Soviet hard-liner James Forrestal as the first secretary of defense. Creating a new U.S. Air Force separate from the army confirmed the importance of atomic warfare in future military planning. 

The act also created the National Security Council, a War Council, the National Security Resources Board, and the Central Intelligence Agency, all of which General George C. Marshall opposed because they gave the military too much influence over foreign policy and abridged the constitutional authority of the president and secretary of state. Truman himself feared that the CIA could turn into a "Gestapo" or "military dictatorship." The CIA's clandestine nature troubled Acheson, who wrote. "I have the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it." Although the act specifically authorized the Agency only to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence, it also empowered it to perform "other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security." The Agency used that vague wording to conduct hundreds of covert operations, including eighty-one during Truman's second term alone. 

     THE U.S MILITARY BEEFS UP TO BECOME THE 
     WORLD'S BIGGEST BULLY 

In late September 1947, George Kennan urged Forrestal to establish a "guerrilla warfare corps"--- a suggestion Forrestal heartily endorsed--- although the JCS recommended against establishing a "separate guerrilla warfare school and corps." In December, Truman approved NSC 10/2, which called for "propaganda, economic warfare ; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world." These activities were to be done in a way that would always afford the U.S. government plausible deniability. In August 1948, Truman approved NSC 20, which authorized guerrilla operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 

At the end of WW II, U.S.policy makers decided not to allow their booming military machine to erode. In 1948, 62 percent of all federal research and development was military-related. The air force claimed a large share. General Carl Spaatz testified before Congress that "the next war will be predominantly an air war." The The United States began missile research, employing many of the hundreds of scientists it had secreted out of Germany, including almost the entirety of Werner von Braun's rocket staff at Peenemunde. Some of the scientists had been involved in human experimentation and Nazi slave-labor programs. Equally disturbing, during the Tokyo war criminal trials, U.S authorities secretly granted blanket immunity to Japanese officers and reserchers involved with the notorious Unit 731 in exchange for sharing the results of lethal experiments conducted on three thousand prisoners in Manchuria. Meanwhile, the air force, competing with the army and the navy over funding and prestige, employed its own in-house think tank to design strategies that would promote the air force;s primacy. In 1948, this division transformed itself into the independent RAND Corporation. During these years, U.S. war plans became increasingly reliant on atomic weapons and air warfare, which were determined to be far cheaper than conventional military forces. By the middle of the next decade, the air force would consume nearly as much of the defense budget as the army and navy combined. 

MORE TO COME

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR-----Episode 12

EVEN BEFORE HIS SEPTEMBER 12, 1946 SPEECH AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, WALLACE HAD SENT A MEMO TO TRUMAN ON JULY 23 AND THAT MEMO WAS LEAKED TO THE PRESS 

   In the midst of the controversy over Wallace's Sept 12 speech, someone leaked Wallace's July 23 memo to Truman in which he identified the "fatal defect" in the Baruch plan. Several Soviet newspapers published it in its entirety. 

     That defect is the scheme . . . of arriving at international agreements by 'easy steps', of requiring other nations to enter into binding commitments not to conduct research into the military uses of atomic energy and to disclose uranium and thorium resources while the United States retains the right to withhold its technical knowledge of atomic energy until the international control and inspection system is working to our satisfaction. 
      Is it ny wonder that the Russians did not show any great enthusiasm for our plan ? . . . I think we would react as the Russians appear to have done. We would have put up a counterproposal for the record but our real effort would go into trying to make a bomb so that our bargaining position would be equalized. . . 
     . . . Realistically, Russia has two cards which she can use in negotiating with us :[1] our lack of information on the state of her scientific and technical progress on atomic energy and {2} our ignorance of her uranium and thorium resources. These cards are nothing like as powerful as our cards---a stockpile of bombs, manufacturing plants in actual production, B-29s and B-36s, and our bases covering half the globe. Yet we are in effect asking her to reveal her only two cards immediately --- telling her that after we have seen her cards we will decide whether we want to continue to play the game. 

   Truman insisted that Wallace stop talking about foreign policy while the postwar conference of the Council of Foreign Ministers was taking place. Byrnes had cabled Truman from Paris to complain that Wallace's speech and memo had thrown the meeting into complete disarray. Byrnes and Baruch were both threatening to resign. Truman feared that Forrestal and Secretary of War Robert Patterson would do likewise. He decided to fire Wallace and wrote a scathing letter demanding his resignation. 

Support for Wallace had poured in throughout the controversy. Albert Einstein wrote, "I cannot refrain from expressing to you my high and unconditional admiration for your letter to the President of July 23rd. There is a deep understanding concerning the factual and psychological situation and a far-reaching perception of present American foreign policy. Your courageous intervention deserves the gratitude of all of us who observe the present attitude of our government with grave concern." 

      WITH WALLACE GONE, THE U.S. PLUNGED 
      HEADLONG INTO COLD WAR BOTH AT 
      HOME AND ABROAD 

On September 24, the long-awaited report from the White House counsel Clark Clifford and his assistant George Elsey arrived. The comprehensive review of Soviet actions, intentions, and capabilities was intended to show that the Soviets had regularly violated their agreements. It painted  dire picture of Soviet efforts "to weaken the position and destroy the prestige of the United States in Europe, Asia, and South America" so they could rule the world, while sowing discord in the United States through the Communist Party. 
The United States needed to respond by beefing up its atomic arsenal, expanding its network of overseas bases, strengthening its military capabilities, and mobilizing its resources to "assist all democracies which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R." They failed, however, to document Soviet perfidy in regard to treaty obligations, admitting that "it is difficult to adduce direct evidence of literal violations." 

In a penetrating critique of the report's distortions, historian Melvyn Leffler wrote, "Clifford and Elsey ignored actions that might have  injected hues of gray into their black-and-white-characterization of Soviet foreign policy," such as all the instances where the Soviets had honored or exceeded their agreements, withdrawn their troops, allowed free elections, and discouraged insurrectionary activity."Double standards and self-deception repeatedly crept into the Clifford-Elsey report," he noted, adding 

     Truman's advisors did not ask how America's own questionable record of compliance affected Soviet behavior. They did not acknowledge that General Lucius Clay and other War Department officials consistently identified France, not Russia, as the principal source of U.S. problems in Germany. They suspected that any Soviet interest in German unification masked the Kremlin's quest to gain leverage over all of Germany, but conveniently dismissed the American desire to dilute Soviet influence in the east and to orient all of Germany to the West. Likewise, Clifford and Elsey pointed to the retention of Russian troops in Iran as irrefutable proof of the Soviet desire to dominate Iran and gain control of Middle Eastern oil. They did NOT say [and may not have known] that, at the very time they were writing their report, State Department officials and military planners were contending that the U.S. troops must remain beyond the stipulated deadlines for their withdrawal in Iceland, the Azores, Panama, the Galapagos, and other locations in order to augment American bargaining leverage for postwar base and military transit rights. 

Leffler also accused them of presenting "a totally misleading rendition of Soviet capabilities." Clifford later admitted that it was the kind of "black and white" analysis that Truman liked. 

Clifford and Elsey ruled out further efforts to negotiate with the Soviets. "The language of military power," they wrote, "is the only language" the Soviets understand.  HENCE, THEY WARNED OMINOUSLY, "THE UNITED STATES MUST BE PREPARED TO WAGE ATOMIC AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE" AGAINST THE SOVIET UNION.  Truman ordered Clifford to round up all ten copies of the report and lock them up. "If this got out," he snapped, "it would blow the roof off the White House, it would blow the roof off the Kremlin." It would also prove that Wallace, whom Truman had fired four days earlier, had been correct in all his warnings about the Hard-line confrontational direction of U.S. policy.

While the Soviets were imposing friendly left-wing governments in their sphere, the British were imposing right-wing governments in theirs. In Greece, the British army toppled the popular leftist National Liberation Front and restored the monarchy and right-wing dictatorship. Jailing of critics and other repressive measures soon sparked a Communist-led uprising. The Yugoslavs provided support but the Soviets did not, as Stalin abided by his wartime agreement with Churchill that placed Greece within the British sphere of influence. 

MORE TO COME

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 11

   HENRY WALLACE DID HIS BEST TO CONVINCE 
  TRUMAN TO QUIT LISTENING TO THE RICH FOLKS
  WHO WANTED TO BULLY RUSSIA AND THE REST OF
  THE WORLD 


Henry Wallace tried to stop the madmen who were governing the foreign affairs of the U.S. in 1945--1947. In July 1946, he wrote a long letter to Truman, repudiating the "growing feeling that another war is coming and the only way we can head it off is to arm ourselves to the teeth. All past of past history indicates that an armament race does not lead to peace but to war." He saw the coming months as very possibly "the crucial period which will decide whether the civilized world will go down in destruction afer the five or ten years needed for several nations to arm themselves with atomic bombs." He urged Truman to consider how "American actions since V-J Day appear to other nations," pointing to "$13 billion for the War and Navy Departments, the Bikini tests of the atomic bomb and continued production of bombs, the plan to arm Latin America with our weapons, production of B-29s and planned production of B-36s, and the effort to secure air bases spread over half the globe from which the other half of the globe can be bombed. . . This makes it appear either [1] that we are preparing ourselves to win the war which we regard as inevitable or [2] that we are trying to build up a predominance of force to intimidate the rest of mankind. How would it look to us if Russia had the tomic bomb and we did not, if Russia had 10,000 --mile bombers and air bases within a thousand miles of our coastlines and we did not ?" 

                     DEFENSE SPENDING THAT UNJUSTLY 
                     ENRICHES---WW II MADE THAT INDUSTRY
                    AWARE THAT THE FEDERAL TREASURY 
                    WAS A MARKET TO BE EXPLOITED 

   Wallace called for sharply cutting defense spending, because maintaining peace by a "preponderance of forces is no longer possible." In 1938, the United States spent less than $1 billion on national defense. Now, he calculated, the War and Navy Departments, war liquidation, ans interest on public debt and veterans' benefits, representing the cost of past wars, consumed $28 billion, or 80 percent of the current $36 billion budget. Wallace reiterated scientists' warnings that "atomic warfare is cheap" and even having ten times as many bombs as one's enemy gives no decisive advantage. "And most important, the very fact that several nations have atomic bombs will inevitably result in a neurotic, fear-ridden, itching-trigger psychology . . . In a world armed with atomic weapons, some incident will lead to the use of those weapons." He forcefully dismissed those advocating "preventive war," whose "scheme is not only immoral but stupid." The only solution, he concluded, "consists of mutual trust and confidence among nations, atomic disarmament, and an effective system of enforcing that disarmament." 

Wallace's peace offensive was aided by two significant publications that summer of 1946. In late August, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to John Hersey's "Hiroshima" that did more to humanize the victims of the atomic bombings than any other contemporary English-language publication. In September, Look magazine began publishing a four-part series by Elliott Roosevelt that detailed how his father's and Stalin's plans for postwar peace and collaboration were derailed by Truman and Churchill. Truman would later dismiss Roosevelt's son as the "product of a piss erection." 

Wallace understood the urgency of the situation. He looked forward to a major address on September 12 in New York's Madison Square Garden.  The speech is reproduced in the e-mail that accompanies this missive. It was absolutely incendiary. Republican Senator Robert Taft accused Truman of betraying Byrnes, who was irate over being so publicly repudiated. The warmongers demanded that Truman muzzle Wallace. Truman fired Wallace on September 20, 1946. 

MUCH MORE TO COME

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR----Episode 10

TRUMAN MAKES THE TERRIBLE MISTAKE OF APPOINTING BERNARD BARUCH TO PRESENT THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE PLAN TO THE UNITED NATIONS 

   As you will recall, the Acheson-Lilienthal report was a proposal mainly prepared by Robert Oppenheimer. Under the plan, an international Atomic Development Authority was to be created to oversee the mining, refining, and utilization of all the world's atomic raw materials. The plan called for the denaturing of all fissionable matial nd making it available for peaceful uses. National activity in the so-called "dangerous areas" would be outlawed. The plan intentionally minimized the need for on-site inspections to increase the chances that the Soviet Union would accept it. 

Hopes for an international agreement were dashed, however, when Truman and Byrnes appointed Byrens's fellow South Carolinian , seventy-five-year-old financier Bernard Baruch, to present the plan to the United Nations. Paying off an old political debt, Truman empowered him to revise it as he saw fit. Baruch had bankrolled Truman when he trailed in his 1940 Senate reelection bid and desperately needed funds. All involved, including Acheson, Lilienthal, and Oppenheimer, were furious, knowing Baruch, an outspoken anti-Communist who viewed the bomb as the United States' "winning weapon," would reformulate the plan so that the Soviets would reject it out of hand. Lilienthal wrote in his journal , "When I read this news last night, I was quite sick. . . We need a man who is young, vigorous, nt vain, and who the Russians would feel isn't out simply to put them in a hole, not really caring about international cooperation. Baruch has none of these qualifications." Baruch's choice of fellow businessmen as advisors further infuriated those who had labored so hard to come up with a plan that would work. He decided not to include scientists because, he later explained, "I concluded that I would drop the scientists because as I told them, I knew all I wanted to know. It went boom and it kied millions of people." Vannevar Bush, who had served on the Acheson-Lilienthal Committee, dismissed Baruch's advisors as "Wall Streeters." He let Baruch know that he considered him and the rest of the crew completely unqualified for the job. Baruch announced that he would turn to General Leslie Groves [pro-war militarist] and the industrialists [ makers of defense products] for advice on technical matters. Facing widespread criticism, Baruch finally relented and asked Oppenheimer to come on board as chief scientific advisor. "Son't let those associates of mine worry you," he told the physicist. "Hancock id pretty 'Right', but [winking] I'll watch him. Searls is smart as a whip, but he sees Reds under every bed." He said they would have to begin "preparing the American people for a refusal by Russia." OPPENHEIMER DECLINED THE INVITATION. 

Baruch proceeded to amend the original proposal, larding it with inspections and other provisions that the Soviets would be certain to reject. Not only did Acheson and Lilienthal try to convince him to remove the provisions, Truman and Byrnes did too. Baruch remained adamant, threatening to resign if his plan was not adopted, and Truman, in a colossal failure of presidential leadership, backed down. On the eve of Baruch's submitting the plan to the United Nations on June 14, 1946, Byrnes admitted that appointing Baruch was "the worst mistake I have ever made." Even Truman later privately admitted that appointing Baruch was "the worst blunder I ever made." 

Soviet leaders waited ten days before lashing out at the U.S. proposal. Pravda charged that the Baruch plan was a "product of atomic diplomacy and reflects the obvious tendency toward world domination." The plan made it clear that the United States intends"to consolidate its monopoly" on the production of "atomic weapons." Pravda pointed out that the U.S. government had contracted production of bombs "to private monopolistic firms such as E. I. de Nemours, whose entire pre-war outlook was connected by a thousand threads to the German I. G. Farbenindustrie." The Soviets The Soviets submitted a counterplan of their own, which would ban production, stockpiling, and use of atomic weapons. Existing stockpiles would be destroyed within three months. 

        The U.S. Makes The Decision To Adopt
      Role of Bully and Master of the Universe

The U.S. decision to proceed with its July 1, 1946 atomic bomb test in the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands sent the Soviets another chilling message about U.S. intentions. The General Assembly of the Universalist Church denounced the tests as being "offensive to the very purpose of the Christian spirit." Ickes described the Bikini tests as "diplomacy by intimidation" and noted that if it were the Soviets carrying them out," Americans would find cause for deep concern about the future peace of the world." Raymond Gram Swing told his ABC Radio listeners that many Americans, including atomic scientists and members of Congress, has protested the decision. "On the one hand we're training ourselves in the use of this very weapon. So we strive to save civilization, and we learn how to wreck it, all on the same weekend." The Soviets, predictably, responded in similar fashion. Pravda's Boris Izakov wondered why the Americans would go to such lengths to improve their bombs if they were serious about disarmament.

THERE WAS A MADNESS TO THE UNFOLDING NUCLEAR ARMS RACE. MORE ABOUT THE MADNESS PRESENTLY.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR --- Episode 9

 THERE WERE HEATED REACTIONS TO CHURCHILL'S 
 IRON CURTAIN SPEECH IN 1946 IN FULTON, 
 MISSOURI 

   Led by members of the Roosevelt family, New Deal progressives condemned Churchill and beseeched Truman to change course before it was too late . Speaking publicly, Eleanor Roosevelt deplored Churchill's inflammatory remarks. James Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor's oldest son, did likewise at a meeting of the Independent Citizens' Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions.  

Following Churchill's speech, U.S.---Soviet relations deteriorated rapidly. At the United Nations, the United States pressed for a confrontation over Iran, despite the Soviet Union's agreement to withdraw its troops. When Soviet troops stayed beyond the March 2 deadline for their removal, Truman threatened war.  He wrote, "If the Russians were to control Iran's oil, either directly or indirectly, the raw material balance of the world would undergo serious damage and it would be a serious loss for the economy of the western world." Forrestal afterward noted that "whoever sits on the valve of Middle East oil may control the destiny of Europe." Truman decided to send a clear message that the United States --- not the Soviet Union --- would sit on that valve. 

Former Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler, the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize winner and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, made it clear that the issue involved was oil, not democracy. "Iran is whollya question of oil," he explained. "Large commitments have been proposed and made to Great Britain. A way ought to be found for Russia to have a share of the oil without carrying on a political military disturbance." Some found that suggestion quite plausible. In an editorial on the crisis, the Washington Post suggested that "Russia may have legitimate claims to make on Iran. On the oil situation, for instance, we have repeatedly argued that a joint plan for the exploitation of the oil resources of the Middle East is definitely in order." 

Claude Pepper got a closer look at the unfolding crisis in his tour of the Middle East, which included an interview with Stalin. After returning to the United States, Pepper addressed the Senate, exonerating the Soviet Union and condemning British imperial overreach. "It comes with ill disgrace from a certain world power whose people are stationed in every nation from Egypt to Singapore to make a world conflagration out of the movement of troops a few miles into some neighboring teritory to resist an oil monopoly which they enjoy." "If American foreign policy is made the scapegoat for such imperialism, it is more stupid than I thought is possible for it to be." The Washington Post reported that after Pepper finished, several senators and House members walked over to shake his hand. 

Pressured by the United States and Great Britain, Soviet forces withdrew from Iran. Truman later told Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson that he had summoned Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko to the White House and informed him that if Soviet troops weren't out in forty-eight hours, "We're going to drop it on you." They were out, he claimed, in twenty-four hours. Although the real story behind the Soviet withdrawal is much more complicated, Truman drew the lesson that that when confronted with superior force, the Soviets would back down. The United States decided to press its advantage. In May, it halted reparations shipments from western Germany that the Soviets desperately needed. In July, it decided to keep troops in South Korea and the following month to maintain a naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean. 

While Truman was making atomic threats, the public quaked at the prospect of atomic war.  In early 1946, Ladies' Home Journal instructed readers, "Over and above all else you do, the thought you should wake up to, go to sleep with and carry with you all day" is prevention of nuclear war. Henry Wallace agreed and pushed Truman to pursue international control of atomic weapons more aggressively. In January 1946, Truman appointed Acheson, who had voiced similar concerns, to head a committee to tackle the problem. Acheson named Tennessee Valley Authority [TVA] Administrator David Lilienthal to chair a board of scientific advisors. Acheson confided to Lilienthal that Truman and Byrnes had neither "the facts nor an understanding of what was involved in the atomic energy issue, the most serious cloud hanging over the world." Commitments had been made, and, with Byrnes then in London, new ones were being made" without a knowledge of what the hell it is all about --- literally ! "  Acheson bemoaned the fact that "the War Department, and really one man in the War Department, Leslie Groves, has, by the power of veto on the ground of 'military security,' really been determining and almost running foreign policy." 

The resulting Acheson--Lilienthal report, which the hardheaded Acheson described as "a brilliant and profound document," was largely the work of Oppenheimer. Under the plan, an international Atomic Development Authority would oversee the mining, refining, and utilization of all the world's atomic raw materials, denaturing all fissionable material and making it available for peaceful . National activity in these "dangerous" areas would be outlawed. The plan intentionally minimized the need for on-site inspections to increase the chances the Sviet Union would accept it. 

   MORE TO COME

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR --- Episode 8

BOTH BEFORE AND AFTER WORLD WAR II, GREAT BRITAIN, THE SOVIET UNION AND THE UNITED STATES LOOKED CLOSELY AT THE MIDDLE EAST TO ASSURE FUTURE OIL SUPPLY 


Iran was another prize. In September 1941, tired of Reza Shah Pahlavi's erratic behavior and questionable loyalties, Britain and the USSR invaded and occupied the country, forcing Reza Shah into exile and replacing him with his twenty-one -year-old son. 

Having eyed Iran's rich oil reserves since the 1920s, the United States now maneuvered to expand its influence, offering lend--lease aid and sending in civilian and military advisors. In 1943, Secretary of State Cordell Hull explained to Roosevelt why it was essential to limit British and Soviet power : "It is to our interest that no great power be established on the Persian Gulf opposite the important American petroleum developments in Saudi Arabia. 

Like Great Britain and the United States, the Soviet Union did indeed have designs on Iranian oil. Stalin wanted to develop the oil fields in northern Iran. He also worried about the security of the Soviet Union's Baku oil fields, which were only a hundred miles north of the Russo--Iranian border. Stalin pressed Iran for oil concessions comparable to those granted to Gret Britain and the United States and, with troops remaining in the country from World War II, supported a separatist uprising in Iran's northern provinces to force Iran's hand. 

Churchill, meanwhile, itched for a confrontation with the Soviet Union. A rabid anti-Communist and unabashed imperialist, Churchill had tried to draw the United States into military engagement with the Soviet Union as far back as 1918. Though forced to defer his long-sought confrontation during the war, he pounced as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Soviet probes in Iran and Turkey had threatened the British sphere in the Middle East and Mediterranean, and Great Britain's hold on India seemed precarious. The exposure of a Soviet atomic espionage ring in Canada in early February 1946 added credibility to warnings issued by Forrestal, Leahy, and other hard-liners.  A speech that month by Stalin raised further hackles, though it was actually much less inflammatory than Soviet expert George Kennan and others contended. 

Anti-Soviet sentiments were clearly on the rise in early March 1946 when Churchill spoke in Fulton, Missouri, with Truman sitting on the platform. His bellicose words delivered a sharp, perhaps fatal, blow to any prospects for post-war comity : 

     From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent . . . Police governments are prevailing. . . in a great number of countries . . . the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization . . . I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. 

Stalin responded angrily, accusing Churchill of being in bed with the "warmongers" who followed the "racial theory" that only English speakers could "decide the fate of the world." 

The speech aroused intense passions on all sides. Major newspapers were mixed in their reactions. The New York Times applauded Churchill's harsh rhetoric, spoken "with the force of the prophet proved right before." The Washington Post also found elements to applaud but criticized Churchill's "illogical" call for an "international police force," as "overdoing the emphasis on force."

The Chicago Tribune agreed with Churchill's analysis of what was occurring in Eastern Europe but sharply disagreed with his remedy and pounced upon his defense of British imperialism : "He proposes an alliance, half slave and half free, with the British empire representing slavery. He comes really as a suppliant, begging assistance for that old and evil empire and frankly expecting to get it on his own terms." Such an alliance would require U.S. acceptance of "the enslavement and exploitation of millions of British subjects." The Tribune lectured sternly that the United States shoud not use its power "to maintain British tyranny thruout the world. We cannot become partners in slave holding." 

Several senators vigorously denounced Churchill's defense of empire. Maine Republican Owen Brewster proclaimed, "We cannot assume the heritage of colonial policy represented by the British foreign and colonial office. Nine-tenths of the world is not Anglo-Saxon. We must consider how we are going to gain the confidence of the world that is not Slav or Anglo-Saxon. I fear an alliance with Britain would be the catalyst that would precipitate the world against us. We should orient American policy independently with the Russians." Florida's Claude Pepper observed, "He spoke beautifully for imperialism ---but it is always British imperialism. I think his tory sentiments make him as much opposed to Russia as to a labor government in his own country. We want Anglo-American cooperation, but not at the exclusion of the rest of the world." Pepper later joined fellow Democrats Harley Kilgore of West Virginia and Glen Taylor of Idaho in issuing a statement rejecting Churchill's proposal for "an old fashioned, power politics, military alliance between Great Britain and the United States " that would "cut the throat of the UNO." Pepper told reporters, "It is shocking to see Mr. Churchill . . . align himself with the old Chamberlain Tories who strengthened the Nazis as part of their anti-Soviet crusade . . . the people of the world who really want peace must take note of this Tory clamor in Britain and the United States which is building up for war. The new British-American imperialism which Mr. Churchill proposes and defends makes us false false to the very ideals for which both nations fought." 

Nor did the public clamor to support Churchill's belligerent call. As one Washington Post reader asserted, "Senator Pepper and his colleagues should be congratulated on their courageous reply to the war-mongering speech of Churchill. Who is President of the United States, Truman or Churchill ? Why should Churchill tell us what our policies should be when even the British people repudiated Churchill's policies in the last election. Churchill is a warmonger and it is time that Senator Pepper told him so. We need  second Declaration of Independence from british rule." 

Riding on the train to Missouri with Churchill, Truman had read Churchill's speech in its entirety and heartedly approved of its contents. But, in light of the outcry against Churchill's pugnacity, he denied having advance knowledge of what Churchill would say. Truman's boldfaced lies were quickly exposed by journalists. 

  MUCH MORE TO COME OF THIS MOST INTERESTING PERIOD IN OUR HISTORY.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR ----Episode 7

IN THE EARLY MONTHS AFTER WORLD WAR II, OUR
GOVERNMENT BEGAN TO DEVELOP INTO A BULLY BECAUSE WE HAD THE ATOMIC BOMB AND
THE REST OF THE WORLD DIDN'T 

During the early postwar years, Truman vacillated in his attitude toward Stalin, often likening him to Boss Pendergast in Kansas City. Others did likewise. Even Averell Harriman, a fierce critic who worked with Stalin as ambassador during the war, recognized the complexity of his personality : 

     It is hard for me to reconcile the courtesy and consideration that Stalin showed me personally with the ghastly cruelty of his wholesale liquidations. Others, who did not know him personally, see only the tyrant in Stalin. I saw the other side as well----his high intelligence, that fantastic grasp of detail, his shrewdness and his surprising human sensitivity that he was capable of showing . . . I found him better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, in some ways the most effective of the war leaders. . . for me Stalin remains the most inscrutable and contradictory character I have ever known. 

   With tensions over Poland having eased, Germany would provide an early test case for postwar cooperation. After Germany's surrender, the Allies divided the country into Soviet, U.S., British, and French zones. Roosevelt had first supported the Morgenthau Plan for "pastoralization" of Germany to ensure that it never again posed a threat to its neighbors. "We have to be tough with Germany," Roosevelt told Morgenthau in August 1944. "We either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so they can't just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past." But the United States revered itself once it became convinced that restoration of the German economy would be key to overall European recovery. This placed the Western powers at odds with the Soviets, who feared German revitalization and were busy stripping the eastern zone of assets to ship back to the Soviet Union. These conflicting interests impeded the creation of a unified Germany, thereby planting the seeds for later conflict, while Germans struggled to eke out a living regardless of which zone they lived in. 
  The first major superpower conflict erupted in the Middle East, not Europe, as Stalin moved to expand Soviet influence in Iran and Turkey at declining Britain's expense. The Middle East had assumed increased strategic significance following completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the introduction of long-distance air routes in the early twentieth century. English historian Arnold Toynbee described it as "the shortest route between the two chief concentrations of population and power in the world of the twentieth century" : India, East Asia, and the Pacific on the one hand, and Europe, America, and the Atlantic on the other. He explained that "command of the Middle East carried with it the power of keeping open the direct routes between those two geographical poles, or closing them, or forcing them open again." The Soviet Union had long coveted the Turkish Straits, which would have allowed it access to the Mediterranean, and Stalin believed he had won that concession from Roosevelt and Churchill during the war. He now pressured Turkey to build joint military bases in the straits. The ensuing conflict, like everything else in the Middle East, revolved around oil. At the start of the war, the United States accounted for 61 percent of overall world oil production. Great Britain controlled 72 percent of Middle Eastern oil, the United States only 10 percent. The United States now sought a bigger share in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia held the key to U.S. ambitions. In 1943, the United States extended lend-lease aid to the oil-rich sheikdom. The following year, Saudi King Ibn Saud granted the United States permission to construct an air base at Dharan. 
   In a 1944 meeting with British Ambassador Lord Halifax, Roosevelt drew a map of Middle Eastern oil holdings and informed Halifax that Iranian oil belonged to Great Britain, Saudi oil to the United States, and Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil belonged to both. The following year, Roosevelt concluded a deal with Ibn Saud pledging U.S. support in return for EXCLUSIVE ACCESS to Saudi oil. Truman understood the importance of maintaining U.S. control of this vital resource. In August 1945, Gordon Merriam, Chief of the State Department Near East Division, alerted Truman to the fact that Saudi Arabia's oil resources were "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in human history." 

   MUCH MORE TO COME 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR --- Episode 6

IN THE FALL OF 1945,  THE U.S. HAD THE ATOMIC BOMB AND RUSSIA DID NOT- WE START BULLYING


   
    With the nuclear issue looming large, scientists descended on Washington in the fall of 1945 to promote international control of atomic energy and prevent military control of atomic research. Wallace supported their efforts, testifying before the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy that the May-Johnson bill, by providing for military oversight of peacetime nuclear research would set up the "most undemocratic, dictatorial arrangements that have ever been proposed to the Congress in a major legislative measure." Its passage would threaten to deliver the American people into the hands of "military fascism." Wallace further pressed Truman to remove control of U.S atomic weapons from Leslie Groves [military general] and require authorization of the president, secretary of state, secretary of war and secretary of navy before they could be used. Wallace feared that given Soviet-hater Groves's unilateral control over the nuclear arsenal , he might launch an atomic attack on his own authority. 
   Such a fear was not as far-fetched as it might seem. In late 1945, Groves openly advocated a preemptive attack against the Soviet Union. He reasoned that the United States had two choices. It could quickly reach an agreement with the Soviets ensuring that nobody use atomic bombs under any circumstances. But such an agreement, he believed, would necessarily entail "the abandonment of all rights of privacy  ---  that of the home, the laboratory and the industrial plant theoughout the world including the United States." Failure to reach an agreement, however, would mean the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union all having atomic bombs. In that case, he contended, "The United States must for all time maintain absolute supremacy in atomic wepons, including number, size and power, efficiency, means for immeiate offensive use and defensive against atomic attack.. We must also have a worldwide intelligence service which will keep us at all times completely informed of any activities of other nations in the atomic field and of theri military intentions." That would lead to an atomic arms race. But he didn't think that "the world could long survive such a race." Therefore, he concluded, the United States should not permit any potential rival "to make or possess atomic weapons. If such a country started to make atomic weapons we would destroy its capacity to mke them before it had progreesed far enough to threaten us." 

The scientists, in their efforts to achieve international control of atomic power and to ensure civilian control at home, always viewed Wallace as their most trustworthy ally in the administration. Oppenheimer visited him in October and voiced the scientists' distress over the growing tension with the Soviet Union and the fact that Byrnes was using "the bomb as a pistol to get what we wanted in international diplomacy." He knew the Russians would respond by very quickly developing their own bomb. Oppenheimer complained that "the heart has completely gone out of" the scientists. "All they think about now are the social and economic implications of the bomb." Wallace was shaken by seeing Oppenheimer so agitated : "I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer. He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent." Wallace shared Oppenheimer's concern about the precarious nature of the international situation and encouraged him to speak directly with Truman. Unsettled by the encounter with Oppenheimer, Wallace commented, "The guilt consciousness of teh atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen. " 
   Oppenheimer took Wallace's advice and met with Truman six days later. The meeting could not have gone worse. Truman stressed national considerations in passing an atomic energy act ; Oppenheimer pressed for international control. The meeting ended disastrously with Oppenheimer's confession of guilt over the bomb. 

Wallace persevered in his effort to mitigate the influence of Truman's conservative advisors, who preferred confrontation with the Soviet Union over continuing the wartime alliance. They saw malign intent in every Soviet action. Wallace encouraged Truman to understand how his words and actions looked to Soviet leaders. Following the cabinet meeting the day after Truman's unfortunate encounter with Oppenheimer, Wallace stayed behind to speak with the president. He again urged Truman to be evenhanded with Great Britain and the Soviet Union and to offer the Soviet Union a loan comparable to the one the United States had offered Great Britain. He compared U.S. dictating election results in Cuba and Mexico to the way the Soviets exerted control over the Balkan states. Truman, as always, greed completely with Wallace's analysis of events. 

The effects of Wallace's repeated interventions were usually short-lived. Truman's other advisors discerned a more threatening pattern in Soviet actions and succeeded in convincing the president to view the world through their prism. By November, they were referring to Wallace and Truman's progressive friends as "Reds" and telling Truman, "Don't pay any attention to what those 'Reds' want you do." 
   Meanwhile, Soviet leaders were pressing their own agenda : securing their gains in Eastern Europe and Asia, rebuilding their shattered economy, and making certain that Germany and Japan never again posed a threat to Soviet security. They were well positioned to act on those interests. With Communists having played a leading role in antifascist resistance movements, beleaguered Europeans often welcomed Soviet troops as liberators. Communist party membership soared across Europe. Communists won more than 20 percent of the vote in France, Italy, and Finland in 1945. With Europeans populations uprooted, homeless, hungry, and unemployed, the prospect seemed ripe for further Communist gains. In Italy, where 1.7 million joined the party, real wages in 1945 were barely a quarter of 1913 levels and GNP was at 1911 levels. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson worried that Europe would turn toward socialism, leaving the United Staes isolated "They have suffered so much and they believe so deeply that governments can take some action which will alleviate their sufferings, that they will demand that the whole business of state control and state interference will be pushed further and further." 
   But the Soviet Union, adhering to wartime understandings and hoping to maintain the wartime alliance, went out of its way to restrain its frustrated Communist allies in China, Italy, France, and Greece. In early 1946, a Gallup Poll found that only 26 percent of Americans thought the Soviets sought world domination. Thirteen percent thought the British did. 

   MUCH MORE TO COME.

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR ---- Episode 5

    SECRETARY OF STATE JAMES BYRNES GOES TO 
   LONDON IN MID-SEPTEMBER OF 1945 TO CONFER
   WITH FOREIGN MINISTERS [ BYRNES WAS A LOSER]

   In mid-September of 1945, Secretary of State James Byrnes traveled to London to confer with Vyacheslav Molotov and other foreign ministers. Before leaving, he made clear his intention to use the U.S. atomic monopoly to force Soviet compliance with U.S. demands. { Although appointed Sec. of State by F.D.R., Byrnes acted like a frigging neocon Republican.]  But whenever Byrnes insisted the Soviets open up Eastern Europe, Molotov pointed to exclusionary U.S. policies in Italy, Greece, and Japan. Tired of Byrnes's belligerence, Molotov finally asked if he was hiding an atomic bomb in his coat pocket, to which Byrnes replied, "You don't know southerners. We carry our artillery in our pants pocket. If you don't cut out all this stalling . . . . I'm going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it." 

U.S. atomic diplomacy, in its first iteration, had clearly failed to produce the desired results. Secretary of War Henry Stimson objected to such crude intimidation. In a September memo, Stimson  had advised Truman that bullying the Soviets with atomic weapons would backfire and only speed the Soviet Union's efforts to attain its own atomic arsenal : 

     our satisfactory relations with Russia are not merely connected with but . . . virtually dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb. . . if we have this weapon rather ostensibly on our hip, their suspicions and their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase. The chief lesson that I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him ; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust. 

Stimson boldly called for halting U.S development of atomic bombs if Great Britain and the Soviet Union did likewise and impounding those the United States had already built.  Truman dedicated the September 21 cabinet meeting to Stimson's urgent appeal to strengthen the U.S friendship with the Soviet Union before it developed its own atomic bombs. The meeting, occurring on Stimson's seventy-eighth birthday, would be the last for the retiring statesman. The cabinet split sharply over Stimson's proposals, with Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace rallying supporters, and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal leading the opposition. Forrestal would play an important role in the hardening of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. He had earned a fortune on Wall Street and married a former Ziegfeld Follies girl before joining the White House staff in 1939. LIKE MOST OTHER WALL STREETERS, HE DEEPLY DISTRUSTED THE SOVIET UNION. He leaked a PHONY ACCOUNT of the cabinet discussion to the press. The next day, the New York Times that Wallace had proposed sharing "the secret of the atomic bomb" with the USSR. Though Truman immediately repudiated this flagrant falsehood and set the record straight, Wallace could see the writing on the wall. 

Having just returned from a conference on atomic energy at the University of Chicago, Wallace understood the real stakes better than Truman and other administration officials. The experts agreed that whatever secret there might have been to the atomic bomb had vanished when the Unite States dropped the first one on Hiroshima. They also knew, as the Franck Committee had warned in June, that the Soviet Union would soon develop its own atomic arsenal. The scientists in attendance drove home the fact that the current generation of atomic weapons paled by comparison to what would soon be available. Therefore, they concluded, steps to curb an arms race wa essential and urgent. Wallace had told the gathering that "any nation that violates the international moral law, sooner or later gets into trouble --- the British have done that in relation to colonial peoples and the United States is in danger of doing it with the atomic bomb." He conveyed that same message to his fellow cabinet members. 

A few days later, Wallace received a letter from physicist Arthur Holly Compton. Compton alerted Wallace to ominous developments at the weapons laboratories. "There is a reasonable chance," he reported, "that a concentrated scientific and technical effort, comparable to that spent on the development of the present atom bomb, could develop a super bomb" of staggering destructive capability. He expressed the deeply held view among the members of the Scientific Panel of the Interim Committee. "We feel that this . . . should not be undertaken because we prefer defeat in war to a victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its use." Compton presented some rough figures to show just how powerful a bomb he was talking about : The "area completely destroyed by 1 atomic bomb, 4 square miles. Area completely destroyable by 1000 atomic bombs, as in a future war, 4000 square miles. Area completely destroyable by 1000 super bombs, about 1,000,000 square miles. Area of continental United States, about 3,000,000 square miles." What worried Compton was that "the theoretical basis of the super bomb has arisen spontaneously with at least four persons working on a project who have independently brought the idea to me. This means that it will occur likewise to those in other nations engaged in similar developments. If developed here, other great powers must follow suit." Wallace and Compton both felt that only some form of world government could meet such a challenge. 

Wallace fought a rearguard action against the powerful forces propelling the country toward war with the Soviet Union. Truman's ouster of the few remaining New Dealers from his cabinet, left Wallace increasingly isolated. Now Stimson too was gone. As Soviet intelligence noted, the RIGHTWARD SHIFT in Truman's economic and foreign policy advisors was unmistakable. 

Wallace, undeterred, met with Truman on October 15 to press him on softening his tone toward the Soviet Union, and gave him a report he had written titled "The Significance of the Atomic Age." Truman read it sentence by sentence in his presence. It warned , "When many nations have atomic bombs it will require only the smallest spark to set off a worldwide humanity-destroying explosion. Steps should be taken at once to call into being a vital international organization based on the elimination of all weapons of offensive warfare, the pooling of the constructive aspects of atomic energy, and the adoption of the principle of international trusteeship for certain areas of the world." Truman agreed completely, telling Wallace that "this was what he had been trying to say right along." He also remarked, somewhat overgenerously, that "Stalin was a fine man who wanted to do the right thing." Truman even agreed with Wallace's statement that "the purpose of Britain was to promote an unbreachable break between us and Russia." Wallace's efforts bore fruit. In the fall of 1945, Truman told a press conference, "Russia's interests and ours do not clash and never have. We have always been friends, and I hope we always will be." 

    TO BE CONTINUED

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR --- Episode 4

    JUMPING AHEAD TO THE END OF WORLD WAR II 

           
   On September 2, 1945, the Second World War officially ended. Though Americans everywhere were cheered by that news, a strange pall hung over the nation as Americans envisioned their own future in the burned-out ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 12, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow observed, "Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured." Public discourse was rife with apocalyptic forebodings, as Americans were struck by what historian Paul Boyer describes as a "primal fear of extinction." The St. Louis Post Dispatch worried that science may have "signed the mammalian world's death certificate." John Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, admitted that he had been contemplating this development for fifteen years and added, "Frankly, I am scared." This was not just a new bomb ; it was, he explained, "the power to kill the human race." The New York Times regretted that humans could now "blow ourselves and perhaps the planet itself to drifting dust." The Washington Post lamented that the life expectancy of the human species had "dwindled immeasurably in the course of two brief weeks." 


War's end left much of Europe and Asia in tatters. As many as 70 million people lay dead. Civilian deaths outnumbered military deaths by more than three to two. The Soviet losses were unparalleled, as retreating German troops destroyed everything in their path. President John F. Kennedy later remarked, "No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including two-thirds of its industrial base, were turned into a wasteland----a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago." 

Only the United States escaped such destruction. The U.S. economy was booming. GNP and exports more than doubled prewar levels. Industrial production soared, growing during the war at a record 15 percent annually. The United States held two-thirds of the world's gold reserves and three-quarters of its invested capital. It produced a phenomenal 50 percent of the world's goods and services. Yet businessmen and planners worried that the end of wartime spending augured a return to prewar depression conditions. They particularly feared the consequences should Europe adopt economic spheres closed to American trade and investment. 

With Franklin Roosevelt at the helm, the United States skillfully steered a middle course between Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Most Americans looked askance at British imperialism and disapproved of Great Britain's repressive policies in Greece, India, and elsewhere. Many also mistrusted Soviet-style socialism and decried the Soviet Union's heavy-handed treatment of Eastern Europe. After the war, the United States used a $3.75 billion credit to pry open the British Empire, gaining equal access for American capital and goods. It also cancelled Great Britain's lend-lease debt. The United States disappointed the Soviet Union by not offering similar aid, although it had dangled the prospect of a large war credit during wartime discussions .  Harry Truman, unfortunately, showed none of Roosevelt's dexterity in navigating an independent course as he tacked increasingly toward the British camp, ignoring Soviet concerns at a time of maximum U.S. strength and relative Soviet weakness. 

   TO BE CONTINUED

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR----Episode 3

                                                       THE ROOTS OF EMPIRE

   In 1941, magazine magnate Henry Luce declared the twentieth century the "AMERICAN CENTURY." Little could he have imagined how true that would be, writing before the defeat of Germany and Japan, the advent of the atomic bomb, the boom in U.S. postwar production, the rise and institutionalization of the military-industrial complex, the development of the Internet, the transmogrification of the United States into a national security state, and the country's "victory'[sic] in the Cold War. 

   But, Luce's vision of unfettered U. S. hegemony has always been a contested one. Vice President Henry Wallace urged the United States to instead usher in what he called "THE CENTURY OF THE COMMON MAN." Wallace, whom realists dismissed as a "dreamer" and a "visionary," laid out a blueprint for a world of science -------and technology--based abundance, a world banning colonialism and economic exploitation, a world of peace and shared prosperity. Unfortunately, the postwar world has conformed much more closely to Luce's imperial vision than Wallace's progressive one. More recently, in 1997, a new generation of proponents of U.S. global supremacy, who would go on to constitute the neoconservative "brain [sic] trust" of the disastrous George W. Bush presidency, called for the establishment of a "new American Century." It was a perspective that gained many adherents in the earlier years of the twenty-first century, before the calamitous consequences of the United States' latest wars became widely recognized. 
   
   The United States' run as the globe's 800-pound gorilla ---the most powerful and dominant nation the world has ever seen ---has been marked by proud achievements and terrible disappointments. It is the latter ---- the darker side of U.S. history --- that this missive explores. The missive doesn't try to tell all of U.S. history. That would be an impossible task. There are libraries full of books dedicated to the things the United States has done right and public school curricula are required to print only U.S. achievements. This brief missive focuses a spotlight on what the U.S, has done wrong----the ways the country has betrayed its mission. Many thinking Americans are profoundly disturbed by the direction of U. S. policy at a time when the United States was recently at war in three Muslim countries and carrying out drone attacks, best viewed as targeted assassinations,  in at least six others.  Why does our country have military bases in every region of the globe, totaling more than a thousand by realistic counts ? Why does the United States spend as much money on its military as the rest of the world COMBINED ? Why does it still possess thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, even though no nation poses an imminent threat ? WHY IS THE GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POOR GREATER IN THE UNITED STATES THAN IN ANY OTHER DEVELOPED COUNTRY,  AND WHY IS THE UNITED STATES THE ONLY ADVANCED NATION WITHOUT A UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE PROGRAM ? 

   Why do such a tiny number of people ---- whether the figure is currently 300 or 500 or 2,000 --- control more wealth than the world's poorest 3 billion ?  Why are a tiny minority of wealthy Americans allowed to exert so much control over U.S. domestic politics, foreign policy, and media while the great masses see a diminution of their real power and standards of living ? Why have Americans submitted to levels of surveillance, government intrusion, abuse of civil liberties,  and loss of privacy that would have appalled the Founding Brothers and earlier generations ? Why does the United States have a lower percentage of unionized workers than any other advanced industrial democracy ? Why, in our country, are those who are driven by personal greed and narrow self-interest empowered over those who extol social values like kindness, generosity, compassion, sharing, empathy, and community building ? And why has it become so hard for the great majority of Americans to imagine a different, perhaps even a better, future than the one defined by current policy initiatives and social values ? 

   Historically, a few great Americans have endeavored to put the country back on the right track. For example, President John Quincy Adams, on July 4, 1821, condemned British colonialism and declared that the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy" lest she "involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force." The United States, Adams warned, might "become the dictatress of the world but she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit." 

   Adams presciently foresaw what would befall the United States if it sacrificed its republican spirit on the altar of empire. Compounding the problem is Americans' persistent denial of their imperial past and the ways in which it shapes present policy. For empires, the past is just another overseas territory ripe for reconstruction, even reinvention. Americans refuse to live in history even though empire must always do so. In Waiting for  the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee wrote : "Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire : how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster : the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one." 

    MORE TO COME

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR --- Episode 2

                AMERICA IN THE LATTER PART OF THE 1800s

   Several years before his election to the presidency, William McKinley said : "We want a foreign market for our surplus products." Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana in early 1897 declared : "American factories are making more than the American people can use ; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us ; the trade of the world must and SHALL be ours." The Department of State explained in 1898 :

   It seems to be conceded that every year we shall be confronted with an increasing surplus of manufactured goods for sale in foreign markets if American operatives and artisans are to be kept employed the year around. The enlargement of foreign consumption of the products of our mills and workshops has, therefore, become a serious problem of statesmanship as well as of commerce. 

   These expansionist military men and politicians were in touch with one another. One of Theodore Roosevelt's biographers tells us : "By 1890, Lodge, Roosevelt, and Mahan had begun exchanging views," and that they tried to get Mahan off sea duty "so that he could continue full-time his propaganda for expansion." Roosevelt 
once sent Henry Cabot Lodge a copy of a poem by Rudyard Kipling [who promoted British colonialism], saying it was "poor poetry, but good sense from the expansionist standpoint." 

   When the United States did not annex Hawaii in 1893 after some Americans [ the combined missionary and pineapple interests of the Dole family ] set up their own government, Roosevelt called this hesitancy "a crime against white civilization." And he told the Naval War College : "All the great masterful races have been fighting races . . . No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war."

   Roosevelt was contemptuous of races and nations he considered inferior.  When a mob in New Orleans lynched a number of Italian immigrsnts, Roosevelt thought the United States should offer the Italian government some remuneration, but privately he wrote his sister that he thought the lynching was "rather a good thing" and told her he had said as much at a dinner with "various dago diplomats . . . all wrought up by the lynching." 

   William James, the philosopher, who became one of the leading anti-imperialists of his time, wrote Roosevelt that he "gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of the higher life. . ." 

   Roosevelt's talk of expansionism was not just a matter of manliness and heroism ; he was conscious of "our trade relatios with China." Lodge was aware of the textile interests in Massachusetts that looked to Asian markets. Historian Marilyn Young has written of the work of the American Development Company to expand American influence in China for commercial reasons, and of State Department instructions to the American in China to "employ all proper methods for the extension of American interests in China." She says [ The Rhetoric of Empire ] that the talk about markets in China was far greater  than the actual amount of dollars involved at the time, but this talk was important in shaping American policy toward Hawaii, the Philippines, and all of Asia. 

   While it was true that in 1898, 90 percent of American products were sold at home, the 10 percent sold abroad amounted to a billion dollars. Walter Lefeber writes [ The New Empire] : "By 1893, American trade exceeded that of every other country in the world except England. Farm products, of course, especially in the key tobacco, cotton, and wheat areas, had long depended on international markets for their prosperity." And in the twenty years up to 1895, new investments by American capitalists overseas reached a billion dollars. In 1885, the steel industry's publication Age of Steel wrote that the internal markets were insufficient and the overproduction of industrial products "should be relieved and prevented in the future by increased foreign trade." 

   Oil became a big export in the 1880s and 1890s ; by 1891, the Rockefeller family's Standard Oil Company accounted for 90 percent of American exports of kerosene and controlled 70 percent of the world market. Oil was nw second ony to cotton as the leading product sent overseas. 

   MORE TO COME 

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR

   In 1897, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend : "In strictest confidence. . . I should welcome any war, for I think this country needs one." 

   In 1890, the Bureau of the Census declared that the internal frontier was closed. The profit system, with its natural tendency for expansion, had already begun to look overseas. The severe depression that began in 1893 strengthened an idea developing within the political and financial elite of the country : that overseas markets for American goods might relieve the problem of underconsumption at home and prevent the economic crises that in the 1890s brought class war. 

   And would not a foreign war deflect some of the rebellious energy that went into strikes and protest movements, if America came up with an external enemy ? Would it not unite people with government, with the armed forces, instead of against them ? This was not, in the beginning, a conscious plan of most of the elite---but a natural development from the twin drives of capitalism and nationalism. 

   Expansion overseas was not a new idea. Even before the war against Mexico carried the United States to the Pacific, the Monroe Doctrine looked southward into and beyond the Caribbean. Issued in 1823 when the countries of Latin America were winning independence from Spanish control, it made plain to European nations that the United States considered Latin America its sphere of influence. Not long after, some Americans began thinking about the Pacific : of Hawaii, Japan, and of the great markets of China. 

   There was more than thinking : the American armed forces had made forays overseas. A State Department list, "Instances of the Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798--1945" [ presented by Secretary of State Dean Rusk to a Senate committee in 1962 to cite precedents for the use of armed force against Cuba] , shows 103 interventions in the affairs of other countries between 1798 and 1895.  A sampling from the list, with the exact description given by the State Department : 

1852 -- 53 -- Argentina. Marines were landed and maintained in Buenos Aires to protect American interests during a revolution.

1853 -- Nicaragua -- to protect American lives and interests during political disturbances.

1853 -- 54 -- Japan -- The "Opening of Japan" and the Perry Expedition. [ The State Department does not give more details, but this involved the use of warships to force Japan to open its ports to the United States. ] 

1853 -- 54 -- Ryukyu and Bonin Islands -- Commodore Perry on three visits before going to Japan and while waiting for a reply from Japan made a naval demonstration, landing marines twice, and secured a coaling concession from the ruler of Naha on Okinawa. He also demonstrated in the Bonin Islands. All to secure facilities for commerce.

1854 -- Nicaragua -- San Juan del Norte [ Greytown was destroyed to avenge an insult to the American Minister to Nicaragua. ] 

1855 -- Uruguay -- U.S. and European naval forces landed to protect American interests during an attempted revolution in Montevideo.

1859 -- China -- For the protection of American interests in Shanghai. 

1860 -- Angola, Portuguese West Africa -- To protect American lives and property at Kissembo when the natives became troublesome.

1893 -- Hawaii -- Ostensibly to protect American lives and property ; actually to promote a provisional government under Sanford B. Dole. This action was disavowed by the United States.

1894 -- Nicaragua -- To protect American interests at Bluefields following a revolution. 

   Thus, by the 1890s, there had been much experience in overseas probes and interventions. The ideology of expansion was widespread in the upper circles of military men, politicians, businessmen --- and even among some of the leaders of farmers' movements who thought foreign markets woukd help them. 

   Captain A. T. Mahan of the U.S. navy, a popular propagandist for expansion, greatly influenced Theodore Roosevelt and other American leaders. The countries with the biggest navies would inherit the earth, he said. "Americans must now begin to look outward," Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts wrote in a magazine article : 

     In the interests of our commerce . . . we should build the Nicaragua canal, and for the protection of that canal and for the sake of our commercial supremacy in the Pacific we should control the Hawaiian islands and maintain our influence in Samoa. . . and when the Nicaraguan canal is built, the island of Cuba . . . will become a necessity. . . The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth. It is a movement which makes for civilization and the advancement of the race. As one of the great nations of the world the United States must not fall out of the line of march. 

 A Washington Post editorial on the eve of the Spanish-American war : 

     A new consciousness seems to have come upon us --- the consciousness of strength --- and with it a new appetite, the yearning to show our strength. . . Ambition, interest, land hunger, pride, the mere joy of fighting, whatever it may be, we are animated by a new sensation. We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle . . . 

    MORE TO COME 

ERRORS OF JUDGMENT AND CHOICE----Episode 7

                                                           AVAILABILITY

  There are situations in which people assess the frequency of a class or the probability of an event by the ease with which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind. For example, one may assess the risk of heart attack among middle-aged people by recalling such occurrences among one's acquaintances. Similarly, one may evaluate the probability that a given business venture will fail by imagining various difficulties it could encounter. This judgmental heuristic is called availability. Availability is a useful clue for assessing frequency or probability, because instances of large classes are usually recalled better and faster than instances of less frequent classes. However, availability is affected by factors other than frequency and probability. Consequently, the reliance on availability leads to predictable biases, some of which will be illustrated in this missive. 

Biases due to the retrievability of instances.  When the size of a class is judged by the availability of its instances, a class whose instances are easily retrieved will appear more numerous than a class of equal frequency whose instances are less retrievable. In an elementary demonstration of this effect, subjects heard a list of well-known personalities of both sexes and were subsequently asked to judge whether the list contained more names of men than of women. Different lists were presented to different groups of subjects. In some of the lists the men were relatively more famous than the women and in others the women were relatively more famous than the men. In each of the lists, the subjects erroneously judged that the class [sex] that had the more famous personalities was the more numerous. 
   In addition to familiarity, there are other factors, such as salience, which affect the retrievability of instances. For example, the impact of seeing a house burning on the subjective probability of such accidents is probably greater than the impact of reading about a fire in the local paper. Furthermore, recent occurrences are likely to be more available than earlier occurrences. It is a common experience that the subjective probability of traffic accidents rises temporarily when one sees a car overturned by the side of the road. 

Biases due to the effectiveness of a search set.  Suppose one samples a word [of three letters or more] at random from an English text. Is it more likely that the word starts with an r or that r is the third letter ? People approach this problem by recalling words that begin wit r [ road ] and words that have r in the third position [ car ] and assess the relative frequency by the ease with which words of the two types come to mind. Because it is much easier to search for words by their first letter than by their third letter, most people judge words that begin with a given consonant to be more numerous than words in which the same consonant appears in the third position. They do so even for consonants, such as r or k, that are more frequent in the third position than in the first. 

   Different tasks elicit different search sets. For example, suppose you are asked to rate the frequency with which abstract words [ thought, love ] and concrete words [door, water ] appear in written English. A natural way to answer this question is to search for contexts in which the word could appear. It seems easier to think of contexts in which the word could appear. It seems easier to think of contexts in which an abstract concept is mentioned [ love in love stories] than to think of contexts in which a concrete word [such as door] is mentioned. If the frequency of words is judged by the availability of the contexts in which they appear, abstract words will be judged as relatively more numerous than concrete words. This bias has been observed in a study which showed that the judged frequency of occurrence of abstract words was much higher than that of concrete words, equated in objective frequency. Abstract words were judged to appear in a much greater variety of contexts than concrete words. 

Biases of imaginability.   Sometimes one has to assess the frequency of a class whose instances are not stored in memory but can be generated according to a given rule. In such situations, one typically generates several instances and evaluates frequency or probability by the ease with which the relevant instances can be constructed. However, the ease of constructing instances does not always reflect their actual frequency, and this mode of evaluation is prone to biases. To illustrate, consider a group of 10 people who form committees of k members, 2 s k s 8. How many different committees of k members can be formed ? The correct answer to this problem is given by the binomial coefficient [ 10 / k ] which reaches a maximum of 252 for k = 5. Clearly the number of committees of k members equals the number of committees of [ 10-k] members , because any committee of k members defines a unique group of [10-k] nonmembers. 

   One way to answer this question without computation is to mentally construct committees of k members and to evaluate their number by the ease with which they come to mind. Committees of few members, say 2, are more available than committees of many members, say 8. The simplest scheme for the construction of committees is a partition of the group into disjoint sets. One readily sees that it is easy to construct five disjoint committees of 2 members, while it is impossible to generate even two disjoint committees of 8 members. Consequently, if frequency is assessed by imaginability, or by availability for construction, the small committees will appear more numerous than larger committees, in contrast to the correct bell-shaped function. Indeed when naive subjects were asked to estimate the number of distinct committees of various sizes, their estimates were a decreasing monotonic function of committee size. For example, the median estimate of the number of committees of 2 members was 70, while the estimate for committees of 8 members was 20 [ the correct answer is 45 in both cases] . 

   Imaginability plays an important role in the evaluation of probabilities in real-life situations. The risk involved in an adventurous expedition, for example, is evaluated by imagining contingencies with which the expedition is not equipped to cope. If many such difficulties are vividly portrayed, the expedition can be made to appear exceedingly dangerous, although the ease with which disasters are imagined need not reflect their actual livelihood. Conversely, the risk involved in an undertaking may be grossly underestimated if some possible dangers are either difficult to conceive, or simply do not come to hand. 

Illusory correlation.  Chapman and Chapman have described an interesting bias in the judgment of the frequency with which two events co-occur. They presented naive judges with information concerning several hypothetical mental patients. The data of each patient consisted of a clinical diagnosis and a drawing of a person made by the patient. Later the judges estimated the frequency with which each diagnosis [ such as paranoia or suspiciousness ] had been accompanied by various features of the drawing [such as peculiar eyes] . The subjects markedly overestimated the frequency of co-occurrence of natural associates, such as suspiciousness and peculiar eyes. This effect was labeled illusory correlation. In their erroneous judgments of the data to which they had been exposed, naive subjects "rediscovered" much of the common, but unfounded, clinical lore concerning the interpretation of the draw-a-person test. The illusory correlation effect was extremely resistant to contradictory data. It persisted even when the correlation between symptom and diagnosis was actually negative, and it prevented the judges from detecting relationships that were in fact present. 

   Availability provides a natural account for the illusory--correlation effect. The judgment of how frequently two events co-occur could be based on the strength of the associative bond between them. When the association is strong, one is likely to conclude that the events have been frequently paired. Consequently, strong associates will be judged to have occurred together frequently. According to this view, the illusory correlation between suspiciousness and peculiar drawing of the eyes, for example, is due to the fact that suspiciousness is more readily associated with the eyes than with any other part of the body. 

MORE TO COME