A COLD WAR

The fault of the Berlin Blockade is often laid at the feet of Stalin. But the truth is a little more complicated.

By 1948, the situation in Germany was still messy. The Four Powers (USA, USSR, UK, France) in control of Germany couldn't agree on a path forwards. Russia and France wanted to keep Germany weak. The USA and UK wanted to build it back up into a European economic power. And they wanted it to be firmly in the capitalist economic bloc. So the USA and UK took a dump on the principles of the Allied Control Commission and just made decisions regarding the future of the two-quarters of Germany under their control. France later joined them. This is what lead Stalin to stop them from entering Berlin, which was fully within the Soviet zone of occupation.

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In 1951, the American Congregational minister James Fifield and his team of geniuses came up with a brilliant idea. To mark the 175th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, they proposed to hold a massive series of events devoted to the theme of “Freedom Under God." The campaign was supported by everyone with wealth who hated the New Deal: Republicans leaders of industry and politics. The goal was to convince Americans think Christianity, laissez-faire capitalism and America went together like peanut butter and jelly.

And then, in 1954, the Scottish Presbyterian minister George Docherty gave a powerful sermon in his Washington DC church, declaring that, “to omit the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is to omit the definitive factor in the American way of life.” A few months later, President Eisenhower signed the phrase into law.

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After Father Coughlin was shut down, another anti-Communist Christian leader rose in his place - James Fifield aka "The Apostle to Millionaires", aka "St. Paul of the Prosperous" aka "the Thirteenth Apostle of Big Business". Unlike Father Coughlin, Fifield was happy to associate himself with rich capitalists - and to take their money to pay for his mansion, his butler, and his limousine. It was Fifield - and his rich patrons - who cracked the code of how to associate Christianity with Capitalism in the minds of Americans - and to make America a Christian nation "Under God".

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Today we talk more about Christians who opposed the New Deal. In the 30s there was a guy called Father Charles Coughlin, a Canadian-American Roman Catholic priest based near Detroit. Commonly known as “the radio priest", he was one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience: first took to the airwaves in 1926, broadcasting weekly sermons over the radio. By the early 1930s the content of his broadcasts had shifted from theology to economics and politics, with an estimated 30 million listeners tuning in to his weekly broadcasts. He’s also known as the father of hate radio.

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In 1950 Harry Truman complained about a “great wave of hysteria” sweeping the nation - the Red Scare. He should know. He was really largely responsible for creating it. Between the launching of his "loyalty program" in March 1947 and it's finish in December 1952, some 6.6 million persons were investigated to see if they were Communist sympathizers. Not a single case of espionage was uncovered, though about 500 persons were dismissed in dubious cases of “questionable loyalty" - which was never defined.

Meanwhile in Hollywood, the FBI were worried that that "so-called intellectuals" might be influencing scripts. Because if it's one thing you don't want in a democracy, it's intellectuals.

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In his "New Deal", FDR brought back the ideals of the "Social Gospel", a 19th century Christian reform movement, to justify the creation of the modern welfare state. For a while, at least, some American Christian leaders were big fans of socialism.

However, starting with FDR, and for the next 25 years, successive American administrations tried every trick in the book to kick Aussie union leader Harry Bridges out of their country. They all failed.



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Manufacturers and the media also used the Dies Committee to silence their critics. Any attempt to criticise the behaviour of industrialists was called "socialism". Along with communist witch hunts, another tactic industrialists used to protect themselves against the New Deal was the newly invented idea of Public Relations - a fancy name for corporate propaganda.

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The Red Scare continues. In 1939, Martin Dies Jr claimed that the Justice Department was investigating 2,850 known communists in government and that FDR had ordered a purge of all those named. But it was all a disinformation campaign launched by Hoover. The President hadn't ordered a purge - but he HAD secretly ordered Hoover to make a list. As it turned out, the list included Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Mrs. James Roosevelt (FDR’s mother), and other prominent figures close to the President were listed as financial contributors to two or more of the suspect groups. And then one member of the Dies Committee accused Eleanor Roosevelt of being part of the Communist Fifth Column.

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As Red Fever grew in the United States in the 1930s, Herbert Hoover asked J. Edgar Hoover to help him blame the Bonus March of 1932 on the Communists. In August 1936, FDR invited JEH to the White House to discuss “subversive activities”. Hoover told him the biggest threat to America was an Australian - International Longshoremen and Warehousemen union President Harry Bridges. So FDR secretly authorized the FBI to conduct non-criminal “intelligence” investigations. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA aka the Dies Committee, as it was run by Democrat Martin Dies of Texas) was created as a temporary committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1938, mainly as a way to undermine the New Deal and the labor movement by investigating Communist influence in them. It changed America forever.

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In April 1919, US authorities discovered a plot for mailing 36 bombs to prominent members of the U.S. political and economic establishment. One of those was Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer. He decided it was the work of Russian Communists, so he ordered the U.S. Justice Department to launch The Palmer Raids. And do you know who was in charge of the Palmer Raids? A 24-year-old American patriot - J. Edgar Hoover. Within three months after taking office, he controlled files on more than sixty thousand people. Hoover began to prepare for an American counterrevolution. Unfortunately, the Russian Communists had nothing to do with the 1919 bombings. It was the work of Italian anarchists. But that didn't stop Hoover from turning the Communists into Public Enemy Number One. Even though he would himself say, years later, that the Communist Party’s influence on American life in the 1920s was “virtually nonexistent”. And even though the new Attorney General in 1924 instructed Hoover that the Bureau should not concern itself with the “political or other opinions of individuals". JEH didn't let that stop him.

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