AMERICA AND RUSSIA: PART V

A SOVIET VIEW OF SIX GREAT AMERICANS

Translations by Ira Gottz, Ann Fried, and Abraham Brumberg

Much can be learned about a country from its attitude toward history. Some nations revere the past, some seem indifferent, while others try to tamper with it. For the temptation that besets a tyrant is continually to rewrite the historical record. He not only insists on being infallible, he wants always to have been infallible. If he should change his mind, history must be revised accordingly—even it patriots must be portrayed as traitors, black described as white, and the truth reduced to a patchwork of lies. In George Orwell’s nightmare novel about the future, 1984, history is totally in the hands of a single political party, in accordance with the party slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

To be sure, history is always being rewritten. Perspectives change: judgments mature. But it is a far cry from this gradual, openly argued process to the doctrine proclaimed today in the Communist societies. “Historians are dangerous people,” Khrushchev has said. “They are capable of upsetting everything. They must be directed.” When William Benton, publisher of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, interviewed the editors of the Soviet Encyclopedia in 1955, they told him quite frankly that all their articles were “of course written from the position of our world outlook—Marxism-Leninism.”

As an illustration of how the Communists currently regard the American past, AMERICAN HERITAGE publishes in the pages which follow the official Soviet view on six of oui notable figures, together with comments and corrections by leading American scholars. Five biographical entries, translated in full, are from the current Large Soviet Encyclopedia. In the sixth example, we compare two accounts of the same man from the Small Soviet Encyclopedia, as printed before and alter an abrupt (hange in the party line.

The America which emerges from these extracts is a strange place. Not simply that the Communists criticize us, which should be expected, but that their dogma presents the average Russian reader with a world in which the only real forces are economic determinism and the class struggle. The Soviet Encyclopedia is the final authority on facts and ideas for over 800,000,000 people. The majority, as Adlai Stevenson has written, get from it only this “curiously dehumanized account of history in which a stereotyped pattern of impersonal force supplants individual ellort.” For many, this is the only American “history” they will ever know. — The Editors

BOL’SHAYA SOVETSKAYA ENTZIKLOPEDIYA, VOLUME VII, PAGE 70

WASHINGTON, George (1732-1799), prominent American statesman of the era of the American British colonies’ struggle for their independence; commander in chief of the colonial troops; President of the United States in 1789-97. The son of a large Virginia plantation owner, Washington engaged in land speculation and amassed a huge fortune. On the eve of and during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), Washington took part in the struggle against the French and in campaigns against the Indians. The latter resulted in the mass extermination of Indians.

In the North American colonies’ War of Liberation from British dominion, Washington unequivocally stood for the defense of the colonies’ interests. In 1774 he was elected to the first Continental Congress and in 1775 to the second Congress. At the start of the War of Independence (q.v.) (1775-83), the Congress, after the battles of Lexington and Concord, appointed Washington commander in chief of the colonial army. Washington played an important role in transforming the untrained and undisciplined colonial troops into a battle-fit and well-organized army. He also managed to strengthen the bonds between the colonies. With the aid from various countries and especially with aid from France, whose double aim was to fortify her position in America and deal a blow against Britain, Washington’s army, after a series of defeats, came out victorious in the war against the British and won independence for the former thirteen colonies. This was a historically progressive act. But when in 1786 the masses demanded that the promises given them during the war to improve their lot be fulfilled and started a rebellion (see Shays’ Rebellion), Washington headed the reactionary force which was organized to mete out punishment against the rebels. Under his chairmanship, the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention (1787) secretly drafted a new constitution assuring the bourgeoisie and the plantation slave-owners that the masses would be altogether deprived of participation in the administration of the State. On the basis of this constitution Washington was elected first President of the United States in 1789. (He was elected a second time in 1792).

During the Jacobin dictatorship in France, Washington, fearing the influence the Jacobin revolutionary ideas might have on the American people, began to conduct an ever increasingly reactionary policy. He suppressed the 1794 Pennsylvania farmers’ uprising and simultaneously destroyed the emerging democratic clubs. Fear of revolution caused him to seek a rapprochement with Britain.

In 1793 Washington declared neutrality in the war which the counterrevolutionary European coalition waged against his ally, revolutionary France, thus violating the treaty of alliance signed with the latter. Under Washington’s influence the United States in 1794 signed a disadvantageous and humiliating commercial treaty with Britain (see Jay’s Treaty). This treaty called forth widespread dissatisfaction in the United States.

As one of the leaders of the American people’s struggle for independence, Washington played an objectively progressive role. At the same time he invariably remained an exponent and defender of the plantation owners and the bourgeoisie.

Comment by Marcus Cunliffe, author of George Washington, Man and Monument:

Most of the particular judgments of the Soviet Encyclopedia could be found in the writings of American historians, though not so easily in current American historical writings and though not necessarily with the same emphasis. But of course they are so arranged as to seem—to Western eyes—“true but not the truth.” And some of them are badly awry. For example:

Mass extermination of Indians. Americans have no great reason to be proud, taking their history in general, of their treatment of the Indians. But at the time of the Seven Years’ War the Indians on the frontier were proud, powerful, and bloodthirsty. The Indian warriors who went with Washington on his first small frontier expedition in 1754 were the killers, not the killed; and the same was true of the Indians who fell upon Braddock’s army (which Washington accompanied) a year later. Even in 1791, during Washington’s Presidency, the Indians of the Northwest Territory were still able to inflict defeat upon an American army led by General Arthur St. Glair.

Shays’ Rebellion. This sentence implies a widespread revolt of the “masses.” In fact, though it may have been symptomatic of discontent elsewhere, the rebellion was confined to one small rising in western Massachusetts. A few of Shays’ men were killed by Massachusetts militia in January-February, 1787. George Washington was then a private citizen, far away in Virginia. He was alarmed by news of the affair, but took no part in meting out punishment against the rebels. Shays himself, the leader, was pardoned and lived in peace for over thirty years thereafter.

The Philadelphia Convention. In an indirect and partial sense, the Convention did represent a response to Shays’ Rebellion. But that was only one among many factors that brought the Philadelphia delegates together, under the somewhat reluctant chairmanship of Washington. The delegates met in secret, to the extent that their debates were not published. But the delegates were elected, and the Convention had the approval of the Continental Congress. Historians continue to argue over the motives of the Founding Fathers at Philadelphia. Charles A. Beard maintained that the delegates were men of property and wealth who stood to benefit economically by the adoption of the new Constitution. Recent critics of Beard have said that his thesis was inaccurate and rather simpleminded: the Founding Fathers were patriots first, and capitalists only in a secondary way. But neither Beard nor his critics would agree that the new Constitution “altogether deprived” the “masses” of a share in the federal government. Nor would they be happy with even a brief summary that made no mention of the factor of states’ rights.

Reactionary policy vis-à-vis France. Again, a complex problem on which American historians are by no means unanimous. Washington’s contemporary opponents certainly accused him of being swayed by the “reactionary” views of Alexander Hamilton. He probably took too seriously the Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion of 1794; and he was unduly harsh in his comments on the Democratic-Republican societies that sprang up in the 1790’s. But though condemned to death, the ringleaders in Pennsylvania were pardoned; and while he would no doubt have liked to see them disappear, Washington did not destroy the Democratic clubs.

It was reluctance to be involved in war with Britain, rather than fear of revolution in America, that led to Jay’s Treaty. It was not an American diplomatic triumph. Yet it may have been almost the best bargain that could be struck, given America’s vulnerability. Jay’s Treaty was indeed most unpopular in the United States, but American scholars who could hardly be accused of want of patriotism or excessive Anglophilia have felt that in the circumstances it was not such a disaster. America, as Washington clearly understood, was still a small, raw nation: she needed to play for time.

Defender of the planters and the bourgeoisie. True and not true. Washington was a gentleman, a rich planter (though land-poor), and a speculator. But the Marxist formulas fail to explain his situation, or the peculiar quality of American conservatism. To call Washington either a revolutionary or a reactionary is to misconceive the man, his era, and his nation.

BOL’SHAYA SOVETSKAYA ENTZIKLOPEDIYA, VOLUME XIV, PAGE 225 AND 226

JEFFERSON, Thomas (1743-1826). Jefferson was the most outstanding American philosopher of the eighteenth century, the ideologist of the bourgeoisdemocratic tendency during the War of Independence of North America, 1775-83 (q.v.) and President of the U.S.A., 1801-09. He came from the circles of the land-owning aristocracy of Virginia, and received a broad education. In 1769 he was elected as a member of the legislative assembly of Virginia. After the congress had been dispersed by the English governor in 1775, he became a member of the illegal committees of correspondence. In 1774 he was outlawed for his pamphlet against George III. In 1775 he was elected to the second Continental Congress. In June 1776, on the commission of the Congress, he drew up the Declaration of Independence of the U.S.A. (q.v.). The paragraph censuring slavery and slave trade was rejected by the Congress. Between 1777 and 1779 he secured the acceptance of the laws directed toward the eradication of survivals of feudal land-ownership law in Virginia; on his recommendation the “statute on the establishment of religious freedom in Virginia” was accepted. The statute deprived the state Church of England of its privileges, and it exerted an influence on the subsequent separation of church and state in the U.S.A. Between 1779 and 1781 he was governor of Virginia. From 1785-89 he was the U.S. minister to France. Being already acquainted with the literature of French enlightenment, he became a friend of Condorcet and Cabanis (q.v.) and a frequenter of the salon of the widow of Helvetius. During 1790-93 he was Secretary of State of the U.S.A.

Jefferson greeted the French bourgeois revolution of the end of the eighteenth century and came forward with a proposal for giving diplomatic and material aid to France. The refusal by Washington’s (q.v.) government to follow this policy was the chief cause for his resignation. Not agreeing with certain positions taken by the reactionary Constitution of 1787, Jefferson in 1790-91 advocated a wide movement for introducing a bill of rights (q.v.) into the Constitution. He was the founder of the anti-Federalist (Republican) party.

In the background of a violent political struggle, in 1796 Jefferson was elected Vice President, but after the defeat of the Federalists (q.v.) in the election of 1800 he became President. In 1804 he was elected President for a second time. Jefferson overruled the reactionary laws introduced by his Federalist predecessor, John Adams (q.v.), which dealt with “aliens” and “sedition” and allowed the imprisonment of all “suspicious” people. He introduced several reforms of a bourgeois-democratic character, but he did not take any measures which would touch on the institution of slavery. In 1803 the government bought the state of Louisiana from Napoleonic France for a sum of fifteen million dollars. In 1808-09 diplomatic relations were established with Russia.

At the height of the war between France and England, Jefferson, wishing to prevent America’s entrance into the war and to cut short the seizures of American merchant ships by the warring nations, obtained the prohibition of marine trade between the U.S.A. on the one hand, and England and France on the other (Embargo Act of 1807). This measure met with strong opposition from the upper bourgeoisie, which did not want to yield its commercial profits. In the beginning of March, 1809, this embargo was repealed.

On finishing his second presidential term of office in 1809, Jefferson dedicated himself to educational activity. He founded the University of Virginia (opened in 1825), where instruction which was independent of the church was introduced for the first time in the U.S.A. The theoretical views of Jefferson showed the influence of Locke, Harrington, and others, as well as of French enlightenment. In philosophy Jefferson supported the naturalism (q.v.) of the French materialists, although he polemicized against them as atheists. He stated that he was a supporter of deism (q.v.), that is, he recognized God as the first cause, and at the same time he rejected God’s intervention in the works of nature. Rejecting the religious bases of morality, Jefferson spoke, in the spirit of idealism, of the existence in the conscience of man of innate moral principles, by which he meant simply bourgeois “virtues.” He developed the theory of the uninterrupted development of revolution according to the degree of education of the masses and of their realization of their rights. In defending the right of the people to revolution, he considered it essential to have revolutionary changes in society, and to revise the constitution and social institutions every twenty years. He criticized the incompleteness and the limitations of the American revolution of the eighteenth century for not abolishing slavery, for not solving the agrarian question in the interest of society, for not providing it with political rights; and he predicted the necessity of new revolutions in the U.S.A. Jefferson’s ideal of society was close to the petit-bourgeois utopian ideal of J. J. Rousseau (q.v.) and it envisaged the division of the land to all workers without compensation. Jefferson idealized the small landowners, and looked upon them as the most valuable members of society. He criticized features of the capitalist system such as the gigantic concentration of ownership in the hands of the few, on the one hand, and the suppression and impoverishment of the working members of society on the other. The Utopian conception of the possibility of the existence of a class of independent small landowners, and the radicalism of his theory, were combined in an attempt at compromise with the slaveowners because of the unlikelihood of realizing his views in the field of politics.

American reactionary bourgeois historians falsify the figure of Jefferson; they gloss over and distort the progressive aspects of his teaching. The proressive forces of the U.S.A. make use of the best traditions of Jefferson in their fight for freedom and democracy.

Comment by Richard B. Morris, Gouverneur Morris professor of history at Columbia University; editor of the Encyclopedia of American History:

It is understandable that Jefferson should receive relatively sympathetic treatment at the hands of Soviet encyclopedists. Here is the man who said at the time of Shays’ Rebellion: “God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion…The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” But he coupled these observations with the assertion in another letter written around the same time that “the will of the majority should always prevail.” This, then, is the flaw in the Jefferson article. It gives an oversimplified portrait of a liberal bourgeois leader with proletarian leanings, whereas the sage of Monticello was a complex personality, an enlightened aristocrat who wanted his country to be a democracy rather than a capitalistic oligarchy or a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Despite the article’s assertion, no outlawry procedure has ever been uncovered against Jefferson for his “Summary View,” the pamphlet referred to in the Soviet article. In fact, although the pamphlet gained wide circulation in America, it scarcely caused a ripple in Great Britain. The election of 1796 was hardly “violent,” but it was certainly close. The much maligned Alien and Sedition Acts are parodied in this article. The Embargo Act interdicted trade with all nations, not only England and France, and the opponents of this measure came from New England and New York rather than from the “upper bourgeoisie.” It is perhaps not quite fair to say that Jefferson rejected the religious bases of morality, for toward the end of his life he wrote his “Morals of Jesus,” which, in his opinion, proved that he was “a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”

To say that Jefferson “envisaged the division of the land to all workers without compensation” is a distortion of his views. Except for supporting the confiscation of Tory estates and drafting legislation abolishing primogeniture and entails, Jefferson nowhere advocates the redistribution of property. He himself held through inheritance, marriage, and acquisition some ten thousand acres and a considerable number of slaves. In his Second Inaugural he asserted that the government should maintain “that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his father’s” (italics added). Perhaps as no other statesman of his time did, Jefferson envisaged the West as affording the small farmer and the landless a grand opportunity to acquire a stake in society. True, in his “Notes on Virginia,” he expressed the hope that “our workshops remain in Europe,” but he was to change or substantially modify this view.

The article is perhaps more significant for what it leaves out than for what it includes. Thus, it stresses what Jefferson was not able to accomplish in his draft of the Declaration of Independence rather than the affirmative role of that document in American political thought. It is true that Jefferson’s clause censuring the slave trade was stricken out by the Congress. But the Declaration does recognize the right of revolution, and asserts the end of government to be the attainment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The fact that a bourgeois idéologue should have substituted “happiness” for Locke’s “property” might have been worth calling to the attention of Soviet readers.

At several points the inconsistency of Jefferson’s stand on slavery is stressed. The article quite unfairly blames Jefferson for not taking any action to end slavery when he was President, notwithstanding the fact that the slave trade was officially outlawed during his administration and on his recommendation. Nor is he given credit for the far-reaching proposal in his Ordinance of 1784, which, if adopted, would have barred slavery from all the western territories after 1800, a proposal which was incorporated into the Northwest Territorial Ordinance of 1787.

Two other omissions are surprising. How can one understand the things for which Jefferson stood without mentioning Hamilton, who epitomized the things that he was against? Even in so brief an article the long political and intellectual partnership of Jefferson and Madison deserves at least passing mention. In the enactment of legislation in Virginia separating church and state, Madison’s role was certainly as consequential as Jefferson’s, and in the organization and leadership of Jefferson’s party, Madison’s part, at least down to 1796, was pre-eminent.

Perhaps the most serious distortion in the article is the assertion that “reactionary bourgeois historians falsify the figure of Jefferson.” This might have been true had the article appeared fifty years ago, as nineteenth-century historians were generally not enamored of Jefferson. We think of Hildreth and Von Holst among his severest critics, and of Albert J. Beveridge perpetuating in our own century, in his monumental biography of John Marshall, the traditional FederalistWhig anti-Jeffersonian bias. But with J. Allen Smith and Charles A. Beard, with Claude G. Bowers and Vernon L. Parrington, Jefferson was apotheosized, and his chief adversary, Alexander Hamilton, reduced to the nadir of his reputation among the historical guild. Despite some revisionism over the past few years, school and college texts almost invariably depict Jefferson as a simple agrarian and decent democrat fighting against the corrupt forces of capitalism and industrialism personified by Hamilton. It’s all a plot, of course, to keep Americans from understanding Thomas Jefferson, “the progressive.”

BOL’SHAYA SOVETSKAYA ENTZIKLOPEDIYA, VOLUME XLII, PAGES 37 AND 38

TWAIN, Mark (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens; 1835-1910), a great American writer and publicist, was born in Florida, Missouri, of a family of provincial judges. Having worked as a typesetter, soldier, boat-pilot on the Mississippi, reporter, and gold prospector in Nevada, Twain’s literary activity began after the Civil War of 1861-65, under conditions of growing capitalist contradictions in the United States. In his first literary production (a collection of humorous tales [including] “The Celebrated Jumping Frog,” 1867, separately published in Russ. tr. in 1943, and others), Twain showed himself master of the short story. In this genre there is especially evident his inexhaustible humor and his marvelous knowledge of the customs and manners of his country. His kindhearted and gentle humor often passes into sarcasm and assumes the force of a mordant satire. In his satirical sketches, The Innocents Abroad (1869, Russ. tr. 1898) and Roughing It (1872), Twain ridicules the stupidity, vulgarity, and ignorance of the typical Philistine. His novel, The Gilded Age (1873, in collaboration with Ch. D. Warner; Russ. tr. 1874), depicts the venality of the state apparatus and the dirty profiteering methods to which the bourgeois businessman resorts. The very title of the novel ironically characterizes an entire epoch of American history. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876, Russ. tr. 1886), Twain contrasts bourgeois society, which is based on deceit and hypocrisy, with the characteristically free and pure world of the boy, a world that values friendship, bravery, and honesty. Twain’s writings of the eighties and nineties are characterized by ever more acute social criticism. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884, Russ. tr. 1885), the author presents a wide panorama of American reality. The very choice of heroes is noteworthy. The narrative is centered around the small vagabond Huck whom the “respectable” society of Petersburg accepts only after he has made a fortune in a fantastic way. The raft on which Huck and the runaway Negro Jim hide represents a small corner of goodness in a large world of meanness and injustice. In The Prince and the Pauper (1882, Russ. tr. 1884) and in the satiric fantasy on a medieval theme, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889, Russ. tr. 1896) Twain severely censures the wealthy classes’ exploitation of the peole. There is an exact correspondence between the castigation of the British monarchy found in these books and the pages of his notebooks, where he writes with bitterness about the transformation of his contemporary America into a “dollar monarchy.” In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain shows that the bourgeois civilization which the enterprising Yankee is propagating is not making the people happy. In his fiction Twain endows the masses with kindness and nobility.

Twain belongs with the best representatives of bourgeois democracy, who viewed the advance of imperialism with alarm and indignation. Although he did not understand clearly the social nature of imperialism and the ways to oppose it, Twain nevertheless saw and felt that the rule of the dollar contradicted the people’s image of happiness and the meaning of human existence. At the end of the nineteenth century Twain wrote the revealing “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899, Russ. tr. 1900), “A Letter from the Recording Angel,” an Autobiography (a vols. 1934 ed.), as well as anti-imperialistic pamphlets. In these he branded the foreign and domestic policies of monopolistic capital, likened the magnates to highway robbers, and suggested that the United States adopt a new flag with an emblem of a skull and crossbones. Twain greatly sympathized with the Boers’ struggle for independence from Britain, with the Russian revolution of 1905-07, and with the Chinese nationalist anti-imperialistic rebellion of 1900-01. A profound disillusionment with bourgeois democracy led Twain at the same time into pessimistic moods. The social contradictions appeared irresolvable to him (The Mysterious Stranger, published 1916; the treatise, What is Man?, 1906). A genuine writer of the people, Twain loved his country and people passionately and loathed everything that oppresses and stunts man—cupidity, cynicism, slavery, and imperialistic force. The founder of critical realism in American literature, he leaned on the oral folklore. Contemporary progressive literature in the United States is developing the realistic and democratic tendencies of Twain’s work.

Comment by Henry Nash Smith, professor of English at the University of California and literary editor of the Mark Twain Estate:

The principal feature of this article is its determination to make the facts of history and biography fit into a neat pattern. The pattern is that of the class struggle, conceived in very simple fashion as the struggle of the virtuous masses against the wicked bourgeoisie. As a result, the tone is highly moralistic.

Mark Twain would not be so widely read in Russia if his work did not lend itself in some ways to an interpretation of this sort. He often invites the reader to adopt the viewpoint of a low or humble character who is at odds with the mores and conventions of society. But the Soviet critic overinterprets this recurrent theme in Mark Twain’s work—perhaps because his vocabulary forces him to. By a stretch of the imagination we might be able to see the low-brow ridicule of the sanctimonious Pilgrims in The Innocents Abroad as an attack on the middle class, but the most resolute search cannot discover such a conflict in Roughing It. To take quite different examples, the bracketing of “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” and “A Letter from the Recording Angel” with the Autobiography fosters generalizations apparently covering all three works but applicable at most to the Autobiography, which is itself too chaotic in its comments about men and events to justify the critic’s description of it. (It contains, for example, much praise of Henry Huttleston Rogers, one of the most powerful financiers of his day.)

It is true that Huckleberry Finn contrasts Huck’s and Jim’s small world of goodness on their raft with “a large world of meanness and injustice” on the shore. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, however, is not built around this contrast. Unlike Huck, Tom is basically a conformist, and his outlawry is a game rather than a symptom of alienation. But A Connecticut Yankee is made to order for the critic who wishes to present Mark Twain as a satirist of the ruling classes. The book makes a frontal attack on the aristocracy and the monarchy (and also, although the Soviet critic curiously makes no mention of the fact, on the Established Church); and the Yankee’s effort to industrialize Britain and establish a republic ends in catastrophe. Yet even here the Soviet critic pulls things off center by refusing to consider Mark Twain’s attitude toward his central character. The Yankee is the author’s mouthpiece in attacking the aristocracy; and he also seems to speak for the author in his proposals to impose a “bourgeois civilization” on Arthur’s kingdom. Are we to infer that Mark Twain ceases at some point to sympathize with the Yankee?

The flat assertion that “Mark Twain endows the masses with kindness and nobility” is belied by all the major works mentioned. The only masses visible in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are the inhabitants of the towns along the shore, previously described as a “bourgeois society which is based on deceit and hypocrisy” and “a large world of meanness and injustice.” In A Connecticut Yankee Hank Morgan begins with the faith that the mass of the people embodies all the true merit of the nation, but at the end he is compelled to face the “large and disenchanting fact” that “the mass of the nation” has been paralyzed by superstitious veneration for the church and the monarchy, and he calls the commoners “human muck.”

Finally, although in his later years Mark Twain did indeed denounce the imperialistic greed of the great powers in Africa and Asia, it would take more analysis and evidence than are provided here to prove that The Mysterious Stranger and What Is Man? arose from his recognition of unsolvable contradictions in capitalist society. The hypothesis is interesting but no more definitive than Bernard DeVoto’s Freudian analysis of the same books. A full reading of these works would not be limited by a single perspective, but might use suggestions derived from Marx, or Freud, or any other of the great system-builders. Such eclecticism no doubt seems decadent to Soviet critics; but their method seems needlessly simple-minded to us.

BOL’SHAYA SOVETSKAYA ENTZIKLOPEDIYA, VOLUME XXXVI, PAGE 636

ROOSEVELT, Theodore (1858-1919), American statesman, President of the United States in 1901-09, belonged to the Republican party. He was Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897-98, and Governor of New York in 1899-1900. In 1901 he became Vice President of the United States and, after the assassination of President McKinley in September 1901, President of the United States. In 1904 he was elected to the Presidency. Roosevelt was one of the most influential representatives of the United States monopolies (primarily of the Morgan financial oligarchy), and one of the ideologists of American imperialism. He was one of those who were mostly responsible for the imperialistic Spanish-American War which the United States unleashed in 1898. He conducted an armament-race policy. While voicing antitrust slogans for demagogic reasons, Roosevelt in fact conducted a policy which made possible the expansion and enrichment of the monopolies.

In foreign affairs Roosevelt was actively guided by his proclaimed “bigstick” policy, especially in relation to South America. In 1902-03 the Roosevelt Administration intervened in the Venezuela Crisis (q.v.). In 1901 it imposed the so-called Platt Amendment (q.v.) on American-occupied Cuba. Further one-sided treaties were imposed on Cuba with the aim of transforming it into a virtual U.S. colony. In 1906 the United States suppressed the anti-American uprising in Cuba and occupied it in 1906-09. Roosevelt was the major instigator of the 1903 Panama revolution, as a result of which Panama broke away from Colombia and in effect fell under the rule of the United States, which seized the Panama Canal Zone. In 1904 Roosevelt broadened the interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, according to which the United States had assumed the role of “policeman of the western hemisphere.” During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), the Roosevelt Administration gave Japan substantial aid, supporting her against Russia. In order to strengthen her dominion over the Philippines, the United States in July 1905 agreed to the establishment of the Japanese protectorate over Korea (see Katsura-Taft Agreement). In 1908 the Roosevelt Administration and Japan signed an agreement concerning China and the Pacific basin (see Root-Takahira Agreement). During the 1912 presidential election Roosevelt emerged as one of the founders of the so-called Progressive party (which fell apart after Roosevelt’s defeat in the election) and promulgated a bourgeois-reform program which, as V. I. Lenin pointed out, was an attempt to save capitalism by means of bourgeois reforms. During World War I, Roosevelt urged the earliest entry of the U.S. in the war.

Comment by John A. Garraty, professor of history at Columbia University and biographer of many late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century figures:

The Russians’ description of Theodore Roosevelt proves once again that you don’t have to resort to outright lies to be a good prevaricator. There are few factual errors in their story, but they achieve their objective of picturing him as a typical capitalist warmonger by selection and omission, not by direct falsification. Shrewdly, they concentrate their fire on Roosevelt’s attitude toward big business and his handling of foreign affairs. Both subjects provide material admirably suited to Soviet purposes.

To question Roosevelt’s sincerity as a trust-buster is clever because, despite his reputation, he was never wholly committed to this method of dealing with the monopoly problem. He would have preferred a system of federal regulation of giant corporations, but could not get the necessary legislation through Congress. Actually, in associating Roosevelt with the “Morgan financial oligarchy” the Russians are following the line taken by William Howard Taft in 1911. Taft charged that Roosevelt had blocked an antitrust suit against the International Harvester Corporation to please the House of Morgan, and winked at a flagrant violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act by allowing Morgan’s U.S. Steel Corporation to swallow the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company during the Panic of 1907. American historians do not generally accept this thesis, although a recent article by Professor Robert H. Wiebe on “The House of Morgan and the Executive” points out that the Morgan interests did seek to prevent suits against their “monopolies” by making informal agreements with the Roosevelt Administration. Certainly no reputable writer would claim that Roosevelt’s trustbusting was simply demagoguery.

In treating Roosevelt’s Latin American policy, the Russians are also exploiting a fruitful source. Roosevelt was undoubtedly an imperialist; he did wield the big stick and throw his weight around in the Caribbean. But here the article seems to me curiously unperceptive and flat. Any American historian could do a much better “hatchet job” if he set his mind to it. Nothing, for example, is said of Roosevelt’s repeated glorification of war in the eighties and nineties. The casually dismissed Panamanian revolution (complete as it was with an American cruiser, a puppet regime recognized with indecent haste, and the questionable transfer of $40,000,000 to a group of “foreign capitalists”) is another opportunity missed. On the other hand, to attack Roosevelt’s intervention in the Venezuela Bond Dispute, which was triggered by the imperialism of European powers, is hardly fair, and to condemn his Cuban policy without mentioning his genuine reluctance to intervene in the 1906 revolution is equally unjust.

The account of Roosevelt’s part in the Russo-Japanese War is wildly distorted. While it is true that Roosevelt was sympathetic to the Japanese in 1905, he gave them no “substantial aid,” and his sympathy grew out of his not-unreasonable suspicion of Russian motives in Manchuria. The article fails to mention that Roosevelt sponsored the Portsmouth Peace Conference, which ended the war, and that he won a Nobel Peace Prize for this work. It also creates the impression that the war led to a general U.S.-Japanese rapprochement, but as a matter of fact the Treaty of Portsmouth caused anti-American riots in Tokyo. The Japanese thought it too easy on the defeated Russians. Some American historians consider Portsmouth the first milestone along the road to Pearl Harbor.

Given the standard Russian preconceptions, their interpretations make sense of a sort. Can we fairly quarrel with Lenin when he says that the Progressive party sought to save capitalism by bourgeois reforms? But why has so much about Roosevelt been omitted? His career as politician, civil servant, writer, and rancher before 1897 is not even mentioned. Surely in a work of reference it merits some coverage. And why is there no discussion of Roosevelt as a man? His flamboyant personality would lend itself easily to Russian distortion: his egotism, his prudery, his almost-insane interest in physical fitness are as easy to caricature as his thick-lensed squint, bristling mustache, bull neck, and flashing teeth. It would be too much to expect a balanced portrait from the Large Soviet Encyclopedia, but this sketch is not even a decent caricature. Perhaps this is a general weakness of biography in a land where the individual counts for so little.

BOL’SHAYA SOVETSKAYA ENTZIKLOPEDIYA, VOLUME XXXVII, PAGE 313

ROCKEFELLER, family of mightiest financial magnates in the U.S. John Davison Rockefeller (1839-1937), its founder, established the Standard Oil Trust (q.v.) which soon monopolized the petroleum industry in the United States. Through all sorts of speculative machinations J. D. Rockefeller amassed the largest fortune in the U.S. and in the whole world. In 1911 his son, John Davison, Jr. (b. 1874), took over the management of Standard Oil and divided part of the huge property among his six children. In 1954 nine Rockefellers shared in the management of forty of the largest concerns, as well as of scientific organizations, universities (Chicago, Princeton), museums (Museum of Modern Art, American Museum of Natural History), etc. The Rockefeller family controls an important part of the petroleum industry in the United States (about thirty per cent of extracion and about one-half of refinement industry). It controls six of the largest companies that belong to the Standard Oil, Texas Company, and Sinclair Oil Corporation group, as well as a number of the largest plants producing chemicals, paper, tobacco; milk, electrical, and sugar industries; ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy; machine building, air transport, railways, the movie industry, etc.—in some cases together with Morgan and K’fchn, Loeb and Company (q.v.), and others. The Rockefeller family also controls the two largest life insurance companies (Metropolitan and Equitable); also the third largest commercial bank in the U.S., the Chase National Bank (q.v.) and its affiliates. In addition, a representative of the Rockefeller family is one of the managers of the second largest bank in the U.S., the National City Bank of New York (q.v.), but here the influence of the Morgan group predominates. In a number of other banks, life insurance companies, etc., the influence of the Rockefellers is interlocked with that of the Morgans and other monopolistic groups.

Over the two decades stretching approximately from the early thirties to the early fifties of the twentieth century, the Rockefellers expanded their position at the expense of the Morgan and other groups. Having a leading position in the petroleum industry, the Rockefeller group made extraordinary profits as a result of the development of the war economy and the increased use of petroleum as fuel and as raw material for the chemical industry.

Eight industrial companies alone (Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of Indiana, Socony Vacuum Oil Co., Atlantic Refining Co., Ohio Oil Co., International Paper Co., International Nickel Co. of Canada Limited) that are within the sphere of influence of the Rockefeller family increased their assets from $6.6 billion in 1946 to $12.9 billion in 1953, and their net profit after tax deductions from $0.5 to $1.34 billion. Through a number of special funds established by them as “trust funds” for science, the Rockefellers exert wide control over numerous scientific establishments in the United States and in other capitalist countries.

The Rockefeller family belongs to the top financial oligarchy in the United States; the Rockefeller group plays an important role in determining the foreign and domestic policy of the United States. In connection with its increased economic power, the Rockefeller group also increased its political influence after World War II (1939-45). Many leading posts in the Eisenhower Administration (from 1952 on) are held directly by representatives of the Rockefeller family and of groups closely connected with it.

Comment by Allan Nevins, De Witt Clinton professor emeritus at Columbia University, chairman of the Advisory Board of AMERICAN HERITAGE, and author of many books, including John D. Rockefeller:

The grandiosity, the slapdash lines, and the raw black-white-and-red colors give this study of the Rockefellers all the effectiveness of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster. It is entirely sound except that it shows little comprehension of what the Rockefellers really did; no understanding of big-business organization in the United States; and no grasp of the regulatory activities of American government with respect to industry and finance. It is impeccably accurate except for three different kinds of confusion: a confusion of the facts of 1900 with those of 1950; a confused idea that the very few people who own stock exercise control in business; and a confusion of public trusteeships with private exploitation. It is written without bias except that half the sentences contain loaded words. It is well proportioned except that it leaves out all the happiest part of the family record.

John D. Rockefeller, the Soviet Encyclopedia tells us, founded the trust which soon monopolized the petroleum industry in America. Actually a group—H. H. Rogers, Henry M. Flagler, Oliver H. Payne, Charles Pratt, John D. Archbold, and two Rockefellers—established the combination, whose increasingly precarious monopoly ended in thirty years. John D. Rockefeller amassed the largest fortune in the world, we are told, by speculative machinations. Throughout his active industrial career he avoided speculation; not until 1901 did his fortune reach $200,000,000; at its highest point it fell short of $900,000,000—and during his lifetime he gave away $550,000,000.

In 1911, according to the encyclopedia, control passed to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who divided the empire with his six children. A frightening spectacle; but hold!—something seems wrong. Of John D. Jr.’s five sons, in 1911 David and Winthrop were not yet born; Laurence was one year old; Nelson, three; and John D. III, five. The spectacle of these three toddlers and creepers helping sway the vast monopoly is less horrible. And was 1911 really the year when the python tightened his grip? On the contrary, history records that in 1911 the United States government decreed the breakup of the Standard Oil combination. It obeyed the order; the industry was divided among numerous highly competitive corporations; and John D. Rockefeller, Sr., at seventy-two, became as completely inactive in its management as his son had long been.

Why were they inactive? The encyclopedia asserts that it was because they were busy maintaining cont.rol of great oil, chemical, paper, tobacco, electrical, and ferrous companies, of railroads, insurance companies, and titanic banks; expanding their position at the expense of the Morgans. It would be news to Texaco, the First National City Bank, the Equitable, and the Standard of California that the Rockefellers “control” them. When John D. Rockefeller died he had one share of the Standard of California, kept for sentimental reasons. Did it never occur to the encyclopedists to look up what the Rockefellers were really doing? After founding the University of Chicago in 1889, the first Rockefeller for the last forty years of his life, 18971937, substantially dropped business and devoted himself to philanthropy. John D., Jr., gave practically his whole life to philanthropy and public service. The five sons are universally respected as philanthropists and public servants. But of the General Education Board, the Institute for Medical Research, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Peking Union Medical College, and all the worldwide benefactions, not a line in the encyclopedia! Perhaps the word philanthropy is not in the Soviet vocabulary.

It is sad that a basic reference work should give so distorted a picture of a family that has filled America and other lands with useful works. It is still sadder that it should suppress the fact that business in this country is owned by millions of investors, not by a few monopolists; that management is primarily in professional hands; that free competition is jealously maintained; and that the government effectively polices private enterprise in the public interest. Perhaps saddest of all, for it reflects a low view of human nature, is the notion expressed in this article that Rockefeller interest in scientific bodies, Princeton University, and the American Museum of Natural History is somehow predatory. The writer did not know the half of it. One Rockefeller is a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard, another is a trustee of the national Y.W.C.A. and the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, and a third founded the Museum of Primitive Art. Where will this sinister infiltration end?

An entry from the Small Soviet Encyclopedia, Vol. IX,columns 240-41, before June 22, 1941

ROOSEVELT, Franklin (born 1882)—President of the U.S.A. From 1907—an active Democratic [party] leader. Became a member of the New York State Senate in 1910; Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, 1913-21; Governor of the State of New York, 1928-32. Became President of the U.S.A. in 1933. Roosevelt was the spokesman of those strata of the American bourgeoisie which, under the conditions of economic crisis and acute class struggle, considered it imperative to grant sizable concessions to the working class and the farming masses. Roosevelt proclaimed the so-called New Deal, consisting of the passage of a number of laws designed to regulate industrial and agricultural production. He was responsible for establishing the National Industrial Recovery Administration (NIRA), the purpose of which was to create “class peace” in the U.S.A. by fixing maximum hours and minimum wages for all branches of industry. In foreign affairs, Roosevelt’s most outstanding achievements were the establishment of normal diplomatic relations between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. (November 16, 1933), as well as the proclamation of the Good Neighbor policy toward Latin American countries.

It was this policy which met with the approval of the American people and which enabled him to become reelected in 1936. Having survived the most critical years of the crisis, the reactionary circles of financial capital came to regard Roosevelt’s concessions as excessive, and pressured the Supreme Court into declaring the NIRA and the New Deal unconstitutional. Under the influence of reactionary elements in the Republican as well as in his own Democratic party, Roosevelt became increasingly more reactionary. This reversal became particularly pronounced after the outbreak of the second imperialist war in Europe. In the interests of imperialist American circles, who demanded the U.S.A.’s active participation in the war for the purpose of redividing the world, the embargo on arms was repealed on behalf of France and Great Britain [sic]. In response to Roosevelt’s demands, the Congress systematically appropriated huge sums of money for rearmament. At the same time, the U.S. increased its pressure on Latin American countries, with the aim of subordinating their policies to American interests. Domestically, the Roosevelt Administration accelerated its offensive against the democratic rights of the American people; social legislation was largely wiped out. The presidential election of 1940, the fear of losing the votes of millions of working people opposed to the war, compelled Roosevelt to conduct an ambiguous policy on the international arena, as well as on the home front. After the presidential election, Roosevelt speeded up America’s preparations for war.

An entry from the same volume, same toaee, after June 22, 1941

ROOSEVELT, Franklin (born 1882)—outstanding American statesman. From 1907—an active Democratic [party] leader. Became a member of the New York State Senate in 1910; Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, 1913-21; Governor of the State of New York, 1928-32. Became President of the U.S.A. in 1933. Having become President under conditions of a severe economic crisis that had greatly affected the American economy, Roosevelt proclaimed the socalled New Deal, consisting of the passage of a number of laws designed to regulate industrial and agricultural production, and in the creation of a number of organizations aimed at combatting the aftereffects of the crisis (NIRA and others). In foreign affairs Roosevelt’s most outstanding achievements were the establishment of normal diplomatic relations between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. (November 16, 1933), and the proclamation of the Good Neighbor policy toward Latin American countries. Roosevelt’s measures met with the approval of the American people, thus assuring his re-election in 1936. Having survived the most critical years of the crisis, the reactionary circles of financial capital now came out against Roosevelt’s policy, pressuring the Supreme Court into declaring the New Deal unconstitutional. However, later on, under the influence of the movement of the masses who supported Roosevelt, the Supreme Court ceased its opposition to Roosevelt’s measures.

From the very beginning, Roosevelt took up a conspicuously hostile position with regard to Hitlerite Germany and other fascist powers. In 1937 Roosevelt urged a “quarantine for the aggressors,” but isolationist developments in the United States impeded his efforts to wage a struggle against the preparaions for aggression. After fascist Germany unleashed the war in Europe, Roosevelt promoted active aid to the democratic countries, considering their fate to be closely tied to the security of the United States. At his urging, Congress appropriated huge sums of money for the defense of the U.S.A. Roosevelt’s popularity with the broad masses assured his re-election for a third term in 1944, despite the tradition according to which a President could not serve for more than two terms. After his re-election, Roosevelt still further accelerated America’s preparations for a struggle against the aggressors.

At the very inception of Roosevelt’s Presidency, Comrade Stalin, in a conversation with the English writer [H. G.] Wells in 1934, emphasized Roosevelt’s most outstanding personal qualities—his initiative, courage, and resoluteness.

Comment by Abraham Brumberg, executive editor, Problems of Communism, published by the United States Information Agency:

In early 1954, the subscribers to the Large Soviet Encyclopedia received a letter from its publishers, which ‘“recommended” that certain pages in Volume II be removed, “with scissors or razor blade,” and that in their place “the enclosed pages containing a new text” be inserted. The pages to be removed contained a biography of “the great son of the Georgian people,” Lavrentii P. Beria (who in July, 1953, had turned from a “son” into an “enemy”), and the new pages featured an article on the Bering Strait.

This rather drastic example of fact-juggling is not unique in the annals of Soviet historiography, as can be seen from the two biographical sketches of Franklin D. Roosevelt printed above. Both are taken from one and the same source—the Small Soviet Encyclopedia, Vol. IX, published in Moscow in 1941; yet some copies of this volume contain the first entry, while others contain the second. How come? The answer is disarmingly simple: Volume IX (a note on the inside cover informs us) “went to press on March 28, 1941”; quite obviously, the printers had not managed to turn out all of the projected 90,000 copies before June 22, 1941, when Hitler’s armies suddenly invaded the U.S.S.R. As of that day, World War II became a “people’s war against fascism”; Russia became an ally of Great Britain and France, and the United States, which only a day earlier had been a “hotbed of imperialism,” was now a gallant friend and bulwark against aggression. Ergo, Roosevelt could no longer be a “spokesman of the American bourgeoisie,” but, quite to the contrary, “an outstanding American statesman,” a man of whom Comrade Stalin himself had once spoken in the most praiseworthy terms. No “scissors or razor blade” this time; the old pages were merely scrapped, and new ones (of a considerably more brownish hue than the original ones), with a new “correct” biography, were inserted by the Moscow binders.

To those who are even cursorily acquainted with the history of the Roosevelt Administration, the absurd generalizations and falsifications abounding in both versions are readily apparent. One is tempted to speculate, however, on how the Soviet citizens resolved the contradictions between the two biographies. Was Roosevelt (circa 1938) a warmonger or an upstanding opponent of “Hitlerite Germany”? Was the “New Deal” merely a “concession” to the masses, or a policy enacted against the “reactionary circles of financial capital”? Was or was not the New Deal wiped out by the Supreme Court? But no matter. The early Soviet historian, M. N. Pokrovsky, once said that “history is politics projected into the past.” Pokrovsky was posthumously (in 1934) purged by Stalin, on grounds of his ostensible “anti-patriotic” and “anti-national” views, but his main principle survived him. As in 1941, so today the intelligent Soviet citizen realizes that history, as taught in the Soviet Union, is not an objective record of the past, but a mirror of the current party line. Accordingly, as the line changes, so does the past. Perhaps this is why so many talented Soviet students decide to become geographers, and study the Bering Strait, rather than historians, and study Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria.