Yeah, I know, and Lincoln was a Republican. But given that the positions of the two parties have changed, it just struck me as incongruitous to imply a modern-day Democrat when he author is referring to someone with a conservative viewpoint.
It’s like me talking about the Minnesota Lakers basketball team. 
Sure, but they’re relatively rare. Or am I missing the registered Democrats going around saying “I can’t stand minorities, but I’m all for affirmative action!”? 
hmmm. Is this your problem? You confuse the ideals of Marxist communism with the reality of the Soviet totalitarian state?
I certainly agree that in the real world, no communist country would long survive without resorting to excessive control to keep itself in power. The economic theory has been pretty thoroughly demonstrated to be unworkable. However, you seem to be making the leap from the notion that all the “communist” countries were totalitarian to the notion that everyone who believed in the ideal was aware of that in advance and that they all supported that goal. In fact, the CPUSA continued to lose members for 60 years because that is not how its members saw the world. Gus Hall always quoted the Moscow party line and everyone who could read a paper eventually recognized that his claims were nonsense–so they quit. While noting that Hall was not too quick on the uptake regarding his sponsors, the best sources that I have seen is that he simply locked himself into a belief system and put himself into denial as to the reality of the Soviet system.
Since the U.S. helped conspire to destroy the one freely elected communist government, we do not know whether they all must end up the same way, but you are imposing a view of the Soviet system on the theory of Marxism and insisting that everyone else “recognizes” what you see–and that anyone who promoted Marxism must have been promoting totalitarianism.
Using your logic, we can note that anyone who supports Capitalism must support sweat shops, child labor, and the absolute right of management to destroy their workers as long as they can find replacements. That would certainly be the message one would get by looking at untrammeled Capitalism in the years when Communism first arose as a popular movement.
I did not mean to imply that King was a Communist, and I don’t see how such an impression could be made from my original post. Indeed, most leaders of the SCLC were very anti-Communist and tried to keep party members out of the movement.
This does not change the fact that the Communist Party and agents of the Soviet Union were interested in exploiting the civil rights movement. They were not terribly successful, but this was their intention. This is very well documented. I refer you to my subsequent citation. BTW, The Atlantic is not known as a hotbed of right-wing wackos.
Well, if your political worldview (or “U.S. view”) is focused on California, you may be right. However, I invite you to visit several other parts of the country (deep south, midwest, Pennsylvania) to broadan your horizons a little. All too often, the knee-jerk racist is a Democrat. I do believe this is a remnant that has survived the political shift, but it has suvived and remained strong. Much of this is due to the strong sense of family present in parts of this country. (“My grandpappy was a Democrat and he would roll over in his grave if I ever voted for a republican.”) David Duke first ran for political office as a Democrat. My office mate, from Pennsylvania, tells me about all his friends and their families. Racist to the core and proud Democrats.
Please think twice before taking the attitude that a racist, by default, just must be a Republican.
Though I don’t think King was a communist, it is true that the party actively recruited blacks and used civil rights as a way to increase their numbers; see Ellison’s Invisible Man for an example, albeit fictional.
To follow up on divemaster’s point, I was born and raised in Archie Bunker’s neigborhood (Astoria, NY), and I had loads of neighbors who through around the N word casually. And I can attest to this:
When Archie Bunker bothers to vote, he votes a straight Democratic ticket.
Why? Several reasons, mostly revolving around economic self interest and vague memories of the New Deal. The Archie Bunkers of New York were constantly griping about John Lindsay, and snarling that “the liberals” had ruined New York… and yet, few of them would ever DREAM of voting Republican! In their minds, the Democrats were “the people’s party,” the party of FDR, while the Republicans were still the party of Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression.
astorian – I agree with your post, but one quibble. John Lindsay was not a Democrat.
December: yes and no. John Lindsay was elected mayor in 1965 as a liberal Republican. But he lost the GOP nomination to John Marchi in 1969, and ran as a member of the Liberal Party. He won a 3-way race for re-election, and promptly became a Democrat. You may recall that he sought the Democratic Party’s nomination for President in 1972.
So… he never ran for mayor as a Democrat, but he was a Democrat for a large chunk of his time as mayor.
My point was merely this: though conservative, blue-collar white ethnics in New York claimed to hate John Lindsay and everything he stood for, they invariably voted for Democrats who shared Lindsay’s ideology… if they voted at all.
Once again, I ask you for the relevance of this to the OP, or anything else. As I noted, the Communist Party and agents of the Soviet Union were also very interested in exploiting CIA, the FBI, and the U.S. Navy, and were very successful at doing so.
So?
Sua
I’ll try not to, but they make it too easy. Unless you want to convince me that the Willie Horton commercials were produced only because the GOP party leadership liked the sound of the name.
I think you phrased this sloppily. If you mean “The Reds” as in a focused, planned communist infiltration, you are wrong. That is one of the lies that conservatives who were anti- equal rights would say, playing off the nation’s anti-communism to their own biased, racist agenda.
If you mean to say that there were communists in the movement, you are right. There were noted communists in SNCC, and I’m sure some in SCLC. But, as tomndebb correctly said, these groups distanced themselves from communists every chance they got. SNCC was more radical than King’s SCLC, but still…
I think some of this confusion might stem from the fact that MLK openly opposed the Vietnam War. At one speech (if you listen to PE you got this on tape) he said,
“Yet our best trained, best prepared, best equipped troops refuse to fight. It is safe to say that they would rather SWITCH than fight.”
It doesn’t mean he is a communist. He was referring to the fact that the black power community sympathized with the NLF/VC, and held the US government in contempt.
“The NLF/VC never called us nigger.”
colin
The OP referred to a belief by some that King was a Communist. You can disagree with me as you see fit, but my statements have addressed the issues raised, and are thus relevant to said OP.
The Communist influence in the King circle came in the person of Stanley Levison. Levison was a CPUSA member with no official title who became a close advisor to King. He remained so until King’s death.
There is evidence that the damage done to the civil rights movement came not by radicalizing Dr. King, but be arousing suspicion in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to the civil-rights movement. It is easy to see, too, how this could have aroused the suspicions, too, of more conservative groups.
The Communist Party of the USA, in this time, was terribly unsuccessful in garnering support among the American people. Major funding and organizational support came from the Soviets, who exerted a considerable amount of control as a result. There were no differences in the goals of the CPUSA and the Soviets. Assertions that various actions were the doings of home-grown Communists and not of the Soviets are, to my mind, naive. They were two sides of the same coin.
Re: Pete Seeger
Is it such arrant nonsense?
In 1941 Seeger joined with Woody Guthrie and others to form a group called the Almanacs. In May 1941 they released an album entitled “Songs for John Doe.” This album consisted entirely of anti-war songs with lyrics like:
Oh, Franklin Roosevelt……said, “I hate war, and so does Eleanor
But we won’t be safe 'till everybody’s dead.”
Don’t you want a silver medal, Billy boy, Billy boy?
……No desire do I feel to defend Republic Steel…
And
Franklin D., listen to me,
You ain’t a-gonna send me 'cross the sea,
Now in May 1941, when this album was released, the Soviet/Nazi Non-aggression Pact was still in effect and both the Soviets and the CPUSA supported a policy of US neutrality. One month later Germany invaded the Soviet Union and both the Soviets and the CPUSA immediately reversed themselves and began supporting US involvement in the war.
And, low and behold; according to Woody Guthrie biographer Joe Klein; Seeger and Guthrie began working on the first of their pro-war/anti-fascist songs (Reuban James) by October of 1941, over a month before Pearl Harbor. Now it’s certainly possible that Seeger simply had a sincere change of heart and decided that the deaths of young American boys weren’t so bad after all. But I must confess that his timing, combined with the fact that Seeger was a professed member of the CPUSA, causes me feel that it is indeed very reasonable to suspect that Seegers behavior was based more on the desires of the Soviet Union than on his own conscience. Not arrant nonsense at all.
And if Seeger was willing to sacrifice his conscience (assuming that he was sincerely anti-war) on something as significant as this for the good of the Soviet Union, then I find easy to believe that he might have sacrificed his patriotic inclinations as well, had the opportunity arisen.
Only Pete Seeger can ever know what was truely in his heart. But
perhaps he himself best summed up his attitude when, on the occasion of his 75th birthday he said “I apologize for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader.”
::sigh:: Yer not getting it, Mr. Moto. I’m not disagreeing with you about whether or not the Soviets, the CPUSA, or someone else tried to infiltrate the SCLC. Hell, you are probably right.
Here’s the question I have for you - you obviously think your observation has some relevance to the OP and the debate. What is it?
As it is, it is a nonsequitur. It’s kind of like someone starting an OP asking if FDR had advance warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and another person responding by saying, “well, one of his chief advisors lived in Japan for 7 years.” Or someone responding to a question about J. Edgar Hoover’s policies by saying that he liked to dress up in drag.
I don’t know what you are tring to say. Did the attempted or actual infiltration of King’s organization make it more or less likely that King was a Communist? Did it affect the policies of King and his organization? Did it make King’s work more or less admirable? What are you trying to say?
Sua
I’m saying that the perception by some that King was a commie springs from the presence of Communists in his organization.
This perception of King himself is unfair. It is clear that he was never a Communist.
However, it is my assertion that these Communists in the organization did harm to a movement that was important in American history.
OK. I’ll try it again:
As demonstrated by his quoted apology, Seeger was certainly guilty of a slavish and gullible acceptance of the Party Line handed out from Moscow. (That the CPUSA was, basically, an organ of the Comintern and, after its demise, other propaganda sources from Moscow is no secret to anyone. I have seen numerous references to that fact from the WWII period when we were allies with the Soviets.) However, it should be noted that Seeger left the party when information regarding Stalin’s actual misdeed were confirmed by the Russians, themselves.
Ellen Schrecker, in her Many Are the Crimes, provides the context that several spies were recruited from the CPUSA (december’s favorite point)–but not that they took orders through the CPUSA. In fact, using the Venona Documents (the collection of cables exchanged between Moscow and the CPUSA that became public after the fall of the U.S.S.R.) and comparing them against the reality of the CPUSA actions and membership, she notes that the biggest problem that the CPUSA had was making some grand proclamation at the behest of Moscow, only to see an immediate drop-off in membership as people recognized it for the twisted propaganda it was. Ms. Schrecker found no evidence of the rank-and-file membership engaging in espionage.
Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson took a different tack with their The Soviet World of American Communism. They seized on the Venona Documents as an opportunity to prove just how terrible the CPUSA had been. The result? They demonstrated that the CPUSA was almost wholly funded from Moscow (a point most rational people assumed was true since the 1930s although it was always denied by CPUSA leadership). What they did not find, however, was that the CPUSA was a fertile ground for spies and traitors. The spies who emerged from CPUSA were all people who had been in the movement in the early 1930s at the height of the Depression and the period of the rise of Fascism. (And, again, the spies were recruited from the CPUSA by the KGB and its predecessors, they were not CPUSA members taking orders through the CPUSA.)
Now, neither of these books is without flaws, yet coming from diametrically opposed orientations, they each provide the same evidence that the standard, idealistic, (and gullible) CPUSA member was generally a typical citizen who drew the line at actual anti-American activities. They also demonstrate that, while the CPUSA provided one source of potential recruits for the KGB, no one actually betrayed our country on the orders of the CPUSA.
Given the overt slander that was imposed on any Communist association by every U.S. administration in the 1930s through the 1950s, most of the U.S. press, and much of Hollywood, it is, perhaps, forgivable that many CPUSA members who heard the American version of the evils of Communism dismissed them as mere propaganda. However, as the reality of the Stalinist regime became apparent, the overwhelming number of CPUSA members quit–including Pete Seeger.
Given reverend MLK’s obvious religious leanings and the Communist Party’s atheistic Marxist attitudes, I would demand some pretty solid evidence to back up the claim that MLK was a communist.
The man was a third generation baptist preacher. I don’t think he would have been inspired by Marx who famously called religion an opiate of the masses.
However, to many right wingers, MLK’s socialist leanings might just as well be communism. But it would be going overboard to think that he was carrying out orders from the “reds” in Moscow.
The US Socialist Party has some literature on MLK.
http://sp-usa.org/lit/MLK.pdf
A lot of these quotes would probably send right wingers in frothing fury (especially if they were racists and hated King already). But to folks that are considerably more left leaning they would be ready to make the distinction between “a modified form of socialism” and Leninist revolutionary Communism.
So, did MLK plagarize his thesis?
I agree with the first two sentences. But, a question about the third: What harm to the civil rights movement? It is my understanding that MLK’s civil rights movement was successful. Sure, that doesn’t mean that as of whatever day, 1967 all the races were happy and sang songs in the forest.
But… the movement was successful in de-segregation (in the passing of two different congressional acts). The movement also signaled a paradigm shift (I hate using that term but it fits in this circumstance) among much of the american public.
My understanding was that the friction between the black power movement and MLK’s movement, as well as the friction between the ‘by any means necessary’ movement and MLK’s non-violent movement, was the most integral force in the split of the civil rights movement.
The questions “how far do we go?”
“how fast do we go?”
and “what tactics do we use?”
were much more important in the split between civil rights groups.
…in short, a difference in ideology between different civil rights groups, led to the fragmentation of the movement.
communists in the movement and whatever ‘problems’ they caused is but a sidenote in my opinion. And it is not because I am a communist that I say this. I happen to have a great interest in the 1960s, and thus have taken a couple classes and undertaken a considerable amount of reading on the subject.
not one professor I have learned under has mentioned communists as a force that did harm to the civil rights movment, although it is clear that there were communists in the movement and the movement tried to distance itself from communism as much as possible (due to the social stigma of the word “communism” more than anything).
how about the fact that SNCC members, working in the South, started carrying guns to defend themselves from lynchings, something that SCLC members were stauncly against?
to generalize: the early civil rights movement accomplished its early aims. from 65 onward there was a noticeable split in the movment, and that split did do some harm in the movement. did communism have much to do with that? No.
colin
You’re actually responding to a different question (although the words of the questions are similar).
Did communists harm the actual movement? Almost certainly not.
Did the perception of communist involvement interfere with the ability of the movement to achieve all of its goals? Probably.
There are still poorly informed people who claim that MLK was simply a “communist” “putting one over on” the American people. (We’ve had them post here, although I’m not going to dignify their tripe by searching and linking to it.)
There are a lot of people who share december’s views on how much of a threat “communism”* was to the U.S. and any perceived link to “communism” is a red flag (so to speak) that causes some number of them to oppose any one who has been so branded along with the ideas that such branded people may promote. (I do not see december in this smaller subset population.)
Obviously, some of these groups were truly reprehensible–or, at least, truly dangerous–but by lumping them all together without differentiation, the fearful could find far more people and “things” to fear in the world, justifying their own excessive and unreasoning hostility to anything that was branded with that label. To that extent, some unquantified number of people who perceived MLK to be “communist” opposed many efforts to open up American society (and some continue to rely on that excuse for any barriers they continue to maintain). Whether they actually oppose equal rights because they fear that it is a “communist plot” or whether that is a convenient cover to disguise more base feelings we do not know, and probably never will. (I am not aware of any sociological studies addressing that issue.)