Midnight
“There is a city that this darkness can’t hide
There are the embers of a fire that’s gone out
But I can still feel the heat on my skin
And this mess we’re in, where you and I
Maybe you and I
We can still make it right
Maybe we can bring back the light”
~The Protomen, “Light Up the Night”
Excerpts from Oliver Lark,George Patton: Proletarian Soldier (London: Doubleday, 1977).
Of one thing there is no doubt, and that is the simple fact that George Patton lived an extraordinary life. Born into an aristocratic conservative family in California on 11 November 1885, Patton would go on to serve with distinction in the First World War, advancing to the rank of Colonel in the American Expeditionary Force. While serving, he helped pioneer the use of armoured warfare, innovating tactics and strategies which would later become staples in the American military. Facing the hardships and horrors of life in the trenches, Patton, like so many others of his generation, came home a changed man. He soon renounced his birthright, became estranged from his wife and family, and joined the Workers’ Party of America, all within a few short months of returning from France in 1919. Patton, along with his close comrade David Eisenhower, had set the pattern for so many World War veterans. They went off to war committed to their nation’s cause, and came home subversives.
…The sheer number of career military officers in the United States Army who professed belief in Socialism after the Great War is simply astounding. While no reliable figures can be found to establish the exact percentage, estimates range from fifteen percent to as high as twenty-eight percent! Whatever the rate, it is clear just how much the American polity and her military were rotting by 1920. Patton was hardly alone in his beliefs in the army, and as his letters show, he formed a discussion club among trusted comrades from the army to correspond on politics.
[…]
In one such letter, Patton writes to Eisenhower, confessing about his experiences in the Great War. “Dear Ike,” he writes:
It was at Chemin-de-Dames that it hit me with the force of revelation. Our Mk. IVs had bogged down in the German auxiliary trench, and the Jerries soon came down on us with artillery, followed by an infantry attack. We soon ran out of ammunition for our tank’s machine guns, and we had to fend off the last of their assault hand to hand, with knives and bayonets. The kids we bayoneted, they couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen. I felt old, and worn out. And as relief came, and we finally had a moment of peace, I suddenly realized I had no idea why I was here, or why I was butchering young German boys, or why they were doing the same to us. I didn’t know whether I could believe in my country anymore, or even believe in God.
While the exact details of Patton’s conversion from Christian soldier to atheist communist remain to the imagination, the documentary evidence suggests that it occurred shortly after the end of the Chemin-de-Dames campaign, while Patton was on a three-day pass in Paris. Patton’s letters and own recollections preserved on archival film suggest that during that time, Patton met up with a French socialist group. One of the few details that are known is that the group was composed of some number of dissident intellectuals, as well as a number of veterans of the French army, discharged as amputees. Patton, now semi-fluent in French, conversed with this group about the political issues of the war and economics for anywhere from a few hours to a whole evening, depending on the account.
Upon returning to the front in early June of 1917, Patton spent the next few months in command of an infantry battalion in the 17th Infantry Division. Morale was dismally poor, and the troops were under-provisioned. Though he had been a stern taskmaster before, he was twice reprimanded by superior officers for fraternization in this period. Thanks to the pressing manpower situation, and his exemplary record, there was no official disciplinary action.
His own memoirs mention an event during this period. A group of NCOs threatened mutiny in response to their orders to go over the wall, unprepared, and attack German lines as part of an upcoming offensive. This conspiracy happened within earshot of a junior officer, who promptly reported it to Patton. Rather than follow standard army protocol and arraign the ringleaders before courts-martial as examples to other potential mutineers, Patton spoke with the conspirators personally. The conversation that followed was downright treasonous: Patton suggested they keep their heads down, and not find themselves in front of a firing squad now so that they could survive the war, and turn their guns on the ones responsible for putting the army in this situation.
[…]
The first self-reference of socialist belief would not come until a diary entry nearly a month later. He writes tepidly in favour of socialism and its “brotherhood of man,” and suggests an imperial nature in the First World War, impugning the motives of the national leaders of the Allies as well as the Central Powers. In perhaps the strongest language seen from this previously gentlemanly character, he calls the current prime minister, Woodrow Wilson, a “pompous old jackass” and “a capitalist running-dog.”
…Like many radicals of his generation, it was the Bolshevik Revolution that ultimately steeled his convictions in socialism. His correspondence after the war contains many recollections and conversations about the aforementioned event. One such letter was written to John Reed, praising his work on Ten Days That Shook the World.
[…]
From the end of the First World War until the beginning of the Revolution, Patton found himself living a double life. His loyalties were ambiguous after a few incidents, but thanks to some personal recommendations from General MacArthur, the Army’s internal affairs division considered him to be still a reliable officer in spite of his socialist sympathies. This mistaken impression was made possible by the turmoil of the founding of the Comintern. When the Socialist Labor Party restyled itself as a Comintern Party, records of Patton’s membership in the party disappeared. Patton himself portrayed it as a matter of leaving the party over its radicalism.
Because of his knowledge, and the strong vouchers for his reliability to the army, the unorthodox officer was considered to be the best candidate to oversee the investigation and infiltration subversive groups within the Army, and to spy on domestic political groups. While on paper he was part of the near-defunct Armor Corps of the US Army, in practice Patton served as an important officer for Army Intelligence’s domestic spying, both on civilians and in the military.
Unbeknownst to his superiors, Patton had never left the party. Instead, he had joined the underground party apparatus, and spent much of the 1920s and early 30s working as a double agent within Army Intelligence. The outcome of his deception would ultimately prove disastrous for the Army, and the coup he’d made against Army intelligence with the network of radicals he had clandestinely shielded in the Army would prove a decisive factor in the coming civil war.
Patton was certainly not the only party member to have turned espionage on its head. Indeed, several other important figures in state police organizations, the US Marshals Service and the National Bureau of Investigation are now known to have been, or suspected to have been party members in the 1920s. Some have spun such a web of lies and half-truths that the real story will never be untangled. The uncertain loyalties of the infamous Public Safety chief J. Edgar Hoover are a staple of crime and mystery fiction to this day. But arguably, the central role that the Army played in the civil war, and the crucial role that Patton and his comrades played in the Red victory, make Patton’s game of smoke and mirrors the most important.
Excerpts from Nadezhda Meyer,The Revolution , (New York: Pathfinder, 1958)
The Revolution began with very modest goals. While MacArthur’s putsch had not lived up to expectations, the fact still remained that in February the Reds were in a very precarious situation. The West Coast, the South, and much of the Prairie were at least nominally under the control of the Whites. Taken by surprise as they were, there was very little opportunity to organize resistance against martial law. Whatever resistance there was within the bourgeois state governments was was forced quickly underground, or it was crushed.
The most spectacular example of White brutality was during the occupation of Louisiana. Huey Long had been the only Democratic governor to defy MacArthur openly, and when the state of emergency was declared he called up the National Guard, re-established the state militia, and ordered a general resistance to the military regime. MacArthur had, however, been prepared for this eventuality. A Marine regiment, supported by two regiments of the Mississippi National Guard and a paramilitary regiment, marched on Baton Rouge. The city’s defenders were caught unprepared. By the time the National Guard was dispatched to repel the invaders, it was already too late. The governor, along with much of the state legislature, had been liquidated.
Across the Industrial Belt, though, the Reds were able to very quickly take control. The urban soviets very quickly directed the Spartacus League to take control of the machinery of government. The lame duck state governments were arrested, and the Workers’ Party assumed control of the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts.
On 4 February, the All-American Congress of Soviets convened in Chicago. Two prepared measures were instituted very quickly. The first, which later became known as the Fundamental Principles of the Soviet Congresses, established the basic rules of soviet government in America. The state governments would be subordinated to state-level soviets. Universal suffrage, without citizenship or residency restriction, was instituted, as well as an assurance of a secret ballot, the recall of deputies and other minutiae. Most importantly, it invoked the right of revolution to permanently alter the US constitutional arrangement, based on the fundamental principle that power derives from the mandate of the masses.
The second measure authorized the creation of a Provisional Government. Often called the Labor Declaration of Independence, it reiterated the central premise of the first measure, as well as empowering the Provisional Government to put down the unlawful coup d’etat in Washington, and to restore the United States Constitution. In essence, it was an open invitation to form a broad anti-fascist united front, pre-empting measures being contemplated by dissident Democrats and Republicans to form their own restorationist movement.
The Provisional Government was organized hastily the very next day. From its inception, it faced numerous difficulties. For one, much of the Party’s senior leadership had been killed or incarcerated in the opening stages of the coup. Vice President-elect Upton Sinclair had escaped only because he was attending to party business in Chicago, and not in Washington to prepare for the inauguration. At this stage, most of the new Congressional delegation, particularly the frontbench, were unaccounted for.
The Centre and Right factions of the party had suffered the most from the sudden turn of events. The Left and Ultra-Left surged into the leadership vacuum. A triumvirate quickly emerged between the now Acting President Sinclair, the Provisional First Secretary William Z. Foster, and Workers’ Party Secretary-General Earl Browder. Out of the chaos of this first few days, they were able to quickly attune to the situation, and worked tirelessly to organize all resources available to resist the Whites.
Like Lincoln before him, Sinclair was keen to use the powers of the executive office as a blunt instrument against domestic insurrection. His first executive order ordered the seizure of all property of those persons or institutions affiliated with the military junta. The veneer of legality that the Provisional Government imposed smoothed the Solidarity-led occupation and collectivization process. The Provisional Government had been endorsed by nearly every organization that opposed the coup, and now they could not object to the “military necessity” of seizing the property of rebels to support the war effort.
The soviets and the trade unions took direct control of industrial and agricultural production within the Industrial Belt. The programme of War Syndicalism put all available factors of production to use in the war effort. General labor conscription began, mobilising industrial armies to stoke the fires of industry. Stockpiles of steel, coal, oil and other raw materials were put under military control.
The Spartacus League as well as the various National Guards and militia groups opposing MacArthur had all quickly pledged themselves to the Provisional Government, and the Provisional Secretary of War Martin Abern wasted no time in coordinating a national chain of command.
The first nucleus of a Red Army formed within the Spartacus League, as it reorganised from a streetfighting militia into a revolutionary military. The “old shirts” of the trade unions and US Army reservists were drafted into a leadership cadre, bringing with them the experience of the Great War’s National Army. The emerging Red Army fashioned itself in that image, seizing the available federal arsenals as industry tooled up to produce rifles, machine guns, artillery, radios and munitions.
Yet for all their energy and efforts, the situation facing the Provisional Government was quite bleak. Their only saving grace was that partisan warfare hindered efforts to mobilize troops against the Red strongholds. Black communist rebels, many Great War veterans, in particular were a constant thorn in the US Army’s side. Organized, disciplined and ruthless, the Red Army Fractions struck at the supply lines of troops heading north, and waged a campaign of terror against the Southern gentry.
Still, in terms of numbers and arms, the advantage was still decisively in the Whites’ favor. Attempts to halt the US Army’s advance northward failed. On 1 March, the 3rd Infantry Division crushed the Illinois National Guard at Cairo in the Civil War’s first major battle. On the same day, a single mechanised cavalry regiment mutinied. It was a single candle holding back the darkness, but it would be just enough of a spark to light the fires of revolution.
Lt. Colonel George S. Patton had been entrusted by MacArthur to bribe the rabble of dispossessed veterans calling itself the Bonus Army encamped in southern Pennsylvania into joining the reactionary cause. He seemed to be the best man for the job: dedicated, efficient in his duties, charming to his friends, ruthless to his enemies. He’d demonstrated as much in both the Great War and his time in military intelligence, where he’d risen to control the intelligence network that infiltrated, spied upon, and disrupted domestic subversive political activity. No one in the US Army understood the Reds better than him.
In what was perhaps the greatest intelligence failure in American history, a mole had worked his way all the way to the commanding heights of the US intelligence community. That mole was Patton. Trained in the craft by the GRU, he’d been working the other angle diligently. His record of success in Army Intelligence was sustained by purposely pitting Army resources against other intelligence groups. He’d been feeding NBI informants to the state police, and state police informants to the NBI for almost ten years.
The men at the top, including MacArthur himself, had always suspected there was a mole in the organization, but in spite of their best efforts identifying him had always eluded them.
In being reassigned to the field, he’d ensured that many personal friends and those he knew to be communist fellow travelers were assigned with him. It wasn’t hard; the Depression had hit the Army as well, and it had been the cavalry that bore the brunt of it. The 3rd Cavalry Regiment had been constantly underbilleted, and it was not hard to bring many outsiders into the regiment in these trying times.
They’d rode forth to co-opt or disperse the Bonus Army. On the morning of that fateful day, Patton dispatched known White hardliners away from the main body as scouts. Thus when he addressed the Bonus Army, announcing his intentions to mutiny against the unlawful coup and bid them to join him, he was not interrupted. It did not take much convincing, either. Most of the rank and file in the unit had viewed their orders with disgust. The Bonus Army was already in a militant mood. They agreed to take up arms against the Whites. The White hardliners were all arrested upon their return. Then, raising a red flag, they marched North to capture the Federal Arsenal in Bedford.
Excerpts from Robert J. Freeman, “The Origins of American State Atheism,” in American Political Science Review v 70 no. 1, Winter 1976.*
Within the political culture of the Union of American Socialist Republics, the role that religious groups and personal religious faith can play has been sharply curtailed. While it has never been without its critics, relegating religion to a completely private role and forcing it out of the public life of the citizenry has remained a remarkably popular policy regardless of their religious adherence.
As this review of the historical record will demonstrate, this policy of state atheism has its roots in the pre-revolution United States and its insurgent labor movement. The dominant viewpoint that developed in the American proletariat was that religion, especially the existing religious institutions, was a reactionary force. At best, it was simply unconcerned with the problems of justice in the here and now, offering, as the old Solidarity lingo put it, “pie-in-the-sky for hungry bellies on earth.” More commonly, extant churches attached to the reactionary right with few exceptions.
The militant anti-clerical mood began on the shop floor, and the often heavy-handed attempts by churches to influence believers into abandoning the workers’ movement did more to trash the social esteem of religion than it did to push workers out of class-consciousness. The avowedly Marxist sections of the old Socialist Labor Party further encouraged the development of robust laicism in the labor movement, and as the worker’s movement assimilated the Marxian schema, the struggle against religion became a part of the political struggle.
This is not to say that even with the degeneration of the old ideology during the First World War, and the resulting mass radicalization of the proletariat, that the American workers renounced religious belief en masse and became explicit atheists. Many did, but most simply maintained more private and personal religious practices. While he may have been exaggerating, when the fascist-aligned orator and priest Father Coughlin decried that the urban and rural working masses had “Stopped going to church on Sunday, and went to Party conferences instead,” there is significant truth to that. Class struggle formed an integral part of working class culture, and its institutions fulfilled a social role as well as a political role, replacing many of the civic functions that religion had previously held.
During the MacArthur Putsch, the American Catholic Church hierarchy, as well as many of the large Protestant branches, quickly aligned themselves with the reactionary government. While this was a deeply divisive move (For example, Father Coughlin’s overly enthusiastic support, and the atrocities committed by the Silver Shirts he was connected to, earned him excommunication by Rome in the aftermath), the damage was quick and permanent. The disintegration of many of the larger religious organizations mirrored the disintegration of the federal and state governments of the former United States. In parallel to MacArthur, the reactionary diehards captured the commanding heights of the organization, but the platform under them fell into chaos.
The bottom-up revolutionary wave couldn’t be easily stopped. In the industrial heartlands of the North and on the Pacific Coast, the religious leaders who conspired with the Putsch met similar fates. The old state authority evaporated in the face of organized revolutionary uprising. The Anti-Fascist Militias and Red Guards, directed by urban soviets led by the Workers’ Party ultra-left, filled the vacuum. While the Provisional Government under Sinclair still made its genuflections to constitutional restoration, the newly formed All-American Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias and Red Guards under Foster promulgated its General Order 1, marking the beginning of the Red Terror.
The Provisional Government may have had the sense of legal legitimacy, and the theoretical loyalty of the rebelling National Guards and Army mutineers, but the AACCAMRG developed the first organizational chain of command for Red forces in the civil war, and while it in theory only covered the Spartacus League and the newly raised Red Guards, in practice it was the nucleus of military command for all anti-Putsch forces in the early stages of the civil war. Under General Order 1, a calculated program of terror was implemented against reactionary forces in Red-occupied territories. “Reactionary religious institutions” were high on the list of targets. While most targets of the Red Terror faced arrest and detention without trial until the end of the Revolution, many of the more infamous ones were given quick show trials by revolutionary tribunal and executed. Many thousands more class enemies faced “justice by revolver,” in summary liquidations in retaliation against similar measures by the Whites.
The Catholic Church was hit most heavily by the Red Terror, but few major churches escaped unscathed. Their thinning congregations abandoned them, and many leaders would be tried and sentenced for their treasonous support of MacArthur or ongoing counter-revolutionary activity. There was a high level of urgency to early phases of the Red Terror; this was a “clearing of the field” in preparation for MacArthur’s drive northward with the bulk of the US Army.
The revolutionary paranoia dissipated after the Army’s poor showing in the Battles of Chicago and Pittsburgh, which saw large scale defections, and routs which handed over large amounts of war materiel, including tanks and heavy artillery, to the Reds. Nonetheless, when the Provisional Government and AACCAMRG agreed to consolidate, forming the Union of American Socialist Republics and taking an overtly revolutionary stance, the policy of suppression of class enemies continued. The Provisional Government, now the caretaker for the revolutionary soviet regime, and captured by the left, promulgated a series of laws that criminalized counter-revolutionary organizations. The skeleton of these emergency acts still informs much of the law today, including religious bodies being subject to the same general applicable tax structure as non-commercial NGOs, and the education system’s critical examination of religious history.
Excerpts from Lev Goldstein,Our Bullets Are For Our Own Generals,(New York: Academy, 1966)*
On 4 March, the Civil War took its first great plunge into open conflict. On that day, the two rival governments promulgated unprecedented decrees with the aim of marshaling available military resources to their cause. General MacArthur decreed, through his puppets controlling the legal offices of the US government, that the state National Guards would be brought under exclusive federal control under the auspices of the War Department.
In parallel, the Provisional Government, under the direction of First Secretary Foster, established the All-American Central Committee for Anti-Fascist Militias and Red Guards (Antifa). Antifa was initially meant only to provide a command hierarchy to coordinate paramilitary forces aligned with the Provisional Government, but it quickly grew into the central command of the entire Red war effort.
At the outset of major fighting, the situation looked grim for the Provisional Government. The Whites controlled, at least on paper, much of the country. It had a considerable advantage in the number of men-at-arms it fielded, particularly in terms of regular forces, an advantage that was compounded by great superiority in the number and quality of artillery, air and mobile forces. But most crucially, they began hostilities well poised to strike from a position of strength.
Antifa’s best available forces were a handful of loyalist National Guard divisions. While they mobilized under the putschists’ preparatory call-up, their officers and men correctly deduced the true nature of their orders and refused to carry out the orders of an unlawful command authority. Instead, they declared themselves the Red Guards of the Provisional Government.
Antifa’s irregular forces, however, had a significant quality advantage over the legions of fascist irregulars that MacArthur had drummed up to support his conventional forces. The Workers’ Party-aligned Spartacus League’s combat pedigree extended back fourteen years to the Biennio Rosso, when demobilized veterans took up arms against police and National Guard despotism. These veterans had continued to fight a low level street war in American cities throughout the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression against Pinkerton strikebreakers and far-right goon squads. While they lacked heavy weapons, making do with whatever could be seized from military armories at the beginning of the conflict, they made up for this deficiency with experience, discipline and a fanatical resolve in the revolutionary cause.
Though smaller in number and less well organized, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s Minutemen made invaluable contributions to Antifa’s war effort. They drew upon the same pool of Great War veterans that the Spartacus League (and to a lesser extent, their right-wing enemies) did as well, and in both cases the experience of frontline conflict proved to be a great levelling factor in direct battle with the traitor units of the US Army and Marines.
The anarchist Syndicalist Federation organized its own combat militia, the Black Brigades (not to be confused with the predominantly African communist militias in the South). With fewer resources and central organization, the Black Brigades tended to integrate into the local revolutionary command, grudgingly accepting the communist hegemony over the antifascist struggle.
This listing, however, should not be taken as exhaustive. Numerous smaller groups, many ad hoc, also operated under Antifa’s aegis during the Civil War, to say nothing of all the individual acts of rebellion and sabotage that occurred in sympathy with the antifascist struggle. These irregular forces would play a vital role in holding the line while a proper Red Army was mobilised.
Antifa’s first major test came just days after its founding. Fresh from trouncing the ill-prepared Illinois National Guard, the 3rd Infantry Division under the command of Brigadier George C. Marshall1 prepared to strike at the heart of the revolution. Marching with all deliberate haste towards the trade union and Provisional Government capital of Chicago, he aimed to strangle the revolution in its infancy. After the rout at Cairo, Marshall expected to end the revolution with minimal fuss in a single quick stroke.
Instead, he encountered continual partisan resistance harrying his supply lines, an early spring thaw that made it impossible to use his unit’s motorization to full effect, and poor morale. Desertions plagued the 3rd Infantry, and the paramilitary auxiliaries proved to be unreliable at best. More often, they left a wake of excessive brutality and looting that hampered the hearts and minds mission that MacArthur had directed, and which Marshall personally agreed with.
This is not to say that either were liberal or humane in their conduct of the war. They simply had the mistaken assumption that their opposition had been duped by foreign agitators, and that they could be easily swayed to the cause of the National Salvation Front once communist perfidy had been revealed. To that end, they engaged in a campaign of politicide against “agents of foreign agitation.” While in theory it only applied to communists, in practice the net was cast so wide that that the politicide campaign was directed at all left-wing opposition to MacArthur’s coup.
Antifa did not allow this to go unanswered. With the ad hoc Army of the Mississippi2 bearing down on Chicago, it promulgated the now infamous General Order 1, authorizing the use of terror on class enemies and fascist collaborators. Antifa’s inflammatory and revolutionary rhetoric signaled that the organization had already far exceeded the constitutional restorationist agenda set for it by the Provisional Government, provoking a measure of rebuke from the DFLP and the few Loyalist Republicans participating in the PG.
While Workers’ Party National Secretary Earl Browder publicly chastised Antifa’s chairman, Martin Abern, for “needlessly endangering the antifascist Popular Front,” in his private letters with William Z. Foster and John Reed, he expressed cautious optimism. While he felt it too premature to move towards open revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie, he was under no illusions about the possibility of any genuine constitutional restoration. Rather, this would be the opening battle of maneuver to force the reformists to accept the necessity of revolution.
Elsewhere, other elements of the US Army marched north to lay siege to workers’ strongholds. MacArthur ordered Colonel Adna Chaffee, commanding officer of the 1st Cavalry Division based in Iowa, to form the Army of the Prairie with whatever forces he could muster, and hook through Minneapolis before driving on to Milwaukee.
The Army of the Ohio, under Major General Robert E. Wood, would drive north to the great industrial cities of Ohio, to cut across Red lines of communication and bisect the Reds at their narrowest point. On his eastern flank, the Army of Appalachia under Lieutenant General Frank Parker was tasked with bringing the renegade 3rd Cavalry Regiment down and taking Pittsburgh.
MacArthur himself, recently given the rank of General of the Armies of the United States by the now National Salvation Front-dominated Congress, established the Army of the Potomac with the intention of driving towards the revolution’s other heart in Metropolis.3 However, MacArthur’s own efforts were delayed awaiting further mobilization of troops and supplies, but he was content to wait. Taking the island citylets of Metropolis would be a nightmare, and he used the delay to try to strongarm the Navy into complying with his regime’s prerogatives.
The crucial delay before any of the Navy’s admirals would put to sea to support MacArthur’s ambitions proved to be a considerable boon to the Reds. While White forces were bearing down further west, the ports on the east coast were still open and under Red control. Ships carrying arms and volunteers from the Soviet Union began arriving in earnest. Additional volunteers came from across Europe to answer the Comintern’s call to defend the forces of workers’ democratic power in America.
…April began bloodily. The Spartacus League’s Abraham Lincoln Column was mangled badly in the Battle of Springfield, but the victory proved Pyrrhic for Marshall. In striking at what he perceived as the weakest point in the Reds’ lines, he exposed the Army of the Mississippi to considerable peril. The Spartacus League proved to be made of sterner stuff than he anticipated, and the Red Guards harried at his flanks. Though he took the field, and forced antifascist forces to retreat for a final defense at Chicago, the black eye he sustained shook the morale of his ranks to the core.
In Ohio, Wood’s forces pushed forward with reckless abandon. Emboldened by the poor showing of the Cincinnati Red Guards, he decided to defy his operational orders for a more cautious advance through the Ohio lowlands. Instead, he chose to divide his forces. A column of National Guardsmen and irregulars, bolstered by mustered veteran volunteer detachments, would lay siege to Columbus. The main body of regulars would push forward by road or rail to Toledo. His master stroke would be to sever all lines of communication between the Midwestern revolutionaries and the East Coast. This risky manuever detached “flying columns” of infantry from the artillery and service units of the 4th Infantry Division.
It was bold and unexpected. Red forces from Cleveland and Akron had been split between relieving the besieged city of Pittsburgh, and preparing for a counterattack to the South. It proved impossible to interdict Wood’s mad dash to the Great Lakes before he was at the gates of Toledo.
…The long assault on Toledo would prove to be one of the darkest chapters of the Civil War. Wood’s White regulars did not hesitate to shell Red defensive positions in the city. Nor did Army Air Force attack aircraft shy away from dropping their payloads in the densely populated city. The attacks, too poorly coordinated to be of any real military use, amounted to a campaign of terror bombing against the city’s civilian population. The beleaguered defenders, outnumbered and outgunned, held onto each meter of ground with stubborn tenacity. But they held on. The trade unions adapted what industry they could to the production of war materiel, a task that did not prove as difficult as originally feared. Much of the city’s factories had spent the First World War building munitions, and adapting the tools back to this task took only the ingenuity and experience that the industry’s veterans had an abundant supply of.
Excerpts from the AH.com thread “Your opinion of Maurice Spector”
RougeBeaver: Exactly what it says on the tin.
SeriousSam: Who?
Ubermunch: OP, your copycat thread gave me cancer.
LeninsBeard: Maurice Spector is a very controversial Canadian politico who had some rapport here in America. Basically, during the Civil War, he organized a volunteer column among the Canadian left that fought under the International Brigade aegis. Got him a lot of acclaim here, and helped the WCPA establishment forget he had been Moscow orthodox before 1933.
AdmiralSanders: A traitor and a scoundrel. 
In all seriousness, he seems like a bit of a prima donna and a glory hound. I’ve only read one bio on him, and from what I remember is that the revolutionary upsurge of the 30s gave him a lot of acclaim among radicalized youth, and he occasionally abused that (allegedly). And before you ask, this was written by a communist fellow traveler, so you can’t really call it a bourgeois smear job.
QuitStalin: Here in the great white north, opinion on him kind of soured after the forties. The left in general, including the moderate left, blamed him for encouraging a trend of going into self-imposed exile in the UASR starting at the outset of WW2, which deprived the left of many of its best and most committed activists.
Full disclosure: my parents were party members, met at a May Day rally in ‘39, and I never heard either of them say a kind word about him. Sure, he had been harassed by the Canadian government, but so did the people who stayed. I think the broader Canadian public at the time just thought “good riddance.”
DeOppressoLiber: I did my thesis at West Point about the irregular forces in the Battle of Toledo. I had found that there was a pattern of overstating the importance of the International Brigades volunteers in the battle; not a dramatic one but definitely noticeable, probably to play up the international nature of the revolutionary struggle.
I can’t say much of him playing at military leader, except that he had the good sense to defer to people who were more knowledgeable in the George Brown Brigade.The Canadian volunteers plugged the holes at the critical moments of the battle, but it is doubtful that the Whites would have made much more progress without them. They weren’t prepared for hard urban fighting, and plenty of American partisans were streaming in from Detroit and Buffalo.
- He had been brevetted to Major General within the ranks of the traitor regime.
- Consisting of one regular Army division, the 3rd Infantry, one National Guard division, the 35th NG Infantry, and two divisions of irregulars, the Illinois Patriots and the Missouri State Volunteers, which were window dressing on far right paramilitary groups under KKK leadership.
- This is somewhat anachronistic; Metropolis is the autonomous republic that consists of the gigantic metropolitan area surrounding New York City.
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