Settling Accounts
“You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”
~William Tecumseh Sherman
William Z. Foster’s Funeral Oration for Norman Thomas
Following the return of the Provisional Government to the District of Columbia in late July, attention turned to finding the many missing friends and comrades. It did not take long to confirm the worst. The bodies of the many murdered in the early days of the coup were exhumed from their unmarked graves and cremated. Their ashes brought to the Capitol rotunda for funeral services in August. Foster offered a funeral oration for the martyred Norman Thomas. Following his and other orations, the Revolutionary Army Orchestra played a solemn version of the union hymn “Solidarity Forever” as the ashes were interred in a small necropolis in the East Front of the Capitol building.
Comrades;
It is with a heavy heart that I come to speak for the dead. Though I did not know him long, Norman was my friend. He was faithful and just to me always, as he was to all who knew him. But more than that, he was kind, even to those who wronged him.
As many will remember, I was the last to consent to his nomination. Then I knew him only by reputation, and in our brief interactions in party business. But I did not believe that the jackals would give in without murderous bloodshed. When I told him as much, Norman simply shook his head and said, “Be that as it may, Bill, I still must try.”
I think some part of him always knew that his life was forfeit the moment his name appeared upon the ballot. But someone would have to bear that cross, and consecrate the Revolution with innocent blood. It was a duty he could not shirk, no matter how hopeless or foolish it may seem. It was how he chose to live his life, to be the best he could be. So he bore the weight of the world on his frail shoulders.
Norman may have been the first casualty of our Revolution. But he was not the last. The sound of cannons still rings over the forests and fields of America. Grieving fathers have buried their sons and daughters in untold numbers. Mothers dread every letter, that it might bring news of more lost kin. Our Revolution surges forward every day. But we must remember our hallowed dead. And remember the cannibals who demanded their blood sacrifice to capital.
So Comrades! Norman Thomas’ ashes are mouldering in the grave. But his truth is marching on! He bids us take up the bayonet with a hardened hand, to tear down the Black Barons that that preyed upon our sisters, herded us into camps, that murdered our sons on the fields of the Somme, that whipped and starved us into submission!
The question of Left or Right; that is, Revolution or Barbarism, has been answered. Now there is only one course: forward. Forward to victory! Forward to the Red Dawn!
And I speak with the voice of the martyred dead, to all the enemies of the workers of all nations: The movement for the abolition of slavery began with the first slave. No longer shall we stand outcast and starving amidst the wonders we have made. You cannot murder us into submission, for as long as there are workers we will rise again and again. Seek not to bar our way, for we shall win through, no matter the cost.
Excerpts from the Preface of The Third Republic , a college level history textbook published in 1975.
The liberation of Washington signaled the death knell of the degenerated remnant of the Second Republic. Born in the fires of America’s First Civil War, the Second Republic had seen the dramatic change in the United States from a union of sovereign states into a united federal republic. In this period, the nation, finally freed from the backwardness of the Slave Power, rose to prominence on the world stage, developing into an advanced stage of capitalism thanks to the decisive destruction of feudal remnant institutions.
As the capitalist economy had advanced, class conflict grew with it. The history of the whole of the Second Republic is the history of class war, from the violent repressions of the labor movement and the institution of Jim Crow segregation after the Civil War, to populist revolt in the west, and finally the development of a unified workers’ party in the early 1900s. The workers’ vanguard endured eras of imperialism, and despotic repression at home, emerging in 1920 as a powerful and unified movement of proletarian revolution.
The Second Republic had built great cities, and colonized the entirety of the continent. It built great engines of wealth and scientific progress. But that powerful edifice of civilization was built on a mountain of corpses; genocided Native Americans, oppressed Africans, and exploited immigrant workers. As the revolutionary leader William Z. Foster eulogized, “the machinery of abundance has left us in want.”
With the American Revolution now a fait accompli , the leaders of the revolution were now confronted with the difficult struggle to institute a workers’ republic. In this endeavor, they faced numerous obstacles, both internal and external.
[…]
One of the most contentious dilemmas of the early Third Republic was the uneasy relationship between the majority Communists and minority Anarchists within the workers’ movement. The Anarchists, though small in number, were well organized and highly politically active, constituting an agitational faction both within and outside of the Party. The lines were not always clear; much of their organizational structures were not strictly anarchist in their constitution, and involved many party members in their leadership. And for all their disagreements, and the anarchists’ skepticism of the Leninist centralism of the communist movement, they had a history of cooperation as long as their history of agitation.
When the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti found themselves persecuted by the bourgeois state, the communist International Labor Defense had rallied to their aid. The Workers’ Party organized mass demonstrations against their unjust imprisonment. Anarchist agitators in the Free Workers’ Union were among the Solidarity federation’s most effective organizers. Anarchist units had fought in the Civil War right alongside Communist and Social Democratic cadres.
The various anarchist cadres, united under the General Union of Anarchists, were now at the crossroads. The new government was no longer just theoretical, but reality. They faced the contentious question of collaboration or confrontation. While in their hearts, many wanted to spur the revolution on towards a stateless free association of workers, the experiences of the civil war and the threat of foreign reactionary terror had fundamentally changed the movement’s core outlook. The GAU voted, with considerable controversy, to endorse Emma Goldman and Rudolph Rocker’s proposition that an authentic “workers’ republic” established by the workers’ soviets was compatible with anarchist principles under the Organisational Platform of Libertarian Communism , and was preferable to anti-worker states. The GAU thus moved to formalise involvement within the nascent UASR and the Workers’ Party.
The Workers’ Party, already divided as to the path the revolution would take after the defeat of the Whites, now had to decide whether to admit the GAU as a faction within the Party. Some even on the left wing of the party considered this a dicey proposition. After a contentious vote, the GAU was admitted into the Party, and Emma Goldman joined the Provisional Government. The DeLeonist pedigree of American revolutionary communism had a strong affinity for syndicalism, and as Foster and Reed had argued, the need for a united front was paramount. Foster had purposefully mixed anarchist and Marxist phraseology in his oratory and writing, particularly in his Funeral Oration for Norman Thomas.
[…]
In September, Earl Browder sought to formalize the revolutionary alliance for the post-revolutionary world. The parties and organizations which had united to put down the MacArthur putsch and establish the UASR would create a bloc to govern the revolutionary state. After several rounds of political hardball, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and the loyalist Democrats and Republicans agreed to join the United Democratic Front.
The socialist-sympathizing bourgeois liberals united the remnants of their old bourgeois parties into a unified Democratic-Republican Party, harkening back to Thomas Jefferson. The UDF created a venue for constructive political discourse between the revolutionary parties.
On 20 September, as the Reds began pushing deep into the White held territory in the South, the governments of Great Britain and France extended diplomatic recognition to the UASR, holding the new government as the lawful successor of the old United States. Concomitant, the UASR agreed to exempt securities held by foreign governments, as well as by citizens of these foreign governments, from the general repudiation of debt the government planned. Diplomatic recognition by much of the world’s sovereign states followed quickly after; only the various reactionary regimes in South America, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy continued to treat the MacArthur regime in Cuba as the legitimate government of the territory comprising the former United States.
[…]
The states began voting almost immediately for a new constitutional convention. By October, the requisite 2/3rds needed had been reached; the states had designated the All-Union Congress of Soviets as the constitutional convention. By November, 3/4ths of the states had ratified the revised Fundamental Principles of the Soviet Congresses, essentially rendering the 1868 Constitution defunct.
After electing a fresh slate of delegates to the Provisional Government, the Congress of Soviets established a Constitutional Committee, chaired by Solon DeLeon, to draft additional constitutional documents to give form to the new republic.
Excerpts from Alexandra Stein, “The Other Revolutionaries,” in Intersection: Race and Gender in America , (Charleston: Commonweal, 1985)
In the battle for history, no figure is as polarizing as Harry Haywood. One part theoretician, one part political leader, one part military general, Haywood was the face of the African National Congress during the 30s, 40s and 50s. While other black leaders were often highly influential in this era, men like Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois are more known for their role in the broader communist struggle. This often compromised their ability to take a decisive role in the black liberation struggle. Haywood, by contrast, is remembered as a leader of black liberation first, and all of the often adversarial implications therein.
And he was often in fierce political battles with fellow Party members. On three separate occasions from 1934 to 1940, the Party Central Committee voted on expelling Haywood from the party, each time retaining him by narrow margins. The controversial nature of his leadership of the ANC is reflected in the differing opinions about him held by modern whites and blacks. To whites, he is a stern and uncompromising zealot for the cause of equal rights. Occasionally, they’ll remember that his promotion of tactics of civil disobedience was a practical concern, not a moral principle. But for Africans, Haywood is remembered quite differently.
Haywood was the man most responsible for ending the terror of living in the South. It is entirely understandable that historically conscious black men and women are not as horrified as whites by Haywood’s connection to the Red Terror, or the counterlynchings the Red Army Fractions engaged in when the judicial system failed to act against white terrorism.
This was a role that Haywood had taken since the Civil War. As the leader of the Red Army’s Nat Turner Column, he cut a swath through the Fascist-held territory in the Mississippi River valley. Vengeful poor whites as well as black sharecroppers joined in droves. Here in the Deep South, the class war was at its bloodiest. Thanks to Haywood’s personal leadership, the thinly suppressed rage of poor whites and oppressed blacks was channeled into an effective instrument against reactionary institutions. He contained the worst of revolutionary excesses while ensuring that justice was still served (indeed, Haywood is fondly remembered in the women’s movement for his harsh punishment of war rape as well as for his enduring alliance with the WLU).
After the Civil War, Haywood served as the commanding officer of the Deep South Military District, responsible for the administration of martial law during the emergency period, as well as a member of the Politburo of the Workers Party. The cause of black self-determination won its early successes thanks in no small part to his passion for the project, and his respect among the new managerial class in the South.
The Battle of the Florida Straits
The Red flotilla, under the command of the tested communist Commander Jean-Paul Sanders*, was ordered into the Gulf of Mexico in October 1933 to interdict flight by White forces into the Caribbean. His force, four battleships and two battlecruisers, was met in the Straits of Florida by Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz’s force of five battleships, including two of the mighty South Dakota -class.
The Whites, having committed all of the capital ships available to them, were in a do-or-die situation. In terms of broadside weight, the two South Dakotas tipped the firepower balance in Nimitz’s favor. But the Reds’ ships were on average more modern.
In the wake of a mild storm, the two forces encountered near the Florida Keys. Carrier based scouts spotted the approach of Nimitz’s battle fleet. Sanders attempted to “cross-the-t”, maneuvering his battle line broadside to the approach of Nimitz’s. But Nimitz’s escorts and own acumen thwarted this. The fleets engaged battle in the early afternoon after a period of skirmishes by escorts in which carrier aviation crippled one of Nimitz’s heavy cruisers. At a range of nearly 25 kilometers, the two fleets started exchanging fire. At this extreme range, the 14 inch guns were almost entirely ineffective due to the design philosophy of American battleships, which emphasized survivability via heavy armor. The heavier sixteen inch guns of the Colorados , South Dakotas and Lexingtons had more luck, particularly against the less well protected ships.
The faster battlecruisers in the lead of the Red flotilla attempted to steam around the head of Nimitz’s battleline. But the seven knot difference in speed was not sufficient, as Nimitz’s tighter turn kept the two lines broadside to broadside.
The fleets slowly closed over the course of the engagement, and their guns increasingly found their marks. The results were savage. Nimitz focused fire on the lightly armored battlecruisers. Within ten minutes, both were ablaze, and drifting out of the battle-line. But their 16 inch guns, along with the 16 inch guns of the Colorados , had already inflicted severe damage on Nimitz’s flagship.
As dusk began to fall, both fleets retired. Sanders was unable to force the Straits of Florida. His battleships endured the pounding delivered, albeit with significant damage. The battlecruisers did not fare as well; both burned well into the night as damage control crews fought valiantly to save the ship. At three in the morning, the fires were mostly extinguished, but the ships were gutted hulks unable to steam under their own power. Unable to safely tow them to safety, Sanders ordered the battlecruisers evacuated and scuttled.
Nimitz did not get off any lighter. The USS Arizona was sunk by the catastrophic effects of plunging 16 inch shells. Her sister ship Idaho , already weakened , was sunk by air launched torpedoes from the Kitty Hawk as she retired. The older Pennsylvania was ultimately scuttled to prevent capture. The two damaged by still serviceable South Dakotas limped back to Cuba.
Excerpts from the AH.com news thread “Recently declassified documents point to British plans to intervene in the American Revolution”
Gally: Found this originally in The Morning Star , but I knew that would immediately bring cries of “Bolshevik agitprop!”, so I found the same story on the DailyTorygraph Telegraph.
It’s really fascinating reading. I’m by no means a military expert, but a lot of these seem like hare-brained bullshit. Honestly, I think it was a bunch of bored British military types spitballing for lack of better things to do. I mean, who thought that sending T.E. Lawrence to lead a cadre of American expatriates to slip into America across the Canadian border and wreak havoc behind enemy lines. It was like they figured, hey, this guy did a lot working with “Arab savages”, surely he’d be able to pull the same miracle in America.
I think T.E. Lawrence said it best, “Your proposal is stark, raving mad. Leave me out of it.”
DeOppressoLiber: Yeah, I downloaded the docs last night. I’m only a little bit way through it. Top kek
I think they sincerely believed the braindead “outside agitator” thesis that still guides so much of Franco-British thinking about dealing with radical groups. They seem to sincerely believe that there was no mass support for the revolution, that all it would take is a bunch of paladins on white horses to ride in and rouse the people to put down the outside agitators.
I think the British Army just wanted something to do. The Royal Navy, as far as I’ve seen, seemed to be much more level headed. I think they were in a genuine panic, because one of their closest rivals, who they did not seriously count as a threat, were now hostile. It’s been a long time since West Point, but as far as I remember, the only official action between the British government and the UASR was a tense showdown between the HMS Invincible and the Lexington in the Caribbean. The Lexington ‘s battle group had been ordered to interdict ships carrying White refugees to Cuba et al. The Invincible had been sortied along with a squadron of light cruisers as a deterrent. Because the Lexington crossed into what Britain considered its territorial waters, the ships confronted each other off the Bahamas. It might have resulted in a shooting match, because the British commodore was a bit overzealous in the application of his orders. But when a seaplane scout reported the Kitty Hawk entering the area, he backed down. Prudent of him; I guess he didn’t want to be on the second battleship to be sunk by the Kitty Hawk.
AdmiralSanders : To be perfectly honest, the chances of the Kitty Hawk’s air group sinking a more modern battleship like Invincible is quite low. Unlike the Idaho , the Invincible had been retrofitted with additional anti-aircraft defenses (Idaho , along with most of the “Standard” type battleships, had their retrofits delayed or cancelled due to the Depression). Not only was she twice as heavy, the Invincible was a far more advanced design, with greater protection against torpedoes as well as the plunging fire that killed her namesake, which gave it better protection against dive bombers as well.
I mean look at what she was carrying in 1933. A squadron of F2F-1 biplanes, a squadron of SB2F-1 dive bombers (basically an F2F that can carry a measly 250 kg of bombs) and a squadron of obsolete T4M torpedo bombers, which couldn’t carry torpedoes large enough to threaten a Revenge- class battlecruiser.
The only planes that were a threat were the handful of TBDs, which had been undergoing sea trials aboard the Kitty Hawk when the revolution began.
Felix Leiter: I wouldn’t put too much stock in this. It is the job of the general staff to plan for contingencies, even seemingly unimaginable ones. Canada had Defence Scheme No. 1, which was planned in the 20s, the era of very close diplomatic relations with the United States. Britain had Plan 1923, war plans for the destruction of France’s colonial empire to force her to the peace table in the event of the unthinkable.
There’s a reason why these plans went into a file and were forgotten until the statutory mandated declassification occurred; the General Staff worked out that any meaningful intervention was totally unworkable, and would only drag the country into a disastrous naval war, leading to the loss of Canada and the likely destruction of much of the Royal Navy’s strength, something that other rivals would no doubt exploit.
Which is not to say that they didn’t do things unofficially. The British Army had advisors in MacArthur’s military from almost the very beginning, and their first-hand experience of modern mobile warfare ensured dramatic changes occurred in British military doctrine. France’s more conservative military establishment did not have access to this wealth of data, and proved far more resistant to change. And honestly, that’s really the reason why they unofficially extended advisors and credit to the MacArthur regime. By May, the British government expected a decisive Red victory in the Civil War. And even a White victory would be destructive to British interests; they wanted to learn what they could before America moved from friend to enemy.
The Fraternal Revolutions
The American revolution was not the only one to occur in 1932-33. It wasn’t even the first; the Second Mexican Revolution had begun in July 1932 as a broad-based popular front took up arms against an increasingly corrupt and reactionary Calles regime. When Calles deposed many populists from the National Revolutionary Party (Partido Nacional Revolucionario, PNR) , he unwittingly began a firestorm.
Many embittered leaders of the First Revolution vowed to take up arms against what they declared a counterrevolution led by Calles. Veterans flocked to their cause, but the revolution did not begin in earnest until the US was locked into a constitutional crisis by January 1933. Freed from the fear of American intervention, the agrarian rebels in the South, led once more by Emiliano Zapata, became increasingly bold.
The Mexican Communist Party (Partido Comunista Mexicano , PCM), underground but with influence in a number of front organizations, including the Confederation of Mexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores de México, CTM), used the degeneration of social order to begin arming a small urban guerilla force. With much of the Army and police tied down combatting Zapata’s Liberation Army of the South and Villa’s North Division, it became increasingly difficult to engage in organized repression against the CTM in Mexico’s urban centers.
The Mexican agrarian rebels looked warmly towards the revolution brewing in their northern neighbor. Before WWI, the Socialist Labor Party had organized aid and relief to revolutionary groups. In turn, many American Marxist agitators had gone into temporary exile in Mexico during the First World War and the Biennio Rosso. In particular, Zapata was influenced by the importation of Marxist theory. At the outset of the Second Revolution, Zapata couched his agrarian revolution in Marxist terms, and sought support from the Comintern.
Zapata’s “People’s War” found common cause with the Mexican workers’ class struggle. An alliance was brokered between Zapata, the left-wing dissidents of the PNR led by Lázaro Cárdenas, the CTM led by the Marxist intellectual Vicente Lombardo Toledano, and the PCM under the loose leadership of Diego Rivera. Initially stalemated throughout early 1933, the shifting tide in the American revolution bolstered their cause. After the liberation of Washington, the American Provisional Government began cooperation with the Mexican Alliance of National Liberation. They promised an offensive to liberate the Mississippi Valley, allowing the two revolutions to link up. In the interim, modest monetary aid from both their own coffers as well as the Soviet Union was channeled into Mexico.
Spartacus League and Red Army troops marched into New Orleans in early November. With MacArthur evacuating the remains of his supporters to Cuba, and desperately trying to hold on to America’s other colonial possessions, the American Revolution was essentially over. At the request of Mexico’s provisional revolutionary government, the UASR committed troops and arms in a “police action” to support the “popular, legitimate government” of Mexico. The flood of American aid and advisors tinted the pink left-wing nationalist revolution to socialist red. One the eve of the taking of Mexico City in 12 January 1934, Zapata announced the unification of the Left PNR, the PCM and agrarian liberation armies into the Workers’ Party of National Liberation (Partido Obrero de Liberación Nacional , POLN).
The leaders of the Revolution announced the formation of the Socialist Republic of Mexico (República Socialista Mexicana). A new constitution, modeled on the American revolutionary constitution, was promulgated on 5 May 1934, tying the new revolution symbolically to the historic struggle of national liberation against the French-imposed monarchy.
The New World revolutions did not end at Mexico. Many other national liberation and populist insurgencies were swept up in the mounting red tide. With the UASR’s triumphant call for world revolution echoing through the new world, every revolutionary group in the New World had a ready patron. All that was required was a genuflection to the Comintern cause. But while the UASR was bold, there were still limits. The Comintern directed communist parties in British, French or other European dependencies in the New World to adopt popular front alliance tactics with reformists, and to shy away from insurrection and direct action, at least for the time being. But in the various independent states in North and South America, the various communist parties, thanks to their position as the conduit of foreign aid, began to explode in profile and membership. In some cases, such as Nicaragua, the local populists merged their movements into the Communist Party. In others, such as Colombia or Argentina, Marxist parties took an influential role in national liberation fronts or electoral revolutions. In Chile, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Comintern aligned parties took power directly by revolution or putsch.
The revolutions in Hawai’i, Puerto Rico and Panama were somewhat independent of the American Revolution. But owing to their previous association with the US, and the strong Marxist leadership, these former territories became Associated Union Republics in the UASR.
By 1935, the revolutionary surge in the Americas began to wane. Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela were rocked by internal revolts and abortive attempts at proletarian revolution, but ultimately the establishment held. The European colonies of the Guianas likewise endured.
To Reign in Hell
The Republic of Cuba, officially an independent protectorate of the United States, was ramrodded into becoming a state by the occupying US Army. The rump White Congress confirmed the Cuban legislature’s declaration shortly before evacuating Washington. While some, including the First Secretary, had been kidnapped and turned over to the Reds, most had escaped, along with a flood of reactionary militants, rich bourgeois and their running dogs.
On 24 December, General of the Armies of the United States Douglas MacArthur infamously announced “I shall return,” before stepping onto the good ship Brumaire. As the ship steamed out of Mobile Bay, a squadron of traitor US Navy ships escorted her to Cuba, while the Royal Navy stymied the efforts of the WFRN to interdict the exodus of counterrevolutionaries.
The next day, the last major battle of the Civil War began on Avery Island, Louisiana. Isolated from retreat by the Nat Turner Column, the last division of the US Army in the mainland, the 10th Infantry, deployed chemical weapons to force a break out to the waiting ships.
Upon his arrival in Cuba, the National Salvation Front-dominated Congress appointed him President-for-Life and Defender of the Constitution; a post he generously vowed he would only hold until the restoration of the Constitution on the Mainland. Cuba’s native elite reluctantly accepted the imposition of MacArthur’s own brand of “national socialism,” needing the might of the US Army remnant to put down the peasant uprisings in the countryside, and fearful of Red invasion.
Former President Hoover, living in exile in Great Britain, took this opportunity to denounce MacArthur as a traitor. Though he had long held his tongue out of a sense of shame, and faint hope that everything would turn out for the best if MacArthur won in the civil war, he now openly confessed that he had only enabled MacArthur’s putsch under extreme duress, including threats to his own life as well as his family.
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