Excerpts from Kenneth Chatham, “International Revolution in the 1930s” in International Affairs , Vol. 33, Issue 1, January 1957*
The oft-repeated truism, “America’s chief export is revolution”, has informed foreign policy strategy in the Entente for over two decades now. But a failure to understand the texture of American foreign involvement has led to severe strategic miscalculation, with disastrous consequences for both the Entente’s security as well as the preservation of global international law.
French and especially British policymakers in the 1930s greatly overestimated the aggressiveness of American foreign action, resulting in aggressive counter-strategy that has in effect become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The new revolutionary regime established in the former United States postured as the vanguard of a world communist revolution, especially in the councils of the nascent Comintern. But the actual actions of that state were far more cautious and tempered.
…America’s traditional sphere of influence is Latin America. It was ultimately not surprising that the UASR asserted a new form of the long-standing Monroe Doctrine, asserting that it would challenge any “imperialist influence in the New World,” as then Foreign Secretary Jack Reed announced before the 1934 Comintern World Congress. And indeed, the United Republics1 wasted no time in asserting its influence.
Both the Great Depression and the Revolution had led to immense economic dislocation in Central and South America. Highly dependent on exports to the United States, and political patronage from American business interests, many states were beginning to face severe political-economic crisis in 1934. But notably, only in Mexico and Chile did this result in the mostly independent seizure of power by indigenous communist movements.
The UASR enforced compliance with the new political-economic order by various means. For the most part, the state leveraged its immense economic power over the mostly extractive export economies of Latin America to induce compliance with a laundry-list of domestic reforms and military cooperation. But this was always supported by the threat of military intervention, a threat that was not empty as the caudillo regime in Nicaragua discovered. In a lightning campaign, the Revolutionary Marines broke the back of the Guardia Nacional and seized the capital city of Managua amidst a nation-wide general strike. After propelling the rebel leader Augusto César Sandino into power at the head of the Frente de Liberación Nacional.
In spite of the nominal inclusion of parties for liberals, the petit-bourgeoisie, and peasants, the FLN was thoroughly dominated by its communist elements, with Sandino himself proving quite amiable to becoming a latter-day Marxist. The FLN enforced the dictatorship of the proletariat that would result in calamity for the Catholic Church, land-owners, and ultimately peasants as well.
With the precedent established, most of the rest of South America quickly began to fall in line. Popular revolt in Argentina resulted in the self-imposed exile of President Hipólito Yrigoyen. A short-lived military regime followed, but failed to impose order amidst the wave of worker revolt following the Red May Revolution. A new constituent assembly was formed, captured by a Popular Front led by the Socialist Party, with the involvement of the Communist Party, and the Democratic Party (formed from the left-wing of the Radical Civic Union). The constituent assembly promulgated a new constitution superficially inspired by the American revolutionary constitution, but lacking key transformative elements.
Argentina provided the mold for a type of collaborator regime to international communism, classified as a people’s democracy by the Institute for Scientific Socialism in 1935. People’s democracies were broadly social democratic societies with major involvement by workers’ or communist parties, but which ultimately did not result in revolutionary transformation. The national-bourgeoisie remained a powerful class within people’s democracies, though ostensibly contained by a social democratic regime.
Most of Latin America was quickly prodded into this relationship. Workers’ parties and revolutionary unions, serving as the conduit through which American trade and foreign investment would flow, gained political power, but did not take power as a class or suppress other class interests.
The people’s democracy form was very clearly not revolutionary, though it had broad appeal. It was not outside of the norm of the kinds of welfare states even conservatives in Britain and France had once been willing to countenance.
…Brazil represents the first break with the new alignment. While President Vargas had curried favor with the UASR, the Integralist coup, established on the back of anti-immigrant sentiment and resentment of the heavy-handedness of American policy to the country, signaled the limits of the “Good Samaritan” foreign policy. Misjudging the strength of the Estado Novo’s hold over the country, and not looking for a major foreign entanglement, the UASR opted to avoid direct intervention.
Severing economic relations temporarily weakened the Brazilian Integralists, but failed to produce the desired result of popular overthrow. Instead, the Estado Novo would establish a concert of South American states around it that would resist integration into the Comintern, and establish increased economic relations with Europe, particularly the Anti-Comintern Axis.
…The promotion of pink people’s democracies characterized world Comintern policy in the 1930s. Whether in China, Latin America, or Liberia, the British military and foreign service interpreted all of these primarily soft-power entreaties as a full prelude to a military assault on the Empire, making no attempt to distinguish reformists from revolutionaries.
While this might be a reasonable interpretation, given the drastic military expansion currently underway in America, British policymakers refused to consider the perspective taken by American policymakers that such efforts were essentially defensive, and that the permanent revolution hypothesis was only partially entertained in soviet government.2
…Liberia provides a case-study in the limits of communist soft-power, as well as their willingness to use hard-power reluctantly to preserve an existing sphere of influence.3 Established by free blacks and emancipated slaves from North America, the Republic of Liberia had historically been a peripheral interest to the United States. Aside from a navy coaling station, the US had little in the way of direct presence in the country.
In 1926, the Firestone Tire Company purchased a large concession from the Liberian government. The resulting rubber plantation, one of the largest in the world, provided work for 25,000 people, and became a major source of revenue for the Liberian Republic.
Come the Red May Revolution, the once powerful Firestone company was in receivership, with its American holdings collectivized. The Liberian government had borrowed five million dollars from the tire giant, and with global rubber prices tanked it had no hope of paying the debt back.
The All-Union Central Bank had assumed ownership of the bond in June 1934, a claim hotly contested by Firestone’s struggling foreign subsidiaries. The American Foreign Secretariat offered Liberian President Edwin Barclay a very generous offer, forbearance on the loan in exchange for the re-opening of the abandoned fueling station by the Workers’ and Farmers’ Revolutionary Navy.
It was impossible to turn down the offer at present. The rubber trees at the plantation were left untapped, the plantation on the verge of rewilding, and the government revenues in the poor nation could not sustain repayment.
By 1935 though, the global economic outlook had greatly improved. Rubber prices had dramatically recovered in the face of a surge of demand from rearmament. Numerous foreign investors turned their attention to acquiring the bankrupt Firestone Company’s plantation in Liberia, including interests backed variously by the Italian or French government.
Barclay dithered, wary of France’s long history of threatening Liberian sovereignty, and began finalizing negotiations with Mussolini’s government.
He received a stern ultimatum from the American Foreign Secretariat. The fine print of his previous agreement with the UASR had the Liberian Republic recognize the assumption of all the assets of the Firestone Company, including the million-acre concession.
Staring down the ships of the WFRN Atlantic Fleet, and the implicit threat of regime change, Barclay capitulated. The Firestone concession was redeveloped under the ownership of a new co-operative, jointly owned by the American state collective Goodyear Tire and Rubber and its workers.
Within two years, the old Republic would be overthrown, and the domination of Americo-Liberians over indigenous Liberians ended. The new People’s Republic would host an ever increasing American military presence throughout the 30s and 40s.
…Ultimately, the Second World War ended the brief experiment in people’s democracies. The scale of the war effort against Brazil resulted in complete upheaval across South America. National war mobilization introduced despotic inroads on the right of private property, proletarianized the peasant class, and consolidated petty-producer and artisan production into capital intensive state or syndicalist hands.
Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru would leave the war as firmly entrenched dictatorships of the proletariat. A wave of revolutionary reform, initiated at the behest of the UASR, would establish similar workers’ republics in Central American allied states.
By seeking to block, whether by sabotage, embargo or the full use of catspaw regimes, the pink social democracies established in South America, the British Commonwealth would ultimately only ensure the New World going nearly fully red.
Post Second World War, American foreign policy has become far more bellicose. The foreign policy line in DeLeon-Debs has been one of “no half-measures.”
- Common short-hand for the UASR in Britain and English-speaking Dominions.
- The author is dramatically overstating how dovish the Workers’ Party was. He interprets the general policy of biding time and building strength while simultaneously rebuilding workers movements in Europe as a lack of interest in revolutionary war, and that’s really an untenable conclusion. It is, however, a popular historical school because it serves the purpose of political interests that favor containment over confrontation.
- The author is incorrect again.
*[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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