The 1942 General Election
The 1942 Election was very muted, even in comparison to 1940, with the Democratic-Republicans and Democratic-Farmer-Labor not even holding conventions, instead affirming their support for the Revolutionary Unity Government. The WCPA did hold a small convention, with John Reed reconfirmed as Premier. He did not attend the convention himself (sending Deputy Angelo Herndon as his representative) nor did he campaign for himself or delegates. The WCPA largely ran a small campaign, focused more on rationing, homefront efforts, and occasional propaganda about spies and traitors. Most delegates also didn’t campaign, mostly working in government.
The only opposition was a small number of independents led by Jeannette Rankin, a former member of the Central Committee forced out by her pacifism. While she couldn’t technically run under her own party, she assembled a group of like-minded pacifists and attempted to run with several independents on a platform of opposing mobilization and involvement in the war in general. This campaign was very unpopular, small, and was ignored by most of the powers to be, with none of the delegates who ran under its banner winning and news of Nazi atrocities dampening any sort of desire for a quick peace.
As expected, with low voter turnout and no real opposition, the Revolutionary Unity Government was reelected as it was in 1940, with few changes. The biggest was the retirement of Haim Kantorovich as Secretary-General. Similar to Upton Sinclair, the relatively moderate Kantorovich was edged out in favor of Earl Browder, a more reliable and radical Party loyalist. Browder’s ascension sealed the dominance of the Left Orthodox faction in the party.
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Reed’s Second Revolutionary Unity Government
VI Congress (7 May 1942 to 28 April 1944 )
Workers’ Communist Party: 1301 (+92)
Democratic-Farmer-Labor: 653 (+4)
Democratic-Republicans: 139 (-1)
Independents: 2 (no change)
V Central Executive Council
Workers’ Communist Party: 253 (+7)
Democratic-Farmer-Labor: 151 (-4)
Democratic-Republicans: 55 (no change)
The Presidium
Secretary-General: Earl Browder
Deputies: Harry Dexter White, Harold L. Ickes, Aubrey Willis Williams, Hubert Harrison, Sam DeWitt, Rosa Pastor Stokes, Francis Waldron
Central Committee (Reed II)
Premier: John Reed (WCP)
Deputy Premier: Harry Truman (DFLP)
People’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs: Robert Minor (WCP)
Attorney General: Thomas Dewey (DRP)
People’s Secretary for Defense: Martin Abern (WCP)
Commissioner-General of the Army: Ludwig Renn (WCP)
Commissioner-General of the Navy: Heinz Ziegler* (WCP)
Commissioner-General of Military Aviation: Joseph McCarthy (DRP)
Commissar for Supply: Wendell Willkie (DRP)
Commissar for Civil Defense: Sam Ballan (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Labor: James P. Cannon (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Finance: Werner Dutschke (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Foreign Trade: Franklin D. Roosevelt (DFLP)
People’s Secretary for Agriculture: Henry A. Wallace (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Education: Benjamin Spock (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Public Safety: J. Edgar Hoover (WCP)
Director-General of State Security: Maurice Halperpin (WCP)
Commissar for Information: Estella Havisham* (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Railways: Claude McKay (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Communication: Ohiya Bonnin (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Maritime Transport: Alben Barkley (DFLP)
People’s Secretary for Energy: William Sidney Hatfield (WCP)
Commissar of Hydroelectric Power: Arthur Ernest Morgan (DFLP)
Commissar of Coal: John L. Lewis (WCP)
Commissar of Oil: H. W. Plainview* (DFLP)
Director of Fuel Rationing: Dante Hicks* (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Manufacturing: Walter Reuther (WCP)
Commissar for Armament: Howard Stark* (DRP)
People’s Secretary for Light Industry: Jean-Francois Breton (DFLP)
People’s Secretary for Construction: John Nada* (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Culture: Joseph M. Schenck (DRP)
People’s Secretary for Geology: Rocco Klein* (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Aeronautics: Quentin Roosevelt (DFLP)
People’s Secretary for Welfare: Victoria Cooper (WCP)
Commissar of Food: Ramsay Gordon* (WCP)
People’s Secretary for Commerce: A. Phillip Randolph (WCP)
Chairman, State Planning Commission: Solon DeLeon (WCP)
Chairman, Academy of Arts and Sciences: Paul Robeson (WCP)
Chairman, Union Bank: Abba P. Lerner (WCP)
Speaker of the CEC: Grace Carlson (WCP)
Chief Whip, CPD: George Meany (WCP)
Revolutionary Military Council of the UASR
Chairman: Earl Browder
Deputy Chairman: John Reed
Standing Members:
Martin Abern (SecDef)
General of the Army Adna Chaffee (Chief of the General Staff)
Fleet Admiral Forrest Sherman (Chief of Naval Operations)
General of the Army Benjamin O. Davis Sr. (Chief of the Army Staff)
General Stjepan Mesaros (Chief of the Political Commissariat)
Normal Members:
Francis Waldron
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Paul Mattick
Harry Truman
Theodore Roosevelt III
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Excerpt from “Presidium Deputy David Dellinger”, episode of “Television Newspaper”, program on PBS-3, May 19th, 1991
_A riff on the popular “Cinema Newspaper” format of the 1930’s, “Television Newspaper”, first airing in 1948, was an attempt to bring that format to television and subscription films. Originally short documentaries in the vein of Kino-Pravda, in 1973, it expanded into longform specials, documentaries and interviews with prominent political figures, meant to show a deeper look at issues going on in the contemporary world.
The May 19th, 1991 episode featured a two-hour long interview with David Dellinger, a pacifist and longtime anti-war activist who came into prominence following his 1964 election as a Labor delegate opposing the Liberation foreign policy of the 60’s. He would later become a member of the Autonomist Communist Party in 1970, and continued his radical pacifism and opposition to wars. Controversially, he visited Indochina and Indonesia to explore the effects of both FBU and Comintern military intervention. He would be a member in the first Social Ecology Union politburo in 1977, and was appointed to the Presidium in 1990.
In the following excerpt Dellinger describes his time as a member of the “War Resisters League” and his work with Jeannette Rankin during the World Revolutionary War._
Frank Morrow (Host): Back in 1941, 42, you were involved with the campaign of Jeannette Rankin, the pacifist politician who had opposed the entry of the United Republics into the World Revolutionary War and were part of the “War Resisters League”, the name given to the independents who ran with Rankin to withdraw the country from the Soviet Union, tell us a little about that.
David Dellinger: In 1940, I had refused to be drafted, and registered as a conscientious objector. Now, thanks to anarchists and Christian socialists, they didn’t arrest conscientious objectors, but were instead funneled into so-called “alternative service”.
FM: What did “alternative service” mean?
DD: Essentially, we were all funneled into doing some form of “public service” somewhere in the country. Because I had driven an ambulance during both the American and Spanish Civil Wars, I was assigned as an ambulance driver for understaffed hospitals and psychiatric wards.
FM: It was at that time you, uh, became involved with the psychiatric hospital strikes.
DD: As we did our service, transporting patients, we noticed the conditions at the hospitals were horrifying. Barely anything had changed since the Revolution. The hospitals were decaying, they would restrain or beat patients with rods, they had terrible equipment, absolutely horrible. So, we all complained, at first. The administrators didn’t listen, no matter how much we complained.
FM: So, you striked.
DD: The hospitals needed the public service workers, because their own workers had been leaving for either the lucrative rehabilitation centers or the political prisons, so we knew that we could force some changes through a great strike. We had more leverage, and major changes were made. No more restraints, better rehabilitation, more access to recreation, more funding.
[…]
FM: Tell us about your involvement in the Rankin campaign of 1942. The anti-war campaign.
DD: I had left the Workers’ Party in 1939, right around when Jeanette [Rankin] and Richard [Gregg] had been ejected from the Central Committee. After war was declared, Jeanette started her anti-war campaign. She reached out to those conscientious objectors who were doing alternative services, members of the old “War Resisters League”, and we met up at [Rankin’s] ranch in Montana. Rankin, Gregg, myself, Ralph [DiGia], Bill [Sutherland], Igor [Roodenko], George [Houser]. We knew we couldn’t form a full anti-war party, with StateSec cracking down on anything like that, but we figured we could try to organize a grassroots campaign, and try to run as independents with a common goal.
FM: Ending the war with a quick peace.
DD: That’s right.
FM: This campaign was and is still today slandered as a kind of bourgeois, quasi-fascist, possibly propaganda effort. Who were some of your supporters at that time?
DD: We were an alliance, united by our shared desire for peace. We were anarchists, Methodists, Quakers, some Trinitarians, Christian socialists. We were opposed to the idea of warfare in general, no matter how abhorrent the other side might be. I had learned that in Spain, that I couldn’t take up arms, no matter who was on the other side
FM: Well, some people have said that there’s only so much a pacifist can take. Especially with the evils of fascism or the current Franco-British incarnation of militaristic capitalism.
DD: Then I feel they fundamentally don’t understand the basis of our opposition. We don’t believe in ” no war within reason” or any war can be justified. We feel that all war is destructive. That it’s not a productive solution. Now, that doesn’t mean to not fight back against oppression, but using the instruments of the state and forcing people to fight and kill each other just isn’t the best method to create change. Change is often guided by peaceful, but strong and resilient protest.
FM: You, yourself are a Christian minister.
DD: Yes, never got around to picking a denomination (chuckles). Yes, I feel very strongly in the Biblical basis that violence is never the answer, no matter the cause or how righteous it might seem.
FM: How did people react at that time to your campaign?
DD: I think we all knew this was a very dim chance of actual success, especially after the Japanese attacked the Aleutian Islands. We tried to appeal more to decency, getting people to remember how the violence of the Revolution had affected them. How they had lost people or how they were injured or how they were destroyed. We did get some people, but mostly, we were driven out and not a lot of people listened. We couldn’t campaign very much, because we didn’t have a lot of openings. Workplaces and soviets locked us out, because they had embraced the war effort I heard years later Hoover had all of us tapped and followed us everywhere.
FM: There was the incident with DiGia and the letter.
DD: Yes, Ralph was campaigning in the Bronx, and during a speech, he quoted Eugene Debs when he was speaking out against the Great War. “If war is right, let it be declared by the people – you, who have your lives to lose.” One line, but somehow, this had gotten to Helen Keller.
FM: Who had known and was friends with Debs personally.
DD: Yes, she had largely retired from politics, but she was very upset by Ralph’s insinuations. She then used her contacts to get all of Debs’ old friends, family, and colleagues from that time, those who were still alive, to sign a letter, stating firmly that Debs would have supported the war effort, that we were capitalizing on his name for our “folly”.
FM: What did you think of the letter?
DD: I will just say that it’s hard to evaluate what Debs might’ve thought when he wasn’t there to say it himself.
FM: Were you surprised by the losses?
DD: As I said earlier, we knew we were a longshot. We knew that we wouldn’t get the support needed, and we knew we wouldn’t win. In fact, I was personally surprised that I got something to the effect of 3 % of the vote for my election. I would’ve thought lower.
[…]
FM: Do you think there’s a connection between the anti-war movement during the World Revolutionary War and the current anti-war Social Ecology government.
DD: No direct connection, though of course many of us ended up working with the party. Myself, Ralph, Bill [Sutherland], who is currently ambassador to Azania. But I do see the same desire for peace. I think after the war had ended, more people came back having experienced the worst of war, and they came to see what we were trying to say. And with the later wars in the Horn of Africa, Indochina, the Congo, they saw that the Union government had begun reenacting the kind of militarism that led to the collapse of the very government it replaced. And now, after a decade of war and destruction and several nuclear attacks, I think people do have a desire for peace. The Cold War has almost led humanity to destruction, and the kinds of policies enacted by Nixon, Haywood, Hampton, are going to march us to destruction. And I think that now more than ever, we have to push back. I believed it then, and the events of the 1980’s only solidified it. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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