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What the Soviets suffered, according to Kennedy at his AU commencement address in 1963, what the Soviets suffered in World War II was the equivalent of the entire United States east of Chicago being wiped out. What Americans don't remember is that throughout most of World War II, the Americans and the British confronted 10 German divisions combined. The Soviets were confronting 200 German divisions. As Churchill says, "The Red Army tore the guts out of the German war machine."
You have to realize what that 27 million Soviets who died during the war means. After 9/11, as I point out to my students, we lost less than 3,000 people on 9/11. How many countries did we invade? How much of the world did we upend after 9/11 to get revenge for that or to stop the effects of that? The Soviet losses in World War II numerically are the equivalent of one 9/11 a day every day for 24 years. Roosevelt understood that. Wallace understood that. They bent over backwards to try to give support and help to the Soviets in rebuilding.
Truman took the opposite view, that we had to stop the Soviets, that their security interests were antithetical to America's interest, and so Truman reverses that policy. He backs off, he wavers, oscillates to some extent for the next year. And Wallace stays on in the Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce. Roosevelt gave him his choice of any position, much like Hoover in 1920, given the choice of any position he wanted, he chose Secretary of Commerce because he wanted to rebuild the economy.
But from that position inside the Cabinet, he wages single-handedly the fight against the nuclear arms race and against the Cold War. And he's often the only voice fighting against Truman's reactionary policy. A lot of the time, he did have allies. And in September of 1946, it just becomes too clear that Wallace's policies of friendship toward the Soviet Union were so opposed by not only Truman but Burns, who's become Secretary of State and is Truman's main advisor, and the rest of the New Dealers are all gone by then. And so Wallace's position is solitary but he gets Truman to sign off on every word that Wallace says in his famous September 1946 speech at Madison Square Garden. And then Truman tells the press that, "I approved every thing Wallace was going to say there." And then Wallace...
PAUL JAY: And the speech was?
PETER KUZNICK: A speech about the need for the United States and the Soviets to work together to create peace. Saying that the Americans are no more in the Soviet camp than they are in the British imperialist camp, and that the United States has gotten to be an honest broker and work with the Soviets and other progressive forces to bring peace to prevent the onset of the Cold War, prevent the onset of the nuclear arms race.
We came very close under the Acheson-Lilienthal Plan to giving up nuclear arms and to preventing a nuclear arms race but Truman and Burns stupidly appointed Bernard Baruch to represent the US at the United Nations, which Oppenheimer and Acheson and the others and Lilienthal knew was a death knell to any kind of attempt to get rid of nuclear weapons and put it under UN auspices and then getting rid of them in 1946.
The United States by 1947, when Truman is going to announce the Truman Doctrine and take over the British commitments in Greece and in Iran and elsewhere, Truman, he meets with Arthur Vandenberg. And Senator Vandenberg tells Truman, "If you want to get this policy through Congress, you have to scare hell out of the American people." And that's what Truman was doing there at that time. And we've seen over and over again how manipulable the American people become when they're scared and they were terrified that the Soviets posed a threat that it was trying to conquer the world.
The Soviets never had a plan for world conquest during this time. What the Soviets wanted was ongoing friendship with the US. They wanted economic aid from the US, which Roosevelt had promised. They wanted help in rebuilding the Soviet economy, which had been destroyed. But Truman makes it seem as if they're out on this aggressive campaign to take over the world and the American people fell for that.
PAUL JAY: Peter-
PETER KUZNICK: By the time Wallace ran in '48 on a progressive vision of world peace and friendship, the media have turned against him. The Democratic Party had turned against him. The Republicans, of course, were against him and they attacked him during the campaign. They red-baited him viscously. He made a lot of mistakes during that campaign, opened himself up to that kind of criticism and ended up doing very, very poorly, although early on it looked like it was going to be a viable campaign.
PAUL JAY: So, Truman helps initiate the Cold War, which in the end, helps to bury Wallace. He uses nuclear weapons in Japan. And again, you'll be able to see this interview I did with Peter about the whole issue of the use of the nuclear bombing of Japan and how it was in fact a shot across the bow against the Soviet Union and, in many historians' view, including Peter, not necessary to end the war with Japan. So, I'm saying, in great depth, you'll see these other stories but talk about the purge of the New Dealers by Truman because that really is part of the story thread we're trying to follow that leads us to the fight with Sanders.
PETER KUZNICK: The most principled ones who were still remaining, when Roosevelt died, a lot of them left. Some of them had already been replaced by 1945. But Roosevelt and Harold Ickes were there with Morgenthau leading the fight. And first, Truman is really vulgar when it comes toward Harold Ickes. He refers to him as "old shitass Icks." He refers to him to the media as "shitass Icks." This is while he's still Secretary of the Interior. And then he gets rid of Ickes, and then is really, Wallace has allies because Wallace is so smart and so persuasive but it was clear which way the country was moving by 1945 and 1946 and it was clear which direction Truman wanted to take the country by the time he fires Wallace in September of 1946.
So, it was a lonely struggle. Wallace waged it heroically for more than a year. Even Eleanor Roosevelt is starting to waver after 1946, when the people who support Wallace when he comes out condemning Truman's policies are people like Albert Einstein and a lot of other real progressives at the time. But the country was moving sharply to the right. And we also during this time have McCarthyism on the rise. It's the chair of the Republican Party who says during the 1946 election that this is a choice between Republicanism and Communism. So, part of what's going on is the Republican effort to damn the New Deal and they're running a neo-McCarthyite campaign in 1946. McCarthy is a latecomer to McCarthyism. McCarthy doesn't make his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia until February 9th, 1950. But the Republican Party had become McCarthyite much, much earlier in 1946.
And Truman made another one of his colossal blunders and that's that he thinks he can preempt this right wing McCarthyite attack on the Democrats by going along with it. So, Truman is the one who initiates the loyalty-security hearings, the God bless America pledges around the country. Truman starts purging the Party of the progressives and the left wingers in 1946. He can bide time and prevent the Republican attack, but he legitimizes it. The same stupid thing we see the Democrats doing over and over again legitimizing the attacks from the right, thinking that they can get a softer version of them and that the right wingers are going to lay off. Instead, the right wing uses the Democratic legitimization of these policies and doubles down and takes it to a further extreme position. We see that with McCarthyism. We see that with the Cold War. We see that with the nuclear arms race. We're going to see it over and over again.
PAUL JAY: Yeah, we see it from the transition from Obama to Trump but I'm jumping ahead. Just quickly before this segment ends, a lot of our younger viewers are probably, because of how terribly history is taught in the American school system, probably don't even know what the New Deal is and the context. Let me just quickly try to frame it, and then if you can help develop it. In the midst of the Great Depression and great crisis of global capitalism in the 1930s, Roosevelt saw as the method of dealing with the crisis, unlike in Europe where fascism and the use of brute force to try to destroy the workers' movement, in the United States, there was concessions made to the workers, to the working class, to ordinary people. Jobs, there was various kinds of stimulus, and so on. That New Deal, by the end of the war, I think in terms of the elites, they said, "Well, we don't need this New Deal anymore. We gave working people way too much. Now, let's get it back." Does that jibe with the way you see it?
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