A War Hero turned Communist Worker?: Lewis Smith's military service

Aleck Lewis Smith was one of the professors that the governor of South Carolina publicly accused of being a "communist worker." When I first started researching the governor's accusations, all I knew was that Smith was employed by Benedict College, and that he was accused of the following: 

The governor's claims about Smith

Taken at face value, Smith's dishonorable discharge from the Navy is one of the most notable accusations. The others were considerably thinner: Forrest O. Wiggins was accused of having a subscription to the National Guardian newspaper, Rideout of being a member of the Progressive Party during the 1948 election. Today I got a copy of Smith's notice of separation from the Navy, so I can now seriously evaluate the governor's accusations.

The most important fact? The governor was wrong! Smith was discharged on March 1, 1955 because of lack of progress. There was nothing suspicious about this. In 1955, Smith was a middle-aged English professor who had been in the Naval reserves for a decade. He had little to offer the Navy, and he certainly had better things to do. There was nothing unusual about his discharge for "lack of progress."

Notice that Smith was discharged from the Navy

The governor also left a lot out. Whatever Smith's politics were, he had served in the U.S. Navy with distinction. He enlisted on November 11, 1940. Smith left no record of his reasons for joining, but he had just graduated from college, and the Navy offered a promising career path for men like him. During the winter of 1940, the U.S. Navy was rapidly expanding as everyone anticipated that America would soon enter the Second World War. 

The war, of course, began for America in December 1941, following the Attack on Pearl Harbor. Smith spent most of the war stationed on the USS North Carolina, a fast battleship. The North Carolina was in the Pacific for almost the entire duration of the war, and it was used to screen aircraft carriers and cover troop carriers. The ship saw combat and was even torpedoed twice during the Guadalcanal campaign. 

In February 1944, Smith was transferred to the USS Pasadena. The Pasadena was a light cruiser, a smaller and more modern ship than the North Carolina. However, it performed a similar service: screening aircraft carriers. 

On both ships, Smith served as a damage control specialist. This was an important and stressful role on a battleship that saw combat. Uncontrolled fires could be catastrophic as the North Carolina was loaded with fuel and ammunition. Combat was an especially intense time. When the ship was torpedoed, fire broke out, and the ship took on tons of water, and damage control specialists had minutes to limit the damage and save the ship, and its crew, from destruction.

At the end of the war, Smith was awarded a bronze star for participating in the liberation of the Philippines and three additional bronze stars and two silver stars for service in the Pacific theater. These awards honor his participation in fourteen separate campaigns, an impressive record of military service by any measure. 

Smith left active service shortly after the surrender of the Empire of Japan, on October 28, 1945. Although he remained in the Naval reserves for a decade, he appears to have lost interest in the military. He moved to the midwest and went into higher education. He does not appear to have recorded his thoughts about his naval service, but his activities suggest mixed feelings. He married a Japanese woman and, in 1970, moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he lived for two decades.

Smith's trajectory is suggestive of one seen with other men his age. Shocked by the destruction he witnessed during the Second World War and deeply concerned about the prospect of nuclear war, he rejected mainstream American politics, deeming it inadequate to the moment. He explored ideas like communism as they offered an alternative, but in Jim Crow South Carolina, even such modest actions made one a target for state politicians. Whatever his political beliefs, Smith certainly represented some of the best of mid-century America. He not only served the country with distinction during war, but during peace, he endured a dishonest political attack made for an abominable goal and he did so with dignity.

Frank R. Veal: Allen University's "Judas?"

Veal and a dean were featured in a 1961 advertisement for evaporated milk
Ebony magazine

As Allen University president, Frank R. Veal played a crucial role in the South Carolina governor's attacks on HBCUs during the late 1950s. He comes off badly in the public record. A protest flyer named Veal as one of the "Judases, Uncle Tom's, and tools of Timmerman" who was carrying the state to deeper ruin. The AAUP report on the incident used more restrained language but likewise condemned him. It determined that he had grossly violated established rules for academic due process, and his actions were "either complete administrative confusion or hypocritical lip service used as a device to conceal administrative misdeeds." Here we take a closer look at Veal's record. 

Most surprising is that, prior to moving to South Carolina, Veal enjoyed close interactions with prominent members of the Communist Party. It appears that the South Carolina press and government officials never learned of this despite the amount of attention they paid to events at Allen.

Veal was born in 1907 to a middle-class family in Milledgeville, Georgia. Veal's father worked as a machinist and a laundryman and was able to purchase his own home. After graduating from high school, Veal left Georgia for South Carolina to attend Allen University. This began a life-long connection with the university and the AME church. He graduated with an A.B. degree in 1932 and then remained at the university for a year to teach history. He then pursued religious studies for most of the 1930s. He earned a B.D. from the divinity school at the University of Chicago and possibly an S.T.N. degree from Boston University. (The BU degree is mentioned in one newspaper article, but I could not find it in university records.) In the mid-1930s, he worked as an assistant football coach at Howard University while also taking classes. He earned a B.D. degree from Howard in 1937.

In 1940, Veal moved to Ohio to work as a minister for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He would serve as a religious minister for most of the 1940s. He was first stationed in the city of Newark, but the next year he moved to Brown Chapel in Cincinnati. Within the church community, he is remembered for raising funds to expand the chapel's physical infrastructure. 

Veal became active in politics while in Ohio. His political work started with civil rights activity. He was a leader in the local chapter of the NAACP. This brought him into regular contact with left-wing political activists in the city. In the late 1940s, leftists, both in the city and nation-wide, were organizing around the third-party presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace. Wallace had served as Roosevelt's Vice President but had split with mainstream Democrats over foreign policy and communism. Wallace advocated for adopting socialist democratic policies and peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. Many of Wallace's supporters were part of the socialist democratic organization the Progressive Citizens of America. In 1948, Wallace ran as a third-party presidential candidate, and the PCA formed the backbone of his political party, the United States Progressive Party.

An important part of the Progressive Party's platform was racial equality, so Veal's work in the NAACP naturally drew him into the Progressive's orbit. He served on a November 13, 1947 committee that welcomed Wallace when he came to Ohio to campaign. He also appeared at a January 21, 1948 Progressive Citizens rally held in Columbus. 

Veal's involvement with the Progressive Party attracted negative attention from internal security forces. The Progressive Party heavily drew membership from communists and was even believed by some conservatives to be under communist control. As a result, many people involved with the Progressives came under FBI investigation. Veal himself came to the FBI's attention after an informant reported that he was a communist. 

The accusation of communist membership was not absurd. Cincinnati was in fact home to a significant number of members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). In Ohio, almost 3,000 people joined the Party. As a major industrial center, Cincinnati was a center for many of the regional CP's activities.

Dorothy Pilder
High school yearbook photo from Ancestry

Although both the Progressive Party and the Communist Party reached out to African Americans, African American membership was small. Many local Party members were white union members. For example, the communist labor organizer Talmadge Raley was born to poor farmers in Kentucky and had moved to Cincinnati to work at a porcelain factory. By the 1940s, he was working as an union organizer and then as a local union representative for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America.

Talmadege was unusual in that much of the CP's membership was made up of white immigrants, especially Jewish immigrants from Eastern Euope. Typical was Dorothy Pilder (later Dorothy Renfrow). Dorothy was born in Cincinnati, but her parents were Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia who ran a delicatessen. Others were from a working-class background. The Party member Victor Keller (or Kellar) was a Ukrainian immigrant who worked as a machine operator in a clothing factory. 

Louis B. Renfrow
Harvard yearbook photo via Ancestry

While Veal's involvement with the Progressive Party brought him into regular contact with members of the CPUSA, his direct engagement with the CP was not very significant. The only information the FBI was able to collect was a report that Veal had been put on a local CPUSA committee charged with handling religious matters. After a year, the Cincinnati FBI office decided to close Veal's file. The file ends with the remark that he was "never considered sufficiently important to be designated as the subject of a Security Card Index."

The Cincinnati office had reviewed its records on Veal because he had moved to South Carolina in August 1948. Veal left Ohio to assume leadership of "Mother Emanuel," the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. This was an honor. The church is one of the oldest and largest African American churches in the south.

Veal's largely dropped out of progressive politics after moving to South Carolina. Continued involvement with the Progressive Party was unworkable. In November, Wallace was soundly defeated in the presidential election, receiving even fewer votes that States' Rights candidate Strom Thurmond, and support for the Progressives collapsed throughout the nation. The Progressive Party never enjoyed strong support in South Carolina, and interest in communism was essentially non-existent.

After he moved, Veal fell within the jurisdiction of the Savannah office of the FBI. That office reviewed the files collected by the Cincinnati office and solicited information from law enforcement officers as well as informants. Their investigation failed to produce any indication that Veal was engaged in subversive activities. One FBI agent (Carlton M. Dillard) requested permission to interview Veal with the goal of developing him as a source of information about communists. Permission was denied, and the FBI again lost interest in him.

Veal moved from Charleston to Columbia in 1952 to serve as pastor for the Emmanuel AME Church. That year, he was one of three African Americans to run for the U.S. House of Representatives. All three lost the election by a significant margin, but their campaigns were significant as the candidates were the first African Americans in South Carolina to run for major political offices in over a generation. 

After he had served as a pastor in Columbia for a year, Veal left the church to work in higher education. He was elected president of Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas. The college is closely affiliated with the AME church, so his election was natural one. Veal served without attracting any controversy for three years and then returned to Columbia after being elected president of Allen University. He replaced Samuel R. Higgins who stepped down after being elected an AME bishop. 

What are we to make of this? In a report, an FBI agent dismissed Veal's activities in South Carolina with the remark that they were "self-centered to promote his own welfare." An informant the agent contacted (Albert B. Brooks) went further. He said that Veal was "over-ambitious" and trying to get elected as Allen University president with the "ultimate aim" of becoming an AME bishop.

The broad contours of the FBI agent's report appear correct. As early as 1948, the press reported that Veal was trying to replace Samuel R. Higgins as Allen University president. A charitable interpretation of his record is that he was an ambitious religious leader who wanted to advance the cause of African Americans but also recognized the constrains imposed political reality. In Ohio, with its more liberal political culture, Veal built relations with progressives, but in the conservative strong-hold of South Carolina, he recognized that he needed to respect the state's staunchly segregationist culture.

Whatever plans Veal had to use the Allen University presidency to advance his standing within the AME church were ruined by the negative publicity surrounding the governor's attacks. He remained as Allen University president until 1962, but he never received his desired bishopric. Instead, he returned to Ohio to serve as pastor of the Bethel AME Church in the town of Lockland (a suburb of Cincinnati). He remained there until his death in 1969. 

Sources

1) "Three Negro Candidates in South Carolina." Jackson advocate. [Jackson, Miss.], August 2, 1952, p. 1.

2) "Move to Oust Dr. Samuel Higgins as Allen U. Head" The Ohio daily-express [Dayton, Ohio]., June 14, 1948, p. 2

Chinese war refugees in South Carolina

Walter Yeh and his family in Columbia, SC in 1956
From Richland Library

The hiring of white faculty and especially the enrollment of a white student at Allen University attracted the public's attention. Unnoticed was that Allen also hired its first Asian professors in 1954, the year it broke with its tradition of maintaining an all-Black faculty.

The professors hired were music professor Walter Huai-deh Yeh and sociology professor Ju-Shu Pan. Their hiring was part of a general effort by Allen University president Higgins and AME bishop Reid to improve academics and integrate the university, and generally help the university adapt to the changes that were expected to follow the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education court decision.

For Drs. Yeh and Pan, their arrival in Columbia, South Carolina marked the end of a long path to escape political turmoil in China. Both had been born in the early 1910s. They had been college students in China during the 1930s, but their studies were disrupted by the war with Japan.

Pan was born in Zhejiang province, and he attended Tsing Hua National University in Beijing. He received an A.B. degree in 1937. This was timely as war broke out that year, and Beijing was captured by Japanese military forces in June. It is unclear what Dr. Pan did immediately after graduating, but he left China in 1944. He was able to secure passage on an army transport, and he landed in San Pedro, California on July 1, 1944. He moved to Chicago and enrolled as a graduate student.  

Walter Yeh in 1958
From the Allen University yearbook via Richland Library

Yeh also moved to the United States in 1944. He was born in Shanghai. For college, he pursued a B.A degree from St. John's University in Shanghai and then studied at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. St. John's University was a liberal arts college founded by American missionaries. It was known for offering superior academics, and the school maintained close relations with American universities. These experiences provided Yeh with familiarity with American culture, which would prove important when he moved to the U.S. 

Yeh graduated from the music conservatory in 1935. It is unclear what he did for the next five years, but in 1940, he was hired as a music professor at the conservatory. His studies took place at an incredibly difficult time as the city of Shanghai was a war zone. Japanese military forces tried to take control of the city in 1932. After encountering resistance from Chinese forces, they agreed to a cease fire, but fighting broke out again in 1937. Large parts of the city were destroyed, and the Chinese military was driven out. For the remainder of the war, until 1945, Shanghai was under Japanese occupation.

The exact date of his departure was not recorded, but he likely left in late 1943. Yeh's path to the United States was circuitous. He flew over the Himalayan mountains to Calcutta, India and then took a ship to Melbourne, Australia and then finally arrived in Los Angeles, California on February 8, 1912. In his arrival documents, Dr. Yeh wrote that he was traveling to Ann Arbor, likely to work or teach at the University of Michigan. However, he ended traveling further east and enrolled at the Eastman School of Music at University of Rochester, receiving an M.A. and a Mus. M. (in music theory) in 1945. He then studied at Harvard University and received an A.M. degree in 1948. He was awarded a Ph.D. by Rochester the next year. His dissertation was "The Chinese Symphony, with male chanters, solo baritone and solo soprano." He received the highest score (219 ell) of all graduating student, in fact all graduating students for several years.

After receiving his Ph.D., Dr. Yeh moved to Alaska to work at Sheldon Johnson Junior College. He only remained there a year, returning to Boston in August 1950. From 1951 to 1954, he worked as a researcher at Harvard. He left that position to move to South Carolina and hold a joint appointment at Benedict College and Allen University.

Ju-Shu Pan in 1958
From the Allen University yearbook via Richland Library

Dr. Pan also moved to Columbia in 1954. He was hired as a professor of social science. He had completed his Ph.D. in sociology in 1946. He then remained at Chicago, working as a researcher. Pan studied the experiences of elderly people who moved into retirement homes. In addition to his dissertation "A Study of the Personal and Social Adjustment of Old People in Homes for the Aged," he published five articles in academic journals (American Sociological Review, The Journal of Educational Sociology, Geriatrics, and The Journal of Social Psychology). Pan's job at Allen was his first permanent one.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate any detailed accounts of how Pen and Yeh came to be hired. Edwin Hoffman said that he'd been hired directly by President Higgins and Bishop Reid, and both were very candid about the situation in South Carolina. He was told that, if hired, he would be among the first white professors at the university, and they only wanted to employ faculty who fully supported civil rights for Blacks. Presumably, they had similar conversations with Pen and Yeh, although both would have had limited experience with the political issues.

In Columbia, Pan and Yeh stood out. Not only were they among the first non-Black faculty at Allen, but they were among the first Chinese immigrants in the city. In 1950, only eleven people in the entire metropolitan area were non-white, non-Black. 

The Social Science Club in 1958. Dr. Pan is in the back row, second from the right. Dr. Hoffman is second from the left.
From the Allen University yearbook via Richland Library

Both Pan and Yeh appear to have appreciated the stability of their jobs in Columbia as they largely remained there for the rest of the careers. After his first year, Dr. Pan moved to Waco, Texas to serve as department chair at Paul Quinn College, but he returned to Allen the next year.

Dr. Pan lived in an Allen University apartment complex for faculty. This was one of the few (possibly the only) racially integrated residences in the state, and he was neighbors with Edwin Hoffman, John G. Rideout, and Forrest O. Wiggins. Dr. Yeh may have lived there as well for a year or two, but by 1957, he had purchased his own home located near the University of South Carolina (at 615 Henderson).

In their accounts of their time in South Carolina, neither Hoffman nor Davis mention Yeh or Pan, so presumably they didn't interact much. Newspapers regularly reported on musical performances that Dr. Yeh helped organized, but otherwise, the two attracted little notice. They were not mentioned at all during the public fight over the employment of Hoffman, Rideout, and Wiggins. 

Certainly, both had good reasons to avoid getting involved in politics. As members of South Carolina's tiny Chinese immigrant community, they could expect minimal support if they became political targets. Dr. Pan was especially vulnerable since he was a non-U.S. citizen and thus could face deportation. 

Moreover, nether seemed to be interested in the political issues. On a form submitted as part of an application for citizenship, one of Pan's former professors at the University of Chicago said that, not only was Pan not member of the communist party, but he in fact was anti-communist. Dr. Yeh appears to have been perceived as someone who would stay out of politics as President Veal made him made chairman of the humanities department in 1957, following the removal of Rideout from this position.

Both Drs. Pan and Yeh remained at Allen for the rest of their careers. Pan published a translation of the Chinese ethnography report, The Lolo of Liang Shan by Yueh-Hua Lin, in 1961. This was a notable accomplishment for professor at a small university that had only began to pursue research ambitious. Unfortunately, this was the last academic work he published as he died two years later of natural causes.

Dr. Yeh lived until 1990. In Columbia, he was a well-regarded member of the community who regularly participated in music performances. He amassed a large music collection. The collection was donated to the University of South Carolina after Yeh's death, and it is currently housed in the Music Library.

The Communist Activities Committee: South Carolina's Baby HUAC

Reflecting the political mood, the cover of the 1958 legislative manual featured a statue of ex-Confederate Wade Hampton in front of a Confederate flag
From the South Carolina State Library

One of the long-lasting consequences of the political attacks on Benedict College and Allen University was the creation of the Committee to Investigate Communist Activities. The committee appears to have had its origins in Governor Timmerman's January 15, 1958 annual message to the General Assembly. A large part of his speech was devoted to accusing Allen University and Benedict College of harboring highly trained communist workers. His speech ended with a recommendation that the General Assembly create a committee to investigate communist activities in order to protect the state from the "communist menace."

The legislature quickly took up the governor's suggestion. The proposed bill was read for the first time in February. It was ratified into law two months later, on April 16, 1958.

The committee was charged with investigating communist activities within the state and regularly reporting to the state General Assembly. They were also to recommend legislation when their investigations suggested that new laws were needed to preserve the state government. 

The committee's main power was to the ability to subpoena witnesses to testify before hearing and provide records like personal books and papers. The committee also was allowed to administer oaths and enforce them by charging witnesses with perjury. The history of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and committees like it demonstrated how significant these powers could be. Just subpeona-ing someone to testify could draw the press's attention and lead to the person being fired from their job and generally ostracized by the community.

The committee members were also given financial resources. They were allowed to employ an executive secretary or general counsel and clerical staff, and were reimbursed for their work via a per diem of ten dollars and milage. For its first year, the committee was appropriated ten thousand dollars (comparable to $100,000 in 2022) from the state general fund for the first year.

An observer knowledable about the history of HUAC-like committees would have sounded alarm. A committee like this provided legislators with a powerful political weapon, creating pressure to expand it beyond its original scope.

Florida's Johns' Committee illustrated how the dynamic could play out. The committee was created two years earlier (in 1956) to investigate organizations that participated in violence or in violation of state law. This type of language was often used to target communist organizations, which were believed to support the violent overthrown the United States government. The committee began by investigating civil rights groups like the NAACP with the goal of establishing ties between these groups and communism. However, in 1961, the legislature broadened the committee's charge to include investigating homosexuality. The committee's activities began to focus on universities, and it started investigating not only suspected homosexuals but also research and teaching activities that committee members found objectionable. Activities that raised concern included the publication of a scholarly article on Beat writers which included mild profanity. The committee questioned university students and faculty, and a number of them ended up being expelled from university.

Senator Rebert C. Dennis, a member of the investigative committee
From the 1958 SC legislative manual via  South Carolina State Library

Remarkably, none of this happened in South Carolina. In its first report (issued in May 1959), the committee reported that they found no substantial evidence of Communist Party activity within the state and expressed the opinion that no new legislation was needed to combat "subversive activities." Two years year (in May 1961), the state legislature expanded the committee's charge to include creating an educational program that informs South Carolinians about the threat posed by communism. 

The committee's activities became focused on its educational mission. In its public reports, the committee continued to advocate remaining vigilant against communism activities, but they also acknowledged that they had found no evidence that such activities were taking place. The sole activity they reported was that a Black self-help organization on Johns Island (the Progressive Club) had received twenty-eight thousand dollars in funding from the Highlander Folk School, a social justice center that many conservatives believed was a communist front. 

Although it existed for decades, the committee never held a public hearing and never used its power to subpoena. Its investigative function appears to have been limited to passing on tips it received to state law enforcement, especially SLED (the statewide investigative law enforcement agency).

In its 1971, committee members expressed concern about the growth of the New Left and student activism on college campuses. Anticipating that its focus would shift to these new political movements and away from communism, the committee asked the legislature to  be renamed the Internal Security Committee. The name change was made 1973.

At the time of the name change, the committee was still meeting twice a month, but it had become largely irrelevant in the public's eyes. The Columbia Record newspaper described the committee as "long inactive" in a 1973 article on the name change. The committee issued no further public reports, and it's unclear what, if anything, the committee did as its records have been lost. 

Remarkably, the committee remained in existence until 1993 when it was disbanded as part of a general reorganization of the state government. In the early 1980s, one state representative (Jarvis R. Klapman) proposed that the committee should focus on guarding against terrorist attacks on critical facilities like the Savannah River nuclear power plant. Nothing came out of this, and by the late 1980s, the committee members were spending their time addressing safety concerns about the Statehouse parking garage. 

Senator Francis C. Jones, a member of the investigative committee
From the 1958 SC legislative manual via  South Carolina State Library

The failure of the investigative committee can be attributed to political factors. The committee's most vocal supporter was Governor Timmerman, and he left electoral politics shortly after the committee was created. Under the state constitution, Timmerman was limited to a single 4-year term in office, and when his term ended (on January 20, 1959), he was appointed as a federal court judge. He remained in the judgeship until his retirement.

While Timmerman served as governor during a pivotal time in South Carolina's history, his political influence was limited. He had been elected in the first gubernatorial election held after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Throughout the south, voters (who were overwhelming white because of voter suppression laws) were outraged at the prospect of school desegregation, and gubernatorial elections were largely decided by candidates' positions on segregation. Timmerman had won the election by being the most vocal segregationist.

Senator John C. West, a member of the investigative committee
From the 1958 SC legislative manual via  South Carolina State Library

Timmerman's overt and heavy-handed attacks on desegregation ran counter to the approach taken by many state politicians. In 1991 newspaper interview, the investigative committee's first chairman, John C. West, later said that the committee was "kind of a hot potato" and senior legislators did not want it. West said that he'd been given the chairmanship because he was a junior state senator looking for more experience on committees.

West's remarks should be viewed critically. He had a long and successful career in politics, and the investigative committee looked like an embarrassment by the 1990s, so he had every reason to downplay the support for the committee. A close examination of the historical record both supports and complicates West's statements. 

Once the initial shock of the Brown court decision wore off, South Carolina legislators avoided the sort of overt repressive measures that Timmerman advocated. Instead, they planned for a managed compliance with desegregation in which major elements of racial segregation were preserved through covert means. For example, public teacher salaries had been determined by a pay scale that was explicitly racist: the set wage for a black teacher was lower than that of a white teacher with the same experience. This system was replaced by one that used standardized test scores to determine salary after legislatures discovered that they could set score cutoffs in a way to largely replicate the older, overtly racially biased system.

The evolution of the investigative committee shows a similar strategy at play. A major component of the committee's educational activities involved working with the University of South Carolina (especially the international studies professor Richard L. Walker) to develop a summer program for public school teachers designed to train them on how to educate students about the purported dangers of communisms and the superiority of American democracy. By doing so, they made university administrators and faculty complicit in the state government's efforts to suppress leftist politics, but unlike more heavily-handed efforts like demanding the firing of left-leaning professors, this collaboration was unlikely to draw public criticism.

In the long-term, Timmerman's attacks on higher education were a dead end. The dismissal of the Benedict and Allen professors was the last effort by state politicians to force out left-leaning professors. However, those attacks demonstrated South Carolina politicians' interest in controlling and repressing higher education within the state. Those politicians were successful in their efforts. In the years that followed, the state government desegregated its higher educational system while simultaneously implementing measures (like the use of standardized test scores in admissions) designed to largely leave intact the system of white supremacy that segregation had produced. This was done with the acquiescence, and sometimes even the cooperation, of university professors. Ultimately, the hope expressed by the dismissed Allen University professor Edwin D. Hoffman, that resisting Governor Timmerman would "encourage teachers to stand on their own hind legs and be men," was not realized. 

Rep. Paul S. McChesney, Jr., a member of the investigative committee
From the 1958 SC legislative manual via  South Carolina State Library

Rep. James A. Spruill, Jr., a member of the investigative committee
From the 1958 SC legislative manual via  South Carolina State Library

Rep. T. Emmet Walsh., a member of the investigative committee
From the 1958 SC legislative manual via  South Carolina State Library

W. E. B. DuBois comes to South Carolina

W. E. B. Du Bois in 1947
From Wikipedia

On February 11, 1957, W. E. B. Du Bois delivered a speech titled "The American Negro and the Darker World" at Benedict College in Columbia, SC. Du Bois had been invited to speak in early January by Allen University professor Edwin D. Hoffman. Du Bois spoke as the university's guest speaker for Negro History Week (a precursor to Black History Month). The talk was jointly sponsored by Allen and Benedict.

Du Bois's talk was announced in The State newspaper. The announcement was only two paragraphs long, but his arrival was certainly a major event. Columbia, South Carolina rarely hosted visitors of his stature.  At the time, Du Bois was almost ninety years old and a distinguished, internationally renown intellectual and civil rights activist.

Du Bois had long been active in international politics as he connected American anti-Black racism to colonialism and global capitalism. During the late 1940s and 1950s, he began to express sympathy for socialism because it offered a political alternative.

As American concerns over socialism rose and tensions with the Soviet Union grew, Du Bois became a political target. In 1951, the Justice Department alleged that an anti-war organization that Du Bois was involved in (the Peace Information Center) was acting as an agent for the Soviet Union. This required the organization to register with the federal government, but Du Bois and others refused, claiming that the allegations were false. Because of his refusal, Du Bois was indicted, but the legal case was dismissed the next year. By the time of his visit to Columbia, the controversy surrounding him died down. In its announcement of his talk, The State described him simply as an "American Negro sociologist and author." No indication was given that he might be a source of political controversy, although certainly Du Bois's views were regarded as outside the pale by many White South Carolinians.

Bacoats Hall
From Benedict College 1970 Benedictus yearbook

Du Bois spoke in the evening at Bacoats Hall on the Benedict campus. The event began with the singing of The Battle Hymn of the Republic and concluded with the singing of Life Ev'ry Voice and Sing. Both songs had major political significance. Life Ev'ry Voice and Sing was (and is) regarded as the Black national anthem, and singing it was an act of rebuke of South Carolina's segregationist culture. The song Battle Hymn of the Republic was even more politically provocative. The song was written by the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe and served as an informal anthem for the Union army during the Civil War. The lyrics included a direct call for the emancipation of slaves: "let [us] die to make men free." 

Reflecting the emphasis on religion at the school, Du Bois's speech was preceded by a prayer delivered by Wallace E. Crumlin, an Allen faculty member who taught religious education. Du Bois was introduced by Benedict president J. A. Bacoats.

Allen faculty member Wallace E. Crumlin
Allen University 1957 Yellow Jacket

Benedict president J. A. Bacoats
Benedict College 1970 Benedictus

The text below is based on a draft held at the Special Collections and University Archives at University of Massachusetts Amherst. The text likely differs from the speech Du Bois delivered at Benedict. The draft is for a version of the speech he gave to the National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership, and it is dated April 30, 1957, a few months after his visit to Columbia. 

In his speech, Du Bois draws on two themes. First, he embeds the historical mistreatment of African-Americans into the broader history of the exploitation of labor, especially colonial labor, by capital. For example, he argues that capital responded to the emancipation of slaves in America by increasing its efforts to extract wealth from Asia and to extract labor from the working classes of the West through use of factory work. Second, he argues that African-Americans were becoming increasingly estranged from "the colored people of the world." While many people in African were organizing against imperialism and promoting the development of socialism, African-Americans are largely trying to assimilate into American culture and regarded socialism as harmful political philosophy that ran counter to American values. Despite the material advantages that they enjoy, Du Bois argued that African-Americans have a much more limited understand of their political situation than the people of African nations. He concluded by calling upon his audience to educate themselves about socialism.

In his autobiography Liberalism Is Not Enough, Benedict professor Horace B. Davis wrote about how Du Bois's speech was received. He wrote that the students at Benedict and Allen were mostly "conventionally patriotic" and saw no connection between American capitalism and their own political oppression. Du Bois's speech had an impact on them. The students paid close attention and, after the talk, many began to learn more about socialism for themselves.

While its highly unlikely that they attended the talk, White politicians in South Carolina would have been outraged to hear that Du Bois had encouraged students at Benedict and Allen to learn about socialism and act in solidarity with the people of India, China, and Africa. However, the speech appears to have gone unnoticed. When the governor began publicly attacking the schools a year later, he made no mention of Du Bois's visit. Du Bois's visit also not mentioned in Forrest Wiggins's FBI file, although Wiggins and the other professors were under close scrutiny around this time. 

From the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries the Africans imported to America regarded themselves as temporary settlers destined to return eventually to Africa. Their increasing revolts against the slave system, which culminated in the eighteenth century, left a feeling for close kinship to the motherland and even well into the nineteenth century they called their organizations "African," as witness the "African Unions" of New York and Newport, and the African church of Philadelphia. In the West Indies and South America, there was even closer indication of feelings of kinship with Africa and the East. 

The early excuse for American slavery on the part of planters was conversion to Christianity; but as slavery became the basis of great income in the sugar empire and the cotton kingdom, and as plans were laid for its expansion, the slaves in the United States sought freedom by escape to the north and joined with the abolitionists to fight for emancipation. The whites as well as many blacks now reverted to the first excuse for slavery, namely conversion of Africa to Christianity; and many plans arose for repatriation of negroes to Africa. The American Colonization Society was the best known, but soon earned the distrust of negroes when it became a method of getting rid of free negroes so as to fasten the chains closer on slaves.

When, later in the nineteenth century, the plight of the slave worsened, there arose again among American negroes plans for migration not only to Africa but to Haiti and South America. Civil War and Emancipation intervened and American negroes looked forward to becoming free and equal citizens here with no thought of returning to African or of kinship with the world's darker peoples. However, the rise of the negro was hindered by disfranchisement, lynching, and caste legislation. There was some recurrence of the "Black to Africa" idea and increased sympathy for darker folk who suffered the same sort of caste restrictions as American negroes.

But this brought curious dichotomy. In our effort to be recognized as Americans, we negroes naturally strove to think American and adopt American folkways. We began to despise all yellow, brown, and black peoples. We especially withdrew from all remembrance of kinship with Africa and denied with the white world that African ever had a history of indigenous culture. We did not want to be called "Africans" or negroes and especially not "negresses." We tried to invent new names for our group. We began to call yellow people "chinks" and "coolies" and dark whites "dagoes." This was natural under our peculiar situation, but it made us more easily neglect or lose sight of the peculiar change in the world which was linking us with the colored peoples of the world not simply because of the essentially unimportant fact of skin color, but because of the immensely important fact of economic condition.

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Europe had begun to expand its trade and to important raw materials to be transformed into consumer goods. Machines and methods for manufacture of foods increased tremendously. When the revolt of slaves, especially in Haiti, and the moral revolt in England and America, led to the emancipation of slaves, the merchants who had invested in the slave labor began to change the form of their investment; they seized colonies in Asia and Africa and instead of exporting native labor, used the land and labor on the spot and exported the raw materials to Europe for consumption  or further manufacture. Immense amounts of wealth for capital were seized for Europeans in India and China, in South America and elsewhere; and thus colonial imperialism arose to dominate the world. Most of the exploited people were colored – yellow, brown, and black. A scientific theory arose and was widely accepted which taught that the white people were superior to the colored and had a right to rule the world and use all land and labor for the benefit and comfort of Europeans. While the emancipation of slaves in America involved great losses for Europeans investors, the simultaneous seizure of wealth in Asia and the new control of colonial labor enabled new rich employers in Europe and North America to accumulate vast sums of capital in private hands and to start the factory system. This method of conducting industry used new inventions and sources of power so as to drive laborers off the land, herd them into factories and reduce them to semi-slavery in Europe by a wage contract.

This brought the labor movement. In the more advanced European countries labor and its friends fought for more political power, public school education, higher wages and better conditions. These things they gradually secured by union organization and strikes. On the other hand, in Eastern Europe there was little education and wages remained very low. Political power rested in the hands of an aristocracy which became rich through encouraging and protecting western investment. This semi-colonial status of labor was even worse in South and Central America and in the West Indies, while in most of Asia and in Africa the condition of colonial labor approached slavery.

Thereupon arose the doctrine of socialism which demanded that the results of the manufacture of goods and the giving of services go to the labor involved and not mainly to the capitalists. This doctrine was in essence as old as human labor. Primitive labor got all the results of what it did or made. Many early societies like the first Christians and tribes in Africa lived in communal groups, sharing all results of work in common. Slavery intervened so that some workers were owned by others; then came aristocracy where a few took the results of the work of the many and the nation became the abode of a rich, idle and privileged class who were served by the mass of laborers. Protest against this and the doctrine that income should in some degree become the measure of effort became an increasing demand from the ancient world through the medieval world and was studied and scientifically stated by Karl Marx in the first half of the nineteenth century. He proposed that capital belong to the state and that workers run the state. Capitalists vehemently opposed this and partially met the demands of labor by raising wages. In the capitalist nations this raise was more than met by increased profits due to exploitation in colonial and semi-colonial lands. Also the spread of democratic control was counterbalanced by hiring White labor to war on colonial labor, and using public taxation for war rather than social progress.

From the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 to the First World War there was continuous struggle led by White troops armed with the most ingenious weapons to keep colonial peoples from revolt, and most of the other peoples of the world in subjection to Western Europe.

This was the situation at the beginning of the twentieth century. British, French, and American capitalists owned the colonies, with the richest natural resources and the best controlled and lowest paid labor. By 1900, they were reaching out for other colonies elsewhere: other nations with fewer or no colonies, led by Germany, demanded a reallotment of colonial wealth. This brought the First World War. 

But it brought more than this: the assault of Germany and her allies was so fierce that Britain and France had to ask help from their colored colonies. They needed black manpower and without it France would have been overthrown by Germany in the first few months of war. Britain needed food and materials from Asia, Africa, and the West Indies. The United States needed American negroes who formed an inner labor colony as laborers and stevedores. This meant an increase of wages and rights for colonial peoples. In the United States it brought the first recognition since 1876 of the equal citizenship of negroes. 

The workers of Eastern, Central and South America were not as badly off as the African serfs and Chinese and Indian coolies but they were sunk in poverty, disease, and ignorance. They were oppressed by their own rich classes, working hand in glove with White Western investors. When war came they starved and died. The situation became so desperate that Russians and Hungarians refused to fight. Their rulers sought compromise by trying to replace imperial rule with Western European democracy. But the Russian leaders, students of Karl Marx and led by Lenin, demanded a socialist state.

The Western world united to forestall this experiment. It said first that no socialist state could succeed, but lest it should and lower the profits of capitalists, the effort must be stopped by force of arms. Sixteen capitalists nations, including Britain, France, Germany, the United States, and Japan, invaded Russia and fought for ten years by means civilized and uncivilized, to overthrow the plans of the Soviet Union. However, the world-wide collapse of capitalism in 1930, made this attack fail and the world witnessed the founding of the first socialist state.

Then came a new and even more unexpected diversion. The Depression, which was the collapse of capitalism, was so bad in Germany, Spain, and Italy that those states fell into the hands of two dictators, Hitler and Mussolini. Backed by capitalists, they seized power and demanded control not only of the colonial world then dominated by Britain, France, and North America, but the domination of the whole world. The west tried to compromise and offered practically everything they demanded, but Hitler's greed and German ambition grew by what they fed upon. They were so convinced of their superior power over the West that Hitler started a Second World War, like the first aimed at control by a part of the White race over the resources, land, and labor of the rest of the world. He began a wild career. He killed six million Jews, accusing them of being the main cause of the Depression and of being an inferior race. He conquered France and chased the British off the continent. They huddled on their own small island to make a last stand, but here Hitler paused. He had a new vision. If instead of wasting his power on a desperate England he turned East and seized the semi-colonial lands of the Soviet Union and Balkan states, then from this central heartland he could seize Asia and Africa and after that turn back to deliver the coup de grace to Britain and America. Hitler thereupon scrapped his treaty with the Soviets which they, spurned by the West, had been forced to accept, and to the relief of Britain and the United States, Hitler turned to conquer Russia. Englishmen and Americans said with Truman, "Let them kill as many of each other as possible." So, although Hitler's rear was exposed, the Western powers held off attack for a year and when they did attack went to the defense of their African colonies and not to aid the Soviet Union. The West was sure that the Soviets would fall in six weeks and thus perhaps rid the world of socialism and Nazis at one stroke.

The result was astonishing. The Soviet Union almost unaided conquered Hitler, saved the Baltic states and the Balkans at a cost of nine million killed and wounded and the distruction [sic destruction] of much they had toiled for since 1917. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin faced a world in which the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and the United States must go forward toward a world in which socialism would grow, not perhaps as complete communistic states like the Soviet Union, but in states like the United States and England where social progress under the New Deal and the Labor government would advance together along paths leading to the same ultimate goal.

This co-operation American Business repudiated when it invented the Atom bomb. After Roosevelt died, our capitalists determined to drive communism from the world and push socialism back. This crusade failed. India became independent and adopted modified socialism; China conquered the stool-pigeons whom we paid to stop her revolution and became the greatest communist state in the world. The Soviet Union, instead of failing as we predicted, became one of the foremost nations of the Earth, with the best educational system and freedom from church domination second only to this nation in industry. Also the Soviet Union took a legal stand against the color line and stood ready to oppose colonialism. We tried to re-conquer China during the war in Korea and to help France retain Indo-China, but again failed. Meantime we formed the greatest military machine on earth and spent and are still spending more money preparing for war than any other nation on earth at any time has spent.

The excuse for our action is that communism is a criminal conspiracy of evil-minded men and that private capitalism is so superior to socialism that we should use every effort to stop its advance. Here we rest today and to sharpen our aim and coordinate our strength, we starve our schools, lessen social services in medicine and housing, curtail our freedom of speech, limit our pursuit of learning, and are no longer free to think or discuss.

Where now does that leave American negroes? We cannot teach the peoples of Africa or Asia because so many of them are either communistic or progressing towards socialism, while we do not know what socialism is and we can study it only with difficulty or danger. After the First World War we negroes were in advance of many colored peoples. We started in two ways to lead the Africans. In the West Indies Garvey tried to have negroes share in western exploitation of Africa. White industry stopped him before he could begin. In the United States negro churches carried on missionary efforts and a few negroes in 1918 tried to get in touch with Africa so as to share thoughts and plans. Four Pan-African congresses were held in 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1925, which American, African, and West Indian negroes attended, and a few persons from Asia and South America. They made a series of general demands for political rights and education. The movement met much opposition. However, it encouraged similar congresses which still exist in all parts of Africa, and it was the inspiration back [sic?] of Mandates Commission of the League of Nations and the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations. After a lapse of twenty years, a fifth Pan-African congress was held in England in 1945. It was attended by negro labor leaders from all parts of Africa and from the West Indies and one from the United States. Especially prominent were the delegates from Kenya and Ghana, the first independent Black dominion of the British Commonwealth. The resolutions adopted here had a clear socialist trend, and further Pan-African congresses were envisioned to be held in Africa. 

Whither now do we go? We American negroes can no longer lead the colored people of the world because they far better than we understand what is happening in the world today. But we can try to catch with them. We can learn about China and India and the new ferment in East, West, and South Africa. We can realize by reading, if not in classroom, how socialism is expanding over the modern world and penetrating the colored world. So far as Africa is concerned we can realize that socialism is part of their past history and will without a shade of doubt play a large part in their future.

Here in our country, we can think, work and vote for the welfare state openly and frankly, for social medicine, publicly supported housing, state ownership of public power and public facilities: curbing the power of private capital and great monopolies and stand ready to meet and cooperate with world socialism as it grows among White and Black.

Citation: Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. The American Negro and the darker world, April 30, 1957. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries 

Calvin C. Hernton on Benedict and Allen

Calvin C. Hernton
From blackpast.org

The following letter was written by Calvin C. Hernton to Lee Lorch. At the time, Hernton was teaching at Benedict College, and Lorch was a math professor at Philander Smith College. Hernton and Lorch had met in the mid-1950s at Fisk University, where Hernton was a graduate student in sociology and Lorch a professor of mathematics. Lorch had been dismissed from Fisk in 1955. He had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee after trying to enroll his (white) daughter in a Black elementary school, and his testimony was used as grounds for dismissing him from the university. Many students – including Hernton – protested against Lorch's dismissal. 

Lorch's professorship at Philander Smith was his first job after being dismissed from Fisk. Hernton  received his M.A. from Fisk in 1956 and then worked as a social worker in New York City before moving to Benedict in 1957. At Benedict, he taught history. 

Hernton's letter is dated April 6, 1958, after he'd been at Benedict for about a year. This was towards the end of the governor's attacks on Allen and Benedict. A few months earlier, in February, a six-man college committee had reported that they had found no incidents of faculty promoting communism on campus. This temporarily brought the college a reprieve, although Hernton's letter indicates that many faculty were still fearful of being dismissed. Later developments proved that those fears were valid. A month after Hernton's letter, on May 2, the three professors accused of being communists (J. S. Kennard, Marion Davis, and Lewis Smith) were informed that would be summarily dismissed from the university if they did not resign within four days. The professors did not tender their resignations, so on May 7, the Board of Trustees announced that their contacts would not be renewed. All the professors had left the college by the start of the next term. 

It is not totally clear what happened with Hernton. Although he would been a natural target of political attacks, his name never appeared in public discussion about the governor's attacks on the college. However, he did leave the college at the end of the year. He spent the remainder of the 1950s teaching at HBCUs in the south, working at Alabama A. & M. (1958-59), Edward Waters College (1959-60), and Southern University and A. & M. (1960-61).

Dear Dr. Lorch:

This is Calvin Hernton. I know it must be astounding (if not offensive) to be hearing from me suddenly like this after three years of oblivion. Especially, since the occasion for this letter is forced by the need of a favor. I do wish to say however, that although I have not written since being the object of your humanity at Fisk, I have thought frequently of you and the things you stand for, and have followed newspaper accounts of whatever struggles you have undertaken.

Since leaving Fisk I have been involved in a number of things in and around New York. This last year I came to Benedict College as an instructor of History. Upon arriving here, I immediately joined in the struggle that was going on -- the struggle of Allen University against the racist and facistic-like [sic] segregationists of this state as led the governor. As I know you are well up on the struggle here (which new enwraps Benedict College also), I shall not belabor the case through its every detail. I would like to mention though (again, as you probably know) that one of the most damnable forces against progress is the fact that the black people who are in positions to lead and wheel [wield?] influence, 95% of them are collaborationists with the white bigots against the interests of their own people. The tzarist-like rule of ignorant college administrators, backed by the "downtown crew", accounts for more than half of the desolation in the efforts of those here who have and are pushing the fight. I mean the fight not only centered around the propossed [sic] ousting of certain instructors at both college, not only the challenge Allen and Benedict to withstand the efforts of the state white supremist [sic] dictatorial actions, but the struggle of Negroes to enter a university to which a large percentage of their taxes go. Fundamentally, one lone woman in the local community and a half dozen professors in the academic arena, stand to carry this three-cornered struggle, while in the background the people in positions to lead are doing everything they can to halt progress and discredit those who are doing and would do otherwise. But who am I talking to -- I'm sure this is old stuff for you.

One more specific incident is worth mentioning. A month ago I obtained rights from Leften Mitchell to produce his play, A Land Beyond The River, the play about the South Car. school integration suit. This was to be a joint affair between the faculties of Allen and Benedict. Finally, after much hedging and 'politicting', a cast was secured and  rehearsals got underway. Once the people got into the play, they liked it very much, and there was enthusiasm. The date of performance was scheduled April 29. We are not having the play now.

Three days ago the presidents of the two college meet [sic]. (pressure had already been put on some faculty members to withdraw, but to no avail) Subsequently, an Allen faculty meeting was called in which the president (dictator) stated, without any reasons at all, that there would be no play this year. The thing that infuriates me is that no body had guts enough to challenge or merely ask WHY? They are all scared stiff of losing their indecent jobs!

And this brings me to the main point of this letter: they have a way of waiting until the last day in May before firing instructors who do not have tenure and who have not conducted themselves like a "good little Nigra teacher". I do not have tenure and I know I have not been a good little boy. I would therefore appreciate it if you should know of any openings (at any place) in the Social Studies area, and would recommend me and let me know very soon. I shall write directly to the president of Philander Smith shortly; but it's always good if one is recommended by someone already employed where you are seeking a job; it helps sometimes, they say.

So if it is not too much please let me hear from you. Meanwhile, I send my fondest wishes and please remember me to Alice and Mrs. Lorch.

Sincerely yours, 

Calvin C. Hernton

The text of this letter from taken from the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University (Call no. 2007-054/025(16).) 

Forrest O. Wiggins's speech: The Ideology of Interest

An announcement of Wiggins's speech
Wiggins, Forrest Oran. Correspondence. (Box 1, Folder 3). 1946 - 1951-11. University of Minnesota Libraries, University Archives.

On January 22, 1951, Forrest O. Wiggins delivered his speech "The Ideology of Interest" at the Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota. Wiggins spoke as part of an event held as part of the university's Centennial Lecture Series. The event was titled "Conflict in the Social Order," and it was sponsored by student and professional organizations like Future Teachers of American and the Sociology Club. 

The purpose of the event was to provide students with an opportunity to study ideological problems related to social conflict. In addition to Wiggins, the political science professor Mulford Q. Sibley and the sociologist Benjamin N. Nelson also spoke, and a panel discussion between the three professors was moderated by the sociologist George B. Vold. About 150 to 200 people attended Wiggins's talk, mostly students and a handful of faculty. 

The text of Wiggins's speech is as follows:

In an extremely pessimistic mood at the time preceding the Civil War, when men seemed to be unable to become aroused over the contradiction between the expressed tenets of democracy and human slavery, Thoreau wrote: "What is the price current of an honest man and patriot today? They will wait, well disposed for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote and a feeble countenance and Goodspeed to the right, as it goes them by."

The new world situation which has come into being as a result of the defeat of fascism requires a reorientation in our ways of thinking. There seems to be no doubt that if we are to be entirety pragmatic, we should examine the fundamental ideologies which have led us into two world-embracing wars within a single generation and a situation where we did not get out of the last business depression except by means of war.

This means to say, and I shall repeat it ad nauseum that capitalism did not emerge from the last depression by any natural causes indigenous to capitalism itself.

If we are to examine some of the basic economic political creeds, we would find, I think, that we have accepted capitalism as the best economic system, democracy with its principles of majority-minority divisions, plus as a political and social philosophy bolstering and lending support to these political and economic systems. Furthermore, I think we should assume the hegemony of the white race over the backward and colonial peoples of the world. 

In the space of some thirty or forty years, and with a pace unparalleled in its rapidity since the close of the last war, these four basic assumptions are no longer valid, nor are they held by a majority of mankind throughout the world. At the very outset, let us enunciate in the clearest possible tones:

1. The present conflict in the world today is not a conflict between democracy and communism; the present conflict in the world today is between capitalism and socialism.
2. The proponents of capitalism are in a distinct minority.
3. The domination of the white race over the rest of the world is no longer possible.
4. The most powerful leader of capitalism is the United States; the most powerful leader of socialism is the Soviet Union.

Conflict of interest is telescoped and brought into sharp focus by means of war. We ought to ask ourselves, "Who are the people who want war at the present time?" The Koreans? Their towns and villages and cities and hospitals and schools and huts are reduced to rubble. More than three-fourths of Korea is destroyed. The population has suffered a loss of more than one hundred thousand casualties. The Koreans do not want war. The Chinese in a period of some twenty years, in which they have been struggling for independence, have lost more than ten million lives. They are only one year out of an internal civil war. The great job of the Chinese is that of reconstruction and industrialization. The Chinese do not want war. The German elections show that the German people will not shoulder arms in defense of Western democracies. The Russians don't want war. Who is it, then, who wants war.

The answer is that it is the capitalists and the militarists in the United States who want war.

I shall let the truth come out of the horses's mouth; I shall give you a series of quotations which will prove this thesis. We may lay down the general principle that American business standard for the proposition that the United States economy requires military spending inevitably leads to military action. And here I call upon the spokesmen of capitalism to speak for themselves.

In Barron's Financial Weekly, of August 7, we find this statement: "The United States has inherited an imperial mantle as order-keeper for the world.... In the past this was left to others, notably the British... In this century the task devolves upon United States leadership; there is no other. Wall Street has a part of play in the immediate re-arming of America... It will do so not just by supplying the Treasury with dollars, but supplying as in the part, intelligent and courageous leadership."

Dr. Palyi, former banker and professor of finance at the University of Chicago, writing in the Commercial and Financial Chronicle of August 12, 1950, states, "We have underwritten Europe's colonial empires as well as the highly artificial semi-totalitarian structures which grew out of them."

Dr. Virgil Jordan, president of the National Industrial Conference Board, says, "America has embarked upon a career of imperialism, both in world affairs and in every aspect of her life... At best, England will become a junior partner of the new Anglo-Saxon imperialism, in which the economic resources and military and naval strength of the United States will be the center of gravity. Southward in our Hemisphere and Westward in the Pacific the path of empire takes its way, and in modern terms of economic power as well as political prestige, the sceptre  [rec scepter] passes to the United States...

"We have no alternative, in truth than to move along the road we have been traveling in the past quarter century, in the direction we took with the conquest of Cube and the Philippines, and our participation in World War I."

Austin Kiplinger, in the Chicago Journal of Commerce, March 2, 1949, writes, "In ABC's, the facts are these: The United States can produce more than its present capacity to consume. Increased consumption at home will sop up some of this excess, but still more excess will remain.

"We sell this excess abroad. And since the rest of the world is not up to our standard of production, we must decide what to take in payment. We can let the deficit stand as a debt which will probably never be paid. Or... and this is where imperialism comes in... we can't take ownership of properties throughout the world, and help to run them. 

"And if we do this, we shall have to cooperate with our own government and foreign governments to arrange the political weather under which American ownership abroad will be carried out...

"Since we are going to be stuck with the role of the imperialists, let us dramatize the new imperialism as an extension of the American way of life, and the American productive system..."

But we could use our productive resources at home. United States News and World Report of April 22, 1949, says "Official planners estimate that a shelf of needed public works at this time could total as much as 127 billion dollars." A few of the things talked about in Washington include such items as road building, 60 billion; floor control, 13 billion; schools, 10,5 billion; waterworks, 9.5 billion; hospitals, 8.5 billion. In the same issue, it states, "Armaments is the new great program for pump priming."

But let us continue. Justice Douglas made this statement: "War is the only divide the government can design to give maximum production and full employment."

David Lawrence, editor of the United States News and World Report, wrote on January 1, 1949, "Present prosperity is underwritten by billions being spent for armaments. Ending the cold war could bring economic upheaval in the United States."

In the Los Angeles Times, October, 1950, speaking of the Koreans and speaking rather prematurely, I think we will agree now, we find this statement: "The United States has won another war... Despite the fiction of carrying out a United Nations police action [and of course that's completely inaccurate], we have a clearer claim to write out our own ticket than in 1918, or even in 1945. For we have not only become the mightiest of military nations, we also stand as the fountainhead of the world's diplomatic leadership, of the world's wealth... Who else dominates the seven seas and the air above them?... We truthfully bestride the world like a colossus. Well, somebody's got to be boss. What are we waiting for?"

Now, of course, a United States Senator will not speak with such bluntness, but the worlds of Senator Sparkman of Alabama before the United Nations Economic Committee on October 25, 1950, echo the same sentiments. Quoting from Senator Sparkman:

"I wonder how many people appreciate the significance of the war in Korea on the international investment picture. It is possible that the long-range effect of the Korean War will be beneficial to the international flow of private capital."

This country has embarked upon a career of Marshall Plan aid, Atlantic Pacts, and the arming of the free nations. After five years of a spending spree, which again has been unparalleled in the history of the world, Scott Nearing says that these are the two results:

1. "In various countries grabbers and exploiters threatened by popular movements have turned to the Truman administration for help. Many of them have got the money and arms they asked for. Each Washington grant of support to a minority of grabbers and exploiters has alienated the exploited majority. Are the Marshall Plan countries ready to stand by the U.S.A. in an atomic war against the U.S.S.R.? Britain, improbably. France and Italy, emphatically not.

2. "Since 1945, the United States has taken part in half a dozen undeclared wars in which imperialist landlords and capitalists were financed, armed, organized and directed by U.S. interests and personnel. This happened in Indonesia, Greece and China. Four other such wars are still in progress – in the Philippines, South Korea and Formosa. In each of these four wars, United States money, arms, equipment, and military advisers are helping to suppress popular movements. Such a policy could not win the support of the people, but only their masters and exploiters. Most notable among the examples of the outcomes which ultimately follows such a policy was the 1949 debacle for the Nationalists in China.

3. "In 1950, United States influence, based on the assumption that this country is a progressive force, has been all but dissipated. Particularly among the colonial people, the United States today is looked upon as imperialist and reactionary.

4. "Even though present United States policy may not guarantee peace, its advocates insist that it will surely bring victory – (a) victory by imperialists in an age which has repudiated imperialism; (b) victory by exploiters in an age which has repudiated exploitation; (c) victory by proponents of competition in an age which can survive only the basis of cooperation; (d) victory by an isolated,  even though industrialized, nation based upon military operations across two oceans and directed against the Eurasian heartland of the planet....

"... The Truman administration is making war on the emerging social order. Any such program is foredoomed to defeat."

That's the international picture. What is the domestic picture? For you cannot understand the international picture unless you see it as the reverse side of the coin of the domestic picture. If we look for persons who profit from the present war scares and hysteria as well as those that pay for the way, the answer becomes rather obvious. 

Corporation profits in 1939 were 6 1/2 billion dollars. Corporation profits in 1950 were 50 billion dollars. The working capital of United States corporations has increased 185 per cent since World War II began. From 1945 to 1949, in a space of four years, the corporations had piled up 135 billions in profits before taxes, and 78 billions after taxes. The farm income is down 2 billion dollars from last year. By a strange coincidence, Truman's defense war budget for 1950 was 50 billion dollars, which is exactly the estimated profits of corporations for the same year.

Now, where do these profit increases come from? First, they come from increased worker productivity. Worker productivity is 32 per cent greater than in 1939 and 65 per cent greater than in 1929. Secondly, it comes from a rise in prices. Profit after taxes rose 27 per cent in the first half of 1950 over the similar period in 1949, which was the highest in the history of our country. Although profits rose 27 per cent, sales rose only 8 per cent. In steel, the profit increase was 19 per cent over the corresponding period last year, and the sale rose only 3 per cent. I hope this gives a lie to the statement that increased profits are due to increased sales.

Here is a nice juicy item, and I will be through with quoting statistics for awhile, I hope. Today's report of the Standard Oil Company was really something. The company broke all records and with gross revenue of $3,322,000,000.00, it turned in a new profit of 365 million dollars which was obviously commented on as meaning that the Standard Oil Company had a profit of a million dollars a day throughout the year. Possibly prices could be lowered without hiring profits very much, in view of the big gross revenue. Possibly the directors may be thinking some time of splitting the stock.. for there would be an advantage... if profits per share do not look so large.

I shall not bore you with what is going on too much; this is an economic age, and I shall give you just a few more figures: Over the third quarter, profits after taxes (I shall give you just a few here) from 1949 to 1950 in food and baking goods have gone up 31 per cent; in iron and steel, 68 percent; in chemicals, 83 percent; in paper and paper pulp, 116 per cent; in textiles, 205 per cent; in mining and minerals, 563 per cent over last year. [Footnote cites "Wall Street Journal, November 8, 1950.]

What happened? The 1939 dollar is now only worth 59 cents in terms of purchasing power. The retail prices of consumers goods is 70 per cent higher than 1939.

Who profits by this? General Foods is owned by Morgan-Rockefeller interests, Standard Brands by Morgan, Continental Can by Morgan-Goldman-Sachs, American Can by Morgan, National Dairy by Morgan, National Biscuit Company by Morgan, Swift and Company by Kuhn, Loeb, Morgan, ad infinitum.

Each of these large financial empires has its representatives in key policy-making positions in the United States government. At the same time that these financial giants are systematically looting the country in the name of patriotism, the government is clamoring for controls and wage freezes, for the passage of an income tax which places the highest increases on the lowest incomes, and refuses to hold down rents and prices. Dewey says we must become like Spartans, give up conveniences. And Truman tells us we must tighten our belts, and, to give us a good example, according to Drew Pearson, within the last month he went on a diet and lost eleven pounds.

I would like to name a few of the men who control the political and economic destiny of this country. Number one is Mr. Charles E. Wilson, to whom Truman has given all of his powers granted under the emergency act. Who is Mr. Wilson. He is president of General Electric, one of the greatest monopolistic anti-labor corporations in the country.

General Lucius Clay, chairman of the board of Continental Can Company and former military governor of United States Occupied Germany, a many who was most instrumental in scrapping the decartelization programs for Germany.

William H. Harrison, president of International Telephone and Telegraph, who is now administrator of the National Production Authority. 

John D. Small, president of Maxson Food Systems, Inc., vice-president of Emerson Radios, now heads the Munitions Board. 

Winthrop W. Aldrich, brother-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., board chairman of Rockefeller's Chase National Bank, chairman of the National Advisory Committee on International Finance, which counsels the Secretary of the Treasury. He is now at the head of the President's Committee on International Trade with dominant influence on Mr. Truman's Point Four Program.

Paul Henry Nitze, vice-president of Dillon-Read, investment banks, head of the State Department Policy Planning Board since December, 1949.

General William Draper, vice-president of Dillon-Read, investment bankers. Dillion-Read [sic Dillon-Read] was closely associated with the German cartels. General Draper was chief economic officer in Germany from 1945 to 1947. He was the Under-Secretary of the Army from 1947 to 1949. [A footnote cites "James Stewart Martin, All Honorable Men, pp. 190ff."]

Dillon-Read is really something. Along with Brown Brothers and Harriman, they placed more than 86 per cent of the two billion dollars which the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis borrowed from the United States investors before the last war.

I shall not bore you any more with the listing of the connections between big business and the policy making positions in the government of the United States. But the Matthews, the Symingtons, the Perkins, the Johnsons, the Webbs – all of these are representatives of ig, monopolistic industries in the financial houses of American.

It was Woodrow Wilson who told us that if you wanted to understand modern wars, you would have to look at them in terms of their economic origin. In Taft's last speech before the Senate, he urges us to drop all pretense of idealism in our international affairs, and I would like to quote him. Mr. Taft says, "Its purpose [he means American foreign policy] is not to reform the entire world or to spread sweetness and light and economic prosperity to people who have lived and worked our their own salvation for centuries."

The war program is possibly only if American people are convinced that we are threatened from outside by an invasion by the Soviet Union and, more recently, we have added China. President Truman's message on the State of the Union said, "Our homes, our nation, all the things we believe in, are in grave danger." And although he explicitly names the Soviet Union as the aggressor in this conflict of interests, no Soviet armed forced have appeared anywhere on the scene.

The President and the Secretary of State have repeatedly given voice to the claim that the Soviet Union recognizes only force and, by implication, that the United States only recognizes only mercy, righteousness and justice. The President says that his policies will bring peace, security and prosperity to the world and freedom at the same time. He implements his peace policy by forcing a reluctant Europe to rearm, lay down plans for the re-militarization of Germany and Japan, calls for the draft of eighteen-year-old boys, and through the passage of the McCarran law, transforms the United States into a police state.

How real is the threat to our homes and to our way of life by the Soviet Union? Let me repeat the remark of a few minutes ago. The Soviet Union has not had a single soldier engaged in war since the cessation of hostilities. This is the only major power in the world of which this may be said.

Ehrenburg, speaking at the Warsaw Peace Conference[,] said, [sic omit comma] "Never has a single political leader, a single deputy, a single journalist or teacher in the Soviet Union called for war against the United States or any other power."

I would like to give you one more quotation from Senator Taft's recent speech, as reported in the Minneapolis Morning Tribute, January 6, of this year: "I do not myself see any conclusive evidence that (the Russians) expect to start a war with the United States. I see no reason for a general panic bn [sic "based"] the assumption that they will do so."

Mr. Dulles, along with Mr. Acheson, and perhaps even more than Mr. Acheson, is a director of a foreign policy of the United States. I would like to give you one or two quotations of Mr. Dulles. At the Federal Council of Churches Conferences on March 9, 1949, Mr. Dulles says, "I do not know any responsible official, military or civilian, in this or any other government, who believes that the Soviet Union now plans conquest by open military aggression."

In an off-the-record speech before the Overseas Writers' Association, January 10th of last year (this was at the time of the Berlin air lift, at the same time when the Senate of the United States was being asked to ratify the Atlantic Pact) , Mr. Dulles said, "There could be a settlement of the Berlin situation at any time on the basis of Soviet currency for Berlin and our right to bring in food, raw materials, and fuel to the Western sectors. The present situation is, however, to United States advantage for propaganda purposes. We are getting credit for keeping the people in Berlin from starving; the Russians are getting the blame for their privation. If we settle Berlin, then we have to deal with Germany as a whole. We will have to deal immediately with a Russian proposal for a withdrawal of all occupation troops and a return of Germany to Germans. Frankly, I do not know what we would say to that."

Let us go back to our fundamental thesis enunciated in the beginning. War is a telescoping and focusing of a conflict of interests. We have been told that interests must necessarily conflict, that man is by nature selfish in looking after his own interests. Suppose we grant this. Can we use the principle of interest as the basis for human organization? We have been following the principle of interest for over 200 years. The mess we are in seems to me to be an adequate answer to this question.

The task of the human race at the present time is to see that interest does not become a principle upon which we organize human society. Our task is to find another, more suitable, principle of human organization before all of us are blown to oblivion.

I can only give you the outline, very briefly, of a new principle of human organization. I call it a new principle, but it is as old as the human race. It has been the principle upon which we have organized our education, our religion, our science, and the family. That is, that goods, things and property[,] shall be used only as instruments in the service of humanity. The family has always been organized on socialistic lines; the same is true of science; the same is true of the president organization of industry as distinguished from business.

In the world today 700 million people have organized their lives according to socialist principles. Beginning at zero in 1917, socialist has brought a third of the human race under that form of social organization. I would like to recall to you that the population of the United States is only roughly 6 per cent fo the world's population.

Both capitalists and socialists agree that the conflict of interests is a thing to be deplored, for it leads to competition and competition is destructive. In the very period when we have been giving the most of our lip service to the doctrine of "free enterprise" and "competition", we have seen the growth of our largest corporations and monopolies. 

For the problem of the conflict of interests between the capitalists and socialist have different solutions. The capitalists say that the social means of production must remain in private hands, roughly, in the United States, in the hands of some 8 per cent of the population. The socialists say that the social means of production must be under social control and directed by the public authorities.

Let us note one thing: that in times of crises, such as depression and war, capitalism must repudiate its own principles. In the first place, it must go in for planning on a national scale and wage-fixing, all of which are contrary to the basic tenets of capitalism. Secondly, it says that its system is predicated on the premise tha 4th public good is enchanted when each unit is at warfare with the other; when each is in competition with the other. It says that the strength of the system depends on each getting as much as he can for himself. But in times of war, the individual is asked to surrender this privilege and innate right on which the strength of the system itself depends, to sacrifice himself for the national interest. I hope I am making ti clear as I go along with the fundamental issues that face mankind today are concerned with the problem of property and they are all reducible to the question of property. There are few indications at the present time in the Western World that we recognize this fact. All the organizations and the political parties which are strong enough to do anything about the problem of property seem oblivious to the fact that it is a problem. Labor in the United States accepts the fundamental tenets of the private property system, so that there is very little shop in that direction. The teaching profession itself stands indicted also. Teachers have become petty business men and accepted the principle of interest. There is perhaps no faculty in the United States that would go to bat on an issue involving the dignity and integrity of the profession. Everywhere a faculty member is a petty business man looking out after his own interest and security with a consequence that the educational function has largely disappeared, lost in the morass of writing articles, book reviews and textbooks and buying groceries. The faculty members do not seem to know enough to see that the integrity of the human race is involved as well as the institutions of culture.

The British and the American people will hold on to the private property system until they are forced to let go. But if it is necessary to fight another war over the system of private property, not only will the capitalist system go but civilization and culture will go down too. But since civilization and culture will go if capitalism survives, the alternatives aren't too happy in any case.

In Britain and in the United States, the business system is winning; socialism is triumphing everywhere else. Any move which threatens the right of legitimate business to profit will be opposed by the gun and the bomb.

I should like to state one elementary political axiom: Property always has and always will rule the state. From this axiom certain propositions may be deduced:

1. To the degree that interest can be made objective, it will assume the form of property.

2. Political freedom without economic freedom is a myth, since the only way in which the will can assert itself is through property objects. Political democracy which does not embrace economic democracy is empty.

3. The will of the people as expressed in political bodies can find expression only when property is publicly owned.

The people want peace and security, a life of abundance and decency. The monopoly capitalists who run and control the American government want scarcity and profits, a "Cold War" if possibly and a "hot war" if necessary. From a world-wide point of view, the system of capitalism has tottered so much that it would fall completely if it were not supported by the United States. There is no logical, organize or necessary connection between capitalism and democracy. In fact, capitalism reached its highest stage of development in fascist Germany. 

Where there is a sharp, clear-cut conflict between civil rights guaranteed by democracy and the demands of profit made by capitalism, the civil rights will be suppressed. I would like to repeat Judge Douglas' statement: "War is the only device that the government can design to given maximal production and full employment." [A footnote reads "Quoted in Fred Stover's 'Atomic Blessing or Atomic Blasting'."] It is clear that for the continuation for capitalism as an economic system we are paying for it not only in terms of the destruction of our way of life, but also the destruction of our material goods and our conveniences. For we cannot build hospitals and homes, we cannot provide medical care and pay adequate salaries to our teachers, we cannot eat adequately. We have to pay for the continuation of capitalism in terms of our very lives.

Now, the ruling classes in every epoch of the world's history have identified the fate of the family, religion, government and civilization itself with the continuation of their rulership. We must, therefore, look with very hypercritical eyes at the present rulers of American when they announce their pious platitudes. I challenge their claims that their way is the American way. Rather do I identify the American was with abundance, peace, and prosperity. I do not identify it with witch-hunt and oppression, the denial of opportunity, monopoly capitalism, and the continuation of colonialism and war. 

Verify, verify, I say unto you, that this is the hour of decision. A resurgence, a reawakening is taking place all over the world. A new day is aborning. For those o you with the desire to participate, I say unto you: "Be ye not afraid, for you are many."

When this speech was given, Wiggins had been teaching at the University of Minnesota for five years, and university officials had been receiving complaints about his political activities for the past two years. Administrators initially defended Wiggins on free speech grounds, but they had begun to reverse their stance by the time of the speech. 

An administrator's report on Wiggins's speech lends some insight into the administration's views at this time. A staffer in the department of university relations (William T. Harris) attended the talk and then wrote a report for the vice president of academic administration (Malcolm M. Willey). The staffer focused on Wiggins's political beliefs: "Dr. Wiggins may or may not be a member of the communist party, but he certainly is an apologist for Soviet Russian and a devoted apostle of 'socialism'. He made this very clear in his talk and in his answers to questions that were put to him."

On the content of Wiggin's speech, the staffer wrote that Wiggins was "no orator" but his presentation was "fairly effective." The talk, he wrote, was organized by first introducing a "plausible point," documenting the point in detail using reputable citations, and then "[sliding] in a wedge of communist dogma which he implies is related the point just made but for which he offers no substantiation whatsoever." The staffer criticized Wiggins for his "blind devotion to the soviet system." According to the staffer, the talk was received "politely" but with little sympathy or enthusiasm. 

By then end of the year, Wiggins was informed that his contact at the University of Minnesota would not be renewed. Initially no justification was offered, but when pressed on the issue, the administration claimed that Wiggins had not be re-appointed because his scholarship was lacking. Wiggins' speech was used to support this assessment. The negative evaluation of Wiggins' scholarship was made by the dean, and the dean claimed to have analyzed the text of the speech in detail and concluded that it demonstrated a serious lack of the qualities of good scholarship.

Wiggins tried to challenge his dismissal from the university, and he received significant support from students and faculty. They were successful in bringing the matter to the public's attention, but they were unsuccessful in having Wiggins reinstated. He left the university during the summer of 1952 and moved to South Carolina to teach at Allen University.