Immersed In Red
ENDORSEMENTS
“Immersed in Red is a remarkably clear-eyed memoir of growing up in an American Communist family. Mike Shotwell’s stepfather, Orville Olson, a hidden Communist, was a key figure in liberal politics in Minnesota in the 1930s and 1940s. Shotwell provides his memories and reflections not only on Olson but also on numerous other hidden Communists, some nationally prominent, who worked with his stepfather over the decades. His portrait of the mental world of long-term, devoted Communists is thoroughly convincing. He combines his memories of his parents and their friends and associates with his own reflections on the nature of Communist ideology based on a very wide and intelligent reading of the literature and primary sources that document the rise and evolution of Communism and like-minded totalitarian belief-systems. Readers will learn much from this book.”
John Earl Haynes is the author of eleven scholarly books on American communism and Soviet espionage, most notably The Secret World of American Communism (Yale University Press, 1995)
“Immersed in Red provides a fascinating picture of growing up in a communist household. Mike Shotwell vividly recalls his stepfather, Orville Olson’s, rigid ideological world and the numerous friends who assisted Soviet intelligence agencies in their efforts to undermine American democracy.”
Harvey Klehr, co-author of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press, 2009)
This is a terrific read!! Immersed in Red is an intimate record of memories and meanings from one man’s very personal experience of the American left’s political insanity. Mike Shotwell gives us unique portraits of communists he and his family knew as friends and comrades beginning in his childhood. These memoires confirm beyond all doubt the many evolutionary links from twentieth-century Marxism, Stalinism and Leninism to the contemporary liberal-progressive movement in America. This book of unique insights spells out the congruence of irrational Soviet idealism with the modern left’s criminal agenda. His personal recollections of communists, famous and infamous, give us unmatched glimpses into the left’s history of stunningly destructive political and social philosophy, all of it responsible for our planet’s current existential convulsions. Mike Shotwell joins the ranks of other highly intelligent men who have grown up and grown out of the madness of Marxism in all its forms. As a bonus, his insightful commentaries are just as persuasive as his accounts. Both convey an authority one can know only by having lived the lies and discovered the truth.”
Dr. Lyle Rossiter Jr., Psychiatrist and author of The Liberal Mind, The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.
IMMERSED IN RED
My Formative Years in a Marxist Household
MIKE SHOTWELL
IMMERSED IN RED
Copyright © 2016 by Mike Shotwell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means—whether electronic, digital, mechanical, or otherwise—without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
World Ahead Press is a division of WND Books. The views and opinions expressed in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position or WND Books.
Paperback ISBN: 978-944212-52-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-944212-53-7
Printed in the United States of America
16 17 18 19 20 21 LSI 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
DEDICATIONS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is dedicated to my wife Gwyneth, the love of my life, for her steadfast encouragement, as well as her many long hours editing and refining, while we molded the work into its final form.
In addition,
I wish to thank Prof. Paul Kengor, Ph.D. for his encouragement, his enthusiasm, his timely comments, and his help in guiding the work into publication. Without him, this book would have been exiled to the closet containing our family archives.
and finally,
I also cannot fail to recognize the many other writers and researchers including, but not limited to, Herbert Romerstein, Ron Radosh, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, David Horowitz, Lyle Rossiter Jr., Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, Jerry Bergman, Tim Tzouliadis, S. J. Taylor, Ann Applebaum, the eminent social commentator and author Tom Wolfe, and the great Whittaker Chambers, whose data I have plumbed and who and are, in the present and the past, so diligently and methodically unearthing the grim tentacles of twentieth-century Marxist-communist ideology … and exposing its dark underbelly to the sunlight for all to see.
CONTENTS
Endorsements
Dedications and Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Part I Parents’ Family Backgrounds, the Depression, and Leftist Sympathy
1. Mother, Father and Grandparents
Part II A Hard Left Turn
2. New Husband, Orville E. Olson
3. Move to California
Part III The Communist Underworld at Work: Allegiance to Stalin
4. Political Acquaintances, Family Friends, and Related Prominent Figures
Part IV Commentary on our Leftist Lives
5. Orville’s Views on a Multitude of Topics
6. Orville and Revolution
7. Cultural Marxism
8. The Doctrinaire World of the Arts
9. House and Senate Investigations of the 40s and 50s
10. Communist Goals and the New Society
11. The Unitarian Church
12. The Pantheon of Enemies
13. Marxism and the Cult of Personality
Part V The Sciences
14. Darwin, Communism, and Religion
15. The Paleontological Record and Lack of Transitional Fossils
16. Marxism and Modern Evolutionary Science
Part VI Reflections
17. Remembrances from my Youth
18. Why Did my Mother and Orville Respond to Communist Ideology?
19. Final Thoughts
FOREWORD
PAUL KENGOR, PH.D.
My first glimpse of Mike Shotwell’s compelling story was in August 2012. He happened to be reading my book, The Communist, on Barack Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, and he reached out to me with an email. “My own background was to have been raised by communist parents,” Mike began his introduction. He told me about his stepfather, his mother, and their comrades, and small but interesting details such as the vaguely grim and oppressive overtone that accompanied their weekend cookouts and visits. But he also described the big picture in no uncertain terms. They “all had one thing in common: they were all hard core communists. And make no mistake, these were not people who wanted a peaceable replacement of our [ US] leadership, they were an angry group that wanted to oust our government and replace it with Soviet leadership … under the banner led by Joseph Stalin.”
Mike told me about his stepfather’s take on the horror stories emanating from the USSR: “All of the reports of the horrors inside [Stalinist] Russia were met with scornful opposition. It was all just [dismissed as] disgusting right-wing propaganda, nonsense, and desperate tactics before the final fall and the rise of the great new racist-free proletariat kingdom. I was also informed that my stepfather would be an important figure in the new government.” That is, he would be a key apparatchik in the “Soviet America” that would triumph and ally with the USSR as part of a single worldwide communist state.
And yet, to the wider public, Mike’s stepfather portrayed himself as a mere good-hearted “progressive,” as did many American Stalinists who quite literally swore a loyalty oath to the USSR. In fact, his stepfather, the unforgettable Orville that readers of this gripping memoir will soon meet, ran the Henry Wallace campaign for president in the state of Minnesota. Wallace ran on the Progressive Party
ticket. The former FDR veep had said some really nice and really stupid things about Joe Stalin (as had FDR), which was enough for American Stalinists to flock to Wallace as their best hope in the 1948 race. Orville E. Olson was a major figure in the Progressive Party, running for governor of Minnesota on the party’s ticket in 1948. As Mike puts it, Olson was “one of the principal organizers of the Progressive Party movement in 1948.”
That is a glimpse into Mike Shotwell’s upbringing. When liberals today scoff at the possibility that there were communist Americans who actually thought this way, Mike bristles: “Nobody can fool me about communists and their agenda. It was seared into me by systematic political brainwashing for years.”
Mike was born in Saint Louis in November 1942, and grew up largely in the Midwest and California. He was raised a classic red-diaper baby. Speaking of his parents’ admiration of Stalin and Mao Zedong, Mike told me, “Imagine growing up in a household where your mother and stepfather idolized two of the greatest mass murderers in the history of mankind.” As a child and teen, Mike was thoroughly indoctrinated into this toxic philosophy and political “madness,” which required years of introspection and real-life experience to reverse. Mike told me that he had undergone a complete “brainwashing.”
The “brainwashing” included the indoctrination at a Unitarian Church in Los Angeles, where, he says, there seemed to be no Christians and not even anyone who believed in God: “I can never remember meeting a single member of the congregation that believed in God, or an afterlife, or considered themselves religious in any way.” It was a pro-Russian “church” that was about not religion but radical-left politics—and about blaming and hating America.
Generally, Mike would tell me in ongoing correspondence, the communists he knew were a “miserable” and “angry” lot, his parents foremost among them (this is not unusual among communists). I once asked if it was fair to classify his parents as “un-American.” Here was his answer:
My step-father and mother were truly ‘un-American.’ They bitterly fought the goings-on of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and identified with those that they felt were so unfairly singled out by these ’right wing crazies.’ If somebody asked them if they were good Americans, they would have carefully explained, ’of course, the best, following in the footsteps of Jefferson and Paine.’ If someone were to say to them, ‘You don’t sound or act like a normal American,’ their chests would have swelled with pride.
Mike emphasizes that his parents never gave up the communist faith and their anti-Americanism. He describes an incident that occurred when he accompanied his aging mother as she looked for a unit in a retirement building in the luxury towers at a Laguna Beach development in southern California. “We found a perfect unit with a perfect exposure on the fourth floor that looked out at the beautifully manicured courtyard,” Mike recalled. “In the background, framing the view, [were] the fluttering flags of California and America. She refused to consider the unit, confiding with a dismissive snort for the prime reason that there was no possibility that she would purchase a unit where she had to stare out at an American flag.”
Mike also speaks to his stepfather’s certainty that Soviet power would one day triumph in the United States: “[He] just assumed that Russia would assume control of the world, including the US. This was a Darwinian truth … pure Marx/Engels.” He underscored: “It wasn’t an issue to debate. It was a foregone conclusion. The only issue was the timeframe. This rotten, disgusting, predatory, and duplicitous [American] society would simply crumble at the feet of the proletariat and be obliterated from the world memory. Prior to ’53 [the year Stalin died], it was assumed Joe Stalin would assume the reins.”
Mike was taught that Stalin’s Russia was the ideal, especially compared to America: “Uncle Joe was a perfect model. Weren’t the Russians all lucky? After all, no society had ever progressed so rapidly.” He said that his parents refused to see that they were living in an America with “the highest standard of living and the most personal freedoms that the world has ever seen…. All they wanted to do was obliterate it and replace it with a totalitarian, communist system.”
It is crucial to realize that Mike Shotwell’s shocking testimony is far from unique. It is actually standard fare for many ex-communists. I’m reminded of the words of Herb Romerstein, one of America’s greatest ex-communists: “Communist Party members were loyal Soviet patriots.” Mike’s stepfather was most certainly just that.
Ever since our first exchange, I would occasionally email Mike and ask questions based on my research at the moment. For instance, did Orville ever meet Paul Robeson? What was his view of Nikita Khrushchev? What did Orville think of J. Edgar Hoover? Mike’s answer to that one, incidentally, was a hoot:
My remembrances of Orville’s statements about Hoover were pretty much in line with his derogatory statements about American ballet dancers who he considered laughable fairies in comparison to the more manly Russian dancers that were much better trained and all married … I recall Orville made open fun of Hoover as a ‘pantywaist’ who had affairs and sex parties with his boyfriend and the close-knit circle around him. Hitler was described in the same way. In a way, the two were linked in the same manner. It was a way of describing to us that crazy, anti-communist people were screwed up vicious monsters who went to all lengths to disguise their insanity including destroying their foes’ reputations, or secretly eliminating them. To describe it another way … anyone who was against communism and the great world-wide proletarian revolution was either insane, an unbalanced person such as a gay, ignorant, or just plain stupid.
Once upon a time, American communists despised homosexuals; now they are embracing them and their “LGBTQ” agenda. They do this less to love gays than to fulfill Marx’s and Engels’ words of two centuries ago: “abolition of the family.”
All along, I knew that Mike Shotwell was recording his story in a short memoir that he intended to one day self-publish. I strongly encouraged him to keep at that book. He did. He started with a solid foundation of about 30 pages before expanding and adding as more disquieting recollections came back to him, jogged by some old name from the crazy commie past. As he did, he continued to improve his manuscript, and I encouraged him heartily.
One day in February 2016, I suggested that Mike pitch his manuscript to Geoffrey Stone, the excellent editor at WND Books, who had done a superb job the previous year with my most recent book, Takedown, on the left’s sabotaging of family and marriage over the last two centuries. Mike did just that, and Geoff, as always, responded promptly and prudently. It led to the publication of the book by this new division of WND Books, World Ahead Press. I know World Ahead Press will do a fine job with the manuscript, which deserves it. Mike deserves it. Gee, anyone brought up the way that Mike was especially deserves it.
I am so pleased and so proud of Mike Shotwell for bringing his riveting story to fruition. I am sure that writing it must have been both painful and therapeutic. It is a tragic story but also one of hope and redemption. He has lived to tell. He is a survivor of the insanity of the far-left worldview. His story is a cautionary tale for Americans and America. The boy who was immersed in red is now a man immersed in truth. And in the end, communism and the far left can never overcome truth.
INTRODUCTION
In 1980, at thirty-eight years old, I purchased a book entitled Breaking Ranks. The author was Norman Podhoretz who, as editor of Commentary magazine, had been a leading Jewish intellectual of the political left in the decades of the 60s onward. The book began with a letter to his son, and dealt with Podhoretz’s personal journey away from leftist ideology to what has been termed “neoconservatism,” and how that had come about. His eloquent writing focused on how and why his perceptions had changed regarding politics and the America he lived in. Many of the ideas he expressed had been circulating in my brain in bits and pieces for several years, but the themes he expressed so clearly resonated with me in their totality.
What d
id Podhoretz’s leftist past and his Breaking Ranks have to do with me? People meeting me from my mid-30s on never knew me to be a militant political leftist; however, as a youth, from junior high through college, and followed by two years in the Peace Corps in South America (1966—68), I sat whole heartedly in the leftist camp. I actively espoused socialist and Marxist/communist thinking that I had absorbed from my home life. I wrote papers throughout my school years parroting the political ideology that I had been indoctrinated with from seven-years-old and into my late 20s and even beyond. As Podhoretz described so well, I ascribed to the articles of faith of the radical left, chief among them that “all of the miseries of the human condition could be cured by the right social and economic arrangements.” I manifested that belief by brazenly defending the regimes of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, thinking that was what their wonderful and grand plans were all about. I supported Fidel Castro and his revolution, was deeply opposed to US foreign policy, and generally felt that intelligent discourse and correct thinking was only articulated by those on the left. I also believed that the US military was a right-wing fascist organization; that southerners were a mean, racist lot; that religious thought was nonsense; that patriotism and flag waving was a cover up for reactionary and bigoted behavior; that the country was run by Wall Street and big business; and that real patriotism was seeking revolution requiring elimination of capitalism and replacement with Russian communism.
What my friends and acquaintances did not know was that when I was seven years old, and my parents were divorced, my mother married a prominent, though behind-the-scenes, American communist. The environment created by that union was an immersion into a political world few are aware of or can fully understand. The impact was profound, compelling me all these years later to share my experience.