Immersed In Red Read online

  “Big business:” Singled out with particular vitriol was the omnipresent, underhanded world of “big business.” Within that realm, all manner of conspiracies abounded, according to Orville, and all aimed at keeping the oppressed populace uninformed and under heel. One had to be ever watchful because the conspiracies were disguised in many forms. For-profit businesses were suspect; whether they provided products or services that were desirable or useful to the public was of no consequence. Money was seen as dirty and the capitalist, free enterprise system rotten to the core. Private business, large or small, had as its purpose the maintaining of the status quo, along with the subjugation of “the workers.” A friendly business owner, who viewed employees with respect for their contribution to the success of the enterprise, was a gross oxymoron, not to be believed. Everybody knew, so it went, the real truth that the huddled masses were kept groveling in the mud, forced to kiss the rear ends of the new oligarchs of the business world. “Oligarchs” was one of Orville’s favorite terms, originally used for the former Russian nobility, but now employed to label “rich people” in general. The notion of pervasive conspiracies came naturally to Orville; after all, conspiracy and deception were the foundation of communist activities designed to infiltrate daily American life. Having internalized that belief from his personal life history, it was a small step to assign that behavior to all opposing institutions.

  The theme of “big business” found its way into nearly every conversation (disregarding the fact that over 95 percent of businesses in the US are categorized as “small”). Reactionary powers in Washington, DC, were the shadowy figures that controlled the purse strings of America and the world. These figures were the enemies. However, there were exceptions. Author and philanthropist, Corliss Lamont, was one. He inherited money from the J. P. Morgan Empire, was radicalized in the 30s and 40s and remained so to his death in 1995. He praised Stalin and anything Russian, was the chairman of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and founded and subsidized the publication, Marxist Quarterly. Anita McCormick Blaine, heiress to the International Harvester fortune, was another exception; she was a heavy contributor to the Progressive Party.

  Both of these philanthropists became heavily involved with the Henry Wallace campaign, the anti-McCarthy movement and other leftist causes throughout their lives. But it is amusing to note that neither ever considered the idea of forgoing their “ill-gotten” inherited fortunes in view of the suffering and injustice all around them. In Lamont’s case, he lived well despite the “criminality” of American business that helped amass his father’s vast fortune. Instead, both Lamont and Blaine were content to remain wealthy and privileged, in stark contrast to their socialist idealism.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 6

  ORVILLE AND REVOLUTION

  Societal “cleansing:” The lectures and adulation of Stalin and Mao were unending. To Orville, these communists were men of enormous personal courage and great wisdom. When confronted with their brutal legacies, Orville dismissed any negative talk as Western propaganda; still, he did subscribe to the belief that a certain amount of societal cleansing was necessary as a part of world revolution. The people that would have to be eliminated in the US during and after the revolution would be the obstructionists to the new society; a certain number simply would not conform.

  In later years I would occasionally meet Orville for lunch at Rancho Park Municipal Golf Course in West Los Angeles. I would ask him about Stalin’s then well-publicized party purges and he would counter with a question such as, “Weren’t the Americans far worse?” To suggest a comparison was stunning and nonsensical; yet, Orville continued to twist the facts to fit his ideal vision. One time he did admit that Stalin in his last year or two was “a little off,” but saw that as essentially irrelevant. In the final run, any minor weaknesses were overshadowed by the great things that he accomplished for the Russian people … the fastest-growing economy and the most benevolent society of all time. I do remember being unnerved by his seemingly unhinged statements, but I kept asking questions and plumbing his thoughts. He never really knew that my political viewpoints had evolved far away from his by the mid-1970s. I cringe to think that, had Wallace won the 1948 election, Orville would have been in an influential position to further Soviet ambitions.

  Ayers and Dohrn: There were two personalities who played a significant role in the evolution of leftist thought and actions moving into the 1960s. They were the domestic terrorist pair, William “Bill” Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, who had formed the Weather Underground cult, with the goal of creating societal chaos that would lead to the overthrow of the government. They were responsible for a bombing spree of the US capitol, the Pentagon and several police stations in New York, as well as the death of one of their own who blew himself up making a bomb in his condominium. To further advance their objectives the Weathermen sought to establish a “white fighting force” to be allied with the “Black Liberation Movement” as well as developing alliances with other radical groups to achieve “the destruction of US imperialism and achieve a classless world: world communism.” Orville’s view of them was of a younger generation demonstrating their frustration with “the system” and taking matters into their own hands for the greater good. In the same vein, my mother strongly supported the Black Panthers and their allied political agenda.

  The relationship between the Weather Underground’s history and my experience with Orville was highlighted by the reports of FBI investigator, Larry Grathwohl, who infiltrated the Underground and learned firsthand about their terrorist activities and goals. These eerily mirrored what I heard from my stepfather in regard to their plans of massive re-education camps of the Chinese and Russian variety, to be implemented after the revolution and takeover. The most horrific aspect of the WU’s blueprint was the estimation that some 25 million people would not readily go along, or submit to “re-education programs,” which would result in their elimination for the good of the new society. Orville’s figures were in the range of 10% or 15%, roughly corresponding to the Underground figures. The hideous scenario depicted by the Underground was simply an accepted necessity of a Marxist revolution.

  Most distressing today is the fact that Ayers and Dohrn have moved into the mainstream of society; Bill Ayers is a former tenured professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Dohrn, remarkably a member of the legal profession, sits on important committees and boards of the American Bar Association, and is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University. To this day, they are unrepentant and unremorseful for the carnage they caused. Ayers has stated, “I wake up every morning thinking about how I’m going to end capitalism.”

  Ayers’ and Dohrn’s world view contained a disturbing undercurrent of truly antisocial behavior. Incomprehensibly, the group showed admiration for the deranged killer Charles Manson and his equally disturbed “family.” In 1969, Ms. Dohrn delivered a speech at a “War Council” meeting organized by the Weathermen and attended by about four hundred people. In it, she made reprehensible comments in regard to some of the victims of the Manson murders, specifically Sharon Tate and her friends, and Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. She was quoted as saying, “Dig it! First they killed those pigs [Tate’s friends] and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly … Wild!” This was followed by a similar exuberant statement about the inhuman butchering of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, which concluded with, “Far Out!” In 2008, Bill Ayers tried to characterize her remarks as “ironic” and that she was just trying to make a “political point.” This remark is all the more disingenuous and distasteful given the horrors it is meant to rationalize.

  More recently, Bill Ayers has been associated with Barrack Obama, although both have tried to minimize the relationship. The two served on the board of the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago, no doubt interacting in their respective capacities. And Obama held a political fundraiser in Ayers’ living room. It is evident they
were more than just “neighbors.”

  Orville not only expressed support for the Weather Underground, but also for Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. They were yet another example of the populous being fed up with capitalism and American foreign policy, and therefore striking back in the name of justice. The pot was finally boiling over and America was getting what it deserved. Not surprisingly, growing up in this environment was topsy-turvy and bewildering.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  CULTURAL MARXISM

  I include this section as it deals with the bridging of the economic Marxism of my youth to the more modern form that blossomed in the 1960s, the newest chapter in the never-ending movement toward the left’s unrealistic utopian ideal. Although Orville had a stake in the new left, he remained for the most part an old-school economic Marxist, but my mother more easily embraced the changing culture. I followed suit, easily moving into this new milieu.

  Two of the splinter groups of classical Marxist-Leninist ideology, the socialist Fabian Society born in England, and the cultural Marxist Frankfurt School in Germany comprised the emerging New Left that would massively impact our contemporary society.

  The Fabian Society: The Fabian Society was formed in January, 1884. The basic philosophy of the society was derived from earlier wealthy elitist socialist thinkers many of whom were connected with the British East India Co. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading members of the Fabians included the science fiction writer, H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw, author of Pygmalion and other plays. Shaw, the Irish playwright, became the outspoken leader of the Fabians, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social, and anti-religious ideas. His stances on public issues were often controversial: promoting eugenics, denouncing both sides in WWI, enthusiastically supporting Mussolini’s 1922 seizure of power in Italy; and praising him as “the right kind of tyrant.” In the 20s, he hailed Lenin as the “one really interesting statesman in Europe,” and toasted Stalin at a dinner party in Moscow stating, “I have seen all the ‘terrors’ and I was terribly pleased by them.” Shaw’s admiration for Mussolini and Stalin demonstrated his growing belief that dictatorship was the only viable political arrangement. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in January, 1933, Shaw described Hitler as “a very remarkable man, a very able man.”

  Author, Clare Ellis, writing about H. G. Wells, stated that he remained a staunch socialist throughout his life. Wells himself, in his 1926 book, The World of William Clissold, wrote that the New Fabian Republic he envisioned would be “a classless World State run by an intelligent minority … it will be more like a world-religion … and become the new human community.” He further declared, “We can weave a world system of monetary and economic activities, while the politicians, the diplomatists, and the soldiers are still too busy with their ancient habitual antics to realize what we are doing.” One again, we see deception guiding the left.

  Ellis reported that the Fabian’s mascot was a tortoise, depicting their slow grinding methodology for achieving their goals by the use of “stealth, intrigue, subversion, and the deception of never calling socialism by its right name.” As with Wells, the government George Bernard Shaw envisioned would be led by a Fabian socialist dictatorship. Two stained-glass windows designed by Shaw depict first, a wolf disguised in a sheepskin holding aloft the Fabian Society banner, and second, a scene of people “praying and worshipping a pile of books which advocate the theories of socialism.” In 1895, influential Fabians, including Shaw and the Webbs, set up a branch of the University of London, namely the London School of Economics and Political Science, which became a means to foster Fabian Society aims. Today, the London School is one of the leading social science institutions in the world, and the foundations can be seen in Britain’s Labour Party, their founding members in 1900 having largely come from the Fabian Society. In the United States, the influence of Fabian transplants is apparent in the slow, grinding movement toward leftist ideals of a national welfare state, coupled with the vilification of capitalism.

  The Frankfurt School: In Germany, the Frankfurt School evolved out of a 1922 conference in Moscow at the Marx-Engels Institute. From these origins, the ideas of these Marxist philosophers were developed, resulting initially in the founding of the Institute for Social Research, a deceptively innocuous title.

  Georg Lukacs, one of the early prominent members of the movement, was born in Hungary to a wealthy family. Distant and problematic family relationships contributed to his melancholy and angry worldview. He embraced Marx’s view that the family was to be destroyed, a tenet he encouraged to further his societal aims. He reportedly stated that the traditional bourgeois family gave off the reeking odor of “swamp gas” and that “women were the enemy.” An apparently depressed personality, he also had a “Dread of the destructive influences of happiness.”

  Besides Lukacs, the group included Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Theodor Adorno. Together they believed in “compulsory promiscuity, one-parent families, premarital sex and homosexuality … ” which all struck deeply into the core ideas of family and child-bearing as mainstays of Western society. Much of this philosophy resulted from combining Marx and Engels with Sigmund Freud under the umbrella of a new philosophy dubbed “Freudo-Marxism.” Frankfurt School historian and writer, Ralph de Toledano, aptly noted, “The Freudian Marxists realized that sex could be a devastating instrument if prompted to run rampant. Anyone that fought against it was condemned as a part of capitalist depravity.” It should be stated, however, that parts of this doctrine were far beyond even Freud’s tolerance. Toledano tells us that Freud referred to the adherents as “morally insane,” and felt that their ideas were “complete lunatic.”

  These predominantly Jewish philosophers gained increasing importance to leftist ideology during the 30s, but at the same time, with the rise of Hitler, the leaders of the Frankfurt School realized they would have to leave Germany. In the United States, the socialist, Marxist-inspired educator, John Dewey, with financing from the Rockefeller Foundation, became their angel when he was able to affect the transfer of many standout members of the group to welcoming top universities such as Cal Berkeley, Princeton and Brandeis; but the most prestigious recipient was Columbia University in New York and their well-known Teacher’s College. Thus was born the slow, unrelenting shift to the left of American academia.

  The cultural Marxists bypassed Marx and Lenin’s ideas of violent revolution and instead concentrated on developing alternate and insidious ways to impose their ideology; thereby furthering the collapse of western society. Their new path would be a “long march through the institutions.”

  These left-wing academics and intellectuals looked to the universities, the arts, Hollywood, and the media, as their new targets, rather than the Marx/Engels focus on “the working man.” The new approach was not based on economic class warfare, which they felt was too restrictive, but rather a system that would demolish capitalism by attacking the cultural framework of western society and its traditional norms and institutions.

  Wilhelm Reich, often characterized as an unadulterated charlatan, nevertheless, commanded great respect with the neo-Marxists and to this day still has followers. He was an early bright star working under Freud, but left that camp to follow his own theater lights. The core of Reich’s theory was that one’s physical inability to surrender to orgasm was the underlying incubator of neurosis which, if not dealt with, eventually turned people to fascism and authoritarianism. At his Orgonon Institute in Maine, he became absorbed in researching what he believed was the cosmic force of orgasms. This energy, which even to the present has never been identified in any scientific experiments, was integral with his overarching concepts of repressed human sexuality as the basis of human psychological problems. Very briefly put, Reich believed that he could capture this “energy” within the confines of his invention, the Orgone Accumulator, and a person who
spent time sitting in this phone-booth sized box would experience its curative powers.

  Around 1970, I came in contact tangentially with this famous contraption. Early in my professional architectural career I met a prominent Hollywood personality and actor who, with his wife, were contemplating a large addition to their home. During my initial visit touring through the home, I was instructed to tiptoe quietly down the hall and not enter one of the bedrooms. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, assuming someone was sleeping there and I would simply see it later. When I returned to take the measurements I needed in order to do my design work, the client reluctantly allowed me into that room. He led me in complete silence; the room was low-lit and filled with boxes, piles of clothing and other family bric-a-brac. But in the middle of the room stood a black voting-booth type structure. The client explained that it was an Orgone box and that it radiated immense energy from somewhere out in the ether. He asked me if I had ever heard of Wilhelm Reich, and he was impressed when I answered in the affirmative. I must say it was a bit discomfiting seeing a grown man fairly quivering from forces of uncontrollable energy he firmly believed were emanating from this box. My experience, complicated by the client’s unwanted advance during a meeting, in the form of a hand on my leg, made me not unhappy that the project did not proceed.