Progressive visions of the Apocalypse
This is the first part of a three-part essay.
This is the first part of a three-part essay.
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by Steve
Kogan
On a cross country
trip some twenty years ago, I pulled into a truck stop that caught my eye
moments after it came into view. High above the rows of gas pumps two displays
were mounted: a huge, inflated model of a polka dotted Tyrannosaurus
Rex and a Christian billboard inspired by the Book of Revelation. It
was a sign from above two ways in one, with the last quarter hour of a white
clock face printed against a black background, the words "Jesus is coming
- Be Prepared," and the hands permanently set to five minutes to twelve,
Judgment time.
There they were,
big as life: a whimsical echo of Sinclair Oil's Dino the Dinosauri and a
message from Scripture on the hour of reckoning. It was American to the hilt: a
super-sized comic representation of the one prehistoric animal that everyone
can recognize standing next to a literal image of Revelation 1:3, "for the
time is at hand," and both of them serving as commercial roadside
attractions.
I had driven
through towns and cities when Route 66 was still Main Street U.S.A. and had
seen any number of signs and cartoon-like models of foods, human figures, and
animals at diners, car washes, and auto body shops from the midwest to LA, but
the combination of dinosaur and Judgment clock stopped me in my tracks. When I
think of them now, their effect becomes all the more heightened by association
with the America of Henry Miller's "air conditioned nightmare," which
now includes over 65,000 miles of land-destroying interstate highways, millions
of cars, buses, SUVs, and tractor-trailers overheating the planet, thousands of
junk food restaurants, rampant obesity in cities and towns, new dangerous
technologies in energy and food production, and all the other demonisms of
America's original sin in exploiting nature for profits, to the point where the
earth trembles before its imminent ruin, according to the eco-litany of the
left.
I was reminded of
that New Testament sign halfway through Al Gore's Earth in the Balance,
when his insistent message began to sound like the voice of a secularized Bible
thumper in my mind, with his scientistic proofs of nature in crisis
substituting for scriptural visions of the Apocalypse. To one degree or
another, the warnings of countless environmental catastrophists are similarly
filled with doomsday scenarios on the coming of famine, chaos, and extinction
of life; and many of the titles of the foundational works read like a secular
version of the end of days: The Rape of the Earth, Our
Plundered Planet, Silent Spring, and Paul and Anne
Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, all written between 1939 and 1968.
The alarms they sounded ring louder than ever, and all evidence to the contrary
has not lessened their appeal to fresh generations of believers. There is
nothing transcendent, however, about the last days they envision, nothing of
Christ's "My kingdom is not of this world" or that the righteous will
be spared the fate of the sinners. As Fairfield Osborn concludes in Our
Plundered Planet(1948), either we send a message across the globe about
"the threat of an oncoming crisis," so that "all peoples
everywhere may join in common endeavor" to save the earth, or we will all
succumb to "the present terrific attack" upon nature's "living
resources." Osborn's work had a pronounced effect on Ehrlich in his youth,
as it did on Gore when he took a course titled Theology and the Natural
Sciences at the Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Translated into
thirteen languages and reprinted eight times in the post-war year it was
published, Our Plundered Planet broadcast an S.O.S. on the
death of civilizations at the hands of "The Plunderer," which is
Osborn's term for mankind and the title of part two. Given "the
accumulated velocity" with which man was destroying "his own life sources,"
Osborn insisted that only world-wide planning" could end "the ongoing
peril" as a result of "the profit motive," whose defenders were
even now causing "mounting injury to people everywhere." In effect,
Osborn was calling for a planetary form of centralized planning and describing
"the present terrific attack" upon nature in similar terms that Karl
Marx had used a hundred years earlier in his call for the proletariat "to
centralize all the means of production in the hands of the state" and
thereby end capitalism's "exploitation" of the working class "in
every land." Osborn recognized the political implications of his work and
in his conclusion stated that "others far more competent will have to
formulate the program, or others, more audacious, grasp the right to prophesy."
Two decades later,
in the midst of the Vietnam War, environmentalist politicians and prophets
began to appear. Taking the "teach-ins" and anti-war demonstrations
as his model, Governor Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day in 1970ii and in a
commemorative speech thirty years later claimed that it was now possible
"to forge a sustainable society," transform America by imbuing its
institutions "with a guiding environmental ethic," and thereby
"change the course of history." In themselves, there is nothing
messianic about the science of ecology and its practical applications; but
Nelson managed to incorporate Osborn's two types of future spokesmen in one and
infused a new politics of environmentalism with an older "right to
prophecy," as he did here by nailing the words "sustainable,"
"sustainability," and "sustaining" twenty-five times into
his speech and combining them six times with "forge" and
"forging," an industrial metaphor that was popular in old leftwing
slogans on the "forging" of a new society, a new world, and even a
new man.
Other
"audacious" prophets armed themselves with an all-purpose critique
that moved from the "counter-culture revolution" into universities,
including the "new environmentalism" that Nelson had helped to
popularize. In every succeeding variation, from new historicist and
post-colonial rhetoric to feminist and social justice theory, there was either
overt or implicit agreement that something was "fundamentally
wrong with American government and American society" and that
"traditional Western thought as a whole needed reconsideration."iii A similar atomizing took place in
the environmental movement, which came to include social justice ecology,
anti-Christian ecology, "theological," or mystical ecology,
eco-feminism, eco-socialism, and even anarchist-inspired eco-terrorism, as in
the following outcry at a congressional hearing by a spokesman for the Earth
Liberation Front, who struck the pose of a revolutionist facing a capitalist
firing squad:
All power to the people. Long live the earth liberation front. Long live the animal liberation front. Long live all the sparks attempting to ignite the revolution. Sooner or later the sparks will turn into flame.iv
Craig
Rosenbraugh's outburst bears no resemblance to Osborn's modest claim in his
conclusion that he has only attempted "to present a synthesis of some of
the biological and historical facts of human existence"; yet Osborn's
"synthesis" is based on a series of narrow choices among
"some" of these "facts," and, like Rosenbraugh's vision of
a planet in crisis, they are all directed to the warning that "man is
destroying the sources of his life." It has been the working premise of
environmentalist ideology for at least a hundred years: "... the
final goal of 'progress' is nothing less than the destruction of life,"v now rendered
as "The very future of life on Earth is in danger," which Earth
First! places at the beginning of its mission statement under the title
"No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth." Echoing Marx's
declaration that capitalism and its global "giant, Modern Industry"
have modernized oppression through "naked, shameless, direct, brutal
exploitation," Osbornremarks early in his work that the industrial
revolution has allowed man "to exploit far more effectively than he could
previously the living natural resources of all of the continents of the
earth." Both statements illustrate Simone Weil's observation in "The
Power of Words" (1934) that "we seem to have lost the very elements
of intelligence," among them "the idea of limit, measure,
degree," and "proportion," and replaced them with "myths
and monsters." For Osborn, the exploitation of "our life
sources" is just such a monster, which he projects onto the human
record as a story of "plunder," "depletion,"
"destruction," and "despoliation," with man's "silent
war" upon the earth playing the same part in Our Plundered Planet as
the victimization of the lower orders by "the ruling class in every
age" in The Communist Manifesto.vi
Environmentalism
and communism thus share the same driving belief that the world has entered an
acute phase of an age-old crisis. The mass campaigns of the new
environmentalism have even unfolded in the same two ways that Moscow
disseminated Marxism-Leninism in an earlier time. As in the structure of Soviet
propaganda, which was inflexible in its ideology and opportunistic to the point
of self-contradiction in practice, the central doctrine of environmentalism -
that "nature's balance" is fragile - remains fixed and absolute,
while the main targets and slogans keep shifting as circumstance requires.
Hence the totalitarian impulse in a movement that thrives on promoting coercive
environmental regulations based on scenarios of planetary catastrophe, even as
those same predictions either contradict or redefine previous forecasts that
were once proclaimed with equal intensity. Visions of man-made global cooling
through atomic war have given way to a new apocalypse of man-made global
warming through the peaceful uses of modern industry; alarms about the
depletion of fossil fuels have morphed into alarms over methods of extracting
vast deposits that continue to be discovered, and, in the wake of technological
advances in food production, earlier warnings of dwindling food supplies have
been replaced by new warnings about greatly increased food supplies, the
monster in this case being the "food imperialism" of biotech
companies and profit-hungry "superfarms," whose "mountains of
additional food" are being marketed at the expense of "sustainable
farming" and will "never eliminate hunger, as hunger in America
should never let us forget."vii This is the
same America that is allegedly facing a double-edged crisis of obesity, in
medical terms through the consumption of the two great culprits, "junk food
and fast food" (including all "processed foods"), and
environmentally through the destructive consequences of their production and
preparation, so that every step in the process that leads to eating junk food
"threatens the environment."viii Indeed,
whatever form the disaster may take, such is the twisted nature of this
irreligious religion that countless thousands seem to hunger for any word of
the planet's demise. At a large Earth Day rally in 1990 in the nation's
capitol, writes John Tierney, "Ehrlich was one of the many Malthusians
warning that this was humanity's last chance to save the planet. ... The crowd
of more than 200,000 applauded heartily after Ehrlich told them that population
growth could produce a world in which their grandchildren would endure food
riots in the streets of America."ix
In 2009, the
Ehrlichs defended their signature work in "The Population Bomb Revisited,"
which included a self-retracting apology that, although, "In honesty, the
scenarios were way off, especially in their timing," they nevertheless
dealt "with future issues that people in 1968 should have been thinking
about - famines, plagues, water shortages, armed international interventions by
the United States, and nuclear winter ... all events that have occurred or now
still threaten."x What the Ehrlichs refer to "In honesty"
is an exercise in face-saving at the expense of thought, since the
"timing" of predicted events is irrelevant if the predictions
themselves are "way off."
It is one thing to
be wide of the mark in foretelling the future, but the Ehrlichs even have
problems in seeing the past, not Shakespeare's "dark backward and abysm of
time" but their own immediate past. In 2009, there needed no historian
come from the grave to tell them that the Soviet regime had left countless
ecological disasters in its wake, that communism had created the greatest
man-made famines in Russia, China, and North Korea, that Communist China had
intervened in the Korean War and swallowed Tibet, that Russia had absorbed
eastern Europe and the Baltic states after World War II and made "armed
international interventions" in Poland, Hungary, and Afghanistan, along
with military and political inroads into the Caribbean, and that Israel had
faced imminent threats of annihilation and ensuing attacks by Arab armies ever
since its war of independence in 1948.
But what need of
facts if they contradict the party line? The very sound of its doomsday alarms
is a drum beat of one bias or another, with America typically bearing the brunt
of attack. Textbook examples can be found in the final chapter of Osborn's
book, where we read that congressional representatives of powerful interest
groups in agriculture are attempting to strike "a new body blow ... at our
forests," that "a national catastrophe" may occur through the
speed with which "the basic living elements of our country" are being
destroyed, and that this destruction is legally sanctioned as "the
American way of doing business." Even as he writes, Osborn fears that new
proposals for legalized plunder are threatening the ecology of the western
states; yet there is nothing new about his indictment of the nation's
commercial activity, which was expressed almost from the beginning of the
republic by any number of old-world Europe's writers and thinkers. Having
visited the United States in 1832, to cite a prime example, the poet Nikolaus
Lenau summed up "the general character of American institutions" with
the snide remark that "what we call Fatherland is here only a property
insurance scheme."xi More to the
point of Osborn's book, we find a similar parallel between land destruction and
"the American way of doing business" in Ludwig Klages's "Man and
Earth" (1913), although Osborn has none of his flair: "Very soon, the
face of the earth will be transformed into a gigantic Chicago, pocked with a
few patches of agriculture!"
If one were to be
asked on an IQ test if "armed international interventions by the United
States" belongs in the same group as "famines, plagues," and
"water shortages," the correct answer would be no. In Ehrlich-think,
however, the answer is yes, although one has to read "The Population
Bomb Revisited" with an attentive ear in order to understand why
the grouping makes sense to them. It has nothing to do with evidence, since the
Ehrlichs never present any, but grows out of their predisposition to single out
the country and portray it in a negative light, both in subtle and not so
subtle ways. The one exception that they make is for groups and individuals
with whom they agree. At separate points, the public at large and even mankind
come in for a pasting, although America remains a constant target of their
negativity.
The Ehrlichs do
cover other nations in the piece, and they also suggest with some emphasis that
they have always been even-handed in their work. None of their critics in 1968,
for example, "seemed to understand that the fundamental issue was whether
an overpopulated society, capitalist or socialist ... could avoid
collapse." We no sooner come to "collapse," however, than
balanced thinking stops. The one example of a fall on this scale was the Soviet
empire, and overpopulation was precisely not the problem; yet the Ehrlichs
insist that their planetary forecasts are truer than ever, the only difference
between then and now being the speedup of the doomsday clock as a result of
"Four decades of largely ignored population growth and related issues -
especially patterns of rising consumption and their environmental
effects." Not to be outdone by other alarmists, they claim that these
dangers not only "make collapse now seem ever more likely" but that
it may come "possibly sooner than even many pessimists think."
The reference to
capitalism and socialism appears in a brief opening discussion on early
negative responses to The Bomb. According to the Ehrlichs, these
criticisms were directed at their views on overpopulation and came "from
both the far right and the far left." Hence the implication that their
work is above partisan politics and therefore strictly objective.
Politics and
partisan interests, however, are inseparable from environmentalism, turn it
around how we will. According to the Ehrlichs, who are not above disparaging
"the vast majority of people," both "the man in the street"
and "individuals who otherwise might be considered highly educated"
were perhaps "the biggest barrier to acceptance of the central arguments
of The Bomb." Even now, they are still unwilling "to do
simple math and take seriously the problems of exponential growth." By
contrast, "a series of scientists" who "vetted" the work
included "some who became top leaders in the scientific enterprise."
Thus begins the
main portion of the Ehrlichs' concluding defense, which is bathed in an air of
authority with a view to suppress any doubts about their predictions. In the
first of two passages taken from "world" statements on environmental
threats to the future, they cite the 1992 "Warning to Humanity"
issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which was "signed by more
than 1500 of the world's leading scientists, including more than half of all
living Nobel Laureates in science," who collectively agreed that man and
nature "are on a collision course." A year later, fifty-eight
international academies, "including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences,
the British Royal Society, and the Third World Academy," took part in a
"Science Summit" and released a statement which similarly claimed
that the growth of "human numbers" increases "the potential for
irreversible changes of far-reaching magnitude."
Bibliographical
references also tend in one direction: "Are we consuming too much?" Our
Final Hour, "Multinationals make billions in profit out of growing
global food crisis," "How the world's oceans are running out of
fish," and, among eight works jointly written by the Ehrlichs, Betrayal
of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future.
The very title is a lesson in what Eric Voegelin in Science, Politics
and Gnosticism refers to as "the prohibition of questions."
He describes it as a characteristic impulse in all modern-day mass movements
that take the form of an "ersatz religion," whose leaders find one
way or another to suppress "critical analysis" of their assumptions
and make that suppression "part of their dogma."
No passage in the
Ehrlichs' defense of The Bombillustrates this principle more
concisely than their discussion of James Hansen, "a top NASA
scientist," who told Congress, in their words, that "the volume of
man-made carbon dioxide already injected into Earth's atmosphere can remain for
no more than a couple more decades without causing changes such as mass
extinctions, ecosystem collapse, and dramatic sea level rises. In summary, he
said, 'We're toast if we don't get on a very different path.'" The very
tone of these alarms is meant to ward off thought, as is the silence of the
Ehrlichs, who allow Hansen's over the top warnings to stand unopposed. This at
a time when a growing body of scientists had already challenged both the
premises and research of Hansen and other climate alarmists and taken them to
task on both accounts.xii
At times, the
Ehrlichs seem deaf to what they themselves are saying. The best example appears
toward the end of their piece, in which they defend The Bomb in
a way that undercuts their earlier appeals to scientific authority. These
include ominous statistics and reports of new threats to "our life-support
systems," such as "the potential of chlorofluorocarbons to destroy
the ozone layer and make life on Earth's surface impossible." We are thus
meant to believe that environmental disaster is the shape of things to come;
yet in the first paragraph of the conclusion we read that it was only natural
for the work to have "its flaws," since "Science never produces
certainty."
Earlier in The
Bomb Revisited, the authors make two statements about the work that are
also at odds with each other, one of which concerns a correct prediction of
theirs, the other an error on the same subject for which they give no account,
although one suspects that they made it because they were unhappy with the
possible consequences of being right about their previous forecast. In the
first, they write that they "were proven entirely correct" in their
"estimate that high-yield grains held the most hope for increasing human
food supplies." In the second, they state that The Bomb got
"the food situation ... wrong in that it underestimated the impact of the green
revolution," an impact that they could have also gotten entirely right,
since it came about precisely because of those "high-yield grains"
which "held the most hope for increasing human food supplies."
There are two
constants, however, on either side of the muddle; for in both passages the
Ehrlichs do not identify the American agronomist Norman Borlaug by name, let
alone refer to him as a "top scientist," even though he was largely
responsible for "the impact of the green revolution." On the other
hand, they take pains to insist that they were right to be concerned about its
"environmental downsides" and right again to recognize that
"serious ecological risks would accompany the spread of that
revolution." Like other specializers in doomsday predictions, the Ehrlichs
are fixated on theirs, in this case that "the reduction of the hungry
portion of the world population" was not only temporary but "may well
have been bought at a high price of environmental destruction to be paid by
future generations."
Their own
prescription for feeding a hungry world is also partisan in nature and has its
origins in the old socialist phrase "to each according to his needs,"
which Marx and his followers amplified and which the Ehrlichs repeat almost
word for word: "It should be noted that in 1968, as today, there was and
is enough food to feed everyone an adequate diet if food were distributed
according to need." Distribution, as they mean it is actually
redistribution - as all who think this way mean it - and what it requires is
not science but human engineering through propaganda and all the resources of
central planning, which a student of Soviet practices has defined more
precisely as central management.xiii
Having presented
their program to feed the hungry, however, the Ehrlichs show no concern for the
human as well as "environmental downsides" of this theoretical ideal
as it was enforced by brutal regimes with a long record of murder, famine, and
ecological degradation. Instead, and with complete disregard of historical
fact, they indict mankind itself: "There is not the slightest sign that
humanity is about to distribute anything according to need." Still worse
is the indictment by a co-believer, whom the Ehrlichs idealize to ridiculous
lengths while ignoring the contradiction between their portrait and a statement
of his on overpopulation that they immediately cite with implicit approval.
Turning once more to their roster of prestigious names, they describe
"World-renowned scientist James Lovelock" as the inventor of
"the apparatus that allowed discovery of the threat to the ozone layer and
saved humanity." This is the same savior, according to them, who
"recently stated: 'We have grown in number to the point where our presence
is presently disabling the planet like a disease.'" There is no
penetrating obtuseness such as theirs, for the Ehrlichs are masters at elevating
their warnings to limitless heights of alarm, so much so that a generous
mankind would still not suffice to end world hunger, for "it is uncertain
how long there will be enough food for everyone even if there were more
equitable distribution."
Among the nations
they discuss, it is the most productive one of all that increasingly comes to
the surface, only to be faulted once again. They are pleased to see lowering
birth rates in Japan, for example, and in "the fully industrialized
nations of Europe," but there is a "big exception" to this
fortunate pattern, namely "the United States, which is a center of
over-consumption and whose population continues growing." Moreover,
"The United States has also been plagued" by a policy under Presidents
Reagan and George W. Bush that promoted "over-reproduction globally"
and made "largely successful attempts to roll back environmental
regulations." There is an incremental piling on of accusations here within
the Ehrlichs' larger picture of an America that "still consumes nearly a
quarter of the Earth's resource flows" and has exported the destructive
practices of the green revolution around the world. In a 1972 article by Paul
Ehrlich and biologist Dennis Pirages, there is an added American threat to the
planet as it projects its pernicious industrial model onto developing nations.
As they wrote after President Nixon's visit to China,
An
"Americanized" China would consume nearly eight billion metric tons
of coal equivalent in energy each year, more than the present total world consumption.
... these numbers mean that raising Chinese energy consumption to the American
level would amount to doubling the environmental impact of homo sapiens.
Indeed, just the concentrated release of heat in parts of China containing most
of the population could lead to major, unpredictable climatic effects.xiv
An
"'Americanized' China" sounds suspiciously like the old "City of
the Big Shoulders,"xv which now
threatens the far ends of Klages's "face of the earth."
At first glance,
an attack on the natural world by a monstrous Chicago hardly seems like a
faithful mirror of the doomsday scenarios that ignited a mass American
movement; yet the new environmentalism could tack in several directions at once
and managed to incorporate the popular and the fantastical in the blink of an
eye. Governor Nelson performed just such a feat in his commemorative address,
which he began by making a direct appeal to the populist strain in American
life: "Thirty years ago on April 22, 1970, Earth Day burst onto the
political scene. Twenty million people demonstrated their concern over what was
happening to the natural world around them ... but the political establishment seemed
oblivious to it all." Calling it "a truly astonishing grassroots
explosion," Nelson described those "twenty million" as a gift to
America, which took the form of a heightened environmental awareness that they
bequeathed to "the nation's political agenda, where it will remain as a
constant reminder for this and future generations."
There was nothing
populist, however, in Nelson's closing picture of an overpopulated America,
which he openly shared with the Ehrlichs, nor was it any different than Klages's
"face of the earth" in local terms. Even Klages's "Very
soon" made a predictable appearance when Nelson envisioned the population
bomb going off "in 75 to 80 years or sooner," at which point "we
will be dealing with twice as many cars, traffic jams, parking lots, paved
roads, planes and air fields, schools, colleges, prisons, apartment houses; a
tremendous loss of agricultural land, open spaces, wildlife habitat," and
"areas of scenic beauty." In short, "a gigantic Chicago, pocked
with a few patches of agriculture!"
In a comment that
recalls the populist side of Nelson's speech, Osborn writes that the Soil
Conservation Service was established "not so much as a result of the
government's vision or strategy but principally because the people had been
struck with dread" by the worst day of the Dust Bowl one year earlier, in
1934. On the other hand, Osborn also hears the voice of Moscow and devotes
several pages to "The transformation that is taking place in regard to a
people and their land under the Soviet regime."xvi His examples
are more extensive than those on FDR's conservation and dam-building projects,
and they mark the first time that he has had anything positive to say in his
chapters on "Man's misuse of the land ... going back thousands of years
even to the earliest periods of human history.
notes
i See
"Gas Station Lust: Sinclair Oil," Anthony Cagle, March 22, 2012 and
"Sinclair History: Evolution of the Company Symbol." On the
abandonment of the dinosaur theory of oil formation, see "Confessions of
an ‘ex’ Peak Oil believer," F. William Engdahl, Geopolitics-Geoeconomics
(14 September, 2007). In order to simplify my notes, I will keep documentation
to a minimum and provide URLs only where a simple search will not suffice.
ii On
contributors to the first Earth Day, see "Who Actually Founded Earth
Day?" Jenny Seifert,alltagsgeschichte (April 23, 2012).
iv Craig
Rosenbraugh, in "Philosophy of the Bomb, Propaganda by Deed and Change
Through Fear and Violence," Arthur H. Garrison, Criminal Justice
Studies,Vol. 17, No. 3 (September 2004), 263.
v Ludwig
Klages, "Man and Earth" (1913), in Cosmogonic
Reflections, by Ludwig Klages, trans. Joseph D. Pryce, entry no. 521. Many
extracts from the collected works are presented as aphorisms. All entries
up to 522 are numbered. The rest are poems and a final essay,
"Consciousness and Life" (no date).
vi Václav Klaus
notes the following parallels: "The environmentalists' attitude toward
nature is analogous to the Marxist approach to economics. ... Much as in the
case of communism, this approach is utopian and would lead to results
completely different from the intended ones." In Klaus, Blue
Planet in Green Shackles: What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? (Washington,
DC: Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2008), 6-7
vii Peter
Rosset, "Lessons from the Green Revolution," Food First / Institute
for Food & Development Policy (April 8, 2000).
x Paul and
Anne Ehrlich, "The Population BombRevisited," in The
Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development, Vol 1, issue 3 (Summer
2009).
xii For a
detailed summary, see Chapter 6 in Klaus, "What is Really Happening with
Global Warming?" which includes references to thousands of "top
scientists" with opposing views.
xiii D. J.
Peterson, Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental
Destruction (Boulder: Westview Press, Inc., 1993), Introduction, 16.
xv Carl
Sandburg, "Chicago, "http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/2043 .
The work was published in the city by Harriet Monroe in her journal Poetry (1914),
which later grew in the foundation, also located in Chicago.
xvi Among his
sources, Osborn cites an "Information Bulletin" by the Soviet embassy
and William M. Mandel's A Guide to the Soviet Union (1946),
whose chapters might just as well have been dictated by Moscow into a playback
machine. On the American Communist Party's involvement in Washington's
agricultural reforms during the 1930s and its role in disseminating Soviet
propaganda on collective farming, see the wikipedia entries on Harold Ware and
the "Ware group," which included Whittaker Chambers. See also
Chambers, https://files.nyu.edu/th15/public/break45.html .
Harold Ware figures prominently on the first page of Diana West’s American
Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (2013), an
in-depth study of Stalin’s penetration of key federal departments and programs
under FDR and beyond, beginning with our recognition of the USSR in 1933.
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