The anti-Soviet hysteria is growing. Winston Churchill delivered a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri calling for an anti-Soviet Anglo-American coalition – “From Stetin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of he ancient states of central and eastern Europe.” He said, Russia posed a “growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.” This further fueled the Whiskey Rebels to take a hard-line stand against the Soviets in particular and Communists in general. “Iron curtain” immediately entered our political lexicon, and public opinion of Russia, and any movement or person who could be associated with it, plummeted. H.A., Ickes, and Eleanor Roosevelt fought back calling the speech an unnecessary attack on Moscow and the proposed Anglo-American alliance a slight to the United Nations. H.A. responded that it “would destroy the United Nations to have two of the chief members of the United Nations ganging up on a third member.” H.A. “didn’t see how these war-like words of Churchill now could have any more real influence on the Russians than this war-like attitude toward the Bolsheviks had in 1919.”
H.A. drew up a list of points to be used by members of the Administration to counter Churchill. H.A. wrote, “the American people were not willing to send American boys to fight anybody now; that certainly the Russians did not want to fight anybody now; that in all probability the situation would finally work out on a basis that would cause the Russians completely and utterly to distrust us; that it would cause the Russians to engage in a race with us in the making of atomic bombs; that while they might have be a long way behind us at the present time, they would have enough bombs to destroy us fifteen years hence; … that they would have no hesitation in continuing their fifth-column activities in all the nations of the world; that they could use these fifth-columnists effectively to destroy our form of government.”
The benefits of the New Deal will be destroyed if we have to use our limited resources to further expand our military might. Big business that creates our armaments will prosper, but the American people will suffer.
© 2013 Ron Millar
© 2013 Ron Millar
