JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 449
This hopeful and terrifically unbalanced homage to wistful loveliness of the Soviet Union, The Businessman's Stake in American-Soviet Friendship, by Harland Allen, was published in Chicago in 1944, and seems to me a small prayer for what the post-war world might bring about. Allen forced the then-popular economic thought that the people dangling from the visor of Uncle Joe Stalin's cap were money angels rather than Russian corpses, and that the air lane shown in the trans-polar map at right would soon be filled with American exports headed to Moscow. (Little did he know that in a decade this line would be the distance traveled by ICBMs, or close enough to it.) At least that seems to be the hope here, Stalin forcibly melted into the Big Board, the Soviet Union trading on the DOW as CCCP (Inc.).
The small pamphlet received some spirited review support from the Northwestern University School of Law, the Des Moines Register and Tribune,the Society for the Advancement of Management, the Meadville Theological School, and Laird Dell Attorney at Law. And that's about it. But these were ripe times for this sort of pro-Soviet thought: after all, dozens of millions of Russians had been killed in the fight in the East against their former Nazi allies, and without all of that blood sacrifice I have no doubt that the war would've lasted for some years to come.* The U.S. had a powerful ally in the Soviet Union regardless of what had happened there in the 1930's and regardless of their attack on Finland and regardless of their Pact with Hitler--from 1942 onward they would hinder and halt the Nazi army and nearly ground the whole thing down to a nub, crushing the German capacity to fight in the west. The atomic bomb was to be untried until July 1945, and the outcome of the war was not yet known. Love for the Soviet Union was high in the sky at this point, FDR making many airy and superior statements about our new ally, while the rest of the propaganda machine was lubed and oiled for the coming fight. LIFE magazine went so far as to pronounce Lenin as "perhaps the greatest man of modern times" and that the NKVD was analogous to the FBI. Even old anti-Soviet hawks like MacArthur publicly pronounced their admiration for the new regime. (George Patton famously did not.)
Back to our pamphlet: aside from some romantic vision of the Soviet Union, Allen maintained that the U.S. needed to deal with the CCCP because of its enormous army (which he did not want to annoy and fight) and its impending "mastery o the air"--it would be better to trade and make money than it would be to make war. Allen pointed out that some of the problems of Americans dealing with the political system in the Soviet Union were inadequate reports on what he described as the country's economic "principle of national planning". .(I hardly know what George Orwell might've said about the supremely understated summation of the Soviet system as "national planning" and the fruitless and embarrassingly weak attempt at controlling language to describe the monstrously repressive regime.) He continues: "Journalists have been positively fearful of open-minded reporting in Russia lest they get tagged--or tarred--with the familiar epithet "communist", and then goes on to describe the similarities of the "two great peace-loving peoples".
And so it goes, on and on in this pamphlet--it just isn't worth going into any further than this. The euphoric sheen of pro-Soviet sentiment and appreciation wore thinner as the war progressed, truer feelings becoming more exposed as the German army retreated westward, reproducing the famous Minard chart of Napoleon's disappeared army in a war 130 years earlier. The endgame for European real estate, fumbled badly by the dying FDR at Yalta, brought out the cardboard smiles between the US and the Soviet Union, relations strained to the point that the military employment of the atomic bomb was in some not-minor sense made to bridle Soviet intentions.
But that was still two years hence for Mr. Allen, who I guess couldn't see into the future that far, even if his work was heralded by the Des Moines Register. He just didn't do a very good job of withstanding the test of time, even though that test ended in 1946.