To the Editor:

Tocqueville once wrote: “Astonishment has often been expressed at this singular blindness of the upper classes of the old regime and the way they compassed their own downfall.” I was reminded of Tocqueville when I read Peter L. Berger’s admirable analysis [“The Greening of American Foreign Policy,” March] of American industry’s disillusion with American power, its preference for “stable dictatorships over unstable democracies.” The “suicidal mania of American business,” as James Burnham once described it, is a continuing pattern duplicated in pre-Hitler Germany and pre-war France. Ernest T. Weir, the open-shop steelmaster of West Virginia, was Radio Moscow’s favorite spokesman because he described UN resistance to the invasion of South Korea as “Truman’s war,” and he wasn’t the only American businessman to take this position. In fact, nothing seems to have changed very much from Tocqueville to Berger. I imagine that Tocqueville would find ample confirmation of his view of the upper classes in the present attitude of American banking and business to Communist China. For example, after a mere ten days in China with five other Chase Manhattan executives, David Rockefeller wrote that “the social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history . . . whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded”—not only, horrors, in economic terms, but also in “fostering high morale and community of purpose.” How like the famous Life magazine issue of March 29, 1943, which said: “When we take into account what the USSR has accomplished in twenty years of its existence, we can make allowances for certain shortcomings, however deplorable. . . . If the Soviet leaders tell us that the control of information was necessary to get this job done, we can afford to take their word for it.”

We might also recall the great Waldorf-Astoria dinner given as a farewell to Soviet Ambassador Litvinov in 1933 and attended by such prominent capitalists as Alfred P. Sloan, Gerard Swope, and Owen D. Young. The high point of the evening came when the guests stood and faced a stage behind which hung a huge American flag and the Red Flag with the hammer and sickle while the organ played, first, “My Country ’tis of Thee” and then the “Internationale.”

A Fortune magazine poll conducted by Elmo Roper in 1943 reported that of various U.S. population groups, the one categorized as “executives” had the greatest confidence in Soviet postwar intentions, 48 per cent, while only 31 per cent of the entire population was of the same belief.

A few months ago, AFL-CIO President George Meany testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In his testimony, he listed half-a-dozen examples of how American business and banking interests have become close economic partners of the Soviet Union. “American capitalists,” said Meany, “were rabid anti-Communists only so long as they saw Communism as a threat to their business interests—not because they were so concerned with democracy and freedom. . . . Now that they see they can make a few bucks dealing with the commissars, they’ve changed their tune.” He cited business deals, in existence or pending, between the Soviet Union and such firms as International Harvester. Control Data, GM, duPont, IBM, and Allis Chalmers as confirmation of his argument.

I am glad that Mr. Berger has singled out “the present leadership of American labor” as one of the few opponents of the powerful intellectual-industrial-banking complex which plays such a dominant role in formulating and supporting American foreign policy. In its unyielding opposition to the USSR and in its perception of “a connection between American power and freedom,” the AFL-CIO is a far cry from the Western European labor movements. It is a measure of the difference between them that the AFL-CIO honored itself by inviting as its guest of honor Alexander Solzhenitsyn, while the British TUC invited as its honored guest Alexander Shelepin, the erstwhile Soviet labor boss and secret-police chief.

Arnold Beichman
University of Massachusetts
Boston, Massachusetts