Victory and Humiliation on the ASS Missouri--Japan Surrenders Unconditionally

 

General Douglas MacArthur orchestrated the most humiliating surrender possible for the Japanese Empire and its officer class.

One day after six years of war in Europe began the even longer war in Asia and the Pacific officially ended on September 2, 1945.  On that day General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) ordered members of the Japanese Government and High Command to assemble to sign the formal documents of unconditional surrender.

The Japanese had been at war even longer than their Axis allies, since the 1937 invasion of China or, if you count low grade guerilla resistance, since the 1931 annexation of Manchuria.  For them, particularly the Imperial officer class who had pushed aggressive expansion, the ceremony was an almost unbearable and ignominious occasion. 

The war had begun with such high hopes.  To them it was to be the extension of Japan’s unique high culture to the backwards nations of Asia and a final end to European encroachment and colonization.  And one after the other they defeated and expelled the British, French, Dutch, and Americans from their possessions.  The vaunted Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would bring Asia to the forefront of the world and, of course, enrich Japan.  The struggle, undertaken for the Emperor, was a divine mission.

The bodies of women, many of them rape victims, and children during the infamous Rape of Nanking, one of the of  the Japanese atrocities that fueled the deep hatred of American and allied troops for their enemies in Asia.

The Japanese conducted their seemingly irresistible advances with a relentless cruelty that shocked the “civilized” world but was totally in keeping with their own traditions and particularly with the Samurai culture as redefined for modern industrial warfare.  The Rape of Nanking was not a trumped-up propaganda ploy as charges of German atrocities in Belgium during World War I had been.  It set the stage for behavior to civilian populations that fell under their control, at least during the period of initial attack and occupation.  The brutal treatment of American and allied prisoners, exemplified by the Bataan Death March was directly due to the contempt the martial culture had for any troops who did not fight “honorably” to the death.

As a result of these depredations, and deeply ingrained Western racism, the war in the East was matched by equal savagery by the Allies.  The Japanese were painted as sub-human in a way that even the Nazis never were.  After some of the most brutal combat in history on all sides the Allies crept to the doorstep of the Home Islands when the U.S. unleashed—twice—a new horror of its own, atomic weapons. 

Faced with what he feared might be the annihilation of his people, the Emperor, against the wishes of many of the same officers assembled on the deck of the USS Missouri, finally ordered the capitulation of the Empire on August 15.

Sailors crowded the decks of the USS Missouri to witness the surrender.

It took until September 2 for MacArthur to orchestrate the final drama.  Holding the ceremony on board the USS Missouri, a battleship that survived the attack on Pearl Harbor emphasized the humiliation.  As did other flourishes like displaying the flag of Commodore Mathew Perry’s flag ship from his 1853 mission which forced the reclusive Japanese to open trade with the West.  Also pointedly on hand as official witnesses were General Jonathan Wainwright, who surrendered the Philippines and was on the Bataan Death March, and British General Arthur Percival, who had surrendered Singapore.  MacArthur and other American officers present did not attend in dress uniforms but appeared without jackets or ties in standard duty kakis.  Most Allied officers wore more formal uniforms and full decorations.

The signing ceremony itself was starkly simple and lasted just 23 minutes from start to finish.  The instrument was first signed by the Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and then General Yoshijiro Umezu, Chief of the Army General Staff. MacArthur then signed as the newly designated Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers who would be charged with occupation and governance of the defeated nation.  A parade of officers representing all Allied combatants in the East followed to add their signatures:  Admiral Chester Nimitz, U.S. Navy; General Hsu Yung-Ch’ang, the Republic of China; Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, United Kingdom; General Kuzma Derevyanko, Soviet Union (which belatedly declared war on Japan only days earlier); General Sir Thomas Blamey, Australia; Colonel Lawrence Cosgrave, Canada; General Philippe Leclerc, France; Admiral C.E.L. Hefrich, the Netherlands; and Air Vice-Marshal Leonard Isitt, New Zealand.

Each signed two copies of the instrument.  The Allied copy was bound in fine leather, lined in gold, and embossed with the seals of the U.S. and Japan.  The Japanese copy was crudely bound in canvas with no seals or ornamentation.

Throughout the ceremony MacArthur never spoke to or even looked directly at his Japanese counterparts.  Afterwards he turned and walked away without shaking hands.  It was over—both the ceremony and, finally, World War II.

Two different days are recognized as V-J Day.  For Britain and most of the rest of the world it is August 15 when the Emperor announced capitulation.  President Harry Truman officially proclaimed September 2 V-J Day for the United States.

Woodstock, Illinois still celebrated VJ Day with a large annual parade and Drum and Bugle Corps festival in 1960.

For several years following the war it was a widely celebrated event.  In Woodstock, Illinois it was the occasion of an annual festival featuring a parade and a famous Drum and Bugle Corps competition until the 1970’s.  But time has erased the great feeling of relief and joy that the nation and world felt when THE War was finally over.  Most years the anniversary goes unnoticed except by the dwindling veterans and their immediate families.

Crosseyed James Gordon Bennett Gave Birth to Modern Newspapers and Sensation Mongering

 

James Gordon Bennett, the cross-eyed publisher in 1851.

James Gordon Bennett, Sr., born this day in 1795 in Newmill, Banffshire, Scotland, was so cross-eyed that one acquaintance said, “when he looked at me with one eye, he looked out at the City Hall with the other.”  Yet he saw far enough to revolutionize American journalism in several ways for good and ill.

Bennet was born into a prosperous Catholic family which was devout enough to give him a good education in hopes that he would enter the priesthood.   He entered a seminary in Aberdeen at age 15 and remained there for four years.  But the restless lad was not cut out for the restraints of the cloth.  He undertook a series of rambles about Scotland while reading voraciously just about anything he could lay his hands on while living on a modest income from his undoubtedly disappointed family.

In 1819 at age 23 he and a friend sailed for North America pretty much on a lark.  After arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia he found work as a school master, the occupation of a gentleman at loose ends.  He frugally saved enough of his meager earnings to pay for passage to Portland, Maine and the allure of a new start in the raw but promising United States.   After another few months as teacher in a rustic village, Bennett made another jump to Boston, in 1820 the proud Hub of the Universe.

Bennett became something of an itinerant chasing opportunity where he could find it in New England. He as a book seller’s clerk and a proofreader for some of the publishers who sold their wares in his shop.  Then it was on to South Carolina where the Charleston Courier hired him to translate Spanish news articles from journals arriving in the busy port from Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America—his first newspaper work.  By 1823 he was in New York City where he first sold news stories and commentary to various papers—today we would call him a freelancer—before landing a spot as assistant editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer, one of the oldest newspapers in the city.

His bitterness over his own experiences at seminary and years spent in New England and the South where anti-Catholicism was rife turned him away from his family’s faith.

New York was the right city at the right time for an ambitious young man.  Thanks to a commodious harbor and the opening of the Erie Canal the city was eclipsing Boston as the commercial, if not yet the cultural capital of the country and was poised to surpass Philadelphia as the financial hub, especially after the Second Bank of the United States was stripped of its Charter by Andrew Jackson in 1836.

That was just a year after Bennett finally raised enough money to open his own newspaper in 1835.  The New York Herald first hit the streets in May of that year.  Intent from the beginning on the widest possible circulation, Bennet aimed his paper squarely at the city’s shopkeepers, clerks, and skilled workingmen instead of at the business and political elites.  Like his contemporary Phineas T.  Barnum he employed excitement and diversion and flattery the by confirming his readers' biases. 

On one hand that meant lurid coverage of crime, scandal, fires, and disasters and on the other hand expressing restrained support for the burgeoning anti-Catholic Know Nothings.  Bennett later explained that it was “not to instruct but to startle and amuse.”

Largely due to the lurid coverage in the New York Herald the murder of prostitute Helen Jewett fascinated the public for decades.  This illustration from a post-Civil War book on the case depicts the alleged killer, Richard P. Robinson slinking away from the scene after bludgeoning the woman in the head with a hatchet and setting her bed on fire with an oil lamp.

The fledgling paper got just what it was looking for with the sensational story of the grisly murder of a young prostitute named Helen Jewett who was found hacked in the head by an ax in her bed in an upscale brothel.  Bennett first initiated the practice of assigning reporters to regularly check in at police stations, courts, and firehouses—beat reporting—that broke the case on the front page of the Herald and continued breathless coverage through the investigation and the trial of 19-year-old Richard P. Robinson, a young man from a respectable and prosperous family who was one of Jewett’s regular customers.

The lurid coverage broke old taboos in the press on sexual scandal which was either omitted from the news or only hinted at in language so oblique that it took a sophisticated reader to decode it.  Bennet was blunt about Jewett’s profession, place of employment, and Robinson’s patronage, although he came to depict Robinson as an innocent young man drawn to debauchery by a tainted woman.  In addition, Bennett’s article featuring the account of Rosina Townsend, Jewett’s madam who discovered body, which has been widely credited with being the first interview published in an American newspaper.  He claimed to have personally conducted the questioning.  Some historians believe it was creatively edited and some believe it was a hoax altogether.

While Bennett’s coverage defended Robinson, his competition at the New York Sun, a paper aimed at a more working class readership than the Herald played up the class resentment of the defendant as a wealthy kid who could buy his way out of killing a poor girl driven to degradation by cruel circumstances.  The two papers battled it out in what became the first great urban circulation war.

In the end, Bennett won twice.  First, sales of the upstart Herald soared, and the paper was soon the most widely read in the city.  Second, Robinson did beat the rap.  The judge disallowed critical testimony of most witnesses—other prostitutes—as inherently unreliable due to their loose morals.  It then took less than half an hour for the jury—all male and respectably middle class—to acquit the young man.

Having found a formula for success, Bennett never looked back.  From waterfront murders to scandals among the elite, to riots, fires, and shipwrecks his faithful readers could count on something exciting every day.  In 1839 he upped the ante by becoming the first newspaper to publish illustrations on its front page—hastily produced wood cuts.

Bennett was the first to employ boys to hawk his papers on the streets revolutionizing circulation in New York and spreading to other cities across the country.  James Cafferty painted this picture of a "news butcher" selling the Herald in 1851.

He also built circulation by recruiting armies of street venders—news boys—to hawk the paper on street corners across the rapidly growing city.  Other papers quickly followed suite creating a fixture of city life that endured for a century.

On the business end, Bennett was equally innovative and aggressive.  Other publishers seemed to spend half their time chasing down and dunning in arrears advertisers and subscribers.  Bennet firmly demanded cash in advance from both.

By 1840 Bennett was a wealthy and successful man. He finally had time, at age 59 to take a wife, Henrietta Agnes Crean.  Together they would have three children including the apple of his eye and heir, James Gordon Bennett, Jr.

Ephemeral copies of the Herald from its early years are nearly impossible to find.  This tattered 1842 edition is one of the few that have survived.  Any copies that the paper may have kept in its own morgue were lost in a disastrous fire during which James Gordon Bennett, Jr. drunkenly tried to assume command of responding fire companies and had to be hosed away by the firemen to keep him out of the way.

Unlike most other New York papers, the Herald was not affiliated with either the Whigs or Democrats or any faction of either.  As noted, Bennett was sympathetic to the Know Nothings and supported some of their local candidates but did not embrace the most extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric, perhaps because he was an immigrant himself.  He extended his coverage to national politics and personally conducted the first interview of a sitting president—Democrat Martin Van Buren.  The former New York State boss of the Albany Regency, one of the first political machines, Van Buren was shrewd enough to exploit the platform provided by New York City’s most influential paper.

Despite the journalistic coup the instinctively conservative Bennett made Whig William Henry Harrison his first national endorsement in 1840.  Thereafter he would swing between parties supporting James K. Polk in 1844, Zachary Taylor in1848, and Franklin Pierce in 1852, all winners.  He was particularly enthusiastic about Pierce, a Northern Democrat with Southern principles.  But Pierce descended into an alcoholic depressive stupor after he watched his beloved son being killed in a railroad accident on the way to Washington and then apparently reneged on an implied promise to appoint Bennett as American minister plenipotentiary to France.  He turned relentlessly against the hapless Pierce attacking him almost daily on the Herald front page and in scathing editorials.

In 1856 Bennett actually flirted with supporting John C. Frémont, the first Republican candidate probably because the dashing famed explorer, Mexican War hero, and self-proclaimed liberator of California made good copy.  But in the end, he passed over New York State’s former President Millard Fillmore running on the American Party (Know Nothing) ticket and backed James Buchannan, Pierce’s Secretary of State and another Northern Democrat with Southern sympathies.

In this mocking cartoon from a rival publication, Bennett is shown as a Scotsman so stereotypically thrifty that he dresses in rags as he rebuff attempts to clothe him in the leather kepi and cloak of the pro-Lincoln Wide Awakes in 1860.

Thereafter Bennett became reliably Democrat and an increasingly powerful influence on the party.  In 1860 with the sand of the Union shifting under his feet, he first endorsed Southern Democrat and incumbent Vice President John C. Breckinridge, then shifted to Senator John Bell of Tennessee, a Democrat running as a Constitutional Unionist.  He thus bypassed Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and Republican Abraham Lincoln.

In 1861 the Herald reported a circulation 84,000 copies and called itself “the most largely circulated journal in the world.”  That also made it perhaps the most influential U.S. newspaper despite competition from Horace Greely’s Republican leaning New York Tribune.

Despite Bennett's stinging criticism of his administration, Abraham Lincoln was a devoted daily reader of the Herald for its accurate and detailed reports of battles in all theaters of the war.

When war broke out, Bennett positioned himself as a loyal war Democrat and a harsh critic of Lincoln’s conduct of the war and later the Emancipation Proclamation, 14th Amendment, and his refusal to entertain Confederate peace feelers.   Despite regular and often scurrilous attacks in its pages, Lincoln was one of the paper’s most avid readers.  He had fresh copies rushed to the White House as soon as they arrived by train from New York.  He admired the paper’s coverage of the war.  Bennett dispatched dozens of correspondents to accompany Union troops in all theaters of the war resulting in detailed accounts of major battles.  Lincoln often found them more reliable than the reports of his generals who tended to minimize their mistakes and exaggerate their accomplishments.

As the wartime election of 1864 drew closer Bennett was a major force in promoting former Union General in Chief George C. McClellan for the Democratic nomination.  McClellan, who Lincoln had dismissed for his timid reluctance to fully commit his Army of the Potomac against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, ran on a platform of offering generous terms to the Rebel states.  But as the election neared Lincoln, who was widely expected to face defeat, gained strength as the tide of war finally seemed to shift against the South.  Perhaps because his son was in the Navy commanding his own armed yacht in action off of Florida, Bennett ultimately decided to make no endorsement in the Herald in that election, although a discerning reader could not fail to notice a bias for McClellan.

After Lincoln was assassinated in April of 1865 and the war drew to a close, Bennett and the Herald pivoted shamelessly and became leaders in turning President into a martyr.  It was not just chasing popular opinion, although that was part of it.  Bennett became an ardent supporter of Lincoln’s second Vice President, Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat, former border state, loyal U.S. Senator, Union General, and wartime Governor of Tennessee.  He supported Johnson’s policy of a generous and gentle reconstruction of the Southern states as a realization of Lincoln’s own postwar plans and as an alternative to the punitive policies of the Radical Republicans in Congress.  The paper stood by Johnson through his impeachment ordeal.

James Gordon Bennet, Jr. who took over his father's newspaper when he was 25 years old was to say the least a colorful character.

In 1866 Bennett retired at age 75 and turned the reins of the Herald over to his 25-year-old son, James Gordon Bennett, Jr.  The younger man was raised mostly in France in the lap of luxury.  He was noted as a yachtsman, a dashing spendthrift, womanizer, and debauched alcoholic.  But he continued to build circulation with a steady diet of sensationalism, not flinching at publishing accounts of his own scandals like drunkenly driving his carriage at high speed through the streets of Manhattan naked on several occasions, brawls over women, and being horse whipped by the brothers of his lovely fiancé, socialite Caroline May when he drunkenly intruded into a May family dinner and proceeded to urinate on the furniture and into the fireplace.

The younger Bennett had a knack for circulation building gimmicks, most famously dispatching reporter Henry Morton Stanley to Africa to find the un-lost missionary Dr. David Livingstone in 1869.  If the news was unsatisfactorily dull, he was not averse to making it up like a famous 1871 hoax about wild animals escaping from the Brooklyn Zoo and terrorizing that city.  Later, in 1881 he backed George W. De Long’s voyage to the North Pole on the USS Jeannette via the Bering Strait. The ill-fated expedition led to the deaths from starvation of DeLong and 19 of his crew, a tragedy that only increased the paper’s circulation.

Bennett Jr sent reporter Henry Morton Stanley to Africa to search for the supposedly lost English missionary and physician Dr. David Livingston.  Dispatches from Stanley were breathlessly awaited by readers.  This is an illustration from the best selling book that Stanley wrote based on his newspaper filings.

The senior Bennett died in Manhattan on June 1, 1872 at age 76 just five months before his rival Horace Greeley also succumbed to illness in November.  He left his son a huge fortune.

After the scandal over his boorish behavior at his fiancé’s house, Bennett Jr., who preferred to be called simply Gordon, relocated to Paris where he lived most of the rest of his life when he was not aboard one of his increasingly fantastic yachts or other mansions in London, Newport Rhode Island, and elsewhere.  He attempted to micromanage the Herald by telegraph but found himself increasingly out of touch with New York. 

Meanwhile new competitors were arising to compete in sensationalism including Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and then William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.  After peaking in circulation in the mid 1880’s the paper began a long, slow decline. 

Meanwhile, in Paris Bennett launched English language Paris Herald and then a London edition.  Both papers fielded numerous correspondents throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world and fed international news to the parent paper in New York.  In time the Paris Herald became a respected paper and even a rival of the Times of London as an international voice.

Bennet Jr. died on May 14, 1918, in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Alpes-Maritimes, France. 

In 1924 the New York Herald was acquired by its smaller rival the New York Tribune, to form the New York Herald Tribune.  The Paris edition became the International Herald Tribune.  In its new guise the New York paper shed its sensationalist image and positioned itself to compete with the New York Time as a sober and respectable mainstream newspaper. 

Despite its reputation and innovative journalism, the New York paper lagged behind the Times and was mortally wounded by a disastrous 114-day newspaper strike and ushered in four years of strife with labor unions, particularly the International Typographical Union. Faced with mounting losses then owner John Hay Whitney shut the paper down on August 15, 1966.

The New York Times and Washington Post jointly acquired the Paris edition which is now published as the New York Times International Edition.

The Bell Ringers, an elaborate animated bronze clock that once adorned the 1894 Herald Building now sits in Herald Square as a monument to James Gordon Bennett Sr. and Jr.  It also plays a snatch of George M. Cohan's Give My Regards to Broadway, the line that goes, "remember me to Herald Square."

James Gordon Bennett and his son are both commemorated in a monument on Herald Square in New York—an animated bronze clock featuring the Roman goddess of wisdom Minerva and two muscular hammer wielding bell ringers by sculptor Jean Antonin Carles.  It first adorned the Herald Building that once stood directly to the north of the square on West 35th Street in 1894.

Daring to Use the C Word--The History of American Communism

 

Journalist Jack Reed was a key figure in the founding of the Communist Labor Party.

Note--The rapidly deteriorating Resident of the White House is becoming increasingly unhinged as everything goes disastrously wrong.  In addition to other ravings and self-destructive aggression, he has fallen back on a golden oldie he learned at the knee of his mentor, the reptilian Roy Cohn--calling every foe within spitting distance a Commie.  He has laid the brand on popular politicians like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the victors of special elections and Democratic Primaries across the county.  He has smeared journalists, media corporations, citizen activists, Canada.  Bound to rally some of his wavering base, but perhaps not the knockout punch he hoped for.   For his minions who cannot understand the differences among Socialists, current social democrats like the recently successful Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), mainstream progressives and liberals, and bomb throwing terrorists here is a plain and unvarnished history of Communism in America.  

On August 31, 1919, at a rump meeting in Chicago of Left Wing members of the fractured Socialist Party (SP), the Communist Labor Party (CLP), a predecessor to the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), was founded.  It was a year of great turmoil.  Long-time Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was in the Federal prison at Atlanta for giving a speech opposing World War I.  Many socialists and unionists were aflame with passion for the apparently successful Russian Revolution.  Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer with the enthusiastic assistance of the young leader of the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, launched his raids against aliens and radicals.  An unheard-of era of government repression was sweeping the land. 

Earlier in the year the SP’s well-established network of language federations, each of which had its own publications and leadership, in cooperation with Left Wing state parties captured a majority on the Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC).  Alarmed, the regulars of the outgoing NEC declared the election invalid charging the language federations with irregularities.  They expelled the leaders of several federations and suspended recognition of the Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, Lettish (Latvian), South Slavic, and Ukrainian federations and the entire state parties of Michigan, Massachusetts, and Ohio. The New York State Executive Committee suspended and reorganized Left Wing locals and branches representing nearly half the state's membership.  Needless to say, such high-handed tactics led to an uproar in the Party.

Anglo members of the Socialist Party Left Wing and dissident state parties found the CLP on August 31, 1919.

The language federations joined by the Michigan state party responded with a call to a founding convention of the Communist Party of America (CPA) to be held in Chicago on September 1.  Many leading English speaking left wingers, including NEC members Alfred Wagenknecht and L.E. Katterfeld and the dashing journalist John “Jack” Reed, lionized by the Party rank and file for his eyewitness account of the Russian October Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World, decided to stay in the SP and try to win control back from the regulars.  The Party called an Emergency National Convention in Chicago scheduled for Aug. 30.  But the regulars controlled the majority of State parties, suspended parties and federations were banned, and a credentials committee ruled against seating many other Left Wing delegates. 

John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow planned to crash the convention anyway, but officials were tipped off and called the police, who obligingly expelled the leftists from the hall. The remaining leftist delegates walked out. Meeting in a rented room directly below the official convention the expelled delegates formed the Communist Labor Party with Wagenknecht at its head.  

....A day later on September 1st Foreign Language sections of the Socialist Party founded another Communist Party.  Both claimed support of Moscow and the Comintern.

Meanwhile, the founding convention of the Communist Party of America went ahead as planned the next day.  Suddenly there were two competing Communist Parties, both claiming allegiance to the Russian Revolution and to the Communist International (Comintern), a situation that displeased V. I. Lenin. 

Both infant parties were soon victims of the expanding Palmer Raids and leaders of both were arrested or in hiding.  Both were forced to essentially go underground by December.

In January 1920 the Comintern ordered the two parties to merge as the United Communist Party, and to follow the party line established in Moscow.  .A faction of the CPA held out for a while but was forced into line by 1921. Many English language leftists, however, soon left the Party and it is estimated that less than 5% of the membership were native English speakers.  Through the decade the Party was beset with internal dissent and was frequently reined in by the Comintern.

Although the Communists were allowed to resume operations as a legal organization, the experience in the underground and the formation of cells and the like as well as stringent control from Moscow were stamped on the Party.  The Red Scare of 1919-1920 prevented the Communists from ever becoming a mass or popular party and helped create the secretive culture and fealty to the Soviets that made it the nightmare of post-World War II of conservatives.

Former IWW organizer William Z. Foster spent most of the '20's marginalized in the United Communist Party, the forced merger of the CLP and CPA.  But the Comintern put him at the head of re-incarnated Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and endorsed his bore-from-within strategy of working inside the conservative business unions of the AFL instead of joining the IWW or organizing explicitly Marxist labor unions-

Initially many rank and file members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were enthusiastic about the new party and some leaders, like William Z. Foster, jumped to the new organization.  But the defection of William D. “Big Bill” Haywood to Moscow after the conviction of 101 IWW leaders for sedition in 1919 left a bitter taste in many mouths.  When reports by Emma Goldman and others exiled to Russia exposed the authoritarian underside of the Lenin regime, support dwindled further.  The Party began to demand that the IWW submit itself to Party leadership—a demand that was rudely rejected by the union. When party members meddled in important IWW strikes of the ‘20s, the rift became pronounced.  By the end of the decade the IWW was firmly anti-Communist.

In 1929 the Party was renamed the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).  Foster, after being frozen out at the demand of Kremlin leaders through most of the ‘20s emerged as the new Party leader and instituted the directed policy of boring-from-within the conservative labor movement and shunning the independent IWW.  CP militants helped form and establish the Congress of Industrial Organization in heavy industry during the ‘30s.

Many well-meaning idealists entered the Party in the Depression years and did heroic work in the labor movement and elsewhere.  But the fickle dictates of Moscow took a toll.  A joke around IWW circles years later was that you could tell just how naïve a leftist was by when they finally got disgusted and abandoned the CP—the 1936-38 Stalinist Purge Trials in Russia, the Hitler/Stalin Pact, the roughshod imposition of Soviet-style government over Eastern Europe in the post-war years, or the final straw for many, the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.

The Soviet Union's brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising was the final straw for many longtime Party members.

When the next great upsurge of the left occurred during the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War, the CPUSA found itself mainly on the sidelines, distrusted by the New Left and ignored as irrelevant.  Self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninists split among a bewildering profusion of new parties and organizations.

With the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union the CPUSA was left a virtual orphan.  It numbers continued to dwindle to a hard core of aging militants, many of them from the decedents from those old ethnic federations and from the needle trades in New York.

Under the Spell of Joan Blondell and Those Big Baby Blues

                       

                                     Joan Blondell--the whole package.

She was the brassy blonde who had been there, done that, and lived to tell about it.  A wise cracking working girl with the biggest blue eyes ever, an electric smile, and a plump figure that turned heads and got attention.  She could scheme and connive with good humor.  Underneath the veneer of urban cynicism, though, you just knew she was capable of undying loyalty to lovers and friends alike.  That was the persona Joan Blondell brought to Warner Bros. in 1930 and which sustained a career that spanned 40 years.

Rose Joan Blondell was born on August 30, 1906 in Brooklyn to a pair of vaudevillians, comedian Ed Blondell and Kathryn “Katie” Cain, an Irish-American hoofer.  Baby Joan was first thrust on stage at just four months old as the daughter of Peggy Astaire in The Greatest Love.  She would be given lines and bits of business in the family act by age four

The family toured relentlessly and Joan did not know a real home until her teenage years.  By then in addition to becoming familiar with hotel rooms in cities across the country, she and her family spent a year in Hawaii and toured Australia for six years.

                                        

                                                        Before blond--Miss Dallas, 1926 age 20.

The family finally settled in Dallas, Texas where she managed to finish school.  Under the name Rosebud Blondell, she won the 1926 Miss Dallas Pageant and placed fourth in the fifth outing of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey later that year. 

The next year, 1927, Blondell tried her hand at North Texas State College in Denton where her mother was working as an actress.  Education didn’t take.  Show Biz did.  She worked as a model and a circus show girl before heading for the Big Apple and a bit of fame.

Blondell joined a stock company and worked regularly in small parts, including stints on Broadway.  Her big break came in 1930 when she was paired with a charismatic young hoofer named James Cagney in the play Penny Arcade.  It only ran four weeks, but the show and its young stars wowed Al Jolson, Broadway’s biggest star and the man who had helped save Warner Bros. with his breakthrough talkie, The Jazz Singer. 

Jolson bought rights to the play and then turned around to sell it to Warners with the provision that Cagney and Blondell had to re-create their parts.  Jack Warner agreed but wanted to change her name to Inez Holmes.  Blondell flatly refused, endangering her big chance in the movies.  Rather than risk losing the property and perhaps Cagney as well, Warner relented.  But it would be far from the last time that Blondell clashed with the notoriously dictatorial studio boss.

                        Blondell and James Cagney made an impression in Warner Bros.' Sinner's Holiday in 1930.

Released as Sinners Holiday the movie was Cagney’s film debut.  The second film Blondell made for Warners, Office Wife had already been released.  In that one she had a supporting role as the sister of the female lead and stole the show handing out world weary advice while getting into or out of revealing underwear.

Sinners Holiday established the screen personas of both Cagney and Blondell.  Cagney shot to immediate stardom.  Blondell was along for the ride.  She would co-star with the actor six times, more than any other actress in his career.  The films included Public Enemy, Footlight Parade, and Blond Crazy.  Cagney later said the only woman he ever loved other than his wife was Joan Blondell.

If Cagney shot to top stardom, Blondell never quite reached that level despite her great popularity with audiences.  Men adored her and women felt like she could be their best friend.  But the studio already had one blond bombshell, Jean Harlow.  Another up-and-coming young actress with a street-wise persona, Barbara Stanwyck played working class girls in edgy and darker material.   Blondell’s close friend Betty Davis was a fast-rising star and would soon be dominating serious and prestige parts.  Ruby Keeler, Jolson’s wife, was the musical star.  And young Olivia de Havilland would soon sew up all of innocent sweetheart parts.  The studio even had extra sassy comic blonds like Glenda Ferrell.

In pre-Code flicks Blondell frequently dished out wise cracks and world weary advice in various states of undress, revealing lingerie, or even from the bath tub.  Seen here on loan to Fox in 1933 with a more modestly covered up Ginger Rogers in Broadway Bad.

So, the studio wasted Blondell’s time in shorts and relegated her to the sassy best friend in over 50 feature films.  She, her sex appeal, body, and sass were perfect for the pre-Production Code naughtiness for which Warners was famous.  She was cast in fallen women pictures—Illicit with Stanwyck in the lead, Big Business Girl with Loretta Young, Night Nurse again with Stanwyck, The Greeks Had a Word for Them in a rare first billed lead, and Thee on a Match with Ann Dvorak and pal Bette Davis.

The studio also put her in their down-on-their-luck Depression stories like Union Station with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as an improbable hobo and Central Park in which two down-and-outers forced to live in the title park fall in love, are separated, and exploited in a scheme to rob a charity ball.

                                    Blondell spent a lot of screen time answering the phone in her underwear or a peekaboo robe.

Blondell was making as many as six pictures a year plus shorts when she married cinematographer George Barnes in Phoenix, Arizona on January 4, 1933.

Musicals were another staple of Warners in the early 30’s.  The fact that Blondell was not a singer and only a so-so dancer did not prevent the studio from casting her as a chorine and pal of the leads.  Most famously she co-starred in Gold Diggers of 1933 in which she performed in a semi-spoken wail/moan Busby Berkley’s epic Forgotten Man number.  That one song may have been Blondell’s finest dramatic performance.  It was on the set of this movie that Blondell met boyish singer Dick Powell who would become her second husband.

The heart wrenching Forgotten Man number from Busby Berkley's Gold Diggers of 1933 was a highlight of Blonell's career.

Warners would pair her with that otherwise cracking blonde, Glenda Ferrell, in six films most notably Gold Diggers of 1937.  The characters were different in each film, and most were straight comedies.  By the mid-Thirties the Production Code office killed the fallen woman genre and limited the amount of time the well-endowed Blondell could spend in lingerie or taking baths.  And the public tired of musicals.  Warners turned to gritty gangster flicks, high flown women’s dramas, prestige historical bio-pics, and swashbucklers.  Davis had the women’s film sewed up, de Havilland’s bosom heaved for Errol Flynn, and Blondell was too urban for most costume dramas.  But she was perfect for gangster films.  She re-teamed with Cagney in He Was Her Man and with Edward G. Robinson in Bullets or Ballots.

Through the later ‘30s Warners used Blondell almost exclusively in comedies.  Scripts got lamer, budgets cheaper, co-stars second rung.  She was in danger of slipping into B movie unit films like her erstwhile partner Glenda Ferrell had with the Torchy Blaine girl reporter series.

Blondell and husband Dick Powell escaped Warner Bros. and made I Want a Divorce together at Paramount in 1940.  A harbinger of things to come?

When her contract with Warners expired in 1939, Blondell cheerfully left her long time home to become a free-lance actress.  Husband Dick Powell left the studio about the same time.  Parts were harder to come by and Blondell was nearing 40.  She teamed with her husband in a preachy comedy I Want a Divorce in 1940.

But now she was lucky to make one or two films a year.  The high points during the War years were Topper Returns, Lady for a Night at Republic Pictures with John Wayne, and Cry Havoc, a gritty war drama about Army nurses at Bataan  for MGM in 1943.

As disreputable Aunt Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945 with her proper sister played by Dorothy McGuire.

Blondell would not appear on the big screen for nearly two years.  And when she did, she was a revelation.  As Aunt Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn she was the scandalous relative of the poor but respectable Nolan family who collects men who may or may not be other women’s husbands.  Blondell considered it her finest film work.

Blondell and Powell divorced in 1944.  In ’47 she married for the third, last, and most disastrous time to charming but profligate theatrical impresario Mike Todd.  She described her relationship with him as the great, passionate love of her life.  But Todd was a spendthrift, heavy gambler, and a cad by nature.  It did not take long for him to spend his way through Blondell’s money leaving her essentially broke.  The couple divorced in 1950 with Blondell alleging physical abuse including being dangled out of a hotel window by her ankle.  A few years later Todd swept Elizabeth Taylor off of her feet then died in a plane crash.

In 1951 Blondell reached the pinnacle of her post-war career in The Blue Veil starring Jane Wyman as a self-sacrificing nurse to young children.  Wyman was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and Blondell was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

She appeared sporadically on the big screen after that, mostly in comedies most notably The Opposite Sex, a musical re-make of Clair Booth Luce’s The Women  with a cast headed by Dick Powell’s next wife, June Allison and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? starring Tony Randal in which she reprised her pal/companion persona to Jayne Mansfield.

After that Blondell worked mainly on television where she appeared as a guest star in programs like Playhouse 90, Lux Playhouse,  Adventures in Paradise, The Untouchables, Dick Powell Theater, Death Valley Days, The Virginian, Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone, Burke’s Law, Bonanza, Dr. Kildare, The Lucy Show, My Three Sons, Slattery’s People, The Man From Uncle, Family Affair, Guns of Will Sonnet, Petticoat Junction, That Girl, The Name of the Game, McCloud, Love American Style, The Rookies, Medical Center, New Dick Van Dyke Show, The Snoop Sisters,  Police Story, and Fantasy Island.

She also was in more than a dozen made for TV movies and had reoccurring or regular series roles in.  The Real McCoys, Here Come the Brides, and Banyon.  

Blondel as the dealer in a high-stakes poker game in The Cincinnati Kid with Steve McQueen, Karl Malden, and Edward G. Robinson.  Ann Margaret got the voluptuous girlfriend part she would have played thirty years earlier. 

Among Blondell’s later appearances on the big screen were a memorable turn in The Cincinnati Kid in 1965 as an experienced dealer in a high-stakes poker game, Support Your Local Gunfighter in ‘71, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood in ’76, Grease in’78, and the re-make of The Champ. She was featured in small parts in two more films released after her death.

Center Door Fancy was an autobiographical novel written by Blondell that was published by Delacorte Press in 1972.

Joan Blondell was diagnosed with leukemia and died in a Santa Monica hospital on Christmas Day 1979 at the age of 73.  She was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Those of us who love this stuff delight in stumbling on her old Warner Bros. films, no matter how slight the plot, on Turner Classic Movies and basking in that sensational smile.