Books: "The Red Decade" -“Never before–or since–had all areas of American society been so deeply penetrated by a foreign nation and a foreign ideology Never before had the country’s thinking, official policies, education, arts and moral attitudes been so profoundly affected by the agents, sympathizers and unwitting puppets of a distant dictatorship.”

In Praise of Eugene Lyons

by John Willson

One of the early war horses of of the American Right, Eugene Lyons has not yet gotten his due. He would never have called himself a conservative, nor be called a conservative by most of us who haggle over such things. But having been a commie–”I thought myself a ‘socialist almost as soon as I thought at all”–he could spot them from any angle and over great distances.

His great book, The Red Decade, will turn three score years and ten in a couple of months. It is a great book, a true tour de force, and if we are to understand the cultural mess we are in at the present age it would behoove us to read it again as it approaches its golden years.

Lyons spent roughly the first thirty-six years of his life as a tireless journalist for Soviet and communist causes–the “innocence” of Sacco and Vanzetti, “justice” for the “working man,” and the like. He would probably have become a “secret courier” to Moscow had not the Italian police blown the whistle on him. He wrote for TASS, the Daily Worker, and was the UPI’s man in Moscow for over six years. Unlike silly progressives like Lincoln Steffens (“I have been over into the future, and it works”), however, Lyons actually saw the terror around him.

Returning to the United States in 1934, he went through an ideological detoxification while writing two exposes of the Soviet paradise, Moscow Carousel and Assignment in Utopia, the latter being powerful enough to influence George Orwell and Whittaker Chambers. Chambers called it “one of the books that influenced my break with Communism.” It also got him elevated, along with James T. Farrell and Max Eastman, to a lead position “among the rats who have been campaigning with endless lies and slanders” against the Soviet Union, by none other than the American “Commissar of Culture,” Mike Gold of the New Masses. Eventually, writes George Nash, “In the decade after Yalta, Lyons, Eastman, [Freda] Utley, and [John] Chamberlain would help to create the conservative intellectual movement.”


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THE RED DECADE - American Deception

The Red Decade is a term coined by journalist and historian Eugene Lyons to describe a period in American history in the 1930s characterized by a widespread infatuation with communism in general and Stalinism in particular. Lyons believed this idolization ofJoseph Stalin and exultation of Bolshevik achievements to have reached its high point in 1938, running deepest amongst liberals, intellectuals, and journalists and even some government and federal officials.  Lyons argues that American intellectuals gave the then-Stalinist Soviet Union (and by extension, Stalinism) a certain international goodwill and respectability that it did not deserve. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Decade

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