In 1932, amid the Great Depression and widespread disillusionment about capitalism's prospects, Schuman had signed an open letter supporting the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, candidates of the Communist Party of the United States in that year's Presidential election.
Political sadism, the persecution of scapegoats, the glorification of war, the encouragement of racial megalomania, and the systematic inculcation of the new faith have afforded substantial psychic satisfactions to a populace whose sickness of the soul has progressed so far that it makes a virtue of poverty and abnegation, idealizes armed conflict and death, (and) prefers mythology to nutrition.... Circuses have in part taken the place of bread.
Schuman denied the accusations and successfully withstood efforts by the committee to have him removed as a government analyst of German radio broadcasts, a post that he held for several months in 1942 and 1943 while he was on leave from Williams.
Many vocal critics, including several Williams alumni, objected to the professor's outspoken liberalism, suspected communism, and continued to call for Schuman's dismissal throughout the rest of his career at the college.
[citation needed] In his 1953 book Techniques of Communism, ex-communist and FBI-paid informant Louis Budenz wrote a subsection on Schuman in a chapter on "Affecting Public Opinion."
[citation needed] Schuman's 1946 book Soviet Politics At Home and Abroad was criticised by Dwight Macdonald as "a neo-Stalinist survey, that is, its author admits practically everything and justifies it in turgid surges of clotted prose as necessary and even praise-worthy".
"[12] Marshall D. Shulman, the Columbia University professor who was the Carter Administration's leading expert on the Soviet Union, recalled using the book for a class he taught at City College of New York in the late 1940s.
[citation needed] Schuman's 1957 book Russia Since 1917 (which was in some ways an updated version of Soviet Politics At Home and Abroad) was described by Kirkus Reviews as "a compendium, elaborately researched and as fairminded as anyone could reasonably desire.
"[13] The International Socialist Review accused the author of having "no understanding of Marxism" and of a "vilification of Trotsky and the Left Opposition," but considered certain other aspects of the book to be valuable and claimed Schuman's argument that "the double-crossing and chicanery of Allied diplomacy was due to the hope that the 'Fascist Triplice' would save 'civilization' from Bolshevism, is ironclad".