John L. Spivak
John Louis Spivak (June 13, 1897 – September 30, 1981) was an American socialist and later communist reporter and author, who wrote about the problems of the working class, racism, and the spread of fascism in Europe and the United States.
Only years later did it transpire that the documents were supplied by the Soviets so that Spivak, alert to the scheme, could discredit them and thereby undermine Congressional efforts to investigate Communist propaganda in the United States.
[8] Soon after it appeared in 1932, an academic study called it "a second Uncle Tom's Cabin, an indictment of peonage and convict-labor in Georgia, powerful enough to put to shame all the rhapsodists of the folk Negro's happy state.
His 1935 exposé in the Communist Party's New Masses charged a congressional committee with deliberately suppressing evidence of an offer made to retired Marine General Smedley D. Butler by Wall Street financiers (the Business Plot) to lead a military coup against the U.S. government and replace it with a fascist regime.
"[15] Spivak wrote, "The anti-semitic character of Nazism has been abundantly demonstrated in these pages; nevertheless this article, and succeeding ones, will reveal Jewish financiers working with fascist groups which, if successful, would unquestionably heighten the wave of Hate-the-Jew propaganda."
"[17] Time provided its readers with a brief description of : "Misleadingly titled collection of sober reports on conditions and states of mind among the unemployed, California migratory workers, Southern sharecroppers and other distressed groups, written by one of the ablest of U.S. radical journalists.
"[19][20] A more appreciative reviewer found Spivak "natively fair-minded and realistic," but doubted his conclusions, especially his assessment of the threat of domestic Nazism and anti-Semitism: "[He] seems to take fools too seriously.
Readers will be considerably baffled to know how this U.S. investigator, who speaks only English and German, managed to evoke such dangerous confidences from the most illiterate classes in Italy, Poland and Czechoslovakia through interpreters.
His book is valuable as a document of a kind that rarely emerges from the censored murk of dictatorship.British diplomat turned academic E.H. Carr found it "ambitious" and partly interesting, and wished Spivak had covered some harder to study regions.
With all respect for Mr. Spivak's abilities, the risks taken by these German, Polish and Austrian revolutionaries seems to be utterly unreasonable and the destinies of the anti-Fascist movement put in rather reckless hands.
Under the fire of the fairly innocuous and sometimes rather naive questions of the impetuous and fearless American journalist, the high Fascist officials in Rome turned white, green, gray and red, and then finally collapsed in utter confusion and helplessness.
No wonder Mr. Spivak foresees momentous changes in the near future.Another New York Times reviewer described it as "a clever attempt to pick out the threads of fear, misery and venality in the texture of Central Europe today, not with a scholar's fine point but with the blunt stub of a partisan."
"[29] In 1940, he was arrested for criminal libel because of charges he made in Secret Armies that Edward F. Sullivan, an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Kurt Sepmeier, a German instructor at Wichita State University, were Nazi agents.
[30][31] Spivak also investigated the financial activities of Charles E. Coughlin, the Catholic radio priest who founded the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan.
"[33] A review of the historical literature on Coughlin places a sympathetic biography at one end of the scale and Spivak's "rabid" study at the other, calling Shrine "a primary document of the brown scare," that is, an unwarranted and hysterical fear of a right-wing overthrow of the federal government.
[34] New Century, a Communist publishing house, issued two pamphlets of Spivak's work that attacked America's political right wing for its role in creating the Cold War: Pattern for Domestic Fascism (1947) and The "Save the Country" Racket (1948).
[35] Esquire published a collection of his short fiction, "lurid stories about easy women, prostitutes, and other 'favors' routinely enjoyed by the middle-class dad on a sales trip," as Sex, Vice and Business by Monroe Fry.
[35] Reviewing it for the New York Times, veteran liberal journalist Gerald W. Johnson wrote that Spivak's style of journalism, committed to "the exposure of villains" and "dramatic intensity," produces in the end "a distinct aura of mythology."
