AMERICAN CIRCUS

Every four years a small group of American politicians get out their cheque book, have lunches with bankers, businessmen and trade union bureaucrats and prepare their campaigns to buy the presidency of the country.

The circus— which has begun once more — is called the primary elections. Voters may register with either or both of the two capitalist parties in the US and help 'select' the candidate to run for the White House.

In fact what really happens is that politicians test out and exploit the frustration of the electorate under the eager gaze of wealthy backers.

will support the man most likely to win and expect the pay-off when he takes his seat Washington and inherits the enormous powers of patronage, appointment and policy that the office of President carries with it.

The abysmally low levei of 'debate' during these battles can be judged by one incident the 1968 campaign that ended election of Richard Milhouse Nixon. One of the more "intellectual' candidates, Robert Kennedy, speaking Oregon crowd. To cheers he made dramatic play for the farmers' vote. 'We're helping the farmer. My family eats more tomatoes than any family I know, and my wife and children wear cotton clothes' The 1972 campaign, which began in the state of New Hampshire earlier this month, has been no exception to this standard of cynicism.

There, the Democratic front runner Senator Edmund 'Sixtus' Muskie failed to outstrip his democratic rivals by a sufficient majority and at last week's Florida primary he slumped disastrously to fourth in the field.

Predictably Muskie's unnamed 20 rich backers are pulling away from the paign and the Senator from Maine seems doomed.

The man who made by far the best showing at Floridaa southern state not particularly known for its racialism— was the extreme right-wing demagogue George Wallace, governor of Alabama.

He pulled over 42 per cent of the vote on his racialist and 'anti-authority' ticket. Wallace stomps the Deep South with a coterie of country and western singers and a veteran. preacher ('We give Thee thanks O Lord for a man of courage like George Wallace).

He exploits the frustration of the poor white working class, promises tax concessions to the middle class, agitates against the intellectuals who are Keeping the small man down. His campaign, he says, is for the working man and the businessman.

The most significant feature of the Wallace campaign in Florida was the kind of big money support he attracted. His backers were a group of powerful bankers. This is one of the first signs that big business is starting to break from its more traditional allegiance to the Republican Party and seek men who propose stronger measures to deal with the upsurge of militancy among the US working class which followed the Nixon pay freeze Last year he ran as a third party candidate and took 13 per cent of the national vote.

This time he seems set to do even better and there is the possibility that he will keep going as an official Democratic candidate and demand his pound of flesh at the climacteric national Democratic convention in San Diego The man he will approach in this horse-trading is almost certain veteran centre-Democrat Hubert Humphrey — vice-President to President Johnson. Humphrey is certain to oblige his rightwing rival. There is probably more desperate promiser American political scene than this battered political warrior.

present 'policy' On Vietnam he is for an end to bombing-that is if Hanoi agrees demilitarized zone. He is for withdrawaled but not unilateral withdrawal -from Vietnam He's against unemployment (of course), wants an end to order in the cities-etc. is pollution, he is. for law and mimphrey's programme miasma vague promises that is designed to say something to everyone, but in fact says nothing. He should find little difficulty in fitting in a few perks for Wallace from Alabama.

Neither Humphrey nor the 'liberal' also rans (Lindsay, McGovern) seem likely to oust Nixon. But whatever the result of the presidential race, one thing is quite certainthe American working class, black and white, will lose.

The two big parties are tied completely to big business, with Democrats traditionally attracting allegiance the politicallycorrupt union bosses.

Nixon Humphrey will have to follow the dictates of the economic crisis and continue the campaign against the US working class inaugurater by Nixon on August 15. This wa.re.--matoch-ile was the day President formally acknowledged his bid to cure the recession by reflation had failed. The extra cash pumped into the US economy did not encourage new investment simply sucked in imports and dealt a fatal blow to the dollar.

His first act was to freeze all wages and now, as part two of the campaign against labour, pay rises are restricted to 5.5 per cent.

measures have caused unprecedented turmoil in the unions and for the first time since the 1930s demands for a General Strike and Labour Party have been heard within the American working class.

It is this perspective of a new Labour Party that remains the only way out for the working class. The alternative is plain. Bankers back Wallace not out of love of 'the people' but because he can gather the had a an recationary forces to deal with the working class and the unions in far more vicious way than Nixon.

Part s of a hive-part series The Great Depression of the 1930s saw the rise of reaction throughout the world on the basis of Stalinist betrayal and the defeats of the working class.

The United States, where unemployment rose from 3 per cent to 26 per cent between 1929 and 1933, was no exception.

The depression hit especially hard against the lower middle-class, the small farmers and businessmen who had traditionally provided the social basis for right-wing movements in the past.

In one formerly prosperous farming county • in Iowa, for example, a quarter of the mortgaged farm • property was foreclosed in 1931-1932.

The banks and the big insurance companies moved in on the small farmers all over the country-a process vividly recorded in John Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath'.

There were thousands of unemployed graduates and jobless office workers who formed recruiting ground for right-wing and fascists-style movements.

Many of these grew out of the same milieu which had earlier given rise to the Ku Klux Klan. One of the most influential in the early 1930s was the Black Legion, i strong in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan and formed by one-time Klansmen.

The Legion drew on the ritual of the KKK and also imitated the European fascist parties. Its members took an oath to support 'God, the United States constitution and the Black Legion in its holy war against Catholics, Jews, Communists, Negroes and aliens'.

Organized along military lines, with a strict hierarchy of membership, the Legion trained its members to use guns and rifles. It was quite specific in its comby John Spencer on the mitment to the preservation capitalism. Its declaration principles stated:

'We believe in the creation o wealth through initiative, labou and industry, and wealth mus be distributed to the peopl through wages. We believe ever! American businessman, if quali fied, will make a success of hi efforts. Wholesale and retai prices of necessities must br governed by supply and deman‹ and not by government com missions, business combinations trusts and monopolies.' The explicit appeal to thi middle-class 'small man' caugh between the working class anc the big monopolies, is quiti clear.

On trade unions, the Legior took the same line as National Association of Manu facturers, which declared union to be 'un-American...an anti American' and enemies of 'thi freedom for which the Anglo Saxon has been fighting and struggling for centuries'.

The Legion's membership wa mainly made up of small tow migrants in the industrial cities many of them from the backwar‹ hil! states. of the • S. Fear immigrants taking their jobs wa a potent factor in recruitment t the Legion, which was responsibli for a number of murders an‹ arson, kidnapping and floggin! of black and trade union mili tants. Among its victims wer two workers from the Hudso Motor Company accused by th Black Legion of Communis Party membership.

One verdict on the Blac Legion is that of the Oaklanı County Grand Jury whicl decided that it could not convic the Legion as a fascist conspirac since 'the men who are listed a officers of the Black Legion.. are not possessed of even averag intelligence... They are no even worthy followers'. rise of the right wing in America. of the right wing in America.

The Legion went into decline after 1936, . partly because, its criminal activities were exposed. A more important reason, however, was the success of the Roosevelt administration in stabilizing the dollar-its value was fixed at $35 an ounce in 1934—and the resulting rise in the confidence and combativity of the working class, culminating in the great movement for the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1936-1937.

More openly fascist than the Legion was the Rev Gerald Winrod's Defenders of the Christian Faith. Winrod, a fundamentalist pastor from the Kansas bible Biligious to tarine in 1925 ind became openly pro-Nazi after the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the beginning of the New Deal in 1933. 1-Semiticization Cats virulently anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic anti-black.

He attacked Roosevelt as an agent of the Jews, and praised Hitler for clamping down on vice in Germany. His newspaper resuscitated the idea current in the 1790s and the 1830s, that Bolshevism and the French anc Russian Revolutions were produced by secret plot lluminati founded in the 18t century. He wrote a book, 'Adam Weishaupt, A Human Devil', in an attempt to prove this bizarre theory.

A third movement similar to the Legion and the Defenders was the Silver Shirts, begun in 1933 by William Dudley Pelley to which a large number of former KKK members belonged. Pelley, the son of a Protestant fundamentalist preacher, dabbled in spiritualism during the 1920s before turning to fascism.

As leader of the Silver Shirts, he called for fascist dictatorship imposed by violent means dvocated the suppression of trade unions and called on industrialists to back his struggle for power. Pelley's economic programme amounted to a corporate state blueprint, in which the government would grade all occupations and citizens would be paid according to their contribution to the National Corporation. Blacks, Indians and aliens would be made wards of the government because they were 'improvident and shiftless'.

The Silver Shirts, like the Legion and the Defenders, had only a short history. A Congressional Committee described Pelley as 'a racketeer engaged in mulcting thousands of dollars annually from his fanatical and misled followers.' The most notorious pre-war American fascist movement was led byradather Charles Coughlin, whose religious programmes had a large audience, began speaking about politics in 1930, denouncing 'international bankers' and communism. To meet the economic crisis, he proposed that capitalists should forgo their profits for a year and concentrate on putting the unemployed back to work.

Backed by his Bishop, Michael Gallagher of Detroit, Coughlin founded the National Union for Social Justice, to press for the issuing of government credits to une unemployed. The National Union opposed strikes as 'absolutely unnecessary' and called for the replacement of capitalism and democracy by new system known as 'social justice'.

Communism was evil because it was atheistic and internationalist, declared Coughlin, who denounced the League of Nations and supported Mussolini's invasion of Abyssynia.

In 1936, together with other right-wing and populist organizations, the National Union threw its weight behind William 'op: Father Charles Coughlin. Above: irman Lindbergh. Below: John L. ewis, union leader. Left: Theodore loosevelt (right) in March 1933.

ICNICN Lemke as candidate for president on programme similar Coughlin's. The radio priest predicted a massive 9 million vote, but in the event Lemke scraped only 90,000. Coughlin went off the air for a short time to return with an openly fascist programme.

Early in 1937 he attacked the Michigan" governor for not using state troopers to crush a strike at General Motors and hit out at union leader John L. Lewis and the Congress of Industrial Organizations for their linkages with communism.

In March 1938 he proposed an American corporate state such as workers, farmers, capi- occupallullal talists and so on. Political parties, in this scheme, were to be abolished. Two months later his paper 'Social Justice' appointed Mussolini 'man of the week' while Coughlin's anti-Semitic oratory and articles became increasingly virulent.

Coughlin's Christian Front, formed later the same year, was unashamedly fascist. It won backing from middle-class Catholics in particular, and one period just before the war a survey of the New York police force revealed no less than 407 Fronters in the ranks of the men in blue.

Coughlin also received backing from wealthy Catholics and rightwing businessmen, though this support was never large-scale. One prominent Coughlin supporter was the airman Lindbergh.

Government pressure finally forced the Catholic hierarchy to order Coughlin off the air early in 1942, following America's entry into the war. He was forbidden by his religious superiors to make any further public statements.

CONTINUED TOMORROW

Tuesday March 21, stage in schools in this coun-