Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism!

[alicemacher]

These scans are from a one-shot propaganda comic. Created in 1947 by an uncredited writer and artist, and issued by the Catechetical Guild Education Society, a Roman Catholic publisher, Is This Tomorrow envisions, step by step, how a communist takeover of America might take place. While the scenario isn't entirely implausible (we're not talking anywhere near Chick Tract-level distortion of reality, here), it does call for more than a little suspension of disbelief in places. And snark. Let's not forget the snark.

This 48-page comic is now in the public domain (scans courtesy of ComicBookPlus.com).



The "what if" scenario begins shortly after World War Two, when a combination of drought and grasshopper infestation endangers the nation's food supply.





(Hmm...Jones has a receding hairline, moustache, and goatee...now who do you suppose he's meant to resemble, duhoy?)

Brown explains that he's set up a number of "front" groups with vague but commendable goals such as opposing "intolerance," and gotten "big names" to endorse them.





(I don't get how having public figures endorse their front groups leads to having the Speaker of the House in their lap...seems like a step or three is missing.)









(Remember, kids, communists are the only ones who cynically use anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism and racism to distract and manipulate the public. No one on the right's ever thought to do that.)

Jones's agents, having gradually infiltrated labour unions and gotten themselves elected to leadership positions, now call for a series of nationwide strikes, which cripple the economy. They also play labour and management against each other, resulting in lynching of wealthy businesspeople. Meanwhile, Jones goes to see his lackey, the Speaker of the House.







(So, the comic itself admits that having the president and vice-president appear together in a parade would be unprecedented. But hey, plot convenience. At least the declaration of emergency powers, with Congress's endorsement, is plausible.)

By order of the Kremlin, Jones orders food storehouses blown up and blames it on "fascists." He has a number of known anti-communist people rounded up. As Americans fight each other for food in grocery stores, Cline privately turns on Jones, who simply declares he's "taking things over" and appoints himself "chief advisor" with emergency powers (just like that, sure) and Cline vanishes from the story. Jones begins food rationing, with priority given to loyal party members, and has his handful of plants in the armed forces summarily execute all the top military brass.





(Instant coup! Just add water blow a whistle!)

Jones seizes control of newspaper journalism by withholding newsprint from dissenting papers. Next, he bans all chambers of commerce and other business associations as subversive, and nationalizes the telephone and radio industries in order to prevent the outside world from infiltrating American society. No mention of television, but then in 1947 regular, mass TV broadcasting was still in its infancy.





(Bit of an art fail here. The students in panel four look skeptical, as opposed to absorbing the party line passively like sponges.)

Jones decides to nationalize the universities, and visits a campus personally to tell the dean which professors to fire. The dean won't have it, so...







(Knocking out a Catholic would-be assassin with a Bible rivals The Graduate finale for heavy-handed symbolism.)





(Granted, the intended audience for this comic is Catholic, so it's understandable the writer would emphasize suppression of Catholicism. Even so, the history of modern totalitarian states suggests that if this scenario actually had played out in the late forties, Judaism and the American Jewish community would be the priority scapegoats. Persecution of Catholics, Protestants and other religious groups would come much later.)

Jones cracks down on all Catholic institutions, then, like Stalin, introduces a five-year plan to revitalize the economy. Workers must now work longer for less pay.





The regime holds sham elections and seizes all the banks' assets. And then...







(OFFICER: "Silly father. Your Oscar-bait speech has no effect on me. Goodbye." KID: "Hey, don't I get a reward?" OFFICER: "Shaddup.")

With the communist victory complete, Jones holds a celebratory banquet, where he dies of a heart attack. No, this isn't divine retribution, for Brown, the second-in-command, takes charge: "Communism does not depend on any one man." The comic concludes with a text piece emphasizing all this could really happen, and offering "Ten Commandments of Citizenship" to prevent it. These include "Practice your own religion" (And if you don't have a religion, you must be a commie yourself!) and "Be American first" (Because asserting your own cultural identity is subversive!).

Comments

[skjam]

Thankfully, Communism never quite managed to get to the next step in taking over America, in large part because it wasn't nearly as well-organized as depicted here.

I happen to have read and reviewed a memoir of someone who grew up in a John Birch Society household, and who no doubt would have seen one of these comics as they were Catholic.

http://www.skjam.com/2013/08/26/book-review-wrapped-in-the-flag-a-personal-history-of-americas-radical-right/

[alicemacher]

An interesting book review about a scary group.

And yes, although there have of course been communists in American society, they've been neither as numerous nor as organized as those on the far right have claimed. Also, even during the Cold War not all of them were in the Kremlin's pocket.

[arrogantcur]

They weren't necessarily threats either. It was apparently not uncommon during the Great Depression for people to unashamedly believe in communism, because if you're dirt poor and you hear about this system of government where everybody has jobs and everybody's basic needs are provided for, it's gonna sound pretty good to you. Certainly better than capitalism did at the time.

The Red Scare would come later, and I'm sure that during the '50s and the late '40s when this book was published there were a lot of people left over from the Depression generation who still thought communism was a pretty good idea. But believing that =/= being part of a shadowy conspiracy to help the U.S.S.R. take control of the country.

[alicemacher]

Absolutely. To cite an example more local to me: J.B. Salsberg, Ontario's only communist Member of Provincial Parliament (1943-1955). (Technically, his party was called the Labor-Progressive Party, but that was due to a legal loophole after the Communist Party of Ontario was banned in 1941.) At that time, before Stalin's brutal policies toward Jews and others was public knowledge outside the USSR., a number of Canadian (and American) Jews were avid communists, and Salsberg represented a largely Jewish riding in Toronto.

Salsberg was, by all accounts, as far from a stereotypical "we will rule the world, muahaha" communist as they came. He was a kind, humanitarian person whom other MPPs respected and often tried to lure to their parties. Among other accomplishments, he helped introduce the 1944 Racial Discrimination Act in response to Jews and blacks being banned from many resorts, beaches and public pools ("No dogs or Jews allowed" was an example of common signage back then).

Although Salsberg did eulogize Stalin on the legislature floor in 1951, four years later, when the full truth about Stalinism became known, he publicly repudiated communism, resigned from his party and retired from politics. For the rest of his life, however, he continued to work for social justice both within and outside the Jewish community.

[arrogantcur]

All of this is really far-fetched, except for one thing near the beginning. The "Make a crisis happen and then take advantage of people being scared shitless to seize power" thing. The Bush administration pulled a lot of things in the aftermath of 9/11 that they wouldn't have been able to get away with before, using the spectre of terrorist attacks to scare people into going along. (I'm not quite conspiracy-minded enough to accept the idea that they caused 9/11, mind you. But they definitely took advantage of it.)

Back to the comic: it's when they start talking about how they have made classes and religions hate each other that I went "Okay, this has stopped being even remotely believable now." Particularly the method as shown. Here we have Mustache Man telling Ginger Man something about Jews, and "the first thing you know" he is freaking the hell out about what a menace all Jews are. Seriously? And what's more, this isn't depicted as a gradual change of mindset over time; look at the faces of the people in front of them. They're in the same room, with the same people, wearing the same clothes. Unless this is like a monthly gathering or something and they fast-forwarded a month or three when everybody happened to be dressing exactly the same, we are meant to believe that Mustache Man told Ginger Man just one single thing about Jews and Ginger Man accepted it without question.

Okay, what often causes somebody to turn into a bigot? If somebody has bad experience after bad experience with Group X with few-to-zero good experiences with members of that group to cancel them out, that could do it, but that's not what happened here. Or if somebody knows very little about Group X except for the fact that members of that group are responsible for Tragic Event X, then stories could cause somebody to become prejudiced after a while, if the person heard a lot of those stories and they came from more than one source. (E.g., anti-Japanese sentiment following Pearl Harbor, helped in part by the fact that many people hearing stories about how horrible the Japanese were, every single last one of them, had no Japanese acquaintances or friends.) But to my knowledge there is no single statement or story you can tell somebody which will cause them to immediately hate Group X with a passion. People can be gullible, but almost nobody is that gullible.

The rest of the plan requires the kind of manpower and coordination that strikes me as close to impossible. And even if they had that many people available to work in perfect synch with one another to influence American society, even if it were a guaranteed success, it would also take a hell of a long time for it to yield results. If I were Stalin and somebody pitched this plan to me, I would be like "Screw this, it's gonna cost way too much and we're probably not going to see any significant payoff in my lifetime."

[alicemacher]

"The rest of the plan requires the kind of manpower and coordination that strikes me as close to impossible."

And that's where all conspiracy theories break down. Grant Morrison has said that such theories assume that every single person allegedly involved will do exactly what they should be doing, when they should be doing it. But that goes against human nature. As Morrison bluntly put it in one interview (I think it was in Disinfo's Anarchy for the Masses), there's always someone who's jacking off instead of watching their monitor at a critical moment.

[skjam]

A book I've just read has its massive conspiracy nearly crash and burn the day before it finally succeeds in ending all war because one of the leaders forgot to tell the other, "Oh by the way, do not under any circumstances fall in love with your secretary. We need to sacrifice her for the greater good." And he failed to have a backup plan in place in case the secretary died accidentally before she was needed.

[arilou_skiff]

The interesting point is that a lot of these things looks like only slightly more moustasche-twirling versions of the kind of propaganda the communists tended to show each other. Real communist takeovers tended to be much more messy and haphazad affairs.

[halloweenjack]

I wonder how much of this had to do with the Church trying to deny the influence of Father Coughlin before the war?

[lilacsigil]

Interesting that they're promoting racial harmony as anti-Communist in such a racially divided time.

[skjam]

Unfortunately, the prevailing philosophy of racial harmony among less-bigoted whites at the time was a softly-softly "don't rock the boat" approach. Yes, it was a shame that people of color were treated as second class citizens, but we mustn't upset the bigots by actually standing up for civil rights and equality. That would just lead to violence, and that would be bad!

Prim disapproval was the thing. And everyone "knew" that Communists were the ones behind the more radical black leaders.

[espanolbot]

Yeah, J. Edgar Hoover was of the opinion that the civil rights movement was actually a Soviet-funded plot to destroy America, for example.

[espanolbot]

It's kind of weird seeing this, coonsidering there was actually a movie made in the mid-Thirties that argued that a divinely appointed fascist dictatorship would actually be the solution to all of America's problems.

It was called Gabriel over the White House, and it's absolutely bizarre. It ends with the president blackmailing the rest of the world into disarming and paying back all the debt from WW1, after becoming vassal-states of the USA under threat of nuclear-biplane bombardment.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

A divinely appointed fascist dictatorship might work. The hard part is getting God to actually show up and do the appointing Himself.

[espanolbot]

Dude got into a car crash while attempting to drive his own presidential convoy at speeds exceeding 100 miles an hour. Although it's made explicit in the movie that the President, a guy called Hammond, IS meant to be possessed by either God or one of his representatives (he drops dead as soon as the unofficial American Empire is permanently fixed in place with the world's nations signing a treaty that makes them America's vassal states), they unintentionally leave JUUUSSSTTT enough room for the interpretation that the guy is crazy to work.

Lying Liars Who Lie Alot!

[7dialsmystery]

"Workers must now work longer for less pay."

Yeah, that was Capitalism not Communism. The Communist and Socialist Parties of America gave American Labor the 8 hour work day, weekends off, and child labor laws.

"A flood of intolerant pamphlets hit the streets."

Like racists in this country needed help, right?

"The Only Solution Is To Declare An Unlimited Emergency, And Give Me Extra-Ordinary Powers!"

President Bush, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney.

"You Dope, Why Didn't You Check On What He Was Learning In School?"

Yeah, buddy, you should have homeschooled that little SOB and taught him creationism, flat earth science, and the war on Christmas.

Re: Lying Liars Who Lie Alot!

[espanolbot]

"You Dope, Why Didn't You Check On What He Was Learning In School?"

___Yeah, buddy, you should have homeschooled that little SOB and taught him creationism, flat earth science, and the war on Christmas.

Heh. Reminds me of how a little while ago, a group of people attempted to pass a law (I think that it was in Ohio) that would "ban political agendas infringing on what's being taught in school".

It was intended to get evolution banned, as it's only taught by those with scheming leftwing opinions. Unlike the Creationists attempting to get the law past... which also would have banned teaching about Aristole for some bizarre reason.

[philippos42]

As someone who's read a lot of "pro-life" literature, I'm struck by the third scan, last panel. Apparently right-wing Catholics have been suspicious of physicians and medicine for a while now.

There have been racists in Leninist-Stalinist governments, but racial division is not a Marxist ideal. The idea that American communists would be the ones stoking racial violence, or beating and killing workers, is so maliciously, libelously backwards it goes beyond Jack Chick conspiracy theory.

And again, class conflict was definitely exploited by the right. The Taft-Hartley Act was written, by the right-wing leaders Taft and Hartley, to weaken labor unions and make it difficult for them to capture and collectivize industries.

This reads very backwards and libelous to me, like the writer came up with a list of "things I would do if I turned evil" and then had them committed by the very faction that was specifically opposed to most of those things ideologically.

Now, change it from "Communists" to "a white nationalist big business axis," and it almost becomes a playbook. And that playbook has been partly followed at various points.

[philippos42]

OK, that last paragraph was overly ideological. But the need to take over the schools is a major premise of politicized Christianity, and one people are still animated by.

These days Catholics (and [white] Christians in general) aren't targeted in the USA, but Muslims, racial minority movements, and various socialist groups have been treated as suspect threats for a long time.

[alicemacher]

"like the writer came up with a list of 'things I would do if I turned evil'"

A common propaganda technique. The weekly Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer (1923-1945) regularly featured detailed, lurid "news" stories, often with obscene illustrations, of Jews "contaminating" German women. The "reader wish fulfillment" function went hand in hand with the "reinforce hatred of Jews" function.