Martin Dies’ Story

By Martin Dies

In this shocking book leading anti-communist Martin Dies reveals the revelations that he uncovered in his quest to rid American of socialism.

“In the seven years during which I headed the Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives, the so-called Dies Committee, I heard a great deal of truth that is still not generally known to the American public. Whatever the reason may be for this ignorance, the time has come when the story that I know so well needs to be told.

“Few are left who know the entire story, and fewer still who know it firsthand. Some lips have been sealed by death, others by fear, and some by possible economic sanctions, or for other reasons sufficient to themselves. This is a silence I have decided to break.” (Martin Dies)<

• Language: English
• Publisher: Muriwai Books
• Release date: Jan 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787208636

Martin Dies

Martin Dies Jr. (November 5, 1900 - November 14, 1972) was a Texas politician and a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives. He was born in Colorado City, Texas in 1900 as the son of Martin Dies Sr., himself a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1909-1919. He studied at the University of Texas and obtained a Bachelor of Laws degree at the National University School of Law, Washington, D.C. Dies worked as an attorney in Marshall, Texas and Orange, Texas and eventually became a district judge. In 1931, Dies was elected from Texas 2nd District to the House of Representatives, a constituency that his father represented for a decade, thus becoming a second generation Democratic U.S. congressman. Between March 4, 1931 and January 3, 1945, Dies Jr. served as a Democrat to the Seventy-second and after that to the six succeeding Congresses. In 1944, Dies did not seek renomination to the Seventy-ninth Congress, but was elected to the Eighty-third and to the two succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1953 - January 3, 1959). Again, he did not seek renomination in 1958 to the Eighty-sixth Congress. In 1941 and 1957, he was twice defeated for the nomination to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate. Dies served as the first chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (Seventy-fifth through Seventy-eighth Congresses). Dies retired in January 1959, and passed away in 1972, aged 72.

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Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

© Muriwai Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

MARTIN DIES’ STORY

BY

MARTIN DIES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

FOREWORD 5

CHAPTER I—WE ARE LOSING 7

CHAPTER II—WHAT COMMUNISM IS, AND DOES— 12

CHAPTER III—THE WASHINGTON CLIMATE 18

CHAPTER IV—SIT-DOWN STRIKES AND THE UNIONS 25

CHAPTER V—THE DIES COMMITTEE IS BORN 34

CHAPTER VI—WHY NOT THE FBI? 41

CHAPTER VII—POLITICS AND POLITICIANS 46

CHAPTER VIII—MINORITIES INTO MAJORITIES 55

CHAPTER IX—BOOK BURNING—LIBERAL STYLE 62

CHAPTER X—ALL IN A DAY’S WORK 67

CHAPTER XI—THE ISMS. 74

CHAPTER XII—THE FOURTH ESTATE 77

CHAPTER XIII—FDR 80

CHAPTER XIV—MRS. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT 87

CHAPTER XV—WHAT THE DIES COMMITTEE DID 91

CHAPTER XVI—ME TOO 100

CHAPTER XVII—YOUTH 104

CHAPTER XVIII—THEY ARE STILL HERE 111

APPENDIX 120

EXHIBITS 178

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 188

DEDICATION

This book is affectionately dedicated to my wife, Myrtle

FOREWORD

Seven years of silent inquiry are needful for a man to learn the truth but fourteen in order to learn how to make it known to his fellow man—Plato

In the seven years during which I headed the Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives, the so-called Dies Committee, I heard a great deal of truth that is still not generally known to the American public. Whatever the reason may be for this ignorance, the time has come when the story that I know so well needs to be told.

Few are left who know the entire story, and fewer still who know it firsthand. Some lips have been sealed by death, others by fear, and some by possible economic sanctions, or for other reasons sufficient to themselves. This is a silence I have decided to break.

I am now 62 years old. In the natural course of events, not long hence I shall stand before my Maker. I would be remiss if I did not relate facts I know to be vital to the survival of the country I love.

Time has healed any wounds and erased any scars or personal bitterness I may have had. Neither anger nor resentment is in my heart. I am at peace with my God and myself.

Seventeen years have obliterated memories of the broken health and character assassination I endured. Even the sufferings of my wife and family are forgiven. Subsequent events have been too terrible, and the continuing threat to our Nation is too imminent and too foreboding to permit personal considerations a place. I can only grieve that so frightful a process has sapped the moral and physical strength of our great Nation.

When those who, wittingly or unwittingly, would destroy us raise their inevitable hue and cry asking Why drag out and rattle old skeletons? the answer will not be stifled. The answer, simply and bluntly, is that those skeletons represent living, breathing, dynamic, clever, and furtive forces, which still are working ceaselessly to destroy us—you and me—and our belief in the dignity and sanctity of man.

Nothing written herein is intended to hurt the Democratic Party, which I love. Only by facing reality, and by eliminating the shameful, can the party deserve respect. I have tried to be bi-partisan, and certainly the Democratic Party has had no monopoly on blunders. We must all be Americans before we can be good Democrats or Republicans.

Two thousand years ago, Cicero said: Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

A whole generation of Americans knows practically none of the facts related here, even though most of the facts have circulated to a limited degree, and a majority of the previous generation is largely unaware or misinformed. This lack of information, and the absorbed misinformation, should weigh heavily on the consciences of some educators, and awaken the concern of all parents who want their children to remain free. If our children do not learn of these incredible blunders, they are doomed to repeat them.

Accordingly, I must speak out, lest I be asked on Judgment Day, Why did you sin by silence when you knew the truth?

Martin Dies

CHAPTER I—WE ARE LOSING

A truth that disheartens because it is true is of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods—Maurice Maeterlinck

We lost World War II. It was not the brave men who offered and gave their lives who lost it for us; it was the politicians. Politics betrayed the 1,076,245 casualties of WWII, and the 157,530 casualties of the Korean War. Now we are losing the miscalled cold war.

Since V-J day, the Soviet Union has built the most dangerous and most inhuman empire the world has ever known. It has enslaved a third of the world’s population, and a fourth of its area. It controls a substantial part of the world’s wealth and natural resources. It has spies and saboteurs around the globe.

After the Russian people had overthrown the Czar in 1917, Lenin and Trotsky, having lost the election, with only 40,000 revolutionaries, overthrew at bayonet point the republican form of government the Russian people had voted to set up. Then the cumbersome Soviet economy staggered along, with inefficiency and un-productivity, improving somewhat as some capitalist incentives were restored, only to falter anew in 1928 under Stalin’s new program.{1}

Then came a colossal blunder.

At a meeting late in the evening of November 16, 1933, in the White House, President Franklin D, Roosevelt handed to Maxim Litvinoff, Peoples’ Commissar for Foreign Affairs, USSR, a letter of recognition, in exchange for a letter of promises, on which recognition was based.{2} Litvinoff’s letter pledged scrupulously to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of United States, from any agitation and propaganda, and from any action aimed at the overthrow of the political or social order of the whole or any part of the United States.

Four Presidents had refused to recognize the Soviet Union because of its record of perfidy and broken agreements. Less than four months before the recognition was signed, the Chief of the Division of Western European Affairs for our State Department had written: The fundamental obstacle in the way of the establishment with Russia of the relations usual between nations in diplomatic intercourse is the world revolutionary aims and practices of the rulers of that country. It is obvious that, so long as the Communist regime continues to carry on in other countries activities designed to bring about ultimately the overthrow of the government and institutions of these countries, the establishment of genuine relations between Russia and those countries is out of the question.{3}

Litvinoff’s official promise was broken almost before the ink was dry; the Communist International announced next day that they would pursue such activities. American Communists were worried. Benjamin Gitlow, a founder and high functionary in the American Communist Party, has written that at a special meeting, following recognition Litvinoff assured the frightened Communists that they had nothing to worry about...the Comintern is not restrained by the Soviet government...’After all, comrades,’ Litvinoff concluded, ‘you should by this time know how to handle the fiction of the tie-up between the Comintern and the Soviet government. Don’t worry about the letter. It is a scrap of paper which shall soon be forgotten in the realities of Soviet-American relations.’{4}

Dr. D. H. Dubrowsky, former head of the Russian Red Cross, told our Dies Committee how he, with two companions, Skvirsky, unofficial representative of the Foreign Office in the United States, and Bogdanov, chairman of the Board of Directors of Amtorg Trading Corporation, anxiously awaited the arrival of Litvinoff from the White House meetings. He testified that Litvinoff came in all smiles and said, Well, it is all in the bag; we have it. Smiling and rubbing his hands, Litvinoff said that they had wanted him to recognize the Russian debts to the United States, and that he had promised to negotiate. He added, for the benefit of his friends, We are going to negotiate until doomsday.{5}

Having thus created the Communist menace, we nurtured it with eleven billion dollars of lend lease, without strings.{6} We nurtured it with Tehran, with Yalta,{7} with Potsdam, with failing to win in Korea, where our top military men said we could and should have won.{8} All this in spite of the fact that the American Ambassador in Moscow had cabled in 1936, We should not cherish for a moment the illusion that it is possible to establish really friendly relations with the Soviet government or with any Communist Party or Communist individual.{9}

In 1943, before he had met Stalin, President Roosevelt told William C. Bullitt, our first Ambassador to the Soviets: I have just a hunch that Stalin doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world democracy and peace.{10}

Winston Churchill, in The Hinge of Fate, quoted a note he had received from the President: I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.{11}

How much of these attitudes came from the President’s personal convictions, and how much they were influenced by Harry Hopkins, and others around him, probably never can be determined. Certainly, Hopkins had a very great influence, and General John R. Deane, head of the United States Military Mission in Moscow during the war, has written that Hopkins carried out the Russian aid program with a zeal which approached fanaticism.{12} However, with Stalin’s open and increasing recalcitrance, and his actual violation of the Yalta agreement, it seems utterly incredible that Hopkins could have dictated in August 1945: We know or believe that Russia’s interests, so far as we can anticipate them, do not afford an opportunity for a major difference with us in foreign affairs.{13}

To go back a bit, on August 28, 1939, Stalin had entered into a pact which permitted Hitler to begin World War II. Then on December 14, 1939, the Soviet Union had been expelled from the League of Nations for its cold-blooded attack on little Finland, the only nation which had scrupulously paid its war debts to the United States. In 1940 it had taken over, occupied, and committed atrocities in the three Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.{14}

In spite of all this, and more, our leaders at Teheran, against the urgent advice of Winston Churchill, granted the Soviets a free hand in the Balkans.{15} They agreed to the communist enslavement of one hundred million non-Russian people in Eastern Europe.

At Potsdam, they gave the Communists East Germany, leaving West Berlin encircled 110 miles inside the Soviet slave empire. At Yalta, having publicly promised that Manchuria would go to its rightful owners, the Chinese, they turned it over to the Soviet Union.{16} They divided Korea and gave control of North Korea to the Communists. They gave the Kurile Islands, which had cost American blood and treasure, and which had never belonged to anyone but Japan, to the Soviets, creating a threat to both Japan’s and our own security in the North Pacific. With victory in sight in Korea, the American administration turned back, allowing the Reds to recover.{17} It fell for the standard Communist trick of negotiation.{18} Ultimately, General Mark Clark, acting under orders, signed a truce agreement of which he said, I gained the unenviable distinction of being the first United States Army Commander in history to sign an armistice without a victory.{19}

Peace has not come, and the armistice agreement has been more violated than observed.

How could anything so unprecedented in history, and so fantastically suicidal to our own welfare, have been permitted?

At the end of World War II, America was the strongest military and economic power on earth. We could have guided a world settlement to guarantee the fruits of our victories and our sacrifices. Had our leaders been unaware of the true aims and the tactics of the Communists, it would have been understandable. Actually, they were better advised and more thoroughly warned about the crises of our times than any leaders in history. The real, and frequently avowed, purpose of Communists to conquer the world, and the strategy and tactics by which they planned to achieve their goal were known and understood within our nation. From Communists’ own confessions, and secret correspondence between the Kremlin and its agents, our government was fully apprised of the precise nature and extent of the Communist conspiracy and the detailed methods by which they plan to conquer the world.

Why, then, did the American government pursue policies which permitted and aided Communism to become the greatest menace of all time?

Why was General Patton’s irresistible drive stopped and brought back to the borders of Czechoslovakia, on orders from Washington, while Czechs were rushing westward to surrender to the Americans?{20}

Why did General Eisenhower pull back from the Elbe,{21} "permitting Soviet and Mongol troops to sack Berlin, with their usual wild orgies of rape and destruction?

Why did we deny weapons to Nationalist China, or sell them at full list prices, while we were practically giving them away to other nations, and pushing them off docks into the Pacific Ocean?{22}

Why did our State Department withhold funds and military aid which the Congress had voted for Nationalist China?{23}

Why did General Marshall insist that Chiang Kai-shek take Communists into the government?{24}

Why was the 1947 Wedemeyer report, which recommended immediate aid to Nationalist China, suppressed for the three years during which free China could have been saved?{25}

Why did we continue to aid and strengthen our avowed enemy, who had been repeating endlessly for 28 years that he intended to rule the world?

We destroyed Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, but we didn’t destroy the idea of a powerful central government, controlling and dominating our lives, our business, and our political thought. We did not know that as soon as the defeat of Hitler was certain, our gallant ally, in August, 1944, was taking the trademark labels off of our lend-lease butter and replacing them with Soviet labels.{26}

While Washington spendocrats, of both parties, have spent and wasted more than 100 billion dollars in so-called foreign aid, supposedly to win friends and stop Communism, international respect for America has never been lower, and Communism has not been stopped: This enormous sum, taken from the pockets of American taxpayers, is more than the total 1960 assessed valuation of the 50 largest cities in the United States.{27} Much of this astronomical total has gone to support Socialist and pro-Communist governments around the world, and seldom do the people of those nations learn of our generosity.

In a speech at Houston, February 25, 1946, I pointed out that our total Federal obligations were then in excess of 600 billion dollars. This has now doubled to 1¼ trillion dollars, as compiled recently by Senator Harry F. Byrd. The Eisenhower administration spent approximately 575 billions in eight years. This is more than 60% of the total expenditures of the Republic{28} from 1789 to 1953,{29} and the New Frontier has upped the astronomical spending rate of past administrations. Interest alone on the funded debt is now more than our total expenditures in any year prior to 1941.

Furthermore, our proliferating bureaucracy is nibbling away steadily at our freedoms. It has become so vast and sprawling that it is impossible to keep under reasonable control. When mistakes, or worse, are discovered, there is so much red tape, apathy, buck-passing, and organized pressure that it is impossible for conscientious public servants to get correction.

I repeat—sadly: we lost World War II; we are losing the mis-called cold-war."

How did we get in this fix, and why?

Does Communist infiltration enter the picture?

CHAPTER II—WHAT COMMUNISM IS, AND DOES—

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.—From final paragraph Communist Manifesto

The Communists mean just that. The theme is repeated, ad nauseam, throughout their voluminous writings. In their various publications, they explain exactly what they intend to do, as clearly as did Hitler in Mein Kampf; and we didn’t believe him either.

Undoubtedly one of the principal reasons for the success of Communist efforts in America is our failure to recognize the efforts for what they are. Most Americans seem unable to conceive, and unwilling to believe, documented facts regarding Communist aims. We persist in considering the Communist rulers civilized beings. The record is otherwise. Nowhere in history has such mass brutality obtained. Too many Americans fail to realize, or refuse to believe, that the Soviet Empire is a slave state, in which the people have absolutely nothing to say.

More alarming and more inexcusable than the popular apathy is the fact that for three decades our highest Government officials have refused to accept the harsh and hideous facts of Communism. Although the world wishfully thought that there would never be another Munich, we have witnessed Tehran, Yalta, Potsdam, the Korean truce, Cuba, Laos, and the Congo. The continuing policy of Summit meetings ignores the record that Communists never negotiate for anything they already have. What they desire is continuing concessions, and when they have had enough concessions, they will have the world, Khrushchev has concluded, and publicly predicted that he expects to win without a shooting war.{30} Unless the American people wake up, and soon, his prediction will come true.

Fundamentally, Americans are among the most sympathetic and charitable people in the world. It is difficult, therefore, to understand why the vast majority ignores, and stands silent in the face of, the most horrible and most extensive brutalities the world has ever known. In Russia, a minimum of 25,000,000 people have been starved to death and murdered in 45 years. In Red China, the figure is probably at least 35,000,000 in a short 13 years.

These ruthless, inhuman atrocities have been investigated, documented, and reported in print, by numerous committees of the Congress. Yet only a relative handful of Americans know where to look for the facts, or even know that the reports exist; and still fewer have read them. One documentary is entitled, The Soviet Empire; Prison House of Races and Nations.{31} Another covers Communist Occupation and Takeover in the slave states of Eastern Europe.{32} It recites a constant pattern of confiscation, deportation, murder, and concentration camps. A third is The Katyn Forest Massacre.{33} Still another is Crimes of Khrushchev. (seven parts){34}

Because it is typical, because it is recent, and because you probably will not read it elsewhere, I shall quote some facts from the 345 page 1960 report of the International Commission of Jurists, on Genocide in Tibet.{35} I have seen nothing in any of the information media on this report except for Lowell Thomas’ little article, Terror in Tibet in the Reader’s Digest.{36} I shall quote from that article and for the benefit of those who object to its obscenities, I will say that I might quote other items from the report itself which are even more horrible.

Thomas wrote

"For the first time we now are given the facts—and the facts are even worse than the rumors *** The picture that emerges is almost too horrible to believe. What Buchenwald was to the 1940’s, Tibet was to the 1950’s.

"Consider the case of the three lamas, Shar Kalden Gyatso, Arrok Dorji Chung and Sharong Karpo. They were taken before a meeting which the Red Chinese forced Tibetans to attend. First, the Tibetans had to watch Chinese women beat the lamas and pull their hair out. Then, under threat of death, they were forced to join in the beatings.