January 2011

The Russians’ description of Theodore Roosevelt proves once again that you don’t have to resort to outright lies to be a good prevaricator. There are few factual errors in their story, but they achieve their objective of picturing him as a typical capitalist warmonger by selection and omission, not by direct falsification. Shrewdly, they concentrate their fire on Roosevelt’s attitude toward big business and his handling of foreign affairs. Both subjects provide material admirably suited to Soviet purposes.

ROCKEFELLER , family of mightiest financial magnates in the U.S. John Davison Rockefeller (1839-1937), its founder, established the Standard Oil Trust ( q.v. ) which soon monopolized the petroleum industry in the United States. Through all sorts of speculative machinations J. D. Rockefeller amassed the largest fortune in the U.S. and in the whole world. In 1911 his son, John Davison, Jr. (b. 1874), took over the management of Standard Oil and divided part of the huge property among his six children. In 1954 nine Rockefellers shared in the management of forty of the largest concerns, as well as of scientific organizations, universities (Chicago, Princeton), museums (Museum of Modern Art, American Museum of Natural History), etc. The Rockefeller family controls an important part of the petroleum industry in the United States (about thirty per cent of extracion and about one-half of refinement industry).

The grandiosity, the slapdash lines, and the raw black-white-and-red colors give this study of the Rockefellers all the effectiveness of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster. It is entirely sound except that it shows little comprehension of what the Rockefellers really did; no understanding of big-business organization in the United States; and no grasp of the regulatory activities of American government with respect to industry and finance. It is impeccably accurate except for three different kinds of confusion: a confusion of the facts of 1900 with those of 1950; a confused idea that the very few people who own stock exercise control in business; and a confusion of public trusteeships with private exploitation. It is written without bias except that half the sentences contain loaded words. It is well proportioned except that it leaves out all the happiest part of the family record.

WASHINGTON, George (1732-1799), prominent American statesman of the era of the American British colonies’ struggle for their independence; commander in chief of the colonial troops; President of the United States in 1789-97. The son of a large Virginia plantation owner, Washington engaged in land speculation and amassed a huge fortune. On the eve of and during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), Washington took part in the struggle against the French and in campaigns against the Indians. The latter resulted in the mass extermination of Indians.

Most of the particular judgments of the Soviet Encyclopedia could be found in the writings of American historians, though not so easily in current American historical writings and though not necessarily with the same emphasis. But of course they are so arranged as to seem—to Western eyes—“true but not the truth.” And some of them are badly awry. For example:

Mass extermination of Indians . Americans have no great reason to be proud, taking their history in general, of their treatment of the Indians. But at the time of the Seven Years’ War the Indians on the frontier were proud, powerful, and bloodthirsty. The Indian warriors who went with Washington on his first small frontier expedition in 1754 were the killers, not the killed; and the same was true of the Indians who fell upon Braddock’s army (which Washington accompanied) a year later. Even in 1791, during Washington’s Presidency, the Indians of the Northwest Territory were still able to inflict defeat upon an American army led by General Arthur St. Glair.

JEFFERSON, Thomas (1743-1826). Jefferson was the most outstanding American philosopher of the eighteenth century, the ideologist of the bourgeoisdemocratic tendency during the War of Independence of North America, 1775-83 ( q.v. ) and President of the U.S.A., 1801-09. He came from the circles of the land-owning aristocracy of Virginia, and received a broad education. In 1769 he was elected as a member of the legislative assembly of Virginia. After the congress had been dispersed by the English governor in 1775, he became a member of the illegal committees of correspondence. In 1774 he was outlawed for his pamphlet against George III. In 1775 he was elected to the second Continental Congress. In June 1776, on the commission of the Congress, he drew up the Declaration of Independence of the U.S.A. ( q.v. ). The paragraph censuring slavery and slave trade was rejected by the Congress.

It is understandable that Jefferson should receive relatively sympathetic treatment at the hands of Soviet encyclopedists. Here is the man who said at the time of Shays’ Rebellion: “God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion…The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” But he coupled these observations with the assertion in another letter written around the same time that “the will of the majority should always prevail.” This, then, is the flaw in the Jefferson article. It gives an oversimplified portrait of a liberal bourgeois leader with proletarian leanings, whereas the sage of Monticello was a complex personality, an enlightened aristocrat who wanted his country to be a democracy rather than a capitalistic oligarchy or a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Lexington and Concord may argue for another hundred years about where the shot heard round the world was actually fired, but to the town of Salem, over on the Massachusetts coast, the question will remain largely academic. The point of the discussion, after all, is where the War of Independence began, and Salem has her own claims to the honor. It was at Salem’s North River Bridge, two months before the clashes at Lexington and Concord, that British troops first met armed American resistance—and retreated. Although no shots were fired at the North Bridge (not to be confused with the Concord landmark of the same name), at least one bayonet was brought into play, and the first American blood was shed.