Bad Start

Clement Attlee's new cabinet was scarcely 24 hours old before one of its members was under heavy attack from Lord Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard and his morning Daily Express. The object of Beaverbrook's wrath was bright, balding John Strachey, 48, whom Attlee had just promoted from Minister of Food to Secretary of State for War. The Standard called Strachey "an avowed Communist [who] has never publicly retracted his belief in Communism." The attack touched an exposed nerve: the British public has been shocked by the laxity of military intelligence services disclosed by the espionage case of Communist Klaus Fuchs (see INTERNATIONAL).

In 1938, the Standard recalled, Strachey had said: "Like all Socialists, I believe that the Socialist society evolves in time into the Communist society." In The Coming Struggle for Power, published in 1932, Strachey had written: "The coming of Communism can alone render our problems soluble." Strachey had once told a friend in the U.S.: "Communism is really a movement for better plumbing."-

The Standard's charges were true--up to a point. Strachey, after joining Sir Oswald Mosley (1931), had broken with him by 1935 and made the small but conspicuous shift to Communism. He says he never became a party member, but he was certainly one of the most influential spokesmen for Stalinism in the English-speaking world of the Swirling Thirties.

The Standard had failed to point out what every politically literate Briton knew: that Strachey had repudiated Stalinism after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 and has attacked it many times since then. Attlee issued a government statement calling the Standard's attack "disgraceful."

Strachey's own defense concluded with a peculiar quotation from an article by him last month in the London Tribune. He had written: "All the nightmare aspects of the Soviet regime really stem from the gigantic error of having maintained, by brute force, far too highly developed an economy among a population the relative maturity of which was totally inadequate to sustain it ...

"Now this supremely disastrous achievement of holding a totally unsuitable economic ant social system in place by sheer force would have been unthinkable if Russia had possessed the safeguard of democracy--in the simplest sense of the existence of responsible and representative gownment."

This was antiCommunist, all right--but Strachey's premises were rather special. A lot of "mature" Britons might feel uneasy with a War Minister who thought that the main trouble with Russia was the immaturity of the Russian people.

Many who agreed with Attlee that the Evening Standard attack was "disgraceful" would also agree that the new Labor government had got off to a bad start.

-Two of Strachey's visits to the U.S. were not without difficulty. In 1933 he was arrested and charged with entering the U.S. under false pretenses; i.e., he had said he was not in favor of violently overthrowing the government. These charges were dropped, but when Strachey arrived in New York again in 1938, he was held at Ellis Island for two weeks because his visa had been canceled while he was en route. The U.S. consul general in London had canceled the visa because he was "convinced that [Strachey] is a member ... of the executive committee of the British Communist Party." Strachey denied this and a U.S. circuit court of appeals later ruled that his visa should not have been revoked.

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