Victor Riesel - Anti-communist Views

Anti-communist Views

Riesel was a militant anti-communist. Initially, his views focused on both fascism and communism. As early as 1939, he joined John Dewey's newly formed Committee for Cultural Freedom, which was opposed to totalitarianism in all its forms. In 1941, he told the Union for Democratic Action that Rep. Martin Dies, Jr. was intent on establishing a national fascist police force to suppress freedom of speech in the United States.

Riesel's attacks on fascism lessened after World War II, and he focused almost exclusively on communism after 1950. Riesel's attacks on communism extended beyond labor unions. He attacked folk musician Vern Partlow for promoting communism and undermining American national security with his 1945 talking blues song "Atomic Talking Blues" (also known as "Talking Atom" and "Old Man Atom"). In 1949, he was named a director of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding Anti-Communist China, a part of the China Lobby. At least one author alleges that Riesel even cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency beginning in the early 1950s, providing information on liberal politicians and union leaders. In the early 1950s, he supported a movement to stop the importation of goods from the Soviet Union into the United States, and for a time longshoremen on the East Coast refused to unload Soviet ships due to Riesel's campaign. During the height of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, he also became interested in purging homosexuals from federal civil service. He publicly called for a "preventive war" with the Soviet Union in 1951, and demanded that President Harry S. Truman drop the atomic bomb on Russia and China. He strongly criticized Malcolm X for meeting with Shirley Graham Du Bois and Julian Mayfield in the mid-1960s, and accused Malcolm X of fomenting communist conspiracies. In the early 1970s, Riesel became an unofficial advisor to President Richard Nixon. He supported Nixon in his column, discussed labor union issues and outreach to working-class voters with him personally over the phone, and occasionally met with Cabinet members. Even as late as 1973, Riesel was defending COINTELPRO, a series of covert and often illegal projects conducted by the FBI aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations in the U.S.

Riesel was intimately involved in the Hollywood blacklist of the late 1940s and 1950s. He strongly criticized Samuel Fuller's 1951 Korean War film The Steel Helmet for promoting communism and portraying American soldiers as murderers. He also attacked the 1954 pro-union film Salt of the Earth as communistic, and implied that the production's on-location proximity to Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Nevada Test Site was a cover for Soviet spying on the American nuclear weapons program. Riesel saw it as his patriotic duty to publicize allegations of communist influence made against actors, directors, producers, and others (especially those claims made by conservative actors Adolphe Menjou and Ward Bond). As the blacklist lifted, Riesel agreed to allow his column to become a means for blacklisted individuals to admit their offenses, denounce communism, and become active in the motion picture industry again. Along with Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell, he would meet privately with these individuals, assess the sincerity of their penance, and then work with them to help rehabilitate their careers if he believed they were being honest with him. Riesel was considered fair in his assessments.