John A. Stormer. None Dare Call It Treason…25 Years Later. Liberty Bell Press, 1990, 1992. See here to purchase the book.
None Dare Call It Treason was a national bestseller in 1964,
when conservative Barry Goldwater ran for President. Written and
published by John A. Stormer, it professed to reveal Communist
infiltration in American institutions. Stormer vigorously argued that
American foreign and domestic policy, public education, news media,
liberal churches, mental health facilities, unions, and tax-exempt
foundations were serving the cause of international Communism. From the
Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Stormer’s own day, Stormer
contended, Communists were weakening American resistance to Communism on
the foreign and domestic fronts, thereby paving the way for the U.S. to
become a Communist country. The U.S. government has made decisions that
have undermined national defense, enabled the Communists to advance
worldwide, and moved the U.S. towards economic collectivism. Meanwhile,
prominent institutions propagandize against free enterprise and the
traditional family and demonize anti-Communists in government and the
private sector.
Twenty-five years later, it was 1989. Ronald Reagan had just been
President, and George H.W. Bush was early in his term. Communism
appeared to be collapsing throughout the world, with Glasnost,
Perestroika, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. While one might think that
this would give an anti-Communist like Stormer cause to rejoice,
Stormer remained concerned. For Stormer, the alleged collapse of
Communism was a mere ruse, designed to encourage the West to bail out
the failing Communist economies. Communists still ruled in the Eastern
European countries, and Gorbachev in speeches continued to voice his
commitment to socialism and world Communist revolution. On the domestic
front, Communists still infiltrated or influenced American institutions.
They used government welfare agencies to foment protest and agitation,
formed alliances with the left to oppose Reagan’s anti-Communist
policies and the Bork nomination, and thwarted the candidacies of
anti-Communist Democrats like Gary Hart. Meanwhile, public educational
curricula and liberal churches continued to deride the traditional
family, Christianity, and morality, all in accordance with Communist
ideology. Through all of this, surveillance of domestic Communism was
virtually abandoned, as institutions like HUAC became a thing of the
past.
Stormer seems to treat Reagan as sincere in his conservative,
anti-Communist convictions, but he has reservations about Reagan. As a
result to the Iran-Contra affair, staunch anti-Communists like Oliver
North have been marginalized within the Reagan Administration or removed
from it entirely. Reagan ceased believing that the Soviet Union was an
evil empire by his second term, and the arms control agreements that he
made with the Soviets gave the Soviets an advantage and failed to live
up to Reagan’s proclaimed goal of “trust but verify.” Stormer’s
Christian religious convictions deepened between 1964 and 1989, and he
came to believe more strongly that spiritual renewal was essential for
the defeat of Communism. In light of that, he disapproved of Nancy
Reagan’s consultation of astrologers.
This book preserved the vast majority of the 1964 text, while adding
over three hundred pages of new material. It slightly altered the 1964
text to remove obsolete information. In the final chapter of the 1964
version, Stormer recommended conservative periodicals, which included Human Events, the Wanderer, and the Dan Smoot Report. In the update, he suggested Human Events and informed readers of its new address. Why he omitted the Wanderer is a mystery to me because it was still around in 2009, when I attended a conservative Catholic church.
Stormer’s book is well-documented. Critics
accused Stormer of taking quotes out of context, as Stormer says the
left has done in its treatment of such conservatives as Joseph McCarthy
and Edwin Walker. Indeed, for much of what Stormer says, there
undoubtedly is another side to the story, for the people who instituted
the policies that Stormer criticized probably did not justify them on
the grounds of wanting to give the Communists a strategic advantage.
Stormer occasionally gives readers a glimpse of their arguments, as when
he attempts to refute the contention that the U.S. in the 1950’s would
have risked war with Russia had it helped the Hungarian protesters. In
some cases, the picture that Stormer paints is incomplete. He criticizes
Truman for prohibiting General Douglas MacArthur to bomb the Yalu
river, across which Communist China sent supplies to North Korea, but he
fails to mention MacArthur’s intention to take over Communist China or
(alleged) desire to use the atomic bomb. Stormer is aware of the
accusation that the Nicaraguan contras are cut-throats, yet he largely
ignores anti-Communist atrocities and focuses on Communist brutality. In
addition, the data that Stormer presents may fit into other narratives
than some grand plot for Communist world domination. Of course,
Communists share many of the same goals as the left and may work with
the left in pursuit of those goals, but does that mean that any domestic
agitation or social justice measure should be treated as a Communist
plot to take over the country? Perhaps they are attempts to work within
the system and make it fairer and more receptive to the marginalized.
Maybe Stormer was correct that there were psychologists who deemed
devotion to far right ideas as neurotic, but does that necessarily mean
that they intended to confine all right-wingers to mental institutions?
Overall, though, this book is engaging to read. Stormer offered an
economic insight that interested me, in explaining why the U.S. does not
experience hyper-inflation, even though it prints lots of money: his
answer is that it is because other countries are buying American assets.
The quotes that Stormer criticizes are insightful in that they present
formidable critiques of traditionalism, yet Stormer makes a legitimate
point when he argues that such critiques have no place in public school
curricula. Families are imperfect, and there are reasons to question
religion, but should students be taught in public schools to question
their parents and traditions? Is that not indoctrination? On the other
hand, would not treating those institutions as infallible result in an
insipid, banal, and even inaccurate education? As was said above, the
additions to this book are more religious than the 1964 original, and
Stormer offers a rigorous (albeit one-sided) biblical defense for
freedom of speech and religion, as well as private property.
I first read None Dare Call It Treason in the sixth grade.
Reading it as an adult, I noticed details that escaped me before. There
was Karl Marx’s lament that the proletariat he championed actually held
to conservative ideas and aspired to be like the bourgeoisie rather than
overthrowing it. There was Stormer’s acknowledgement that prominent
labor unions were led by staunch anti-Communists, along with his
dismissal of wealth inequality through his argument that most Americans
own some sort of stock. There was also an ex-Communist’s testimony that,
in working for FDR to shape the New Deal, his goal was for FDR to be
like Kerensky in Russia, who was replaced by the Bolsheviks. One might
wonder how the Communists failed to take over the U.S. before now, if
Stormer’s narrative is accurate.