Anyone who studies history will quickly discover that the ideas set forth by Karl Marx were NOT original or innovative. Many of these ideas were practiced, and failed, long before Karl Marx ever came along…including among the first Pilgrims to come aboard our shores.

In all cases, these experiments failed. Let me cite one example:

Governor William Bradford, who came across on the Mayflower and became the governor of the Plymouth Colony wrote of their experiment in communal living in 1620:

“This community…was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong…had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought an injustice…and for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc, they deemed a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.”

So, Marxism was tried on what would become American soil nearly 200 years before Marx came along and it was found to be unsuccessful.

Governor Bradford then when on to say:

“At length, after much debate…the governor gave way that they should set corn every man for his own purpose, and that regard trust to themselves…and so assigned to every family a parcel of land according to the proportion of their number.”

In other words, before the words of Marx, early settlers discovered that not only was communal living inefficient but, to later quote Bradford, “a violation of the laws of God.”

The Founders of this country heeded these lessons well and based the economic foundations strongly on Capitalism.

Now, let’s move forward to the 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution. Rest assured the leaders had one primary target in their sites: The United States. Delegates from the then American Socialist Party were invited, in 1919, to the Third International and were given the tools to start their work in this country. At the time, the Russian Communist Party even sent helpers to the United States to help build a full-fledged Bolshevik program and helped build early labor unions. As you will see in the next essay they even penetrated the U.S. Armed Forces. The American Socialist Party evolved into the “Communist Labor Party of the United States” whose purpose was to “free down-trodden workers of capitalistic America”.

In 1953 the U.S. Subversive Activities Control Board issued the following statement:

“We find upon the whole record that they evidence preponderantly establishes that leaders of the Communist Party, USA, and its members consider allegiance they owe to the United States as subordinate to their loyalty and obligations to the Soviet Union.”

The American Communist Party then started on a campaign of terrorism by sending bombs to prominent people and, on September 16, 1920, a huge bomb blew up a substantial piece of Wall Street in NYC.

Many of these American Bolsheviks were subsequently deported. But, no story was more ironic than that of communist activist Emma Goldman. Two years after she was sent to the Soviet Union, and saw the results of what she was advocating, she denounced the Bolsheviks and communism. Her last wish was to be buried back in the United States. She was!

Communism already infiltrated American Labor Unions and, because of the same ignorance shown by many of today’s young people, union members were unknowingly supporting communism. Except, then they were doing it while waving the American flag and thinking they were showing their patriotism.

This leads us to the gripping story of Whitaker Chambers which will be the subject of my next essay.