5. There is no comprehensive account of the American League Against War and Fascism. I suppose the reasons are ideological, as liberal historians may be reluctant to acknowledge a movement in which leading roles were played by Communists. I have used a variety of sources: Eugene P. Link, Labor-Religion prophet: The Times and Life of Harry F. Ward, (Westview Press, Boulder, CO:- 1984); Earl Browder, The American Communist Party in the Thirties, in Rita James Simon, As We Saw the Thirties, (University of Illinois press, 1967); and William Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party of the United States, (Greenwood Press, New York, 1968).. as well as the peace histories of Curti (footnote 3) and Charles Chatfield, For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America 1914-1941, (University of Tennessee Press, 1971). The best account of the Emergency Peace Campaign is in the Chatfield volume where quotations are drawn from pages 170 and 262-263. Programs of the two organizations are quoted from Curti, page 286, and DeBenedetti, page 130 (see footnote 1). Also useful is Frederick J. Libby, To End War: The Story of the National Council for Prevention of War, (Fellowship Publications, Nyack, NY, 1969.) from which quotations are taken from pages 124-125. The account of the student movements is from three sources: Dennis Mihelich.. Student Antiwar Activism during the Nineteen Thirties, Peace & Change, (1974) vol. 2, No.3; Hal Draper, The Student Movement of the Thirties: A Political History, in the Simon book (see reference above) and James Wechsler, Revolt on the Campus (Covici-Friede, New York, 1935).
6. Most Americans know little of this critical period of European history. For the following account I have relied upon D.F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, two volumes (Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y. 1961). Anti-communism in France, Britain and the United States played a critical role in their refusal to join with the Soviet Union to stop the expansion of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Soviet ambassador Litvinov called for united action when the Italians invaded Ethiopia in 1935, but the French made their own deal with the Italian fascists. Similarly the British ignored the Soviet proposal for a treaty to stop the Germans in 1935 when Hitler announced German rearmament. Instead, the British agreed to a "Western air pact" that would "leave Hitler a free hand in the East" and an Anglo-German Naval Treaty that allowed Germany to build a submarine fleet. When the Germans marched into the Rhineland in 1936, the British, French and U.S. ignored Soviet calls for action. According to Fleming (page 61) "German industrialists had also done their work well among their associates in the democracies, especially in Britain, explaining that Hitler's real aim was to suppress communism." This pattern was repeated. Litvinov called for action at the League of Nations when the fascist counter-revolution in Spain was supported by German and Italian troops in 1936, when Austria was invaded by Germany in 1938, and when Czechoslovakia was taken over by Germany in 1938-1939, but each time the Western countries turned a deaf ear. The climax of "appeasement" came in 1938 when British minister Neville Chamberlain went to Munich and yielded Czechoslovakia to Hitler. By 1939 the Soviet struggle to forge a common front with the West had failed and they resorted to what Fleming calls "The Soviet-German Truce" of 1939-1941. Concerning the buildup to World War II, many Americans know only about this pact which is often called "The Hitler-Stalin Pact" although the two men never met each other.
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