Who amongst us has ever heard of William A. Wirt?
In her exceptional book “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character,” Diana West writes that Wirt, a Gary, Indiana schools superintendent, asserted before a Congressional committee in May 1934 that there was a deliberately conceived plot among members of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration to overthrow the established social order in the United States and substitute a communist-style planned economy.
The Roosevelt administration well understood that if Wirt’s accusations were seriously investigated it might distract from or even halt their political momentum. For that reason, it was decided that the proceedings would be a suppression of the truth rather than an uncovering of the truth.
For performing his patriotic duty, Wirt was branded a liar by committee Democrats, smeared by the press and even ridiculed by Roosevelt himself, a fate that would likewise befall future anti-communists such as ex-Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers, journalist M. Stanton Evans, Representative Martin Dies (D-TX) and Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI).
As West notes, a careful investigation of Wirt’s charges might have averted the Communist infiltration of the U.S. government that marked the middle decades of the twentieth century. Expert estimates now peg the number of Americans assisting Soviet intelligence agencies during the 1930s and 1940s as exceeding five hundred, including high-ranking government officials such as Alger Hiss (State Department), Lauchlin Currie (White House), Harry Dexter White (Treasury) and Roosevelt’s most intimate and Lend-Lease boss Harry Hopkins, who twice covertly passed vital secrets to the Soviets. World War II Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall said: “Hopkins’s job with the president was to represent the Russian interests. My job was to represent the American interests.”
More revealing is the political mechanism by which elected U.S. officials and the media have long sought to shield the apparent conspiracy from investigation, against an airing of the facts, even as they also casually sacrificed a good citizen to do so. This was the beginning of an era, an era of American betrayal and the onset of the Big Lie.