ALAN writes:

The city of St. Louis is now run by a loose coalition of “Progressives”, Communists, Feminists, thieves, and shysters.  Under their leadership, downtown St. Louis now looks as Bolshevik Russia must have looked in the 1920s-‘30s, replete with abandonment, degradation, vandalism, lawlessness, and splendid examples of the calculated ugliness called Communist “art”.

It’s been a short path from yesterday to today.

In mid-afternoon on July 11, 1932, several thousand unemployed men and women gathered outside City Hall in downtown St. Louis “to demand relief measures of some sort”. Doubtless many in the crowd were ordinary men and women who were lured into the event by typical Communist agitprop methods.  A few well-trained agitators incited the crowd to move forward and attempt to rush into City Hall against 50 policemen who were there to stop them.

The resulting confrontation included tear gas bombs thrown into the mob by police, shots fired into the air in an attempt to disperse the mob, bricks and clubs thrown at officers by some people in the mob, glass doors and windows broken, theft from a vendor across the street, some people injured and some arrested. A World War I-vintage hand grenade was thrown at police, but it did not explode.

“Unemployed Councils” were groups organized by Communists in 1930 for agitating the unemployed.  The riot at City Hall was the work of one such group in St. Louis.  A similar riot was staged at a welfare office in Chicago in January that year, and another in October.  [See Harold Lasswell and Dorothy Blumenstock, World Revolutionary Propaganda: A Chicago Study, Knopf, 1939, pp. 204-10]

A St. Louis newspaper published a photograph of a young brunette woman named “Yetta Becker, Girl Leader of Communists”.  She was a member of the Young Communist League. She made three speeches to incite the mob. Through a megaphone, she shouted to women in the crowd, “Follow me, we’re going through those damn cops. They can’t stop us.” [St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 16, 1932, p. 1]

Her intent was to incite a group of 50 women to storm into the building and be backed by a hundred or so men to push them in.  But when the action began, she backed off to seek safety.  Six months later, a news item reported she was fined $200 and sentenced to a year in the Workhouse.  It was a repeat performance for her.  She was no stranger to City Hall.  She had been convicted on two previous peace disturbance charges.

It is hard to tell whether she was a true-blue Red or just another woman, filled with the zeal of youth, to whom it seemed the Communists offered some good ideas.  In court, she was quiet and restrained.  She said she was unemployed and lived with her mother and unemployed older brother.  After a few years, her name disappeared from newspapers. Did she grow up and get wise?  Did she abandon the Reds?  One of her former comrades did.  He said his experience with the Communists sickened him.  [“Former St. Louis Red Sick of Communism”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 19, 1936, p. 13]

Soon after the riot, a sob story was manufactured:  The injuries and damage to property were all the fault of the police.  The police started it all.  The jobless men and women were angelic beings who hoped only to get something to eat and acted only in self-defense against policemen who brutalized them for doing nothing.

Standard Communist playbook.

Three days after the riot and certainly not by any coincidence, William Z. Foster, Communist candidate for President, spoke at a meeting in St. Louis less than a mile from City Hall.  His book Toward Soviet America was published that year.

Nice guy, that Foster…..the kind who hoped one day to declare, “The Workers’ Paradise has outlawed private property, and you will be happy without it…..or we will shoot you.”

Come to think of it, isn’t that vaguely reminiscent of when Klaus (“The Thug”) Schwab said, “In the New World Order, you will own nothing and be happy…..or we will shoot you,”…..?  Isn’t that a coincidence?

When a group of Communists from the Unemployed Council met in a room at the St. Louis Public Library in January 1933, thirty policemen were assigned to guard the building.

Let’s put this in context:

It was only 15 years after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

Joseph J. Mereto’s book The Red Conspiracy was published in 1920.

Richard Whitney’s Reds in America appeared in 1924 and included “descriptions of numerous connections and associations of the Communists among the Radicals, Progressives, and Pinks”.

Wilbur Abbott’s The New Barbarians and Blair Coan’s The Red Web were published in 1925.

Nesta Webster’s The Socialist Network was published in 1926.

The Communist Shakes His Fist by Bruce Reynolds appeared in 1931.

Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling’s The Red Network, a comprehensive study of Socialist and Communist groups working to make America into a Communist nation, was published in 1934.

All of those books provide an excellent overview of the depth and extent of agitprop in America by Communists, Socialists, and dozens of front groups.

The “National Student League”, a Communist college and high school student organization, got started in 1932, “spread like wildfire into about 150 schools and colleges”, and took part in riot demonstrations and Communist “Hunger Marches”.  [ The Red Network, p. 206. ]

The reaction to the 1932 riot reflected at least some degree of masculine fiber in the police, the courts, and city government.  They called Communists by that name, did not credit sob stories or excuses for rioting, imposed penalties, and outlawed future meetings by Communists in open public spaces.

Of course that did not fix the problem of Communism in St. Louis.

There were lessons to be learned back there in the 1930s, but very few Americans chose to learn them.  It is obvious that the Communists and their numerous allies were stronger by far in their determination to Communize America than Americans were to preserve their liberty, individual rights, private property, free enterprise, and freedom of association.

Not long after 2000, I began to see signs promoting Communism on windows in stores along Cherokee Street in south St. Louis, a sight my father could not have imagined in the 1950s.  Cherokee Street was a six-block long shopping district that thrived in the 1940s-‘60s and exemplified American free enterprise through a variety of shops that offered residents nearly everything they needed within walking distance.  In recent years, Communists began appearing as candidates for mayor.  All traces of that patriotic American masculine fiber in the 1930s had now vanished.

In 2020, Communist-trained agitators in St. Louis put on another riot and destroyed or vandalized other people’s property to show how peaceful they are.

[This essay originally appeared here in Sept., 2022]

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