Memory Hole: A Long-Suppressed Manuscript on American Socialism
Over the years, I have heard stories of this or that suppressed manuscript. Usually, the person telling me about this is convinced that this manuscript would change everything. In other words, it is some sort of a silver bullet.
There are no silver bullets. A culture clings to its presuppositions, irrespective of any kind of bullets, including silver. The American Establishment, which we sometimes called the New World Order, remains in control of political and economic affairs, as the 2008-2009 crisis indicated. There were no arrests. There were no trials. Nobody went to jail. There were instead multibillion-dollar bailouts paid for by American taxpayers. It was business as usual.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that suppressed manuscripts don't exist. It also does not mean that these manuscripts could not create some embarrassment for the American Establishment. I figure it's always a good thing to impose a little embarrassment for the powers that be. They deserve it. But I have no illusions about any magical effects of the publication of such manuscripts. People don't read manuscripts. They don't read books very often. If they can't get a quick summary of it in a YouTube video, they are not interested. People are not going to the barricades, metaphorically speaking, based on a multi-volume exposé of this or that aspect of the political Left.
MCCARRAN'S MANUSCRIPT ON THE FABIANS
One of the most curious of the suppressed manuscripts that I personally have seen is the four-volume typewritten book by Margaret Patricia McCarran, which she titled "The Fabian Transmission Belt." She was the daughter of Sen. Pat McCarran, who was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and also of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in the early 1950's.
Because she had access to all of her father's papers and files, she was able to survey the development of Fabian socialism as no other Americans conservative ever had. She was a serious student. Her Ph.D. dissertation was Fabianism in the Political Life of Britain, 1919-1931 (1954). It is available as a PDF document from the Mises Institute. For anybody who is serious about understanding the Fabian movement, this is the book to begin your detailed study.
Her Ph.D. dissertation was the tip of the iceberg in her research. She went on to document the development of the Fabian movement in the United States as well as Great Britain. She provided the extracts from primary source documents. She offered footnotes.
She wrote "The Fabian Transmission Belt" in four volumes on legal size paper. She had them bound. I don't know how many sets she produced, but I know where one set is. I saw it in 1964, and at one stage I began reading it. My father-in-law. R. J. Rushdoony, had a copy, which she had given to him. He had great respect for her, although he disagreed with her adulation of John F. Kennedy.
It was around 1964 that her superiors in the Catholic Church found out about the manuscript. She was a nun. Her bishop intervened and demanded that she return all copies of the manuscript to him. She had already given a copy to my father-in-law, and the bishop never got his hands on it. He confiscated the ones she had. Where those copies exist, I don't know. Maybe they were burned. But the hierarchy did their best to see that this manuscript never saw the light of day.
There was another set. It was in the possession of Rose Martin. She used it to write her readable one-volume book, Fabian Freeway: High Road to Socialism in the USA (1966). It is available as a free download from the Mises Institute. This book is a very good survey of the Fabian connections in the development of American socialism and the American Left in general.
Even in the midst of the battles against socialism, from the 1950's through the late 1960's, neither of these published books had much influence. They remain starting points in any study of 20th-century socialism in the United States. This is why I don't believe in silver bullets.
"The Fabian Transmission Belt" deserves to be available in a PDF format. Sister McCarran was not what anyone would call a lively writer. But the direct quotations and the footnotes in this manuscript are extraordinary. I have never seen anything like them. For any specialist who wants to understand the socialist movement in the United States and Great Britain, this would be an ideal source of information. I think her bishop understood this. Also, I doubt that he acted on his own authority. What he didn't know was that Rose Martin had a set, and she never returned that set to Sister McCarran, who did not in turn hand it over to her bishop.
Because of the World Wide Web, materials like these do get published. It takes time, but eventually they get published. Anyway, a lot of them do. These are not silver bullets, but over time, in the hands of good communicators, these materials are made available to the general public. A tiny handful of researchers can make good use of such materials.
Obviously, none of this material ever gets into the textbooks. It doesn't even get into the monographs. Professional historians are completely unaware of these developments. Essentially, these materials have been dropped down the memory hole. This is especially true of McCarran's unpublished manuscript. Her bishop did his very best to make certain that none of this information got out, but Rose Martin was able to rewrite the material, and it did get out.
Only a tiny number of people have the diligence, time, and dedication that Sister McCarran had. They find it difficult to find successors who will carry on the work. The successors, if any, find it difficult to persuade the next generation that any of this was relevant. But in the battle for the minds of men, the battle over 20th century socialism was crucial.
SOCIALISM'S DEMISE
A crucial document is Ludwig von Mises' 1920 article, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." It showed why all socialist systems are at bottom irrational: no free market prices. The Left never completely dropped that document down the memory hole, but they ridiculed it, without having read it, with such authority, that until the Soviet Union finally shattered in the early 1990's, the article remained an academic laughingstock. Only when what he had predicted came visibly true in the USSR did even a highly narrow segment of the academic world admit that Mises had been right.
Historian Clarence Carson wrote a book about socialism: The World in the Grip of an Idea. Fortunately, the world is no longer in the grip of that idea. But, prior to 1991, those of us who were in the trenches had to bide our time until the reality of what Mises had said would happen, did happen.
CONCLUSIONS
Sister McCarran did yeoman service in exposing the Fabian roots of the American Left in the first half of the 20th century. The story is still not in the textbooks. This is another reason why we need better textbooks, with accompanying YouTube videos. This generation has forgotten about the ideological and institutional challenge that Fabianism represented. Every generation has its battles. This battle was a big one. The fact that the Fabians lost it does not make it any less important for historical study.