My friend and colleague, Dinesh D’Souza, has advanced an
intriguing thesis regarding the roots of Barack Obama, arguing, in
short, that to understand Obama, we must understand the
anti-colonialism of his African father. Predictably, D’Souza’s
thoughts have brought the wrath of the liberal choir.
I’m not going to dissect D’Souza’s argument. But I would
like to add some important information: If Obama is indeed
motivated by anti-colonialism, the source may be Frank Marshall
Davis as much as, if not more than, Obama’s father.
I come to this via a different route from D’Souza. My new
book — released the same day as
D’Souza’s, coincidentally — examined the communist movement in
the 20th century, and specifically how communists duped
progressives and liberals. I
determined, definitively, that Frank Marshall Davis was not a
duped liberal but a duping communist. I show this at length,
quoting Davis’s weekly columns from the CPUSA organ, the
Honolulu Record, and reprinting pages from Congressional
investigations and from Davis’s declassified FBI file, including a
document that lists his Communist Party number: 47544.
As to their relationship, Davis was introduced to a
teenage Obama in the 1970s by Obama’s leftist grandfather, Stanley
Dunham, who sought a father figure for Obama. Of all people to
pick, Dunham chose someone summoned before the Senate in 1956 to
testify to Communist Party associations.
In Dreams from My Father, Obama recalled fondly
how Davis advised him on women, on race, on college, on life. He
shared with Obama his “hard-earned knowledge.” Numerous
biographical accounts (from the left, and highly sympathetic)
describe Davis as a “mentor,” a “father” figure, and an “important
influence” on Obama.
Those accounts avoid like the plague the fact that Davis
was blatantly pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin. This is painfully evident
in Davis’s Honolulu Record columns. So shocking are those
columns that they generated the longest chapter in my book. Davis,
befitting CPUSA’s disgusting position at the time, demonized the
Democratic administration of Harry Truman. Davis took that position
because it was Moscow’s. As George Kennan described American
communists, they “obeyed” the “master’s voice” in the
Kremlin.
That brings me back to D’Souza’s thesis. I did not address
Obama’s father’s anti-colonialism, but I can attest to its
dominance in Davis’s writings.
Consider a May 19, 1949 column, “How Our Democracy Looks
To Oppressed Peoples,” where Davis excoriated the Marshall Plan.
Yes, the Marshall Plan.
“For a nation that calls itself the champion of democracy,
our stupendous stupidity is equaled only by our mountainous ego,”
Davis complained. “Our actions at home and abroad are making
American democracy synonymous with oppression.” He added: “I have
watched with growing shame for my America as our leaders have used
our golden riches to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black
peoples of the world.”
Davis characterized the Marshall Plan as a “device” to
maintain “white imperialism.” This nefarious “oppression of
non-white peoples everywhere” was purchased via Secretary of State
George Marshall’s “billions of U.S. dollars … to bolster the
tottering empires of England, France, Belgium, Holland and the
other western exploiters of teeming millions of humans.”
In another column a few weeks later, on August 18, Davis
stepped up the communist attack on “the double-talking Truman
administration with its program for World War III.” “The Truman
doctrine in Greece and Turkey and then the Marshall Plan,” were,
claimed Davis, “based upon the continuation of colonial slavery by
the ruling classes of Western Europe.”
In his next column, Davis protested: “I shall not help
England and France keep millions of my colored brothers in Africa
and Asia in colonial slavery. Yet that is what our dividend
diplomats ask of you and me when they demand our support of the
bi-partisan Marshall plan.”
Bad as this was, it’s the tip of the iceberg.
Yet, there’s a more sinister element, as suggested by a
July 1935 document held in Comintern Archives in Moscow. That
document ordered American comrades (like Davis, who, at that point,
lived in Chicago), to go to Hawaii to agitate against Hawaii
becoming part of the United States. The Soviets wanted the
territory as a base of operations. What would be the party line?
The document ordered American communists to claim there was a
“growing discontent of the masses of the population in the Hawaiian
Islands,” resulting from “the regime of colonial oppression and the
exploitation of American imperialism with its policy of
militarisation of the Hawaiian Islands.”
That was precisely Davis’s position when he relocated to
Hawaii, whether by orders, by personal beliefs, or both. And it
isn’t unreasonable to expect he might have shared such thinking
with a bright teenager named Barack Obama. Bear in mind, Obama
admitted to learning from Davis, including college advice — his
very next step. Obama describes his first days at college as
hanging out with “Marxist professors,” attending “socialist
conferences,” and “discuss[ing] neocolonialism.”
Rather than heralding the American exceptionalism that
sought freedom for the people of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Davis
would have passed to Obama a very different narrative about
America’s place in the world, beginning with its alleged
imperial-colonial sins.
This was the wrong side of history, but it was the side of
Frank Marshall Davis. The remaining question is to what extent this
affected Obama, then and still today.
