nothing new. In 1934 a certain Vito Marcantonio was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from East Harlem as a Republican, in a political environment where Democrats, as today, were considered irredeemably corrupt. He served one term as a Republican before losing in 1936. In 1938 Marcantonio returned to Congress for the first of six terms representing the “American Labor Party,” in which guise he served as a mouthpiece for the Communists, and therefore the Russian authorities.

As one feature of his long service to the Kremlin, Marcantonio was a prominent figure in the first great “peace offensive,” during the 1939-41 Hitler-Stalin Pact, as the pro-Soviet left offered pretexts for isolationist rhetoric. Communist-controlled unions called for “peace” strikes among workers producing warplanes for besieged Britain. The pseudo-folk Almanacagain based in the machinations of a “Progressive” party.

In that year, former vice president and New Deal cabinet member Henry A. Wallace ran for president representing the new party, gaining only 1.1 million votes, or 2.4 percent, and no electoral votes. The Wallace Progressive party was denounced as a Russian operation by commentators as diverse as the conservative H.L. Mencken and the anti-Stalinist leftist Dwight Macdonald. As noted by Hilton Kramer, writing in The New Criterion in 1994, Macdonald described Wallace and his enthusiasts with unsurpassable accuracy: “Wallaceland is the mental habitat of Henry Wallace plus a few hundred thousand regular readers of The New Republic [and] The Nation. . . . It is a region of perpetual fogs, caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf