Mr. DENNETT. The Communist Party had as one of its principal objectives and one of its chief propaganda weapons, which it used upon other persons of political mindedness, that the Communist program was a consistent program on a domestic policy and on foreign policy, that our program was liberal domestically and liberal internationally. However, in 1938, after a long period of struggle and effort, the Communist Party succeeded in prevailing upon many people to accept the slogan of collective security as the proper policy to pursue in foreign affairs. That, of course, was quite consistent with the policy of the Soviet Union because it was the Soviet delegates to the League of Nations who had continually agitated for a policy of collective security.
I think it was some time in 1938 that the Italian Premier launched his attack in Ethiopia, and while we were clamoring for collective security to be applied to that situation, it wasn’t too long afterwards when the Soviet Union had a serious dispute with Finland, and hostilities broke out and the Soviet Union smashed the Finnish Army and the Finnish military installations.
We were confronted with the necessity of making an immediate switch demanding nonintervention.
So our insistence upon nonintervention contradicted our prior insistence upon collective security. This presented no end of trouble, especially to those who had to meet the public and had to answer to the public for the consistency of their program and policies from one day to the next. It ultimately led to the disaffection of Mr. Howard Costigan. And the chief reason that Mr. Costigan disaffected at that time was because of his loyalty to Franklin D. Roosevelt as then President of the United States, who came out in bitter denunciation against the Soviets for attacking Finland, which left him in the position of having a consistent policy because he had complained bitterly against Mussolini’s march into Ethiopia. He had also been critical of the Japanese invasion of China. He had also been critical of each military venture where one country had attempted to impose its will upon another by military means.
So Costigan felt that he was on sounder ground to continue his support of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he did so with as much effort as he dared, without bringing down the wrath of the Communist Party on him at that particular moment. However, the Communist Party sensed that he was beginning to disaffect, and we proceeded to isolate him from everything we could. I mean the Communists proceeded to isolate Mr. Costigan.