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Anna Louise Strong letter to Eleanor Roosevelt regarding the Nazi-Soviet Pact, August 24, 1939
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| Title | Anna Louise Strong letter to Eleanor Roosevelt regarding the Nazi-Soviet Pact, August 24, 1939 |
| Author | Strong, Anna Louise (1885-1970) |
| Publication Date | 1939 |
| Notes | In this letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, Anna Louise Strong hopes to provide "a view of the Soviet-Nazi pact quite opposed to most of the views probably pouring into the White House." Strong believes that the pact "may have saved peace for the time in Europe and without the sacrifice of Poland." She anticipates that Hitler may become more conciliatory as a result.
Strong defends these statements by sharing her perspective, beginning with the confident belief that Stalin "wants peace in Europe and acts for it intelligently in economic terms." She believes that Hitler's aggression has been financed, and occasionally instigated, by the interests of financiers in London who hope to profit from their investments while using Hitler against the Bolsheviks. She further believes that Poland was in more danger from a "British sellout like Munich" than from any kind of German military action, and that the Soviets, seeing Britain positioning itself to blame Russia for the upcoming sellout, took action to remove any motivation for Hitler's aggression while simultaneously unifying Britain in defense of Poland.
Strong believes that Hitler was willing to sign the pact in order to avoid being "forced into war", and that he had "lost faith in Japan as an ally" while also losing faith in his ability to rapidly assimilate the Czechs in recently acquired territory. She states that Hitler simply needs "triumphs" to distract the German people from their real needs, and that the pact with the Soviet Union supplies such a triumph (though possibly at the cost of "fatally undermining Nazi ideology"). Strong characterizes the Soviet approach as creating "a sort of limited League of Nations" which will be open to all countries, and believes that, in doing so, they have distanced themselves from Britain's approach to the crisis. |
| Contextual Notes | Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970) was an American journalist and political activist throughout her life. After spending much of the 1910s working as a progressive advocate for child welfare, she became involved in the labor movement in Seattle, and through that movement increasingly identified herself with international communism. This advocacy, along with her work for the Seattle Union Record, connected her to the events surrounding the Seattle General Strike in 1919. Strong later left Seattle, and spent much of the 1920s and 1930s living in the Soviet Union, meeting with men such as Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, and writing books about her experiences for Western audiences in an attempt to build support for the USSR. During World War II, she continued to promote the cause of communism, although her support for the Chinese communist movement ultimately alienated her from the government in Moscow, limiting her to one visit to the Soviet Union in the final two decades of her life. She spent most of those years living in the People's Republic of China, befriending Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, and continuing to publish books and articles in support of communism until the end of her life.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945 as the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (as well as being the niece of an earlier American president, Theodore Roosevelt). In the 1930s, she had become a prominent advocate for the New Deal and the African-American civil rights movement. During World War II, she became an advocate for the United Nations, and later served as the United States' delegate to the U.N., chairing the commission that composed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. |
| Subjects (LCSH) | Strong, Anna Louise, 1885-1970--Correspondence; Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962--Correspondence; Soviet Union--Foreign relations--Germany; Germany--Foreign relations--Soviet Union |
| Digital Collection | Pamphlet and Textual Documents Collection
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| Digital ID Number | PAM0391 |
| Ordering Information | To order a reproduction or inquire about permissions contact: photos@u.washington.edu. Please cite the Order Number. |
| Repository | University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections Division |
| Repository Collection | Anna Louise Strong papers. Accession No. 1309-001. Box 4/17 |
| Object Type | Letter (correspondence)
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| Physical Description | 1 leaf; 27 x 18 cm. |
| Digital Reproduction Information | Scanned from original text or image at 150 dpi saved in TIFF format, resized and enhanced using Adobe Photoshop, and imported as JPEG2000 using Contentdm software's JPEG2000 Extension. 2010. |
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