In 1953, a Communist Warns America of the Secular Marxist Strategy to Create Soviet America by Attacking God

Bella Dodd: "First Enemy of the Communist Is a Belief in God"

This Substack article is an excerpt from my book The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation.

In June 1953, Bella Dodd, a card-carrying CPUSA member in the 1930s and 1940s, testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), explaining why she left the Communist Party.¹ Her testimony was particularly significant for her revelations describing how the CPUSA “masked its Marxist agenda in language that made it acceptable to Americans.”² Dodd was a Communist in her twenties during the Great Depression through her middle age in the post–World War II era. Dodd eventually rose to become a high-level member of the CPUSA. She understood how Communism worked as a revolutionary methodology in practice. She also knew from the inside how deviously the CPUSA disguised its message to make Communism acceptable to Americans. In the 1920s, the general American public rejected Marxism despite the appeal of the Russian Revolution to a generation of American liberal intellectuals of that era. By the 1940s, Dodd understood that the strategy of the CPUSA had come to concurring from within America, mainly by advancing American socialism under “social justice” themes and by taking over the Democratic Party. Her warnings bear remembering once again today.

Marxism: A Secular Religion

Dodd testified that she had been a member of the national committee of the CPUSA from 1944 to 1948. She explained to the committee that “communism is a way of life.”³ She testified the following:

It [Communism] is a whole philosophy of being. If you believe in communism, then everything you do, you do with this philosophy. If once you lose that philosophy, you have to rethink your every single act and every statement you make.⁴

Indoctrination into the CPUSA for Dodd was a quasi-religious process. She explained:

Communism is like a religion. President Eisenhower said that the other day, but it is a religion without a God. If you believe strongly in communism, it is your duty to bring it into every phase of your life. If you are a member of the American Association of University Professors, if you are a member of the association of your specialty such as a member of the mathematical association, it is your duty to bring the party line into those organizations. If you are a member of a fraternity, you are supposed to bring it into the fraternity, into any group where there is the privilege of discussion. If you are a teacher, you are supposed to live by the principles of Marxism and Leninism.⁵

Dodd told HUAC outright that the United States “is being prepared for revolution.” She elaborated that the “strategy” of the Communist Party was “world revolution.”⁶ Communists in the United States, even in the 1930s and 1940s, pursued these goals with zeal, intolerant of any disagreement.

“There is only one academic freedom to them [the Communists], that is loyalty to the Communist Party,” she said. “There is no room for a difference of opinion.”⁷ She insisted Communists attacked those who opposed them with “high-sounding words” that were in reality “general smear words” and “emotional words,” such that in the 1940s, the Communists called their enemies “fascists” and in the 1950s, “McCarthyites.” She detailed that these “are words which have no definition, and first you create a sense of fear and hatred and then you apply this word to everyone against you.”⁸

Dodd understood how important taking control of language was to the success of Communism. She pointed out that “they [the Communists] took the anti-Fascist slogan and made themselves the protagonists of antifascism. They did the same thing with the word ‘democracy.’ It became very difficult to oppose them because they posed everything in terms of the word ‘democracy.’”⁹

The Attack on God and the Constitution

She expressed alarm that “if you go through the catalogs of various colleges of America, you find from the period of 1925 to about 1948 or 1949 that most of the colleges, for instance, have dropped all their courses on ethics and religion; you will find most of the colleges dropped their courses—even the law schools dropped their courses—on constitutional law.”¹⁰ She asked, “If your law schools drop their courses on constitutional law, how much more do the liberal arts colleges do it?”¹¹ A few moments later in her testimony, she returned to the point: “You will be interested in noting the catalogs about ethics, courses on religion, courses on the Bible; they have practically been dropped out of the college curricula. It is a method of despiritualizing the American people.”¹²

She acknowledged that “the first enemy of the Communist is a belief in the fact that you are created by a Divine Creator.” She insisted that Communists “have to get rid” of God “before anything else.” Why? “If they [Communists] can wipe that out [belief in God], then it is easy, because if you don’t believe in a God, all you believe in is better material advancement, and the Communists promise greater material advancement for all.”¹³ She explained how Communist indoctrination begins by eliminating God in the nursery schools:

In the nursery schools, you begin by affecting the children by emphasizing material values. You eliminate, for instance, from the nursery school rhymes and anything that has to do with religion. At Christmas you deal with Christmas as a pagan holiday. You choose the rhymes, choose the activities, and you follow the educational philosophy that says the child is just a blank page. He learns only by doing. You adopt that philosophy and implement it.¹⁴

The Important Role Teachers Play Indoctrinating American Youth

She received a doctor of jurisprudence degree from New York University in 1927 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1931. She graduated from Hunter College in New York City in 1925 and returned there to teach courses in the political science and economics departments from 1926 to 1938. In her June 1953 testimony to HUAC, she openly admitted to using her teaching position to indoctrinate students into Communism.

There is no doubt in my mind that I influenced students. I was teaching economics; I was teaching political science, history. These are subjects which are very easily influenced by a Marxist-Leninist approach. I was teaching during the period of the depression, and during that period the Communists said the reason for the depression was the breakdown in the capitalist system and the only thing which would obviate any future depressions would be elimination of the system. Change the system, and you would have no more depressions. Unfortunately, there were no other answers being given at the time. The Communist answer was the easiest answer to give. It was easy to just push the students in that direction.¹⁵

Dodd acknowledged that when she went into the classroom, she was entirely a Communist and that it was impossible to teach objectively. She explained it was impossible for a Communist to “divide himself,” so that even when she went into the classroom, she was a Communist “primarily” because it was “impossible” for her “to divide” herself. “You can’t tear yourself apart,” she explained.¹⁶ As a teacher, she clearly understood the importance of her role in indoctrinating students. In her summation, he returned to her earlier theme:

Well, as I said before, communism is a way of life, and it is almost like a religion. It affects your attitude toward your students, toward your government, affects your attitude toward things that are happening day by day. Most Communist college professors begin by being very much interested in their students, and if they have a Communist philosophy, they pass it on. Many of them try to influence their students to become Communists. Any number of students have become Communists because they admired a professor who was going in that direction. Then he functions within all the other organizations on campus in affecting their thinking, the question of choosing books for the library, the question of establishing curricula for the college.¹⁷

In response to questioning from the committee, Dodd responded that teachers are desired by the Communist cause because “the Communists know that the old people living in America today are not going to make the revolution.” She stressed Communists “count on the young people, and those who control the youth are the people who control the future of this country.”¹⁸ One of Dodd’s most essential points came in this discussion of the Communist plan to take over the United States by indoctrinating the youth of America in the schools. “I certainly believe the American people have got to stop fooling around with just fighting communism in the abstract,” she insisted. “They [the American people] have got to know what the thing means, why they are against it, and how to fight it.”¹⁹

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1 “Testimony of Bella V. Dodd, June 17, 1953,” Investigation of Communist Activities in the Columbus, Ohio, Area, Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Third Congress, First Session, June 17 and 18, 1953 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1953), 1741–1777.

2 Coughlin and Higgins, Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left, 10.

3 “Testimony of Bella V. Dodd, June 17, 1953,” Investigation of Communist Activities in the Columbus, Ohio, Area, 1748.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., 1757.

6 Ibid., 1758.

7 Ibid., 1760.

8 Ibid., 1761.

9 Ibid., 1747.

10 Ibid., 1768.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., 1769.

13 Ibid., 1770.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., 1771.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 1768.

18 Ibid., 1769.

19 Ibid., 1769.