JUNIUS IRVING SCALES, AN AMERICAN COMMUNIST

Junius Scales in FBI custody

This is the story of how a wealthy and privileged Southern WASP got caught up in the subversive world of Communism.

Yale historian Glenda Gilmore, in her award-winning book about radical roots of the civil rights movement, recalled a childhood event in her native Greensboro:  "When I was about eight, I visited an abandoned mansion in our neighborhood.  Here, everyone whispered, was where the Communist had lived.  No one really understood what a Communist was; rather, the lesson lay in what became of them.  They left their homes, they lost their families, and they went to prison.  That's what happened to...the rich golden-haired boy who had grown up in that house."

The rich golden-haired boy was Junius Irving Scales.  Born in 1920 to a prominent North Carolina family, Scales was named for his grandfather, a Confederate colonel, and Scales' father was named for the colonel’s brother, governor of North Carolina after Democratic "redemption" of the state from Republican Reconstruction.  As a boy, Scales lived in a 34-room mansion built by his father in a new development of his, just west of the then-city limits of Greensboro.  According to Scales, his father, a lawyer and real estate developer, was then a millionaire several times over.  Among the family's servants was a black woman born into slavery; she wore a servant's uniform and attended to young Scales.

The family fortune faltered in the late 20s, however, and they left the mansion and rented a home in Chapel Hill.  Scales was an avid reader, and at age 15 he became a fixture at Chapel Hill's Intimate Bookshop.  There, as expressed by Gilmore, Scales "breathed in the radical politics that mingled in the bookstore’s dust."  In the 30s, according to Gilmore "varying shades of liberals, Socialists, anti-Fascists, and new Communists came together to create a hotbed of agitation among students and professors at the University [of North Carolina]..."  Scales enrolled at the University, where he soon became disenchanted with his classmates; disenchantment led to depression, and he attempted suicide.  Later he found some like-minded friends interested in radical politics, and as Gilmore concluded, "Radical politics held out a lifeline to Scales."

As is so often the case with the feckless children of the leisure class, Junius Scales, the inept social misfit, decided not to deal with his personal hang-ups in a positive way but instead chose to make his problems society's problems.  He turned against his country and embraced Stalin.  And, typically, copped out by claiming that it was based on his burning need to right the wrong of systemic discrimination against black people.   

Obviously joining the civil rights movement is admirable.  The fallacy of Scales, however, is the claim that it was the "only" way to get involved.  He could have worked to improve things by using his status and prominent name - along with whatever skills he may have possessed - without becoming a Communist.  Many people managed to work on behalf of civil rights without betraying their country.  

No, he chose to become a Communist as a way to rebel against his country, like Bradley Manning, because that was apparently easier than dealing with his own personal issues.  If you don't think that American leftists have crippling anti-social problems then you really must take a few minutes to scan the comments sections of any Conservative blog and read the trollish rhetorical belches they spend all day posting.  But I digress...

As the article explains, Scales finally woke up in 1957 when Stalin was denounced by Khrushchev:

Scales later summarized the effect on him:  "Most of what the capitalist press and the professional anti-Soviet experts had been saying about the Soviet Union for years was true...  Stalin - my revered symbol of the infallibility of Communism...had been a murderous, power-hungry monster!  My idol had crumbled to dust forever."

It's unfortunate that so many proud Americans were smeared as "rabid" and "paranoid" by misguided and subversive types like Scales simply for pointing out what he himself eventually came to realize was true: Stalin was a monster who killed tens of millions and every member of the Communist Party was doing work on his behalf.

The disgusting "dupes" of Stalin deserved to be marginalized every bit as much as Nazi sympathizers.  The wages of worshiping mass-murdering dictators should be the same.  Instead, Scales became a cause célèbre who eventually received a pardon from President John F. Kennedy.  

Let there be no misunderstanding on this point.  I'm not implying that Nazi sympathizers deserved the same preferential treatment and "do-overs" that Communists received but rather the opposite: punish them all to the fullest extent of the law for their crimes and marginalize them in society for everything else.  They are equally bad and for too long has this double-standard existed.

After all, it must be remembered that for two years from 1939 to 1941, Communists were supportive of Nazi Germany and against U.S. involvement in the war because that's what Stalin and the party instructed them to do.  It didn't end until Hitler broke the deal by invading Russia.  That's when shit got real.  But the lesson here is that statists will be statists and their interests are not based on any kind of humanity but on enhancing their power.  Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out.