[In 1934, American Communists translated a Stalinist book about
revolution into a children’s game. Curiously, it didnt catch on. ]
[[link removed]]

HOW TO TURN AMERICA INTO COMMUNIST RUSSIA: THE BOARD GAME  
[[link removed]]


 

Frank Jacobs
February 17, 2023
Big Think
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ In 1934, American Communists translated a Stalinist book about
revolution into a children’s game. Curiously, it didn't catch on. _

, Tobias Higbie / Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

 

* Board games were popular in 1930s America, and so was communism
(relatively speaking). 
* “Toward Soviet America” brought both together and taught
children about the coming revolution. 
* Americans, however, preferred the uber-capitalist Monopoly, the
game’s diametrical opposite.

The 1930s were the golden age of board games. With millions of
Americans out of pocket due to the Great Depression, board games were
one of the cheapest forms of entertainment. One of the most popular
games of the decade was Monopoly — no doubt precisely because it
allowed players to imagine themselves getting rich and powerful. (See
also Strange Maps #1078
[[link removed]].)

Like Monopoly, but the exact opposite

One board game from the early 1930s was Monopoly’s diametrical
opposite. Instead of celebrating capitalism, it aimed to destroy it.
The players’ goal is to _get rid of_ the rich and powerful, end
oppression, and seize the means of production. Ultimately, their
actions will turn the U.S.A. into the U.S.S.A. — the
United _Soviet_ States of America.

Children playing a board game at the Vacation Playground 189 in
Brooklyn in the early to mid-1930s. Board games were a popular form of
entertainment in Depression-era America. (Credit: Underwood Archives /
Getty Images).

The game was called _Toward Soviet America_. As you may have guessed
by its absence from your family room, it never caught on. When we take
a closer look at the board, the book that inspired it, and the author
of that book, we get a glimpse of a now obscure chapter in America’s
sociopolitical history — one in which the Communist Party of the USA
(CPUSA for short) saw the proletarian revolution in America as
imminent and itself as the inevitable vanguard of the toiling masses.

Not coincidentally, the 1930s were also the golden age of American
communism. The U.S. wasn’t yet in a Cold War with the Soviet Union,
ground zero of the world revolution. And the misery of the Depression
was working in the CPUSA’s favor. In 1932, William Zebulon Foster,
Secretary-General of the CPUSA, got more than 100,000 votes in the
presidential election, more than any communist candidate before or
since. Still, that was just 0.3% of the total.

“America’s Lenin” gets a state funeral

Foster’s electoral irrelevance — in his two previous presidential
runs, he garnered just 0.1% — and the political hostility he faced
at home stood in stark contrast to the respect and consideration he
received in the USSR. “America’s Lenin” was a loyal servant of
Moscow and a welcome guest even after his retirement in 1957.

It was on one such visit to the USSR in 1961 that Foster died, aged
80. The “Chairman Emeritus” received a state funeral — surely
the only U.S. presidential candidate ever to be thus honored. The
funeral took place in Moscow’s Red Square, and the honor guard was
headed by Nikita Khrushchev himself.

Go once around the board, visiting all of capitalist America’s
social injustices, then head for “Soviet America” in the center.
(Credit: Tobias Higbie / Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Foster’s most lasting legacy is _Toward Soviet America_. Published
in 1932, the book “explains to the oppressed and exploited masses of
workers and poor farmers how, under the leadership of the Communist
party, they can best protect themselves now, and in due season cut
their way out of the capitalist jungle to Socialism.”

In its latter chapters, the book describes life as it could be in a
future Soviet America:

_“The establishment of an American Soviet government will mark the
birth of real democracy in the United States. For the first time the
toilers will be free, with industry and the government in their own
hands. Now they are enslaved: the industries and the government are
the property of the ruling class.”_

Reverse propaganda

Curiously, after World War II, the book’s propaganda value was
reversed. _Toward Soviet America_ was disavowed as incorrect and
outdated by both the CPUSA and Foster personally — and reprinted by
their opponents, with plenty of notes
[[link removed]],
as a clear indication of what the Communists’ real goals were for
the country.

In 1932, the Communist ticket for the U.S. presidential election
campaigned as “Foster and Ford [for] Food and Freedom,” as well as
for self-determination for the “Black Belt” in the South. Excerpt
from election poster. (Credit: Boston Rare Maps)

In its heyday, however, the CPUSA judged _Toward Soviet
America_ important enough to turn it into a board game. The board was
printed in the March 1934 issue of _New Pioneer_, a communist youth
magazine. In an uncharacteristic capitulation to free market dynamics,
the CPUSA must have realized that a popular board game would be a
better vehicle for the “Sovietization” of young American minds
than a 340-page Stalinist diatribe with passages like this one:

_“In no country is culture so debased by capitalism as in the United
States. Essentially a gigantic effort to perpetuate the robbery of the
workers, it is sterile, hypocritical, colorless, lifeless. America’s
capitalistic writers are engaged in trying to convince the working
class what a glorious thing it is to be a wage slave; her artists and
poets are busy glorifying Heinz’s pickles and the advertising pages
of The Saturday Evening Post; her dramatists and musicians are cooking
up patriotic slush and idiotic sex stories to divert the masses from
their troubles and the hopeless boredom of capitalist life; her
scientists are trying to prove the unity of science and religion,
etc., etc.”_

Soviet America, the beautiful

So, how do you play _Toward Soviet America_? Up to four players start
with four “men,” each in one of the four cardinal directions. They
must make a circuit of the U.S., visiting its many social injustices,
before entering the “home stretch toward Soviet America.”

Close-up of the northeast quadrant of the map/board, showing some of
the obstacles on the way to Soviet America — obvious ones like Wall
Street, the NRA, and “boss thugs,” but also the A.F. of L.
(American Federation of Labor) and Socialist Party “misleaders.”
(Credit: Tobias Higbie / Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Players advance using a button toss, spinning a cardboard dial, or
drawing numbered cards. For some reason, dice were not an option for
the young pioneers. Perhaps they were deemed too frivolous.

Along the way, you can land on squares that are conducive to the
inevitable proletarian revolution (_United Farmers
League_ or _Militant Auto Workers_ — advance three spaces), or to
bourgeois or revisionist detractions (_Farm Misleaders_ or _Boss
Thugs_ — go back three spaces). If you’re unlucky, you’ll land
on a “blockade” (_Child Labor_, _Deportations_, _Ku Klux Klan_),
where you’ll have to wait for a comrade to arrive to set you free.

When you’ve gone around once, head for the center, where communist
utopia awaits. The egalitarian Walhalla is populated by such communist
luminaries as Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, and Joseph Stalin (because of
the centerfold, the latter two names read as _Max_ and _Stain_), as
well as Foster.

An American communist pantheon

Other names on the roundel represent further members of the American
Communist pantheon, including Ella Reeve Bloor (a.k.a. “Mother
Bloor,” a feminist activist), Earl Browder (CPUSA leader in the
1930s and early 1940s), William L. Patterson (an African-American
leader), Julio A. Mella (a founder of the Cuban Communist party), and
Tim Buck (General-Secretary of the Communist Party of Canada).

These communist heroes are now all but forgotten. If, through some
freak of history, William Z. Foster had won the 1932 presidential
election and Soviet America had become a reality, their names and
faces would be as familiar to us now as those of George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. And Foster would have gotten a
state funeral in Washington instead of Moscow.

In 1971, on the 10th anniversary of his death, the USSR dedicated a
stamp to the memory of William Z. Foster, “America’s Lenin.”
(Credit: Wikipedia / Public domain)

_FRANK JACOBS is Big Think's "Strange Maps" columnist._

_From a young age, Frank was fascinated by maps and atlases, and the
stories they contained. Finding his birthplace on the map in the
endpapers of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings only increased his interest
in the mystery and message of maps._

_While pursuing a career in journalism, Frank started a blog called
Strange Maps, as a repository for the weird and wonderful cartography
he found hidden in books, posing as everyday objects and (of course)
floating around the Internet._

_"Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas
for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the
most practical side of the world, its geography and its political
divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do
everything but that - maps that show the world from a different
angle"._

_A remit that wide allows for a steady, varied diet of maps: Frank has
been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the
subject
[[link removed]] in
2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily,
and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure,
amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more._

_Get BIG THINK in Your Inbox [[link removed]]. Join
our community of more than 10 million lifelong learners and get
smarter, faster today._

* U.S. history
[[link removed]]
* Communist Party
[[link removed]]
* children
[[link removed]]
* games
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]