Content area
Full Text
It was six o'clock in the morning on May 1, 1950. In Mosinee. Wisconsin, a small Marathon County papermill town, Mayor Ralph Kronenwetter was still in his pajamas. Suddenly, outside of his house, a man shouted, "Come out with your hands on your head." Five armed guards stormed inside. They grabbed the mayor, paraded him out the door, and informed him that the Council of People's Commissars had taken over the town. The man leading the assault was Chief Commissar Joseph Zack Kornfeder (see cover image}, who declared Mosinee part of the United Soviet States of America. The communist invasion of Mosinee had begun.
It ended the next day. The brainchild of state and national leaders of the American Legion, the two-day mock communist takeover of Mosinee aimed to teach Americans the horrors of communist rule. The Legion selected May ? to coincide with International Workers' Day, traditionally celebrated by the communist movement worldwide. The attack also came at a propitious time in the early Cold War. In August 1949, the Soviet Union had successfully tested an atomic bomb. Two months later, Mao Tse-Tung's People's Liberation Army triumphed in China. In February 1950, less than three months before Mosinee's D-Day, Wisconsin's own Senator Joseph McCarthy broke onto the national scene, warning of communists in the U.S. State Department. The Legion's timing and the invasion's novelty combined to generate fantastic media coverage. Television networks, newsreel companies, wire services. Life magazine, Readers' Digest, and even the Soviet TASS news agency sent reporters.
Today, Mosinee and its Cold War past have been largely forgotten, save for viewers of the chilling documentary Atomic Café (1982), which features live invasion footage, or readers of historian Richard Fried's The Russians are Coming! (1998), which chronicles the story...