Chapter 3 examines how American fears of “pernicious” Soviet propaganda threatened to undermine Soviet–American relations on the eve of Ilf and Petrov’s visit. The long history of American politicians and government officials equating advocacy of revolution and actual revolutionary violence made a Soviet promise to desist from distributing propaganda in the United States a requirement of the 1933 normalization of relations. In the summer of 1935, the participation of American communists in the Comintern (Communist International) congress in Moscow outraged American officials. But their desire for “friendly” relations prevented a diplomatic break. Still, as Ilf and Petrov found when they applied for visas, American officials exercised caution in allowing authors – even funny ones – into the United States.

The Court dealt with the relation between the president and administrative agencies in several cases. It endorsed the Progressive view that agencies had to be substantially independent of the president by limiting the president’s power to remove agency members, but applied the nonfdelegatin doctrine generously in upholding a broad delegation in the field of foreign affairs and in doing the same in connection wh legal challenges to FDR’s recognition of the Soviet Union.