House Goes Hunting

RADICALS

House Goes Hunting

Not since 1920 when Alexander Mitchell Palmer was attorney general of the U. S. has the Federal Government hunted Reds. Because overt radical agitation and the economic condition of the nation follow the same cycle. Communist leaders in the last fat prosperous decade have starved politically out of public sight. The last lean year has brought them suddenly to the surface, to gorge themselves on hard times, to feast on unemployment, to stage Red demonstrations throughout the land. Alarmed by the spectre of radical resurgence, the House of Representatives last week voted (210-to-18) to start a Red hunt of its own, through a special investigating committee.

Chief agitator for the new Red hunt was New York's big (6 ft. 4 in.; 210 Ib.) Congressman Hamilton Fish, onetime Harvard footballer. Loudly he warned the House that Communists were seizing U. S. schools, were plotting to overthrow the Government. He blamed the Third International for labor troubles in the textile industry of the South. He cited the charges of Soviet propaganda made against Amtorg Trading Corp. by New York City's Police Commissioner Whalen (TIME, May 12), now retired. He demanded the immediate deportation to Russia of all alien Communists, seriously recommended that U. S. citizens favoring Communism be shipped to a desert island in the Philippines to practice their political creed alone.*

Representative Fish was deprived of credit for this investigation when Representative Snell, potent chairman of the potent Rules Committee, rewrote the Fish resolution, put his own name on it. To be investigated were "Communist propaganda in the U. S. . . . The Communist party of the U. S. and all affiliated organizations . . . the Communist International, the Amtorg Trading Corp., The Daily Worker and all groups or individuals who . . . advise, teach or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the U. S. or attempt to undermine our Republican form of government. . . ."

Iowa's Representative Christian William Ramseyer stood out against the House majority as an objector to the Red hunt. Declared he:

"The country has greater troubles than this wild goose chase to which Congress should address itself. ... I don't want anything like this to distract the minds of the people from the great and fundamental economic conditions they are faced with now. We have large surpluses to eat and wear, yet unemployment is rife. Instead of going off witch hunting, why not create a committee to study why, in the midst of plenty, we are in the midst of want? . . . An economic system that permits that has something wrong with it. ... It isn't the preaching of radicals that creates unrest and revolution; it's a distressed economic condition."

Declared Oklahoma's Congressman Charles O'Conner: "The best way to fight Communist propaganda is to put something in the soup besides statistics."

* Because the U. S. does not recognize the Soviet government, the Department of Labor is unable to deport some 1,000 Russians it now holds as undesirable aliens.

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