Reds Meet

Cleveland, whose conservative citizens shuddered with apprehension 33 years ago when the late great Liberal Tom Johnson became Mayor, was host last week to the eighth convention of the Communist Party, U. S. A. More than 3,000 ill-dressed spectators filled Prospect Auditorium when Party Secretary Earl Browder, in the absence of sick Chairman William Zebulon Foster, opened the meeting beneath loops of blood-red bunting and a painting of a worker bursting from his chains. No one without a scarlet party card was admitted to executive sessions, but the party organ, the New York Daily Worker, carried full and enthusiastic reports of the doings and deliberations of the 500 delegates who represent 25,000 U. S. Reds.

P:Receiving for the Central Committee a red banner presented by Cleveland Workers, Ella Reeve ("Mother") Bloor, 71, announced: "I hope to meet you in Washington at the first Soviet Congress of the U. S. A."

P:To the convention's praesidium of 37 were elected, amid loud cheers, ten honorary world members, including Josef Stalin and George Dimitroff, fiery Bulgarian Communist tried for the Reichstag fire.

P:Keynote address was delivered by Secretary Browder, who cried: "Our task is to win the majority of the working class to our program. We do not have unlimited time to accomplish this. Tempo, speed of development of our work, becomes the decisive factor in determining victory or defeat. For Fascism is rearing its ugly head more boldly every day in the United States!''

P:Only U. S. Government official to receive a kind word from the Reds was General Johnson, who was ambiguously complimented for "spotting loopholes in the NRA as clearly as any Communist could have done it."

P:For the occasion, Negro Poet Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues, Fine Clothes to the Jew) wrote a "workers' song" entitled " One more 'S' in the U. S. A." Excerpt:

Oh, the bankers they all are planning For another great big war. To make them rich from the workers' dead, That's all that war is for. So if you don't want to see bullets holding sway Then come on, all you workers, And join our fight today. Chorus: Put one more S in the U. S. A. To make it Soviet. One more S in the U. S. A. Oh, we'll live to see it yet. When the land belongs to the farmers* And the factories to the working men-- The U. S. A. when we take control Will be U. S. S. A. then.

*Poetic license. Soviet doctrine favors nationalization, not individual ownership, of agricultural lands (see No Philosophical Abstractions under Russia, Foreign News).

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