Red Issue

No news to any political observer is the fact that U. S. Communists, though equipped with a Presidential candidate of their own, are this year hoping & praying for the re-election of Franklin Roosevelt. Their declaration for him has been delivered obliquely in the form of statements by Nominee Earl Browder and other Red leaders that the No. 1 Communist objective in the current campaign is to "defeat the Landon-Hearst-Liberty League reaction" (TIME, July 6). That objective stemmed from a shift in Communist world strategy decided at Moscow last year. Reds in every land were to cease their partisan sniping, work for a "People's Front" of all Liberals and Labor.

Meantime, anti-New Dealers have been hardly less active in calling public attention to the President's Communist backing than New Dealers have been in harping on the Liberty League's friendship for the Republican nominee. Publisher William Randolph Hearst has put a charge of Red fire in his daily blast against the New Deal. Last month Col. Robert Rutherford ("Bertie") McCormick shocked his Chicago Tribune readers with this scarehead: MOSCOW ORDERS REDS IN U. S. TO BACK ROOSEVELT. Featured in the GOPress was the resignation of James Casey as managing editor of Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker because of his disgust with "candidates who speak in the open for Earl Browder and then confer at closed chamber sessions for the election of Roosevelt."

The time had come, decided the Democratic Presidential nominee last week, to break his silence on the Red issue, simultaneously strike a hard blow at his prime journalistic foe. A new Hearst campaign against him, he learned, was to begin on Sunday. Few hours after his return to the White House from Harvard on Saturday, the President issued a strategic statement over the signature of his Assistant Secretary Stephen Early.

Next morning across the top of every Sunday Hearstpaper in the land streamed this headline: 'COMMUNISTS CAN JOIN ... IN ... SUPPORTING ROOSEVELT' SAYS BROWDER. Beneath it was a long, well-documented exposition of current Red strategy. Simultaneously on the front pages of the nation's press (the Hearstpapers included ) appeared the well-timed Roosevelt retort:

My attention has been called to a planned attempt, led by a certain notorious newspaper owner, to make it appear that the President passively accepts the support of alien organizations hostile to the American form of government.

Such articles are conceived in malice and born of political spite. They are deliberately framed to give a false impression-- in other words to "frame" the American people.

The President does not want and does not welcome the vote or support of any individual or group taking orders from alien sources.

This simple fact is, of course, obvious.

The American people will not permit their attention to be diverted from real issues to fake issues which no patriotic, honorable, decent citizen would purposely inject into American affairs.

STEPHEN EARLY.

In the President's favorite phrase of strong condemnation, he was plainly accusing William Randolph Hearst of playing "dirty ball." A slugger but no sluggard, the old publisher stepped smartly to the plate, smacked the Roosevelt pitch straight back at the box. From Amsterdam, he cabled a strident "Reply to the President" which was splashed on the front page of every Hearstpaper on Monday.

Excerpts: ". . . If I can say so without offense, I do not think that Mr. Roosevelt has a great deal of knowledge. His Administration has proved that. . . .

''However, I want to be perfectly fair to Mr. Roosevelt--and I have been.

"I do not say and I never have said what Mr. Roosevelt intimates safely through his secretary, that he willingly receives the support of the Communists and the Karl Marx Socialists and the Frankfurter Radicals and the Tugwell Bolshevists and the Richberg Revolutionists, and all the malcontents and disturbers in this country.

"I have simply said, and proved by actual and accurate quotation, that he does receive such support from the enemies of our system of government, and that he has done his utmost in act and utterance while in office to secure and justify such support.

"I do not find any pleasure as an American in saying this of an American President, but it is the truth.

''And as I am not a shifty, prevaricating politician, but for over 50 years have endeavored to serve my country as an honorable and patriotic journalist, I am compelled in fairness to my readers to tell the truth. . . ."

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