Author

Like Senator Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina who last week stamped on it with his feet (see p. g). General Hugh Johnson, when he recently finished reading Ferdinand Lundberg's America's 60 Families, was moved to violent action. So he damned the book in his daily column and roared into a microphone on his Bromo Quinine hour: "It is such a tissue of libel that the father of lies will have to move over on his throne when the spook of that author arrives. Moreover, it is the frankest kind of Communist propaganda." The General has a standing offer to allow any person attacked in his nightly talks to make a rebuttal on his radio time. Last week at the suggestion of the publisher, Vanguard Press, and with the approval of NBC and the program's sponsors, the General turned his Bromo Quinine hour over to Author Lundberg.

Born in Chicago 35 years ago, son of a Swedish father and a Norwegian mother, Author Lundberg got his start as a police reporter in purple days of Chicago gangdom. That road led to United Press and finally to the New York Herald Tribune as a Wall Street reporter. His toughest assignment was the 1929 crash. In 1934 he quit reporting to write Imperial Hearst, which was successful enough to maintain him and his Vassar-graduate wife in a bookish Manhattan apartment. With the help of General Johnson and Secretary of Interior Ickes, who used the title for the theme of his attack on monopolies, America's 60 Families shot into the best-selling shelf.

Unselective, poorly organized, overloaded with names and figures, America's 60 Families is good muckraking. Lundberg's collection of "conspicuous wastes" would have warmed the heart of the late Thorstein Veblen (Theory of the Leisure Class). He managed, for instance, to "isolate 723 bathrooms in the various Du Pont establishments, at which point, with much ground remaining to be covered, the quest was regretfully terminated."

In a long analysis of some of the Lundberg figures, the Annalist said last week: "No 500-page book on economic history can escape containing true statistical statements but Mr. Lundberg's book has come surprisingly near that achievement." More open to question, however, than Ferdinand Lundberg's facts are the inferences he draws from them, unfailingly deducing sinister motives for acts often quite innocent.

Last week what Mr. Lundberg had to say over the air in his own defense was very simple. On the question of libel, a sore subject since the Du Pont Co. has sued him for $150,000, Mr. Lundberg said: "General Johnson, so far as I know, is not an authority on libel." As for the charge of Communist propaganda, Author Lundberg declared: "I am not now, nor was I ever, a member of the Communist Party or of any of its affiliated or oppositionist groups. I am not now, and never have been directly or indirectly connected with a Communist, Socialist or any other revolutionary Left-wing faction in either a formal or an informal way."

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