Persistent Pink

Author of a Communist tract called The Coming Struggle for Power, baldish, fattish, 37-year-old British Evelyn John St. Loe Strachey says he is no Communist. Having barely escaped deportation proceedings during a U.S. lecture tour in 1935, young Mr. Strachey this year set out on another with the proofs of a new book, Hope in America, under his arm. Last week he sat cooling his heels, along with a Hungarian pianist and two Montenegrin stowaways, in the flag-draped detention room at Ellis Island.

Mr. Strachey was wrathful because the Department of State had canceled his visa while he was on the high seas. The State Department maintained that it had canceled the visa on evidence of fraud: after swearing to the U.S. Consulate-General in London that he did not advocate the overthrow of the U.S. Government by force or violence, John Strachey had become an official of the British Communist Party. Mr. Strachey denounced this charge as false, demanded a hearing from the State Department. The Department frostily agreed to grant one in London. But the American Civil Liberties Union and other outraged liberals began wiring Franklin Roosevelt and the Department of Labor, which straightway granted Writer Strachey a hearing on a technicality having nothing to do with Communism. As he repaired there at week's end, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear an appeal on the Strecker deportation case. This case may establish that membership in the Communist Party is not in itself grounds for deportation.

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