Fable Flayed

No gossip has so rankled ruling British Conservatives as that told about the Cliveden Set (pronounced kliv-den). First to "discover" the Set was The Week, mimeographed newssheet edited by tall, lean Claude Cockburn (pronounced ko-burn), former U. S. correspondent of the London Times, at present a writer for London's Communist Daily Worker.

Many a U. S. and British newsman has since elaborated the original Cockburn details, spreading the story that a group of rich, pro-Fascist Conservatives were meeting and regularly plotting at Cliveden, country estate of Lord & Lady Astor. Among the reported Cliveden coups were the political downfall of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, the trip of Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax to Berlin, the sending of Lord Runciman to Czechoslovakia, engaging Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh to "spy" on Soviet and German air power, the Munich Pact.

High priestess of the Set was supposed to be Virginia-born Lady Astor, nee Nancy Langhorne, the mistress of Cliveden and M. P. for Plymouth. Last week in Saturday Evening Post "Priestess" Nancy indignantly denounced all Cliveden Set stories. Lord & Lady Astor put in their first disclaimers last spring; he to the London Times, she to the Daily Herald. Now she gives full tongue. "Cliveden Set! There is no such thing! It is a fantastic invention. It has no existence. It never did exist." After that heated beginning Cliveden's mistress proceeded sarcastically to list those who really were in the Set.

Salvation Army General Evangeline Booth, said Lady Astor, was "up to the neck in the Cliveden Set," since she often comes to the estate. Franklin D. Roosevelt was once "compromised" there. During the War, when the estate was a military hospital, he came out and helped mow Cliveden's lawn. Since Bolshevists Leonid Krassin (died, 1926) and Gregory Sokolnikov (since "purged") were once entertained at Cliveden, Lady Astor thought Kremlin Set might be a more apt title for those she entertained. Other Cliveden Set members: Charles Chaplin, Will Rogers, Emma Goldman, Herbert Hoover, James Ramsay MacDonald, numerous Rhodes scholars.

Lady Astor's story was simultaneously corroborated by Playwright George Bernard Shaw, also a Clivedenite,who wrote in Liberty: "You meet everybody worth meeting, rich or poor, at Cliveden. . . . According to English notions all Americans are insanely hospitable. But Lady Astor is phenomenal even among American hostesses. ... I could prove that Cliveden is a nest of Bolshevism. . . . The Astors have become the representatives of America in England; and any attack on them is in effect an attack on America. . . . Never has a more senseless fable got into the headlines."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.