Portrait of a Party Man

Henceforth, Communists who work for the U.S. Government and conceal or deny their membership in the Communist Party are inviting a jail term, a stiff fine or both. The charge is fraud against the Government.

The test case was that of Carl Aldo Marzani, 35. Marzani came to the U.S. from Italy in 1924. His father started a tailor shop in Scranton, and son Aldo, a bright, studious lad, quickly learned the language and rose to the top of his class at Scranton Central High School. Then he won a scholarship to Williams College.

He seemed to be on his way to big things. The Commons Club elected him president. He became a member of the top-ranking Gargoyle Society, the debating team, the undergraduate council and Phi Beta Kappa. He met and later married an up-&-coming young actress called Edith Eisner.

Copping another scholarship, he went to Oxford in 1936 for two years' study in economics and philosophy. During Spain's Civil War he hobnobbed with "Durruti's Column," an anarchist outfit on the Loyalist side. Then, with his wife, he hitchhiked all over Europe and on into India and the Orient. In 1939 he returned to the U.S. with a fluent command of Italian, Spanish, German and French--but no job. He applied for relief.

Boring from Within. In 1942, Marzani turned up in Washington as an economist, first with the Coordinator of Information, then with the Office of Strategic Services. He was given the job of making visual presentations of complex military strategy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Everyone agreed that he was highly efficient. In 1945 he and his $7,175-a-year job were transferred, with the rest of OSS, to the State Department.

State began a recheck. Last week in Washington, a federal district court jury listened to the charges. In 1940 and 1941, the Justice Department contended, Marzani had been a branch organizer and educational director of the Communist Party in New York City, under the party name of Tony Whales. A New York detective, a Negro member of a secret squad organized by Mayor LaGuardia in 1939, testified that in 1940 Marzani was urging fellow Communists to join the Army to destroy morale, in 1941 was telling Negro leaders that the time was ripe for revolution. The fraud, said the Government, was Marzani's repeated denials of all these activities.

Marzani listened with an air of bored restlessness. When his turn came, he shouted angry denials. Sure, he had dropped in at Communist headquarters, attended dances and election rallies, even sold Daily Workers. But that was just to help out his wife, an avowed Communist.

Unimpressed, the jury last week convicted Marzani on all eleven counts of the indictment. Maximum penalty on any count: ten years in prison, a fine of $10,000.

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