Brother Hanns

The House Committee on Un-American Activities last week got around to Communist Gerhart Eisler's younger brother Hanns.

Hanns, Hollywood composer and author of a new book criticizing the movies (TIME, Sept. 29), sweated and squirmed under the Washington kleigs as he listened to Committee Chief Investigator Robert Stripling describe him as "the Karl Marx of Communism in the field of music." Like Brother Gerhart, Hanns demanded the privilege of reading a statement to the committee. Chairman J. Parnell Thomas shouted an angry refusal. Thereupon, like Brother Gerhart, Eisler handed out typewritten copies of his statement to newsmen: "This hearing is both sinister and ridiculous. ... I would be delighted to spend as much time as this committee will allow to lecture on ... the art of the fugue. But . . . this committee has called me only in order to . . . smear me."

For the first few days, the committee seemed not particularly interested in bald, fat little Hanns Eisler. What seemed to interest it most was a long list of "certain prominent persons" who, it charged, had tried to help Eisler enter the U.S. The list sparkled with glittery names: Radio Commentator Raymond Swing, onetime Willkieman Russell Davenport, Hollywood Director William Dieterle, Columnist Dorothy Thompson and Eleanor Roosevelt.

"Dear Sumner." Not unaware of the headlines it was about to make, the committee called upon Sumner Welles, former Under Secretary of State, to identify two "Dear Sumner" notes which Mrs. Roosevelt had written to him concerning Eisler in 1939. Eisler, as a refugee music professor from Hitler Germany, was then attempting to get into the U.S. through Cuba, but was being denied a visa as a suspected Communist. With her first note, on White House stationery, Mrs. Roosevelt sent Welles a batch of papers given to her by a friend of Eisler's, a "perfectly honest person," who thought that the case had not been examined carefully enough. Wrote Mrs. Roosevelt: "Why not do it all over again and bring it out in the open and let [Eisler and his wife] defend themselves?"

To "Dear Eleanor," his friend since childhood, Sumner Welles wrote a long and friendly letter. But it added up to a brush-off: the State Department had reason to believe that Eisler was a Communist; visas could not be given to Communists ; the U.S. consul general at Havana would listen to whatever evidence Eisler could present on his own behalf, but the law would have to be followed.

Mrs. Roosevelt sent off a second note: "This Eisler case seems a hard nut to crack. What do you suggest?" This brought another polite brush-off from Welles. Last week Mrs. Roosevelt, now busy with U.N. duties, told newsmen that she had never met Eisler and did not remember writing the notes to Welles. "When I was in the White House," she said airily, "I had hundreds of such requests a month, and, depending on the character of the request, the letters were passed on to the correct Government department."

Mexicali Ruse. In any case, as the committee knew beforehand, neither Mrs. Roosevelt nor anybody else on its "prominent persons" list had actually been of any help to Eisler. He got into the U.S. late in 1939 on a visa obtained from a "sleepy" consul at Mexicali, Mexico. The consul, Wyllis Myers, whom the committee did not bother to subpoena, issued the visa without bothering to check his files on Eisler.

But Eisler's troubles did not end when he caught Myers napping. As soon as he crossed the border at Calexico, Calif., he was picked up by immigration authorities. He was allowed to remain in the U.S. only after he had sworn that he had never been a Communist and that he hated Stalin as much as he hated Hitler.

These statements were his undoing last week. Under persistent questioning, Eisler finally admitted that he had joined the German Communist Party in 1926, that he had visited Moscow at least three times, that he had once been the guiding spirit behind the Comintern's "international bureau of music." The conclusion was obvious that, whether now or in 1940, he had perjured himself. The committee therefore ended its three-day show by demanding that the Department of Justice 1) prosecute the composer for perjury, and 2) start deportation proceedings against him.

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