Under Raps

Labor's Communist-liners bent under some hard hammering last week:

P: In Washington, 36-year-old Harold Christoffel, onetime president of Milwaukee's United Automobile Workers(C.I.O.) Local 248 and leader of two long, bitter strikes at the Allis-Chalmers plant, stood long-faced as a federal judge sentenced him to prison for two to six years for perjury. He had lied repeatedly to the House Labor Committee when he denied being a Communist or having Communist affiliations (TIME, June 9).

P: In Manhattan, the Justice Department's drive on alien Communists caught up with Russia-born Irving Potash, vice president of the C.I.O.'s International Fur & Leather Workers Union, member of the Communist Party's national committee. He was hustled off to Ellis Island, where he joined four others held as deportable Communists.* He also joined them in what they cried was a hunger strike against their being denied bail. At week's end all were free on bond, pending hearings. None looked the worse for his fast.

P:In San Francisco, Phil Murray's hatchetman Allan Haywood delivered the bad news to Red-eyed Harry Bridges: he was fired as a C.I.O. regional director for refusing to go along with Murray's policy of opposing Henry Wallace's third party. Australia-born Harry Bridges' grip on about 75,000 longshoremen was not affected. But he was expecting more bad news --another attempt to deport him.

P: In Washington, before a House Labor subcommittee, broken-nosed Herbert K. Sorrell, whose A.F.L. Conference of Studio Unions has had Hollywood cinemakers in strike ferment for three years, denied over & over that he had ever been a Communist Party member. Shown a C.P. card signed "Herbert Stewart" (Sorrell's mother's name was Stewart), he cried "fake," but admitted that it looked like his handwriting. An expert swore that it was.

* The four: Gerhart Eisler (TIME, Feb. 16); John Williamson, the Communist Party's labor secretary; Ferdinand Smith, secretary of the C.I.O.'s National Maritime Union (TIME, Feb. 23); Charles A. Doyle, upstate New York director of the C.I.O.'s United Gas, Coke & Chemical Workers.

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