Ups & Downs

P:For good behavior, and because he was finally ready to settle his $10,000 fine, ex-Congressman J. Parnell Thomas was paroled from the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Conn. New Jersey's Republican Thomas, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee before the law caught up with him, had done nine months and two days of a six-to-18-month sentence for padding his payroll and swindling the Government out of some $8,000.

P:After nearly four years of legal stalling, 36-year-old Homer L. Loomis Jr., onetime head of Georgia's anti-Negro, anti-Semitic "Columbians," decided to serve the one-year jail term he got in 1947 for starting a race riot in Atlanta.

P:For his able conduct of the Alger Hiss trials, U.S. Prosecutor Tom Murphy, who in eight years has never lost a case for the Government, got the President's personal thanks, but that was as far as it went. Unfortunately, Murphy had not bothered to cultivate the men who dispense New York's Democratic plums--or even to join a political club. Since there was little chance for reward or advancement (i.e., the judgeship Murphy was hoping for), there was little point in staying on the Government payroll for a piddling $9,400 a year. After Hiss's appeal has been completed, therefore, Murphy will resign.

P:Less than a week after a committee had set up shop in Manhattan to purge the nation's airwaves of suspected Communists and their fellow travelers, committee members began explaining that it was all a terrible misunderstanding. Mrs. Hestor McCullough, who had helped put Actress Jean Muir out of a job by protesting to her studio (TIME, Sept. 4), announced that she would continue protesting whenever she saw fit as an individual but not as member of any purge committee. The editors of Counterattack, who had assembled the charges of Communist leanings against Actress Muir in the first place, denied that they had any intentions of setting themselves up as a final authority in such matters. At week's end representatives from the broadcasters and from the actors' union got together to see what they could do about handling anti-Communist charges and providing a fair hearing for the accused.

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