Roundup No. 2

Before sunup over New York City one day last week, 100 FBI agents climbed into 25 Buicks and began moving through the slumbering city. Precisely at 7 a.m., FBI fingers rapped on doors or punched doorbells at 20 homes. The second big roundup of U.S. Communists had begun.

Within a few hours, twelve men and four women were arrested in New York and one man in Pittsburgh. They and four others--missed in the first day's roundup --were indicted under the Smith Act by a New York federal grand jury, on charges of conspiring to teach and advocate violent overthrow of the U.S. Government. They were the second echelon of the party's high command. Presumably they would take up the U.S. party reins when the eleven Communist bosses (convicted of similar charges in 1949) are sent off to prison. Among them were familiar figures: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 60, national committee member and New York Daily Worker columnist; Party Theoretician Alexander Trachtenberg, 65, a product of Russia and Yale; Simon Gerson, 41, onetime candidate for New York City councilman and longtime party newspaperman.

In Foley Square courthouse, where Alger Hiss stood trial and where the party's eleven leaders lost their 1949 marathon with the law, attorneys for the newly arrested comrades fussed loudly about bail. Originally it was set at $277,500, so that the Commies would think twice about jumping bail as Gerhart Eisler did, but later it was trimmed to $176,000. To the Reds' rescue, as usual, came wealthy Party-Liner Frederick Vanderbilt Field, who put up $31,000 in U.S. bonds, $5,000 in cash, enough to spring four of the 17.

The Daily Worker shouted of "Fascist violence and terror," and nonparty voices, among them the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York Post, muttered darkly about endangered freedoms, berated the U.S. Supreme Court for its opinion (TIME, June 11) affirming the conviction of the top Communist leaders. The Providence Evening Bulletin said there is a real but narrow line between outlawing "conspiracy to teach and advocate" and "teaching and advocacy of radical ideas themselves," hoped the U.S. would stay on the "safe side of that line" and limit its anti-Red campaign to "genuine conspirators." That seemed to be what was on the Government's mind. Attorney General Howard McGrath indicated that his department was after Communist "leaders" (perhaps 100). Any Communist who valued his freedom would henceforth have to think twice before taking an executive post in the Communist Party's Moscow-directed conspiracy to overthrow the U.S.

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