Red but Not Read

In a converted loft on Manhattan's West 26th Street a handful of Communists put to bed another Worker (no longer the Daily Worker), a sickly-looking eight-page tabloid. "Forty-two percent of all plants being operated in the Soviet Union," exulted a Page One story, "were constructed in the last four years." The market for such "news" is dwindling these days. The Worker is a failure, a Red newspaper that is printed but not read. Its claim to 15,963 paid circulation is as phony as its news. At week's end loyal party workers hawk unsold copies through Harlem, the Lower East Side slums, low-rent housing projects.

The Worker is one of eleven Communist periodicals still published in the U.S. Once a daily with 100,000 circulation, it now struggles into print only twice a week. It is a chronic beggar, surrounding its dialectic with incessant pleas for cash. Ads come hard. Its chief, and sometimes its only, account is Harry's Clothes Shop on Third Avenue, an establishment that knows an out-at-elbows tovarish when it sees one, and offers him suits for $10 to $15, alterations free. The Worker's editor is James Edward Jackson Jr., 48, a mustached man who rose (if that is the word) from pill rolling in a Richmond drugstore to a secretary of the national committee of the Communist Party of the U.S.

Zigs & Zags. Sorry as it is, the Worker is the most influential of U.S. Communist publications--which range in format from Political Affairs, a sort of Soviet Reader's Digest, to Glos Ludowy (Voice of the Masses), a weekly distributed to 3,000 left-leaning Poles in Detroit. Even if their circulation claims are accepted as genuine, as they cannot be, total readership falls short of 70,000, much of that duplicated. About the only circulation that the Worker can really count on steadily is in official Washington. More than 150 copies are studied by Government agencies, looking for zigs and zags in the Soviet line.

The scrutiny is largely a waste of time. Steady pressure from Washington, including the McCarran Act, which requires U.S. Communist publications to be labeled as propaganda, deprives them of overt support from Moscow. Thus abandoned, the Worker, etc., seem to be drifting rudderless in Moscow's wake. Gus Hall, general secretary of the U.S. Communist Party and a regular Kremlin visitor, was usually good for a navigational fix--until the State Department yanked his passport.

Anemic Stuff. Mistakes in position are frequent and embarrassing. MOSCOW-NIPS PLOT TO KILL ARMY CHIEFS, cheered a Worker headline, after the ill-starred "doctors' conspiracy" against Stalin in 1953. When Khrushchev released the doctors, the Worker, caught by surprise, hastily backflipped. A 1961 Worker editorial demanding a "permanent ban" on nuclear testing appeared the same week that the Russians resumed testing. In the very next issue, the paper broke out in a rash of four articles justifying and approving the resumption.

At this year's budget hearings in Washington, the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover said that the Communists are now most busy trying to infect the minds of American youth with such late-blooming Red publications as New Horizons for Youth, launched in New York two years ago, and Communist Viewpoint, a newsletter born last month that circulates modestly among U.S. colleges. Like the rest, they are pretty anemic-looking stuff.

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