Red Hunt Hacks Home

The Red hunt of the House of Representatives last week hacked slowly home to the Capitol where it reported on its eight-month beating of all the coverts of the land for sly Communist foxes. With a majority of his investigating committee supporting his views. Chairman Hamilton Fish Jr. contended:

1) There are 500,000 Red sympathizers in the U. S.

2) There are 82,000 Red voters.

3) There are 12,000 dues-paying members of the Communist Party.

4) The Communist Party is a menace to the U. S. and an agent of armed revolution directed from Soviet Russia.

5) Amtorg Trading Corp. does not finance OGPU (Soviet secret police) in the U. S.

6) The Soviet did not try to depress prices by wheat short-selling in Chicago.

7) The so-called Whalen Documents of a Red plot in the U. S. were not authenticated.

The Fish report recommended that Congress: 1) deny Communists naturalized citizenship; 2) declare the Communist Party illegal; 3) deport all alien Communists; 4) bar Communist propaganda from the mails; 5) send U. S. agents to report on conscript labor on commodities entering this country.

A minority of one. Congressman John E. Nelson of Maine, disagreed with the Red picture of his colleagues, decried the "hysteria" over Communism, declared: ''Our best defense against the red shirt of the Communist and the black shirt of the Fascist is the blue shirt of the American workingman."

As if to square his position on the Red issue, Chairman Fish gave a curious interview the day before his committee report was released. He said: "If Communism is a trial, so also is Capitalism. ... It is up to the Capitalist system to clean its Augean stables and divest itself of some of its manifestations of greed, inhumanity and reaction. ... I believe in Capitalism shorn of its abuses and ugly greed to exploit labor for the Almighty Dollar."

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