Youths Meet

One hot day last week, while most of the 21,000,000 U. S. youths busied themselves with job-hunting, beach-lolling, wood-chopping, hitchhiking, woo-pitching and other normal youthful summer affairs, 1,450 exceptionally earnest ones gathered in Manhattan for the annual meeting of the American Youth Congress. The Congress, closest approach to a U.S. youth movement, is barely five years old and still speaks for only a minority of the younger generation. But the Congress seemed important enough to get considerable attention from professionalviewers-with-alarm.

As the delegates, aged 14 to 36, met in the gold-&-burgundy ballroom of the Manhattan Center, Baltimore's cynical Journalist H. L. Mencken was discovered in the press box. Said he: "I always like to listen to people who really believe in things." The delegates settled down to earnest debate of youth's problems, to be lightened by a doughnut-dunking contest, a speech by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt and a day at the New York World's Fair. But they soon had their hands full of a piece of business not on their program: answering oldsters who insisted on knowing whether the American Youth Congress was Red.

First to pose this question was one Murray Plavner, a onetime AYCer, now a press agent, who issued a broadside to the effect that the Congress was a "Communist front" organization. His pamphlet was sponsored by six grownups, including Gene Tunney. Plavner and a young lawyer named Alfred M. Lilienthal demanded that the Congress condemn Communism, as well as Fascism and Naziism, and oust their adherents from the AYC. Sixteen New York City councilmen and 56 State legislators echoed the demand.

Soon the Congress was in an uproar. Delegates charged up & down the aisles, fought for the microphone, called each other names. Eventually the anti-Communist resolution was overwhelmingly defeated. Thereupon up sprang William Ball, president of the Young Americanist League, and cried: "All patriots follow me." Out of the hall with him marched eleven of the 1,450 delegates and observers.

Lest anyone suppose that there were no patriots left, the Congress next day unanimously passed a resolution declaring its opposition to "all forms of dictatorship, regardless of whether they be Communist, Fascist, Nazi or any other type," but announcing its intention to remain open to members of all political creeds. To show further that it was not radical, the Congress elected as chairman Georgia's Jack McMichael, a devout Y. M. C. A. worker.

To balance their books, the Congress then proceeded to pass other resolutions. Chief one: to urge that Congress appropriate $500,000,000 for a loan fund to help youths finish their schooling, establish homes and get started in the world. They also balloted (by means of voting machines) for a president in 1940 and plumped for a third term for Franklin Roosevelt, who got 904 votes to 58 for New York City's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, his closest competitor.

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