Gibson Girl

Three daughters had the late Robert W. Gibson, wealthy architect, designer of the New York Botanical Garden Museum. Lydia was a leftist. A painter, sculptress, contributor to the old (Communist) Masses and Liberator, she became in 1922 the wife of well-known Communist Leader Robert Minor. Already she had been banished from the Social Register. Poor dear Lydia was beyond the pale.

Well to the right was her sister Katherine, who married Augustus Van Cortlandt Jr., brought her two daughters out at small, correct debuts, and divided her time between her Manhattan town house and her Mt. Kisco, N. Y. estate. Sister Katherine's only publicity: one false Cholly Knickerbocker rumor in 1936.

Right down the middle went the third, Hester. She married and divorced Ellery C. Huntington Jr., All-America (Colgate) football star and Wall Street lawyer, married and divorced Sculptor Oscar Fulton Davisson Jr. Among such liberal minds as inhabited conservative New Canaan, Conn., Hester was in the forefront. Still within the pale, still listed in the Social Register, Hester was not Red, but a delicate pinko.

But it was handsome Hester, not Lydia, who swept into New York Federal Court last week, put up $7,500 in Government bonds and cash to bail out a rumpled, disgruntled ex-candidate for President, Nicholas Dozenberg, alias George Morris, better known as Earl Browder, 48-year-old Communist leader. Indicted on a passport-fraud charge, he had already spent one night in the detention pen. Hester Huntington had met him for the first time the day before. Said she: "I did it on principle." Grateful Mr. Browder walked out of jail to await trial on Nov. 27.

That the Justice Department was seeking to uncover a passport factory allegedly operated by and for Communists was indicated at week's end by the activity of Federal agents, who continued issuing subpoenas to Communist leaders and their friends to appear before the Grand Jury. More big names was the FBI promise.

Whether or not the minuscule Communist Party (100,000 accredited members) was ever the menace Red-baiters deemed it, last week it appeared to be in rout,* two leaders reported fleeing to Mexico, another pair too ill to be questioned, the Communist New Masses in danger of folding because of lack of funds, newsstands reporting the Daily Worker hard to sell. Only regret of many U. S. citizens was Browder's prosecution on a seemingly minor offense, thus permitting cries of persecution from the Left.

One painfully interested observer of all this headline turmoil was Hester Huntington's ex-husband, father of her three handsome children. From his office at No. 49 Wall Street Ellery Huntington icily avowed: "My family has been here many generations and anything not absolutely 100% American is naturally distasteful to me."

Just as icy were the editors of the Social Register, compiling their 1940 lists: "Mrs. Huntington? Who? We never talk."

*Another group that felt the pressure of the Government finger last week was the German-American Bund, whose leader, Fritz Kuhn, faces trial on charges he stole $14,000 of the Bund's money. Kuhn took a leaf from the Hitler notebook, announced his successor to his cheering colleagues: long-jawed G. Wilhelm Kunze, now Vice Leader.

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