"The Worst Is Yet to Come"

Three months ago, Jacques Duclos, bespectacled French Communist leader and Stalinist spokesman in western Europe, let loose a violent blast at U.S. Comrade Earl Browder. The complaint (couched in 7,000 words of dialectic diatribe): Browder, by dissolving the U.S. Communist Party and setting up the Communist Political Association, had led his followers into heresy. He had suggested that socialism and capitalism can get along together. From the day of the Duclos barrage a bitter storm raged around Kansas-born Earl Browder's hapless head.

Last week the lightning struck. In the Daily Worker, Browder was bitterly attacked by his onetime mentor--mild-mannered, 64-year-old William Z. Foster, old-line radical, thrice the Communist candidate for President of the U.S. Foster branded the No. 1 U.S. Communist an evangelist for a "capitalist Utopia." He added: "Such national unity, based on class peace with the monopolists, would be a first-class disaster to the workers."

Earl Browder said that Foster was guilty of "the purest anarcho-syndicalism." He assailed his critics for "IWWism," "semi-Trotskyism," and "bohemian anarchism." And, said he, bitterly: "The worst is yet to come."

It was not long in coming. Last week the Communist Political Association went into a special three-day convention, behind closed doors, in a midtown Manhattan clubhouse. At week's end, the 93 shirt-sleeved delegates, following their orders, had unceremoniously kicked Earl Browder off his throne, together with his two top henchmen, onetime Cartoonist Robert Minor and three-time Vice-Presidential candidate James W. Ford, a Negro.

Back on the throne went lean-faced Bill Foster. Then the Association went back to class warfare by reconstituting itself the Communist Party, ready to fight for Stalinism.

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