Win the Peace for Whom?

Everyone knew that retired Brigadier General Evans F. Carlson was a Marine, and a good one. In the early days of the Pacific War, his Gung Ho Raiders wrote heroic headlines at Makin and Guadalcanal. Not so many U.S. citizens knew that General Carlson had also long been an apostle of Communistic causes and Communist-fringe groups. In 1939, after traveling 2,000 miles as a military observer with China's Communist Eighth Route Army, he had resigned from the Marines to push his crusade. Last week Old China Hand Carlson made his ideology perfectly clear to everyone.

At a press conference in Manhattan, General Carlson and Russophile Singer Paul Robeson, cochairmen of the National Committee to Win the Peace, announced a San Francisco conference for next month to urge withdrawal of U.S. troops from China, withdrawal of U.S. support from Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Government. Said Cochairman Carlson: "The only democratic force [in China] is that being fostered by the Communists. People in this country don't like that word Communist; but I've learned it's wise to go behind words and find out about actions."

Russian Accent. His advice had an ironic twist. Behind the laudable words in the title of his Win the Peace Committee were a spate of suspicious actions. One of its founders was the C.I.O. Electrical Workers' Julius Emspak, also a sponsor of the American Peace Mobilizers, who had picketed the White House early in 1941 with cries of warmongering, then neatly flip-flopped the day Germany invaded Russia. One of the speakers at the inaugural convention was a member of Greece's Communist-led EAM; others were from the far left wing of the U.S. Congress: Washington's Hugh de Lacy, California's Ellis Patterson.

At a later meeting of the New York chapter, Win the Peace seemed hell-bent on highballing down the Communist Party line. In a strong Russian accent, delegates clamored for destruction of all atom bombs, repudiation of the Baruch report, acceptance of the Soviet plan for "outlawing" atomic war. Scrupulously avoiding mention of Russian occupation armies, they demanded withdrawal of U.S. and British forces from Palestine, China, the Philippines and Greece.

On Win the Peace's membership rolls there was plenty of window dressing with such innocent names as Songstress Lily Pons and Author Henry Seidel Canby. But there were also the names of New York's Communist Councilmen Peter V. Cacchione and Ben Davis, Manhattan's Party-line Congressman Vito Marcantonio, Daily Worker Columnist Frederick V. Field. Communist-dominated unions were heavily represented.

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