"There Is a Danger . . ."

"I had pictured myself as defending civil liberties," said Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas last week. "And yet," he added, "there is a Communist danger in this country." Standing in the old Supreme Court chamber where the Senate is temporarily housed, thoughtful Paul Douglas summed up the feelings of other conscientious and sorely troubled men.

For more than two weeks of agonized soul-searching, the Senate had grappled with a problem which the U.S. had never squarely met.* And yet, as Douglas pointed out, the country faced an undeniable danger from U.S. Communists who owed their first allegiance to a foreign enemy. In the end, the Senate came down to a debate over two specific ways of holding the danger in check.

With Scissors & Paste. One bill bore the name of Nevada's portly Pat McCarran. Actually it had started out as a catchall of five different anti-Communist measures. McCarran had gone to work with scissors and paste, put in a few ideas of his own and laid the result before the Senate. His omnibus bill was a clumsy-looking vehicle. Nevertheless it moved. It moved along the path of recent court opinions which found Communism a clear and present danger, branded the basic aims of Communism as criminal in intent. It was aimed at Communists and their organizations and fronts, requiring them to register the names of their members and label their propaganda for what it was. President Truman said that he would veto it as an infringement of civil rights.

The other bill was drafted by West Virginia's Harley Kilgore. The Kilgore bill as drawn would have left above-ground Communism strictly alone. But it provided for the roundup and mass detention of potential spies and saboteurs in times of national emergency.

Over the constitutionality and effectiveness of those two measures, the debate wore on.

Above & Below. It was against the omnibus McCarran measure that Paul Douglas, like Harry Truman, first cried out in the name of civil rights. The bill, said Douglas, "can easily lead to the smearing of innocent persons." He seized on the provision making it a crime to "contribute substantially" to the establishment of a dictatorship in the U.S. Who was to say what "substantially" meant?

Douglas also had another argument against the McCarran bill. He argued: the McCarran "blunderbuss" would not accomplish what it set out to do. What was to prevent Communist groups from changing their names as often as they were cited, from arguing their cases interminably through the courts? He argued that the bill would merely drive the Communists underground and out of sight; it was better to keep them in sight. The fact was, the McCarran bill would probably drive the Reds underground. But that was its chief usefulness. The reiterated Communist threat to go underground is political blackmail; there never was a revolutionary party which went wholly underground of its own free will. Driven underground, Communism would be deprived of its recruiting agencies, its propaganda outlets; its subversive lies would be muffled.

The bill's supporters whirled in rebuttal. In their turn, they hurled the charge of unconstitutionality at the Kilgore camp.

Omnibus or Blunderbuss. At that point both sides drew back a step and reconsidered. The McCarran bill, despite the objections leveled against it, would certainly intimidate the Reds in peacetime. The Kilgore bill was designed for wartime emergency.

Burying their reservations, the McCarran camp decided to accept the Kilgore bill with a few minor refinements. Paul Douglas and other Administration Senators, with a second, over-the-shoulder look at the Communist danger, decided to accept McCarran's measures. The two bills were put together in a bigger-than-ever omnibus bill and passed by an overwhelming 70 to 7 vote.*

This week, conferees from both the House (which had already passed a bill similar to McCarran's) and the Senate came to agreement on a final version of the new anti-Communist law (see box). From the White House, Harry Truman continued to regard it with disfavor. But the Congress obviously had the strength to override a presidential veto.

* The nearest thing to a solution: the 1940 Smith Act, under which the eleven Communist leaders were convicted last fall. The Smith Act makes it a crime to teach or advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S.

* The seven holdouts, all Democrats: Graham (N.C.), Green and Leahy (R.I.), Taylor (Idaho), Kefauver (Tenn.), Lehman (N.Y.), Murray (Mont.).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.