Make-Believe Ballroom

On Manhattan's lower East Side, in a hired hall where such jazzmen as "Wild Bill" Davison and Max Kaminsky blow their horns, the leaders of the U.S. Communist Party assembled last week to tootle their stuck whistles. It was the party's 15th biennial convention. There were placards to set the theme. "Hail the Socialist Soviet Union, Guardian of World Peace," said one. "Seat Red China in the U.N." "Mail Birthday Greetings to Our Leader, William Z. Foster."

Even as Communist Party conventions go, it was a dismal affair. The party's secretary general, mouthy Eugene Dennis, was unavoidably detained--by the bars of Manhattan's federal house of detention, where he is serving a year for contempt of Congress. The other ten convicted top party leaders were facing jail, too, unless the Supreme Court should throw out their conviction for conspiracy. Membership had shrunk (from 80,000 last year to no more than 55,000). But none of this had dulled the U.S. Communists' love for Russia or their hatred for the American form of government. Big, boisterous Benjamin J. Davis Jr., one of the party's top Negro leaders, left little doubt of that.

". . . Sooner than the reactionaries think, we'll be running the country and will have done with the Trumans, Fords, Deweys and Hoovers," said he. ". . . It gives us double pride that the American imperialists suffered one of the greatest political setbacks ever from [the North Koreans and Chinese Communists]."

Only two years before, the party had attracted some 17,000 to Madison Square Garden. This year, bellowed National Organizer Henry Winston, "Madison Square Garden was denied to the Communist Party." (It wasn't. The party did not even try to rent the Garden.) The faithful in 1950 wouldn't have filled one bleacher section in the Garden. The press was barred, and even the location of convention headquarters was kept secret until meetings were under way. "You know," explained one party hack, "we're not exactly popular now."

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