Red on the City Desk

Congress, which has investigated Communists on the stage, screen and radio, last .week got around to the U.S. press. Before the House Un-American Activities Committee appeared Charles W. Judson, 42. He freely admitted that, under the party alias of "Peter Steele," he had been a member of the Communist Party from 1937 to 1941 at the same time he was city editor of the Los Angeles Daily News (circ. 209,000). Judson, now senior associate editor of California's Fortnight magazine and a militant antiCommunist, named 16 others as members of the party's Newspaper Unit No. 140 during the same period. Among them: Tom O'Connor,* later a writer on Manhattan's PM and now managing editor of its successor, the Compass; Charles Daggett, onetime pressagent for James Roosevelt and now a movie publicity man; Philip M. Connelly, Los Angeles Herald-Express reporter who later became state C.I.O. president and is now one of the fifteen California Communist leaders awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy under the Smith Act. Judson said the Communist unit concerned itself principally with trying to dominate the management and policies of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild, although only a small percentage of the Los Angeles Guild members were Communists.

Despite his dual role as working Communist and city editor, Judson said the party had never tried to influence him in his newspaper duties. After a year in the Communist Party's newspaper unit, he found that its orders on Guild matters conflicted with his responsibilities on the city desk, where he had the right to hire & fire, consequently transferred to a non-news unit of the C.P. But he stuck with the Party three more years, until its role "as a total captive of Russian foreign policy was quite apparent to me."

* Said O'Connor last week: 'I am not a Communist. "

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