To Take the Pressure Off

After Collier's last month ran an article titled "I Was Called Subversive," the magazine was pelted with complaints. They leveled charges of "pro-Communism" at Collier's and at the author, Mrs. Dorothy Frank, a California housewife, who had defended UNESCO courses in Los Angeles public schools. Some at the same time demanded that Collier's (circ. 3,100,000) fire Associate Fiction Editor Bucklin Moon, who was charged with "a long record of Red-front affiliations." The two complaints had no direct connection, since Moon had nothing to do with Collier's buying or running the article. Nevertheless, last week Collier's summarily fired Moon, and was mum on the reason. But Moon and memos from indignant Collier's staffers told the story.

Bucklin Moon, 42, is less known as a

Collier's editor than as the author of four books about U.S. Negroes, which have won him considerable critical acclaim as well as a Julius Rosenwald fellowship and the $2,500 George Washington Carver award. Moon, who is often mistakenly thought to be a Negro because of his writing, for ten years was an editor at Doubleday & Co.; six months ago he joined Collier's staff.

A Refusal. Last week Collier's Editor Roger Dakin called in Moon's boss, Fiction Editor MacLennan Farrell, told him of the letters of protest against Moon. He also showed him citations on Moon from the report of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which said that: 1) Moon had been a sponsor of the 1949 Communist-front Waldorf culture conference and was named in the Daily Worker as a member of a group organized by the fellow-traveling National Council of the Arts, Sciences & Professions; and 2) Moon's novel Without Magnolias had been mentioned in the Daily Worker and his The High Cost of Prejudice had been advertised in a Communist book catalogue. Told to fire Moon, Farrell refused. He gave his reasons in a memo to Dakin: "Buck Moon ... is not a Communist. He never has been. He never will be. He is an antiCommunist, a liberal, a registered Democrat . . . His book . . . may very well have been favorably reviewed in the Daily Worker. It was well reviewed everywhere, including many papers in the South ... I think a thorough investigation . . . would show him to be politically 'clean' . . . More is at stake than one man's job ... a free press is worth more to all of us than an intimidated press."

A Protest. Next day Editor Dakin (once a staffer on Manhattan's late, pinko PM) called in Moon and fired him himself. "I pointed out that the evidence against me was a little flimsy," said Moon, "and could easily be answered. Dakin just said that firing me would take the pressure off Collier's." If he was being fired for that reason only, Moon wanted a letter saying so. Wrote Dakin: "We have been eminently satisfied with your work in the fiction department." Moon insists that he has never been a Communist, that his name was not authorized for use in the Waldorf culture conference, and that he dropped out of the National Council about five years ago.

The six-man Collier's fiction staff promptly protested to Dakin in a memo: "We are all distressed that this could happen on a magazine that once had a reputation for independent judgment . . . The magazine has, in bowing so spiritlessly to pressure, publicly 'admitted' its 'guilt' and injured the reputation of a man who has been given no chance to prove his innocence." Said Bucklin Moon: "All I can do is, through a great deal of personal work and some money, try to get myself officially cleared. I'm not trying to be a martyr. But this is a terrifying thing that can happen to anyone."

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