Facing Life

What kind of American becomes a Communist or a fellow traveler? Persistently, both right and left tend to answer the question by referring to a type that logically emerges from the writings of Marx; the pro-Communist is expected to be a poverty-driven, culturally disinherited proletarian rebel. But increasingly the U.S. is aware of another type--not poverty-stricken, not rebellious by temperament, not disinherited by external economic forces but created by a subtle psychological rejection of the values upon which Western civilization has been built. In short, an idealist gone wrong.

Last week the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee faced such a man: William Howard Hinton, 35, a tall, rawboned farmer-intellectual with grey flecks in his hair and credulity in his eyes. A colleague characterized him as "always one to want to save the world." From 1947 to 1953 Hinton lived in China, working first with a Protestant mission under UNRRA supervision, later for the Communists as an agricultural adviser. Since then, he has been touring the U.S. as a free-lance lecturer. Last week Hinton got a letter, enclosing a subpoena, from Indiana's Senator William Jenner. It said: Come to Washington and give the U.S. Senate "the benefit of your experience."

Hinton's experience included Harvard and Cornell, where he majored in dairy farming. In World War II, he bucked the national pattern not by noisy rebellion and not with unshakable conviction. He registered as a conscientious objector because "we ought to help one another . . . instead of killing each other."

In 1943, as he put it: "I began to see what the war was about . . ." He asked to be classified as eligible for the draft but was found to be 4F (perforated eardrum). He pressed for an overseas war job and got one with OWI, was sent to South China in 1945 to write leaflets and show U.S. movies. Hinton was soon convinced that he wanted to save the Chinese.

Sun in His Eyes. In 1947 he went back to South China, began teaching Chinese peasants to operate U.S. tractors. "In Nationalist-held territory," he told the Senators last week, "our work was disappointing. The land belonged to the largest landowners . . . ordinary folk went hungry." On UNRRA orders, Hinton was sent across the battle lines to Communist-held Hopei. Suddenly, even the sun seemed to shine more brightly in his eyes.

Hinton is still dazzled by the "agrarian reforms." He told the Senators that "the tractors were used to haul water for the aged and widows. Most of the government personnel were out in the fields helping with the work." In 1949 the Communists captured Peking, and Americans saw plainly the cruel, aggressive outlines of the new Red regime. But not William Hinton; he stayed on. "Starting in 1950, I went on salary," he testified. "[At] $75 monthly . . . I was well off."

Girl Who Broke. At one point Idaho's Senator Herman Welker introduced the subject of Hinton's sister, Joan. She too went to China, and she and her American husband, Irwin Engst, still are working for the Communists on a dairy farm somewhere in Inner Mongolia.

Joan Hinton, now 33, was an attractive blonde prep-school girl, interested in horses and sports. At the University of Chicago she became a physicist. She was a junior scientific assistant at Los Alamos when the first atomic bomb was exploded; she and her mother spent happy weeks together in the rough outdoors of Dr. Robert Oppenheimer's Perro Caliente ranch, although Oppenheimer cabled last week that he did not know them well. By her own account, "something started to stir" in Joan Hinton when the first A-bombs were dropped. "Hiroshima," she scribbled in a frenzied letter, "150,000 lives. One, two, three, four . . . one hundred and fifty thousand . . . Were we to blame?" Most atomic scientists, far closer to the bomb than Joan Hinton, have struggled with this sense of guilt. Joan Hinton's answer was to abandon her profession and her country.

In 1948, she forsook her laboratory and fled to the Chinese Communists. For a while she made four-wheeled carts in an iron factory in the mountains of Shensi; soon she was attending a Communist "peace conference" that charged the U.S. with germ warfare. In a letter published in People's China, she wrote: "The Chinese with their bare hands are building up a new nation; while the Americans . . . are preparing to destroy mankind."

Beggars & Rags. The Senators asked William Hinton if he had met his sister Joan during his years in China. The witness declined to answer, "on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment . . ."

Jenner: "That your answer might tend to incriminate you?"

Hinton: "Yes."

Seventy-nine times Hinton took refuge behind the Fifth Amendment, refusing to say whether or not he is a Communist, or whether he was sent back to the U.S. to spread Communist propaganda. Then he launched into a lengthy prepared statement that made it plain where he stood.

"Beggars and rags were a rare sight when I left China although very common in 1947, when I arrived . . . The stores were crowded with buyers and heavily stocked with goods--almost all China-made. The American embargo though bitterly resented in China, was not effective . . . Imported Swiss watches tempted many a farmer.

"Our intervention in Korea [by 'our' Hinton meant the U.S. intervention] is looked on very much as we would look on Chinese armies driving to the Rio Grande. [But] always I found people, even total strangers, friendly to me, an American. They wanted to know all about Lin Ken, 'who freed the slaves,' and Lo Sze Fu (Roosevelt), 'who wanted one world.' "

"Loyal American?" Hinton concluded: "I feel certain that no government can hope to lead the Chinese into aggressive adventures abroad." The committee which had heard about aggressive adventures in Korea and Indo-China, was dumfounded. Later, Chairman Jenner, struck by Hinton's repeated mention of cooperation, asked: "Why don't you cooperate with this committee? Why don't you want to make us as happy as those people . . . in Communist China?" Hinton was hurt. "Look," he remonstrated, "I have not been accused of any crimes. I'm a perfectly loyal American citizen . . ."

A Successful School. William and Joan Hinton are the children of Mrs. Carmelita Hinton, an Omaha-born schoolteacher who in 1935 founded the Putney School in southeastern Vermont. William and Joan attended the prep school, which their mother ran so successfully that she attracted the children of some of America's most alert and influential people. Mrs. Hinton believed that the revolution John Dewey had wrought in the elementary schools could and should be extended to secondary schools. She wanted "to experiment, to pioneer, to break through some of the traditional ideas of education for adolescents."

Mrs. Hinton is liked and respected in her Vermont community. Last week one of her neighbors, the daily Brattleboro Reformer, wrote of her children: "It is beyond our capacity even to try to guess what motivates a man like William Hinton, who left Putney some ten years ago on a journey into world Communism in which his colossal faith in the infallibility of his own judgment has helped exile his sister . . . brought heartache to his mother and has helped create an unnecessary shadow over the [school]. The only answer, and one which still does not explain the working of such a man's mind, is that when the tentacles of Communism wrap themselves around an individual they also draw an iron curtain between him and the eternal verities."

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