MCCARTHY BY THE NUMBERS
STOUT, JONATHAN
McCarthy By the Numbers Its 81, It's 200, It's 57, It's Strike Three, No? By JONATHAN STOUT New Leader Washington Correspondent WASHINGTON. D. C. A LMOST FOUR WEEKS AGO Senator Joseph R....
...repeal of unemployment compensation laws...
...The analysis should prove that American unions in IMS were able to spend on lobbying only a small fraction of the amount their enemies put op...
...The Senator, in fact, has much to learn from the way Communists themselves have used his type of ineptnest Is a cfoak for their activities...
...McCarthy represented Judge Kenyon as being in the State Department now...
...OWE OP THE unfortunate results of the McCarthy fiasco is to make the public increasingly skeptical of all charges by anybody about Communists...
...Obviously, in this case, the answer was Senator McCarthy's rules of common sense...
...The issue this time, as usual, is communism: Louis it a. Communist, and District Council 9 of tlie Painters decided it was time to get rid of Mm...
...While Senator McCarthy seemed a Jttle uncertain about his figures, there was no, uncertanty about the fact that the subject itself touched a live nerve so far as the public is concerned...
...and the elimination (this gets more "positive" as you go along) of collective bargaining...
...the fact of the cold war is real and palpable...
...For approximately the fifth time in his long and cyclical career, Louis Weinstock has been expelled from membership in the AFL Painters...
...The Ftp set also shows that Denham pelsttoned is* It fa fane* tons fa 1949...
...D. C. A LMOST FOUR WEEKS AGO Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Wisconsin JRepublican, startled the nation with a speech in the Senate charging that there are 81 known Communists and fellow-travelers still lurking in our State Department...
...A LOOK AT THE RECORD...
...And It shews that the eown try's employees have not been convinced by Taft fcHartley that their labor leaders are tyrants...
...It was against this background that Senator McCarthy launched his recent charges...
...In any case, Louis in a hardy man...
...Thte Illuminated what was later so disappointing about Senator McCarthy's presentation...
...That's not hard to understand...
...It became a standard joke...
...LOOKING BACKWARD...
...we commented on the stse and activity of the labor contingent on Capitol HUL Sinco then, the staff of the Congressional Quarterly News Features has prepared a detailed analysis of the figures reported by Washington lobbyists...
...Another time somebody else might have some charges to make that are backed up with facts, and it would be very unfortunate if the public got accustomed to regarding all such charges as being merely "red herrings...
...which, boiled down, meant in plain words that Senator McCarthy was going to express his opinons, not...
...THOSE WHO AGREE with Senator McCarthy's baste thesis that innocents and f* flow-travelers often can prove more dangerous in objective fact than the bene fide Communist party member, cannot be grateful to the Senator for the carelessnes with which he prepared his case...
...abolition of the right to strike and/or picket...
...Instead of inviting a young lady to come up and see their etchings, Communists, with broad grins, invited them to come up* and see their Moscow gold...
...Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Steve Nelson wrote long, heart-warming accounts of the bond which has always existed between Thirteenth Street and the men in the pita...
...In the future, he ought to leave this subject to people who understand it...
...It began to make the churge of Moscow gold sound ridiculous—which was what the Communists wanted to achieve—and after a while the public quit paying attention to it, until just very recently when, after 30 years, proof was finally produced that there was Moscow gold,, that it Zwirf financed the American Communists, and that it had paid for the creation of the Communist espionage network here...
...if the record of American diplomacy from the period of Teheran to the period of China were not marked by such failure, the public might not today feci there is ground for apprehension...
...McCarthy fell Into an embarrassing bobble through sheer carelessness, and failed to extricate himself when he charged a high State Department official with having attempted to alter department loyalty records...
...When Senator Tydings impishly tried to reveal McCarthy's embarrassment by asking him to name the State Department official he charged with attempting to alter loyalty records McCarthy impaled himself on the other horn of his dilemma by saying he would not or could not name the man...
...Informed grapevine reports In Washington intimated that the man McCarthy had in mind was Joseph A. Panuch, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the administrative division from 1945 to 1947, who later became an adviser to Qen...
...all of them nfSfael —laws, and that the cevis granted eighteen...
...Without being tiresome about the petty details, Senator McCarthy lost public support and confidence when he committed a bobble in each of the first two cases he presented...
...THE SENSE of disappointment can be followed from its inception in the wordy wrangle . between Senator McCarthy and Subcommittee Chairman Millard Tydings, conservative Maryland Democrat, at the openng of the hearings...
...give facts and evidence...
...But simply as the opinions of someone with no more expertness than the average man-onthe-streef, they just didn't offer a sound or sensible basis for pupllc excitement...
...The Trotskyltes, however, persisted in calling the miners' attention to the Communist record on srikes during the war...
...HPS VP...
...the fact of hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States is self-evident...
...Senator McCarthy has had his opportunity...
...Another difficulty is that the Council, in expelling the men, made it clear that expulsion carried tcifh it a denial of the right to work in New York as a painter...
...and the possibilities of a hot war cannot be ignored...
...Thirty years ago Social Democrats who saw the menace and immorality of comrmimsm charged, on a rather sound basis, as it now develops, that Moscow was financing American Communists, To counter this attack, the Communist* themselves picked up the charge and repeated it at every opportunity...
...The nation waited with baited breath for the hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee at which McCarthy was going to produce some facts and evidence to support his charges...
...it brought over a number of anti-Communists to Weinstock's side...
...Those of us who half-expected that Senator McCarthy might give us something solid and substantial to hang our hats on, are left with the feeling that the Senator has turned out to be a big disappointment...
...Manufacturing groups •pent SMSO.OOO...
...The report shows, first of slL that the Act did not effectively "simplify'' the Board's operational It handled 98*799 eases shuksg the year, or more than twice as many as It handled during the peak years of the Wagner Ae...
...One difficulty it that ail three men are firmly entrenched in their various locals', which have already passed resolutions supporting them against the Council...
...Senator McCarthy's opinions may be interesting—and If he had ever demonstrated in any way in the past that he is an expert on this subject his opinions might, have been even more than interesting...
...HIT HIM AGAIN...
...The NLRH's report on Us activities during 1141 appears Co confirm most of organised labor's complaints against the Taft-Hartley Act and Robert N. Denham...
...It turned out that she was never in the State Department, but in the UN Commission on the Status of Women...
...it spent $621,000, or more than twice aa much as the whole labor movement put together...
...The comrades jumped into the strike at the beginning and told the miners, in effect, not to worry because the Daily Worker was standing behind them...
...A revealing tip-off came over the question of whether Senator McCarthy was making any charges against anybody...
...McCarthy insisted, contrary to the general understanding from the tenor of his speech on February 20 in the Senate: "I am not making charges...
...The Worker of June 11,1943, wrote: "The miners must return to work immediately . . . uphold the Commander-in-Chief in WHATEVER STEPS MAY BE NECESSARY...
...An industrious researcher from the Militant went through a file of bid Daily Workers and discovered that the miners' strike in the spring of 1943 aroused only demands for Lewis' head on Thirteenth Street...
...It also shows that the Committee for Constitutional Government had the country's second biggest lobby in 1949 (the American Medical Association had the biggest...
...The two Trotskyite papers, Lrthor .Action and the Militant, had an immense lot of fun with the CP during the coal strike...
...The total lobbying expenditures of all labor groups were 9187.000...
...Involving almost two million workers, the vote went for a union shop 17 per cent ujko time...
...The moment he indicated that he was applying what he called rules of common sense as the criterion of Judgment, he raised the question of whose rules of common sense...
...HE'S DOWN...
...This seems to have been a tactical mistake...
...as the Daily Worker cheerfully points out, he was previously expelled in 1932, 1933, 1936 and 1938, but he is still the President of Painters Local 848...
...The result has been disappointing...
...I am giving the committee information on individuals who, according to all the rules of common sense, are extremely bad security risks...
...Later, he discovered that the person he had in mind was the seme man he had referred so to his Senate speech of February 20 with the highest praise as being one of the most outspoken and fellow-travelers in the State Department...
...A month ago...
...The fact of Soviet spying is now sufficiently proved to be entirely credible...
...la 15,000 union shop elections...
...Along with Louis, the Council expelled Morris Davis and Morris Gainer, who are also Stalinists...
...It shows, for example, that the entire AFL spent less on lobbying last year than the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and that the CIO unions spent less than a third as much as the AFL...
...This Committee is currently sending out tons of literature advocating "a positive labor program," which includes: repeal of all Federal labor laws...
...Were Senator McCarthy a better practical psychologist, he would not contribute to such a state of mind...
...If there never had been an Alger Hiss in the State Department...
...Later at Wheeling, W. Va., Senator McCarthy expanded the number to over 200...
...Later still, in a dispute with Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois in the Senate chamber, McCarthy said, "I think there are at least 57 Communists in the State Department...
...and John Gates was photographed personally supervising shipments of food to the coal fields...
...Lucius B. Clay in Germany...
...Squinting at Labor By Daniel Seligman NO CONTEST...
Vol. 33 • March 1950 • No. 11
