Editorial
EDITORIAL Ideal Opportunity AMONG OTHER THINGS, the recent election demonstrated that the majority of the American people have at last put the issue of Communist infiltration in perspective. On...
...Peter Frelinghuysen (R.-N.J...
...His voice booms with equal sincerity in the great international debates and in the unpublicized defenses of Anna Kethly, a trade-unionist jailed by Hungarian Communists, and Val Lorwin, a civil servant persecuted by McCarthy...
...His has never been the socialism of the Master Plan to be rigidly grafted on society, but rather the ceaseless struggle for human decency at every new opportunity...
...Such a Joint Committee would be of sufficient stature to compel party leaders in both Houses to name to it a superior type of Congressman...
...Harold Velde (R.-Ill...
...has been worthy of the things he believes in...
...Of course, Mr...
...For this reason, the coming Eighty-fourth Congress affords an ideal opportunity to remove the investigation of Communist activity from the realm of reckless and partisan demagoguery, and place it on a new plane of responsibility and good sense...
...after scores of frustrating and bitter struggles, he has not??as have other, lesser men??deteriorated into a professional "anti" or retreated to the sidelines with those who are so busy criticizing their former creeds that they are largely unmoved by the needs of humanity today...
...Congressman Francis Walter (D.-Pa...
...Senator John McClellan (D.-Ark...
...But it is difficult to ask a Congressman to vote, plain and simple, to abolish the Un-American Activities Committee...
...On the one hand, we saw the election of Clifford Case, the cowed silence of Joe McCarthy, and the defeat of two incumbent (Fred Busbey, Kit Clardy) and one comebacking (Richard Vail) smear artist...
...Thomas is young because he is still fighting for his vision of a better world...
...In establishing the new committee, Congress could simultaneously (1) enact a new code of fair procedures for investigations, along the lines of those already proposed by Senator Paul Douglas (D.-Ill...
...and Rep...
...Change is unlikely until Congressmen are presented with an omnibus solution which enables them to vote simultaneously for anti-Communism and for a responsible basis of investigation...
...We now await the bipartisan formulation of concrete legislation to make that principle a reality...
...to succeed McCarthy as Chairman of the Investigations Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, has announced that he would like to take that subcommittee out of the Communist field and return it to its original task of checking on graft, duplication, mismanagement, etc...
...slated to be Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, has already announced that he will recommend the abolition of the Committee and the transfer of its functions to a subcommittee of the House Committee on the Judiciary...
...We recognize that many partisan and personal vested interests stand in the way of this proposal, but we are convinced that a genuine effort by responsible leaders in both parties could put it across...
...A contrast which perfectly illustrates the voter's new sophistication was furnished in the Far West: Running against equally mediocre conservative incumbents, Glen Taylor of Idaho, who had collaborated with the Stalinists, was trounced, while Richard Neuberger of Oregon, who had never been other than an anti-Communist liberal though smeared as a "pinko" and "left-winger," was elected...
...but he remembers, as many have forgotten, that he is against these blights because he is for one world, peaceful, democratic, and just to the toilers in farm and factory who produce its riches...
...Young Mr...
...Vice President Nixon and Senator McClellan have already indicated sympathy with the principle of a Joint Committee...
...Such a solution has already been proposed several times in the past, most recently by Congressman Jacob K. Javits (R.-N.Y...
...The regular rotation of the chairmanship between Senate and House, as well as the rotation between parties due to elections, would tend to minimize the sort of one-man vendetta conducted in the last Congress by McCarthy and by Rep...
...On the other hand, Communist-line votes in New York and California sank to all-time lows...
...Elmer Davis, a young man very much like Mr...
...Such a Joint Committee could combine the best assets of existing groups: the thorough files of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the brilliant research staff of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee headed by Benjamin Mandel, the legal ability of the Senate Investigations Subcommittee's new majority counsel, Robert Kennedy...
...and (2) provide definite legislative machinery for coordinating Congressional anti-Communist activity with that of the Executive Branch, as recommended after the Army-McCarthy hearings...
...Thomas, has summed it up well: "The real celebration of Norman Thomas's birthday will take place in each man's conscience, where, looking back on Norman Thomas's three score and ten, he asks himself whether he...
...in the last Congress: namely, the creation of a Joint Committee on Internal Security, on the model of the present Joint Committees on the Economic Report and on Atomic Energy...
...Thomas is against Communism, fascism, monopoly exploitation, machine corruption...
...Thomas ON NOVEMBER 21, a group of his friends will celebrate the seventieth birthday of Norman Thomas, one of the youngest men in public life...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 46
