HOME REVISITED
Mayer, Milton
Home revisited by MILTON MAYER Ileft home last June, whipping my loved ones before me and bound for Prague to see, for six months, how the other half lived. I was uneasy about leaving my own, my...
...And this is the quite ancient lesson of Phoenix and, by contrast, of Tucson: The few may move a representative government by moving the many to immobility...
...He lectures widely in this country and abroad for the American Friends Service Committee...
...the church had been receiving threats of violence...
...After Christmas I came home, then, to see how my half was living...
...His articles have appeared in many publications, including Fellowship, The Reader's Digest, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and Liberation...
...In Phoenix the Birchists, the night I was there, may have been ten per cent of the audience...
...Fred Schwartz's Christian Anti-Communist Crusade...
...But Tucson wasn't Phoenix...
...I saw the command of public behavior slip all at once from their grasp...
...In so far as it lies with them to do so, they are tearing the fabric of their own society to pieces...
...Its only indispensable resources are believing Birchers, Minute Men, Crusaders...
...I was uneasy about leaving my own, my native land just then...
...All across the country I found a preponderance of church people unaware that there are seminaries in the Communist countries...
...not more...
...I didn't at the moment, but only a week or two afterward, realize the nature of the offense I had committed and continued to commit across the country: It isn't enough now to report what is bad about Communism...
...The first question from the audience—from all sides of the audience—involved the canard...
...Birchism couldn't move in here without destroying the university first...
...And more indignant when 1 added that an absolute majority, filty-one per cent, of the Czechs voted Marxist in that same free election...
...But the view of the Tucson police was suggestive: "A fellow can suddenly go crazy and do anything...
...Given the circumstances, I talked about freedom from fear as the only coinage in which the price could imaginably be paid...
...I told a college audience in Southern California that they had been brainwashed if no instructor in current history had ever discussed that election with them—and a shower of coconuts came down on my old gray head from some of the tall trees in the academic grove...
...It was both...
...But the wall runs over into the back pages and the vegetables are out altogether...
...Really...
...At least as of 1962...
...Not that there isn't a wee bit of cunning behind it all, among the operators, big and little, for whom civilization is a race between the Red Menace and the red ink...
...It's going to take slow, tiresome sweat...
...One of the local patriot groups—it may have been the Stay American Committee, which lists Senator Goldwater as a handmaiden of Communism—had made a handbill of the radio attack and distributed it on the campus...
...But it was the lecturer, not the lecture, that attracted...
...At the Chicago airport I found rosy-red people lighting out for a weekend at the tables in Las Vegas...
...In the ensuing din and tussle I tried to go on speaking...
...There comes a point—when the Birchists are fifteen per cent of the meeting...
...Now a parish hall is still a church, and I should have supposed it immune, in America, to brown-shirt shenanigans...
...They took the flag, in its heavy standard, from the platform and carried it slowly around to the rear...
...My trouble was, as usual, that little did I think...
...They can either shut their eyes to history or fight it...
...Is an American citizen to wear a set of brass knucks to a gathering of his fellow-citizens called to consider the headiest problems of state...
...One man, who said he was a member of the church, would neither sit down nor stop shouting abuse at both me and the minister...
...Nobody said anything about Communism...
...And their manners ordinarily dominate intercourse at the community level...
...I felt that the dignitaries on the platform behind me were wondering how they could get the thing over with, and I sympathized with them...
...Christianity has a different vision...
...Nor could Birchism be its first fruit...
...I had supposed, when I came home, that my platform recital of the facts and figures of daily life in a Communist country would be old stuff, and I studied my first few audiences for signs of lecture-fatigue...
...And wouldn't their conscious effort so to prepare themselves itself be a body blow to the spirit of discussion...
...Were a few intruders to seize a privately owned flag from a public platform, these people would be on their feet in immediate indignation, and they would prove to be the whole audience...
...Everybody everywhere seemed to be unsure of everything...
...Phoenicians—as they call themselves in Phoenix—are distinctly church-going people...
...But even in California nobody anywhere seemed to be building a shelter for gracious dying...
...The five or ten per cent who stayed away for this reason represent Birch-ism's real achievement...
...This is the problem, not the public disturbances and the anonymous bomb threats that flow from the injections of Dr...
...The press, then, is the answer...
...Denouncing the Doctor's road show for what it is—and what it is is callous—they were at immediate pains to "reaffirm our complete and utter opposition to and abhorrence of Communism in any form and anywhere...
...It was placed on the floor, and the church flag was moved from the platform to the floor with it...
...Do we do anything more than exacerbate the exacerbated...
...They have a wonderful country there, too, but they haven't had our luck...
...And all of them talk about places in the Southern Hemisphere where, apparently, the fallout is most remote: Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay...
...Neither Louie nor Sam knew me, but they knew each other and the world they lived in, and I had walked into that world and sat down on a stool with them...
...keep putting pressure on them, and they blow up and blow you up with them...
...You will see: It will pass...
...Our uninformed countrymen could do with more information, to be sure...
...In college communities some informed men had been able to inform some circles, but in one such circle I found an informed matron up to her fallen waistline in International Affairs who said, when I spoke of the Anglican Bishop of Nanking, "Are there still churches in China...
...It provides an outlet for middle-class frustration...
...But I saw as I went along that the tension in the hall precluded a serious hearing even by that part of the audience actually interested in the lecture...
...But the Crusade was—or had just been, or was just going to be—everywhere conducting its anti-Communist Schools...
...The only other customer was a deep creased old farmer named Sara, a friend of Louie's...
...The papers in Phoenix— they're one man's, of course— wouldn't attack you or the Birchists...
...We have a wonderful country here...
...On home, then, to California, where the living is higher and longer still and Las Vegas so close that you can fly over there free in the evening and back home, lighter laden, in time for work...
...The secret society—beginning with Masonry—has always had trouble in our egalitarian country and the newest of them was the unlikeliest ever...
...Did I or didn't 1? I said 1 didn't and added that I had documentary proof of my innocence with me which I hoped those interested would come to the iiont to see at the end of the meeting...
...But other people were talking, too, less pedantically anil more audibly...
...My home-town paper went after me for "intellectual dishonesty" when I lectured at the local college on life in darkest Czechoslovakia, where people seem to be the same as they are in America minus civil liberty (which we don't know how to use here) and electric toothbrushes (which they don't know how to use there...
...They included me in their conversation, and for three-quarters of an hour we made adagio chin-music...
...They are dangerous because the rest of us simply cannot figure out a way to deal with them...
...they are able to misinform themselves because they are kept uninformed by their press...
...But I had got to Phoenix the day the worst cold in years had knocked the spots out of—or into—the citrus crop...
...They are our fellow-citizens and neighbors plainly beset by personal troubles, on top of which they are suddenly beset by cosmic troubles...
...And what was he doing in Prague, anyway...
...They don't brawl...
...Only secondarily...
...The topics were: (1) what makes space ships go up so high (none of us knew...
...So I hate to go abroad again, and I have to...
...If Birchism continues to roll in Phoenix, each public meeting will have a harder time than the last, as the fifty per cent is always more helpless to know exactly what to do...
...But the diversity of the talkers raised my one good eyebrow...
...I was persuaded that the meeting would be difficult, but not riotous...
...But then came August 13 in Berlin— the spooky quiet of Prague persisted—and the terror at home was reported to be rolling faster...
...Its parish hall accommodates maybe four hundred...
...Public apathy is getting to be a serious problem in Prague...
...I said that it depends on what is meant by "Communist...
...My bones, which never fail me, told me that the ancient breed which gave us Socrates, and now Louie, might have the answer...
...I saw their bewilderment...
...The Communists, principled, programmed enemies of public order under pre-revolutionary conditions, know how to destroy this faith in the platform...
...Anti-Communism was not quite enough lor the leading Bay Area churchmen...
...Phoenix got the capitol...
...Gandhi said that the only irresistible enemy was timid decency...
...that there is no comparison whatever between our society now and Germany's in the Twenties...
...including one man taking notes constantly while the young woman with him recorded me in—did I say that Prague was spooky?—shorthand...
...The Birchists (like the Marxists who have forgotten Marx) have fallen victim to the devil theory of history...
...I thought that a movement that called Dwight Eisenhower "a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" would blow itself up and out in another six months...
...That was northern California, to be sure...
...But there was no interruption anil no scrimmaging, and when I finished my talk the audience rose with an ovation...
...I said that if any of our brethren would feel easier with the flag off the platform I was sure that the rest of us wotdd yield to them, but nobody outside the first two or three rows heard me...
...I didn't succeed...
...A popular movement finds resources and, if it cant find them outside, provides them itself and evokes its own Welches and Schwartzes...
...I had thought to relax the tension a little...
...But the question period was a shambles, in which, to my astonishment...
...Their power is purely mesmeric...
...one must also not report anything good about it...
...The distinction between terrorism and the terrified act is important lest we come to believe that there is a diabolically cunning enemy to contend with...
...But these young people were not conservatives...
...The terrorism in the Birchist movement seems to be—as of 1962— a reflex of the terrified rather than a programmed undertaking of hard-headed men who use terrorism as a conscious instrument...
...2) Sam's older cousin who has kept a diary since he was seven and has never found anything useful to do with it (this anent Louie's insistence that a written account should be kept of all business transactions, Sam dissenting...
...Mind you, I'm a stranger here myself, just off the boat, but it would seem to me that the way to stop Birchism is first of all to resist the temptation to take its consequences for its causes...
...But Louis and Sam do with less...
...How would they prepare themselves for red-eyed rough-house...
...one must not dispraise any least aspect of it...
...North Manchester is maybe 4,000 souls, in and around-about, and no great likelihood of a sensational increase or a Nike base to protect it...
...And I bethought me sadly of the more recent words of another Lacedaemonian, Professor Josef L. Hromadka, my dean in the Gomenius Theological Faculty of Prague: "We Christians cannot make a way of life by simply being against...
...Jesus Christ is first of all an affirmation, a 'Yes' and not a mere 'No.' Marxism has a vision...
...Uninformed by our press (including TV, radio, and newsreels), we Americans are helpless to transfigure peoples into persons and Communist countries into living societies of men, women, and children...
...A specter is haunting America— the specter of Communism...
...if government ownership of the railroads is Communist, then Switzerland is Communist...
...I tried to get on with my topic, "The Price of Peace...
...It appeared to have caught on at last...
...Waiting for Leftists...
...But what they need worse just now is something else...
...Southern California was—as wouldn't it be?—a little tougher...
...Little did I think back to the middle Twenties when Germans, thinking so little, said, "In Russia, in Italy, maybe, but among an advanced people like ours—no, such fantasies will never take hold...
...It was Phoenix that spelled it out...
...Before my evening church meeting there was just time for a quick dinner with the non-organized peace movement on the campus...
...These were the fifty per cent of the audience in Phoenix...
...We can not reach out to people that way and still call ourselves Christians...
...twelve?—at which the fifty stay home altogether and draw the blinds, like decent Southerners or decent Germans...
...Their country is suddenly producing more history than it can consume...
...And sometimes it was as if I had committed this mortal offense against the American myth...
...By the end of my tour I was unashamedly committing the capital crime of speaking for an hour and a half—and in the question period people still wanted to know about plumbing, can-openers, concert tickets, and out-of-season vegetables...
...My subject was, "Christians under Communism," and I meant to speak to it, and I did...
...In Tucson the meeting hail to be adjourned before the question period when the police got a report of a bomb in the church...
...if it was real and durable, it must involve a long degenerative process...
...An afternoon lecture at the state college in the suburbs should have attracted thirty students and two or three faculty members...
...Fred Schwartz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade before the Officers of Life Insurance Companies in Texas...
...Under these conditions all across our long-isolated land, how get the specter delimited, or even delineated...
...They could not be sure that they could shut down discussion...
...It didn't pass there, but, had I thought, I should have thought (as I still do) MILTON MAYER, regular contributor to The Progressive, is currently living in Switzerland after six months in Prague...
...You were only an incidental witness to the mental health of Tucson...
...In Germany it had been the disintegration of the Republic that kicked off Nazism, and not in the least the other way around...
...On my way through town, along Main Street, I saw Louie's Ice Cream—Candies—Sodas...
...They are polite and orderly...
...Again a small radio station was broadcasting hourly...
...3) the weather, with special reference to (3a) road conditions, (3b) lump versus egg coal on a frosty morning, and (3c) getting back into bed after getting the fire started...
...Is there anything left of such a gathering, and, ultimately, of such a state, but a show of force...
...If the Phoenicians have got to keep themselves steamed up over Cuba, Vietnam, Katanga, and Guiana (or is it Guinea this week, or Ghana...
...And then I got to the Middle West, where people are hard to drag forward to the New Frontier or back to the Old...
...The university made Tucson a cosmopolitan community...
...Theirs are not the families that average six hours a day of TV...
...If it was, it could not have been produced by any concatenation of recent events...
...I missed Long Beach, the city, like the seven claiming Homer dead, which disputes with Houston the birthplace of Dr...
...rather the failing heart of "an advanced people like ours" which would give Birchism the green light...
...It was on its way to the San Francisco Bay Area with the endorsement of Mayor Christopher, who said, "It's anti-Communist and that's enough for me...
...the walls at the back and halfway down the sides were lined with people, some of whom were city detectives...
...The result, at Tucson, was their total ineffectiveness, at Phoenix their nearly total success...
...In Western Europe a Communist is your everyday neighbor at your workbench or in the house across the street or in parliament...
...They are neither cafe society nor tavern society...
...It battens on our un-information and would shrivel without it...
...Now we see that there may be problems more serious than apathy...
...They may be resented but not, ordinarily, denigrated...
...These really are real people whose real troubles have got out of hand...
...But these Birchers, Minute Men, Crusaders are not devils or enemies and not in the least cunning...
...You'd have had it easier a week earlier...
...Nor was I myself...
...If so, it succeeded by a hall...
...He likes you fine...
...It was living high...
...Did I say Prague was spooky...
...Running away—just away—has always appeared to me to be the ultimate "No...
...But the few who openly attacked the meeting in Phoenix were supported by enough friends within the audience—I repeat, not more than ten per cent—to paralyze the fifty per cent who had come unprepared...
...with the self-starting few individuals in any locality who read the editorial page and who come to the top in any serious public enterprise...
...What I can't see is how the solution is to be applied in Phoenix, or in the centers of any Twentieth Century democracy (there are miniscule pockets of Birch ism even in Midwestern cities like Dayton...
...and not just in Bohunkus, Tennessee, but in New York City...
...Where was I? "The ovation"—this is a mosaic of several subsequent conversations— "was in honor of ourselves...
...In the first place, we have a decent press here...
...Really you have got to go back to the Arizona Constitutional Convention, when the Tucson delegation came back with the worst lemon in the grab-bag—the state university...
...One lady kept calling, "Do you love the flag or don't you...
...at its best it always does badly without me, and it was not at its best...
...Its genesis seemed to be a delayed guilt over the U-2 and the attack on Cuba— guilt intolerable to a people brought up to believe that there actually had been a little boy who could not tell a lie and had fathered a country...
...if they survive, they will survive to cry, like the little girl who tore up her doll in a pique...
...Phoenix is a rich man's playground...
...a small radio station had been broadcasting an hourly attack on me, the heart of which was an ancient canard involving my alleged advocacy of desecration of the flag...
...It was a little spooky to live in the controlled (and therefore meaningless) quiet of Prague and hear through the mails that the terror was really rolling at home...
...To violate either negative is as bad as to dwell too lightly on either affirmative—and any of the four distinct offenses is proof of intellectual dishonesty or (as friends a little less warm than my home-town editor would call it) Communism...
...And there, far from the hot sun and quick freeze of the Los Angeles Times' Southland, far, too, from the abrasive intelligence of the East coast cities, I lifted mine eyes to the flats whence cometh my country's help, and in North Manchester, Indiana, I found it...
...It was a picture postcard of country-town America, an old, outdated postcard...
...We were three ordinary men who knew their own size and deliberated their own-sized affairs...
...The "faceless masses" figure, created long ago by carefree jack-the-i ippers like West-brook Pegler, has become the headless horseman...
...The Anti-Communist Crusade shares its absolute negativism with the other right radicals, but unlike the rest of them, it professes Christianity...
...I spotted a large number of young people of student age among the inflamed...
...This time there was no postponing the furious issue of the flag...
...Not really...
...It was only here and there, and only in California...
...A majority of my companions wasn't sure...
...But the editor of my hometown paper is a true Californian: he explained that he and I are warm friends...
...a swimming-pool would do just as well...
...We know now that it did not stop McCarthy, but only the one Joe McCarthy...
...I could not in Phoenix, and cannot now, see how they will be stopped by retaliation, even by legalized retaliation...
...And as Phoenix goes— or North Manchester—so goes the country...
...Mounting the stool, I ordered a double chocolate soda from Louie...
...they cannot find enough hours a day for their activities, private and public...
...The specter owes its liveliness to our press, to an extent I had previously only imagined...
...Even in Communist Czechoslovakia, where the Church fights for its life, a church-sponsored meeting would not be disturbed...
...People left their seats to stop them, and people left their seats to help them...
...The minister of the chinch, who had introduced me, left the platform to join the knot of heaving, hollering people around the flag, and by and by the flag was carried back to the front of the hall...
...They cannot have their troubles beaten out of them...
...Now it's going to take more than luck to keep our country wonderful...
...But not to the platform...
...Welch or Dr...
...Word from Phoenix preceded mc (and a flying wedge of detectives) to Tucson that same night...
...I knew and respected the new conservative movement on the American campuses...
...They simply did not know what to do when the going got rough...
...They are civilized society...
...They fight it, with the primitive weapons they have at hand...
...They were looking around the hall...
...And on that pre-Kodachrome postcard of Louie's Ice Cream—Candies— Sodas, showing the proprietor behind the marble counter and an old farmer with winter-time time to kill and a stranger in town on the stool, I thought I read the solution of John Dewey's problem and ours: Let people five without more pressure than people can bear, and they're almost human...
...Phoenix is neither cosmopolitan nor a community...
...My own, my native land has a hard time without me at its best...
...an Algerian lellah, no...
...So the talk I heard, here and there, about emigration from America was distressing...
...Pleading as soon as I could a sick headache, I got an hour's reprieve from the kids at Manchester College and ducked into Louie's...
...Americans are not misinformed by anybody...
...As soon as I began speaking, I saw a small group of youngish men coming from the rear to the platform...
...As I left behind me that part of the country that sells sunny contentment, but doesn't deliver it, I felt the weight of John Dewey's little Birchist on my pack-sore shoulders...
...Little did I think that in another six months (with my own ears, as my mother would say) I would hear Barry Goldwater called a Communist dupe...
...Too cold or too hot, it's all the same...
...The heavy-burdened Birchists in Phoenix—and elsewhere—need to know the price of out-of-season vegetables in Prague...
...still less so in Berlin, where pressure, the recurrent ruin of the Germans, is kept as high as it can be...
...The bomb-shelter kick was a bad sign...
...But the fifty would have been fifty-five or sixty if some people had not stayed away because (in the words of one of them) they "aren't looking for trouble...
...Phoenix may yet get to be a touch-and-go thing...
...The conversation began (like those of Socrates) with homely matters, and there (unlike those of Socrates) it stayed...
...I discovered that it was new stuff, all of it...
...The rich winter here and lake off in the summer, leaving the place to those who can't afford to get out, the 'poor.' It's the 'poor' middle class in which Birchism finds buyers...
...The non-principled, unpro-grammed Birchists in Phoenix know how to do it, too, without any knowledge of pre-revolution...
...Birchist terrorism is not an intelligent act of war...
...Especially, 'or the Birchists.' " It's strictly business, like Goldwater...
...The church downtown was new and splendid, the largest in that part of the country...
...An American lellow, yes...
...Schwartz...
...They are doing what comes naturally to troubled people in a troubled time...
...At Tucson the Birchists were still few enough proportionately—a maximum maybe of five per cent compared with ten at Phoenix—to be uncertain of themselves...
...Why was Tucson healthy and Phoenix sick...
...Had there been a bomb, and had it exploded, the reaction would have put an instant end to all the Birchist hopes in Tucson...
...They need to talk—perhaps to scream— and to be listened to and spoken with...
...Amazed, and sometimes indignant...
...twenty...
...When that five or ten rises to fifteen or twenty, the fifty will fall away fast, and the mildly prejudiced forty will find themselves pushed in the direction of violent outburst...
...Was it durable...
...Still, north or south, it's the gracious-living belt, and it isn't America...
...Let's say that another fifty per cent came to hear the lecture, and the other forty per cent were drawn by mild prejudice because of the radio attack and the handbills...
...The rest of us should know better...
...An America that was ready to listen to the golems of the Rand Corporation and the Stanford Research Institute was an America in which the spectacle of a whole people so disheartened that they wanted only to hide and die would evoke, within itself, a posse to drive them to hiding and death...
...John Dewey once tried to fig...
...It attracted some three hundred and fifty, including a hover of uniformed policemen—to a hall meant to hold two hundred and fifty...
...Opening my Book to Acts 4: 31-35, I bethought me sadly of the Lacedaemonian Claude Bourdet's laconic observation of a decade ago: "If McCarthy can force you to say, every time you turn around, 'I hate Communism,' he doesn't care if you hate him too...
...Better weather...
...One of them asked angrily if there were any non-Communist countries in Europe...
...Was it real...
...and maybe by more, if building ollicials are generally affected by it...
...The process of free government, which requires orderly discussion, died on the spot...
...Perhaps the two can coexist—I myself think that they can— but I know that without vision a people perish...
...The men who support the barnburners from their cool counting-houses at the rear are only supporters, like the Thyssens in Germany...
...They have had no practice since playground days in pushing and pulling, in shaking fists, in calling names, in threatening and in being threatened...
...But it was closer to country-town China than Phoenix is—though it didn't know and wouldn't believe it...
...Communist" is a tricky proposition, but a man who would stamp on the flag—Birch-ists with blood to shed would be prepared to shed it now...
...Still it was not so bad...
...The lecture itself had not been successfully interrupted, though there had been loud interpolations and still louder asides...
...True, the meeting the next night— it was a public forum in a church— was packed far beyond the drawing power of the actual lecturer's actual topic...
...Its dominant note was absurdity, and truly un-American absurdity at that...
...These people are not public opinion-makers but public attitude makers...
...And it is not at its very best just now—though I've been worse places, and recently...
...In my ten-dollar-a-day tepee in the Hotel Westward Ho in Phoenix—I won't go there again, and not for political reasons, either—I found my "serious and most worthy consideration" solicited by the hotel with a neatly printed pamphlet ("Personalized with your advertisement on the back cover—$15.00 per 1,000") entitled, "Insurance against Communism," an address given by Dr...
...But the cunning is behind the Birchists...
...One of them said, "And it will be worse downtown tonight...
...The audience included coppers disguised as people...
...Slow, tiresome men are needed for the job...
...They are willy-nilly dangerous to the stability of American society in a lime of great trial like 1962...
...There were little areas of terror forming, and they were coming up from the countryside in contrast to McCarthy's cloud-seeding performance of the early Fifties...
...Here I put an earnest question around the table: "Does a meeting like this afternoon's actually do more good than harm under these conditions...
...There was an angry shout, "It is," at which at least a third, and maybe more, of those present applauded the angry shouter...
...Neither is it enough now to praise American life...
...A few years ago it was a serious problem in Phoenix...
...All the powers of our society have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Bishop and President, du Pont and Reuther, Harvard Liberals, and Texas Minute Men...
...and how can a government as sensitive as ours to public opinion, or an Administration elected by an actual minority of the 1960 Presidential vote, long hope to deal with reality abroad without being clobbered by the haunt at home...
...what they were sent up there to get was the state prison...
...They ranged from the moneyed idlers who want to live forever, pleasured forever—why forever, given the pleasure they have had to date, I can not imagine—to the radical pacifist farmer who says he's ready to quit now and go...
...There had been the usual anonymous threats...
...Maybe the threat—it turned out to be false—was tactically intended to discourage free discussion...
...The specter is already consuming the spirit of some very unhappy people among us—their uniform characteristic seems to be their lost enjoyment of life— and is riveting the attention of many more who had the spiritual means to resist it through the McCarthy era and up until now...
...The fundamental formation of public policy in our society rests, in a sense, with its lecture-goers...
...ure out how to get his little boy to want to get out of a puddle of ice-cold water...
...What they need worse is the voice of calm that keeps calling the meeting to order, and the man in the pulpit was long ago called to sound that call to the heavily burdened everywhere...
...The excuse is plausible that the price of out-of-season vegetables in Prague does not make front-page news and the wall in Berlin does...
...In Prague the dictatorship absorbs the pressure at the top, releasing only so much of it as the public can bear, in doses rigidly compounded...
...here he's your everyday nightmare...
...People were ama/ed when I said that the Communist Part) of Czechoslovakia was the leading party in the free election of 1946, winning the prime ministry (and the other leading cabinet posts) with thirty-eight per cent of the vote...
Vol. 26 • April 1962 • No. 4
