Check at Chicago

The House's Red hunt had a check last week in Chicago. The Soviet scent was temporarily lost. The Congressional committee chairmanned by New York's Representative Hamilton ("Ham") Fish Jr. abandoned its search for Communist propaganda until late next month when it will try to pick up the trail again in Los Angeles.

After the excitement in New York fortnight ago, the committee's Chicago hearings were largely bathos. The Tribune assigned Philip Kinsley, its No. 1 newshawk, to report the two-day session, but his stories never made the Tribune's first page.

School teachers told of catching young pupils with Red handbills which they could neither read nor understand. One Morris Gordin, Russian-born Red who had turned against the Soviet, regaled the committee with a tale of how he had written his thoughts on cigaret papers and smuggled them from Moscow to the U. S. in the soles of his shoes. He damned the Soviet regime to the committee, declared that its "politicians are just as bad as in America." A representative of the American Intelligence Vigilantes announced there are 238 Negro Communists in the U. S. Negro Congressman Oscar De Priest testified that Communism "would never muster more than 5%" of his race and he wished "other groups were as loyal."

Major Walter Furbeshaw of Illinois Steel Co. was sure there were 100,000 Communists in the U. S. Harry A. Jung of National Clay Products Association set the figure at 30,000. Police Lieut. Make Mills of the Radical Squad offered statistics to show that: 1) 51,675 persons are directly affiliated with Communism; 2) 4,088 persons are active Reds; 3) 79,325 persons inactively sympathize with Communism; 4) 1,089,107 persons are actively opposed to Communism.

When Arthur W. Fisher, president of the Chicago branch of the American Civil Liberties Committee, attempted to tell the House committee how Chicago police illegally brutalized Red meetings, the committee members turned hostilely upon him, refused to let him make a statement without interruptions such as "That's far enough" or "Never mind that" or "Confine yourself to what you personally know." Vainly did Mr. Fisher point out that the committee had already accepted "a mass of unauthenticated documents" from anti-Reds, had heard witnesses give "broad testimony." When the young lawyer spoke of the "racket" of anti-Red agitation, the committee abruptly arose, adjourned its Chicago session, left him alone in the witness chair.

The committee disbanded without observing any of last week's anti-war demonstrations staged by Communists on orders from Moscow .

Meanwhile in New York City the police heard and broadcast reports that the Russian government had recalled Peter Bogdanov, chairman of Amtorg Trading Corp. and four sub-officials of this Soviet commercial agency as a result of last fortnight's commotion. As if to divert public attention from the discredited documents produced by Grover Aloysius Whalen to link Amtorg with Soviet propaganda, the city police began a game of hide-&-seek with mysterious characters who, it claimed, were the heads of the Soviet secret police in the U. S.

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