Red Scare

Red Scare To liberalize the University of Wisconsin its regents made famed Liberal Glenn Frank president in 1925. Last year a blatant young editor named John Bowman Chapple managed to win the Republican nomination for U. S. Senator, partly by charging that President Frank and his faculty "pinks'' had made the university a hotbed of communism, atheism and free love (TIME, May 2, 1932 et seq.). Alarmist Chapple lost the election, but he had started a Red scare which last week resulted in a legislative investigation at Madison.

A proposal for compulsory military training sent a handful of students scurrying to the Capitol to swear they would never bear arms for their country. Their demonstration incensed Assemblyman James H. Higgins, a Milwaukee dry cleaner, who spluttered: "I was never so insulted in all my life. Eighteen-and 20-year-old kids throwing abuse at World War veterans! . . . Their views suggested that they were believers of Communism, Bolshevism and atheism!"

To climax Assemblyman Higgins' indignation, he had discovered that some of the young witnesses were out-state students attending the University on legislative scholarships. Charging that most of these out-of-state scholarships went to "Communists and Eastern radicals," he put through the Assembly a resolution for an investigation into the whole question of university "Communism and atheism."

Last week Assemblyman Higgins and two colleagues opened hearings in a packed Senate parlor. They compared scholarship grants before and during President Frank's tenure. Students and townspeople offered a welter of rumors and opinions, few facts.

Star witness was one William Harrison Haight Jr., 19-year-old student and R. O. T. C. member, who said he had been hired by the U. S. Secret Service to smell out Communism in the University. He had found none in classrooms, but could and did point his finger at 18 students who belonged to the Communistic John Reed Club and the National Student League. Spying on their meetings, he had discerned a trend toward violent revolution at some distant date. But, said he, members rarely mentioned that subject. Their chief interest seemed to be in abolishing the R. O. T. C.

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