Rightabout

Last week the third Kansan ever nominated for the Presidency of the U. S. declared of the second Kansan so honored: "The election of Landon would be a major tragedy to the United States. . . . The Landon-Hearst-Wall Street ticket is the chief enemy of the liberties, peace and prosperity of the American people. Its victory would carry our country a long way on the road to fascism and war."

Kansan No. 3 spoke from the stage of Manhattan's frowsy Manhattan Opera House. Behind him a great fist reared out of a tremendous mural packed with thousands of marching faces, white and black. Around the walls, between draped red banners and U. S. flags, photographic murals showed, twice as big as life, a happy group of Russians, a Southern lynching bee, a breadline, a row of crosses in a War cemetery. Thick blue smoke wreathed up from the round tables on the floor where sat, rough-clothed and mostly in their 30's, 751 delegates to the ninth national convention of the Communist Party of the U. S., first one ever opened to press and public. The speaker was the No. 1 U. S. Red, slender, sandy-haired Party Secretary Earl Browder, onetime Wichita bookkeeper.

All the famed U. S. Reds were there. Still frisky at 74, white-haired, militant "Mother" Bloor presided at an opening session. Ailing William Zebulon Foster, the Party's chairman and three-time candidate for President, was on hand to assert that his "is now the only party which is carrying on the old American tradition." Big, beetle-browed "Bob" Minor, crack Party organizer who was once the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's crack cartoonist, got thunderous cheers when he characterized Alf Landon's foreign policy as: "A blank sheet of paper with the fountain pen in the hands of William Randolph Hearst." But the real hero of the convention was not present. He was John Llewellyn Lewis, no Communist.

Secretary Browder gave him credit for progressive planks in the Democratic platform. Speaker after speaker urged Communists to join him in his fight for industrial unionism. Thunderous cheers greeted every prediction of a nationwide wave of strikes to be touched off by a great steel strike under John L. Lewis' leadership as he moved to organize that industry (see col. 3). Sitting in the hall, asserted one delegate, were 20 Communist officials of steel company unions, already boring from within.

Red cheers for John L. Lewis stemmed from the major shift in Communist policy decided at the Seventh World Congress of the Third International in Moscow last summer (TIME, Aug. 26 et ante). Since then U. S. Reds have soft-pedaled talk of the Communist revolution, worked for a United Front with left-wing Socialists, non-Communist trade unionists and farmers. This year, it was said last week, the Party's members (51,000) would vote the national Communist ticket, support Farmer-Labor candidates in local and congressional elections. Their goal was to help form a national Farmer-Labor party in 1940. To achieve that, urged Secretary Browder, comrades must drop their Communist jargon, learn to speak the language of the U. S. workingman, shape their program to his ways of thinking. "Ours is not a program of revolutionary overthrow of capitalism," declared he in an astonishing Red rightabout. "It can be realized within the present American form of government."

At week's end the Communist convention, nominating Earl Browder for President and Negro James W. Ford, soft-spoken Harlem organizer, for Vice President, adopted a platform in which the new Red strategy was for the first time formally documented. Excerpts :

"A real peoples' party is arising. Organized by the workers and farmers themselves, the Farmer-Labor Party is growing in the majority of States. . . . It is the most hopeful sign in American political life. . . . The Communist Party unconditionally supports the building of the Farmer-Labor Party. It pledges itself to work to bring the trade-unions and all progressive forces into its ranks. . . . "The chief aim of the Communist Party today is to defeat the Landon-Hearst-Liberty League reaction, to defeat the forces of Wall Street."

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