Headliner

As a maker of headlines, most successful third-party Nominee this year has been Communist Earl Browder. In this he was conspicuously aided by unknown persons of Tampa, Fla., who locked him out of the hall where he was to speak, and by the police of Terre Haute, Ind., who locked him up as a vagrant (TIME, Oct. 12). Born in Kansas, son of a country schoolmaster, Earl Browder's own schooling ended at 9 when his father had a breakdown and the son got a job as an errand boy. He studied bookkeeping, became office manager of a farmers' Co-Operative at Olathe, finally in 1917 went to jail for opposing the draft.

He spent a year in Platte County Jail in Missouri writing a treatise on "A System of Accounts for A Small Consumer's Co-Operative." Later as a trusty bookkeeper in the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth he: 1) met his boyhood idol Big Bill Hay wood and 2) was allowed to study all the books on economics and socialism he wanted. A week after he was paroled he joined the Communist Party, spent five years with William Z. Foster boring from within the American Federation of Labor, later visited Russia, passed two years as a union organizer in Hankow, returned to the U. S. along with Depression and be came secretary of the U. S. Communist Party at $40 a week.

No soap-box rabble rouser but a kindly, even-spoken man, Earl Browder does a good patient job among earnest Party workers, achieves publicity for his cause only by maneuvering into headline situa tions. Not altogether undeserved was his arrest as a vagrant. During the campaign he has traveled 26,000 miles, mostly in day coaches, shuttling about the country, visiting 26 States. Last week, while Negro James W. Ford, Communist Vice-Presidential Nominee, was hopping about to Nashville, Richmond, Durham, Harlem, Earl Browder decided to play return engagements at his two most successful stands. Of his first visit to Terre Haute he said: "That speech ... I didn't get to make . . . was the most successful I ever made in my life." Back to that Indiana city therefore went the Red Nominee armed with a $1,000 certified check to prove he was not a "vagrant." Again he did not make a highly successful speech because a court refused him an injunction against police interference, because 200 hoodlums with rotten eggs and soft tomatoes blocked his way into the radio station where he was to broadcast. Next he went to Tampa where he had just started to speak from a platform in an empty lot when a dozen hoodlums rushed in, knocked down several of his supporters with clubs and pistol butts, picked up the platform from behind, slid Nominee Browder and platform guests off into the dirt.

Unable to advocate the election of Franklin Roosevelt openly, Red Browder has throughout the campaign done the next best thing: told voters that the election of the Republican Nominee would be a catastrophe. Said he last week in answer to an inquiring comrade: "Advise everybody to vote Communist and if they won't take your advice, tell them that the worst possible thing they can do is to vote for Landon."

Thus did Comrade Browder, whose party polled 102,991 votes four years ago, bring himself to the attention of voters in 32 to 34 States where he hopes to have his Red ticket on the ballot.

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