Boo!

If ham-fisted Congressman Martin Dies had been able to call Orson Welles's Martians before his Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities he could not have extracted a more lurid story than he got last week. Witnesses testified in all seriousness to their belief in:

1) A Jewish-Communist plot to overthrow the U. S. Government next August by the ingenious means of bringing in 150,000 Communists, mostly ex-Loyalist Spaniards. The importees would seize U. S. arsenals, take over public utilities and transportation facilities. Meanwhile, rich Jewish conspirators would unload their securities, creating financial chaos.

2) A counter-revolutionary scheme by fascistic anti-Semites who intended to crush Revolution No. 1 before it got under way, set up a dictatorship in Atlanta under a retired U. S. Army General.

No Communists were produced by the Dies Committee. They apparently existed only in the vast credulousness of some people like a Manhattan socialite named Dudley Pierrepont Gilbert, who had nothing better to do after he lost his money (but not his wife's) in the depression than to organize something called American Nationalists, Inc., which he endowed with a Fascist salute. After that petered out, Mr. Gilbert told the committee, he met a "medium-sized" man named George Rice who said he was a bodyguard-waiter for the Communistic plotters within Manhattan's Harmonie Club (for rich Jews).* "George Rice" told Dudley Gilbert eye-popping stories about the coming revolution. Dudley Gilbert hastened to build himself a retreat in the fastnesses of the Kentucky mountains, a place to hide himself and family from the dread Communists.

Frightened Dudley Gilbert passed the dire information on to two men of action: James Erwin Campbell, Army reserve captain and V. F. W. official of Owensboro, Ky., and George E. Deatherage, a St. Albans, W. Va., house painter with a Hitleresque mustache who calls himself "national commander of the Knights of the White Camellia." Messrs. Campbell and Deatherage decided to set up a sort of Hitler to whom they would play Goering and Goebbels. For their Fuehrer they chose sympathetic Major General George Van Horn Moseley, who retired as commander of the U. S. Army's Fourth Corps Area last year with a blast against the New Deal, followed up with frightening speeches about the dastardly Jews, warnings that the time might come when the Army would have to "take over." General Moseley had started his own investigation of "isms" which called for considerable travel. "If the Jews bump me off," he wrote in a spirit of martyrdom to Captain Campbell, "be sure to see they get credit for it from coast to coast. It will help our cause."

Having found their Hitler, Knight Deatherage ("Judaism and Communism are synonymous") proposed to Captain Campbell that they go abort organization, contact "leaders of main groups throughout the nation"--Father Coughlin, Kansas' anti-Semite Gerald Winrod, John Frey of the A. F. of L.'s Metal Trades Department, the American Legion's Americanism Commission Director Homer Chaillaux,* Louis John Taber, master of the National Grange, Walter Garrison of the Associated Farmers of California--"in all, men who are heads of large groups on our side of the fence." George Deatherage's meeting to bring these leaders together never came off.

With his customary bull-in-china-shop finesse Mr. Dies managed to kick the chairman of the Republican National Committee, redheaded John Hamilton, out of the subversive bag. Mr. Hamilton, it seems, had been in correspondence with Facist Campbell to the extent of sending him a copy of the Republican National Committee list when he asked for it. Another potent Republican was revealed to be Mr. Campbell's correspondent. Chairman Dies introduced a letter from paunchy, cigar-smoking Banker Felix McWhirter, treasurer of the Indiana Republican State Committee, who asked Mr. Campbell if any of three persons were of Jewish blood: Alf Landon, William Allen White Mrs. Cordell Hull.

At week's end the U. S. had not yet been overthrown by anyone.

*A search of the club's records failed to reveal any such employe as George Rice.

*Himself a star witness on Communists before the Dies Committee last year.

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