"Only the Steadfast"

Since the Hitler-Stalin pact, U. S. fellow travelers have fallen away in droves, but the Communist rank & file has hung on through every swing toward Hitlerism. Pondering these tenacious loyalists, a writer in the pinko Nation last week observed: "Genuinely perturbed by the defections around them, they calmly recite Lenin's prophecy: When the locomotive of history takes a sharp turn, only the steadfast cling to the train."

Last week three hitherto steadfast Communists jumped from the train with what dignity they could. Frail, bespectacled Granville Hicks, a free-lance critic, writer (I Like America, John Reed--The Making of a Revolutionary), whose appointment to a Harvard fellowship raised a great stir in 1938, resigned not because he disapproved of the Russo-German Pact, but because bigwig Reds approved it before they could possibly know anything about it. ''The leaders of the Communist Party," wrote Mr. Hicks in the weekly New Republic, "have tried to appear omniscient, and they have succeeded in being ridiculous. They have clutched at straws, juggled sophistries, shut their eyes to facts. . . . They have shown that they are strong in faith--which the future mayor may not justify--and weak invitelligence."

At his request, the Communist weekly New Masses dropped from its masthead the name of salty "Robert Forsythe" (real name: Kyle Crichton of Collier's). George Wishnak, onetime business manager of the acrobatic Daily Worker, explained his withdrawal from the Party: "Anyone . . . who continues to affiliate himself with or to express sympathy for the elements that support this alliance of Soviet Russia with Nazi Germany, if he is to be consistent, must pray for a Hitler victory. This I refuse to do."

Meantime the U. S. adherents of Joseph Stalin's new partner temporarily lost their leader by arrest. German-American Bundesfuehrer Fritz Kuhn, who has been out on $5,000 bail since he was charged with stealing $14,000 from his outfit (TIME, June 5), had to go to jail in Manhattan in default of $50,000 bail. His bail was upped, an assistant district attorney explained, when Prosecutor Tom Dewey heard that Mr. Kuhn was about to skip the country.

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