New Communist Front Man

With his face hidden behind a mask made of a ripped Pullman pillowcase (to thwart photographers), Earl Browder stepped off a train last week at Atlanta, Ga. He was shackled to two Negro prisoners, escorted by G-Men. His destination: the U. S. Penitentiary at Atlanta. The Kansas-born Communist leader and onetime Presidential candidate was going to prison for passport fraud. Sentence: four years. By good behavior he could get out in three years, four months.

For the past eleven years Earl Browder had been general secretary (titular head) of the Communist Party in the U. S. Picked by the Party hierarchy to fill his uncomfortable shoes was another native-born U. S. citizen, an old-fashioned radical, 56-year-old Robert Minor. A Texan, a carpenter in his early days, Communist Minor has had a long career of Bolshevik activity. As a young man he took up cartooning and landed a job on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 1916 he became publicity director for the defense of Tom Mooney. When the U. S. entered World War I, he went to Europe as a war correspondent, there met and talked to Lenin. One day, after the Armistice, Bob Minor was put under arrest, condemned to be shot for spreading Bolshevik propaganda among U. S. troops. Friends intervened and he was released. He returned to the U. S. and a life of soapbox orating, street-corner meetings, parades, riots, writing for the Daily Worker, which he edited. He went through the motions of running for Mayor of New York City, for Governor of the State. As his third wife he married an ex-socialite, Lydia Gibson.

Six years ago, with Attorney David Levinson, he went to New Mexico to fight for ten miners who were facing a charge of murdering a sheriff. He and Levinson were kidnapped, carried into the desert and beaten. From that adventure Minor returned a Communist hero. He kept his heroism green by fighting for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War.

Observers, wondering why the Communists picked old Bolshevist Minor instead of a younger man, guessed that the Party, busy with internal struggles, wanted another home-grown front man.

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