Lonely Voice

Five nights a week at 7:45 E.S.T., approximately 1% of New York City's radio listeners dial station WHN for 15 minutes of liverish news analysis by a balding frenetic, German-born commentator named Johannes Steel. Fortnight ago he had a proud announcement: he would be the American Labor Party's candidate for Congressman from Manhattan's lower East Side.

Dark-horse Steel's most prominent backer turned out to be Commerce Secretary Henry A. Wallace, who had written him a letter of endorsement saying: "I wish you all success." Democrats and Republicans were astounded. But Manhattan's Communists, seeing a chance for "an important labor victory" (and incidentally a Congressional partner for their idol Vito Marcantonio), were not surprised at all. They had already marshaled their forces.

Communists pleaded for 1,000 of the faithful to ring doorbells in Steel's behalf. The Daily Worker reported that 100,000 pieces of campaign literature had already been published, with another 200,000 in the works. PM, which occasionally (but not in this case) wanders from the party line, hopped in with a glowing story on the virtues of Party-liner Steel. Ex-Sergeant Marion Hargrove agreed to head a veterans' committee already heavily loaded with other left-wingers.

Too Many Fingers. But the road to office was not all smooth for Candidate Steel. To the New York World-Telegram, he was " 'an all-out defender of Stalin's politics' with a special bent for Soviet worship. . . ." The New Leader, an anti-Communist labor paper, described him as "a servile propagandist... a consistent fabricator ... of his personal life and history," recalled that he was once praised by the Soviet Izvestia as a "lonely voice" in America. The New Leader also pointed out that Steel had the classic commentator's background--in 1934 he had written: "Hitler's days are numbered. The reader can count them on his fingers."*

His Democratic opponent, Arthur G. Klein, went to court in an unsuccessful attempt to show that Steel had no business in the election anyway, under his trade name of Johannes Steel. There was no such person, said Klein--Steel's name had been Herbert von Stahl, was anglicized to Herbert Johannes Steel when he was naturalized in 1938.

At week's end, Candidate Steel began to show the wear & tear of campaigning. Incensed at the hostile attitude of the avidly New-Dealish New York Post, he snorted: "What a pigsty the New York press is!"

* Fingers needed by the reader: 3,953.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.