The Lost Weekend

The American Communist Party (spring model '46) hopefully held its breath. On Friday, ex-Comrade Earl Browder crossed over into Soviet territory at the frontier station of Vainikkala, Finland. Then & there he vanished. What had happened to him? The C.P. hoped for the worst.

Ever since haggard, bitter Earl Browder had been dethroned as U.S. Communist boss last July, for deviation from the party line, he has been the Party's No. i anathema. A withering pamphlet entitled "The Path of a Renegade" relegated him to the "gutter of history," denounced him as a lackey of Big Business. Cried the pamphlet: "Browder fostered . . . the fiction that there exists somewhere, some international Communist tribunal that determines policy for our Party, that our Party is not a fully independent Party of the American working class." In his weekly typewritten "Distributors Guide--A Service for Policy Makers" (price: $100 a year), Editor Browder cracked back by branding his former comrades as "Tories of the Left."

The Browderless weekend wore on; speculation raged. Might Browder win reinstatement from Moscow? Stranger shifts had marked the party's history. Or, perhaps, he had met with an accident?

Monday dawned, and Moscow still said nothing of Earl Browder's whereabouts. Brooks Atkinson cabled to the New York Times: "He has had sufficient time to reach Moscow, unpack his bag, shave, take a bath. . . . This bureau's staff of efficient secretaries, couriers, chauffeurs and writers--in that order of relative importance --cannot locate Earl. Let us know if you hear anything."

Then, on the sixth day of waiting, Reuters flashed the bare news that Browder was actually in the Russian capital. Disappointed U.S. Communists gathered that he was sound of limb. But, still uninformed of what he was up to in Moscow, they might have to sweat out some more of Browder's lost weekends before he returns to his "Service for Policy Makers."

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