Phrase-Mongers

Pert, talented Author Ruth (My Sister Eileen) McKenney was born with revolt in her veins. Said she: "My mother, whose maiden name was Flynn, was an Irish nationalist. ... In my Sunday school . . . my sister Eileen and I were evicted for having pernicious views." Along the rocky road to fame, as the writer of a zany best-seller and slick Hollywood scenarios, Ruth McKenney paused to join the Communist Party. Her corpuscles promptly began to tingle again. A 1940 sample: "The Second Imperialist War ... is a fight among thieves, a bloody quarrel among the vultures."

Last week the Communist Party of Connecticut, like Ruth McKenney's Cleveland Sunday school, turned her out. With her went her husband, Richard Bransten, her Hollywood collaborator and onetime Washington correspondent, under the name of Bruce Minton, for the New Masses. Printing the eviction notice, the Daily Worker accused the Branstens of "attacking the basic line of the Party . . . slandering its leadership." Their conduct, frowned the Worker, was "characteristic of petty-bourgeois radicalism . . . and ultrarevolutionary phrase-mongering."

Vacationing in bourgeois Vermont, the literary culprits phrase-mongered: "We do not belong to any faction. . . . Both of us consider ourselves loyal members of the Communist Party."

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