Out of the Hat

Not since the days of shrewd publicity chief Charlie Michelson have the Democratic party bosses pulled anything really neat out of the political hat. But last week they showed signs of perking up.

Merry -Go -Rounder Drew Pearson started the business with a radio broadcast on American Action, Inc. Promptly PM, the New York Post, the Chicago Sun, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, armed with ammunition from the Democratic National Committee locker, all opened up.

The story of A.A. was not new. The Cleveland Press broke it last February. But it was still a story.

A.A. was organized in the summer of 1945 by a group of politicians, superpatriots, businessmen. Its purpose was to combat the C.I.O.'s Political Action Committee, to ring doorbells and get out the vote, just the way P.A.C. did. It would have a blacklist, just like P.A.C. Targets of A.A. were such P.A.C.-backed Congressmen as Vito Marcantonio, Hugh De-Lacey, Edmund V. Bobrowicz (TiME, Sept. 30). But as salts in a cooled solution, when agitated, crystallize into some odd shapes, some oddly familiar shapes appeared in A.A. At the bottom of it:

Upton Close, pompous radiocaster, Anglophobe, labor-baiter, Red-baiter, whose radio punditing deals as often with fancy as with fact; Merwin K. Hart, insurance lawyer, author, lecturer, admirer of Franco's Spain and scorner of the word "democracy," who once declared: "Tougher products result from a Fascist education"; John T. Flynn, writer, vitriolic and acid-tongued spearhead of the prewar, now defunct, America First Committee.

In the hierarchy of A.A. are President Edward A. Hayes, lawyer, American Legion big shot and onetime National Commander, unsuccessful candidate for the Illinois governorship in 1940; Treasurer W. Homer Hartz, Chicago businessman and former president of the Illinois Manufacturers' Association.

Among supporters of A.A.: General Robert E. Wood, chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck & Co., once earnest chairman of America First; Lammot du Pont, chairman of the board of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., arch Republican, anti-New Dealer and Liberty Leaguer.

This week the Democrats got ready to follow up. A House committee will begin an investigation to see whether there has been any violation of the Federal Corrupt Practices Act (the law covering campaign expenditures). The inquiry might serve to offset the same congressional probing of P.A.C.

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