Cemetery in the Backyard

Gideon's Army was on the march. Henry Wallace's third party, as yet nameless and pennonless (but not penniless), bivouacked briefly last week on Capitol Hill. Wallace had come, at his own request, to deliver an attack on the European Recovery Program before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Into the record went Henry's written polemic of 11,000 words, while, with Running Mate Glen Taylor at his side, he read abstracts from it. The Marshall Plan, he said, was a "blueprint" for war, a "colossal hoax" on the people of the U.S., and would "impose Washington and Wall Street intervention in the internal affairs of the participating countries." He had a counter proposal: the U.S. should give $50 billion to the United Nations to be spent for relief over the next ten years.

The Press Laughed. Committee members began to question him. What was the difference, New York's orotund Sol Bloom wanted to know, between the Wallace line and the Communist line on ERP? Replied Henry stiffly: "I am not familiar with the Communist approach. I am not prepared to discuss it. I don't know what the Communist objection is. I don't follow the Communist literature." South Dakota's Karl Mundt asked him if he thought Russia was meddling in European affairs. No one could say for sure, Wallace replied, because it was "impossible to get at the truth from what we read in the American press." The press and committee members laughed.

The barrage continued. When Wallace suggested that "new faces" were needed to reach an "understanding" with the Soviet Union, Wisconsin's Republican Representative Lawrence Smith remarked that he did, indeed, hope to see some new faces in the Administration after November. Wallace shot back: "I thank you for your support, sir."

On Murray Hill. Next day things were different; the third party's leaders were among friends. Happily they journeyed back to Manhattan to preside over the official opening of their headquarters in a brownstone mansion on lower Park Avenue, just an indignant glance from the Union League Club.

The sedate old Murray Hill house was built in 1863, its walls rumored to be bulletproofed against Civil War draft rioters. George S. Bowdoin, a partner of J. P. Morgan, acquired it some 20 years later. In its backyard is a cemetery with eight weathered headstones--one for each of the chow dogs buried there by Bowdoin's spinster daughter, Edith, who died five years ago. What was left of gilt and ormolu in the house glistened under new fluorescent lights. Businesslike desks, clacking typewriters and paid workers crowded the high-ceilinged chambers.

Some 1,500 of the Wallace faithful showed up for the reception, including old New Dealer Rex Tugwell and Communist-liner Lee Pressman, lately bounced as counsel to the C.I.O. At a press conference, Glen Taylor announced that his domestic program called for nationalization of the steel industry, coal mines and railroads.

At week's end Henry Wallace went to Minneapolis, where he told an audience that the Truman Doctrine would never have been allowed, and that the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia might not have happened, if he had been President.

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