The Time Is Ripe

Douglas A. Hyde always wanted to be a missionary. He was a Methodist, "but at 17, he joined Britain's Communist Party, and became a missionary for Marxism instead. "Everyone worked together and thought alike," said he, "which was the great attraction." That was in 1928.

He went to work in 1939 for London's Communist Daily Worker (circ. 120,000) and later became its home (domestic) news editor. At war's end, when "I saw the way things were shaping up in Eastern Europe," he had his first doubts about Communism. "It kept bothering me more & more." Last week, appalled by the fall of Czechoslovakia, and the prospects it opened up, he quit his party and his paper, to become a Roman Catholic.

Why hadn't he quit sooner? "Well," he said wanly, "I guess it was because I was home news editor and not foreign editor."

In following in the steps of Louis Budenz, who had quit as managing editor of New York's Daily Worker (TIME, Oct. 22, 1945) to rejoin the Roman Catholic Church, Convert Hyde took along his two children. His wife, a Communist for ten years, also quit the party. Said Hyde: "It became obvious to me that the movement for which I had fought and worked so long was destroying those very freedoms and decencies for which it claimed to be fighting. . . . Communism was incapable of providing a cure for an extremely sick world. My growing disillusionment led me to seek some other answer. . . . The time is ripe for large-scale resignations.."

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