New Label

In a Manhattan public hall one day in 1943, 400 delegates of the Communist Party's Young Communist League met and announced they were dissolving their organization. Actually, they were only changing their name as part of Communist Leader Earl Browder's (and Moscow's) short-lived project of cozying up to capitalistic democracy.

Next day, 332 delegates met in the same hall to create its Communist-front successor: American Youth for Democracy. It was to be, according to Y.C.L. ex-President Max Weiss's prospectus, an "advanced anti-fascist youth organization in which Communists play a leading role."

For a while, A.Y.D. flourished. It had 63 chapters in colleges and universities, devoutly followed the party line. It attracted to its rostrums such well-intentioned notables as Edward G. Robinson, Norman Corwin, the late Brigadier General Evans Carlson of Carlson's Raiders. On the campuses, left-wingers, new discoverers of the world of politics and plain Communists joined up. Then, after the war (and the departure of Browder to the darkness reserved for deviationists), things began to change.

Last week, the Daily Worker announced that the A.Y.D. had dissolved itself. One big reason, perhaps the main one, was that A.Y.D. was finding it too tough to get new members, or even to hold on to old ones. It had shrunk to a handful of active chapters. There was nothing left to do but change names again. Soon, as A.Y.D. promised, U.S. colleges would discover a new "Marxist youth organization" on their campuses, "carrying forward A.Y.D.'s . . . militant activity in the interests of young people." But this time it might be harder: Communist fronts no longer seemed to have the attraction that they had had in the piping days of war, or in the first uneasy you-can-get-along-with-Russia days of peace.

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