Gone Underground

During nearly three years of argument, trials, appeals and other due processes of law, U.S. Communism's eleven leaders had gone on scribbling their denunciations of U.S. "imperialism," organizing demonstrations, beating the drums for the

Chinese "volunteers" in Korea and posturing publicly as patriotic political thinkers. But last week, just as the deliberate arm of law at last reached for them, there were wild squeals of outrage and the sound of scuttering feet. Four of the eleven were taking it on the lam.

In Manhattan's federal district court, General Secretary Eugene Dennis and the six other comrades who surrendered on their bonds were argumentative to the last. Cried Defendant Benjamin Davis, lawyer and onetime New York city councilman: "It is a crime against American democracy." Snapped the judge: "Sit down." Davis sat, glowering.

Judge Sylvester Ryan collected $10,000 in fines from each, ordered them to jail to serve the five-year sentences which the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld. Later, handcuffed and clad in prison denim, they were bundled off to the Lewisburg, Pa. penitentiary in the same van as convicted Atomic Spy David Greenglass.

The four who vanished might well be the planned nucleus of an underground party. Burly Gus Hall, a 40-year-old Finn from Minnesota with several years' training in Moscow, became "national secretary" when Dennis was jailed last year for contempt of Congress, has been running the party for the past twelve months. Henry Winston, a Negro, national organizational secretary, is his right-hand man. Robert Thompson, a D.S.C. winner in World War II, and Gilbert Green were chairmen for two of the party's strongholds, New York and Illinois. The missing four had been free on $20,000 bail apiece posted by the Civil Rights Congress, courtroom arm of the Communist Party. Judge Ryan declared their $80,000 bail forfeited, then summoned the Civil Rights Congress secretary, Frederick Vanderbilt Field, for an explanation.

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