Third-Round Knockdown

In the world that the Communist Party wants and works for, a case of subversion could be handled with a commissar's rubber stamp and the click of a key in a cell door. But it took the U.S. nine years--from 1950 to last week--just to get the Communist Party of the U.S. legally labeled subversive.

Under a law that went into the books in 1950, the five-member Subversive Activities Control Board ruled in 1953 that the Communist Party of the U.S. was subversive, had to register with the U.S. Government, disclose its revenue sources, names and addresses of its members. In 1956 the Supreme Court upset the ruling. In 1957 the U.S. Court of Appeals bounced out a similar ruling. But in Washington last week the Court of Appeals finally upheld the Subversive Activities Control Board, 2 to 1. "The preponderance of all the evidence," wrote Chief Judge E. Barrett Prettyman, is that the Communist Party of the U.S. follows the "program and policy of the Communist Party abroad."

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