The Right to Ask

Louisville Newsman Carl Braden has a long record of addiction to Communist causes; he wrote off and on for the Daily Worker, promoted the Red-organized Stockholm peace appeal, went to jail for violating a Kentucky sedition law. Frank Wilkinson, onetime public information director of the Los Angeles Housing Authority, has for eight years refused to say whether he is a member of the Communist Party, is field representative of something called the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. In Atlanta three years ago, Braden and Wilkinson were called up as witnesses before an Un-American Activities subcommittee checking on Communist infiltration and propaganda in the South. Both men refused to say if they were Communists. Instead of calling on the Fifth Amendment, they took the First, challenging the relevance of the question and the committee's right to ask about their political beliefs.

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court, by narrow 5-4 majorities, decided that Braden and Wilkinson had no reason not to answer. In majority opinions written by Associate Justice Potter Stewart (Justices Felix Frankfurter. John Marshall Harlan, Charles Whittaker and Tom Clark concurring), the court ruled that Congress could legally inquire about a witness' Communist ties if the question was related to some legislative purpose and if that purpose was made clear.

The subcommittee had good reason to suspect that Braden and Wilkinson were Communists, wrote Justice Stewart, and reasonable grounds for trying to find out whether they were members of the Communist propaganda apparatus. The court carefully avoided any blanket endorsement of committee investigations (noted Stewart in a rare aside: "These opinions do not imply any personal views as to the wisdom or unwisdom of the creation or continuance of the committee"), but it rejected the argument that Wilkinson and Braden were being persecuted merely for attacking the committee. Nor did their attacks make them immune from questioning as Communist suspects. "We can find nothing to indicate that it was the intent of Congress to immunize from interrogation all those (and there are many) who are opposed to the existence of the Un-American Activities Committee."

To the court's four dissenters-Chief Justice Earl Warren. Associate Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas and William Brennan-the majority view weakened the First Amendment and gave the committee license to harass its critics. Justice Black warned that "it is already past the time when people who cherish ... the Bill of Rights can afford to sit complacently by while those freedoms are destroyed by sophistry and dialectics."

But the fact still remained that the two purposeful plaintiffs had turned themselves into critics in an effort to get the court to bring down the committee.

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