Down with Bottomless Degeneracy!

It was, in every sense, a revival meeting. Gathered in quaint old Webster Hall, a onetime Greenwich Village ball room, were 1,000 delegates and ob servers attending the first open con gress held by the U.S. Communist Party in seven years. The Reds' aim during the five-day conference was to rebuild their fading cause by publicly exploiting the country's antiwar, civil rights and allied New Left movements.

All the same, the musty Old Left slogans festooning the hall in classic agitprop type attested to the fact that there has been little dialectical ecumenism among the faithful in recent years.

SOCIALISM IN OUR COUNTRY, IN OUR TIME, droned one timeless banner stamped with a jaded peace dove. Though "fraternal guests" invited from 85 countries were unable to get U.S. visas, non-Communist newsmen were admitted for the first time--but only briefly and on condition that no pictures be taken of faces. Unfortunately, the gathering in Webster Hall looked more like a tintype from an early Dreiser novel than a revolutionary threat for the '60s. Most of the delegates were middle-aged to elderly whites, though there was a smattering of Negroes and a small youth contingent.

"Depraved Insanity." Minnesota-born Gus Hall, 55, the party's longtime "leading spokesman," delivered a three-hour, 30,000-word harangue that sounded strangely like a Molotov jeremiad from the '50s. He denounced the U.S. commitment in Viet Nam as "coldblooded imperialist aggression," "depraved insanity" and, in what was doubtless intended as the most formidable indictment of all, "moral degeneracy with no bottom." Then, contending that the party had "fought its way out of political isolation," he commanded the comrades to unite in a popular front with Vietnik and Negro groups to achieve "left unity."

Exhorting labor to rid itself of antiCommunism, Hall picked as a special target the international affairs department of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.--whose militantly anti-Red policies were shaped by Jay Lovestone, 67, an almost-forgotten ideological dissident who in 1929 was purged as the national secretary of the U.S. Communist Party by Stalin, for a decade thereafter ran his own splinter faction, the Lovestonites, and in 1940 turned bitterly anti-Red. In Hall's romantic view, Old Comrade Lovestone's present operation is "an arm of the CIA involved in trying to get governments overthrown."

Wow for Wayne. In any case, declared the Red leader, Communists and other leftists must coalesce to elect an "independent" candidate for President in 1968 to replace Lyndon Johnson. Did he have anyone in mind? Well, allowed Hall, Oregon's Democratic Senator Wayne Morse had been "playing a big role in peace." The only problem was that Morse himself last week came out for Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, while Bobby announced that he was for L.B.J. On the other hand, as an ex-Republican and a currently restive Democrat, Morse would certainly be a novel kind of candidate for the Communists--all 12,000 of them.

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