In all his scouring of the subversive underworld, rawboned Martin Dies of Texas, First Whip of the Red Hunting pack, never put on the stand a real, live, honest-to-goodness Communist. At his House Committee on Un-American Activities hearing last week in Washington he could have reached out and touched one: wispy, unobtrusive Earl Browder, general secretary (at $40 a week) of the Communist Party, its 1936 Presidential candidate.
Unfortunately for cigar-chewing Congressman Dies (last week he switched to gum), Witness Browder was under wraps. His pipe line to Moscow had failed to inform him of the Communazi non-aggression pact in time to prepare a U. S. explanation in keeping with Comintern ethics. Last week his explanation sounded like something out of a fairy tale: "It [the pact] caused dismay in Tokyo . . . broke the Axis . . . reopens the open door in China . . . lessens the danger, of Fascist penetration in South America . . . is one more step in reaching the Marxian ideal of Communism."
For the rest of his testimony Comrade Browder warmed over his story, told in 1936. of the offer of a man named Davidson (who said he represented a half-dozen rich Republicans) to enrich the party by $250,000 if it named President Roosevelt on its 1936 ticket, declared the party had turned toward conservatism since 1935, discoursed on its tenets, tactics, tanglements.
Damaging to Earl Browder's story of Communist innocence undented was the testimony of his former comrade, beefy Benjamin Gitlow, ousted from the general secretaryship of the party in 1929.
In that year, he said, Stalin swallowed the U. S. party, cleaned out its personnel, put in his puppet Browder. To Browder's claim that funds no longer flowed through the Moscow pipe line, Witness Gitlow replied that they used to come at the rate of $100,000 a year, probably still did.
More embarrassing to Earl Browder was an admission he let slip that he traveled through Europe during the last two years on a false U. S. passport. Asked to tell what name he had traveled under, Comrade Browder declined to answer on the ground that doing so might tend to incriminate him. Well might he be cautious. Day before, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had warned that all travelers on fake passports would be prosecuted if apprehended (possible penalty: $2,000 fine and five years in jail).
To previous knowledge of U. S. Communist goings-on the evidence added nothing. But it did prove one thing: that Earl Browder's party is still hog-tied to the dictates, the machinations of Moscow, wherever they may lead.