In Manhattan at 10:45 one evening last week Earl Russell Browder, general secretary of the U. S. Communist Party, was scheduled to speak for 15 minutes over the Columbia Broadcasting System. It was the first time a full-fledged, thoroughgoing Red had ever appeared officially on a national radio network. That morning readers of Hearst's New York American, glancing down the list of Station WABC's evening programs, found Boake Carter at 7:45, Cordell Hull at 8:30, Walter O'Keefe at 9, Ed Wynn at 9:30. The program note for 10:45: "Talk." American readers able to put two & two together, however, guessed the nameless speaker's identity from the spluttering and fuming against him in their paper's editorial and news columns.
An hour before the broadcast some 100 patriotic and prosperous members of the National Americanization League, led by a be-spatted onetime alderman from Manhattan's "silk stocking" district and a burly onetime major general in the Irish Army, appeared before the Columbia Broadcasting building, marched up & down the sidewalk with small U. S. flags and placards lettered SMASH COMMUNISM and BROWDER IS BORING FROM WITHIN.
In Washington, Grosvenor Dawe, director of Plain Talk Institute, called for a boycott of all advertisers sponsoring Columbia programs.
Also in Washington, Representative John L. McClellan of Arkansas announced in the House that he had inquired at the Federal Communications Commission, learned that letters and telegrams protesting the Communist broadcast were pouring in. "I denounce," cried he, "the action of the Columbia Broadcasting System for aiding and abetting a public enemy that seeks to invade this nation by the dissemination of its poisonous propaganda."
"Goodness gracious!" replied Representative Walter M. Pierce of Oregon, "what do you know about Russia?"
Columbia Broadcasting System felt obliged to issue a statement explaining that it had scheduled the Browder address in accordance with its policy of granting free time to representatives of all recognized political parties. An engineer, it promised, would be ready to cut the speaker off the air instantly if he departed by so much as a word from his carefully censored text to sound the tocsin of revolt. It also announced that it had allotted Red-fearing Representative Hamilton Fish Jr. an equal amount of time on its network at the same hour next evening to answer Red Browder's speech.
If advance publicity counted for anything, Communist Browder must have had a notable audience when he stepped up to the microphone. Some Columbia patrons were disappointed, however. In Boston it was announced in advance that seven New England stations affiliated with the system would substitute a program of dance music for the Red secretary's speech, though their listeners would hear Representative Fish's reply to it next evening. Most Pacific Coast stations also refused to broadcast the speech.