Tooling up for Mass Repression: The Subversive Activities Control Board
1953-12-12 035-0019-005 [Oc]tober 1950, the board spent more than two years on the petition of the Attorney General that the Communist Party be ordered to register as a "Communist action organization." The stenographic record of this proceeding ran 14,413 pages and there were 507 e...
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| Institution: | MCR - The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick |
| Language: | English |
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12 December 1953
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10796/92EEA08E-2130-4D71-9EFD-141AE59CE862 http://hdl.handle.net/10796/D9638F2F-9D66-43FD-BB6A-90F12C7FAA5E |
| Summary: | 1953-12-12
035-0019-005
[Oc]tober 1950, the board spent more than two years on the petition of the Attorney General that the Communist Party be ordered to register as a "Communist action organization." The stenographic record of this proceeding ran 14,413 pages and there were 507 exhibits, many of them full-length books. To date the Communist Party is the only organization against which the board has issued an order, but the Attorney General has filed petitions to proceed with hearings and findings against twelve "front" organizations. The first year was devoted not so much to the Communist Party case, however, as to the systematic McCarranization of the board, under personal supervision of the Democratic McCarthy from Nevada. Senator McCarran was in the peculiar position of being the sponsor and nominal author of legislation finding "the Communist movement in the United States" to be an agency of a foreign power and at the same time the chairman of the committee passing on the names of board members appointed by the President to make an impartial determination as to whether the Senator's findings were correct. He took full advantage of this position. Senate confirmation of the board was withheld for nearly a year—during most of which time the Communist Party case was on trial before persons uncomfortably awaiting confirmation —before McCarran was finally satisfied. THE FIRST chairman of the board— and Senator McCarran's first target—was Seth W. Richardson, a highly respected and very conservative Republican. The main charge against him was that as chairman of the government's Loyalty Review Board he had shown "softness" toward "Communists" by permitting clearance of too high a proportion of government employees accused of "disloyalty." He was also suspected of softness toward New Dealers, since he had been counsel to the investigating committee headed by Owen J. Roberts, Republican former Supreme Court justice, which failed to find the Roosevelt Administration guilty of culpable negligence in connection with the Pearl Harbor disaster. Like many of the government employees whose cases he had reviewed, Mr. Richardson was also up against a "sympathetic association" charge: he was a former law partner of Joseph E. Davies, author of "Mission to Moscow," an un-McCarranite book. There were no hearings. After eight months in office Mr. Richardson resigned unconfirmed, for reasons of health. Charles M. LaFollette, one of the original and still unconfirmed board members, was appointed acting chairman after he had served as chairman of the panel hearing the Communist Party case. Mr LaFollette, however, was also a "sympathetic association" case, having been an officer of Americans for Democratic Action, an organization which is anti-Communist but not anti-Communist enough to suit Senator McCarran. The subcommittee studying the confirmation of board members actually voted to request the F.B.I. files on each of President Truman's appointees. The Communist Party, contending that a board exposed to such pressures could not be expected to show the impartiality formally required of it, tried to get the hearings delayed pending Senate confirmation of the nominees, but the board denied the motion. The Communist Party was not alone in finding an inconsistency between the board's uncomfortable situation and its responsibilities. The Washington Post commented editorially: There is no doubt, as the board's chairman, Seth Richardson, declared. that "the board has lawful power to convene this heating." Unhappily, however, there is a great deal of force to the contention put forward by Vito Marcantonio [counsel for the Communist Party] that "this board sits in jeopardy, and if at any time it takes a view contrary to that of the chairman of the Senate committee (Senator Pat McCarran) which is to pass on its nominations the members may never be continued in the positions to which they have been appointed." . . . The board entirely lacks the independence necessary to its quasi-judicial function. Although the board uniformly denied all motions made in behalf of the Communist Party, the ultra-rightists in Congress remained dissatisfied. There was an attempt in the House to eliminate the board's budget from the appropriations bill on the ground that its members were not "interested in fighting communism.'' This move failed, but [PICTURE: 'The Road to Ruin' - Fitzpatrick. Courtesy St. Louis Post-Dispatch.]
292/946/35/20(iv) |
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| Physical Description: | TEXT |