Tooling up for Mass Repression: The Subversive Activities Control Board
1953-12-12 035-0019-006 the $620,000 requested for the board by President Truman was cut to $235,000. Mr. LaFollette at one point withdrew as chairman of the hearing panel, charging that government counsel treated him with "disdain" and communicated this attitude to government witn...
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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/A144983E-FCC1-4CAF-ABE3-0A6472424CBD http://hdl.handle.net/10796/C3DB18B4-F2A2-493A-AD80-C800B1459CB6 |
| Summary: | 1953-12-12
035-0019-006
the $620,000 requested for the board by President Truman was cut to $235,000. Mr. LaFollette at one point withdrew as chairman of the hearing panel, charging that government counsel treated him with "disdain" and communicated this attitude to government witnesses, so that he was no longer able to conduct an orderly hearing. Ultimately, the four members of the board who remained after the Richardson resignation were summoned to the Capitol for a "get acquainted" meeting with the members of the Senate Internal Security subcommittee. After this interesting but unfortunately unrecorded session, three of the four were at last confirmed, but no action was taken on the nomination of LaFollette. When the three were confirmed, the board had been in existence more than nine months, the Communist Party case had been before it more than eight months, and the actual hearing of testimony had gone on more than three months. On withdrawing from the panel, Mr. LaFollette remarked of his fellow-member, Peter Campbell Brown, formerly of the staff of the Department of Justice: "We will have speedier hearings, I am sure, because the panel member, Mr. Brown, whom I have asked to preside from now on, has already evidenced the remarkable capacity to make speedy rulings upon all objections. . . . The fact that they almost uniformly amount to a sustaining of any position taken by the petitioner [the Attorney General] and a rejection of any position taken by the respondent [Communist Party] is purely coincidental, I am sure." When LaFollette's recess appointment expired without Senate action, Brown became chairman of both the board and the panel. At the conclusion of the Communist Party case Brown resigned and was succeeded by Thomas J. Herbert, Ohio Republican appointed by President Eisenhower; Herbert is presiding over the fate of the organizations accused of being "fronts." NO ONE was much surprised when the board, in April of this year, found the Communist Party to be a "Communist-action organization" as defined in the act and ordered it to register. Though the result was foreordained, some of the methods by which it was reached are of interest. It is instructive to remember that for some years before the McCarran Act we had laws on the books requiring the registration of any agent of a foreign principal and of any organization which aims to control by force or to overthrow the government. The present registration provisions, in so far as they are directed at the Communist Party, are inspired in part by the testimony of Attorney General, now Supreme Court Justice, Tom Clark that he had been unable to obtain evidence sufficient to prosecute Communists for failure to register under these acts. The purpose of the new act, therefore, was not to create registration requirements aimed at the Communist Party but rather (1) to transfer the fact determination from the regular courts to a specially created board, (2) to authorize this board to draw inferences of foreign control from ideological evidence, and (3) to extend the registration requirements to organizations deemed to be "Communist fronts." In dealing with the Communist Party the difficulties of proving foreign "control" or "domination" become immediately apparent despite the fact that many persons might assume that this matter could be easily determined. The difficulties stem from the question of what is meant by control. It cannot mean actual physical control, in the sense, for example, that the Red Army could enforce Soviet decisions on the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The transfer of funds might be an important clement, but there seems to be little evidence, if any, of the use of "Moscow gold." Inevitably, therefore, the exploration gets back to some ideological measure or standard of control. A group of people, it is argued, have agreed to believe rigidly in certain concepts promulgated by a foreign power and to urge others to accept these concepts. As part of their indoctrination, they have agreed in advance to change their views, from time to time, at the behest of the same foreign power. But merely to state this standard of proof should be sufficient to indicate its dangers. Many organizations—nationality groups, for example—steadily support the "line" of a foreign power. Apart from this, our government has never insisted on its right to promulgate a fixed, official line of its own. Yet this is exactly what is involved in the insistence that all those who believe our policy should be changed to conform to the programs of another government are "agents'' of that government. To take such a position precludes significant debate on vital issues of foreign poky. Hence the attempt to prove foreign domination by reference to an ideological standard leads back to the basic proposition that only overt acts should be punished, not beliefs, not even the agreement in advance to adhere to a particular belief, for such an agreement is, after all, still a belief. IN APPLYING the ideological test in this first case the board found it to be quite unimportant whether the Russian or the American expression was the earlier. It also refused, on the ground of irrelevance, to permit the Communist Party to show that many of the views used as tests of non-deviation had been shared by a considerable portion of the non-Communist world. The test would thus be equally valid to show that the Soviet Union is controlled and dominated by the Communist Party of the United States if that were the desired result. It would also, if sound, go far to show that the board is controlled and dominated by the Department of Justice, since its report does not deviate by a hair's breadth from the department's contentions on all the numerous and complex issues presented for determination. The Communist Party, of course, argued that there was nothing inherently improbable about two organizations applying the same theory to given facts and arriving independently at the same result. In answer to this the board cut many Gordian knots by deciding that the theory is itself the organ of control. Thus the board finds that Marxism-Leninism "has been promulgated and issued by the Soviet Union as the overall philosophy, authoritative rules, directives, and instructions governing the world Communist movement" and that "the [Marxist-Leninist] classics are one of the chief means by which the C.P.S.U. directs, dominates, and controls the C.P.U.S.A." The board does not hesitate, either, to plunge into obscure doctrinal disputes, deciding which of the possible interpretations is true Marxism-Leninism and then pin-
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