The Press: A Man Named Shelton

To the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, during its 1955 investigation of Communism in the press, came a letter from a secret informant who charged over a fictitious signature that “a man named Shelton” was a member of a Communist group on the New York Times. The Senate investigators assumed that their informant was accusing Newsman Willard Shelton, whose name was familiar to them because he had written stories criticizing the subcommittee. But when a process server went to the Times to find Willard Shelton,* he was told that there was no such person on the payroll. Learning that a man named Robert Shelton had a copyreader’s job on the Times, the process server wrote in “Robert” for “Willard” on the subpoena and handed it to Timesman Shelton.

To the surprise of committee members, who by then were inclined to accept Associate Counsel Julien Sourwine’s judgment that “somebody had bobbled,” Robert Shelton, 30, refused three times to answer questions about possible Communist affiliations at the subcommittee’s open hearings last January. With three other Manhattan newsmen, he invoked the First Amendment (freedom of speech and the press) ; all four were indicted for contempt of Congress (TIME, Dec. 10).

Shelton, the first of the “uncooperative” newsmen to go to trial, called no witnesses when his case was heard last week in Washington by Federal Judge Ross Rizley. Instead, Defense Attorney Joseph L. Rauh Jr., chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, argued that the investigation was illegal because it served “no valid legislative purpose,” that the subcommittee had no more right to question Shelton than any other “man off the street,” heard his testimony solely to “expose him and others to contempt and ridicule.” The investigation was a “reprisal” against the Times, which had frequently criticized the segregationist views of Mississippi’s Democratic Senator James Eastland, subcommittee chairman. Rauh pointed out that 30 of the 38 witnesses called to testify in closed session were current or onetime employees of the Times, and the subcommittee’s Counsel Sourwine testified that he had made no comparable effort to investigate any other paper.

After a two-day trial without jury, Judge Rizley found Shelton guilty of contempt, dismissed as “patently unsound” Rauh’s argument that the investigation was 1) illegal, and 2) aimed specifically at the Times.

Judge Rizley fined Mrs. Mary Knowles, 46, the Plymouth Meeting, Pa. librarian who was found guilty of contempt of Congress (TIME, Jan. 21), $500 and sentenced her to 120 days in jail—longest term ever handed a woman for contempt of Congress.

* Who had never worked for the Times. He is an assistant editor of the AFL-CIO News in Washington.