COMMUNISTS: Beat Me Again, Massa

Ever since the Communists kicked him out of the party as a deviationist, Earl Browder has worn the wistful air of a man denied even the chance to do penance for his sins. During the trial of eleven top U.S. Communists last year, he cried: “I’m the one who should be on trial. I was the original conspirator.” But nobody in the U.S. paid any attention to him. The Russians—who had left him dangling on their payroll as a publisher’s representative—roused only long enough to yawn and take his job away from him.

But last week the onetime U.S. Communist chieftain seemed happy again. When he heard that a bench warrant had been issued in Washington for his arrest on a charge of contempt of Congress, he paid his own way to the capital to surrender to authorities. He refused to post $1,500 bail—he was, he said, too broke to do so. Couldn’t his friends raise the money? Fifty-nine-year-old Earl Browder smiled, puffed contentedly at his pipe, and said he had no intention of asking anyone for help.

Asked his present ideological beliefs, he said, humbly, that he was “a student of Marxism.” As he was led off to jail with the look of the martyr on his face, none of the comrades was around to note it.