LABOR: Under Raps

Labor’s Communist-liners bent under some hard hammering last week:

¶ In Washington, 36-year-old Harold Christoffel, onetime president of Milwaukee’s United Automobile Workers(C.I.O.) Local 248 and leader of two long, bitter strikes at the Allis-Chalmers plant, stood long-faced as a federal judge sentenced him to prison for two to six years for perjury. He had lied repeatedly to the House Labor Committee when he denied being a Communist or having Communist affiliations (TIME, June 9).

¶ In Manhattan, the Justice Department’s drive on alien Communists caught up with Russia-born Irving Potash, vice president of the C.I.O.’s International Fur & Leather Workers Union, member of the Communist Party’s national committee. He was hustled off to Ellis Island, where he joined four others held as deportable Communists.* He also joined them in what they cried was a hunger strike against their being denied bail. At week’s end all were free on bond, pending hearings. None looked the worse for his fast.

¶In San Francisco, Phil Murray’s hatchetman Allan Haywood delivered the bad news to Red-eyed Harry Bridges: he was fired as a C.I.O. regional director for refusing to go along with Murray’s policy of opposing Henry Wallace’s third party. Australia-born Harry Bridges’ grip on about 75,000 longshoremen was not affected. But he was expecting more bad news —another attempt to deport him.

¶ In Washington, before a House Labor subcommittee, broken-nosed Herbert K. Sorrell, whose A.F.L. Conference of Studio Unions has had Hollywood cinemakers in strike ferment for three years, denied over & over that he had ever been a Communist Party member. Shown a C.P. card signed “Herbert Stewart” (Sorrell’s mother’s name was Stewart), he cried “fake,” but admitted that it looked like his handwriting. An expert swore that it was.

* The four: Gerhart Eisler (TIME, Feb. 16); John Williamson, the Communist Party’s labor secretary; Ferdinand Smith, secretary of the C.I.O.’s National Maritime Union (TIME, Feb. 23); Charles A. Doyle, upstate New York director of the C.I.O.’s United Gas, Coke & Chemical Workers.