CRIME: Curious Coincidence

“Have you ever traveled under a false passport?”

“I have.”

When the U. S. Communist Party’s general secretary and No. 1 front man, crook-mouthed Earl Browder, so testified to the Dies Committee last September, he put himself in danger of a second Federal imprisonment. (In 1917 he was jailed as a conscientious objector to World War I.) Last week the possibility of a second term for Earl Browder, and imprisonment for many another big-name Communist, was brought measurably nearer by the U. S. Department of Justice.

First hint that something unpleasant was a-brewing for Browder & Co. came via the Republican National Committee’s alert publicity man, Franklyn Waltman. In the name of Republican Congressman (and Dies Committeeman) John Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, Mr. Waltman handed the following poison-ivy bouquet to Attorney General Frank Murphy: “Our dynamic attorney general, who has been so enthusiastically and tirelessly swooping by airplane all over the country in pursuit of lesser violators of the law . . . has been strangely indifferent and listless in the case of Browder. . . . Even Browder must be surprised, perhaps slightly contemptuous. . . .” Thereupon a spokesman for Frank Murphy replied: “It obviously seems to be a curious coincidence that the Republican National Committee issues a statement tonight. . . . The facts are that the department has been actively preparing this case and others . . . and that it expects decisive action in a few hours.”

Next day Earl Browder was indicted by a Manhattan Federal Grand Jury on two counts, charged with false swearing in 1937-38 passport applications. Maximum penalty on conviction: Five years in prison, $2,000 fine, on each count. Tears of anger and chagrin in his eyes, he pleaded not guilty, was held in $7,500 bail, as the Grand Jury dug into still more evidence of Communist travel habits. Possible was the bagging by Frank Murphy of such Reds as Executive Committeeman Max Bedacht, Publisher Alexander Trachtenberg. And no one could reasonably complain that prosecution for criminal fraud endangers the civil liberties of Communists or nonCommunists.