National Affairs: No Dies

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Closest parallel is perhaps Senator John Scott's inquiry in the Ku Klux Klan in 1871, which began as a straight political move, accepted rumors, facts, alarms, nevertheless succeeded despite its flounderings, or perhaps because of them, in startling the victorious North with a picture of the desperate state of mind of the defeated South. Few correspondents would give Chairman Dies credit for statesmanship. Many held him only a showman. Some considered him a dangerous demagogue; some gave credit for the Committee's more effective work to Investigator J. B. Matthews and Attorney Rhea Whitley. But the Committee's cumulative findings suggested that Chairman Dies's perpetually scandalized method of listening to everybody, hauling in back-fence radical gossip, old shoes, scandals, guesses and wild charges, was perhaps the best method of building up the picture of the elusive world of U. S. Communism.

Agents. If all Chairman Dies's evidence should turn out to be true, U. S. democracy is riddled from top to bottom with anti-democratic elements. If true only in part, it presents a situation at least as ugly as that ventilated by Senator La Follette's expose of violations of civil liberties.

Said Witness Krivitsky: "Soviet military intelligence has approximately the same function as the same service of other countries. Its unique feature is that it can recruit members of the Communist parties in the countries in which it operates. The leaders of the Communist Party consider it their duty to aid Soviet military intelligence in its work."

But because Russia's intelligence service is interested in "the entire economic and political life of this country," it does not concentrate only on military secrets: ". . . Its agents are planted in all institutions, governmental, industrial and otherwise."

No limelight lover after 17 years underground, Witness Krivitsky was still able to smile sardonically for cameramen after five hours of testimony, called it the worst ordeal of his life.

Dirba. Two days later the Dies Committee heard a witness as outspoken and blunt as Witness Krivitsky was retiring. This was Maurice Malkin, 40-year-old naturalized Russian fur worker, charter member of the U. S. Communist Party, long a well-known figure in the allegedly Communist-dominated Fur Workers Union in Manhattan. Tossed into jail for two years after the incredible New York fur workers' strike of 1926,* Comrade Malkin nursed a grievance. But he remained a member until 1936, collected information, gossip, made statements that led Chairman Dies to observe: "It would be hard for the Chair to believe, if it were not for other information he has of the same kind."

Malkin charges:

> That a fur workers' union borrowed $1,750,000 from the late Gambler Arnold Rothstein, hired "Legs" Diamond to do its dirty work.

> That New York police had been bribed, including the famed head of New York's Industrial Squad, Detective Johnny Broderick.

> That Communist agents operated in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Comrade Malkin named nine OGPU agents—including Julia Stewart Poyntz, who left the Party in 1936, mysteriously disappeared after threatening to write a book exposing it; named 24 labor unions, including the Newspaper Guild, as led or dominated by Communists.