The Press: Is Communist a Dirty Word?

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An editor can and does call a Democrat a Democrat, a Baptist a Baptist, sometimes even a spade a spade—but he has to be very careful whom he calls a Communist. Many a Communist-at-heart takes care not to be one officially. What many an editor would like to know: is it libelous per se to call a man a Communist? To the growing body of legal opinion, on which a solid answer will be based some day, two noteworthy items were added last week:

¶The Saturday Evening Post paid $1,500 out of court for calling a man a "Stalinist busybody." The Post recently paid $11,000 for calling someone else "a Communist wrecker in American labor." One reason for the big difference in payoffs: one man had only been damned in passing, the other had been dealt with at length.

¶A federal judge dismissed a suit against Reader's Digest, which named a Boston lawyer as the former "legislative representative for the Massachusetts Communist Party." Said the judge: the reference itself is not libelous; come back again if you can prove you were hurt.

Some high-powered lawyers argue that the label "Communist" is not libelous, if the editor goes no further. The safest rule (now held to firmly by the Post's lawyers) : when in doubt, don't.