PHILANTHROPY: Heat Treatment

In January the Fund for the Republic, a $15 million Ford Foundation offshoot, completed the first of 50-odd projects it has launched to enlighten the U.S. about its civil rights. The project, supervised by Harvard Law Professor Arthur E. Suther land: a 474-page Bibliography on the Communist Problem in the U.S., which took 18 months and $67,000 to prepare. Last week the book received scathing criticism.

Novelist (Studs Lonigan) James T. Farrell said it was overbalanced with works by Communist "hatchetmen" and showed "inexcusable sloppiness." Wrote Brown University's Labor Economist Philip Taft: "You deserve a vote of thanks from the Communist Party." Reviewing the bibliography in the New Leader, the I.L.G.W.U.'s Dr. John A. Sessions noted astonishing omissions. Example: the morumentally anti-Communist autobiography of Angelica Balabanoff, onetime first secretary of the Communist International. The bibliography, wrote Sessions, "has no room for the works which have hurt the Communists most."

Replied Fund Vice President W. H. ("Ping") Ferry: suggestions that the book be revised had come three months ago from Professor Sutherland himself and from Cornell University's Clinton Rossiter, an eminent historian now working on a Fund-financed ($300,000) study of Communist influence in the U.S.

Last week's criticism of the Fund was very different in origin from right-wing attacks on it that have mounted in fury during recent months. Commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. and Columnist David Lawrence accused the Fund of soft-pedaling Communist subversion. American Legion National Commander Seaborn Collins said the Fund "is threatening and may succeed in crippling the national security."

Last month the Fund was attacked again for hiring Fifth Amendment-Pleader Amos Landman as a part-time pressagent; it replied that Landman had been hired because he was competent. Subsequently, plans to spend $200,000 to put the Washington Post and Times Herald's liberal cartoonist Herbert Block (Herblock) on TV were scrapped "by mutual consent" (TIME, Oct. 24).

Last week the Fund admitted that Manhattan Attorney Arthur H. Dean, ar Eisenhower Republican who negotiated the U.S. cease-fire in Korea, had resigned from its board of directors on Sept. 27, less than four months after his election. Dean, senior law partner of New York's famed Sullivan & Cromwell, would say only that he had quit for "policy reasons." Asked a reporter: "You mean the Fund's policies?" Said Dean: "Yes."