The Press: Deportation Order

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At his drawing board last week in the Chicago Sun-Times (circ. 544,784), Pulitzer Prizewinning Cartoonist Jacob Burck, 49, was going over the proofs of a cartoon for next day's paper. It showed the grasping hand of Soviet power being squeezed open by rebellious satellite citizens as they desperately tried to escape (title: "Losing His Grip?"). Just as he was finishing with the proof, the phone rang. On the line was a reporter from the rival Chicago Daily News. He told Burck that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had just ordered him deported on the grounds that he: 1) had become a Communist after entering the U.S. in 1914, 2) was in the U.S. illegally. Said Burck: "I feel they have no case. I will appeal."

The Government's charge was based on evidence that "from at least late 1934 or early 1935 to at least some time in 1936" Burck was a member of the Communist Party. Technically, the Government had a case. Born in Poland, Cartoonist Burck (original name: Yakko Bochkowski) came to the U.S. at ten. During the Depression, he was a frequent contributor to Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker, and one day in 1934 he took a party card from a persistent editor in the Worker's office to "keep him quiet." In 1935 he went to Moscow to sell a set of murals. But when he refused to revise the mural to Red specifications, i.e., make Stalin a more prominent figure, the Reds refused to pay for it, and Burck returned to the U.S. He worked for a year at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch under Dan Fitzpatrick (TIME, June 22) before joining the Chicago Times. Burck stoutly denied he was ever a Communist in spirit, said that he signed the party card only as a matter of "expediency," and that he never attended closed party meetings. As to why he never became a citizen after taking out his first papers, Burck says: "I had been waiting in line a long time [for my final papers]. Suddenly I recalled that I had a cartoon to draw for the next day's editions." Staffers on the Sun-Times support his whimsical explanation, point out that Burck is a "real bohemian," disorganized in everything he does. Even his cartoons are always half finished until his editors "start putting the heat on."

Why the Government was prosecuting the case now was a mystery, especially since the Immigration Service charge against Burck says: "The documentary evidence . . . from 1937 [after he came back from Moscow] to the present shows [Burck] to be outstanding in his profession, [to have] accepted the duties of a responsible member of the community ... a loyal and patriotic individual."

Sun-Times Publisher Marshall Field Jr. backed up his cartoonist, and so did the Post-Dispatch in an editorial: "The idea that Jacob Burck should be banished behind the Iron Curtain is nothing less than preposterous . . . There is nothing 'subversive' whatever about his metropolitan daily newspaper cartooning, which now dates back more than 16 years. Assume that he realized his error and . . . sincerely changed his affiliation . . . Should the U.S. then not want to reclaim him as it has . . . others who saw their mistake?"