National Affairs: A Million Nays

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The Gallup poll reports that 79% of the men and women interviewed in a nationwide survey were opposed to letting Red China into the U.N. Only 8% are in favor and the rest have "no opinion." In 1950, on the eve of the Korean war, only 58% were opposed and 11% in favor.

The intensity of U.S. opposition to seating Red China is indicated in another statistic. The "Committee for One Million Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations," which came into existence less than a year ago (TIME, Oct. 19), has now passed its goal of getting 1,000,000 signatures on anti-admission petitions addressed to the President of the U.S. The signatures sweep across a broad range of opinion.

Among the signers: liberal Democratic Senator Paul Douglas and conservative Republican Senator John Bricker, A.F.L. President George Meany and former U.S. Steel Chairman Irving Olds, ex-President Herbert Hoover, ex-U.N. Delegate Warren Austin, Novelist John Dos Passes, Poet Conrad Aiken. Also among the signers: General George C. Marshall, who, between tours as Army Chief of Staff and Secretary of State, spent a year in China half-persuading the Nationalists to lie down like lambs with the conquest-bent Communists.