The Redhunter (16 page)

The typical debate featured a visiting speaker who would plead the posted resolution for twenty minutes (sometimes the president
had ever so gently to gavel him down when he seriously overran the time he was given). He was followed by three student speakers,
one from each party. Inevitably they divided on house resolutions, one or two speakers in favor, one or two opposed. Rising
from the floor, members would then direct questions to the speaker and contribute their own comments. (“If we vote in favor
of Taft-Hartley we are identifying ourselves with a movement that wants to castrate the labor union movement!” “The speaker
clearly hasn’t read the act. Why deny to workers,
just because they are union members,
the right we have—even as students.”) At the close of the session, often after heated debate, came the vote on the resolution.

The union’s executive committee met early in January to make up a schedule for the spring semester and decide whom to invite
and what resolutions to debate.

Tom Scott had twice argued in the
Spectator
that the Communist
Party U.S.A. should be treated as simply another American political party, not as a subversive organization. In a guest column
written for the
Spectator,
he argued that the Bill of Rights and the protocols of democratic practice required the recognition of the Communist Party
“at every level, as a voluntary organization, promoting its own positions, set forth by its own officials and candidates.”

It didn’t surprise the executive committee members, seated around a table at Hamilton Hall in a classroom used for seminars,
when Tom Scott, cigarette in hand, proposed inviting Gus Hall, president of the Communist Party, to address the Political
Union. Harry Bontecou, as vice president of the Conservatives, objected forcefully. “The Communist Party U.S.A. is
not
an independent party. It’s an agent of the Soviet Union. If it
were
independent, we’d go along.”

Scott replied fervently that there was no firm evidence of any such link. “And if it’s an open question—’Is the CPUSA independent
or isn’t it?’—the business of a politically interested body like ours—after all, that is what we are, the Columbia
Political
Union—is to—
inquire.
” The format of union proceedings provided “ideal auspices” for open discussion. And who was better equipped to stand up to
such questioning than Gus Hall? “Let him have his say. Is that a pro-Communist position, to permit somebody to speak?”

Bontecou argued his position tenaciously. “That which is known should not be approached as if it were unknown.” It was
known,
he insisted, that the Communist Party was a Moscow-run operation.

After a half hour, Ed Tucker, the president, suggested an alternative. “Why don’t we schedule a debate on the question ‘Resolved,
That the Political Union should invite Gus Hall, the head of the Communist Party of America, to address the Political Union’?”

Scott asked for a five-minute adjournment to consult with his colleagues. He and his lieutenants went into an adjacent room.
Harry turned to Chris Russo, seated on his left. They spoke in quiet voices, out of hearing of the president at the other
end of the table. Russo was Conservative Party president.

“What do you think?”

“We’d obviously lose. All they have to do is bring up the First Amendment and stroke that violin good and hard—and we lose
the house.”

“So?” Lionel Spitz, the party parliamentarian leaned over, “We
can still get the important things said. What’s
important
is to bear down on the Wallace movement, stress its subordination to the party line.”

“We don’t have the votes in the executive committee to block the debate. So let’s think about the guest speaker. Maybe invite
one of the senators or congressmen supporting the Mundt-Nixon Bill outlawing the Communist Party.” Spitz listed a few names:
Senators Pat McCarran—Howard McGrath—James Eastland—Herbert O’Conor—”

“What about going with a faculty speaker? Willmoore Sherrill would be great,” Harry said.

His associates agreed. “Let’s hold out for that. We had two Progressive speakers last fall, and one of them was Emerson—”the
reference was to an ardent Progressive from the law school faculty.

Conservative Party president Russo called out to Tucker at the end of the long table: “We’ll go along with the resolution,”
he said—“provided we get to name the speaker.”

The Progressive cadre returned. Scott sat down, lit another cigarette, and announced in grumpy tones, “We’ll go along with
the resolution.” Confronted by the Conservative claim to precedence in naming the speaker, Scott froze.
Nothing doing.
The wrangling went on into deadlock. Tucker called for a lunch break and an opportunity for the principal antagonists—the
Progressives and the Conservatives—to caucus.

“Here’s an idea you can take with you to lunch,” Tucker said. “Cancel the visiting speaker. Let the whole evening be handled
by student speakers.” An hour later, returned from the break, the parties agreed. Scott would speak first, Bontecou next.

The debate was scheduled for March 18, 1948. On March 10, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, son of the republic’s
founding father and the voice of Czech resistance to operational Communist control, was found dead, three floors down from
the apartment he occupied in the Foreign Ministry Building.

That was the end of such resistance as the traditionalist liberals had been able to maintain against the colossus of postwar
Soviet power. Masaryk was dead! Who was left to lead opposition to Communist control?

The coalition government was dissolved. The Communist Party now exercised undisputed power. The purge of the opposition began.
The “Czech coup” had taken place: Czechoslovakia was now behind the Iron Curtain. Ten years after the Nazis had asserted claim
to the Czech Sudetenland and, a few months later, to the entire Czech Republic.

Sentiment at Columbia was preponderantly critical of the fake suicide, but opinion was not undivided. Scott issued a press
release from the offices of the Young Progressives urging a calm view of the Czech drama. He warned against jumping to “warmongering
conclusions.” He asked whether anyone could presume to pass conclusive judgment on the Czech development without first investigating
the charges, “widely circulated in Europe,” that Masaryk had been found in collusion with neofascist elements to engage in
repressive counterrevolutionary activity. There was heated talk in Congress. Outraged members dismissed as transparently unpersuasive
the hollow Soviet claim that Masaryk’s defenestration had been his own doing.

Two days after the coup, the Political Union convened. Anticipating the heavy demand for seats in the heated political atmosphere,
the secretary declined to admit nonmembers until five minutes before the program was to begin. Membership cards were examined
as students filed through two entrances to the hall. At both doors Young Progressives handed out a pamphlet, with excerpts
of spoken and written views of prominent Americans, mostly academic figures, who had spoken out against the projected prosecutions
of the Communist American leaders under the Smith Act, which forbade conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution. The students
made their way to their seats with excited anticipatory chatter. But quickly they fell silent. The large hall was packed.
Two dozen nonmembers stood in the rear of the hall.

Only a few minutes behind schedule, President Tucker called the house to order. He read out the resolution, written and punctuated
according to high Oxford University debate protocols: “Resolved, That this house should invite to speak the president of the
Communist Party of the United States.”

Ed Tucker was from Georgia. When he was speaking to more than
three people his Southern accent deepened. He was affable, relaxed, and quick witted. “We figgered it’s our problem, not any
outsiders’ problem, to talk about who we want to inviyate to speak. So we’re going to hear from students of Columbia, not
from outsiders.” First, he said, the president of the Progressives, Tom Scott. Then, for the Conservatives, vice president
Harry Bontecou. “I don’t really care
who
wins this debate; I think we’re going to have a
great
evening. Tom, you all go ahead. Ten minutes.”

Tom Scott devoted the first half of his time to recalling American figures who in their day had been thought alien and seditious.
He reminded the audience of the terrible Alien and Sedition Act passed under President John Adams. He spoke of efforts attempted
before the Civil War to silence those who took unconventional positions. He spoke of the persecution of the Wobblies before
and after the First World War. Of the Palmer Raids in 1920. He cited the prominent civil-rights scholars who opposed any disqualification
of the Communist Party to participate in the great national debate, to compete for the opinions of free men. And concluded:
“Do we want to do that bit all over again?”

He turned finally to face Harry Bontecou, sitting in the front-row right, spokesman, that night, for the hundred-odd Conservative
Party members.

“I do believe, Mr. President, that after we are through with this debate tonight with the antidemocrats, we ought to schedule
a debate for the next session.

“I am convinced that the arguments for illegitimizing the Republican Party,” he said, just a trace of a smile on his face,
“are every bit as convincing as those that would forbid the Communist Party.” There was laughter. “No one seriously doubts
that the GOP is engaged in class warfare and that its policies are substantially, perhaps even critically, influenced by the
all-powerful munitions makers who lust for another world war.” There was scattered applause.

Scott was staring him in the face: “I call upon Mr. Bontecou, whose subversive demagogy you are fated to hear, to make his
fascistic case.”

That was tough language, even for the PU. The applause was more tepid than Tom Scott expected, more robust than the Conservatives
thought tolerable.

Harry Bontecou was pale. The applause from the Conservative ranks was tentative, apprehensive. When he began speaking there
was a strain in his voice. Student speakers were permitted, under union rules, to consult notes, not text. Harry scanned his
notes briefly.

He began by recounting what had happened one year earlier at Berkeley, in California. A student political organization announced
two scheduled events. The first was to feature George Hamilton Hughes, the self-proclaimed Nazi, the founder, in North Dakota,
of the “U.S. National Socialist Party.” At the succeeding session, the speaker would be Gus Hall, president of the Communist
Party.

Harry’s voice matured into a more stable pitch, the tone becoming forceful but never strident. What happened—as Harry told
the story to the packed, attentive house—was that soon after hearing the news of the invitations, John Meng, the chancellor
of Berkeley, released for circulation in the university an open letter to the student body.

Dr. Meng had begun by saying that he would not interfere with the students’ right to invite whomsoever they chose to come
to Berkeley, but that—Harry consulted his notes—”‘to accord these undistinguished visitors anything more demonstrative than
a shudder of polite disgust would be to attribute to their presence a totally fictitious importance.’ ”

Harry told how Chancellor Meng had then called on the faculty of Berkeley to join with him in making an appropriate demonstration
on the day that Hamilton Hughes arrived: Faculty and students would remove to a synagogue to participate in a memorial service
for the millions of victims of Nazism and Communism.

“You have read what Mr. Gus Hall said about what happened in Czechoslovakia last week,” Harry reminded them. “ ‘A counterfascist
victory.’ ” Harry asked the assembly whether they expected to hear anything from Mr. Hall they did not already know a Communist
official would say.

He turned his head up slightly, looking now at the heavy Gothic woodwork above the head of the presiding president. “Communists
in America or elsewhere, whether native or Soviet, come to recapitulate their dogmas, to press their drive to coopt the moral
slogans of the West, and to practice their science of confusion. Yes, we of the Conservative Party concede that Communists
are fit objects of curiosity, but only for practicing social scientists—”some boos were
heard—”who inquire into the darker mysteries of the human temperament. This organization isn’t a psychological laboratory.”

He asked whether one could expect to satisfy political and, indeed, intellectual curiosity when inviting to speak someone
whose views were entirely synchronized with the “unflinching even if erratic” will of Joseph Stalin, who “only nine years
ago declared his friendship with Adolf Hitler.” What service was being performed by inviting the head of the Communist Party
to speak if he could say nothing attributable to any thought that originated with him? An invitation to a self-proclaimed
Communist served “only an extrinsic point—the affirmation of the students’ administrative right to invite whomsoever they
choose. But that right is not being challenged at Columbia any more than it was at Berkeley.”

He closed solemnly: “And yet they are human beings. Few of us are practiced at giving that ‘shudder of polite disgust’ recommended
by Dr. Meng. How then do you treat a Communist we have ourselves invited? We can jeer him. Some may treat him with that terrible
coldness that says that we can’t, at our level of attainment, take seriously a man who seeks out and works for an ideological
kingdom which it is the very purpose of our education to know to despise. Why then bring him here, if no purpose can be served
by doing so, and if the only result can be that we will humiliate ourselves and him?”

Harry looked now at the Chair. “Fight him, fight the tyrants everywhere; but do not ask them to our quarters merely to spit
on them, and do not ask them to our quarters if we can’t spit on them. To do the one is to ambush a human being as one might
a rabid dog; to do the other is to ambush ourselves—into breaking faith with humanity.”