33

HELEN KAY

The State, County, and Municipal Workers of America is one of the most glaringly Communist outfits in the whole list of C. I. O. affiliates. The Communist record of Abram Flaxar, president of the union, is discussed in some detail in this report. At this point, we present the Communist record of another of the highest functionaries of the State, County, and Municipal Workers of America.

This is the record of Helen Kay. It will be admitted on all sides that the editorship of the national publication of one of the C. I. O. unions is a key position. Helen Kay occupies this position in the State, County, and Municipal Workers of America. She is the editor of the union's national publication, News of State, County and Municipal Workers.

Helen Kay (whose real name is Kolodny) has been a member of the Communist Party for at least 12 years. In the August 6, 1932, issue of the Daily Worker (p. 4), she contributed an article entitled "The Power of the Daily Worker." This contributed article was written from the standpoint of a party member who was boosting the party's official newspaper.

In 1933, Helen Kay was editor of the New Pioneer, the Communist Party's official publication for children. In addition to editing the magazine, she contributed numerous signed articles for its columns.

Helen Kay's writings for other Communist Party publications include contributions to Soviet Russia Today (June 1936) and New Theatre magazine (August 1936). The Workers Library Publishers, official agency of the Communist Party, have also published her work. Helen Kay's next Communist Party assignment was as executive secretary of the League of Women Shoppers. She was, in fact, the original executive secretary of that Communist front organization (see League of Women Shoppers' letterhead of October 7, 1935).

As editor of News of State, County, and Municipal Workers, it is one of Helen Kay's major duties to publicize the C. I. O. Political Action Committee. This duty she has performed in numerous issues of the union's publication ever since the C. I. O. Political Action Committee was set up in July 1943. Miss Kay is simply one more in the long list of avowed Communists and notorious Communist sympathizers who form the backbone of Sidney Hillman's C. I. O. Political Action Committee.

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34

HERBERT MARCH

Herbert March is chairman of "the arrangements committee and sponsors" of the Hyde Park (Illinois) Joint Political Action Conference, the local organization of the C. I. O. Political Action Committee. March is president of the Chicago Industrial Union Council, the Chicago organization in which all the locals of the C. I. O. unions in the city and vicinity are federated. March is, in effect, the Chicago leader of the C. I. O. Political Action Committee. In 1938, he was chairman of the C. I. O. organizing committee in Armour Packing Co., and in 1939 he was district director of the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee. At the 1943 annual convention of the C. I. O., March was a delegate from the United Packing House Workers of America, of which union he is now a district organizer. From his trade-union record which we have cited, it is clear that Herbert March holds a high place in the affairs of the C. I. O.

Herbert March is a Communist. Not one of the secret variety, but one who has openly paraded his allegiance to the doctrines of Lenin and the destruction of American free institutions. March was formerly district organizer for the Young Communist League. He is now 33 years of age and has graduated into the ranks of adult Communists.

A few years ago the Communist Party operated throughout the country under the guise of a series of State conferences for legislative action. The Illinois People's Conference for Legislative Action took care of the Chicago area. It was entirely under the control of the Communist Party. Herbert March was one of the gathering's principal speakers.

In 1942 Herbert March was a member of the Citizens' Committee to free Earl Browder (see Daily Worker, March 11, 1942, p. 5). Browder, the general secretary of the Communist Party in the United States, was serving a penitentiary sentence at Atlanta, and all the Communists and their fellow travelers agitated ceaselessly for his release.

Inasmuch as the Communist Party is a conspiratorial organization, the overwhelming majority of its members hold their membership in strictest secrecy. There are, however, better ways of identifying a Communist than seeing his party membership card. Take the case of Herbert March for example. The Special Committee on UnAmerican Activities has evidence that Herbert March is, and has been for a long time, a regular participant in the highest councils of the Chicago Communist Party. Furthermore, as we have noted, March was publicly active as the district organizer of the Young Communist League (the name of which organization has now been changed to American Youth for Democracy). But when all is said and done, the best evidence of the fact that a man is a Communist is his public subservience to the Communist Party line. The United States Civil

Service Commission defines a Communist as "one who has followed the Communist Party line through one or more changes."

Under the Civil Service Commission's definition of a Communist, Herbert March must be identified as such. Like all other confirmed Communists, March did the familiar party line somersault when Hitler marched into Russia. Before June 22, 1941, March was among those who addressed the following declaration to the President of the United States:

We, the undersigned, loyal and patriotic American citizens, do hereby declare our opposition to conscription as subversive of American democracy and a long step toward regimentation and dictatorship (Sunday Worker, August 4, 1940, p. 2, column 4).

After Hitler marched into Russia, Herbert March contributed an article to the Daily Worker, organ of the Communist Party, in which he wrote, in part, as follows:

The most significant development has been the offensive in North Africa and at Stalingrad at the same time. These offensives show that England, Russia, and the United States are working closer together than many people thought. It shows that Hitler's road is getting narrower and shorter. Two big things are now in order. The first is the continuation of the American and British offensives to the continent of Europe and a clearer statement of war aims (Daily Worker, December 6, 1942, p. 5, column 7).

Herbert March's union, the United Packing House Workers of America, is dominated by Communist leadership. It is also one of the C. I. O. unions which is most zealously contributing its resources to Sidney Hillman's C. I. O. Political Action Committee.

97287-44

35

FRANK R. McGRATH

Frank R. McGrath is president of the United Shoe Workers of America, affiliate of the C. Î. O. McGrath is a member of the C. I. O.'s executive board, highest governing body of the organization, which launched the C. I. O. Political Action Committee. He has, as a matter of course, represented his union in the annual conventions of the C. I. O. in recent years. At the present time, also as matter of course, he is putting the full force of his union into the work of the C. I. Ó. Political Action Committee.

The United Shoe Workers of America is under the domination of the Communists, and there is no doubt about McGrath's personal Communist affiliations.

In keeping with his Communist sympathies and affiliations, McGrath, on January 3, 1944, sent his cordial greetings to the Daily Worker, notoriously subversive Communist newspaper, on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. In a letter of that date, addressed to Louis F. Budenz, editor of the Daily Worker, McGrath wrote as follows:

I have been a reader of the Daily Worker for several years. I find your paper has been a consistent supporter of organized labor and has devoted itself to the worthy case of building cooperation and understanding among the people and governments of the United States, Great Britain, Soviet Union, China, and the other United Nations.

I congratulate you on your Twentieth Anniversary and trust that you will continue your efforts on behalf of the laboring people. I am sure that you will continue to work with the American people who are supporting the efforts of our great President to mobilize our nation for the early victory planned at the historic conference at Teheran.

It takes no reading between the lines to ascertain that the foregoing letter sent by McGrath to the Daily Worker is the work of a Communist. Not only its eulogy of the Communist newspaper, but its whole tenor reflects the current line of the Communist Party.

Most of McGrath's close associates in the leadership of the United Shoe Workers of America are notorious Communists. Among them are Isadore Rosenberg, Jack Zucker, Julius Crane, and Jack Spiegel. McGrath was formerly a leader in the Shoe Workers Industrial Union Council. This labor organization was wholly Communist and was affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League, headed by William Z. Foster, national chairman of the Communist Party of the United States. The Trade Union Unity League was composed of some 20 Communist unions and was affiliated with the Red International of Labor Unions of Moscow.

McGrath and Fred Biedenkapp, the latter a long-time Communist Party leader in this country, led a Communist committee of protest to Washington in 1933 (Daily Worker, October 30, 1933, p. 1).

The United May Day Conference, entirely engineered by the Communist Party for its 1937 May Day demonstrations, numbered

Frank R. McGrath as one of its members along with such outstanding Communist Party leaders as Ben Gold and Max Perlow.

McGrath was also affiliated with the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Bridge. Earl Browder testified concerning the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that some 60 percent of its personnel were members of the Communist Party. The Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was a Communist front organization and was so found unanimously by the Special Committee on Un-American Activities in its report to the House of Representatives in January 1940.

McGrath was a member of the Joint Committee on Trade Union Rights, which supported the Communist Party leaders of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union when they were serving prison terms a few years ago (Daily Worker, November 11, 1940, pp. 1, 5).