Court Opinion

ID: 9449995
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:31:50.179007+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:06.251419
License: Public Domain

BAZELON, Chief Judge
(dissenting) :
In American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born v. Subversive Activities Control Board, 117 U.S.App.D.C. -, 331 F.2d 53 (1963), decided today, I have explained why I think the statutory definition of a Communist front should be read to include only organizations “primarily operated for the pui'-pose of giving aid and support to a Communist-action organization” in advancing the sinister objectives of the world Communist movement. Here, as in that case, the Board does not appear to have applied this standard. I do not consider whether the evidence would support a finding of sinister purpose, because in my view the staleness of the record requires us to remand the case to the Board for supplementary findings.
In Labor Youth League v. Subversive Activities Control Board, 116 U.S.App.D.C. 151, 322 F.2d 364 (1963), we noted that the serious consequences of registration to an organization and its past and present members demand strict adherence to the requirement that proof of its status be timely. There the problem was mootness. Here it is the age of the evidence at the time of the Board’s hearings, and the lapse of eight years since the Board made its findings.
The hearings were held in 1954 and much of the evidence dated back to the late 1930’s and the early 1940’s. As the court points out, our relations with the Soviet Union have shifted radically in the meantime. And the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War engaged the loyalties of sincere democrats as well as Communists.
Despite the court’s warning against reliance on old evidence, it concludes that the Board could view the rather meager evidence relating to the period 1950-1954 “through the coloration of the past.” I cannot agree.
As an example of what this court now approves, I refer to the Board’s finding that officers or functionaries of the Communist Party controlled the Brigade in 1952. The Board included in this category the Brigade’s two officers, Wolff and Fishman, and six of the nine members of its Executive Committee. The court recognizes that the preponderance of the evidence fails to show that either of the two Brigade officers, as well as two of the six Executive Committee members, were officers or functionaries of the Party at any time. This leaves only Nelson, Weiss-man, Smith and Love. But as to these four of the eleven top officials of the Brigade in 1952, the court ignores the age of the evidence that they were Party functionaries. The most recent evidence on any of the four concerns Weissman, said to be a Party organizer in 1949, and Nelson, on whom the evidence dates from 1946. The finding on Love is based on testimony given by Horan, who left the Party in 1939, concerning Love’s activities in Spain in 1938. The evidence about Harold Smith goes back to 1946, when Earl Browder was expelled from the Party and Smith, his bodyguard, remained loyal to him. Continued loyalty to a man who had been expelled in 1946 does not support an inference that Smith was a Party functionary in 1952.
The record was stale when the Board made its findings. In the eight years since then there have been turbulent changes in world affairs. Though American-Soviet relations have not changed as radically in this period as before, the views of many who were formerly sympathetic to the Communist cause have undergone profound change, particularly after the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956.
I would remand to the Board for further hearings concerning the activities of the Brigade from the passage of the Act in 1950 to the present.