THE HOBGOBLIN IS A MAN

A man with a big stick is loose in America, but he is not walking quietly. Commissioned by Congress to investigate un-American activities, Dies has maneuvered himself into a one-man Supreme Court to judge what is and is not "American" under the Constitution. He has made "isms" almost as popular as sex-murders, and with the press caught by the scruff of its neck feeds it daily with red meat, mostly carrion.

The climax came two weeks ago when he published the membership of the League Against War and Fascism. Many names were merely on the mailing list. And although the great majority had no notion of the League's Communist affiliations, the complete list was published and the resulting hub-bub forced one school teacher to resign her job, and the rest to become targets of public suspicion.

Now threatening that Reds may tie-up the Chicago meat-packing industry over night, Dies clearly shows that un-Americanism has no limits but his own imagination. If workers in the stockyards come within the scope of the Committee, who may remain outside? Stockyards mean unions, and unions mean possible Communists. One Party man on the Harvard Faculty might soon provide an opening for the Dies wedge, one radical on a magazine grounds for an expose. Mr. Dies has become past-master of an art on which all strong-men depend. Rather than investigating, he is condemning. Newspapers have become for him an instrument of blackmail--a Roman Forum from which he can read his list of proscription.

With the hunt in full swing, little chance for opposition exists to Dies' request for an additional $500,000. But before his Committee runs wild Congress would do well to apply its checks. "Un-Americanism" is too broad a word for safety. If Congress confined his investigations specifically to groups engaged in overthrowing the government, more facts and less sensation would result. Stripped of his power to prowl at will, Dies would soon find that the sum-total of his scares add up to little. Un-Americanism becomes a ghost story when told in installments before bedtime. But collected in one rational account, the goblin of subversive activities is cut down to man-size.