No Room: II

In a months-long fit of timorousness, the State Department has acquired the unpleasant habit of locking up educators, visiting scholars, and students on Ellis Island. And as if the incessant lock-ups are not enough, State meets requests for information with all the loquacity of a laryngitic clam. Those within Ellis Island stockades have not the slightest idea of their supposed misdemeanors, and those in American trying to help are kept equally ignorant.

One of the silliest cases, and one of the meanest as well, occurred last week when a senior returning to Princeton was grabbed at Idlewild and shipped off to the detention camp. Of course, no one told him why, except that he was considered a possible "security risk." Tight-lipped officials managed to drop one him, however, and that concerned a letter the senior had written and sent to people around the nation while a sophomore, urging an armistice in Korea and the return to America of all American soldiers there. It also concerned a pro Chinese letter to the Princetonian last year. Apparently this was what George Orwell described as thoughterime.

We do not know why the State Department should fall in with the red-hunters but we suspect it was pushed. This is an election year, and although President Truman has attacked the McCarran-McCarthy sort of statesmanship constantly, he is too clever a politician to permit the State Department to risk giving the Republicans more ammunition for their campaign.

Thus the State Department is playing it safe: detaining people who at other times would enter without quibble, threatening to exclude others altogether, and even refraining from any policy decisions which, bad or good, might arouse discussion. This would not be quite so serious if the Russians, like Americans, took a breather every four years and talked themselves silly.

They do not, however, and the current series of detentions are excellent propaganda for them. Educators and students have far more prestige in Europe than in the United States, and there are no prairie spell-binders there to denounce Reds In Our Colleges. When some of these educators and students travel to America, only to end up on Ellis Island, it is difficult to blame United States allies from questioning the real extent of freedom in this country. In fact, it is difficult not to join in their questioning.

Whatever the reasons for State's timid concern over "security risks," they are ill-founded. The fact that the Department is simply frightened, while the McCarthys are demagogues, is no argument on behalf of State, for the executive branch can wield more power more quickly than a United States Senator. So far during the last few months that power has been used to the nation's detriment, and election or no election, we hope that those who operate State will soon regain their courage.