Editor, Youth Leader Attack McCarran Act For 'Stifling Debate'

Two speakers blasted the McCarran Act at a meeting sponsored by the Socialists Club last night.

Adam Schweig, a member of "Advance," a youth organization which is being tried for alleged Communist-front actities under the Act, quoted President Truman's statement that the Act "puts the government in the thought-control business."

Lionel Libson, editor of the Marxist magazine "New Horizons," claimed that the Act's purpose is to stifle dissent.

Schweig, a student at C.C.N.Y., explained that Advance was being attacked because it had "supported the Communist Party's position" by opposing nuclear testing and the McCarran. Act, and advocating negotiations on Berlin and nonintervention in Cubs. He said that he did not think "there is a single peace organization in this country which could not be attacked on the same grounds."

The charges against Advance showed "backward reasoning," Sohweig asserted. He said that he had always thought it the right of every American citizen to dissent from any law that he considered unjust.

Libson, under indictment for allegedly falling to register as a member of a Communist action group, claimed that his freedom to print his own beliefs was seriously threatened. At the same time, he said, every American's freedom was imperiled. "If extreme leftist thought is overturned," he asked, "who will he the next extreme left?"