COMMUNIST TRAINING OPERATIONS

Part 3

(Communist Activities and Propaganda Among Youth Groups)

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1960

UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE

COMMITTEE ON UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES,

PUBLIC HEARINGS

Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee of the Committee on Un-American Activities met, pursuant to recess, at 10:00 a.m., in the Caucus Room, Old House Office Building, Washington, D.C., Honorable Francis E. Walter (chairman) presiding.

Subcommittee members: Representatives Francis E. Walter, chairman, Pennsylvania; Clyde Doyle, California; Edwin E. Willis, Louisiana; Donald L. Jackson, California; and Gordon H. Scherer, Ohio. Committee members present during hearings: Representatives Walter; Doyle; Tuck, Virginia; Scherer; and Johansen, Michigan. (Appearances as noted.)

Staff members present: Richard Arens, staff director, and Donald T. Appell and Robert H. Goldsborough, investigators.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee will be in order. Who is your first witness, Mr. Arens?

Mr. ARENS. Mr. Herbert Romerstein. Please come forward and remain standing while the chairman administers the oath.

The CHAIRMAN. Raise your right hand, please.

Do you swear the testimony you are about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? Mr. ROMERSTEIN. Yes, sir.

TESTIMONY OF HERBERT ROMERSTEIN

Mr. ARENS. Please identify yourself by name, residence, and

occupation.

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. My name is Herbert Romerstein. I live in Brooklyn, New York. I am a free-lance research specialist, and I do Some writing.

Mr. ARENS. Mr. Romerstein, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. Yes, sir. I was a member of the Communist Party from 1947 to 1949.

Mr. ARENS. Did you subsequently, of your own volition, break with the Communist Party?

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. Yes, sir; I did.

Mr. ARENS. Did you make information at that time available to your Government respecting the Communist Party?

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. Yes, sir. In 1951 I testified before the Internal Security Subcommittee.

Mr. ARENS. Have you subsequently maintained an interest in Communist activities among youth organizations?

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. Yes, I have.

Mr. ARENS. Mr. Romerstein, it is our understanding that in the past summer in order to acquire information for your Government you attended the Vienna Youth Festival held in Vienna, Austria.

I should like to have you, if you will please, sir, proceeding at your own pace, tell us something of the international structure of the group that sponsored the Vienna Youth Festival.

Then we will proceed from there to discuss with you the local organization or organizations which sponsored the Youth Festival, and then we would like to ask you questions respecting the festival itself, which we understand you attended.

May I, as a point of departure, ask you, first of all, on the basis of your background and current study, what is the current drive, current program, of the Communist operation on American soil in regard to youth?

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. Sir, let me first point out that my primary purpose in going to Vienna was not to obtain information for the Government, although the Government is always welcome to anything I know about anything, any sort of subversive activities against this country.

My primary purpose in going was to present an American point of view in Vienna, because I knew American Communists would be going over there and pretending that the American people were supporters of Communist ideology.

Mr. ARENS. I did not mean to suggest in my question, Mr. Romerstein, that you were going under Government auspices or that you were going, in any sense, as one in Government employ to acquire information.

Would you respond, if you please, sir, to the question with reference, first of all, to the current program of the Communist operation on American soil to attempt to penetrate youth groups.

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. Yes, sir. I have here a copy of the June 1959 issue of Political Affairs, which is the Communist Party theoretical organ and which was distributed in the party when I was a member as well as being distributed today. It carries a report by Hyman Lumer, who served as, in effect, national youth director of the Com munist Party. Although he is a middle-aged man he is national educational director and also took charge of youth work of the Communist Party.

This is the report he made in April, 1959.

He points out that a number of nonparty Marxist youth groups have sprung up, chiefly on college campuses, and points to one in particular, in New York, which calls itself the Student Committe on Progressive Education, or SCOPE, for short. This organization is running Marxist classes.

But he also points out that in one area, and this a quote: "In one area, there is a pre-teen group consisting of youngsters 11-12 years of age."

There is one important point I think we should mention. Some of these young people who are involved in the SCOPE group and in the group known as the "Call" group

Mr. DOYLE. What group is that?

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. That is Call, C-a-1-1.

This was signers of A Call to Youth which appeared in Political Affairs in April, 1958.

This group has frequently expressed its contempt for this committee. its contempt for American institutions, but when they receive their orders from the Communist Party they do not express contempt. They simply take those orders.

Let me give you an example of this. This group wants the formation immediately of a nationwide Marxist-Leninist youth organi

zation.

Mr. ARENS. When they say a nationwide Marxist-Leninist youth organization in Communist jargon, what do they actually mean? Mr. ROMERSTEIN. It may be called a Young Communist League, as it once was, or American Youth for Democracy or Labor Youth League or something else entirely. It is, in fact, the youth section of the Communist Party. They wish to set this up nationwide, as soon as possible. They have been discussing this for quite a while now. Because of the internal situation in the Communist Party, where some of the leaders of the party are in a different faction than the leaders of this youth group, the party has not permitted them to form this nationwide youth organization. Lumer points out in the article that this is not the time for such a nationwide youth organization.

Let me point to something that I received when I was in the party. It is a publication called "Youth" and it was put out by the National Youth Commission of the Communist Party in 1948.

They define a term they call "vanguardism." That is, they, the youth, did not "understand that the party was the vanguard of the entire working class, including the youth, and that they did not have the responsibility of formulating general and overall political policy." In other words, the youth are not permitted to think for themselves. They are supposed to do what the party tells them to, and at the national convention of the Communist Party in December, 1949-pardon me-1959, which I covered from the press room, a resolution was passed on youth which uses almost the exact same terminology.

The party is the vanguard of the working class and, therefore, of its youth, as well as of non-working-class youth.

It should not and does not delegate its vanguard role to any other group or organization. To do so would mean to set up more than one center of Communist leadership, more than one Communist Party. These young people who are so brave before congressional committees knuckle down when the Communist Party tells them they cannot form a youth organization immediately and they have to form local committees until the Communist Party is able to establish a national youth commission to control the situation.

51693-60-pt. 3—2

I wonder about whether any of them might have courage to buck the Communist Party on this. As yet we have not seen any evidence of this.

(At this point, Mr. Johansen entered the hearing room.)

Mr. SCHERER. Whom did you say was the author of that publication?

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. Sir, the Political Affairs?

Mr. SCHERER. The article you were referring to?

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. The person was Hyman Lumer.

Mr. SCHERER. Hyman Lumer. We had a Wilfred Lumer. Is he related to this man?

Mr. ARENS. We had Hyman Lumer in Pittsburgh, Mr. Scherer. Mr. SCHERER. Mr. Lumer was also identified.

Mr. ARENS. There was a Wilfred Lumer. That was on another subject. Hyman Lumer is the educational director of the Communist Party.

Mr. SCHERER. Are they related?

Mr. ARENS. I do not think so.

Would you kindly outline for the committee, Mr. Romerstein, the background and structure of the international setup which sponsored the Vienna Youth Festival held in Vienna, Austria, just last summer!

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. Yes, sir. The festival was organized as the previous six festivals were by two international Communist organizations, the World Federation of Democratic Youth, with its offices in Hungary, and the International Union of Students, with its offices in Czechoslovakia.

The CHAIRMAN. What was the second one?

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. The International Union of Students. These two groups are the international Communist youth and the student organizations. They set up what they call an International Preparatory Committee to run the Vienna Youth Festival which met in Stockholm in 1958 and decided that they would have their festival in Vienna.

Mr. ARENS. May I interpose this question. What is the age bracket of those who are in charge of the international apparatus which has been putting on these youth festivals?

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. I have not run across any of them under thirty. Most of them are in their forties. In particular, the delegate of the Austrian Communist youth organization-all Austrian youth boycotted the festival except the Communist group called the Free Austrian Youth-their delegate to the Stockholm meeting that organized the festival was 46 years old. His name was Walter Wachs. He is a 46-year-old youth.

Let me point out once more on this question as to whether the Communists allow the youths to make decisions for themselves—the American representative to the International Preparatory Committee was over 60 years old. His name is Holland Roberts, and he ran a Communist education institution in California called the California Labor School and was the American representative to the Communist World Peace Council.

Mr. DOYLE. You say he was over 60 years old?

Mr. ROMERSTEIN. Yes, sir. He was teaching school in 1918.

Mr. DOYLE. Did you say that the members of this preparatory committee that admittedly were Communist, averaged between 30 and 40 years of age?