Coping with Communists: Communists are not very numerous but they get around; you will run into them everywhere. There is a popular belief that Communist infiltration is found only in the left wing of the Democratic Party; I have not found it so. A Communist cell can pop up wherever more than four people assemble. I have spotted them in organizations so reactionary that their presence, if known, would have caused deaths from apoplexy.

Communists are most easily understood if you think of them as a fanatical, evangelical religious sea. I speak here of American Communists; I have no knowledge of Russian Communists, having never met one to my knowledge and having never been to Russia.

From the standpoint of religion the peculiarities of communists form a recognizable pattern. They have an outrageously unscientific "bible" which they point to as being the last word in science. It appears in "authorized" and "forbidden" translations. They have a god - the idea of the "proletariat" - a major prophet, a minor prophet, and an apostate saint. They are absolutist in viewpoint and brook no argument Anything is moral to them which serves to propagate the faith, no matter how offensive to the unbeliever. Theirs is a "higher" morality; what we have is a "decadent, bourgeois" morality. They are indefatigably zealous. They are usually sincerely and altruistically devoted to their cause. You will find other such characteristics.

Their favorite technique is to bore from within. The operators are usually clandestine Communists, hiding behind some other party label-this is not offensive to their own strict moral code. They will make use of democratic parliamentary procedure and the democratic concept of free speech to ends destructive ofboth. Their notion of free speech is one in which you hire the hall and they do all the talking, on a subject of their choice. It is stricdy a one-way proposition - try it in their hall sometime!

A common technique is to operate in a cell of three -one to make a motion, one to second it, and the third to harangue. They generally spread around the hall to do this and may not even appear to be acquainted.

A chairman confronted with this triple play can find himself in a pickle. The subject picked by the cell is always one which can be made popular with the particular crowd and which is not overtly connected with Communism. A group of three can often stampede a crowd into some action disastrous to the objectives of the crowd but suited in some devious fashion to Communist purposes.

An able chairman can prevent this by means described earlier in this book if he spots the Communist cell.

Fortunately this can often be done in plenty of time. American Communists are hardly ever very intelligent although many display some aspects ofbriltiance. They tend to behave in regular patterns which they have been taught and by which they can be spotted, but they can most easily be spotted by their addiction to catch words and phrases.

These shibboleths change from season to season, but, if you are in politics, you will hear them, come to recognize them, and listen for them.

A few years back the word "activize" was such a touchstone. "People's" this and "People's" that has enjoyed a long popularity, as has "United Front." There is no way to tell you what these words will be at some time in the future. Listen for them and check the Daily Worker now and then to see what they are up to.

Some of them reveal themselves by calling themselves "Communist-sympathizers." This sort of person explains that he is not a Communist himself, but sympathetic to their social ideals. Consider, citizen - have you ever heard of a Democrat-sympathizer, or a Republican-sympathizer? There ain't no such animal.

Communists are merely irritating nuisances rather than dangerous. Only the timid and the mendacious profess to fear a communist revolution in this country. Anyone acquainted with the mares and the culture of this country can see that ninety-nine Americans out of a hundred, at the very least, don't want any part of Communism. It does not fit in with our individual ambitions.

Of what use, then, are the American Communists?

They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of clanger to the Republic.

Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.

Unfortunately we are more prone to ignore the sick spot thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.

Lawyers in Politics: Lawyers constitute around half of all our state legislators and congressmen. They hold other political offices way out of proportion to their numbers in the population. Many people take this as a matter of course and it is in fact a logical consequence of certain features of our social structure.

We have already mentioned the fact that a lawyer can run for office easier than most other people and that, in many offices, he can take a bribe in an undetec-table manner. However these are not real objections to lawyers in public life; lawyers are certainly as patriotic and as honest as the average run of men and I believe that they average more intelligent than the general run.

Nevertheless it seems very unfortunate that lawyers should make laws. It may even be argued that lawyers should not be judges. The latter idea is certainly radical, but the profession of judging is by no means the same as the profession of the solicitor or the barrister. It could be a separate profession; the origin of the identification of the two professions seems to go back to Biblical times, when priest, teachers, judges, and lawyers were all one profession. Two of the professions separated out; the other two could be separated just as, in England, the two professions of solicitor and barrister are separate. There is now no legal requirement that the justices of our Supreme Court be lawyers.

But lawyers do their greatest damage in lawmaking. In the first place lawyers speak a language not known to the rest of us; they write laws in that language and then we must hire one of their guild to tell us what the law means. They assert that their special language is necessary, as ordinary speech is not suffitiendy exact. One may doubt this; many semanticians have disputed the claim. A layman is surely entitled to doubt it, even without the special analytical skills of the semantician and without knowing the other language, since lawyers are forever disputing as to what a law means after they have written it.

I wonder what the result would be if one could attack the constitutionality of a law on the grounds that it could not be understood by the ordinary literate adult? The ordinary adult is required to obey the laws-which carries with it the implication that there must be some way of telling him what it is that he must do. How would it be to require that laws be expressed in such terms in the first place?

Even a lawyer cannot require me to rimpf unless he has some way to tell me, in English, what it is I have to dotorimpf.

A foreign language is a minor vice of the lawmaking lawyer, however. Foreign languages can be gotten around, more or less, through interpreters. The worst thing a lawyer brings to the task of lawmaking is a faulty orientation.

You have heard of the Fillyloo Bird? He flies backwards because he does not care where he is going but he likes to see where he has been. Lawyers as a group are strongly related to the Fillyloo Bird, by training, by lack of training, and by association. They look to the past