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    "label": "Memorandum from Chester Kerr to Wilson Wyatt and Leon Henderson",
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    "title": "Memorandum from Chester Kerr to Wilson Wyatt and Leon Henderson",
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    "ocrText": "- 3 -\nElliott was followed by another musical interlude - a colored boy named Kenneth\nSpencer singing \"Freedom Is My Land\" - and then the entre-acte business took up\nagain, same technique, this time the man-girl conversation leading up to the same\ndramatic appearance of another speaker, one John Randolph who identified himself\nas a veteran and thus, ipso facto, their spokesman.\nI was subsequently informed that Randolph acquired his veteran status by\nservice within the U.S. and that he is at the moment an aspiring actor. His\nSmithfield performance indicated his real ambition and he made the most of the\nchance to appear before Lillian He 11man and Herman Shumlin. He was for housing\nand for the people of Greece, was against Turkey, and \"tired of fighting.\" Let\nthem do the fighting this time. I don't want to be sent to Greece. Without us,\nthey can't march. They will stop if we squawk loud enough. The chairman of the\nAVC felt this was perhaps the low point of the evening.\nRandolph swapped places in the next interlude of darkness with, lo and behold,\nOne World Corwin. Although he tried us slightly with the way in which he wrapped\nhimself in Willkie's cloak, this was undeniably the evening's sanest speaker from\nour point of view and thus the dullest from the point of view of the faithful.\nWith no attempt at rabble-rousing whatever, in contrast to the other trained\nseals, Corwin read a quiet, sincere speech, launching a sober attack on unilateral\naction. In the course of it, he got off a couple of able cracks: 1) \"There are\nno Communists on this platform tonight, unless Elliott is keeping something from\nus\" (uncertain laughter); 2) \"If membership in an organization containing a few\nCommunists is evidence of membership in the Communist Party, then the U.S.A. must\nbe Communist because it belongs to the United Nations. (This was probably\nNorman's last public appearance, since it can reasonable be assumed that following\nthe devastating Hamburger profile in this week's New Yorker he has no choice but\nto enter a monastery.)\nFrank Kingdon came next. He barely mentioned Greece, devoted most of his\nraucous shouting to praise of PÇA, which he labelled \"the only liberal organiza-\ntion to speak out against the Truman Doctrine.\" (This was as close as anyone\ncame all evening to mentioning ADA.) He claimed Vandenburg for their side, pre-\nsumably because of the amendment, and this brought loud applause. He tore Senator\nBall apart, using the extreme bad taste of remaking \"I said Ball, not the plural, \"\nwhich convulsed the audience. He said that when FDR died, liberals lost the\nDemocratic Party as an instrument of their cause (isolated shouts from the crowd\nof I'we mant a third party\"). He wound up with a strong \"join PCA and fight with\nus\" plea, which we thought fairly academic since the crowd, except for perhaps a\ncouple of dozen like ourselves, was heartily in accord with what he wanbed to\nfight for.\nKingdon then went into the collection speech and did plenty OK. There was\nno single contribution to match Dubinsky's $5000 in Washington, but there were\nseveral $2500 and $0000 checks, and plenty of thers down the line. The collection\nwas magnificently organized, as indeed was the entire evening. There was a\npretty girl collector for every fifty members of the audience. Kingdon finally\ngot down to demanding a dollar per head, and each girl stuffed a bag nearly full.\nNot content to stop there, he next demanded loose change and the firls each pro-\nduced a coin box. We guessed (and hand no way of knowing) a take of from $30,000\nto $50,000.\nSERVICE"
}