To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

CRIMSON'S "After the Trial" editorial of October 20, raises a very timid and blushing doubt on the constitutionality of the Smith Act and goes on to question loyalty case procedure. It isn't that it makes much difference whether Communists are jailed or federal workers fired for political beliefs; the big issue is whether everything is done with "procedural safeguards." A yawn from the writer and the piece is done.

A bit more excitement is called for. Hysteria over the "Red" issue is everywhere. At Peekskill over a hundred people were injured in stone throwing after a concert. Local vigilantes have suggested running a Harvard professor out of town. Page one of the same CRIMSON says that the Navy wants to know, among other things, what sort of social affairs its ROTC men attend. The jury and the judge in the Hiss case were threatened after the trial. And now leaders of the Communist Party are jailed for "teaching, advocating, and encouraging." This hasn't been a crime in the many other years the Communists have been doing it; nor is it a crime now in such countries as England, France, Sweden, etc.

In other years the CRIMSON would have found such a condition of the country shocking. Courts would have thrown out the case against the Communists. America has never been a land of persecution. Here no one has been afraid to talk up; the police have not been permitted to keep files on the beliefs of citizens. When the situation has been momentarily altered, as in the period which gave a neighboring city unpleasant notoriety, or when a "Red Hunt" after the First World War put hundreds in chains, it has been to the shame of our nation. The fact that because of the present hysteria it has been possible to give the jailing of the Communists a legal hale is irrelevant. An attack on liberty of expression can come through executive (loyalty board), legislative (Sullivan Bill) or judicial (trial of Communists) means. Whatever form it takes it must be stopped. Richard W. Reichard, 4G