200 U. S. Delegates Pictured Their Country Like This. .

(The following is an excerpt from the official program distributed at the U. s. cultural presentation.)

"...In a time of developing economic crisis, the few of us lucky enough to land jobs face declining wages, insecure seniority, speed-up and general campaigns of terror and sabotage against our unions. But the greater part of our young people have no jobs at all, and walk the streets in search of employment, unable to secure adequate training facilities, unable to barter trained or untrained muscle and brain for over a pittance, forming a desperate reservoir of reserve labor and an unwitting weapon against the unemployed. Many of us are former servicemen, our meager veterans allotments exhausted, our post-war dreams of full employment smashed. To the ever-louder demands of our youth for jobs, all Wall St. men can answer is "Join the Army..."

"The greater part of American youth have no jobs. America is run by economic royalists and military brass hats. The average American family needs $78 per week to survive it receives $58."

These and similar statements were made last August by one of the few U. S. youth groups to recently penetrate the "Iron Curtain." Similar beliefs are still actively being spread by this group.

Ten thousand delegates to the World Youth and Student Festival at Budapest, August 14 to 28, heard or read these descriptions of American. This was the second such festival, dedicated to "peace, independence, democracy"; it grouped representatives from 82 national groups.

Most of the 200-person U. S. delegation claimed only to represent "people interested in the preservation of peace." The majority of the group held political opinions ranging considerably to the left of the Progressive Party. A fluctuating minority, often no more than half a dozen people, contained members of such organizations as the American Friends Service Committee and the YMCA; a few independent students were included in this minority. Three delegates went to Harvard.

Crime Marked Stay

Marking the delegation's two-week stay in Budapest were incidents of intra-group wrangling and suspicion, during which the majority frequently attempted to silence dissenters from its policy. The delegation also ran into friction with the U. S. Embassy, and one instance of out-and-out crime.

The U. S. delegation was organized last spring by a group called the American Festival Committee, with headquarters in a dingy building on Bleecker St. in downtown Manhattan. People wishing to attend the festival had to make arrangements through this committee; the Hungarian government was unusually willing to approve all visa applications made through the group. Anyone who wished to go to the festival and could play his way was welcome--the only restriction was that no purely "observers" were allowed, all had to be members of the delegation.

When the U. S. group arrived in Budapest on Aug. 14, it found the Hungarian government had turned over large areas of its capital city to the festival. Buses had been commandeered for transportation. The best restaurants in town were used to feed the delegates. The Amusement Park on Margaret Island in the Danube was carmarked for use by Festival people. So were the city's enormous public baths.

All these facilities were packaged and sold to the delegates for forty dollars for the two weeks stay. The U. S. delegates were bedded down in acollege dormitory with newly-in-stalled additional plumbing; they were assigned interpreters by the Hungarian government. They were given periodicals to keep them up on world events. "The Hungarians did a damn good job." and one of the delegates.

First event of the Festival was a mass opening ceremony in Budapest's huge stadium on Aug. 15. All the delegates were impressed by the unquestionably spontaneous reception they received as they drove through the city.

The head of the Hungarian Festival Committee welcomed the U. S. delegates to the ceremony. So did the chiefs of other important groups: a U. S. S. R. Youth Organization, "Free" China, and France. According to one American student who attended the ceremony, "their speeches were standard stuff--the vague, welcome-to-our-fair-city type of thing."

The address given by the girl co-chairman of the U. S. group was considerably more politically-toned. A student told a CRIMSON reporter that "we had no time to work out the speech before she gave it, so we voted to let her write it on her own."