A recent writer for the American Legion's monthly magazine fears that an article by National Commander Earl Cocke, Jr. was too subtle for Legion members. There was some question whether readers would recognize their commander's references to "pastel mink coats, Phi Beta Kappa keys, and deference to the British Foreign Office." In answer to this call for help from the ranks, "American Legion" has taken off its kid gloves.

It takes guts for a national magazine to attack the Red Menace in this country, but "American Legion" has been running such expose articles for over a year now. One of the first was "That Man Budenz" in the November 1950 issue, describing the virtues of professional ex-Communist Louis Budenz. Unfortunately columnist Joseph Alsop has just turned up evidence showing Budenz to be little less than an outright liar under oath.

Then, last May, "American Legion" ran an expose entitled "You Should Know About This Book." The book was a Mentor Pocket edition called "Good Reading." The magazine warns us that "unknown even to the publishers, some poisonous pages were slipped into this book, of which two million copies have been sold." These pages "are loaded to the gunnels with the deadly microbes of mental blight straight from the Marxist laboratories of psychological warfare . . . When exposed to the infection, immature, unstable, or impressionable (though innocent) minds might well become permanently warped!" Several paragraphs later we learn the reason for this philippic--"the book unblushingly pays tribute to those badly decomposed tuberoses of demagoguery, Henry Wallace's `Sixty Million Jobs' and Wendell Willkie's `One World'."

But it is in the September issue that "American Legion" unleashes its Sunday punch and names names, in a lead article by Eugene Lyons. Mr. Lyons titles the article "Our New Privileged Class"; he is piqued that there are people who have been accused of communist sympathies (by such sources as Louis Budenz and "Red Channels") but have not been struck by "the lightning of society's wrath." He shows a picture of the State Department's John Carter Vincent, and underneath runs the stinging indictment: "From China to Switzerland to North Africa." At the top of another page is a string of photos labeled "Dear to the Hearts of Left-wingers are these controversial figures." Here we find composer Aaron Copland, "recently appointed to a choice chair at Harvard"--and Owen Lattimore, "stung by accusations, he wrote a whimpering lament." The editors of "American Legion" add that this article "Makes the Harvards look ingenuous." It may at that, but only by comparison.