Hearst-baiting, in fact, became a major occupation for the leftist groups in the middle thirties, when the Ethopian and Spanish conflicts drove deeper the wedge between right and left in the United States. The Socialist League's organ. The Student Herald, bitterly attacked Hearsts Record American for its 1935 pinkwash of the University's govern-department. One of the Student Herald's favorite gimmicks was a small advertisement in the CRIMSON, which read:

IF you read the New York Times,

IF you think there is a need for an intelligent student paper in Greater Boston, buy the Student Herald.

ON THE OTHER HAND,

IF you read the Boston American,

IF you therefore think shoes are the only requisites for civilization,

IF you think there is adequate coverage to student thought and action in present Boston Newspapers,

CALL Geneva 9271 (Boston Home for Incurables.)

But tirades against war and war mongers could not occupy leftist groups forever. When war clouds in Europe spread over Russia as well, the Communists turned a somersault and urged cooperation with the Allies against Germany.

The Soviet admirers who organized at the University after the war were few and their activities time. But anti-Russian feeling was soon so high that their every move drew nation-wide publicity and student contempt. When 26 students received, in 1948, a charter for the American Youth for Democracy, papers headlined the fact that "Harvard OK's Red-Front Student Unit." AYD members were mugged by students when distributing literature in Wigglesworth Hall.

A battery of police had to be assigned to its every meeting to protect the speakers from heckling and attack. Under these pressures, the AYD folded, and the last openly Communist organization at Harvard was gone.

Men who were students in the thirties remember the Communists as the most energetic men in the University. Few in numbers, they spread their doctrines in every meeting and under every door possible. Although they gave the University a reputation hard to live down, they were a vital part of the intense political life of Harvard of the thirties.