Page 14 - Report on the National Lawyers Guild, legal bulwark of the Communist Party

8 THE NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD
a listing of organizations as subversive pursuant to the President's loyalty order, in which it urged revocation and cancellation of the list.
OPPOSES LEGISLATIVE ACTION ON COMMUNISM
Any legislation which would curb the activities of Communists,
regardless of the importance of such legislation to our national security, is faced with bitter opposition from the National Lawyers Guild.
At its first convention, the guild opposed statutes providing that teachers take a loyalty oath or those "making criminal advocacy of or
membership in any political party" (Daily Worker, February 23, 1937, p. 5). The latter was directed against pending legislation against criminal syndicalism, affecting the legal status of the Communist Party in various States.
It has opposed legislation directed against the Communist Party, Voorhis registration bill, H. R. 1054; the Tenney law in California barring the Communist Party from the ballot (Lawyers Guild Review, June 1941, p. 66; Daily Worker, May 18, 1942, p. 5).
The National Lawyers Guild denounced the anti-Communist pro- visions of the Taft-Hartley law on the ground that it was unconstitu- tional. Leonard B. Boudin, chairman of the labor law committee of the National Lawyers Guild, testified before a labor subcommittee of the House of Representatives concerning the non-Communist affidavit of the Taft-Hartley bill. At that time, Mr. Boudin stated that the non-Communist affidavit was an insult to the American worker because Congress thereby told the workers they were not wise enough to manage their own affairs.
On May 7, 1948, the National Lawyers Guild denounced the Mundt-
Nixon bill to control subversive activities. In commenting on the
Mundt-Nixon bill, the Lawyers Guild Review, bimonthly publication of the National Lawyers Guild, made the following statement:
It would be a costly error to treat this measure as merely another unwise legis- lativeproposaltobeanalyzedandthenroutinelydisapproved. Webelieveitis far more than that. Its concepts are so hostile to our democratic way of life that its enactment into law would amount to nothing less than a coup d'etat in con- stitutional guise.
The parallel between the above opinion and that of Simon W. Ger- son, who represented the Communist Party, U. S. A., before the Com- mittee on Un-American Activities on May 2, 1950, is striking. We quote his comment in part:
Any bill which seeks such objectives will necessarily do force and violence to the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Let us therefore understand the issue clearly: The United States can have the Constitution or it can have the Mundt-Nixon bill. It can't have both.
On May 2, 1950, Harry C. Lamberton, representing the National Lawyers Guild, testified before the Committee on Un-Auierican Activities against the Nixon bill (H. R. 7595).
In the July 14, 1949, .issue>f j the Daily jWorker, the National Lawyers Guild was reported as urging the defeat of the Govern- ment's bill to fix heavier penalties for unlawful possession of secret documents, as referred to in the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and to lengthen the statute of limitatioas on prosecution of peacetime
spies.