Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, RIP.

THE TELL a story about David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and John L. Lewis, founder of the CIO. In the mid-1930s, Dubinsky broke away from the AFL and joined the CIO. A no-nonsense anti-Communist, Dubinsky became alarmed at the influx, with Lewis's approval, of Communist Party organizers into the ranks of the CIO staff and officialdom. When he protested to Lewis at this open Communist infiltration, Lewis drawled his reply: "Well, Dave, stop worring about the Communists. After all, who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?"

Unconvinced by Lewis's reassurances, Dubinsky returned to the AFL. In the meantime, Lewis--a hero to the Communists because his isolationism at the outbreak of World War II paralleled the Stalin-Hitler PAct and because he had endorsed Wendell L. Willie over the "imperialist warmonger" FDR--overnight became their villain after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941. Lewis refused to change his isolationism, so the Communists finally threw him out as president of the CIO.

A year or so later, Dubinsky ran into Lewis lunching at the Washington Sheraton. As Dubinsky left the dining room he greeted Lewis and then, with his sly, malicious grin, added: "Nu, John, so who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?"

Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, who died March 8 at 84, was, in his way, the John L. Lewis of Journalism. He, too, thought that he could use the Communists to achieve his ambitions as a liberal newspaper editor and publisher. In the end, they helped bring him down and also PM, the New York daily he founded in 1940. It had its brief moment of glory, but, with a supreme intellectual arrogance, he thought that if he played the Popular Front game--using such friends as Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett as his intermediaries with Earl Browder--his liberal journalism could win a circulation and power that would give him independence.

Ingersoll was, of course, no more a Communist than was John L. Lewis. Both men merely wanted to use Communists for their ends and were willing to compromise whatever moral standards they possessed to achieve those ends. He hired Communists recommended to him by New York Communist labor leaders, thinking it would help circulation. It didn't. Yet, to his credit, he ignored Communist pressure during the Nazi-Soviet Pact and called for U.S. support of beleaguered Britain. But when Hitler attacked Stalin, the pall of Communism descended on the paper. It was an ethos summarized in Orwell's famous finding that the tragedy of the liberal intellectuals of the 1930s was that they were anti-Fascist but not anti-totalitarian.

For a brief period in 1944, when Ingersoll was off to war, PM allowed some non-Communist editors (including this author^ to function, but when he returned, that era of relative independence ended. He didn't last, and by the end of 1946 he was out, another victim of the illusion that Communists are, as the Popular front apologia used to have it, "liberals in a hurry."