Labor and Civil Liberties — A Troublesome Problem

Some time ago the Fund for the Republic sponsored a poll to discover how Americans felt about “Communism, conformity and civil liberties.” The general findings of the study make highly illuminating reading; they are available in book form (Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties, by Samuel Stouffer). Two leaders in workers’ education, Benjamin Segal and Harry Fleishman, have since managed to obtain exclusive and complete data on the 750 rank-and-file union members, 687 wives of union members, and 107 local union presidents included among the 6,500 persons interviewed—data not broken down as such in the book. They published a good part of this material in July 1955 in a series of articles in Labor’s Da...