Venerable Chestnut

One near-zero morning last week, cheerful, bespectacled John Williamson stepped briskly from his apartment in Manhattan's Washington Heights to be greeted by some absolute strangers. They made themselves known with dispatch. They were FBI agents and immigration officers, and they hustled John Williamson off to Ellis Island.

Thus the Government tapped another top Communist for deportation. Williamson, 45, married and father of two sons, is the party's national labor secretary and a member of its twelve-man policymaking board. The Justice Department identified him as fourth in the U.S. party's hierarchy, called him "the most important figure" it has picked up to date (others: Gerhart Eisler,* Alexander Bittelman, Claudia Jones).

Like the others, Williamson was accused of advocating the overthrow by violence of the U.S. Government. His lawyer, Mrs. Carol King, who had defended them all, promptly sought his release on bail, set to planning his defense.

Before Williamson can be deported, however, the Justice Department will have to nail down the question of whether or not he is an alien. The Government says he was born in Scotland and came to the U.S. in 1913. Williamson's story is that he was born in San Francisco, where his birth records were destroyed in the great fire and earthquake of 1906.

Immigration men consider that yarn a venerable chestnut. Almost every Oriental picked up for illegal entry into the U.S. has tried to use it.

Also ticketed for deportation this week was Ferdinand Christapher Smith, national secretary of Joe Curran's C.I.O. National Maritime Union. Smith, a Negro, entered the U.S. from Jamaica in 1919. Like Williamson, he was picked up as he left his Manhattan apartment and taken to Ellis Island. He not only advocated violent overthrow of the U.S., said the warrant, but returned from a Mexican trip in 1945 without a visa. Smith's politics were no news to Curran. Only recently Joe had called him a Communist Party cardholder.

* Whose composer brother, Hanns, ordered deported last week, agreed to leave the country voluntarily. He will go to Paris, write the score for a movie version of Alice in Wonderland.

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