Fisher and the HYRC

A lot of things got straightened out last night in this case of Fisher vs, the Harvard Young Republican Club. All of them fall into one basic, unpleasant pattern. It is a pattern of guilt on both sides. The Club has been guilty of various underhanded political machinations--the sort of maneuvering that probably goes on in all the big undergraduate political organizations, but that has never before become general knowledge. What is more serious, it has also been guilty of encouraging Fisher, whether officially or unofficially, to do some of the things he has done. Fisher, on his side, has been guilty of some false accusations. And he has sent a 300-page report to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

This report is the most important single aspect of the entire affair. Even though it has been discredited in Washington, the report was written and sent to the House Committee. It shows that the House Committee's business has a lot more to do with your business, and your roommate's business, that most non-alarmist people probably realized a few days ago. And anybody who could help the House Committee to extend its business in this way automatically discredits himself as a political figure, at least among those people who object to House Committee investigations of the Thomas variety.

The position of the Young Republican Club in this matter, to get down to the specific issues that were straightened out last night, appears to be an innocent one. Fisher wrote the Report during the summer at the request of a high officer of the National Young Republican Federation, and the YRC's officers knew nothing about it until they returned to College this fall.

This clears up the question of guilt. Responsibility, however, is an other matter, and the fact that last spring's YRC leaders helped to get Fisher, as a Young Republican, into NSA, places some of the responsibility on the Club. This point is not so tenuous as it may seem. Fisher is conspicuously unsophisticated when it comes to politics--this is an other of the points that became clear last night--and the YRC must have known that in an important position, he might become subject to curious influences. Yet the YRC informed all its members that Fisher would be good man to vote for as a Harvard NSA delegate.

It is Fisher's lack of political sophistication that has caused a good bit of the trouble. Several of his accusations, such as the one on racial discrimination, are clearly unjustified, although they appear to come out of naivete rather than out of dishonesty. If, as the case seems to be, he was trying to recruit Negroes for the YRC at Registration by using a line involving Lincoln and the freeing of the Slaves, it was hardly discrimination on the part of the YRC to ask him not to continue his act. At least two of Fisher's other points cannot be gotten past so easily, however.

One of these points concerns the alleged "support," allegedly supplied off and on, to Fisher in his NSA and Student Council activities. Both NSA and the Student Council are, of course, non-political organizations, and the YRC has been careful not to have any official say in Fisher's business. All that happened was this: three personal friends of Fisher's, all members of the nine-man YRC Planning Committee, give him advice, or reprimanded him, as the case demanded--strictly in their capacity as personal friends. It would not be fair, on this point, to accuse Fisher of a deficiency of sophistication when he assumed that he was receiving the opinion of the Planning Committee.

The second point concerns the relationship of Arthur W. Bingham to the League For Reaction. Nobody will Know, at least for a while, whether or not Bingham actually is a founder of the League, as Fisher states. True enough, Bingham has denied ever being member of the League. But he has failed to answer some of Fisher's more specific accusations, or even to comment on them.

One of these accusations involves a 'phone call from Bingham to Fisher in which Bingham supposedly said that the League For Reaction was formed as a test-balloon to see how much bitterness there was over the results of the Presidential election. Bingham refused to say whether or not there has been such a 'phone call or whether he had made such a statement.

On the one hand, Fisher has made some distorted accusations, and this may he another of them; on the other, members of the YRC Planning Committee have conceived of peculiar methods in the past, and Bingham is a member of the Planning Committee, and the test-balloon idea is therefore not extraordinary. But no matter which way it finally comes out, this sub-quarrel will only add one more lie to the pattern of underhandedness, bitterness, and dangerous, and dangerous naivete that has characterized the entire affair, and the characterizes too much of politics as practiced by Harvard undergraduates.