Publicity Drive Started For Red Youth Festival

A lecture series sponsored by two alleged Red front organizations, moved into Cambridge this weekend, after most undergraduates had moved out to Yale. The groups began a projected Boston area publicity campaign to send students to Moscow for the Communist 1957 International Youth Festival.

The first lecture, accompanied by movies, was presented by a Mrs. Joan Gaynor in Phillips Brooks House last Saturday night to a small student crowd. The presentation immediately brought criticism from the Boston representative of the National Student Association. Earlier this year the NSA wrote letters to all representatives specifically warning them that their attendance at the festival would provide material for Communist propaganda.

The Boston vice-chairman of the NSA, Clive Grey, yesterday again denounced what he termed the "fraudulency" of the campaign's intentions. The drive is sponsored by the International Union of Students and the World Federation of Democratic Youth, both listed as Communist fronts by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Grey stated.

Mrs. Gaynor used movies of this summer's festival at Warsaw, which she had attended with her husband as one of 32 U.S. delegates, despite the fact that under State Department rules at the time their passports were not valid for Poland.

Following the films, she announced that an informal group, headed by Lawrence H. Scott 1G, would publicize the coming Festival in Cambridge in an effort to get some Harvard students to attend.

Prior to last summer's festival, Harry H. Lunn, Jr., president of the NSA, charged that nearly 30,000 non-Polish young people would receive financial aid to be able to attend. "An estimate for the budget of such a meeting would be an accurate indication of its importance in furthering the purposes of those who are financially supporting it," he said.

There are no plans to use contributions the Cambridge group collects to send over American students, and the $6 collected at the lecture will go for further advertising, Mrs. Gaynor said. At this point she added that interested students would have to pay their own way over, but travel within the Iron Curtain countries would be free.