On April 29 and 30, 1964, a subcommittee of the Committee on Un- American Activities held public hearings in Buffalo, N.Y., in compliance with a resolution adopted by the full committee on March 4 of the same year. The hearings concerned the structure, organization, strategy, tactics, and major objectives of the Communist Party and other Communist organizations in the Buffalo area. Their purpose was to assist the committee and the Congress in considering legislation designed to protect the national security.

Members of the subcommittee present for the Buffalo hearings included Representatives Joe R. Pool, of Texas; August E. Johansen, of Michigan; Richard H. Ichord, of Missouri; and John M. Ashbrook, of Ohio.

Mr. Pool, acting as chairman in the absence of Mr. Willis, pointed out that the committee had held hearings in Buffalo in 1957, but that significant changes in Communist Party organization and activities had taken place since that time and committee investigation revealed that two new Communist organizations, the Workers World Party and the Progressive Labor Movement, had come into being in the Buffalo area since 1957.

The Workers World group, he said, had been founded by former members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Buffalo who had left the SWP in February 1959 because they believed the old-line Trotskyist organization was not sufficiently revolutionary in its outlook.

The Progressive Labor Movement had grown out of a faction within the orthodox Communist Party which, defying the main party's position, sided with Peking in the dispute between the Chinese Communists and Moscow. Its members also disagreed with the policy adopted by the National Committee of the CPUSA on the action to be taken following the Supreme Court decision of 1961 upholding the registration provisions of the Internal Security Act. This policy was to reduce the national leadership of the Communist Party to three and ignore the registration order.

The dissident faction wanted to dissolve the Communist Party and re-form it under a new name. They felt this would obviate the need for the party to register under the Internal Security Act of 1950.

Expelled from the Communist Party in 1961 for refusing to toe its line, Mortimer Scheer, a leader of the faction, and his supporters organized in Buffalo the nucleus of a new Communist group, the Progressive Labor Movement, which now has its headquarters in New York City.

*Text from Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities. House of Representatives. 88th Cong. Pp. 1517.