Louis Calhern, starring on Broadway as Oliver Wendell Holmes in "Magnificent Yankee," spoke at a meeting of the theatre division of ICCASP at the Henry Miller Theatre on February 22. That month the organization also joined with a number of other left-leaning and front organizations to demand that the US break off diplomatic relations with Franco's Spain. The literature division met March 12 at the Henry Hudson Hotel to hear liberal Republican city council member Stanley M. Isaacs, novelist Henrietta Buckmaster, artist Robert Gwathmey, actor Jose Ferrer, Sidney Faulkner, Mrs. Minnie Ferguson and Horace Marshall.
The big news in March was the appointment of Harold Ickes as executive chairman. He recently had resigned as Secretary of the Interior because of his opposition to the confirmation of controversial oil man and Truman crony Edwin W. Pauley as Under-Secretary of Navy. At the time Ickes was the only member of FDR's original cabinet still serving. Jo Davidson made the announcement of Ickes' appointment at the meeting of the ICCASP's Philadelphia chapter where he also announced that the group had grown to 10,000 members. At the same meeting, Senator Harley M. Kilgore of West Virginia warned that a small but vocal minority in the US was "attempting to take us down the road to imperialism, a one-way street with a dead end, war and world destruction." He said that this cabal was conducting an anti-Soviet crusade. Davidson said that ICCASP was reorganizing with a five point program- international security, full employment, an end to racial discrimination, the abolition of poll tax and an extension of medical, cultural and scientific facilities throughout the world.
Also in March, WOR carried Ickes speech at an ICCASP dinner at the Hotel Commodore. Window dressers belonging to the ICCASP created 26 windows illustrating the need for price controls at the Manhattan Price Control Board at 1775 Broadway. The New York science division adopted a resolution censuring Truman's appointment of Bernard Baruch to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. They urged that he be replaced by none other than the godlike Henry Wallace. The group objected to Baruch on the grounds that he would be taking advice from Wall Street bankers and the "grand dukes" of science James Conant, Vannevar Bush and Arthur Compton, and would not be likely to develop and make the best use of atomic energy for civilian purposes. Hmm. Wonder from whom Wallace would have been taking advice?