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THE 

COMMUNIST 
TRIAL 


•^••VaBtt  ^*<rLr  *      *       »*         ' 

erican  Crossroads 


by 

George  Marion 


By  the  same  author: 

BASES  AND  EMPIRE: 

A  Chart  of  American  Expansion 

THE  "FREE  PRESS": 
Portrait  of  a  Monopoly 


From  the  collection  of  the 
2      n 

z        m 

o  PreTinger 

i     a 

AJibrary 

t         P 


San  Francisco,  California 
2006 


ERRATUM : 

Two  remarks  by  District  Judge  Vincent  L.  Leibell  are  incorrectly 
Abated  on  page  63  to  Judge  Medina.  The  same  quotations  are 
,roduced  in  "Why  This  Book"  preceding  the  title  page. 


The  Communist  Trial 


WHY  THIS  BOOK? 

The  answer  is  in  a  letter  by  the  author  to  a  Protestant 
minister  in  Gilbertsville,  New  York. 
REVEREND  SIR: 

Thank  you  for  your  obviously  sincere  letter,  and  permit  me 
to  reply  with  equal  directness.  You  say:  "It  is  my  opinion  that 
Judge  Medina  has  bent  over  backward  to  give  the  defendants 
in  the  current  conspiracy  trial  the  fairest  sort  of  treatment." 
What  else  could  you  think?  You  have  been  told  the  defend- 
ants and  their  lawyers  behaved  abominably  and  only  the 
"saintly  patience"  of  the  Judge  kept  the  trial  going.  But  you 
have  not  been  told  the  shoe  is  on  the  other  foot. 

Let  me  cite— from  the  very  beginning  of  the  pre-trial  record 
going  back  to  the  summer  of  1948— proof  of  the  gross  preju- 
dice with  which  Judge  Medina  entered  this  case— and  refused 
to  leave  it. 

MEDINA:  "That  is  the  way  we  conduct  our  judicial  proceed- 
ings in  this  country."  You  have  to  bend  over  backward  indeed 
to  miss  the  inference  that  the  defendants  are  agents  of  a  for- 
eign country— Russia.  And  again:  "You'll  get  an  American 
trial."  Pages  20-22. 

MEDINA:  "If  the  difficulty  has  to  do  with  this  idea  of  over- 
throwing the  government  by  force,  public  policy  might  require 
that  the  matter  be  given  prompt  attention.  There  may  be 
some  more  of  these  fellows  up  to  that  sort  of  thing."  Page  126. 

MEDINA:  "Not  involving  weasel  words  that  they  used,  if  you 
interpret  them  to  mean  the  overthrow  of  the  government  by 
violence,  and  they  say  they  do  not,  isn't  there  just  some  play 
on  words  there?"  Pages  130-132. 

When  pre-trial  defense  attorney  Unger  said:  "There  is 
not  a  word  in  the  indictment  alleging  any  acts  committed 
by  the  defendants  or  by  the  Communist  Party,"  page  139 
shows: 

MEDINA:  "No,  they  want  to  wait  until  they  get  everything 
set  and  then  the  acts  will  come." 

All  this  was  before  Judge  Medina  had  been  named  trial 
judge.  This  was  before  any  misconduct  could  have  occurred: 
it  was  before  any  of  trial  counsel  for  the  defense  had  even  been 
retained! 

Who  provoked  whom?  Don't  you  think  you'd  better  read  my 
report  from  the  record  before  you  form  an  opinion? 


THE 

COMMUNIST 

TRIAL 


An  American  Crossroads 


by   GEORGE   MARION 


'AIRPLAY  PUBLISHERS 
25  West  44th  Street 
New  York  18,  N.  Y. 


Copyright  1949  by  George  Marion 
All  rights  reserved 


ANNE  J.  WILSON 

714  North  Mentor  Avenue 

PASADENA  6,  CALIFORNIA 

The  People  in  This  Book 


PRESIDING  JUDGE:  Harold  R.  Medina. 

DEFENDANTS: 

Eugene  Dennis,  John  B.  Williamson,  Jacob  Stachel,  Robert 
G.  Thompson,  Benjamin  J.  Davis,  Jr.,  Henry  Winston,  John 
Gates,  Irving  Potash,  Gilbert  Green,  Carl  Winter  and  Gus 
Hall. 

PROSECUTORS  : 

John  F.  X.  McGohey,  United  States  Attorney  for  the  South- 
ern District  of  New  York. 

Frank  H.  Gordon  and  Irving  Shapiro,  Special  Assistants  to 
the  U.S.  Attorney  for  the  Southern  District  of  New  York. 

Edward  C.  Wallace,  Special  Assistant  to  the  Attorney-Gen- 
eral of  the  United  States. 

Lawrence  K.  Bailey,  Attorney,  Department  of  Justice. 

TRIAL  COUNSEL  FOR  THE  DEFENSE: 

George  W.  Crockett,  Richard  Gladstein,  Abraham  J.  Isser- 
man,  Louis  F.  McCabe,  Harry  Sacher  and  Eugene  Dennis, 
who  acted  as  own  attorney. 

Unger,  Freedman  and  Fleischer:  represented  all  the  defend- 
ants in  the  preliminary  stages  of  the  trial;  did  not  appear 
as  trial  counsel  after  above  attorneys  were  retained.  Briefs 
were  filed  in  the  case,  at  various  times,  by  the  American 
Civil  Liberties  Union,  American  Labor  Party,  National  Law- 


yers  Guild  and  other  organizations,  as  "friends  of  the  court" 
interested  in  constitutional  aspects  of  the  case;  they  were 
represented,  of  course,  by  their  own  attorneys. 

WITNESSES  (for  the  prosecution): 

Louis  Francis  Budenz,  Herbert  A.  Philbrick,  Frank  S.  Meyer, 
Eugene  H.  Stewart,  Fred  Cook,  William  O'Dell  Nowell, 
Charles  W.  Nicodemus,  Garfield  Herron,  Angela  Calomiris, 
Thomas  Aaron  Younglove,  William  Cummings,  John  Victor 
Blanc,  Balmes  Hidalgo.  ( Other  persons  placed  on  the  stand 
briefly  for  such  technical  purposes  as  authentication  of  a 
document. ) 


Contents 


Book  One:  Witness  Number  Eight 

Chapter    1      THE  PITTSBURGH  INCIDENT  9 

2  THE  WOMAN  IN  THE  CASE  17 

3  FOLEY  SQUARE  29 

4  THE  'FIX'  43 


Book  Two:  Aesop's  Fables 

Chapter    5      SKID  ROW  50 

6  FOR    IMBECILES    ONLY  55 

7  HAROLD   IN    WONDERLAND  62 

8  THE    LAW   IN    WONDERLAND  70 

9  GOOD    MORNING,    JOE  80 
10         LOUIS    FRANCIS    AESOP  93 

Book  Three:  The  Reptile  Tribe 

Chapter  11      APOSTLES  OF  JUDAS  107 

12  HYSTERIA  119 

13  THE  EXPENDABLES  131 

14  THE   USES    OF   PERVERSITY  142 

Book  Four:  Force  and  Violence 

Chapter  15      PROSTITUTES  AND  PIGEONS  151 

16  LAW   AND    ORDER  157 

17  THE    SECRET   OF    SECRECY  168 

18  'COMMUNIST'  MEANS  YOU  180 
Documentary  Appendix 


Book  One:    Witness  Number  Eight 


"Thou  shalt  not  bear  false  witness  against  thy  neighbor." 

-Exodus,  20:16. 


Chapter  1 
THE  PITTSBURGH  INCIDENT 


On  January  10,  1948  a  stockily-built  man  of  36  and  a  red- 
headed woman  ten  years  younger  were  picked  up  by  detec- 
tives on  a  street  in  downtown  Pittsburgh.  They  said  they  had 
come  to  Pittsburgh  two  or  three  days  earlier  and  were  shar- 
ing a  room  in  a  local  hotel.  He  gave  his  home  as  Cumberland, 
Maryland,  and  she  said  she  lived  not  far  from  there  in  a 
community  called  Westernport.  In  her  purse,  the  detectives 
found  a  nickel-plated  .22-calibre  pistol  and,  searching  the 
hotel  room  thereafter,  they  uncovered  an  automatic  revolver 
—a  German  Luger— in  the  man's  suitcase. 

Two  indictments  were  thereupon  returned  by  the  local 
equivalent  of  a  grand  jury— the  Alleghany  County  Inquest. 
The  first  indictment  charged  Charles  W.  Nicodemus  and 
Louise  Trail  with  carrying  concealed  weapons.  The  second 
said  they  carried  the  weapons  "with  intent  unlawfully  and 
maliciously  to  do  injury"  to  some  person  unknown  to  the  In- 
quest. The  indictments  said  nothing  more. 

9 


10  Witness  Number  Eight 

The  newspapers  manifested  little  interest  in  the  matter. 
The  published  accounts  show  that  the  story  received  small 
space  and  the  reporting  was  singularly  inadequate.  Our  news- 
papers are  not  noted  for  their  indifference  to  adultery,  yet  no 
Pittsburgh  paper  seems  to  have  inquired  whether  Louise  Trail 
was  Miss  or  Mrs.  or  whether  Nicodemus  was  married.  No 
published  account  of  the  arrest  contains  any  fact  explaining 
the  second  indictment,  that  is,  why  the  police  believed  that 
the  weapons  they  carried  were  designed  to  do  injury  to  some 
one  rather  than  designed  to  enable  them  to  stage  a  holdup, 
for  instance.  For  that  matter,  there  is  no  clue  to  the  arrest 
itself;  nothing  indicates  that  attention  was  drawn  to  them 
by  unusual  conduct,  an  altercation  or  an  accident.  The  papers 
seem  to  have  been  satisfied  with  a  story  all  loose  ends! 

Available  accounts  do  show  these  facts:  1.  that  in  the  course 
of  routine  procedure,  Nicodemus  and  Miss  or  Mrs.  Trail  were 
photographed  and  questioned.  2.  that  the  Trail  woman  said 
she  was  carrying  a  pistol  because  she  was  often  out  late  at 
night.  3.  that  Nicodemus  at  first  declined  to  comment  but, 
on  second  thought,  said  he  was  a  trade  union  (C.I.O.)  or- 
ganizer who  had  been  "fighting  the  Communists/'  4.  that  both 
were  released  after  posting  bail. 

There  is  no  further  public  record  of  this  case  until  late 
May.  On  May  21,  1948,  Pittsburgh  papers  recorded  that  Nico- 
demus and  Louise  Trail  had  been  tried  the  preceding  day. 
The  brief  account  said  they  were  "held  not  guilty  but  or- 
dered to  pay  costs,"  an  unusual  combination  which  the  papers 
do  not  explain.  The  five-paragraph  news  story  indicates  pretty 
clearly  that  the  two  were  let  off  not  because  of  any  doubt 
about  their  guilt,  but  because  Nicodemus  was  considered  use- 
ful as  an  anti-Communist.  The  first  paragraph  sums  up  the 
idea  thus: 

"The  claim  by  Charles  Nicodemus,  36,  of  Cumberland, 
Md.,  that  he  carried  a  pistol  because  of  threats  from  Com- 
munists won  his  acquittal  late  yesterday." 

An  anti-Communist  is  above  the  law.   Nicodemus  did  not 


The  Pittsburgh  Incident  11 

and  could  not  deny  the  charges,  but  as  an  anti-Communist 
he  was  excused  from  paying  die  full  penalty  for  an  acknowl- 
edged crime.  There  is  more  to  this,  however,  than  mere 
general  sympathy  of  a  magistrate  for  a  professed  anti-Com- 
munist. Right  now  anti-Communists  are  a  dime  a  dozen. 
They  do  not  receive  rewards  or  exemptions  for  their  mental 
attitudes  alone.  They  must  give  something  for  something. 
The  news  story  goes  on  to  explain  what  Nicodemus  had  to 
offer  in  the  police  bazaar  where  he  bargained  for  his  liberty. 
He  "had  cooperated  with  the  FBI,"  detectives  told  the  po- 
lice magistrate,  "while  making  investigations  of  'Red*  infiltra- 
tions in  the  plant"  where  he  was  employed  (in  Cumberland). 
In  sum,  the  guilty  couple  escaped  because  the  Federal  Bu- 
reau of  Investigation  interceded  for  Nicodemus. 

The  case  ends  thus— with  Nicodemus  under  pressing  obli- 
gation to  the  FBI  for  his  freedom— and  eleven  months  pass. 
On  Tuesday,  April  19,  1949  at  4:10  p.m.,  a  witness  steps  down 
from  the  stand  in  Room  110  of  the  Federal  Courthouse  at 
Foley  Square  in  New  York  City.  Though  there  are  but  twenty 
minutes  left  of  the  Court  day,  the  next  witness  is  called.  He 
is  a  man  wearing  glasses  so  thick  as  to  give  him  a  sinister,  Dr. 
Caligari-like  air.  Though  we  have  never  seen  him  in  glasses, 
we  easily  recognize  this  solidly-built  man  with  the  thick  crop 
of  black  hair  as  the  same  man  shown  in  two  photographs- 
front  and  profile— in  the  files  of  the  Pittsburgh  police  over 
the  "rogue's  gallery"  identification  tag  "53417,  January  10, 
1948."  He  is,  of  course,  our  old  acquaintance,  Charles  W. 
Nicodemus. 

Nicodemus  is  the  eighth  witness  to  mount  the  stand  for 
the  prosecution  in  the  trial  of  eleven  principal  leaders  of  the 
Communist  Party  of  the  United  States.  They  are  charged  with 
conspiring  to  "teach  and  advocate  the  duty  and  necessity  of 
overthrowing  and  destroying  the  Government  of  the  United 
States  by  force  and  violence."  The  reader  will  pardon  me  if 
I  postpone  further  discussion  of  the  origins  of  the  trial  or  of 
the  witnesses  preceding  Nicodemus.  It  is  a  question  of  pur- 


12  Witness  Number  Eight 

pose:  it  is  not  my  purpose  to  provide  an  index  to  the  massive 
trial  record  with  its  tens  of  thousands  of  pages  and  millions 
of  words  of  testimony  and  argument.  I  propose  rather  to 
keep  myself— and  the  reader— from  drowning  in  this  sea  of 
evidence  by  steadfastly  clinging  to  the  meaning  of  the  trial. 
It  is  my  belief  that  we  will  make  more  progress  by  following 
the  path  of  one  witness,  than  by  pursuing  a  simple  chrono- 
logical record  of  the  case.  Let  us,  therefore,  stick  stubbornly 
to  Charles  W.  Nicodemus  for  the  time  being. 

Having  sworn  to  tell  the  truth,  the  whole  truth  and  noth- 
ing but  the  truth  so  help  him  God,  Nicodemus  testified  for 
the  remainder  of  the  day.  At  the  next  court  session,  Friday, 
April  22>  he  resumed  his  testimony  and  later  that  day  was 
turned  over  to  the  defense  for  cross-examination  followed 
by  re-direct  examination.  This  consumed  almost  the  entire 
day  before  he  was  dismissed,  bringing  his  total  time  on  the 
stand  to  one  full  day. 

In  the  course  of  direct  examination  by  Assistant  United 
States  Attorney  Frank  H.  Gordon,  Nicodemus  testified  that 
he  had  been  a  member  of  the  Communist  Party  and  had  been 
especially  active  in  the  party  from  mid- 1944  to  January  1946. 
He  was  invited  and  permitted  to  relate  alleged  incidents  that 
made  sensational  newspaper  copy.  There  was  one  story  of 
how,  in  1945,  when  the  work  of  the  plant  included  war  re- 
search, the  Cumberland  organizer  of  the  Communist  Party 
"ordered"  members  working  in  the  Amcelle  plant  to  make 
a  detailed  map  of  the  plant  showing  entrances,  exits  and  so 
on.  Nicodemus  did  not  claim  he  ever  saw  anyone  making  such 
a  map  or  ever  saw  anyone  giving  the  organizer  such  a  map. 
Why  shouldn't  an  organizer  who  has  the  power  to  give  "or- 
ders" to  party  members,  have  the  power  to  demand  compli- 
ance or  at  least  demand  an  explanation  of  non-compliance? 
(If,  indeed,  Communists  give  and  take  such  orders,  which  is 
the  impression  this  testimony  is  designed  to  convey.)  Nico- 
demus was  never  asked  about  the  map  and  never  heard  any- 
one else  talk  about  it. 


The  Pittsburgh  Incident  13 

This  testimony,  moreover,  casts  dark  suspicion  on  the  Com- 
munist Party  in  general,  but  does  not  even  purport  to  incrimi- 
nate any  defendant.  Judge  Medina  admitted  it  into  evidence 
on  the  ground  that  he  "supposed"  the  prosecution  would  later 
show  a  "connection"  with  the  defendants.  Later,  no  connec- 
tion having  been  shown,  he  ordered  the  story  stricken  from 
the  record.  With  a  straight  face,  he  then  instructed  the  jury 
to  wipe  the  story  from  its  collective  mind.  How  a  juror  erases 
prejudice  from  his  mind  at  the  command  of  a  judge,  no 
lawyer  has  ever  been  able  to  explain  to  a  layman.  And  aside 
from  the  jury,  there  is  the  public.  It  was  Tuesday,  April  19, 
when  Nicodemus  told  the  map  tale.  It  was  Friday,  April  22, 
that  the  Court  struck  it  out.  And  before  he  did  so,  the  witness 
had  already  begun  to  relate  a  second  lurid  story  of  plotting 
and  sabotage  so  that  the  jury  could  hardly  have  noticed  the 
"elimination"  of  the  first  story.  The  newspapers  certainly 
didn't  notice  it! 

( Four  months  and  ten  thousand  pages  later,  when  defense 
lawyers  introduced  a  rebuttal  witness,  Judge  Medina  would 
not  permit  them  to  ask  the  witness  if  he  was  ever  asked  to 
draw  a  map.  The  Judge  correctly  pointed  out  that  he  had 
stricken  the  map  testimony  from  the  record.  But  he  put  it  this 
way:  "I  thought  it  was  not  properly  connected  and  /  struck 
it  out  at  once"!) 

The  new  and  better  story  remained  in  the  record  and  thus 
constituted  Nicodemus'  only  contribution  to  the  case.  Just 
before  Christmas,  1945,  he  said,  Al  Lannon,  a  Communist 
leader  but  not  one  of  the  defendants,  attended  a  Communist 
meeting  in  Cumberland.  Asked  how  a  revolution  to  establish 
Socialism  could  hope  to  be  successful  in  the  United  States, 
Lannon  replied,  according  to  Nicodemus,  that  the  Red  Army 
would  intervene.  He  was  very  specific  about  it:  the  Red  Army 
would  strike  via  Alaska  and  Canada,  destroying  Detroit.  He 
was  not  talking  about  bombing,  but  about  mass  invasion, 
Nicodemus  swore.  But  let  the  record  speak  for  itself  on  this 
major  testimony  of  a  minor  witness. 


14  Witness  Number  Eight 

(From  the  record) 

NICODEMUS:  It  was  pointed  out  that  a  revolution  wouldn't 
be  successful  in  the  country  without  the  help  of  the  Red  Army, 
and  until  the  Soviet  Union  had  consolidated  its  position  in 
Europe  that  the  hope  of  that  couldn't  be  held  very  high. 

GORDON:  All  right,  did  you  say  anything? 

NICODEMUS:  Yes,  I  did.  I  had  a  question  in  my  mind  and 
I  asked  Lannon  how  the  Soviet  Union  could  possibly  ever 
invade  the  United  States  without  a  navy  and  Lannon  pointed 
out  to  me  as  had  been  pointed  out  before  that  the  Red  Army 
in  Siberia  numbered  some  hundreds  of  thousands  and  was 
a  strong  force  and  that  the  Russians  were  constantly  building 
it  up  and  they  had  a  good  air  force,  they  were  building  air 
strips,  whenever  the  time  come  with  air  support  the  Russians 
could  invade  Alaska  down  through  Canada  and  they  could 
even  destroy  Detroit. 

DEFENSE  COUNSEL  RICHARD  GLADSTEIN:   What  was  that? 

JUDGE  HAROLD  R.  MEDINA:  They  could  even  destroy  De- 
troit, as  I  understood  it.  Did  you  say  that? 

NICODEMUS:  That  is  what  I  said. 

MEDINA:  Why  all  of  the  defendants  are  smiling  broadly. 

DEFENDANT  JOHN  GATES:  Why  certainly  we  are. 

DEFENDANT  IRVING  POTASH:  Certainly  we  are. 

MEDINA:  We  are  getting  back  to  that  country  club  atmos- 
phere again.  Well,  there  isn't  going  to  be  any  country  club 
atmosphere  in  my  court. 

GLADSTEIN:  When  a  man  hears  something  that  is  ludicrous 
and  absurd  to  the  extreme  I  suppose  he  is  permitted  the 
human  reaction  of  a  smile  of  contempt. 

MEDINA:  That  to  me  is  the  same  line  as  some  of  the  com- 
ments we  have  had  in  the  past.  It  may  seem  very  funny  to  the 
defendants.  They  seem  to  enjoy  it,  but  I  don't  think  it  is,  and 
their  laughing  is  not  going  to  have  any  effect. 

GLADSTEIN:  This  is  the  Federal  Court.  I  had  expected  a 
serious  and  sober  effort  on  the  part  of  the  government,  if  it 
could,  to  prove  the  charges  that  have  been  made  that  a 


The  Pittsburgh  Incident  15 

political  doctrine  advocates  the  overthrow  of  the  United 
States.  But  instead  of  that  we  are  being  treated  to  one  after 
another  of  these  witnesses,  persons  giving  the  same  type  of 
story  we  have  heard  from  Congressman  Rankin  and  J.  Parnell 
Thomas. 

e  «  « 

You  and  I,  in  the  calm  of  our  homes,  might  find  equal 
reason  within  Nicodemus'  story,  to  dismiss  it  as  nonsense. 
Two  or  three  points  capable  of  influencing  even  a  steady 
reader  of  the  Hearst  press,  rise  to  the  very  surface.  First,  it 
is  generally  understood  by  informed  people— even  informed 
anti-Communists— that  Communist  leadership  is  adult.  The 
many  documents  introduced  into  evidence  by  the  prosecution 
at  Foley  Square,  show  a  group  of  men  who  study  history, 
economics,  and  world  affairs  intensively;  they  draw  up  pro- 
grams and  plans  on  the  basis  of  detailed— even  tedious— analy- 
sis and  discussion.  How  then  can  they  be  capable  of  the 
strategic  idiocy  Nicodemus  describes? 

Observe  that  Nicodemus— or  whoever  wrote  his  lines  for 
him— is  not  indifferent  to  strategic  questions:  he  takes  note 
at  the  start  that  the  Soviet  Union  has  no  navy  for  an  invasion. 
Now  if  we  are  going  to  discuss  strategy,  we  should  note  that 
no  American  military  man  of  any  responsibility  believes  that 
the  Red  Army  can  march  to  Detroit  via  Alaska  or  Canada, 
or  carry  out  an  airborne  invasion  of  the  United  States  in  force. 
A  Reuters  dispatch  from  Fort  Churchill,  in  Canada's  Far 
North,  to  the  New  York  Times  of  May  10,  1949,  sums  up  the 
general  American-British-Canadian  understanding  of  the  lim- 
ited nature  of  Arctic  military  action. 

"On  the  strategic  side/'  it  says,  "the  conviction  is  now  fully 
established  that  large-scale  warfare  in  the  Canadian  Arctic 
is  an  impossibility.  .  .  .  The  military  planners  appear  to  have 
abandoned  any  thought  of  a  full-scale  invasion  of  North 
America  across  the  Polar  Region.  On  the  basis  of  experience 
at  Fort  Churchill  and  elsewhere,  they  just  do  not  think  it 
could  be  done." 


16  Witness  Number  Eight 

It  must  be  remembered  that  the  Russians  have  had  much 
more  experience  of  the  Arctic  than  we  have  and  have  long 
known  the  limitations  more  recently  verified  by  the  United 
States.  At  any  rate,  no  serious  military  student  thinks  the 
Red  Army  thinks  it  can  stage  a  trans-Arctic  invasion.  Why 
then  should  anyone  believe  American  Communists  think  so? 
Two  of  the  defendants,  for  example,  have  fought  in  two  wars 
-Spain  and  World  War  II.  Both  John  Gates  and  Robert 
Thompson,  at  the  age  of  twenty  attained  the  rank  of  battalion 
commander  in  Spain;  Gates  was  a  parachutist  in  War  II  and 
Thompson,  decorated  for  bravery  in  New  Guinea,  was  rec- 
ommended for  the  commission  of  captain.  Others  of  the 
defendants  are  veterans  of  War  II.  There  is  no  reason  they 
should  be  considered  capable  of  believing  in  the  invasion 
that  other  soldiers  reject. 

Still,  let  us  suppose  this  impossible  invasion  to  be  possible. 
Let  us  suppose  the  men  in  the  Kremlin  believe  the  Red  Army 
can  invade  America;  suppose,  further,  that  they  plan  such 
an  invasion.  What  follows?  It  follows  that  no  one  in  the 
world  but  the  men  in  the  Kremlin  would  know  it.  The  ability 
of  Soviet  leaders  to  keep  a  secret  is  pretty  well  established. 
Yet  Nicodemus  would  have  us  believe  that  they  shared  this 
secret  with  several  score  leaders  (Lannon  was  a  member  of 
a  leading  committee  with,  at  various  times,  fifty  to  a  hundred 
or  more  members)  of  the  American  Communist  Party.  And 
the  thing  doesn't  end  there.  The  leaders  of  this  party,  which 
is  pictured  by  the  prosecution  and  by  this  very  witness  as 
conspiratorial  to  a  Hollywood  extreme,  are  now  said  to  have 
relayed  this  same  top-secret  military  plan  to  every  rank-and- 
file  Communist  in  the  United  States.  Not  in  code,  mind  you, 
but  in  casual  direct  reply  to  a  casual  direct  question!  And 
these  rank-and-file  Communists,  veterans  of  lifelong  indus- 
trial warfare,  many  of  them  veterans  of  World  War  II  and 
even  War  I,  are  supposed  to  be  such  simpletons  as  to  swallow 
this!  Is  it  any  wonder  the  defendants  burst  into  laughter? 


Chapter  2 
THE  WOMAN  IN  THE  CASE 


The  laughter  of  the  defendants  was  distinctly  not  music 
to  the  ears  of  Judge  Harold  R.  Medina.  He  complained  of 
the  "country  club  atmosphere"  but  it  was  not  really  the  dig- 
nity of  his  courtroom  that  he  wished  to  maintain.  By  various 
comments  he  let  it  be  understood  that  he  did  not  want  the 
jurors  to  see  the  defendants  as  ordinary  human  beings  who 
laugh  and,  perhaps,  on  occasion  even  weep.  That  would 
endanger  something  other  than  his  judicial  dignity,  namely, 
the  horned-devil  concept  of  Communism  on  which  this  trial 
depended.  On  one  occasion,  when  defense  counsel  provoked 
laughter,  Medina  remarked  with  unconcealed  bitterness: 

"It  would  be  just  wonderful  for  the  defense  if  we  could 
get  everybody  laughing  and  giggling  here  and  forget  the 
seriousness  of  the  charges  that  these  men  stand  indicted  for." 

Well,  we  can  agree  with  the  learned  Judge  that  Nico- 
demus'  testimony,  though  nonsensical,  is  no  laughing  matter. 
We  have  weighed  the  words  of  the  witness  in  the  quiet  of 
our  homes,  but  a  certain  jury,  hearing  the  same  words  in  the 
unquiet  of  a  certain  courtroom,  will  not  so  readily  dismiss  it 
for  the  fable  it  is.  How  can  they?  Have  they  not  been  reading 
the  headlines  everyone  else  reads?  And  in  the  headlines,  as 
in  the  reports  of  the  House  Un-American  Activities  Committee 
and  the  ukases  of  the  Attorney  General  of  the  United  States, 
the  Communists  have  been  repeatedly  "convicted"  before 
they  set  foot  in  court.  In  fact,  they  have  been  convicted  of 
crimes  far  more  serious  than  any  they  are  charged  with  here! 

17 


18  Witness  Number  Eight 

No  less  a  person  than  the  President  of  the  United  States  pub- 
licly referred  to  them  as  "traitors/'  Not  long  before  the  case 
was  scheduled  to  go  to  the  jury,  Attorney  General  Tom  Clark 
(then  already  confirmed  by  the  Senate  for  appointment  to  the 
Supreme  Court)  boasted  in  a  magazine  article  that  the  trial 
was  part  of  the  Department  of  Justice's  "successful"  drive 
against  "avowed  enemies  of  the  country."  And  before  the 
trial  began,  the  defendants  had  been  charged  repeatedly,  in 
open  hearings  where  they  had  no  opportunity  to  testify  or  to 
cross-examine  the  witnesses,  with  the  crime  of  espionage. 
In  such  an  atmosphere,  even  the  testimony  of  a  Nicodemus 
will  not  fall  of  its  own  weight.  In  anti-Communist  trials  any- 
thing goes;  any  stick  to  beat  a  dog. 

The  defense  must,  therefore,  be  conducted  just  as  though 
Nicodemus'  testimony  were  serious  evidence.  A  serious  at- 
tempt must  be  made  to  refute  it.  How?  An  obvious  approach 
is  to  attack  what  the  lawyers  call  the  "credibility"  of  the  wit- 
ness, by  exposing  his  relations  with  the  FBI.  In  non-legal 
terms,  the  point  is  to  show  how  the  circumstances  indicate 
that  Nicodemus  was  likely  to  have  been  influenced  by  the 
FBI  to  give  the  testimony  desired  by  the  FBI  rather  than  to 
describe  events  as  the  witness  had  actually  experienced  them. 

Two  newspaper  clippings  that  tell  conflicting  stories  give 
us  a  starting  point.  The  previously  quoted  Pittsburgh  news 
account  suggested  that  Nicodemus  had  been  cooperating  with 
the  FBI  before  his  arrest.  But  while  Nicodemus  was  still  on 
the  witness  stand  at  Foley  Square,  a  Cumberland  newspaper, 
reporting  his  testimony,  added  a  meaningful  background  fact 
it  had  gathered  locally.  The  paper's  story  said: 

"It  was  learned  here  today  from  reliable  sources  that 
Nicodemus  had  been  working  with  the  government  since  an 
incident  in  Pittsburgh."  (Cumberland  Evening  Times,  April 
20,  1949.) 

This  is  a  significant  difference.  If  Nicodemus  did  no  favors 
for  the  FBI  before  his  arrest,  his  release  was  no  reward  for 
past  services.  For  what  then?  Why  not  in  return  for  the 


The  Woman  in  the  Case  19 

promise  to  render  some  future  service  to  the  FBI  or  the  De- 
partment of  Justice  (to  which  the  FBI  is  attached)?  You  will 
see  that  this  question  might  have  decisive  importance  for  a 
juror  who  must  decide  whether  or  not  to  believe  the  testimony 
of  Charles  Nicodemus. 

Now  suppose  you  were  of  counsel  for  the  defense.  You 
would  wish  to  explore  this  question  for  the  benefit  of  the 
jury.  To  that  end,  you  would  wish  to  put  in  evidence  every 
fact  that  would  suggest,  to  an  American  of  ordinary  ac- 
quaintance with  the  facts  of  American  life,  a  "deal"  between 
Nicodemus  and  the  FBI.  You  would  have  to  bring  that  evi- 
dence in,  largely  by  way  of  cross-examination.  And  in  order 
to  be  able  to  cross-examine  Nicodemus,  you  would  want  to 
be  fully  briefed  on  his  past.  That  would  mean  talking  to 
everyone  who  knew  Nicodemus  in  his  home  life,  at  work,  in 
his  trade  union  and  at  play.  It  would  mean  going  to  Cumber- 
land, Maryland,  where  Charles  Nicodemus  lives  with  his 
second  wife,  the  former  Louise  Trail. 

Everything  in  Cumberland— this  will  be  the  first  thing  we 
learn— turns  on  the  giant  Amcelle  plant  of  the  Celanese  Cor- 
poration of  America.  Even  the  incidents  related  by  Nicodemus 
at  the  trial  revolve  about  the  low-lying  buildings  occupying 
forty-odd  acres  of  the  nearly  eight  hundred  acres  fenced  in 
by  Celanese.  To  understand  the  life  and  testimony  of  Charles 
Nicodemus,  we  must  feel  the  power  of  the  great  corporation 
as  Nicodemus  felt  it  in  August  1933  when  he  first  went  to 
work  there.  At  that  time  there  was  no  union  at  Amcelle,  and 
Nicodemus  learned,  the  hard  way,  what  it  means  for  each 
worker  to  make  his  own  "wage  bargain"  with  a  giant  cor- 
poration. 

Celanese  is  a  little  too  much  of  an  opponent  for  one 
worker.  A  typical  Wall  Street  corporation,  it  has  spread  over 
the  entire  continent  since  Christmas  Day,  1924,  when  the 
Cumberland  plant  produced  its  first  cellulose  thread  for  mak- 
ing rayon.  Celanese  now  produces  its  own  chemicals  near 
Bishop,  Texas,  and  carries  rayon-making  from  acetic  acid  to 


20  Witness  Number  Eight 

finished  cloth  in  a  dozen  or  more  plants  of  its  own  in  the 
United  States  plus  two  in  Mexico  and  two  in  Canada,  aided 
by  three  research  laboratories.  The  1,000  employes  of  Cela- 
nese's  first  year  grew  to  23,000  in  1949  and  the  size  of  its 
business  is  indicated  by  the  1948  sales  total  of  over  $230,- 
000,000.  Its  New  York  headquarters  are  not  in  Wall  Street 
but  in  1945  the  J.  P.  Morgan  investment  affiliate  and  the  firm 
of  Dillon,  Read  and  Company  (which  are  definitely  Wall 
Street)  marketed  a  $40,000,000  stock  issue  for  Celanese  and 
recently  $20,000,000  worth  of  bonds  were  sold  in  Canada 
to  finance  the  building  of  a  pulp  plant  there.  The  war  helped 
fatten  Celanese  to  Wall  Street  size:  profits  of  the  war  years 
averaged  over  $7,000,000  a  year.  But  the  loot  of  the  shooting 
war  was  as  nothing  to  the  booty  of  the  cold  war:  in  1946 
profits  more  than  doubled  the  best  war  year!  In  two  more 
years,  the  1946  profit  of  over  $16,000,000  had  more  than 
doubled  again  to  $39,484,000-more  than  five  times  the  peak 
war-year! 

Of  course  our  American  mythology  forbids  us  to  say  that 
this  represents  exploitation.  Profits  are  supposed  to  be  a  ther- 
mometer of  national  health.  Yet  even  if  great  profits  garnered 
by  a  few  industrial  and  financial  giants  somehow  seeped 
down  through  the  whole  social  structure,  that  wouldn't  alter 
the  basic  problem  of  the  industrial  worker.  The  individual 
company's  day-to-day  struggle  for  profits  spoils  the  individ- 
ual worker's  day-to-day  life.  It  makes— it  did  as  a  matter  of 
fact  make—Charles  Nicodemus  the  bitter  enemy  of  Amcelle. 

Take  a  simple  instance.  Sunday  work  was  abolished  ten 
years  ago  in  the  not-far-distant  Meadeville  plant  of  the  Ameri- 
can Viscose  Corporation,  itself  no  small  concern.  But  there 
is  still  no  Sabbath  at  Amcelle.  In  a  recent  strike  where  Sunday 
work  was  an  issue,  a  strike  bulletin  put  it  this  way:  why 
should  Celanese  stop  Sunday  work  when  "it  doesn't  cost  them 
any  extra  to  disrupt  your  family  and  community  life?" 

More  serious  is  the  fact  that  the  great  plant,  largest  of 
Celanese  properties,  is  operated  with  the  objective  of  giving 


The  Woman  in  the  Case  21 

management  the  greatest  flexibility  in  maintaining  low  costs 
and  high  profits.  This  happens  to  entail  laying  off  3,000 
workers  on  six  holidays  a  year,  including  Christmas,  without 
pay.  The  workers  say:  "Just  when  you  need  more  pay,  you 
get  less!"  It  also  entails  total  disregard  for  the  continuity  of 
the  job  on  which  all  these  workers  depend  for  their  very 
lives.  As  a  company  booklet  informs  the  employes:  business 
conditions  or  shortage  of  materials  may  necessitate  "fur- 
loughs" at  any  time.  (So  many  were  the  furloughs  at  the 
very  time  of  the  trial  that  the  county  sent  out  an  S.O.S.  for 
State  and  Federal  aid!) 

It  won't  be  necessary  to  explain  that  Nicodemus  and 
other  Amcelle  workers  longed  for  a  union.  When  the  New 
Deal  established  a  favorable  climate,  they  set  up  a  unit- 
Local  1874-of  the  CIO  Textile  Workers  of  America.  Then 
they  had  to  fight  for  recognition.  The  law  said  they  had  the 
right  to  organize,  but  they  soon  discovered  that  law  or  no 
law,  the  company  was  employing  spies,  "spotters,"  to  weed 
out  the  active  union  fighters  before  they  could  get  organized. 
The  company  also  set  up  a  company  or  fake  union  in  oppo- 
sition to  the  workers'  own  organization.  Not  until  they  went 
on  strike  in  November  1936,  under  the  guidance  of  men  who 
did  not  rely  on  legal  guarantees  but  showed  them  how  to 
fight  for  their  rights,  did  the  workers  force  the  company  to 
bargain  with  them  collectively  through  Local  1874. 

The  victory,  and  the  changed  conditions  it  brought,  gave 
the  union  organizers  great  prestige.  Nicodemus  says  those 
leaders— he  named  Arthur  Schusterman  and  Boyd  Coleman 
specifically— are  Communists.  He  so  testified  at  the  trial  of 
the  eleven  Communist  leaders.  In  that  case,  the  prestige  of 
the  common  victory  would  have  attached  to  the  Communist 
Party  and  its  leaders.  That  would  explain  why  Nicodemus 
wanted  to  join  the  party. 

Shortly  after  the  strike,  he  swore  on  the  witness  stand, 
Schusterman  asked  him  if  he  would  like  to  become  a  member 
of  the  Communist  Party  and  he  replied  that  he  would.  By 


22  Witness  Number  Eight 

February  or  March  1937,  he  was  an  active  member  and  con- 
tinued to  be  active  until  "around  1940."  Some  time  in  the 
spring  of  1944,  he  declares  he  again  became  active  and  con- 
tinued in  the  party  until  January  1946. 

From  the  time  Nicodemus  joined  the  Communist  Party 
of  Cumberland  until  he  left— and  afterward,  too,  no  doubt- 
he  found  the  energies  of  the  organization  necessarily  devoted 
largely  to  battles  on  the  Amcelle  front.  There  were  Celanese 
strikes  in  1939,  1940  and  again  in  1947,  and  incessant  griev- 
ance engagements  between  strikes.  The  writing  and  distribu- 
tion of  leaflets;  the  day-to-day  grievance  procedures;  the 
organization  of  picket  lines  and  the  constant  fight  to  main- 
tain them  against  police  and  court  interference  (so  readily 
exerted  at  the  request  of  big  corporations);  the  building  of 
strike-funds  and  the  provision  of  relief  for  the  children  and 
wives  of  strikers;  all  the  tedious  routine  that  goes  into  the 
daily  skirmishes  in  the  endless  war  between  owner  and 
worker,  between  capital  and  labor,  was  the  concern  of  the 
Communist  group  Nicodemus  joined. 

These  local  activities  were  supplemented  by  discussions, 
study,  much  emphasis  on  the  necessity  to  master  "theory." 
Such  discussions  tended  to  turn,  at  that  time,  on  the  distant 
battles  in  Spain  as  the  center  of  the  complex  of  world  affairs. 
Nor  were  the  discussions  mere  talk;  they  entailed  activities 
—fund-raising  for  Spain,  for  instance.  Perhaps  the  Cumber- 
land Communists  even  provided  a  volunteer  or  two  for  the 
Abraham  Lincoln  Brigade  that  helped  defend  Madrid! 

When  Nicodemus  testified  later  at  the  Communist  trial, 
he  was  unable  to  remember  any  of  this.  As  a  newspaperman 
in  Spain,  I  saw  four  to  five  thousand  Americans,  largely 
Communist  Party  members  including  the  defendants  Gates 
and  Thompson,  fighting  in  the  ranks  of  the  International 
Brigades.  But  Nicodemus  does  not  remember  Spain.  Ordi- 
nary Amcelle  workers  saw  known  Communists  fighting  for 
them  at  Amcelle  and  acknowledged  these  services  by  electing 
to  union  office,  year  after  year,  die  men  Nicodemus  identified 


The  Woman  in  the  Case  23 

as  Communists.  Schusterman  was  president  of  the  union  in 
1938  and  held  other  offices  in  the  Local;  Coleman  was  presi- 
dent in  1946  and  1947.  But  Nicodemus  cannot  remember. 

The  life  of  Cumberland  Communists,  in  the  testimony  of 
Nicodemus,  is  all  of  a  piece  with  his  story  of  the  "invasion." 
The  humdrum  daily  work  finds  no  echo  in  it.  It  is  all  sensa- 
tion, all  melodrama  about  the  Communist  Party  in  Cumber- 
land and,  by  inference,  the  Communist  Party  in  general.  Only 
thus,  only  obliquely,  does  it  strike  at  the  defendants  them- 
selves. 

I  have  checked  the  testimony  of  Charles  W.  Nicodemus, 
word  for  word,  against  the  recollections  of  many  of  his  fellow- 
workers  and  neighbors  and  even  relatives.  What  they  have  to 
say  does  more  than  contradict  his  testimony:  it  explains  it. 
It  fills  in  the  gaps  we  had  occasion  to  note  earlier  in  the  news- 
paper accounts  of  the  "Pittsburgh  incident."  And  as  the  story 
of  Nicodemus'  private  and  political  life  emerges,  we  see  that 
his  stories  of  Communist  violence  fit  the  pattern  of  his  own 
life  better  than  that  of  the  organization  he  now  hates. 

From  the  time  he  says  he  joined  the  Communist  Party 
until  the  day  he  was  expelled,  Nicodemus  was  the  subject  of 
much  criticism  and  complaint.  The  general  character  of  the 
criticism  was  that  he  was  a  man  of  undisciplined  violence. 
It  was  said  that  his  lone-wolf,  tough-guy  attitude  tended  to 
endanger  the  party  and  discredit  the  union.  He  liked  to  show 
visitors  a  knife,  saying  it  was  "just  the  thing  to  knock  off  those 
capitalist  stooges."  In  1938,  at  the  Maryland-District  of  Colum- 
bia Industrial  Union  Council  Convention,  held  in  the  State 
Armory  at  Cumberland,  he  brought  an  arms  catalog  with  him. 
He  had  a  trick  of  pulling  out  the  catalog  during  the  speeches 
and  pointing  out  to  his  neighbors  the  price  of  certain  machine- 
guns,  by  way  of  saying  that  a  machine-gun  should  be  used 
instead  of  all  that  talk.  In  1939,  he  was  bitterly  opposed  to 
settling  the  Celanese  strike  on  the  terms  accepted  and  favored 
by  the  union  and  party.  During  the  war  he  never  reconciled 
himself  to  the  no-strike  pledge.  Publicly  he  denounced  it  as  a 


24  Witness  Number  Eight 

fraud  on  the  workers  and  privately  he  gave  leadership  to  an 
underground  movement  against  it.  Some  workers  say  mem- 
bers of  the  Nicodemus  group  damaged  machinery  in  protest 
against  "speedup."  His  mood  is  indicated  by  his  own  testi- 
mony that  during  this  period  he  was  "inactive"  in  the  Com- 
munist Party  which  firmly  upheld  the  no-strike  pledge. 

On  his  return  to  the  party,  he  took  no  part  in  the  fight  to 
force  the  company,  for  the  first  time,  to  hire  Negroes.  The 
company's  "patriotic"  interest  in  high  war  production  did  not 
go  so  far  as  to  induce  it  to  fill  up  the  gaps  in  its  force  by 
voluntary  hiring  of  Negroes.  It  opposed  this  step— and  so  did 
Nicodemus. 

Women  workers  were  just  as  little  to  Nicodemus'  liking. 
Non-Communist  women  in  the  plant  came  to  known  Com- 
munists to  ask  help.  They  said  Nicodemus  had  organized  a 
group  in  his  department  —  the  "downtrist"  —  to  terrorize 
women  workers  by  "accidentally"  dropping  crates  on  them. 
Filthy  signs  and  lewd  pictures  were  posted,  they  said.  Called 
to  account,  Nicodemus  maintained  his  position  against  both 
Communist  Party  leadership  and  trade  union  leadership. 
What  that  position  was  is  interesting  as  showing  the  real 
content  of  a  worker's  life— Communist  or  non-Communist— 
as  opposed  to  the  melodramatic  sketch  furnished  by  Nico- 
demus. 

Before  1937,  the  twisting  operation  that  is  part  of  the 
making  of  rayon  yarn,  was  done  on  a  machine  called  the  "up- 
twist,"  apparently  because  the  yarn  travelled  from  the  bottom 
of  the  machine  to  the  top  in  the  course  of  the  operation.  In 
1937,  an  improved  machine  was  tried;  whatever  its  other 
characteristics,  it  reversed  the  course  of  the  yarn  and  was 
therefore  called  "downtwist."  This  was  the  origin  of  the 
downtwist  department. 

Whenever  a  change  of  any  kind  takes  place,  union  men 
know  they  have  to  watch  out  lest  the  company  take  advan- 
tage of  the  chance  to  divide  the  workers.  That  happened  in 
this  case.  Men  were  transferred  from  uptwist  to  downtwist 


The  Woman  in  the  Case  25 

as  the  new  machines  gradually  replaced  the  old  and  the  up- 
twist  department  became  smaller  and  smaller;  women  were 
dropped  it.  It  was  argued  that  women  couldn't  lift  the  fifteen 
or  sixteen  pounds  of  yarn  to  the  top  of  the  machine.  This  was 
an  appeal  to  the  selfishness  of  the  male  workers,  an  invitation 
to  them  to  fight  for  job  security  at  the  expense  of  the  women. 
Later,  under  war  conditions,  not  enough  men  being  available, 
some  women  were  drawn  from  the  vanishing  uptwist  depart- 
ment to  the  downtwist,  and  the  weight  of  the  yarn  proved 
no  problem  to  them.  Nevertheless,  some  of  the  "boys,"  as 
male  hands  in  the  department  were  called,  under  Nicodemus' 
leadership,  set  a  date  beyond  which  any  woman  coming  from 
uptwist  to  downtwist  would  start  without  seniority,  that  is, 
as  a  new  employe,  though  she  might  have  worked  side  by  side 
with  the  same  men  now  in  downtwist,  for  ten  or  fifteen  years 
in  the  old  department.  In  a  layoff,  she  would  thus  be  the  first 
dropped. 

A  meeting  was  called.  Nicodemus  testified  it  was  a  party 
meeting;  Schusterman  and  Coleman  later  testified  it  was  an 
informal  group  of  union  leaders.  According  to  testimony  of  all 
three,  Coleman  and  Schusterman  ripped  into  Nicodemus  for 
this  selfish,  shortsighted  stand  which  could  split  the  union, 
make  all  the  women  of  the  community  hostile  to  the  union, 
and  play  into  the  company's  hands.  Nicodemus  walked  out  on 
the  meeting.  At  this  point  he  was  in  bad  with  the  men  who 
had  built  the  union  and  on  the  verge  of  expulsion  from  the 
Communist  Party  for  violation  of  basic  principles  of  conduct 
toward  women  workers  and  Negroes. 

Nicodemus'  private  life  was  no  better  than  his  political 
life.  His  conduct  toward  his  mother  and  toward  his  then  wife, 
Irma,  was  a  scandal  to  the  neighbors.  Irma  was  subject  to  a 
major  chronic  infirmity;  during  dangerous  attacks  of  her 
illness,  Nicodemus  would  walk  out  of  the  house,  abandoning 
her.  His  own  mother  feared  him  and  feared  for  him.  She  told 
friends  about  a  gun  and  knife  in  his  car  and  asked  them  to 
persuade  him  to  discard  the  weapons.  There  were  sugges- 


26  Witness  Number  Eight 

tions  in  1944  that  Nicodemus  needed  weapons  because  he 
was  making  outside  money  in  connection  with  an  illicit  en- 
terprise, but  in  reality  there  was  a  more  serious  reason  for 
his  fear:  Nicodemus  was  afraid  of  the  return  of  a  soldier 
with  whose  wife  he  had  begun  an  unsavory  affair. 

The  soldier  was,  of  course,  the  husband  of  Louise  Trail. 
When  Irma  and  Louise  were  fired  by  Celanese  after  they  had 
a  fight  in  the  Amcelle  plant,  the  matter  could  hardly  remain 
a  secret.  His  sordid  romance,  and  the  fear  of  retribution,  be- 
came the  dominant  elements  of  Nicodemus'  life.  Had  he 
encountered  the  wronged  husband  in  the  street  by  some 
mischance,  Nicodemus  might  have  killed  him  out  of  fear  and 
guilt.  And  his  state  of  nerves  aflFected  his  relations  with 
everyone  about  him. 

As  might  be  expected,  he  quarreled  even  more  bitterly 
with  his  comrades.  The  parting  of  the  ways  came  on  the 
question  of  jobs  for  Negroes.  With  V-E  Day,  "furloughs"  be- 
came more  frequent  and  the  newest  workers,  according  to 
union  "seniority"  principles,  would  go  first.  But  now  the  Com- 
munists said— and  this  appears  in  Nicodemus'  testimony— 
that  there  is  a  higher  principle  than  seniority:  the  right  of 
Negroes  to  keep  the  jobs  denied  them  by  discrimination 
until  wartime.  Nicodemus  refused  to  support  this  policy; 
he  fought  it  openly  and  viciously.  During  a  union  meeting 
later,  he  screamed  that  "no  black  bastard"  would  work  in  his 
department.  Summoned  to  a  disciplinary  showdown  at  the 
home  of  some  comrade,  he  says,  he  refused  to  go  and  there- 
after never  attended  a  Communist  meeting. 

The  man  who  has  wronged  another  must  hate  his  victim. 
Nicodemus  sought  revenge  on  the  Communists.  In  the  flame 
of  the  cold  war  he  found  his  opportunity:  he  became  an 
active  anti-Communist.  By  naming  and  denouncing  Commu- 
nists in  a  region  and  under  conditions  that  amounted  to 
"putting  the  finger"  on  them,  he  assisted  a  company-favored 
anti-Communist  grouping  to  capture  control  of  the  union. 
In  the  process,  the  builders  of  the  union  were  ousted  from 


The  Woman  in  the  Case  27 

office,  though  Schusterman,  long  an  officer  of  the  union,  con- 
tinued to  be  elected  chairman  of  his  department— the  finished 
fabrics  examination  department— without  opposition.  Nico- 
demus  fared  better;  he  was  rewarded  with  the  post  of  auditor 
in  the  Local  and  made  subchairman  of  his  department.  Some- 
thing less  than  thirty  pieces  of  silver,  but  a  reward  of  the 
same  kind. 

Louise  Trail's  husband  was  home  from  the  war,  however, 
so  Nicodemus  and  Louise  now  lived  a  guilty,  furtive  life 
despite  his  new  "honors."  They  went  armed  like  hunted 
things.  That  is  why,  when  they  made  their  trip  to  Pittsburgh 
in  January  1948,  she  had  a  pistol  in  her  purse  and  he  had  a 
Luger  in  his  suitcase.  And  now  at  last  we  know  that  the 
"unknown"  person  threatened  (according  to  the  second  in- 
dictment) with  bodily  harm,  was— the  betrayed  husbandl 

This  will  help  us  to  understand  why  Judge  Medina  moved 
heaven  and  earth  later,  to  keep  the  name  of  Louise  Trail  out 
of  the  record.  When  Arthur  Schusterman  testified  for  the 
defense  on  August  30,  he  was  not  permitted  to  answer  ques- 
tions about  her.  Boyd  Coleman  followed  Schusterman  to  the 
stand,  and  when  asked  who  was  present  at  a  January  1946 
meeting— the  one  Nicodemus  described  as  the  last  Communist 
meeting  he  attended— Coleman  named  Schusterman,  Nico- 
demus and  "Nicodemus'  girl  friend,  Louise  Trail—" 

(From  the  record) 

McGoHEY:  I  object  to  the  characterization,  your  Honor. 

MEDINA:  I  don't  know  what  I  am  going  to  do  with  these 
people,  I  swear.  What  on  earth  possessed  you  to  bring  that 
in,  will  you  tell  me? 

COLEMAN:  The  question  was  who  was  there,  your  Honor. 

MEDINA:  Did  some  one  of  these  lawyers  tell  you  to  put 
that  in? 

COLEMAN:  No,  they  did  not,  sir. 

MEDINA:  Well,  I  will  strike  it  out.  This  description  of  that 
woman  as  Nicodemus'  girl  friend  was  absolutely  a  gratuitous 


28  Witness  Number  Eight 

thing  brought  in  by  the  witness  without  any  occasion  at  all. 
I  won't  have  that  sort  of  thing. 

0  *  * 

The  lawyers  protested  the  inference  and  Medina  replied: 
"It  is  ...  only  a  few  moments  ago  that  I  sustained  objec- 
tions about  that  woman  that  has  just  been  named,  and  I  won't 
have  my  ruling  circumvented  in  that  way."  Later,  still  furious, 
he  referred  again  to  "characterization"  by  the  witness  and 
said  if  he  "keeps  doing  it  he  may  be  sorry."  The  jury  never 
did  find  out  the  real  role  of  Louise  Trail  in  this  case. 

Nicodemus'  attempt  to  explain  his  gun  to  the  Cumber- 
land newspapers  a  few  days  after  his  arrest  is  rather  sad.  He 
said  he  "had  expected  trouble"  with  the  Communists  during 
the  last  negotiations  with  Celanese,  had  acquired  a  gun  at 
that  time,  and  simply  forgot  he  had  it.  We  need  not  waste 
time  with  this  explanation.  We  know  what  we  need  to  know: 
tangled  in  the  web  of  his  own  crimes  and  immoralities,  his 
personal  and  political  indecencies,  Charles  Nicodemus  had 
lost  his  freedom.  He  had  become  a  prisoner  of  the  FBI.  He 
wishes  us  to  believe  his  testimony  is  his  own.  "I  am  a  volun- 
tary informer,"  he  argues,  in  effect.  But  volunteer  or  no,  he 
was  in  no  position  to  argue  with  the  FBI.  He  was  in  no  posi- 
tion to  decide  what  he  would  or  would  not  put  in  the  state- 
ments he  gave  the  FBI. 

This,  it  is  easy  to  understand,  is  what  the  defense  must 
get  across  to  the  jury.  It  must  help  the  average  juror,  the  aver- 
age American  with  his  characteristic  prejudices  and  illusions, 
to  grasp  the  meaning  of  the  facts  we  have  presented  about  this 
one  witness.  Fair  play  demands  an  answer  to  the  question: 
is  Charles  Nicodemus  telling  his  own  story  or  one  dictated  to 
him  by  the  FBI?  In  the  courtroom  at  Foley  Square,  the  de- 
fense will  try  to  get  that  answer.  But  it  will  try  in  vain.  For, 
as  we  shall  see,  the  Court  will  not  even  permit  it  to  ask  the 
question!  Yet  that,  too,  is  an  answer! 


Chapter  3 
FOLEY  SQUARE 


It  is  late  in  the  morning  of  April  22,  1949.  Attorney  Harry 
Sacher  is  cross-examining  prosecution  witness  Charles  W. 
Nicodemus.  The  questions  for  some  time  have  been  directed 
toward  Nicodemus'  attitude  with  respect  to  Negro  workers. 
This  is  the  issue,  Nicodemus  concedes,  on  which  he  was 
expelled  from  the  Communist  Party.  The  proceedings  begin 
to  drag  as  Assistant  Prosecutor  Gordon  objects  to  each  ques- 
tion and  his  objections  are  monotonously  sustained  by  Judge 
Medina.  Without  warning,  Sacher  abandons  this  matter  and 
plunges  into  the  "Pittsburgh  incident"  and  its  FBI  sequel. 

(From  the  record) 

SACHER:  Did  you  at  any  time  have  any  conversation  with 
an  agent  of  the  FBI  in  regard  to  the  matters  which  you  have 
testified  to  here  today? 

NICODEMUS:  Yes,  I  have. 

SACHER:  When  for  the  first  time  did  you  have  such  a  con- 
versation? 

NICODEMUS:  The  first  time  was  in  about  January— January 
of  forty— let's  see  when  was  it.  I  want  to  get  that  clear.  1947 
in  January.  About  1947  somewhere  in  January. 

«         «         « 

Now  this  sounds  like  an  honest  attempt  to  be  as  precise 
as  the  witness*  memory  will  permit  him  to  be.  But  the  year 
is  crucial.  Was  it  1947-before  the  Pittsburgh  incident?  Sacher 

29 


30  Witness  Number  Eight 

naturally  pursued  the  matter  further,  definitely  without  en- 
couragement from  the  Court. 

(From  the  record) 

SACHER:  But  do  you  know  in  what  year  it  was? 

NICODEMUS:  Yes. 

MEDINA:  He  said  1947. 

SACHER:  Are  you  sure  it  was  1947? 

NICODEMUS:  I  beg  your  pardon,  it  is  1948. 

SACHER:  Yeah!  ...  In  what  city  did  you  talk  to  the  FBI 
man? 

NICODEMUS:  In  Cumberland. 

SACHER:  How  far  is  Pittsburgh  from  Cumberland? 

NICODEMUS:  Around  160  miles  I  imagine. 

SACHER:  Do  you  remember  making  a  trip  to  Pittsburgh  in 
January  1948? 

NICODEMUS:  Yes. 

SACHER:  Did  your  conversation  with  this  FBI  man  occur 
before  you  went  to  Pittsburgh  or  after  you  went  to  Pittsburgh? 

NICODEMUS:  With  the  FBI  man,  it  occurred  after. 

SACHER:  Yes.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  before  you  saw  the  FBI 
man  you  had  pleaded  guilty  to  an  indictment  in  Pittsburgh 
for  carrying  concealed  weapons,  had  you  not? 

GORDON:  First  we  will  let  the  witness  answer  and  then 
I  would  like  to  make  a  statement  on  this  subject. 

MEDINA:  Well,  I  think  it  is  perfectly  permissible  to  show 
a  conviction  of  crime,  if  such  be  the  fact.  I  will  hear  his  testi- 
mony. Did  you  plead  guilty  to  such  a  charge? 

NICODEMUS:  I  did  plead  guilty. 

SACHER:  Did  you  also  plead  guilty  to  an  indictment  accus- 
ing you  of  carrying  a  revolver,  an  automatic  pistol  and  other 
deadly  weapons  concealed  on  your  person  with  intent  there- 
with unlawfully  and  maliciously  to  do  injury  to  another 
person? 

NICODEMUS:  I  did  not. 

SACHER:  I  show  you  what  purports  to  be  a  certified  copy 


Foley  Square  31 

of  the  indictment  charging  you  with  carrying  a  revolver,  an 
automatic  pistol  on  your  person  with  intent  unlawfully  and 
maliciously  to  do  injury  to  another  person,  and  show  you  the 
reverse  side  of  the  indictment,  and  ask  you  whether  this  is 
a  photostatic  copy  of  a  plea  of  guilty  signed  by  you  on  May 
20,  1948? 

MEDINA:  Is  this  the  record  of  the  judgment? 

SACHER:  Yes,  your  Honor,  it  is.  It  is  a  photostat  certified 
by  the  court. 

000 

Sacher  pointed  out  the  guilty  plea  on  the  paper  and  asked 
the  witness  to  read  it,  but  Nicodemus  said  he  couldn't  make 
it  out.  The  prosecution,  backed  by  the  Court,  rushed  to  his 
aid  to  save  the  witness  from  acknowledging  a  fact  obviously 
well  known  to  him:  that  he  had  pleaded  guilty  to  both  in- 
dictments. This  fact  appeared  on  the  court  documents  offered 
in  both  cases  by  the  defense;  so  also  did  the  fact  that  on  May 
20  he  was  permitted  to  withdraw  his  plea  to  both  charges, 
was  acquitted  in  both  cases,  was  sentenced  to  pay  costs  in 
both  cases.  All  of  these  facts,  in  their  proper  order,  were  es- 
sential to  the  defense  objective,  namely,  to  show  that  Nico- 
demus had  been  rescued  from  prison  by  the  FBI  in  return 
for  commitments  to  the  FBI.  But  prosecution  objections  in- 
terrupted this  presentation  and  the  Court  deliberately  gave 
the  jury  to  understand  that  the  defense  was  trying  to  conceal 
the  fact  of  acquittal.  An  unmistakable  team-play  by  Judge 
and  Prosecutor  takes  the  edge  off  the  cross-examination  as  the 
record  continues: 

(From  the  record) 

MEDINA  (to  witness):  .  .  .  you  say  you  pleaded  guilty  to 
that  one? 

GORDON  (heading  off  witness):  No,  your  Honor,  he  said 
he  pleaded  guilty  to  illegal  possession,  and  that  is  all  he  re- 
members. 


32  Witness  Number  Eight 

Medina  tried  again,  and  again  Gordon  prevented  the 
witness  from  speaking. 

(From  the  record) 

GORDON:  Maybe  somebody  stuck  it  in  front  of  him  and  he 
signed  it,  but  he  says  he  pleaded  guilty  to  illegal  possession. 

SACHER:  Maybe  there  were  two  other  guys  there. 

*         »         * 

Having  succeeded,  at  length,  in  getting  the  witness  to 
identify  his  signature  on  the  document  in  question,  Sacher 
offered  it  in  evidence.  Before  it  was  accepted  by  the  Court, 
Gordon  called  the  Court's  attention  to  "an  endorsement  on 
here-" 

(From  the  record) 

SACHER:  Just  a  moment. 

GORDON  ( going  right  on ) :  —and  now— 

SACHER:  I  object. 

GORDON:  —the  plea  is  allowed  to  be  withdrawn  and  a  find- 
ing of  not  guilty  is  entered— 

SACHER  (protesting):  Now,  if  it  please  the  Court— 

MEDINA  ( ignoring  Sacher ) :  I  didn't  see  that  at  all. 

SACHER:  If  it  please  the  Court,  there  is  signed  there  a  plea 
of  guilty  by  this  witness,  and  that  is  why  I  want  to  offer  in 
evidence— 

MEDINA:  You  offered  the  whole  paper.  Do  you  object  to  it? 

SACHER:  ...  I  asked  him  only  whether  his  signature  ap- 
peared under  the  plea  of  guilty,  and  that  is  what  I  am  offer- 
ing in  evidence. 

MEDINA:  I  can  tell  you  right  now  that  if  in  part  of  it  he 
said  he  pleaded  guilty  and  then  the  other  part  he  says  he 
withdrew  the  plea  and  he  was  adjudged  not  guilty,  it  is  all 

going  in. 

«          *          o 

When  Sacher  offered  no  objection  to  introduction  of  the 
whole  document,  Gordon  nevertheless  prolonged  the  argu- 
ment in  the  presence  of  the  jury. 


Foley  Square  3& 

(From  the  record) 

GORDON:  I  object  to  his  having  brought  the  subject  up  in 
the  first  place.  ...  As  I  understand  the  law,  if  a  man  has  been 
convicted  of  a  crime,  you  may  show  that  as  bearing  upon 
his  credibility— 

MEDINA:  Yes,  and  I  understood  this  was  the  judgment  of 
a  conviction. 

GORDON  (continuing):  —but  if  some  subsequent  action 
of  the  Court  wipes  that  out,  then  it  has  always  been  my 
understanding  of  the  law  that  that  is  not  admissible;  and  to 
bring  up  the  first  part  without  the  second  part  leaves  me  in 
a  position  where  I  can  do  nothing  but  say,  we  must  now  have 
the  whole  thing  in. 

MEDINA:  All  right. 

GLADSTEIN:  May  I  say  something,  in  view  of  the  statement 
Mr.  Gordon  made? 

GORDON:  Mr.  Gladstein  has  no  part  of  this,  your  Honor. 

GLADSTEIN:  Well,  I  have. 

MEDINA:  Mr.  Gordon,  you  know,  you  get  so  excited.  If  you 
would  only  be  calm,  we  could  sit  here  and  hear  all  this  out. 
Go  ahead,  Mr.  Gladstein.  .  .  .  Do  you  say  this  is  a  judgment 
of  conviction  or  that  this  adjudges  him  not  guilty? 

GLADSTEIN:  I  say  this,  that  the  thing  that  affects  this  wit- 
ness' credibility  is  that  he  went  into  court  and  pleaded  guilty 
to  the  accusation  contained  in  the  document,  and  the  fact  that 
later  on,  as  you,  your  Honor,  know  and  lawyers  know,  for  one 
reason  or  another  arrangements  were  made  to  withdraw  the 
plea  of  guilty,  is  immaterial  to  the  plea  of  guilt. 

MEDINA:  Well,  I  will  tell  you  what  happens  before  me  if 
a  man  pleads  guilty  and  then  I  am  convinced  he  is  not 
guilty.  I  let  him  withdraw  his  plea  and  let  him  plead  not 
guilty.  That  is  the  way  it  is  done.  This  business  of  "making 
arrangements,"  where  do  you  get  that  from? 

GLADSTEIN:  Why,  if  your  Honor  please,  it  is  well  known, 
and  it  happens  all  the  time,  that  people  are  given  opportuni- 
ties on  probation  or  otherwise  to  withdraw  a  plea  of  guilty 


34  Witness  Number  Eight 

after  they  have  pleaded  guilty  in  fact  and  have  been  guilty  in 
fact. 

MEDINA:  Well,  it  seems  to  me  that  it  is  a  pity  this  subject 
was  brought  up  at  all,  but  now  that  it  is  here,  in  fairness  to 
the  witness  the  whole  story  is  going  to  come  out. 

GLADSTEIN:  That  is  exactly  what  we  want. 

000 

The  document  was  thereupon  admitted  in  evidence  and 
Gladstein  asked  permission  to  put  a  question  to  the  Court. 

(From  the  record) 

MEDINA:  You  look  so  innocent,  Mr.  Gladstein,  how  can 
I  refuse? 

GLADSTEIN:  .  .  .  when  a  man  pleads  guilty  in  your  court 
and  you  later  feel  he  is  not  guilty,  do  you  ever  require  him  to 
pay  the  costs  of  the  proceeding,  if  he  is  innocent? 

MEDINA:  Well,  I  never  heard  of  that  cost  business  here 
but  they  do  have  that  in  a  good  many  parts  of  the  country. 

GLADSTEIN:  But  your  Honor,  they  do  that  when  a  man  is 
guilty. 

MEDINA  (furious):  Well,  I  don't  know  about  that.  But 
I  know  when  a  judgment  is  a  judgment  of  guilty,  and  when  it 
is  a  judgment  of  not  guilty,  and  I  am  going  to  look  at  this  for 
a  minute  or  two  and  I  am  going  to  tell  the  jury  which  one  it 
is.  You  men  can  argue  your  heads  off  to  the  contrary  but  it  is 

going  to  be  just  the  way  I  say. 

o          o          * 

The  proceedings  continued  in  this  spirit.  After  the  Court 
had  told  the  defense  to  read  to  the  jury  such  parts  of  the 
document  as  it  wished,  and  the  prosecution  any  further  parts 
it  might  desire,  Sacher  said  he  would  read  it  all,  if  that  was 
the  Court's  desire. 

(From  the  record) 

MEDINA:  It  seems  to  me  there  was  a  grave  injustice  done. 
SACHER:  There  was  no  injustice  done. 


Foley  Square  35 

MEDINA:  And  there  isn't  going  to  be  any  while  I  am  here. 

SACHER:  And  there  won't  be  any  while  we  are  here,  be- 
cause we  are  going  to  bring  out  all  the  facts— 

MEDINA:  You  think  you  are. 

SACHER:  If  the  Court  permits  it. 

MEDINA:  If  you  think  you  are  going  to  spend  a  few  days 
going  into  seeing  what  he  did  and  what  he  didn't  do,  you 
are  mistaken. 

000 

Sacher  thereupon  read  the  document,  beginning  with  the 
full  text  of  the  first  indictment  charging  Nicodemus  and 
Louise  Trail  with  illegal  possession  of  a  revolver  and  an 
automatic  pistol,  continuing  to  the  reverse  side  where  under 
date  of  May  20,  1948  "appear  the  words,  1  or  we  plead  guilty 
to  indictment  as  returned/  bearing  the  signatures  of  Louise 
Trail  and  Charles  Nicodemus."  Under  the  same  date  and 
immediately  beneath  the  guilty  plea,  appears  the  informa- 
tion that  the  plea  is  "allowed  to  be  withdrawn  by  the  Court," 
and  next  under  that,  "the  defendants  adjudged  not  guilty  and 
pay  costs  by  the  Court,"  and  finally— all  bearing  the  same 
date— "Defendants  sentenced  to  pay  the  costs  of  prosecution 
by  the  Court." 

Judge  Medina,  misreading  the  cost  figure  as  the  trivial 
sum  of  $3.10,  here  sought  to  render  the  defense  ridiculous  by 
reading  the  sum  before  Sacher  could.  "And  the  costs  are 
$3.10,"  he  announced  triumphantly,  inviting  the  jury  to  feel 
that  neither  Nicodemus  nor  the  judge  in  the  case  would  be 
much  concerned  about  the  disposition  of  a  cost-claim  of  that 
amount.  This  is  a  glaring  instance  of  the  Judge  in  the  role  of 
Prosecutor  and  what  makes  it  stand  out  is— that  the  Judge 
was  wrong! 

He  had  tripped  over  a  projecting  fact:  that  the  costs  on 
this  one  charge  were  not  the  wholly  insignificant  figure  of 
$3.10.  They  came  to  the  substantial  sum  of  $43.26.  As  it  de- 
veloped later,  when  the  second  document  had  been  read 
after  an  equally  tedious  argument,  costs  on  that  charge  were 


36  Witness  Number  Eight 

shown  to  be  $77.97.  Thus  Nicodemus  and  Louise  Trail  had 
been  found  "not  guilty"  but  fined  $121.23! 

Page  after  dreary  page  of  the  transcript  records  Judge 
Medina's  effort  to  belittle  the  effect  of  the  evidence  and  to 
turn  it  against  the  defense  before  the  defense  was  allowed 
to  introduce  it.  When  Sacher  came  to  the  second  indictment, 
the  prosecution  returned  to  the  argument  that  it  was  not 
admissible  because  the  witness  had  been  found  not  guilty. 
Once  again,  the  Judge's  remark  that  he  was  permitting  it 
only  "in  fairness  to  the  witness,"  provoked  a  colloquy. 

(From  the  record) 

GLADSTEIN:  May  it  be  made  clear  that  in  fairness  to  the 
defendants,  in  order  to  impeach  the  witness,  that  the  whole 
story  be  brought  out? 

MEDINA:  Mr.  Gladstein,  I  think  it  is  unfair  to  make  it  ap- 
pear that  the  man  was  found  guilty  when  he  was  not  found 
guilty. 

GLADSTEIN:  Now  if  your  Honor  please— 

MEDINA:  Maybe  that  sounds  absolutely  bad  to  you,  and  it 
is  probably  some  more  judicial  misconduct. 

SACHER:  Well,  the  point  is— 

MEDINA:  When  the  record  shows  that  the  man  was  found 
not  guilty,  the  least  it  seems  to  me  that  could  have  been  made 
plain  right  from  the  beginning  is  that  he  was  found  not  guilty. 

GLADSTEIN:  If  your  Honor  please— 
«         «         « 

But  the  defense  was  not  permitted  to  speak.  The  prosecu- 
tion quickly  moved  for  the  noon  recess  and  the  Court  re- 
cessed leaving  the  jury  with  nothing  more  on  its  mind  than 
the  Court's  strong  and  repeated  defense  of  the  witness!  The 
noon  recess  failed  to  improve  the  atmosphere  in  Judge 
Medina's  courtroom.  After  the  defense  had  read  the  second 
document  to  the  jury,  every  attempt  to  explore  the  relation- 
ship between  the  Pittsburgh  arrest  and  Nicodemus'  subse- 


Foley  Square  37 

quent  appearance  at  the  trial,  only  set  the  legal  merry-go- 
round  spinning. 

(From  the  record) 

SACHER:  You  testified  that  you  saw  an  agent  of  the  FBI 
in  Cumberland  after  your  visit  to  Pittsburgh,  is  that  right? 

NICODEMUS:  That  is  right. 

SACHER:  You  visited  Pittsburgh  from  January  8  to  Janu- 
ary 10,  1948,  is  that  right,  is  it? 

NICODEMUS:  No,  wait,  just  a  minute.  I  am  trying  to  figure 
out  here  now  when  I  did  go  back.  I  can't  answer  you  right 

off.  That  is  a  long  time  ago.  A  lot  of  things  happened. 

«         »         « 

Sacher  tried  to  break  through  this  stalling  by  recalling  to 
the  witness  that  the  indictments  recently  shown  him,  said 
that  he  came  to  Pittsburgh  on  January  8  and  was  arrested 
on  January  10.  But  the  prosecution  objected. 

(From  the  record) 

MEDINA:  Sustained.  You  will  ask  no  further  questions  about 
that  incident.  The  record  shows  the  man  was  found  not  guilty. 
If  you  think  you  are  going  to  retry  that  case,  you  are  making 
a  mistake. 

SACHER:  I  am  not  going  to  retry  it.  The  record  also  shows 
he  was  sentenced  to  pay  costs  after  he  had  already  interposed 
a  plea  of  guilty. 

MEDINA:  I  will  sustain  the  objection. 

GLADSTEIN:  Excuse  me.  Your  Honor,  I  move  that  you 
strike  the  remark  you  have  just  made  for  the  third  time 
about  what  the  record  shows. 

MEDINA:  I  deny  the  motion. 

SACHER:  Do  you  recall  the  date  when  for  the  first  time  you 
saw  this  agent  of  the  FBI? 

NICODEMUS:  No,  I  don't  recall  the  date,  not  the  exact  date. 

SACHER:  Was  it  in  January  or  in  February  1948? 

NICODEMUS:  Well,  it  was  either  in  the  latter  part  of  Janu- 
ary or  the  first  part  of  February. 


88  Witness  Number  Eight 

SACHER:  Whom  did  you  see  in  the  FBI?  What  was  the 
name  of  the  agent  you  saw? 

NICODEMUS:  The  name  was  Jones. 

SACHER:  What  was  his  first  name? 

NICODEMUS:  Raymond. 

SACHER:  Did  you  tell  Mr.  Jones  that  you  had  been  arrested 
in  Pittsburgh? 

GORDON:  Objection. 

MEDINA:  Sustained. 

SACHER:  Now,  if  it  please  the  Court,  I  wish  to  show  that 
it  was  pursuant  to  arrangement  between  this  witness  and 
the  FBI  that  what  happened  on  this  exhibit  took  place.  That 
is  what  I  am  directing  my  question  to  now. 

GORDON:  And  I  deny  that  the  United  States  Government 
entered  into  any  agreement  with  any  Judge  in  Pittsburgh— 

SACHER:  Now  if  your  Honor  please— 

GORDON  ( continuing ) :  —to  get  this  man  out  of  any  charge. 

SACHER:  I  object  to  this. 

GORDON:  And  I  object  to  any  further  question  .  .  .  along 
this  line. 

MEDINA:  I  will  sustain  the  objection  to  this  particular 
question.  I  will  pass  on  the  others  as  they  arise. 

SACHER:  How  many  times  did  you  see  Mr.  Jones  after  this 
first  occasion  in  the  latter  part  of  January  or  the  early  part 
of  February? 

NICODEMUS:  Well,  I  imagine  I  seen  Mr.  Jones  about  three 
times,  approximately,  three  or  four  times. 

SACHER:  When  was  the  last  time  that  you  saw  Mr.  Jones? 

NICODEMUS:  The  last  time?  You  mean  between  the  time 
that  I  was  arrested  and  the  time  that  I  went  back  to  Pitts- 
burgh? 

SACHER:  When  did  you  last  see  Mr.  Jones,  please? 

NICODEMUS:  Well,  I  have  seen  Mr.  Jones,  if  you  want  to 
know  how  recently  I  have  seen  Mr.  Jones— 

MEDINA:  That  is  what  he  is  asking  you. 

NICODEMUS:  All  right.  I  have  seen  Mr.  Jones  a  week  ago. 


Foley  Square  39» 

For  another  half  hour,  Nicodemus  twisted  and  dodged  in 
an  attempt  to  avoid  specifying  the  dates  of  his  meetings  with 
the  FBI  agent.  He  acknowledged  that  he  gave  the  agent  two 
statements,  a  first,  one-page  statement  in  his  own  handwrit- 
ing and  a  second,  longer,  typewritten  one.  For  perhaps  thirty 
minutes  he  maintained  that  one  of  them  was  delivered  in 
1949  or  not  earlier  than  September  1948,  but  at  last  made  his 
first  major  admission:  that  he  signed  or  initialled  his  first 
statement  to  the  FBI  some  time  in  January  1948  after  the 
Pittsburgh  incident.  This  was  two  full  years  after  he  had 
been  expelled  from  the  Communist  Party  and  shows  that  he 
did  not  "volunteer"  his  services  to  the  FBI  until  he  was  in 
trouble. 

Sacher  now  persisted,  despite  frequent  adverse  rulings, 
in  bringing  out  the  second  date  the  witness  so  firmly  disre- 
membered. 

(From  the  record) 

SACHER:  Now  those  were  the  only  two  statements  that  you 
made  to  him,  is  that  correct? 

NICODEMUS:  Those  are  the  only  two. 

SACHER:  Now  isn't  it  a  fact  that  the  second  statement 
which  you  gave  him  was  given  to  him  prior  to  May  20,  1948, 
when  you  appeared  in  the  Court  of  Quarter  Sessions  in 
Pittsburgh,  isn't  that  right? 

NICODEMUS:  Before  May,  yes. 

«         «         « 

So  it  was  that  the  defense  extracted  from  Nicodemus, 
like  a  stubborn  tooth,  the  admission  that  he  made  two  state- 
ments to  the  FBI  between  the  time  of  his  arrest  and  the  time 
of  his  release.  His  very  effort  to  fix  the  dates  first  earlier  and 
then  later  than  May  20,  exposes  the  guilty  significance  of  the 
real  dates:  the  statements  were  the  price  of  his  release.  They 
committed  him  to  tell  on  the  witness  stand  those  stories  the 
FBI  desired  him  to  tell  and  that  he  had  in  fact  told  on  direct 


40  Witness  Number  Eight 

examination.    The   sequence   of   events    is    damning.    Sacher 
therefore  made  Nicodemus  repeat  his  admission. 

(From  the  record) 

NICODEMUS:  I  just  told  you  that  I  gave  Mr.  Jones  two 
statements  that  I  can  recall.  One  statement  I  gave  him  after 
I  had  been  arrested  in  Pittsburgh,  and  the  next  statement  I 
gave  him  some  time  after,  prior  to  the  time  I  had  went  to 
Pittsburgh  to  stand  trial. 

#         *         * 

It  had  taken  a  whole  day  to  wring  from  this  witness  a 
simple  sequence  of  events  that  must,  by  the  nature  of  the 
events,  have  made  so  deep  an  impression  upon  him  that  he 
could  never  forget  it.  1.  He  had  been  arrested  and  faced 
serious  charges.  2.  An  FBI  man  came  to  his  home.  3.  He  next 
went  to  the  FBI  man's  office  where  he  made  or  delivered  a 
statement.  4.  He  made  another  visit  to  the  same  office  and 
delivered  a  further  statement.  5.  Only  after  that  was  he  per- 
mitted by  a  Pittsburgh  court  to  withdraw  a  guilty  plea  to 
two  charges  and  get  off  with  costs  amounting  to  a  moderate 
fine.  6.  A  week  before  he  took  the  stand  at  the  Communist 
trial,  he  had  again  seen  the  same  FBI  man. 

To  anyone  with  experience  in  criminal  practice,  it  is  all 
too  clear:  the  witness  was  in  the  power  of  the  FBI  and,  im- 
mediately preceding  the  present  trial,  was  given  a  last  re- 
hearsal of  the  story  he  was  ordered  to  tell.  But  as  the  cross- 
examination  ended  and  redirect  examination  began,  the 
Court  once  more  refused  to  permit  this  to  go  to  the  jury  for 
its  consideration.  The  acquittal  of  Nicodemus  in  Pittsburgh 
was  all  the  jury  need  know,  said  Medina  in  a  last  and 
furious  colloquy  about  this  issue.  Over  defense  objection,  he 
permitted  the  prosecution  to  ask  questions  he  had  specifically 
refused  to  let  the  defense  put  to  the  witness: 

(From  the  record) 

GORDON:  Did  Special  Agent  Jones  of  the  FBI  make  any 


Foley  Square  41 

representation  to  you  that  he  would   get  you  out  of  this 
Pittsburgh  charge? 

NICODEMUS:  No,  sir,  he  didn't. 

GORDON:  Did  you  give  him  these  statements  in  return  for 
any  suggestion  of  that  kind? 

NICODEMUS:  No,  I  did  not. 

GORDON:  When  was  the  first  time  that  you  talked  to  me 
about  being  a  witness  in  this  case? 

NICODEMUS:  That  was  around  Thanksgiving  of  1948. 

GORDON:  That  was  after  the  case  in  Pittsburgh  had  been 
dismissed? 

SACHER:  I  object  to  that  as  assuming  a  state  of  facts  not 
in  evidence. 

MEDINA:  Not  in  evidence  that  they  found  him  not  guilty? 

SACHER:  No,  they  sentenced  him  to  pay  costs,  I  say  to  your 
Honor. 

MEDINA:  You  know,  Mr.  Sacher,  you  can  go  on  saying 
that  till  Kingdom  comes,  and  every  time  you  say  he  was 
sentenced  to  pay  costs,  I  will  say  to  the  jury  he  was  found 
not  guilty. 

SACHER  ( pointing  to  document  in  his  hand ) :  It  says  here 
he  was  sentenced  to  pay  costs. 

MEDINA:  It  says  he  was  found  not  guilty. 

SACHER:  It  says  that  he  was  sentenced  to  pay  costs. 

MEDINA:  And  it  says  that  he  was  found  not  guilty. 

SACHER:  It  doesn't  say  that. 

«         »         « 

Other  lawyers  on  both  sides  joined  in  this  nursery  round 
and  Medina  poured  visible  hatred  on  the  defense  counsel 
who  had  dared  to  stand  up  against  his  interpretation. 

(From  the  record) 

MEDINA:  Maybe  the  jury  will  forget  what  I  tell  them  and 
maybe  you  will  induce  them  to  disregard  the  instructions  of 
the  Court,  but  not  while  I  still  have  breath  in  me. 


42  Witness  Number  Eight 

GLADSTEIN:  I  want  to  assign  that,  your  Honor,  as  judicial 
misconduct. 

MEDINA:  That  is  fine,  fine,  fine. 

GLADSTEIN:  And  also,  in  connection  with  your  Honor's 
statements  that  you  will  continue  to  tell  the  jury  that  the 
case  in  which  Mr.  Nicodemus  was  involved  turned  out  as  not 
guilty,  would  you  be  good  enough  to  add,  if  you  tell  the  jury 
that,  that  it  was  no  doubt  because  Mr.  Nicodemus  was  inno- 
cent that  the  Court  imposed  a  sentence  of  $140? 

a         «         * 

You  and  I  are  not  lawyers.  We  cannot  say  from  our  own 
experience  where  the  truth  lies  in  this  controversy  concerning 
the  legal  proprieties.  But  as  laymen  we  are  perfectly  compe- 
tent to  judge  the  real  issue.  The  Court  says  it  doesn't  know 
anything  about  "this  business  of  'making  arrangements/"  It 
will  not  admit  the  possibility  that  Nicodemus  was  brought  to 
court  by  the  FBI  in  return  for  a  little  service  rendered  him  in 
Pittsburgh. 

Well,  well,  well!  It  is  inspiring  to  know  that  Harold  R. 
Medina  who  not  only  practiced  law  for  many  years  before 
President  Truman  appointed  him  to  the  bench  in  1947,  but 
taught  practice  to  thousands  of  students  at  $35  each,  has  not 
so  much  as  heard  of  a  "deal."  It  is  nice  to  know  that  even 
now,  rounding  out  forty  years  of  practice,  he  has  never  heard 
of  a  "fix."  He  has  kept  his  very,  very  pure  ideals  through  all 
these  years  of  very,  very  prosperous  practice.  Bravo,  Judge 
Medina! 

We  cannot,  however,  give  Judge  Medina  what  teachers 
call  "alertness  credit."  For  he  was  practicing  law  in  New  York 
city  during  Judge  Seabury's  investigation  of  the  Magistrates' 
Courts  there,  and  he  was  in  practice  when  the  Wickersham 
Commission  published  the  results  of  its  nationwide  inquiry. 
Yet  he  never  heard  of  a  "fix."  The  Wickersham  Commission 
did;  Judge  Seabury  did.  Perhaps  we  had  better  take  time  out 
right  now  to  tell  this  very,  very  pure  young  man  how  very, 
very  impure  a  court  can  be. 


Chapter  4 
THE  "FIX" 


The  police  court  is  "the  underworld  of  the  law."  It  is  the 
habitat  of  various  forms  of  insect  life  including  "the  shyster 
lawyer,  the  stoolpigeon,  the  bailbond  shark,  and  the  official 
grafter  who  accepts  a  split  of  the  lawyer's  fee  or  the  bonds- 
man's fee." 

So  says  Ernest  Jerome  Hopkins— we  will  identify  him  in 
a  minute— from  long  and  nationwide  experience.  Stand  "in 
the  corridor  of  any  typical  police-court  building  from  eight 
to  ten  o'clock  any  morning  in  the  year,"  he  suggests.  "You 
may  learn  to  identify  the  various  'runners'  and  'fixers,'  trace 
the  transactions  between  shysters  and  bond  agents  and  certain 
policemen  and  court  attaches.  . . .  You  will  feel  without  a  doubt 
that  you  are  in  the  'underworld'.  ...  It  is  not  merely  because 
police  courts  are  housed  in  buildings  almost  invariably  old 
and  dirty;  I  have  seen  police  courts  and  police  jails  trans- 
ferred to  new  and  spotless  buildings,  and  within  a  week,  by 
some  peculiar  magic,  they  looked  as  pediculous  as  of  old. 
Social  agencies  have  thrown  up  their  hands  at  the  problem. 
.  .  .  Normal  citzens  avoid  these  places.  The  Halls  of  Justice 
are  left  to  the  police,  the  'runners'  and  the  'fixers.' "  So  much 
so  that  the  only  outsiders  habitually  present  are  a  queer  kind 
of  neurotic  known  to  reporters  as  "carrion  crows."  This  is  the 
Pittsburgh  police  court,  the  New  York  police  court,  the 
American  police  court.  This  is  the  "police-fostered  under- 
world." 

It  is  a  world  unknown  to  the  Judge  at  Foley  Square.  The 
Court  and  prosecution  there  operate  on  a  high  moral  plane. 

43 


44  Witness  Number  Eight 

From  the  mountaintop  of  pure  legal  theory,  they  deny  the 
possibility  of  a  "deal"  between  the  FBI  and  a  criminal,  fol- 
lowed by  a  "deal"  between  the  FBI  and  a  police  court.  They 
gasp  in  horror  at  the  defense  suggestion  of  a  "fix."  They  will 
not  let  the  sins  of  the  real  world  mar  the  sainthood  of  the 
FBI— or  explain  the  presence  in  the  courtroom  of  the  wit- 
ness Nicodemus. 

The  atmosphere  up  here  is  so  thin  that  we  had  better  get 
down  to  earth  before  we  go  back  to  Foley  Square.  The 
Wickersham  Commission  did  not  operate  in  that  sinless, 
saintly  world  inhabited  by  Medina  and  Gordon.  Fully  as  re- 
spectable as  Judge  Medina— it  was  appointed  by  then  Presi- 
dent Herbert  Hoover  and  headed  by  George  W.  Wickersham, 
Wall  Street  law  partner  of  another  Republican  President,  the 
late  William  Howard  Taft— it  got  right  down  to  the  dirt  and 
lice  of  the  police  court.  Ernest  Jerome  Hopkins,  a  veteran 
police  reporter  and  Wickersham  investigator,  sums  up  its 
many-volumed  findings  and  reports  in  a  valuable  book,  Our 
Lawless  Police.  That  is  the  source  of  the  above  quotations. 

But  Hopkins  has  much  more  to  say  about  the  "fix."  In  the 
average  police  court,  he  says,  it  is  customary  for  the  prisoner 
to  be  relieved  of  all  he  has  in  return  for  a  suspended  sentence 
or  other  form  of  release.  The  Wickersham  Commission  veri- 
fied this  throughout  the  United  States.  Testimony  taken  be- 
fore Judge  Seabury  in  a  famous  public  investigation  in  New 
York  City— while  Harold  R.  Medina  was  practicing  law  there 
—brought  it  out  in  ugly  detail.  From  that  investigation,  Hop- 
kins cites  examples:  a  man  arrested  had  just  been  denied  bail 
by  a  judge  when  ( in  the  victim's  own  words )  "a  short,  stocky, 
dark  fellow  came  in  and  said:  'You  get  me  $70  and  I  will 
take  you  out  on  bail/"  He  scraped  up  $60  and  "the  judge 
obligingly  reversed  himself  and  granted  bail.  ...  An  entirely 
innocent  woman  paid  $500  for  bail.  From  one  girl,  repeatedly 
arrested,  an  attorney  refused  $300,  saying  he  had  to  pay  the 
judge  and  that  the  arresting  offcer  wanted  too  much  money. 
On  her  next  arrest  the  same  lawyer  wanted  $400.  Later,  $300 


The  'Fix'  45 

was  asked  by  still  another  attorney,  with  the  statement  that 
$100  was  for  the  policeman  and  $100  for  the  judge/'  Only  the 
fact  that  this  system  is  standard  would  explain  the  fortunes 
amassed  by  certain  New  York  policemen.  Judge  Seabury 
learned  that  one  cop  and  his  mother  had  deposited  $185,000 
in  five  years!  And  the  Wickersham  Commission  found  that 
this,  far  from  being  peculiar  to  New  York,  was  a  nationwide 
condition. 

But  there  is  still  another  kind  of  "fix"  that  fits  our  case  even 
more  closely.  Our  witness,  Nicodemus,  has  reluctantly  ac- 
knowledged under  cross-examination  that  he  made  "state- 
ments" to  the  FBI  man  who  was  his  "contact."  He  is,  in 
short,  an  informer,  or,  in  the  uglier  police  terminology,  a 
stoolpigeon.  Some  stoolpigeons  get  paid  in  cash:  several  of 
Nicodemus'  fellow-witnesses  testified  they  received  monthly 
fees  (usually  not  very  impressive  in  size)  plus  expenses.  But 
the  usual  payment  of  the  informer  is  immunity— a  "fix"  for 
some  crime  he  has  committed  or  protection  in  some  racket 
he  conducts.  Hopkins  describes  it  as  "the  indirect  compensa- 
tion of  police  protection,  or  immunity"  from  the  legal  con- 
sequences of  "indulgence  in  some  form  of  degeneracy  or 
crime."  He  says,  "That  is  the  compensation  usually  extended/' 

Captain  Michael  Fiaschetti  affirms  Hopkins'  statement— in 
his  own  barroom  English.  Head  of  the  brutal  New  York 
Italian  Squad  until  he  got  tough  with  a  politically-protected 
lawyer,  Fiaschetti  has  told  his  story  in  a  book,  made  mildly 
literate  by  police  reporter  Prosper  Buranelli,  You  Gotta  Be 
Rough.  Describing  the  exact  type  of  "fix"  evident  in  Nico- 
demus' case,  he  tells  how  he  caught  a  young  fellow  who, 
in  the  summer  of  1921,  tried  to  hold  up  an  East  Side  drug- 
gist. The  lad  was  desperately  broke,  he  had  no  gun,  but  "it 
was  serious  enough  to  mean  about  ten  years.  ...  I  made  a 
dicker  with  him.  .  .  .  Freedom  for  information  .  .  .  that  was 
the  bargain.  It's  been  done  before  and  it  will  be  done  a  few 
times  more  before  the  world  has  gone  straight.  .  .  . 

"Valuable  merchandise,  freedom.   There's  an  idea  around 


46  Witness  "Number  Eight 

that  stoolpigeons  get  cash.  That's  mostly  rot.  I've  never  heard 
of  a  case  where  a  squeal  got  anything  like  real  dough  from  the 
police.  .  .  .  For  the  most  part  you  do  your  bargaining  with 
that  precious  commodity  freedom.  .  .  .  Sharp  practice,  you 
might  call  it.  I've  never  read  any  moral  or  improving  book 
on  the  ethics  of  trading  freedom  for  information." 

Thanks,  Captain  Fiaschetti.  There's  the  odor  of  degeneracy 
about  your  explanation,  but  at  least  it  is  not  mixed  with  the 
smell  of  hypocrisy  that  haunts  Foley  Square.  It  is  not  hard 
to  understand  Judge  Medina's  reluctance  to  let  the  facts  of  life 
into  his  courtroom.  He  is  trying  a  case  that  smells  of  Fias- 
chetti-morality;  ten  thousand  Fiaschetti's  prepared  this  case.  It 
is  not  just  Nicodemus  who  must  be  shielded  from  the  rays  of 
reality.  Of  thirteen  witnesses  placed  on  the  stand  by  the 
government,  two  were  FBI  Special  Agents— that  is,  regular 
FBI  employees;  seven,  in  addition  to  Nicodemus,  were 
FBI  "plants"  who,  unlike  Nicodemus,  were  boldly  pre- 
sented as  "undercover  agents"  or  informers  for  the  FBI; 
even  the  three  remaining  witnesses  bear  the  stoolpigeon 
stamp:  they  were  paid  in  the  American  police  equivalent  of 
thirty  pieces  of  silver— jobs  and  immunities. 

The  FBI  itself  talks  publicly  of  these  things,  making  it 
still  harder  for  Judge  Medina  to  keep  the  jury  in  that  never- 
never  world  of  his  own  creation.  In  an  inspired  article  in 
the  July  8,  1949  issue  of  the  weekly  U.S.  News  and  World  Re- 
port, the  FBI  admits  that  it  deals  with  and  employs  crimi- 
nals not  only  on  occasion  but  systematically.  It  concedes  that 
it  furnished  "underworld"  characters  as  witnesses  for  the 
prosecution  in  this  case  and  it  says  FBI  Chief  J.  Edgar  Hoover 
is  frankly  worried  that  exposure  will  frighten  his  pigeons  away. 
"It  [the  FBI]  finds  that  it  is  winning  its  lawsuits  at  the 
expense  of  its  underworld  contacts,"  said  the  article.  "It  sac- 
rificed seven  of  its  agents  inside  the  Communist  Party  when 
it  brought  them  to  the  witness  stand  in  the  trial  of  eleven 
Communists  in  New  York.  And  it  is  losing  more  as  a  result 
of  showing  its  files  in  the  Coplon  case." 


The  'Fix  47 

Judge  Medina  refused  defense  demands  to  produce  FBI 
reports  admittedly  submitted  by  Nicodemus  and  other  inform- 
ers. But  in  the  Hiss  and  Coplon  cases,  the  Court  declined  to 
cover  for  the  agency.  And  so,  as  the  article  plaintively  ob- 
serves, "much  of  the  mystery  has  been  stripped  from  the 
FBI.  A  public  illusion  that  the  agency  depended  solely  upon 
science  to  solve  crimes,  has  been  shattered/'  Aside  from  its 
bad  effect  on  the  general  public,  the  lifting  of  the  mystery 
has  a  fatal  effect  on  the  underworld.  The  live  stoolpigeon  is 
a  dead  duck  the  minute  he  is  brought  into  the  daylight.  His 
business  is  dirty  and  secrecy  is  indispensable  to  it.  The  cur- 
rent trials  have  penetrated  the  FBI's  secret  places.  "No  one 
knows  when  a  court  will  order  the  FBI  files  opened  again  to 
public  inspection."  So,  since  the  trials,  "one  after  another, 
FBI  undercover  agents  have  been  dropping  away."  The  FBI 
no  doubt  exaggerates;  it  probably  has  a  stranglehold  on  many 
of  its  informers.  But  it  is  certainly  worried,  for  there  is  one 
undeniable  truth  in  this  complaint:  the  FBI  would  be  helpless 
without  underworld  agents.  Largely  engaged  in  political  po- 
licing—thought control— it  employs  ordinary  police  techniques 
—and  police  ethics— in  its  work.  Above  all,  it  has  borrowed 
from  the  Police  Department  the  very  basis  of  its  work:  the 
secret  stoolpigeon  system.  And  now  the  system  is  withering 
in  the  light  of  publicity. 

"It  takes  years  to  develop  new  contacts  inside  underworld 
agencies,"  yet  many  of  these  are  being  "sheared  off  overnight," 
the  article  says.  "Many  of  those  whose  identities  were  re- 
vealed have  quit.  At  least  one  is  said  to  have  vanished."  It 
all  adds  up  to  a  serious  situation:  the  FBI  "is  losing  its  under- 
world contacts,  and  no  detective  agency  can  work  without 
them." 

There  at  least  is  an  absolute  truth.  At  any  rate,  no  detec- 
tive agency  does  work  without  them.  Ask  Fiaschetti.  In  a 
chapter  entitled,  How  the  Detective  Really  Gets  His  Man, 
or,  To  Hell  With  Sherlock  Holmes,  the  policeman  confirms 
the  FBI  view: 


48  Witness  Number  Eight 

"Why  don't  somebody  write  a  detective  story  with  a  stool- 
pigeon  in  it?  Why  didn't  Conan  Doyle  tell  about  Sherlock 
Holmes'  stoolpigeons?  Holmes  had  stoolpigeons.  Of  course 
he  did.  How  could  he  break  a  case  if  he  didn't?  In  the  honest- 
to-God  story  of  how  the  detective  gets  his  man,  stoolpigeon's 
the  word.  .  .  .  Take  away  information,  the  tip,  the  secret  whis- 
per of  the  stoolpigeon,  and  the  detection  of  crimes  would  be 
paralyzed.  The  police  organization  of  every  city  of  the 
country,  and  of  the  world  as  well,  would  stand  helpless  and 
gaping." 

Fiaschetti  is  quite  sincere.  The  FBI  is  quite  sincere.  Judge 
Medina  is  quite  sincere.  The  police-mind  does  not  understand 
how  you  can  keep  order  if  you  let  people  invoke  Constitu- 
tional rights.  The  police-mind  does  not  understand  how  you 
can  enforce  law  without  breaking  the  law.  To  the  police-mind^ 
every  citizen  exists  only  as  a  potential  lawbreaker  and  you 
must  have  spies  to  watch  him  all  the  time.  To  the  police- 
mind,  the  stoolpigeon  system  is  a  part  of  life  itself,  unpleasant 
perhaps,  but  like  excrement,  inevitable. 

Starting  from  this  fatalism  about  it,  Fiaschetti  does  not 
hesitate  to  reveal  things  that  would  turn  an  honest  man's 
stomach.  He  demonstrates  that  the  stoolpigeon  system  is  in- 
separably part  of  the  "frameup,"  the  blackmail  and  extortion, 
the  "fix"  and  the  "deal"  of  the  police  court.  No  wonder  Judge 
Medina  will  not  let  the  defense  look  behind  the  police  record 
of  the  "Pittsburgh  incident"  with  its  curious  "not  guilty  and 
sentenced  to  pay  costs."  If  the  jurors  are  permitted  to  see  the 
stoolpigeon  system  in  all  its  viciousness,  they  might  quit  listen- 
ing to  the  prosecution  witnesses!  They  might  say  with  Cir- 
cuit Judge  Norval  Harris  of  Indiana: 

"The  Communist  trial  is  a  farce  .  ,  .  and  the  whole  in- 
dictment should  be  thrown  out.  The  prosecution's  case  is  based 
on  vile  evidence  of  stoolpigeons  and  informers.  That  kind 
of  evidence  I  would  not  permit  in  my  court.  I  detest  stool- 
pigeons  and  informers.  So  do  the  American  people." 

Yes  we  do.  So  much  so  that,  despite  Judge  Medina,  the 


The  'Fix  49 

Government  was  very  much  on  the  defensive  about  its  case. 
Just  before  the  conclusion  of  the  Communist  trial,  there  was 
argument  in  a  Federal  Court  in  San  Francisco  over  a  date  for 
the  trial  of  labor  leader  Harry  Bridges.  When  defense  counsel 
predicted  that  this  trial  would  see  "another"  parade  of  wit- 
nesses "dragged  from  the  gutter,"  F.  Joseph  Donohue,  Special 
Assistant  to  the  Attorney  General  of  the  United  States,  arose 
to  enter  a  denial.  As  reported  by  the  New  York  Times  of 
September  23: 

"Mr.  Donohue  pledged  himself  not  to  offer  a  witness  'for 
whose  credibility  I  would  not  personally  vouch/  He  would 
not  present  'stoolpigeons'  and  labor  spies/  he  said." 

In  the  Federal  Court  at  Foley  Square,  stoolpigeons  are 
presented  as  patriots  admired  by  the  American  people;  in  the 
Federal  Court  at  San  Francisco,  the  same  Department  of  Jus- 
tice admits  that  the  American  people  despise  and  distrust  these 
perjured  sneaks. 

Yes  we  do.  And  that  is  why  I  chose  to  put  off  reciting  the 
legal  and  political  history  of  this  trial,  and  other  background 
facts,  until  we  had  caught  the  scent  of  the  government's  case, 
the  foul  smell  of  the  stoolpigeon  and  the  dank  odor  of  the 
underworld  slime  from  which  the  informer  emerges.  Later  we 
shall  have  to  dig  deeper  into  this  filth  for  the  source  of  the 
"vile  evidence  of  stoolpigeons  and  informers"  with  which 
the  record  is  replete.  But  right  now  it  is  time  to  turn  back 
and  see  what  kind  of  trial,  what  kind  of  charge,  what  land 
of  case,  required  the  testimony  exclusively  of  informers  and 
"underworld  contacts." 


Book  Two;     Aesop's  Fables 


"It  would  be  a  mistake  to  imagine  that  it  is  enough  to 
adopt  the  Communist  formulae  and  conclusions  of  Com- 
munist science  without  mastering  the  sum  total  of  different 
branches  of  knowledge,  the  final  outcome  of  which  is  Com- 
munism. Communism  becomes  a  mere  phrase,  an  empty 
facade,  and  the  Communist  a  mere  bluffer,  if  he  has  not 
worked  over  in  his  consciousness  the  whole  inheritance  of 
human  knowledge."— V.  I.  Lenin. 


Chapter  5 
SKID  ROW 


Til  Constitution  you  right  over  the  head  with  this  club," 
the  indignant  policeman  told  me.  "Now  shut  up  and  get  out 
of  here." 

If  ever  I  saw  a  wronged  man,  it  was  that  uniformed  offi- 
cer. Cops  just  don't  like  people  who  "answer  back."  They 
aren't  used  to  it.  In  America,  I  mean;  for  the  unlimited  power 
of  the  policeman  is  not  taken  for  granted  in  the  same  way 
anywhere  else  in  the  world. 

Don't  take  my  word  for  it.  The  Wickersham  Commission 
said  it  emphatically  after  the  most  exhaustive  study  of  law 
enforcement  ever  made  in  the  United  States. 

But  I  didn't  know  that  at  the  time.  I  only  knew  that  ac- 
cording to  the  Constitution,  "it  can't  happen  here."  That 

50 


Skid  Row  51 

policeman  gave  me  my  first  lesson  in  Applied  Constitutional 
Law— the  Bill  of  Rights  in  daily  practice.  There  are  no  les- 
sons but  those  you  learn  on  your  own  hide:  I  can't  remember 
a  thing  about  the  theory  of  Constitutional  Law  as  taught 
me  in  a  law  school  not  long  before  that  incident;  on  the 
other  hand  I've  never  forgotten  what  the  policeman  taught  me. 

Forgive  me  for  talking  about  myself.  My  excuse  is  that 
this  book  aims  to  give  you  the  direct,  human  sense  of  the 
trial  as  I  experienced  it.  I  want  to  show  not  the  surface 
events  at  the  trial,  but  what  the  trial  means  to  you  and  to  me 
personally,  to  ordinary  everyday  Americans  in  terms  of  or- 
dinary everyday  experience.  And  the  incident  I  am  relating 
is,  unfortunately,  one  of  the  most  ordinary  experiences  of 
everyday  life  in  every  part  of  the  United  States  to  the  work- 
ingmen  who  make  up  the  largest  part  of  the  population  of 
our  country. 

It  happened  at  Third  and  Howard  Streets  in  San  Fran- 
cisco. I  was  young  and  romantic  and  had  set  out  to  work 
my  way  around  the  world.  On  the  West  Coast  I  found  some- 
thing as  rewarding— and  as  exotic,  to  me— as  the  Taj  Mahal 
of  India,  the  Aztec  villages  in  Mexico,  the  twisted,  medieval 
"Arab"  half  of  Tetuan  in  Spanish  Morocco.  That  thing  so 
moving  to  me  was  called  the  Skid  Row.  The  name,  borrowed 
from  the  great  lumber  camps  of  the  Northwest,  is  applied, 
in  every  city  of  the  Coast,  to  the  street  favored  by  the  migra- 
tory workers. 

What  excited  me  about  the  Skid  Row  was  the  talk  of  the 
workers.  They  loved  ideas:  philosophy,  politics,  world  affairs, 
class  struggle.  It  thrilled  me  to  find  Americans— of  all  national 
origins— who  earned  their  living  by  the  hardest  kind  of  labor 
imaginable,  but  had  not  been  stupefied  and  brutalized  by  it. 
It  never  ceased  to  amaze  me  that  they  were  so  passionately 
intellectual.  I  was  too  green  to  understand  that  theirs  was 
no  eagerness  for  ideas  in  the  empty  abstract;  I  only  hazily 
felt  that  their  intellectual  interests  were  rooted  (more  solidly 
than  my  own)  in  the  unromantic  bread-and-butter  problems 


52  Aesop's  Fables 

of  their  daily  life.  Yet  that  was  the  case.  Their  talk  was,  in 
large  part,  directed  toward  ways  of  correcting  the  conditions 
that  kept  them  working  to  exhaustion  several  months  of  the 
year  and  then  turned  them  into  bums  for  the  winter.  Their 
talk  was  radical  talk. 

I  knew  nothing  of  working  class  radicalism  and  little  of 
the  realities  of  trade  unionism,  but  this  did  not  interfere  with 
my  appreciation  of  the  Skid  Row.  Even  without  full  under- 
standing of  the  violent  social  conflicts  behind  the  ideas  these 
men  discussed,  I  considered  the  very  range  of  their  talk— 
and  the  whole  restless  movement  of  the  Skid  Row,  with  its 
people  so  real  and  alive  and  unlike  the  wax  mannequins  of 
the  movies— a  demonstration  of  democracy  beyond  anything 
I  had  ever  dreamed.  On  arrival  at  any  Coast  town,  I  turned 
automatically  toward  the  Skid  Row. 

On  this  particular  summer  evening,  the  Skid  Row  was 
its  normal  self.  There  was  the  usual  flow  of  dungareed  hu- 
manity, there  were  the  customary  knots  of  talkers;  here  the 
Salvation  Army  corner,  there  the  succession  of  soapbox  speak- 
ers in  the  spot  habitually  set  aside  for  them.  The  Skid  Row 
was  normal,  but  something  abnormal  was  to  happen.  There 
was  a  sudden,  chilling  wail  and  before  I  could  make  up  my 
mind  whether  it  was  an  ambulance  siren,  a  fire-engine  or  a 
harbor  disaster-signal,  a  big  car  screeched  to  an  instant  halt 
at  the  curb  nearest  the  soapbox  gathering. 

The  car  was  a  Marmon,  then  manufactured  by  the  Nor- 
dyke  and  Marmon  Company  in  my  hometown  of  Indianapolis 
where  there  was  no  Skid  Row,  where  the  Ku  Klux  Klan 
under  D.  C.  Stephenson  was  all  powerful,  where  as  a  boy 
I  delivered  telegrams  to  the  officers  of  the  American  Federa- 
tion of  Labor  and  the  United  Mine  Workers  and  other  con- 
servative labor  leaders  who  looked,  talked  and  thought  like 
business  executives— and  rode  in  Marmons.  But  now  the  name 
Marmon  always  reminds  me  of  six  or  eight  of  the  biggest  po- 
licemen I  had  ever  seen,  piling  out  of  a  car  on  the  San  Fran- 
cisco Skid  Row  in  a  fraction  of  a  second. 


Skid  Row  53 

They  scattered  that  peaceful  gathering,  as  well  as  all  the 
little  knots  of  talkers  further  down  the  Row,  displaying  that 
fine  discrimination  and  delicate  regard  for  human  rights  so 
characteristic  of  our  policemen.  Then  they  filled  a  patrol- 
wagon  with  men  who  were  wanted  on  no  charge,  men  who 
had  not  even  resisted  their  violence,  random  victims  of  an 
unwarranted  raid,  selected  for  routine  false  arrest,  routine 
stationhouse  beating,  routine  release. 

It  was  old  stuff  to  them  but  I  was  shocked  and  resentful. 
Poor  naive  little  me  with  my  unsullied  schoolboy  faith  in  the 
inviolability  of  Constitutional  rights!  In  the  Indianapolis 
schools,  I  had  learned  what  textbooks  teach  on  this  subject  all 
over  the  United  States.  Moreover,  my  first  three  years  in  school 
were  spent  in  Springfield,  Illinois,  where  Abe  Lincoln's  home 
was  still  a  shrine  and  his  views  still  a  tradition.  I  really  be- 
lieved what  I  was  taught  about  the  basic  guarantees  of 
American  democracy.  I  'Icnew  my  rights,"  as  the  saying  goes, 
the  rights  of  every  American  citizen,  so  it  didn't  even  occur 
to  me  to  run  when  the  police  sluggers  started  "enforcing"  the 
Constitution  in  the  way  peculiar  to  the  preservers  of  law 
and  order.  I  just  stood  right  where  I  was,  too  outraged  to  be- 
lieve what  I  saw.  When  a  be-badged  and  duly  licensed  and 
uniformed  officer  of  the  law  told  me  to  "move  on,"  I  talked 
back. 

"I've  got  a  right  to  be  here,"  I  flared,  in  all  my  righteous 
ignorance  of  the  laws  of  power  and  the  power  of  The  Law. 
'We've  all  got  a  right  to  be  here.  Didn't  you  ever  hear  of  the 
Constitution?" 

That  did  it.  People  don't  talk  back  to  American  cops.  It's 
a  kind  of  lese  majeste.  Above  all,  never  mention  the  Constitu- 
tion to  an  officer  of  the  law.  He  regards  that  document  as  a 
personal  affront.  I  think  the  cop  turned  red,  only  you  couldn't 
tell  because  his  face  had  a  head  start. 

"Ill  Constitution  you  right  over  the  goddam  head,"  he 
said.  "I'll  Constitution  your  goddam  face."  He  also  men- 
tioned other  parts  of  my  goddam  anatomy.  No  doubt  he  raged 


54  Aesop's  Fables 

at  me,  instead  of  hitting  right  out,  only  because  I  was  so 
obviously  young  and  unduly  innocent-looking. 

I  have  taken  up  your  time  with  this  story  because  it  was, 
in  effect,  the  story  of  the  trial.  Which  is  to  say,  there  was  no 
trial;  the  government  just  Constitutioned  the  defendants  right 
over  the  head.  Only  this  time  it  was  not  done  with  a  club.  It 
was  done  with  a  sedition  law,  with  headline  hysteria,  with  a 
charge  based  on  a  desk  sergeant's  theory  of  Communism,  and 
finally  with  witnesses  and  evidence  dredged  up  by  our  secret 
political  police  from  the  bottom  of  the  political  underworld. 

Only  the  mind  of  a  policeman  could  have  devised  this  trial. 
That  is  the  key  to  the  otherwise  utterly  mysterious  record  of 
this  proceeding.  Everything  in  the  trial  stems  from  the  be- 
wilderment of  the  cop  who  has  a  problem  that  cannot  be 
solved  by  bringing  down  a  nightstick  on  the  head  of  some 
citizen  who  has  talked  out  of  turn.  The  cop  has  been  forced 
by  circumstances  to  bring  the  citizen  into  court.  He  is  still 
determined  to  keep  him  from  talking  back,  from  citing  the 
Constitution,  but  how  can  he  do  it?  How  shall  he  transfer 
to  the  courtroom,  the  power  he  wields  on  the  Skid  Row? 


Chapter  6 
FOR  IMBECILES  ONLY 


The  Queen  of  Hearts  had  a  similar  problem.  She  solved 
it.  Alice  thought  it  all  quite  silly,  but  it  must  be  admitted 
that  the  Queen's  solution  was  considered  worth  borrowing 
by  the  government  in  the  Communist  conspiracy  case.  At 
any  rate,  her  formula— "sentence  first,  trial  afterwards"— was 
vigorously  applied  by  Judge  Harold  R.  Medina. 

In  some  ways  this  case  is  madder  than  the  one  conceived 
by  Lewis  Carroll.  Suppose  the  Government  were  to  charge 
eleven  men  with  conspiring  to  walk  on  the  grass  in  Central 
Park  and  you  were  attending  the  trial.  You  would  expect  to 
hear  witnesses  who  had  overheard  the  defendants  plotting 
to  commit  that  offense,  would  you  not?  If,  instead,  the  Govern- 
ment put  witnesses  on  the  stand  who  testified  that  an  associate 
of  one  defendant  was  a  Bluebeard,  that  he  killed  seven  wives 
and  hid  their  bodies  in  a  closet,  wouldn't  you  decide  that 
you  were  in  Wonderland  and  would  soon  wake  up?  I  hope  to 
show  you  in  the  following  pages  how  wild  this  trial  really 
is,  and  why  it  got  that  way. 

The  Government  played  the  Queen  of  Hearts  by  bringing 
into  court  a  ready-made  theory  of  Communism  and  then  refus- 
ing to  admit  any  evidence  that  contradicted  it  or  that  failed 
to  fit  it.  It  is  therefore  logical  for  us  to  begin  by  comparing 
the  theory  on  which  the  Communists  were  tried,  with  the 
undisputed  surface  facts  about  Communism.  I  believe  the 
following  points  can  be  accepted  (by  anyone  but  a  policeman) 
as  statements  of  fact  about  Communism,  alike  for  the  purpose 

55 


56  Aesop's  Fables 

of  attacking  the  Communist  Party  or  of  defending  it.  They 
are  elementary  facts,  but  facts. 

First,  Karl  Marx  openly  enunciated  the  main  principles 
of  Communism  in  The  Communist  Manifesto  just  over  one 
hundred  years  ago. 

Second,  for  the  past  century  Marxist  parties  bearing  vari- 
ous names  have  openly  taught  and  acted  upon  those  prin- 
ciples wherever  democratic  processes  gave  them  the  right  to 
operate  as  legal  political  parties.  Where  such  rights  were 
denied,  they  did  and  do  propagate  and  advance  Marxist- 
Leninist  principles  by  underground  methods. 

Third,  from  the  very  proclamation  of  The  Communist 
Manifesto,  governments  and  ruling  classes  have  tried  to  out- 
law the  Communists.  (In  fact,  the  Manifesto  was  itself  is- 
sued in  1848  to  meet  a  wave  of  redbaiting  then  sweeping 
Europe. ) 

Fourth,  from  the  two  prosecutions  of  Marx  himself  in 
1849  to  the  American  Communist  conspiracy  case  just  a  hun- 
dred years  later,  the  attempts  to  find  something  criminal 
about  Communism  have  failed  to  overcome  one  major  ob- 
stacle: that  Communist  doctrine  specifically  repudiates  vio- 
lence in  the  sense  of  minority  adventures,  individual  acts  of 
terror  and  other  magic  formulae  for  revolution.  Marxist  writ- 
ings and  teachings  sharply  differentiate  (as  the  United  States 
Supreme  Court  has  noted )  between  the  broad  historic  process 
called  "social  revolution,"  and  the  violent  coup  d'etat  or  "pal- 
ace revolution/'  The  latter  is  emphatically  frowned  upon  by 
the  Communists. 

Fifth,  the  Communists  have  won  hundreds  of  millions  of 
adherents  over  the  face  of  the  earth.  The  Communist  move- 
ment today  governs  perhaps  a  third  of  the  globe  and  its  inhabi- 
tants. Even  the  State  Department's  recent  anti-Communist 
White  Paper  on  China  does  not  deny  that  the  Communist  re- 
gime there  enjoys  popular  support.  And  certainly  the  mil- 
lions who  have  joined  the  Communist  Party  in  Italy,  France 
and  other  countries  where  anti-Communist  governments  and 


For  Imbeciles  Only  57 

classes  are  in  power,  have  joined  it  voluntarily.  One  may  argue 
that  they  are  deceived,  if  he  wishes,  but  not  that  they  are 
subject  to  compulsion. 

Sixth,  in  the  course  of  the  past  century,  the  Communists 
have  elaborated  the  principles  first  stated  pamphleteer-fashion 
in  The  Communist  Manifesto,  into  an  enormous  body  of  the- 
ory. As  the  record  of  this  trial  reveals,  they  call  that  ency- 
clopedic body  of  literature,  "the  classics  of  Marxism-Lenin- 
ism," and  describe  its  principles  as  "scientific  Socialism." 

Enough  of  this  work  was  introduced  in  evidence  at  the 
trial  to  fill  thousands  of  pages  of  the  record.  From  those  pages, 
it  is  evident  that  no  desk  sergeant  is  competent  to  explain 
Marxist  theory.  I  myself  have  read  and  studied  all  the  works 
cited  at  the  trial,  yet  I  do  not  regard  myself  as  competent  to 
expound  the  principles  of  Communism,  and  where  I  can  I 
shall  rely  upon  direct  quotation  of  official  sources. 

Judge  Medina  professed  to  find  Marxist  theory  bewilder- 
ing and  said  it  seemed  to  employ  a  "special  jargon."  There 
is  indeed  a  technical  terminology  in  any  of  the  social  sciences 
for  the  use  of  Communists  and  non-Communists  alike;  if  one 
wishes  to  deride  it,  he  may  call  it  a  "jargon."  The  Marxist 
works  produced  at  the  trial  are  sometimes  relatively  popular 
in  style,  but  many  of  them  digest  and  generalize  the  experi- 
ence of  past  societies  and  the  lessons  of  past  revolutions. 
They  are  necessarily  more  or  less  difficult  and  technical.  One 
has  only  to  think  of  the  three  heavy  tomes  constituting  Karl 
Marx's  classic  study,  Das  Kapital—ihe  very  foundation  of  the 
modern  Communist  movement— to  realize  that  no  honest  man 
could  attempt  to  characterize  Communism  without  extensive 
study.  After  such  study,  he  would  have  to  describe  it  in  sci- 
entific terms,  with  cautious  qualification,  and  at  great  length. 

To  sum  up  the  elementary  facts:  Communism  today  is  a 
complex  doctrine  guiding  an  established  world-movement 
of  vast  scope.  Compare  this  reality  with  the  government 
theory  on  which  the  American  Communists  were  tried.  The 
government  theory,  if  we  may  dignify  it  with  that  name,  is 


58  Aesop  s  Fables 

that  Communism  teaches  how  a  small  band  of  armed  men  may 
seize  power  in  a  national  emergency  by  ordinary  cutthroat 
methods.  I  am  not  exaggerating  the  kindergarten  character 
of  the  government  case.  Let  me  cite  a  few  lines  of  a  typical 
report  on  the  trial  by  Russell  Porter,  who  repeated  the  same 
approved  formulation  of  the  prosecution  case  day  after  day 
in  the  New  York  Times,  for  instance  this,  on  June  4,  1949: 

"Government  witnesses  have  testified  the  defendants  set 
up  a  secret,  nationwide  organization  to  train  professional 
revolutionaries  in  the  tactics  of  the  Russian  Revolution  of 
1917.  Among  other  objectives,  according  to  the  evidence,  party 
members  were  taught  how  to  infiltrate  the  armed  forces,  get 
possession  of  soldiers'  and  sailors'  uniforms,  and  use  force  and 
violence  with  the  aid  of  the  Red  Army,  when  the  time  is 
ripe,  to  set  up  a  Soviet  America  dictatorship  to  destroy  the 
United  States  Constitution  and  its  guarantees  of  freedom  and 
democracy." 

This  is  the  ultimate  in  simplification;  it  is  the  pre-school 
version  of  the  theory  of  Communism.  Or  perhaps  it  would  be 
fairer  to  call  it  the  imbecile's  own  guide  to  Marxism.  True, 
as  Porter  says,  government  witnesses  did  testify  to  these  pre- 
posterous "facts."  And  they  do,  indeed,  correspond  to  what 
we  have  been  taught  by  the  House  Un-American  Activities 
Committee,  newspaper  headlines,  radio  commentators,  writers 
of  "I  Was  a  Communist"  books  and  articles,  and  all  the  rest 
of  the  elements  that  make  up  the  machine  for  the  manufac- 
ture of  public  opinion.  But  the  repetition  of  childish  non- 
sense for  however  long  a  period  by  however  many  persons 
will  not  make  sense  of  nonsense.  And  the  bogey-man  theory 
of  Communism  is  nonsense  by  a  decisive  test:  it  does  not  ex- 
plain current  events.  The  Communists  all  over  the  world 
would  not  be  achieving  the  successes  that  so  alarm  the  anti- 
Communists,  if  they  were  the  simpletons— villains,  but  still 
simpletons-portrayed  in  the  government  "theory."  Poll- 
parrots  cannot  lead  men  in  battle  or  rule  great  nations  in 
time  of  peace. 


For  Imbeciles  Only  59 

Proceeding  to  trial  on  such  a  basis,  the  government  could 
only  stumble  from  absurdity  to  monstrosity.  The  indictment 
applies  the  government  "theory"  of  Communism  to  the  period 
from  "on  or  about"  April  1,  1945  to  July  20,  1948,  but  the  "evi- 
dence" admitted  in  the  trial  goes  back  to  1848!  The  prosecu- 
tion set  out  to  show  that  Communists,  even  before  the  Rus- 
sian Revolution,  were  robots  who  slavishly  applied  Marxist 
doctrine  to  every  situation  in  every  country  in  identical  fash- 
ion, and  that  since  the  Bolshevik  Revolution  they  quite  liter- 
ally get  "orders"  from  Moscow  for  every  move.  The  choice  of 
a  certain  period  of  three  years  for  the  actual  indictment,  was 
determined  by  the  following  facts: 

During  the  period  of  American-Soviet  wartime  harmony, 
particularly  following  the  Teheran  Conference  (October 
1943),  the  then  leader  of  the  American  Communists,  Earl 
Browder,  engineered  a  radical  alteration  of  the  Communist 
movement  here.  He  proposed  to  take  the  Communist  Party 
out  of  American  political  life  and  leave  it  only  as  a  kind  of 
educational  society.  He  argued  that  the  wartime  honeymoon 
of  the  United  States  and  the  Soviet  Union  would  continue  in 
time  of  peace  and  that  it  would  be  accompanied  by  a  like 
honeymoon  of  capital  and  labor  within  the  country.  His  pro- 
posals and  his  supporting  arguments  were  strongly  opposed  by 
William  Z.  Foster,  who  said  in  a  letter  to  the  fifty-odd  top 
American  Communists,  that  the  major  capitalists,  grown  fat 
on  war  profits,  would  be  more  aggressive  than  ever  after  the 
war,  both  at  home  and  abroad.  Foster  obtained  only  one 
supporting  vote,  however,  and  Browder's  proposals  were 
adopted  by  the  Communists  in  1944.  Foster's  letter  was  not 
made  public  at  the  time,  so  the  general  membership  of  the 
Communist  Party  did  not  then  know  his  views.  In  early  1945 
there  were  many  indications  that  powerful  American  interests 
did  not  plan  to  continue  friendly  relations  with  Russia.  The 
beginnings  of  the  cold  war  ( or  the  resumption  of  the  basically 
anti-Soviet  policy  followed  since  1917)  were  reflected  in  do- 
mestic policies.  Inside  the  Communist  Political  Association, 


60  Aesop's  Fables 

which  had  replaced  the  Communist  Party,  these  signs  were 
noted,  and  various  doubts  were  voiced  as  to  the  wisdom  of 
the  change  made  in  1944.  But  no  one  said  outright  that  Foster 
had  been  right  and  a  basic  error  had  been  made  in  following 
Browder. 

In  the  spring  of  1945,  Jacques  Duclos,  a  French  Commu- 
nist leader  regarded  with  great  respect  by  Communists  in 
other  lands,  published  an  article  primarily  aimed  at  certain 
tendencies  in  his  own  party.  The  article,  however,  strongly 
criticized  the  American  Communists  and  reproduced  the  letter 
written  by  Foster  in  1944.  The  New  Yorfc  World-Telegram 
published  a  story  about  this  article  on  May  22,  1945  and  two 
days  later  the  full  text,  in  translation,  together  with  the  1944 
letter  by  Foster,  appeared  in  the  Daily  Worker.  Publication 
of  this  material  caused  an  explosion  within  the  Communist 
Party.  A  general  discussion  was  opened  and  for  some  weeks 
the  Daily  Worker  was  largely  devoted  to  the  discussion.  The 
upshot  of  the  affair  was  that  the  party  reversed  itself,  declared 
that  it  had  made  a  bad  mistake  in  listening  to  Browder,  and 
adopted  substantially  the  program  of  Foster.  Browder  lost  in- 
fluence and  was  later  expelled. 

These  events  are  recited  in  the  indictment  in  unrecogniz- 
able form.  They  are  distorted  to  fit  the  government  "theory" 
of  Communism.  They  are  repeated  at  the  trial  in  opening  ar- 
gument and  in  the  testimony  of  prosecution  witnesses,  as 
twisted  to  fit  the  "orders  from  Moscow"  assumption.  The 
prosecution  case  stuck  rigidly  to  the  theory  of  Communism  as 
a  plot  to  seize  power  by  the  use  of  little  bands  of  armed  men 
in  troubled  times.  It  followed,  in  short,  a  theory  in  direct  con- 
flict with  the  known  facts  about  the  scope  and  content  of 
Communist  theory  as  exemplified  by  the  Communist  move- 
ment in  the  world  today. 

This  led  to  a  line  of  "proof  that  so  glaringly  contradicted 
reality  as  to  give  rise  to  a  doubt:  the  prosecution  might  be 
considered  as  not  really  making  a  serious  attempt  to  obtain 
a  conviction.  The  atmosphere  in  the  courtroom  will  quickly 


For  Imbeciles  Only  61 

dispel  any  doubt;  the  political  climate  throughout  the  United 
States  forbids  such  a  thought.  It  is  a  grimly  earnest  trial 
and  what  is  more  the  defendants  were  convicted  before  they 
ever  entered  the  courtroom. 

But  the  result  is  a  puzzle:  the  government's  "proof"  proves 
only  that  it  holds  a  fantastic  theory  of  Communism;  it  is  con- 
tradicted at  every  turn  by  indisputable  facts.  What  happens, 
then,  in  such  a  trial?  The  answer  to  that  is  the  whole  essence 
of  the  case:  the  policeman  takes  over!  Not  just  the  United 
States  Marshals  who  were  instructed  by  the  Court  to  use 
force  on  counsel  for  the  defense;  not  just  the  jailers  who  hand- 
cuffed three  defendants  remanded  to  jail  in  the  course  of  the 
trial,  and  two  more  sentenced  to  thirty  days  for  contempt  of 
court;  not  these  but  the  political  police  took  over! 

And  that  is  why  the  story  of  this  trial  is  every  American's 
business.  As  a  trial,  it  was  no  trial  at  all;  as  "due  process," 
it  was  a  farce.  But  as  a  political  portent,  it  was  and  is  deadly 
serious.  That  is  why  I  am  writing.  The  fact  that  I  am  writing 
about  a  trial  of  Communists,  should  not  mislead  you  as  to  this 
book's  purpose.  It  is  not  a  plea  for  Communism.  It  is  not 
even  a  plea  for  the  particular  Communists  named  as  defend- 
ants. It  is  a  warning  that  you  are  in  danger  if  police  lawless- 
ness, hysteria,  prejudice  and  panic  are  permitted  to  replace 
the  Bill  of  Rights  in  certain  cases.  Toleration  of  lynch  justice 
only  with  respect  to  Communism,  will  end  up  as  toleration  of 
lynch  justice,  period.  We  are  not  dealing  with  a  new  wrinkle 
in  jurisprudence;  what  we  have  here  is  a  familiar  and  perilous 
political  principle.  That  principle  was  already  in  operation 
in  Judge  Medina's  courtroom  when  the  Communist  conspir- 
acy case  began. 


Chapter  7 
HAROLD  IN  WONDERLAND 


We  are  in  the  Federal  Court  for  the  Southern  District  of 
New  York  at  Foley  Square  in  New  York  City.  It  is  the  begin- 
ning of  the  trial  proper  and  we  intend  to  stay  through  open- 
ing argument  and  the  full  testimony  of  the  government's  first 
and  chief  witness— ex-Communist  Louis  Francis  Budenz.  Even 
thus  early,  however,  the  trial  has  a  history. 

1.  The  defendants  were  indicted  July  20,  1948.    The  in- 
dictment, that  we  have  mentioned  and  will  have  occasion  to 
deal  with  again  from  other  points  of  view,  may  be  here  sum- 
marized from  one  angle.    It  accuses  the  defendants  of  con- 
spiring to  "teach  and  advocate  the  overthrow  and  destruction 
of  the  government  of  the  United  States  by  force  and  violence/' 
not  directly  but  in  these  several  indirect  ways:  a.  by  organiz- 
ing the  Communist  Party;  b.  by  arranging  to  "publish  and  cir- 
culate, and  cause  to  be  published  and  circulated,  books,  ar- 
ticles, magazines,  and  newspapers  advocating  the  principles 
of  Marxism-Leninism";  c.  by  arranging  to  "conduct  and  cause 
to  be  conducted,  schools  and  classes  for  the  study  of  the  prin- 
ciples of  Marxism-Leninism,  in  which  would  be  taught  and 
advocated  the  duty  and  necessity  of  overthrowing  and  de- 
stroying the  government  of  the  United  States  by  force  and 
violence." 

2.  The  defense  immediately  moved  to  quash  the  indict- 
ment on  two  main  grounds:  I.  that  the  Grand  Jury  which  re- 
turned the  indictment  was  a  handpicked  rich-man's  jury  in 
violation  of  the  Constitution;  II.  that  the  Smith  Act  on  which 

62 


Harold  in  Wonderland  63 

the  indictment  was  based,  and  the  charge  under  it,  are  un- 
constitutional; they  violate  such  basic  rights  of  individuals 
as  freedom  of  speech  and  the  press. 

3.  Federal  Judge  George  M.  Hulbert  ruled  that  the  de- 
fendants must  stand  trial.   In  effect,  this  leaves  the  Constitu- 
tional questions  for  possible  ultimate  decision  by  the  Supreme 
Court.   He  declined  to  decide  the  Grand  Jury  question,  hold- 
ing that  it  might  be  raised  if  and  when  the  case  came  to 
trial. 

Even  in  the  earliest  stages  of  the  case,  the  defense  en- 
countered crude  prejudice.  We  have  been  told  many  times  that 
Judge  Medina  "leaned  over  backward"  to  be  fair— he  often 
said  so!  But  start  at  the  very  first  pages  of  the  stenographic 
transcript  during  preliminary  motions,  arraignment  and  so  on. 
Here  on  page  20: 

(From  the  record) 

MEDINA:  That  is  the  way  we  conduct  our  judicial  proceed- 
ings in  this  country. 

000 

One  must  indeed  lean  over  backward  to  miss  the  inference 
that  Communists  represent  a  foreign  country— Russia.  Two 
pages  more  and  we  get  it  again: 

(From  the  record) 

MEDINA:  All  right,  they  will  have  an  American  trial. 

*  o  a 

4.  It  came  to  trial  the  17th  day  of  January,  1949.  The  de- 
fense immediately  raised  the  Grand  Jury  question  and  for 
many  weeks  presented  evidence  in  support  of  its  charges. 
This  pre-trial  "challenge  round"  of  the  proceedings  lasted  un- 
til March  4,  when  Judge  Medina  denied  the  defense  motion 
to  quash  the  indictment  and  ordered  the  trial  proper  to  begin 
March  7. 

5.  Beginning  March  7,  time  was  consumed  with  such  pre- 
liminaries as  selecting  twelve  jurors  and  four  alternates,  so 


64  .  Aesop's  Fables 

that  presentation  of  opening  argument  was  delayed  until 
March  21  and  March  22. 

That  is  where  we  enter  the  courtroom.  Having  heard  the 
opening  arguments,  we  return  on  March  23  when  the  prose- 
cution places  Budenz  on  the  stand.  We  remain  here  until 
late  in  the  morning  of  April  6  when  the  first  witness  finally 
leaves  the  stand.  This  represents  ten  days  of  actual  testi- 
mony, ten  days  of  court.  During  that  period,  every  problem 
inherent  in  such  a  trial  comes  to  the  surface;  every  argument 
has  to  be  made  or  renewed.  Thus  we  obtain  a  fair  sample 
of  the  actual  courtroom  conduct  of  such  a  trial. 

The  sample  shows  that  Judge  Medina  tried  the  case  ac- 
cording to  the  policeman's  theory  of  Communism  devised  for 
this  specific  trial.  During  opening  argument  he  laid  down  his 
line  for  the  conduct  of  the  trial.  The  prosecution  had  ex- 
plained its  "cutthroat  bands"  theory  of  Communism  and  the 
defense  proposed  to  refute  that  description  of  Communist 
principles  by  showing  what  the  defendants  actually  taught 
and  did  every  minute  of  the  period  during  which  they  were 
alleged  to  have  been  engaged  in  such  melodramatic  shenani- 
gans. But  even  while  Eugene  Dennis,  Secretary  of  the  Com- 
munist Party,  acting  as  his  own  counsel,  was  formulating  this 
projected  defense,  Judge  Medina  interrupted  to  say: 

"I  don't  see  how,  Mr.  Dennis,  to  disprove  a  charge  of  con- 
spiring to  teach  and  advocate  the  overthrow  of  the  United 
States  government  by  force  and  violence,  it  is  going  to  be 
relevant  for  the  defendants  to  show  what  very  good  boys 
they  were  in  some  other  respects." 

One  need  not  be  a  lawyer  to  know  that  Judge  Medina 
has  here  made  a  very  improper  comment  in  the  presence  of 
the  jury.  And  without  being  a  lawyer,  one  may  safely  say 
that  the  learned  Judge  has  embodied  some  very  bad  law,  as 
lawyers  put  it,  in  his  comment.  For  it  is  the  very  a-b-c  of  com- 
mon justice,  that  a  defendant  does  not  have  to  disprove 
charges;  the  burden  of  proof  is  on  the  prosecution.  It  is  true 
that  Dennis  is  offering  to  prove  something,  but  he  is  not  ac- 


Harold  in  Wonderland  65 

cepting  any  obligation  to  disprove  the  charge.  Judge  Medina 
is  no  novice;  he  is  well  aware  that  he  is  giving  the  jury  a 
misleading  impression  of  Dennis*  offer. 

This  is  the  real  point:  the  prosecution,  in  order  to  prove 
the  charges,  has  indicated  what  kind  of  evidence  it  plans  to 
offer— cloak-and-dagger  stuff.  Now  the  defense  states  that 
it  proposes  to  discredit  that  evidence,  to  discredit  the  kind  of 
case  offered  by  the  government,  by  showing  that  Communist 
principles  and  practices  have  nothing  in  common  with  cloak- 
and-dagger  conspiracy.  Surely  that  is  relevant!  Surely  that  is 
not  at  all  the  same  as  undertaking  to  disprove  the  charge! 

Dennis  told  the  jury  that  the  defendants  would  show  that 
their  lifelong  activities,  teachings,  and  whole  way  of  life  had 
and  could  have— in  full  context— only  one  meaning:  to  show 
the  American  people  that  the  Communist  way  was  the  right 
way.  It  was  not  a  matter  of  winning  the  sympathies  of  the 
jury  for  Communist  theory,  but  of  proving  that  die  defendants 
had  sought  only  to  persuade  the  people  of  the  United  States 
that  they— the  majority— should  correct  certain  fundamental 
evils  (war,  economic  crises,  Jim  Crow)  which  Communist 
theory  attributes  to  capitalism  itself  and  contends  can  only 
be  eliminated  by  the  adoption  of  Socialism. 

In  sum,  the  defendants  say  they  wish  to  offer  proof  that 
they  sought  only  to  convince  the  American  people  by  fair 
argument.  That  would  seem  an  entirely  reasonable  way  of 
defending  themselves  against  the  accusation  of  planning  to 
coerce  the  American  people.  It  would  seem  the  only  logical 
way  of  answering  the  accusation  that  they  planned  to  force 
the  people  into  Communism  with  the  help  of  the  Red  Army. 

But  Medina  said  "No!"  and  "No!"  again.  Breaking  into 
Dennis*  outline  of  the  defense  proposal  to  describe  actual 
Communist  work,  he  remarked  with  heavy  sarcasm:  "I  don't 
think  you'll  get  around  to  that/'  And  he  made  it  his  business 
to  see  that  they  did  not  "get  around  to  that"  without  fighting 
every  inch  of  the  way.  Thus  he  assured  a  trial  fantastic  be- 
yond precedent. 


66  Aesop's  Fables 

The  moment  the  actual  taking  of  testimony  started,  the 
Alice  in  Wonderland  character  of  this  conduct  came  to  the 
surface.  For  the  government  witnesses,  starting  with  Num- 
ber One,  were  permitted  to  picture  activities  in  the  Commu- 
nist Party  to  suit  the  needs  of  the  prosecution,  but  the  defense 
was  not  permitted  to  reply  at  all  I  Budenz,  for  example,  spent 
five  full  days  and  a  part  of  a  sixth  under  direct  examination. 
Having  been  in  the  Communist  Party  for  years,  he  described 
his  life  and  activities  there  a  la  Russell  Porter  and  the  FBI. 
He  testified,  specifically,  that  as  editor  of  the  more  or  less 
official  party  newspaper,  the  Daily  Worker,  he  had  taught  and 
advocated  the  violent  and  forcible  overthrow  of  the  United 
States  Government  in  the  course  of  his  editorial  work.  Now 
watch  what  happens  when  the  defense  tries  to  refute  this. 

The  defense  proposed  to  prove  that  Budenz  was  a  common 
Bar,  or  perhaps  an  uncommon  perjurer.  To  this  end,  it  pre- 
sented the  articles  Budenz  had  himself  written  for  the  Daily 
Worker  during  his  years  in  the  party.  Seeking  to  force  his  ad- 
mission that  not  one  article,  not  one  sentence,  not  one  phrase 
counselled  coercion  of  the  American  people— force  and  vio- 
lence—the defense  offered  the  articles  in  evidence.  But  the 
Court  said  these  articles— a  series  on  Socialism,  by  the  way- 
were  irrelevant  precisely  because  they  contained  nothing 
about  force  and  violence!  They  were  inadmissible,  Medina 
held,  because  they  were  exclusively  concerned  with  labor 
problems,  Jim  Crow,  the  fight  for  peace,  and  other  legitimate 
political  activities. 

Why,  yes!  That  is  exactly  the  point.  The  chief  government 
wftness  is  unable  to  show  a  single  line  that  appeared  in  the 
Daily  Worker  while  he  was  its  editor,  representing  something 
other  than  legitimate  political  activity.  But  Medina  says  this 
is  inadmissible.  To  evade  the  real  point,  and  to  make  it  ap- 
pear that  the  defense  is  offering  only  certain  carefully  se- 
lected parts  of  the  paper,  he  put  these  rhetorical  questions  to 
the  witness: 

"I  suppose,  Mr.  Budenz,  that  in  any  one  of  these  periods 


Harold  in  Wonderland  67 

it  was  not  the  fact  that  every  article  in  the  Daily  Worker 
from  page  one  to  the  end  had  something  about  overthrowing 
the  State  by  force  and  violence?" 

"No,  sir." 

"There  must  be  plenty  of  parts  of  the  Daily  Worker  that 
had  nothing  to  do  with  these  issues?" 

This  is  infamous!  The  record  is  inescapable:  it  is  not  true 
that  the  defense  selected  parts  of  the  Daily  Workerf  parts 
suitable  for  its  purpose.  In  question  after  question,  the  defense 
gave  Budenz  the  whole  range  of  the  paper  during  his  editor- 
ship. Why  did  the  Court  permit  Budenz  to  testify  that  he 
advocated  force  and  violence  in  the  pages  of  tne  Daily  Work- 
er? SureJy,  if  he  did  so,  the  best  and  only  trustworthy  evidence 
would  have  been  the  guilty  articles  themselves.  Had  any  such 
article  existed,  the  government  would  certainly  have  produced 
it  in  evidence.  The  Court,  in  all  fairness,  should  have  required 
the  introduction  of  such  articles  before  permitting  the  prosecu- 
tion to  question  Budenz  on  this  subject.  But  the  Court  did 
not  limit  the  prosecution  or  the  witness  in  any  way. 

So  now  it  is  up  to  the  defense  to  show  the  inherent  dis- 
honesty of  this  procedure.  The  lawyers  therefore  invite  Bu- 
denz to  cite  any  example  he  pleases  of  the  advocacy  of  force 
and  violence,  in  any  part  of  any  issue  of  the  Daily  Worker. 
His  memory  fails;  his  replies  are  vague  and  evasive.  So  the 
defense  next  proposes  to  introduce  Budenz'  writings,  one  by 
one,  but  here  the  Court  interposes  barriers.  The  lawyers  fight 
for  their  rights,  however,  producing  the  Budenz'  series  on 
Socialism.  They  wish  to  give  him  a  chance  to  look  at  each 
one  and  show  which,  if  any,  constitutes  or  contains  the  advo- 
cacy of  force  and  violence  to  which  he  has  testified.  How  else 
is  the  jury  to  decide  whether  it  agrees  with  this  witness' 
judgment  of  what  constitutes  the  advocacy  of  force  and  vio- 
lence? How  else  is  the  jury  to  decide  whether  he  is  an  honest 
man  or  a  barefaced  liar?  How  else  is  the  jury  to  fulfill  its 
sworn  duty,  a  duty  it  cannot  delegate  to  the  witness  or  to  the 


68  Aesop's  Fables 

Court,  a  duty  that  belongs  to  the  jury  alone:  the  duty  of 
judging  the  facts  in  the  case? 

Yet  now  the  Court  rules  that  the  articles  are  inadmissible. 
It  forbids  the  jury  to  read  them!  It  refuses  to  let  the  defense 
confront  the  witness  with  his  own  writings  that  contradict 
his  testimony.  And  not  content  with  that,  Judge  Medina 
brazenly  misrepresents  to  the  jury  the  nature  of  the  defense 
offer! 

Judge  Medina  did  not  stop  there.  He  elaborated  an  argu- 
ment that  had  this  effect:  if,  in  fact,  there  were  not  one  word 
ever  written  or  published  by  the  defendants  to  sustain  the 
charges  made  by  the  government  witnesses,  then  nothing  the 
defendants  wrote  or  published  was  admissible  in  their  own 
defense!  If,  in  fact,  every  word  ever  written  or  published 
or  spoken  by  the  defendants,  appears  in  the  context  of  lawful 
critcism  of  existing  evils;  if  the  defendants  dealt  only  with 
the  oppression  of  labor,  the  subversion  of  democracy  by  Wall 
Street,  the  race  discrimination  imbedded  in  our  national  life, 
then  their  words  were  doubly  inadmissible! 

"As  I  read  those  articles,"  the  Judge  explained,  "it  again 
occurred  to  me  you  were  going  to  seek  to  take  the  offensive, 
and  the  offensive  in  this  case  is  by  the  prosecution.  Now 
if  you  think  this  or  that  or  the  other  American  practice,  or  a 
thing  that  is  done  here  or  there,  is  going  to  be  pilloried,  and 
that  the  defendants  and  their  counsel  are  going  to  take  the 
offensive,  you  might  just  as  well  know  now  that  that  isn't  going 
to  happen." 

Surely  this,  too,  is  borrowed  from  Lewis  Carroll.  "Ill  be 
judge,  111  be  jury.  ...  Ill  try  the  whole  case  and  condemn 
you  to  death!"  But  Medina  denied  vehemently  that  there 
was  any  unfairness  about  it.  He  was  perfectly  willing  to  admit 
articles  that  were  "relevant  and  competent,"  he  said.  The 
only  kind  of  article  he  wouldn't  admit  is  the  kind  that  actually 
appears  in  Communist  publications!  He  explained  why  he 
couldn't  do  that: 

"When  you  have  literature  by  this  witness  which  covers 


Harold  in  Wonderland  69 

everything  under  the  sun  that  may  be  deemed  a  grievance 
by  anybody,  of  young  people  because  they  were  not  given 
positions  of  responsibility,  women  because  they  cannot  be 
given  positions  of  men,  colored  people  because  they  are  ex- 
cluded from  this  or  that  in  certain  parts  of  the  country,  the 
Jews  because  they  are  not  treated,  in  their  opinion,  the  same 
as  other  people,  I  am  going  to  make  the  same  ruling  that  I 
have  made  here,  you  see,  that  that  has  no  bearing  on  what 
this  witness  has  testified  to  at  all,  and  I  am  going  to  rule 
it  out." 

Medina  never  relented.  He  stubbornly  maintained  that 
he  was  only  insisting  on  "a  prosecution  of  these  defendants, 
not  of  America  as  a  whole/'  He  would  admit  competent 
documents.  Every  document  offered,  however,  was  rejected 
until  defense  attorney  Richard  Gladstein  announced  that  un- 
der the  Court's  rules  there  was  nothing  further  the  defense 
could  submit. 

"Of  course,"  he  said,  "if  the  only  article  I  can  show  you 
is  one  which  shows  force  and  violence,  I  will  never  produce 
such  an  article  because  none  was  written." 

And  so  a  conviction  in  this  remarkable  case  was  assured. 
War  and  Fascism  are  out  of  the  case.  Jim  Crow  is  out.  The 
jury  is  not  to  hear  what  Communists  speak,  write,  or  think. 
It  is  to  hear  nothing  other  than  cloak-and-dagger  stuff  as  pre- 
sented by  the  government.  It  is  to  hear  what  prosecution 
witnesses  say  Communists  speak,  write  and  think. 

But  there  is  no  stopping  here.  Once  you  take  this  path, 
there  is  no  halt— short  of  shock  treatments— this  side  of  the 
madhouse.  To  be  consistent,  therefore,  the  government  now 
supplied  a  legal  "theory"  to  justify  the  procedure  adopted,  a 
"theory"  worthy  of  the  institution  in  which  this  trial  seems 
bound  to  end. 


Chapter  8 
THE  LAW  IN  WONDERLAND 


The  Queen  of  Hearts  was  always  screaming,  "Off  with  their 
heads !"  But  to  do  Wonderland  justice,  it  must  be  noted  that 
Alice  never  saw  anyone  executed.  Not  quite  so  optimistic  a 
report  can  be  delivered  from  Foley  Square.  No  actual  de- 
capitation took  place  there,  but  when  judicial  sandbagging 
was  ordered,  sandbagging  followed.  That  was  Judge  Medina's 
department,  and  he  managed  it  in  a  very  "legal"  way,  with  a 
very  simple  formula:  "This  is  an  ordinary  criminal  case/* 
Now  that  is  so  brazen  it  is  subtle!  Its  implications  do  not  at 
once  leap  to  the  mind.  So  observe  what  follows  in  this  little 
incident  with  a  later  witness,  recorded  at  page  3382  of  the 
record  (which  does  not,  unfortunately,  record  gestures  and 
intonations ) : 

(From  the  record) 

JUDGE  MEDINA  (to  witness):  Now  do  you  see  Stachel 
here? 

DEFENSE  ATTORNEY  SACHER:  May  I  respectfully  request 
that  the  defendants  be  referred  to  as  "Mister"? 

PROSECUTOR  McGoHEY:  I  have  no  objection. 

MEDINA:  You  may  request  it  but  I  may  leave  the  "Mister" 
off  occasionally.  (To  witness):  Now  do  you  see  Stachel  here? 

WITNESS  NOWELL:  Yes,  your  Honor,  I  do. 

MEDINA:  Now  go  down  there  and  point  him  out. 

(Witness  goes  to  edge  of  defense  counsel  table.) 

NOWELL:  The  gentleman  sitting  there  next  to  the  aisleway. 

70 


The  Law  in  Wonderland  71 

MEDINA:  You  better  go  right  over  there  and  point  to  him. 
NOWELL  (preceding  toward  defendant  Stachel):  This  is 
Mr.  Stachel. 

o  o  « 

What  the  witness  has  done  under  the  Court's  direction,  is 
known  to  the  underworld  as  "putting  the  finger"  on  a  victim. 
Transfer  of  this  technique  to  that  other  underworld,  the  police 
court,  can  be  justified  in  only  one  situation:  when  the  very 
essence  of  the  proof  is  the  ability  of  a  witness  to  identify  a 
man  charged  with  a  specific  criminal  act.  In  the  Communist 
conspiracy  case,  there  is  no  element  of  this  situation.  The 
identity  of  the  defendants  is  not  at  issue;  their  position  of  lead- 
ership in  the  Communist  Party  is  not  denied;  and,  what  is 
more,  they  are  not  charged  with  any  act.  Identification  can- 
not, therefore,  be  a  material  element  of  the  proof  in  this  case. 
No,  the  sole  purpose  of  the  "fingering"  is  to  tell  the  jury  that, 
in  the  eyes  of  the  Court,  these  men  are  no  better  than  com- 
mon gangsters,  or  at  least  that  they  are  charged  with  some- 
thing on  a  par  with  the  crimes  of  an  Al  Capone. 

Eventually,  Medina  said  so.  When  the  defense  protested 
against  this  "fingering"  technique,  and  protested  each  time 
it  was  repeated,  Medina  replied  that  this  was  an  ordinary 
criminal  trial.  "We  will  follow  the  same  procedure  here  that 
we  do  in  other  criminal  cases,"  he  said.  The  charge  was  to  be 
proved,  he  said,  as  you  might  prove,  say,  a  burglary  charge. 

"You  are  not  dealing  with  a  criminal  who  has  committed  a 
robbery,"  Gladstein  protested.  "These  are  political  leaders  of 
a  political  party." 

Medina  refused  to  consider  this  argument.  It  was  essential 
to  a  whole  series  of  rulings  on  which  the  government  case 
rested,  that  he  maintain  his  position.  As  Russell  Porter  sum- 
marized the  Judge's  comments  during  later  argument— follow- 
ing the  close  of  the  government's  case— the  charge  in  this  case 
is  compared  not  merely  to  vulgar  crimes  but  to  violent  ones. 

"The  Judge  reinforced  his  decision  that  the  government 
had  made  out  a  prima  facie  case  by  comparing  the  position 


72  Aesop's  Fables 

of  a  man  charged  with  first  degree  murder  and  shown  to  have 
held  a  grudge  against  his  victim,  gone  to  a  store  and  bought 
the  gun  with  ammunition,  hidden  in  the  man's  house  and 
waited  till  he  came  home  to  shoot  him. 

"He  upheld  his  decision  to  accept  the  testimony  of  the 
FBI  agents  by  comparing  them  with  similar  police  agents  who 
join  a  gang  of  bank  robbers  and  learn  the  details  of  their 
conspiracy  in  order  to  report  them  to  the  authorities/' 

An  "ordinary"  criminal  trial!  A  "common"  criminal  case! 
A  prosecution  for  burglary!  But  look  at  the  record.  If  the 
government,  in  good  faith,  thought  this  a  common  criminal 
case,  why  did  it  introduce  into  evidence,  beginning  with  its 
very  first  witness,  scores  of  books  and  pamphlets  by  Marx, 
Engels,  Lenin,  Stalin  and  others?  In  what  kind  of  "ordinary" 
criminal  trial  does  the  prosecutor  read  to  the  jury  from  The 
Communist  Manifesto,  Foundations  of  Leninism,  and  so  on? 
What  kind  of  case  fills  thousands  of  pages  of  its  record  with 
extracts  from  printed  works,  openly  published  by  the  Commu- 
nist Party  and  admittedly  circulated  by  it  as  widely  as  pos- 
sible? What  kind  of  "common'  crime  can  be  proved  by 
books? 

Counsel  for  the  defense  repeatedly  asked  that  question. 
It  provoked  disputes,  colloquies,  that  took  up  many  hours 
of  the  trial.  It  was  never  answered  but  we  may  as  well  an- 
swer it  right  now:  no  crime,  common  or  uncommon,  ordi- 
nary or  extraordinary,  can  be  proved  with  such  evidence.  No 
criminal  trial  has  such  a  record.  This  is  not,  therefore,  a  crimi- 
nal trial;  it  is  a  political  trial.  That  is  the  heart  of  the  matter 
and  that  is  why  the  Court  steadfastly  declined  to  answer  the 
question  or  to  acknowledge  the  true  character  of  the  case. 

Judge  Medina's  attempts  to  show  why  the  case  should  be 
treated  as  a  burglary  case,  produce  some  of  the  most  startling 
dialogue  in  the  record,  and  his  use  of  the  burglary-theory 
produces  the  most  fantastic  procedures.  On  March  30,  during 
the  direct  examination  of  Budenz,  the  prosecution  offered  in 
evidence  a  book  known  as  The  History  of  the  Communist 


The  Law  in  Wonderland  73 

Party  of  the  Soviet  Union,  one  of  the  youngest  of  the  "Marxist 
classics."  Defense  Attorney  Richard  Gladstein  rose  to  say: 

"I  have  no  objection  to  the  contents  of  the  book,  but  I  will 
make  this  objection:  I  submit  that  it  is  not  proper  in  a  court 
of  law  to  try  men  upon  the  fact  that  they  recommended  for 
study  any  book/' 

Another  defense  attorney,  Abraham  Isserman,  added  that 
introduction  of  the  book  was,  in  effect,  to  put  books  on  trial, 
to  try  history. 

Medina  summarily  dismissed  the  defense  point  of  view: 
It  is  trying  those  persons  who  used  the  book  and  other  means 
to  allegedly  commit  a  crime,  and  that  is  part  of  the  parapher- 
nalia of  the  charge,  it  seems  to  me.  I  will  allow  it." 

Paraphernalia!  But  a  book  raises  somewhat  different  prob- 
lems than  a  burglar's  tools,  the  defense  caustically  submitted. 

"Is  the  jury  to  read  and  study  this  book  before  it  renders 
its  verdict?"  Isserman  asked.  And  how  would  this  be  ar- 
ranged? "Is  the  Court  going  to  do  it?  Or  shall  we  read  it  to 
the  jury  word  for  word  and  then  bring  in  people  to  explain 
it?" 

For  all  reply,  Medina  reiterated  his  burglary  theory:  "This 
book  is,  as  I  understand  it,  part  of  the  paraphernalia,  one  of 
the  implements  that  are  alleged  to  have  been  used  by  the  de- 
fendants in  forming  the  conspiracy  that  is  alleged  in  the  com- 
plaint or  in  the  indictment." 

There  is  something  about  political  trials  that  leads  them 
inevitably  toward  book-burning.  Was  it  not  a  famous  Nazi  who 
said:  "When  I  hear  the  word  'Culture/  I  reach  for  my  gun"? 
Judge  Medina,  having  compared  the  defendants  to  burglars, 
has  no  retreat:  he  must  compare  the  only  tools  they  used- 
books— to  a  burglar's  jimmy.  There  is  the  smell  not  only  of 
bonfires  but  the  gas-chamber  in  this  vicious  sophistry. 

"To  call  these  books  'paraphernalia'  and  'apparatus'  is  to 
reduce  books  to  the  level  of  tools  of  thieves,"  Sacher  declared 
on  another  occasion.  "I  tell  you  the  culture  of  the  world  will 
not  long  survive  with  that  approach  to  books." 


74  Aesop 's  Fables 

Of  course,  if  the  prosecution  could  show  that  the  defen- 
dants threw  Marxist  classics  at  the  head  of  the  witness,  in- 
tending thereby  to  make  Marxist-Leninist  principles  penetrate 
his  mind,  the  Court  might  reasonably  speak  of  the  books  as 
"implements"  of  the  crime.  But  there  is  no  evidence  that  these 
principles  ever  made  any  impression  on  the  mind  of  Louis 
Budenz.  In  the  actual  circumstances,  the  comparison  shows  a 
profound  contempt  for  ideas,  whereas  the  Founding  Fathers 
—or  their  constituents— thought  the  free  circulation  of  ideas 
was  so  important  that  they  protected  that  freedom  in  a  Bill 
of  Rights  tacked  on  to  the  Constitution. 

An  accusation  against  ideas  must  be  met  by  defense  of 
ideas.  All  Medina's  freely  invoked  powers  could  not  put  the 
burglary  case  together  again.  Though  he  threatened  the  de- 
fendants and  their  lawyers  almost  from  the  first  day  of  the 
trial,  though  before  the  trial  was  over  he  did  indeed  remand 
several  defendants  to  jail  for  the  "duration"  and  set  United 
States  Marshals  to  keep  the  lawyers  in  their  seats,  he  could 
not  put  down  the  defense  challenge.  The  defense  dared  not 
relent.  It  had  pointed  out  before  the  trial  began  that  the  de- 
fendants were  charged  with  "wrong"  ideas,  whereas  the  Con- 
stitution protects  ideas  from  the  scrutiny  of  policemen  and 
politicians.  Once  this  right  had  been  violated  and  the  de- 
fendants' ideas  placed  on  trial,  the  defense  could  only  insist 
upon  demonstrating  at  every  juncture  that  it  had  not  misstated 
the  nature  of  the  case.  The  prosecution— in  which  we  must 
include  Judge  Medina,  or  rather,  in  which  Judge  Medina 
included  himself— not  being  free  to  turn  back,  could  only 
attempt  to  cry  down  the  defense. 

This  it  was  that  gave  the  trial  its  bitter  flavor  of  personal 
combat  between  a  judge  and  a  group  of  lawyers.  Virtually  all 
that  the  public  obtained  from  press  reports  of  the  trial,  was  the 
fact  of  the  combat.  The  impression,  the  only  impression  left 
with  the  public,  was  of  a  poor,  patient  judge  martyrized  by 
rascally  Communist  lawyers  who  used  "Communist  tactics 
of  jumping  up  and  down"  to  wear  out  this  very  incarnation  of 


The  Law  in  Wonderland  75 

even-handed  justice.  The  Judge  frequently  furthered  this  im- 
pression by  charging  that  the  defendants  were  trying  to  pro- 
voke him  into  some  action  which  would  cause  a  mistrial.  In 
this  way,  he  sought  to  account  for  the  unusual  character  of  the 
trial. 

But  that  explanation  was  unnecessary.  How  could  a  trial 
full  of  books  have  been  other  than  strange?  If  you  offer  a 
burglar's  jimmy  in  evidence,  why  there's  an  end  of  it.  But 
once  you  admit  a  book  into  evidence,  you  have  to  ask  what 
the  book  was  used  for.  A  jimmy?  Why  that  pries  open  a 
window.  But  a  book?  Ah,  that's  a  question  of  the  contents 
of  the  book,  the  meaning  of  the  book,  the  life  and  character  of 
the  writer  and  the  reader.  When  only  parts  of  each  book, 
pages  or  even  sentences,  are  offered  in  evidence,  nothing  but 
a  trick  answer  can  result.  The  very  quotations  read  by  the 
prosecution  into  the  record,  warned  against  doing  what  the 
prosecution  was  thereby  doing.  Prosecutor  McGohey,  reading 
an  article  by  Eugene  Dennis  in  Political  Affairs,  Communist 
monthly,  seemed  unaware  that  he  was  telling  the  jury  it  could 
not  understand  Marxism-Leninism  by  taking  extracts  out  of 
context: 

"Stalin  counselled  the  Bolsheviks  to  study  Lenin,"  Dennis 
wrote,  "  'to  study  Lenin  not  from  isolated  quotations  but  from 
the  substance  of  his  work,  to  study  him  seriously  and  thought- 
fully/" 

Medina  nevertheless  permitted  the  prosecution  to  read 
such  isolated  quotations  throughout  the  trial.  To  give  the 
appearance  of  fair  play,  he  would  invite  the  defense  to  find 
other  extracts  if  it  could  be  argued  that  they  contradicted  the 
prosecution  offering.  But  he  would  not  hear  the  real  defense 
reply— that  in  the  context  of  the  whole  book  and  the  whole 
theory  of  Marxism-Leninism,  the  extracts  did  not  mean  what 
prosecution  witnesses  were  allowed  to  say  they  meant. 

The  Judge  and  prosecutor  not  only  depended  upon  out-of- 
context  quotations,  but  frankly  feared  books  in  context.  The 
History  of  the  Communist  Party  of  the  Soviet  Union  played 


76  Aesop's  Fables 

so  large  a  part  in  the  government's  case,  that  the  question 
arose  of  giving  each  member  of  the  jury  a  copy  so  that  he 
might  follow  the  various  readings.  Then  it  was  suggested  that 
it  would  be  even  better  to  give  each  juror  a  copy  to  retain. 
But  here  the  government  and  the  defense  divided: 

(From  the  record) 

McGoHEY:  Not  overnight. 

MEDINA:  No,  not  overnight. 

McGoHEY:  Oh,  we  would  have  them  here  every  day.  We 
will  bring  them  into  the  courtroom  so  that  the  jurors  can  have 
them  each  day. 

CROCKETT:  May  I  suggest  that  there  is  nothing  inappro- 
priate for  the  jury  to  keep  the  books.  There  is  no  very  great 
expense  attached  to  it.  This  is  the  cheapest  issue. 

MEDINA:  No,  no,  I  don't  go  along  with  this  business  of 
taking  them  home. 

SACHER:  When  will  they  read  them? 

MEDINA:  We  have  recesses. 

SACHER:  Recesses?  We  would  like  them  to  smoke  during 
the  recesses. 

MEDINA:  You  would  like  them  to  take  them  home? 

SACHER:  Yes,  I  think  it  is  a  good  idea. 

MEDINA:  Well,  I  don't. 

«         »         » 

Judge  Medina  was  forced  to  elaborate  his  "common 
crime"  theory  of  the  trial  to  explain  why  extracts  are  admis- 
sible but  whole  books  are  not.  This  required  him  to  drop  the 
burglary  hypothesis  and  substitute— arson!  It  was  April  4, 
near  the  end  of  the  cross-examination  of  Budenz.  Defense 
attorneys  were  pressing  their  point.  Not  only  whole  books, 
but  additional  expert  testimony  would  be  necessary  to  explain 
the  extracts  already  admitted,  they  said,  because  "we  are 
getting  into  a  big  field  of  political  ideas  and  philosophical 
ideas." 


The  Law  in  Wonderland  77 

"If  your  views  have  any  substance,"  said  the  Judge,  "we 
will  be  here  a  good  many  years." 

"Well,  your  Honor,"  attorney  Isserman  retorted,  "the 
government  is  bringing  in  these  documents,  not  the  defend- 
ants. They  are  bringing  in  volume  after  volume  and  book 
after  book  with  regard  to  a  philosophy  that  took  a  hundred 
years  to  develop,  and  that  is  really  what  is  on  trial." 

Why,  now,  come,  said  Medina.  Suppose  A,  B,  and  C  are 
charged  with  conspiracy,  and  suppose  "they  got  up  certain 
papers"  that  described  their  conspiracy  "in  the  most  une- 
quivocal language."  Nothing  was  missing.  "They  had  every- 
thing down  there,  how  they  were  going  to  get  to  the  Presi- 
dent's house  and  blow  up  the  house"  and  so  on.  And  suppose, 
said  the  Judge,  that  there  was  a  lot  more  of  this  document,  750 
pages  more  of  it,  that  had  nothing  to  do  with  the  details  of  the 
plot  "but  spoke  in  the  most  extravagant  terms  of  how  good 
all  these  people  were."  What  would  be  the  use  of  admitting 
the  750  irrelevant  pages? 

This  is  nonsense-with-a-purpose.  Of  course  no  such  docu- 
ment ever  existed  or  could  exist.  Gangsters  plotting  an  un- 
mistakable crime  that  requires  writing  down  the  plan  of 
action,  don't  add  750  pages  of  whitewash.  If  they  fear  the 
guilty  documents  may  fall  into  the  wrong  hands,  they  may 
employ  cryptic  language;  but  then  they  would  not  defeat 
the  purpose  of  the  cryptic  language  by  putting  down  in  "une- 
quivocal language,"  somewhere  else  in  the  same  communica- 
tion, their  whole  plan  "to  burn  down  the  President's  house." 
Men  who  plan  tangible  acts  either  don't  put  them  down  on 
paper  or  don't  add  pages  of  vague  self-praise. 

And  therein  lies  the  secret  of  Judge  Medina's  maneuver. 
He  is  deliberately  concealing  from  the  jury  the  difference  be- 
tween acts  and  ideas—the  very  essence  of  the  Communist  con- 
spiracy trial.  Communist  books,  written  up  to  one  hundred 
years  ago,  certainly  cannot  contain  unequivocal  plots  to  burn 
down  anything  in  the  United  States  from  on  or  about  April 
1,  1945  to  July  20,  1948.  Nor  can  the  writings  of  American 


78  Aesop's  Fables 

Communists  before  or  during  the  period  covered  by  the  indict- 
ment speak  in  "unequivocal  language"  of  some  criminal  act 
covered  by  this  indictment.  Why  not?  For  the  very  good  reason 
that  this  indictment  does  not  charge  them  with  any  criminal 
act  whatsoever!  The  defendants  are  not  charged  with  an  act; 
they  are  charged  with  something  called  "teaching  and  advocat- 
ing." Nor  are  they  charged  with  teaching  and  advocating  any 
act,  criminal  or  otherwise,  least  of  all  a  clear  and  specific  of- 
fense such  as  burning  down  the  President's  house. 

There  is  the  gimmick.  Sedition  trials,  political  trials,  trials 
of  ideas,  always  have  some  such  dodge.  The  defendants  are 
charged  with  no  act.  They  are  charged  only  with  teaching 
and  advocating  certain  ideas  known  to  Communists  as  "the 
principles  of  Marxism-Leninism."  It  is  these  ideas,  this  com- 
plex system  of  ideas  as  a  whole,  that  the  government  is  attack- 
ing. The  government  says  that  "the  principles  of  Marxism- 
Leninism"  require  the  overthrow  of  the  government  of  the 
United  States  by  force  and  violence  and  therefore,  the  de- 
fendants, who  teach  those  principles,  should  be  put  under 
lock  and  key.  That  is  the  Communist  conspiracy  case. 

"I  ask  you  ladies  and  gentlemen  to  remember  that  phrase, 
'Marxism-Leninism/"  Prosecutor  McGohey  said  to  the  jury 
in  his  opening  argument.  "You  will  hear  it  frequently,  through- 
out this  trial.  We  propose,  we  say  that  we  will  establish  that 
it  is  fundamental  in  the  principles  of  Marxism-Leninism: 

"1.  That  Socialism  cannot  be  established  by  peaceful 
evolution  but,  on  the  contrary,  can  be  established  only  by 
violent  revolution,  by  smashing  the  machinery  of  government 
and  setting  up  in  its  stead  a  dictatorship,  a  dictatorship  of  the 
proletariat. 

"2.  That  this  smashing  of  the  machinery  of  government  and 
setting  up  the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat  can  be  accom- 
plished only  by  the  violent  and  forceful  seizure  of  power  by 
the  proletariat  under  the  leadership  of  the  Communist  Party." 

But  this  is  in  itself  an  admission  that  the  prosecution  case 


The  Law  in  Wonderland  79 

does  not  rest  on  any  document  or  documents  admitting  in 
"unequivocal  language"  an  intent  to  perform  specific  criminal 
acts.  It  does  not  modify  this  admission  that  McGohey  goes  on 
to  outline  the  cloak-and-dagger  features  of  the  government 
case.  Following  the  principles  of  Marxism-Leninism,  he  said, 
the  defendants  in  schools  and  publications  taught  and  teach 
"that  the  classic  model  for  forceful  and  violent  overthrow 
of  the  government  of  the  United  States  is  the  Russian  Revolu- 
tion of  October  1917"  and  so  on  through  the  kindergarten- 
theory  of  Communism.  But  all  he  is  saying  is  that  he,  Tom 
Clark,  and  perhaps  Judge  Medina,  so  interpret  the  multiform 
doctrine  called  "Marxism-Leninism."  He  is  conceding  that 
there  is  not  and  cannot  be  evidence  that  the  defendants  plan- 
ned, so  to  speak,  to  burn  down  the  President's  house.  Nor  can 
there  be  any  document  advocating  the  commission  of  any 
given  act  of  violence  at  a  given  time  and  place.  There  are  no 
admissions;  there  is  only  interpretation. 

Now  the  cat  is  out  of  the  bag.  In  the  context  of  today's 
events,  Medina's  hypothesis  about  burning  down  the 
President's  house,  is  evidence  of  a  frame  of  mind  that  may 
well  lead  to  burning  up  the  Bill  of  Rights.  There  has 
been  only  one  case  in  history  of  a  government  trying  to  outlaw 
Communism  on  so  shabby  a  pretext.  That  was  the  trial  of  the 
late  Georgi  Dimitrov  and  the  leaders  of  the  German  Commu- 
nist Party  at  the  instigation  of  Hermann  Goering  and  Paul 
Joseph  Goebbels.  Appropriately  enough,  the  charge  against 
Dimitrov  and  his  co-defendants  was— arson!  Is  there  no  pres- 
ent day  symbolism  in  the  fact  that  the  very  men  who  cried 
"Arson!"  had  themselves  set  fire  to  the  Reichstag,  subsequently 
ordered  the  burning  of  books  loved  by  all  the  world,  and 
finally  started  that  mighty  blaze  known  as  the  Second  World 
War? 


Chapter  9 
GOOD  MORNING,  JOE 


Now  here  is  a  pretty  pickle!  Mr.  McGohey  has  an  Alfred 
Hitchcock  scenario  on  his' hands  but  the  light  is  bad.  He 
plans  to  present  (and  does  present)  a  simple  Hollywood 
cloak-and-dagger  plot.  All  his  evidence  is  of  that  character 
and  his  witnesses  would  be  miscast  in  any  other  kind  of  story. 
But  those  confounded  books  have  got  into  the  picture!  It  is  a 
very  serious  conflict  for  the  prosecution.  Since  this  is  not  Hol- 
lywood, the  scenario  could  not  be  "shot"  with  the  absolute 
freedom  the  prosecutor  might  prefer.  Certain  concessions  to 
reality  had  to  be  made.  Even  in  presenting  his  kindergarten 
version  of  Communism,  the  prosecutor  was  forced  to  use  the 
language  of  actual  Communism,  that  is,  to  read  from  the  vast 
library  of  Communist  theoretical  works,  the  Marxist  "classics." 
The  melodrama  gets  lost  in  the  lecture-hall:  now  it  is  the 
prosecutor  who  reads  extracts  from  a  variety  of  books  and 
pamphlets,  after  which  the  defense  reads  counter-extracts 
from  the  same  books;  then  it  is  the  turn  of  the  defense  to  read 
extracts  and  of  the  prosecution  to  counter.  Our  thriller 
threatens  to  end  up  as  a  documentary  for  classroom  use. 

This  is  no  imaginary  problem  for  the  prosecution.  It  is 
very  real.  The  Communists  must  be  presented  as  simple 
cutthroats  who  seriously  believe  they  can  "seize"  power  by 
armed  force  in  an  economic  crisis  or  upon  the  outbreak  of 
war.  But  how  can  you  make  a  jury  see  them  that  way  if  day 
after  day  they  are  shown  as  studious  men  poring  over  scien- 
tific books?  The  books  create  the  wrong  atmosphere.  They 

80 


Good  Morning,  Joe  81 

emphasize  the  complexity  of  Communist  theory  and  the 
seriousness  with  which  Communists  use  it  as  a  guide  in  their 
daily  work.  They  suggest  that  Communists  just  don't  fit  the 
description  supplied  by  the  prosecution.  If  they  don't,  what 
becomes  of  the  whole  prosecution  theory  of  the  case?  Plainly, 
the  prosecutor  is  in  trouble. 

Now  comes  Louis  Francis  Budenz,  a  slightly  soiled  hero,  to 
the  rescue.  His  membership  in  the  Communist  Party  from 
mid- 1935  to  late  1945,  during  which  period  he  occupied  prom- 
inent positions  and  came  into  contact  with  the  defendants, 
lends  a  certain  authority  to  his  testimony.  His  abandonment 
of  the  party  for  the  ostensible  purpose  of  returning  to  the 
Catholic  Church,  makes  him  a  safe  witness  and  one  certain 
to  be  very  hostile  to  the  defendants:  vindictiveness  goes  with 
renegacy.  Moreover,  as  a  witness,  Budenz  was  not  an  untried 
quantity.  He  had  told  his  story  to  a  number  of  governmental 
bodies:  the  House  Un-American  Activities  Committee  and 
comparable  bodies  in  various  states;  he  had  even  published 
a  book  with  substantially  the  same  bias.* 

The  prosecutor  has  assigned  to  Budenz  the  admittedly 
difficult  task  of  reconciling  the  complicated  and  known  facts 
about  Communism,  with  the  government's  nightmare-in-the- 
kindergarten  theory.  This  is  a  double  job:  first,  to  fit  the 
actions  of  the  American  Communists  into  the  "orders  from 
Moscow"  pattern;  second,  to  water  down  Communist  theory 
to  the  same  level.  Budenz  tackled  the  first  part  of  the  assign- 
ment in  the  afternoon  of  March  24. 

The  specific  questions-and-answers  purported  to  "explain" 
events  within  the  Communist  Party  from  May  1945  through 
the  years  covered  by  the  indictment  (the  revolt  against 
Browder,  previously  described).  The  prosecutor  first  showed 

*  While  the  defendants  were  under  indictment  but  before  trial, 
Budenz  testified  before  the  Un-American  Committee  that  Eugene  Den- 
nis had  headed  a  wartime  spy-ring!  Needless  to  say,  Dennis  was  not 
indicted  for  espionage  and  the  government's  chief  witness  at  Foley 
Square  said  nothing  about  spying. 


82  Aesop's  Fables 

that  Budenz  had  held  leading  editorial  positions  on  the  Daily 
Worker  during  the  period  in  question;  then  the  witness  was 
asked  about  the  paper's  news  of  the  San  Francisco  Conference 
to  organize  the  United  Nations.  Budenz  identified  Joseph 
Starobin  and  Frederick  Vanderbilt  Field  as  the  reporters  who 
"covered"  the  conference  for  the  Daily  Worker.  The  direct 
examination  then  continued: 

(From  the  record) 

GORDON:  While  Mr.  Starobin  and  Mr.  Field  were  in  San 
Francisco,  did  you  receive  any  communication  from  either 
of  them? 

BUDENZ:  Yes,  sir.  I  received  several  communications  but 
one  specifically  from  Mr.  Starobin. 

GORDON:  Can  you  recall  when  it  was  that  you  received  it? 

BUDENZ:  It  was— was  in  between  the  time  that  D.  Z.  Manuil- 

sky  of  the  Ukrainian  Delegation  arrived  in  San  Francisco— 

oaa 

Defense  Attorney  Sacher  interrupted  the  witness  here  to 
ask  the  Court  to  direct  him  to  state  the  time  in  terms  of  day, 
date,  month  or  year.  This  is  normal  procedure;  throughout  the 
trial  Judge  Medina  required  that  "the  time  and  place  be  fixed" 
by  the  calendar.  But  on  this  particular  occasion,  he  did  not 
choose  to  overthrow  the  obviously  rehearsed  testimony  by 
such  a  requirement.  Gordon  made  only  a  perfunctory  show  of 
asking  for  the  date: 

(From  the  record) 

GORDON:  Well— 

BUDENZ:  It  was  in  May  of  that  year. 

GORDON:  Do  you  remember  the  date? 

BUDENZ:  Not  the  specific  date.  It  lay  between  the  arrival 
of  D.  Z.  Manuilsky  of  the  Ukrainian  Delegation  in  San  Fran- 
cisco and  the  publication  of  the  Jacques  Duclos  article  attack- 
ing Earl  Browder. 

*         *         « 

Medina  not  only  overruled  a  defense  motion  to  strike  this 


Good  Morning,  Joe  83 

testimony  from  the  record,  but  himself  prodded  Budenz  with 
questions  designed  to  further  identify  Ukrainian  Premier 
Manuilsky  as  the  former  secretary  of  the  Communist  Interna- 
tional. The  date  of  his  arrival  in  San  Francisco  was  established 
(by  reference  to  news  dispatches)  as  May  6,  and  the  publica- 
tion in  the  World-Telegram  of  the  story  about  the  Duclos 
article  was  given  as  May  22.  Accordingly,  the  whole  point 
of  Budenz's  testimony  here,  is  to  connect  Manuilsky  with  the 
events  that  followed  publication  of  the  Duclos  article. 

To  this  end,  Budenz  further  related  that  he  opened  Staro- 
bin's  letter  and  started  to  read  it,  but  before  he  finished  it 
the  letter  was  taken  away  by  defendant  Jack  Stachel  and  he 
never  saw  it  again.  But  he  had  seen  enough,  he  said,  to  show 
that  Manuilsky  had  talked  to  Starobin  about  precisely  this 
matter.  According  to  Budenz,  Manuilsky  said  "that  the  French 
comrades  had  been  given  the  commission  to  instruct  the  Amer- 
ican comrades  as  to  how  to  act  in  these  matters."  Following 
this  lead,  Gordon  constantly  phrased  his  questions  so  as  to 
exploit  the  "international  network"  implication  of  Budenz' 
story.  He  persistently  put  into  his  subsequent  questions  the 
expressions,  "the  French  comrades,"  and  "the  American  com- 
rades." Thus,  referring  to  the  Daily  Worker  of  May  24  in 
which  the  Duclos  article  was  first  printed,  Gordon  asked: 

"And  in  that  issue  is  there  published  anything  by  a  French 
comrade?" 

In  this  manner,  the  prosecution  "established"  that  the 
subsequent  events  happened  on  "orders  from  Moscow."  But 
the  whole  record  of  the  trial  contradicts  this  tale.  It  shows  that 
the  American  Communists  made  their  own  decisions  to  such 
an  extent  that  they  could  fall,  unchecked,  into  what  they 
themselves  later  characterized  as  a  completely  wrong  policy. 
The  "secret"  communication  of  "orders"  by  Manuilsky  to  the 
American  Communists  between  May  6  and  May  22  (by  the 
"safe"  medium,  incidentally,  of  an  ordinary,  uncoded  letter) 
is  a  fabrication  that  fails  to  explain  two  facts:  1.  Why  Duclos' 
criticism  of  the  American  Communists  was  not  secretly  com- 


84  Aesop's  Fables 

municated;  2.  that  it  was  openly  published  well  before  May  6 
in  the  April  issue  of  the  magazine  Cahiers  de  Communisme. 

The  prosecutor,  however,  is  satisfied.  He  has  explained 
the  1945  reorganization  in  terms  of  the  government's  arbitrary 
description  of  Communism.  This  description  is  distinctly  old 
hat.  So  much  so,  that  many  years  ago  a  well-known  comedian 
laughed  it  out  of  fashion  by  doing  a  pantomine  take-off  on  it. 
The  comedian,  Zero  Mostel,  did  an  elaborate  silent  routine  of 
an  American  Communist  getting  up  in  the  morning,  going 
through  the  waking-up  process  and  getting  dressed,  then 
going  immediately  to  the  telephone.  There  he  is  heard  calling 
long  distance;  he  asks  long  distance  for  Moscow  and  the 
Moscow  operator  for  the  Kremlin.  When  he  gets  the  Kremlin, 
he  asks  for  "Joe."  And  after  all  that  build-up,  he  says,  "Good 
morning,  Joe!  What  do  I  do  today?" 

At  any  rate,  for  what  it  is  worth,  Budenz  has  now  per- 
formed the  first  part  of  his  assignment:  to  describe  the  1945- 
1948  actions  of  the  American  Communists  in  terms  of  the 
"orders  from  Moscow"  theory.  There  remains  the  second  and 
harder  task:  to  whittle  down  the  involved  and  extensive  body 
of  Communist  theory  to  the  level  of  a  Skid  Row  policeman's 
mind.  The  method  chosen  by  the  prosecutor  to  steer  Budenz 
through  this  part  of  his  assignment,  was  dictated  by  the  nature 
and  form  of  the  indictment,  which  we  have  only  briefly  noted 
in  earlier  pages. 

The  indictment  contains  ten  numbered  paragraphs.  These 
describe,  one  by  one,  the  steps  taken  by  the  Communists  to 
effect  the  reconversion  of  the  Communist  Political  Association 
into  the  Communist  Party  of  the  United  States  in  the  spring 
and  summer  of  1945.  The  steps  cited  in  the  indictment  include 
the  calling  of  various  meetings  and  conventions;  the  adoption 
of  a  preliminary  resolution  and  a  subsequent  new  party  Con- 
stitution; the  adoption  of  a  program  calling  for  party  and  non- 
party  schools  in  which  Marxism-Leninism  would  be  taught 
and  for  books,  articles,  magazines  and  newspapers  in  which 
the  same  principles  would  be  propagated. 


Good  Morning,  Joe  85 

Now  here  is  the  first  extraordinary  thing  about  the  indict- 
ment: no  one  disputes  the  facts  it  cites!  The  defense  merely 
denies  that  the  cited  facts  constitute  a  crime.  And  this  points 
to  the  second  extraordinary  thing  about  the  indictment:  you 
cannot  lay  your  finger  on  the  charge!  In  any  indictment  you 
expect  to  find  a  charge  that  certain  clearly  unlawful  acts  were 
performed  at  a  stated  time  in  a  given  place.  A  conspiracy  in- 
dictment charges  a  number  of  persons  with  plotting  to  per- 
form some  similarly  unlawful  act  or  acts.  In  either  case,  every- 
one knows  what  the  charge  is  and  what  will  or  won't  serve 
as  a  defense.  If  a  man  is  charged  with  breaking  into  and 
entering  a  house  at  444  East  44th  Street  on  the  night  of  May 
24,  1945,  for  the  purpose  of  stealing  jewels  therein,  you  do  not 
need  a  lawyer  to  tell  you  that  the  act  charged  is  in  itself 
unlawful.  If  eleven  men  are  charged  with  conspiring  to  burn 
down  the  President's  house,  any  layman  can  see  that  the  plot 
is  unlawful  and  the  act  plotted  is  unlawful.  But  this  indictment 
is  different:  it  charges  only  lawful  acts! 

In  this  indictment,  eleven  men  (twelve  in  fact,  but  the 
case  of  William  Z.  Foster  was  "severed"  because  of  illness) 
are  charged  with  "conspiring"  to  organize  meetings,  news- 
papers and  schools  that  they  have  every  right  to  organize  or 
agree  to  organize.  These  things  they  "conspired"  to  do  are 
not  only  lawful  acts,  but  acts  the  Constitution  specifically 
forbids  Congress  ever  to  declare  unlawful.  No  other  specific 
acts  are  charged  in  the  indictment.  The  defendants  do  not, 
it  is  obvious,  deny  the  acts  charged.  And  this  leads  to  the  third 
extraordinary  aspect  of  the  case:  you  cannot  find  an  issue! 

The  indictment  fails  to  allege  a  criminal  act.  The  govern- 
ment is  content  to  recite  certain  actions  and  say  that  each 
forms  part  of  a  continuous  conspiracy  to  teach  and  advocate 
the  overthrow  of  the  Government  of  the  United  States  by 
force  and  violence.  The  defense  replies  that  this  is  not  only 
poppycock  but  an  attack  on  the  Bill  of  Rights,  an  attack  on 
freedom  of  speech  and  of  the  press  and  all  the  other  freedoms 


86  Aesop's  Fables 

cited  in  the  first  eight  Amendments  to  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States. 

What  the  indictment  really  says,  is  this:  let's  call  the  open, 
public  activities  of  the  Communist  Party,  a  "conspiracy."  Then 
let's  put  the  Communists  in  jail  for  these  activities.  But  one 
could  hardly  expect  the  government  to  give  the  game  away 
by  language  of  that  kind.  So  the  indictment  uses  some  of  the 
most  involved  sentences  (the  first  sentence,  paragraph  one, 
of  the  indictment,  contains  187  words)  and  curious  language 
imaginable.  It  says  that  the  defendants  performed  the  various 
acts  already  described,  "for  the  purpose  of  organizing  the 
Communist  Party  of  the  United  States  of  America,  a  society, 
group  and  assembly  of  persons  dedicated  to  the  Marxist- 
Leninist  principles  of  the  overthrow  and  destruction  of  the 
Government  of  the  United  States  by  force  and  violence/' 

"Marxism-Leninism"  —  that's  the  prosecution's  secret 
weapon  in  this  case!  The  indictment  uses  the  phrase  again  and 
again.  The  defendants,  it  says,  caused  the  Communist  Party 
to  adopt  a  Constitution  based  on  "the  principles  of  Marxism- 
Leninism."  They  planned  to  "publish  and  circulate  .  .  . 
books,  articles,  magazines  and  newspapers  advocating  the 
principles  of  Marxism-Leninism."  It  was  likewise  "a  part  of 
said  conspiracy  that  said  defendants  would  conduct,  and 
cause  to  be  conducted,  schools  and  classes  for  the  study  of 
the  principles  of  Marxism-Leninism,  in  which  would  be  taught 
and  advocated  the  duty  and  necessity  of  overthrowing  the 
Government  of  the  United  States  by  force  and  violence." 

In  the  last  sentence,  particularly,  "Marxism-Leninism"  be- 
comes the  equivalent  of  advocating  the  violent  overthrow  of 
the  government.  Thus,  by  mere  indirection,  obliquely,  the 
charge  of  conspiracy  is  propped  up  and  the  appearance  of  a 
case  is  maintained  in  the  indictment.  These  sinister  references 
to  "Marxism-Leninism,"  also  indicate  how  the  prosecution 
must  "prove"  its  case.  It  must  persuade  the  jury  that  to  teach 
"the  principles  of  Marxism-Leninism"  is  to  teach  and  advo- 
cate "the  overthrow  of  the  government." 


Good  Morning,  Joe  87 

But  precisely  here  lies  the  quicksand.  How  shall  the  prose- 
cutor venture  on  that  ground?  He  dare  not  submit  the  whole 
mass  of  Communist  theory,  the  library  of  Marxist  literature, 
to  the  jury  and  say:  "Here,  now,  study  all  this  and  decide  that 
it  adds  up  to  unlawful  advocacy."  In  the  first  place,  the  jury 
wouldn't  know  where  to  start.  But  beyond  the  practical  dif- 
ficulty of  such  a  method,  lies  the  political  difficulty:  to  rest 
the  case  frankly  on  books  and  books  alone  would  be  a  confes- 
sion that  the  defendants  are  on  trial  for  political  heresy,  not 
for  plotting  to  burn  down  the  President's  house  (as  in 
Medina's  hypothesis )  or  to  take  over  the  government  by  sud- 
den armed  assault  (as  the  prosecution  quite  seriously  alleges). 
To  admit  that  it  is  a  political  trial  would  be  fatal.  It  would 
follow  that,  under  the  Constitution,  the  government  had  no 
right  to  try  the  case  in  the  first  place.  It  is  not  proper  to  bring 
men  before  the  bar  of  American  justice  because  they  believe, 
teach  and  publish  a  doctrine  that  condemns  capitalism  and 
advocates  its  replacement  by  Socialism. 

This  is  the  dilemma  of  the  prosecutor.  That  is  why  he  must 
somehow  counter  the  effect  created  by  introducing  books  into 
the  case.  That  is  why  he  puts  his  faith  in  Budenz.  He  uses 
Budenz  for  all  he  is  worth— no,  that  is  a  dubious  formulation. 
He  used  Budenz  for  many  days;  his  testimony  fills  pages  1338 
through  2614  of  the  stenographic  record.  Almost  1300  pages- 
say  five  books  this  size! 

Yet  the  real  mission  of  Louis  Budenz  is  fulfilled  when  he 
has  uttered  one  sentence!  He  is  called  upon  to  pronounce  a 
one-sentence  interpretation  of  the  phrase  "Marxism-Leninism." 
One  sentence  carefully  wrapped  up  in  1277  pages  of  testimony! 
And  in  smuggling  that  one  sentence  into  the  record,  the  Court 
and  prosecutor  and  witness  combined  to  perpetrate  as  ugly 
a  legal  swindle  as  this  country  has  ever  seen. 

What  was  the  content  of  that  sentence?  Budenz  was  asked 
to  state  and  did  state,  his  opinion  as  to  the  meaning  of  Marx- 
ism-Leninism. Thus  there  went  into  the  record  as  evidence, 
that  which  was  not  and  could  not  be  evidence— a  mere  con- 


88  Aesop's  Fables 

elusion,  Louis  Budenz'  interpretation  of  the  meaning  of  Marx- 
ism-Leninism. The  opinion  and  conclusion  of  Louis  Budenz 
as  to  the  meaning  of  the  whole  vast  library  of  Communist 
writings  embodying  the  principles  of  Marxism-Leninism,  by 
some  strange  coincidence,  exactly  corresponded  to  the  opinion 
and  conclusion  of  John  F.  X.  McGohey,  United  State  Attorney 
for  the  Southern  District  of  New  York.  It  likewise  exactly 
followed  the  characterization  of  Marxism-Leninism  repeatedly 
made  in  the  indictment.  Here  is  Budenz'  magic  sentence  as 
recorded  at  page  1809  of  the  stenographic  minutes  of  the  trial: 

"In  the  United  States  this  would  mean  that  the  Communist 
Party  of  the  United  States  is  basically  committed  to  the  over- 
throw of  the  Government  of  the  United  States  as  set  up  by  the 
Constitution  of  the  United  States/' 

By  admitting  this  sentence  into  evidence,  Judge  Medina 
ended  the  trial  for  all  serious  purposes.  What  a  marvellous 
trick  this  is!  It  avoids  the  necessity  for  evidence  and  for  a 
jury  as  well.  The  "proof"  of  the  defendants'  guilt  is  "estab- 
lished" by  the  mere  say-so  of  Louis  Budenz!  This  one  sentence 
is  not  only  the  substance  of  the  testimony  of  Budenz,  but  it  is 
the  whole  substance  of  the  government's  case  from  beginning 
to  end.  All  the  rest  of  the  testimony  is  pure  atmosphere.  The 
indictment  and  the  prosecution  case  alike,  rest  on  a  difficult 
question:  what  is  the  meaning  of  Marxism-Leninism?  The 
long  and  complex  readings  suggest  how  hard  it  will  be  to  get 
a  definite  answer  to  that  question,  to  find  one  interpretation 
that  will  exclude  all  others  and  convince  a  jury  beyond  a 
reasonable  doubt.  But  now  this  central  problem  of  the  trial 
has  been  wrenched  from  the  hands  of  the  jury.  It  has  been 
turned  over  to  a  prosecution  witness  and  he  has  been  permit- 
ted to  say,  as  a  matter  of  evidence,  "Yes,  Mr.  Prosecutor,  your 
interpretation  is  the  right  one;  the  interpretation  of  Marxism- 
Leninism  in  the  indictment  is  correct."  The  trial  continues, 
but  the  issue  has  been  foreclosed. 

Let  us  turn  now  to  the  courtroom  to  see  this  swindle 
transacted.  The  prosecutor  opens  a  series  of  questions  on  the 


Good  Morning,  Joe  89 

Constitution  adopted  by  the  reorganized  Communist  Party 
in  1945.  The  first  sentence  of  the  preamble  is  read;  it  says: 

"The  Communist  Party  of  the  United  States  is  the  political 
party  of  the  American  working  class,  basing  itself  upon  the 
principles  of  scientific  Socialism,  Marxism-Leninism." 

The  prosecutor  asks  Budenz  what  that  means.  Defense 
Attorney  Gladstein  is  on  his  feet  at  once.  To  ask  the  witness 
what  it  means,  he  says,  "amounts  to  an  invasion  of  the  province 
of  the  jury.  It  is  for  the  jury  to  decide." 

"How  will  they  know  what  Marxism-Leninism  is  referred 
to  there  unless  somebody  tells  them?"  replied  Judge  Medina. 

In  the  continuing  argument,  Attorney  Isserman  elaborated 
the  defense  objection.  "The  record  already  indicates,"  he  said, 
"that  Marxism-Leninism,  or  scientific  Socialism  is  a  body  of 
ideas  of  vast  scope  and  extent.  That  is  indicated  already  by 
the  documents  that  have  been  put  into  evidence  by  the  govern- 
ment and  from  the  quotations  read  to  the  jury  and  the  balance 
of  the  articles  not  read  to  the  jury.  There  is  no  evidence  that 
this  witness  is  qualified  to  testify  on  the  meaning  of  a  body 
of  ideas  such  as  Marxism  is  composed  of. 

"Moreover,  any  definition  of  that  meaning  would  be  one 
that  would  take  a  person  qualified  over  a  considerable  period 
of  time  to  explain  with  reference  to  the  vast  body  of  writings 
which  compose  Marxism-Leninism." 

Judge  Medina  overruled  all  defense  objections  and,  taking 
the  matter  out  of  the  hands  of  the  faltering  prosecutor,  forced 
the  pace  himself.  "In  the  context  we  now  have  in  evidence 
here,"  he  said,  "there  is  no  reason  whatever  why  this  witness 
may  not  explain  to  us  what  was  the  common  understanding 
between  him  and  his  fellow-Communists  of  this  sentence." 

Sacher  objected  even  more  heatedly  to  the  Court's  com- 
ment than  to  the  question  itself.  He  protested  that  the  defend- 
ants were  not  charged  "with  such  interpretations  and  meanings 
as  this  witness  may  give  to  Marxism-Leninism  or  anything  else. 
Nor  are  they  charged  with  conversations  and  closet  interpre- 
tations between  Mr.  Budenz  and  anybody  else,"  an  obvious 


90  Aesop  s  Fables 

reference  to  pre-trial  preparation  of  the  testimony  by  Budenz 
and  McGohey. 

Medina  pressed  on.  "Mr.  Budenz,  what  did  you,  in  con- 
nection with  the  other  Communists  that  you  were  working 
with  there,  understand  that  to  mean?"  Further  emphatic  pro- 
test by  the  defense  blocked  an  answer  until  after  the  noon 
recess  on  March  29,  when  Budenz  at  last  succeeded  in  execut- 
ing his  mission  by  putting  the  following  answer  into  the 
record: 

"This  sentence,  as  is  historically  meant  throughout  the 
Communist  movement,  is  that  the  Communist  Party  bases 
itself  upon  the  theory  and  practice  of  so-called  scientific 
Socialism  as  appears  in  the  writings  of  Marx,  Engels,  Lenin 
and  Stalin  .  .  .  who  have  specifically  interpreted  scientific 
Socialism  to  mean  that  Socialism  can  only  be  attained  by  the 
violent  shattering  of  the  capitalist  state,  and  the  setting  up  of 
a  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat  by  force  and  violence  in  place 
of  that  state.  In  the  United  States  this  would  mean  that  the 
Communist  Party  of  the  United  States  is  basically  committed 
to  the  overthrow  of  the  Government  of  the  United  States 
as  set  up  by  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States." 

Now  let  us  see  where  we  stand.  We  have  already  heard  the 
defense  barred  from  showing  what  it  holds  Marxism-Leninism 
to  be— the  actual  activities,  writings  and  speeches  of  the  de- 
fendants. Judge  Medina  frequently  asserted  that  he  had  per- 
mitted a  good  deal  of  this,  had  been  very  generous,  in  fact,  in 
allowing  defense  testimony  and  cross-questioning  on  such 
matters  as  Jim  Crow,  the  labor  movement  and  other  things  in 
connection  with  which  the  defendants  had  been  "good  boys." 
But  always  he  allowed  this  as  a  kind  of  favor  with  the  express 
statement  that  these  were  "collateral"  or  "peripheral"  issues. 
But  there's  the  rub!  No  side  question  but  the  heart  issue  is 
involved  here;  the  real  meaning  of  Marxism-Leninism  is  ex- 
pressed in  a  vast  body  of  literature  inextricably  interwoven 
with  day-to-day  activities  in  a  hundred  fields  of  workaday 
struggle.  All  this  the  witness  has  been  allowed  to  exclude 


Good  Morning,  Joe  91 

from  the  jury's  contemplation  by  his  simple  assertion  that 
Marxism-Leninism  is  nothing  but  the  violent  overthrow  of  the 
government. 

The  defense,  in  a  motion  to  strike  out  Budenz'  definition, 
makes  that  point.  The  definition  has  no  place  in  the  record 
because  "it  is  invading  the  province  of  the  jury  in  deciding 
the  ultimate  issue  in  this  case— in  prejudging  that  decision/' 
Denied. 

The  Budenz  definition  was  given  in  March  and  the  key 
lines  appear  on  page  1809  of  the  stenographic  record.  Approxi- 
mately five  months  later,  defendant  Robert  Thompson  took 
the  stand.  He  was  asked  the  same  question  put  to  Budenz, 
and  the  following  took  place,  as  recorded  on  pages  11,818 
and  11,819  of  the  record: 
(From  the  record) 

GLADSTEIN:  Will  you  state  to  this  jury  what  is  Marxism- 
Leninism? 

McGoHEY:  Objection. 

MEDINA:  Sustained. 

GLADSTEIN:  May  I  call  your  Honor's  attention  to  the  state 
of  the  record— 

MEDINA:  No,  I  don't  want  to  hear  any  argument  about  it. 

GLADSTEIN:  But,  your  Honor— 

MEDINA:  I  will  hear  what  this  witness  directed  to  be  taught, 
resolutions  that  he  voted  for  setting  up  the  schools  and  what 
was  to  be  taught  in  the  schools,  and  when  the  time  comes, 
if  it  does,  for  him  to  testify  what  he  taught  and  in  particular 
schools,  within  certain  limitations  I  will  permit.  I  do  not  con- 
ceive the  question  before  us  to  be  one  which  makes  that  ques- 
tion relevant. 

GLADSTEIN:  Would  your  Honor  notice  that  in  the  record 
your  Honor  permitted  the  witness  Budenz  to  be  asked  pre- 
cisely that  question  and  to  give  an  answer  to  it? 

MEDINA:  You  know,  I  just  told  you  I  didn't  desire  to  hear 
argument  but  you  wanted  to  get  that  point  in  and  so  again 
you  have  become  contemptuous.  Go  ahead. 


92  Aesop's  Fables 

GLADSTEIN:  May  I  ask  the  witness  the  very  same  question 
that  Mr.  McGohey  asked,  your  Honor? 

MEDINA:  I  tell  you,  Mr.  Gladstein,  again,  I  do  not  desire 
to  hear  argument. 

GLADSTEIN:  I  do  not  want  to  argue  but  I  am  asking  per- 
mission— 

MEDINA:  No,  you  are  arguing,  and  you  are  again  con- 
temptuous. 

*  *  a 

A  lavish  cross-section  of  Marxist-Leninist  theory  may  be 
found  in  the  trial  record.  There  it  stands  for  the  jury  to  con- 
sider. In  the  Federal  courts,  the  judges  have  the  right  not  only 
to  expound  the  law  but  to  comment  on  the  evidence.  They  do 
not,  however,  have  the  power  to  delegate  that  right  to  a  wit- 
ness. That  is  exactly  what  Judge  Medina  has  done:  he  has 
permitted  Louis  Budenz  not  only  to  comment  on  the  evidence 
but  to  sum  up  the  case.  And  worse:  his  summary  has  been 
offered  and  accepted  as  evidence  submitted  by  an  authoritative 
witness. 

"Who  would  know,"  Judge  Medina  argued  in  the  presence 
of  the  jury,  if  not  this  man  "who  was  right  up  there"  working 
with  the  defendants? 

A  man  who  was  working  with  the  defendants  would  know, 
but  a  man  who  is  a  defendant  either  wouldn't  or  it  won't  do 
him  any  good;  Judge  Medina  isn't  going  to  let  him  tell. 

Well,  the  case  is  in  the  bag.  And  so,  too,  is  the  Bill  of  Rights 
if  the  Supreme  Court— or  the  people— of  the  United  States 
permit  this  legal  lynching  to  go  unchallenged. 


Chapter  10 
LOUIS  FRANCIS  AESOP 


Anything  "went"  in  the  Communist  conspiracy  trial.  The 
star  witness  was  even  permitted  to  relate  one  of  Aesop's 
fables  in  modern  anti-Communist  dress.  The  purpose  of  his 
fable,  and  of  the  government  in  bringing  it  into  "evidence," 
was  to  support  Budenz'  previous  definition  of  Marxism-Len- 
inism. The  prosecution  definition  was  well  tailored  to  fit  the 
indictment,  but  it  hung  very  loosely  on  the  evidence.  For  the 
evidence  included  Communist  books  and  documents  which 
forbid  Communists,  in  the  most  explicit  terms,  from  engaging 
in  any  of  the  cloak-and-dagger  nonsense  alleged  by  the  prose- 
cution. There  are  several  such  clear  disavowals  in  the  1945 
Constitution  of  the  Communist  Party  of  the  United  States. 

It  was  Budenz'  job  to  talk  his  way  out  of  that  language, 
and  he  called  Aesop  to  his  aid.  History  is  so  full  of  such  at- 
tempts to  twist  the  clear  meaning  of  written  words,  that  I  can 
also  borrow  a  reply  to  the  Budenz  fable  from  a  book  on  my 
shelf.  It  is  a  single  sentence  inscribed  as  the  motto  of  a 
miniature  edition  of  Dante's  The  Divine  Comedy:  Dov  £ 
piana  la  lettera  non  fare  oscura  glosa— where  the  words  are 
clear  as  sunlight,  don't  conjure  up  clouds  of  mysterious  in- 
terpretation. For  it  was  precisely  the  prosecution's  purpose 
to  drown  the  plain  meaning  of  certain  Marxist  passages,  in 
a  sea  of  obscure  commentary.  It's  a  pity  the  witness  was  not 
acquainted  with  the  work  of  Juan  Ruiz,  the  archpriest  of 
Hita,  who  told  the  classic  story  of  an  ignorant  man  turning 
meaning  upside  down. 

In  his  fourteenth  century  book  of  verse,  El  Libra  de 

93 


94  Aesop's  Fables 

Buen  Amor,  the  Spanish  priest  relates  a  fabulous  history  of 
how  Rome  obtained  its  culture.  The  rude  Romans  went  to 
the  civilized  Greeks  to  ask  for  their  code  of  laws.  The  Greeks 
replied  that  the  ignorant  Romans  didn't  deserve  the  law  be- 
cause they  were  incapable  of  understanding  it.  But  under  pres- 
sure they  agreed  to  a  test:  a  debate  by  signs.  The  Romans 
didn't  know  where  to  turn  for  a  representative  capable  of  fac- 
ing the  Greek  philosophers,  so  they  decided  to  choose  the  most 
bumptious  yokel  they  could  find  and  thus  put  the  issue  in 
the  hands  of  God.  They  dressed  the  bumpkin  in  the  rich 
garments  of  a  Doctor  of  Philosophy  and  he  took  his  place 
on  the  stand  puffing  fire:  "Bring  on  the  Greeks;  111  show  'em." 

Came  the  learned  choice  of  Greece  and,  with  both  nations 
watching  breathlessly,  he  opened  the  debate  with  quiet  con- 
fidence. He  held  up  one  finger— the  one  next  to  the  thumb— 
and  sat  down.  The  yokel  got  up,  all  bluster,  and  pointed  his 
thumb  and  two  fingers,  harpoon-like,  at  his  adversary,  then 
sat  down  drooling  self-satisfaction.  The  Greek,  for  his  second 
sign,  extended  his  flat  palm.  The  bumpkin  replied  with  a 
clenched  fist,  his  face  the  picture  of  uncomprehending  stub- 
bornness. 

This  ended  the  debate.  The  Greek  wise-man  turned  to 
his  countrymen  and  said,  "The  Romans  deserve  the  law;  I 
will  not  deny  them  their  due."  Asked  what  he  had  said  and 
what  the  Roman  had  replied,  the  Greek  gave  this  explanation : 
"I  said  there  is  one  God.  The  Roman  replied  that  He  was 
One  in  three  persons.  I  said  everything  is  in  the  hand  of  God 
and  he  agreed  that  all  is  in  His  power.  As  soon  as  I  saw  that 
the  Romans  understood  and  believed  in  the  Trinity,  I  knew 
they  deserved  the  security  of  the  law." 

Those  who  asked  the  yokel,  got  quite  a  different  and  Bu- 
denz-like  answer:  "He  said  to  me  that  he'd  gouge  out  an  eye 
with  his  finger  and  that  got  under  my  skin,  made  me  boiling 
mad,  I  can  tell  you.  So  I  answered  him  in  his  teeth  (that's 
the  way  you  have  to  talk  to  those  fellows)  that  right  in  front 
of  everybody,  I'd  poke  out  both  his  eyes  with  my  two  fingers 


Louis  Francis  Aesop  95 

and  break  his  teeth  with  my  thumb.  Then  he  said  he'd  slap 
me  so  hard  my  ears  would  ring  in  the  New  Year,  and  I  an- 
swered I'd  give  him  the  kind  of  punch  in  the  nose  that  he 
wouldn't  forget  all  the  New  Years  of  his  life.  Well,  when  he 
saw  he  couldn't  scare  me  and  that  I  was  too  tough  a  customer 
for  him,  he  decided  he  might  as  well  quit  threatening  and 
he  gave  up/' 

Juan  Ruiz  sums  it  up  as  well  for  the  Communist  conspiracy 
case  as  for  the  censor  who  might  misread  his  book:  "There 
is  no  evil  word  here  unless  it  be  ill  taken/'  It  was  precisely 
Budenz'  assignment  to  misread  those  passages  of  the  1945 
Communist  Constitution  that  refuted  his  "definition"  of  Marx- 
ism-Leninism. Immediately,  therefore,  after  the  Court  re- 
fused to  strike  that  definition  from  the  record,  Gordon  asked 
Budenz  a  curiously-worded  question  that  only  a  well-re- 
hearsed witness  could  have  understood.  Does  the  expression, 
"basing  itself  upon  the  principles  of  scientific  Socialism, 
Marxism-Leninism,"  as  it  appears  in  the  1945  Constitution, 
have  "any  particular  meaning  with  respect  to  other  language 
which  may  appear  and  does  appear  throughout  the  Consti- 
tution?" Gordon  asked. 

"Yes,  sir,"  Budenz  replied  without  hesitation.  "It  implies 
that  those  portions  of  this  Constitution  which  are  in  conflict 
with  Marxism-Leninism  are  null  in  effect.  They  are  merely 
window-dressing  asserted  for  protective  purposes,  the  Aesop- 
ian language  of  V.  I.  Lenin." 

This  passage  not  only  has  a  rehearsed  character,  but  the 
way  had  been  opened  for  it  by  Judge  Medina  in  one  of  his 
earlier,  prejudicial  remarks  so  frequently  encountered  in  the 
record.  He  had  said:  "I  also  notice  what  strikes  me  as  a 
curious  way  of  expressing  themselves  in  these  articles  and 
resolutions.  It  isn't  always  clear  to  me.  I  suppose  somebody 
is  going  to  explain  that  before  we  get  much  further  in  the 
case,  because  there  are  a  lot  of  words  that  don't  mean  much 
to  me.  It  seems  to  me  like  a  special  jargon  that,  maybe,  is 
used  in  this  particular  subject." 


96  Aesop's  Fables 

The  prosecutor  seized  on  this  invitation  to  let  Budenz  de- 
fine such  technical  terms  as  tailism,  revisionism,  renegade  (a 
word  that  should  have  made  him  blush),  exceptionalism, 
and,  as  we  have  seen,  Marxism-Leninism  itself.  Budenz'  "defi- 
nitions," even  on  their  face,  are  not  definitions;  they  are 
political  attacks  on  the  defendants  in  the  familiar  language 
of  the  lowest  grade  anti-Communism.  The  true  meaning  of 
the  terms  is  a  matter  of  the  internal  history  of  the  Socialist 
and  Communist  movements  for  the  past  seventy-five  or  one 
hundred  years.  And  it  is  recorded  history— but  Budenz  has 
never  read  the  records!  Under  cross-examination,  he  admitted 
that  he  had  given  the  "Communist  understanding"  of  "revi- 
sionism" and  of  the  "renegade  Kautsky,"  although  he  had 
never  read  the  basic  work,  Marxism  and  Revisionism,  a  col- 
lection of  articles  by  Lenin  and  Stalin  used  as  a  standard  text 
on  the  subject  by  Communists. 

Similarly  armed  with  ignorance,  he  was  able  to  extend  his 
essay  on  "Aesopian  language,"  defining  it  as  "roundabout 
protective  language  based  on  the  well-known  writer  of  fables, 
Aesop."  The  first  use  of  the  term  was  ascribed  to  Lenin  in  his 
preface  to  his  book,  Imperialism.  The  preface  explains  that 
the  book  was  written  while  Lenin  was  in  foreign  exile  before 
the  Revolution.  To  get  the  Czarist  censors  to  admit  the  book 
to  Russia,  Lenin  explained,  he  avoided  certain  terms  and 
subjects.  For  instance,  his  study  of  imperialism  deals  largely 
with  its  economic  side,  whereas  he  would  have  wished  to  show 
pointedly  how  economic  domination  leads  to  capitalist-impe- 
rialist domination  of  political  life  at  home  and  in  the  eco- 
nomic subject-countries.  Moreover,  he  would  have  wished  to 
give  his  illustrations  in  terms  of  the  Czarist  empire,  but  to  get 
by  the  censor  he  had  to  say  "Japan"  when  he  meant  Russia. 
In  sum,  said  Lenin,  he  had  to  employ  that  "cursed  Aesopian 
language"  imposed  by  the  censor. 

Now  what  has  all  this  to  do  with  the  American  Communist 
documents  under  attack  in  this  court?  Those  documents  say 
"American  imperialism"  when  they  mean  American  impe- 


Louis  Francis  Aesop  97 

rialism.  They  discuss  not  only  the  economics  but  the  poli- 
tics of  American  imperialism  and  do  not  disguise  their  hostility 
to  it.  Having  no  formal  censorship  to  face,  American  Com- 
munists in  1945  availed  themselves  of  the  possibility  of  saying 
outright  just  those  things  Lenin  could  not  say  because  of  the 
censor.  Under  the  prevailing  conditions,  they  had  no  need  of 
the  "protective"  and  censor-evading  "Aesopian-language  of 
V.  I.  Lenin,"  and  employed  none. 

If  you  read  the  record,  you  will  find  that  Budenz 
reveals  himself  as  a  political  mountebank.  He  simply  labels 
every  American  Communist  declaration  of  legitimate  politi- 
cal purpose,  "Aesopian  language"  and  "window-dressing." 
But  the  record  shows  that  identical  or  similar  declarations  are 
to  be  found  in  those  very  Marxist-Leninist  classics,  beginning 
with  The  Communist  Manifesto  of  1848,  which  were  written 
beyond  the  reach  of  the  censor.  They  contain  the  most  ex- 
plicit avowals  of  Communist  revolutionary  aims  side  by  side 
with  an  outline  of  legitimate  methods  by  which  these  aims 
are  to  be  achieved.  The  Communist  Manifesto  and  the  1945 
Constitution  of  the  Communist  Party  of  the  United  States 
alike  publicly  announce  that  the  Communists  work  for  the 
absolute  elimination  of  capitalism  and  its  replacement  by  So- 
cialism (which  later  develops  into  Communism).  Both  docu- 
ments state  that  this  can  be  achieved  only  by  day  to  day  strug- 
gles to  improve  the  condition  of  the  working-class,  and  by 
day  to  day  education.  Indeed,  they  insist  that  the  struggle 
for  democratic  rights  even  as  understood  by  capitalist  ideolo- 
gists, is  an  important  part  of  the  advance  toward  Socialism. 

Curiously  enough,  the  Manifesto  not  only  explains  this, 
but  does  so  in  language  designed  to  give  the  lie  to  the  Louis 
Budenzes  of  1848  and  to  their  Aesopian  fables!  "The  spectre 
of  Communism"  haunting  Europe,  according  to  the  very  first 
sentence  of  the  Manifesto,  was  a  reference  to  what  we  call 
the  "Red  Menace"  or  "Communist  bogey"  today;  that  is,  the 
policeman's-eye-view  of  Communism  in  a  time  of  hysteria. 

"Where  is  the  party  in  opposition  that  has  not  been  decried 


98  Aesop's  Fables 

as  communistic  by  its  opponents  in  power?"  asks  the  second 
paragraph  of  the  Manifesto.  And  it  notes  that  the  opposition 
tries  to  out-redbait  its  tormentors  by  hurling  "back  the  brand- 
ing reproach  of  Communism"  with  the  utter  recklessness  we 
see  even  today.  For  in  1848,  each  party,  says  the  Manifesto, 
redbaits  the  parties  not  only  to  the  Left  of  it  but  even  to  the 
Right— even  as  the  Republicans  and  Democrats  of  today.  Pre- 
cisely because  of  this  redbaiting,  Marx  and  Engels  were  com- 
missioned to  write  the  Manifesto.  As  that  document  puts  it: 
"It  is  high  time  that  Communists  should  openly,  in  the  sight 
of  the  whole  world,  publish  their  views,  their  aims,  their  ten- 
dencies, and  meet  this  nursery  tale  of  the  spectre  of  Com- 
munism with  a  manifesto  of  the  party  itself." 

It  is  perfectly  true  that  the  Manifesto  is  the  revolutionary 
program  of  a  revolutionary  party.  It  concludes  with  an  avow- 
al: "The  Communists  disdain  to  conceal  their  views  and  aims. 
They  openly  declare  that  their  ends  can  be  attained  only 
by  the  forcible  overthrow  of  all  existing  social  conditions. 
Let  the  ruling  classes  tremble  at  a  Communist  revolution. 
The  proletarians  have  nothing  to  lose  but  their  chains.  .  .  . 
Workers  of  the  world,  unitel" 

That  is  the  conclusion;  all  that  goes  before,  the  whole  of 
the  Manifesto,  explains  what  Marx  meant  by  "Communist 
revolution"  and  "the  overthrow  of  all  existing  social  condi- 
tions." In  terms  of  Poland,  Austria,  Germany,  France,  Switz- 
erland and  the  United  States  of  that  time,  he  specifically 
outlined  the  kind  of  legitimate  political  activities  and  educa- 
tion appropriate  to  Communist  parties.  His  suggestions  in 
the  Manifesto  add  up  to  a  campaign  to  win  majorities  by  es- 
tablishing "the  union  and  agreement  of  the  democratic  parties 
of  all  countries."  In  the  years  that  followed,  Marx,  Engels, 
Lenin  and  Stalin  many  times  had  occasion  to  repudiate  the 
real  Aesopian  fable— that  their  theory  contemplated  hand- 
made revolutions.  Every  Communist  document  of  importance 
contains  this  repudiation. 

The  repudiation  is   explained   in  the   greatest  detail  by 


Louis  Francis  Aesop  99 

Lenin  in  a  pamphlet  called  Left-Wing  Communism,  an  Infan- 
tile Disorder.  The  major  purpose  of  the  pamphlet  was  to 
denounce  flirtations  with  adventurist  violence  by  certain 
groups  of  Dutch  and  other  Communists.  He  said  there  could 
be  no  revolution  until  the  people  as  a  whole  have  reached 
the  limit  of  their  power  to  endure  suffering  from  the  evils  of 
the  old  system.  Even  that,  he  said,  was  not  in  itself  enough 
to  permit  a  revolution. 

"It  is  not  sufficient  for  revolution  that  the  exploited  and 
oppressed  masses  understand  the  impossibility  of  living  in  the 
old  way  and  demand  changes."  It  is  also  necessary  that  con- 
ditions be  so  critical  the  ruling  classes  "cannot  continue  in  the 
old  way,"  or  that  there  be  "a  national  crisis,  affecting  both  the 
exploited  and  the  exploiters."  Here  indeed  is  the  reference 
to  a  "crisis"  on  which  the  government  makes  much  of  its 
case.  But  the  next  sentence  shows  that  the  crisis  contemplated 
is  one  in  which  a  majority  desires  to  and  can  overthrow  a 
government.  "For  revolution  it  is  essential,  first,  that  a  ma- 
jority of  the  workers  (or  at  least  a  majority  of  the  class- 
conscious,  thinking,  politically  active  workers)  should  fully 
understand  the  necessity  for  revolution,  and  be  ready  to 
sacrifice  their  lives  for  it.  .  .  ."  The  sense  of  the  word  "ma- 
jority" is  qualified  here,  but  go  on  to  the  next  words  and  it 
becomes  clear  that,  as  Lenin  understands  it,  this  limited 
majority— the  majority  of  the  more  active  workers,  could  not 
if  it  would,  carry  out  a  revolution  against  the  will  of  the 
actual  majority  of  the  population  or  even  in  the  face  of  ma- 
jority apathy.  For  the  sentence  above  concludes:  ".  .  .  sec- 
ondly, the  .  .  .  ruling  classes  [must]  be  in  a  state  of  govern- 
mental crisis,  which  draws  even  the  most  backward  masses 
into  politics"  Only  when  the  crisis  stirs  the  normally  inac- 
tive masses  into  action  against  the  government  can  the  ad- 
vance guard  of  class-conscious  workers  lead  a  revolution.* 

In  a  series  of  lectures  published  as  Foundations  of  Lenin- 

*  On  this  point,  see  Appendix,  The  Schneiderman  Case. 


100  Aesop  s  Fables 

ism  and  duly  introduced  by  the  prosecution  in  this  trial,  Stalin: 
quoted,  approved  of  and  enlarged  upon  these  ideas.  As  ex- 
pressed above,  the  evidence  shows,  they  were  taught  in  Com- 
munist schools  here  and  quoted  in  Communist  speeches  and 
publications.  They  reflect  an  elementary  truth  of  history 
understood  by  serious  students  of  history  from  Thomas  Jef- 
ferson to  J.  V.  Stalin:  that  you  cannot  "make"  a  revolution; 
you  cannot  tell  a  revolution  when  to  happen.  Jefferson  wrote 
the  basic  thought  into  the  Declaration  of  Independence  which 
affirms  the  right  of  revolution.  The  Declaration  says  that 
a  government  rests  on  the  consent  of  the  governed  and  the  aim 
of  government  is  to  protect  certain  "inalienable  rights"  of  the 
individual,  rights  that  add  up  to  "life,  liberty  and  the  pursuit 
of  happiness."  Now,  in  the  words  of  the  Declaration: 

"Whenever  any  form  of  Government  becomes  destructive 
of  these  ends,  it  is  the  Right  of  the  People  to  alter  or  abolish 
it  and  to  institute  new  Government,  laying  its  foundation 
on  such  principles,  and  organizing  its  powers  in  such  form, 
as  to  them  shall  seem  most  likely  to  effect  their  safety  and 
happiness." 

In  short,  the  people  have  the  right  to  overthrow  any  gov- 
ernment and  replace  it  with  a  government  of  their  own  revo- 
lutionary choosing.  Abraham  Lincoln  said  it  so  forcefully 
it  should  be  remembered  for  all  time: 

"Whenever  they  shall  grow  weary  of  the  existing  govern- 
ment, they  can  exercise  their  Constitutional  right  of  amending 
it,  or  their  revolutionary  right  to  dismember  and  overthrow  it!" 

To  get  the  people  to  exercise  that  right  is  another  matter; 
they  are  slow  to  kindle,  or  as  the  Declaration  puts  it: 

"Prudence,   indeed,   will   dictate   that   governments   longj 
established  should  not  be  changed  for  light  and  transient 
causes;  and  accordingly  all  experience  hath  shewn  that  man- 1 
kind  are  more  disposed  to  suffer,  while  evils  are  sufferable, 
than  to  right  themselves  by  abolishing  the  forms  to  which  they 
are  accustomed." 

And  that  is  why  only  the  ignorant  could  counsel  a  revolu- 


ouis  Francis  Aesop  101 

ionary  party  to  rely  on  adventurous  "risings"  or  armed  forays 
cutthroat  bands.  Relying  on  history,  the  Communists  have 

^  jut  away  such  childish  toys  and  they  forbid  any  Communist 
o  play  with  them.  Budenz  labels  the  Communist  words  of 
earning,  "window-dressing."  But  there  is  no  reason  to  look 
or  some  mysterious  meaning  in  them  or  find  in  them  any 
contradiction  with  the  avowed  revolutionary  aims  of  the 

e  Uommunists.    They  merely   express   the   belief   common  to 

k  Thomas  Jefferson,  Karl  Marx  and  serious  political  scientists 
)f  our  day,  that  a  revolutionary  party  cannot  make  revolu- 
ions  but  can  prepare  for  the  coming  of  revolution  by  non- 
riolent  everyday  work  and  education. 

Another  "political  scientist"  who  held  that  Marxism  em- 

loyed  an  Aesopian  language,  was— Adolf  Hitler!  On  page  25 

>f  the  Houghton-Mifflin  1937  edition  of  Mein  Kampf  in  Eng- 

k  ish,  Hitler  describes  how  his  conversion  to  anti-Semitism 
nabled  him  to  see  the  "realities"  of  Marxism  behind  "the 
heoretic  claims  of  the  first  apostles  of  Social  Democracy."  In 
he  Budenzian  language  of  Hitler:  "It  had  taught  me  to  under- 
stand the  verbal  methods  of  the  Jewish  people,  whose  aim  is 
hide  or  at  least  to  cloak  their  ideas;  their  real  objective  is 
lot  to  be  read  on  the  lines,  but  is  tucked  away  well  concealed 
Between  them." 

The  Court  and  prosecutor  took  a  certain  risk  in  borrowing 
from  Hitler,  for  the  latter  bases  his  hatred  of  Marxism  on  its 
imdamental  concern  for  democracy,  its  refusal  to  tolerate 
minority  coercion  of  the  majority.  The  page  quoted  above 
goes  on:  "The  Jewish  doctrine  of  Marxism  rejects  the  aristo- 
cratic principle  of  Nature,  and  in  place  of  the  eternal  privilege 

|  of  force  and  strength  sets  up  the  mass  and  dead  weight  of 
.umbers."  How  one  professional  anti-Communist  persists  in 
contradicting  another! 

Judge  Medina  nevertheless  prodded  Budenz  to  interpret 
away  every  passage  of  the  1945  Constitution  that  disavowed 
minority  violence.  Article  9,  Section  1  and  2  of  that  docu- 
ment say: 


102  Aesop 's  Fables 

"Conduct  or  action  detrimental  to  the  working  class  and 
the  nation,  as  well  as  to  the  interests  of  the  Party,  violation 
of  decisions  of  its  leading  committees  or  of  this  Constitu- 
tion, financial  irregularities,  or  other  conduct  unbecoming 
a  member  of  the  Party,  may  be  punished  by  censure,  removal 
from  posts  of  leadership,  or  by  expulsion  from  membership. 
.  .  .  Adherence  to  or  participation  in  the  activities  of  any 
clique,  group,  circle,  faction  or  party  which  conspires  or  acts 
to  subvert,  undermine,  weaken  or  overthrow  any  or  all  insti- 
tutions of  American  democracy,  whereby  the  majority  of  the 
American  people  can  maintain  their  right  to  determine  their 
destinies  in  any  degree,  shall  be  punished  by  immediate  ex- 
pulsion." 

Of  course  the  defense  protested  against  permitting  Bu- 
denz  to  take  away  from  the  jury  the  task  of  interpreting  this 
(as  he  had  already  done  with  other  and  vital  matters).  But 
once  again  Medina  took  over  the  prosecutor's  role  and  gave 
Budenz  the  chance  to  say  that  those  passages  are  "purely 
Aesopian  language  for  protective  purposes  to  protect  the 
Party  in  its  activities  before  courts  of  law  in  America  while 
it  could  continue  the  theory  and  practice  of  Marxism-Lenin- 
ism/* 

This  is  not  and  cannot  be  evidence.  It  is  nothing  but  anti- 
Communist  agitation.  Budenz  was  not  asked  to  and  did  not 
testify  that  he  ever  heard  the  defendants  discussing  this  pas- 
sage during  the  process  of  drafting  the  Constitution.  He  did 
not  testify  that  they  said  it  should  be  put  in  for  protective 
purposes.  He  merely  asserted,  on  his  own,  that  it  is  "window- 
dressing."  And  Medina  calls  that  "evidence!"  The  Judge  does 
feel,  however,  the  necessity  of  explaining  why  he  admitted 
these  outrageous  "interpretations,"  but  his  explanation  is 
merely  additional  anti-Communist  agitation.  He  says  that  it 
was  necessary  to  admit  Budenz'  "testimony"  because  the  lan- 
guage of  the  Communist  Constitution  "looked  a  little  peculiar 
to  me." 

In  this  general  atmosphere  of  complete  hostility  to  the  j 


Louis  Francis  Aesop  103 

defense,  Budenz  is  permitted  to  stretch  his  "Aesopian"  fable 
beyond  the  limits  of  sanity.  During  cross-examination,  when 
he  was  asked  to  show  how  (as  he  testified  earlier)  he  had 
preached  force  and  violence  in  his  Daily  Worker  articles,  he 
offered  the  shadow  of  a  shadow  of  a  shadow.  Pointing  to  an 
article  that  appeared  April  12,  1945,  he  said  that  "since  Aesop- 
ian language  has  to  be  used,"  he  recommended  in  the  article 
the  reading  of  an  article  in  the  monthly  magazine,  Political 
Affairs.  That  is  Shadow  No.  1.  The  article,  by  defendant  John 
Williamson,  in  turn  urged  the  reading  of  The  History  of  the 
Communist  Party  of  the  Soviet  Union  ( Shadow  No.  2. )  "And 
every  Communist  knows,"  said  Budenz,  supplying  Shadow  No. 
3,  "that  when  you  begin  to  read  The  History  of  the  Communist 
Party  of  the  Soviet  Union,  you  begin  to  commit  yourself  to 
the  Leninist  line." 

According  to  this  gibberish  from  the  anti-Communist 
madhouse,  if  you  urge  a  person,  in  unequivocal  language,  to 
read  Marxist  classics  with  the  avowed  aim  of  inducing  him 
to  become  a  Communist,  you  are  using  "Aesopian  language." 
If  you  urge  reading  the  Bill  of  Rights— upon  which  the  de- 
fense relies  strongly  in  this  case— you  are  using  "Aesopian 
language."  And  Budenz  continued  in  this  vein,  unchecked 
by  the  Court.  Asked  if  there  was  anything  about  force  and 
violence  in  the  discussion  between  June  1945  when  the  Com- 
munist policy-change  began  and  October  10,  1945  when  Bu- 
denz left  the  party,  this  transpired: 

(From  the  record) 

BUDENZ:  There  was  no  specific  reference  to  the  overthrow 
of  the  government  by  force  and  violence  but  the  whole  dis- 
cussion in  the  Daily  Worker  was  over  that  question. 

GLADSTEIN:  Was  over  what  question? 

BUDENZ:  Over  the  question  of  adopting  the  Marxist-Lenin- 
ist position,  the  Leninist  line,  which  is  the  overthrow  of  the 
Government  of  the  United  States  by  force  and  violence. 
GLADSTEIN:  Did  it  say  anywhere  in  the  Daily  Worker  that 


104  Aesop  s  Fables 

the  Marxist-Leninist  line  is  the  overthrow  of  the  government 
by  force  and  violence? 

BUDENZ:  Of  that  I  cannot  be  sure  but  every  Communist 
knows  what  the  Marxist-Leninist  line  is. 

«  »  0 

If  there  were  any  logic  in  the  conduct  of  this  trial,  Budenz 
and  the  prosecution  would  have  been  held  to  have  overreached 
themselves  at  this  point.  For  as  cross-examination  continued, 
Budenz  similarly  identified  the  language  of  certain  1944  elec- 
tion articles  in  the  Daily  Worker  as  "Aesopian/'  But  that  is  the 
period  when,  according  to  the  prosecution  theory  of  the  case, 
the  Communists  had  abandoned  the  Marxist-Leninist  or  "vio- 
lent" line  and  therefore  had  no  need  for  "protective"  language 
or  "window-dressing."  The  defendants  are  indicted  on  the 
charge  that  later,  in  1945,  they  reorganized  the  Communist 
Party  and  returned  to  the  Marxist-Leninist  line.  Yet  Budenz 
says  Browder's  language  in  1944  is  just  as  "Aesopian"  as  Fos- 
ter's in  1945.  There  is  no  reason  for  this  to  trouble  the  Court. 
Having  swallowed  the  Aesopian  camel,  why  should  Judge 
Medina  strain  at  an  FBI  gnat? 

Indeed,  this  courtroom  has  no  place  for  logic.  We  have 
seen  the  prosecution  case  begin  as  a  melodrama,  slow  down  to 
the  pace  of  a  documentary,  recover,  then  turn  into  a  farce. 
Now  we  shall  see  the  testimony  of  Louis  Budenz  on  "Aesop- 
ian language"  degenerate  into  burlesque.  In  the  last  hours 
of  cross-examination,  defense  attorneys  read  to  the  witness 
selections  from  the  letter  written  by  Foster  to  the  Communist 
leaders  in  1944.  The  letter  was  already  in  the  trial  record, 
and  Attorney  Sacher  was  asking  the  questions.  The  witness 
would  not  give  direct  answers  and  the  defense  objected  to 
replies  that  were  long  anti-Communist  essays  in  the  guise 
of  "explanation."  Judge  Medina  defended  the  witness: 

The  way  it  is  Aesopian  is  what  he  wants  to  explain,"  said 
the  Judge.  "But  you  don't  want  the  explanation.  That  is  all 
right.  It  can  be  brought  out  on  redirect." 

This  prodding  gave  the  jury  the  impression  the  defense 


Louis  Francis  Aesop  105 

had  something  to  hide,  so  a  little  later  Sacher  decided  to  let 
Budenz  "explain."  The  attorney  had  just  read  a  long  passage 
in  which  Foster  said  the  Roosevelt  Administration  was  an  anti- 
monopoly  coalition  and  big  capital  hated  it.  Sacher  asked 
Budenz  if  that  was  "Aesopian." 

(From  the  record) 

BUDENZ:  Yes,  sir.  May  I  explain?  .  .  .  That  this  was  hanging 
on  to  the  Roosevelt  Administration  in  Aesopian  language  be- 
cause the  very  same  organization  had  condemned  Roosevelt 
strongly  when  it  served  Soviet  policies  to  do  so  and  Commu- 
nist principles  to  do  so.  Therefore,  their  standing  behind 
Roosevelt  at  this  time  was  not  merely  part  of  that  effort  to 
influence  people  to  adopting  Roosevelt,  since  they  had  con- 
demned Roosevelt  specifically  as  being  against  trade  unions, 
as  destroying  social  security,  and  as  bringing  about  Hitlerism 
during  the  period  of  the  Hitler-Stalin  Pact;  there  could  be 
more  explanation  of  that  but,  beyond  that,  through  this  ef- 
fort, the  idea  of  the  force  on  force  concept,  which  Duclos 

brings  forward  as  essential,  is  being  brought  forward." 

«         «         « 

If  this  means  anything— and  though  I  have  read  the  Duclos 
article  I  cannot  understand  the  last  reference— it  means  that 
Budenz  considers  the  Communists  were  dishonest  opportunists 
when  they  backed  Roosevelt  because  they  didn't  always  back 
him.  But  what  in  the  world  has  that  to  do  with  "Aesopian 
language?"  If  the  Communists  appealed  to  the  American  peo- 
ple to  support  Roosevelt  at  a  time  when  their  real  purpose  was 
to  get  the  people  to  oppose  Roosevelt,  their  language  might 
legitimately  be  calld  "Aesopian."  But  the  witness  does  not 
pretend  that  was  the  case;  he  charges  only  that  sometimes 
they  did  support  Roosevelt  and  sometimes  they  didn't.  When 
they  did,  they  said  so;  when  they  didn't,  they  said  that,  too. 

It  goes  on  and  on  like  that.  Another  passage  was  read  and 
Budenz  said  it  was  "Aesopian"  and  again  explained.  "It  is 
Aesopian  because  there  isn't  a  thing  said  about  the  expansion 


106  Aesop  s  Fables 

of  Soviet  imperialism.  ...  To  read  this,  one  would  imagine 
that  only  American  imperialism  were  expanded/'  Sacher 
read  another  sentence  about  American  imperialism  and  Bu- 
denz  said  it,  too,  was  "Aesopian"  "because  it  says  nothing 
about  the  Soviet  imperialism  appetite  being  whetted,  which  is 
never  criticized  in  any  Communist  document  and,  there- 
fore  w 

Sacher  cut  him  off  to  ask  if  he  did  not  wish  to  modify  his 
definition  of  "Aesopian  language"  so  as  "to  cover  anything 
which  is  less  than  complete  in  your  mind."  The  witness  did 
not  answer,  but  that  does  not  matter.  It  is  clear  that  he  has 
engaged  in  vulgar  verbal  trickery.  His  original  "definition" 
of  "Aesopian  language"  said  it  was  phraseology  intended  to 
mean  one  thing  to  the  initiate  and  another  to  the  novice— a 
surface  meaning  for  the  general  public  and  a  secret  meaning 
for  the  full-fledged  Communist.  He  has  so  far  shifted  his 
ground  that,  in  the  end,  anything  a  Communist  says  is  styled 
"Aesopian  language."  But  this  is  nothing  better  than  name- 
calling! 


Book  Three;  The  Reptile  Tribe 


"And  slimy   things    did   crawl  with   legs, 
Upon  a  slimy  sea." 

—Rime  of  the  Ancient  Mariner. 


Chapter  11 
APOSTLES  OF  JUDAS 


Calling  names  doesn't  require  much  character.  Therefore 
Louis  Budenz  was  well  equipped  for  the  job.  Under  cross- 
examination  he  revealed  that  he  had  never  had  a  conviction 
so  strong  that  he  obeyed  it  before  making  sure  which  side 
his  bread  was  buttered  on.  He  did  not  leave  the  Communist 
Party— for  all  the  supposed  fervor  of  his  reconversion  to  Ca- 
tholicism—until he  had  obtained  the  guarantee  of  a  job  as  a 
professor  at  Notre  Dame  University.  He  also  took  everything 
he  could  get  from  the  party  between  the  time  he  made  up  his 
mind  to  leave  and  the  time  of  his  actual  leaving.  And  since 
his  departure  he  has  made  a  very  good  thing  of  his  status 
as  an  ex-Communist.  On  all  this,  I  shall  let  the  record  speak. 

It  is  necessary,  however,  to  explain  why  this  tarnished 
hero's  personal  traits  should  be  worth  our  time.  There  is  only 
one  reason:  that  they  are  not  personal!  The  renegade,  an 
inevitable  figure  in  the  political  trial,  has  certain  charac- 
teristics; it  is  the  mark  of  the  renegade,  not  the  life  of  Louis 
Budenz,  that  interests  us  here. 

107 


108  The  Reptile  Tribe 

The  appearance  of  the  renegade  on  the  witness  stand 
is  a  national  danger-sign.  First,  it  warns  that  hysteria  has  so 
far  lowered  the  public  moral  standard  as  to  endanger  normal 
standards  of  fair  play.  Second,  it  is  the  signal  that  sedition 
laws  are  eating  away  "due  process"  and  therefore  removing 
all  democratic  safeguards  against  abuse  of  power  by  the  men 
in  power.  After  World  War  I,  during  a  nationwide  wave  of 
anti-radical  violence  and  judicial  lynching,  California  pro- 
vided a  memorable  illustration  of  the  place  of  the  renegade 
in  the  political  heresy  trial. 

The  Industrial  Workers  of  the  World,  the  IWW,  was  the 
principal  target  in  California.  Under  its  1919  Criminal  Syndi- 
<2alism  Act,  the  state  made  504  arrests  in  five  years,  held 
•every  arrested  person  in  $15,000  bail  and  actually  brought  264 
of  them  to  trial.  One  trial  was  used  to  bring  another:  the 
court  would  not  accept  a  non-member  as  an  expert  witness, 
so  other  members  would  be  called  to  testify— and  arrested 
as  they  left  the  courtroom.  (There  is  history  behind  the  tac- 
tics of  Prosecutor  McGohey  and  Judge  Medina  in  demanding 
that  defense  witnesses,  under  cross-examination,  name  fellow- 
Communists.  There  is  history  behind  the  witnesses'  stubborn 
refusal  to  do  so.)  The  witch-hunting  forces  in  California 
found  even  these  wholesale  arrests  too  slow,  so  the  state  At- 
torney General  obtained  a  "temporary"  injunction  which,  in 
effect,  ordered  the  IWW  to  cease  functioning  pending  hearing. 

And  on  what  basis  did  the  court  suppress  the  IWW  in  ad- 
vance of  trial?  On  the  affidavits  of  three  renegades  who,  of 
course,  had  not  yet  been  subject  to  cross-examination.  They 
were  not  only  renegades,  but  professional  witnesses— renegades 
turned  professional  informer.  In  his  Free  Speech  in  the  United 
States,  Zechariah  Chafee,  Jr.,  a  noted  Professor  of  Law  at 
Harvard  University,  dismisses  one  of  the  affidavits  as  having 
no  bearing  on  the  case  and  says: 

"The  other  two  affidavits  were  by  two  former  members 
of  the  IWW,  whom  the  state  used  to  trot  out  in  almost  every 
IWW  prosecution.  Of  these  two  renegades,  the  California 


Apostles  of  Judas  109 

Court  of  Appeal  said,  in  a  case  the  following  year,  that  their 
testimony  had  been  received  in  every  case  reviewed  by  that 
court  in  the  past  three  or  four  years,  and  that  they  went  over 
practically  the  same  ground  as  in  previous  trials.  One  of  these 
witnesses  is  mentioned  in  ten  appellate  opinions  as  the  chief 
witness  for  the  state  as  to  the  criminal  activities  of  the  IWW, 
and  the  other  in  eight  such  opinions." 

The  testimony  of  these  renegade-informers  bears  the  char- 
acter-stamp of  the  testimony  in  the  Communist  conspiracy 
trial  where  the  witnesses  are  also  renegades  or  informers— 
so  far  as  concerns  Budenz,  renegade  and  informer— like  the 
IWW  witnesses.  Chafee,  writing  in  1941,  could  not  have  been 
commenting  on  the  testimony  of  Budenz  and  his  colleagues 
—but  he  might  as  well  have  been: 

"I  do  not  recall  any  appellate  opinion  in  which  a  single 
prisoner  was  charged  by  witnesses  with  himself  committing 
or  participating  in  the  destruction  of  property  or  personal 
injuries,  or  even  with  directly  inciting  such  acts  by  speeches. 
...  It  is  always  some  other  members  of  the  IWW  who  are  said 
to  have  committed  or  incited  destructive  acts,  and  not  the 
prisoners  at  the  bar." 

And  as  Chafee  continues,  note  that  the  use  of  the  Aesop's 
fable  trick  was  not  new  in  the  Communist  conspiracy  case: 

"Even  the  wording  of  the  documents  became  milder  after 
the  statute  was  passed,  but  the  state  met  this  by  evidence 
that  members  of  the  IWW  had  said  this  was  camouflage." 

Everything  Chafee  has  to  say  about  the  California  rene- 
gade-informers' testimony,  applies  to  this  trial: 

"Aside  from  the  suspicion  which  must  always  rest  upon 
such  professional  witnesses  .  .  .  almost  everything  they  said 
related  to  acts  [before  passage  of  the  law  under  which  the 
defendants  were  tried],  none  of  them  committed  by  the  pres- 
ent defendants,  and  the  contents  of  IWW  pamphlets  which 
had  been  long  in  circulation." 

Even  the  renegades  offered  little  to  suggest  need  for  the 
emergency  procedure  followed.  Of  the  three  affidavits  one 


110  The  Reptile  Tribe 

contained  a  single  paragraph  offering  the  pretext;  the  witness 
said  that  in  1922  he  had  been  a  member  of  an  "Inner  Circle" 
of  the  IWW,  whose  members  were  designated  to  murder  jur- 
ists and  prosecutors.  Of  the  character  of  the  witness  who  as- 
serts this,  Chafee  says  the  following: 

"One  of  these  two  renegades,  a  Los  Angeles  policeman 
and  thrice  a  former  member  of  the  IWW  .  .  .  stated  on  the  wit- 
ness stand  [in  another  IWW  case]  that  he  liad  never  told 
the  truth  before  in  his  life/  'admitted  participation  in  num- 
berless atrocious  offenses/  and  was  judicially  characterized 
as  showing  himself  to  have  been  'one  of  the  most  repre- 
hensible characters  thinkable/" 

One  does  not  have  to  go  back  to  the  1920's  for  examples 
of  the  kind.  During  the  progress  of  the  Communist  trial,  in 
the  very  building  where  it  was  held,  a  similar  admission  was 
made  by  a  renegade-informer  witness  in  the  Alger  Hiss  case. 
The  witness,  Whittaker  Chambers,  confessed  to  systematic 
lying  during  his  alleged  career  as  a  "Communist  espionage 
courier."  But  this  was  represented  as  proof  that  lying  is  an 
accepted  part  of  Communist  activity,  not  as  an  inescapable 
fault  of  the  witness*  character.  Under  cross-examination,  how- 
ever, Chambers  was  forced  to  confess  a  series  of  perjuries 
after  he  left  the  Communist  Party  and  became  an  active  anti- 
Communist,  and  even  to  admit  that  he  committed  perjury  be- 
fore the  Grand  Jury  that  indicted  Hiss— on  the  strength  of 
his  perjuries! 

Unlike  the  cross-examination  of  Chambers,  that  of  Budenz 
was  severely  curtailed  by  the  Court.  We  shall  have  to  take  it 
for  what  it  yields.  To  begin  with,  Budenz  admitted  that  he 
had  fully  decided  by  May  or  June  of  1945  that  he  must,  on 
principle,  leave  the  Communist  Party  and  the  Daily  Worker. 
But  he  did  not  leave  until  October,  continuing  to  draw  his 
wages  from  the  movement  he  presumably  now  despised. 

(From  the  record) 

GLADSTEIN:  During  the  time  you  were  working  there  and 


Apostles  of  Judas  111 

pretending  to  be  a  loyal  Communist,  although  you  had  al- 
ready made  up  your  mind  to  leave  the  Communist  Party,  did 
you  borrow  money  from  them? 

BUDENZ:  No,  sir. 

GLADSTETN:   You  did  not? 

BUDENZ:  No,  sir. 

GLADSTEIN:  Why  isn't  it  a  fact  that  you  did? 

BUDENZ:  Borrow  money  from  them?   No,  sir. 

GLADSTEIN:  Yes.  At  that  time  you  were  indebted  to  the 
Communist  Party,  weren't  you? 

BUDENZ:  I  wasn't  indebted  to  the  Communist  Party.  I  had 
perhaps— this  was  covered  by  expenses. 

GLADSTEIN:  Were  you  in  debt  to  the  Daily  Worker? 

BUDENZ:  Not  that  I  can  recall,  no. 

GLADSTEIN:  Did  you  borrow  money  from  the  Daily  Worker 
after  you  decided  to  leave  the  Communist  Party? 

BUDENZ:  That  I  cannot  recall. 

GLADSTEIN:  Isn't  it  a  fact  that  you  did? 

BUDENZ:  I  say,  I  can't  recall  that. 

GLADSTEIN:  Isn't  it  a  fact  you  were  in  debt  over  $800  to 
the  Daily  Worker  at  that  time? 

BUDENZ:  I  can't  recall  that,  no,  sir. 

GLADSTEIN:  Can  you  recall,  isn't  it  a  fact  you  were  in  debt 
regardless  of  whether  you  can  recall  the  amount? 

BUDENZ:  This  was  against— there  was  an  amount,  I  don't 
know  what  the  amount  was,  but  it  was  against  expenses  that  I 
had  incurred  and  things  of  that  character. 

GLADSTEIN:  Isn't  it  a  fact  you  did  borrow  money  and  you 
were  paying  back  on  the  loan  from  time  to  time? 

BUDENZ:  May  have  been. 

GLADSTEIN:  Yes! 

MEDINA:  Well,  when  you  decided  to  leave,  and  you  were 
there  without  telling  them,  did  you  go  ahead  and  borrow 
money  from  them,  after  you  decided  to  leave? 

BUDENZ:  I  don't  recall  that,  no,  your  Honor. 

GLADSTEIN:  There  is  no  question  at  all,  is  there,  sir,  that 


112  The  Reptile  Tribe 

you  had  decided  to  leave  the  Communist  Party  long  before 
August  4,  1945?  That  is  clear,  isn't  it? 

BUDENZ:  Yes,  sir. 

*          «          o 

Gladstein  thereupon  introduced  into  evidence  a  check 
and  Budenz  after  stalling  as  long  as  possible,  acknowledged 
his  signature  as  endorser.  The  check  was  dated  August  4, 
1945.  It  was  made  out  to  Budenz  by  the  Freedom  of  the  Press 
Co.,  Inc.,  publishers  of  the  Daily  Worker,  and  specifically 
stated  on  its  face  that  it  was  for  the  purposes  of  a  loan. 

(From  the  record) 

GLADSTEIN:  Isn't  it  true  that  when  you  left  the  Daily 
Worker  you  owed  them  $899.94? 

BUDENZ:  I  am  not  certain  of  that,  counselor,  no,  sir. 

GLADSTEIN:  You  don't  know  the  amount,  that  is  what  you 
are  uncertain  about? 

BUDENZ:  That  is  right. 

GLADSTEIN:  Have  you  ever  paid  back  the  amount  you 
owed  them? 

BUDENZ:  No,  sir.  I  should  be  glad  to  do  so,  if  it  were  neces- 
sary. 

«         «         « 

At  the  next  opportunity  Budenz  again  vaguely  inserted  a 
reference  to  some  part  of  this  money  being  "against  expenses," 
and  when  Gladstein  insisted  on  separating  the  two  matters,  the 
Judge  intervened  in  an  obvious  effort  to  rescue  Budenz.  Me- 
dina remarked  that  Gladstein's  repetition,  in  his  questions,  of 
the  word  "loan,"  against  the  witness'  reference  to  "expenses," 
couldn't  change  the  witness'  testimony.  But  this  was  a  rescue 
that  failed:  several  questions  later,  the  evasive  witness  was 
forced  to  admit  that  when  he  got  a  loan,  his  checks  showed 
it  as  a  loan.  Medina  asked  the  stenographer  to  reread  that 
admission,  and  then  he  asked  Budenz  if  that  was  the  case. 


Apostles  of  Judas  113 

(From  the  record) 
BUDENZ:  Yes,  sir. 
MEDINA:  Every  time? 
BUDENZ:  Well,  I  can't  say  every  time. 
MEDINA:  That  is  what  you  are  saying. 

BUDENZ:  Well,  I  mean  to  say  so  far  as  I  can  recall. 
«         »         « 

Ultimately,  all  efforts  to  rescue  Budenz  were  wasted.  He 
tried  to  follow  the  Court's  hint,  and  in  further  answers  sug- 
gested that  loans  and  expenses  might  not  always  be  differ- 
entiated. But  this  wouldn't  stick.  The  defense  produced 
another  check.  This  one  was  dated  October  5,  1945  and  was 
in  payment  of  Budenz'  wages.  On  the  back  of  the  check,  above 
the  endorsement  identified  by  Budenz  as  his,  were  a  series  of 
accounting  entries.  One  of  the  entries  specified  $3.00  de- 
ducted from  his  wages  toward  repayment  of  a  loan.  Budenz 
was  now  beyond  salvation  and  the  Judge  was  himself  in 
deep  water. 

(From  the  record) 

MEDINA:  Will  you  let  me  have  that  check? 

GLADSTEIN:  Yes,  your  Honor,  I  will  do  that. 

MEDINA:  Who  put  that  word  'loan"  on  there,  on  this  Ex- 
hibit P,  Mr.  Budenz?  Do  you  recognize  the  handwriting? 

BUDENZ:  No,  I  don't,  your  Honor. 

MEDINA:  Did  you  borrow  the  money? 

BUDENZ:  That  I  am  not  certain  of,  your  Honor. 

MEDINA:  Even  with  the  check  right  there  and  your  signa- 
ture on  it? 

BUDENZ:  Well,  it  may  have  been  that  I  borrowed  it  but 
this  is  in  regard  to 

MEDINA:  Well,  it  certainly  looks  like  it. 
«         «         » 

The  following  day,  the  defense  again  pursued  the  issue 
of  the  loan  versus  the  alibi  of  "expenses."  It  was  established 
that  the  accounting  entries  on  the  October  5  check  specifically 


114  The  Reptile  Tribe 

showed  an  addition  to  Budenz'  wages  of  $15  for  "expenses," 
as  well  as  a  separate  small  plus-payment  for  a  book  review, 
aside  from  the  $3.00  deduction  shown  as  loan-repayment. 
Thus  the  documents  recalled  what  Budenz  could  not  or  would 
not  remember:  that  he  had  borrowed  money  from  the  Daily 
Worker  at  a  time  when  he  was  planning  to  leave  and  would 
not  be  able  to  repay  it  from  his  wages.  The  cross-examination 
continued: 

(From  the  record) 

GLADSTEIN:  Now,  Mr.  Budenz,  this  check,  Exhibit  Q,  is 
dated  October  5,  1945,  and  it  shows  that  it  was  made  in  pay- 
ment of  your  wages  up  to  and  including  October  11.  You 
asked  for  your  salary  in  advance  that  week,  didn't  you? 

BUDENZ:  Yes,  sir. 

GLADSTEIN:  And  you  didn't  go  down  to  the  office  of  the 
Daily  Worker  that  last  week,  did  you? 

BUDENZ:  Not  from  Monday  on.  I  was  ill.  I  mean  Tues- 
day. 

GLADSTEIN:  And  you  knew  you  were  leaving  the  Commu- 
nist Party  and  the  Daily  Worker  about  the  10th  of  October, 
didn't  you? 

BUDENZ:  Yes,  sir. 

#         «         « 

For  many  days  Budenz  had  been  an  aggressive,  contentious 
witness.  His  manner  had  been  that  of  a  witness  who  has  the 
offensive.  But  he  now  underwent  a  change.  He  seemed  to  be 
trying  to  disappear  through  the  back  of  the  witness  stand; 
his  voice  became  inaudible  and  it  was  the  prosecutor  who  had 
to  say  sharply,  "Keep  your  voice  up,  please,  Mr.  Budenz." 
The  witness,  however,  continued  to  have  voice  trouble  as 
other  checks  were  introduced  showing  that,  aside  from  getting 
his  last  salary-check  in  advance— for  a  week  of  work  he  did 
not  do— he  had,  on  October  4,  telephoned  to  get  an  addi- 
tional check  for  expenses  and  medical  aid.  This— a  further 
favor  sought  as  a  comrade  from  his  comrades— took  place 


Apostles  of  Judas  115 

during  the  week  already  set  by  Budenz'  new  mentors  for  the 
triumphant  announcement  that  he  had  withdrawn  from  the 
Communist  Party  and  returned  to  the  Catholic  Church. 

The  attorneys  next  directed  their  questions  toward  an- 
other aspect  of  the  relationship  of  the  renegade-informer  to 
his  new  job  of  professional  witness:  the  material  rewards  or 
job-insurance,  the  "price"  of  the  informer.  Budenz  was  as 
evasive  as  ever  and,  as  ever,  the  Court  permitted  his  non- 
responsive  and  argumentative  answers  to  stand.  When  Glad- 
stein,  so  handicapped,  nevertheless  pressed  for  a  "Yes"  or 
"No"  answer  to  a  yes-or-no  question,  Medina  rebuked  him 
for  "emotional  excitement  and  pressing  people  and  talking 
fast  and  all  of  that."  That  did  not,  however,  induce  the  de- 
fense to  abandon  the  pursuit  of  the  elusive  answer: 

(From  the  record) 

GLADSTEIN:  You  arranged,  however,  for  a  job  before  you 
left  the  Communist  Party? 

BUDENZ:  Oh  yes.  I  had  a  family  to  take  care  of. 

000 

The  job  was  identified  as  a  professorship  at  Notre  Dame, 
but  questions  to  show  that  he  did  not  have  the  educational 
and  other  qualifications  of  a  professor  were  barred.  His 
whole  history,  however,  reveals  no  such  qualifications,  a  fur- 
ther indication  that  the  job  was  a  bribe,  a  payment  to  the 
informer  for  his  desertion  of  the  party  and  his  subsequent 
services  as  a  professional  witness  against  it.  The  Court  sus- 
tained all  objections  to  questions  about  articles  Budenz  wrote 
for  commercial  magazines,  that  is,  other  income  derived  from 
his  new  profession  of  "saying  many  of  the  things  you  have 
testified  to  here."  The  same  barricade  was  raised  against 
questions  designed  to  show  that  Budenz,  like  the  witnesses  in 
the  California  IWW  cases,  was  a  paid  professional  witness. 

(From  the  record) 

GLADSTEIN:   Have  you  gone  out  to  Seattle,  Washington, 


116  The  Reptile  Tribe 

to  give  testimony,  the  same  kind  of  testimony  that  you  have 
given  here  for  which  you  received  a  fee? 

McGoHEY:  Objection. 

MEDINA:  Sustained.  <r 

GLADSTEIN:  Have  you  gone  out  to  Honolulu  in  the  Hawai- 
ian Islands  to  give  the  same  story  you  have  given  here  for 
which  you  received  a  fee? 

McGoHEY:  Objection. 

MEDINA:  Sustained. 

GLADSTEIN:  Did  you  receive  any  money  for  doing  any 
work  for  Congressman  J.  Parnell  Thomas  along  the  lines  of 
your  testimony  here? 

McGoHEY:  Objection. 

MEDINA:  Sustained. 

GLADSTEIN:  During  the  years  you  were  in  the  Communist 
Party 

MEDINA  ( interrupting ) :  How  does  it  affect  a  man's  credi- 
bility, that  he  gave  the  same  testimony  on  a  number  of  other 

occasions? 

«         «         « 

This  is  characteristic  of  the  Court's  conduct  in  this  case. 
Observe  that  Judge  Medina's  comment  has  the  effect  of  mis- 
representing the  aim  of  the  questions:  it  leaves  out  the  key 
element— the  fee,  the  money,  the  reward  which  is  part  of  the 
informer's  motive  for  giving  the  testimony  his  direct  or  indi- 
rect employer  wants.  It  is  part  of  the  price  of  perjury. 

Is  that  irrelevant?  The  professional,  paid  witness,  earning 
direct  fees  or  gaining  payment  through  jobs,  articles  and 
books,  was  simply  crawling  through  the  woodwork  of  the 
forty-eight  states  in  trial  after  trial  and  hearing  after  hearing 
at  that  very  time.  Some  months  after  the  Budenz  affair,  but 
still  in  the  course  of  the  trial,  Alexander  Bittelman,  a  Commu- 
nist leader  who  was  not  a  defendant,  was  summoned  to  a 
hearing  on  deportation  charges.  The  New  York  Times  of 
August  2,  1949,  in  a  brief  story  about  the  hearing,  said: 

"The  only  witness  yesterday  was  Charles  Baxter,  former 


Apostles  of  Judas  117 

minor  party  functionary  from  Cleveland,  who  left  the  party 
in  1945.  He  testified  that  he  attended  the  Lenin  School  in 
Moscow  and  that  the  ultimate  aim  of  the  party  was  the  'revo- 
lutionary overthrow  by  force  of  capitalistic  states/  On  cross- 
examination,  Mr.  Baxter  admitted  that  he  received  a  tempo- 
rary job  as  clerk  in  the  Cleveland  Immigration  Service  before 
he  testified  in  ten  deportation  cases  involving  alien  party  mem- 
bers. As  an  expert  government  witness,  he  said  he  received 
$25  a  day/' 

In  a  criminal  wire-tapping  case  in  New  York  only  a  few 
days  later,  the  Court  remanded  defendant  John  G.  Broady  to 
prison  for  the  duration  of  the  trial  because  he  offered  a  prose- 
cution witness  a  job  before  the  witness  returned  to  the  stand 
for  the  last  time.  Yet  here  we  have  the  government  shame- 
lessly giving  people  jobs  just  before  they  appear  as  govern- 
ment witnesses,  and  the  courts  find  nothing  wrong  with  that! 
One  of  the  witnesses  in  the  Communist  trial,  William  O. 
Nowell,  admitted  that  he  was  given  a  job  in  the  Immigration 
Service  just  a  few  weeks  before  the  trial;  the  Immigration  Ser- 
vice is  part  of  the  Department  of  Justice  which  is  prosecuting 
the  case! 

Medina's  reluctance  to  permit  questioning  on  the  subject 
of  renegade-informers  and  professional  witnesses,  will  easily 
be  understood  by  anyone  who  knows  how  ugly  their  story 
is.  It  will  equally  be  understood  that  the  defense  cannot  sim- 
ply accept  the  Court's  ban  on  so  vital  an  issue.  For  while 
Budenz  soon  completed  his  testimony  and  left  the  stand, 
twelve  little  Budenzes  followed! 

And  that  was  inevitable.  It  had  to  be  and  it  is  important 
to  know  why.  We  do  not  need  to  know  the  life  history  of  each 
of  these  sordid  creatures,  but  we  must  understand  what  they 
are,  where  they  come  from  and  why  they  behave  as  they  do. 
They  are  the  symptoms  of  a  serious  sickness  of  the  body 
politic.  It  is  an  old  ailment,  but  more  dangerous  in  these  times 
than  ever  before.  Long  ago— in  1798— Edward  Livingston,  a 


118  The  Reptile  Tribe 

friend  and  follower  of  Thomas  Jefferson,  described  the  disease 
while  denouncing  the  Alien  and  Sedition  Acts,  then  about  to 
be  enacted  by  the  Federalist  Administration  of  President 
John  Adams.  Livingston  was  relating  what  he  believed  would 
happen  after  passage  of  those  laws: 

"The  country  will  swarm  with  informers,  spies,  delators, 
and  all  the  odious  reptile  tribe  that  breed  in  the  sunshine 
of  domestic  power.  .  .  .  The  hours  of  the  most  unsuspected 
confidence,  the  intimacies  of  friendship,  or  the  recesses  of 
domestic  retirement  afford  no  security.  The  companion  whom 
you  must  trust,  the  friend  in  whom  you  must  confide,  the  do- 
mestic who  waits  in  your  chamber,  are  all  tempted  to  betray 
your  imprudent  or  unguarded  follies;  to  misrepresent  your 
words;  to  convey  them,  distorted  by  calumny,  to  the  secret 
tribunal  where  jealousy  presides,  where  fear  officiates  as  ac- 
cuser, and  suspicion  is  the  only  evidence  that  is  heard." 

And  as  Livingston  foretold,  so  did  it  happen. 


Chapter  12 
HYSTERIA 


So  it  happened,  and  so  it  is  happening  again.  Snooping, 
systematic  informing,  loyalty  inquisitions,  wiretapping,  have 
become  an  accepted  norm  of  what  we  still  smugly  call  "the 
American  way  of  life."  On  a  day  when  the  Communist  trial, 
the  Alger  Hiss  trial  and  the  Judith  Coplon  trials  were  in  simul- 
taneous session  like  a  three-ring  circus  or  a  witches'  Sabbath, 
an  advertisement  in  the  New  Yorfc  Times  brought  home  to  me 
more  forcefully  than  the  trials  themselves,  the  present  spy- 
ridden  state  of  affairs.  The  ad  offered  for  sale  an  electronic 
device  know  as  the  Teletap.  With  this  remarkable  product  of 
our  remarkable  technology,  said  the  ad,  a  businessman  can  tell 
whether  his  telephone  conversation  is  tapped  at  either  end. 

Yes,  with  the  Teletap  you  are  protected  from  the  growing 
menace  of  the  "snoop,"  the  enterprising  Teletap  manufacturer 
assured  his  fellow  free-enterprisers.  But  that  is  small  comfort 
to  the  rest  of  us.  We  cannot  afford  expensive  instruments  to 
test  whether  we  still  have  some  small  remnant  of  the  privacy 
guaranteed  to  us  by  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States. 
And  tests  are  certainly  needed.  In  the  aftermath  of  the  Hiss 
trial,  it  was  learned  that  the  FBI  had  been  spying  on  the  fore- 
man of  the  Hiss  jury  all  through  that  trial.  One  FBI  report 
detailed  a  conversation  between  the  foreman  and  his  wife. 
If  you  think  about  it  awhile,  it  will  dawn  on  you  that  this  must 
have  been  obtained  by  tapping  the  couple's  bedroom  wall! 

That  is  the  tone  of  the  trials  and  that  is  the  character  of 
the  evidence.  In  all  these  heresy  trials,  as  in  the  Communist 

119 


120  The  Reptile  Tribe 

trial  itself,  the  spy  comes  into  his  own.  The  kind  of  chit-chat, 
malice,  innuendo,  supposition,  and  uncomprehended  scraps 
of  accurate  information  from  public  documents  that  are 
scrambled  together  in  the  FBI  reports  exposed  in  the  Coplon 
case,  are  the  spy's  eternal  stock-in-trade.  The  reports  reek  of 
perjury,  blackmail— and  murder.  The  month  of  June  1949  was 
particularly  rich  in  FBIism.  One  Morton  E.  Kent,  a  former 
State  Department  employe,  was  hounded  from  his  private 
job  and  thereupon  committed  suicide.  It  accidentally  made 
news.  It  appears  that  the  FBI  reports  on  Kent  had  dragged 
in  the  name  of  Emilie  Condon,  wife  of  Edward  U.  Condon, 
head  of  the  National  Bureau  of  Standards  and  long  an  out-of- 
reach  target  of  the  House  Un-American  Activities  Committee. 
When  Condon  hit  back,  the  public  learned  how  the  FBI  had 
ruined  Kent. 

First,  by  irresponsible  and  illiterate  pieces  of  information, 
insufficient  for  open  action  against  Kent,  the  FBI  had  "con- 
nected" him  with  "subversive"  organizations  or  persons.  An 
FBI  agent  thereupon  "suggested"  to  Kent's  employer  that  he 
wouldn't  want  to  have  a  man  on  his  payroll  if  the  FBI  re- 
garded the  man  as  subversive,  would  he?  The  employer  needed 
export  licenses  from  another  government  agency  in  his  busi- 
ness, so  he  fired  Kent.  Kent,  seeing  no  end  of  this  process 
killed  himself. 

A  signed  editorial  in  the  Daily  Compass  (June  13)  by 
publisher  Theodore  O.  Thackrey  called  this  by  its  right  name 
—a  "secret  police  system,  outside  the  law  since  it  is  the  law, 
spying  upon  ordinary  citizens,  hounding  them  to  death  on 
suspicion  of  political  heresy  ...  a  secret  political  police  sys- 
tem [established]  in  this  country  by  the  perversion  of  the 
FBI  from  the  law-enforcement  functions  for  which  it  was 
originally  intended  into  a  keyhole  peeping,  wiretapping  snoop 
and  pry  group,  keeping  its  appropriations  fat  by  feeding  the 
witch-burning  flames  of  political  intolerance." 

Kent  was  not  the  first.  Harry  Dexter  White,  former  Assist- 
ant Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  died  of  a  heart-attack  August 


lysteria  121 

948  after  denying  the  charges  of  Elizabeth  Bentley,  who 
shared  with  Whittaker  Chambers  the  star  dressing-room  of 
the  summer,  pre-election,  "spy"  hearings.  W.  Marvin  Smith, 
a  government  employe,  plunged  to  death  down  a  stairwell  of 
the  Justice  Department  Building,  after  he  was  named  as  the 
notary  who  witnessed  automobile-sale  papers  mentioned  in 
Chambers'  testimony  about  Hiss.  Laurence  Duggan,  former 
State  Department  aid,  was  killed  in  a  fall  from  the  window  of 
his  sixteenth  floor  office  in  New  York  City  in  December  1948. 
Duggan's  case  underscores  the  irresponsibility  of  an  ugly 
system  that  has  many  other  hideous  features.  A  man  of  con- 
servative social  background  and  New  Deal  inclinations,  he  was 
named  by  Isaac  Don  Levine,  State  Department-connected 
ghostwriter  of  many  sensational  anti-Soviet  books,  in  secret 
hearings  before  the  Un-American  Committee.  Levine  testi- 
fied to  hearsay  twice  removed:  he  said  the  self-confessed  per- 
jurer, Chambers,  had  told  him  in  1937  that  Duggan  was  one 
of  his  (Chambers')  inside-the-government  sources  of  infor- 
mation. After  Duggan's  death,  Chambers  denied  he  had  ever 
told  Levine  that,  and  the  FBI  hastened  to  report  that  it  had 
found  Duggan  "a  loyal  employe  of  the  United  States  Govern- 
ment." But  that  won't  bring  him  to  life. 

With  just  such  irresponsible  stuff  the  FBI  has  been  able  to 
compile  dossiers  on  more  than  one  million  Americans.  All  to 
protect  us  from  the  encroachments  of  the  Communist  police- 
state!  In  the  Coplon  case,  the  reports  showed  all  the  familiar 
trickery  of  the  police  agent:  the  role  of  agent  provocateur; 
the  "planted"  papers;  the  "decoy"  papers  falsely  naming  an 
employe  of  Amtorg  (corporation  buying  and  selling  for  the 
Soviet  Government),  as  an  American  government  agent;  a 
report  reversing  that:  it  said  Amtorg  employes  had  spied  for 
the  Soviet  government.  Another  document  is  even  worse;  it  is 
a  hash  of  spy  "tips"  thrown  together  to  make  a  file  on  the  noted 
film  star,  Fredric  March.  It  tells  how  "Confidential  Informant 
ND  402"  carried  a  message  from  March  to  complain  of  being 
criticized  in  the  Daily  Worker  and  how  "the  subject  had  tears 


122  The  Reptile  Tribe 

in  his  eyes  when  he  sent  the  message";  how  "on  November  27, 
1945,  Confidential  Informant  ED  324  advised  that  he  had 
observed  a  throw-away  advertising  a  meeting  to  be  held  in 
Madison  Square  Garden  on  December  4,  1945  at  8  p.m."  and 
how  later,  "Confidential  Informant  ND  336"  did  attend  that 
dread  meeting  (very  secret,  seating  capacity  20,000)  and  did 
hear  speakers  Julian  Huxley,  noted  British  scientist  and  Henry 
Wallace,  discourse  on  the  menace  of  the  A-bomb,  and  that 
Fredric  March  did  there  read  a  poem  by  the  well-known 
radio-writer,  Norman  Corwin,  captioned:  "Set  Your  Clock  at 
U-235."  The  hash  includes  similar  sizzling  secrets  contributed 
by  Confidential  Informants  T-3,  305,  336,  T-6,  T-8,  T-7,  ND 
342,  ND  359,  ND  384,  ND  388,  ND  400,  ND  403. 

On  the  basis  of  similar  information  in  the  same  month, 
Gordon  R.  Clapp,  head  of  the  Tennessee  Valley  Authority 
(TVA),  was  labelled  "unemployable"  by  the  Army.  It  turned 
out  that  Military  Government  authorities  in  Germany  had 
sent  to  Washington  seven  names  from  which  to  choose  one 
for  a  ninety-day  assignment  in  Germany.  A  Major  May,  going 
to  a  file,  found  Clapp's  name  linked  with  certain  others  and 
recommended  investigation.  This  was  then  passed  on  to  a 
Major  Morrison,  who  rather  than  bother  with  investigating 
one  unknown  person  when  he  had  six  clear  names,  cabled 
Germany  that  Clapp— who  hadn't  asked  for  a  job  and  didn't 
know  he  was  wanted— was  "unemployable,"  though  Morrison 
knew  that  term  implied  suspicion  of  disloyalty.  In  public  in- 
quiry, Morrison  revealed  that  he,  a  supposedly  responsible 
officer  "evaluating"  intelligence  reports  did  not  know  what 
names  were  connected  with  Clapp's,  nor  why,  nor  even  that 
Clapp  held  the  enormously  responsible  post  of  head  of  TVA, 
by  an  appointment  the  Senate  confirmed  only  after  public 
hearings  not  long  before. 

This  is  the  foul  mess  resulting  from  our  toleration  of  poli- 
tical police  in  a  cold-war  hysteria.  The  evidence  and  witnesses 
in  the  Communist  conspiracy  case  come  from  this  same  cess- 


Hysteria  123- 

pool— and  smell  of  it.  Thirteen  in  number,  in  the  order  of  their 
appearance  on  the  stand  they  are : 

Louis  FRANCIS  BUDENZ:  Renegade,  informer,  professional 
anti-Communist  witness. 

HERBERT  A.  PHILBRICK:  Informer,  "planted"  in  the  Com- 
munist Party. 

FRANK  S.  MEYER:  Renegade. 

EUGENE  H.  STEWART:  Special  Agent  of  the  FBI. 

FRED  COOK:  Special  Agent  of  the  FBI. 

WILLIAM  O'DELL  NOWELL:  Renegade,  informer,  long-time 
professional  anti-Communist  witness  and  labor  spy;  given 
job  by  government  just  before  trial. 

CHARLES  W.  NICODEMUS:  Renegade,  informer,  rescued 
from  prison  by  the  FBI. 

GARFIELD  HERRON:  Informer,  "planted"  in  the  party. 

ANGELA  CALOMIRIS:  Informer,  "planted"  in  the  party. 

THOMAS  AARON  YOUNGLOVE:  Informer,  "planted"  in  the 
party. 

WILLIAMS  CUMMTNGS:  Began  as  labor  spy;  subsequently 
"planted"  in  party. 

JOHN  VICTOR  BLANC:  "Planted";  became  active  in  party 
only  after  becoming  informer  for  FBI. 

BALMES  HIDALGO:  Informer  "planted"  in  party;  the  busy- 
body volunteer-informer  type  who  supplies  particularly  worth- 
less information  for  want  of  understanding  on  his  part. 

A  case  supplied  with  a  roster  of  rogues  no  more  trust- 
worthy than  these,  needs  help.  The  government  tried  to  per- 
fume these  witnesses  with  patriotic  incense.  More  than  once, 
during  their  testimony,  the  FBI  issued  statements  lauding 
these  informers  as  worthy  citizens  who  had  performed  a 
"patriotic  service"  by  "undercover"  spying  inside  the  party. 
Russell  Porter  outdid  the  FBI.  While  witness  Herbert  A.  Phil- 
brick,  for  nine  years  a  spy  in  the  Boston  area,  was  under  cross- 
examination  that  revealed  all  the  little  chicaneries  inherent  in 
the  trade,  Porter  wrote  (Times,  April  12): 


124  The  Reptile  Tribe 

'Wearing  a  red,  white  and  blue  tie  and  sitting  under  the 
Great  Seal  of  the  United  States  with  its  outstretched  wings 
of  the  American  eagle  on  the  wall  of  a  Federal  courtroom,  the 
witness  said  he  joined  the  Communist  Party  to  inform  the 
FBI  of  its  activities,  as  a  patriotic  duty/' 

That's  pretty  fancy  writing— and  those  are  pretty  fancy 
stage  props— but  all  the  purple  prose  in  Christendom  won't 
change  the  spelling  of  the  word  "betray."  The  spy  of  high  or 
low  degree  is  a  betrayer.  Judas  betrayed  his  dear  teacher,  a 
leader  of  a  small  and  intimate  band  in  a  persecuted  cause.  It 
was  an  inside  job  for  money,  and  we  hate  his  name.  For  ma- 
terial rewards,  for  cash,  for  jobs,  or  for  immunities,  or  for 
the  satisfaction  of  petty  passions,  these  thirteen  heirs  of  Judas 
followed  in  his  path.  We  hate  Judases  because  all  that  is  hu- 
man in  a  man  rots  away  from  the  leprosy  of  betrayal. 

Think  what  it  means  to  be  an  informer:  you  learn  how  to 
win  the  confidence  of  certain  fellow  humans;  you  share  their 
griefs  and  joys;  you  take  a  place  in  their  hearts.  Then,  when 
you  know  them  well,  as  they  are  in  the  bosom  of  their 
families,  in  work  and  play,  in  anger  and  compassion,  you  tell 
tales  of  them  to  men  who  do  not  know  them  in  all  the  round- 
ness of  their  lives  and  therefore  could  not  truly  comprehend 
the  partial  facts  or  fantasies  you  relate  if  they  wished  to.  Since 
your  reports  are,  at  best,  facts  out  of  context,  they  are  lies;  and 
so,  as  your  employer  shows  himself  impatient  for  just  certain 
facts  which  suit  his  purpose,  you  find  it  easy  to  slip  into  falsi- 
fying completely  what  is  already  a  lie  in  its  heart.  Only  in  this 
way  can  you  be  a  successful  informer. 

All  of  the  government  witnesses  are  renegades  or  informers 
or  both.  Seven  of  the  thirteen  are  full-scale  inside  betrayers  of 
the  kind  described  above.  They  are  presented  with  the  boast 
that  they  were  "planted"  in  the  Communist  Party,  by  way  of 
giving  authority  to  their  testimony.  The  prosecution  even 
made  a  point  of  having  them  remain  active  up  to  the  moment 
of  taking  the  stand,  hoping  the  theatrical  coup  would  conceal 
the  taint  of  the  informer.  But  when  all  is  said  and  done,  they 


Hysteria  125 

are  such  sorry  witnesses  to  make  a  "case,"  that  one  wonders 
why  the  government  stooped  to  use  them. 

A  great  many  people  have  asked  that  question.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  when  the  government  closed  its  case  on  May  19  with 
the  weakest  of  the  seven  "plants,"  there  was  general  surprise. 
Porter  says  the  prosecution  "caught  the  defense  by  surprise  in 
resting  its  case  at  the  end  of  the  cross-examination  of  Balmes 
Hidalgo  Jr.,"  and  I  believe  that  is  true  but  I  know  it  is  only  a 
half-truth.  Reporters  covering  the  trial,  newspapermen  out- 
side, lawyers  observing  it,  and  others  with  whom  I  talked,  had 
agreed  that  the  prosecution's  last  witness  (or  some  witness 
before  it  rested  its  case)  would  be  "an  atom-bomb,"  as  one 
man  expressed  it,  that  is,  a  witness  of  stature,  offering  testi- 
mony of  a  grade  far  above  that  characterizing  the  trial  there- 
tofore. They  expected  a  witness  capable  of  understanding 
Marxist  theory  and  interpreting  the  line  and  activity  of  the 
defendants.  After  a  mess  of  small  fry,  a  big  fish  was  expected. 
But  none  appeared,  and  a  little  thought  will  reveal  the 
error  in  the  thinking  behind  this  false  expectation.  What  use 
would  a  man  of  better  understanding  be  to  the  prosecution? 
The  prosecutor  is  busy  reducing  Communism  to  tales  of  sabo- 
tage and  plots  to  bring  the  Red  Army  down  through  Canada  to 
Detroit.  He  needs  witnesses  who  will  say  that  Marxist  theory 
means  armed  forays  by  cutthroat  bands.  A  higher-grade  wit- 
ness would  defeat  the  prosecutor's  purpose.  He  would  be  ex- 
pected to  discuss  Marxist  theory  on  the  level  that  it  has  been 
discussed  and  interpreted  by  many  non-Marxist  and  anti- 
Marxist— but  sober— writers  for  the  past  century.  That  was  in 
less  hysterical  times,  but  the  shelves  of  public  libraries  still 
contain  many  such  works  which  treat  serious  ideas  in  a  serious 
way  and  have  nothing  in  common  with  the  claptrap  presented 
by  Louis  Budenz  and  twelve  other  informers  in  Judge  Me- 
dina's courtroom.  No,  assuredly,  Prosecutor  McGohey  could 
not  have  used  witnesses  other  than  the  kind  he  used. 

The  prosecution  needed  informers,  but  one  wonders  why 
the  FBI  supplied  them.  It  is  a  prime  principle  of  police  work 


126  The  Reptile  Tribe 

to  protect  your  informers.  They  may  lead  you  to  evidence  or 
they  may  cheat  you  by  manufacturing  it,  but  they  must  not 
be  betrayed;  they  must  not  be  put  on  the  witness  stand  where 
they  lose  further  usefulness  and  cast  a  cloud  over  your  case. 
If  the  government,  and  the  FBI  in  particular,  here  violated 
that  principle,  it  is  precisely  because  these  informers  are  of 
such  low  grade  that  no  real  sacrifice  was  entailed.  The  thirteen 
witnesses  are  considered  suitable  to  the  kind  of  reckless  and 
irresponsible  case  now  prosecuted,  but  they  are  not  considered 
as  having  any  real  value  to  the  FBI.  They  know  nothing  that 
cannot  be  read  in  Communist  publications  available  on  the 
newsstands.  They  do  not  understand  even  that  much.  They 
are,  in  short,  expendables. 

Even  knowing  the  character  of  Louis  Budenz  and  his 
twelve  disciples,  it  is  hard  to  read  the  record  and  believe  such 
testimony  as  theirs  was  given— and  permitted— in  the  year  1949. 
It  is  hard  to  admit  that  a  Federal  Court  tolerated  the  con- 
cocted, self-contradictory  web  of  inventions  called  "proof"  in 
this  case.  It  can  be  understood  only  by  bearing  in  mind  the 
hysteria  of  the  times,  the  actual  terror  of  dangerous  thoughts 
that  prevailed  in  the  fifth  year  of  the  cold  war.  On  June  12, 
1949,  when  the  University  of  California  adopted  a  require- 
ment that  faculty  members  take  an  anti-Communist  oath,  Dr. 
George  Pettitt,  assistant  to  the  university's  president,  offered 
a  revealing  explanation: 

"We  don't  like  the  idea  of  oaths— nobody  does.  But  in  the 
face  of  the  cold-war  hysteria  we  are  now  experiencing,  some- 
thing had  to  be  done." 

Dr.  Pettitt  neglected  only  to  say  that  the  hysteria  was  not  a 
spontaneous  thing  but  was  part  of  a  carefully  cultivated  mood. 
With  respect  to  the  Communist  trial,  there  is  documentary 
evidence  of  a  meaner  and  uglier  purpose  within  the  general 
framework  of  the  cold  war.  Anti-Communism  had  become  a 
football  of  domestic  politics.  This  is  what  happened: 

In  the  summer  of  1948,  the  Republicans  and  anti-Admin- 
istration Southern  Democrats  grabbed  the  anti-Communist 


Hysteria  127 

ball.  The  "spy"  hearings  not  only  fed  the  war-on-Russia  hys- 
teria and  the  anti-Communist  fever,  but  also  turned  anti- 
Communism  into  a  partisan  weapon  for  use  against  the  Demo- 
cratic Party.  The  hearings  became  an  attack  on  the  Adminis- 
tration for  alleged  laxity  in  hounding  Communists  and  Com- 
munist sympathizers.  (Carried  one  semantic  step  farther  by 
local  witch-hunters,  the  formula  later  reached  its  broadest  in 
California  where  the  Tenney  Committee  issued  blacklists  of 
persons  and  organizations  not  even  charged  with  kind  feelings 
for  Communism,  but  guilty  of  "appeasing"  the  Communists 
in  some  respect!  He  that  is  not  with  me  is  against  me:  failure 
to  turn  informer  and  redbaiter,  to  hunt  with  the  pack,  means 
that  you  must  join  the  hunted!)  The  political  advisers  of 
President  Truman  understood  this  very  well.  The  Administra- 
tion aided  and  abetted  the  hysteria-mongers,  but  it  knew  that 
was  not  enough;  it  must  also  capture  the  political  credit  for 
"saving  the  country  from  Communism." 

The  strategy  adopted  called  for  the  outlawing  of  the  Com- 
munist Party  and  the  jailing  of  Communists  all  over  the  coun- 
try, by  methods  just  short  of  open  illegality  or  storm-trooping. 
The  first  move  was  the  indictment  of  the  Communist  leaders; 
that  was  carried  out  on  July  20,  just  in  time  to  affect  the  found- 
ing convention  of  the  Progressive  Party  two  days  later.  The 
main  drive,  however,  was  saved  for  the  last  weeks  of  the  cam- 
paign. Insiders  tipped  off  reporters  in  September  to  the  coming 
events.  In  a  syndicated  column  from  Washington  on  Septem- 
ber 16,  Hearst  writer  George  Dixon  told  the  story  under  the 
heading,  "Stealing  the  Show  from  the  GOP."  It  ran  as  follows: 

"The  Democrats,  through  Attorney  General  Tom  Clark, 
plan  a  sensational  attempt  to  take  the  anti-Communist  play 
away  from  the  Republicans  in  the  next  few  weeks.  The  De- 
partment will  seek  indictments  against  well-known  Commu- 
nists in  key  cities  all  over  the  country.  The  Department  will  go 
before  Grand  Juries  with  evidence  gathered  by  its  own  agents. 
.  .  .  Clark  is  sending  many  cases  in  the  FBI  files  to  Grand 
Juries  all  over  the  country." 


128  The  Reptile  Tribe 

A  month  later,  with  only  weeks  to  ballot-day,  the  drive 
opened  wide.  An  advance  announcement  of  its  Constitution- 
evading  purpose,  appeared  in  an  article  on  October  21  by 
Scripps-Howard  syndicated. writer,  Tony  Smith.  It  was  headed 
"Nationwide  Drive  on  Reds  is  Given  Pre-Election  Timing." 

"A  nationwide  crackdown  on  the  'open'  Communist  Party 
leadership  began  gathering  steam  today  ...  in  at  least  five 
American  cities.  Listed  are  New  York,  Philadelphia,  Cleveland, 
Denver  and  Los  Angeles.  .  .  .  One  expert  for  the  House  un- 
American  Activities  Committee  concedes  that  the  proceedings 
in  Denver  and  Cleveland  indicate  that  federal  officials  finally 
have  found  a  way  to  jail  any  Communist  official  they  regard 
as  a  security  danger.  He  explained  that  the  trick  is  to  sub- 
poena the  Communist,  ask  him  questions  he  can't  answer, 
and  then  cite  him  for  contempt  when  he  refuses." 

Well,  that's  it!  A  "trick"  to  jail  Communists!  In  a  Justice 
Department  bulletin  of  June  15,  1949,  later  expanded  into  an 
article  by  Tom  Clark  in  Look  magazine  (already  cited),  the 
Administration  boasts  that  it  has  carried  out  this  plan.  It  has 
hounded  aliens  who  could  not  be  deported,  out  of  the  coun- 
try; it  has  loyalty-investigated  men  out  of  their  jobs;  it  has 
put  thirty-four  "alleged  Communists"— the  term  is  Clark's— 
in  jail  on  contempt  charges  in  Washington,  twenty-five  more 
in  Los  Angeles  and  seven  in  Denver;  it  has  used  passport  vio- 
lations and  perjury  charges  where  these  "have  been  the  only 
cases  provable";  and  it  has  brought  eleven  "topflight  Commu- 
nists to  trial  in  New  York."  All  of  this  in  the  Department's 
avowed  effort  "to  stamp  out  Communism,"  whether  or  not 
Communist  activity  is  within  the  Constitution!  This  latter 
problem  is  on  Clark's  mind,  for  he  asks  that  laws  be  passed 
to  give  the  drive  more  leeway,  and  he  proposes  sanctions 
against  lawyers  who  defend  the  civil  rights  of  Communists. 
In  Clark's  language,  the  right  to  practice  should  be  denied 
not  only  to  Communists,  but  to  "lawyers  who  are  not  prob- 
ably card-carrying  Communists,  but  who  act  like  Commu- 


Hysteria  129 

nists  and  carry  out  Communist  missions  in  offensives  against 
the  dignity  and  order  of  our  courts." 

This  is  the  man  who,  when  that  avowal  appeared,  had 
been  elevated  to  the  bench  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  the 
United  States  by  the  President  and  Senate  of  the  United 
States!  Is  it  any  wonder  that  half  the  county  prosecutors  and 
Justices  of  the  Peace  of  these  United  States  now  think  they 
have  been  empowered  to  use  any  "trick"  to  jail  any  person 
they  choose  to  regard  as  a  "security  danger"? 

Only  in  this  climate  of  moral  degradation  is  it  possible  to 
comprehend  the  testimony  of  Prosecutor  McGohey's  thirteen 
expendables.  The  whole  sorry  business  is  more  deserving 
of  contempt  than  of  indignation.  The  humorist,  Frank  Sulli- 
van, in  a  piece  in  the  New  Yorker  magazine  of  July  2,  1949, 
poured  the  withering  acid  of  ridicule  on  it.  The  record 
would  not  be  complete  without  quotation  from  Sullivan's 
article,  called:  These  Are  the  Trials  That  Try  Men's  Souls. 

"It  is  not  as  difficult  as  it  first  seems,"  he  gravely  assures 
us,  "to  get  the  judges,  the  defendants,  the  complainants,  the 
attorneys,  and  the  charges  in  these  various  causes  celebres 
straightened  out  in  one's  mind  if  one  devotes  a  portion  of  each 
day— say,  half— to  a  careful  scrutiny  of  the  newspapers." 

He  then  proceeds  to  scramble  all  the  cases,  casts  and  facts 
beyond  disentanglement: 

"To  begin  with,  Judge  Medina  is  the  Federal  magistrate 
who  is  presiding  over  the  trial  of  the  eleven  Communists 
accused  of  advocating  the  overthrow  of  the  government  by 
force.  We  all  know  Judge  Medina  by  this  time,  as  his  trial 
is  now  in  its  twenty-third  year,  so  there  is  little  likelihood 
of  our  confusing  him  with  Judge  Hickenlooper,  who  is 
prosecuting  David  E.  Lilienthal  for  allowing  Gerald  Eisler 
to  escape  on  the  U-235." 

After  more  delicious  confusion,  in  which  Senator  Wherry 
met  Judith  Coplon  in  upper  Manhattan  and  "snatched  her 
purse  which  was  full  of  microfilm  showing  Hollywood  actors 
and  actresses  engaged  in  Communist  activities,"  Sullivan 


130  The  Reptile  Tribe 

gets  down  to  the  political  motives  behind  the  trials.  And  here, 
for  all  the  innocent  merriment,  there  are  teeth  in  his  smiles. 

"Now,  what  is  behind  this  whole  series  of  trials?"  he  asks. 
"It  is  important  for  us  to  understand  that.  Well,  some  think 
that  it  is  all  because  Lloyd  Paul  Stryker  wants  to  get  control 
of  the  atomic  bomb  out  of  the  hands  of  Judith  Coplon,  in 
order  to  embarrass  the  Democrats  in  the  Congressional  elec- 
tions a  year  from  next  fall.  How?  How  can  you  embarrass 
a  Democrat?  Many  thinking  people  are  asking  themselves 
that  question  in  these  troubled  times." 

Yes,  how  can  you  embarrass  a  Democrat?  Or  a  Republi- 
can? Or  a  bipartisan  regime  so  blind-drunk  with  the  wine  of 
anti-Communism  that  it  can  put  the  scales  of  justice  in  the 
hands  of  a  Tom  Clark?  Or  a  ruling  class  so  frightened  that 
it  tries  to  legalize  many  previous  lawless  acts  of  "war  on 
Communism"  by  convicting  eleven  Communist  leaders  of 
secret  conspiracy  on  the  patently  false  testimony  of  thirteen 
degenerate  informers? 


Chapter  13 
THE  EXPENDABLES 


What  scabrous  souls  the  informer's  trade  produces!  From 
the  witness  stand,  William  Cummings  related  how  he  had 
recruited  an  in-law  and  two  cousins  for  the  Communist  Party 
—only  to  turn  their  names  over  to  the  FBI.  But  no  sooner 
do  you  rate  one  witness  the  worst  of  the  thirteen,  than  another 
witness  turns  up  who  proves  you  have  not  hit  bottom.  John 
Victor  Blanc  confessed  that  he  had  similarly  recruited  a 
brother-in-law,  but  this  time  without  the  knowledge  of  the 
relative  involved!  Blanc  simply  forged  his  brother-in-law's 
signature  to  an  application  blank,  and  then  collected  from 
the  FBI  for  "expenses"  incurred  for  this  and  other  "patriotic" 
services  rendered. 

From  March  23  through  May  19,  none  but  renegades  and 
informers  took  the  stand,  with  the  exception  of  two  Special 
Agents  of  the  FBI.  For  two  months,  they  unwittingly  bared 
their  souls  on  direct  examination,  or  reluctantly  confessed 
their  sins  under  cross-examination.  The  accidental  reader  of 
the  record  from  page  1338,  where  the  testimony  of  Louis 
Budenz  begins,  through  page  6025  where  the  thirteenth  and 
last  government  witness  ends  his  testimony,  will  find  a  re- 
volting document  revealing  to  him  an  unsuspected  under- 
world below  the  last  layer  of  Hell.  All  thirteen  witnesses,  he 
will  find,  practiced  betrayal  as  a  profession  over  a  period  of 
years.  All  received  money  for  it,  in  the  form  of  monthly  al- 
lowances, expenses,  jobs,  or  other  opportunities  for  gain. 

131 


132  The  Reptile  Tribe 

All  thirteen  made  it  their  business  not  just  to  be  present  at 
Communist  meetings  but  to  be  bosom  buddies  of  their  fellow- 
Communists.  At  social  gatherings  and  in  private  homes,  many 
of  them  generously  took  pictures  of  their  comrades— and  sent 
copies  to  the  FBI.  They  worked  to  win  confidence,  to  have 
entre  to  homes  and  knowledge  of  their  associates'  personal 
affairs;  they  went  out  with  them  socially,  played  with  their 
children,  were  part  of  their  lives— all  to  gain  positions  which 
gave  them  access  to  membership  lists  and  permitted  them  to 
influence  policy-making.  Then  they  were  able  to  include  in 
their  reports  not  only  the  names  they  had  gathered,  but  cop- 
ies of  Communist  leaflets  which  they  themselves  had  written, 
and  descriptions  of  Communist  acts  which  they  themselves 
had  performed. 

They  spied  on  trade  unions,  womens*  groups,  youth  organi- 
zations and  non-Communist  minority  political  parties,  too. 
The  witness  Angela  Calomiris  joined  an  AFL  union  and  a 
CIO  union,  the  American  Labor  Party,  the  Progressive  Party, 
the  International  Workers  Order,  the  Congress  of  American 
Women,  Greeks  for  Democratic  Action,  the  Joint  Anti-Fascist 
Committee,  "and  at  least  five  others,"  she  remembered  com- 
placently. She  sent  reports  to  the  FBI  on  all  of  them,  and 
what  the  FBI  wants,  above  everything,  is  names.  The  witness 
Herbert  Philbrick,  who  boasted  that  he  had  been  an  in- 
former for  the  FBI  the  full  nine  years  of  his  membership  in  the 
Communist  Party,  was  also  a  joiner.  He  joined  the  Progressive 
Party,  the  Civil  Rights  Congress,  the  CIO  United  Office  and 
Professional  Workers,  and  American  Youth  for  Democracy. 
When  first  questioned  about  his  work,  he  acknowledged  re- 
porting to  the  FBI  on  all  of  them.  After  overnight  coaching, 
he  qualified  this:  his  reports  were  only  on  "Communist  activi- 
ties" in  these  other  organizations,  he  said.  But  ordinary  work- 
ing people  don't  believe  that  labor  spies  and  political  police 
agents  are  or  can  be  so  discriminating.  When  John  V.  Blanc  of 
Cleveland  gave  similar  testimony  in  the  Communist  trial,  his 
local  Council  of  the  CIO  United  Auto  Workers,  though  many 


The  Expendables  133 

of  its  members  are  very  actively  anti-Communist,  voted  unani- 
mously to  drop  Blanc  from  Council  membership. 

The  testimony  of  the  thirteen  not  only  reveals  them  as  low 
fellows,  but  as  low-quality  craftsmen  in  their  chosen  trade 
of  informer.  They  were  men  and  women  capable  of  gathering 
names,  of  acting  as  agents  provocateurs,  but  nothing  more. 
Their  task  of  winning  posts  inside  the  Communist  Party  re- 
quired little  ability,  for,  as  their  own  evidence  shows,  Ameri- 
can Communists  were  more  trusting  than  the  politically  wiser 
workers  of  the  rest  of  the  world.  They  were  not  so  familiar 
with  the  police  agent  "plant"  as  Communists  elsewhere  are; 
moreover,  they  were  constantly  engaged  in  trying  to  compel 
their  persecutors  to  give  them,  in  practice,  the  legality  which 
Communists  enjoyed— and  still  enjoy— in  theory  only.  They 
practiced— so  the  testimony  of  these  very  witnesses  shows— 
barely  enough  "security,"  or  not  enough,  to  protect  some  of 
their  members  from  loss  of  private  jobs  to  which,  law  or  no 
law,  they  would  be  instantly  exposed  if  they  became  known 
as  Communists.  When  the  witnesses  describe  their  rise  within 

\  the  Communist  Party,  therefore,  the  stories  are  of  easy  success 

i  in  gaining  control  of  membership  lists  and  funds.  But  their 
testimony  simultaneously  reveals  that  they  never  understood, 
never  tried  to  understand,  what  the  subjects  of  their  espionage 
were  doing,  saying  and  studying  during  those  many  long  years 
they  wrote  reports  about  them. 

Here  are  spies  not  only  sent  to  work  among  the  Com- 

!  munists,  but  brought  to  the  witness  stand  to  testify  on  how 
these  Communists  understood  and  taught  the  theory  of  Com- 

1  munism  or  scientific  Socialism.   But  watch  them  on  the  stand! 

,  They  do  not  testify  from  knowledge;  they  testify  from  recent 

1  re-reading  of  the  reports  they  sent  to  the  FBI  over  the  years, 
and  from  recent  coaching  on  their  testimony  by  the  FBI. 
The  witness  Blanc  will  do  as  an  example.  He  took  the  stand 
briefly  on  May  13,  continued  all  day  May  16  and  concluded 
only  after  another  full  day,  May  17.  Under  cross-examination, 

!  he  acknowledged  that  he  had  never  made  the  least  attempt  to 


134  The  Reptile  Tribe 

understand  what  his  comrades  were  talking  about;  even  for 
the  purpose  of  pretending  to  be  a  Communist,  he  used  an- 
other device.  Yet  after  each  meeting  he  went  home  and 
wrote,  from  memory,  a  report  on  the  evening's  events  and 
discussion,  just  as  if  he  knew  what  it  had  all  been  about. 
Almost  at  the  end  of  the  examination,  he  was  asked  a  ques- 
tion about  Das  Kapital,  or  Capital,  the  major  work  of  Karl 
Marx,  and  it  would  have  been  no  surprise  to  learn  that  he 
had  never  opened  it.  But  it  turned  out  that  up  to  the  moment 
he  was  asked  that  question,  he  had  never  heard  of  the  work 
at  all!  And  this  man  employed  as  a  spy  inside  the  Commu- 
nist Party  from  1944  to  1949,  did  his  work  to  the  satisfaction 
of  the  FBI  without  reading  American  Communist  publica- 
tions, either.  Asked  about  an  article  in  Political  Affairs,  the 
monthly  theoretical  magazine  of  the  Communist  Party  of  the 
United  States,  Blanc  said:  "I  never  read  a  Political  Affairs 
in  my  life." 

Ignorance  was  no  handicap  to  the  informer-witnesses.  Em- 
ployed as  a  betrayer,  Blanc  won  confidence  by  trickery,  falsi- 
fication and  by  betraying  even  his  employer,  the  FBI.  Fake 
recruiting  was  his  specialty;  his  success  in  recruiting,  achieved 
by  inventing  recruits,  established  his  credit.  On  direct  ex- 
amination, he  describes  how  "I  formed  my  own  club  in  the 
Park  Drop  Forge  Company"  plant  where  he  was  employed. 
There  had  been  a  strike  in  the  plant  from  January  to  April 
1947.  A  Communist  official  had  suggested  that  when  the  work- 
ers returned  to  the  job,  the  best  and  most  militant  of  them 
should  be  invited  to  join  the  party,  and  they  should  be  mem- 
bers of  a  club  or  unit  in  the  plant  itself.  The  record  says: 

(From  the  record) 

BLANC:  I  spoke  to  several  workers  who  had  been  closely 
contacted  [connected]  with  a  grievance  I  had  taken  up  in 
front  of  management  for  them  and  asked  them  as  a  favor 
to  me  to  join  the  Communist  Party. 

QUESTION:  Did  they  join? 


The  Expendables  135 

BLANC:  Well,  after  I  told  them  further  that  it  wouldn't 
take  up  much  of  their  time  and  it  wouldn't  cost  them  anything, 
a  few  of  them  joined. 

QUESTION:  Did  they  pay  dues? 

BLANC:  They  did  not. 

QUESTION:  Who  paid  their  dues? 

BLANC:  I  paid  their  dues. 

QUESTION:  Did  they  subscribe  to  the  Worker  or  the  Daily 
Worker? 

BLANC:  The  subscription  to  the  Worker  was  also  paid  for 

by  me. 

*         *         * 

Witnesses  like  Blanc  usually  tried  to  conceal  the  ugliness 
of  this  kind  of  work,  the  work  of  the  police  provocateur,  by 
denying  that  they  turned  over  to  the  FBI  the  names  of  their 
own  recruits.  But  subsequent  questions  trip  them.  In  ac- 
knowledging that  they  report  all  meetings  fully,  they  admit 
that  on  occasion  they  sent  even  the  names  of  their  own  re- 
cruits to  the  FBI.  This  recruiting  story  has  another  interesting 
aspect.  It  shows  that  the  informer  gave  a  very  different  pic- 
ture of  the  Communist  Party  to  his  proposed  recruit,  than  he 
now  draws  in  court.  In  fact,  the  party  as  he  presented  it  to 
his  recruit,  is  the  party  as  the  defendants  now  describe  it!  He 
won  the  confidence  of  the  men  he  sought  to  recruit  by  de- 
fending their  interests  in  ordinary  daily  quarrels  with  the 
plant  management.  And  it  is  this  militancy  in  unmelodramatic 
activity,  incidentally,  that  caused  the  Communists  to  recruit 
Blanc  in  the  first  place  and  it  is  this  militancy  which  main- 
tains his  credit  later. 

Still  another  aspect  of  the  story  illustrates  the  meaning 
of  the  word  "provocateur."  Blanc  asked  his  fellow-workers 
to  join  the  Communist  Party  as  a  personal  favor.  He  is  in  the 
party  to  obtain  evidence  that  will  enable  the  government  to 
prosecute  the  Communists,  but  he  gets  other  men  to  put  them- 
selves in  peril  of  prosecution  as  a  personal  favor  to  him  and 
without  suggesting  that  the  Communist  Party  does  unlawful 


136  The  Reptile  Tribe 

things.  And  now  he  mounts  the  witness  stand  to  swear  that 
it  does.  If  he  is  believed,  not  only  these  defendants  but  Blanc's 
recruits  become  subject  to  imprisonment.  That  is  what  is 
meant  by  police  agent,  or  agent  provocateur. 

In  testifying  against  the  defendants,  Blanc  tells  tales  of 
how  this  Communist  or  that  Communist  talked  in  unmistak- 
ably violent  terms  of  the  Socialist  Revolution.  He  is  very  glib, 
and  on  cross-examination  he  reveals  why:  he  spent  a  solid 
week  with  FBI  Agent  David  Weible,  in  December  1948,  pre- 
paring his  testimony.  This  came  out  when,  in  questions  about 
a  report  he  made  in  1945,  he  said  he  could  recall  the  details 
because  he  saw  the  report  not  long  ago. 

(From  the  record) 

BLANC:  They  were  given  to  me  to  review. 

QUESTION:  "They,"  you  mean  your  reports? 

BLANC:  That  is  right. 

QUESTION:  All  of  them? 

BLANC:  No,  sir. 

QUESTION:  How  many? 

BLANC:  Only  the  reports  that  I  would  be  able  to  testify  on 
this  trial. 


It  developed  that  there  were  "forty  or  fifty"  of  these.  After 
a  week  of  coaching  on  his  testimony,  in  other  words  after  he 
had  definitely  been  given  a  role  in  the  prosecution  cast,  he 
continued  to  recruit  people  who  would  thereby  become  sub- 
ject to  criminal  action  if  the  trial  should  end  in  conviction! 
He  recruited  only  "imaginary  people,"  he  says,  in  March  and 
April  1949,  but  he  "may  have"  recruited  some  real  people 
between  December  and  March,  he  admitted.  I  find  this  on  the 
sickening  side,  but  when  Blanc  told  how  he  had  "recruited" 
his  brother-in-law  without  telling  the  latter,  Judge  Medina— 
who  so  thoroughly  disapproved  of  laughter  by  the  defend- 
ants— himself  laughed  aloud.  It  would  be  interesting  to  see 


The  Expendables  137 

how  the  thirty-five  to  fifty  persons  recruited  by  Blanc  from 
1945  to  1948,  look  at  this  joke. 

All,  all  the  prosecution  witnesses  come  from  this  secret, 
slimy  swamp  that  breeds  the  reptile  tribe,  the  professional 
betrayer.  Is  it  not  ironic  that  the  prosecution  should  have 
called  on  a  dozen  secret  betrayers  to  prove  that  the  Commu- 
nists are  conspirators  secretly  plotting  to  betray  their  coun- 
try? That  is  precisely  what  they  are  supposed  to  prove.  Is  it 
any  wonder  that  the  case  is  one  of  the  shabbiest  in  the  history 
of  political  heresy  trials  or  witch-hunts  in  the  United  States? 

One  of  the  features  of  the  "proof,"  is  that  it  is  rarely  about 
the  defendants.  The  most  sensational  things  the  seven  FBI 
"plants"  have  to  tell,  were  said  or  done  by  other  persons  than 
the  defendants  (just  as  in  the  IWW  trials).  The  witnesses 
often  knew  or  met  one  or  more  of  the  defendants,  heard  them 
speak  at  meetings  or  lecture  in  schools.  But  when  something 
really  "hot"  occurred,  when  some  Communist  preached  wild 
force  and  violence,  it  turns  out  that  the  witnesses  are  not 
quoting  a  defendant  but  somebody  else. 

The  witness  Blanc  came  down  from  the  stand  several  times 
to  "finger"  various  defendants.  He  had  been  recruited  into 
the  party  in  1944  by  defendant  Gus  Hall.  He  had  heard  de- 
fendant John  Williamson  speak  in  Ohio  in  July  1945.  He  had 
attended  a  meeting  early  in  1946  where  defendants  Jack 
Stachel  and  Carl  Winter  were  present  and  had  things  to  say. 
He  had  attended  a  school  in  the  summer  of  1946  where  de- 
fendant Gil  Green  delivered  one  lecture.  But  having  "fin- 
gered" these  defendants  after  the  fashion  of  the  gunman's 
cowardly  accomplice,  he  went  on  to  relate  damaging  state- 
ments made— by  other  people.  He  swears  that  at  a  school  he 
attended,  an  Ohio  Communist  official,  Hymer  Lumers,  "also 
known  as  Lewis,"  taught  that  you  couldn't  vote  the  Commu- 
nist Party  into  office;  you'd  have  to  overthrow  capitalism  to 
get  Socialism,  and  "when  that  time  came,  we  could  always  rely 
on  the  Soviet  Union  as  our  ally." 

This  is  the  pattern  of  all  the  prosecution  testimony.    We 


138  The  Reptile  Tribe 

have  already  seen  how  Nicodemus  performed  this  same  chore 
of  linking  Communist  plans  for  violent  revolution  with  "inva- 
sion" of  the  United  States  by  the  Red  Army.  In  his  case,  too, 
it  was  not  a  defendant  who  said  these  things.  So  with  all  the 
other  witnesses.  The  witness  Philbrick  relates  how  a  group 
to  which  he  belonged  met  at  the  homes  of  its  members  and 
whoever  was  host  or  hostess  for  the  evening,  acted  as  chair- 
man. Once  it  came  the  turn  of  a  girl  named  Martha,  and 
Martha  (Philbrick  says  he  took  pains  to  find  out  the  last 
names  of  all  these  members,  but  here  it  sounds  more  conspira- 
torial just  to  say  "Martha"),  said:  "We  must  arm  the  workers 
for  the  struggle  against  the  capitalists."  This  is  admitted  as 
evidence  against  the  defendants!  How  roundabout  are  the 
roads  to  Rome! 

To  get  this  shoddy  material  into  the  fabric  of  the  case,  it 
was  necessary,  as  usual,  to  avoid  facing  defense  objections. 
This  was  done  in  the  customary  way:  Judge  Medina  gave  a 
display  of  weary  tolerance  of  those  argumentative  lawyers, 
scolded  them  for  arguing— and  ignored  the  substance  of  their 
argument. 

(From  the  record) 

GLADSTEIN:  Your  Honor,  may  I  state  the  grounds  of  objec- 
tion? 

MEDINA:  I  rather  suspect  it  is  what  I  have  already  heard 
but  you  may  do  so. 

GLADSTEIN:  Your  Honor,  I  object  because  this  calls  for 
statements  not  made  by  a  defendant  but  statements  supposed 
to  have  been  made  by  some  other  person,  the  theory  of  its 
being  offered  against  the  defendants  being  that  the  defendant 
happened  to  be  in  the  same  room— same  room  in  a  public 
meeting. 

MEDINA:  At  a  Communist  meeting. 

GLADSTEIN:  Any  meeting,  and  didn't  get  up  afterwards  and 
say  anything  by  way  of  disagreement  or  otherwise,  the  theory 
is  it  is  admissible  against  the  defendant. 


The  Expendables  139' 

MEDINA:  That  is  what  you  say  the  theory  is. 

GLADSTEIN:  May  I  know  then  the  theory  upon  which  it  is 
received? 

MEDINA:  You  see,  it  is  the  same  old  story.  You  get  up  to 
state  grounds  of  an  objection  and  argue,  argue,  argue.  You 
ask  me  questions  and  then  you  begin  to  ask  Mr.  Gordon,  and 
then  we  forget  all  about  what  we  are  doing  and  we  have  to 
start  all  over  again. 

GLADSTEIN:  No,  my  point  is  that  it  converts  the  charge  from 
one  of  supposed  advocacy  by  a  defendant  into  something  that 
somebody  else  said. 

MEDINA:  It  is  the  old  story.  You  want  to  get  up  and  argue 
to  the  jury,  and  perhaps  others,  when  all  you  do  is  object  and 
you  continually  insist  that  you  are  stating  grounds  of  an  objec- 
tion when  all  you  are  doing  is  just  making  a  little  speech 
which  you  should  reserve  for  your  summation.  The  witness; 

may  answer  the  question. 

«         »         « 

The  witness  Calomiris  attended  a  school  where  defendant 
Gil  Green  once  spoke,  but  her  testimony  "convicts"  not  Green 
but  lecturer  Francis  Franklin  of  criminal  advocacy.  He  told 
them,  she  said,  that  "it  would  be  necessary  to  violently  over- 
throw the  existing  government/'  The  same  things  happened 
in  St.  Louis,  according  to  witness  Thomas  Younglove.  At  a 
class  organized  by  his  party  club  in  the  winter  of  1945-1946, 
a  St.  Louis  lawyer  named  Douglas  MacLeod  allegedly  "said 
the  ballot-box  was  not  the  answer  to  bring  about  Socialism  but 
it  would  have  to  come  about  by  violent  action."  Now  no  one 
knows  who  MacLeod  is,  but  everybody  knows  Joseph  Stalin, 
so  Younglove  brings  Stalin  to  St.  Louis  by  remote  control.  At 
the  concluding  session  of  a  six-week  course  in  October  1946, 
he  says,  Ralph  J.  Shaw,  Missouri  Chairman  of  the  Party,  re- 
ported he  had  just  come  from  a  meeting  of  the  National  Com- 
mittee. Shaw  said,  according  to  Younglove,  that  a  "personal 
representative"  of  Premier  Stalin  had  addressed  the  National 
Committee  meeting,  saying  that  war  was  near  and  might  come 


140  The  Reptile  Tribe 

at  almost  any  time  and  if  it  did  "we"  must  be  prepared  to  go 
underground.  Shaw's  own  comment,  according  to  Younglove, 
was  that  "if  war  does  come,  we,  the  party  workers,  will  do 
all  we  can  to  sabotage  the  war  effort." 

The  more  contemptible  the  witness  (if  this  is  not  splitting 
liairs )  the  more  far-fetched  the  stories  he  consents  to  tell.  Wil- 
liam Cummings,  who  recruited  his  in-law  Nathan  Thomas,  and 
his  cousins,  Ed  and  Ellen  Payson,  in  order  to  betray  them  to 
the  FBI,  swears  that  at  a  meeting  in  Toledo  in  1945,  two  Com- 
munist officials  even  set  an  approximate  date  for  the  coming 
American  revolution!  Mrs.  Adeline  Kohl  and  Paul  Prosser, 
Tie  says,  agreed  that  a  first  estimate  of  ten  years  (1955)  was 
too  conservative!  "Due  to  world  conditions,"  including  Com- 
munist work  in  the  United  States,  "it  was  much  closer."  And 
to  add  some  "color"  to  his  story  he  relates  that  during  a  two- 
week  course  he  took  in  the  winter  of  1945-1946,  during  which 
defendants  John  Williamson  and  Gilbert  Green  lectured,  some- 
body else— someone  who  is  not  a  defendant— warned  that  the 
streets  of  America  "would  run  red  with  blood"  as  they  had  in 
Russia  in  1917. 

Patience,  reader.  One  more  of  these  proud  "plants"  of  the 
FBI  and  we  shall  go  on  to  other  matters.  The  seventh  "plant" 
and  last  prosecution  witness,  Balmes  Hidalgo,  really  touches 
Txrttom.  His  morals  are  on  a  par  with  the  others  but  due  to  his 
superior  ignorance  and  incomprehension,  he  succeeds  in  bur- 
lesquing their  performances.  In  his  club,  the  Tom  Paine  Club 
in  New  York  City,  in  the  spring  of  1947,  he  said,  "a  girl  named 
Betty"  stated  that  American  Communists  know  violent  revo- 
lution is  the  only  way  but  "she  told  them  if  anybody  ever  ac- 
cuses us  of  this,  our  answer  is,  'No.  We  just  predict  it/  "  That's 
the  beauty  of  testimony  like  this:  try  and  prove  that  no  girl 
named  Betty  ever  said  that! 

When  you  are  all  through  with  the  trash  these  witnesses 
drag  into  the  Federal  Court  of  the  Southern  District  of  New 
York  in  the  name  of  "evidence,"  you  have  nothing  that  an  hon- 

prosecutor  or  newspaperman  could  touch  with  a  ten-foot 


The  Expendables  141 

pole.  Yet  the  prosecution  relied  on  this  stuff  and  this  stuff 
only,  and  the  big  commercial  newspapers  went  for  it  eagerly. 

If  the  testimony  of  the  prosecution  witnesses  was  far  re- 
moved from  the  persons  of  the  defendants,  it  was  also  remote, 
in  point  of  time,  from  the  period  of  the  indictment.  Of  the 
testimony  of  William  Nowel],  for  example,  the  Times  (April 
19)  could  say:  "The  witness  extended  the  pattern  of  such  ac- 
tivities, previously  traced  between  1935  and  the  present,  back 
to  1929."  The  alleged  activities  took  place  "as  much  as  twenty 
years  ago." 

If  they  testify  only  about  other  people  and  other  times,  of 
what  use  are  these  moral  lepers  to  the  prosecution?  They  can- 
not be  there  as  character  witnesses,  having  none  themselves. 
Nowell,  who  was  expelled  from  the  Communist  Party  some 
thirteen  years  ago,  has  since  been  repeatedly  identified  by 
non-Communist  workers,  on  various  jobs,  as  a  labor  spy.  In 
connection  with  a  job  he  had  in  1944  at  the  Ford  works  in  De- 
troit, he  said  the  workers  dropped  "things  out  of  cranes  on  me, 
and  pushed  things  off  stockpiles  on  me."  To  tell  the  truth, 
they  forced  the  company  to  fire  him,  but  he  solemnly  says 
that  he  was  fired  because  of  collusion  between  the  Commu- 
nists and  the  violently  anti-Communist  (and  anti-labor)  Ford 
Motor  Company! 

No,  you  can't  deodorize  these  witnesses.  It  is  certainly  not 
for  their  fine  scent  that  the  prosecution  chose  them.  If  we 
want  to  understand  what  they  were  chosen  for,  we  must  face 
the  problem  as  the  prosecutor  saw  it.  His  job  is  to  convince 
the  jury  that  Communists  preach  force  and  violence,  but  he  has 
no  evidence  that  the  defendants,  during  the  period  of  the  in- 
dictment, taught  or  advocated  anything  that  will  support  his 
cloak-and-dagger  case.  He  knows  that  the  testimony  of  his 
several  informers  as  to  what  other  Communists  said  and  did 
in  other  times,  will  not  permit  conviction  of  these  defendants. 
How  then  shall  he  persuade  the  jury  to  silence  these  men 
and  outlaw  their  books?  His  answer  is— secrecy! 


Chapter  14 
THE  USES  OF  PERVERSITY 


Secrecy!  When  the  High  Priest  made  up  his  mind  to 
throw  Jesus  to  the  Roman  wolves  as  a  pre-Munich  appease- 
ment sacrifice,  he  invoked  the  same  charge  of  dark  and  secret 
ways.  As  XVIII  Johns,  19-23  relates: 

"Jesus  answered  him,  I  spake  openly  to  the  world;  I  ever 
taught  in  the  synagogue,  and  in  the  temple,  whither  the  Jews 
always  resort;  and  in  secret  have  I  said  nothing. 

"Why  askest  thou  me?  ask  them  which  heard  me,  what 
I  have  said  unto  them:  behold,  they  know  what  I  said. 

"And  when  he  had  thus  spoken,  one  of  the  officers  which 
stood  by  struck  Jesus  with  the  palm  of  his  hand,  saying, 
Answerest  thou  the  High  Priest  so? 

"Jesus  answered  him,  if  I  have  spoken  evil,  bear  witness 
of  evil;  but  if  well,  why  smitest  thou  me?" 

The  High  Priests  of  anti-Communism  are  no  better  than 
the  earliest  guardians  of  orthodoxy.  They  brought  on  not  one 
but  thirteen  Judases  to  create  the  impression  that  the  Com- 
munists taught  in  secrecy.  It  was  not  enough  that  witness 
after  witness  should  relate  how  Joe  Doakes  told  him  Marxism 
means  force  and  violence.  It  was  necessary  to  describe  Com- 
munists as  cunning  conspirators  operating  in  an  atmosphere 
of  sinister  secrecy.  More  important  than  Joe  Doakes'  alleged 
words  of  incitement,  is  the  irrelevant,  manufactured  or  dis- 
torted detail  that  the  witness  smuggles  into  his  testimony.  It 
is  the  scenery  of  secrecy  that  counts,  not  the  plot  of  the  play. 

Louis  Budenz,  for  instance,  in  describing  meetings  of  the 
National  Committee  of  the  Communist  Party,  was  not  required 

142 


The  Uses  of  Perversity  143 

to  relate  incidents  and  leave  it  to  the  jury  to  decide  whether 
they  showed  something  secret  and  conspiratorial.  He  was 
permitted  to  characterize  the  meetings,  to  call  them  "secretive 
or  semi-secretive."  When  the  defense  objected,  the  Court 
did  not  order  this  stricken,  but  turned  to  Budenz  and  asked 
what  he  meant;  did  he  mean  admission  was  by  card  only? 
Budenz  gave  an  evasive  answer,  but  Judge  Medina  blandly 
remarked  that  perhaps  the  witness  meant  "extra-secretive." 
Upon  protest  by  the  defense,  he  withdrew  this  remark  but 
in  a  manner  that  indicated  he  personally  attached  great  im- 
portance to  Budenz'  testimony:  "Just  pay  attention  to  what 
the  witness  said  happened,"  he  instructed  the  jury. 

Subsequent  witnesses  follow  the  same  pattern.  The  meet- 
ings they  attended  were  "secret."  The  decisions  taken  by  the 
Communists,  though  openly  published  for  proclaimed  pur- 
poses, become  evidence  of  secret  preparation  for  violent  revo- 
lution. Witness  Philbrick  and  many  other  witnesses  related 
how  the  Communist  Party  fixed  tasks,  usually  that  of  in- 
creasing their  membership  in  the  main  industries  of  a  given 
state  or  locality,  as  key  tasks  or  "concentration"  tasks.  By 
choosing  words  to  get  the  "secrecy"  emphasis  desired,  Phil- 
brick  turns  this  into  a  tale  of  how  they  "colonized"  a  Gen- 
eral Electric  plant  at  Lynn,  where  jet  airplane-engines  are 
manufactured.  His  own  testimony  shows  that  there  were 
meetings,  discussions,  printed  documents,  calling  for  energetic 
efforts  to  win  adherents  among  the  workers  in  every  industry 
represented  in  Massachusetts.  But  a  touch  of  secrecy,  coupled 
with  a  reference  to  jet-planes,  will  convert  Communist  plans, 
openly  published,  into  a  secret  decision  with  sinister  ends. 
"Concentration"  thereby  becomes  a  code-word  meaning  prepa- 
ration for  ultimate  invasion  of  America  by  the  Red  Army. 

The  remoteness  of  the  testimony  from  the  charges  in  the  in- 
dictment, the  shallowness  of  the  proof,  must  be  buried  in  mys- 
tery. The  party  secretly  taught  violence  and  publicly  preached 
peace  and  democracy,  Philbrick  testified.  He  himself,  he  says, 
helped  prepare  material  for  both  public  and  secret  purposes. 


144  The  Reptile  Tribe 

Copies  of  leaflets  and  other  material  he  prepared  were  sent  to 
the  FBI  with  his  reports,  and  these  copies  are  now  submitted 
in  evidence.  Not  one  document  advocates  force  and  violence! 
How  is  this?  Philbrick  explains  that  it  is  because  material  for 
public  consumption  did  not  contain  advocacy  of  force  and 
violence.  But  where,  then,  is  the  material  you  yourself  pre- 
pared for  secret  use?  The  witness  has  no  answer.  The  prose- 
cution has  no  answer.  The  Court  has  no  answer. 

There  can  be  no  answer  for  there  is  no  such  material. 
The  testimony  of  this  very  witness  contradicts  the  testimony 
about  "secret  material."  The  story  of  "Aesopian  language" 
contradicts  it.  In  supporting  Budenz'  fable,  Philbrick  shows 
that  the  prosecution  is  not  relying  on  things  said  and  done 
in  secret.  It  is  relying  on  interpretation  of  openly  published 
documents  of  the  Communist  Party.  Elaborating  the  Budenz 
story,  Philbrick  said  that  Communists  taught  violence  by  use 
of  semantic  devices,  that  is,  by  their  special  use  of  words. 
They  used  words  containing  a  hidden  meaning  recognized 
only  by  Communists,  he  said.  With  such  devices,  he  testified, 
the  party  could  prepare  the  minds  of  its  members  for  war 
while  calling  for  "peace."  They  could  rally  members  to  sup- 
port of  "totalitarian"  Russia  by  calling  them  to  defend  "de- 
mocracy." They  could  arouse  them  against  the  United  States 
by  attacking  "Fascism"  and  "Imperialism,"  he  said.  In  all  seri- 
ousness, this  witness  and  other  witnesses  testified  that  the 
Communists  have  such  a  code.  But  in  all  seriousness,  if  one 
may  speak  seriously  of  nonsense,  the  existence  of  such  a  code 
would  make  unnecessary  any  secret  documents.  If  there  is 
a  code,  the  "secret  material"  is  an  invention;  if  the  secret 
material  exists,  the  "code"  is  pure  perjury.  In  truth,  both 
are  false.  The  secret  documents  and  the  code  are  alike  in- 
ventions that  are  worthy  only  of  these  corrupt  spies. 

Angela  Calomiris,  like  all  the  other  "plants,"  attended 
"secret"  schools  and  takes  up  much  time  with  testimony  that 
Communists  use  only  first  names,  and  that  there  are  no  re- 
cording secretaries  at  meetings  and  that  no  minutes  were 


The  Uses  of  Perversity  145 

taken  after  the  1945  reorganization.  Yet  one  of  the  "secret" 
schools  she  attended  was  held  in  the  building  at  35  East  12th 
Street  that  housed  the  national  state  and  county  offices  of  the 
party,  as  well  as  the  Daily  Worker.  Surely  it  was  always  under 
observation  and  always  known  to  be  under  observation.  And 
her  diploma  from  this  school,  the  witness  says,  she  sent  to 
the  FBI  to  be  photographed.  Now  what  kind  of  "secret"  school 
gives  diplomas? 

William  Cummings  says  he  attended  a  "secret"  school 
held  in  rooms  over  "the  Russian  cooperative  restaurant."  One 
touch  of  borscht  should  be  enough  to  make  this  school  sus- 
pect. But  is  it  not  a  grim  joke  that  this  witness  to  the  hor- 
rendous secrecy  of  the  Communist  Party  was  a  secret  police 
agent  who  had  first  entered  FBI  service  on  a  labor  espionage 
assignment?  And  he  testifies  that  when  the  secret  school  was 
over,  he  secretly  reported  to  the  FBI!  Russell  Porter  relates, 
without  a  trace  of  irony:  "He  said  he  always  met  the  agents 
at  night." 

Secrecy,  secrecy,  secrecy!  That's  the  prosecution's  "con- 
spiracy" case!  Judge  Medina  frankly  told  the  defendants  that 
he  attached  as  much  importance  to  this  matter  as  the  prose- 
cution did.  "He  stressed  the  importance  of  the  secrecy  attrib- 
uted to  Communist  activities  in  the  testimony,"  Porter  noted 
in  his  account  of  argument  after  the  prosecution  rested  its 
case  (Times,  May  21).  In  fact,  the  role  of  secrecy  in  the 
prosecution  case  was  fully  revealed  in  the  course  of  the  argu- 
ment. The  defense  had  moved  to  dismiss  the  indictments  for 
want  of  valid  evidence;  the  argument  turned  on  a  legal  point, 
one  easily  understood  by  a  layman.  It  was  a  question  of  the 
Supreme  Court  doctrine  that  there  must  be  a  "clear  and 
present  danger"  to  the  country  before  the  government  may 
attempt  to  curb  speech. 

Justice  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes,  Jr.  formulated  the  doc- 
trine in  1919,  when  he  was  virtually  alone  in  retaining  his 
senses  at  a  time  of  German  spy-scares  and  witch-hunts  for 
"agents  of  Russian  Bolshevism."  Holmes  said: 


148  The  Reptile  Tribe 

"The  question  in  every  case  is  whether  the  words  used 
are  used  in  such  circumstances  and  are  of  such  a  nature  as  to 
create  a  clear  and  present  danger  that  they  will  bring  about 
the  substantive  evils  that  Congress  has  a  right  to  prevent.  It 
is  a  question  of  proximity  and  degree/' 

In  1941,  the  Supreme  Court  remarked,  in  an  opinion  on 
an  appeal  by  the  noted  labor  leader,  Harry  Bridges,  that  "the 
substantive  evil  must  be  extremely  serious  and  the  degree  of 
imminence  extremely  high  before  utterances  can  be  punished." 

In  other  words,  the  fact  that  the  teaching  of  Marxism 
may,  by  some  process,  prove  the  decisive  element  in  some 
future  revolution  at  an  unpredictable  date,  is  not  enough  to 
permit  the  government  to  outlaw  the  teaching  of  Marxism 
today.  There  is  no  "clear  and  present  danger."  Holmes'  dis- 
senting opinion  of  1919  became  the  majority  opinion,  the 
view  of  the  Supreme  Court,  when  the  hysteria  following 
World  War  I  died  away.  In  1943  the  Court  could  say: 

"It  is  now  a  commonplace  that  censorship  or  suppression 
of  expression  of  opinion  is  tolerated  by  our  Constitution  only 
when  the  expression  presents  a  clear  and  present  danger  of 
action  of  a  kind  the  State  is  empowered  to  prevent  and  pun- 
ish." 

The  prosecution  seized  on  the  word  "action."  Many,  many 
times  during  the  trial,  it  brought  up  the  agreed  fact  that  Com- 
munists teach  Marxism  as  a  "guide  to  action."  But  what  of 
that?  What  idea  was  ever  worth  teaching  except  with  the 
design  to  put  it  in  practice?  The  Supreme  Court  said  in  1945: 

"The  First  Amendment  is  a  charter  for  government,  not 
[a  charter  for]  an  institution  of  learning.  'Free  trade  in  ideas' 
means  free  trade  in  the  opportunity  to  persuade  to  action, 
not  merely  to  describe  facts." 

Indeed,  the  Court  had  elaborated  this  point  in  1940,  say- 
ing: "Every  expression  of  opinion  on  matters  that  are  impor- 
tant has  the  potentiality  of  inducing  action  in  the  interests 
of  one  rather  than  another  group  in  society.  But  the  group  in 
power  at  any  moment  may  not  impose  penal  sanctions  on 


The  Uses  of  Perversity  147 

peaceful  and  truthful  discussion  of  matters  of  public  inter- 
est merely  on  a  showing  that  others  may  thereby  be  per- 
suaded to  take  action  inconsistent  with  its  interests.  Abridg- 
ment of  the  liberty  of  such  discussion  can  be  justified  only 
where  the  clear  danger  of  substantive  evil  arises  under  cir- 
cumstances affording  no  opportunity  to  test  the  merits  of 
ideas  by  competition  for  acceptance  in  the  market  of  public 
opinion." 

Now  the  prosecution  had  no  testimony  to  overcome  this 
doctrine,  no  evidence  that  would  show  a  very  "proximate" 
danger  or  a  very  "imminent"  evil.  If,  as  its  witnesses  show, 
the  Communists  taught  the  same  doctrine  in  1929  that  they 
teach  today,  and  this  teaching  has  not  yet  produced  an  at- 
tempted overthrow  of  the  United  States  Government,  where 
is  the  fire  today?  The  prosecution  was  reduced  to  the  argu- 
ment that  times  have  changed,  the  world  has  changed,  and 
that  in  view  of  the  cold  war  the  "clear  and  present  danger" 
doctrine  has  become  a  luxury  we  can  no  longer  afford.  The 
prosecutor  made  that  point  even  before  the  trial.  In  a  brief 
or  memorandum  in  October  1948,  opposing  the  defense  motion 
to  quash  the  indictment,  McGohey  said: 

"Assuming,  arguendo,  that  the  'clear  and  present  danger' 
doctrine  is  applicable  to  this  prosecution  ...  we  submit  that 
it  is  impossible  to  conclude  that  the  allegations  of  these  indict- 
ments .  .  .  viewed  in  the  context  of  world  events,  do  not 
charge  a  clear  and  present  danger  to  the  Government  of  the 
United  States." 

"The  context  of  world  events"  .  .  .  that's  another  way  of 
spelling  "cold  war."  And  now,  when  the  government  has 
rested  its  case,  and  the  defense  again  raises  the  "clear  and 
present  danger"  doctrine  in  a  motion  to  dismiss,  Judge  Medina 
and  Prosecutor  McGohey  alike  reveal  that  they  just  don't 
like  the  doctrine.  Here  is  the  substance  of  days  of  argument: 

(From  the  record) 

MEDINA:  So  the  clear  and  present  danger  you  are  talking 
about  is  the  immediate  overthrow  of  the  government? 


148  The  Reptile  Tribe 

ISSERMAN:  That  is  correct. 

MEDINA:  Well,  that  being  so,  it  seems  to  me  it  reduces 
itself  to  an  absurdity,  because  on  that  theory  you  couldn't 
punish  anybody  for  such  a  conspiracy  unless  the  government 
was  just  about  to  be  overthrown,  and  then  it  would  be  too 
late.  Isn't  that  so? 

ISSERMAN:  That  is  throwing  the  "clear  and  present  danger" 

doctrine  out  of  the  window. 

•         »         * 

McGohey  picked  up  the  ball  and  ran  through  the  opening 
made  by  the  Court.  Justice  Holmes,  he  said,  "was  talking  from 
the  background  of  a  life  and  an  experience  where  there  was 
the  freest  possible  discussion,  in  the  town  meetings  of  New 
England"  and  the  like.  "He  was  not  talking  about  the  kind  of 
propaganda  speakeasy  that  we  heard  about  in  this  case,  where 
persons  went  to  school  under  assumed  names,  coming  through 
a  doctor's  or  dentist's  office  into  rooms  some  place  else.  This 
is  not  the  kind  of  freedom  of  speech  Holmes  said  could  be 
protected.  In  no  event  did  Holmes  in  any  of  his  decisions 
say  that  where  you  have  an  organized  group,  nationwide 
with  a  system  such  as  has  been  shown  in  this  case,  that  kind 
of  teaching  cannot  be  reached." 

All  that  McGohey  is  saying,  is  that  he  and  the  men  who 
initiated  this  case  don't  like  the  Communist  Party  and  don't 
think  it  should  enjoy  the  protection  of  the  Constitution  under 
the  "clear  and  present  danger"  doctrine.  That  determines 
the  testimony  of  the  thirteen  renegade-informers  placed  on 
the  witness  stand  by  the  government:  they  must  describe  the 
teaching  of  Marxist-Leninist  principles  in  the  United  States 
in  terms  of  a  "propaganda  speakeasy."  They  must  invest  Com- 
munist schools  with  secrecy  and  make  a  dark  mystery  of  the 
very  openness  and  scope  of  Marxist  work  in  the  world  today. 
They  must  do  that  to  get  McGohey  around  the  barrier  of  the 
Supreme  Court. 

Without  some  new  device,  McGohey  has  no  case.  The 


The  Uses  of  Perversity  149 

Supreme  Court  has  said  that  you  can't  stop  people  from 
advocating  doctrines  just  because  you  don't  like  them  and 
you  happen  to  be  in  power.  But  McGohey  says  this  is  differ- 
ent. This  is  dangerous.  This  is  a  far-reaching  organization  in 
a  cold- war  world.  And  for  want  of  evidence  that  the  defend- 
ants are  spies,  Soviet  agents,  traitors  (as  the  headlines  have 
it),  for  want  for  credible  evidence  that  the  Communist  Party 
is  indeed  engaged  in  a  plot  to  overthrow  the  United  States 
Government  with  the  aid  of  the  Red  Army,  he  must  substi- 
tute mystery,  secrecy,  dark  innuendo.  What  we  do  not  know, 
it  is  implied,  we  cannot  prove  only  because  these  men  are  so 
dangerously  conspiratorial,  so  secretive  in  their  work.  If  we 
wait  for  evidence,  it  will  be  too  late. 

Once  again  we  must  call  on  Alice  in  Wonderland  for  a 
parallel.  If  you  remember,  the  trial  of  the  Knave  of  Hearts 
was  about  to  break  up  when  the  White  Rabbit  found  a  piece 
of  paper  on  which  someone  had  written  "a  set  of  verses." 

"Are  they  in  the  prisoner's  handwriting?"  a  juror  asked. 

"No,  they're  not,"  said  the  White  Rabbit,  "and  that's  the 
queerest  thing  about  it." 

"He  must  have  imitated  someone  else's  hand,"  said  the 
King. 

"Please,  your  Majesty,"  said  the  Knave,  "I  didn't  write  it, 
and  they  can't  prove  that  I  did:  there's  no  name  signed  at 
the  end." 

"If  you  didn't  sign  it,"  said  the  King,  "that  only  makes  the 
matter  worse.  You  must  have  meant  some  mischief,  or  else 
you'd  have  signed  your  name  like  an  honest  man." 

Communist  "secrecy"  was  similarly  established.  The  ab- 
sence of  evidence  of  guilt  proved  it.  McGohey  had  already 
outlined  that  approach  to  the  case  in  his  opening  argument. 
He  would  prove,  he  said,  that  everything  the  Communists 
did  had  a  secret  purpose.  Communist  clubs,  or  branches,  from 
World  War  I  to  the  summer  of  1948,  were  not  political  clubs 
or  educational  societies,  but  "classes  for  the  indoctrination  of 
their  members  with  the  theory  and  practice  of  Marxist-Leninist 


150  The  Reptile  Tribe 

principles  for  the  overthrow  of  the  United  States  Govern- 
ment." Of  course  all  passages  in  Communist  documents  ex- 
pressly forbidding  such  an  approach  to  Marxism,  are  there  for 
"legal  purposes"  only;  they  are  "mere  talk,"  they  are  "empty 
words."  In  this  context,  the  fact  that  Communists  conducted 
schools  and  publications  becomes  evidence  that  they  secretly 
taught  force  and  violence.  But  what  they  taught  in  the  schools 
becomes  irrelevant! 

Witness  Garfield  Herron  testified  that  he  attended  a 
"secret"  leadership  school  in  Chicago.  But  when  the  defense 
sought  to  cross-examine  him  in  such  a  way  as  to  show  that 
the  teachers  in  this  "secret"  school  taught  exactly  the  theory 
contained  in  the  published  documents  already  in  the  record, 
Judge  Medina  barred  the  questions.  No,  he  said,  that  would 
only  lead  to  "trying  the  war  in  Spain,  Jim  Crow,  whether 
trade  unionism  is  a  good  thing  or  a  bad  thing,  how  about 
wage  raises,  how  about  all  the  things  that  are  done  to  the 
Negroes  in  the  South,  and  of  course  the  whole  trial  will  get 
off  on  something  that  is  not  an  issue." 

Secrecy!  There  is  nothing  more  cynical  about  this  case 
than  the  fact  that  the  prosecution  and  the  FBI  chose  to  use 
spies  to  prove  the  secret,  conspiratorial  character  of  the  Com- 
munist Party.  For  where  do  informers  come  from?  What  do 
you  know  about  the  stoolpigeon  system  of  ordinary  police 
practice  which  gives  rise  to  the  labor  spy  and  the  political 
informer?  You  probably  know  very  little,  for  it  is  not  publi- 
cized by  the  forces  of  'law  and  order."  It  is  an  ugly,  secret, 
shameful  thing  and  until  you  have  become  acquainted  with 
it,  you  cannot  feel  the  full  horror  of  this  terrible  trial. 


Book    Four:    Force  and  Violence 


"The  poor  have  no  laws.  The  laws  are  made  by  the  rich, 
and,  of  course,  for  the  rich"— Address  by  the  Association 
of  Working  People  of  New  Castle  County,  Delaware, 
October  1829. 


Chapter  15 
PROSTITUTES  AND  PIGEONS 


Meet  Chile  Acuna.  Many  an  innocent  person  did  meet 
him— and  wound  up  in  prison  on  "framed"  charges.  Chile  Acuna 
was  a  stoolpigeon— the  word  is  his— for  the  New  York  City 
Vice  Squad.  His  career  ended  (so  far  as  I  know)  when  he  was 
forced  to  tell  his  whole  hideous  story  on  the  witness  stand 
during  the  Seabury  Inquiry.  He  counted  150  prostitution 
cases  on  which  he  "worked,"  and  acknowledged  that  forty  of 
them  were  "frameups." 

Acuna  described  how  he  entrapped  prostitutes  and 
"framed"  innocent  women.  The  officers  he  worked  with, 
would  wait  near  the  apartment  Acuna  was  to  enter;  after 
ten  or  fifteen  minutes  they  would  break  in.  Now  Acuna  would, 
in  his  own  words,  "play  the  comedy"  regularly  performed 
on  these  occasions,  a  performance  intended  to  conceal  his 
connection  with  the  police.  He  would  be  taken  into  the  next 
room  where  he  at  first  was  heard  to  deny  any  wrongdoing 
and  then,  after  he  was  "beaten"  into  confession  (the  officers 

151 


152  Force  and  Violence 

slapped  the  wall  hard  and  he  began  to  groan  and  weep),  he 
would  implicate  the  women.  Then  he  would  leave— it  was  an 
"escape"  in  the  comedy— while  the  victims  were  placed  under 
arrest.  If  he  were  alone,  he  said,  he  would  go  to  the  station- 
house  and  wait  for  his  police  confederates— and  for  the  $5  to 
$10  per  person  (some  of  the  arrests  were  mass  arrests)  which 
brought  his  earnings  up  to  $150  a  week. 

Acuna  worked  for  hire,  but  during  the  Communist  trial 
when  attorney  George  Crockett  tried  to  find  out  how  much 
informer  William  Cummings  was  promised  for  his  work  as  a 
stoolpigeon  by  the  FBI  official  who  hired  him,  Medina  turned 
that  to  ridicule.  The  Judge  asked  the  witness:  "He  didn't  say, 
'Now,  you  stoolpigeon,  you're  going  to  get  so  much,  did  he?' " 
But  observe,  in  the  next  lines,  that  Acuna  unhesitatingly  refers 
to  himself  as  a  "stool."  Stoolpigeons  are  not  as  dainty  as 
Medina  pretends. 

"If  there  was  another  stool  with  me,"  Acuna  testified, 
speaking  of  his  "escape"  following  arrest,  "he  would  go  to  the 
telephone  and  call  up  the  bondsman  or  lawyer  that  was  his 
favorite  and  notify  them  of  the  arrest  that  had  been  made  just 
now  so  that  in  many  cases  when  the  officers  arrived  with  the 
people  that  had  been  arrested  at  the  station-house,  the  bonds- 
man was  there  already  waiting." 

The  waiting  victims,  •  including  a  dancing  teacher,  a  phy- 
siotherapist, physicians'  nurses  and  others  who  had  committed 
no  offense  whatsoever,  would  be  turned  over  to  the  gentle 
care  of  the  shyster  and  bondsman.  The  whole  sequence  is  so 
common  that  Ernest  Jerome  Hopkins  sums  it  up  in  one  pro- 
vocative paragraph  of  his  Our  Lawless  Police: 

"Imagine  the  attitude  toward  the  law  of  an  individual  who 
has  gone  through  the  whole  series  of  experiences:  he  was 
arrested  falsely  on  lying  stoolpigeon  information;  he  was  phy- 
sically maltreated  upon  and  after  arrest;  he  was  approached 
by  a  shyster  lawyer,  who  has  obviously  been  'tipped  off'  by 
some  policeman  or  jailer,  and  told  that  a  payment  to  'square' 
the  judge  and  the  arresting  policeman  would  effect  his  re- 


Prostitutes  and  Pigeons  153 

lease;  he  has  raised  that  money  by  hook  or  crook,  and  has 
been  dismissed  or  discharged  in  the  end,  though  tagged  with 
a  'police  record/  Even  the  rightful  dismissal,  under  such  cir- 
cumstances, appears  to  the  victim  a  plain  act  of  crookedness." 

This,  then,  is  the  stoolpigeon  system.  It  consists  not  just  of 
the  stoolpigeon  and  his  job,  but  the  whole  police  process.  And 
that  process,  like  the  pigeon  himself,  is  rooted  in  the  cor- 
ruption surrounding  organized  vice.  The  Wickersham  Com- 
mission found  that  the  stoolpigeon  system  is  worse  here  than 
in  other  countries,  and  that  its  character  is  determined  by 
police  exploitation  of  organized  vice.  Specifically,  our  laws  on 
prostitution,  gambling,  drug  peddling  and  the  like— the  sump- 
tuary laws— start  the  process.  The  stoolpigeon  may  go  on  to 
the  field  of  more  important  crimes,  but  he  is  indispensable 
to  the  police  in  the  field  of  prostitution.  Hopkins  says: 

"In  enforcing  the  sumptuary  laws  especially,  stoolpigeons 
as  agents  provocateurs  seem  a  real  necessity.  .  .  .  The  stool- 
pigeon  is  a  criminal,  or  an  associate  of  criminals,  who  'snitches' 
to  the  police.  .  .  .  These  underworld  sneaks  are  more  numer- 
ous in  our  country  because  of  our  peculiar  sumptuary  laws, 
such  laws  being  seldom  enforceable  without  the  use  of  go- 
betweens  who  masquerade  as  purchasers  and  buy  the  out- 
lawed commodity.  The  stoolpigeon  himself  may  be  a  drug 
addict,  a  'fence/  an  underworld  hanger-on  of  any  other  kind." 

The  rotten  stoolpigeon  system  makes  for  the  frameup  at 
least  as  easily  as  for  law-enforcement.  The  informer  is  utterly 
indifferent  to  truth  or  falsity,  guilt  or  innocence.  The  shame- 
ful story  of  the  New  York  Vice  Squad  and  its  stoolpigeons 
made  front  pages  some  years  ago,  but  Harold  R.  Medina 
didn't  notice.  The  record  is  there,  just  the  same;  Hopkins 
analyzes  it: 

"In  sumptuary  cases,  when  the  *buy'  is  made,  the  detectives 
make  the  arrest.  The  stoolpigeon  'escapes/  The  evidence  in 
such  cases  may  be  the  marked  money  that  was  passed  by  the 
agent  provocateur.  But  the  temptation  to  'frame*  a  case  is  as 
great  as  the  opportunity/' 


154  Force  and  Violence 

That  is  an  understatement.  The  "frameup"  is  not  just  a 
matter  of  temptation  and  opportunity;  it  is  inherent  in  the 
stoolpigeon  system.  The  stoolpigeon  is  an  agent  provocateur, 
an  entrapper,  a  man  who  incites  the  commission  of  the  spe- 
cific act  of  prostitution  or  drug  sale  for  which  the  victim  is 
then  arrested.  But  the  stoolpigeon  himself,  more  often  than 
not,  became  a  police  agent  because  he  was  entrapped.  Police 
Captain  Michael  Fiaschetti  (Yow  Gotta  Be  Rough),  has  a 
whole  chapter  cynically  entitled,  The  Making  of  a  Stool 
Pigeon.  He  boasts  that  he  had  a  private  network  that  was 
"one  of  the  biggest  stoolpigeon  organizations  on  record,"  but 
he  was  always  eagerly  working  on  new  prospects. 

"The  one  I  wanted  to  get  most  of  all  was  Whitey  Anderson. 
I  wanted  to  give  him  a  chance  to  choose  between  taking 
a  stretch  or  tipping  me  off  to  the  big  boys  of  his  smart  set. 
I  grabbed  Whitey  and  locked  him  up  in  the  Tombs." 

Putting  Whitey  in  the  lineup  on  a  false  charge  of  holdup, 
Fiaschetti  had  a  friend  come  in  from  outside.  "  Tick  out  the 
one  as  you  go  in/  I  instructed  him,  'the  little  fat  guy  with  the 
brown  suit  and  spats/  You  should  have  seen  the  change  in 
Whitey 's  face  when  the  supposed  victim  of  the  stickup  came 
in,  glanced  at  the  lineup,  stepped  instantly  to  Whitey,  touched 
his  shoulder,  and  said:  'This  is  the  man  who  robbed  me/" 

In  the  face  of  this  "frameup,"  Whitey  "turned  stool."  And 
it  is  not  just  in  the  vice  and  common-crime  fields  that  entrap- 
ment is  used  to  make  stoolpigeons.  The  very  terminology  of 
labor  espionage  suggests  it:  the  recruiter  of  labor  spies  is 
called  a  "hooker."  Clinch  Calkins,  in  Spy  Overhead,  explains 
the  necessity  for  the  hooking  process.  The  company  that 
needs  spies,  or  the  detective  agency  that  supplies  them,  re- 
quires "bona-fide  employes  in  the  plant."  Even  though  suf- 
ficiently corrupt  to  accept  a  bribe,  they  would  not  necessarily 
be  ready  to  face  the  full  implications  of  a  Judas-role.  "There- 
fore the  potential  traitor  must  lose  his  innocence  by  degrees. 
Not  until  he  is  caught  in  the  trap  beyond  self -extrication  must 
he  be  allowed  to  learn  what  he  is  really  doing." 


Prostitutes  and  Pigeons  155 

This,  too,  is  one  of  the  secret  facts  of  American  life  neces- 
sary to  an  understanding  of  the  record  of  the  Communist 
trial.  The  hooker  who  performs  the  "tender  operation  of  get- 
ting a  worker  on  the  line,"  plays  him  skilfully  and  soon  makes 
a  full-fledged  professional  labor  spy  of  him.  If  exposed  in  the 
plant  where  he  is  spying  on  his  fellow-workers,  the  hooked 
spy  may  be  transferred  to  another  plant  or  himself  become  a 
professional  hooker.  Anyone  who  wants  an  authentic,  detailed 
account  of  this  dirty  business,  should  read  the  account  given 
by  Red  Kuhl  in  the  record  of  the  LaFollette  Hearings  ( U.S. 
Senate )  1936-1937.  Kuhl  was  a  hooker  of  twenty  years'  experi- 
ence who  finally  turned  upon  himself  in  disgust  and  became  a 
kind  of  free-lance  agent  aiding  unions  to  uncover  spies  and 
undo  the  damage  they  cause. 

Such  an  awakening  of  conscience  is  extraordinary.  More 
often,  all  moral  sense  perishes  in  the  stoolpigeon  system— at 
either  end  of  it.  Fiaschetti  describes  a  triple-cross  he  prac- 
ticed, with  no  indication  that  he  is  ashamed.  He  wanted  to 
get  a  girl  named  Marjory  to  "squeal"  on  her  lover,  Bill.  He 
decided  to  entice  Bill  with  a  pretty  girl  and  let  Marjory  catch 
him  in  the  act.  The  girl  Fiaschetti  wanted  for  a  decoy  "didn't 
want  to  do  the  job,"  but  the  policeman  didn't  hesitate  to 
blackmail  her.  "She  was  keeping  out  of  the  way  of  a  rough 
and  exceedingly  angry  husband.  She  had  left  him  and  was 
living  with  the  other  chap.  Anybody  situated  like  that  seeks 
to  oblige,  especially  if  you  hint  you  might  possibly  say  some- 
thing to  the  husband."  So  she  agreed,  and  the  trap  was  set 
for  Bill.  For  all  Fiaschetti  knew,  Bill  was  "faithful  devotion 
itself"  to  his  girl,  but  "he  was  only  human"  and  fell  into  the 
trap.  Marjory  duly  "squealed"— and  was  thereafter  in  no  posi- 
tion to  refuse  any  dirty  assignment  Fiaschetti  might  hand  her. 

We  have  not  begun  to  touch  bottom.  All  this  filth  not  only 
proceeds  from  the  underworld— as  even  the  FBI  concedes— 
but  is  possible  only  because  the  police  protect  and  foster  an 
underworld.  It  is  not  just  the  informer  who  gets  immunity;  it 
is  the  underworld  itself.  Police  departments  rather  openly 


156  Force  and  Violence 

argue  that  it  would  break  up  their  law-enforcement  systems 
if  they  closed  down  dives,  houses  of  prostitution,  and  known 
nests  of  crime.  Fiaschetti  states  this  with  his  customary  bru- 
tality: 

"In  any  big  city  there  are  many  people  who  run  rack- 
ets, gambling,  policy  games,  disorderly  and  rowdy  resorts, 
bootlegging  .  .  .  and  so  on.  I  knew  of  hundreds  of  such.  ...  I 
was  not  supposed  to  go  around  squelching  minor  law  breakers. 
Nevertheless,  I  could  easily  have  had  any  of  these  petty  of- 
fenders raided,  closed  up,  and  locked  up.  Instead,  having 
something  on  them,  I  made  them  give  me  information/' 

Fiaschetti  is  a  powerful  witness  precisely  because  he  is 
not  moralizing  when  he  observes:  "Here  you  have  the  real 
backbone  of  the  stoolpigeon  system.  The  great  number  of 
doubtful  characters  on  the  fringe  of  the  underworld  who 
engage  in  business  more  or  less  illegal  live  in  constant  fear  of 
the  police,  and  the  detectives  are  often  able  to  use  them  as 
stoolpigeons.  They  are  allowed  to  take  their  large  profits,  and 
in  return  they  squeal." 

This  tale  of  the  underworld  is  a  reminder  that  we  have  so 
far  had  ^only  the  barest  glimpse  of  the  whole  complex  system 
of  lawless  law-enforcement  in  which  the  stoolpigeon  system 
is  a  cog.  Fiaschetti  did  not  decide  to  give  the  underworld 
immunity  in  return  for  services  rendered;  that  was  decided  be- 
fore he  was  born.  City,  state,  and  national  political  machines 
protect  organized  crime  and  vice,  and  are  so  closely  integrated 
with  the  underworld  as  to  be  inseparable.  And  the  corrup- 
tion of  these  political  parties  and  personal  machines  is  per- 
mitted, tolerated  and  necessary,  because  still  more  powerful 
interests  have  need  of  their  services.  Just  as  the  politicians 
and  police  give  the  petty  underworld  protection,  so  the  hand- 
ful of  powerful  industrial-financial  interests  that  rule  our 
country,  protect  and  encourage  the  dishonest  political  ma- 
chines and  police  departments.  That  is  the  class  reality  be- 
hind the  curious  trial  at  Foley  Square. 


Chapter  16 
LAW  AND  ORDER 


"But  who  decides  when  the  majority  wants  to  overthrow 
the  government?"  This  question,  in  many  forms,  was  put  to 
the  defense  by  Judge  Medina.  Court,  prosecution  and  press 
asserted  that  the  defense  never  answered  the  question;  jury 
and  public  were  supposed  to  draw  the  proper  conclusions 
from  the  alleged  failure  to  answer.  When  the  defense  put 
Anthony  Krchmarek  of  Cleveland  on  the  stand  to  refute  the 
testimony  of  informer  William  Cummings,  Russell  Porter 
wrote  in  the  Times  of  July  27: 

"The  witness  testified  that  George  Siskind  .  .  .  said  Social- 
ism will  come  in  the  United  States  when  the  majority  'wants' 
it.,  .  .  .  Mr.  Siskind  said  the  small  group  that  now  controls  the 
wealth  of  the  country  will  inevitably  obstruct  such  a  change,' 
the  witness  went  on.  'Therefore,  if  that  does  happen  there 
will  come  a  time  when  it  will  be  necessary  to  carry  out  the 
will  of  the  majority— and  that  is  the  dictatorship  of  the  pro- 
letariat. He  said  this  would  be  the  first  time  the  majority 
would  come  into  its  own  and  operate  the  wealth  of  the  nation 
for  the  whole  people,  not  the  few/  " 

But  Porter  found  a  gap  in  this  testimony.  "The  witness  did 
not  quote  Mr.  Siskind  as  to  who  would  determine  what  the 
majority  'wants/  "  he  observed. 

Of  course  the  witness  didn't  quote  anyone  on  that  point 
and  of  course  the  Communists  had  no  "answer"  to  the  ques- 
tion. The  defense  always  replied,  in  effect,  that  the  question 
was  one  for  history  to  answer.  The  government,  however, 

157 


158  Force  and  Violence 

relying  upon  the  man-in-the-street's  superficial  knowledge  of 
history,  treated  this  as  an  evasion,  as  one  more  example  of  the 
concealment  of  "secret"  and  "conspiratorial"  meanings.  Porter 
went  on,  in  the  account  cited  above,  to  say  that  the  prosecu- 
tion had  "introduced  evidence"  that  Communist  "professional 
revolutionists"  were  taught  that  the  National  Board,  the  top 
leadership  of  the  Communist  Party,  would  do  the  deciding. 
The  board  would  hand  down  a  "  'decision'  on  what  the  major- 
ity of  the  American  people  wants  when  the  board  decides  the 
time  is  ripe  for  force  and  violence.  .  .  ." 

Defense  witnesses  ridiculed  this  idea.  They  denied  they 
had  ever  attempted  to  foresee  the  unforeseeable.  They  said 
they  had  taught  only  general  revolutionary  principles:  that 
modern  conditions  leave  open  the  possibility  of  a  peaceful 
establishment  of  Socialism,  but  history  shows  that  no  ruling 
class  ever  bowed  to  the  will  of  a  majority  without  first  attempt- 
ing to  thwart  the  will  of  the  majority.  If  the  people  say,  "We 
are  tired  of  your  rule.  Go  away,  we  want  to  abolish  the  existing 
form  of  government  and  set  up  a  new  one,"  it  is  silly  to  think 
the  old  rulers  will  walk  away.  The  Communists  said  they 
taught  that  the  minority  would  oppose  change  by  force  and 
that  the  majority  must  prepare  to  meet  violence  with  violence. 

The  reason  for  asking  the  defense  the  question  about  "who 
decides?"  is  to  "establish"  that  the  Communists  plan  to  make 
an  undemocratic  decision  when  the  time  of  revolution  arrives. 
But  what  is  a  "democratic"  solution?  Who  determined  the  will 
of  the  majority  of  the  inhabitants  of  the  thirteen  colonies  on 
the  day  the  Founding  Fathers  signed  the  Declaration  of  In- 
dependence? There  was  certainly  no  referendum.  And  there 
was  certainly  active,  even  violent,  opposition  to  a  revolutionary 
break  with  Britain.  The  number  of  Loyalists  was  greater  than 
is  generally  suggested  by  school  textbooks,  and  the  violence 
inflicted  on  the  Loyalists  by  the  revolutionaries  is  a  reminder 
that  omelettes  are  not  made  without  breaking  eggs.  Was  it 
"democratic"  for  the  Founding  Fathers  to  "hand  down  a  deci- 
sion" that  the  majority  of  the  American  people  wanted  inde- 


Law  and  Order  159 

pendence  and  a  new  government?  Even  today,  one  can  an- 
swer that  only  by  judging  the  record  of  history  in  the  light 
of  events  that  followed  the  Declaration  of  Independence.  And 
so  judging,  we  may  say  that  the  Founding  Fathers  correctly 
interpreted  that  most  difficult  of  all  things  to  assess— the  will 
of  the  majority. 

Before  the  event,  who  could  have  predicted  how  it  would 
happen?  Even  among  the  ardent  advocates  of  independence, 
who  could  have  foretold  the  sequence  of  events  that  would 
produce  the  precise  machinery— the  fateful  Congress  influ- 
enced by  the  Boston  Massacre— for  launching  and  conducting 
the  American  Revolution?  How  much  more  fantastic  it  is 
to  suppose  the  Communists  have  blueprinted  the  machinery 
that  history  will  create  at  some  unknown  future  time  when 
a  revolutionary  crisis  of  unknown  form  shall  arise.  Some 
Marxist  teachings  may  fairly  be  interpreted  as  denying  that 
the  time  for  decisive  action  in  a  revolution  is  determined  by  a 
referendum.  Is  that  undemocratic?  Would  history  have  for- 
given the  Founding  Fathers  if  they  had  held  up  the  Declara- 
tion of  Independence  until  it  had  been  approved  by  a  popular 
referendum— and  the  British  had  hanged  all  the  leaders  and 
suppressed  the  Revolution?  The  proof  of  the  pudding  is  in 
the  eating,  and  the  proof  of  majority  will  is  in  the  stubborn- 
ness with  which  the  people  prosecute  that  bitterest  of  all 
wars— a  revolutionary  war. 

So  much  for  force  and  violence  by  majorities  or  minorities 
in  time  of  revolution.  But  one  cannot  hope  to  understand 
the  whys  and  wherefores  of  the  Communist  trial  unless  he 
first  confronts  the  problem  of  everyday  violence  in  the  society 
we  live  in.  The  force  and  violence  I  first  encountered  on  the 
Skid  Row  was  not  an  isolated  or  exceptional  case.  On  the 
contrary,  it  was  and  is  the  rule;  systematic  violence  against 
law-abiding  men  is  the  established  and  nationwide  practice  of 
law-enforcement  authorities  in  the  United  States.  I  say  this 
on  the  strength  of  the  mountains  of  evidence  piled  up  by  the 
authoritative  Wickersham  Commission,  whose  findings  I  have 


160  Force  and  Violence 

quoted  earlier  in  this  book.  On  that  very  Skid  Row,  the  Com- 
mission learned,  San  Francisco  police  had  stationed  two  de- 
tectives. They  were  former  pugilists,  and  their  express  assign- 
ment was  to  spend  the  day  beating  up  migratory  workers  or 
"floaters." 

Reckless  beating  is  by  no  means  peculiar  to  San  Francisco; 
it  is  a  nationwide  characteristic  of  American  police,  the  Com- 
mission found.  Everyone  takes  it  for  granted.  In  Dr.  Fredric 
Wertham's  recent  study  of  murder,  The  Show  of  Violence,  the 
noted  psychiatrist  tells  how  he  was  called  to  New  York  police 
headquarters  one  night  by  top  police  brass,  to  confer  with 
Robert  Irwin,  a  former  patient  wanted  for  murder.  Irwin  told 
Wertham  the  police  had  been  surprisingly  nice  to  him. 

"They  didn't  even  beat  me  up,"  he  confided. 

"High  police  officials  never  beat  people  up,"  Wertham 
replied.  "They  have  cops  for  that." 

Yes,  they  have  cops  for  that  and  that's  what  they  have 
cops  for.  The  Wickersham  Commission  established  that  the 
norm  of  our  daily  life  is  the  policeman  who  is  above  the  law 
and  the  norm  of  his  daily  life  is  lawless  beating,  reckless 
seizure  of  citizens  against  whom  he  can  neither  prove  nor 
charge  any  crime— kidnaping,  to  give  it  its  right  name— fol- 
lowed by  unlawful  imprisonment  "on  suspicion,"  forced  con- 
fession, actual  murder.  All  this  in  a  climate  that  denies  any 
rights  to  Negroes,  the  foreign-born,  the  poor,  the  workingman, 
the  radical  or  suspected  radical.  The  end  is  sadism,  degen- 
eracy, medieval  torture  and  modern  corruption. 

As  Hopkins  sums  it  up:  "Lawlessness  in  the  enforcement 
of  law  is  persistent  enough  to  be  called  an  American  institu- 
tion." So  American  that  "it  is  news  to  most  Americans  that 
police  work  need  not  be,  and  in  other  countries  relatively 
speaking  is  not,  a  violent  profession."  Not  in  England,  not  in 
France,  not  in  Germany.  No,  and  for  all  the  millions  of  words 
about  the  "police  state,"  least  of  all  in  Soviet  Russia!  It  may 
go  against  the  grain  to  admit  it,  but  the  true  story  of  police- 
statism  begins  at  home.  Let  Hopkins  tell  it: 


Law  and  Order  161 

"The  facts,  in  summary,  amount  to  this:  that  we  only  think 
we  are  living,  have  but  the  illusion  we  are  living,  under  the 
form  of  criminal  justice  taught  to  every  schoolchild  and  clearly 
laid  down  in  the  Constitution.  .  .  .  Individuals  who  are  consti- 
tutionally guaranteed  against  violence  are  beaten,  clubbed, 
slugged  or  shot  by  officers  of  the  law,  either  upon  arrest,  or 
without  even  the  pretext  of  arrest.  Persons  considered  guilty 
of  crime  only  in  the  arbitrary  judgment  of  constables  are 
subjected  to  equally  arbitrary  punishment,  and  that  often  of 
the  'cruel  and  unusual'  sort  forbidden  by  law.  Persons  en- 
titled to  liberty  are  deprived  of  that  liberty  with  fantastic 
frequency,  by  false  and  unreasonable  arrest.  Arrested  persons 
are  further  subjected  to  unlawful  periods  of  incommunicado 
imprisonment  in  police  jails,  either,  again,  as  punishment  for 
assumed  offenses,  or  while  inquiry  is  being  made  as  to  their 
possible  guilt;  that  such  guilt  often  does  not  exist  is  shown  by 
the  extremely  high  percentage  of  releases  without  formal  ac- 
cusation of  crime.  The  inquiry  itself  quite  commonly  takes  the 
form  of  the  secret  trial-by-ordeal,  directed  to  the  forbidden 
purposes  of  making  a  lawlessly  captured  person  incriminate 
himself.  At  times,  the  ordeal  may  reach  the  condition  of  actual 
torture.  Finally,  both  to  conceal  the  previous  unlawful  treat- 
ment, and  to  decide  and  sway  the  action  of  the  courts  of  law, 
police  commit  positive  or  negative  perjury." 

Hopkins  is  talking  about  the  United  States  of  America  in 
the  twentieth  century!  About  what  is  happening  in  every  city 
of  the  United  States  right  this  minute!  Let's  take  these  things 
one  by  one,  beginning  with  beating.  Any  child  playing  police- 
man will  tell  you  by  his  actions  that  a  cop  is  somebody  who 
beats  people.  A  policeman  will  agree;  at  least,  he  will  ask  why 
they  gave  him  a  club  and  a  gun  if  they  didn't  want  him  to 
use  them.  And  he  uses  them. 

The  treasury  of  violence  amassed  by  the  Wickersham  Com- 
mission is  particularly  rich  in  stories  of  torture  to  extract  con- 
fessions. Hopkins  compresses  untold  human  suffering  into 
one  paragraph:  "In  various  cases  which  occurred  between 


162  Force  and  Violence 

1920  and  1930,  the  Wickersham  Commission  found  that  sus- 
pected persons  had  been  starved,  kept  awake  many  days  and 
nights,  confined  in  pitch-dark  and  airless  cells;  had  been 
beaten  with  fists,  clubs,  blackjacks,  rubber  hose,  telephone 
books,  straps,  whips;  beaten  on  the  shins,  under  the  knee 
cap  (at  the  point  of  the  patellar  reflex),  across  the  abdomen, 
the  throat,  the  face,  the  head,  the  shoulders,  above  the  kid- 
neys, on  the  buttocks  and  legs;  kicked  on  the  shins,  the  torso 
and  in  the  crotch;  had  had  their  arms  twisted,  their  testicles 
twisted  and  squeezed;  had  been  given  tear-gas,  scopolamin 
injections  and  chloroform;  had  been  made  to  touch  corpses 
and  hold  the  hands  of  murdered  persons  in  morgues;  that 
women  had  been  lifted  by  the  hair;  in  one  case,  a  man  had 
been  laid  flat  upon  the  floor  and  lifted  repeatedly  by  his 
organs  of  sex.  This  in  modern  America  between  1920  and 
1930,  in  the  fifteenth  decade  of  the  Constitution,  and  for  the 
purpose  of  obtaining  a  Voluntary*  confession  of  guilt." 

Reckless  arrest,  police  kidnaping,  is  just  as  common  as 
beating.  It  is  so  taken  for  granted  that  no  one  had  done  any 
statistical  studies  on  it,  so  Hopkins  compiled  figures  for  the 
first  three  months  of  1930  in  Dallas,  Texas.  He  found  there 
had  been  1823  "on  suspicion"  arrests,  which  are  completely 
unlawful.  Sixteen  of  the  kidnapees  were  held  more  than  forty- 
eight  hours  and  four  of  them  more  than  five  days.  The  1823 
averaged  twenty-two  hours  apiece— 40,106  hours  or  almost 
five  years  stolen  from  them  by  the  Dallas  kidnapers.  And  now 
for  the  climax:  not  one  in  twenty  of  the  victims  was,  in  the 
end,  charged  with  any  offense  at  all! 

In  1949,  a  less  "respectable"  authority  made  a  similar 
count  in  Detroit— with  a  similar  result.  The  weekly,  Michigan 
Worker,  found  the  Detroit  police  force  had  made  20,169  un- 
lawful arrests  "for  investigation"  in  the  preceding  year.  It  will 
be  the  same  this  year,  in  San  Francisco,  Dallas,  Detroit  or 
New  York. 

Justice  can  only  wither  where  the  law  is  poisoned  at  the 
root  and  in  the  flower.  Criminal  conduct  by  the  police  up  to 


Law  and  Order  163 

the  door  of  the  courtroom,  must  be  followed  by  new  crimes 
in  the  courtroom  itself.  There  "we  come  to  the  final  manifesta- 
tion of  police  lawlessness— perjury,  committed  by  the  police 
in  the  courts  of  law,  or  caused  by  them  to  be  committed  by 
other  witnesses."  Aside  from  the  outright  frameup,  "it  seems 
almost  a  part  of  law  enforcement  to  give  each  judge  what  he 
requires;  the  policeman  feels  the  man  is  guilty,  the  judge  re- 
ceives the  evidence  and  convicts."  But  the  "evidence"  has  been 
"routine  perjury,"  the  shading  and  distortion  of  facts,  the 
withholding  of  facts,  the  pitiful  lapse  of  memory  under  cross- 
examination.  This  is  so  matter-of-course  that  you  may  "as 
well  put  the  average  prosecuting  attorney  on  the  witness  stand 
as  the  average  patrolman  who  has  worked  on  a  case,"  Hop- 
kins says. 

It  is  done,  however,  every  day  in  every  court,  under  the  fic- 
tion that  the  policeman  is  neutral.  Yet  no  informed  person 
will  believe  the  statement  of  a  policeman  on  a  stack  of  bibles. 
In  1931,  an  official  inquiry  revealed  that  five  New  York  magis- 
trates had  a  ten-year  average  of  about  one  conviction  out  of 
every  four  cases  (27.2  per  cent).  Four  of  the  five  must  have 
had  a  very  low  average,  for  the  fifth, -Mrs.  Jean  Norris,  had 
found  almost  nine  out  of  ten  persons  haled  before  her, 
"Guilty!"  Asked  why  she  had  a  record  of  86  per  cent  convic- 
tions, she  said  it  was  because  she  always  took  a  policeman's 
word!  They  are  sworn  officers  of  the  law,  she  explained.  Such 
is  public  opinion  of  policemen,  that  she  immediately  became 
the  butt  of  newspaper  and  magazine  ridicule;  not  one  daily, 
not  one  weekly  defended  her.  And  clearly,  the  sworn  word  of 
sworn  officers  of  the  law  carried  very  little  weight  with  the 
other  four  magistrates. 

The  prosecutor  and  policeman  who  will  stoop  to  perjury, 
will  certainly  not  shy  away  from  employment  of  perjurers, 
or  "routine  subornation  of  perjury."  Hopkins  calls  it  "the  pro- 
cess by  which  the  stories  of  witnesses  are  gone  over,  often 
with  repeated  and  severe  grilling,  and  *built  up*  to  suit  the 
case  of  the  prosecution.  Both  detectives  and  prosecuting 


164  Force  and  Violence 

attorneys  participate  in  this,  which  is  virtually  third-degreeing 
the  witnesses."  When  he  has  once  been  bludgeoned  into  mak- 
ing the  statements  planned  by  the  police  or  the  prosecutor, 
"there  is  the  ever-ready  threat  of  a  perjury  charge  to  hold  the 
witness  in  line." 

All,  all,  the  government  testimony  in  the  Communist  con- 
spiracy case  is  of  this  rehearsed  character,  so  that  even  the 
incontestable  facts  related  by  the  witnesses  become  threads 
in  a  fabric  of  lies.  On  a  lower,  routine  police-level,  a  recent 
novel  by  David  Alman,  World  Full  of  Strangers,  gives  an 
authentic  picture  of  this  perjury-coaching.  Detective  McCarthy 
and  two  other  officers  enter  a  hotel-room,  without  warrant 
naturally,  to  make  an  arrest  that  will  help  their  record.  They 
want  the  man  in  the  room  to  testify  that  the  girl  is  a  prostitute. 

"All  right,  Miller,  where'd  you  meet  her?" 

"Movies." 

"She  came  over  to  you?" 

"No.  I  just  asked  her  if  she  wanted  a  cigarette." 

"Don't  give  me  that,"  McCarthy  said  angrily.  "She  sat 
down  next  to  you  and  asked  if  you  wanted  to  get  fixed  up, 
that  right?" 

"No,  I  just  told  you-" 

"God  damn,"  McCarthy  shouted,  "you  heard  me!" 

"What's  this?"  Miller  frowned.  "A  murder  trial?" 

McCarthy  slapped  him. 

"She  asked  you  if  you  wanted  to  get  fixed  up,  right?" 

Miller  looked  up.  "I  got  nothing  against  the  girl.  What  do 
you  want?" 

McCarthy  slapped  him  again. 

"Why're  you  doing  that?"  Miller  asked,  tears  in  his  eyes. 
"Jesus,  what  did  I  do?" 

McCarthy  struck  him  in  the  chest  with  his  closed  fist.  ... 

"You  can  save  yourself  a  lot  of  trouble,"  McCarthy  said. 
"All  I  want  you  to  tell  the  judge  is  that  she  gave  you  a  hustle, 
that's  all.  .  .  ." 

In  the  end,  the  detective  had  his  way.  Even  a  strong  man 


Law  and  Order  165 

knows  he  is  in  a  trap:  it  is  practically  impossible  to  obtain 
redress  for  abuse  by  lawless  policemen.  Where  some  big  pub- 
lic scandal  forces  action,  the  punishment  of  policemen  is 
usually  immoderately  moderate.  It  has  to  be,  for  otherwise 
the  police  would  abandon  their  lawless  violence,  and  that  is 
not  what  the  men  above  them  desire. 

Police  apologists  generally  justify  their  violence  by  the 
"war  on  crime"  theory.  The  criminal  is  a  dangerous  enemy  and 
the  police  are  eternally  at  war  with  him,  the  theory  runs.  War 
is  no  place  for  nice  courtesy  and  fine  restraint.  But  the  "war 
on  crime"  theory  will  not  stand  a  moment's  comparison  with 
police  practice,  for  the  first  thing  that  stands  out  about  police 
violence,  is  that  it  is  not  exercised  against  the  Legs  Diamonds 
and  the  Al  Capones.  They  are  handled  with  kid  gloves.  Police 
violence  "is  visited,  in  exceedingly  numerous  instances,  upon 
mere  indigents  and  morons  and  vagrants  and  unemployed 
men  and  migratories  and  drug  addicts  and  immigrants  and 
illiterates,  an  appallingly  numerous  class  in  this  country,  cases 
for  the  hospitals  and  the  social  agencies  and  the  educational 
system  and  the  employment  bureaus,  but  regarded  every- 
where by  the  police  as  their  prey." 

Hopkins  risks  confusing  us  by  mixing  the  law-abiding 
workers  and  unemployed  with  the  habitual  small  offenders. 
The  latter  may  indeed  come  largely  from  what  the  social 
worker  calls  the  "under-privileged  classes,"  but  they  should 
not  be  confused  with  the  class  itself.  It  is  not  because  they  are 
lawbreakers  that  the  police  abuse  Negroes,  the  unemployed, 
immigrants  and  workers  in  general;  it  is  because  they  are 
Negroes,  unemployed,  immigrants  and  workers. 

This  form  of  police  violence  is  no  accident  and  the  raid  I 
witnessed  on  the  Skid  Row  is  its  most  typical  form.  There  is 
nothing  our  Constitution-breaking  authorities  dislike  so  much 
as  workingmen  who  assemble  peaceably  and  discuss  their 
problems.  In  today's  cold- war  jitters,  the  police  are  not  re- 
quired to,  and  do  not,  tolerate  politics  in  the  lower  depths. 
They  strike  out  with  fist  and  club.  And  not  just  at  the  Com- 


166  Force  and  Violence 

munists;  not  just  at  persons  and  parties  opposed  to  the  capi- 
talist system,  but  at  all  dissenters  from  the  present  bipartisan 
foreign  policy  of  the  Truman  Administration,  notably  Henry 
Wallace.  Wallace  is  no  Communist;  he  is  a  Rooseveltian  New 
Dealer,  a  firm  believer  in  and  defender  of  an  anti-monopoly 
type  of  capitalism.  But  he  is  an  open  and  bold  dissenter  from 
the  golden-calf-worship  of  the  postwar  years,  and  his  public 
opposition  to  the  cold  war  abroad  and  Department  of  Justice 
tyranny  at  home,  has  encouraged  other  dissenters.  Dissent  is 
back-talk,  just  what  the  policeman  can't  stand. 

Of  course  the  policeman  doesn't  think  all  that  out.  He 
doesn't  know  that  the  people  he  beats  up  on  the  Skid  Row  are 
"dissenters."  He  doesn't  think  at  all;  he  acts.  But  he  acts 
against  those  he  has  been  taught  to  abuse,  the  classes  of  Ameri- 
cans who  can  be  abused  with  impunity:  the  poor,  the  humble 
workingman,  the  Negro,  the  radical.  He  has  learned  by  experi- 
ence that  he  can  beat  them,  kidnap  them  ( arrest  them  without 
warrant  and  hold  them  indefinitely  without  charge),  and  even 
murder  them,  without  consequences  to  himself. 

The  Wickersham  Commission  found  there  was  (and  is)  a 
special  form  of  police  sluggery— Hopkins  calls  it  "the  street 
beating  for  'crime  prevention'  purposes"— employed  against 
the  poor  ( who  are  the  majority  of  Americans,  too ) .  Police  just 
descend  upon  certain  districts,  especially  during  "crime 
drives,"  and  with  fist,  blackjack  and  club,  try  to  put  the  fear 
of  God  into  the  whole  population.  Needless  to  say,  they  do  not 
do  this  on  Park  Avenue,  but  in  Harlem;  not  in  the  Silk  Stock- 
ing district  but  on  the  lower  East  Side,  the  areas  in  every  city 
peopled  by  the  workingman,  the  Negro,  the  Puerto  Rican, 
the  poor  and  the  unprotected. 

Casual  street  murder  of  a  Negro  in  Harlem  by  a  policeman 
is  so  common  that  it  isn't  even  "news."  Harlem  has  no  rights. 
When  Chile  Acuna  was  testifying  before  Commissioner  Sea- 
bury,  he  explained  certain  raids  in  that  area.  The  police 
officers  he  worked  with,  he  said,  were  liable  to  be  sent  back 
to  pound  a  beat  if  they  didn't  keep  up  their  record  of  arrests. 


Law  and  Order  167 

So  when  they  were  "short  of  arrests  in  their  average,  they  used 
to  go  to  Harlem  and  in  Harlem  they  go  to  any  colored  house 
or  colored  apartment  and  they  make  any  arrests  at  all,  just  be- 
cause they  thought  colored  people  had  less  chance  in  court." 
Yes,  colored  people  have  less  chance  in  court.  No  chance, 
more  often  than  not.  And  the  white  victim  of  unequal  oppor- 
tunity is  not  much  better  off.  The  very  fact  that  he  has  been 
wronged  is  turned  against  him;  his  joblessness  stamps  him  a 
"vagrant"  or  "floater";  his  poverty,  as  much  as  his  resentment, 
brands  him  "subversive"  or  "criminal."  And  the  more  it  be- 
comes apparent  that  the  gorge  of  the  peoples  of  the  world  is 
rising  against  this  monstrous  system  of  perpetual  violence  and 
perpetual  oppression,  the  more  brutal,  sadistic  and  violent 
become  the  attempts  of  the  ruling  minority  to  maintain  the 
status  quo.  Policemen  are  no  longer  equal  to  the  task.  The 
masses  must  be  moved  to  violence.  The  stormtroopers  of 
Hitler  and  the  native  Fascist  hoodlums  of  Peekskill  are  prod- 
ucts of  the  same  causes  and  are  employed  for  the  same  ends. 
The  "legal"  violence  imposed  on  the  Communists  at  Foley 
Square  is  of  the  same  stamp.  Violence!  If  you  wish  to  under- 
stand it  you  must  face  squarely  the  fact  of  class  in  the  United 
States,  and  the  class  basis  of  the  terror  in  which  we  live  today. 


Chapter  17 
THE   SECRET   OF   SECRECY 


Violence  against  the  majority!  Systematic,  oppressive, 
sadistic  violence!  All  other  violence  is  born  here.  Even  the 
murders  committed  by  a  psychopath  who  runs  amok,  are  pos- 
sible only  against  the  background  of  social  violence.  No 
doubt  mental  disorder  was  the  immediate  reason  for  the 
rampage  of  Howard  Unruh,  the  veteran  who  killed  thirteen 
men,  women  and  children  in  Camden,  New  Jersey,  early  in 
September  1949.  But  what  caused  that  disorder  to  find 
that  particular  expression?  In  The  Show  of  Violence,  Dr. 
Wertham  concludes  that  murder  in  our  society  is  ultimately 
explained  by  a  class  system  that  rests  on  contempt  for  human 
life— the  life,  that  is,  of  the  underdog. 

"The  individual  act  of  murder/'  he  writes,  "exists  against 
a  background  of  victimization  of  many  people.  The  problem 
of  homicide  is  only  part  of  the  general  problem  of  preventable 
deaths."  Calling  attention  to  a  study  issued  by  the  Metro- 
politan Life  Insurance  Company,  in  which  a  "subtle  and 
highly  complex"  relationship  between  "economic  considera- 
tions" and  homicide  is  acknowledged,  Dr.  Wertham  cites  some 
not  so  subtle  examples:  "A  German  insecticide  company  had 
a  monopoly  on  producing  the  gas  approved  for  gas-chambers. 
One  pound  of  this  gas  could  kill  125  persons.  The  financial 
profits  on  producing  the  gas  were  200  per  cent."  The  gas- 
chamber  is  new,  but  how  different  is  it  from  murder  by 
starvation  in  India?  From  1770  to  1900,  a  total  of  31,500,000 
people  died  of  starvation  in  that  tortured  land.  Much  of  that 

168 


The  Secret  of  Secrecy  169 

time,  exactly  "forty  persons  owned  all  the  shares  of  the  East 
India  Company  and  received  dividends  of  22  per  cent  per 
year,"  Dr.  Wertham  grimly  notes. 

What  can  be  proved,  he  asks,  by  elaborate  studies  of  the 
quirks  in  the  minds  of  certain  supposedly  psychopathic  mur- 
derers, in  a  society  where  presumably  sane  and  definitely 
highly-educated  men  encourage  or  perpetrate  such  class- 
murders  as  that  of  Sacco  and  Vanzetti?  And  where  they  tol- 
erate and  justify  a  system  of  production  that  demands  delib- 
erate blindness  to  human  suffering  in  the  name  of  "free  enter- 
prise"? The  poet  Thomas  Hood,  sums  it  up:  "O  God!  that 
bread  should  be  so  dear,  and  flesh  and  blood  so  cheap!" 

You  don't  have  to  go  abroad  to  look  for  mass  murder  by 
indifference.  Each  year  in  the  United  States,  325,000  people 
die  for  want  of  medical  care.  In  1947,  17,000  Americans  were 
killed  on  their  jobs  in  industrial  accidents  and  one  of  those 
accidents  was  the  Centralia  mine  disaster  which  occurred 
just  five  years  after  one  of  the  miners  had  written  to  the 
Governor  of  Illinois:  "Please  save  our  lives."  The  politically 
and  economically  and  socially  powerful  never  waste  time  or 
money  to  prevent  deaths  that  cost  them  nothing,  so  111  men 
died  needlessly  in  that  mine  collapse. 

Violence  by  indifference  is  one  side  of  the  coin;  deliberate 
violence  by  the  police  against  the  majority  is  the  other.  A  so- 
ciety that  exposes  the  majority  to  wanton  violence  cannot  safe- 
guard even  the  ruling  minority  from  its  effects.  The  case  of 
James  Forrestal  ought  to  have  given  pause  to  the  ruling  minor- 
ity. Here  was  one  of  sixty  or  six  hundred  men  who  rule  the 
United  States.  I  refer  not  so  much  to  his  high  place  in  public 
life,  as  to  his  social  and  economic  status  in  private  life.  Presi- 
dent of  the  banking  empire  of  Dillon,  Read  and  Company,  he 
was  Wall  Street  incarnate  before  he  became  Secretary  of  the 
Navy.  Subsequently  he  moved  into  the  still  mightier  post  of 
Secretary  of  the  National  Military  Establishment— the  com- 
bined armed  services.  He  thus  united  in  his  person  a  great 
public  and  a  great  private  power.  That  power  was  used  to 


170  Force  and  Violence 

create  a  hysteria  that  would  carry  us  unresisting  down  the 
road  to  World  War  III.  "The  Russians  are  coming!"  he 
screamed  at  us  daily  in  black  and  red  headlines. 

Under  the  awful  pressure  he  had  himself  created,  his  mind 
snapped.  The  bogey  of  his  own  manufacture  became  a  reality 
to  him.  He  leaped  from  his  bed  one  night— a  paranoiac  Paul 
Revere— to  run  down  the  street  in  his  pyjamas,  screaming  once 
more:  "The  Russians  are  coming!" 

They  put  him  in  a  hospital  for  treatment.  He  had  all  the 
comfort  and  seclusion  that  his  public  position  and  his  private 
fortune  could  procure.  But  there  was  no  refuge.  The  frenzy 
of  violence  he  had  loosed  at  the  Russians,  the  Communists, 
and  the  common  people  of  all  the  world  overtook  him.  He 
plunged  from  a  tower-window  to  violent  death  in  the  dark 
abyss  he  had  prepared  for  the  victims  of  his  madness!  He  died 
in  a  trap  set  by  the  few  for  the  many. 

Is  it  possible  that  all  this  violence,  running  through  our 
American  way  of  life  like  a  virus  multiplying  in  the  blood- 
stream, is  a  secret  unknown  to  the  average  American?  Is  he 
equally  unaware  of  the  violence  of  indifference  and  the  vio- 
lence of  the  club?  Why  that  cannot  be  so;  he  must  know  at 
least  the  fact  that  lawlessness  is  the  norm  of  police  conduct. 
It  is  the  meaning  that  he  misses.  Knowing  the  fact  of  violence, 
he  continues  to  think  that  the  Constitution  with  its  Bill  of 
Rights  is  a  description  of  life  in  our  country;  he  knows  as  little 
about  the  policeman  on  the  Skid  Row  as  I  knew  when  I  first 
went  there.  Nor  is  his  innocence  accidental:  all  the  powers 
that  be  have  combined  to  conceal  the  truth  from  him  and 
teach  him  falsehood  in  our  public  schools,  in  our  newspapers, 
in  churches  and  meetings  of  the  American  Legion,  Chambers 
of  Commerce  and,  sad  to  say,  all  too  many  union  halls. 

This  is  the  real  conspiracy,  the  conspiracy  of  the  Big  Lie. 
The  conspirators  cannot  deny  the  violence  all  about  us  and  the 
suffering  it  produces,  but  they  can  and  do  explain  it  away  by 
systematic  falsehood.  And  it  is  remarkable  how  persistent 
repetition  of  a  falsehood  can  confuse  even  those  who  have  in 


The  Secret  of  Secrecy  171 

their  grasp  the  facts  from  which  the  truth  might  be  deduced. 
The  Wickersham  Commission  and  its  interpreter,  Hopkins, 
provide  the  perfect  illustration.  They  not  only  see  the  extent 
of  violence  in  our  life,  but  know  that  it  contradicts  all  that  we 
are  taught  about  "the  American  way  of  life." 

"The  lawlessness  within  law  enforcement,  by  its  results, 
might  reasonably  be  considered  the  most  fundamentally  sub- 
versive of  all  forms  of  lawbreaking,"  Hopkins  writes.  It  sub- 
verts "the  very  basis  of  government"— respect  for  law— and 
mocks  our  professed  standards  of  "Americanism"  and  "justice." 
"A  word  as  to  those  standards.  Every  schoolchild,  every  candi- 
date for  citizenship,  learns  them  by  simply  reading  the  Consti- 
tution and  takes  pride  in  the  fact  that  this  nation  was  the  first 
to  promulgate  them  in  written  form  upon  earth."  And  yet,  says; 
Hopkins,  "if  there  were  a  general  conspiracy  to  frustrate  the 
working-out  of  those  principles  and  do  away  with  them  at  last, 
action  to  that  end  could  be  little  more  effectual  than  it  is  in 
many  cities  today." 

Exactly!  Yet  Hopkins  never  dreams  there  is  such  a  con- 
spiracy! He  sees  the  evidence  of  it  and  notes  that  there  is  no 
other  logical  conclusion,  but  he  cannot  imagine  that  it  is  so! 
Today,  after  Peekskill,  when  violence  is  becoming  more  and 
more  political,  when  more  and  more  openly  it  tends  toward 
conscious  Fascism,  there  is  the  same  blindness  in  the  face  of 
fact.  Or,  more  exactly,  the  same  failure  to  recognize  the  truth 
because  all  the  shapers  of  public  opinion  are  busy  day  and 
night  telling  us  it  isn't  so.  How  close  a  man  can  come  to  inde- 
pendent discovery  of  the  truth,  only  to  be  browbeaten  out  of  it 
by  "respectable"  authority  to  the  contrary!  Hopkins,  describ- 
ing the  extent  to  which  the  police  have  instituted  trial-by- 
beating,  trial-by-kidnapping,  trial-by-third-degree,  for  lawful 
court  procedure,  again  comes  within  an  inch  of  seeing  the 
conspiracy:  "The  police  must  have  secrecy  or  the  game  is  up. 
Not  only  must  what  goes  on  in  the  sweating  session  be  kept 
secret,  but  if  possible  the  existence  of  the  practice  itself."  Why 
then  can't  Hopkins  accept  the  evidence  of  his  own  eyes,  that 


172  Force  and  Violence 

there  is  a  nationwide  conspiracy  by  the  minority  to  bamboozle 
the  majority? 

Any  attempt  to  answer  that  question,  to  open  a  discussion 
of  the  underlying  issue,  proceeds  under  an  enormous  handicap. 
It  takes  place  in  the  framework  of  our  peculiarly  American 
mythology.  In  that  mythology  there  is  no  ruling  class  because 
this  is  a  democracy.  Therefore,  no  matter  how  great  the  evi- 
dence that  a  minority  controls  the  machinery  of  state  and 
uses  it  to  keep  the  majority  in  its  "place,"  the  fact  is  never 
acknowledged.  No  matter  how  great  the  evidence  that  the 
myth  itself  is  a  decisive  factor  in  maintaining  the  privileges  of 
the  privileged  and  the  complacency  of  the  majority,  the  myth 
continues  to  pass  for  fact.  To  break  down  the  inertia  of  habit, 
<only  a  word  is  needed,  only  a  phrase.  Why  doesn't  Hopkins 
understand  his  own  facts?  Because  to  understand  them,  one 
must  first  ask  what  kind  of  struggle  is  responsible  for  that  sub- 
version he  has  described.  And  what  kind  of  struggle  safe- 
guards our  human  rights  and  democratic  liberties  from  the 
truly  subversive?  The  answer  is— class  struggle;  and  those  are 
forbidden  words. 

Our  American  mythology,  refusing  to  acknowledge  that 
democracy  is  a  class  system,  cannot  concede  that  the  United 
States  Constitution  is  itself  a  product  of  class  interests  set  in 
a  framework  of  class  conflict.  To  say  out  loud  that  American 
-society  is  a  class  society,  is  to  invite  violence.  The  myth 
enjoys  more  than  the  force  of  law  in  the  United  States;  it  is 
enforced  by  lawless  violence.  It  is  a  secret  law  that  insists 
upon  discussion  of  domestic  politics  and  world  affairs  in  terms 
of  resounding  "moral"  concepts  instead  of  hard  material  reali- 
ties. And  anyone  daring  to  go  beyond  those  arbitrary  boun- 
daries of  thought  or  advocacy,  is  automatically  excluded  from 
"respectable"  society.  He  is  a  Communist,  a  Marxist,  a  heretic. 

The  late  Charles  A.  Beard  found  that  out.  When  he  first 
published  his  "An  Economic  Interpretation  of  the  Constitu- 
tion," he  was  assailed  as  a  "Marxist"  by  older,  more  orthodox 
historians.  That,  incidentally,  was  1913,  before  the  Russian 


The  Secret  of  Secrecy  173 

Revolution  provided  the  now  conventional  "national  security" 
pretext  for  redbaiting.  Beard's  simple  acknowledgment  of  the 
class  basis  of  the  Constitution  was  his  crime.  He  very  prop- 
erly insisted  that  he  was  no  more  a  Communist  than  were  his 
critics.  In  an  introduction  to  the  1935  edition  of  his  book, 
Beard  points  out  that  the  Communists  were  not  the  first  to 
speak  of  the  class  struggle  and  hence  it  is  silly  to  shout  "Marx- 
ist" at  everyone  who  escapes  the  myth  of  classlessness.  He 
wrote: 

"The  germinal  idea  of  class  and  group  conflicts  in  history 
appeared  in  the  writings  of  Aristotle,  long  before  the  Christian 
era,  and  was  known  to  great  writers  on  politics  during  the 
middle  ages  and  modern  times.  It  was  expounded  by  James 
Madison,  in  Number  X  of  The  Federalist,  written  in  defense 
of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  long  before  Karl 
Marx  was  born.  Marx  seized  upon  the  idea,  applied  it  with 
vigor,  and  based  predictions  upon  it,  but  he  did  not  originate 
it.  Fathers  of  the  American  Constitution  were  well  aware  of 
the  idea,  operated  on  the  hypothesis  that  it  had  at  least  a  con- 
siderable validity,  and  expressed  it  in  numerous  writings." 

Beard  had  done  nothing  more  than  to  expound  the  politi- 
cal philosophy  of  Madison,  the  father  of  the  Constitution.  Of 
course,  if  it  is  a  crime  simply  to  read  the  powerful  works  of 
Karl  Marx— as  it  may  well  be  if  the  present  case  is  not  other- 
wise decided  in  the  high  court  of  American  public  opinion- 
then  Beard,  too,  was  a  criminal  conspirator.  For  "at  the  time 
this  volume  was  written/'  he  explained,  "I  was,  in  common 
with  all  students  who  professed  even  a  modest  competence 
in  modern  history,  conversant  with  the  theories  and  writings 
of  Marx.  Having  read  extensively  among  the  writings  of  the 
Fathers  of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  and  studied 
Aristotle,  Machiavelli,  Locke  and  other  political  philosophers, 
I  became  all  the  more  interested  in  Marx  when  I  discovered 
in  his  works  the  ideas  which  had  been  cogently  expressed  in 
the  preceding  centuries.  That  interest  was  deepened  when  I 
learned  from  an  inquiry  into  his  student  life  that  he  himself 


174  Force  and  Violence 

had  been  acquainted  with  the  works  of  Aristotle,  Montes- 
quieu, and  other  writers  of  the  positive  bent  before  he  began 
to  work  out  his  own  historical  hypothesis/' 

Beard  had  followed  not  Marx  but  Madison.  Philosophi- 
cally, the  difference  between  the  two  men  is  profound,  for 
Madison  supposes  wealth  and  poverty  to  be  the  result  of  dif- 
ferences in  men's  abilities;  Marx  explains  the  unequal  dis- 
tribution of  wealth  by  tracing  its  history.  Madison's  theory 
is,  in  effect,  a  justification  of  privileged  classes,  while  Marx 
intends  his  theory  as  a  weapon  in  the  hands  of  the  working 
class  to  end  class  privilege  forever.  But  here  we  are  not  con- 
cerned with  the  intent  of  either.  All  that  is  relevant  to  our  pur- 
pose is  that  Madison  sees  conflicting  class  interests  as  the 
great  reality  with  which  the  Constitution  must  deal.  He  wrote 
in  The  Federalist: 

"From  the  protection  of  different  and  unequal  faculties  of 
acquiring  property,  the  possession  of  different  degrees  and 
kinds  of  property  immediately  results;  and  from  the  influence 
of  these  on  the  sentiments  and  views  of  the  respective  pro- 
prietors, ensues  a  division  of  society  into  different  interests 
and  parties.  .  .  .  The  most  common  and  durable  source  of  fac- 
tions has  been  the  various  and  unequal  distribution  of  prop- 
erty. Those  who  hold  and  those  who  are  without  property 
have  ever  formed  distinct  interests  in  society." 

Yes,  in  the  United  States  as  in  all  other  countries,  the  prop- 
ertied and  the  propertyless  are  locked  in  class  struggle.  Madi- 
son continues,  describing  other  economic  interests:  "Those 
who  are  creditors,  and  those  who  are  debtors,  fall  under  a 
like  discrimination.  A  landed  interest,  a  manufacturing  inter- 
est, a  moneyed  interest,  with  many  lesser  interests,  grew  up  of 
necessity  in  civilized  nations  and  divided  them  into  different 
classes  actuated  by  different  sentiments  and  views.  The  regu- 
lation of  these  various  and  interfering  interests  forms  the 
principal  task  of  modern  legislation,  and  involves  the  spirit 
of  party  and  faction  in  the  necessary  and  ordinary  operations 
of  the  government." 


The  Secret  of  Secrecy  175 

Beard's  summary  of  the  whole  Madisonian  concept  under- 
lying our  Constitution,  emphatically  establishes  the  class  basis 
of  American  democracy:  "Party  doctrines  and  'principles' 
originate  in  the  sentiments  and  views  which  the  possession 
of  various  kinds  of  property  creates  in  the  minds  of  the  pos- 
sessors; class  and  group  divisions  based  on  property  lie  at  the 
basis  of  modern  government;  and  politics  and  constitutional 
law  are  inevitably  a  reflex  of  these  contending  interests." 

Beard  calls  his  system,  "economic  determinism";  Commu- 
nists employ  "dialectical  materialism"  and  "historical  material- 
ism." We  need  not  define  or  explore  these  terms  further  than 
to  note  that  by  virtue  of  these  different  approaches,  Commu- 
nists profess  to  find  a  meaning  in  history,  whereas  Beard  spe- 
cifically declines  to  look  for  any.  He  writes:  "It  may  be  that 
some  larger  world-process  is  working  through  each  series  of 
historical  events;  but  ultimate  causes  lie  beyond  our  horizon." 
This  would  lead  to  a  fatalistic  acceptance  of  all  the  evils  we 
meet,  including  the  class  violence  we  have  encountered;  yet 
Beard,  without  suggesting  a  remedy,  does  provide  us  with  a 
clue  to  that  violence  and  to  the  Communist  conspiracy  trial 
itself: 

"The  whole  theory  of  the  economic  interpretation  of  his- 
tory rests  upon  the  concept  that  social  progress  in  general  is 
the  result  of  contending  interests  in  society— some  favorable, 
others  opposed,  to  change." 

That  is  precisely  the  origin  of  the  policeman's  violence 
on  the  Skid  Row  and  judicial  violence  in  the  courtroom  at 
Foley  Square.  The  defenders  of  the  status  quo,  employing 
daily  violence  against  the  majority  in  defense  of  the  privileges 
of  the  minority,  must  go  beyond  that  to  punish  advocacy  of 
change  itself.  A  special  form  of  violence  must  be  invented  for 
use  against  those  who  hold  and  teach  dangerous  ideas,  ideas 
in  conflict  with  the  official  mythology.  The  minority,  the  rul- 
ing class,  is  frightened  by  the  rapidity  of  change  in  the  world 
today.  It  resorts  more  and  more  to  violence.  While  professing, 
in  great  hollow  waves  of  propaganda  from  the  advertising 


176  Force  and  Violence 

agencies  employed  by  the  National  Association  of  Manufac- 
turers, to  believe  that  capitalist  ideology  would  triumph  in 
any  peaceful  joust  with  Marxist  ideology,  our  ruling  class  has 
been  careful  to  pass  laws  making  it  unlawful  to  advocate 
Marxism. 

A  law  specifically  invented  for  that  purpose  and  em- 
ployed to  prevent  peaceful  submission  of  any  non-conformist 
theory  to  the  judgment  of  the  American  people,  must  ob- 
serve the  pretense  of  respect  for  democracy.  The  trick  in 
our  time,  therefore,  is  to  cry,  "Stop  thief!"  That  is,  the  ruling 
class,  practicing  violence  against  the  majority,  declares  that 
advocates  of  fundamental  change  must  be  suppressed  be- 
cause they  plan  to  attain  their  ends  by  force.  Here  is  how  the 
argument  runs: 

"I  am  of  the  opinion  that  the  manifesto  and  program  of 
the  Communist  Party,  together  with  other  exhibits  in  this  case, 
are  of  such  character  as  to  easily  lead  a  reasonable  man  to 
conclude  that  the  purpose  of  the  Communist  Party  is  to  ac- 
complish its  end,  namely,  the  capture  and  destruction  of 
the  state,  as  now  constituted,  by  force  and  violence.  .  .  . 

"If  those  who  support  the  Communist  Party  in  its  pres- 
ent declaration  of  principles  hope  for  success— and  I  must  as- 
sume that  they  have  such  hope— I  cannot  do  otherwise  than 
conclude  that  they  must  contemplate  the  employment  of  force 
and  violence.  In  other  words,  I  am  unable  to  perceive  how 
the  expropriation  of  private  property  can  be  accomplished 
without  the  employment  of  forbidden  instrumentalities.  I 
say  this  because  of  the  fact  that  up  to  the  time  of  the  capture 
and  destruction  of  the  present  government  its  officers  will  be, 
as  they  now  are,  charged  with  the  protection  of  property 
rights,  and  I  cannot  imagine  that  such  officers  and  those 
whose  property  the  Communists  will  take,  will  meekly  capitu- 
late the  moment  the  Communists  demand  a  transference  to 
them  of  all  such  rights.  Should  such  a  transfer  be  demanded 
and  refused,  could  it  for  a  moment  be  supposed  that  the  Com- 
munists, if  they  considered  their  strength  sufficient,  would! 


The  Secret  of  Secrecy  177 

hesitate  and  seek  peaceful  means  of  persuasion?  It  seems  to 
me  that  they  would  unquestionably  exert  whatever  coercion 
and  employ  whatever  force  and  violence  was  necessary  to  the 
achievement  of  their  success." 

That  was  the  opinion  of  Judge  John  C.  Knox,  now  Senior 
Judge  of  the  Federal  Court  of  the  Southern  District  of  New 
York,  in  a  case  decided  in  1920.  It  was  the  opinion  of  many 
other  apologists  for  the  ruling  class  and  defenders  of  the 
status  quo.  They  worked  tirelessly  to  make  that  opinion  the 
law  of  the  land,  which  would,  of  course,  repeal  the  Bill  of 
Rights.  And  in  1940  they  finally  succeeded  in  placing  on 
the  statute  books  of  the  United  States,  a  law  under  which 
they  could  outlaw  dangerous  thoughts  while  maintaining  the 
appearance  of  "due  process."  That  law  was  the  Alien  Regis- 
tration Act,  otherwise  known  as  the  Smith  Act,  under  which 
the  defendants  in  this  case  were  indicted  in  July  1948. 

The  Smith  Act  was  sneaked  past  the  public  by  parlia- 
mentary trickery,  concealed  by  hysteria.  Even  Zechariah 
Chafee,  Jr.,  outstanding  authority  on  legislative  and  judicial 
attempts  to  curb  freedom  of  speech  and  the  press,  thought  it 
was  just  a  measure  for  fingerprinting  aliens.  In  his  1942  book, 
Free  Speech  in  the  United  States,  Chafee  says  of  its  quiet  pas- 
sage: "Not  until  months  later  did  I,  for  one,  realize  that  this 
statute  contains  the  most  drastic  restrictions  on  freedom  of 
speech  ever  enacted  in  the  United  States  during  peace." 

Chafee  relates  how  it  was  done.  First,  a  bill  purporting 
to  strike  only  at  radical  aliens  was  introduced  by  Representa- 
tive Howard  Smith  of  Virginia.  With  legislators  in  a  mood 
to  pass  any  anti-alien  measure  without  debate,  a  section  apply- 
ing to  citizens  was  inserted— but  only,  everyone  was  assured, 
for  the  limited  purpose  of  preventing  tampering  with  the 
armed  forces.  Now  the  stage  is  set,  and  a  thought-control 
amendment  is  tacked  on  and  the  bill  is  passed  almost  with- 
out debate. 

It  was  Smith  himself  who  offered  the  thought-control 
amendment  to  the  Smith  Act,  the  words  that  would  later 


178  Force  and  Violence 

cover  the  indictment  of  the  Communist  leaders.  We  have 
curbed  aliens,  he  said,  "but  do  you  know  that  there  is  noth- 
ing in  the  world  to  prevent  a  treasonable  American  citizen 
from  doing"  the  very  things  we  forbid  aliens  to  do.  "He  can 
advocate  revolution,  the  overthrow  of  the  government  by 
force,  anarchy,  and  everything  else,  and  there  is  nothing  in 
the  law  to  stop  it/' 

"The  mood  of  the  House  is  such,"  declared  Representative 
T.  F.  Ford  of  California  on  July  28,  1939  in  debate  on  Smith's 
bill,  "that  if  you  brought  in  the  Ten  Commandments  here  to- 
day and  asked  for  their  repeal  and  attached  that  request  to 
an  alien  law,  you  could  get  it."  So  no  one  looked  into  the  con- 
tent of  the  bill,  the  press  virtually  ignored  it,  and  it  became 
law  on  June  28,  1940. 

"Here  at  last,"  wrote  Professor  Chafee  in  1942,  "is  the 
Federal  peacetime  sedition  law  which  A.  Mitchell  Palmer 
and  his  associated  patrioteers  tried  to  scare  the  country  into 
passing  twenty  years  ago— without  success.  Not  a  spark  of 
evidence  was  introduced  in  committee  or  in  Congress  to  show 
any  more  need  for  such  a  Federal  statute  now  than  in  1920. 
.  .  .  The  plain  reason  for  it  is,  that  the  persons  and  organiza- 
tions who  have  been  hankering  for  such  a  measure  during  the 
last  two  decades  took  advantage  of  the  passion  against  immi- 
grants to  write  into  an  anti-alien  statute  the  first  Federal  peace- 
time restrictions  on  speaking  and  writing  by  American  citizens 
since  the  ill-fated  Sedition  Act  of  1798." 

History  warns  that  there  is  no  limit  to  the  powers  that 
can  be  exercised  under  such  sedition  laws,  or  speech-restric- 
tion measures.  Under  the  Espionage  Act  and  various  state 
measures  of  World  War  I,  the  United  States  experienced  sev- 
eral years  of  thought  control.  The  illegal  mass  raids  ordered 
by  Attorney-General  Palmer  and  carried  out  by  his  assistant, 
J.  Edgar  Hoover,  were  accompanied  by  shameful  court  deci- 
sions permitting  their  reign  of  political  terror.  Those  deci- 
sions were  certain,  as  Chafee  noted,  to  "serve  as  precedents 


The  Secret  of  Secrecy  179 

for  the  construction"  of  Section  II*  of  the  Smith  Act.  For 
"The  truth  is  that  the  precise  language  of  a  sedition  law  is 
like  the  inscription  on  a  sword.  What  matters  is  the  exist- 
ence of  the  weapon.  Once  the  sword  is  placed  in  the  hands 
of  the  people  in  power,  then,  whatever  it  says,  they  will  be 
able  to  reach  and  slash  at  almost  any  unpopular  person  who 
is  speaking  or  writing  anything  that  they  consider  objection- 
able criticism  of  their  policies." 

All  pretense  of  restraint  is  abandoned  in  the  use  of  the 
sword  of  sedition.  Look  how  the  reckless  blade  has  cut 
away  the  principles  of  due  process  in  the  Communist  con- 
spiracy case: 

First,  an  Attorney-General,  a  Cabinet  officer  of  the  United 
States  Government,  having  previously  sworn  to  uphold  the 
Constitution,  "declared  war  on  Communism"  and  set  out  to 
find  a  way  of  jailing  the  Communists  in  spite  of  the  Consti- 
tution. 

Second,  for  this  purpose  he  impanelled  a  Special  Grand 
Jury,  in  an  atmosphere— created  beforehand— that  would  ren- 
der calm  consideration  of  evidence  highly  improbable.  To 
make  assurance  doubly  sure,  Grand  Juries  were  hand-picked 
in  that  district.  A  restrictive  class-system  of  selection  had 
been  deliberately  instituted  in  1937  or  1938  by  that  same 
Judge  Knox  who  had  found  Communism  illegal  in  1920. 

Third,  that  same  Judge  Knox  now  had  and  exercised  the 
power  to  choose  an  "impartial"  judge  to  try  a  case  about 
which  he,  Knox,  was  not  in  the  least  impartial. 

Fourth,  he  chose  Judge  Medina,  who  had  been  appointed 
to  the  bench  in  1947  by  President  Truman  on  the  recommenda- 
tion of  Attorney-General  Tom  Clark! 

*  See  Appendix  for  these  sections  as  renumbered  in  U.S.  Code. 


Chapter  18 
'COMMUNIST  MEANS  YOU 


And  so  the  verdict  of  "Guilty,"  formally  delivered  just 
about  noon  of  October  14,  1949— and  immediately  followed 
by  contempt  sentences  against  all  the  defense  lawyers— was, 
in  effect,  determined  before  ever  the  trial  began.  And  before 
ever  the  trial  began,  the  historic  consequences  of  such  a  ver- 
dict were  clear  to  men  who  had  studied  history  or  seen  it 
enacted  in  our  time.  Certainly  the  verdict  and  its  consequences 
were  foreseeable  one  year  before  the  event,  in  October  1948, 
when  the  telephone  rang  in  the  Detroit  home  of  George  W. 
Crockett,  a  Negro  lawyer. 

It  was  Maurice  Sugar,  Mr.  Crockett's  associate,  calling 
from  New  York.  The  call  caught  Mr.  Crockett,  paint-brush  in 
hand,  on  a  ladder  in  his  living-room.  As  he  came  down  to 
answer  the  phone,  his  mind  was  on  other  jobs  that  needed 
doing  around  the  house.  He  not  only  was  not  thinking  about 
the  Communist  trial,  but  had  not  thought  about  it.  Yet  against 
his  own  background  he  could  recognize  the  dangerous  prin- 
ciples of  thought-control  and  political  oppression  when  he 
saw  them.  That  telephone  call  was  therefore  destined  to 
change  the  whole  course  of  his  life,  for  Mr.  Sugar  had  called 
to  invite  him  to  join  the  defense  in  the  Communist  conspiracy 
case! 

Mr.  Crockett  said,  "No,"  politely.  He  had  never  opened  a 
Marxist  book  in  his  life;  he  doubted  his  competence;  he  named 
several  other  Negro  lawyers  more  suitable,  in  his  opinion.  But 
he  agreed  to  give  it  some  thought  before  making  his  negative 
final.  Ninety  minutes  of  thought  and  discussion  brought  him 

180 


'Communist'  Means  You  181 

back  to  the  telephone.  To  understand  those  ninety  minutes, 
we  must  look  at  Mr.  Crockett's  background. 

Having  entered  practice  in  Jacksonville,  Florida,  in  1934, 
he  had  gone  to  Washington  in  1939  to  serve  first  in  the  De- 
partment of  Labor  and  later  on  the  President's  Fair  Employ- 
ment Practices  Committee  (FEPC).  Some  of  his  work  at- 
tracted national  interest.  In  1943,  when  the  Philadelphia 
Traction  Company  was  refusing,  despite  the  manpower  short- 
age, to  employ  Negroes  above  the  rank  of  porter,  Crockett 
prosecuted  the  case  before  the  FEPC.  His  suggested  findings 
became  the  ultimate  court  order  in  the  case,  an  order  Presi- 
dent Roosevelt  later  sent  the  Army  to  enforce.  Articles  Crock- 
ett wrote  in  law  journals  were  picked  up  by  courts  in  Georgia 
and  Louisiana— the  empire  of  white  supremacy— which  did 
not  know  they  were  borrowing  the  arguments  of  a  Negro!  As 
a  result  of  his  reputation  and  his  own  thinking,  he  moved 
on  from  government  service  to  the  labor  field  in  1944.  He 
founded  the  Fair  Practices  Committee  of  the  CIO  United 
Auto  Workers  and  was  its  executive  director  from  1944  to 
1946;  in  1947  he  became  administrative  assistant  to  the  inter- 
national secretary  of  the  union. 

Crockett's  private  life  was  as  solid  and  conservative  as  his 
professional  life.  He  was  devoted  to  his  three  children  and 
proud  of  his  wife,  Ethelene,  who  had  completed  her  study 
and  taken  the  degree  of  Doctor  of  Medicine  after  the  birth 
of  their  third  child.  His  favorite  occupation  was  to  putter 
around  the  house.  And  he  found  time  to  write  a  weekly  labor 
column  for  the  Detroit  Negro  weekly,  the  Michigan  Chronicle. 

To  enter  the  Communist  case  was  to  risk  all  this.  Friends, 
dropping  in  soon  after  the  call  from  New  York,  pointed  that 
out.  A  friend  with  a  strong  anti-Communist  bias,  while  not 
challenging  the  right  of  Communists  to  competent  counsel,  or 
of  non-Communist  lawyers  to  defend  Communists  without  fear 
of  reprisal,  argued  that,  in  effect,  there  would  be  reprisal. 

"This  is  an  opportunity,  it's  true,"  he  told  Crockett,  "for 
you  to  practice  the  kind  of  law  you're  prepared  to  practice. 


182  Force  and  Violence 

But  I'd  hate  to  see  you  go  into  it.  Considering  the  present 
temper  of  the  UAW,  your  usefulness  would  be  impaired  and 
that  would  be  a  loss  to  the  UAW  and  to  the  whole  trade- 
union  movement." 

This  argument  convinced  Crockett— in  the  opposite  sense! 
As  he  told  the  jury  in  summation  a  year  later,  he  had  read 
about  the  indictment  in  the  papers.  "And  where  you  rely  on 
newspaper  comment  to  tell  you  about  the  Communist  Party, 
you  are  likely  to  be  misled."  From  the  papers  he  had  got  the 
idea  that  the  defendants  were  charged  with  conspiring  to 
overthrow  the  government.  But  now,  studying  the  actual  in- 
dictment, discovering  that  "nowhere  does  it  allege  a  single 
act  done  by  these  defendants  in  pursuance  of  their  alleged 
conspiracy,"  learning  that,  in  effect,  it  indicted  the  60,000  to 
80,000  American  Communists  and  would  go  on  from  there  to 
make  "co-conspirators"  of  all  who  failed  to  meet  the  anti- 
Communist  standards  of  the  witch-hunters,  he  at  once  under- 
stood the  dangerous  potential  of  the  case.  No  acts  being 
charged,  the  indictment  necessarily  pursues  thoughts,  beliefs, 
teachings,  he  explained  to  his  friend. 

"If  this  case  is  lost,"  he  reasoned  aloud,  "the  UAW  soon 
won't  need  me  or  anybody  else.  There  won't  be  any  UAW!" 

He  convinced  his  friend,  and  in  the  process  convinced 
himself.  So  it  was  that  ninety  minutes  after  the  first  call,  he 
was  at  the  telephone  again,  informing  Maurice  Sugar  that  he 
would  join  trial  counsel.  He  became  attorney  for  Carl  Winter, 
Detroit  Communist  leader  with  whom  he  had  publicly  de- 
bated political  differences  just  three  months  earlier.  Near  the 
close  of  the  case,  I  asked  him,  in  an  interview,  if  he  had  ever 
had  occasion  to  regret  his  decision. 

"Absolutely  not,"  he  replied.  "I  am  proud  to  be  associated 
with  the  case." 

Proud  because  he  was  defending  something  more  than 
eleven  men,  he  held.  He  showed  me  a  letter  he  had  written 
to  the  Detroit  News  stating  "that  this  indictment  and  trial  of 
the  Communist  Party  and  its  leaders  is  a  step— a  cleverly  con- 


'Communist'  Means  You  183 

cealed  step— which  if  unchecked  now  can  and  will  lead  our 
country  to  Fascism  and  war."  The  newspaper,  which  had  ac- 
cused defense  counsel  of  obstructing  justice,  did  not,  it  goes 
without  saying,  publish  Crockett's  reply,  that  being  the  way 
of  our  "free  press."  And  this  one-sided  treatment  of  the  case 
by  the  press  was  so  nearly  uniform  that  it  has  determined  the 
state  of  public  opinion  about  the  issues  in  the  case. 

Following  the  verdict  and  its  accompanying  contempt 
sentences  for  the  lawyers,  the  bulk  of  the  press  hailed  the  con- 
viction and  published  not  a  word  about  the  real  political  sig- 
nificance of  the  case.  It  reported  with  approval  Judge  Medina's 
charges  of  a  conspiracy  by  the  lawyers;  it  credited  the  Judge 
with  "saintly  patience";  it  found  his  charge  to  the  jury  a 
miracle  of  even-handed  justice  and  the  whole  trial  an  inspiring 
example  of  American  fair  play.  Let  us  give  this  press  clamor 
and  the  trial  behind  it,  the  name  they  deserve:  fraud! 

A  foul  fraud;  a  double  fraud.  It  is  a  fraud  to  present  the 
trial  as  fair  in  any  respect;  to  say  that  the  defendants  ever 
had  a  chance,  that  their  lawyers  were  ever  permitted  to 
perform  their  duties  or  exercise  their  rights.  But  it  is  a  worse 
fraud  to  pretend  that  this  trial  and  verdict  affect  only  the 
eleven  defendants.  It  takes  sheer  brass  to  deny  that  the  intent 
is  to  outlaw  the  Communist  Party  and  thereby  to  reach  mil- 
lions of  people  who  are  not  Communists.  It  is  fraud  to  deny 
that  this  trial  lessens  your  stature  and  threatens  the  very  foun- 
dations of  the  Republic. 

Neither  the  role  of  the  press  nor  the  role  of  the  courts  is 
wholly  new  to  me.  I  have  been  a  newspaperman  too  long  to 
have  any  illusions  about  the  press.  For  the  rest,  I  was  in  Hit- 
ler's Germany  for  a  short  time,  and  I  have  been  in  the  Clerical- 
Fascist  Spain  of  Gil  Robles  and  Lerroux  (1933-1936)  and  in 
Portugal  of  the  Fascist  Novo  Estado.  The  things  happening 
here  are  shocking  not  because  they  are  new  but  because  they 
are  Fascist;  they  are  sickening  because  they  come  enveloped 
in  a  sticky  wrapper  of  hypocrisy  that  makes  them  even  more 
unclean  than  they  were  in  Europe. 


184  Force  and  Violence 

Consider  the  fraud  of  the  "fair  trial."  I  have  tried  to  show 
the  peculiar  nature  of  the  case,  making  for  combat  in  the 
courtroom.  But  I  have  hardly  touched  the  long  preliminary 
proceedings  that  bear  on  this  issue.  The  pre-trial  record  run- 
ning to  almost  five  thousand  pages,  is  completely  independent 
of  the  sixteen-thousand  page  record  of  the  trial  itself.  Most 
of  that  pre-trial  record  consists  of  the  evidence  and  argument 
submitted  by  the  defense  in  support  of  its  charge  that  the 
jury  system  in  the  Federal  Court  in  New  York  is  a  class  system. 
The  record  even  that  early  shows  Judge  Medina  treating  the 
defense  lawyers  roughly,  charging  them  with  bad  faith,  im- 
plying a  virtual  lawyers'  conspiracy  against  him. 

The  fact  is  that  the  defense  charges  against  the  Grand 
Jury  system  not  only  were  proved  to  the  hilt  but  did  not  re- 
quire proof!  The  picking  and  packing  of  the  district  juries  and 
Grand  Juries  by  order  of  Judge  Knox  is  a  matter  of  record, 
confirmed  by  Judge  Knox  even  when  called  as  a  witness  by 
the  defense  in  the  challenge  proceeding.  The  record  shows— 
and  he  does  not  deny— that  he  picked  a  jury  commissioner  for 
his  "good  business  and  social  connections"  and  a  Deputy  Jury 
Clerk  with  "thorough  practical  knowledge  of  the  social,  racial, 
and  economic  groups  of  New  York  City  and  their  geographic 
distribution."  The  record  shows  they  then  proceeded  to  build 
up  a  list  of  "qualified"  jurors  by  eliminating  the  "social,  racial 
and  economic  groups"  they  didn't  like,  and  concentrating  on 
Yale,  Harvard,  Princeton  graduates,  residents  of  the  silk-stock- 
ing district  and  so  on.  They  didn't  like  the  unemployed  and 
housewives,  for  instance.  A  1941  United  States  Government 
study  of  Knox's  methods,  openly  described  a  quota  system  as 
follows:  "About  2  per  cent  of  the  names  in  the  wheel  are  of 
the  unemployed  or  retired,  88  per  cent  are  business  or  profes- 
sional men,  and  ten  per  cent  are  women."  At  the  trial,  in 
answer  to  a  question  by  Judge  Medina,  Judge  Knox  said  that 
after  he  had  allowed  relief  workers  to  serve  on  juries  during 
the  depression,  "I  had  two  or  three  experiences  in  cases  that 
were  tried  before  me  where  I  felt  that  their  feelings  towards 


'Communist'  Means  You  185 

the  government  as  a  whole  and  towards  wealth  as  a  whole 
and  towards  society  as  a  whole  was  not  good,  and  so  I  then 
asked  that  a  number  of  them  be  eliminated." 

In  short,  Judge  Knox  ordered  the  poor  eliminated  in  favor 
of  "men  of  substance/'  men  with  a  bias  toward  wealth  and 
privilege.  The  record  shows  he  got  them.  Yet  at  the  end  of 
the  challenge,  Medina  was  not  ashamed  to  say:  "Not  only 
have  the  defendants  failed  to  prove  this  charge  [of  wilful, 
deliberate  exclusion]  but  the  evidence,  largely  adduced  by 
them,  conclusively  refutes  it."  Later  he  called  the  whole  chal- 
lenge "a  colossal  bluff"!  And  this  was  the  mood  in  which  the 
trial  proper  began! 

From  the  pre-trial  record,  it  clearly  appears  that  Judge 
Medina  was  already  convinced  that  the  defendants  and  their 
lawyers  were  misbehaving  according  to  plan.  In  the  later 
language  of  his  contempt  decree,  he  found  that  they  had 
entered  into  an  agreement  "in  a  cold  and  calculating  manner" 
to  cause  "such  delay  and  confusion  as  to  make  it  impossible  to 
go  on  with  the  trial";  to  provoke  incidents  in  the  hope  of 
forcing  a  mistrial,  and  even  to  try  to  impair  the  health  of  the 
Judge  "so  that  the  trial  could  not  continue."  Now  I  recall  a 
typical  day  in  court  when  Judge  Medina  whipped  himself  up 
into  a  fury  against  defendant  Benjamin  Davis  and  the  de- 
fense in  general,  without  the  slightest  provocation.  A  little 
later,  he  used  patronizing  language  to  Mr.  Davis  calculated 
to  provoke  the  defendant,  a  Harvard  law  graduate  and 
New  York  City  Councilman,  into  a  sharp  reply  ("Now  be  a 
good  boy,"  he  said,  shaking  a  finger  at  the  Negro  leader;  "I 
will  not  be  a  good  boy,"  thundered  Davis,  resentful  of  the 
"Uncle  Tom"  role  assigned  him  by  the  Court).  And  this  is  the 
kind  of  thing  relied  upon  by  Medina  in  his  whole  contempt 
finding;  he  cited  it  (as  if  it  reflected  credit  upon  himself)  in 
denying  Davis  the  right  to  make  his  own  summation,  and  on 
this  basis  he  described  Davis  as  of  "violent  disposition"— pub- 
licly, on  the  very  eve  of  the  verdict. 

But  let  us  assume  that  the  defense  was  at  fault  in  every 


186  Force  and  Violence 

instance.  Assume  that  Judge  Medina's  constant  rebukes  and 
prejudicial  rulings  were  forced  by  the  conduct  of  the  defense, 
and  that  he  had  reluctantly  come  to  the  conclusion  that  the 
defense  was  misbehaving  by  deliberate  plan.  Yet  having  come 
to  this  conclusion  before  the  trial  itself  began,  before  selection 
of  a  jury  began,  why  did  he  insist  upon  remaining  in  the 
case?  How  could  the  defense  receive  a  fair  trial  from  a  judge 
who  felt  himself  constrained  to  curtail  the  rights  of  defense 
counsel  from  the  very  beginning  of  the  trial  proper,  on  the 
basis  of  their  alleged  misconduct  before  the  trial?  I  will 
answer  my  own  questions:  from  the  record,  it  is  apparent  that 
Judge  Medina  no  more  intended  the  defendants  to  have  a  fair 
trial  than  Judge  Webster  Thayer  intended  Sacco  and  Van- 
zetti  to  have  a  fair  trial.  The  case  against  the  lawyers  is  a 
monstrous  fraud  built  up  by  months  of  play-acting,  with  the 
powerful  assistance  of  the  press. 

Far  more  dangerous  is  the  second  fraud:  the  pretense  that 
this  is  a  conviction  of  just  eleven  defendants  as  individuals. 
Hitler  hasn't  been  dead  long  enough  to  make  that  stick.  The 
trial  of  leading  Communists  in  Germany  on  a  charge  of  burn- 
ing down  the  Reichstag  was  the  pretext  not  just  for  hunting 
down  Communists  but  for  liquidating  the  Weimar  Republic. 
The  International  Military  Tribunal  that  tried  the  Nazi  war 
criminals  at  Nuremberg,  said  this: 

"On  the  28th  February,  1933,  the  Reichstag  building  in 
Berlin  was  set  on  fire.  This  fire  was  used  by  Hitler  and  his 
Cabinet  as  a  pretext  for  passing  on  the  same  day  a  decree 
suspending  the  constitutional  guarantees  of  freedom."  (Nazi 
Conspiracy  and  Aggression,  1947. ) 

Is  it  possible  to  believe  that  this  time  it  will  be  different, 
this  time  only  the  Communists  will  suffer?  No  witch-hunt  is 
confined  to  witches;  there  being  no  witches,  witches  have  to 
be  invented.  In  the  context  of  today's  events,  "Communist" 
means  you.  I  heard  a  recording  last  night  of  the  riot-incited 
hoodlums  of  Peekskill,  screaming,  "Go  back  to  Russia  you 


'Communist'  Means  You  187 

white  niggers!  You  Jew  bastards"  Do  you  really  think  you 
are  safe  when  gangsters  are  officially  turned  loose? 

I  live  in  Sunnyside,  a  New  York  City  community.  Defend- 
ant Robert  Thompson  lives  a  few  blocks  away  and  his  small 
daughter  and  my  son  attended  the  same  nursery  school  a  few 
years  ago.  On  the  night  of  November  20,  1948,  a  shady  char- 
acter named  Robert  Burke,  recently  employed  as  a  labor-spy 
on  the  waterfront,  forced  his  way  into  Thompson's  home  and 
tried  to  attack  Thompson's  daughter.  Arrested,  Burke  admitted 
to  police  that  he  went  to  Thompson's  home  to  make  trouble, 
but  he  was  not  tried  for  breaking  into  his  home  or  for  at- 
tempted rape.  He  was  convicted  of  a  misdemeanor.  The  case 
was  then  reopened  on  motion  of  the  prosecutor,  and  Burke 
went  scot-free. 

These  are  no  casual  incidents.  In  the  Germany  of  rising 
Nazidom,  any  Communist  brought  before  a  court  was  guilty, 
while  no  tool  of  the  Fascists  could  be  convicted  of  a  crime. 
Fascism  deliberately  turns  a  whole  nation  over  to  hoodlums, 
sex  maniacs,  sadists,  perverts  who  collect  lampshades  made  of 
the  skins  of  concentration-camp  inmates  selected  for  their  in- 
teresting tattoo-marks.  Why  should  you  think  your  own  skin 
is  safe? 

And  so  I  conclude.  I  have  tried  to  tell  you  truthfully  what 
happened  at  Foley  Square,  but  that  does  not  mean  I  have 
tried  to  be  "objective/*  i.e.,  indifferent  to  this  conflict  that  in- 
volves my  freedom  and  yours,  my  life  and  yours.  No,  I  have 
not  tried  to  tell  a  story  without  a  purpose.  I  apologize  for  the 
shortcomings  of  a  necessarily  hasty  attempt  to  squeeze  the 
essence  of  a  huge  and  baffling  record  into  these  few  pages.  I 
apologize  for  my  inadequate  showing  of  the  meaning  of  the 
trial  in  the  context  of  history.  But  I  do  not  apologize  for  trying 
to  "incite"  you  to  "overthrow"  this  verdict. 

What  the  American  people  do  now  will  determine  whether 
or  not  we  are  to  pass  through  the  Hell  of  Fascism.  There  arer 
there  no  doubt  always  will  be,  Americans  who  think  it  can't 
happen  here.  And  certainly  there  are  great  differences  between 


188  Force  and  Violence 

German  Fascism  and  our  native  brand:  the  Nazis  at  least  felt 
it  necessary  to  have  a  burning  building  as  a  pretext  for  sus- 
pending the  Constitution.  Our  cold  warmongers  manufactured 
an  occasion  out  of  thin  air.  No  one  tried  to  burn  down  the 
White  House  in  the  spring  and  summer  of  1945.  A  discussion, 
published  in  newspapers  and  magazines,  took  place  within  the 
Communist  Party  of  the  United  States;  a  meeting  was  held  at 
Madison  Square  Garden.  That  is  all  the  force  and  violence 
the  government  ever  proved  in  the  trial  at  Foley  Square.  That 
is  all  the  justification  offered  for  this  dangerous  decision. 

Will  the  Supreme  Court  overthrow  it?  This  is  not  a  moving 
picture:  we  cannot  sit  back  and  wait  with  the  assurance  of  a 
happy  ending.  We  have  the  power  to  guide  and  instruct  the 
Supreme  Court.  We  have  the  power  to  determine  what  must 
now  happen  in  the  intensified  struggle  between  Fascism  and 
Democracy  in  these  United  States.  Silence  can  be  a  political 
act,  too.  Silence  in  the  face  of  this  decision  would  be  an  invi- 
tation to  Fascism.  The  verdict  at  Foley  Square  is  not  the  pri- 
vate affair  of  the  Communists;  it  is  the  business  of  every  man 
on  earth.  It  is,  above  all,  your  responsibility  and  mine:  we  are 
at  an  American  crossroads. 

ANNE  J.  WILSON 

714  North  Mentor  Avenue 

PASADENA  6,  CALIFORNIA 


APPENDIX 

I.    THE  CONSPIRACY  INDICTMENT 

The  Grand  Jury  charges: 

1.  That  from  on  or  about  April  1,  1945,  and  continuously  thereafter 
up  to  and  including  the  date  of  the  filing  of  this  indictment,  in  the 
Southern  District  of  New  York,  and  elsewhere,  WILLIAM  Z.  FOSTER, 
EUGENE  DENNIS,  also  known  as  Francis  X.  Waldron,  Jr.,  JOHN  B. 
WILLIAMSON,  JACOB  STACHEL,  ROBERT  G.  THOMPSON, 
BENJAMIN  J.  DAVIS,  JR.,  HENRY  WINSTON,  JOHN  GATES,  also 
known  as  Israel  Regenstreif,  IRVING  POTASH,  GILBERT  GREEN, 
CARL  WINTER,  and  GUS  HALL,  also  known  as  Arno  Gust  Halberg, 
the  defendants  herein,  unlawfully,  wilfully  and  knowingly,  did  con- 
spire with  each  other,  and  with  divers  other  persons  to  the  Grand 
Jury  unknown,  to  organize  as  the  Communist  Party  of  the  United  States 
of  America  a  society,  group,  and  assembly  of  persons  who  teach  and 
advocate  the  overthrow  and  destruction  of  the  Government  of  the  United 
States  by  force  and  violence,  and  knowingly  and  wilfully  to  advocate  and 
teach  the  duty  and  necessity  of  overthrowing  and  destroying  the  Govern- 
ment of  the  United  States  by  force  and  violence,  which  said  acts  are 
prohibited  by  Section  2  of  the  Act  of  June  28,  1940  ( Section  10,  Title  18, 
United  States  Code),  commonly  known  as  the  Smith  Act. 

2.  It  was  part  of  said  conspiracy  that  said  defendants  would  convene, 
in  the  Southern  District  of  New  York,  a  meeting  of  the  National  Board 
of  the  Communist  Political  Association  on  or  about  June  2,   1945,  to 
adopt  a  draft  resolution  for  the  purpose  of  bringing  about  the  dissolution 
of  the  Communist  Political  Association,  and  for  the  purpose  of  organiz- 
ing as  the  Communist  Party  of  the  United  States  of  America  a  society, 
group,  and  assembly  of  persons  dedicated  to  the  Marxist-Leninist  prin- 
ciples of  the  overthrow  and  destruction  of  the  Government  of  the  United 
States  by  force  and  violence. 

3.  It  was  further  a  part  of  said  conspiracy  that  said  defendants  would 
thereafter  convene,  in  the  Southern  District  of  New  York,  a  meeting  of 
the  National  Committee  of  the  Communist  Political  Association  on  or 
about  June  18,  1945,  to  amend  and  adopt  said  draft  resolution. 

4.  It  was  further  a  part  of  said  conspiracy  that  said   defendants 
would  thereafter  cause  to  be  convened,  in  the  Southern  District  of  New 

189 


York,  a  special  National  Convention  of  the  Communist  Political  Associa- 
tion on  or  about  July  26,  1945,  for  the  purpose  of  considering  and  acting 
upon  said  resolution  as  amended. 

5.  It  was   further  a  part  of  said  conspiracy  that  said  defendants 
would  induce  the  delegates  to  said  National  Convention  to  dissolve  the 
Communist  Political  Association. 

6.  It  was  further  a  part  of  said  conspiracy  that  said   defendants 
would  bring  about  the  organization  of  the  Communist  Party  of  the 
United  States  of  America  as  a  society,  group,  and  assembly  of  persons 
to  teach  and  advocate  the  overthrow  and  destruction  of  the  Govern- 
ment of  the  United  States  by  force  and  violence,  and  would  cause  said 
Convention  to  adopt  a  Constitution  basing  said  Party  upon  the  prin- 
ciples of  Marxism-Leninism. 

7.  It  was  further  a  part  of  said  conspiracy  that  said  defendants  would 
bring  about  the  election  of  officers  and  the  election  of  a  National  Com- 
mittee of  said  Party,  and  would  become  members  of  said  Party,  and 
be  elected  as  officers  and  as  members  of  said  National  Committee  and 
the  National  Board  of  said  Committee,  and  in  such  capacities  said  de- 
fendants would  assume  leadership  of  said  Party  and  responsibility  for 
its  policies  and  activities,  and  would  meet  from  time  to  time  to  formulate, 
supervise,  and  carry  out  the  policies  and  activities  of  said  Party. 

8.  It  was  further  a  part  of  said  conspiracy  that  said   defendants 
would  cause  to  be  organize  Clubs,  and  District  and  State  units  of  said 
Party,  and  would  recruit  and  encourage  the  recruitment  of  members 
of  said  Party. 

9.  It  was  further  a  part  of  said  conspiracy  that  said  defendants  would 
publish  and  circulate,  and  cause  to  be  published  and  circulated,  books, 
articles,  magazines,  and  newspapers  advocating  the  principles  of  Marx- 
ism-Leninism. 

10.  It  was  further  a  part  of  said  conspiracy  that  said  defendants 
would  conduct,  and  cause  to  be  conducted,  schools  and  classes  for  the 
study  of  the  principles  of  Marxism-Leninism,  in  which  would  be  taught 
and  advocated  the  duty  and  necessity  of  overthrowing  and  destroying 
the  Government  of  the  United  States  by  force  and  violence. 

In  violation  of  Sections  3  and  5  of  the  Act  of  June  28,  1940  (Sections 
11  and  13,  Title  18,  United  States  Code),  commonly  known  as  the  Smith 
Act. 


190 


II.    THE  MEMBERSHIP  INDICTMENT 

The  Grand  Jury  charges: 

1.  That  from  on  or  about  July  26,  1945,  and  continuously  thereafter 
up  to  and  including  the  date  of  the  filing  of  this  indictment,  the  Com- 
munist Party  of  the  United  States  of  America  has  been  a  society,  group, 
and  assembly  of  persons  who  teach  and  advocate  the  overthrow  and 
destruction   of    the   Government    of   the   United   States    by   force   and 
violence. 

2.  That  from  on  or  about  July  26,  1945,  and  continuously  thereafter 
up  to  and  including  the  date  of  the  filing  of  this  indictment,  in  the 
Southern  District  of  New  York,  BENJAMIN  J.  DAVIS,  JR.,*  the  de- 
fendant herein,  has  been  a  member  of  said  Communist  Party  of  the 
United  States  of  America,  the  defendant  well  knowing  during  all  said 
period  that  said  Communist  Party  of  the  United  States  of  America  was 
and  is  a  society,  group,  and  assembly  of  persons  who  teach  and  advocate 
the  overthrow  and  destruction  of  the  Government  of  the  United  States 
by  force  and  violence. 

In  violation  of  Sections  10  and  13,  Title  18,  United  States  Code. 

III.  EXCERPTS  FROM  THE  SMITH  ACT 

(These  are  the  section  numbers  in  the  U.S.  Code  as  revised  in  1948.) 

Sec.  10.  [Subversive  activities]:  advocating  overthrow  of  government 
by  force. 

(a)  It  shall  be  unlawful  for  any  person- 

(1)  to  knowingly  or  wilfully  advocate,  abet,  advise,  or  teach  the 
duty,  necessity,  desirability,  or  propriety  of  overthrowing  or  destroying 
any  government  in  the  United  States  by  force  or  violence,  or  by  the 
assassination  of  any  officer  of  any  such  government; 

(2)  with  the  intent  to  cause  the  overthrow  or  destruction  of  any 
government  in  the  United  States,  to  print,  publish,  edit,  issue,  circulate, 
sell,  distribute,  or  publicly  display  any  written  or  printed  matter  ad- 
vocating,   advising,    or    teaching    the    duty,    necessity,    desirability,    or 
propriety  of  overthrowing  or  destroying  any  government  in  the  United 
States  by  force  or  violence; 

*  Each  of  the  eleven  defendants  is  similarly  indicted  individually. 

191 


(3)  to  organize  or  help  to  organize  any  society,  group,  or  assembly 
of  persons  who  teach,  advocate,  or  encourage  the  overthrow  or  destruc- 
tion of  any  government  in  the  United  States  by  force  or  violence;  or 
to  be  or  become  a  member  of,  or  affiliated  with,  any  such  society,  group, 
or  assembly  of  persons,  knowing  the  purposes  thereof. 

(b)  For  the  purposes  of  this  section,  the  term  "government  in  the 
United  States"  means  the  Government  of  the  United  States,  the  govern- 
ment of  any  State,  Territory,  or  possession  of  the  United  States,  the 
government  of  the  District  of  Columbia,  or  the  government  of  any 
political  subdivision  of  any  of  them.  June  28,  1940.  c.  439,  Title  12, 
54  Stat.  671. 

Sec.  11.  Attempting  or  conspiring  to  commit  [the  above]  prohibited 
acts. 

It  shall  be  unlawful  for  any  person  to  attempt  to  commit,  or  to  con- 
spire to  commit,  any  of  the  acts  prohibited  by  the  provisions  [above]. 

Sec.  13.  Any  person  who  violates  any  of  the  provisions  [above]  shall, 
upon  conviction  thereof,  be  fined  not  more  than  $10,000  or  imprisoned 
for  not  more  than  ten  years,  or  both. 

IV.   THE  SCHNEIDERMAN  CASE 

Excerpts  from  the  1943  Supreme  Court  opinion  in  the  case  of 
William  Schneiderman  (320  U.S.  118). 

".  .  .  Political  writings  are  often  over-exaggerated  polemics  bearing 
the  imprint  of  the  period  and  the  place  in  which  written.  Philosophies 
cannot  generally  be  studied  in  vacuo.  Meaning  may  be  wholly  distorted 
by  lifting  sentences  out  of  context,  instead  of  construing  them  as  part 
of  an  organic  whole." 

The  Court  then  considered  The  Communist  Manifesto,  State  and 
Revolution,  and  Foundations  of  Leninism  (under  its  earlier  title,  The 
Theory  and  Practice  of  Leninism),  all  introduced  by  the  government, 
and  said: 

"A  tenable  conclusion  from  the  foregoing  is  that  the  Party  in 
1927  desired  to  achieve  its  purpose  by  peaceful  and  democratic  means, 
and  as  a  theoretical  matter  justified  the  use  of  force  and  violence  only 
as  a  method  of  preventing  an  attempted  forcible  counter-overthrow 
once  the  Party  had  obtained  control  in  a  peaceful  manner,  or  as  a 
method  of  last  resort  to  enforce  the  majority  will  if  at  some  indefinite 
future  time  because  of  peculiar  circumstances  constitutional  or  peaceful 
channels  were  no  longer  open." 


WHO'S  EXPANDING?  WHO  THREATENS  WHOM? 
You'll  find  the  answers  in 

BASES  &  EMPIRE 


By  GEORGE  MARION 


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Dr.  Harry  Elmer  Barnes,  in  the  Annals  of  the  authoritative  and  ultra-conservative 
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