TRAGI-COMEDY ON FOLEY SQUARE
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
Tragi-Comedy on Foley Square By William E. Bohn THE OBSERVER AT THE TRIAL of the eleven members of the American Communist Politburo soon realizes that the performance proceeds on two planes....
...In many respects, the American people rank well among the peopies of the world...
...His section of the organization was known as the Professional Group, and the instructions were that its mem* bers should infiltrate key industries...
...The typical American judge tries hard to preserve the dignity of the court...
...On the whole, they seemed to me to be about on tr level with a crowd from the lower •ranks of Tammany henchmen...
...Sitting among the so-called "special •writers," I faced the jury...
...Up and down the row of defendants ran the words "stooge," "stoolie...
...He is like a good actor playing the part of a judge...
...SUDDENLY I SAW THE JUDGE, defendants, attorpeys, jury, newsmen and spectators, as special organs of the American public—set aside here to deal with Communism...
...Superficially, it is comic...
...It wa6 his last day, and the defense attorneys were making their final attempts to tag him as a low-down dog...
...On the one hand, no matter what the outcome of this trial, the American people will learn from it a lot about Communism...
...Then the witness explained how, while the Mundt-Nixon Bill was in the air, his party group was divided into cells consisting of five members each...
...Except for the novelist, Russell Janney, the folks assembled there in judgment are just like the ones you find yourself jostling against on a bus or a subway train...
...I was all get to feel the air crackle with strain and suspense...
...All day long I was watching them...
...Are they leaders or dupes...
...Lawyers speaking for Socialists and Socialism have stood before the courts with dignity and expounded high principles...
...I always leave that austere courtroom and come out into' the sunlight of Foley Square with two opposite notions struggling for mastery in my mind...
...There was no .tpjgh, of, the sort of goodness, the sort of idealism, which is common among Socialists or trade unionists...
...Janney alts there with his cane, so alert, so deeply excited and amused, that you would pick him out in any crowd as someone special...
...Since the summer of 1945, the Communist Party has been a "revolutionary" outfit...
...It will be the contention of the prosecution .that, under the terms of the Smith Act, planning and organizing thus to change our government is a crime...
...A single glance was enough to convince me that the long campaign to impugn the method of jury selection was quite ¦unnecessary...
...Frank S. Meyer has told about Communist schools, how they are organized, what they teach, and how they are twisted and turned by party dictators...
...The men on trial were bored, the defense attorneys were asking silly questions and, in what was advertised as a trial of Marxism, the judge did not Know how to spell the name of Karl Kautsky...
...None of this goes for Judge Medina...
...The old free-and-easy America has come to an end...
...I can remember how Seymour Stedman presented the case of Eugene Debs...
...When Frank Gordon, the government's attorney, began his quiet questions, we found that this man is—or had been up to that moment—a member of the Communist Party in Massachusetts...
...Down underneath it is tragic...
...THE ELEVEN DEFENDANTS sat in a row practically facing me...
...Even the smartest newspapermen had...
...no guess...
...They don't know enough about Marxism either to accept it or reject it...
...I felt as if the whole show had been written by Gilbert and Sullivan and perhaps staged by Billy Rose...
...Thereafter, he had joined the Young Communist League and, in 1944, the party...
...Perhaps ¦ene should go easy on them because $ey were plainly tired and bored...
...Whether we approve of him or not, whether his influence has been for good or ill, he was better than these so-called Communists...
...It is run from the top down for the purpose of setting up a Communist regime instead of the "capitalist" one which we have now...
...Comparisons kept-flashing through my mind...
...Before i dropped in to see My first performance by Judge Medina and the eleven, 1 had read in the papers about the fierce animosity between his honor and the defense attorneys...
...Their organization is on trial...
...He dearly loves the pat quip, the gentle rejoinder...
...At the apex of the performance, of course, sits the judge, Harold R. Medina...
...As a piece of adult education it is a success...
...They agreed that Carl Winter, one of the defendants, said to an audience that it is about time for American Communists to follow the example of Lenin, * • * ENOUGH HAS BEEN REVEALED to show the pattern of the government's case...
...He told, especially, about the state conventions which marked the end of Earl Browder's regime and the turning of the Communist Political Association into the Communist Party...
...The attorneys Were throwing about the titles of volumes by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky...
...It was then- common and predominant characteristic...
...They are not the kind of J$ty»*who have ideas...
...His face is mobile...
...The performance was so much in the nature of a slow-motion affair, that I had abundant time in which to make observations—as ycfu do in railway car or in a dentists's waiting-room...
...Judged by most standards, they would rank comparatively high...
...In 1940 he had been a member of the Youth Council and had reported to the FBI...
...On the other hand, the stories of Communist intrigue, and of FBI undercover work, go to show that something beautiful has gone out of our life...
...I compared them in my imagination with the leaders of the socialist movement, with trade union men, with groups of politicians...
...This is no place for innocents...
...I began to see why the luces of those Communists are dark and so queerly twisted...
...I recall the way Morris Hillquit defended our Socialist assemblymen...
...THE DEFENSE ATTORNEYS are, generally, an unimpressive lot...
...In facing up to it, the government is constrained to make use of some of its own dark and subterranean means...
...At the very start of my first day in court, defense attorney Harry Sacher asked Louis Budenz if he had read Lenin's book, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky...
...Tales of undercover workers used to be placed in the Balkans and Czarist Russia...
...And two FBI men from Detroit have told about a Lenin memorial meeting in the automobile capital...
...They were as much in the dark as anyone with regard to the identity of this man...
...You...
...I "was watching the faces of those eleven inen a,nd wonderlngwhethcr they had ever read those books, whether, If they had read them, they could possibly understand them...
...I kept asking myself: Who are these men...
...It is something to sit there and watch juryman Russell Janney, the author, following the turns of the actor-judge with loving admiration...
...Their habitual sneers are probably directed as much at themselves as at the court...
...In the meantime, the young man sat there, quietly answering questions...
...The whole outfit was so slithily set up that identities were concealed and mobilization could be quick and effective...
...They don't know, even, how to ask intelligent questions about it...
...Louis Budenz was on the witness stand...
...But no honest person should help to 'spread the notion that Karl Marx is on trial...
...During the noon recess, the whole region about the courthouse buzzed with curiosity as to who would serve as the government's second witness...
...They were so close that I could observe every atti-| tude, every expression...
...And then, when the judge ijiade his enhy, suddenly we saw there on the witness stand, as though he had been materialized by a spiritualistic medium, a dark, quiet, meticulously dressed young man who was indentified as Herbert K. Philbrick...
...A hurried whisper went up and down the rows of defendants and their attorneys...
...His pose and expression are designed to give the impression that he is above Jhe ripples and riots of human emotion...
...Karl Marx, Who wrbte the Communist Manifesto a century ago, is supposed to bo represented by these men...
...This row of little lawyers merely tries tiresomely to delay the procedures of justice...
...It ia a surreptitious business which, so far as it can, tends to debase all our lives...
...Except for rare outbreaks, he sticks to the patois of the Jaw books...
...Ijnean that as human beings in any sort of society, they would not amount flfc much...
...And all the time he had been reporting to the FBI...
...These men are on trial...
...If there was ever a jurybox full of common pepole, this is it...
...In all of its theory and action, the Russian Bolsheviks are the accepted example...
...Are they smart or stupid...
...The judge was taking notes, and after a pause he looked up to ask: "Kautsky, Kautsky—how do you spell that...
...But I sat there on an April day in New York and heard a smooth young man tell about cvilintentioned traitors and clever government spies opprating in the heart of old New England...
...iExcept for one, possibly two, I de,elded that these men are not much...
...read in the papers that Marxism won trial at Foley Square...
...I have never seen his like on any bench...
...Since then I have heard three other witnesses...
...Their repetitious objections are-so routine that they are bored by their own words and actions...
...He is a very special occupant of the juridical throne...
...But the obvious cynicism mirrored in their faces and attitudes was not the product, pf, boredom...
...These little men have nothing to do with him or his works...
...When finally I found time to roll down to the federal courtroom on Foley Square, in the heart of downtown New York, I found myself walking in on a restrained, slow, and on the whole rather dull and routine affair...
...Of "what sort...
...But, to deal with problems like those being presented here, they seemed singularly unprepared...
...How the orders came down from above, how the Massachusetts comrades obediently did as they were told—it was all laid on the line...
...They really belong to a lower world, an underground place which they are trying to enlarge...
Vol. 32 • April 1949 • No. 17
