THE SEDITION TRIAL

...I care considerably what becomes of it, and I am not sure that it is doing itself any good in the present instance...

...The people who listened, via the leaky steam pipes, to the deliberations of the Insull jury, discovered that several members of that body refused to hold Samuel guilty because they did not fully trust themselves as judges of the intricate maze of evidence presented...

...What if the defendants are acquitted, as they very well may be ? The reason I think they may be is the reason that Sam Insull was acquitted...

...As long as injustice abounds, in the economic, political, or social orders, its victims are going to be anti-Semitic...

...In the first place, those Jews who are glad that anti-Semites are being tried for no-matter-what are sadly deluded as to the way to save the Jews...

...Here are some 30 assorted indecent individuals, ranging all the way from Lizzie Dilling, whose Red Network was once endorsed by the Americanism Commission of the American Legion, to the Messrs...

...So, too, with conspiracy cases...

...Those of the defendants who were not actually in the pay of the Nazis were, I don't doubt, in enthusiastic correspondence with those who were...

...The lawyers for the defense have been trying, and will continue to do so, to gum up the machinery of the case and win an acquittal from a bewildered jury...

...One, or two, or half a dozen jurymen say, "Dog-gone, this guy may be guilty, but it would take a Philadelphia lawyer to understand the case, and I'm not going to send a man up when I'm not positive...

...If she did, then I must say that the United States was neither safe nor secure in the first place, and that I do not believe...

...Anti-Semitism is a sickness that takes root in already sick bodies politic and flourishes as the sick bodies grow sicker...

...The sickness has got to be cured, and the Jews, if they want to be saved, have got to cure the sickness of the body politic...

...But where Pel-ley, Deatheridge, and some of the others were working the anti-Semitic racket like so many of their countrymen before them, the Nazi agents used them simply to spread poison, be it anti-Semitism or anything else, against the American Government and such of its officials as were anti-Nazi...

...If they win their acquittal, or a high court reversal of a conviction, the Dillings, Pelleys, et al., will be stronger than ever before...

...I would like to see somebody try to prove that Lizzie Dilling constituted a clear and present danger to the United States of America...

...But anti-Semitism, anti-Negroism, and anti-Catholicism have never been illegal in this great land, and I, for one, am glad they never have been because I think that laws which won't work are a menace to law in general...

...They have all been thrown together into a conspiracy, and conspiracy is a devilish hard charge to prove...

...they will have what appears to be the sanction and approval of the courts on their indecent activity...

...Of course their activity was useful to the Nazis, but will the jury believe that they conspired to destroy the republic...

...No, I am not worried about the defendants...

...The way to save the Jews, as Mayer's millions of followers already know, is for the Jews, every last bedeviled one of them, to live such exemplary lives that the Gentiles will ultimately be ashamed of themselves...

...The Dragnet Technique In the second place, the great democratic doctrine of civil rights is that expounded by the late Justice Holmes...

...The dragnet technique of conspiracy indictment, which throws a lot of nuts, petty racketeers, and genuine villains together—that, my friends, constitutes a clear and present danger...

...Kunze, Viereck, etc., who were taking Nazi money for fomenting fascism in the United States...

...The only solution to the dilemma is a solution which it is too late to adopt...

...Whichever way the trial goes, the social fabric which holds the community together will be worn a little thinner...

...I am worried about the country...

...But I like the country, with all its and my faults, and I hope it does not have to stand the strain of very many more trials like this one...

...First: don't try to illegalize phenomena which can not be illegalized...

...Anti-Semitism, for instance, may be no less intense, and may be a great deal more, than it was before Pearl Harbor, but a movement for legislation against it, to which I think this trial is a prelude, will go great guns on the grounds that after all, aren't we at war with Hitler and isn't Hitler anti-Semitic ? There are a lot of principles here, as there always are when Mayer hits the holiness trail...

...the Nazis never really cared who the slaves were, and Aryanism was simply a phony used to recruit the shlemiehls...

...That's a tough assignment for the Jews, but, with the Gentiles as bad as they are, it is no tougher than trying to be no worse than the Gentiles...

...And second: protect the country against such phenomena by spreading the blessings of democracy so widely and deeply all over the country that the citizens will laugh the Pelleys out of existence...

...Holmes insisted that no man should be gagged unless his words constituted a clear and present danger to the safety and security of the community...

...Their followers will be cheered immensely, and diseases like anti-Semitism will spread at a somewhat faster rate than before...

...It is not yet too late to spread the blessings of democracy, though the hour may be approaching...

...And the technique of using either a courtroom inflamed by war fever (or the long arm of the executive, as in the case of the postoffice suppression of Silver Charley Cough-lin) to get rid of people we do not like—that, too, constitutes a clear and present danger...

...If you, for instance, kill a man, and it develops that just before you killed him I told you I hated him, did I conspire with you...

...The Nazi idea is, and always was, to rule a slave world...

...they are all of them bad people, engaged in low and indecent activity, and I do not care what becomes of them...

...So something like half, or more than half, of these sedition defendants were simply continuing to engag-e, after Pearl Harbor, in the same activity in which they engaged legally for many years before...

...Suddenly they're seditionists...

...Bookkeeping cases of that sort are hard to win, sir ply because the jury may be lost in the labyrinth of the case...

...Those Jews who want to prosecute anti-Semites are suffering from cart-and-horse trouble...

...Hirohito is no more an Aryan than Hitler, and less of one than Joe Louis...

...But I will tell you what does constitute a clear and present danger...

...Issues Of The Case Of course the Government has some sort of case...

...I do not like the defendants in this trial, and I was busy exposing them years before anybody ever took notice of them...

...A Two-Part Solution And if they are convicted and placed in stir, they will be martyrs to their followers, and powerful institutions like the Chicago Tribune, which uses them for its reactionary aims, will use the conviction as a sign that free speech has been strangled by Roosevelt...

...It may be too late to prevent a wave of legislation which will not work...

...It's a two-part solution...