Mme Perkins' Problems

As Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins must enforce immigration laws that turn unwanted aliens away from the U. S., must perform the sometimes ogreish job of deporting aliens who have lived, labored, sunk their roots in the U. S. No ogress, Frances Perkins last week had on her hands two noteworthy problem cases.

Seaman. Australian Harry Bridges, C.I.O.'s wiry West Coast maritime boss, entered the U. S. legally in 1920, twice applied for first citizenship papers, twice allowed his application to lapse. For Harry Bridges, this was a serious mistake. By the time he made a third application in 1936--two years after San Francisco's bloody General Strike--Secretary Perkins was besieged with requests to deport Australian Bridges as an undesirable alien. This year the hue has been raised still louder by Congressman Martin Dies's Committee on UnAmerican Activities, whose chairman claims that Bridges is a Communist. Secretary Perkins says she is awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on whether Communism provides ground for deportation.* With impatient Chairman Dies even threatening to impeach her unless she acts, Secretary Perkins still refuses to be hurried. Meantime, Los Angeles' Superior Court last week found harried Harry Bridges guilty of another offense--trying to influence it in a labor dispute by releasing a telegram to Secretary Perkins threatening a strike if his union lost the case--fined him $125 for contempt of court.

Cobbler. Year that Harry Bridges entered the U. S., a Tsarist major general, Nicholas Theodore Bogomoletz, who had just distinguished himself on the German front, was put in charge of the armored trains of the White Russian armies operating in Southern Siberia. One night soldiers from General Bogomoletz' own train, drawn up at the station at Posolskaya, inexplicably opened fire on a detachment of U. S. expeditionary forces patrolling the line. Two U. S. soldiers were killed. General Bogomoletz--who said he was asleep when the shooting started--was tried and exonerated by his Russian superiors, much to the dissatisfaction of the commander of the A.E.F. in Siberia, General William Sidney Graves. When the White Russians had to evacuate Siberia later that year, General Bogomoletz, who had acquired as mistress a revolution-widowed girl of 20, Anna Zaporojschuk--escaped from the Bolsheviks to Harbin, Manchuria. Two years later Anna and her protector sailed steerage for Seattle.

To white-haired "Nick" Bogomoletz, now 67, eking out a living as a cobbler on Los Angeles' Hollywood Boulevard, this chronicle last year seemed very remote. But someone called the attention of the Bureau of Immigration to the fact that Nicholas Bogomoletz did not divorce his Russian wife until 1929, year that he and Anna were given their U. S. citizenship. The bureau started proceedings (aided by affidavits of long-memoried U. S. Army officers who were still bitter over the incident at Posolskaya). Result: Bogomoletz' and Anna's citizenship was revoked, and he was arrested for deportation on a charge of moral turpitude.

To the help of Nick Bogomoletz sprang White Russians from California and over the U. S., who did not like to speculate on his fate if he turned up in Russia in 1938. Radio Commentator Boake Carter was not alone in comparing Alien Bogomoletz favorably with Alien Bridges. By last week, when the record of the Bogomoletz case was forwarded to Madam Secretary Perkins with the recommendation that he be deported to Latvia, it had become almost as famed as the Bridges case. Meantime, Nicholas Bogomoletz and Anna Zaporojschuk, who have a 15-year-old daughter, had finally married.

* The case of Joseph Strecker, Austrian born and a confessed onetime Communist. His contention that he is entitled to citizenship since Communist Party membership does not imply advocacy of violent tactics, accepted by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, has been appealed to the Supreme Court.

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