Redbug-on-a-Slide

The Solicitor-General of the U. S., correct in morning coat, wing collar and striped sponge-bag pants, last week appeared before the U. S. Supreme Court to attack a foreign-born lunchroom proprietor of Hot Springs, Ark. in a case fateful for all alien radicals in the U. S. Important also for Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor were the Solicitor-General's arguments, for in attacking Radical Joe Strecker, able Robert Houghwout Jackson was clearing the name of Frances Perkins, against whom rested impeachment charges based on her alleged mollycoddling of an even more famed alien radical, Australia's and California's Harry Bridges. Two days after Miss Perkins told a House committee what an honest, patriotic woman and public official she really is (see p. 10), Mr. Jackson told the Supreme Court that, in Madam Secretary Perkins' opinion, Alien Strecker is a lecherous, insidious, incendiary character who ought to be deported.

Joseph George Strecker, 50, born in Galicia (then Austria, now Poland), got to the U. S. in 1912 on a borrowed $300. He dug coal for six years in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois at War-boom wages. In 1917 he was not drafted for the army because he came from an enemy country. When he developed sciatica in 1918, he was affluent enough to retire to the baths at Hot Springs, Ark. for two years. In 1920 he turned waiter, soon owned his own restaurant in Hot Springs. He bought real estate and mortgages, had $6,000 when he was arrested in 1934. He no longer has that much. His rise to fame as a test-case radical has cost him dear.

In 1932, just before the Presidential election, Joe Strecker passed a Negro church in Hot Springs, saw a white woman addressing a black & white audience of about 50. Communism was her theme. Joe remembers she told how bread and oranges were being cast into the sea by capitalists to hike prices. When the collection was taken up, Joe tossed in 60/. He must have signed something because he soon received a membership book from Kansas City headquarters of the Communist Party, with six 10^ dues stamps affixed and a handbill urging William Zebulon Foster for President. Joe Strecker, who had voted for Al Smith in 1928, was sufficiently impressed to vote for Mr. Foster in 1932. But he paid no more "dues" to Mr. Foster's party.

In January 1933, a Hot Springs detective called on Joe in connection with an application he had filed for U. S. citizenship. In Joe's room the detective spied the Communist booklet, pocketed it. Joe's citizenship examinations then turned into an investigation of Joe's politics by agents of the Immigration Bureau. They arrested him under the 1918-20 law which says that any alien advocating forcible overthrow of the U. S. Government, or ganging with folk who so advocate, shall be deported.

To various questions they asked him, Joe Strecker gave the following answers:

Q. "Would you bear arms against the present government if the Communists were in a majority and certain of a victory? . . ."

A. "Certainly, I'd be a fool to get myself killed for capitalism.

"Yes, I joined the Communist Party. . . . [But] I do not consider myself a Communist because I am not paying dues to the Communist Party. I do not know whether we shall ever have a Communistic system in the United States. I have read

Marx's books and Marx states that sooner or later there will be a Red Government in every country in the world. I am trying to protect myself. . . .*

"I do not know what is going to happen. I do not know how long I am going to live. If I knew when I was going to die I would get me about four women and have a hell of a time before I die.

"If Communism comes in this country I will not be against it, because I have got to go with the people, and whatever the people want, I will have to go along with them."

Joe sold enough Cities Service stock to buy a $1,000 Liberty bond to post for his freedom. After long proceedings, delayed by the Communist Party's interpolating that it did not now advocate overthrowing the U. S. Government, and by Poland's protesting that it did not want Joe because he was originally Austrian (the village of his birth was obliterated by the World War), a warrant for his deportation which had been issued in August 1934 became effective as of January 1937. Joe hired a lawyer to appeal his case in U. S. Circuit Court at St. Louis. That lawyer drank up his expense money and filed no appeal, so Joe was taken to New Orleans to be deported. But Joe's Hot Springs lawyer, one C. Alpheus Stanfield, whose lucrative practice in Arkansas's easy-divorce courts enables him to take "radical" cases for fun, followed him.

Lawyer Stanfield appealed to Federal District Judge Wayne G. Borah (the Idaho Senator's nephew), who ruled against Joe; then to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Here Judge Joseph C. Hutcheson Jr. found that there was nothing in the Labor Department's record against Joe to warrant deporting him. Judge Hutcheson spoke of "the tyranny of labels over certain types of minds" and twitted the prosecution (inferentially, Madam Secretary Perkins herself) for "a kind of Pecksniffian righteousness, savoring strongly of hypocrisy and party bigotry "

This characterization, so curiously opposite to Congressman Dies's picture of Miss Perkins, Solicitor-General Jackson last week sought to erase. He was arguing her appeal against Judge Hutcheson's ruling. After dragging in Joe Strecker's "four women," he attacked the Communist policy/- which Joe had embraced as a "Trojan horse" policy for capturing the U. S. He asked the Court to read current Communist references to "revolution" not "in the light of prophecy" but as active, ominous, highly contemporary. Joe Strecker's failure to pay further Communist dues was no defense, argued Mr. Jackson. He urged Constitutional liberty of thought and speech for citizens only. Said he: "We don't have to confer upon the guest all the privileges of the household."

The mounting importance of Joe Strecker as a Reddish bug under the national microscope was further emphasized when, to defend him before the Supreme Court, up rose Lawyer Whitney North Seymour of the eminent Manhattan firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett. Mr. Seymour, a Republican libertarian, won freedom in 1937 for Red Angelo Herndon from Georgia's 71-year-old insurrection law. For Joe Strecker he argued that his case paralleled Herndon's, and that in view of the Communist Party's disclaimers, its members constitute no immediate menace such as the 1918-20 deportation law had in mind; and even if they did, Joe Strecker was no longer a member, hence harmless.

This week the Supreme Court's august decision on Joe Strecker is at least two weeks off. Meantime, he waited in Hot Springs, did a few odd jobs (carpentering, paperhanging).

*To protect himself financially against the U. S. going Red, Joe sold enough Armour & Co. 4% bonds to buy 2,200 rubles worth ($1,588) of U. S. S. R. bonds, paying (still) 7% gold.

/- The Communist Party last week filed with the Supreme Court a brief again denying that it believes in, teaches, advises or advocates overthrowing the U. S. Government. As everyone knows, this statement reflects the policy adopted at the Third International's congress of 1935 at Moscow (which No. 1 U. S. Communist Earl Browder attended) exhorting Reds the world over to throw in their lot with liberals for the present, work with them in Popular Fronts until such time-as real Red revolutions become practicable.

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