Red Labyrinth

In Manhattan's massive Federal Courthouse on downtown Foley Square, the U.S. Government brought eleven top leaders of the Communist Party to trial. The twelfth, William Foster, 67-year-old party chairman, had begged off because of an ailing heart. The charge, hung on them last summer by a grand jury: they had conspired in 1945* to form the present Communist Party structure and teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. Government.

On the outcome depended the future of the Communist Party as a legitimate political party in the U.S.

Better Not to Weep. But the outcome, by all signs, was many weeks away. If they could help it, the Reds were not even going to let the charge come to the point of a legal decision. Inside & outside the court they did their best to delay, distract and confuse. The faithful, chanting "solidarity forever," marched in dogged droves outside the courthouse. City authorities assembled 400 policemen in the streets and in nearby buildings--just in case.

Inside, while Federal Judge Harold Medina rocked comfortably in a high-backed chair, the defendants' seven lawyers ranted, sobbed and barked up every legal alley.

Medina, who looks like Movie Actor Adolphe Menjou, stopped rocking occasionally to advise the lawyers: "Start sawing wood." Deadpan, Judge Medina listened to a tearful outburst on racial discrimination from Counsel George Crockett. The next day when Crockett, a bespectacled Negro, said that he regretted weeping, Medina advised: "It is generally better for counsel to refrain from weeping in the courtroom . . . And I understand you promise not to do it again."

Crockett leaped to his feet. "I do not say I will not do it again." Said Medina: "Well then, if you feel like doing it, you go ahead . . . with moderation."

Blue-Ribbon Juries. But even the cool and collected Medina had not been able to keep proceedings on the track. They were still in the pretrial stage when the Communists engineered a legal collision which confounded confusion. They challenged the whole system of picking "blue-ribbon" juries. If they were right, then both the grand jury, which had handed down the indictment, and the panel from which the trial jury was to be chosen would be without legal authority. Medina settled himself stoically while the defense lawyers talked that one out.

They charged that blue-ribbon juries were "superior" citizens, chosen from such lists as college directories and the Social Register. They maintained that Jews and Negroes were "systematically excluded." Jurymen had to have $250 in real property. The Reds' lawyers argued that their clients all fell "within the classes discriminated against": Henry Winston and City Councilman Benjamin Davis were Negroes. The others had been "workers": Irving Potash was a furrier; Robert Thompson, a machinist; Gus Hall, a lumberjack; John Williamson, a patternmaker; Gilbert Green, a metalworker; Carl Winter, a draftsman; Jack Stachel, a capmaker; John Gates, now an editor of the Daily Worker (see PRESS), was a former construction laborer.

The lawyers declared that Judge Medina himself, when he was a lawyer, had argued in 1946: "The blue-ribbon jury is made up mostly of bankers, insurance men, brokers, manufacturers and people of means. Taken in the aggregate, with the exclusion of women, laboring men, workers and Negroes, it is a rigged jury."

Judge Medina coolly pointed out: "I got licked in that case." The U.S. Supreme Court later decided that the blue-ribbon system--for juries in New York State, at least--was constitutional.

How Long? Nonetheless, the Communist lawyers were prepared to use this distraction for all it was worth. They dealt out subpoenas to a long list of witnesses, began by summoning members of the jury panel.

Lawyer Harry Gladstein, sometime counsel for Harry Bridges, put Herbert Allen, investment banker, on the stand, Gladstein demanded: Was Allen's name in any college directory? "Unfortunately," said Allen, "I didn't have the opportunity for education you seem to have had. I had to work my way up in life."

Judge Medina chuckled. But the Reds' lawyers bored in again. What race did Allen belong to? How much stock did he own? How big was his house? There were some 500 names on the panel after Allen's. The Reds' lawyers had found a legal labyrinth they could run around for weeks--if Judge Medina let them.

*The year when U.S. Reds, on orders from Moscow, kicked out Veteran Leader Earl Browder, quit playing friends with Western capitalism, and redeclared class war.

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