Monstrosities & Martyrs

For 20 weeks the eleven Communists on trial in Manhattan for conspiracy had hankered after martyrdom or a mistrial. Their lawyers had repeatedly raked Federal Judge Harold R. Medina with harsh and measured spite. Sometimes, when their tactics seemed to be getting to him, the judge would leave the courtroom, his face suffused with anger, to compose himself. Last week, at long last, he decided it was time to "reduce the disorder" in his court.

The man on the witness stand was Daily Worker Editor John Gates (born Saul Regenstreif), one of the eleven Communists accused of conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the Government. U.S. Attorney John F. X. McGohey had just asked him who were the authors of a pamphlet issued by the party's National Veterans Committee. He and others had prepared it, Gates answered. Who were the others, McGohey wanted to know. Gates flared up: "Those people work in private industry. I will not disclose their names and jeopardize their jobs."

Answer the Question. McGohey paused at this show of defiance and turned to the court for help. Said Judge Medina: "Answer the question." Loudmouthed Defense Lawyer Harry Sacher stood up and shouted "I advise him of his constitutional right to refuse." Judge Medina stonily intoned "I repeat my direction." Gates was defiant: "I would have to bow my head in shame and I could never raise my head in decent society if I ever became a stool pigeon. Even under the court's direction."

Angrily, the court ordered the answer stricken from the record. The long-sought hour of martyrdom was at hand. The entire defense, counsel and defendants, was on its feet, roaring and waving its arms at the court. Judge Medina hastily ordered the jury from the room. U.S. marshals (some of them rushed down from the Hiss-Chambers trial two floors above) closed in between the defense and Judge Medina, between the defense and the spectators. Said Judge Medina to Gates: "I now adjudge you guilty of a willful and deliberate contempt . . . You are to be remanded until you have purged yourself of contempt for a period not to exceed 30 days." That meant that, instead of being free on bail, Gates would be lodged in jail after each day's session.

Off to Jail. The thick, booming voice of towering Henry Winston, Negro organizational secretary of the party, topped the uproar: "If your honor pleases, now may I be heard? More than 5,000 Negroes have been lynched in this country for such..."

"Now, Mr. Winston--"

"...and the Government of the United States should be ashamed for bringing in this monstrosity."

Judge Medina ordered him remanded to jail for the duration of the trial, then looked around for more trouble. He got it.

His mustached, kewpie-like face thrust aggressively forward, Gus Hall (real name Arno Gust Halberg), chairman of the Ohio Communist Party, sneered: "It sounds more like a kangaroo court than a court of the United States. I have heard more law and more constitutional law in kangaroo courts." Judge Medina ordered him to jail too.

Eugene Dennis. Communist general secretary, added his shrill piping to the tumult. Judge Medina brushed him off with the observation that since Dennis was acting as his own lawyer, the court would deal with him, as he would with the rest of the counsel, at some future date. At last Dennis gave the signal and the disciplined Communists and their mouthpieces sat down. But not before Judge Medina had warned the lawyers that the "proper authorities" would be asked to "take care of ...your contemptuous conduct and your impudence." He had no intention, said the judge, of letting the trial be "disrupted" by such caterwaulings.

Eagerly displaying their fetters for photographers, the trio of jailed Communists were trundled off to the Federal House of Detention for the weekend, thereby missing a $20-a-plate "testimonial dinner" in their honor which 1,900 Manhattan party liners and Communists paid to attend. Their lawyers unsuccessfully harangued the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this week to let them out.

The well-oiled party machinery of protest whirred. The Sunday Worker headlined an interview with Winston's wife and two-year-old son: "We're Proud of Our Daddy." Henry Wallace dutifully got into the act and called it a "native brand of fascism." As the trial resumed this week, 500 pickets chanted and shouted outside the courthouse.

The Communists had achieved martyrdom of a sort, all right, and their friends made their noisy most of it. It had taken a lot of doing. In the hands of a sterner judge than Harold Medina they would have been locked up weeks before for their calculated flouting of all the rules of courtroom conduct.

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