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reedom

EAR in mind the name Claude
Lightfoot. It may play an im-

_ portant part in American history.

Claude Lightfoot is at this
moment being tried before a U.S.
court because he belongs to a
political organisation the U.S.
government does not like.

If he is convicted he may be
sent fo prison for 10 years and’
fined $10,000. The way will then
be open for thousands of other
Americans — trade unionists,
radicals, Liberals, Communists—
to be imprisoned for the same
reason as Lightfoot because the
government does not like them
or their associates.

But not only Claude Lightfoot,
the 44-year-old Chicago Negro, is
being tried. In the dock with him
is the new U.S. conception of jus-
tice, of freedom, of human rights.

For the first time in U.S. his-
tory a man is facing jail for the
sole crime of being a member of
a political party — and one that
has had 35 years of legal exist-

ence.
*

Lightfoot was arrested last June
under the Smith Act, which had
already been the means of im-

. prisoning Communists on charges

of “conspiring to teach and ad-
vocate the overthrow of the gov-
ernment by force and violence.”

In these trials the prisoners
were never charged with actually
doing anything — merely with
proposing to do something at
some indefinite time in the future.

Another section of the act im-
posed penalties on people for be-
ing members of societies which
advocate the violent overthrow
of the government, but this sec:
tion was never invoked or tested
in court.

The government was, in fact,
not ready to make so obvious a
breach with all democratic rights.
But now, having prepared the
ground, it is going ahead.

The charge against Lightfoot is
in two paragraphs. The first de-
clares that the Communist party
is a society of persons who ad-
vocate the violent overthrow of
the government. The second says
Lightfoot “has been a member of
the said Communist party” and
has knowledge of its objectives.

There is, of course, no dispute
that he has been a member of
the Communist party. He is the

U.S. party’s executive secretary
in Illinois and an alternate mem-
ber of its national committee.

Lightfoot is not even charged
with “conspiring.” The govern-
ment thinks that it is not now
necessary. He is charged only
with joining the Communist party
and having certain beliefs.

This is “guilt by association.”
It is “group guilt.” It is the kind
of “guilt” that makes mass ar-
rests possible. The kind that fill-
ed concentration camps under
Hitler. The kind that led to the
gas-chamber massacres.

The theory of guilt. by associa-
tion was the favorite weapon of
Senator Joseph McCarthy. Mc-
Carthy made association with any
radical organisation or individ-
ual a charge that could lead to
the ruin of every American who
came before his notorious com-
mittee.

But now that charge is a cri-
minal charge — it may: carry a
10-year prison sentence, a $10,000

fine.
*

Consider the devil’s progress
by which the United States has
reached its present denial of civil
liberties, once considered sacred.

First the Congressional “inves-
tigations” of the McCarthy Com-
mittee, the Un-American Activi-
ties Committee and _ similar
bodies; the bullying of witnesses,
the blacklisting, the jailings for
“contempt of Congress,” the em-
ployment of paid’ informers.

Then the arrest and conviction
of Communist leaders under the
Smith Act for “conspiracy,” ac-
sustoming the public to the im-
prisonment of Communists. “
- Now the attempt to imprison
people merely for membership of
a party that has been legal for
half a lifetime. .
*

What is “membership” of the
Communist party? The Commun-
ist Control Act of 1954 gives no
fewer than 14 points to define
membership. Here are some:

Anyone who has made finan-
cial contributions in any form.

Anyone who has “conferred

with officers or members.”

Anyone who has “advised,

counselled or in any way im-

parted information, suggestions,
recommendations to officers or

By PHILIP BOLSOVER -

To the 11 U.S. Communist leaders already serving prison terms under thought-contro! legislation
have been added 12 more who have been ordered by U.S. courts to begin serving their sentences.
shown above .are (seated, left to right): Robert Tho spson, Henry Winston, Eugene Dennis, Gus Hall, John
Williamson; (standing), Jack Stachel, Irving Potash, Carl Winter, Beniamin Davis, Jr., John Gates and
Gilbert Green. Those who began serving prison sen‘ences earlier this month are: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,
Pettis Perry, Claudia Jones, Alexander Bittleman, Alexander Trachtenberg, Victor Jeremy Jerome,
Albert E. Lannon, Arnold S. Johnson, Betty Gannett, Jacob Mindel, William W. Weinstone and George

Blake Charney.

members of the organisation or

to anyone else in behalf of the

objectives of the organisation.”

Anyone who has “acted as an
agent, courier, messenger, cor-
respondent, organiser or in any

capacity in behalf of the organi-
sation.”

By these definitions a “mem-
ber” is virtually anybody any-
where who has associated in any
way with members of the organi-
sation.

What illimitable powers the
security police of the U.S. govern-
ment therefore have in their at-
tempts to disperse all organisa-
tions, to terrorise all individuals
of progressive views!

0d

The charge that the Commun-
ist party advocates the “over-
throw of the government by force
and violence” has been riddled by
one of the highest legal authori-
ties in the land — Supreme Court
Justice Black — who in a dissent-
ing opinion on the first Smith
Act case, wrote of the Communist
leaders:

“They were not charged with
non-verbal acts of any kind to
overthrow the government. They
were not even charged with say-
ing anything or writing anything
designed to overthrow the gov-
ernment. Sey

“The charge was that they
agreed to assemble and to talk
and to publish certain ideas at a
later date; the indictment is that
they conspired to organise the
Communist party and to use
speech or newspapers and other
publications in the future to teach
and advocate the forcible over-
throw of the government.”

These six U.S. Communist leaders in California also face prison under U.S. thoucht-control legisla-
tion. They are (left to right): Ernest F

bert and Al Richmond.

ox, Loretta Starvas Stack, Albert J. (Mickey) Lima, Rude Lam-

The very basis of the charge
against Lightfoot is on all counts’
faked So was the Nazi charge
that Communist agents had fired

’ the Reichstag.

We know what happened in
Germany. And we know how

i

The 11

fascism in Germany led to the
Second World War.

The United Statés has_ still
some way to go before it becomes
completely fascist. But it travels
the same evil road. And we have
had our warning.

Walt Whitman
on witch-hunters

watt WHITMAN, the great Am-

erican poet, believed, to the
core of his being, that all he
wrote, all he did, was to advance
the lot of mankind. Consequent-
ly he involved himself all his
life, in the politics of his day, a
fact which needs highlighting in
this day when so many writers
and artists either run from public
life or accommodate themselves
to the repression they see about
them.

These revealing excerpts from
Horace Traubel’s famous books on
Whitman are as timely as
though they were written today:

How aE

“The trouble is that writers are
too literary — too damned liter-
ary. There has grown up — Swin-
burne, I,think, an apostle of it —
the doctrine (you have heard it,
it is dinned everywhere) art for
art’s sake. Think of it — art for
art’s sake! Let a man really ac-
cept that — let that really be his
ruling thought — and he is lost.
Instead of regarding literature as
only a weapon, an instrument in
the service of something larger
than itself, it looks upon itself as
an end — as a fact to be finally
worshipped, adored. To me, that’s
all a horrible blasphemy, a bad-
smelling apostasy.”

bos Bo os

Whitman wrote of a censor by
the name of Anthony Comstock

who was a special agent for the

US. Post Department:

“The psychology of that man
would baffle devils. He haunts
the purlieus of Heaven with his
crude philosophy; he makes the
worse the better reason; he never
yet has discovered the difference
between virtue and vice; he is
~not so much knave as ass; he goes
about stumbling like a bull in a
china shop; they say sometimes
that he is incompetent for his
job; I go further than that; I say

there should be no such job; no
one is competent to fill such a

job; we want no censors, monitors,
inquisitors.”

u 5 os xt

“T look ahead seeing for Am-
erica. a bad day—a dark if not
stormy day — in which this re-
striction (against the Chicago
anarchists) this attempt to draw
a line against free speech, free
printing, free assembly, will be-
come a weapon of menace to our
future.”

oe % %

A worker said Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass: “How he knows
the life of us workingmen! And

_ what a love for us!” Whitman’s

reply: “Yes, I hope they’re living
words. If anybody knows it, the
workingman should; live words;
the workingman is the average
man, If Leaves of Grass is not
for the average man, it is for
nobody.”

% oa ses

Milton wrote, in Areopagitca:
“As good almost kill a man as
kill a good book. Who kills a
man kills a reasonable creature.
God’s image; but he who destroys
a good book kills Reason itself,
kills the image of God as it were,
in the eye. We should be wary
therefore what persecution we
raise against the living labors of
public men; how we spill that
reasoned life of man, preserved
and stored up in books, since we
see a kind of homicide may be
then committed, sometimes, a
martyrdom.”

Whitman said, of this passage:

“That should be earried over
every library, every publishing
house, every public place what-
soever; children should be taught
it; grown up people should be
forced to remember it. It is
precious, sacred, everlasting.’

; PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JANUARY 28, 1955 — PAGE 10