Oklahoma Storm Signal

Although the war-winning ways of the Soviet Army have stemmed the flow in the press of terrorizing descriptions of the Bolshevist menace, there remains still an undercurrent of red baiting in several states which is reminiscent of the shameful violations of civil liberties that followed the last Armistice. the Oklahoma criminal syndicalism case is a test case, in a sense, for it may determine the whole temper and atmosphere of civil liberties for the duration of the crisis, and for the period of local reaction against Communism which may follow this war.

In Oklahoma the signs are encouraging. When the Oklahoma Criminal Court of Appeals reversed a lower court decision convicting Alan Shaw, Eli Jaffe and Ina Wood for membership in the Communist Party and possession of literature, most of which can be found in Widener's stacks, the Red Herring was thrust back into its barrel. But the people who prosecute Communists because they are Communists, and the law which they used for their drive against local Reds, are still extant, and their disregard of the Bill of Rights can continue to damage civil liberties.

The case was brought, after complaints by the American Legion and the Catholic Church, during the election campaign of 1940 as part of the drive against Communist election activity. Ironically, a party prosecuted for advocating overthrow of the government by force was brought to trial at a time when they were resorting to the very orderly ballot box.

And thirty states have similar sweeping syndicalism acts on the books. In one of them the new crime of syndicalism is defined as "Any doctrine or precept advocating . . . unlawful acts of force . . . as a means of accomplishing a change in industrial ownership . . . or effecting any political change." These laws are a menace to civil liberties because they do not fix the line between permissible and punishable utterances, and because, though they seem at first sight to apply to thoroughly seditious persons, they can easily be interpreted by juries in times of excitement of include peaceable advocates of industrial or political change.

The Oklahoma court remanded these three cases for retrial, ruling that no competent evidence had been submitted that the Communist Party or the defendants had either sought to overthrow the government by force and violence or advocated such doctrine. It is fortunate that the higher court could sense the weakness of a law so susceptible to wide interpretation when it deplored prosecution for opinion and made a plea for the wisdom of giving people "an opportunity to let off a little steam . . . against the possible wrong-doings of the government." But, though the interpretation was condemned, the law itself was upheld, leaying the way open, under it, or one of the thirty-two similar state laws, for a repetition of the case of De Jonge vs. Oregon in which the state sentenced a man to seven years' imprisonment for nothing else except assisting in the conduct of a meeting whose only alleged unlawfulness lay in its being called by the Communist Party.