walk have been used. In some sections vagrancy has become a favorite charge and disorderly conduct can also be used to harry the unwelcome speaker. In New York City members of the Worker's Party were arrested under a section of the penal code forbidding aliens to carry firearms. The actual crime was drilling with stage muskets in preparation for a parade. Seagle describes a case in Alabama in the following passage: "In one of the classic cases in the reports, arising in Atlanta, Georgia, a professor desiring to speak on Socialism was refused a license by the mayor. When he attempted to speak without one, he was arrested and tried by the very mayor who had refused the license, who also happened to be exofficio judge of the City Court. The mayor must have been gifted with a fine sense of irony: he sentenced the professor to labor on the public works". 7 7. Seagle, op. cit., p. 41. CHAPTER IV THE ADMINISTRATION OF FEDERAL JUSTICE Severe criticism has been directed at the Department of Justice for its administration of the Espionage Acts. It is claimed that prosecutions were made with little regard for the constitutional rights of freedom. It has been shown that the Bureau of Investigation of the Department was guilty of expending large sums of the government's money for the prosecution of harmless opinions. Prosecutions were first made against disloyal utterances due to the war fever and later against anything that smacked of the "reds" and "Bolsheviks". The red hysteria which followed the war was apparently a transmutation of the war fever. This chapter will be devoted to a discussion of the activities and methods of the Department of Justice in the prosecution of violators of Federal laws during the war and the two years immediately following. Federal judges are practically selected by the Attorney General of the United States. Applications for appointment are referred to him and investigated and reported on by him. The recommendation is made to the President and is usually acted upon. It has been charged that the Department supervised the Federal judges during the prosecutions under the Espionage Act. This charge has not been disproved but a decision must be withheld until further information is obtained. While some of the Federal judges went out of their way to lay on heartily against those accused before them of violating the Espionage Act the list is not large. It is The Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice The Bureau of Investigation was created in 1908 as an adjunct to the Department of Justice. In the beginning it was a small bureau with an annual appropriation of less than a half million dollars and 141 employees, but it grew during the war to the largest bureau in the Department with over 600 employees (excluding those in the post office, Army, and Navy) and an annual appropriation of about two and a half million. The Bureau was under the leadership of William J. Burns who was formerly the head of his own private detective agency. The bearing of the bureau upon civil liberties be comes evident when we understand its activities. According to the report of the Attorney General for 1920 some of its chief features were: 2 "1. Collecting evidence and data upon the revolutionary and ultra-radical movements for use in such proceedings as might be instituted against individuals or organizations. 2. A card index numbering over 200,000 cards, giving 3. A review of the reports of the special agents con- 4. 5. Special attention to strikes in which radicals were alleged to take part--notably the steel and coal strikes of 1919, the railroad shopmen's strike, the switchmen's strike of 1920 and the coal strike of 1922". It is evident that in such a system of watching there is 1. See Chafee, "Freedom of Speech", pp. 81-83. 2. pp. 172-9. |