Mr. RODENBERG. It was Densmore, not Frankfurter.

Capt. HALE. Densmore. Well, sir, I will be very glad to answer any questions.

Mr. SCHALL. You started to make some statement.

Capt. HALE. Of course, the coroner's jury refused to bring in any indictment, and the examination of the witnesses disclosed the attack had been made by the parade breaking up and running into the I. W. W. hall before the shooting began, and the commander of the Butte, Mont., post of the American Legion made a public statement in which he said that the people in the hall had been attacked first, and he said if the officers of the law can not prevent this sort of an attack happening, perhaps the resistance of the raided will have that effect. That was an American Legion man, who is commander of one of the posts in Montana. The New York World put it in an editorial, in which it reviewed the evidence and came to the conclusion that the attack was made before the firing began, and a number of other papers-I think the Nation-reviewed the evidence to that effect, and certainly the coroner's jury did not bring any recommendation at all as to anybody being indicted for that."

Mr. RODENBERG. Were not those boys shot down in the street, which the newspaper reports indicated?

Capt. HALE. No; I don't think so. I think the coroner's jury evidence was that they broke down the door and came into the hall, and were shot after coming in, and then, of course, in the excitement that followed afterwards, various people were hunted down. One man was lynched and hung from a bridge on the theory that he was secretary of the I. W. W., and he turned out not to have been, but a returned veteran from the American Expeditionary Forces.

The CHAIRMAN. Did they discover that after he had been hung? Capt. HALE. They discovered that after he had been hung, because it was a terrible situation out there. It was one of the most terrible pieces of excitement that has ever happened.

Mr. SCHALL. If my memory serves me right, somebody read to me a report in a newspaper where the men were marching through the street and were attacked and shot down on the march.

Capt. HALE. Yes; all the newspapers in the country reported it that way.

Mr. SCHALL. How could a report of that kind originate? I heard an I. W. W.—a carpenter who was working in my house was telling me a speech an I. W. W. made while in Indianapolis, and he went on reciting some of the things that you brought in here that sounded to me like "bunk." I can not understand how the press of the country would-how they could be mistaken on a proposition of that kind. Our boys were shot down in the street, and this fellow stated that these fellows had come up to the hall and attacked them in the hall, and they were shot in the hall and there killed in the hall, and that they wiped the blood up from the floor in the hall, which seemed to me to be a preposterous lie.

Capt. HALE. That is the evidence before the coroner's jury, exactly that, and the reason this report came out the way it did in all the newspapers of the country was occasioned, I should think, by three things: First, the fact that news gets out from the side of the prosecution quicker than from the side of the defense. That is always so.

I think that is universally admitted. The second reason was, there is a tremendous hatred and prejudice against the I. W. W.'s in this country, so that every newspaper wants to picture the anti-I. W. W. point of view. The third reason is that a newspaper loves a sensation, and it is a much bigger sensation if people fire on the American Legion when it is peacefully paraded-I won't say the American Legion than if some of the members break into a hall and scuffle, row, and fight ensue.

Mr. SCHALL. Were not these men killed during the parade? Were not their bodies picked up in the streets?

Capt. HALE. No; the evidence before the coroner's jury showed, as far as I have been able to get the facts, that somebody in the parade started up-as the parade started by the I. W. W. hall somebody in the parade shouted out, "Let's go in and break up the place," or something of the sort; whereupon the parade broke, and a number of young fellows went and smashed down the door and went into the I. W. W. hall, and started to throw literature around, and break up furniture and attack the men who were there, who were not very numerous in number, and after that, some hot-headed man in the I. W. W. who had a gun-and you must remember people still carry guns in the far West more than they do anywhere else-shot, and then the shooting became somewhat general, and then, of course, everybody became terribly inflamed, because the feeling between the I. W. W. and the local people has been awfully high in the Northwest; nowhere has it run so high. It has been at white heat in Washington, over and over and over, and not only the feeling against the I. W. W., but against all organized labor; as for example, in the case of the suppression of the Seattle Union Record for a number of days. That is the most I can tell you about the Centralia affair. I very much deplore the fact that the I. W. W. people made any resistance. I think it is a thing that is probably deplored by all the I. W. W.'s, be cause it has given them a most rotten reputation throughout the country. I know that whenever their halls in New York have been raided, that the police have never found a weapon upon any one of them, and that although their furniture has been broken up and the men have been beaten up no resistance has been made, and their policy there is to refrain absolutely from any retaliation, because they know that public sentiment will go against them so terribly if they retaliate, and that they won't get any meeting place at all. You see the I. W. W. has been raided by the bomb squad in New York-the principal office at 115 East Tenth Street, I think it is, has been raided a great number of times, and the furniture has been seized, and the people have been savagely beaten, and except for one arrest for carrying concealed weapons there have been no concealed weapons found upon anybody. The concealed weapon which was taken off a man who was arrested was a penknife about as large as this, and when the man was taken up before Magistrate Ten Eyck and the knife was exhibited the magistrate pulled a knife out of his own pocket of the same size and character and said, “Officer, what do you mean by bringing a man before me on such a whippedup charge?" He said, "Well, sir, here is some stuff that shows the intent," and he fished out a lot of papers. The magistrate looked them over, and the thing on top was a slip of paper from a newspaper

with one of Dr. Crane's articles. The magistrate gave the detective the dickens and discharged the man. That is the only case in which any concealed weapon has been found on any I. W. W. in the New York raids.

You see, this whole situation is so terribly colored by popular fear and ignorance, that it is almost impossible to get at it.

Mr. SCHALL. What is your idea of the I. W. W. organization?
Capt. HALE. Well, do you mean as to its legality?

Mr. SCHALL. No; I mean as to its objects.

Capt. HALE. Do you mean as to its economic object, or what? There are so many aspects to the situation.

Mr. SCHALL. Where is it pointed?

Capt. HALE. Its purpose is comprised in what is known as the syndicalist movement of labor. That is a movement that originated in the French form of labor organization. The French unions are to-day called "syndicale," the syndicalism which has developed in this country in the I. W. W. If you will make the question more specific, I can answer you better. I might say this, that the Department of Labor, through Secretary Houston, held in some cases not very long ago--I could not give the exact date, but held that the I. W. W. was not on its face an illegal organization so as to warrant the deportation of a man belonging to the I. W. W. merely for being a member of it, and in a case of my own in New York City, one of the Lusk committee cases, in which two I. W .W.'s were on trial for criminal anarchy, the court charged the jury that the I. W. W. was on its face a perfectly legal organization, and that "you must not be influenced in any way by the fact that these men belong to the I. W. W., in finding your verdict upon the facts as presented. Mr. CANTRILL. Did you defend these men before the Lusk committee?

Capt. HALE. The Lusk committee obtained the indictment. They presented the evidence to the district attorney and the district attorney presented it to the special grand jury, called for that purpose, at the instance of our local inquisitors up there. The grand jury found the indictment, and the men were tried. That was the first case in which I was retained. The trial lasted for three weeks, and during that time we lived in a perpetual atmosphere of bombs in the newspapers. While there were statements of every kind in the newspapers, whereas in the court room itself things were as quiet as a country festival-perhaps not that, but as quiet as anything could be. I used to go down to court every day and go ahead with my evidence. The district attorney went ahead with his evidence. When I read the newspapers, coming out of the court room, I learned people had been searched at the door for concealed weapons; people had not been admitted, because they were dangerous anarchists, and I learned various efforts had been made against the life of the prosecuting attorney and against the life of the court, and my clients were publicly connected with the newspaper stories, with the May Day bomb outrages. Well, they had no more to do with that than I did. The statements were spread, emanating apparently from someone in the district attorney's office, which connected the defendants with the bomb question. This sort of statement, don't you know-I wish I had the newspaper clippings here to show you, but this sort of statement that "the bomb squad is busily investigating the evidence,

to find out whether the bomb exploded in front of Judge Nott's house may not have been exploded by this same band.”

The CHAIRMAN. This is all very interesting, but there are some other witnesses, and we would like to have you resume the discussion of the bill.

Capt. HALE. I will be very glad to do so, indeed.

The CHAIRMAN. I realize that you have been taken off the bill by questions from the members of the committee.

Capt. HALE. I did not expect to go into any of this at all.

The CHAIRMAN. But we are anxious to conclude these hearings to-morrow by noon, and if we do so we shall have to get on with two or three more witnesses this afternoon.

Capt. HALE. Well, sir, as my time has been so taken up with answering questions, perhaps you would allow me just ten minutes or something of that sort to conclude my actual argument, the one I expected to make.

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Capt. HALE. I wanted to call the attention of the committee to the fact that under this statute, the Congressional Record for January 12, 1848, would not be mailable, in which Abraham Lincoln made a speech in reference to revolution and the right of revolution. That is one of the famous Lincoln quotations, familiar, I am sure, to all the committee, the speech in the House on January 12, 1848, in which he said:

*

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing Government and form a new one that suits them better. * * Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing Government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with or near about them who may oppose their movement.

* * *

That speech was made by then Congressman Lincoln with reference to something or other, I don't know what, but it is one of the famous Lincoln quotations, and that sort of thing most obviously would not be allowed to go through the mails under the Graham bill, and yet it is printed in the Congressional Record, and there are various other things that are perfectly familiar in American writings. As it is said, political talk is almost always likely to be exciting talk, and even some sober and dignified talker may talk about revolutionary things, such as this clipping from President Wilson in the New Freedom:

We have forgotten the very principles of our origin, if we have forgotten how to object, how to resist, how to agitate, how to pull down or build up, even to the extent of revolutionary practices.

Of course, if any radical was to talk about pulling down and building up to the extent of revolutionary practice, he would very quickly get himself indicted. We have other collections of that sort of thing. I don't need to go into it any further, except to point out when anybody who is a conservative makes excited political speeches, nobody takes it seriously, because he is not counseling crime; as, for example, the Secretary of the State of Massachusetts, speaking in public in Boston a little while ago, said:

If I had my way with these Bolshevists and traitors, I should take them out in the front yard every morning and shoot them, and the next morning I would have a trial to see if they were guilty.

And even Senator Fall said in the Senate:

God forbid that we should appeal to the legitimate rights of the American people to change forcibly every form of Government.

And Billy Sunday, the preacher, said:

If I had my way with these ornery wild-eyed Socialists and I. W. W.'s, I would stand them up before a firing squad and save space on our ships.

We don't talk about putting people like that in jail, because they are not inciting to crime. They are simply using excited political language, and in the same way a Socialist and a Communist or any kind of crank can get up and use wild language, only when he does it we think it is in dead earnest and we run for the handcuffs and say it is a revolutionary movement. There isn't any in this country to amount to anything. There is no revolutionary movement in the sense of blood or forcible revolution. There is a strong revolutionary movement to change the form of industrial society, and incidentally the Government, because they believe the Government is the bulwark of the existing society-to change that to make the fundamental changes, but the methods are not on the one hand there are what they call secondary preliminary methods and on the other hand the method of industrial strike, just exactly as in England at the present moment. The emergency trades-union congress, recently held, threatened a general strike to occur on February 20, which was later extended to March, if before that time the English Parliament had not nationalized the mines. That is the sort of thing these people want to do. They wanted to convert the coal strike into a strike for political ends rather than a strike for higher wages and lesser hours.

They wanted to convert the steel strike into the same thing, and when we put restrictions upon them and prosecute them or give them the cause to think we prosecute them we strengthen the revolutionary desire on their part. We make them less amenable to Americanization. That is why I am against this kind of legislation. I believe that it foments revolution. I believe that the Lusk committee in New York State has fomented more revolution than all of the agitators in this country could have fomented. It is repression; it is prosecution.

The CHAIRMAN. Repress people who have risen up against it in their own country?

Capt. HALE. Repress people who have risen up against it in their own country. In other words, who feel with great sincerity that there is something wrong about existing institutions who do not admire the Constitution, who want to have some other form of Government. People have viewed the Constitution all the way down from people who only want to have one House down to people who want have the President directly chosen from the House, as in England. Mr. KREIDER. This bill does not legislate regarding those matters at all.

Capt. HALE. I think under that bill anybody who got very excited and said some exciting things on the public platform would be in great danger.

Mr. KREIDER. When he advocates force in order to accomplishnot to prevent a labor organization from striking unless certain demands are met. There is nothing like that.