The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  She said that no thinking or well-informed person really believed that we were in this war for the sake of world democracy; that if we were sincere in our belief we would have entered the war when the neutrality of Belgium was violated, and we would most certainly have gone in when the Lusitania was sunk, but we did not enter the war until the U-boat became a menace to world trade, and threatened to isolate the Allies and threatened to cut off the munitions and our over-production that we sent to the Allies, and to threaten the vast loans the capitalists had already made to the Allies.

  She said our men were in this war for what they believed was world freedom or world democracy; that in order to send our men, American men, into battle, they must have a principle to fight for, an ideal, and the capitalists and profiteers knew this and for this purpose the phrase was coined, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” She said further that while our men entered the war in this belief, that they would become undeceived finally and that when they returned to this country it would be with a different belief and they would never take up life again on the old system. She said they would learn while they were abroad that they were not fighting for democracy but for the protection and safeguarding of Morgan’s millions. That when they came back, or perhaps before, this country would be plunged into a revolution that had been for a long time pending, that we had been drifting towards an industrial revolution for a long time and this would most certainly bring it about.

  She said further that the activities of the Red Cross, the activities of the Food and Fuel Administration and other war-created activities, were mere war camouflage. That is all, I believe, she said as directly bearing on the war.

  Mrs. Flowers had brought along a friend, Miss Gertrude Hamilton, to attend the Stokes lecture, and Miss Hamilton was also called as a witness for the prosecution. Miss Hamilton repeated essentially what Mrs. Flowers had told the court, but added one small detail that was new. Miss Hamilton was certain that Rose Stokes had mentioned a poem that she had written, but that Miss Hamilton was quite sure Rose had not read to her audience, in which she had said that she was “thrilled by the sight of soldiers marching down the street.” But now, Rose had said, after second thoughts, she regretted having written the poem and that “if she had the power to recall the poem she would do so.”

  Graham Stokes hired two prominent Kansas City attorneys, Seymour Stedman and Harry Sullivan, to handle his wife’s defense in the case of United States of America v. Rose Pastor Stokes. Most of the trial work was done by Mr. Stedman. When Mrs. Florence Gebhardt was called to the witness stand for the prosecution, it began to seem as though she had heard an entirely different speech. Instead of a lecture that was anticapitalist, Mrs. Gebhardt had come away from the event convinced that she had heard a lecture that was pro-Russian. Asked to describe the talk, Mrs. Gebhardt stated:

  She said that in Russia everything was free, that the land there being occupied was divided and the people were going to live on it as long as they wished, or could move off whenever they were ready; that the vaults and the banks were being broken into and the contents divided among the people to whom they rightfully belonged.

  THE PROSECUTION: Did she say whether or not she approved of that?

  There was an objection to the question from Mr. Stedman, which was overruled, and Mrs. Gebhardt was directed by the court to answer.

  MRS. GEBHARDT: From her remarks I would say she approved of that.

  All told, eleven witnesses were called for the government’s side of the case, and following Mrs. Gebhardt’s testimony the prosecution concentrated on what the witnesses thought the defendant had had to say, or felt, about Russia. Another Dining Club member, for example, Mrs. Margaret DeWitt, testified, somewhat ramblingly, that:

  She spoke of the Bolsheviki as having taken possession of the land and of the country and of having taken possession of the money in Russia, and having taken possession of the land and allowing the principal land holder his fair ratio such as he could till, and that the rest of the land would be divided up among the Russian people, or among the people. And that theirs was an ideal government, that theirs was a true democracy and a pure democracy, and that they offered to the world this idea.…

  I then asked a question. I asked why, if Russia were in this condition, and that she had come to this country and had profited by its institutions and developed here, why she did not return to Russia and give Russia the benefit of that—of her training. That was the time she mentioned the President. She said the President would not permit her. She said Emma Goldman had made that effort, but was not permitted, but she said, “I hope you do not class me with her.”

  The next witness was male, Mr. C. M. Adams, the husband of a Dining Club member, and his impression of the evening was not that Rose Stokes had wanted to disassociate herself from Emma Goldman, but that she had identified herself strongly with, and actually extolled, the famous anarchist. Said Mr. Adams, “Well, she mentioned about Emma Goldman being one of the greatest shining lights in her belief and only wished that she could express herself along the lines in as good fashion as she did.”

  The government had decided that its case would be given greater weight if an actual serviceman could be found who would testify on how Mrs. Stokes’s remarks had affected him. Army Lieutenant Ralph B. Campbell, it seemed, had attended the lecture, and in his testimony he brought up the matter of the poem, which he insisted that Rose had actually read to her audience, thereby contradicting the earlier testimony of Miss Hamilton. Furthermore, Lieutenant Campbell stated, there had been a burst of applause after Rose Stokes read her poem, but that the defendant had “raised her hand to check the applause,” indicating that she no longer agreed with the poem’s patriotic sentiments. There was no testimony to corroborate this.

  In his cross-examination of Lieutenant Campbell, Mr. Stedman tried to make order out of the confusion of exactly what the defendant had said, or had not said, on that fateful evening at the Woman’s Dining Club of Kansas City.

  MR. STEDMAN: I wish you would start out at the beginning of the address and state as much as you remember.

  LT. CAMPBELL: Mrs. Stokes started her address with a resumé of industrial life of the world—

  STEDMAN: Pardon me, state what she said. You are now giving your conclusions.

  THE PROSECUTION: Oh no, he’s not! He is stating the substance of what she said. Do you want him to use the exact words she stated?

  STEDMAN: He stated the “resumé” and I assume it is a conclusion.

  THE COURT: Well, of course, Lieutenant Campbell, you may state as far as you can the substance of what she stated there. The court doesn’t understand by that, that counsel requires the explicit repetition of a long speech, but the substance of the various topics considered and what the subject matter was and her expressions relating to it.

  LT. CAMPBELL: She mentioned the working conditions beginning with practically a written history; discussed the ancient guild system of workers—

  STEDMAN (interrupting): That is not what I am asking for.

  THE PROSECUTION: Yes it is.

  THE COURT: Are you asking him to attempt to repeat the speech as near as he can verbatim?

  STEDMAN: No. No man living could probably do that.… In substance what I am asking for is the language and not conclusions.

  THE COURT: You may ask him for anything you see fit as near as he can recall. We are not going to take up time here to have an hour’s speech recited by the witness.

  STEDMAN: I am not trying to quarrel with Your Honor.…

  THE COURT: Very well. You are at liberty to ask him about any portion of the speech you desire.

  STEDMAN: I understand the court’s ruling on this to be then that I cannot ask this witness the substance of that address?

  THE COURT: I said that you could ask the substance of it but not to the extent of having him practically repeat in substance the entire speech which would amount even though not verbatim to something like an hour or more.
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  Throughout this interchange, the prosecution, in the person of the United States district attorney, remained silent, allowing Mr. Stedman and the judge to become further at loggerheads, and to work each other into the position of adversaries. Mr. Stedman seems to have been principally interested in “language”—as much direct quotation from the Stokes speech as the witness could remember—and the judge seems to have taken the position that this was asking the impossible. Meanwhile, it had probably begun to be clear to Stedman that no actual language would be forthcoming from Lieutenant Campbell. Mr. Stedman stepped away from the bench, saying, “Very well, to that I wish to take an exception and I do not care to cross-examine the witness any further.”

  All this testimony and cross-examination was very curious because, supposedly, the government’s case against Rose Stokes was to be built upon the letter she had written and caused to be published in the Star on March 20, and not on the speech she had given to the Dining Club on March 16, about the content of which no two members of the audience seemed able to agree anyway. Still, there was one final, hostile witness from the Dining Club audience, Mrs. Eva J. Sullivan. Mrs. Sullivan testified that just before Mrs. Stokes had been introduced, the club’s president had handed the defendant “a piece of paper”—presumably the check for her honorarium—saying, “I will have to take care of this, because it is your money,” to which Mrs. Stokes had replied, “You may not want to give it to me after you have heard my talk.” Mrs. Sullivan went on to say that the tenor of the talk had been that there were two classes of people who were interested in the war—one class for democracy, and the other for profit, and that the defendant had made the statement that she was “afraid the profiteers were getting control, and misleading the others.”

  As the trial progressed, it seemed to get farther and farther afield from the “wilful, felonious” act Mrs. Stokes had been charged with committing: writing the letter. Next, the prosecution brought in a witness to testify about an entirely different Stokes lecture, which she had delivered four days after the Dining Club talk, hundreds of miles away in the little town of Neosho, Missouri, in the southwestern corner of the state. Of what he could recall of this second lecture date on her Missouri tour, Mr. Frank D. Marlow said:

  She said that the government at Washington was controlled absolutely by the moneyed class; that she believed that President Wilson was honest and sincere; that he was helpless for the reason that the government was controlled by the profiteers or the moneyed class. She said that she couldn’t sanction and endorse the war because it was a war for the profiteer. She said that freedom of the seas meant freedom for the millionaires and she pointed to herself as one of those millionaires. She said that she couldn’t advise nor urge men to fight in this war for the reason that it was a war for the profiteers.

  All sorts of testimony was heard in the trial that probably would not be judged permissible in a court of law today. For example, one of Rose Stokes’s arresting officers, Chief Deputy United States Marshal James N. Purcell, was allowed—over objections from the defense table—to describe his conversations with the defendant immediately after her arrest, when she would have been far wiser to have curbed her natural loquacity. She had told him, said Officer Purcell, that the United States government was controlled by the profiteers; that the war was between the capitalist classes on both sides, and that therefore it made no difference which side won as far as working people were concerned. She said that if Germany’s winning the war would improve American working conditions, then she was all for Germany. As for what was going on in Russia, she said that the press accounts were not true, but were “censored to suit the people,” as the vested interests in the Allied powers wanted them to be censored.

  Shackled to the wrist of Officer S. W. Dillingham of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, another of the arresting officers who was allowed to testify, she was as voluble as ever, and allegedly told him that she hoped that both Germany and the Allies would be defeated. The only victory she wanted to see was for the working classes. Mr. Dillingham said that he asked her, “Is it your point to cause a revolution in this country, as in Russia?” She replied, “Yes.”

  On March 29, while awaiting her arraignment, Rose Stokes was allowed to grant an interview to Mr. P. S. Dee, a reporter from the Kansas City Post. His testimony was that Mrs. Stokes had told him that the country had gone “war crazy,” that “profiteers were getting such a strong hold on the government that after the war it would be absolutely impossible to jar them loose,” and that she “feared for the working class, whose conditions were already so bad.”

  Only briefly did her letter to the Star, which constituted the entire basis of the prosecution, come into the proceedings. When the paper’s managing editor, Mrs. Stout, was cross-examined, Mr. Stedman tried to shift some of the blame onto Stout for publishing the seditious material, while at the same time turning it over to federal authorities. There was the following exchange:

  STEDMAN: Did you think its [the letter’s] possible effect was a violation of the Espionage Law?

  STOUT: I was not familiar with the legal aspect, the technical aspect, but it seemed to me it was a subject the government should have.

  STEDMAN: Did you think it might possibly create insubordination?

  STOUT: I did not reason about it to that extent.

  STEDMAN: Did you think that it was seditious?

  STOUT: I thought it was disloyal.

  STEDMAN: You thought it was disloyal?

  STOUT: Yes.…

  STEDMAN: You thought it was disloyal and you sent 440,000 copies to people who read your paper, did you?

  STOUT: Yes.

  One of the few members of the Dining Club who took the witness stand in Rose Stokes’s defense was Mrs. Annette Moore, the club’s president, who, after all, had engaged Rose as a speaker. Mrs. Moore said:

  Her subject was “After the War, What?” and was purely problematical and apprehensive in every regard. Her whole thought seemed to be for the working class, and seemed to be that if—she precluded [sic] every remark with “if”—and if such and such were the fact, if the profiteers were permitted to charge such extortionate prices, such prices as the world had never known before, that in that event that when the boys came home from the trenches and found the democracy they had been fighting for had not been won, then we should have a social revolution in this country.…

  She said as she saw these boys marching down Fifth Avenue, that she was thrilled at the sight of them, and she said that she was inspired to write this poem, and I believe—I am not quite certain on that point, but I believe she said that if the boys had not been fighting for democracy, and did not get what they had gone to fight for, that she would feel like recalling that statement.

  Mrs. Moore’s testimony was not exactly a powerful defense, but at least she did not mention anything about an endorsement of the Bolsheviks, which had seemed to obsess so many of the other witnesses.

  Rose Stokes then took the stand on her own behalf. Once more, the subject was her remarks to the Dining Club, and not her letter to the editor, which was at issue. She began by stating at the outset that she had made no mention of the Red Cross on the evening of March 16, 1918. She then offered a summary of her lecture. Her summary was very long—too long, perhaps, because Rose was a woman who, given an audience to listen, always rose to the occasion—and the prosecution made no effort to interrupt her. This was what she told the judge and jury:

  Now I said the war, at the bottom, was economic.… And I said that the United States, as other governments, had entered the war from vital pressures of vital interests; that no government ever declares war for purely idealistic reasons.…

  I further said … that peoples have to have an ideal, that peoples on the contrary always went to war because of an ideal, and that therefore, if the people would fight at all, they must be stirred in their idealistic natures. Their hearts, their minds, are simple, pure, clean, and they desire to fight on
ly for the highest things; and that when President Wilson uttered the great watchword of democracy, “We will make the world safe for democracy,” the people arose to answer that call. And I said, “Can you imagine the people, who would die fighting for an ideal, fighting for purely economic reasons? Can you imagine the people fighting for such a thing as Morgan’s dollars?” I said that when men fight they answer a great call, and that we could not get a baker’s dozen, that is the very phrase I used, that we could not get a baker’s dozen, if we had called out, “Come on, and fight,” for instance, “for Morgan’s dollars.”

  I said I had two brothers in the service, one in the army and one in the navy. I had persuaded my good mother, who hates war and who is so much opposed to killing that she would not have her boy go into the army, but he was eager to go and I wanted him to go, and I persuaded her and it took me a long time to persuade her, and finally she let him enter the navy and he is there now.

  I said I was not opposed to the war; the war was upon us, it was here, we could not stop it.…

  I never said our men were befooled. I said our men answered the call of democracy, believing they were fighting for democracy, and when they came home, when—if they found the things they fought for were not gained, that undoubtedly we should have both an industrial and social revolution in this country.…

  I asked for questions and for a while we discussed further these matters and one question that was asked me was this: “Do I approve of the social revolution in Russia?” I said I approved of the ideal for which Russia was striving, and I approved thoroughly of the ideals of the Bolsheviki, the ideals they were striving for; that I knew them to be honest, sincere socialists who were working in the interests of the people; that they were socializing land and industry in Russia as fast as these could be socialized, and naturally there is always in great changes—great political, social or economic changes—some distress, just as there is in so-called peaceful times elsewhere; but that the newspapers, through the strict censorship, had not given us the truth about Russia, and I had reasons to believe through sources of information that I had, coming through such men as Colonel Thompson of the Red Cross, recently returned from Russia, and men like Lincoln Steffens, recently returned from Russia—that what I had learned from them gave me a different impression, and that President Wilson himself had heartily supported the ideas and aims of the Russian revolution.