The Jews in America Trilogy (140 page)

The “false reports,” of course, consisted of her letter to the
Star
. The court reminded the jury that the Star's 440,000 papers in daily circulation not only went to thousands of Kansas City servicemen stationed at home and abroad, but was also going to young men of enlistment and conscription age—all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five—as well as to younger men who would soon be of enlistment age. Furthermore, the newspaper circulated to the “mothers, fathers, wives, sisters, brothers, sweethearts, and friends of these men.” The aggregate total of people who could be perverted by Rose Stokes's words he seemed to imply, was staggering. Multiply this by the mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters of the sweethearts and friends, and it was easy to see how Rose's thoughts could cause widespread insurrection across the face of the American continent. The court noted that an attempt had been made, during the trial, to show that the
Star
's editor was equally culpable of printing the disloyal letter. This, however, the court forgave, reminding the jury that Rose had implored the editor to publish the letter, and that therefore the editor was simply being a gentleman by doing something that a lady asked. He added that, “People who … seek to promulgate their views through the press do so generally for the purpose of securing wide circulation and, if possible, adoption of those views”—no matter how dangerous or un-American those viewers might be.

The court embarked upon a long digression on the subject of Great Britain, and its treatment of its colonies, to which there had been a reference “in a rather slighting way.” England, the court reminded the jury, was one of America's allies. So were France and Italy. England's colonies—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—though under no obligation to do so, had all rallied to the cause of the Mother Country and sent volunteers to aid England in its hour of conflict. English was the official language of America, yet the defendant had spoken slightingly of England. “Anything,” the court said, “which leads to a lack of cooperation, anything which in any sense and from any source weakens the manpower and fighting power of that Ally,
is a blow at ourselves, and to the success of our common venture.”

The court then got to what it felt was the heart of the matter: the defendant's pro-Russian sentiments. “The present Bolshevist government, if it can be called a government,” said the court, “is characterized by the defendant as ideal.” The United States, on the other hand, had been characterized as a capitalistic system that oppressed the poor and enriched the middle and upper classes. “This would include,” said the court, “all who, by industry and prudence, have made accumulation and provision for the future. The classes referred to embrace not only those of large wealth but those of modest fortune as well.” In Russia, “the workers, so-called, are permitted arbitrarily to seize and divide up the land and wealth of the country, irrespective of former ownership. If such a system were to be applied to this country, not only the so-called rich, but the small land holder, and the small merchants would be called upon to divide their holdings on a per capita or similar basis. Such are the views of this defendant.” One can only imagine that the conservative Middle Western burghers of Kansas City who comprised the jury were stabbed by fear at these dark words. Did America want its “banks and vaults broken into and the money divided among the people”?

American democracy, the court said, might not be perfect, but it was close to it, and agencies of the United States government were already hard at work on programs to improve the conditions of the poor. Now America was at war, and it was a time for Americans to present a united front to support that war. “Individualism must be put aside for the moment in this country,” the court concluded. “We must now stand shoulder to shoulder … and that is true whatever may be her [the defendant's] opinion about different things, that may be settled here in times of peace and within our own domestic borders. Now the hand of that sort of criticism, and the tongue of that sort of criticism must be stayed until peace is restored and we can work these things out together, as we have always worked out problems here at home.”

In short, the court appeared to be asking the jury to return a verdict of guilty.

And that was precisely what it did. The jury was out only
twenty minutes before coming back with a verdict that found Rose Pastor Stokes guilty as charged on all three counts.

The judge then pronounced his sentence. The defendant was to pay the costs of the prosecution, and to be imprisoned at the Missouri State Penitentiary for ten years on each of the three counts. The only leniency provided was that the three ten-year terms could be served concurrently.

It began to seem as though the first Jewish woman in the
Social Register
, who may also have been the first Communist in the
Social Register
, might also be one of the first
Social Register
listees to go to jail.

In their eighty-nine-page brief for Rose Stokes's appeal, her attorneys were thorough, coolheaded, occasionally witty, and at all times incredulous about he way her trial had been handled. Messrs. Stedman and Sullivan claimed a total of 137 errors, which they proceeded to describe. The lawyers objected to the admission of unrelated testimony about Rose's second Missouri speech in Neosho; to admitting the testimony of Purcell and Dillingham, the two arresting officers; to the testimony of P. S. Dee, the newspaper reporter; to the question asked of Mrs. Gebhardt as to whether or not the defendant “approved” of what was going on in Russia; and to many other fine points of law. But most of the lawyers' objections centered on the fact that the trial had ranged far afield from the “crime” that Rose was accused of committing, which was writing to the editor and causing her letter to be published, and to the judge's extraordinarily biased and prejudicial instruction to the jury—“an appeal to the passion and prejudice of the jury … without relation to anything in evidence in the case, and persuasive as a whole to influence the jury to return a verdict of guilty.

“What the trial judge overlooked entirely, the gist of the whole matter,” the lawyer wrote, “is that
the criminality charged
against this defendant is the effect of her single communication on other minds, with the results in military obstruction by the conduct of others.” In other words, the lawyers contended, if the prosecution had been able to demonstrate that a single soldier had been insubordinate, or a single sailor had mutinied, as a result of Rose's little letter, it might have had a case. But instead all eleven of the witnesses were quizzed on what she
might not have said in her lecture—an “attempt to prove one alleged crime by another.”

Returning again and again to the letter, the lawyers pointed out that all Rose had said was that she was against the government. By this, they insisted, she meant that she was against the Wilson administration, “in the same sense in which every person who voted for candidates of the opposition last November was against the government.” To vote for an opposition candidate, or to disapprove of what an administration was doing, was no crime. “Indeed,” the lawyers wrote,
“we are against the government
… in fulfilling our professional obligations to Mrs. Stokes” by taking her case, in which the government was her adversary. “Only the high temper and passion of the war spirit could account for the writing of this indictment.

“Finally,” the lawyers added, “as to the letter and its understanding, what impact in any reading could these insignificant little sentences have to pervert the general philosophy and patriotism of any reader? Mrs. Stokes is not for the government; she is in the opposition. This is not so startling a discovery as to disrupt the mental poise of a reader.… There was no scintilla of evidence of an obstruction of the recruiting service by this letter and its dissemination. There was no evidence … that her letter constituted in any respect an interference with the success of our military forces and an aid to the military forces of the enemy.”

And what business, her counselors wanted to know, did the judge have in bringing in this hypothetical analysis of what would happen if Russian bolshevism were transported to America?“Why is any of this material included in the charge at all?… There was nothing about the Russians in the letter which is the basis for the indictment.” The lawyers labeled this “a shocking example of judicial impropriety,” and asked, “Under what sort of doctrine of judicial notice does the trial judge give to the jury the benefit of his certainty as to Russian events? This … was more than an appeal to the passions of the jurors. It took away from the trial the character of a decorous criminal prosecution under the genius and liberality of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.”

Russia had nothing to do with her letter. Neither did the loyalty of Great Britain's colonies or the other Allies. In the
course of what the lawyers termed a “meandering trial,” the judge had allowed masses of testimony on extraneous matters, such as Rose's feelings “toward the war, the Red Cross, the Russian Revolution, Woodrow Wilson, patriotism versus internationalism, knitting socks for soldiers, and what not.”

At the end of their brief, Rose's lawyers rather delicately brought up the matter of her rights of free speech, as guaranteed under the First Amendment to the Constitution. It was a tricky point, because a number of prominent American jurists and thinkers had already taken the stance that there were certain clauses in the Espionage Law itself that could be interpreted as an abridgment of free speech, and that the law itself was unconstitutional. Wisely, probably, Rose's lawyers decided to skirt this last issue, but they did note that the trial judge had stated that “individualism must be put aside for the moment in this country.” Replied the lawyers, “If by ‘individualism' the trial judge means the sum total of our individual liberties, then he sets aside the Constitution as a war measure, and this is beyond the remotest stretch of any act of Congress. We submit that it is the most vital function of the judiciary to serve an opposite role, to hold Congress jealously to the line of immunities and liberties preserved to the individual, in war as in peace, by the guarantees of the Constitution.”

The labors of Messrs. Stedman and Sullivan were, in the end, successful. The guilty verdict against Rose Stokes was overturned by the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit, for the Western District of Missouri, and the government dropped its case. But much damage had nonetheless been done. The publicity surrounding the trial had left Rose branded in the public's mind as some kind of traitor or spy, involved in espionage, sedition, un-American and unpatriotic activities, against the war, opposed to the draft, in favor of a Bolshevist form of government, in favor of a similar revolution in America. Her lecture career—for which she had earned handsome honoraria—was over. Her name had become anathema.

Throughout the trial, James Graham Phelps Stokes had been a model of stoic, stiff-upper-lipped, upper-crust, if unhappy, supportiveness. He had obtained leave from his army duties to be with his wife, and appeared every day at her side—looking handsome in his captain's uniform, a walking advertisement
for patriotic duty—and of course he paid the considerable legal bills that the defense of his wife had entailed. But the trial had been an emotional as well as a financial strain, and the signs of this showed in new lines of weariness on his good-looking face, as well as in the abrupt way he dismissed newspaper reporters' questions with, “No comment.” After the appeal was won, both Stokeses did their best to withdraw from the lime-light, and to retire to their private lives. But close friends and family members suspected that the ordeal of the trial had been a final test of the patience of Graham Stokes with his irrepressible Jewish wife, that the test had been failed, and that it was only a matter of time.…

For America's Eastern European Jews, 1919 would be a kind of watershed year. Three seemingly unconnected events—the outcome of the Russian revolution in 1917, the end of the First World War in 1919, and the advent of Prohibition that same year—would interweave and mesh in such a complex way, each event exerting a subtle but powerful force upon the others, that thousands of lives would be affected by their confluence.

The Russian revolution of 1917 took place in two stages—in February, when Nicholas II was overthrown, and in October, when the Bolshevist rule was established. Most Russian Jews greeted the news of the czar's downfall, when it reached America, with great jubilation. Of the Bolsheviks' takeover in October, there was less certainty and unanimity of approval. In New York, the conservative
Tageblatt
was disapproving, and editorialized that true freedom and order would not come to Russia until the Bolshevist movement had failed, and a representational democracy, on the lines of America's, had been adopted. But the socialist-minded
Daily Forward
was rapturous, and its managing editor, Baruch Vladeck, wrote: “Life is strange: my body is in America. My heart and soul and life are in that great wonderful land, which was so cursed and is now so blessed, the land of my youth and revived dreams—Russia.”

America's entry into the war, meanwhile, effectively halted transatlantic immigration from Eastern Europe, and never again would there be such a tide of immigration as had been seen
over the previous four decades.
*
Then, in the clamorous, almost hysterical spirit of jingoism that swept across America following the war, a flurry of increasingly restrictive United States immigration laws were passed that reduced immigration to a trickle, and virtually “froze” the American Jewish population at the figure where it then stood. These laws were drawn blatantly along racial and ethnic lines, and set strict quotas; they were accompanied by much patriotic breast-beating about eliminating “undesirables,” “the foreign element,” decrying “foreign ideologies,” and calling for “one hundred percent Americanism.”