Talk No Crime

A big boast by Paul F. Kassay, young Hungarian, led to his indictment two months ago under Ohio's drastic criminal syndicalism law.-- Kassay was a mechanic at the Goodyear-Zeppelin airdock where the Navy's Akron was being built. He bragged to workmen beside him that the great dirigible would never take the air because he was craftily leaving loose rivets in her frame. The workmen turned out to be U. S. Department of Justice agents who yanked Kassay off the job, turned him over to the State of Ohio to be prosecuted as a dangerous radical (TIME, March 30). The case against Kassay rested on what he had said, not what he had done, because investigators turned up no legal evidence of sabotage of rivets on the Akron. He was held in $40,000 bail.

Last week Kassay again found himself a free man. Judge Walter B. Wanamaker in Common Pleas Court at Akron quashed his indictment on the ground that the syndicalism statute was unconstitutional. His reason: it violated the guarantees of free speech. Conceding the State's right to protect itself against subversive doctrines, Judge Wanamaker ruled: "Mere talk, in and of itself alone, unattendant with evil consequences that might reasonably be expected to flow there from, cannot be made by law a crime in Ohio."

Efforts to repeal the syndicalism law, enacted in 1919, during the current session of the Ohio Legislature mustered only ten votes when War veterans' organizations lobbied for its continuation as a protestation against Reds.

Judge Wanamaker, active member of the American Legion, was one of the first U. S. aviators shot down behind the German lines. His ambition is to become, like his father, a justice of Ohio's Supreme Court.

--Syndicalism, from the French syndicate (trade unions), differs from orthodox Socialism in that it advocates direct producer control over industry by the Unions rather than through the medium of the State. U. S. example: Industrial Workers of the World. Syndicalist doctrines have now been absorbed by Communism. In 35 States which enacted Wartime laws to protect their governments, advocacy of syndicalism is a criminal offense. Active use of these statutes against Communists is still made in California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey. In California are jailed eight violators of the syndicalist law, in Pennsylvania eight more.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.