Shoes on the Stand

A towering, well-tailored hodcarrier with a roguish black mustache clambered into the witness chair in a San Francisco federal courtroom last week, thumbed his red suspenders and settled back for a long stay. John Schomaker, former Communist, was Witness No.1 in the case of the U.S. v. Harry Bridges.

The Government proposed to prove that Bridges perjured himself at his naturalization proceedings in 1945 when he swore that he had never been a Communist. Schomaker had served as business agent of Bridges' International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, but lost the job in a union election in 1938 and eventually quit the union.

One morning in October 1933, Schomaker, Bridges and a Communist named Bruce B. Jones sat in a restaurant sipping coffee (paid for by Bridges) and talking. "In the course of the conversation," said the witness, "Jones put the $64 question to Bridges. The question was: 'When are you going to join the party, Harry?' Bridges already had the application." Bridges acted "kind of coy" for a few minutes, Schomaker went on, but finally he signed up under the name of Harry Dorgan, using his mother's maiden name.

Load of Briclcs. Amid persistent objections from Vincent Hallinan, Harry Bridges' brassy chief defense lawyer, Hod-carrier Schomaker (known on the waterfront as "Shoes") then proceeded to drop a full load of bricks on the pencil-nosed leader of the I.L.W.U.

He testified that he personally took up Bridges' party membership cards on two occasions and issued him new ones; he often saw Bridges pay party dues. He told of meetings between Bridges and party officials, and testified that the Communists were in complete control of the bloody 1934 West Coast waterfront strike, with Bridges taking orders from Sam Darcy, California Communist boss at the time.

Bag of Tricks. Rugged, bellicose Defense Attorney Vincent Hallinan, who hasn't been quite so rambunctious since Judge George B. Harris clamped a six months' jail sentence on him early in the trial for contempt, rushed at John Schomaker like a cocky mahout. Pretending to read from a transcript of Schomaker's testimony in a 1939 court hearing, he asked the witness: "Do you remember being asked 'Are you a member of the Communist Party?' Answer, 'Who, me? No.' "

"That is very possible," said the flustered witness, "but I don't recall it." During the luncheon recess. Government lawyers looked up the 1939 transcript, found no such testimony. Confronted with the evidence, and lectured by the judge for his conduct. Hallinan insisted, "Anything I can do to show this man is lying I'm entitled to do ... I set out to trick him and I did."

For 2 1/2 days, frustrated Lawyer Hallinan tried by every trick he knew to rattle Schomaker, and found himself instead an unwilling straight man in Shoes Schomaker's comic routine. Hallinan tried to show that Shoes had too good a memory of events that took place years ago: "You even said Bridges got out on the left side of the car and you got out on the right." "I guess Bridges was more left than I was," cracked the witness.

By week's end, Schomaker's devastating testimony was unshaken and the Government had produced another ex-Communist to substantiate it. For the first time in its ten-year effort to deport Harry Bridges to his native Australia, the U.S. seemed to be getting somewhere.

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