tbrator

Story of The Masses Trial

By Floyd Dell

Art Young's Pictures of It

Morris Hillquit on the

New Espionage Law

John Reed Brings a Message

UPTON SINCLAIR'S

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE: FOR A CLEAN PEACE AND THE INTERNATION

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Louis Post, Assistant Secretary of Labor writes :

"If you were never to write another sentence worth the reading, your articles on a "Clean Peace" and "Internation" would justify your life work. They are an inspiration at a vital moment. To use a familiar but in this case a wholly inadequate expression, they alone are worth a year's subscription. They point out the right road to the true goal. As a slight earnest of my sympathy with the spirit and tenor of those articles and of my confidence that you will make your paper's policy vital with their vitality, I am en-closing check and list of subscriptions."

Governor Hunt of Arizona put all his state institutions on our list. We have had letters of appreciation from people so different in their points of view as Colonel House, Count Tolstoi, Senator Williams, Congressman Baer, Eugene V. Debs, William Allen White, David Starr Jorrla:i, William J. Robinson, Harvey J. Wiley, James P. Warbasse, Gertrude Atherton.

"Now, as so often in the past, I stand immeasurably your debtor for high thought and noble spirit." John Haynes Holmes.

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THE LIBERATOR   CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

EDITOR, Max Eastman
MANAGING EDITOR, Crystal Eastman
ASSOCIATE EDITOR, Floyd Dell

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A Tribute from a Soldier

THIS is a letter from a soldier to whom your new magazine has come as a draft of sweet .air in, say, a Methodist prayer meeting on an August evening. The reading tables in barracks, library and "Y" huts offer many magazines, ranging all the way from the New Republic to Snappy Stories. (Ranging upward or downward as you may please.) They are interesting. So is the war. So might he the prayer meeting. In the usual publications as in the usual religious enter-prises and the cantonments there is material to think about, but so little encouragement! We in the army need encouragement because we know, better than any of you know, what a devil of a state civilization is in.

We are here for a variety of reasons. Some of us are in it because it is the biggest thing that has ever been pulled and we just naturally have to watch the process from the point of view of a cog. . . . or a metal atom in a cog.

The army is intensely interesting, the most interesting experience I have ever had, barring a love affair with my wife. But occasionally it closes in on you. You look for thought among the men and there is none. You look for significance in their reactions and find it so rarely. You look, now and then, at the world outside and it is all rushing forward in such a torrent of physical purpose that you would like to get away into the woods and lie on your back and talk about common birds and extraordinary planets with your sweetheart and forget this man-choked camp and all that it so unconsciously means.

The whole thing is so discouraging if you consider it only intrinsically-just like the elder, droning away in prayer or reveling in a debauch of testimony. You become impatient for it to come to a close so you can get outside and swear or sing and feel the night wind.

And then some one comes in, quietly and humbly and leaves the door open and August whiffs at you and you breathe deeply and can take an interest in what's happening . . . and know that when you are out in the night you'll have a wonderful time talking it over, that you have learned something after all.

That's what happened to me when my best friend, who happens to be my wife, sent me the first two copies of THE .IJ13ERATOR. They are tucked under the blankets of my folding cot now. Yesterday was Sunday and I lay in barracks and read your editorials and John Reed on Russia and Hortense Flexner's verses about shattered trees, and Brubaker's darts, and Floyd Dell's review of "Political Ideals" (which,

The War: Springtime

by the way, was another welcome draft).. . . I didn't miss a line in a paragraph or a shading in a picture, and when I had finished, I wrote things in my diary with a renewed determination to find out all I can of this affair, and remember it, and add it up, and try to have something to say when the last hymn has been sung and we go down the steps which the trustees haven't repaired yet, and strike the open road which I can follow just as Iong as I darned please!

I'm a good soldier. I didn't wait to be drafted. My gang is in a jam and I had to get in myself because, even if I don't see much that is noble in gang fighting, it is interesting, and if I get out alive enough to tell about it no one can ever accuse me of having watched from the side lines. I like to drill and sing and live a regular life, and it is all so significant that I don't find the restrictions terribly galling.

The bunk does tire me, though. You don't find much of it coming from the inside. It is thrown at us, not from us. The boys are all right. . . . It is a splendid show to watch, but now and then we would like to have somebody open the door.

You have done that, Max Eastman. You let the few of us who are interested know that big ideas are current, that people are hoping, as we hope, that the end is to be a bigger stir than the war itself. My interest in the building of this big, paradoxical machine is whetted again. The possibilities of the recoil are so innumerable ! It isn't going to drive right ahead to the avowed goal and stop there. We all know that. Bigger things than making the world safe by agreement of a score of men are going to happen. The truly great ideas will find, in time, fertile ground in the army, and I for one want to be in the service when the men realize what they have undergone, when they see that acquisitiveness has raised so much hell, when they come to know that nations: as we have regarded nations, can not endure in the old manner. . . . Understand me, it won't be mutiny or desertion or any of the crimes classified in the Army Regulations. It will simply be an understanding, a waking up from a tense dream, and a turning to face the new problems of construction.. . . So we hope.

THE LIBERATOR will be such a big figure ! I hope you can keep right on with it. I hope you aren't scotched by the people who are blind and deaf. I shall read and re-read and cherish these copies until others come. May whatever Gods remain on the job bless you and your group.

Pre. H, G.

r-

THE PRODIGAL SON AND HIS FATHER

The Third in a Series of Biblical Designs and Character--Studies

By Boardman Robinson

THE LIBERATOR

Vol. 1, No. 4   June, 1918

The recent trial of the Masses editors is of such immediate and vital interest to lovers of liberty all over the country, that we are devoting a large part of this issue to it. We present first a brief statement of the facts, prepared by the Masses Defense Committee, then the story of the trial, and the speeches made by Morris Hill-quit and Masi Eastman at a Testimonial Dinner given to the defendants by the Liberty Defense Union at the conclusion of the trial.

The Masses Case

'rHE prosecution of the editors of The Masses for

"conspiracy to obstruct recruiting and enlistment" is an attack on the lawful freedom of the press.

It is not an attempt to defend the country against conspirators, spies, or any other classes of criminals contemplated by those who framed the espionage law.

It is an attempt to put four American citizens in jail for expressing their lawful opinions. And it is the culmination of a series of acts which the New York Evening Post has described as "governmental persecution."

Not one word of evidence to prove that these men ever wrote to each other, or ever discussed the subject of the draft or enlistment with each other, after the passage of the espionage law, was adduced by the government.

Not a word of direct evidence that they intended to, or wanted to, or ever even imagined or discussed the possibility that they might obstruct recruiting or enlistment.

No pretense that they ever made an attempt to reach with their magazine men of draft age or men eligible for enlistment.

No pretense that anybody was ever deterred by them from enlisting or registering under the law.

No pretense that they ever received a cent of German or pro-German money, or that they had any

pro-German friends or connections, or anything but hatred for German militarism and the German imperial government.

* * *

The prosecution's evidence of conspiracy consisted solely of the open publication by these men of their opinions about the war and about the principle of conscription, and the rights of conscientious objectors, in a magazine which they owned and published without profit for the sake of individual expression.

In addition to the August, September and October issues of this magazine the government produced a telegram and a few letters written individually by two of the defendants to persons in no way connected with the case and before the espionage law was passed, in which similar opinions were expressed-none of them addressed to prospective soldiers, none of them advising against enlistment or registration. In no one of these letters was there a statement of opposition to the war or to conscription as vigorous as those openly published in the magazine.

The prosecution adduced two issues of The Masses that were written, printed and distributed before the espionage law was passed, and every extreme statement of opposition to war and to conscription in those issues was diligently and repeatedly read to the jury as of equal import with those published after the law was passed.

Upon such evidence, the bulk of it relating to facts ante-dating the passage of the law under which the defendants were indicted, and none of it proving an intent to obstruct recruiting or enlistment, and none of it even tending to prove a conspiracy, or any kind of a plan or arrangement among the defendants, the government is attempting, by working upon the war-time prejudice and excitement of a jury, to send these American citizens to prison.

The defense established by uncontradicted testimony the following facts, not only proving that there was no conspiracy and no intent to violate the law, but proving that every effort was made by the de-