SOCIALIST YOUTH SCORE MAJOR LEGAL VICTORY IN U.S.
The Bloomington, Indiana, case came to a most sudden and dramatic end March 20, the day the trial opened before Monroe Circuit Judge Nat U. Baw. after listening to arguments by Prosecuting Attorney Thomas Hoadley and Defense Attorney Leonard E, Boudin for two and a half hours, the judge quashed the case,
He ruled that the 1951 Indiana anti-Communist statute was unconstitutional and that his ruling barred any further indictments of the defendants James Bingham, 25, Ralph Levitt, 25, and Tom Morgan, 22.
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Such a decision is historic, So far as is verifiable at the moment, this is the first time in American legal procedures that a judge at this level has declared a law unconstitutional, The timehonored procedure has been for the judge to determine whether or not the law in question has been violated and leave it to the higher courts to decide the constitutionality of the measure involved, Judge Hilits decision thus establishes a new precedent, and -=- by an ironic turn -- in the very field that up to now has been the most. sensitive in the United States: witch-hunting.
Hoadley had secured two indictments of the three members of the Young Socialist Alliance. Lysal, a youth organization that adheres to the general position of Trotskyism, One indictment charged them with attending a public campus meeting March 25, 1963, where “a person from New York delivered a violently anti-capitalistic speech." The speaker was Leroy McRae, a young Negro socialist making a speaking tour of campuses throughout the country. The other indictment charged them with moeting May 2, 1963, in an apartment rented by-John Glenn, a local attorney who later traveled to Cuba-in defiance of a State Department ban on such travel,
Under the infamous ‘Indiana law it was a crime for "two or more persons to assemble for. the purpose.of advocating or teaching" the overthrow of the state or federal government by "forse, violence or any unlawful means." a
The Young Socialist Alliance did not take the indictments in . silence or lying down, The leaders and members fought back with all their energy. Their principal tactic was to publicize the case as widely as possible and to seek backing for the legal defense among all circles interested in defending democratic rights, To centralize are york they organized the Committee to Aid the Bloomington Students CABS].
They made a pamphlet out of Leroy McRae!ts speech. They took the efforts of the prosecution to try the case in the local red-baiting press and reproduced this “evidence" on a wide scale, They wrote hundreds of letters to prominent “individudlis. They sent speakers to every possible campus. They called the case to the attention of campus newspapers and to the editors of the daily press although at first the reaction of these spokesmen of the "free" world was to dump their appeals in the wastebasket, = ~ oo
But they began to get results, Bertrand Russell came to their -defenses; and Linus Pauling,..twice winner of a Nobel prize; and the writers Norman Mailer, Glancy Sigal and Lionel Trilling; and. Otto Nathan, friend of Albert Einstein and executor of his estate, Murray Kempton of The New Republic, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker and David Dellinger of the magazine Liberation backed the case, as did Mark Lane and Dr, Willard Uphouse, and Carl and Anne Braden, The list grew longer and longer. As for the colleges and universities, the outstanding professors who added their names grew by the hundreds,
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becoming one of the most impressive lists the country has seen in many, many years. The list, in fact, reads like a who's who of distinguished names on the campuses of the United States.
The Emergency Civil Liberties Council provided its best-known attorney Louis Boudin.
As the trial date neared, branches of CABS were organized on an increasing number of campuses, and the YSA stepped up recruiting activities, Young students, new to the ideas of socialism, but aroused over the case, prepared their own briefs for talks and educationals on the subject. Nation-wide tours were prepared and a campaign launched to raise as much as #10, 000 to help cover defonse costs.
In response to these preparations by the defendants, the witchhunters of Bloomington tried to work up a truly venomous smear «= to associate the defendants with the events in Dallas!
But this proved completely ineffective in face of the careful, consistent work of the Young Socialist Alliance in spreading tho truth about the case, And the response on campuses from coast to coast before the trial even opened, clearly revealed that this case could become the most damaging to the witch-hunters. and their capitalist backers since the famous victory of James Kutcher, the logless veteran.
The judge did not mention this. But many American judges aro known for their ability to see political straws, especially when the breeze begins to pick up,
The Young Socialist Alliance succeeded in dealing a telling blow to the witch-hunt. Their case will now become a significant legal precedent in further cfforts to finish with McCarthyism once and for all in its home territory.