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Progressivism and Anarchism: Judge Henry D. Clayton and the Abrams Trial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Richard Polenberg
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Extract

A highly symbolic confrontation occurred in a New York City courtroom on October 21, 1918. On the witness stand was Jacob Abrams, a thirty-two year old Russian immigrant, an alien, a Jew, a dedicated anarchist. On the bench sat Henry DeLamar Clayton, Jr., a sixty-one year old federal judge, a man who had represented Alabama in Congress for eighteen years, and who was an ardent Wilsonian progressive. Abrams, who came from Uman, a village near Odessa, had landed at Ellis Island in 1908. He worked as a bookbinder, and lived, in 1918, in a teeming, largely Jewish ghetto in East Harlem. Clayton's ancestors had emigrated to the colonies before the American Revolution. A fifth-generation American, he had lived, for most of his life, on his plantation near Eufala, a small town on the west bank of the Chattahoochee River. Now, Clayton was questioning the witness and Abrams was defending his anarchist beliefs. ‘This Government was built on a revolution’, Abrams said, ‘…When our forefathers of the American Revolution—’ That was as far as he got. ‘Your what?’ Judge Clayton interrupted. ‘My forefathers’, Abrams replied. ‘Do you mean to refer to the fathers of this nation as your forefathers?’ Clayton asked. Abrams said that indeed he did, that ‘we are all a big human family’ and ‘those that stand for the people, I call them father'. But the judge had made his point, and the jury had no doubt gotten it.

Type
Articles
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , Fall 1985 , pp. 397 - 408
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1985

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References

1. New York Times, October 22, 1918, 10.

2. Cited in Fleming, Walter J., Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (Cleveland, 1911), 385–86Google Scholar. Biographical information on Henry DeLamar Clayton may be found in Memorial Record of Alabama, 2 vols. (Spartanburg, 1976Google Scholar; reprint of 1898 ed.), i, 407–09; and Owen, Thomas McAdory, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography 4 vols., (Spartanburg, 1978; reprint of 1921 ed.), iii, 347–48Google Scholar.

3. Clayton, Victoria Hunter, Black and White Under the Old Regime (Milwaukee, 1899), 178Google Scholar.

4. Ibid, at 61, 129, 131–32, 165, 188.

5. New York Times, February 13, 1916, 6.

6. New York Herald Tribune, October 14, 1918, 10.

7. Clayton to John Sharp Williams, October 8, 1918, Henry D. Clayton Ms., (University of Alabama), Box 530.

8. New York Herald Tribune, October 14, 1918, 10.

9. See Rodabaugh, Karl, ‘Congressman Henry D. Clayton, Patriarch in Politics: A Southern Congressman During the Progressive Era’, The Alabama Review, xxxi (1978), 110–20Google Scholar.

10. Owen, History of Alabama, i, 551–53.

11. Clayton to George Sutherland, December 15, 1916, Learned Hand Ms., (Harvard Law School), Box 17.

12. Clayton to A. Mitchell Palmer, July 21, 1915, Woodrow Wilson Ms., (Library of Congress), Reel 535.

13. Gompers to Clayton, November 19, 1914, American Federation of Labor-Samuel Gompers Ms. (Cornell University), Reel 78.

14. Rodabaugh, Karl, ‘Congressman Henry D. Clayton and the Dothan Post Office Fight: Patronage and Politics in the Progressive Era’, The Alabama Review, xxxiii (1980), 125–49Google Scholar.

15. Clayton to Henry C. Walthour, March 15, 1917, Clayton Ms., Box 527.

16. Clayton to John Sharp Williams, October 8, 1918, Clayton Ms., Box 530.

17. Congressional Record, 62nd Congress, 3rd Session (February 19, 1913), 3418.

18. New York Times, January 7, 1916, 5.

19. Bertram Clayton to Henry Clayton, April 5, 1917, Clayton Ms., Box 528.

20. Clayton to Alice K. Davis, June 4, 1918, Clayton Ms., Box 529.

21. Clayton to Bettie Clayton, November 21, 1918, Clayton Ms., Box 530.

22. Harry Weinberger to Agnes Inglis, February 11, 1920, Harry Weinberger Ms. (Yale University), Box 1.

23. Clayton to George Stuart, September 9, 1918, Clayton Ms., Box 530.

24. New York Times, April 29, 1918; ‘Motion Pictures and the War’, Current Opinion, lxiv (1918), 402Google Scholar.

25. Clayton to ‘Dear Little Mother[-in-law]’, September 9, 1918, Clayton Ms., Box 530.

26. Clayton to D. C. Allen, October 10, 1918, Clayton Ms., Box 530.

27. Copies of the indictments may be found in the Department of Justice Files. A fifth defendant, Hyman Rosansky, who had helped distribute the leaflets but then cooperated with the police when he was apprehended, was also found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. A sixth, Gabriel Prober, a friend of Abrams, was also indicted but was found innocent.

28. Trial transcript, 387. When I consulted the Records of the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York at the National Archives Records Center in Bayonne, New Jersey, the actual transcript of the trial was missing. Fortunately Professor Fred Ragan had, years ago, photocopied it for his own use. Professor Ragan graciously made his copy available to me, and another copy has been made for the N.A.R.C.

29. Ibid, at 389.

30. Ibid, at 488–89.

31. Chafee, Zechariah, ‘A Contemporary State Trial—the United States Versus Jacob Abrams et al.’ 33 Harvard Law Review 747–74 (1920)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. ‘Evidence—Province of the Court’, 30 Yale Law Journal 196 (1920)Google Scholar.

33. Trial transcript, 426–28.

34. Ibid, at 434–36.

35. Ibid, at 521–22.

36. Ibid, at 700–01.

37. Ibid, at 828.

38. Ibid, at 832–65; a slightly different version is provided in Nicholas Biddle to Director, Military Intelligence Division, October 25, 1918, Military Intelligence Division Ms. (National Archives).

39. Clayton to Selmon Stephens, September 24, 1918, Clayton Ms., Box 530.

40. Clayton to Charles C. Thach, September 16, 1918, Clayton Ms., Box 530.

41. Trial transcript, 865.

42. Ibid, at 864.

43. Ibid, at 870.

44. New York Times, October 28, 1918, 10.

45. Hugo H. Ritterbusch to Clayton, October 26, 1918, Clayton Ms., Box 530.

46. ‘American Bolsheviks Get Twenty Years’, The Negro Worker, Steimer-Fleehine Ms., (International Institute of Social History)Google Scholar.

47. Goldman, Emma, Living My Life (New York, 1970 [1931]), p. 667Google Scholar; Goldman to Harry Weinberger, October 27, 1918, Weinberger Ms.

48. Grantham, Dewey, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville, 1983), xvii, 417–18, 421Google Scholar.