To Harry Weinberger, defense attorney in New York City, Archibald Stevenson’s list was a mere rumbling, a tiny jolt, warning him—and all others who opposed the shadow war—about the vast domestic intelligence network seething beneath the surface of postwar America. Well known after his eloquent defense in 1918 of the young Russian immigrant Mollie Steimer and her alleged co-conspirators, Weinberger despised the espionage and sedition laws and thus focused his legal brilliance on assisting their victims. How easily democracy could slip from the grasp of ordinary people! It was not for the love of money or fame that Harry Weinberger practiced law; it was for the love of democracy.
Weinberger was not an anarchist, as many of his clients were, nor was he a communist. He was never a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. He wasn’t even a socialist. He was, however, a deep devotee of democracy and a fighter for liberty for all individuals, whether or not he believed what they believed. In 1919, he was also a pacifist, despite his combative nature and his boyhood dream of one day becoming a soldier.
When Weinberger was twelve years old, he had tried to enlist in the U.S. Army to fight in the Spanish-American War. The recruiting sergeant turned him down but Weinberger insisted. “Don’t you need a drummer boy?” he asked. “Go back to school,” the sergeant told him. The boy again asked if he could participate in some way. He would do anything to be part of the war, he said. Though small in stature, he was a fighter by nature, he assured the sergeant, who again scolded him. “Back to school,” said the soldier, turning his back on the boy. By the time of the next war, Weinberger was as persistent as ever, but he was now a pacifist. “As far as war between nations was concerned my mind was made up: All war was wrong,” he wrote. “War only settled which side was stronger.”
When asked about this dramatic transformation, Weinberger always said that the origin of his beliefs could be simply explained: the study of history. As a young man, he had memorized great speeches such as Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, quoting fervently its “Blessed are the Peacemakers.” He knew by heart Mark Twain’s famous antiwar passages in “The Mysterious Stranger.” And from the writings of Robert Ingersoll, a popular late-nineteenth-century thinker, he memorized: “I would rather have been a poor French peasant, and worn wooden shoes, and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder that covered Europe with blood and tears known as Napoleon Bonaparte.”
So too he had read three times or more all of Emerson’s essays. He knew the histories of Greece and Rome, of France and England, and especially of America, which he loved. He sympathized with the heroes of revolutions who overthrew despots and at least attempted to provide justice to every man. And he admired Henry David Thoreau largely for his creed that “that government is best which governs least.”
Like so many men and women of his generation, Weinberger was also strongly influenced by the social philosopher Henry George, author of the best-selling book Progress and Poverty. Selling hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide in the early 1880s, this book confronted the conundrum of industrial America: deepening poverty amid advancing wealth. George, a writer, printer, and owner of the San Francisco Daily Post, identified what he believed to be the essential flaws of capitalism: that it could not thrive without producing poverty, war, and social inequities. But unlike other thinkers of his era, such as Karl Marx, who believed such flaws were endemic to capitalism and thus irreparable, George believed the system could be fixed. And for this, perhaps, as well as his passionate belief in liberty and justice, George won the admiration of his readers. From George, Weinberger learned to be a reformer rather than a radical, standing guard at the gates of a democratic capitalism. From George he knew that if the civil liberties of ordinary people were infringed, then the people eventually would rise up and perhaps even revolt to regain those rights.
For Weinberger, the best chapter of any book ever written was “The Central Truth” in Progress and Poverty, in which George claims that unjust and unequal distribution of wealth in America would eventually destroy the self-evident truths—the guarantee of liberty and justice for all—that are the soul and heart of the Declaration of Independence. Weinberger even memorized one line, as he was wont to do: “Only in broken gleams and partial light has the sun of Liberty yet beamed among men, but all progress hath she called forth.”
Weinberger was the son of Jewish immigrants from Budapest, Hungary. Growing up in an Irish neighborhood along New York City’s East River, he learned quickly how to fight, becoming in his own words, “a pugnacious little East Sider who fought for the love of fighting.” After high school, he immediately went to work as a stenographer to pay for his night schooling in law at New York University. When he passed the bar in 1908 fewer than one out of ten lawyers in New York were college graduates. Only five feet four and a half inches, Weinberger was still a great fighter; but now his battlefield was the courtroom.
In his early years of practicing law, he was an active member of the Republican Party in New York, serving as captain of his election district, publicly debating Democrats and socialists, working briefly as an assistant to the New York attorney general, and planning to run for office. But because of Woodrow Wilson’s strong stand in 1916 against the war and Weinberger’s firm commitment to prevent wars, he switched parties. As a Democrat, he worked hard on Wilson’s campaign. But early in 1917, the faint roar of the drums of war was growing stronger and Weinberger began to distrust Wilson. When America declared war on Germany, Weinberger remained true to his principles of pacifism and isolationism and left the Democratic Party—thus, as he later wrote, “wrecking my political career.”
And so it was that Weinberger returned full-time to the courtroom, following in the tradition of the writers and thinkers he had so admired in his studies. Weinberger, in his own way, would become a significant entry in his nation’s history. Tightly embracing the ideals of liberty and justice, he was committed to democracy and dedicated to fighting violations of individual rights as guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Although he believed there were moments when leaders could be given special powers to protect the security of their nation, Weinberger was adamant in his belief that even at such times, in a democratic nation, the liberties of speech and press and the right to petition the government and to assemble peaceably must never be outlawed. “If liberty of speech and press is not to be permitted because Americans may too easily be converted from democracy, then Americans cannot be too well grounded in their ideals, and cannot love liberty as much as we have been led to believe,” he wrote.
He was also committed to the underdog, especially immigrants, whom he saw as the core of much of America’s greatness. “It is the little men and women who carry on the ordinary work of civilization, and who love and transmit to their children the songs, the stories and the poetry of democracy and liberty, and who supply the backbone and support of democracy everywhere.”
It wasn’t surprising then that Weinberger not only disagreed with Wilson’s decision to go to war but also objected vehemently to the new wartime laws: the Selective Service Act, the Espionage Act of 1917, and especially its amended 1918 version. No longer aspiring to any political post in 1917, Weinberger directed his passion to assisting individuals caught in the nasty web of such laws. For his personal motto, he adopted a phrase that he had seen written on the wall of a Texas jail where he had tried to gain the release of several Mexican revolutionists: “IT IS BETTER TO DIE ON FIGHTING FEET THAN TO LIVE ON YOUR KNEES.” The pugnacious little East Sider was now in for some of the toughest fights of his life.
Because of his outspoken stand against the Great War, Weinberger lost friends, many actually, all of whom he referred to as “those who go with the wind and the tide.” He also lost clients who worried about his reputation for speaking truth to power. Even those who did not abandon him during the war and postwar years sometimes distanced themselves out of fear of the people he represented and the things he said and did to give his clients a chance to walk in the sun of liberty, if only for a few miles.
Although never an anarchist, communist, or socialist, Weinberger spent time in all of those circles, not only defending the right to express such beliefs but also working with the organizations. Shortly after Wilson announced America’s entry into the war, for example, Weinberger joined Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman’s No-Conscription League. In May of 1917, at one of their meetings, he spoke out against the newly enacted Selective Service Act, calling it unconstitutional for violating the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibits involuntary servitude. In June both Goldman and Berkman were indicted for obstruction of that act and although they represented themselves in court, Weinberger worked for their release on bail, appealed their case, and argued it before the U.S. Supreme Court in December of 1918.
It was Goldman who first connected Weinberger to the case of Mollie Steimer, Jacob Abrams, and four other young Russian immigrants. On the 1st of September, 1918, from her prison cell at the federal penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri, Goldman wrote a note to Weinberger, asking him to check out a new case. She was worried, she said, that a group of ardent young activists operating without the guidance of a caring legal adviser would say things they might later regret. “I see some more of our N.Y. boys are in trouble, Abrams & others,” her note began.
On September 10, Weinberger wrote to the defendants, telling them that he would represent their interests when they entered their pleas. They agreed to work with him, thus beginning one of the most significant cases of Weinberger’s career—a case that would claim his heart, mind, and soul for many months and would touch an assortment of Weinberger’s notable contemporaries, such as J. Edgar Hoover, A. Mitchell Palmer, and Ray Stannard Baker. And, because of Weinberger’s fighting spirit, the case of Mollie Steimer, Jacob Abrams, and their comrades would land on the desks of the great jurists Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., at the U.S. Supreme Court. Their responses would eventually affect every American whose freedom of speech was thereafter challenged.
The case effectively began on the morning of August 23, 1918, shortly before eight o’clock, at the corner of Houston and Crosby Streets in New York. There a group of boys and men sat on fire hydrants, talking about this and that before beginning their workday at a nearby garment factory. Suddenly the air was filled with leaflets, fluttering to the ground from somewhere high above them, landing on their shoulders and their heads, on the sidewalk, in the gutter. Some leaflets were written in Yiddish. The workers quickly discarded those and then discovered several in English, parts of which they read out loud:
“Our” President Wilson, with his beautiful phraseology, has hypnotized the people of America to such an extent that they do not see his hypocrisy…. His shameful, cowardly silence about the intervention in Russia reveals the hypocrisy of the plutocratic gang in Washington and vicinity. The President was afraid to announce to the American people the intervention in Russia. He is too much of a coward to come out openly and say: “We capitalistic nations cannot afford to have a proletarian republic in Russia.” Instead he uttered beautiful phrases about Russia, which, as you see, he did not mean, and secretly, cowardly, sent troops to crush the Russian Revolution…. What have you to say about it? Will you allow the Russian Revolution to be crushed? YOU: Yes, we mean YOU, the people of America! The Russian Revolution calls to the workers of the world for help. Workers of the World! Awake! Rise! Put down your enemy and mine!
Five young men and one young woman, all Russian immigrants who lived as a group in a small, bare apartment in the back of the third floor of an East 104th Street building in Manhattan, had written the leaflets. Then, with a small motor-driven press and a hand press—both found later by government agents in the basement of 1582 Madison Avenue—they had printed five thousand copies each, in Yiddish and in English, distributing at least nine thousand to working people at various meetings and out of factory windows in New York’s garment district.
Mollie Steimer was the one who threw the leaflets from the washroom window on the top floor of the shirtwaist factory where she worked for $15 a week. The workmen who read them immediately informed the police. The police then informed the New York City branch of military intelligence, which sent two agents to the factory. Scouring the building, they encountered a young Russian worker, Hyman Rosansky, who confessed he was part of the group distributing the leaflets and he named his comrades: Mollie Steimer, Jacob Abrams, Hyman Lachowsky, Samuel Lipman, and Jacob Schwartz. Steimer and Lachowsky, who had handed out most of the leaflets, and Lipman, who had written the English leaflet, were quickly arrested and taken into custody. Detectives followed Abrams—who had acquired the printing press—and Schwartz—who had written the Yiddish circular—to their 104th Street apartment. Police raided it, confiscating the leaflets and arresting Schwartz, Abrams, and three other young men who came into the apartment during the raid.
When they arrived at the station, Schwartz was spitting blood, and at least two of the others bore the evidence of beatings, from fists and blackjacks. During the interrogations that ensued, the beatings continued. Four agents, each standing in a corner of a small room, told Lipman to take off his glasses and began to beat him, throwing him back and forth among them, striking him with blackjacks. Even after he lay on the floor unconscious, they continued hitting and kicking him. Abrams would testify later at the trial that Schwartz, who suffered from two heart conditions, chronic endocarditis, which is an infection of the inner lining of the valves, and mitral stenosis, which is an obstruction of the mitral valve, was “lying on the floor covered with sweat and with his handkerchief full of blood.” Lachowsky’s face was bloody, his clothing blood-soaked, and clumps of hair missing later that night, according to the account of one of the other boys. “Our arrest was most terrible,” Schwartz wrote from his jail cell. “While we were sitting there so worn, thin, pale-faced and bruised, the whole ‘chariot wheel of Justice’ rolled on to crush us.”
Abrams, Steimer, Schwartz, Lachowsky, and Lipman were indicted on four counts that charged them with conspiring to violate the Espionage Act by publishing leaflets containing disloyal language against the government with the intention of inciting resistance to the war effort and crippling war production. Also indicted were Gabriel Prober, a friend of Abrams’s who had been at Abrams’s Upper West Side apartment when the police arrived, and Hyman Rosansky, who agreed to cooperate with the government. All were confined to the Tombs, New York City’s jailhouse. Another young man, Boris Aurin, also at Abrams’s apartment when the police arrived and brought into headquarters for questioning, was released for lack of evidence. Abrams was the oldest, at twenty-nine years old, and Steimer and Lipman, the youngest, were both twenty-one.
Seven weeks later, on October 14, the trial began at Foley Square, the location of Manhattan’s federal courthouse. The presiding judge was Henry De Lamar Clayton, a Southern Democrat who had previously been a U.S. representative from Alabama for eighteen years. As the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he had introduced the Clayton Antitrust Act before his 1914 appointment to the federal bench in the Northern and Middle Districts of Alabama. Judge Clayton had never tried an Espionage Act case. Nor was the sixty-three-year-old jurist an expert on war legislation. At Foley Square, there were three such experts on the federal bench but because of an overcrowded docket in New York, Judge Clayton was called in from outside the district to take the case.
Coming from Alabama, Judge Clayton had little exposure to immigrant populations and in fact had shown a hint of prejudice by favoring English literacy tests for immigrants, which would keep many of them out of the workforce. In Alabama there were few Russians, Bolsheviks, socialists, or anarchists and there was little evidence of what was perhaps a New York watchdog style of criticizing the government. Adding to his particular state of mind, five months before he was given this case, his brother, a graduate of West Point and a colonel, had been killed in France. When the trial began Judge Clayton wore a gold service star in memory of his brother. At that moment, his tolerance for pacifists who took a stand against the war in Germany or against U.S. intervention in Russia was low.
The trial started quietly enough, without any news coverage. War news took precedence that October as it had for months. However, because of Weinberger’s decision to call to the stand several prominent witnesses—such as George Creel, the head of the Committee on Public Information, and Raymond Robins, the head of the American Red Cross mission in Russia—and because of the spirited Mollie Steimer, the case soon would have staying power on the nation’s front pages.
The prosecution’s approach was fairly straightforward, setting out to prove that the defendants had written, printed, and disseminated seditious leaflets and that they did it with criminal intent to derail the war effort and to incite resistance to government policy. Thus they clearly violated the Espionage Act.
For the defense, Weinberger maintained that the Espionage Act was unconstitutional, that, even if it were constitutional, the defendants did not violate it, and that there was no criminal intent on the part of the defendants. There was never a single piece of evidence showing that anyone who had read the leaflets had actually tried to stop any war anywhere. Further, his clients were not pro-German, he pointed out. They were not protesting America’s involvement in the war with Germany and they had not in any way obstructed it. In fact, after the United States had declared war on Germany, Abrams had offered to join a regiment of Russian immigrants to go to Russia to fight against Germany. What his clients did protest was U.S. military aggression against Russia, a nation with which the United States was not officially at war.
One of Weinberger’s strategies was to show that the circulars in question were effectively true because revolutionary Russia, which President Wilson had applauded at first, had indeed been betrayed—and invaded—by the Allies. Toward this end Weinberger tried repeatedly to persuade Judge Clayton to allow into evidence President Wilson’s 1917 telegram to the new Bolshevik regime in which he promised to give Russia aid and assured them of the sympathy of the American people. Weinberger also read parts of the president’s own writings and speeches that were similar to his clients’ allegedly treasonous circulars. All of the statements in the leaflets were true, he said, and even the president had at one time or another expressed similar, if not the same, sentiments about Russia.
To demonstrate how the nation had been lied to, Weinberger sought to expose the fraudulent Sisson documents. The Committee on Public Information, according to Weinberger, had designed the Sisson story deliberately to sway American opinion against the new Bolshevik regime, thus providing justification for military intervention against the Revolution and the new government. Weinberger was determined to show that without the awareness of the American public and without the vote of Congress, the president had sent American troops to Russia. Thus his clients’ protests against a war with a nation with whom we were officially at peace were not wrong.
A large part of Weinberger’s strategy was to call prominent Americans to the stand who had been in Russia and who could substantiate all that he was saying—such as Creel and Robins. When Robins testified, Weinberger asked: “Did you investigate the Sisson documents and did you reach the conclusion that they were false?
“Is it not true that the Soviet Government, before the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, asked you to bring about an understanding with the Allies to continue the war, on the part of the Soviets against Germany, on condition of material aid, and that was to consist of transportation, instructors for the army, materials, and food?
“Was not that put in the form of queries put forward by the Bolsheviki Government to the United States?
“As far as you know, was any answer ever made by the U.S. to the offer of co-operation by the Bolsheviki Government against the Germans?”
Claiming that the questions were irrelevant to the case before them, the judge told the witness not to answer. But nothing deterred Weinberger. His questions were a legal device, as he had worded them in such a way to expose facts he wanted the jury to hear. Next, he did what some defense attorneys would not have had the courage to do: he called each of his young clients to the witness stand.
Lipman testified that police had beaten him, kicked him, and dragged him around the floor by his hair. He said that he was a socialist, that he had composed the English circular, and that he had done so because he sympathized with the Russian Revolution and, in fact, celebrated it. “I was overjoyed by the idea that, for the first time in the history of the world, we have a government by the people, for the people, and from the people.” Wilson had provoked him, he said, by saying to Congress, “I stretch out my hands to the Bolsheviks” and then sending a military expedition to Russia that ended up fighting the Bolsheviks. Lipman wanted simply to protest that hypocrisy.
Lachowsky admitted he had printed the circulars, denied he was pro-German, and described his mission as a protest against the intervention into Russia. Abrams confessed that he was an anarchist but insisted that he had no intention of imposing the doctrines of anarchy on anyone and that not believing in governments had nothing to do with the leaflets. On cross-examination he said he had tried to enlist in the American armed forces in order to go back to Russia to fight against Germany but he was refused. He also testified that he saw Lachowsky’s bloody head and Schwartz with blood everywhere, and that he heard Lipman’s moans and screams from another room.
Then came Mollie Steimer, whose maturity, audacity, obstinacy, and pure grit must have surprised everyone—even Weinberger, who repeatedly referred to her as “this little girl.” Steimer, who five years before had come from the Ukraine to the United States, was indeed small in stature, being only four feet nine inches tall and weighing a mere ninety pounds. And with her short curly black hair and her full, round face, she looked even younger than she was. Yet, of all the defendants, she delivered what many considered to be the most compelling, and perhaps the most indignant, of the defense testimonies. “When you are taken and you know that you did something, then you are ready to pay the price, but when you are taken by lies and falsehood then you feel very indignant,” Steimer told a journalist sixty-one years later.
Like her comrades, Steimer admitted that she had done what she was accused of doing. And like them, she claimed that under the right of free speech and a free press, she had not violated any law. Nor would she acknowledge the law under which she was charged, the law that her lawyer claimed to be unconstitutional. Unlike her comrades, however, she refused to take the oath before testifying and she would not rise when the judge entered the courtroom. As an avowed anarchist, she did not recognize the U.S. system of law and thus she would not honor the judge. Even Weinberger was put to the test when he called her “Mollie” in his first question. She would not respond until he addressed her more respectfully as “Miss Steimer.” She was tough, independent, and high-spirited.
On the stand she said that she had distributed the circulars “to show the hypocrisy of the government of the United States and the Allies, those who claimed that they were fighting for democracy, those who called themselves staunch sticklers for the right of self-determination of nations, and at the very same time interfered with the situation in Russia.”
As if teaching a class, she turned to the courtroom and defined anarchism, explained why she chose to be an anarchist, and talked about her concepts for a more humane, egalitarian society. “While at present the people of the world are divided into various groups, calling themselves nations, while one nation defies another—in most cases considers the others as competitive—we, the workers of the world shall stretch out our hands toward each other with brotherly love. To the fulfillment of this idea I shall devote all my energy, and if necessary, render my life for it.”
Her descriptions of her family’s poverty and of her bleak days as a shirtwaist factory worker without any possibility for a meaningful future were poignant and unforgettable. The oldest of six children, she, her seventeen-year-old sister, her fourteen-year-old brother, and her father all worked in factories. Her father, she said, labored long hours at Standard Oil Company in a low-paying job in the town of Elizabethport, New Jersey. “How tired he usually comes home from work and how much so when the day’s work lasted fourteen hours!” she said, speaking to the courtroom spectators as if on stage. “He would just have supper, glance at the newspaper and go to bed. Early in the morning, when all were yet asleep, father rose, took his little bundle and again went to the plant. In this manner of miserable existence the years rolled by. What did this hard laboring man get out of life? Nothing! Absolutely nothing, except suffering.”
Steimer’s defiance and unwavering confidence annoyed Judge Clayton. From the first time they had met, which was the day she was arraigned in his courtroom, they had been at odds. On that day, Steimer had implied that the indictments were really about the government trying to “stifle free speech.” To that Judge Clayton offered a fiery response: “Freedom of speech is one thing and disloyalty is another. What you term free speech does not protect disloyalty. I am sorry for the people of New York that have to deal with individuals who have no more conception of what free government means than a Billy goat has of the gospel.”
Throughout the trial he spoke to her in disapproving, condescending tones and challenged her ideals whenever possible. He even quizzed her on a personal level, agitating her about such topics as free love and polygamy. As an anarchist who did not believe in laws, did she believe in any of society’s laws to protect public morality, such as marriage? he asked. She responded that she did not think such laws were successful in protecting public morality. And no, she did not believe in the necessity of a legal marriage.
“Now when a girl marries it is for the sake of getting out of the factory. It gives her a chance to get something to eat,” she told the judge. “Then, because they do not really love each other, she and her husband soon grow tired of their marriage. What is the use of law combining them when their hearts are not combined any more?”
“When love grows cold you think that ends the marriage relation? Do you not believe that the marriage relation should be protected by law?” the judge asked.
“I believe,” said Steimer, “that two people should combine when they love each other truly, and not because of any law.”
Then was she a proponent of free love, and polygamy? Finally she told the judge firmly, “Well, I do not think that this has anything to do with this trial.”
But the judge continued to impugn her, as if forcing a duel. Belief in polygamy, he told her, leaning down to face her squarely, was one of the grounds for denying citizenship to aliens and deporting them. She had already put herself in jeopardy by admitting she was an anarchist, he warned her. But the “little girl” never flinched and boldly continued to play the judge’s sparring game. Perhaps she knew she couldn’t be the victor, even if she won the battle. And indeed Steimer’s quest was not to win the case but rather to create a dialogue to expose truths. Steimer was then as she would be for the rest of her life, “consumed with compassion to work for the good of the people,” whatever the cost, as one New York journalist later described her.
In her testimony, Steimer confirmed the stories of her co-defendants about the brutality of police and detectives during the night of the arrests. When she saw Schwartz after his interrogation, for example, he was “deathly pale,” breathing heavily, and coughing up blood. The police denied inappropriate behavior against any of the defendants. Schwartz would never make it to court.
On the first day of jury selection, which was October 10, Schwartz had a fever of 103 degrees and was taken out of the prison to a bed at Bellevue, a New York hospital that was then crammed with flu victims and severely short-staffed. On the night of October 13, the thirty-two-year-old Schwartz died. The official cause listed on the death certificate was pneumonia. But Weinberger saw it differently: “His heart bled from the third degree, thus weakening him and he developed pneumonia which was the secondary and apparent cause of death.”
In his closing argument, Weinberger’s years of studying history and literature shone through his legal arguments. Like the great orators whose works Weinberger had memorized as a young man, he eloquently compared the young radicals on trial to historical figures who had risked speaking the truth and had stood up for their beliefs. “You may think that these defendants are unimportant. If you look back in history, that same feeling was always present in every trial where great men or great women were convicted.”
Then he brought up examples of people who seemed unimportant during their lifetime but were later revered for their bravery. He began with Jesus, who was “against the government at that time, contrary to the opinions of the District Attorney of his days, contrary perhaps to the written opinions of the newspapers of his day, and he was crucified, and his thought, back in those days of Judea, has influenced the thought of the world.” Next, he spoke of the soldier and teacher Socrates, who taught men to question authority and who was condemned to death by a jury and forced to drink hemlock. Socrates was ahead of his time, Weinberger said, and his opinion was different from that of the majority. He noted the great European philosopher Spinoza, who was stoned for his beliefs and later lauded. And he referred to the abolitionists, such as Elijah Lovejoy, the anti-slavery newspaper editor whose printing presses were thrown into the Mississippi River and who was shot for his belief that slavery must end.
He compared the ideals of his clients to those of great thinkers in history, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in France and Ralph Waldo Emerson in America. “Whoso would be a man, must be a non-conformist,” said Weinberger, quoting Emerson. Piotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin, he said, fled Russia because of his protests against the czar, lived in exile safely in England where he was never imprisoned for his beliefs and where he wrote numerous books on anarchism and on the French Revolution—books used in U.S. colleges as texts of authority. His clients also bravely stood up for what they believed was right, standing with the Russians in their revolt against despotism and with America against militarism, he said.
His defendants had the right to question and protest against an army being sent to Russia. Only Congress can declare war, Weinberger said, and then only can the president send an army to make war.
You know that we did not know in this country that an army was being sent to Russia, and we found that an army was at Archangel, an American army, without Congress ever declaring war. What is it that makes the government try to shut the mouths of those who protest? What is it that makes the government bring an indictment, and four counts at that, against defendants who say it is wrong to send an army into Russia? Are we so poor, are we so weak, are we such cowards, that we fear the truth, or the questioning of truth?
If our Government is true, if our Government is right in its invasion of Russia, let us have a fair discussion. You cannot answer a fact, gentlemen of the jury, by sending people to jail. You may seal the lips with death, but you cannot stop a man’s idealism and message from continuing in the hearts of others. You may close their mouths but for every man and for every idealist that goes to jail, ten thousand more step forward.
The defendants, he said, told the truth about what they had done, admitted to the accusations of writing and distributing the pamphlets, and, he said, they “had one big idea to carry to the Americans, a liberty-loving people, calling to their attention what they thought was a wrongful act by the President of the United States, without authority of Congress, sending an army to invade a nation we were at peace with, calling to the American public to protest.”
On October 24, the jury declared four of the defendants guilty on all four counts. Prober was acquitted on all counts. The next day, Steimer, Abrams, Lipman, and Lachowsky appeared before the court to hear their sentences. Each was allowed to speak, which, with the utmost composure and confidence, they did. There was no breaking down, no shouting, no pleading.
“If it is really a crime to stand up for the people you love,” Abrams told the jury, “if it is a crime to believe in ideals, if it is a crime to stand up for the thing that you yourself are standing up for—your country—I am proud to be a criminal.”
“I am glad you got that out of your system,” responded the judge.
“I do not ask for mercy,” said Abrams.
“That makes my task somewhat easier,” said the judge.
When it was Steimer’s turn, the young girl looked out on the throng of spectators as if to find inspiration from the crowd that had gathered. But just as she was about to speak, the judge snapped, “You turn around and address the Court [the judge]. This is one time, Mollie, when you are brought in touch with a knowledge that there is some authority, even over an anarchistic woman.”
She then spoke: “I do not believe in any authorities but what I do want to say is this, that though you have sent military troops to Russia to crush the Russian Revolution, though you may succeed in slaughtering hundreds of thousands of revolutionists, you will by no means succeed in subduing the revolutionary spirit. On the contrary, the more you will seek to suppress the truth, the sooner will the thought of truth and light enter the hearts of the workers and the sooner is the international social revolution bound to come.”
The judge replied, “Very well, I must commend you for having the merit of brevity, and Shakespeare said that brevity is the soul of wit.”
He then commenced with the sentences. Abrams, Lipman, and Lachowsky each got a $1,000 fine and twenty years in prison, to be served in the penitentiary of the state of Maryland. Steimer was fined $500 and sentenced to fifteen years at the Missouri State Penitentiary for women. Rosansky got a $1,000 fine but only three years in prison, as his confession led to the apprehension of the others.
The courtroom was brimming with spectators, many of whom ended up standing in the corridor straining to hear the sentences, and when they did, they seemed shocked. “Why they are just children!” one person said. Another said, “Twenty years in prison for calling President Wilson a ‘hypocrite’?” And another replied, “Or twenty years in prison for being a Russian and believing in the new Russia?”
The defendants were sent back to the Tombs, where they had been since their arrests and would remain until Weinberger could gain their release on bail.
That night at the Parkview Palace, a meeting hall on Fifth Avenue at 110th Street, at least 1,200 people attended a memorial service for Jacob Schwartz—including several agents from the MID assigned to shadow Harry Weinberger and John Reed. Weinberger and Reed, both passionate speakers, were asked to deliver the first eulogies. And perhaps because Reed was in the midst of writing his book Ten Days That Shook the World, and because Weinberger, just hours before, had listened to one of the most severe sentences of his career as a defense attorney, they spoke with more than the usual fire. Weinberger, for example, said that Schwartz was a highly principled man, one of those individuals who “leave behind them a memory of idealism—a memory of having fought and worked for the betterment of their fellowmen everywhere.”
Seventeen days later, the Armistice was signed and, on the same day, Weinberger won his battle to gain the young Russians’ freedom from the Tombs, on bail, $10,000 each. Raising the money was a challenge but Weinberger was inspired by the hopeful news. Perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court would not only review his case but also reverse the convictions, thus freeing his clients. It was now, for Weinberger, more than a mere hope: it was a mission.
Donations for Weinberger’s fund came from all over the city: large ones from wealthy sympathizers with addresses on Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive and small ones from the Lower East Side, the South Bronx, and East Harlem. Raymond Robins and his sister-in-law sent $1,000 in Liberty Bonds. Lillian Wald sent $300 in Liberty Bonds. Frederick Blossom, a socialist and an advocate of birth control, donated $6,000, which he borrowed from a bank with interest. Some donors, jittery about associations with such high-profile radicals, asked Weinberger to respect their wish for anonymity. And most of them ironically used their Liberty Bonds to free the young rebels caught in the web of a law that punished allegedly unpatriotic behavior.
After three months behind bars, Abrams was the first to be released, on a deposit of $10,000 in Liberty Bonds, on November 16. Then on the 18th, another $10,000 in Liberty Bonds set free Mollie Steimer; on the 25th, another $10,000 from real estate and bonds funded Lipman’s release. On the 27th, it was clear that Weinberger still did not have the next $10,000 for freeing Lachowsky, who was now in poor health. It was unclear whether Lachowsky had the flu but because of Schwartz’s death, he refused to go to Bellevue and was weakening each day. Knowing this, Abrams volunteered to go back to jail so that Lachowsky could be released and treated as soon as possible. And this he did, for three days, when at last Weinberger came up with the money for Abrams’s second release, another $10,000 in Liberty Bonds. Rosansky, who had informed on his comrades, was not a sympathetic cause for anyone except his wife. No money was raised for him and so he was transferred to the Maryland prison to begin serving his term.
On the day of Steimer’s release, her cell mate, Agnes Smedley, looked out the cell window as she left the prison. Smedley would later write about Steimer, who had deeply impressed her, especially because of Steimer’s compassion for female inmates who suffered from venereal disease or struggled with sick babies. “I watched her pass through the prison yard that day,” Smedley wrote. “A marshal walked beside her, talking out of the corner of his mouth. He did not offer to carry her suitcase, heavy with books. Mollie did not listen to him. Her eyes were looking straight ahead into the distance.”
Steimer spent Christmas Day of 1918 with her family, but without her father, who had died while she was at the Tombs, and without her brother Jack, who had also died that autumn of the flu. Although no longer behind bars, Steimer would never be totally free, as she and her co-defendants would be shadowed at all times by at least one government agent. C. J. Scully, M. J. Davis, and Frank Faulhaber, often the agents stalking Steimer, were even present on Steimer’s first night of freedom at a Greenwich Village café where friends and supporters were eager to hear every detail of her life now as a celebrated criminal. According to one of the agent’s reports, Steimer told her friends that her time in jail was beneficial because she had learned a lot and because “hereafter she will know how to act when necessary.”
Steimer would not be able to walk to the mailbox or to a friend’s apartment without a government agent close behind her. One young special assistant in the Justice Department who was only two years older than Steimer and who was relatively new to the department was especially interested in monitoring her activities, partly because of her possible ties to a publication called The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin, which the assistant and his superiors wished to destroy. Under the guidance of this ambitious counter-radical specialist, whose name was John Edgar Hoover, spying on Steimer would one day assume the character of a mission. And daring, as always, Steimer would respond with an array of deceptions to fool and embarrass her stalkers—tempting them with suspicious-looking papers, later found to be blank, or leading them on pointless chases around the city. Nothing the government did seemed to frighten Steimer or deter her from her quest to stop the U.S. invasion in Russia.
Perhaps Agnes Smedley, who spent so many days in jail with Steimer, best described Steimer’s point of view. “Mollie’s reasoning is something like this,” Smedley would write in early 1920. “Under the Czar we knew there was no hope; we did not delude ourselves into believing that he would release those who worked against the system which he represented and upheld. In America we have been carefully taught that we live in a democracy, and we are still waiting for some one to feed us democracy. While waiting, we starve to death or are sent to prison where we get free food for 15 or 20 years.”
Although Weinberger seemed to appreciate Steimer’s determination, spunk, and certitude, he did have a problem with her cat-and-mouse game with the government. One of the stipulations of his clients’ releases on bail in November was that he would be responsible for them, making sure they did not get into trouble or flee before the appeal in the case had been decided. In other words, they were in Weinberger’s custody. In the months ahead, this would prove to be a trying task, especially regarding Steimer, who would be arrested eight more times. The only good news for Weinberger regarding his young clients was that by early 1919 they were no longer the only voices protesting America’s military presence in Russia. Soldiers were risking courts-martial by questioning their country’s involvement in Russia. Soldiers’ families, shocked to learn that the Armistice did not end the fighting in Russia, were signing petitions and organizing protests. And a few politicians were beginning to pick at the edges of issue. Leading the pack was a Republican senator from California, Hiram Johnson, who, calling the U.S. intervention in Russia a “criminal policy,” spoke for hours on the Senate floor on January 29:
Why did we enter Russia? I answer, for no very good reason; and we have remained for no reason at all. And what is our policy toward Russia? I answer we have no policy. We have engaged in a miserable misadventure, stultifying our professions, and setting at naught our promises. We have punished no guilty; we have but brought misery and starvation and death to the innocent. We have garnered none of the fruits of the victory of war, but suffer the odium and infamy of undeclared warfare. We have sacrificed our own blood to no purpose, and into American homes have brought sorrow and anguish and suffering.
Bring the American boys home from Russia.