COMMUNISTS: Tight Hold

By the time the Smith Act trial of five St. Louis Communist leaders had ground through its 18th and final week, both prosecution and defense could agree on one point: the FBI has a tight hold on the U.S. Communist Party.

Early in the trial the defendants got a major shock when the U.S. called the Rev. Obadiah Jones as a prosecution witness. The Rev. Mr. Jones, Negro pastor of Mt. Tabor Baptist Church, was local chairman of the Communist Civil Rights Congress, and such a notorious Communist that the Baptist Ministerial Alliance had expelled him in 1953. Quietly, he testified that he had joined the party in 1946 because the FBI had asked him to.

Balance of Power. He went on to say that Defendant Marcus A. Murphy, a Negro and C.P. candidate for lieutenant governor of Missouri in 1940, taught Negroes that they held the balance of power in the U.S., and “whatever side the Negro would be on would win the revolution.” Snapped Murphy: “As a minister, can you tell me if the $11,000 you received from the FBI as an informer is an answer to your prayers?” Replied Jones (who works weekdays as elevator operator for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch): “I don’t pray for money. I work for that.”

Later the Government called one William Walter Cortor. A defense attorney, Mrs. Mary Kaufman, took one look at Cortor and gasped. Cortor, she told the judge in a voice trembling with rage, had sat in on a strategy meeting at her home a few nights before, when the defense discussed how to cross-examine Jones. Cortor testified that he had been filing weekly FBI reports since December 1950.

Charge of Conspiracy. The expenditure of five such key FBI informants in this one case indicated the importance which the Justice Department attached to getting convictions. Best-known defendant was William Sentner, 46, onetime general vice president of the Red-wired United Electrical Workers, and for years a powerful figure in the Missouri C.I.O. (before the C.I.O. expelled the U.E.W.). The others, in addition to Defendant Murphy: Robert Manewitz, 37, a onetime member of the C.P. state committee and treasurer of the city central committee; James Forest, 43, C.P. state chairman for Missouri, and his wife Dorothy Rose Forest, once the organizational secretary of the party in Hollywood.

When final arguments were completed last week, Judge Roy W. Harper warned the jury that “it is not your function to pass on the relative merits of Communism or capitalism, or any other issue . . . The crime charged is a conspiracy [to advocate and teach forceful overthrow of the Government].” Two hours and 15 minutes later, the jury was back with a verdict: all defendants guilty. The conviction brought to 72 the number of Communist leaders tried and convicted under the Smith Act.