WOMEN: Petition Denied

Mme. Rosika Schwimmer, 54, beetle-browned Hungarian Jewess, indefatigable publicist, onetime Hungarian Minister to Switzerland, has been trying for some time to become a U. S. citizen. Because she, in 1915, helped persuade Henry Ford to outfit and command his famed “Peace Ship,” she was subjected to specially alert questioning by a Chicago naturalization board last summer (TIME, July 11). When she told the board she was an atheist and that she would not personally bear arms for the U.S. because ” I understood that women are not required to bear arms in the United States,” the board refused her citizenship. Last week the Schwimmer Case was heard in the U.S. District Court by Judge George A. Carpenter, who asked Mme. Schwimmer another question.

” If you were a nurse,” mused the Judge, ” caring fora wounded American soldier, and observed an armed enemy approaching, would you take up a pistol and shoot the enemy?”

“No,” stoutly answered Madame Schwimmer, “but I would warn the soldier. I would not kill a man, even if he tried to kill me.” She added that she might fling herself upon the enemy and try to disarm him. “That’s all,” said Judge Carpenter. “Petition denied.”

Then Judge Carpenter rose from his seat. He pointed at the U.S. flag over his courtroom door and sternly said to Mme. Schwimmer:

“You cannot be a halfway citizen under that flag. . . . We have a great deal to give when we confer citizenship upon an alien. It is like admitting a new stockholder, and he or she should be willing to do what the other stockholders have obligated themselves to do. We must forget our various views on pacifism when war comes.”