IMMIGRATION: On Angel Island

Q. “Are you an alien?”

A. “I am.”

Q. “Are you a member of the Communist Party?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Have you at any time been a member of the Communist Party?”

A. “No.”

Last week in a small dining room at the U. S. Immigration station on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, these questions & answers started and summarized the most important deportation hearing of the decade. Answerer was Harry Bridges, the long-nosed bony Australian whose power over Pacific longshore labor won him top rank in C. I. O. Hanging on his answers was hard-boiled Dean James M. (“Chink”) Landis of Harvard Law School, former head of SEC, whom Madam Secretary of Labor Perkins drafted as special examiner. Also attentive, though not in the little dining room, were large shipping and industrial interests to whom Laborite Bridges personifies Satan; eminent politicians to whom the labor vote is extremely important; and C. I. O. and A. F. of L., U. S. Labor’s two bitterly rival wings.

A Japanese steamer dropped its hook on the only public telephone cable to Angel Island, breaking the line and isolating the Bridges proceedings for a whole day. A telegraph operator grabbed a knife and went berserk in the room next to the trial chamber, had to be overpowered. Otherwise the performance went along quietly enough, covering ground familiar to reporters of the long, moot Bridges story.

Major Lawrence Milner (retired) of the Oregon National Guard testified that he had been with Bridges to Communist Party meetings in Portland, seen him pay Party dues, knew that he avoided Communists in public, and they him, to keep his interest secret. Witness Milner admitted having committed perjury at a Communist Party trial but said he only did so in the line of his undercover duty.

Witness John L. Leech, a onetime Communist, was cross-examined about an affidavit he was said by the defense to have signed, in which he related that four times in Portland he was offered money to identify Bridges as a Red.

Everything for Harry Bridges depended on whether or not they proved him a Communist at the time deportation proceedings were started against him, last April. Because in the Strecker case, for which this case was delayed, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that temporary Communism, since discontinued, is not a deportable offense (TIME, April 24). Running the Bridges defense was a lady veteran of the Strecker fight, and of a lot of other celebrated “liberal” cases, notably those of Angelo Herndon, the Scottsboro Boys and John Strachey. She was Carol Weiss King, 44, a short, swart, athletic Manhattan widow with bushy black eyebrows and thick eyeglasses, a specialist in labor and radical defense work, particularly alien deportations. Examiner Landis was stern with her when she opened her case with a long statement to the effect that Harry Bridges was being railroaded by the Interests.

If Harry Bridges is deported after a grandstand trial which may last two months, the final decision will rest, not with Examiner Landis or Immigration Commissioner James Houghteling or a board of review, but with another lady: Frances Perkins, who some Congressmen think should be impeached for not sending Bridges away long ago.