RADICALS: Mice Apprehended

The U.S. Government, out to slay a Fascist dragon, still had enough time to pop at field mice. In a Minneapolis courtroom the Department of Justice triumphantly snagged a nestful of mice: 18 Trotskyites convicted of advocating the overthrow of the Government. Only hope for the mice was in an appeal. They vowed they would take their squeaking case all the way to the Supreme Court.

For a long time the Trotskyite mice* dominated the cat-runs of Minnesota labor. Their tiny but concentrated strength lay in the Minneapolis teamsters’ Local 544, whose chief mouse was lean, somber Vincent Dunne. Last summer, Dunne & union scuttled from A.F. of L., holed in with C.I.O. (TIME, July 7). Then their trouble began.

A.F. of L.’s old Tom Cat Uncle Dan Tobin mewed a complaint to his old friend Franklin Roosevelt. The Department of Justice whistled up its terriers, shouldered its blunderbuss and tramped into Minneapolis, raided the mousehole at Local 544, seized literature and Trotskyites, scruffed them off to court, accused them all of having wicked and revolutionary ideas.

In court, Government prosecutors unveiled a picture of the late Leon Trotsky, a red flag, stacks of books and pamphlets by Trotsky, Lenin, Marx. These could be considered as determining the defendants’ state of mind ruled Judge Matthew M. Joyce. Said he: “In his early days Hitler wandered around in a greasy old overcoat and was belittled.” Government witnesses, most of them faded or redyed Trotskyites, declared that:

Vincent Dunne & friends once visited Trotsky in Mexico. Dunne’s union had a record of leading violent strikes. Local 544 engaged in military drills and target practice.

The mouse-defendants admitted that there had been some calisthenics and some target shooting with two .22 pistols and two .22 rifles. Chiefly to intimidate sniffing local Fascists, squeaked they. As for the capitalist system, they admitted that their whiskers curled against it, but they categorically denied, on their honor as mice, that they wanted to overthrow it by force.

For five weeks a Federal jury of farmers, laborers, merchants and a janitor’s wife listened to revolutionary manifestoes and such, goggled at the mouse-dropping evidence. Vincent Dunne’s brother, one of the defendants, committed suicide. Five others were finally let off by the judge. Of the remaining 23, the jury exonerated all of sedition, convicted 18 of conspiring to arouse insubordination in Army and Navy.

This week Judge Joyce handed out sentences of a year-and-a-day to 16 months in the clink. Even if Minneapolis’ Trotskyite mice should win their Supreme Court appeal, their nest had been broken up.

*Acting as the Socialist Workers Party, a wizened little offshoot of the Communists.