Fairy Tale

After 126 days of feverish dawdling, the biggest sedition trial in U.S. history adjourned for a two-week vacation. Prosecutor O. John Rogge, who has sworn to show the jury every one of his 9,000 documents “if it takes forever,” admitted sadly: “It’s just impossible to estimate the length of this case. All our estimates seem now like fairy tales.”

It has been strongly hinted that the defendants, accused of conspiring with the Nazis to undermine morale in the U.S. armed forces, are trying to stall until the war ends. If delay has been a deliberate defense tactic, it has been a spectacular success. In the past 18 weeks:

¶ The original cast of 30 defendants has shrunk to 26—one has died; two were granted motions of severance because of poor health; one, who will be tried later, was severed for obstreperous conduct.

¶ Six defense lawyers and one defendant acting as his own counsel have been fined a round total of $1,000 for contempt of court. The most talkative lawyer, after being asked for $350 in contempt fines, was barred from the case.

¶ Neither admonitions nor fines prevented the defendants from shouting, giggling and demonstrating in court, but their lawyers finally persuaded them not to wear grotesque false-faces and signs reading, “I am a Spy.”

¶ Time & again the trial has plowed on while various defendants were excused: 1) to have teeth fixed; 2) to go apartment-hunting; 3) to sit up with sick relatives; 4) to be treated for poison ivy and carbuncles.

¶ Most of the defendants, having landed in their present trouble through literary composition (Lawrence Dennis, Elizabeth Dilling, George Sylvester Viereck, et al.), are now hard at work writing books giving their own versions of the trial.

When the court announced the two weeks’ recess, one of Prosecutor Rogge’s harassed staff cracked: “Will we have a vacation every summer?”