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 CHAPTER X

THE GREAT I. W. W. TRIAL

Story of the Greatest Criminal Prosecution Known in the Jurisprudence of America—The Lawless Acts Leading up to the Arrests—Methods of Violence Used by Members of the I. W. W.—Sabotage and Terror—Chief Figures of the Trial—Incidents from the Inside.

The greatest trial with which the American Protective League was identified was the genuine cause celébrè known all over the world as the I. W. W. trial. It began in the Federal Court for Chicago, presided over by Judge Kenesaw M. Landis (the same of fame in the Standard Oil case), on April 1, 1918, and ended with ninety-seven convictions and sentences in one lot. The case was concluded at two in the afternoon of August 30, 1918.

The trial lasted for five months. The preparation for it covered two years or more. The record is said to be the most elaborate and complete ever prepared in any case at law. The case was by no means a Chicago or Illinois case, but was a national and indeed an international one. The documentary and other evidence preserved in the rooms of the Bureau of Investigation in Chicago is so voluminous as to pass belief, and it includes more proof of the depravity of the human mind than any like assemblage of written and printed material known to man. It is the record of the attempted ruin of this republic.

With this great case, the American Protective League had been connected practically all the time from the date of its own inception. It had men shadowing the suspects, men intercepting their mail, men ingratiating themselves into their good graces, men watching all their comings and goings, men transcribing and indexing the reports, men looking into the law in all its phases as bearing on these cases. No one knows how many A. P. L. operatives, in all