Page:The web (1919).djvu/78

 the Department of Justice, we put all of these meetings out of business in the territory of our jurisdiction. No more socialist meetings of any kind here. We got information which resulted in my calling upon certain Russellites. Collected five books of 'The Finished Mystery,' and some copies of the 'Kingdom News.' Russellites were watched, and they promised to discontinue activities until after the war. They have done so."

It is not to be denied that the following of the radical banner among all nations of the world is an increasing one and one which will demand great care on the part of the governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Bolshevism is the great threat of the day, and we shall have to meet it in America as it must be met in Germany and Russia before there can be any lasting peace.

At times some of these radicals have got caught in the jaws of the amended Espionage Act, as for instance, Eugene V. Debs, the veteran Socialist candidate for the presidency, who was given three concurrent sentences of ten years each. Early in the fall of 1918, Dr. Morris Zucker, a well known Socialist in Brooklyn, was arrested on a charge of sedition and locked up. He is said to have declared that the stories of German atrocities committed by German army officers were not true and that they were circulated by capitalists in this country to further their own purposes. Dr. Zucker was of the belief that American soldiers are "make believe" soldiers. On September 6, 1918, in Philadelphia, Joseph V. Stillson, secretary of the "Kova," a Lithuanian newspaper, was caught by the Espionage Act and sentenced to three years' imprisonment at Atlanta.

In Chicago, in December, 1918, there began the trial of Victor L. Berger, Congressman-elect from Milwaukee, for violation of the espionage act and conspiracy to obstruct the United States in prosecuting the war with Germany. With Berger, four other Socialist co-defendants were arraigned: Adolph Germer, National Secretary of the Socialist party; J. Louis Engdahl, Editor of the ''American Socialist''; William F. Kruse, Secretary of the draft-evading organization of the anti-war Socialists, and Irwin St. John Tucker, a radical Episcopalian rector.