The Solicitor-General of the U. S., correct in morning coat, wing collar and striped sponge-bag pants, last week appeared before the U. S. Supreme Court to attack a foreign-born lunchroom proprietor of Hot Springs, Ark. in a case fateful for all alien radicals in the U. S. Important also for Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor were the Solicitor-General's arguments, for in attacking Radical Joe Strecker, able Robert Houghwout Jackson was clearing the name of Frances Perkins, against whom rested impeachment charges based on her alleged mollycoddling of an even more famed alien radical, Australia's and California's Harry Bridges. Two days after Miss Perkins told a House committee what an honest, patriotic woman and public official she really is (see p. 10), Mr. Jackson told the Supreme Court that, in Madam Secretary Perkins' opinion, Alien Strecker is a lecherous, insidious, incendiary character who ought to be deported.
Joseph George Strecker, 50, born in Galicia (then Austria, now Poland), got to the U. S. in 1912 on a borrowed $300. He dug coal for six years in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois at War-boom wages. In 1917 he was not drafted for the army because he came from an enemy country. When he developed sciatica in 1918, he was affluent enough to retire to the baths at Hot Springs, Ark. for two years. In 1920 he turned waiter, soon owned his own restaurant in Hot Springs. He bought real estate and mortgages, had $6,000 when he was arrested in 1934. He no longer has that much. His rise to fame as a test-case radical has cost him dear.
In 1932, just before the Presidential election, Joe Strecker passed a Negro church in Hot Springs, saw a white woman addressing a black & white audience of about 50. Communism was her theme. Joe remembers she told how bread and oranges were being cast into the sea by capitalists to hike prices. When the collection was taken up, Joe tossed in 60/. He must have signed something because he soon received a membership book from Kansas City headquarters of the Communist Party, with six 10^ dues stamps affixed and a handbill urging William Zebulon Foster for President. Joe Strecker, who had voted for Al Smith in 1928, was sufficiently impressed to vote for Mr. Foster in 1932. But he paid no more "dues" to Mr. Foster's party.
In January 1933, a Hot Springs detective called on Joe in connection with an application he had filed for U. S. citizenship. In Joe's room the detective spied the Communist booklet, pocketed it. Joe's citizenship examinations then turned into an investigation of Joe's politics by agents of the Immigration Bureau. They arrested him under the 1918-20 law which says that any alien advocating forcible overthrow of the U. S. Government, or ganging with folk who so advocate, shall be deported.
To various questions they asked him, Joe Strecker gave the following answers:
Q. "Would you bear arms against the present government if the Communists were in a majority and certain of a victory? . . ."
A. "Certainly, I'd be a fool to get myself killed for capitalism.