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"Yes, I joined the Communist Party. . . . [But] I do not consider myself a Communist because I am not paying dues to the Communist Party. I do not know whether we shall ever have a Communistic system in the United States. I have read
Marx's books and Marx states that sooner or later there will be a Red Government in every country in the world. I am trying to protect myself. . . .*
"I do not know what is going to happen. I do not know how long I am going to live. If I knew when I was going to die I would get me about four women and have a hell of a time before I die.
"If Communism comes in this country I will not be against it, because I have got to go with the people, and whatever the people want, I will have to go along with them."
Joe sold enough Cities Service stock to buy a $1,000 Liberty bond to post for his freedom. After long proceedings, delayed by the Communist Party's interpolating that it did not now advocate overthrowing the U. S. Government, and by Poland's protesting that it did not want Joe because he was originally Austrian (the village of his birth was obliterated by the World War), a warrant for his deportation which had been issued in August 1934 became effective as of January 1937. Joe hired a lawyer to appeal his case in U. S. Circuit Court at St. Louis. That lawyer drank up his expense money and filed no appeal, so Joe was taken to New Orleans to be deported. But Joe's Hot Springs lawyer, one C. Alpheus Stanfield, whose lucrative practice in Arkansas's easy-divorce courts enables him to take "radical" cases for fun, followed him.
Lawyer Stanfield appealed to Federal District Judge Wayne G. Borah (the Idaho Senator's nephew), who ruled against Joe; then to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Here Judge Joseph C. Hutcheson Jr. found that there was nothing in the Labor Department's record against Joe to warrant deporting him. Judge Hutcheson spoke of "the tyranny of labels over certain types of minds" and twitted the prosecution (inferentially, Madam Secretary Perkins herself) for "a kind of Pecksniffian righteousness, savoring strongly of hypocrisy and party bigotry "
This characterization, so curiously opposite to Congressman Dies's picture of Miss Perkins, Solicitor-General Jackson last week sought to erase. He was arguing her appeal against Judge Hutcheson's ruling. After dragging in Joe Strecker's "four women," he attacked the Communist policy† which Joe had embraced as a "Trojan horse" policy for capturing the U. S. He asked the Court to read current Communist references to "revolution" not "in the light of prophecy" but as active, ominous, highly contemporary. Joe Strecker's failure to pay further Communist dues was no defense, argued Mr. Jackson. He urged Constitutional liberty of thought and speech for citizens only. Said he: "We don't have to confer upon the guest all the privileges of the household."