A Washington reporter's two-year crusade has begun to pay off. Scheduled to go on trial shortly in the District of Columbia are 34 persons already indicted for sedition. A dogged Pinkerton-minded reporter had a big hand in bringing them to book.
In 1940 the Washington Post's grey, sharp managing editor Alexander F. ("Casey") Jones became convinced, that all the pro-isolationist, anti-Semitic propaganda that was then flooding the U.S. was more than mere coincidence. To Reporter Dillard Stokes, who has a nose sharpened by 19 years in U.S. newsrooms, has studied law and authored many a spare-time true detective story, Casey Jones gave a blank-check assignment: investigate and expose subversive activities —"take your time, be sure of your facts," then shoot the works.
In September 1941 Stokes heard that Prescott Dennett, chief of the "Islands for War Debts Committee," had received a summons to appear before the District of Columbia grand jury. Stokes grabbed a taxi, scooted for Dennett's office, there watched a truck being loaded with mailbags. He followed while some of the bags were delivered to the America First Committee headquarters, others to the offices of isolationist Republican Congressman "Ham" Fish. When he phoned Fish's office and got a flat denial that any of the mailbags were there, Stokes wangled his way into Fish's locker room, found the bags.
Later he discovered a bonfire behind America First headquarters. At night he crept in, gathered up charred debris, examined the fragile fragments under magnifying glass, deciphered many names.
Another time he obtained, by means he will not disclose, waste paper from Dennett's office and made a file of persons and organizations corresponding with Dennett. Then he rented a special mailbox, adopted the phony names of "Jefferson Breem" and "Adam Quigley," wrote Jew-baiting letters to all the names in the file. He was flooded with antiSemitic, anti-Roosevelt, isolationist literature, not only from persons to whom he had written, but from others as well. Soon other organizations he had never heard of had him on their mailing lists.
Results of all this sleuthing discovery: that many propaganda agencies in the U.S. were working together, swapping mailing lists; that many an isolationist Congressman's free mailing privilege was being used to disseminate such propaganda, some of which even was inserted into the Congressional Record and then mailed out as Congressional Record "reprints"; that Congressman Fish's secretary, George Hill, later jailed for perjury (TIME. March 2), was serving as handyman for a propaganda ring managed by George Sylvester Viereck and Dennett.