Left-Wing Political Activist and Progressive Leader in the Berkeley Co-op
III. Loyalty Issues and Radical Reaction in the Roosevelt-Truman Era
Interview 3: October 27, 1988
Tape 3, Side A
Loyalty Investigations in the Roosevelt-Truman Era
LarsenThis is the 27th of October. As we left off last time, we were just beginning to talk about the interrogators. You can pick up the thread of thought there.
Treuhaft
The loyalty program that was instituted. . . The 1940s were a critical decade in American history, and marked by the presidency of [Franklin] Roosevelt at the beginning and [Harry] Truman at the end. And they were much more different from each other than most people today believe. Roosevelt represented the New Deal, the war against fascism and a period of liberality in American politics. However, even during his tenure, there were un-American activities committees. There was in Congress the Dies Committee, which was an un-American activities committee. Roosevelt never took them on in a frontal attack. He was a very shrewd politician. He let things like this go along, and wouldn't step in until it was a) very necessary, and b) politically possible. Dies was considered rather a crack-pot. He didn't have any really wide support. But there always had been, in the U.S., an illiberal, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist core; and that was marked by people like Father Coughlin, during the war, and Gerald L.K. Smith — those Fascist crack-pots. I suppose Coughlin had probably the largest following in the Middle West.
But when Truman became President, the Congress adopted a loyalty act and set up loyalty committees within the various government agencies, to protect the government from control by the subversives; that was, Communists. It started off with a rather small scare, but pretty soon, tens of thousands of government employees were involved. And the procedure that was used, it was done quietly but not publicly, which differentiates it from the McCarthy period. It was an insidious quiet thing that did not receive a great deal of publicity. Very few people knew it was
The idea of disloyalty was a fairly new one in American politics. There had been, after World War I, a period when there was an attack on disloyalty, but that was directed at foreigners, mainly. The Palmer raids. There was an Assistant Attorney General named Palmer, who rounded up anarchists and aliens. There was no important Communist party at that time. It was an attack mainly on foreign ideologies. So the idea of Americans, native-born Americans being disloyal, is a rather new idea.
And, as I say, it came on somewhat insidiously at first in the form of these loyalty investigations within the government. I handled many of these cases. I've just finished reading the draft of an account of that period by Carl Bernstein,4 the journalist of Watergate fame. His parents were friends of ours, Al Bernstein and his wife, Sylvia. We knew them in San Francisco, when he was assigned as an investigator in the Office of Price Administration. My wife got to know him and we became good friends.
Al Bernstein also was terrifically disturbed and shocked by the loyalty program. He had associated with Communists a lot. It's not clear whether he was or was not a member of the Communist party. He had graduated from Columbia Law School but never got into legal practice. Except that, while he was in Washington working for a government agency and organizing the [United] Federal Workers of America union, he was called upon more and more to represent people in these loyalty cases. He represented hundreds of people in individual trials. And I represented probably dozens in the same thing, in the same series of events. But my activity on that, yes, that was in Washington and it was during the war.
Larsen
What defense would you use?
Treuhaft
Well, they would send out what was called a written interrogatory, and they would make it clear that there were no charges against you: "We're just sort of looking into things as we are obliged to do. But we have information to the effect that you've attended social events where Communists and other subversives were present. Is it true that you subscribe to the Daily People's World? Is it true that you were acquainted with, in my case, Louis Goldblatt, a well-known
None of them asked if I was a Communist, I don't think. Although to have a government job, I had to sign a loyalty oath saying I wasn't a Communist. I don't think I was at that time, but I'm not sure. I may have been. But they were looking for the connections. So I went beyond denying. I really attacked their right to ask these questions. On the question of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Appeal, well, that was an organization that was being sponsored by UNRRA,5 the United Nations relief organization, and it was to give help to refugees of Spanish fascism. My knowledge of Lou Goldblatt was peripheral. He was the secretary-treasurer of the ILWU, the longshoremen's union. He was second in command to Harry Bridges and a very brilliant, able man. He later became a good friend. [Interruption] I'll let that ring.
Larsen
You were telling me about Goldblatt.
Treuhaft
The thing about Goldblatt was that he was a member of the War Labor Board, and I was working as an attorney in the War Labor Board. I was dying to get to meet him. I'd met him once socially but I wanted to get to know him pretty well. For one thing, his work on the board was extremely important. He was the real power house who was able to carry things in the board, and he was looked up to. He was the real intellect on that board — he and Wayne Morse, later Senator Wayne Morse. But he would pass by my desk with his nose up in the air and was very busy with other things. I never got a chance to talk to him, but I was accused of being a "close associate" of his. I was just as close to him as I was to any other board members who ran the western region, the western part of the United States, under the War Labor Relations Act.
In my case, it never came to a hearing. They just sort of dropped it. You have to remember a number of things. This happened to me in San Francisco. San Francisco was more left-liberal in its outlook than the rest of the country. California, generally, was. San Francisco was. It was a labor stronghold. Harry Bridges, although attacked by the Hearst press, was probably a hero to more people than he was a devil. So it never got to the point
But right after the war, when the Cold War was coming into play, he [Truman] permitted Congress to goad the agencies to move along at a tremendous clip in increasing the loyalty investigations and increasing pressure on people within the government. And, of course, this spread outside the government also, as you move along in time during the Truman administration. I guess he was president for about six years, part of those in his first term and then another four years.
By the end of Truman's presidency, he was responsible for permitting passage of things like the McCarran Act, and the setting up of concentration camps for subversives, under a bill that was introduced by Senator [Hubert] Humphrey, another person who is now considered a great liberal. Truman, also, is considered a pretty good guy. And the fact is, that what's called the McCarthy era is really the Truman-McCarthy era. That was clearly initiated by him. But before it was over, Truman was being denounced by McCarthy and his own loyalty was put into question.
Activities Related to the Communist Party
Reasons for Joining the Communist Party
LarsenWhy were you and Decca willing to take the risk to join the Party?
Treuhaft
At that time, all the people that we liked and respected were in the Party. We liked and respected them because they were doing the kinds of things that we thought should be done in resistance to the loyalty program, and during the war, in support of the war. We, it must be said, came into the Communist party only after the earlier period, when the Communist party was against U.S. participation in the war. In other words, we joined a couple of years after the Soviet Union was attacked by Hitler. Yes, we were aware of the Party's former position, but what the Party was doing when we came into it seemed to be right on every score.
It was the only place where Blacks, called Negroes in those days, were respected; the only place where women's rights were being talked about; and if you had a liberal point of view, the
We were in there, not purely from the point of view of doing good, but because we enjoyed doing things with the people that we liked, and we also enjoyed the kind of struggle that we were engaged in. We were always at odds with the leadership of the agencies where we worked — the War Labor Board, the OPA. The top administrator would be a political appointee, would be pretty conservative. We would feel that we were pushing ahead, that we were trying to do far more than the heads of the agencies wanted us to do in terms of rent control, in terms of price controls. And, also, we saw some positive results. I think I mentioned the other day that the extraordinary fact that all these people who were knocking themselves out and working long hours in the OPA were able to hold inflation down during wartime to less than 10 percent, 5 to 10 percent. That's a very extraordinary feat when you consider that in peace time inflation has galloped away at a far, far greater rate. In other words, it worked.
The Beginning of the Civil Rights Movement
LarsenYou were at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. It sounds like you preceded it by about ten or fifteen years.
Treuhaft
Oh, yes, the Civil Rights Movement in the South, absolutely. There's no doubt about that. And the Communist party is not given sufficient credit really for things like getting Jackie Robinson into major league baseball.
Larsen
Jackie Robinson.
Treuhaft
Jackie Robinson, the first Black in major league baseball. Well, the Communist party as early as the 1930s had been picketing the Polo Grounds, the Yankee Stadium for not having Blacks. They were agitating for a long time and spreading the word around. I don't think they were solely responsible, but they certainly were given a lot of credit in the Black community for speeding up the day when Blacks were admitted.
You have to also remember what a terrible time it was — the excesses of racism in the period 1940 to 1960. When we came to San Francisco in 1943 and until just about the end of the war, there were no Blacks, zero, in the entire municipal railway system in San Francisco. There was not a Black bus driver. They were excluded. During the war Roosevelt signed a — what's it called? — an executive order directing that in the interest of the war effort there should be integration in industry and that Blacks should not be excluded. Nobody paid much attention to it. It was never really enforced.
By the end of the war, enforcement measures were beginning to be taken. The streetcar workers in San Francisco declared that they would go on strike if one Black person came to work for the system. Everybody would walk off. Well, when the court ordered them to hire some Blacks, nobody walked off. And the same was true on the Bay Bridge. There were no — not one Black employee as a toll collector. No women either, of course. You have to remember how different those times were. There were no women in law school, when I went to law school. There were no Blacks in the American Bar Association. They excluded by charter Blacks until well into the 1950s. All of the fraternal organizations — the Moose, the Elks, and whatnot — were segregated.
Larsen
Did you initiate some personal activities to change this?
Treuhaft
Yes, I was involved in that. I'll tell you about that in a moment. But just to complete the picture, the worst of it was that the unions themselves were segregated. And the law firm that I was in did the pioneer work in breaking that discrimination during the war — the Bethlehem Shipyard, Kaiser Shipyard, all the shipyards in the Bay Area, who had recruited tens of thousands of Blacks from the South — thereby changing the whole character of this area in terms of demographics, effecting long-term changes. They were expecting these people to come out here just for the war jobs, and then go back to the South at the end of the war.
Well, the unions which controlled labor in the shipyards, which were all craft unions, the old A. F. of L. [American Federation of Labor] craft unions, didn't have any place for Blacks. They set up auxiliaries. When the Blacks came out here, they had to join a union in order to go to work, but they weren't in the same union. They were in a separate auxiliary where they paid dues, but they had no control over that money, and some of those unions became very, very rich as a result of that. So there was a violent legal battle to break the segregation. We went to court, and finally had
Larsen
I don't know.
Treuhaft
He was a member of the Co-op Board for a time when I was on that, too. But anyway, that's clearly the answer to the question of why I got into the Party. The Party was the only show in town that was really doing things that nobody else was doing, and that needed to be done.
Civil Rights Law Cases
LarsenHow did you participate? What were your activities?
Treuhaft
Well, my partners and I considered ourselves civil rights lawyers from the beginning, from the '40s and into the '50s. We participated very often. It was a handful of lawyers who were almost all Communists in two or three law firms. Our law firm was the only one in the East Bay and we had two, three, four lawyers — at various times up to six or seven. The law firm from which we split off in San Francisco and the Garry Dreyfus law firm, Charles Garry and Barney [Benjamin] Dreyfus, were just about the only lawyers who took on the civil rights cases.
We always had dozens of discrimination suits going against restaurants and hotels for violation of individual rights. This was true in the years when there were demonstrations at the Palace Hotel to enforce the hiring of Blacks. No Blacks were employed except as chambermaids. No Black waiters. We represented the organizations that were taking action. We represented them when they were arrested for picketing and for sitting-in, in almost every phase of life, like union discrimination that I mentioned. My law firm handled all the cases. My partner and I handled all of the restrictive covenant cases in Northern California.
Larsen
Who was your partner?
Bert, Bertram Edises. Well, we're getting out of the '40s and into the '50s now, and the loyalty oath moved from the government into public life and in the '50s, communities. Well, the McCarran Act, I think, became law in the '40s, and the Smith Act began to be enforced at the end of the '40s. I was involved when HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) started to have its hearings, representing people who were subpoenaed to testify before those committees.
The fetish for the loyalty regulations, which first applied only to government employees, progressed into general private employment as well, especially if it had any connection with war contracts. And, of course, the country kept up the military establishment even after the war, so it was very hard to find a fair sized business that didn't have military contracts. The whole waterfront was declared a security area, so all of the longshore workers, members of the longshore union, had to be certified and cleared as being loyal.
We represented workers who were denied clearances, and we would represent them when their hearings came up. Also, we would sue the government and sue employers to establish the right to employment of people who were charged with subversion. By that time also it was illegal under the McCarran Act for a member of the Communist party to be a union officer.
Larsen
What was your success rate with this?
Treuhaft
Well, we had an extraordinarily good success rate, in this sense. We usually lost our cases down at the lowest level, in the Superior Court, and very often in the lower Appellate Courts. We won almost every case that we took up to the Supreme Court. The reason for that is, well, for one thing, in that period, the '40s and '50s, if an FBI man got on the witness stand, the jury would just faint away and accept anything an FBI person said as gospel. It was considered dangerous to try to cross-examine an FBI agent. There was such adoration of them and such belief in their purity. It wasn't until the '60s that people became skeptical about the police and the FBI and whatnot. The '60s brought about that change. But before that, well, there was a whole history.
The Harry Bridges Case
TreuhaftOne of the things I grew up with in California, in my maturity, was the Harry Bridges case.7 Harry Bridges was an Australian national, who was the prime organizer of the longshoremen's union. He effected tremendous changes, led a general strike in 1934 and 1936, and established fair hiring arrangements in California twenty years before they reached the East Coast longshoremen, who were in a different union. So he was under attack from the very beginning.
First, he was under attack by the shipping interests, because he was organizing the workers, and he was arrested for deportation as a subversive alien. He had applied for citizenship and he had been turned down. That was in the '30s, before I came to California.
One of the partners in the law firm I went to work for, Aubrey Grossman, represented Bridges in the deportation case. Well, that case was lost at the hearing level, before the Department of Labor Hearing Officer. They ruled that he must be deported. It was lost in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It was won only in the U.S. Supreme Court. And that was partly because the hysteria that affects the lower courts tends to abate by the time a case gets to the higher courts. And when it takes two or three years before you get to the Supreme Court, things are much more calmly ap- praised.
So the Bridges case was won by my law firm when they tried to deport him. Then he applied for citizenship, they turned him down, and the same type of hearing was held and lost all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered him to be admitted to citizenship. I think that's the first time that's ever happened. Harry used to go around boasting that, "I am the only guy in the U.S. who can prove that he's not a `Commie'. The U.S. Supreme Court has said so." [Laughter]
Larsen
Did you present before the Supreme Court?
Treuhaft
No, I was very junior in those days. The senior partners, who had organized the law firm in 1934 and 1935 when they got out of law school, were first-rate constitutional lawyers. All of us became good constitutional lawyers because we were handling a lot of constitutional cases. There was another thing about the Communists,
So, you know, the Bridges case is an example. So, he's admitted to citizenship. He goes to the Federal Court House proud as punch to be sworn in and he takes with him two officers of the union to be his witnesses, because you have to swear that you're not a Communist and your witnesses have to swear that you're not a Communist. So he picked up two officers of the union to go down to the courthouse with him to be sworn in; one of them wasn't available, so another one substituted. He's sworn in, be- comes a citizen. Within a year after that he's prosecuted — this is his third prosecution — he's prosecuted for perjury, for allegedly falsely swearing that he was not a Communist at the time he was admitted to citizenship. They used the same tired old witnesses that they had used over a period of five or six years, who were thoroughly, what's the word —
Larsen
Biased?
Treuhaft
No. They'd been torn apart. They'd been proved to be liars.
Larsen
Perjurers?
Treuhaft
No, not perjurers, but, oh, what the devil's the word?
Larsen
Discredited?
Treuhaft
Discredited. Yes, thoroughly discredited; and it seemed it would be a pushover to win this case where they were prosecuting him for having, at the moment that he was being sworn in, been a member of the Communist party. Well, you could say a lot of things about Harry Bridges, but he was never stupid. And the whole idea was so bizarre. Not only that, his two witnesses were also prosecuted for perjury for swearing that he was not a Communist when they allegedly knew that he was. They allegedly knew that they were falsely swearing. Well, until this case came along, the lawyers who had represented him were all Communists. When they finally prosecuted Harry on this third occasion, we were well into the '50s — it must have been '54 or '55 — but it was well into the McCarthy period also. We decided we wanted to have a lawyer on the defense team who was not a Communist to sort of broaden the —
Larsen
A token.
Yes. So who do we take, who comes along? The best trial lawyer in San Francisco at the time, Vincent Hallinan, who was not a left-winger at all. His only political activity at that time, I think, was sending money to Ireland to support the IRA.8 He was never considered a radical. He was extremely rich. He had become rich as a lawyer, as a street fighter in the courts. His wife too had become rich parlaying real estate in San Francisco into millions of dollars. I talked to Hallinan when he got into the case. He said, "I've never seen such a pushover." He said, "I've never had a book like I have on every one of their witnesses. We know the whole life history of these guys. We're able to prove that they're liars." He said, "This trial is just a joke."
Well, I didn't personally participate in the trial except a couple of my bosses and former partners did, but the case ended with Harry being found guilty. Hallinan went to jail for six months for contempt of court, in this case which couldn't be lost! He was found guilty of contempt by the trial judge, Judge George Harris of the Federal District Court who had been an old friend of his, but who, as in the case when public attention is attracted to these trials, and charges of communism fly around, like everybody else, is affected and acts entirely differently. This is what happens in political cases. Harris found Hallinan guilty of contempt for arguing that the prosecution was barred by the statute of limitations. I think three years had gone by since Harry Bridges had become a citizen, so Hallinan argued this vehemently, as is his way. The judge told him to sit down and he got up and he tried to argue it again, and he was given six months in jail for contempt.
Well, Hallinan had been in contempt of every judge in California that he had ever appeared before, and nobody had ever dared even to fine him, let alone jail him. They'd fine him a hundred dollars and he'd say, "I'm not gonna pay it. Send me to jail." And then, "Oh, come on, Vince." You know. He never went to jail for a day; six months for being Harry Bridges' lawyer, and the case went up to the Circuit Court of Appeals. Conviction was affirmed. The U.S. Supreme Court reverses the conviction on the grounds that the statute of limitations barred the prosecution, the very ground that Hallinan spent six months in jail for! So, that attests to the hysteria that was beginning to show itself even in a liberal place like California. But it was happening all over.
The Civil Rights Congress
Tape 3, Side B
TreuhaftThe Civil Rights Congress was formed nationally just around the end of the war; around 1945, I think. There was a national meeting of lawyers and people interested in civil rights, most of whom were probably Communists, to form an organization that had two main emphases. One was for the protection of Communists; and another, which became equally important, and more important, was the attempt to establish civil liberties and civil rights for Blacks, which was the only important national minority at that time. It was the only politically important minority, I should say.
The prestigious organization that occupied the field was the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. But the NAACP was a somewhat elitist organization. They were primarily, almost entirely, interested in court action. They had chapters all over the U.S., but the chapters were mainly conduits to raise money to send East to finance the court actions — taking cases to court, to try to establish rights to employment, try to fight against discrimination, the right to vote, that sort of thing. Well, they had a good reputation because they had very good law- yers, but they were not terribly successful. They would win their cases very often but not until much, much later did the cases that they won have enough national importance to make a real difference in the lives of colored people. It was elitist to the extent that when Thurgood Marshall, now a Supreme Court justice, was counsel for the NAACP, he jokingly referred to it as the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People. That was true in my own experience. The NAACP here in California was a very unimportant organization, although it had national prestige and people would think of it in terms of fighting discrimination.
So the Civil Rights Congress was organized to have a broader, and more active, activist approach to fight for civil rights — not only in court but in the streets — to picket, to do things that were considered beneath the dignity of an organization like the NAACP. They never picketed. The need for such an organization by the end of the war was very great. There was a tremendous amount of dislocation in the lives of Blacks who had moved from the South to places like California and the Northwest, to work in the shipyards and other war industries. When the war was over, these people who had been living, for whom temporary housing had been constructed, found themselves in that same housing that would decay, and was now becoming permanent housing and permanent slums. And that's true, locally, even today in Richmond, Vallejo, Oakland.
The Civil Rights Congress was also interested in pushing legislation and in defending people who were being charged under the Smith Act. I guess it was around 1948 or '49 that the Civil Rights Congress was organized and formed. It had a brilliant national leader, William Patterson, who had been one of the defense attorneys in the Sacco-Vanzetti case and the Scottsboro case (nine Black boys accused of raping two white women).
Larsen
When did you join?
Treuhaft
Pardon me?
Larsen
When did you join?
Treuhaft
Oh, we joined just right at the beginning. I think it was around '47 or '48 when it was set up. Again, it was an organization that was truly interracial. The NAACP, while it got a lot of money from the white community, didn't have very much interracial composition. White donors would be made honorary members of the NAACP, but essentially it was a Black, middle-class organization. The Civil Rights Congress appealed to the working-class Blacks and the unemployed Blacks, and left-wing whites. And in the Bay Area chapters, it was always primarily a Black organization with white membership also.
My wife became interested in it. She became Secretary-Treasurer of the East Bay local and devoted herself to it for ten years. Pretty much on assignment to begin with, from the Communist party. You had to find a place where you were going to be active — a "mass organization" — and this was her mass organization. As lawyers, my partner, Bert Edises, and I were the only ones in the East Bay who would take these cases.
In the East Bay, one of the main problems in the Black community, the main target in the sense that something needed immediate improvement, was police brutality. In addition to the very large Black population that had come to California in the war years, there had long been a very small resident Black population in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland. The Black population that was here before the war was somewhat elitist. These were people who came because they had jobs here. These were the sleeping car porters, working on the railroads which stopped here because this
This new wave that came in during the war overwhelmed them. Tens of thousands of new Black families inundated the area, needed housing, didn't have housing, and lived in slum conditions from the very beginning. Came from the South, mainly from rural areas, where they had no education whatever because they came from places where there were segregated schools. Most of my clients were Black, those people from the South. Very few of them had got past the third or fourth grade because if you lived on the farm, you'd be pulled out of school when the harvest and planting came along. And the schools that they went to weren't very much to begin with. They had no experience in city living so that they'd be in trouble from the beginning. They'd be under attack from their neighbors because of loud music, peeing in the streets, all sorts of accusations against them. Nothing had been planned to acclimate them to city living. It took some time.
Police Brutality in Oakland, California
LarsenDo any of these cases stick out in your memory?
Treuhaft
Well, yes. It was so bad. At the same time we had this influx of Blacks from the rural South, with no education, no experience of city living, we also had a fairly large influx of whites from the rural South. They gravitated into things like police work. The Oakland Police Department was very heavily Southern white.
There was a great deal of corruption in the police department. There was nobody in the department to put any kind of stop at all to the unbridled brutality, hatred really, on the part of the police toward the Black citizenry here. Because once they came North, the Blacks quickly began to shed the mantle of submissiveness which had been necessary to their survival in the South. They had begun to assert their manhood, throw their weight around, show they couldn't be pushed around. So there was a lot of resentment, a lot of hatred on the part of the police toward the Blacks and the Blacks toward the police.
A common occurrence in Oakland, and I had dozens and dozens of cases reported to me, would be the Friday night rolling of the drunks. Workers were paid by check. They didn't have bank accounts. They cashed their checks Friday night in the bars, which
We went to court on some of these cases and sued the police. Very, very hard cases to win. Almost impossible. Lawyers — very soon, we were the only ones in town — and I mean the only ones, who ever sued the police for damages for these beatings. For assault, battery, injury. Of course, we also represented these Blacks at the same time when they were being charged with resisting arrest — another favorite charge, also hard to beat.
So very soon, some of the criminal lawyers in town started to send cases to us. They'd say, "Well, I'm representing this guy, and the police really beat the shit out of him. I think he really ought to sue." I'd say, "Why don't you do it?" "I can't do it. I gotta get along with the police." [Laughter] "You got nothing to lose. Why don't you do it?" That was pretty much the attitude. And for many, many years, we were, almost without exception, the only lawyers to ever sue the police. We were, in turn, hated by the police.
Larsen
Did they ever threaten you?
Treuhaft
Not overtly, but there were times I was afraid that the same thing could easily happen to me. You know, the crudity of what they were doing was just awful. And it wasn't until one of the great things that the Civil Rights Congress did — and this was around 1949 — we kept petitioning Sacramento and were going after the legislators and finally got the Judiciary Committee of the [California] Assembly to send a sub-committee to Oakland to investigate the charges of police brutality. That was the first time that had happened in any community in California. And the hearings were held there. The investigator they had for the committee was depending on us for information on cases, and whatnot. We had fed them a whole lot of them. He was a former Chief of Police of Bakersfield.
Larsen
Who was he?
I wish I could remember his name, but he was fired by the committee because of objections from the police, and whatnot, because of his close association with us. The poor guy, he was a conservative former chief of police and he got kicked out because he had to rely on us. There was nobody else to rely on. The NAACP played a shameful role in those hearings. The local president, a lawyer who's now a judge, said to the committee, "Well, in a way, you have to understand the police here. It's not an altogether bad thing that all these white Southerners are in the police department." (At that time there were maybe three Blacks in the whole damned police department.) He said, "As Southerners, they have a better understanding of Blacks than do Northerners. And it's not an unmixed thing."
Larsen
That's really incredible.
Treuhaft
Yes. So the cases that we won were few and far between; but when we won one, it was very satisfactory. But it was still a very much losing proposition. The whole law practice was a losing proposition.
The Jerry Newson Case
LarsenI was about to ask if you were staying alive with the fees you were getting.
Treuhaft
Well, in this way. The case that most discredited the NAACP, and which put me and my partner, Bert Edises, on the map in the Black community, was the Jerry Newson case. This was in 1948-49.
Newson, an orphan who was about eighteen years old, lived with his aunt and uncle in one of these old wartime housing projects in Oakland. He was charged with murder. To go back a little bit, there had been a very brutal murder in a drugstore in West Oakland, the Black ghetto at that time. Blacks hadn't moved into East Oakland yet. All of 7th Street was sort of the hub of the Black community, and there was a large Black community all around the West Oakland area. The housing projects have been torn up and redeveloped since then, and the Blacks moved out of there, but at that time Harbor Homes was the name of the housing project where Newson lived. There's a drugstore at the corner of 7th Street and Adeline. A white pharmacist named Savage and his very light-colored Black assistant were found shot through the back of the head.
The papers picked it up immediately, notably the Oakland Tribune, and called it an execution-style murder because they had been shot in the back of the head by a large caliber gun — each one of them — and it appeared that the bullets that went through the back of the head also went through the fin- gers. So it appeared that they were holding their hands in front of the face and were shot in a kneeling position in an execution-style murder. So there's a white pharmacist and his assistant, who was married to a cousin of Lionel Wilson, the Mayor of Oakland now. There was a tremendous manhunt for the murderer or murderers. And there was a lot in the papers. They had no clues. A couple of weeks went by and there was pressure on the police to produce a suspect. We read in the Tribune — the first we read about it was in “Shoeshine Boy Confesses.” Headline. First news about this guy.
They had a picture of this young Black, eighteen and a half years old, in custody. My wife and I saw that in the evening (the Tribune was an evening paper at the time). We were immediately very skeptical and wondered what the devil was going on. She lost no time at all. She was Secretary of the Civil Rights Congress at the time. She scooted down to the address that the paper gave, Harbor Homes, and found the place surrounded by police. The boy was in jail but the aunt and uncle were there. Decca got in, got through the police, and talked to the aunt and uncle. Police were searching the place for guns and whatnot. She talked to the Newsons and she offered legal help. She didn't know anything about the case, but these people wanted the help. I went to see them and they authorized me to act as attorney for the boy.
It took hours for me to get in to see him. When I saw him, he was already charged with the murders. They already had the confession, so-called. What had happened was that two weeks earlier, he had been arrested for robbery. He had robbed the office of his own housing project, and the police picked him up because he started spending money very freely. He had a shoeshine stand on 7th Street, and the shoeshine boy bought a ring for $100, you know. Bam! The police got right on him, and he in no time confessed that he had held up the housing project and taken $500.
So, while he was in there for a week on the robbery charge —no lawyer, of course (this was before Gideon9) — one of the detectives said, you know you can get into deep trouble if you go around
So, what actually happened was that he was in this contraption for some time, totally new to him, and the questions kept coming in a dozen different forms, did you do it, did you do it. And finally he said, "You want me to say I did it. I did it. Let me go home now." So the press, a dozen reporters, were outside the room waiting for the word, and Inspector Riedel said, "He confessed." So they all rush in and Riedel says, "Would you write this down?" And he says, "What do you mean? I was kidding. I didn't do it." Well, that was the sum total confession.
Anyway, there was huge publicity about that case. It was the big case of the decade. We went to trial and we fought it every step of the way. We challenged the jury, which was, of course, all white and the panel was all white. We challenged the way the grand jury was selected. First, we represented him — there was no indictment — at the preliminary hearing, where they try to show cause for him to be held for trial. Well, he and Harris were both charged, and the evidence against him came from a young Black girl, Barbara Cruikshank, who said that she had looked in after the drugstore was closed that night. She looked in there and she saw Jerry Newson, whom she was acquainted with, in the back room. Newson had denied ever having been in the back room, where the bodies had been found. She testified to that in the preliminary hearing. But she wouldn't swear that she had seen Harris in there. She said there was another person but she couldn't identify him. So the case against Harris was dismissed in the Municipal Court, and Newson alone was held for trial.
That's when we challenged the jury panel and everything else, and it went to trial. In the preparation for the trial, we knew that so far as we could tell, all the way to the preliminary hearing and
Well, we knew that they didn't have that, because we knew through the contact that I had that the Oakland gun experts were unable to establish a match. They had gone to San Francisco to see if San Francisco's experts could establish a match, and the San Francisco man couldn't do it either. What we didn't know, we learned this only at the trial — was that at the last minute, just before the trial, they had sent the evidence, the firearms evidence, to Paul Kirk, a University of California physics professor. He had come up with a match when nobody else could.
So when the case went to trial, they had impressive firearms evidence. We didn't have a chance. Kirk covered the walls of the courtroom with huge blow-ups of the fatal bullet, taken through a binocular microscope alongside the test bullet, to show how the lines and striations matched. But there was something peculiar about the photographs because there was a sort of fuzzy white space in between the two fields, and there were pencil marks to carry the lines across and a pencilled line to mark the separation of the fields.
Well, Newson was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to die in the gas chamber. We, of course, filed a motion for a new trial. While this was pending an astonishing thing happened. I was contacted by the Oakland Police Department's own technicians, the ones who after weeks of study had been unable to establish a match. They wanted to talk to us off the record about the firearms evidence. They called me up and said, "Don't, whatever you do, let that firearms evidence get out of the courtroom. Make sure that it is preserved." So then they met with Bert and me privately, in our office. "We know our business," they said. "We could not find a match. There are always accidental matches. They sent this evidence over to this big-shot in San Francisco, a hot-shot expert. When he couldn't find a match, they took it away from him and they sent it to this guy in Berkeley. When we heard that he claimed that he had a match, we said we'd like to see it. And we went out to his laboratory, and we rotated the bullets and we couldn't see it. He had an assistant show us. We only saw what one called `accidentals,' which you see anytime but which disappear when you rotate the bullets.
"Those photographs though are absolutely phony. That white line doesn't exist. There's supposed to be a hairline within the microscope that separates the two fields. We asked him [Kirk] why there was no hairline, why they had to draw the line in by pencil — he said, well, something was wrong with the equipment, and we got this white space in between. Then he drew his pencil lines in such a way that instead of separating the two fields as a properly adjusted hairline should, it goes through the edge of the field of one bullet. When you do that, it's obvious that everything on either side of the line will match."
I'll never forget those men, Fuller and Davis, good Catholics, who put their jobs on the line by giving us affidavits for use on our motion for a new trial. We lost on the motion for a new trial. Death penalty cases go directly to the State Supreme Court. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction, not on the firearms evidence, but on other grounds, and ordered a new trial. Well, having won on the Supreme Court was a tremendous victory. The guy had been in death row for about a year.
This kid, whom we got to know quite well — I became convinced of his innocence. Usually in criminal cases, I'm pretty skeptical. I don't care whether my client is guilty or not. But in his case, I really wanted to know. So I said to him before the second trial, they may have some fingerprint evidence. He said, I was never in my whole life in the back room of that drugstore. He said, "I've been in front, I've been inside and that kind of thing, but not in the back."
"Look," I said, "That's a big statement to make. You have to be very careful. If you were ever in there for any innocent purpose, you'd leave fingerprints around. If you testify that you were never in that room and they produce fingerprints, you're dead. So be very, very careful. It's safer to say, `Well, I might have been in there, I was in there from time to time, I was in there a lot,' so that if there are fingerprints in there, you're covered." He said, "Well, if my life depends on it, I was never in there." Well, that was pretty strong evidence to me, that I was giving him a way out.
For the second trial, we had weighty firearms experts of our own and thoroughly discredited their firearms testimony. The result, however, was not an acquittal, but a hung jury. The prosecution persisted, and the case went to an almost unprecedented third trial. Each of these trials would last a month. I lost twenty pounds during each of those trials. And gained them back. The third trial ended also with a hung jury. The same prosecutors
On the appeal to the Supreme Court after the first conviction, Coakley asked for a rehearing in the Supreme Court, and in his brief he warned, "The justices must remember that appellate courts are created by the people, and by the same token can be abolished by the people, and you have let yourselves be subverted by these Communists." He went wild, out of his mind, to file such a brief in the State Supreme Court.
And so, after three trials, the murder charges were dismissed. But Newson didn't go free. He had pleaded guilty to the earlier offense — robbery of the housing project. For a first offense, an eighteen-year-old would usually get a maximum of five years and he would be out in a year and a half. Well, he was kept in jail for eleven years on that robbery conviction. Every time he came up for parole, Coakley would warn the Parole Board, "This man's a killer, we know he's a killer. Something went wrong in his trial, but it's your responsibility. If you let him out, you're letting a killer out, a murderer." And the parole authority never did grant parole. Finally, we went to Court, and finally prevailed on a writ of habeas corpus. But anyway, it's a long, long history, and it was fascinating.
We became extremely well-known in the Black community. The NAACP had refused to take the case. I'd gone to them. I went to a meeting of the executive board, and I said, "Look, we need you in this case." They said, "We don't represent murderers."
Btreuhaft
Whatever happened to the Oakland Police Department firearms experts?
Treuhaft
We called them as witnesses.
Btreuhaft
Were they fired?
Treuhaft
No. They had civil service. They were in pretty solid positions because they had the goods on this guy. They really did.
Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt4x0nb0bf&brand=calisphere
Title: Left-Wing Political Activist and Progressive Leader in the Berkeley Co-op
By: Robert E. Treuhaft, Creator, Robert G. Larsen, Interviewer
Date: 1988-1989
Contributing Institution: University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
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