Ben Compton's antiwar trial and sentencing

Ben Compton's antiwar trial and sentencing make the courtroom an extension of the political struggle that began in the streets: his refusal to submit his convictions to the demands of wartime authority brings a twenty-year prison sentence, an appeal, and a journey toward Atlanta. The episode’s force lies in the contrast between official procedure, which proceeds with jokes and genial manners, and the severity of the punishment it delivers.

Before the Trial

The prosecution follows a pattern of labor protest and political repression already visible in Compton’s organizing. During a New Jersey textile strike, he urged Webb Cruthers to speak to the workers about their place in a larger historic struggle. At an overflow meeting, police dragged Compton away as strikers gathered in sleet outside a hall they had been barred from entering. Webb then climbed onto a hydrant to address the crowd. The episode places Compton’s politics amid workers’ efforts to assemble and speak, and the police presence that repeatedly narrowed those opportunities.

That conflict takes a more dangerous form in Everett. Ben and Bram Hicks went there after reading in Solidarity about the shingleweavers’ strike and the free-speech fight. Deputies arrested the arriving Wobblies, struck them with rifle butts and clubs, and loaded them into trucks. At a meeting later held at the Empire Casino in the Bronx, the same contest over political speech appears under federal surveillance. Two agents sat in front with a stenographer; police shut the doors after a few hundred people had entered, and soldiers and sailors watched from the gallery. The meeting was intended to send greetings to Russia’s workers. When Compton spoke, he condemned a war that, in his view, benefited bankers and munitions makers, and warned that workers would eventually turn the lessons of violence against the profiteers. The authorities broke up the meeting and arrested him and others. Conscription-age men in the audience had to show their registration cards before leaving.

Arrest and Conditions of Release

After his arrest, Compton was questioned in an office by Mr. Watkins, an elderly official seated at a mahogany desk. Morris Stein joined them as his lawyer. Watkins offered to quash the charges if Compton promised to report for military training, explaining that his number had been called. Compton answered that, if released, he would keep opposing the capitalist war until the authorities arrested him again. The offer made the conflict explicit: the state presented military compliance as the price of freedom, while Compton refused to treat release as a reason to abandon his opposition.

He was let out on fifteen thousand dollars bail, with Stein assuring the authorities that he would not agitate until trial. The Steins would not tell him who had supplied the money. Morris and Edna Stein gave Compton a room in their apartment, where Fanya Stein was often present. They fed him and tried to restore him with wine at meals and milk before bed, but he slept heavily, read the books in the apartment, and showed little interest in anything. When Morris raised his case, Compton brushed the discussion aside and said that this constrained existence felt little better than jail. Helen Mauer called with news she could not safely discuss by telephone, but he did not ask her to visit. His outings were limited to sitting on a bench above the Hudson and looking across at the Jersey shore.

Trial and Sentence

When the case came to trial, the press was full of hints of German victories. Outside, it was spring and sunny; inside the courtroom, Compton sat in stuffy gloom. The proceedings seemed almost deceptively ordinary. Stein and the judge exchanged small jokes, and the Assistant District Attorney was genial. The jury returned a guilty verdict, and the judge sentenced Compton to twenty years in prison. The courteous atmosphere did not soften the result; its calmness made the severity of the sentence more striking.

The one moment when Compton fully came to life was his address to the court before sentencing. He spoke about the revolutionary movement he had been preparing to defend. At first his words seemed weak to him, and he nearly stopped in the middle. Then his voice gathered strength and filled the courtroom. The judge and the older attendants sat up as he ended with the final words of The Communist Manifesto: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” The speech did not avert the sentence, but it gave the courtroom a second, opposing account of justice: not punishment imposed by the state, but a future Compton defined through collective freedom.

Appeal and Departure

Stein filed an appeal, and the judge allowed Compton to remain free on bail while it proceeded. The appeal dragged on. Compton returned to studying law, and Stein brought him lawbooks, saying that he might be able to join the office and eventually become a partner if he passed the bar and regained his citizenship. Stein believed the war would soon be over and the Red Scare would subside, leaving room to obtain a lighter sentence. Compton, meanwhile, slept badly and suffered kidney trouble. Fanya’s anxious attentions and the uncertainty of the appeal deepened his sense of being suspended between freedom and imprisonment.

After the armistice, as news arrived of the peace conference and revolutionary movements across Europe, Fanya told people that she and Compton were married and took him to live in her studio apartment on 8th Street. She nursed him through influenza and double pneumonia. On the first day his doctor permitted him to go out, she drove him up the Hudson. They returned in the early summer gloaming to find a special-delivery letter from Morris: the circuit court had denied the appeal but reduced the sentence to ten years. Compton was to report the following day for delivery into the custody of the U.S. District Court, and Stein said he would take the case to the President.

Compton accepted the news without protest. Fanya broke down, then quarrelled bitterly with Morris. Compton walked around the block, noticing the houses, taxis, streetlights, faces, a strangely shaped hydrant, and bottles of mineral oil in a drugstore window. He considered going to Brooklyn to say goodbye to the older people there, but stopped at the subway station, unable to go; he decided he would write instead. The next morning he went to Stein’s office carrying a suitcase. He had made Fanya promise not to come, and had to remind himself repeatedly that he was going to prison, as if the journey might otherwise pass for a business trip. He wore a new English tweed suit she had bought him.

Lower Broadway was dressed with flags, and crowds gathered to watch marching soldiers while a military band played “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” The celebratory street and the approaching imprisonment occupied the same scene. Compton reminded himself that the cheering public belonged to the country that had jailed Debs, killed Joe Hill and Frank Little, beaten the Wobblies in Everett, and now intended to imprison him. After walking through the crowds with Stein, he entered the Federal Building. Being alone with the deputy on the train to Atlanta brought relief once the public ceremony was over. The deputy removed Compton’s handcuffs except when the train stopped at a station. Compton remembered that it was his twenty-third birthday.