The Foster Deadlock

After deliberating 31 hours and taking 38 ballots, the jury of eleven men and one woman which tried William Z. Foster at St. Joseph, Mich., on the charge of criminal syndicalism split in a six-six deadlock. The indications are that Mr. Foster will not be retried.

Both the prosecution land the defense made emotional appeals in their final address to the jury. 0. L. Smith, Assistant Attorney General of Michigan, made his plea for conviction on the basis of patriotism, urging the jurors to keep faith with our soldier dead " beneath the crosses on Flanders Field." Frank P. Walsh, chief counsel for the defense, compared the Foster trial to the trial of Socrates and the persecutions of the early Christian martyrs, and quoted from Plato, Thomas Jefferson, Wendell Phillips, and the Declaration of Independence in behalf of the right of free speech and revolution.

Judge White, in charging the jury, upheld the best traditions of the law in his scrupulous regard for fairness and strict interpretation of the statute. " Under the constitution and laws of Michigan," he said, "the Communist Party and Foster have the right to teach and advocate the theories and doctrines of the class struggle, mass action, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Soviet system of government, the abolition of the capitalistic system, and industrial unionism, internationalism, affiliation of the American union movement with the Red Internationale of Labor, the Communist social revolution and other industrial, economic and political changes mentioned in evidence in this case." The whole question at issue, he declared, was whether Foster and the Communists sought to accomplish these changes by violence and sabotage.

In discussing the verdict, Russell Dunn, a grocer, and one of the jurors voting for acquittal, said'. "They didn't give us the dope. The prosecution didn't prove that the Communist Party advocated violence. That was the only thing we split on. We kept arguing about that until everybody got tired, but nobody changed his mind all the way through."

Foster's own comment on the outcome of the trial was short and quite free from any intemperate exultation.

"I regard this as a victory," he said," not only for me, but for the jury. It is a remarkable fact that five men and a woman should have risen above all the prejudices they must have had against many of the doctrines outlined in Communist literature, and should have voted solely on the facts at issue."

Charles E. Ruthenberg, Secretary of the Communist Party, is the next man to be tried. Since he is a member of the Communist Party, instead of just a " sympathizer," as Foster is, the state is expected to be able to present a much stronger case for conviction.