People v. Spielman

• Decision Date: 03 December 1925
• Docket Number: No. 16632.,16632.
• Citation: 318 Ill. 482,149 N.E. 466
• Parties: PEOPLE v. SPIELMAN et al.
• Court: Illinois Supreme Court

318 Ill. 482

149 N.E. 466

PEOPLE

v.SPIELMAN et al.

No. 16632.

Supreme Court of Illinois.

Oct. 28, 1925.

Rehearing Denied Dec. 3, 1925.

Error to First Branch, Appellate Court, First District, on error to Criminal Court, Cook County; Hugo Pam, Judge.

Sidney Spielman and another were convicted of criminal libel. On writ of error, conviction was affirmed by the Appellate Court, and defendant Arthur Lorenz brings error.

Affirmed.

Heard, J., dissenting.Henry W. Drucker, of Chicago (John G. Riordan, of Chicago, of counsel), for plaintiff in error.

Oscar E. Carlstrom, Atty. Gen., Robert E. Crowe, State's Atty., of Chicago, and James B. Searcy, of Springfield (Edward E. Wilson, Clarence E. Nelson, and Ferre C. Watkins, all of Chicago, of counsel), for the People.

DE YOUNG, J.

At the November, 1922, term of the criminal court of Cook county, Arthur Lorenz was jointly indicted with Sidney Spielman for criminal libel. Spielman was not apprehended. Lorenz moved to quash the indictment, but the motion was denied. He then entered a plea of not guilty. A jury trial resulted in a verdict of guilty and a sentence of six months' imprisonment in the house of correction and a fine of $1 and costs. On a writ of error from the Appellate Court for the First district, the judgment of the criminal court was affirmed. Lorenz prosecutes this writ of error for a further review.

The indictment consisted of three counts. The first count charged, in substance, that Spielman and Lorenz, contriving and intending to vilify and defame the members of the American Legion, a corporation, to bring them into public scandal and disgrace, to injure and aggrieve them, to impeach their honesty, integrity, virtue, and reputation, and to publish their natural defects and thereby expose them to public hatred, contempt ridicule, and financial injury, unlawfully, maliciously, and willfully composed in the German language, and on December 13, 1921, published in a certain newspaper called the Staats Zeitung, circulated in Cook county, a certain false, scandalous, malicious, and defamatory libel of and concerning the members of the American Legion. The article was then set forth, first as it appeared in the German language and then as translated into English. The second count charged that Lorenz, by the same article, libeled Reed G. Landis, James C. Russell, Harry A. Newby, Fred L. Pond, Charles W. Schick, Horatio B. Hackett, Palmer Edmunds, John J. Kelly, William Purday, W. W. Sullivan, and George F. Carroll, members of the American Legion. The third count charged Spielman and Lorenz with libeling seven deceased persons. Upon this count, however, a nolle prosequi was entered.

The translation of the article from German into English, as it appeared in the indictment, is as follows:

‘The Finest of the Fine.

‘The American Legion, this instrument bought with British money to suppress the truth, to gag freedom of conscience, to beat down every free expression of opinion, to betray organized American labor-this American Legion demands the scalp of Police Commissioner Miller of St. Louis. Mr. Miller has in plain terms given expression to a naked truth, in that he has established the fact, that the number of crimes in America show an actually fearful increase, and that the second place, 85 per cent. of all crimes must be attributed to the war veterans. Even the one who knows himself free from any malevolence against the war veterans, who in overwhelming majority did not enter the army in exuberant enthusiasm, but under bitter legal compulsion, will find nothing objectionable in Miller's statement. Indeed it cannot be disputed that the war has completely ruined the economic and social conditions in America. There is, of course, want, which is responsible for the increase of the lawlessness, but only in a small measure. Far stronger than the want is the after effect of the seven fat years, which America emjoyed from the beginning of the blood-strained munition neutrality of Wilson. The people became accustomed to rich wages easily obtained and seek them today in the way and manner most pleasing to them; with the crowbar on the dwelling-door or with revolver on the street. But the army, far from being a hotbed of patriotic virtues, was quite obviously an excellent preparatory school for the fostering of this inclination, at least among the millions, who did not learn to understand the seriousness of the war but sneaked about in the American training camps or at the halting places in France.

‘The American Legion, as you know, goes about peddling the claim that it embodies the cream of the nation. It tries to make people believe that in itself the best and noblest elements of the American people are united. Patriotism and love of country, and, what is herewith combined, unselfish devotion to its American fellow citizens, belongs to its copyhold, and its American native country owes it a special reverence, because it so spontaneously sprang to her defense. That is, of course, an audacious lie. Those, who in the year 1917 (as alreadypreviously in the years of American neutrality), voluntarily took up arms, were quite other than the cream. They were simply the refuse of the nation. Those who really had adopted the trade of war as a means of making a living, were indeed the best among them, and they were almost without exception, tramps, vagabonds, and bums who did not make any specially brilliant guard for the starry banner. With them stood the many, altogether too many, who already had worn the prison stripes, and for whom the army was far less an opportunity to rehabilitate their civil honor, than it was to evade the Spanish curtains.

‘Somewhat of this caliber were the overwhelming majority of the American volunteers of the year 1917, who, according to the tradition of the past decades, undeniably placed the American uniform only a shade higher than the garb of the prison house. People of this character, we repeat, were, almost exclusively, either those who found themselves ready or those who found themselves condemned to carry on the crusade for the Washington hostility to Germany,clothed in humanitarian phrases. Hoboes and dull lads that was the company, upon which the Wilsons and Morgans, the servants of Britain and the friends of France relied. Truly a worthy tool for a worthy cause.

‘When the American Legion claims as its nucleus those volunteers, it is naturally treading upon dangerous ground, for the possibility of a relapse of those elements into their earlier pursuits is imminent, and a criminal warrant might effect their undoing. The other members of the Legion were simply conscripts, who obeyed the call to arms under a hatred compulsion and in the presence of this state of affairs could not in any way show any particular patriotism. Torn from their civilian pursuits, exempted from the strife of existence, and when not in the immediate war zone, subjected to only loose discipline anyway, the less firm characters among them were in danger of a moral bewilderment. The rise in crime shows, that this danger has become an actuality. It would not, perhaps, have been so, if America had been able to give all of them bread and wages, as soon as they stepped from the army into civilian life. That was not possible because of the criminal shortsightedness, with which all questions relating to the war were handled, and the result is that the wearers of the uniform, once arrayed against the Huns and barbarians are to-day waging war against justice and law in America. And when there is not only a confusion about mine and thine, but when we much more day after day see deeds of repulsive barbarity, of horrible brutality, then do we hear resounding from the...