The talk is on the dissent during wartime and the subtitle is How I Came to Admire the Black Sheep of the Family.
You see this on the third page of the handout is from a newspaper front page of the Birmingham News on July 28, 1918.
And the person on trial is William Denson, and I guess he was my second cousin,
our first cousin, once removed. I don't know how that all goes, but he is on trial for violation of the Espionage Act in federal court.
And he's defended by four former justices of the Alabama Supreme Court.
The main attorney was my grandfather, who is seated right here and also right there.
He was the chief counsel for the defense, and then the others, he was a former associate
justice, all the others were former chief justices.
This is William Benson here, the defendant, and this is also him back here.
And his father-in-law, Judge Dowdell, is here, and then Judge Weekley and Judge Tyson.
So it was sort of a dream team defense team that came to defend him.
So I want to talk about that, but first on your handout I want to mention some of the
books that are there and comment on them because these are books that I've read over the years
and they all apply to dissent during wartime.
If you're just going to read one book, I would recommend Perilous Times. This is a book that
also you can get from laissez-faire. It goes from the very beginning during the formation
of the country, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and goes all the way up to the present time.
The author, Jeffrey Stone, was a former provost of the University of Chicago, he's a former
dean of the Chicago Law School, but he also wrote one of the briefs in the Japanese internment
cases, the Karamatsu case.
And so he's taken a very active interest in dissent during wartime because the Japanese
internment was not dissent, but it was wartime power exercised by Franklin Roosevelt to just
issue an executive order to put all Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.
And I knew that a child, he was a child at the time he was put in, became Chancellor
of AUM, a branch part of Auburn University, and he remembers being in the concentration
camp and how distraught his family was.
They were loyal American citizens of Japanese descent and they were placed in the internment
concentration camp for the whole period of the war and suffered greatly.
Let me read a part of Jeffrey Stone's introduction to the situation and I think he covers it
very well.
It is often said that dissent in wartime is disloyal.
The claim puzzles civil libertarians who see a clear distinction.
In their view, dissent in wartime can be the highest form of patriotism.
Whether, when or for how long and on what terms to fight the war are among the most
are the most profound decisions a nation can encounter.
A democratic society must debate these issues throughout the conflict.
Dissent that questions the conduct and the morality of a war is, in this view, the very essence of responsible and courageous citizenship.
At the same time, or you might say on the other hand, dissent can readily be cast as disloyal.
A critic who argues that troops are poorly trained or that war is unjust must make a significant contribution to public discourse, but he also gives, quote, aid and comfort, end quote, to the enemy.
The enemy is more likely to fight fiercely if it is confident and believes in the adversary divided and is uncertain.
Public disagreement during a war can strengthen the enemy's resolve.
Money generates a powerful mass psychology. Emotions run high. Spies, saboteurs and terrorists
lurk around every corner. Our way of life is imperiled. Anything that increases the
danger to our troops, our sons and daughters, is feared and despised. The thought that a
loved one or friend has put his life and limb at risk for an unworthy cause is intolerable.
We are just. Our enemy is cruel, immoral, inhuman. Loyalty is the order of the day.
In such an atmosphere, the line between dissent and disloyalty is elusive and often ignored.
As we shall see, the United States has a long and unfortunate history of overreacting to
the perceived dangers of wartime. Time and again, Americans have allowed fear and fury
to get the better of them.
Time and again, Americans have suppressed dissent,
imprisoned and deported dissenters,
and then later regretted their actions.
This book is first and foremost about why this happens
and how we can break the pattern as we look to the future.
So his sympathies are clearly in favor of allowing dissent
and protecting that dissent with the Constitution.
Another book I recommend to you is Limits of Dissent about Clement Van Landingham in the Civil War.
And I might mention just before we get to that, the Alien and Sedition Acts that were passed by the Adams Administration during the Quasi-French War,
are the things that caused the Alien and Sedition Act, and it was a very vicious act used by the Adams Administration against the Anti-Federalists and resulted in the famous Kentucky and Virginia resolutions by Madison and Jefferson for nullification.
So the Alien and Sedition Act started from the very beginning of our country, so there's been a battle on this from the very beginning.
During the war between the states, Clement Van Landingham was a congressman from Ohio,
and in July of 1861, he made speech on the floor of Congress critical of Lincoln and
the administration for the unconstitutional war that was going on.
He was a real thorn in Lincoln's side, and they gerrymandered his district so that he
was defeated, and he continued to make speeches during the war.
He was from Ohio. He was a Democrat. He was not a Southern sympathizer. He simply felt that Lincoln was wrong in the war and he was opposed to it.
So there was a military district in Ohio and they passed an ordinance making it illegal to make speeches against the administration.
He continued to speak out and one night, at midnight, they broke into his home and officers arrested him, took him to a military camp and tried him in the military court and sent him to prison.
And he was not allowed to have a habeas corpus writ or to have any constitutional protection.
Lincoln took charge of the Senate and banned him from America and he first went to the South and then went to Canada and while he was in Canada he was nominated to be governor of Ohio and ran and was defeated but he continued to speak out and eventually came back to America and they let him alone but this is a very good book if you want to see some of the things going on in the Civil War
The next big case, and I have a book, but it's a book or series of trials, great trials
in America, and this is about ex parte Milligan. You'll see it listed there by Klaus. It's
a very similar case to Van Landingham. He again was arrested by a military officer,
tried by a military court where the civil courts were available, and he was sentenced
was to death. And his case got to the Supreme Court after the war had ended. Dan Landinghams,
he tried to appeal to the Supreme Court and they didn't hear it, but the war was still
going on. When Milligan appealed his case, the war was over. And this is one of the great
decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. They reversed the conviction and said that the
fact that a war was going on did not suspend the Constitution. It was just as effective
during war as it was during peacetime. And you'll see during the trial of William Bentsen
that the U.S. Attorney is arguing that the Constitution is suspended during wartime. It's
a great decision. It's been attacked over and over, but it's one of the, I think, one
of the great decisions of the Supreme Court. Another book I recommend to you is Lincoln's
Lincoln's Wrath, it's a fairly new book and is mainly about one trial.
Lincoln took over about 300 newspapers, confiscated the presses and put them out of business because
they were critical of the war.
And this is about one of those trials and shows you the fiercely unconstitutional acts
Another book I want to mention in the Spanish-American War is Twelve Against the Empire, the Anti-Imperialist
in 1898-1900. These were twelve men who were classical liberals and they were not from
the left, of course, and they opposed the Spanish-American War primarily when they found
The War was really about getting the Philippines. There was one man that also recommended the book Atkinson. Mr. Atkinson was one of the twelve mentioned here. He was from Boston. He was a merchant there.
And he wrote letters and cards, about 100,000 of them, and addressed them personally to all the soldiers serving in the Philippines, and told them to mutiny and to just lay down their arms and not take part in the war.
And there was no law to arrest him on, but they confiscated all of those cards and letters and did not allow them to be sent out of the United States.
and it would be my opinion that his actions, Atkinson's actions of trying to cause mutiny is what caused the passage of the Eskimoj Act during World War I, which we'll get to.
But that's a very good book and it shows how America is now becoming an empire and how they opposed it.
Getting to World War I, this won't be anything to show up, but Opponents of War by Peterson and Fipe is one of the best books on World War I and the dissent that was waged mainly by socialists.
The laws that were passed during the First World War, and these all come up in the William
Dunson trial, the Selective Service Act was passed in May of 1917, and then the Espionage
Act was passed in June of 1916, and then the Sedition Act was passed in May of 1918.
So all three of those acts eventually were in place during World War I and you had people
that tried to avoid the draft, people that were arrested under the Espionage Act and
finally under the Sedition Act.
Under the Espionage Act it made it unlawful for you to try to encourage mutiny or to interfere
with the operation of the military and we'll get into the facts of the Denson case and
show how that took place.
There were 2,168 trials under the Espionage Act and 1,055 were convicted and 1,113 not
guilty so it was a less than 50% rate of conviction.
It was because of that low rate of conviction in the Espionage Act that the Sedition Act
was passed in May of 1918 and of course the trial of William Denson is in July of 1918
But he's charged under the Espionage Act, not the Sedition Act.
But the thing that makes his case so volatile is that Eugene Debs was tried and convicted
under the Sedition Act in June of 1918, just two or three weeks before Benson went on trial.
So it was an inflammatory period.
The international socialist in 1890 labeled capitalism as the main cause of war and tried
to encourage all socialists throughout the world to avoid any war.
And so nationalism and socialism came into direct conflict when World War I broke out.
Some socialists objected to the war and some fought for their countries.
The International Workers of the World was a strong socialist union in America called
the Wobblies and many of them protested against the war.
and that's how the ACLU got into protecting socialists from the government on their dissent.
They were dissenting on the basis that they wanted to destroy capitalism and they thought
that capitalism was causing the war so that's sort of the whole anti-war ideas sort of in
place were from socialists and that's how the anti-war movement got such a bad name
In my opinion, in World War I, it was the leftists that were protesting, whereas in the Spanish-American War, it was classical liberals.
Anyway, Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years in the penitentiary, and in June of 1918, and he served three years, he received a million votes for president.
And then the Sedition Act was finally repealed in 1920, and the Espionage Act stayed in place.
One thing I wanted to mention, the George Creel's committee, the Committee on Public Information, I found a book at home, I didn't bring it, it's called The Four Minute Men.
And another one of my relatives was a Four Minute Man, which was a propagandist for the war.
And I've heard and read various descriptions of why they named it The Four Minute Men, but this book tells the story about it.
is that back in 1918 the movies when they showed a movie they would have to change the reels and it took four minutes to change the reels so the committee on public information George Creel selected people in every community to go to the movie theater and give a speech during that intermission so you had a captive audience and they gave four minute speeches in favor of the war and this reached millions and millions of people sometimes they had to hear it over and over but they were there to see the movie
and then they had to listen to the pro-war speech.
Another, well let me mention this, the certain things during World War I,
that's when really the government came down hard on the economy,
nationalized the railroads, expanded the income tax to cover everybody
and extremely high rates, passed the Food and Fuel Act of August 1917, Herbert Hoover took
charge of that and learned about all of his pro-government activities at that time, managing
the fixing prices, and created the War Industries Board with Bernard Baruch, handling price
The next book is on World War II, a trial-on-trial, this was a great sedition trial of 1944, Lawrence Dennis and Maximilian St. George Roosevelt was determined to prosecute somebody for sedition, so they put that in the New Deal, and they put that in the New Deal, and they put that in the New Deal, and they put that in the New Deal, and they put that in the New Deal, and they put that in the New Deal,
These people on trial under the Smith Act, which passed in 1940, and it was a complete debacle.
Lawrence Dennis served as his own attorney, and the trial went on and on.
Finally, a judge died, and they brought in another judge, and finally the thing just sort of collapsed.
But it's a good survey on dissent during World War II.
And finally, in the Vietnam War, the book Secrets by Daniel Ellsberg is highly recommended to you.
He's very active now in the dissent against this war, and he states that his great regret is that he did not dissent earlier in the Vietnam War.
It's a courageous story. He talks about how he went to Vietnam as a soldier and was very much for the war.
And then he came back and worked for the RAND Corporation and did research for the government officials and he would see the reports and see that they were saying that the war couldn't be won, that we needed to get out and then the officials would get up and all talk about how the war was going great and he gives the instance where he was with McNamara and McNamara read this report about how things were so terrible and then had a press conference and told everybody everything was going great.
and realize that the people were not being told the truth about the war and made the decision to release the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and of course that went to trial and the New York Times was sustained in the Supreme Court and the trial was so unfair that the federal judge finally threw it out as you will probably recall the government agents broke into the psychiatrist office of Ellsberg to try to steal the records to attack him with and they were caught and when the judge found out about
So with that background, I'll get into the Denson trial.
My first knowledge of William Denson was when I was a freshman in law school and I was taking
a course the second semester in appellate procedure and the professor said we were going
to study the trials and the appeals of a very brilliant but very eccentric lawyer from Birmingham
named Wild Bill Denson. And so as I was walking out of the classroom, he called me aside and
said, since we're going to be discussing Mr. Denson, is he any kin to you? I said,
oh, I've never heard of him. And so I went home and asked my father who was a lawyer
and I said, they had him take a course on Wild Bill Denson, is he any kin to us? He
Yes, but you don't need to know anything about him.
So all information was cut off and I never heard anything about him again until a cousin of mine in Texas sent me that from the cartoon about the trial and I began to try to find out more about it.
But my father did tell me a little about Wild Bill's father and it's an old saying, I guess it's a southern expression, that the acorn didn't fall too far from the tree.
While Bill was very much like his father, his father was born in 1846. His name was William Denson. He was the oldest brother of my grandfather.
He was a 17-year-old, I guess, when he joined the Confederate Army and fought in some of the really tough battles.
and then after the reconstruction ended in 1876, he ran for the Alabama legislature when Confederate soldiers could then hold office and he must have taken part in the Grover Cleveland campaign because Cleveland appointed him the US Attorney for two different districts in Alabama and finally he ran for Congress and was elected in 1890 and his campaign promise was that if he was elected
The first thing he was going to do, and I'm going to tone this down a little bit, is that when he got to the Capitol steps, he was going to find the first damn Republican and kick his butt down the Capitol steps.
And the legend is that he kept that campaign promise.
And my grandfather, his youngest brother that he sort of looked after was on the Alabama Supreme Court, and he had run statewide, and he was very embarrassed about his brother's language and rambunctious conduct.
and so he wrote him a letter and told him to tone down his campaign and his brother wrote him back.
This is why Bill's daddy wrote him back and called him Nimmi.
He said, Nimmi, what scares you is just fun to me.
And so he didn't tone it down at all.
So he served in Congress for 10 years and died in 1907.
So he was not living at the time his son was put on trial.
And I think that's one reason my grandfather represented him because Wild Bill's father was not there to defend him.
But I think one reason my father had a low opinion of Wild Bill is that the name William Denson is sort of a revered name in our family.
And I'll tell you a little bit about the original ancestor that Wild Bill and his father were named for was named William Denson.
and he was born in London and his father died when he was a year old and so he came to America at age 17 in 1638 and financed his trip by making a contract with a Mr. Pitts in Virginia at a large plantation and became what's called an indentured servant he agreed to work for him for seven years I guess at either no wages or low wages and room and board so he was a young teenager striking out on his own
He was a Quaker, and at that time, that's still within the period of the Thirty Years' War that didn't end until 1648.
So Quakers were very much discriminated against as dissenters in England.
And the English Civil War was just four years away, so it was a time of great political turmoil.
So I'm not sure exactly what all his reasons for coming to America were.
But he set out on his own and as an indentured servant came to this county in Virginia that did not discriminate against Quakers.
He was eventually elected to the House of Burgesses in 1659.
And I remember reading this 40 years ago in Williamsburg.
There's a plaque about the House of Burgesses.
And I guess this may have been the first House of Burgesses.
But he was elected to that.
and he eventually acquired one or more ships and used those ships to bring in more settlers,
colonists to Virginia and the king rewarded him for that and gave him 450 acres of land
and he built a home and the foundation is still there.
But I went through William and Mary one time and tried to research this a little bit and
I found some petitions signed by his sons in the 1660s or 70s and they were protesting
to the King of England that they were loyal colonists and yet their German neighbors were
not having to pay the tax and I'm not sure why that was but the thought came to me as
I was sitting there in that library that Thomas Jefferson was a student there a hundred years
was later, and maybe he read some of those petitions and maybe it inspired him somewhat
for the tax protests that went on in the American Revolution.
But with that history of William Vinson, my father felt that while Bill had disgraced
the family name by being arrested and put on trial, and as you'll see, my father was
a, if we get into the trial, while Bill talks about him being a soldier in France getting
I don't know exactly why my father had a low opinion of Wild Bill, but that's some of the background.
I'll read you one more interesting sidelight on Wild Bill.
This is a book, Pilgrim in the Ruins, which is one of the biographies of Walker Percy.
I've read several of these. Walker Percy is what I call a New South writer.
I don't like his writings. Movie Goa is one. I don't know if you've ever read that.
Walker Percy's father and Wild Bill got into a duel, not that the practice of law was always a tame affair, even as late as the 1920s, so this would be after the trial.
There was still something of a raw frontier edge to Birmingham.
The carrying of pistols was not unheard of.
In fact, even Leroy came close to shooting it out with another lawyer, a brilliant and
intimidating man named Will Denson. Fortunately, they only came close. Denson, who had represented
union people against the corporations, came up against Percy and other defenders of business
interest in court and was known to be a very good shot. He practiced with his pistol every
Every morning, squeezing off 50 rounds with each hand every morning in downtown Birmingham.
And he also won most of his cases.
Intimidating as Denson was, Percy, now Percy's father, Walter Percy's father that's having
a duel was a very prominent lawyer in Birmingham who represented a lot of corporate interests.
And obviously, he and Wild Bill got into a lot of disputes in court.
After a particularly heated confrontation, the two decided to settle the matter with
pistols.
On an appointed morning, they drove to the country and found a secluded spot.
Percy asked for a chance to practice.
Denson consented.
Percy lined up six pine cones and blasted away, six hits.
In this one respect, at least Leroy was not like his father, he was a very good shot.
Denson then asked to take the same practice shots.
Percy could not very well refuse.
Six hits, dead and true.
Percy then destroyed six more pinecones, and again Denson followed suit.
The warm-up rounds apparently had a conciliatory effect.
Quote, clearly, we're both too good with these things to be doing this, said Percy.
Denson agreed, and they returned to their cars, and still enemies, but with much more
respect for each other.
So that will give you a little background on Wild Bill. And he obviously had a lot of enemies, especially in the legal profession. And the trial started on a Thursday. The courtroom was packed. It was federal court. And I've never heard of a judge doing this, but the judge let lawyers sit around inside the rail when they didn't have enough chairs. And the courtroom was packed and they let them open the doors.
and for two days it was a packed courtroom and I guess they came to see the dream team
defense but also to see if Wild Bill got his comeuppance and go into prison.
Count one, he was indicted in April of 1918, which was a month before the Sedition Act
and put on trial in July 1918, a month after the Sedition Act was passed.
So count one of the indictments stated, he did willfully and knowingly cause mutiny or
insubordination or refusal of duty among the military and naval forces.
And count two was he attempted to do the same.
So it would seem to be fairly easy to convict someone of the attempt to do that.
So the plan of the defense was strictly to show that all the statements he made, and
they were pretty inflammatory, as we'll get into against Wilson, would clearly be a violation
of the Sedition Act.
But what the defense was, don't convict the man for saying things that was lawful to say
As I said, my grandfather was the chief counsel and he had been chairman of the Democrat delegation
that went to the national convention from Alabama and re-nominated Wilson for a second
term, primarily on the basis that he kept us out of war.
So I think that's one reason my grandfather was willing to defend Wild Bill because I
I think that he felt betrayed by Wilson in violating his campaign promise to keep us out of war.
Now here's the statement that finally got Bill indicted. I might mention you'll see
in the book by Peterson and Fite that there were various organizations of citizens that
by the Justice Department and sanctioned by the Justice Department to spy on American citizens and turn them in to the authorities.
And I feel sure that's what happened because Bill made no public speeches.
All of these are private conversations he's having with individuals that he knows.
Some of them are alleged clients. I think they were put up to entrap him.
But he was sitting in a restaurant during a trial at lunch and there were many lawyers present
President.
And someone began to be critical of Congressman Huddleston from Birmingham who had voted
against the Selective Service Act.
And as the criticism mounted, Bill began to defend Huddleston for his action.
And then Bill said he thought the act was unconstitutional in itself and should never
have been passed.
And someone at the table became very angry with him and stated that anybody that defended
Huddleston should be afraid of being arrested.
So Bill told him that he had no fear of that because you had a constitutional right to
either praise or criticize public officials and you had a duty to do so.
And then he stated, quote, I might go out and criticize the President himself and say
he's a traitor and ought to be hung and the law could not touch me.
Little did he know.
So I think that's the statement that first got to the U.S. Attorney and got him indicted
in April of 1918.
At the trial there were 22 witnesses against him and Mr. Scribler testified that Bill stated
on another occasion, quote, to hell with the President, he should be hung to a lamppost,
end quote. Mr. M.P. Smith said he heard Bill say in a private conversation, the only reason
the United States entered the war was to get back money loaned to the allies, end quote.
Jack Bell heard Denson say in April 1918, quote, the United States had no business in
in this war, and if people had stayed off the ships, they would not have been sunk,
end quote, because he's talking about the Lusitania there.
Mr. Riley Logan stated, he heard Bill state in a private conversation, quote, I would
support the government if it was fighting for the right cause, but this war is not being
fought for the right cause.
A Judge Walker said that Bill advised some of his clients to fill out questionnaires
for the draft and told them to claim all exemptions allowed by the law.
A Fred Fight, a candidate that the aviation field in Texas was coming through Birmingham,
and on the way to Washington he stated he went to Bill for advice on a matter and during
the discussion stated quote, Bill stated, President Wilson got us into this war and
we have no right to be in this war.
Several witnesses said they heard Bill state quote, Wilson was elected on a peace platform
and he turned into a traitor.
He ought to be hanged and I, for one, would be glad to see it.
Another person stated that there was a discussion at another dinner conversation about the Macklemore
Resolution in Congress which had warned Americans to stay off ships going into the danger zones
of England.
And Bill stated that he had supported the Macklemore Resolution and thought it was an
excellent thing and the crowd reacted very strongly against him on that.
Bill Whitney said that he was a client and went to Bill for advice and asked if under
the U.S. Constitution could an American citizen be compelled to go to France and fight their
war. And Bill advised him just to claim all the exemptions possible under the draft. And
the man stated that he would be willing to fight to defend America but saw no reason
to go to France and fight their war. Bill did not advise him not to go and didn't advise
I think this is part of the entrapment. I think that the U.S. Attorney got various people to go to him. I can't imagine a real client going and asking for this kind of advice.
I think they were sending people in there and trying to get Bill to advise them not to go or to avoid the draft or do something like that.
and then he would clearly have been guilty under the Espionage Act if they had not gone, if they'd taken that advice.
But the thing that really endured me to Bill was his own defense.
He got up and testified, and he's not one I'm sure that you could coach.
He's got all these great lawyers there to advise him, but he takes his own defense and gets up and testifies
I've criticized President Wilson because he was elected on a peace platform under the promise he would keep America out of the war.
He departed from his platform and violated his promise to the people.
He could have kept us out of this war, and he could have kept his promise, but he didn't.
A man elected on a peace platform and then immediately goes and is elected and goes to Congress and asks for war, then he is a traitor to the people.
I criticized him for doing that and a man had a constitutional right to criticize the President at the time I stated that.
I was not critical of the government or of Congress or the military, just the President.
I had a brother in the Army who was a Colonel and had been in the Army for 24 years.
My first cousin, Nim Denson, that's my father, was already in France getting ready to go
into the trenches.
So I had no reason to say anything that would hurt my kin who were in the Army getting ready
to fight.
My criticism was strictly of the President.
Then here's the statement that he volunteers without anybody asking him and that I really
thought this is sensational.
He said, I still think all of those things right now, but I wouldn't say them since they've passed the sedition act.
That's what you always advise a client, saying, don't volunteer anything, you know, and maybe they'll think you've changed your mind or you regret having said it, and eat it back off a bit.
I still think it, I just don't say it since they've passed the sedition act.
In the final arguments, Ralph Quinn was a U.S. Attorney. He opened by making the argument
that the President did not declare war, that Congress declared it. He stated further that
violations of international law by the Germans led America to getting into the war. Of course,
that's, I guess, submarine warfare, sinking ships that are supposed to be passenger ships
He says there's a difference in the interpretation of free speech privilege under the Constitution
in times of peace and in times of war.
He is in effect saying that the Constitutional protection of free speech is suspended during
wartime.
That was part of his jury argument.
He said the necessity of severe discipline in time of war affects the ability to speak
out against the war.
He said the authority and the esteem vested in the President as Commander-in-Chief of
the Army should not be attacked in time of war.
And then my grandfather got up and argued that he is indicted only for interfering with
the operation of the military under the Espionage Act and that the law at the time that he was
The jury went out at 8 o'clock on Friday. They kept them together in the hotel and then they came back at noon on Saturday and found him not guilty.
and they could easily have convicted him, especially after his statement that he said that he had not withdrawn his thoughts.
He still thought exactly that same thing about Wilson and just wasn't saying it anymore.
So that is the trial of Wild Bill Denson and sort of give you a little history of the effect during World War I of dissent and what was going on.
So at this time I'll be glad to entertain any questions that any of you have.
Okay, well I've got these books here, if any of you want to come up and look at them.
He continued to do well, he remained very controversial, as you can see he got into
I think that his law practice went down and I think he suffered greatly from it socially.
I don't know if that mattered to him or not.
One thing that I thought about on this is both of his sons graduated from West Point
and I just wondered if that was sort of a reaction to try to compensate for their father's
One of them, Renda, retired as a two-star general, and his son, Bill, Wild Bill's son was named Bill, he went on to Harvard Law School and became a very good Wall Street trial lawyer, and there's a book written about him, and I knew this Bill pretty well when I was a graduate.
When I was a graduate student in New York, I used to have dinner with him, but I had heard that he was a prosecutor at Nuremberg, and I was against the Nuremberg trial, so I never brought it up, but he wasn't at Nuremberg, he was at Dachau.
He died about two years ago, and this is a book about him, Justice at Dachau, and he was the chief prosecutor in the Dachau trials.
trials. One famous case he had was he practiced with his father for a short time and then he went to New York but he represented the Saturday Evening Post when Bayer-Bronk sued him for libel and that's the suit that put the Saturday Evening Post out of business but the most interesting thing about Bill I wish I had known when I was talking to him because I had dinner at his house, his wife was German. He met her while he was prosecuting the Dachau cases
and she was a survivor of Dresden and she was a small, well a teenage girl I guess at the time but she and many other members of their family were escaping the Russians as they were coming and went to Dresden because it was a non-military target and of course the firebombing that went on and she survived by being in a basement most everybody in the house was killed but her and so she and Bill met and married while he was in Germany and Bill spoke very highly
I never brought Wild Bill up because at that time I didn't know that much about him. I wish I had known more about Wild Bill.
Bill thought very highly of him and said he was just a fabulous lawyer. But I think that he did suffer from that trial.
And I think that he was not well thought of because he was attacking, you know, suing businesses and very successful at it.
So it probably hurt him a great deal. Any other questions? Tom?
The only thing I know about the trial is what I read in the Birmingham papers. They didn't
covered in any great extent they just gave you the certain highlights of
testimony but it certainly could have used some of that about Lincoln the the
the thing that's interesting to me about the wartime dissent in Lincoln there
were 30,000 trials that are the records are all there I don't know if any of you
read the book the fate of Liberty by as listed in here the guys head of the
Lincoln Museum was going to try to dispel the thing that Lincoln was trying people unconstitutionally.
And he read 13,000 transcripts of trials where people were tried, just like Van Landingham
and Milligan.
And he then makes a statement, I think in the book Fate of Liberty, that there were
30,000 trials and about a 99% rate of conviction.
and these people that were tried by military courts in the North where the courts were open
and those were all held to be, I mean, the one case held that that was an unconstitutional act
to try people in a military court in a place where the regular courts are still open.
So that's 30,000 unconstitutional trials that took place during the Lincoln administration
that are well documented if somebody wanted to do some research.
Your third book on Lincoln can be on the...
Tom's got another book on Lincoln coming out.
It's funny, my wife gets after me about reading so much,
and so we took a trip on the Orient Express train trip,
and she made me promise I wouldn't bring any books,
and so I just ordered the book
they had recommended for the trip,
and one was, I wrote you about this,
When the Whistle Blows, or something like that.
It's just about railroad history, and lo and behold, there's a whole chapter on how crooked
Lincoln was, and he, as a railroad lawyer, he found out where the railroad was going
to go, the Transcontinental Railroad, so he bought the land in 1858, or somewhere around
that period of time.
Then when he got to be president, they had a law passed that the president could determine
where the railroad went, so naturally he put it on his property, and it's the most flagrant
The corruption, I guess I've ever seen, but the corruption against the war dissent in
the Lincoln administration is just awesome.
I mean, those trials, that's probably one of the main ways he won reelection in 1864
is the intimidating factor of trying these people on military courts without lawyers,
without being an arrest warrant.
They just break in your house, put you in a room and convict you and send you to prison.
So 30,000 of those as compared to the Espionage Act which is just 2,000 trials.
Any other questions?
Okay, well thank you very much, it's always a pleasure for me to be back from New Zealand.