Oklahoma Witch Hunt: CP Progressive Book Store Raided- August 1940.
10,000 books seized in Oklahoma City & Booksellers on Trial
Aug. 17, 1940 police raided the Communist Party bookstore (The Progressive Bookstore) in Oklahoma City, arresting 20 people (including customers) and seized more than 10,000 books. This was for violating a criminal syndicalism statute enacted by the state legislature in 1919 to prohibit:
"teaching, preaching, publishing or distributing anything or doing anything, that calls for overthrow of our government.”
Among the books seized were :
Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Joseph Stalin, Foundations of Leninism
U.S. Constitution
Declaration of Independence
The rationale was the political background of the defendants and their operation of a communist-inspired bookstore. Four—Bob Wood, Alan Shaw, Ely Jaffe, and Ina Wood—were tried and convicted in three separate trials of violating Oklahoma’s criminal syndicalism statute. The defendants’ lawyers stressed their clients had not advocated specific acts of violence or unlawfulness and their only motive was to sell books that discussed revolution and advocated radical change.
Prosecutors argued the literature and nature of the bookstore constituted criminal advocacy. Opinion of the trials was often sympathetic to the defendants. 1 (Stalin’s atrocities were not known).
After the Soviet Union became an ally in WWII in 1941, public opinion in the nation and (later) Oklahoma tipped against prosecutions. In 1943 the Oklahoma appeals courts reversed the convictions of the defendants (though upholding the constitutionality of the OK criminal syndicalism law). The successful appeal of Bob Wood was based on the jury not finding intent to overthrow the government by force and no evidence that indicated the literature at the store was “reasonably likely to result within the immediate future, in the commission of a crime.” In addition, U.S. Supreme Court precedent required that “no inference can be drawn from the possession of books mentioned, either that they embodied the doctrines of the Communist Party or that they represented views advocated by the appellant.”2
Friesen, Gordon. Oklahoma Witch Hunt. [Oklahoma City]: [Oklahoma committee to defend political prisoners], 1941.
Wiegand, Shirley A., and Wayne A. Wiegand. Books on Trial: Red Scare in the Heartland. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007, (p. 207).