Crackpot's Roundup

Crackpots' Roundup

Grubbing in the lowest strata of the "vermin" press, Attorney General Francis Biddle presented his much-laden findings to a Washington grand jury, last week got the jury to indict 27 men and one woman for conspiracy to promote revolt and disloyalty among members of the U.S. armed forces. Rounded up for a trial this autumn were some of the country's best-known and loudest rabble-rousers, anti-Semites, Anglophobes, Roosevelt-haters, defeatists, Axis agents and just plain crackpots.

The list included William Randolph Hearst's friend William Griffin, violently anti-British publisher of the New York Enquirer; wild-eyed, red-haired Mrs. Elizabeth (Red Network) Billing, Gerald B. Winrod, publisher of the Defender, notorious preacher of racial and religious intolerance; Prescott Freeze Dennett, organizer of the Islands for War Debts Committee, operator of a one-man isolationist news service (an Army draftee, he was arrested in a St. Louis barracks); Nazi Agent George Sylvester Viereck, now in prison for failing to disclose in full his connection with the Nazi Government.

The lengthy indictment charged that 30 publications and 28 organizations (including the America First Committee) were used by the conspirators to sow disunity. Maximum punishment on conviction: 20 years in prison, $30,000 fine.

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