"The Field Day Is Over"

For six months, Federal Judge Harold R. Medina had suffered the taunts, insults and studied defiance of defense lawyers with weary patience, as they popped up like hammers on a honky-tonk piano--to protest, to object to rulings, to object to rulings on objections, to object to rulings on objections to rulings. Fortnight ago, Harold Medina, who had often talked as if he had had enough, acted at last. When the Communists' lawyers tried to outshout him, as they had so often done before, Medina peremptorily ordered them to "sit down," and had marshals see that they complied. "Your field day is over," Medina snapped. In Manhattan's Federal Court, the eleven defendants (accused of conspiracy to teach the violent overthrow of the U.S.) looked stunned. Even the lawyers seemed a bit subdued.

A Regular Formula. Medina warned defense witnesses that they might be jailed for contempt if they refused to answer proper questions, cut them off sharply when they plunged into shrill attacks on Wall Street, the Ku Klux Klan or the Atlantic pact. "This trial would go on for an indefinite period if I received all the evidence offered every time two Communists talked to each other," he said.

Last week sallow, bigheaded Robert G. Thompson, New York State chairman and a member of the Communist national committee, took the stand and promptly ran afoul of the new Medina. Thompson had been head of Ohio's Young Communist League from 1938 to 1941. Had he ever used the party slogan: "The Yanks are not coming?" Thompson was vague: "Very possibly ... in all probability . . . it would have been consistent with policy at that time ..." Judge Medina broke in impatiently: "That's a regular formula. It's maybe this, and maybe that, or I may have, but he knows well enough whether he used it or not."

"He Didn't Say . . ." Thompson had also referred to discussion by "the party's ranks" when he meant, he admitted under crossexamination, only the "ranks" of the national committee. "You agree that in the Communist Party 'the ranks' means the national leadership?" prodded the prosecutor. "I object, he didn't say he agreed," said Defense Lawyer Richard Gladstein. Judge Medina broke in: "That's right. It might have been--he assumed it was--it may have happened--it probably was the case--it was most likely so--but Mr. Thompson didn't at any time agree it was so."

But by week's end, the evasive Mr. Thompson had admitted, with Judge Medina himself taking over some of the questioning, that the U.S. Communist Party taught 1) that violent revolution is inevitable in all imperialist countries; 2) that the U.S. is an imperialist country; 3) that the dictatorship of the proletariat can only be achieved through violence.

Said the new Medina grimly: "This trial is going to move now."

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