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    The Terror in San Jose

    By JOHN TERRY

    San Jose, California, July 24.

  1. MOB hysteria and vigilante terrorism have returned to this city, fifty miles south of San Francisco in the heart of Santa Clara Valley, one of the most intensive fruit-growing regions in the United States. Here, where Brooke Hart was kidnapped and murdered last fall and where 6,000 men, women, and children jammed St. James Park last November 26 to watch lynch-hangmen jerk Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes into the air, citizens have again overthrown adequate legal machinery and turned to violence-this time in the name of "anti-Communist, anti-red Americanism."

  2. As a result, thirteen residents of this community, one of them a woman, have been taken from their homes, banished from the city, and driven from county to county as fast as deputy sheriffs could herd them along. Nine of them, according to local press reports, were beaten with pick-handles. The outrage, cruelest and most primitive of a series of hysterical anti-red demonstrations conducted during the past week by police and citizens in various central California cities in the wake of the San Francisco general strike, occurred on the night of July 19. Vigilantes (estimated as high as thirty in number, armed with pick-handles whose grip ends were bound with raw-hide thongs) seized Mr. and Mrs. Jess Tanner in their impoverished home on Stowe Avenue in east San Jose. Thirteen-year-old John Tanner was taken to county detention headquarters by an unidentified man. The vigilante mob then moved on to a nearby cottage to carry off thirty-year-old Cecil Hausler, this time leaving behind a terrorized sister and a prostrated mother.

  3. In further visits by automobile in and about San Jose that night the vigilantes rounded up ten more persons, after failing in their efforts to locate John J. O'Rourke, candidate for the county board of supervisors in the August election, said to be a Communist.

  4. What followed that night and on successive days remains, despite the comparative uninterest of the press, one of the most ominous spectacles in recent California history, well cakulated to swell the ranks of intelligent and stupid radicalism alike. The lead of a story printed on page one of the San Jose Mercury-Herald of July 20 supplies part of the picture:

    Armed with bright new pick-handles, their faces grim, eyes shining with steady purpose, a large band of "vigilantes," composed of irate citizens, including many war veterans, smashed their way into three communist "hotspots" here last night, seized a mass of red literature and severely beat nine asserted radicals.

  5. Among the prisoners seized that night by vigilantes was one Antone Meshler. Again quoting the Mercury-Herald, Meshler "was asked where the reds were meeting that night but said he did not know. A shirt was tied over his head and fists and pick-handles were plied in an effort to freshen his memory."

  6. Properly "freshened," the thirteen prisoners were take by their captors to the adjoining San Benito County boundary and turned over to sheriff's officers. So far as can be learned no attempt was made by the San Benito Count sheriff's officer to apprehend the vigilantes for kidnapping and assault. San Benito County Undersheriff M. T. Huble refused to answer this correspondent's questions. By two o'clock on the morning of July 20 the band of thirteen had been turned over to the Monterey County sheriff s office in Salinas and jailed on vagrancy charges on complaint of Sheriff Carl Abbott. When asked why vagrancy was charged against persons who had been seized in their home' by night-riding terrorists and driven to prison, a member of Sheriff Abbott's office replied with admirable logic, "Because they were disheveled, their clothes were torn, and they had no place to go."

  7. Released without trial on their own recognizance on the evening of July 20 with the understanding that they would not return to Monterey County within a year, the thirteen were herded south from Salinas by deputy sheriffs through Monterey and San Luis Obispo Counties to Santa Barbara County, the authorities having proceeded on the familiar reasoning that the solution of social problems lies in hustling vagrants, alleged and otherwise, out of the community. The present whereabouts of the thirteen refugees is apparently unknown here. Neither the Tanners nor Cecil Hausler had returned to their homes by today, while reports are lacking for the others, who are Antone Meshler, Fred Bovee, John Orozzo, A. Kodick, Sam Anderson, M. Mettio, Albert Bega, Sam and Nunzio Pesco, and Ben Pesco, Sr.

  8. Meanwhile the wave of anti-red hysteria, engendered in large degree by San Francisco newspaper stories dealing with the general strike, has swept the length of Santa Clara County, including the town of Palo Alto, seat of Stanford University and home of Herbert Hoover. Ill-defined "security leagues" in Palo Alto and Los Gatos and a "Committee of Safety" in San Jose and the county in general are enrolling several thousand citizens and creating new deputy sheriffs wholesale for such varied purposes as "combatting communism and fascism," conducting "educational campaigns," supplying the sheriff with an immediately available army in case of labor trouble in the orchards, and furnishing civil authorities with a body of citizens "ready to act in cases of emergency, such as earthquakes." (There was an earthquake in 1906 !)

  9. From the standpoint of civil liberties, one finds in the San Jose newspapers an attitude toward vigilante activity which is anything but reassuring. The Mercury-Herald's enthusiastic news story of the July 19 episode was somewhat tempered by an editorial condemning vigilante violence, but the San Jose Evening News has been outspoken in indorsing the recent terrorism. The vigilante mob which carried pick-handles drew from the News on July 20 a story introduced by the following purple lead: "The mongoose of Americanism dragged the cobra of communism through the good Santa Clara Valley orchard dirt last night." And on the twenty-first the News carried the following editorial commendation of terrorism:

    The citizens who accomplished that feat were doing their plain duty, the same as they are doing in San Francisco--raiding every place where they find Communists and driving them out.... The News offers its congratulations to this committee and wishes to say to them that every time they clean up a den of Communists and lead them boldly out of the county they are accomplishing a great result and will receive the commendation of the public in general.

  10. More reassuring is the attitude of Sheriff William J. Emig of Santa Clara County. Despite anti-red hysteria he has denounced vigilante activity, has promised to exert every effort to apprehend the unknown terrorists of July 19, and has told this correspondent: "I can't go about rounding up 'reds.' And I won't. When laws are broken, I'll act promptly." Palo Alto's Security League, its secret member ship said to be divided along "conservative" and "direct action" lines, already shows signs of decline. The Committee of Safety in San Jose denies connection with perpetrators of the July nineteenth outrage. In San Francisco Municipal Judge Lazarus has dismissed eighty-four Communist "suspects" and is quoted as saying that they "were not agitators but merely penniless unfortunates." Nevertheless the "red round-up" continues in San Francisco. And in San Jose the County Detention Home, when asked what will become of thirteen-year-old John Tanner, replies: "We can't answer that. We are giving him a home and protection until something is decided. John is a good bright boy. He won't talk. We hardly blame him."