In his files at Washington University, among Missouri’s Communist Party materials, William “Bill” Sentner kept a collection of St Louis labor history documents, including a newspaper clipping of a Mark Twain quote on the “undeniable right” of US citizens “to alter their form of government”:
My kind of loyalty is to my country, not to its institutions or its office holders. Institutions are extraneous — they are its mere clothing and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, death. . . .
The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his tongue and does not agitate for a new suit is disloyal; he is a traitor.
This passage may have been used in Sentner’s court proceedings — he was one of the American Communist Party leaders arrested and prosecuted under the Smith Act of 1940, which imposed wartime criminal penalties for publishing, advising, or teaching that it would be desirable to overthrow the US government “by force or violence.”
Prefiguring today’s political climate, the Smith Act collapsed the categories of seditious foreigner and violent radical. Sentner was smeared as a foreign bomb-thrower. In reality, he was a dedicated pacifist and a homegrown American red, born in St Louis to Russian Jewish immigrants who worked in the city’s garment district.
Sentner’s problem was that he became one of the most effective organizers in Midwest history. As president of the United Electrical Workers (UE) District 8, he put forward a unique worker-first strategy that cut across the race and gender lines of the 1930s — and for that, he had to be stopped.
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Auteur: Devin Thomas O’Shea
