Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

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This is known as the “Abrams case,” and it stood as one of our greatest judicial scandals. Among others who protested was Professor Zechariah Chafee, Jr., of the Harvard Law School. He published in the “Harvard Law Review,” April, 1920, an article entitled “A Contemporary State Trial”; and subsequently he embodied this article as a chapter in his book on “Freedom of Speech.” Dean Pound of the Harvard Law School, with Professors Frankfurter, Chafee and Sayre (President Wilson’s son-in-law), also the librarian of the Law School, signed a petition for executive clemency in this Abrams case. These actions excited great indignation among the interlocking directorates, and Mr. Austen G. Fox, a Harvard graduate and Wall Street lawyer, drew up a protest to the Harvard board of overseers, which protest was signed by twenty prominent corporation lawyers, all Harvard men, including Mr. Peter B. Olney, a prominent Tammany politician; Mr. Beekman Winthrop, ex-governor of Porto Rico, and Mr. Joseph H. Choate, Jr., recently notorious in connection with the scandals of the Alien Property Custodian. The overseers referred the matter to the “Committee to Visit the Law School,” which consists of fourteen prominent servants of the plutocracy, including a number of judges. The result was a “conference,” in reality a solemn trial, which occupied an entire day and evening, May 22, 1921, at the Harvard Club in Boston. Mr. Fox appeared, with a committee of his supporters and a mass of documents in the case; also the United States attorney and his assistant, serving as witnesses.

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