Dean Strang has seen firsthand how the American criminal justice system can operate as an instrument of injustice. The Madison criminal defense attorney was the appellate lawyer for Audrey Edmunds, a Waunakee woman who served 11 years in prison due to erroneous medical testimony. The judge in that case thumbed his nose at mounting evidence of her innocence until an appellate court overruled him and she was freed.
Strang, more famously, was also one of the trial attorneys for Steven Avery, convicted of murder after being wrongfully imprisoned for 18 years in an earlier case. As documented in the hit Netflix series, Making a Murderer, the case against Avery was riddled with reasonable doubt, while the conviction of his nephew, Brendan Dassey, is about an obvious a miscarriage of justice as it is possible to imagine. But the courts have refused to admit it.
After his daily dives into the swamp that is the injustice system, Strang relaxes by writing books about historical injustices involving working people. His 2013 tome, Worse than the Devil, recounts the wholesale prosecution of radicals and anarchists following a 1917 bombing they had nothing to do with.
Strang’s new book — like his last, published by the UW Press — is Keep the Wretches in Order: America’s Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW. It is a fascinating look at how the federal government, beginning in 1917 during World War I, set out to destroy the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies.
In fact, the most shocking and instructive aspect of Strang’s book is just how blatant and unvarnished was the justice system’s trampling of what we would now consider basic rights. And, as Strang documents, it was all part of a deliberate strategy, hatched by the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., to crush this labor union. As one of the plotters put it, “Fear is the only force that will keep the wretches in order.”
Strang’s focus is on the largest group of Wobblies to be prosecuted, in Chicago, where 166 unionists were charged — and after various attritions, 112 brought to a trial — for engaging in conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act. Smaller groups of Wobblies faced simultaneous prosecution in Sacramento, Wichita and Omaha, bringing the national total to nearly 300. More than half would end up spending a year or more behind bars.
In Chicago, after a four-and-a-half-month trial, the jury deliberated less than an hour before convicting all 97 remaining defendants, who were sentenced to prison terms of up to 20 years — although many would later receive commutations and pardons. In most cases, the evidence against them came down to belonging to a union that produced pamphlets and other material they had nothing to do with.
The standard of criminal behavior applied against the Wobblies, Strang writes, was “that antiwar sentiment equaled illegal aid to a foreign government.” He warned that the same standard could just as readily be brought to bear against “the quiet Quaker in her meeting house, the mother of draft-age sons who were needed on the farm, the aging veteran who, reliving the horrors he had seen, had come to the hard conclusion that war never in the end is a solution.”
As the judge expressed during sentencing, “When the country is at peace, it is a legal right of free speech to oppose going to war and to oppose even preparation for war; but when once [sic] war is declared, this right ceases.”
These prosecutions helped transform the Justice Department into a powerful tool of political repression, which would be wielded again in the coming decades against suspected communists, anti-war protesters and civil rights leaders. It also set a template for a modern era in which, Strang notes, “capital continues to organize against labor as effectively as ever” in the form of right-to-work laws and such.
“In the end, I think,” Strang writes in his preface, “we do not study history to learn about the past for the sake of the past. We should study history to see more sharply the present, to understand how the past carried us to the present. With this improved clarity, we then can imagine the future we want.”
One, hopefully, with a justice system that is less unjust.
Author Dean Strang will appear on June 28 at Mystery to Me Bookstore, 7 p.m.
