CHICKEN NOT HEN

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 34, 9 August 1939, Page 11

CHICKEN NOT HEN

COMMENT BY JUDGE

BRIDGES DEPORTATION CASE

SAN FRANCISCO, August 7.

Mr. Richard Gledstein, counsel for the defence, in answer to the deportation charges against the Australian Labour leader Harry Bridges, contended that the case against Bridges was not prepared by the Government. He said it was prepared in an improper manner and then presented to the prosecution and taken into court. Harper Knowles, an American Legion anti-radical leader, who. was treated as a hostile witness, admitted that Stanley Doyle, a Legion official, rigged up a recording device in Bridges's hotel room.

Judge Landis commented that this might be nice but it was improper.

Knowles denied that shipping firms and other employers were backing his committee or that he had conspired with Portland and Seattle immigration officials to secure Bridges's deportation.

Judge Landis declared that aliens were not necessarily deportable because they were undesirable, although they were if they advocated the overthrow of the Government by force. "The fact that a hen is a chicken doesn't mean that a chicken is a hen, nor is an alien deportable because he wears an orange tie on St. Patrick's Day," he commented.