SOCIALISTS TO ANSWER CHARGE

Four local Socialists are being held on $ 10,000 bail apiece after their arrest today for violating the federal Espionage Act, our paper reports.

The four suspects – Angelo Creo, Charles Nelson, Clinton H. Pierce and Charles G. Zellman, were arrested by Schenectady police last Sunday for distributing literature “antagonistic to the draft act.” They’re rearrested on federal charges in the Albany office of U. S. Commissioner Borden H. Mills.

At issue is a pamphlet titled “Protect Our Rights,” which asserts that the world war “was to determine whether the Chambers of Commerce of the allied nations, including the United States, or the Chambers of Commerce of the Central powers [ i. e. Germany and its allies] would have the superior right to exploit undeveloped countries.”

The pamphlet further claims that the U. S. only entered the war this April because “if the allies did not win, certain loans made to the European states through J. P. Morgan would be repudiated, and American investors who had accepted the promises of Mr. Morgan that the loan would be paid would lose their investments.”

Defense attorney Louis G. Hunt claims that copies of “Protect Our Rights” were mistakenly mixed with copies of “The Price We Pay,” an anti- war pamphlet not considered seditious, and that his clients never intended to hand out the more inflammatory publication.

Schenectady is a Socialist stronghold, having elected a Socialist mayor earlier this decade, but Commissioner Mills warns that traitors enjoy no immunity from federal authority there.

“Evidently the Socialists in that city believe the because the large number of Socialists there they will not be molested,” Mills says, “If I knew that the Socialists were to carry this city by thousands of votes, and if a Socialist mayor was to be elected, it would make no difference as to my course.”