PURELY COMMENTARY
When Alien Registration Paralyzed Libertarianism
PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor Emeritus
T
hese are glorious times corn-
pared with the "witchhunts" of
the earlier decades of this
century.
The previous ones were the era
when a person with an accent might be
suspected of being a Communist or an
endorser of Communism. Those were
the years when Jews and others struggl-
ed for the right to emigrate to this coun-
try. Now there are millions of illegal
aliens who are being granted the
privilege of attaining citizenship in the
United States.
There were sad years during which
there were proposals to register aliens,
to fingerprint them and to deny them
basic rights in labor's ranks.
Such a bill received overwhelming
support of both houses of the Michigan
legislature and had the blessings of
Governor Wilber Brucker. The shock-
ingly amazing element was the leading
part played in its support by the Detroit
Federation of Labor, whose chief at the
time was Frank Martel.
That dramatic period in Michigan
history is reconstructed in Michigan
Historical Review, Spring 1988, in an
article by Thomas A. Klug, a Ph.D. can-
didate in history at Wayne State
University who presently teaches at
Marygrove College.
Under the title "Labor Market
Politics in Detroit: The Curious Case of
the `Spolansky Act' of 1931," the entire
matter as it is revived in the Klug arti-
cle is a genuine Michigan drama. Not
only the Michigan legislature and
Governor Brucker, and the Detroit
Federation of Labor and its leader
Frank Martel, but the Michigan
Manufacturers Association and the
Theodore Levin
Union League of Michigan had their
nefarious roles.
There were the leaders of the op-
position who finally succeeded in hav-
ing the Michigan Alien Registration
Act scrapped. They included Fred M.
Butzel, Theodore Levin before he
became a federal judge, Rabbi Leon
Fram, Maurice Sugar and your colum-
nist who worked closely with the op-
ponents and with Patrick O'Brien who
secured an injunction to prevent enact-
ment of the proposed law before he
became Michigan attorney general.
Klug provides this explanatory note
about the Michigan bill and its
sponsors:
The spirit of rallies, "eviction
parties," and songfests that
marked the Michgian
unemployed-councils movement
remained high despite vicious
attacks on its Communist
leadership. One attempt to "root
out the reds" came in the form
of an act passed by overwhelm-
ing margins by both the
Michigan House and Senate on
May 18, 1931 that would have re-
quired all aliens to register with
the state to prove their legality
and simultaneously forced any
Michigan resident to produce
upon demand proof of his or her
citizenship or "registered"
status. Moreover, employers
would be required to
demonstrate that none of their
employees were "illegal." The
practical effects of this would be
to give police and employers
license to harass "undesirable"
elements at will and make
"suspects" out of anyone with
"foreign-sounding" names or a
trace of an accent.
The bill was sponsored by
the Union League of Michigan,
a "civic" organization whose list
of officers read like a Who's Who
of Michigan businessmen.
Properly to understand and
evaluate the entire drama one must
know the background and role of Jacob
Spilansky. Here is the Klug explana-
tion of this Communist hunter's status
in his role of advocate of anti-alien
actions:
The logic of the Detroit
Federation of Labor's support
for the Spolansky Act of 1931
was thus in place just before the
start of the Great Depression. A
special combination of the
power of Detroit's employers,
the craft unionist strategy of
defending local labor-market
bastions, and the city's attrac-
tiveness to immigrants and com-
muters from Canada brought
the DFL to the extreme demand
for alien registration.
But the DFL never prepared
a registration bill — employers
did. Or, to be exact, employers
defined an alien problem and
began the political process that
resulted in the 1931 Michigan
act. The trouble that employers
had with aliens was not that
they competed with American
workers for jobs, which was fine
enough, but that too many com-
munists were foreign born. This
was one of the conclusions of an
investigation undertaken in ear-
ly 1927 by Jacob Spolansky for
a committee of Detroit manufac-
turers . . . Spolansky, a pre-war
immigrant from the Ukraine,
came to Detroit as a special
representative of the National
Metal Trades Association, an
open-shop organization based
in Chicago . . . The NMTA pro-
vided its branches and com-
pany members with expert ser-
vices, ranging from machine-
shop tips and legal advice to
plant guards, undercover spies,
and strikebreakers.
In Jacob Spolansky the
NMTA and the manufacturers of
Detroit found the embodiment
of America's first generation of
professional radical hunters. A
true specialist in the art and
methods of domestic counter-
intelligence, Spolansky was pro-
of that career anti-communists
were not born to that role — they
were made. During World War I,
the Army's Military Intelligence
Continued on Page 42
Stain of Deir Yassin And The Hidden Arab Pogrom
I
n the battle for independence
that was to lead to statehood,
there was one stain on the Jewish
record. It was part of a continuous war
between Jews and Arabs, and 200 Deir
Yassin Arabs lost their lives. The failure
of the Arabs to heed the Jewish warn-
ing resulted in the tragic death of
women and children. There was heart-
rending regret, deep remorse, apologies
in the Jewish community and from
Jewish leadership everywhere. They did
not matter. Deir Yassin was
perpetuated as the great Arab pro-
paganda tool against Israel and the
Jewish people.
It is passed on as the propaganda
tool among the children who are
shouting slogans in the present rioting.
Even during the ABC televising of the
disputes from Jerusalem, chidren were
heard vociferating their two slogans:
"My Land" and "Deir Yassin." The Deir
Yassin rebuke keeps reverberating.
Therefore the compulsion to tell the
facts in an effort to indicate that there
was Arab guilt as well, that many of the
accusations against the Jews should be
treated as libels.
2
FRIDAY, MAY 27, 1988
Deir Yassin as an indictment of
Jewry keeps repeating. It was publish-
ed in 1970 in Detroit Free Press ar-
ticles. There was need then, as there is
now, to refute some of the charges. At
least, there is need to clarify the events
that took place in April 1948. Therefore
the charges were analyzed with the ap-
pended facts in my column on this page
of December 18, 1970.
The expose of the libels is lengthy,
yet it must be recounted for the record.
The all-too-frequent references to Deir
Yassin, the manner in which mere men-
tion of it misleads Jews as well, calls for
"The Facts and the Lies About Deir
Yassim" as I gathered them for my
December 18, 1970 page, to be reprinted
in part:
In 1947, the year before
Israel became a state, Palesti-
nian Arab contingents, stiffened
by men of the regular Iraqi ar-
my, had seized vantage points
overlooking the Jerusalem road
and from them were firing on
trucks that tried to reach the
beleaguered city with vital food-
stuffs and supplies. Deir Yassin,
like the strategic hill and village
of Castel, was one of these van-
tage points.
In fact, the two villages were
interconnected militarily, rein-
forcements passing from Deir
Yassin to Castel during the
fierce engagement for that bill.
Hagana, the Jewish defense for-
mation, after heavy uphill
fighting in which it lost many
men, took the strongly fortified
height. Deir Yassin had been
similarly fortified, its stone
dwellings transformed into bas-
tions. As its share in the battle
for Jerusalem's approaches, the
second — and smaller — Jewish
para-military force, the Irgun
Zvai Leumi (known as "Etzel" or
"Irgun") decided to assault Deir
Yassin. It detailed 100 of its
number for the purpose .. .
A small open truck accom-
panied them, fitted with a loud-
speaker. In the early dawn light
of April 10, 1948, it was driven
close to the village entrance and
a warning was broadcast in
Arabic to civilian, noncomba-
tant inhabitants to withdraw
from the danger zone, as an at-
tack was imminent. Everyone
who left would be guaranteed
safe passage — if not, it would be
his or her own responsibility.
Some 200 villagers did come out
and took shelter on the lower
slopes of the hill on which Deir
Yassin was perched. None of
them, during or after the
fighting, was hurt or molested in
the slightest, and all were after-
wards transported to the fringe
of the Arab-held fifth of East
Jerusalem and there released.
The actual battle of Deir
Yassin began with a typical
Arab subterfuge, which has
been often replayed since. The
Palestinian Arab and Iraqi gar-
rison hung out white flags from
houses nearest the village en-
trance; it was accompanied by a
hail of fire. One of the first to be
hit was the Irgun commander.
Fierce house-to-house fighting
Continued on Page 42