Biography
Arthur Berg was a delegate for the Oil Workers Industrial Union of the IWW. Arthur Berg received a ten-year sentence for violating Oklahoma's criminal syndicalism laws because hebelonged to the IWW.
White describes Berg as a thirty-eight-year-old itinerant oilfield and harvest worker arrested by railroad police in Haileyville on December27,1922 for vagrancy, then prosecuted for IWW literature and membership. Berg denied being an organizer; the author identifies him as one. The ten-year term and$5000 fine were imposed penalties, not demonstrated actual service.
White traces Berg’s initial thirty-day vagrancy sentence to the December 27, 1922 arrest, a January 17 criminal-syndicalism charge while he remained jailed, and trial the following February. County prosecutor O.H. Whitt prosecuted and Judge A.C. Brewster imposed ten years and a $5,000 fine. White explicitly reports that Berg and Homer Wear remained in prison until the Criminal Court of Appeals freed them in early 1925 for procedural and evidentiary errors, and that neither was retried. The nominal ten years is not actual service.
Ahmed White, Under the Iron Heel (University of California Press, 2022), physical PDF pages [180, 181, 182] (printed page = physical minus 11); source193 SHA256 7c24fb0ba336fcbf379fb9720f70dcdbf754d796a50dee77b39e38e0f9bd2868.
