Biography
Dennis Batt was a Detroit tool-and-die maker turned Marxist journalist who became a leading figure of the left wing of the Socialist Party of Michigan. In 1919 he was named national secretary of the Organizing Committee of the Communist Party of America and was the first editor of its weekly organ, The Communist. On September 2, 1919, he was arrested on the floor of the CPA's founding convention in Chicago and held under Illinois's newly enacted state Sedition Act because of his editorship of that paper; the disposition of the charge is undocumented. In early 1920 Batt and the Michigan group broke from the CPA and founded the Proletarian Party of America; he later became a mainstream Detroit labor-movement functionary before his death in 1941.
Contemporary arrest report and one-day conflict
Ferguson’s contemporary participant report places the opening of the Communist Party convention on Monday, September 1, 1919 and describes Dennis E. Batt’s arrest in the convention hall on Monday afternoon under a warrant invoking the new Illinois sedition law. This points to September 1, rather than the September 2 date currently stored in the biography and arrest field. Both readings are preserved as an unresolved one-day conflict; this review does not silently overwrite the existing date. The report establishes an arrest, not a separately documented jail admission, physical discharge, conviction or sentence. No incarceration date or running custody counter is inferred from it.
