Biography
Emerson P. Jennings was a Wilkes-Barre printer, union member and organizer of the Luzerne County Unemployed League. He circulated a petition seeking the impeachment of Judge W. Alfred Valentine after Valentine issued an injunction during the 1935 Glen Alden coal strike. Police arrested Jennings on August 2, 1935, accusing him of conspiring to dynamite the automobile used by Valentine’s daughter. Officers questioned him for hours and confined him in a cellar vault beneath the Kingston engine house. He was subsequently released on bail. At the October 1936 trial, the principal witness recanted and testified that he had been employed to implicate Jennings falsely. The jury nevertheless convicted Jennings. The Superior Court reversed the judgment and ordered a new trial; the prosecution was abandoned in April 1938.
Isidor Schneider’s September 24, 1935 New Masses account calls Jennings a Wilkes-Barre printer and civic leader who gathered ten thousand signatures seeking Judge W. Alfred Valentine’s impeachment and headed the delegation to the Pennsylvania legislature. It says he was lured to a hotel by a supposed printing customer named McHale and arrested there. The article reports co-arraignment with Charles or Joe Harris and Gerald Williams, whom the Scranton Times identified as local man Fred Buchner rather than a Bronx stranger. It attributes to Williams the allegation that Jennings offered 300 dollars to dynamite Mary Valentine’s car and later paid him money; Schneider challenges that testimony and alleges a police frame-up. These are disputed contemporary prosecution and defense accounts, not findings of guilt or proof that either co-accused was a political activist. Jennings’s civic campaign and help obtaining arrested Unemployed News sellers’ release add context to the existing prosecution; no new arrest date, term or outcome is inferred. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v16n13-sep-24-1935-NM.pdf#page=23 (printed20).
Physical arrest distinguished from warrant and hearing
Jennings was physically arrested on August 2, 1935 and confined overnight. Carl Reeve’s contemporary report gives August 2 in both its summary and hotel-meeting account, then describes the August 3 hearing at 11:30 a.m. The appellate opinion independently dates the information and warrant August 3 and explicitly states that Jennings was arrested the night before the warrant issued (paragraphs 9–10). The August 3 date previously retained in this record describes the formal proceeding, not the physical arrest or custody start. The arrest and incarceration dates and matching summary wording are corrected to August 2; the later trial and appellate history are unchanged. Both sources establish subsequent bail but not an exact physical release day, which remains unfilled. The newspaper’s age fifty-seven supports only an approximate 1877–1878 birth-year window, not a verified birth date.
Commonwealth v. Jennings, 129 Pa.Super.584, paragraphs 9–10 and 30; Daily Worker, September 3, 1935, original PDF page 3
