Biography
George Casper was a Farmers' League member charged with criminal syndicalism at White Cloud, Michigan during the 1933 farm revolt. The farm revolt of 1933 — the Farmers' Holiday Association and the Communist-led United Farmers' League fighting mortgage foreclosures with penny auctions and picket lines — brought waves of arrests across the Midwest, many under state criminal-syndicalism laws.
The Daily Worker of May 13, 1933, page 2, reports an International Labor Defense campaign against Michigan's criminal-syndicalism law centered on George Casper and Clyde Smith, farmers arrested for seeking to prevent a foreclosure at White Cloud. Thousands of repeal petitions had been distributed statewide. A separate item on the formation of the Farmers National Defense Bureau says the two faced possible twenty-year terms; this describes exposure to a potential sentence, not a sentence already imposed.
Daily Worker, August 23, 1934, page 1: An August 22 Ludington dispatch reports his abduction the previous night from a farmers’ meeting at Custer Town Hall. The paper alleges that the mob was organized by the Roach Canning Company of Scottsville during demands for higher bean and pickle prices. His whereabouts were unknown at the time of reporting. This describes political abduction, not a documented police arrest or jail admission.
The October 9, 1934 Daily Worker reports that the criminal-syndicalism charges against him in the White Cloud foreclosure-defense prosecution were dropped. It separately describes John Rose’s conviction and successful appeal. The charge dismissal supplies no exact individual physical-release date. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1934/v11-n242-NAT-oct-09-1934-DW-LOC.pdf#page=3
The farm report says White Cloud, Michigan defendants George Casper and Clyde Smith were released on $1,000 bail each after nearly six weeks in jail following a foreclosure protest meeting. This earlier bail interruption is preserved alongside the later six-month custody report; no uninterrupted six-month interval or exact release day is inferred.
