Biography
Harold Fiske was a young IWW organizer recruiting farm workers in Kansas. Harold Fiske was arrested in 1923 and convicted under the Kansas criminal-syndicalism act on no evidence beyond the preamble of the IWW constitution. In Fiske v. Kansas (1927) a unanimous Supreme Court reversed his conviction — the first time the Court set aside a state criminal-syndicalism conviction, and an early landmark in applying the Fourteenth Amendment to protect speech.
White dates the Kansas arrest to June2,1923 and describes membership applications, agricultural-union bylaws and a song among the evidence. The imposed sentence was one to ten years; the Supreme Court unanimously reversed in1927 for insufficient evidence. Reversal is not assumed to be physical discharge.
White describes Fiske’s June 1923 arrest at Geneseo and pretrial jail confinement followed by a September trial at Lyons. He was free on appeal during the ensuing litigation. The 1927 Supreme Court reversal is not treated as the end of four uninterrupted years in prison.
Ahmed White, Under the Iron Heel (University of California Press, 2022), physical PDF pages [178] (printed page = physical minus 11); source193 SHA256 7c24fb0ba336fcbf379fb9720f70dcdbf754d796a50dee77b39e38e0f9bd2868.
