Biography
Harry Wicks was a founding leader of the Communist Party of America in 1919 — a delegate to its founding convention, a member of the committee that drafted the party program, a member of its Central Executive Committee representing Portland, Oregon, and associate editor of the party organ The Communist. In April 1919 he was arrested in Spokane, Washington, for "disloyalty" after a militant strike speech, and secondary sources report he was jailed again during the November 1919 federal anti-Communist crackdown, though no trial, conviction, or sentence is on record for either arrest. From 1919 onward he was repeatedly accused of being a police informant or agent provocateur — including a 1923 charge (of which a Workers Party commission cleared him) and a 1937 expulsion from the CPUSA as an alleged spy; historian Theodore Draper found no convincing evidence for the spy charges. He later served as a Communist International representative to the Communist Party of Australia (1930–31) and died in Chicago in 1956. (Recorded as Harry M. Wicks; Herbert Moore Wicks, 1889–1956)
The October 9, 1935 Daily Worker reports from Philadelphia that police broke into a hotel room and beat and arrested the Communist mayoral candidate the previous day. He had addressed an antiwar protest from a second-floor window near the Italian consulate at Twelfth and Market Streets. The newspaper estimates ten thousand demonstrators. It supplies no formal charge or physical discharge. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n242-NAT-oct-09-1935-DW-Q.pdf#page=1
In his statement on the Communist ballot-petition challenge, Wicks says he was addressing thousands outside the Philadelphia Italian consulate at 12:30 p.m. on October 8 when police assaulted and arrested him. He says he was held in jail on inciting-to-riot and disorderly-conduct charges, citing Magistrate Fitzgerald’s court records. This supplies the previously unstated charges for the existing October 8 arrest. His accusation of falsified election records is attributed to him; no final verdict or release date is reported. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n253-NAT-oct-21-1935-DW-Q.pdf#page=4
The October 10 Philadelphia dispatch in the October 11, 1935 Daily Worker identifies the Communist mayoral candidate as H. W. Wicks and describes his arrest with six others after the Italian-consulate antiwar meeting. It reports that the court hearing yesterday morning, October 9, resulted in the discharge of all those arrested. The exact candidate, city, consulate demonstration and chronology identify the already recorded October 8 prosecution. This adds a reported court disposition; it does not separately establish the time or day of physical release from jail, and no release date or measured custody total is inferred.
