Biography
Lotta Burke was a Cincinnati garment worker, labour leader, suffragist, Socialist, pacifist and women's-rights speaker. Sources give her dates as 1869-1960, while a contemporary report called her 45 in June 1917, which would place her birth around 1871 or 1872; neither establishes an exact birth date, so none is recorded. A later biographical account says she died in December 1960 and was buried at St. John Cemetery in St. Bernard, Ohio.
She was arrested in Cincinnati on June 12, 1917 with Thomas Hammerschmidt, initially on a treason allegation, for ordering anti-conscription handbills. After a preliminary hearing on June 25 she was held in a Dayton, Ohio jail and released on July 16 on a $3,000 bond -- a stay of about three weeks.
She was later prosecuted with twelve others for conspiracy to defraud the United States by encouraging men not to register for military service, and was convicted by February 1920. A government compilation records a fifteen-month sentence and names Missouri State Prison, but no admission or release has been found and she was on appeal bond during the litigation. The Sixth Circuit affirmance was reported in 1923.
ON MAY 26, 1924 THE SUPREME COURT REVERSED ALL THIRTEEN CONVICTIONS, holding that openly urging resistance to draft registration was not defrauding the United States under the statute charged.
An earlier version of this record said she served fifteen months in the Missouri State Prison. Fifteen months was the sentence imposed; whether she served any of it is unresolved.
The Ohio account individually reports a fifteen-month custodial sentence for conspiracy to violate the Selective Service Act by urging others to refuse registration: Burke at Missouri State Prison, Hammerschmidt and Geier at Atlanta. The printed April30,1917 indictment predates the May18 statute and may be a source error; it is not entered as an arrest date. No complete actual-service total is supplied. [PDF64]
Government Prosecutions under the Espionage Act, Senate Document159 (March1922), PDF page 64.
