Mike Plesh

Mike Plesh was a defendant in the Sacramento criminal-syndicalism prosecution arising from the organizing campaigns of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. The prosecution followed the California agricultural strikes of 1933 and the arrests of union organizers and supporters in 1934. Mike Plesh was acquitted on April 1, 1935, when the jury returned its verdicts. Eight other defendants were convicted; their convictions were reversed on appeal in September 1937.

Daily Worker, August 23, 1934, page 1: The Sacramento dispatch individually lists this defendant among seventeen facing six criminal-syndicalism counts. It describes the Sacramento prisoners collectively as crowded fourteen to a cell, with no beds or blankets for two weeks and a hole in the floor for a toilet. The stated six-to-eighty-four-year range was potential exposure if convicted, not an imposed sentence. The account’s unnamed Chinese detainee is not identified with any named defendant.

A Sacramento defense statement dated February 27, 1935, printed in the Daily Worker on March 5, included this defendant among fourteen signers. The statement defended the International Labor Defense and its conduct of the trial and bail campaign against factional criticism. It also named Luther Mincy and John Fisher as acquitted about a week before the statement. Its allegations about other defendants’ cooperation with police are partisan claims, not independently established facts. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n055-NAT-mar-05-1935-DW-Q.pdf#page=3

The prisoner letter coauthored by Donald Bigham and Martin Wilson recalls this defendant’s earlier life: worked in a Pennsylvania steel mill and studied sculpture in spare time. It identifies all six as young workers drawn to California agricultural labor and union organizing, then held in Sacramento in the1934criminal-syndicalism prosecution. The letter is undated, so its publication on March 12, 1935 is not treated as proof of renewed or uninterrupted custody overriding independently established bail gaps. Its four-to-fifty-six-year exposure is possible punishment, not an imposed sentence. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v14n11-mar-12-1935-NM.pdf#page=22

PDF pages 7–8 explicitly attribute the jail drawing to Mike Plesh, one of the Sacramento eighteen then on criminal-syndicalism trial. The drawing supplies prisoner-created evidence of defense solidarity; its depicted crowd is not a captioned identification of every face or a new jail episode. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1935/v11n01-jan-1935-orig-LD.pdf