In Re MacKay

71 F. Supp. 397, 1947 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2735
CourtDistrict Court, N.D. Indiana
DecidedMarch 31, 1947
Docket887-P-10275
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 71 F. Supp. 397 (In Re MacKay) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, N.D. Indiana primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
In Re MacKay, 71 F. Supp. 397, 1947 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2735 (N.D. Ind. 1947).

Opinion

*398 SWYGERT, District Judge.

The petition of James Elwood MacKay for naturalization is denied. It is the holding of the Court that the petitioner is not entitled to be admitted to citizenship:

First, because he comes within the purview of Section 305 of the Nationality Act of 1940, 8 U.S.C.A. § 705, which in pertinent part provides that, “No person shall hereafter be naturalized as a citizen of the United States — who * * * is a member of any * * * organization * * * that believes in, advises, advocates, or teaches — (1) the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States.”

Secondly, and irrespective of the application of this section of the Naturalization law, Mr. MacKay’s petition is denied because his membership in the Communist Party is incompatible with the requirement that a petitioner for naturalization must be a person attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the same.

Thirdly, the petition is denied because, aside from these grounds, the petitioner has demonstrated by his answers in the testimony before the Court that he is not a person attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States.

With regard to the application of Section 305 of thé Nationality Act of 1940, the petitioner admits that he is a member of the Communist Party. This question becomes pertinent: Is the Communist Party of the United States an organization which believes in, advises, advocates or teaches the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States?

The present Constitution of the Communist Party of the United States (Government’s Exhibit 1) was adopted in 1945, which was several, years after the pertinent amendment to Section 305 of the Nationality Act. Irrespective of the absence of any direct language in this document which advises or advocates the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the .United States, the first sentence of the Preamble of the Party Constitution reads, “The Communist Party of the United States is a political party of the American working class, basing itself upon the principles of scientific socialism, Marxism-Leninism.” It is common historical knowledge that the Communist theories are básed on Marx’ and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, and as Chief Justice Stone pointed out in his dissenting opinion in Schneiderman v. United States, 320 U.S. 118, 63 S.Ct. 1333, 1367, 87 L.Ed. 1796, “The fountain head of Communist principles, the Communist Manifesto, published by Marx and Engels in 1848, had openly proclaimed that Communist ends could be attained ‘only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions’.”

I also quote other excerpts from the Communist Manifesto. On page 17 this appears: “The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the work people of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they ^destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash machinery to pieces, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.”

On page 19: “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.”

On page 20: “The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.”

And, again, on page 20: “In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie *399 lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”

And, finally, on page 31: “If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”

While the present Constitution of the Communist Party of the United States contains no direct language advocating the forcible overthrow of the Government of the United States, its basic principles are laid in the Communist Manifesto from which these quotations have been taken. Moreover, the Communist propaganda, such as has been introduced in evidence, is replete in its references to its adherence to the ideas of Marx and Engels. For example, Government’s Exhibit 7, entitled “The Communist Party and You,” contains this sentence: “It (the Communist Party) bases all its actions and policies on the science of Socialism, developed and elaborated by the greatest social scientists and working class leaders in history — Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin.”

Nowhere in the Constitution of the Party, or in any of the present day literature that is in evidence, are the principles of forcible revolt, as advocated by the Communist Manifesto, disavowed or repudiated. Furthermore, it is my opinion that the Court may take judicial knowledge of the historical fact that Communism, based on the writings and teachings of Marx and Engels, advocates force and a so-called dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary means of obtaining the objectives of Communism; and, also, that conformity to prevailing democratic processes by Communists in a particular country is for tactical purposes only inasmuch as a world wide revolution is the ultimate objective, which objective is the common bond of the Communist parties in the various countries of the world.

In further consideration of this point the reports of the hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the House of Representatives amply prove that the Section 305 (b) of the Nationality Act of 1940 is aimed directly at those who support and advocate Communism, or who are members of the Communist Party.

It is common knowledge as well as an inevitable conclusion from the evidence submitted at this hearing that the so-called “party line” of the Communist Party in America is shaped or influenced by external interests; that is, its stand or policy on any particular issue is not formulated by the Party members solely themselves; rather formulated in part or in whole by interests and influences emanating from outside this country.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
71 F. Supp. 397, 1947 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2735, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/in-re-mackay-innd-1947.