Opinion ID: 1474108
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 21

Heading: The Book, Spreading Germs of Hate.

Text: Defense counsel objected to the introduction of defendant's book entitled, Spreading Germs of Hate. Defendant wrote this book in 1930 and it relates a story of propaganda in the 1914-18 war. The book is an interesting combination of facts, imagination, suggestions, and inferences. The author has said its purpose was to reveal propaganda and its technique, in order to immunize the American people against further exposure. The purpose could well have been further propaganda, an attempt to laugh off all the past so that those countries which had gotten far behind in the propaganda race could start off even again in the matter of selling themselves to the United States. Be that as it may the main theme of the book or the ultimate purpose of the author need not be fully and correctly understood for our purposes. The book is largely autobiographical. The defendant shows himself to be a great propagandist of the last war. He reveals to some extent the methods of his foreign principal in that war. The book was introduced as evidence on the issue of intent or willfulness. It suggests the willful nature of defendant's acts set out in this indictment because of the similarity to those during the last war, and the book also shows defendant's thoroughgoing knowledge of how his foreign principal worked then. With this knowledge he was able to do it again with improvements. Of course propagandizing was no crime, but it shows that defendant knew how not to disclose too much. The Government introduced the book with the argument that it revealed prior similar acts of propagandizing with its always present secrecy or confusion to show that any failure of the defendant to make a full disclosure was likely to be a willful act. The book, while revealing some prior similar acts, did not show a highly interrelated chain that were closely akin except for the fact that most of them would come under the head of propaganda. It might be better argued, therefore, that the book showed the author as an expert in this field of activity. If defendant was an expert in the relation of the law to propaganda and counter-propaganda, and if he was well versed in the necessity of a foggy atmosphere of confusion, secrecy and camouflage encompassing propaganda and counter-propaganda, then there is little basis for believing that anything defendant did in covering up the scent was done carelessly and inadvertently. In this book, defendant stated, There is no safeguard which the law can create which human ingenuity cannot circumvent. [20] This argument, of course, also supports the introduction of the book on the issue of intent. The book was subsequently used liberally by both sides. Later, the defendant made 18 prayers in respect of instructions to the jury. None of them in any way concerns the book. Hence defendant made no request for an instruction limiting its purpose. We see no error in the introduction or retention of the book as evidence.