Opinion ID: 1474108
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 14

Heading: Disseminating Views of Congressmen on Political Topics.

Text: We come to an activity carried on in connection with, or as a corollary to, the two immediately preceding ones just discussed, but it is a sufficiently distinctive type of work to be recounted in its own category. This activity is the work of picking out Congressional literature with views that are liked and seeing to it that they get before more people. The defendant became a sort of publicity agent for the good (from his viewpoint) already created. This dissemination, probably beyond the hopes of the original author, was of material obviously political in nature. In this connection there was evidence that defendant secured from a clerk of a Congressman a mailing list of the National Committee to Keep America Out of Foreign Wars. This mailing list had some 100,000 names. Later this same clerk at defendant's request made a mailing list from Who's Who in America. The defendant had this clerk send out 125,000 copies of the Six Men and War speech referred to in the previous heading. There was much additional testimony concerning the insertion of material in the Congressional Record under Extension of Remarks, the ordering of reprints, mailing them out, from which it could be inferred that defendant was the instigator, organizer, and supervisor of many more instances of this same general type of activity. Thus the evidence shows that defendant was engaged in at least four types of political activity which he did not disclose. He merely said, as to his business, that he was an author and journalist. Under our construction of the Act it was necessary for defendant to reveal these four kinds of political activity even if they were done entirely on his own. Hence defendant failed to disclose facts material to a full, truthful answer to Item 11: give a comprehensive statement of nature of business of registrant. There was plenty of evidence that defendant acted willfully.