A.B. Magil with a valuable early biography of legendary Communist Detroit labor lawyer Maurice Sugar on the occasion of one of his numerous runs for judge. Sugar’s legacy is still very much felt in Detroit through the Sugar Law Center for Economic & Social Justice and the larger labor movement.

‘Maurice Sugar-Detroit’s Labor Candidate’ by A.B. Magil from the New Masses. Vol. 14 No. 12. March 19, 1935.

THE shadows of war hung over the world of 1913-14. An economic crisis had caught the country in its grip and many were unemployed. The I.W.W., the Socialist Party and other Detroit labor groups organized a parade as a demonstration against unemployment. The police banned it. The organizations decided to put up a fight. Who could handle the legal end? They decided to let Maurice Sugar, just graduated from University of Michigan Law School take a crack at it. He was young and inexperienced, but he was a socialist; had been lecturing before various labor groups and seemed a fighter.

Sugar brought suit for an injunction to restrain the police from interfering with the parade. He made it hot for the cops who took the witness stand. In the end the fight was lost. The judge ruled that since the organization involved didn’t believe in the Constitution, they had no constitutional rights. From that moment Maurice Sugar’s life was bound up with the labor movement. He is today among the foremost labor attorneys in the country, and he has been drafted by the entire Detroit labor movement, from extreme right to extreme left, as labor’s candidate for judge of Recorder’s Court in the elections to be held on April 1.

In 1914 the Detroit Typographical Union, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, was conducting a strike against the open-shop Mack Printing Co., at that time one of the largest in its field. The company had obtained an injunction prohibiting picketing, and striker after striker had been arrested for violating the injunction. The union tried three different attorneys. All of them knew their jobs as far as the legal end of it was concerned, but the strikers and union officials were dissatisfied. “We want someone who can fight,” they said. They got Sugar. He has remained the attorney for the Typographical Union to this day.

In the summer of 1918, the old Moose Temple in Detroit was crowded with workers who had come to hear Gene Debs at a meeting protesting against the war. The chairman of that meeting was Maurice Sugar. Less than a year before he had been sentenced to jail for his courageous opposition to the war. As the sentence had been appealed, he was still free. Like Debs, he went to prison for his loyalty to socialism. Only a few months later, on November 25, 1918-two weeks after the armistice which ended the war that he had opposed-he was sentenced to the Detroit House of Correction.

He had been a delegate to the famous St. Louis convention of the Socialist Party in April, 1917, where he voted for the anti-war resolution. But Hillquit and Berger, who also voted for this resolution, then proceeded to sabotage it. The Socialist Party was a muddling party, with a vacillating leadership of middle-class radicals who wanted to be respectable. Some of the leading figures, such as Upton Sinclair, William English Walling and Charles Edward Russell went over openly to the jingoists. Others gave lip-service to the anti-war resolution, which was by no means a revolutionary document, but predominantly pacifist in tone. In this atmosphere it took courage to fight against the war. The young attorney, Maurice Sugar, had everything to lose in a material sense, and nothing to gain from such a fight. He chose to fight.

In the fall of 1917, Sugar was arrested and indicted on two charges: failure to register and conspiracy to obstruct the draft. The latter charge arose from the fact that he was one of five members on the board of directors of The Michigan Socialist, weekly organ of the Socialist Party, which had urged workers not to register. The teachings of Lenin and the Bolsheviks were at that time unknown in this country; but instinctively the true internationalists in America, like their comrades in Germany, Liebknecht and Luxembourg, groped their way toward the revolutionary path.

There are some crimes of which one may well be ashamed to be innocent, Maurice Sugar told the court before sentence was passed on him; there are some crimes of which one may well be proud to be guilty.

“My conduct [he wrote], has been based upon the belief that the war in which this country is now engaged is a war springing from the economic antagonism of the ruling classes in the countries involved; and this clash of economic interests is made possible through the exploitation of the workers of all countries by these ruling classes…

“To me this is not a war for democracy…the czar of Russia, the Mikado of Japan, and the king of Italy are no more friends of democracy than the rulers of the central powers. This is not a fight against kings; it is not a fight for kings; and it is assuredly not a fight by kings. It is a fight against capital; it is a fight for capital; and it is a fight by the slaves of capitalism.

“The only fight for democracy in the world today is the fight by the workers of all countries for the ownership of industry…I have chosen to cast my lot with these fighters for democracy-with the democrats of the world. In their victory lies the end of the misery and poverty of the people-for they are the people.”

Sugar was sentenced to a year in the House of Correction and $500 fine. With leading Detroit attorneys offering their services, he appealed the sentence and carried the fight to the United States Supreme Court, where it was finally upheld. Disbarment proceedings were started against him. The esteem in which he was held by members of his own profession is indicated by the fact that 110 Detroit lawyers, some of whom strongly disapproved of Sugar’s political views, signed a petition appealing to the court not to disbar him. He was disbarred, nevertheless, and not till six years later, in 1924, was he reinstated. In September, 1919, Sugar was released after 10 months in prison. Shortly after that came the House of the Masses trial, a chapter in American labor history that deserves to be better known. The national leadership of the Socialist Party, after expelling the entire Michigan organization of 5,000 members, sought to get control of the Detroit headquarters of the party, the House of the Masses, a valuable piece of real estate. They could think of no better way than to bring suit in the courts. The officials’ brief filed for the Hillquit machine by the prominent socialist lawyer, Seymour Stedman, declared:

“The Communists, who are now in possession and control of the House of the Masses, the property of the socialists, were expelled from the Socialist Party of the United States because, among other things, they advocated the use of direct or mass action, as the primary and principal means of securing a change or destroying the capitalist system and the present form of government of the United States.”

It went on to say that “the use of the House of the Masses for advocating direct or mass action for overthrowing the present form of government constitutes a continuing nuisance.” This was in 1920, at the height of the Red raids, when every militant worker was being hunted down and thrown into jail.

The boom days. Prosperity illusions. Fog of the high-wage-car-in-every-garage myth blanketing the country. Slow corrosion of the labor movement. Many a good man­ even some who had gone to jail during the war-became enamored of the New Capitalism and deserted the labor movement, never to return. In Detroit the once influential independent union, the United Automobile, Vehicle and Aircraft Workers of America (later the Auto Workers’ Union) had dwindled. The A.F. of L. unions were dominated by class-collaboration policies. The Communist Party was a small, isolated, sectarian group. Here as in perhaps no other American city the workers had become infected with the prosperity virus.

Maurice Sugar knew too intimately the real conditions in the Ford paradise and the quicksands on which it was built. He remained loyal to the cause of labor. After the founding of the International Labor Defense he was for years the only Detroit attorney who would handle its cases.

The crash came, with renewed attacks on the living standards of the workers and new struggles. On May 18, 1931, the Michigan Legislature, working under the sub rosa direction of Jacob Spolansky, America’s stool­ pigeon No. 1 and agent of the National Metal Trades Association, rushed through a bill requiring the registering, photographing and finger-printing of all foreign-born. At once a great mass protest movement was launched such as Michigan had never seen. Maurice Sugar played a leading role in that fight, which ended when the U.S. District Court declared the law unconstitutional. The record of the past twenty years shows that Sugar has represented practically all the unions in the city of Detroit, including the Detroit Federation and various international unions whose headquarters are in other cities. And there have been not only A.F. of L. unions, but also those affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League and independent unions like the Mechanics Educational Society of America.

A list of the labor cases Sugar has handled in the past two or three years reads like a history of the Michigan labor movement during that period. In all these cases, as in dozens of others that he has defended for the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations, Sugar served without fee. During the great tool and diemakers’ strike in the automobile industry in the fall of 1933, he represented the strikers in court, handling over two hundred cases. Not a striker was convicted.

There is a side of Maurice Sugar’s activity that for lack of space I can only touch upon: his work in the cultural field. Sugar was one of the founders of the John Reed Club of Detroit and has actively participated in all of its work. He was selected by the John Reed Clubs of the United States as their delegate to the first World Congress Against War, held in Amsterdam in August, 1932.  Subsequently, he visited the Soviet Union, and on his return went on an eight-weeks’ lecture tour from coast to coast under the auspices of the Friends of the Soviet Union, of whose National Committee he is a member. The following year he again went on a six-weeks’ tour for the F.S.U.

Sugar is the author of a number of workers’ songs that have been sung by workers’ groups throughout the country. (He generally writes both the words and music of his songs, though he has no musical training.)

Sugar undoubtedly reached the height of his career as a defender of the oppressed in the James Victory trial. In his final address to the jury he again and again warned against race prejudice, against being influenced “by stories that come from the poisoned press.” (The Hearst newspaper, The Detroit Times, had played a particularly vicious role). In concluding, he said:

“It is true that colored men and colored women are different in color from white men and white women. But that is the only real difference. They have the same hearts, they have the same pleasures, they have the same joys, they have the same pains, they have the same agonies as other people. No, their pains and agonies are not the same. They are greater, because a poor colored worker suffers not only as does a poor white worker, he suffers in addition from prejudice against him by reason of the fact that he is a colored worker. The Negro is doubly exploited…He is denied his rights as a worker and then is further oppressed because he is a colored worker.

“All Labor Unites to Elect a Fighter.” Under this slogan the candidacy of Maurice Sugar is being supported by such organizations as the Detroit and Wayne County Federation of Labor, the Mechanics Educational Society of America, the Society of Designing Engineers, the United Automobile Workers (A.F. of L.), the Detroit Federation of Teachers, the Detroit Federation of  Musicians, the Trade Union Unity League, the Communist Party, the International Labor Defense, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and many others. It is the nearest thing to a united front of all labor that any large American city has seen.

Those who want to make contributions in order to help elect the first militant labor judge in the country can address Maurice Sugar Campaign Committee, 1010 Barium Tower, Detroit, Michigan.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v14n12-mar-19-1935-NM.pdf