The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith today placed before the Federal Attorney here a complaint against J.B. Stoner, ?otorious anti-Semite, for circulating from Chattanooga through the mails a leaflet inciting the murder of Jews.
Alexander F. Miller, Southern Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League, made the complaint on the basis of a leaflet headed “Stoner Anti-Jewish Party,” which the League charged violates Section 211 of the United States Criminal Code relating to “publications of indecent character.” This statute makes it a crime to send through the mails printed matter inciting to murder or assassination.
Announcing the action taken by the Anti-Defamation League, Arnold Forster, head of the organization’s Legal Division, pointed out that Stoner has gone one step beyond the activity of such anti-Semites as William Hunt Diederich, the internationally known sculptor, who was cleared on a criminal complaint last week in Federal Court here.
“While the Anti-Defamation League first traced the activities of Diederich,” Forster said, “it made no request for criminal action against him since his actions were technically within the law. We felt, on the other hand, that men like Diederich must be socially ostrecized in order to build a dam against the poison which they disseminate. Action such as that taken by the Institute of Arts and Letters to expel Diederich from its ranks achieves this result. Stoner, we believe, however, has violated the law in his most recent leaflet which he is circulating through the mails.
“Stoner himself is an erratic bigot who wields little influence and has no organization that might make his activities dangerous. He even was unacceptable to the Ku Klux Klan which threw him out. But if such violations of the law are permitted to pass unchallenged, they will open the flood gates to similar abuses by the organized forces of bigotry that can result in murder and riot.”
In its complaint, the League points out that in his anti-Semitic leaflet Stoner says that “the Jews are too evil to be allowed to live” and urges the enactment of a law “making it a criminal offense to be a Jew, punishable by death.” The leaflet declares that “if our great and beloved America is to live, Jewry must die and the Jewish race must cease to exist.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
