The Young People's Socialist League, closely affiliated with the Socialist Party, planned to use disguises, if necessary, after the Socialist Party adopted its anti-war program in 1917. Thus in "Outlines of the Evidence Taken Before the Judiciary Committee of the Assembly of New York," pages 608-9, appears a letter of William F. Kruse, National Secretary of the Young People's Socialist League, written to the secretaries of its different branches, in which he urged them to have an "unofficial emergency committee," have "several copies of your most important records and especially your mailing list stowed away in various safe and secluded places," and have "three trustworthy officers broken in for each important job." "At least one of these officers should be a girl," he continued, "so that if our boys are jailed for refusal to serve, the girls can keep the League going." He added: "If ever the Y. P. S. L. is suppressed you will immediately get together all its members as quietly as possible under the name of some athletic club, dance society or pleasure club. The name of this organization should have nothing in common with Socialism."
In concluding this chapter the attention of the reader is called to the fact that the Socialists are trying their best to make it appear that the interests of the American workingmen in general are jeopardized when a member of their party is put in jail or is on trial. This is rank hypocrisy. Even if the Socialist Party was a real workingman's party, this fact would not give it the right to set up its justly condemned bomb throwers, its preachers of Bolshevist revolution, its teachers of race suicide, etc., as working-class martyrs and protagonists of free speech, which they claim is no longer allowed in our country.