I recently read an interesting post by Joe Kirby, the author of SiouxFallsJoe.com and a fellow enthusiast for South Dakota history. Kirby’s great grandfather and namesake, Joe Kirby, was South Dakota’s leading trial attorney in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The younger Kirby’s blog post recounts his ancestor’s representation of German farmers from Hutchinson County who opposed the draft during World War I:
The first Espionage Act case argued before the Supreme Court happened to be from South Dakota. In 1917, thirty German socialist farmers from Hutchinson County, South Dakota signed a poorly drafted and ill-advised petition to the state’s governor criticizing the military draft and requesting a change in the selective service laws. Understandably, they didn’t like the fact that their German blooded sons were being forced to fight their relatives back in Germany.
The federal government immediately charged the farmers with violating the Espionage Act. They were convicted in federal court and shipped off to Leavenworth prison. Their attorney, Joe Kirby, appealed the convictions to the US Supreme Court. What happened next was a big surprise.
I’ll leave it to Joe’s post to reveal the big surprise, but I’ll just say that the elder Kirby made quite an impression on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
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