Felony Quotes (1 quote)
On the Enquirer I specialized in news of organized labor. … The dock and timber workers and the migratory farm laborers…were drawn to communism. The California State Legislature had passed a strong bill defining criminal syndicalism and making it a felony. The politicians were looking for a place to use it. On November 9, 1919, I was the only reporter from a conservative paper to cover the organization meeting of the Communist Labor Party of California, as it was then called. I wrote lurid and sensational stories about this small group of…persons, which resulted in indictments against them, and which required that I had to testify against them, in trial after trial, over the next several years. In this connection I became aware of open boasting by a police detective of his having framed some of the defendants in a matter where I knew the facts to be otherwise. The effect of this involvement on me was to wipe out any desire to be…[a] newspaperman; so I entered the university and went into physical science largely as a means of escape from the corruption of the world, in addition to the fact that I was genuinely interested in physical science.
As a high school student in Oakland, California, Condon had rival interests in journalism and science, and became a reporter for the Oakland Enquirer. That had a lasting effect on his attitude toward government and society. As described in his autobiographical 'Reminiscences of a Life in and out of Quantum Mechanics', Proceedings of the International Symposium on Atomic, Molecular, Solid State Theory and Quantum Biology, Sanibel Island, Florida' (22 Jan 1973), published in International Journal of Quantum Chemistry (1973), 7, 7-22; collected in Asim O. Barut, Halis Odabasi and Alwyn van der Merwe (eds.), Selected Popular Writings of E.U. Condon (1991), 316-317.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
