Biography
Harry Snyder was an unemployed worker prosecuted after the May 1934 relief demonstration at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration headquarters in Oklahoma City. The government charged the defendants with conspiracy to seize federal property under the federal sedition statute. Judge Edgar S. Vaught sentenced Snyder to a year and a day and a $100 fine. International Labor Defense attorneys J. O. Cook and Stanley Beldon supported the appeal.
The Daily Worker reported the filing of the Oklahoma relief-demonstration defendants’ appeal on March 4, 1935, with J. O. Cooke and Stanley Beldon named as counsel. The report described the convictions as arising from the preceding May demonstration. Its stated prison terms are imposed sentences, not newly established actual service; the appeal-funding deadlines were prospective. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1935/v12-n055-NAT-mar-05-1935-DW-Q.pdf#page=3
A first-person letter signed Harry J. Snyder, No. 46468, Leavenworth, Kansas, states that he checked in there on March 16, 1935 for one year and one day with a $100 fine. He identifies the Oklahoma organizing and relief-defense prosecution. The number is a historical institution register reference, not a current identification number; the reported institutional entry is retained as an attributed chronology, not assigned to a particular structured case without a positive prosecution bridge. The letter describes an obstruction-of-justice petitioning accusation involving people arrested February 5, 1935, while the existing case records a federal conspiracy-to-seize-property accusation; neither is silently substituted for the other. Labor Defender, May 1935, printed page 21.
