Biography
John Turner was a British anarcho-syndicalist and trade union organizer who became the first person prosecuted under the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act when he visited the United States on a lecture tour. He was arrested in New York in October 1903 and held on Ellis Island while his deportation case (Turner v. Williams) went to the Supreme Court. The Court upheld the act in 1904 and he was deported to England.
Dwight Morgan's historical discussion in the Daily Worker of March 27, 1935, page 5, describes Turner's American trade-union speaking tour as undertaken at Samuel Gompers' invitation. It names Clarence Darrow and Edgar Lee Masters as counsel challenging the deportation in the United States Supreme Court on speech, due-process and separation-of-powers grounds. This adds an attributed account of the defense to the existing 1903-1904 case without changing its custody dates.
