Waldo Frank

Waldo Frank was an American novelist and essayist and the first chairman of the League of American Writers. He accompanied the Communist presidential candidate Earl Browder to Terre Haute, Indiana as a writer and correspondent during the Browder Midwestern campaign tour. On September 30, 1936, immediately after the party arrived by train, police arrested Browder, Frank, Seymour Waldman, Charles Stadtfeld and Andrew Remes on a vagrancy charge, in an effort to keep the campaign from speaking. Frank was held about 25 hours in the Terre Haute jail and released on October 1, 1936; all charges were dropped, with no trial or conviction and no bail required. The arrests of prominent literary and political figures drew national free-speech protest.