
1932
In the 1930s the Communist Party enjoyed considerable support in the United States. Nevertheless, this booking card indicates that in 1932, Michigan Central Railroad police arrested Mike Stone, a politically active Pennsylvania coal miner; his crime, in a word, was “Communism.” Eight years later, Stone was charged with perjury and false pretense for gathering illegal signatures on petitions and received a possible maximum penalty of 42 years in jail. Apparently, he served a reduced term, as his name surfaced repeatedly in the early-1950s testimony of undercover FBI agent Matthew Cvetic. Photography likely played a role in Stone’s repeated arrests: mug shots, like the one seen here, had been employed in increasingly sophisticated ways for criminal identification since the late 1880s.