Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders

Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders in New York City from 1949 to 1958 were the result of US federal government prosecutions. Leaders of the Communist Party of the United States were accused of violating the Smith Act, a statute that prohibited advocating violent overthrow of the government. The defendants argued that they advocated a peaceful transition to socialism, and that the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and of association protected their membership in a political party. The US Supreme Court’s Yates decision brought an end to similar prosecutions in 1957.

About Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders in brief

Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders in New York City from 1949 to 1958 were the result of US federal government prosecutions. Leaders of the Communist Party of the United States were accused of violating the Smith Act, a statute that prohibited advocating violent overthrow of the government. The defendants argued that they advocated a peaceful transition to socialism, and that the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and of association protected their membership in a political party. In 1957, eight years after the first trial, the US Supreme Court’s Yates decision brought an end to similar prosecutions. After the revolution in Russia in 1917, the communist movement gradually gained footholds in many countries around the world. In Europe and the US, communist parties were formed, generally allied with trade union and labor causes. In 1940 the Congress passed the Alien Registration Act of 1940 which required all non-citizen adult residents to register with the government, and made it a crime to knowingly or willfully advocate the duty, necessity, desirability,… of overthrowing or destroying any government in the U.S. by force or violence. Five million non-citizens were fingerprinted and registered following passage of the Act. The first convicted under the Act were members of the Socialist Workers Party in Minneapolis in 1941. The CPUSA’s membership peaked at around 80,000 members during World War II under the leadership of Earl Browder, who was not a strict Stalinist and cooperated with the US government during the war. In 1943, the government used a Smith Act to prosecute the American Nazis; that case ended in a mistrial when the judge died of a heart attack.

The government did not prosecute any communists under the law during WW II, then an ally of the Soviet Union, and did not want to alienate Soviet Union. In 1945, William Foster took over leadership of the CPUSA, and took the hard line over the attack on the Japanese in Pearl Harbor. The bitter rival SWP of the SWP, bitter rivals of the Communists, supported the prosecution of theSWP– a decision they would later regret. In the late 1940s, bitter rival members of SWP were convicted of the crime of membership in the Communist Socialist Party of America (CSPA) and were sentenced to prison terms of up to five years in federal prison. The trial was featured twice on the cover of Time magazine, and the defense frequently antagonized the judge and prosecution; five defendants were jailed for contempt of court because they disrupted the proceedings. The prosecution’s case relied on undercover informants, who described the goals of theCPUSA, interpreted communist texts, and testified of their own knowledge that the CP USA advocated the violent overthrow of the US government. After a 10-month trial, the jury found all 11 defendants guilty. The judge sentenced them to terms ofup to fiveyear prison, and sentenced all five defense attorneys to imprisonment for contempt. Two of the attorneys were subsequently disbarred. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, a free-speech advocacy organization, passed a resolution in 1939 expelling communists from its leadership ranks.

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