Smith Act trials

The Events Federal trials in which defendants were charged with violating the Smith Act of 1940, which made it illegal to advocate the overthrow of the government

Dates December 8, 1941-October 3, 1949

Throughout the 1940’s the federal government used the Smith Act to prosecute radical groups as a means of protecting national security. First Amendment advocates criticized the Smith Act trials as being a form of censorship and a violation of free speech because the defendants were being punished for their political viewpoints and not for any specific act against the government.

The Minneapolis sedition trial of 1941 was the government’s first prosecution under the Smith Act of the previous year. On June 27, 1941, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided offices of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, and seized large quantities of communist literature. In August, the U.S. Justice Department indicted twenty-nine members of the Socialist Party, who pleaded not guilty to charges that they were conspiring to overthrow the government and to create insubordination among the armed forces.

First Amendment advocates demanded that the government drop the charges because the defendants’ speeches or publications should have been protected by the First Amendment and because they did not pose an immediate threat to national security. The government did not drop the indictments, however, and a trial began on October 27, 1941. The jury convicted eighteen of the twenty-nine defendants. Those convicted were sentenced to prison terms ranging from twelve to sixteen months. After an appeals court upheld their convictions and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review their case, the convicted socialists began serving their prison sentences on December 31, 1943. The last prisoners were released in February, 1945. American communist leaders applauded the convictions of their rival Trotskyists. However, seven years later, they too would find themselves facing prosecution under the Smith Act.

Great Sedition Trial of 1944

The Great Sedition Trial of 1941 was a mass trial of dozens of suspected Nazi conspirators and sympathizers. The defendants, who included a former U.S. diplomat, had little in common with one another except for their shared faith in fascism and their hatred for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jews, and communists.

This trial began in April, 1944, and quickly evolved into circus. Despite U.S. District judge Edward Eischer’s efforts to follow proper courtroom procedures, the unruly defendants frequently interrupted the proceedings with Nazi salutes, cheers, groans, and laughter. They also wore an array of costumes into the courtroom that ranged from a satin nightdress to Halloween masks. One defendant died during the trial, which lasted so long that some defendants were permitted to take vacations.

At the end of the 102d day of the trial, Judge Eischer died at home of a heart attack. A mistrial was then declared, but it was almost a full year before the government dismissed the indictments in December, 1945—four months after the end of World War II. Because Germany had been the enemy and the Soviet Union was an ally during World War II, the government had focused its attention on prosecuting pro-Nazi leaders rather than communists. That all changed after World War II ended.

Communist Party Trials

After the war ended, U.S.-Soviet relations began to deteriorate and Cold War tensions sparked fears of a possible communist takeover. President Harry S. Truman was under political pressure to take action against domestic communists in order to prove that he was not “soft on communism.”

In 1948, Eugene Dennis, the general secretary of the Communist Party USA, and eleven other party leaders were arrested, charged and indicted for violating the Smith Act. They were accused of conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force. Their trial was held in the U.S. courthouse on Foley Square in downtown Manhattan during the same time as another celebrated trial in the same building: the perjury trial of Alger Hiss, a former U.S. State Department official accused of having spied for the Soviets. The communists’ trial lasted for ten months and was marred by loud confrontations among the defendants, their lawyers, and the judge. In October, 1949, the communist defendants were found guilty, fined ten thousand dollars each and sentenced to five years in prison.

Impact

Although the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the convictions of the communist leaders in its 1951 decision, the Court later reversed itself in 1957 by ruling in a similar case that teaching anti-American ideas, no matter how objectionable it may seem, is not the same as actually implementing a plan to overthrow the government. The government eventually stopped using the Smith Act to prosecute communists and fascists, but the federal law remained on the books.

Bibliography

Belknap, Michal R. American Political Trials: Revised, Expanded Edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Examination of select trials that resulted from political persecution from the early colonial era to the late twentieth century.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Cold War Political Justice: The Smith Act, the Communist Party, and American Civil Liberties. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. Detailed history of the Smith Act and the 1949 trial of eleven leaders of the Communist Party USA who were convicted of conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government.

Finan, Chris. From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007. Broad history of assaults on free speech in the United States from 1919 through 2006.

St. George, Maximilian, and Lawrence Dennis. A Trial on Trial: The Great Sedition Trial of 1944. Washington, D.C.: National Civil Rights Committee, 1946. A defense attorney and defendant’s account of the United States v. McWilliams trial.

Steele, Richard W. Free Speech in the Good War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Analysis of the effects of foreign conflict on domestic affairs and free speech during World War II.

Stone, Geoffrey. Perilous Times—Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Historical analysis of the tendency by the United States to compromise free speech rights in the name of national security during wartime or another national crisis.