In 1941, 28 leaders of Local 544 and of the Socialist Workers Party were put on trial for sedition under the Smith Act, passed into law a year earlier. Eighteen were convicted and served 12- to 18-month sentences in prison during 1944–45. The Minneapolis case was the first peacetime federal prosecution for sedition in American history and the first under the Smith Act.

The charges under the thought-control act were: 1) Advocating overthrow of the government by force; 2) Publishing and circulating literature advocating this; 3) Forming organizations "to teach, advocate and encourage" such overthrow; 4) Becoming members of such organizations; 5) Distributing publications which "advised, counseled and urged" insubordination in the armed forces.

The Smith Act remains on the books to this day. As part of a broad nonpartisan campaign in the labor movement, the convictions of the 18 were appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, described below by Dobbs.

The Communist Party, which backed Roosevelt's entry of U.S. forces into the war, supported the Smith Act prosecutions of the Teamsters and SWP leaders. Just a half decade later in 1949, several Communist Party leaders were convicted under the same act in the opening years of the anti-communist witch-hunt.

Copyright © 1987 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.
 

But the U.S. Supreme Court refused even to review the case of the eighteen, and its antidemocratic stance exposed a myth about the judicial process. According to capitalist propaganda the highest court acts objectively and consistently to interpret constitutional principles in the light of changing times and conditions. In reality, this is not the case, as its attitude toward us demonstrated.

Basically, the judicial process is designed to serve ruling-class needs. The only constant involved is the upholding of constitutional guarantees extended to capitalists--the right to private property in the means of production, and comparable matters. On paper, the Bill of Rights is just as explicit as the constitutional protection of capitalist property. But the high court's history shows that supposedly inviolable guarantees to the exploited masses have been undermined and whittled down through a variety of legal devices, each one designed to meet specific capitalist needs at a given juncture. Workers' rights have been infringed upon through court action, then partly restored, only to be violated anew; and this consistent pattern of inconsistency has been attuned to the ebb and flow of the class struggle. Taken as a whole, judicial interpretation of the Constitution has reflected two opposite trends: increasingly specific protection of capitalist interests, and ever-deeper erosion of the workers' democratic rights.

The class approach used by the judiciary can be seen in its overall handling of the Smith Act. When our case reached the Supreme Court in 1943, the country was deeply involved in a world imperialist conflict. The masses generally were under the illusion that it was conducted as a progressive struggle against fascism, and there was wide disagreement with our reasons for opposition to U.S. participation in the war. In those circumstances a large section of the population tended to acquiesce in the use of the Smith Act against us, the first time it was invoked.

At the same time, though, many others became concerned about the witch-hunting aspects involved in the conviction of the eighteen. Most people in that category supported the war, but they didn't want precedents set in the name of the "war effort" that would serve to weaken their own democratic rights. So they responded to our appeal for protests against the sedition frame-up.

The Supreme Court--which, as Finley Peter Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" said, "follows the election returns"--was thus confronted with a dilemma. It wanted to sanction our imprisonment, but not at the risk of stirring up a political hornets' nest by formally declaring the Smith Act constitutional. In that contradictory situation, the top judges decided, their best course was to do nothing. They simply allowed the decision of the lower court to stand, thereby causing us to be jailed in accordance with ruling-class needs of the moment; and through that procedure the way was still left open for them to make one or another pragmatic ruling on the thought-control law itself later on, as might be required under changed political circumstances after the war.  
 
Smith Act used against CP
It took only a few years for such an occasion to arise. In 1949 the government tried the Stalinists on sedition charges, a move that demonstrated the evil consequences of the CP's unprincipled conduct in supporting the earlier imprisonment of the eighteen. During that year several leaders of the Communist Party were convicted on counts under the Smith Act. They appealed the convictions to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in opposing them the Justice Department cited the outcome of the Minneapolis case as legal justification for the move against the CP.

The federal assault on the Stalinists took place in a political climate marked by a "cold war" against the Soviet Union and other workers' states and by witch-hunt attacks in this country on those who opposed the imperialist line. The political atmosphere worsened when the Korean War broke out and a wave of ultrarightism, led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, began to dominate the U.S. scene. Under such conditions the sheer weight of reaction seriously obstructed the development of a movement in defense of the victimized Communist Party leaders. Actions on their behalf had been made twice difficult, moreover, because of the extent to which the CP's finky conduct during World War II had alienated labor and liberal circles. Consequently, not many were ready to emulate the Socialist Workers Party in defending the CP's constitutional rights as a matter of democratic principle.

When the appeal from the 1949 convictions reached the Supreme Court during the Korean War, the court took full advantage of the isolation the Stalinists had earned for themselves. Their case was used as a convenient vehicle for a decision upholding the constitutionality of the Smith Act. The court ruled that the law in question was directed at "advocacy" of violent action against the government, not at mere "discussion" of ideas; that the Communist Party was a "highly organized" formation engaged in a "conspiracy" to seize power; and that use of the law against that party was necessary because of the "inflammable nature of world conditions."

Later on, though, the foregoing interpretation of the thought-control law was sharply modified. This took place between 1957 and 1961, as still other convictions under the Smith Act reached the high court. All the defendants in these later instances were alleged to be members of the CP. Yet the court now found it impolitic to automatically reconfirm the ruling it had made in the first case involving Stalinists.

The political climate was changing. The Korean War had ended and McCarthyism had fallen into disrepute. Mass actions were developing in the Black struggle for full equality. A student radicalization was beginning that would later serve to trigger massive protests against the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. New signs of dissidence were cropping up in the trade unions. In sum, a spirit of nonconformity was arising, with a marked tendency to evolve toward widespread opposition to ruling-class repression.  
 
Thought-control act softened up
Faced with those developments, the Supreme Court judges decided to shift gears on the Smith Act issue. The primary object was to forestall a massive campaign for outright revocation of the vicious thought-control measure, and steps were taken accordingly to soften it by means of a rewriting through judicial interpretation. The revised rulings made between 1957 and 1961 can be summed up along the following lines:

Advocacy of forcible measures against the government could not be prohibited so long as there was no effort to instigate action toward that end. Where plans to use force and violence for the overturn of capitalist rule were alleged, the organization in question had to be of sufficient size and cohesiveness to pose a substantial danger of achieving its goal. That organization had to be presently inciting its members to action aimed at overthrow of the government at the first propitious moment. Only those active members of the accused organization having guilty knowledge and intent could be convicted. Mere membership was not in itself sufficient grounds for conviction.

On the basis of the above reinterpretation of the Smith Act, convictions of alleged CP members were in some instances reversed by the Supreme Court. The freeing of those victims tended to discourage further prosecutions under the given law for the nonce, and that served, in turn, to alleviate pressures for its repeal.

This thought-control device has thereby been kept alive. So it continues to present a statutory medium through which people can be prosecuted, in violation of the Bill of Rights, on charges of "advocacy" aimed at "eventual" overthrow of the government by force and violence; and to serve that purpose the law can be given all the necessary teeth by judicial fiat, whenever the capitalist overlords so desire.

As the class struggle grows sharper in the future, the ruling class can be expected to call for new legal devices on the part of the judiciary like those manifested between 1943 and 1961. It can also be anticipated that the Supreme Court will comply with such political demands. Its erratic handling of the Smith Act for witch-hunting purposes leaves little doubt on that score. If, for instance, the legal interpretation developed by 1961 had been applied in the case of the eighteen, a decision would have been in order to set us free. But at the time, when we asked the top federal judges to protect our constitutional rights, their reply was curt and cowardly: "Petition denied."

An order was then issued requiring us to present ourselves for incarceration about a month later, on December 31, 1943, and we responded to the court's antidemocratic ruling with a public statement which declared:

"History proves that prisons and force have never destroyed progressive ideas. We go to jail confident that our socialist ideas will ultimately be adopted by the masses who have suffered under a dying capitalism. We shall come out of prison ready to continue the struggle on behalf of the working masses."  
 
 
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