The
Alien Registration Act (also known as the Smith Act) was passed by
Congress on 29th June, 1940, made it illegal for anyone in the United
States to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing
the government. The law also required all alien residents in the United
States over 14 years of age to file a comprehensive statement of their
personal and occupational status and a record of their political beliefs.
Within four months a total of 4,741,971 aliens had been registered.
The main objective of the act was to undermine the American
Communist Party and other left-wing political groups in the United
States. One of the first men to be arrested and imprisoned under
the act was James
Cannon,
the national
secretary of the Socialist Workers Party.
After the Second World War it was now decided
to use the Alien Registration Act against the American
Communist Party. On
the morning of 20th July, 1948, Eugene Dennis,
the general secretary of the American Communist
Party, and eleven other party leaders, included William
Z. Foster and Benjamin Davis, were
arrested and charged under the Alien Registration
Act. This law, passed by Congress in 1940, made it illegal for
anyone in the United States "to advocate, abet, or teach the
desirability of overthrowing the government".
The case began in March, 1948. It was difficult for the prosecution
to prove that the twelve men had broken the Alien
Registration Act, as none of the defendants had ever openly called
for violence or had been involved in accumulating weapons for a proposed
revolution. The prosecution therefore relied on passages from the
work of Karl Marx and other revolutionary
figures from the past.
The prosecution also used the testimony of former members of the American
Communist Party to help show that Dennis and his fellow comrades
had privately advocated the overthrow of the government. The most
important witness against the leaders of the party was Louis
Budenz, the former managing editor of the party's newspaper,
The Daily Worker.
Another strategy of the prosecution was to ask the defendants questions
about other party members. Unwilling to provide information on fellow
comrades, they were put in prison and charged with contempt of court.
The trial dragged on for eleven months and eventually, the judge,
Harold Medina, who made no attempt to disguise his own feelings about
the defendants, sent the party's lawyers to prison for contempt of
court.
After a nine month trial the leaders of the American
Communist Party were found guilty of violating the Alien
Registration Act and sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000
fine. They appealed to the Supreme Court
but on 4th June, 1951, the judges ruled, 6-2, that the conviction
was legal.
This decision was followed by the arrests of 46 more communists during
the summer of 1951. This included Elizabeth
Gurley Flynn, who was also convicted for contempt of court after
telling the judge that she would not identify people as Communists
as she was unwilling "do degrade or debase myself by becoming
an informer". She was also found guilty of violating the Alien
Registration Act and sentenced to two years in prison.
(1)
Statement issued by Eugene
Dennis (
March 21, 1949)
We eleven defendants will prove that the very
time when we allegedly began this menacing conspiracy
we were in fact advocating and organizing all-out support to the Government
of the United States. We will prove that
all of us taught the duty of upholding the United States Government
and of intensifying the anti-Axis war effort and we defendants will
put in evidence the honorable war record of the 15,000 American Communists
who, in accord with what we taught and advocated, served with the
armed forces in the military defense of our country.
We will show with what peaceful intent we taught
and advocated, amongst other things, to oppose American support to
the unjust and criminal war against the Chinese people waged by the
miserable Chiang Kai-shek, to oppose the civil war against the Greeks,
waged by the monarchist-fascist puppet of the American masters, with
the American people footing the bill, to oppose the Anglo-American
oil lords against the new State of Israel, and the people of Indonesia,
and to oppose the restoration of the German and Japanese monopolies
and war potential under the new management of the American cartelists.
You will see that our Communist Party Constitution acknowledges not
only that we learn from Marx and Lenin but that we owe much to and
learn from the teachings of men like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln,
Frederick Douglass, William Sylvis, and Eugene V. Debs.
The prosecution asks this jury for what amounts to a preventative
conviction, in order that we Communist leaders may be put under what
the Nazis called protective custody. I ask the jury to weigh the prosecution's
case against the proof we defendants will offer to establish that
we have taught and advocated the duty and necessity to prevent the
force and violence of Fascism, imperialists of war and Iynching and
anti-Semitism. I ask you to weigh carefully our sincere offer of proof
which demonstrates that we Communists are second to none in our devotion
to our people and to our country, and that we teach and advocate and
practice a program of peace, of democracy, equality, economic security,
and social progress.
(2)
Louis
Budenz, testimony at
the trial of Eugene Dennis and the leaders of the American
Communist Party
(March 29, 1949)
The Communist Party bases itself upon so-called scientific socialism,
the theory and practice of so-called scientific socialism as appears
in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, therefore as interpreted
by Lenin and Stalin who have specifically interpreted scientific socialism
to mean that socialism can only be attained by the violent shattering
of the capitalist state, and the setting up of a dictatorship of the
proletariat by force and violence in place of that state. In the United
States this would mean that the Communist Party of the United States
is basically committed to the overthrow of the Government of the United
States as set up by the Constitution of the United States.
(3)
Howard
Zinn,
A People's History of the United States (1980)
In 1940, with the United States not yet at war, Congress passed
the Smith Act. This took Espionage Act prohibitions against talk or
writing that would lead to refusal of duty in the armed forces and
applied them to peacetime. The Smith Act also made it a crime to advocate
the overthrow of the government by force and violence, or to join
any group that advocated this, or to publish anything with such ideas.
In Minneapolis in 1943, eighteen members of the Socialist Workers
party were convicted for belonging to a party whose ideas, expressed
in its Declaration of Principles, and in the Communist Manifesto,
were said to violate the Smith Act. They were sentenced to prison
terms, and the Supreme Court refused to review their case.
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