The Palgrave Handbook of Anti-Communist Persecutions

Christian Gerlach, Clemens Six, Christian Gerlach, Clemens Six, Christian Gerlach, Clemens Six

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030549633
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This handbook explores anti-communism as an overarching phenomenon of twentieth-century global history, showing how anti-communist policies and practices transformed societies around the world. It advances research on anti-communism by looking beyond ideologies and propaganda to uncover how these ideas were put into practice. Case studies examine the role of states and non-state actors in anti-communist persecutions, and cover a range of topics, including social crises, capitalist accumulation and dispossession, political clientelism and warfare. Through its comparative perspective, the handbook reveals striking similarities between different cases from various world regions and highlights the numerous long-term consequences of anti-communism that exceeded by far the struggle against communism in a narrow sense. Contributing to the growing body of work on the social history of mass violence, this volume is an essential resource for students and scholars interested to understand how twentieth-century anti-communist persecutions have shaped societies around the world today.

Chapter 7 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Part IPolicies and Practices of Persecution

© The Author(s) 2020

C. Gerlach, C. Six (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Anti-Communist Persecutionshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54963-3_2

Begin Abstract

The Smith Act Trials and Systemic Violence: Anti-Communist Persecution and Prosecution in America, 1949–1957

Barbara J. Falk^{1, 2, 3}

(1)

Canadian Forces College, Toronto, ON, Canada

(2)

Royal Military College of Canada, Toronto, ON, Canada

(3)

University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Barbara J. Falk

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

In 1948 the US government publicly launched a legal assault on the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) with indictments against the twelve national leaders of the Party. Beginning in January 1949, they were tried under the 1941 Alien Registration or Smith Act and found guilty of conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the US government by force and violence.¹ However, no overt acts were alleged, and no “plot” existed. Nor were any of the defendants charged with espionage-related offenses. Yet Dennis was arguably the most important legal enabler of the era, resulting in five US Supreme Court decisions and fifteen subsequent trials.

Although the experience of American communists does not fit the pattern of violence attending guerilla movements or civil wars, Johan Galtung’s broader conceptualization of violence fits the systematic persecution and prosecution of the CPUSA from the late 1940s onward. Many CPUSA leaders and activists were persecuted via near continual legal and illegal state surveillance, their children were harassed, employment opportunities denied, and dozens were prosecuted and imprisoned for acts which represented only the thinnest veneer of reality, involving an abuse of the legal and judicial process. Post-Cold War accounts have predominantly focused on interpenetration of the CPUSA by Soviet espionage networks, now confirmed by VENONA decrypted cables released by the National Security Agency and Russian archives.² This research has had the net effect of portraying the party as containing a coterie of spies, effectively local puppets of Moscow. Yet this characterization does not fit the lived experience of thousands of CPUSA members who saw themselves as American revolutionaries, acting in the tradition of Jefferson and Lincoln, committed to civil rights, social welfare, and active citizenship. Individually and collectively they were persecuted—often for decades after the McCarthy era—because of their partisan choices, groups they may have participated in, or who they knew. Moreover, the attack on the CPUSA legitimized a broader crackdown on domestic dissent, resulting in a McCarthyite chill on free expression and association—values that the United States championed in its ideological battle with the Soviet Union.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the Smith Act prosecutions, and the forms of persecution and popular prejudice attendant upon CPUSA leaders, activists, and their family members. Two American communists, CPUSA leader and National Board member Gil Green, and San Antonio-born communist and spouse of two national leaders, Sylvia Hall Thompson illustrate the breadth and depth of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) scrutiny, surveillance, and harassment of family members. The Smith Act enabled Green’s indictment, trial, and finding of guilt. Yet the environment of Red-baiting and anti-Communist hysteria that the Smith Act furthered justified the extent and expense of surveillance on Thompson, who was never arrested. Taken together, these two cases illustrate how the law was politicized in the domestic Cold War, sanctioning direct structural violence while anti-communist ideology normalized cultural violence.

Context: The 1949–1957 Smith Act Prosecutions

After the Second World War, through congressional investigatory committees, federal and state employment policies, and laws targeting CPUSA members as dangerous elements in a seditious Fifth Column, the public and legal imaginary of the CPUSA was transformed into the agent of the Soviet Union. Central to this process were a wave of arrests, indictments, and prosecutions known collectively as the Smith Act trials, after the 1940 law that enabled a democratic government to legally target a radical political party.³

In 1949, eleven national leaders were tried and convicted of conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow and destruction of the US government by force and violence.⁴ They were not charged with doing anything or even conspiring to commit any overt criminal act. The indictment was several steps removed from any effort at actual overthrow, yet such fine legal distinctions were lost in much of the inflammatory media coverage, which emphasized their role in an existing or future plot to overthrow the government. Not without reason did defense attorneys argue that not only was communism itself on trial, but so too were the many books and articles used to teach party cadres the tenets of Marxism–Leninism, in direct violation of the First Amendment of the American constitution.⁵ Even the defense lawyers in the original trial were imprisoned after being cited for contempt.⁶

Moreover, legal precedent allowed fifteen subsequent prosecutions that, in essence, legally liquidated communism as a legitimate political force in the United States. The net effect of the trials was that it became illegal to teach Marx and Lenin in the United States if you believed in the messages of the texts themselves. Moreover, active membership in an organization that advocated or taught these texts was a criminal act, a federal felony, resulting in a series of Smith Act “membership cases.” More than the Red-baiting of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) or the rhetoric of the bombastic Wisconsin senator after whom the era is named, the Dennis trial is the cornerstone in the legal architecture of McCarthyism, much more so than the better-known cases of Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten, or the Rosenbergs. None had the same precedential value, yet Dennis has largely been sidelined by history.⁷

Moreover, the 1950 appeal decision and the 1951 Supreme Court decisions effected a judicial rewrite of the “clear and present danger” test under the First Amendment, widening the scope for prosecution of dissent.⁸ Until a new Supreme Court ruling, the Yates decision in 1957 which definitively stopped Smith Act prosecutions, more than a hundred and thirty Americans had been indicted, and most of those tried and convicted, in fifteen “2^nd string” and even “3^rd string” Smith Act trials from Massachusetts to California, Puerto Rico to Hawaii.⁹ The trials, continued CPUSA infiltration by the Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) and prosecution by the Department of Justice, struck a near-fatal blow to domestic communism.

Throughout the Dennis trial of 1949, CPUSA leaders were usually caricatured as dupes or automatons, slavish to the shifting party lines dictated by Moscow. Chief Prosecutor John F.X. McGohey’s opening statement reiterated the importance of the Soviet model to the CPUSA as the historical recipe for successful revolution in America:

The Russian revolution is studied in detail as a blueprint for the revolution in every other country. It is pointed out that 50,000 trained revolutionaries succeeded in establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, and it is stressed that these 50,000 are trained leaders who, as the Communist Party, acted as the vanguard of the proletariat, and by skilfully directing the proletariat at the time of national crisis, brought about the overthrow of the Government. This is the model for the revolution in this country. At the proper time, they are taught—the proper time being a time of national crisis, unrest, disorder brought about by a severe depression or war—at such time the Party members will be in positions of influence in the key trades in the basic industries, and when the National Board decides that the revolutionary situation is at hand, the Party will lead the proletariat in violent revolution. They teach that this revolution cannot be without violence, for to be successful the entire apparatus of the Government must be smashed. Every vestige of the bourgeois state and class must be wiped out.¹⁰

The trial reinforced the view that CPUSA amounted to a dangerous conspiracy, with “Un-American” leaders actively working to overthrow the US government.¹¹

As CPUSA leaders sought to showcase their support for unions and African American civil rights, communism was being recast as a national security threat to the vital interests of the United States. The CPUSA’s message hardened and shrunk to a narrower audience, while subject to a barrage of criticism and public reinterpretation. The CPUSA message—that to be a good communist is to be good American, and that to be anti-communist was to be anti-liberal and anti-union—would fall on deaf ears by the late 1940s and early 1950s. The CPUSA’s ability to negotiate a public space to be heard beyond their own dedicated core membership diminished—due to both adherence to the Muscovite line and dramatically deteriorating domestic conditions. Such conditions did not exist in states such as France and Italy, and their postwar communist parties continued to thrive. Moreover, deeply committed Party leaders and activists were subject to much greater surveillance, harassment, legal prosecution, and structural violence than were their Western European counterparts, as the cases of Green and Thompson both illustrate.

Gil Green

Gilbert (Gil) Green was the head of the Illinois District of the CPUSA at the time of arrest in July 1948. Born in “Red Chicago” in 1906, the oldest of three sons of Jewish immigrants, he grew up quickly after his father succumbed to diabetes when he was 9 years old.¹² His newly widowed mother moved the family to the Jewish ghetto on the West Side, and as sole breadwinner, struggled to earn enough as a self-employed dressmaker, still having to apply for “Home Relief.”¹³ Green recalled he was more sensitive to the racist exclusion of Blacks in childhood, perhaps because he was no stranger to typical anti-Semitic taunts, he and his siblings ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Anti-Communist Persecutions in the Twentieth Century
• Part I. Policies and Practices of Persecution
• Part II. Anti-Communism in the Context of Nation-Building, Race and Religion
• Part III. Anti-Communist Persecution and New Models of Capital Accumulation
• Part IV. The Role of Non-State Actors
• Part V. Responses of the Persecuted
• Part VI. Concluding Remarks
• Correction to: The Palgrave Handbook of Anti-Communist Persecutions
• Back Matter