Punishment of Mere Political Advocacy

In the summer of 1941 a group of Trotskyists were arrested for allegedly advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. These men and women, many of whom were affiliated with Teamsters Local 544 in Minneapolis, ran afoul of a new peacetime sedition statute: the 1940 Smith Act. Historians of labor and radical history have noted how the prosecution of these Trotskyists served as a test case for federal court actions that became a hallmark of the second red scare during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Yet this first Smith Act case had its own history. This article provides a substantive account of the origins of that case, unearthing its roots in local Teamsters union disputes and in the national political climate that resulted in the Smith Act's passage. Although the 1941 case set a precedent for Cold War–era prosecutions, it was also a product of its era, resulting from shifting attitudes about civil liberties during World War II and from a virulent form of early labor anticommunism that included rank-and-file cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi

Citizenship · Civil liberties · Peacetime · Political science · Politics · Sedition · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Statute · Law · Race, History, and American Society