The Top Twelve

Despite all the shooting that has been done at the U.S. Communist Party, the real question has never been decided: Is the party, as many Americans have long believed, a tightly controlled, Moscow-directed conspiracy aimed at overthrowing the U.S. Government?* But last week, after more than a year of secret hearings, a federal grand jury sitting in Manhattan fired the first shot of a new barrage. Its charge was a collective indictment of the twelve men who run the U.S. Communist Party--its entire national board--as conspirators "dedicated to the Marxist-Leninist principles of the overthrow and destruction of the Government ... by force and violence." In addition, each of the twelve was indicted individually for membership in "a society, group and assembly of persons who teach and advocate the overthrow and destruction of the United States by force and violence." The jury's weapon was the eight-year-old Smith Alien Registration Act, originally aimed at fifth-columnist aliens./- Its maximum penalty: ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine on each indictment.

The Kingpins. The day after their indictment and speedy arrest, six of the kingpin Commies went into court in New York City, put up $30,000 in Treasury bonds for bail and walked jauntily out (see cut). They were old (67), ailing William Z. Foster, a radical for almost 50 years, thrice the C.P.'s presidential candidate, now its chairman; shrewd, greying Eugene Dennis, C.P. general secretary, already on bond awaiting appeal of his one-year sentence for contempt of Congress (TIME, July 7, 1947); tall, Harvard-trained Benjamin J. Davis, New York City's only Negro (and only Communist) councilman; bald John Williamson, the party's labor secretary, out on bail pending a deportation hearing (TIME, Feb. 23) ; stocky Jack Stachel, little known outside the party but one of its veteran propagandists, also tapped for deportation; Mississippi-born Henry Winston, a moonfaced Negro, the C.P.'s organizational secretary.

Next day 34-year-old John Gates, editor of the Daily Worker, surrendered in Manhattan. Carl Winter, chairman of the C.P.'s Michigan committee, was picked up in Detroit. Russian-born Irving Potash, chairman of the New York Joint Board of the C.I.O.'s Fur & Leather Workers Union, hustled back from vacation to turn himself in. Still unaccounted for this week: Gilbert Green, the party's leader in Illinois; Robert Thompson, New York State C.P. chairman; Gus Hall, leader of the party's Ohio wing.

Most of the defendants were old hands at fighting Government charges and they had their countercharges ready. The indictments, they shouted, were "a monstrous frame-up ... an American version of the Reichstag fire ... a domestic counterpart of the criminal bipartisan attempts to turn the war in Berlin from cold to hot." They were timed, they said, to embarrass Henry Wallace's convention in Philadelphia (see Third Parties).

Acts or Ideology? The Communists were talking, as usual, through their hats. But the implications of the indictments furrowed many a non-Communist brow. If the nation's top twelve Communists were convicted, would all other Communists be subject to arrest as party members? The non-Communist American Civil Liberties Union promptly, and somewhat sadly, announced that it would "undoubtedly be obliged to come to the assistance of the defendants." Said the A.C.L.U.'s John Haynes Holmes: "The indictment ... on its face ... in our judgment violates every principle of freedom of speech and press."

Tom Clark's lawyers protested that they sought no precedent for condemning an entire organization, many of whose members were doubtless innocent of any subversive intentions. They insisted that they were not trying to make all Communists guilty by association. Their case they said, had nothing to do with the Communist ideology, per se, but with specific acts of sedition.

These were arguments that could not be settled until the Government began its case in court. But one thing was clear before the fight up to the Supreme Court: if the charges were made to stick and were applied against other Communist leaders, the party would disintegrate or be forced underground.

*In 1943, the Supreme Court heard the late Wendell Willkie argue that a naturalized alien named William Schneiderman should not have his citizenship revoked on the grounds that he was a member of the Communist Party. The Supreme Court agreed, but declined, 5 to 3, to decide whether or not the Communist Party had advocated the violent overthrow of the Government.

/- Never before used against the Communists, never fully tested in the courts, the Smith Act was applied in 1941 against members and hangers-on of the minuscule Socialist Workers (Trotskyist) Party, implacable foes of the Stalinist Communists. Result: 18 went to jail after the Supreme Court refused to review their conviction.

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