Word: contemptibly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...After the Supreme Court decision reversing the contempt-of-Congress conviction of Union Organizer John Watkins for refusing to identify Communists he had known, an attorney for Pulitzer Prizewinning Playwright Arthur Miller observed that the Watkins decision "fits the [Miller] case like a glove." But in Washington last week, U.S. District Judge Charles F. McLaughlin, while dropping one count, refused to set aside the other count of Miller's contempt-of-Congress conviction. McLaughlin's reason, which gave the narrowest possible meaning to the Supreme Court's Watkins decision: Miller, while before a House Un-American Activities...
...court cut into the field of state investigations of subversive activities by reversing the New Hampshire contempt conviction of Paul Sweezy, sometime lecturer at the state university...
...court reversed the contempt-of-Congress conviction of Labor Organizer John Watkins, who had refused to answer Communists-I-have-known questions put to him by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954, and in so doing, the Chief Justice, as voice of the court's majority, gave congressional investigators a narrowed field to work in-how much narrowed only future decisions will tell...
...asking such questions the committee was tramping on his rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ("Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech ... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble''). For his refusal to answer, John Watkins was convicted of contempt of Congress, was fined $500 and given a suspended sentence of a year in jail...
...admitting that he was a "classical Marxist," Sweezy refused to answer some questions (e.g., had he advocated Marxism at a university lecture?) put to him by the New Hampshire attorney general acting on authorization from the state legislature. The New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld Sweezy's conviction for contempt on grounds that 1) "there exists a potential menace from those who would overthrow the Government by force and violence," and 2) "the need for the legislature to be informed on so elemental a subject as the self-preservation of Government outweighed the deprivation of constitutional rights that occurred...