Word: overthrows
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...cast in majestic gloom. The babbling of the spectators in the pewlike benches had stopped. Wary-eyed deputy marshals, their numbers reinforced, had ranged themselves around the crowded room, against its marble walls. Eleven bosses of the Communist Party, on trial for conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. Government, now at the hour of reckoning, sat inside the rail behind their five lawyers. U.S. Attorney John F. X. McGohey, their unsmiling antagonist, rested his grey head on his hand...
...eleven Communists had been indicted and found guilty under the Smith Act. The law, passed by Congress in 1940, and never finally tested by the U.S. Supreme Court, made it a crime to teach or advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. Government, or to conspire to commit such acts. There was no question of an overt act of violence; no revolution had actually been attempted. Had the activities of the eleven then constituted for the U.S. what Justice Holmes once characterized as "clear and present danger"? The defendants had merely plotted and planned, taught and preached. No matter...
...defendants had taught their followers to prepare for the coming of some crisis-a depression, perhaps a war with Russia. At that point the revolutionists would spring into action. Through strikes and sabotage, they would paralyze the industrial machine, bring about the violent overthrow of the Government, establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Orders to follow such a course had come directly from Moscow, which maintained rigid discipline over its U.S. followers. The methods of the U.S.C.P. embraced lying, false swearing, secrecy (all characteristics of a conspiracy), and the whipping of aggrieved minorities into active resentment...
According to Schirmer, the Communists do not advocate the violent, overthrow of the United States government...
Schirmer, who joined the Communist Party while an undergraduate, appeared as a defense witness before Judgo Harold R. Modina in July at the Communist trial in New York. He testified there that the Party was not a subversive organization "teaching violent overthrow...