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).