During and following World War I, a series of statutes addressed a complex of concerns that included enemy espionage and disruption, anti-war activism, and the radical ideologies of anarchism and Bolshevism, all identified with immigrant communities.

The Spanish Civil War had given this possibility a name, a "fifth column", and the popular press in the U.S. blamed internal subversion for the fall of France to the Nazis in just six weeks in May and June 1940.

[5] In the late 1930s, several legislative proposals tried to address sedition itself and the underlying concern with the presence of large numbers of non-citizens, including citizens of countries with which the U.S. might soon be at war.

Attorney General Jackson and FBI Director Hoover delineated the proper roles for federal and state authorities with respect to seditious activities.

[10] On October 13, 1941, the 77th United States Congress amended the Smith Act, authorizing a criminal offense for the unlawful reproduction of alien registration receipt cards.

The Smith Act set federal criminal penalties that included fines or imprisonment for as long as twenty years, and denied all employment by the federal government for five years following a conviction for anyone who: ... with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or ... organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof.The Smith Act's prohibition of proselytizing on behalf of revolution repeated language found in previous statutes.

The details required for registration had been expanded since the passage of the Act to include race, employer's name and address, relatives in the U.S., organization memberships, application for citizenship, and military service record for the U.S. or any other country.

[14] In a radio address meant to reassure aliens, Biddle said: "It was not the intention of Congress to start a witch hunt or a program of persecution."

[17] After the U.S. declared war in 1941, federal authorities used data gathered from alien registrations to identify citizens of enemy nations and take 2,971 of them into custody by the end of the year.

[21] The Smith Act was written so that federal authorities could deport radical labor organizer Harry Bridges, an immigrant from Australia.

[23] In September, the special examiner who led the hearings recommended deportation, but the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) reversed that order after finding the government's two key witnesses unreliable.

[24] In May 1942, though the Roosevelt administration was now putting its anti-Communist activities on hold in the interest of furthering the Soviet-American alliance, Attorney General Biddle overruled the BIA and ordered Bridges deported.

The union had grown steadily in the late 1930s, had organized federal relief workers and led a strike against the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal agency.

[32] SWP defendants included James P. Cannon, Carl Skoglund, Farrell Dobbs, Grace Carlson, Harry DeBoer, Max Geldman, Albert Goldman, and twelve other party leaders.

It advocated strikes and the continuation of labor union militancy during World War II under its Proletarian Military Policy.

At trial, the judge took Biddle's view and refused to instruct the jury in the "clear and present danger" standard as the defendants' attorneys requested.

After deliberating for 56 hours, the jury found the other 23 defendants (one had committed suicide during the trial) not guilty of violating the 1861 statute by conspiring to overthrow the government by force.

[40] In March 1942, the government charged George W. Christians, founder of the Crusader White Shirts, with violating the Smith Act by attempting to spread dissent in the armed forces.

[44] Early in 1942, President Roosevelt, supported by the rest of his Cabinet, urged Attorney General Biddle to prosecute fascist sympathizers and anti-Semites.

[46] In 1942, 16 members of the "Mankind United" semi-religious cult, including founder Arthur Bell, were arrested by the FBI under the act.

President Roosevelt especially wanted to take legal action against several prominent pre-war critics on both on the left and right such as Charles Lindbergh and the so-called "McCormick-Patterson axis" of Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Daily Tribune, and the president's former allies Joseph Medill Patterson of the New York Daily News and his sister Cissy Patterson of the Washington Times-Herald in disdain.

[47][48] Twenty-eight prominent individuals (mostly members of Congress)[49] were indicted in Washington, D.C., in July 1942, accused of violations of the Smith Act,[50] in what became the largest sedition trial in the US.

The weakness of the government's case, combined with the trial's slow progress in the face of disruption by the defendants, led the press to lose interest.

[52] Among the defendants were: George Sylvester Viereck, Lawrence Dennis, Elizabeth Dilling, William Dudley Pelley, Joe McWilliams, Robert Edward Edmondson, James True, Gerald Winrod, William Griffin, Prescott Freese Dennett, German American Bund leaders Gerhard Kunze, August Klapprott, and Herman Schwinn, and in absentia, Ulrich Fleischhauer.

With the end of World War II, attention turned from the defeated ideologies of the Axis powers to the threat of Communism, and in December 1946 the government had the charges dismissed.

[55] After a ten-month trial at the Foley Square Courthouse in Manhattan, eleven leaders of the Communist Party were convicted under the Smith Act in 1949.

An eleventh defendant, Robert G. Thompson, a distinguished hero of the Second World War, was sentenced to three years in consideration of his military record.

[57] Other party leaders indicted included Claudia Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founding member of the ACLU who had been expelled in 1940 for being a Communist.