COMMUNISTS: Guilty

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The jurors, six men and six women, went about their work conscientiously. Only after seven days of reading and discussion did they reach their verdict, delivered last week in the federal court in Manhattan. The verdict: the 13 defendants were guilty as charged of conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. Government.

The defendants in the ten-month trial were second-drawer leaders of the U.S. Communist Party, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, member of the party's national committee; Alexander Trachtenberg and Alexander Bittelman, Russian-born party theoreticians; Pettis Perry, one of U.S. Communism's chief apostles to Harlem. They were the fourth batch of J.S. Reds to be convicted under the 1940 Smith Act. First came the 1949 marathon trial of eleven top Communist leaders that made Judge Harold Medina famous. In 1952, six lesser Red lights were convicted in Baltimore, 14 in Los Angeles. Last week upholding the Smith Act for the second time, the U.S. Supreme Court refused 7-2, to review the Baltimore convictions.

Besides the 44 found guilty thus far, 39 U.S. Reds are now under indictment. Of these, 30 are on trial or awaiting trial in Honolulu, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Detroit, St. Louis; five have been temporarily excused from trial because of illness; four are fugitives.