Biography
Irving Blau was among the Colorado Communists jailed for contempt in Denver in 1948 for refusing to cooperate with a federal grand jury investigating the Communist Party. As the National Guardian reported in its first issue, U.S. District Judge J. Foster Symes ordered Arthur Bary, the chairman of the Colorado Communist Party, to name every member of the party's clubs and cells in the state; when he refused, Bary was jailed to be held indefinitely until he complied, and others were imprisoned alongside him — some for refusing, on Fifth Amendment grounds, to answer self-incriminating questions — with trial by jury denied. The episode was part of the federal pursuit of the Colorado party that would later produce Smith Act prosecutions (Bary v. United States) in the 1950s.
