William F. Dunne

William F. Dunne was a veteran labor journalist and editor of the Daily Worker and a founding member of the American communist movement. In 1927 he was sentenced to thirty days in a New York City jail for publishing David Gordon's poem "America" — prosecuted as indecent literature — and faced a further federal indictment over the paper's mailing. Bailed pending appeal, his case was part of the broad free-speech fight around the Daily Worker. Earlier, as editor of the Butte Daily Bulletin in Montana, he had been convicted of sedition in 1919 for his wartime editorials, a verdict overturned by the Montana Supreme Court. He is distinct from the later anarchist prisoner Bill Dunne also in this database.