In August 1922 state and federal agents raided the Party's secret convention in the dunes at Bridgman, Michigan, arresting the national leadership and charging them under Michigan's criminal-syndicalism law — simple membership in the Party was the crime. General Secretary C. E. Ruthenberg was convicted and died in 1927 with his appeal pending; William Z. Foster's jury hung. Parallel prosecutions ran across the country under the criminal-syndicalism statutes that more than thirty states had passed against the IWW and the communists.
In California, Charlotte Anita Whitney's conviction for helping found the Communist Labor Party produced Whitney v. California (1927), in which the Supreme Court upheld guilt by association over Brandeis's great concurrence on free speech; she was pardoned within months. The syndicalism era normalized the doctrine — membership as crime — that the Smith Act would federalize a generation later.