As war approached and the Party's Nazi-Soviet-Pact line made it a pariah, the government reached for any available charge against its leaders. General Secretary Earl Browder — the Party's 1936 and 1940 presidential candidate — was prosecuted in 1940 not for anything political but for decades-old passport fraud, and sentenced to four years in Atlanta, a punishment universally understood as political: the sentencing judge was urged by the prosecution itself to note the maximum was rarely given for the offense.
Browder entered Atlanta in March 1941. After Pearl Harbor made the Soviet Union an ally and "Free Earl Browder" a mainstream slogan, President Roosevelt commuted the sentence in May 1942 in the interest of "national unity." The episode previewed the coming pattern: when the Party's politics could not be prosecuted directly, its leaders would be imprisoned on whatever statute lay to hand.