In 1948 the Truman Justice Department indicted the Party's entire national board under the Smith Act — not for any act or plan, but for conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government, a conspiracy proven from Marxist-Leninist classics. The nine-month 1949 trial before Judge Harold Medina at Foley Square was the longest federal trial to that date, a daily front-page spectacle with FBI informers expounding the Party's books.
All eleven defendants — Eugene Dennis, Benjamin Davis Jr., John Gates, Gus Hall, Henry Winston, and the rest — were convicted in October 1949 and sentenced to five years (three for veteran Robert Thompson, decorated at Guadalcanal). Medina then summarily jailed the defense lawyers for contempt, a punishment upheld by the Supreme Court that chilled political defense work for a decade: after Foley Square, communists could scarcely find counsel.