After Dennis, the Justice Department indicted the Party's state and district leaderships wholesale: New York's "second string" including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Claudia Jones, the California board (the Yates defendants including Dorothy Healey and Oleta Yates), and boards in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Washington, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and beyond. In all, some 145 people were indicted under the Smith Act's advocacy and membership clauses and over a hundred convicted, with sentences of two to five years; Claudia Jones was deported to Britain on release, and Flynn served over two years at Alderson in her sixties.
The trials ran on a traveling repertory of paid FBI informer-witnesses — Harvey Matusow's 1955 recantation, False Witness, blew up several cases — and stripped the Party of functioning leadership everywhere, even as the convictions moved toward a reckoning in the Supreme Court.