After Dennis, the Justice Department indicted the Communist Party's entire secondary leadership — more than 140 state and regional officers in waves of "second-string" Smith Act trials from New York to Los Angeles, Honolulu to Puerto Rico. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the sixty-one-year-old veteran of the Lawrence and Paterson strikes, was convicted in 1953 and served over two years at Alderson, writing a prison memoir; Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born organizer, was imprisoned and then deported. Alongside the trials ran the Taft-Hartley non-Communist affidavits, denaturalization drives, and the McCarran Act's registration machinery — an interlocking system that made party membership effectively a status crime.

The machine stopped in 1957. In Yates v. United States, the Supreme Court distinguished the advocacy of abstract doctrine from incitement to action, reversing or ordering acquittals for fourteen California defendants and setting a standard under which virtually no Smith Act case could be won. The remaining prosecutions collapsed, and no American has been imprisoned under the act's advocacy clauses since — though by then the party the trials targeted had been reduced to a shell honeycombed with informants.