The Smith Act of 1940 — the first peacetime federal sedition law since 1798 — made it a crime to advocate overthowing the government or to belong to a group that did. Its first use came in 1941 not against fascists but against the Socialist Workers Party and the leadership of Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544, the militant local that had won the 1934 general strikes: twenty-nine were indicted after Local 544 broke with Teamster president Daniel Tobin, a Roosevelt ally who had asked the White House for help against his rivals.
Eighteen defendants, including SWP leader James P. Cannon and strike organizer Vincent Raymond Dunne, were convicted in December 1941 of advocating revolutionary doctrine — the evidence consisting almost entirely of Marxist classics and party resolutions — and served twelve to sixteen months in Sandstone and Danbury. The ACLU condemned the prosecution, and the Communist Party's applause for it would return upon them cruelly: the same statute, and the precedent set in Minneapolis, sent the CP's own leadership to prison at Foley Square eight years later.