Communism, Anti-Communism, and the Federal Courts in Missouri, 1952–1958: The Trial of the St. Louis Five (review)

This book is a competent local study of a national phenomenon: the Justice Department’s attempt to destroy the American Communist Party (CPUSA) in the 1950s. The principal weapon, the Smith Act of 1940, prohibited membership in any organization deemed to advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Prosecutors relied on the law when indicting the party’s entire national board in 1948. Eleven of the board’s twelve members were convicted the following year, convictions upheld in 1951 by the Supreme Court in its decision Eugene Dennis et al. v United States. A rush ensued to prosecute other CPUSA leaders throughout the land.

Brian Birdnow rightly emphasizes that historians have largely neglected such regional crusades, and his introduction terms the St. Louis proceedings “prototypical” (p. 2) because, in many ways, they were. He narrates the trial process clearly and effectively. A notable conceptual strength of the book is its treatment of “political justice.” Birdnow rightly employs the term, which the legal historian Michal R. Belknap and others have used when highlighting the limits of dissent in Cold War America. Birdnow displays no hesitation in stressing that “from 1946 to 1955, the United States government clearly used the Smith Act to harass and paralyze the domestic Communist movement” (p. 165). The book’s mere existence represents no small achievement—the back cover reveals that Birdnow was stuck on the historical profession’s notorious adjunct faculty treadmill during its entire writing.

Despite Birdnow’s laudable pluck, he displays questionable judgment when he argues that “no discernible Cold War hysteria existed in St. Louis” (p. 150) during the eighteen-week trial. He emphasizes that the judge generally excused the defendants “from naming the names of other alleged Communists” (p. 153). Other evidence, however, suggests a quite different interpretation. Local newspapers, both conservative and liberal, agreed that authorities originally set bail so high that the working-class defendants could not “hope to provide” it (p. 85). The jury convicted all five of the accused after only two hours and fifteen minutes of deliberations. Four of the defendants “received maximum five-year sentences” (p. 155), yet Birdnow acknowledges that similar cases elsewhere usually resulted in milder penalties.

For some reason Birdnow devotes only four pages to explaining why, on 29 April 1958, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the judgments and sentences and ordered that all five defendants receive new trials. In the more relaxed atmosphere in the late 1950s, the prosecutors declined to pursue the cases further. Clearly a major change had occurred; and it deserves systematic analysis. Another problem is that readers never really get to know the St. Louis Five, either as a group or as individuals. Most likely, few neighbors or friends remain alive and available to provide interviews that would have helped with characterization. Yet the book’s endnotes list a solitary Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report on defendant William Sentner (among Sentner’s personal papers). Quite possibly, complete FBI files on all the principals might at least have offered detailed physical descriptions and daily routines.

Unfortunately, Birdnow’s editors have done him few favors. At one point, he quotes Belknap on the “kind of grinding monotony” that characterized all the Smith Act trials (p. 148). Yet, despite an apparent awareness of the need to bring readers along through lively writing, Birdnow reiterates at least ten times in thirteen pages (pp. 137–149) the claim that the St. Louis proceedings mirrored the national experience. Similar repetition characterizes much of the book.

The book closes with a somewhat distracting chapter detailing how American history is rife with examples of reading “certain individuals or groups out of ‘polite society,’ and taking steps to neutralize, marginalize or hinder them and their growth” (p. 166). Birdnow drags his audience through a decade-by-decade survey of alleged political persecution. From the...