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dragged on; the Soviets tested the hydrogen bomb the week of the arraignments; Dien Ben Phu was laid siege during jury selection and the fortress fell mid-way during the trial. And for good measure, the jurors’ names and photographs were published in The Philadelphia Inquirer the day of opening statements. Later, their home addresses and employers were published. Sheldon Labovitz, one of the Philadelphia Smith Act defendants, wrote a memoir of the trial many years later, Being Red in Philadelphia (Cameo Books, 1998). Like all of the Philadelphia defendants, he now seems more benign than hardened; he was an activist for racial justice and desegregation of the military and demonstrated for nuclear disarmament and world peace. But he remained a dreamer and a committed adherent to Karl Marx’s vision of the world’s inex- orable movement to a workers’ paradise. Labovitz wrote that while the defendants were initially disquieted by being represented by “scions of steel magnates and other capitalist gi- ants” – the defense team was indeed thorough- ly establishment – the trial team demonstrated that it would prepare and present a professional defense of the defendants and not ideology, re- jecting the Party’s strategy. Labovitz wrote that while the defendants acquiesced to McBride’s approach, one compromise was necessary. The defendants chose one of their number, selected according to Labovitz because he was the only defendant who was not Jewish or Black, to pro- ceed pro se and advance the Party’s agenda in statements to the jury if the lawyers declined to. Predictably, in his opening statement he assailed the capitalist system and predicted its demise. Before he could build up a head of steam in his attacks on capitalist tyranny, the judge sustained the government’s objections. McBride’s defense team conducted a thorough and professional investigation of the govern- While the government witnesses were thoroughly discredited, the fact remained that the defendants were regional officers of the Party; on that basis alone they were found guilty and prison terms imposed. But the convictions did not stand. The Supreme Court held shortly thereafter in a similar case that the Smith Act required proof of more than mere sup- port of the Communist agenda, requiring proof of “advocacy and teach- ing of concrete action for the forcible overthrow of the government.” Accordingly, the convictions of four of the Philadelphia defendants were reversed on appeal by the Third Circuit for insufficient evidence and the remaining five cases were dismissed by the government on remand as the cases fell apart. United States v. Kuzma, 249 F.2d 619 (3d Cir. 1957) Bernard Segal, in addition to becoming President of the College, was President of the American Bar Association in 1969 and was integral to that organization’s embrace of civil rights. He served as an advisor to pres- idents and argued over fifty cases in the United States Supreme Court. ment’s witnesses, including collecting the ThreeoftheyoungerdefenselawyerswerelaterinductedintotheCollege. many prior statements of the so-called expert informers who had testified dozens of times in criminal trials, deportation hearings and be- fore legislative committees. The collection of prior statements and testimony revealed that the informers simply made up much of their testimony in order to meet the expectations of the tribunal or committee before which they appeared, often in return for money. Several of the government’s witnesses were proven to be true fabulists in withering cross-examination. Labovitz wrote that McBride convinced the de- fendants that the Fifth Amendment was central to any criminal defense, particularly in their case. Charlie Hileman fought in the Battle of the Bulge and clerked on the Su- preme Court before practice. Henry Sawyer served in the Navy during theWar.JohnRogersCarrollwasabittooyoungforservice.Buttheyall fought the Smith Act. Two other defense lawyers became esteemed judg- es and yet another became an accomplished Supreme Court advocate. After their exoneration, most of the defendants drifted back into ano- nymity. Labovitz went on to an academic career, founding the social work program at Richard Stockton College. He dedicated his 1998 memoir to McBride, whom he called a “staunch defender of the Bill of Rights.” McBride later served as Attorney General of Pennsylvania and a Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. When he died in 1965 at the age of sixty-two, his obituary in The Philadelphia Inquirer called him “a fighter... and a man dedicated to defending both underdogs and lost causes.” Robert E. Welsh, Jr. Philadelphia PA SUMMER 2023 JOURNAL 76 The defendants were inclined to testify because they were true believers, after all, but had they done so, they would have been examined on Lenin’s and Stalin’s support of violence and that of others as a means to revolution which would have made the defense of the ideology the central issue in the trial. The discipline of not testifying was critical to preserving an attack on the sufficiency of the evidence on appeal.