Smith Act
The Alien Registration Act, popularly known as the Smith Act, 76th United States Congress, 3d session, ch. 439, 54 Stat. 670, 18 U.S.C. § 2385 is a United States federal statute that was enacted on June 28, 1940. It set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence, and required all non-citizen adult residents to register with the federal government.
Other short titles
Civilian and Military Organizations License Act
An Act to prohibit certain subversive activities; to amend certain provisions of law with respect to the admission and deportation of aliens; to require the fingerprinting and registration of aliens; and for other purposes.
ARA
Alien Registration Act, 1940
June 28, 1940
Repealed. June 27, 1952, ch. 477, title IV, § 403(a)(39), 66 Stat. 280, eff. Dec. 24, 1952 [1]
Approximately 215 people were indicted under the legislation, including alleged communists and socialists. Prosecutions under the Smith Act continued until a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 1957[2] reversed a number of convictions under the Act as being unconstitutional. The law has been amended several times.
Legal proceedings[edit]
Harry Bridges[edit]
The Smith Act was written so that federal authorities could deport radical labor organizer Harry Bridges, an immigrant from Australia.[6] Deportation hearings against Bridges in 1939 found he did not qualify for deportation because he was not currently—as the Alien Act of 1918 required—a member of or affiliated with an organization that advocated the overthrow of the government.[22] The Smith Act allowed deportation of an alien who had been "at any time" since arriving in the U.S. a member of, or affiliated with, such an organization. A second round of deportation hearings ended after ten weeks in June 1941.[23] In September, the special examiner who led the hearings recommended deportation, but the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) reversed that order after finding the government's two key witnesses unreliable.[24] In May 1942, though the Roosevelt administration was now putting its anti-Communist activities on hold in the interest of furthering the Soviet-American alliance, Attorney General Biddle overruled the BIA and ordered Bridges deported.[25] Bridges appealed and lost in District Court[26] and the Court of Appeals,[27] but the Supreme Court held 5–3 on June 18, 1945, in the case of Bridges v. Wixon that the government had not proven Bridges was "affiliated" with the CPUSA,[28] a word it interpreted to require more than "sympathy" or "mere cooperation".[29]