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The story of the only American ever to be convicted solely for
being a member of the Communist Party. On November 18, 1954, Junius
Irving Scales, the Communist Party district organizer for the upper
South, was arrested on a quiet Memphis street by FBI agents.
Charged with violation of the Smith Act of 1940, Scales spent the
next six years ensnared in a legal system that was in thrall to a
daunting force: McCarthyism. Scales's case twice reached the U.S.
Supreme Court; ultimately, his lower-court guilty verdict was
upheld. Scales served fifteen months in Lewisburg Penitentiary
before his six-year sentence was commuted by President Kennedy in
1962. ""Cause at Heart"" follows Scales from his privileged
southern upbringing through the awakening of his social conscience,
his civil- and labor-rights work for the Party across the South,
his arrest and trials, his disillusionment with the Party, and his
time in prison. Even behind bars Scales refused to cooperate with
his prosecutors, to ""name names."" In their foreword, Vernon
Burton and James Barrett draw chilling parallels between the Smith
Act, the legal grounds on which Scales was convicted, and
contemporary restrictions on individual rights such as the Patriot
Act. Today, as it did sixty-plus years ago, ""Congress has
radically expanded the description of what constitutes a threat to
the U.S. government.
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