ABSTRACT
On the morning of 20 June 1951, a hundred FBI agents poured out of the Foley Square Federal Building in Manhattan at dawn, buttoned up their grey trench coats and bounded into a fleet of waiting Buicks. Spreading throughout New York City in a well-orchestrated operation, they surrounded twenty private homes, burst into bedrooms and dragged 16 Communist Party leaders off to jail under the Smith Act charge of conspiring to teach the overthrow of the US government.1 This was the second group of top Party functionaries to be arrested under the Act.
