|
|
Article: Smith Act
- Article from:
- West's Encyclopedia of American Law
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 The Gale Group, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
SMITH ACT
The Smith Act (54 Stat. 670) of 1940 proscribed, among other things, the advocacy of the forcible or violent overthrow of the government. The act became the analogue of the New York Criminal Anarchy Act sustained in gitlow v. new york, 268 U.S. 652, 45 S. Ct. 625, 69 L. Ed. 1138 (1925). New York had passed that law in 1902, shortly after the assassination of President william mckinley. Between the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939, the House of Representatives drafted the Smith Act because of a fear that there might be a repetition of the anarchist agitation that had occurred in 1900 or the antipathy toward alien radicalism that had surfaced ...
Related newspaper, magazine, and journal articles:
|
|
Smith Act.
The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.;
January 1, 2000 ;
330 words
...Smith Act, 1940, passed by the U.S. Congress as the Alien Registration Act of ... parties. In 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court restricted the application of the Smith Act to instances of active participation in, or verbal encouragement of ...
|
|