Only Feds for the Reds

For his operations as western Pennsylvania's top Communist Party leader, Steve Nelson, 53, was convicted in two courts. A Pennsylvania Court of Quarter Sessions gave him a stiff 20-year sentence and $10,000 fine for twelve violations of the 37-year-old state sedition act; then a Federal District Court added a milder five-year term for Smith Act violations. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out (6-3) Nelson's conviction by the state of Pennsylvania, ruled that the Federal Government alone may prosecute those who advocate its overthrow.

The ruling threw a large question mark at similar statutes of Hawaii, Alaska and 42 states (all except Arizona, Missouri, North and South Dakota, South Carolina and Oregon). One state pressingly affected: Kentucky, where ex-Newsman Carl Braden, tabbed a Communist and convicted 16 months ago under a state law for advocating sedition, is now appealing a 15-year sentence and $5,000 fine.

"Congress," said Chief Justice Warren in delivering the majority opinion, "intended to occupy the field of sedition" when it passed the 1940 Smith Act and succeeding anti-subversive statutes. State laws are "in no sense uniform," and their enforcement could present "serious danger of conflict" with federal antisubversion operations. In the strongest dissent that Earl Warren has ever faced, Justices Stanley Reed, Sherman Minton and Harold Burton argued that "in the responsibility of national and local governments to protect themselves against sedition, there is no 'dominant interest' . . . Congress has not, in any of its statutes relating to sedition, specifically barred the exercise of state power to punish the same acts under state law."

Dissenting also was the man who framed the Smith Act, Virginia's Democratic Representative Howard W. Smith, who says that Congress never meant to write off state sedition laws. He has already introduced legislation that would put them back in force.

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