Former State Communist Chief Dies

William V. Schneiderman, a lifelong Communist whose strange alliances once involved a Republican presidential nominee’s defending him before the U.S. Supreme Court, is dead.

The former California Communist Party leader was 79 and died Tuesday at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco after suffering for years from heart diseases.

Schneiderman, who during the 1950s also was acting leader of the Communist Party of the United States, was one of 14 California Communists convicted in 1952 of violating the Smith Act.

After a six-month trial in Los Angeles--then the longest criminal trial in the city’s history--all were convicted of advocating the violent overthrow of the government and sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000.

But in 1957, after a lengthy appeal process, five of the guilty findings were vacated and retrials ordered in the other nine cases.

Although that case filled newspaper front pages across the country, it was an earlier judicial ruling that produced one of the more peculiar courtroom alliances in the country’s history.

Schneiderman had been born in czarist Russia but was brought to the United States at age 2. His political persuasions first surfaced publicly in 1939, when he filed for governor of Minnesota on the Communist ticket.

The federal government tried to revoke his citizenship, claiming that he had concealed his Communist Party membership when he applied for naturalization in 1927.

A federal judge upheld the government and revoked Schneiderman’s citizenship, and he was faced with deportation when Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential nominee, entered the case.

Willkie, who represented Schneiderman without fee, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that Schneiderman’s was a “vital test for civil liberties” that could involve tens of thousands of other naturalized immigrants.

In a 5-3 opinion in 1943, the justices ruled that cancellation of citizenship was not justified by merely imputing a “reprehensible interpretation” to an organization and its members unless “overt acts” were involved.

Schneiderman’s illnesses forced his resignation as chairman of the California Communist Party in 1964.

His wife, Leah, said Thursday that he was a “very gentle man who did not believe in force and violence. He was a true believer (in Communism). He was aware of errors, but he never broke with the party.”