Benjamin Gitlow Trials: 1920-25

Gitlow continued agitating, but in 1929, when in Moscow as a delegate to the Comintern, he defied Josef Stalin to his face. He told Stalin that plans developed in Moscow would not work in America. He was expelled from the Comintern and then from the U.S. Communist Party. For a while, he worked with some dissident Communist groups, but by the late thirties, he had become bitterly anti-Communist. He testified before many congressional committees and wrote and lectured extensively against Communism. He died in 1965.

For all his activity, though, his greatest legacy comes from the case he fought all the way up to the Supreme Court—and lost at every stage.