Biography
Clyde Smith was a Farmers' League member charged with criminal syndicalism at White Cloud, Michigan during the 1933 farm revolt. The farm revolt of 1933 — the Farmers' Holiday Association and the Communist-led United Farmers' League fighting mortgage foreclosures with penny auctions and picket lines — brought waves of arrests across the Midwest, many under state criminal-syndicalism laws.
The Daily Worker of May 13, 1933, page 2, reports an International Labor Defense campaign against Michigan's criminal-syndicalism law centered on George Casper and Clyde Smith, farmers arrested for seeking to prevent a foreclosure at White Cloud. Thousands of repeal petitions had been distributed statewide. A separate item on the formation of the Farmers National Defense Bureau says the two faced possible twenty-year terms; this describes exposure to a potential sentence, not a sentence already imposed.
The October 9, 1934 Daily Worker reports that the criminal-syndicalism charges against him in the White Cloud foreclosure-defense prosecution were dropped. It separately describes John Rose’s conviction and successful appeal. The charge dismissal supplies no exact individual physical-release date. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1934/v11-n242-NAT-oct-09-1934-DW-LOC.pdf#page=3
Rob Hall’s December 1933 Labor Defender account identifies Smith as secretary of the Michigan Farmers League and says his criminal-syndicalism charge in the White Cloud foreclosure protest was reduced to unlawful assembly after farmer protests. The later dismissal already documented remains a separate development; this account supplies no individual physical release day. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1933/v09n11-dec-1933-lab-def.pdf#page=16
The farm report says White Cloud, Michigan defendants Clyde Smith and George Casper had been released on $1,000 bail each after nearly six weeks in jail following a foreclosure protest meeting. This establishes an earlier bail interruption; it cannot be reconciled into one continuous interval with a later February 1934 report of six months held without further evidence. No exact bail day or actual total is invented.
