Biography
Junius Scales was born in Greensboro, NC; his great-uncle was NC Governor Alfred Moore Scales. Chair Carolinas District CPUSA; UNC Chapel Hill student/grad. US Army 4 years. Arrested 1954; convicted 1955 Greensboro federal court; reversed; retried & re-convicted 1958; Scales v. United States, 367 U.S. 203 (1961) — 5-4 affirmed (only conviction under Smith Act membership clause to stand). 6 years; entered USP Lewisburg October 1961. Sentence commuted by JFK Christmas Eve 1962 — last Smith Act prisoner released. Left CPUSA 1957 over Khrushchev Secret Speech. Junius Irving Scales was a North Carolina-born organizer who became chairman of the Communist Party USA’s Carolinas District and the only American ever sent to federal prison under the membership clause of the Smith Act of 1940 — the provision that made it a crime to be a member of any organization that advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government, even without any underlying act. He was indicted in 1954, convicted in 1955, won reversal at the Supreme Court in 1957, and was retried and reconvicted in 1958. The Supreme Court affirmed the second conviction 5–4 in Scales v. United States, 367 U.S. 203 (1961) — the same docket as Wilkinson and Braden — and he began serving a six-year sentence at the U.S. Penitentiary in Lewisburg in October 1961.
By this point Scales had publicly resigned from the Communist Party (in 1957, after Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin) and made clear that he would not testify against former comrades. He spent fifteen months at Lewisburg before President Kennedy commuted his sentence on Christmas Eve 1962. He spent the remainder of his life as a printers’ union proofreader at the New York Times and as the author of Cause at Heart (1987), one of the most widely read first-person accounts of the McCarthy-era left.
