The information filed against Ruthenberg charged that he “did voluntarily assemble with a certain society, group and assemblage of persons, to wit, the Communist Party of America, formed to teach and advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism.”^[77]  The prosecution’s main witness at trial was Francis Morrow, or “K-97,” the government agent who was a delegate to the Communist Party’s national convention.  K-97 testified that Ruthenberg had attended the Bridgman convention as a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of America, contravening the defense’s claim that Ruthenberg had attended the meeting as an advocate for the adoption of an open and legal Workers’ Party. ^[78]

     Ruthenberg entered into evidence and testified on the proposed program of the Workers’ Party that he had introduced to the delegates at Bridgman.  On the one hand, as the defendant pointed out, the program insisted that the party’s function was to be overtly political, rather than covertly subversive: “The class struggle must take the form of a political struggle, a struggle for the control of the government.”  On the other hand, there was text that, at least in its tone, might be read as more threatening: “The Workers’ party declares one of its chief immediate tasks to be to inspire in the labor unions a revolutionary purpose and to unite them in a mass movement of uncompromising struggle against capitalism.” Similarly, the resolutions of a committee that Ruthenberg had steered, which were adopted unanimously at the Bridgman convention, had the same ambivalent quality; some appeared to distance the Workers’ Party from the illegal Communist Party (“A legal C.P. is now impossible.  Should conditions change only a convention can change the party’s policy”) and others seemed to maintain that integral link (“The illegal Communist party must continue to exist and must continue to direct the whole Communist work”).^[79]

     Striving to dispel any negative implications that might be drawn from the Workers’ Party program and resolutions, Ruthenberg insisted that, although the program endorsed the ultimate control of the American government by the working class, it did not advocate or teach crime, sabotage, violence, or other illegal means of terrorism as the means to bring about that end.  At most, the program did “nothing more than to predict that force, violence, civil war and bloodshed will be the inevitable consequence of the class struggle”^[80] between the working class and the capitalist state.  But Ruthenberg’s characterization of his personal and his party’s purposes was challenged, not only by K-97, but also by the damning inferences that could be derived from the illegal Communist’s Party’s effective control of the legal Workers’ Party agenda.  To that extent, the testimony of Jay Lovestone, the national secretary of the Communist Party of America, who had participated actively at the Bridgman convention, undercut the defense’s theory of the case.  Addressing the purposes of the Worker’s Party, Lovestone stated unequivocally that “the members of the open party were to carry out the policies of the Communist party” and the “Workers’ party  .  .  .  was in all respects a Communist organization.”^[81]