This was one of several indictments of activist women during the World War I years. Their criticism of the war threatened the national power of the patriotic mothers. After being sentenced to 10 years in Missouri State prison, Pastor Stokes and her attorney, Seymour Stedman of Chicago, Illinois, successfully appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Paul, Minnesota. In reaction to this, Pastor Stokes moved to the left in her political leanings. The government ultimately dismissed the case against her in 1920. Judge Walter H. Sanborn authored the opinion that overturned the decision, citing a bias by the District Judge. Despite tensions due to their differing positions on World War I, relations between Pastor Stokes and her husband were relatively congenial. Graham had been embarrassed before World War I by her public activism related to birth control, not widely accepted, and labor politics. Some of his family were among those who were quite opposed to her politics. With increasing strain between them, in 1925 Graham brought a petition for divorce in Nyack, New York, on grounds of "misconduct by his wife". He won a decree. Pastor Stokes issued a statement denouncing New York's divorce laws, and saying that she and her husband had lived as "friendly enemies" for some time. She said she would cherish her freedom. By 1929, Pastor Stokes had remarried. Her second husband was Jerome Isaac Romain, a Polish-Russian Jewish immigrant and a language teacher who was seventeen years younger than she. He was an active member of the Communist Party and became its cultural chief in New York. He later changed his name to Victor Jeremy Jerome, called V.J., serving as editor for decades for Political Affairs. The couple lived at 215 Second Avenue in the Lower East Side. But Pastor Stokes also kept her cottage in Westport, and frequently lived there. Communist Party activity After World War I, Pastor Stokes had left the Socialist Party again; in 1919, she became a founding member of the Communist Party of America and helped develop it into the 1930s. In 1922, she traveled to Moscow as an American delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern). She served there as the reporter for the special Negro Commission at the Congress and adopted the pseudonym "Sasha". After returning to the United States, Stokes was elected to the Executive Committee of