Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution Since the Age of FDR by Donna T. Haverty-Stacke (review)

In Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution Since the Age of FDR, Donna T. Haverty-Stacke examines the federal government's first Smith Act prosecution, which was against Socialist Workers Party leaders. Using declassified government documents and newly available archival sources, Haverty-Stacke's timely treatment of the relationship between free speech and national security is an excellent social and political history.

The Alien Registration Act of 1940 (Smith Act) was an unusual peacetime anti-sedition law. Making it illegal to advocate disloyalty in the armed forces and criminalizing those who showed support for overthrowing the government, the law gave federal authorities the power to target individuals and organizations advancing these actions. World War I's Sedition Act had similar provisions, but the nation had not passed similar peacetime restrictions since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In June of 1940, however, as the war in Europe brewed and the United States committed itself to war preparedness, FDR found support for the law among members of the military, patriotic organizations, and members of Congress who were in a panic over the potential for military and industrial sabotage.

Disgruntled rank-and–file members of Minneapolis's Teamster Local 544 saw the new law as an opportunity and turned to the FBI to rid them of the Trotskyist union leaders. In July of 1941, the Justice Department put fifteen Trotskyist leaders of Local 544 in jail. Several of these unionists led the militant 1934 Teamster strikes in Minneapolis that lasted over six months, breaking the open shop culture of the city. It was rank and file resistance to their union leaders' militancy in 1934, Haverty-Stacke argues, that instigated the Smith Act arrests. Haverty-Stacke examines how this inter-union conflict developed and follows its consequences into the war and postwar period, contributing to a growing literature that documents labor anticommunism and anticommunists reliance on state repression.

Focusing on the first Smith Act prosecution, Haverty-Stacke demonstrates that the law expanded the power of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. With new legal authority, J. Edgar Hoover escalated domestic surveillance and encouraged the attorney general and federal lawyers to prosecute. In many ways, the state's work in developing their case (and their informants) against SWP leaders provided a model for the postwar period. Emboldened by the presence of the FBI, rank and file opposition imagined a heightened sense of their importance. Harverty-Stacke argues that "the bureau's agents raised the stakes in what otherwise was a run-of-the-mill intra-union faction fight mired in the politics of early labor anticommunism," and the results were staggering (5). Teamsters lost proven organizers, successful Trotskyist unionists found themselves outside the house of labor, and Americans lost free speech protections.

Haverty-Stacke finds that the decision of the federal government to prosecute Trotskyists was due to a confluence of factors. Rank and file members of Local 544, calling themselves the Committee of 99, accused local union leaders of using their positions to recruit for the SWP, an organization, they argued, committed to overthrowing the government. Turning to their international union leadership and the justice department, these disgruntled unionists made the case that their union was being used as a tool by the SWP. The International Brotherhood Teamsters president, Daniel Tobin, also leaned on the Justice Department and asked if it would share with him its intelligence on these local SWP members, which it did. Then Tobin used the wartime emergency and the AFL's no-strike pledge as an excuse to put the local in receivership. He argued that the SWP opposed US involvement in war, and its members had a hold on the local's leadership. When local SWP leaders fought back by calling for a vote on whether to accept receivership or bolt to the CIO, Tobin wrote to FDR and told him that...