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

On 8 December 1941, eighteen defendants in a Minneapolis courtroom were sentenced to prison-terms ranging from twelve months plus a day to sixteen months. Having ostensibly violated a peacetime anti-sedition law that criminalized “disloyalty” as dissemination of anything – from casual speech to published pamphlets to distribution of classic 19th-century socialist tracts – that could be construed as advocating the overthrowing of the government, those convicted were sentenced one day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Much of the trial turned on testimony relating to the accused’s association with the Socialist Workers Party (swp), known to be an opponent of imperialist war.

The Act under which these defendants were convicted was named after Congressman Howard K. Smith of Virginia, who in 1939 promoted a bill against the threats of fascism and communism to the governance of the United States. Most commonly associated with the post-World War II Cold War judicial persecution of the Communist Party, USA, the Smith Act first targeted 29 individuals active in the Trotskyist swp and their like-minded counterparts in the militant Minneapolis labour movement, most especially the General Drivers Union, Local 574/544 of teamsters, coal handlers, and market labourers, and, secondarily, the Federal Workers Section of unemployed workers and the Union Defense Guard. A number of the original 29 defendants were found not guilty, and one committed suicide before the trial. The contingent that eventually went to jail, exhausting a fruitless appeals process in 1943, included swp leaders James P. Cannon, Vincent Ray Dunne, Albert Goldman, Felix Morrow, Farrell Dobbs, Carl Skoglund, and Grace Carlson.

The first Smith Act trial was also directed at a highly successful and militant union, led by some of these revolutionary Left Oppositionists, which had exploded into national prominence in 1934. Three truckers’ strikes brought the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (ibt) Minneapolis local out of the doldrums of the Great Depression. Its membership soared from a paltry 200 in 1933 to an amazing 7,000 a year later. All of this was accomplished against the foot-dragging, obstructionist conservatism of a reactionary, bureaucratic “craft unionism,” epitomized by ibt head, Daniel Tobin. The General Drivers Union, under the leadership of Dunne, Dobbs, and Skoglund, then spring-boarded this local success into a massive inter-state organizing campaign that, over the course of the late 1930s, saw the ibt make dramatic gains in the Midwest, bringing hundreds of thousands of new members into the international union. As Haverty-Stacke shows, in what is the most deeply researched and carefully argued study of this “little Red Scare,” those involved in bringing the Trotskyists and others to trial included Teamster boss Dan Tobin; J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Attorney General Francis Biddle, and the Justice Department.

The 1941-1943 persecution of Trotskyists and Minneapolis militants was an egregious attack on basic freedom of expression. It in effect outlawed being a communist and declared belief in basic tenets of Marxism itself a seditious conspiracy. The Smith Act was loudly and justifiably condemned by progressives in the labour movement, the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu), and a wide array of critics, including I. F. Stone.

Ironically, however, the very Communist Party, USA that would later find itself subjected to Smith Act attack, applauded the state’s move against what it considered a “Trotskyite” fifth-column. It went so far as to equate the defendants with “a sabotage organization” that deserved no more support than the “National Socialist Workers Party,” or Nazis. Earl Browder’s lawyers provided an affidavit and ostensible evidence of Trotskyism’s threat to the war effort – in the form of quotes supposedly establishing the swp’s intention to overthrow the government that included citations from standard, and long distributed, Marxist literature – as part of their appeal to Roosevelt to pardon Browder, then in jail on trumped-up, anti-communist...