Trotskyists on Trial

Free Speech and Political Persecution Since the Age of FDR

Donna T. Haverty-Stacke

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479849628
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Legal History
• Index: Law

Passed in June 1940, the Smith Act was a peacetime anti-sedition law that marked a dramatic shift in the legal definition of free speech protection in America by criminalizing the advocacy of disloyalty to the government by force. It also criminalized the acts of printing, publishing, or distributing anything advocating such sedition and made it illegal to organize or belong to any association that did the same. It was first brought to trial in July 1941, when a federal grand jury in Minneapolis indicted twenty-nine Socialist Workers Party members, fifteen of whom also belonged to the militant Teamsters Local 544. Eighteen of the defendants were convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government. Examining the social, political, and legal history of the first Smith Act case, this book focuses on the tension between the nation’s cherished principle of free political expression and the demands of national security on the eve of America’s entry into World War II. Based on newly declassified government documents and recently opened archival sources, Trotskyists on Trial explores the implications of the case for organized labor and civil liberties in wartime and postwar America. The central issue of how Americans have tolerated or suppressed dissent during moments of national crisis is not only important to our understanding of the past, but also remains a pressing concern in the post-9/11 world. This volume traces some of the implications of the compromise between rights and security that was made in the mid-twentieth century, offering historical context for some of the consequences of similar bargains struck today.

1

Militancy and Fear

May 1934–June 1940

The first Smith Act trial originated, in part, in the personal histories of the defendants. The ties between certain members of Teamsters Local 544 and the Socialist Workers Party shaped their union militancy and made them targets of government concern as early as the mid-1930s. The political history of the Smith Act’s passage also informed the background to the case. As World War II spread throughout Europe and Asia, anxieties deepened in America over the fate of its own security in a dangerous world. In 1940, the fear of subversion at home fueled an antiradical mood that supported the passage of the Smith Act, the most restrictive peacetime sedition measure in more than 140 years. Many Americans argued that to preserve democracy, the civil liberties of those deemed a threat to national security had to be suspended. In 1941, such thinking made possible the arrest and trial of twenty-nine Trotskyists, eighteen of whom were convicted for conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the government.

Past as Prologue: Trotskyist Militancy in Minneapolis during the 1930s

Max Geldman, one of the twenty-nine, reflected later in life on something James Cannon, a fellow defendant and leader of the SWP, once told him: that ardent revolutionaries were able “to live with the music of one’s youth.”1 They remained committed to beliefs forged early in life, even during trying times. That, to Geldman, was the mark of a true member of the movement—in his case, the Socialist Workers Party. The description could be applied to most of Geldman’s fellow defendants in the 1941 case. Each came to the SWP, and for some also to Local 544, from different backgrounds, but each came to share a commitment to Trotskyist politics and militant union organizing during the depths of the Great Depression. Most carried those commitments with them for the rest of their lives. Before being challenged during the 1941 trial, those beliefs sustained these revolutionaries through the turbulent events of the 1930s in Minneapolis: the 1934 Teamsters strikes; the 1939 Federal Workers Section strike; and their Union Defense Guard’s confrontation with fascist Silver Shirts in 1938.

Vincent Raymond Dunne, one of the leading defendants in the 1941 trial, certainly remained true to the music of his youth during his long life. Born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1889, he moved to Minnesota to live on his grandfather’s farm after his father was seriously injured on the job in a streetcar accident. One of nine children, Vincent learned the hard lessons of survival in America’s expanding industrial economy not only from the trauma that his father’s workplace injuries caused his family, but also from his having to work to support that family when he turned fourteen. Dunne, once described as resembling Humphrey Bogart with his “cool blue eyes” and long, dark face,2 labored as a lumberjack in Minnesota and Montana and as a grain harvester in North Dakota, where he first heard of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). After being laid off the job in Montana, he hoboed his way to Seattle, where he was drawn further into the Wobbly orbit and was arrested six times for speaking publicly about industrial unionism. While he was working in Montana, he had briefly become a member of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), but it was through the IWW that Dunne first became a self-identified socialist. Although he respected the sincerity of the Debsian socialists in the Wobbly movement, he preferred the more syndicalist approach of the WFM branch.3 Dunne’s commitment to militant union organizing as the core of workers’ self-liberation remained at the heart of his radical politics for the rest of his life.

Returning to Minneapolis after his years tramping around the Northwest, Dunne “got a job teaming” and soon “worked himself into the class of express drivers.” Over coffee at the lunch counter of the Union Depot he met a young Swedish waitress named Jennie Holm. They married in 1914 and had two children, but that did not slow down Dunne’s political activism or union organizing.4 He became a delegate and the financial secretary of the city’s Central Labor Union in the early 1920s. And he soon found an ally and mentor when he became a weigh master in the coal yards.5 Carl Skoglund, who would become known as a “grand old working-class leader,” immigrated to Minneapolis from Sweden in 1911 and, after surviving a near-debilitating accident while working for a cement contractor, tried his hand at a variety of jobs until becoming a coal yard truck driver in 1928.6 There he became an organizer for the Teamsters Local 574 and forged a close friendship with the militant Dunne, becoming his “first real teacher . . . as a revolutionary socialist.”7 The two men held true to their shared sense of militancy and drew on their friendship for support as they organized workers in the coal yards in the mid-1930s and, later, when they faced the Smith Act prosecution in 1941.

Both Dunne and Skoglund not only believed in industrial unionism but also were drawn into the ranks of the nascent Workers (Communist) Party during the early 1920s. In this political commitment they were joined by several others who would share their fate as defendants in the first Smith Act trial. James Cannon, like Dunne, was born in Kansas, experienced the difficulties of life as an industrial worker firsthand in the meatpacking, railroad, and printing industries, and first became drawn into the revolutionary wing of the Socialist Party and the IWW. After 1918, Cannon became a leader of the new Workers (Communist) Party in America. He was instrumental in the party’s shift from its underground and divided posture (between the foreign language sections and the native-born American labor-based wing) into a united entity by 1922. In these early years, Cannon was supported in his work by Vincent Dunne’s brother William.8 But it was not just personal ties that drew workers like Vincent Dunne and Skoglund into the early manifestation of the Communist Party. It was the revolutionary nature of the new party that attracted them and several others in the city’s coal yards, like Harry DeBoer and Farrell Dobbs. Born in 1907 in Crookston, Minnesota, DeBoer had to leave school after the eighth grade to earn a living. He worked as a truck driver “his entire adult life” and served as an organizer for his Teamsters local from 1934 to 1941. Dobbs, who was born in Queen City, Missouri, in 1907, graduated from high school and was employed “as a wire man for Western Electric” until the Depression hit, when he lost his job and took up work in the coal yards. There he was drawn into the growing community of Trotskyist labor organizers, joining their ranks in March 1934.9 Each of these militant workers and political radicals remained true to the music of his youth and paid the price when later targeted by the Justice Department for advocating those beliefs.

Cannon, Dunne, and Skoglund believed they first paid a price for remaining true to their beliefs in 1928. That September the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International met in Moscow and laid bare the divisions that had been forming within the movement during the previous few years. It quickly became apparent that dissent from Stalin’s rule would not be tolerated and any interpretations of the party’s agenda, other than his focus on building “socialism in one country” (the prioritizing of the Soviet state), would be definitively rejected. Leon Trotsky, who criticized Stalin’s position, had been banished from the movement. Those who agreed with Trotsky were likewise expelled. James Cannon and William Dunne found themselves on opposite sides of this fight, with Cannon in the ousted Trotskyist camp. Along with him went other future Smith Act defendants in Minneapolis, including Vincent Dunne, Carl Skoglund, and Oscar Coover.10 Coover, a “quiet-spoken, warm-hearted and friendly” electrician, had belonged to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers since 1906 and by the late 1920s had come to support the Trotskyists in Minneapolis.11 To these exiles their expulsion signaled that their work had just begun: they would (re)build what they believed to be a true Marxist party, a Left Opposition, which advocated world proletarian revolution. As Dunne saw it, that commitment to global socialist revolution was the real manifestation of Marxism. In his mind, he and his fellow Trotskyists did not leave the Communist Party so much as it had left them.12

By the early 1930s, the Trotskyists had created their own organization, officially called the Communist League of America, Left Opposition of the Communist Party, and issued their own newspaper, the Militant. Headquartered in New York, centered on a group of leftist intellectuals, it had a committed branch in the Minneapolis contingent that was connected to that city’s labor movement via the small Teamsters Local 574.13 The Trotskyists in Minneapolis were devoted to using their Left Opposition (what would become the SWP) as a vanguard party to “unite the working class in struggle.”14 They also believed that democratic, industrial unions were central to this revolutionary commitment as vehicles through which workers could “resist oppression” and as forums in which to educate workers in the ideas of the party.15 Their approach thus essentially married the lessons that Dunne, Skoglund, Cannon, and others had learned in their younger years struggling though hardscrabble lives in America’s expanding industrial heartland with the radical Marxist politics they accessed first via the IWW and later the Communist Party, now having taken a unique Trotskyist turn. In Minneapolis the body that they would focus on transforming into the democratic, industrial union for this revolutionary cause was Teamsters Local 574.

A fledgling craft union with about 200 members by 1933, Local 574 was at that time a “small, cautious and conservative” union. Its leaders, facing the hostility of Minneapolis employers and the city’s reactionary Citizens Alliance, were wary of launching bold organizing drives for fear of losing what little ground they had gained. The infamous alliance deployed labor spies, kept files on activists, and cooperated with the FBI in order to maintain an open-shop town.16 Confronting such opposition, the leaders of 574 instead remained committed to defending workers they had organized and supported the craft unionism generally advanced by their parent bodies, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and American Federation of Labor (AFL).17

As radical socialists and labor militants, Dunne and Skoglund supported the industrial union approach and dismissed the fears of their more wary Teamster brothers. In order for them to lead a successful organizing drive among all coal yard workers, they would have to overcome both the hesitancy within Local 574 and the hostility of the city’s employers. The first step Dunne and Skoglund took was to organize all the coal yard truck drivers into 574, including independent owner-operators as well as men who drove trucks owned by the coal companies; in 1933 the local represented workers in only nine of the city’s sixty-two yards. Although 574’s council did not initially support this effort, the two men moved ahead with their plan anyway, building on the trust the men had in them as fellow workers and on the support of 574’s president, William Brown, who shared their industrial union vision. Personal connections aided these alliances. Dunne’s brother Miles, a “dashing young bachelor” who was fond of “prize fights, football, hunting and fishing,” was a “bosom drinking companion” of Brown’s. Vincent Dunne, as a weigh master, knew almost all the men who came through the yards. And Skoglund, the “old Swede,” became a father figure to many of the younger men, including DeBoer, who were drawn to his call for solidarity in the fight for better wages, shorter hours, and safer working conditions. Over the years, Dunne and Skoglund built up the ranks, more than doubling the size of the local. By November 1933, they felt it was time to demand that all the city’s coal yard employers recognize these workers within Local 574.18

Not surprisingly, given Minneapolis’s history as an open-shop town, the employers refused. But Dunne and Skoglund did not give up. Sustained by the backing of the men and aided by the organizing skills of Miles Dunne, they took advantage of a sudden cold spell and the increased demand for home heating coal in early February to call a strike. Seven hundred men walked off the job on February 7, bolstered in their commitment to the cause by the tactics that their Trotskyist leaders had the foresight to implement, including nightly meetings to boost morale and the use of “flying squadrons” (groups of three or four strikers who patrolled the yards) to intercept trucks driven by “scabbing drivers.”19 By February 10, the men returned to work, confident in their ability to gain union recognition. On February 14 and 15, elections were held across the city in the yards, with Local 574 winning support from approximately 77 percent of the voting men.20

But the elections were not a total victory. Under pressure from the Regional Labor Board, the coal yard employers recognized the existence of Local 574, but they did not promise to recognize it for exclusive collective bargaining. Its struggle for the closed shop became one of the driving forces behind Local 574’s next round of confrontations with Minneapolis employers. By the spring of 1934, the Dunnes and Skoglund were focused on utilizing the momentum they had built in the coal yard organizing drive. That effort had rapidly expanded the ranks of the union to almost 3,000 workers by the end of April.21 Cognizant of the vital role trucking played in Minneapolis’s economy, being the main form of transportation for goods into and throughout the city, and eager to secure the bread-and-butter demands that were of concern to the workers, they decided to take action.

With the support of President William Brown and Vice President George Frosig, Local 574 issued its demands on April 30 for “‘the closed shop, shorter hours, an average wage of $27.50 a week, and extra pay for overtime.’” Immediately it was confronted with the concerted opposition of the 11 major trucking firms to which it presented these demands, and soon thereafter, of the more than 150 other companies in the city. Continued employer resistance led the union to vote for a strike, which began on May 16.22

Of the many major strikes that took place around the United States during 1934, the Teamsters strikes in Minneapolis were among the bloodier. Girding themselves for the struggle, members of the union’s strike committee set up special headquarters with a field hospital and a commissary staffed by a women’s auxiliary. Almost as soon as the workers took to the streets, their pickets were met with fierce resistance. Striking truck drivers clashed with police in the city’s market district on May 19 and May 21, resulting in the injury of thirty-seven peo...