Labor Anti-Communism and the 1941 Smith Act Trial

On June 27, 1941, FBI agents and US marshals raided the headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party in Minneapolis. Three weeks later, twenty-nine party members were arrested, fifteen of whom also belonged to the militant Teamsters Local 544. That July they were charged with violating the 1940 Smith Act, specifically for advocating the overthrow of the government and conspiring to create insubordination in the armed forces. Although historians have generally overlooked this first Smith Act case, it reveals the extent of labor anti-communism before the pressures of Taft Hartley. Opposition to political radicals within organized labor was rooted in fundamental ideological disagreements among workers, not solely because of the second red scare. This paper will focus on the origins of the 1941 case, examining the extent to which such early labor anti-communism influenced the first Smith Act indictments. While it seems that the Roosevelt administration and the FBI were genuinely concerned about the seditious potential of this group, other evidence suggests that the decision to target them was influenced by Daniel Tobin, leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who wanted to purge communists from Local 544. Shortly before the June raid and arrests, Tobin had reached out to President Roosevelt. But if the FBI appeared receptive to Tobin's arguments, how much that request resonated with the Roosevelt administration is far less clear. The paper will examine the connections between Tobin, the FBI, and the Roosevelt administration in targeting Local 544 in order to explore the complex role that organized labor played in opposing political radicals before McCarthyism, and to question the extent to which organized labor was complicit in the creation of the domestic security state that would later undermine its strength during the cold war.