archives.nypl.org -- International Labor Defense records (original) (raw)

For those Americans who dared to challenge the prevailing political and economic status quo, the decade of the 1920s was not a tolerant era. Although the massive repression carried out during the infamous Red Scare of 1919-1920 was not repeated during the ensuing years, many trade union activists and political radicals often found their peaceful activities disrupted and themselves arrested. Once in jail, such prisoners, frequently penniless and ignored, encountered a hostile legal system. Small defense committees might sometimes assist a fortunate individual, but, except for the fledgling American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), no comprehensive legal organization existed. Badly needed was a strong, national group that could meet the needs of such prisoners by pooling financial resources, legal strategy, and political influence.

The creation of the International Labor Defense (ILD) in 1925 represented an important effort to fill that void. Until its demise in 1946, the ILD vigorously defended union members, political radicals, immigrants, and other individuals who it felt to be unjustly arrested and prosecuted. During the 1930s, the group attracted particular notoriety through its highly publicized campaigns in behalf of black prisoners, thus vividly dramatizing both southern and American racism, adding a new militancy to the civil rights struggles of the period, and introducing many Afro-Americans to Communist teachings. The ILD also provided moral and financial assistance to political prisoners and their families.

Background

The impetus for the ILD's creation came from James P. Cannon, an influential American Communist, who discussed the idea with William D. "Big Bill" Haywood and others during a trip to the Soviet Union in 1925. Upon his return home, Cannon immediately set out to create interest in the Project. On June 28, 1925, slightly over 100 delegates representing various trade unions and radical political groups met in Chicago and formally voted to establish the ILD. As a statement of purpose, the delegates affirmed that the new organization would vigorously defend the rights of political prisoners, especially those "persecuted for their activity in the labor movement". Families of these prisoners were not to be ignored, since, according to one resolution, "It is the first duty of the labor movement to provide regular material and financial aid to the dependents of class war prisoners". The convention further pledged to support "the struggles of national minorities", demanded freedom for long-term political prisoners such as Tom Mooney in California, and, condemned the use of injunctions in labor disputes. The delegates elected Andrew T. McNamara of Pittsburgh as chairman and Cannon as national secretary.

Although the new organization would provides assistance to political prisoners, it was much more than just a traditional legal aid society. As its basic philosophy of action, the ILD formulated the concept of "mass protest" or "mass defense", which taught that legal prosecutions in a capitalistic society were politically motivated and that the court system was dominated by ruling class interests. As one ILD official later declared, "The task of the ILD is to destroy the illusions of a democracy and justice above classes, and to expose their class character". This necessitated a twofold strategy. First, the ILD had to provide the accused with properly trained attorneys to handle courtroom duties. Second, it had to develop a defense movement outside the courtroom to mobilize the masses, thereby forcing the legal system through public pressure to grant justice to the defendant. Without such mass action, the ILD felt, the defendant's chances would be virtually nil. Moveover, participation in such a mass movement would educate the masses politically and give them a sense of their potential power.

The ILD's philosophy also stressed the group's obligations to improve the morale and material comfort of defendants unjustly sentenced to jail. The organization initially identified 128 such political prisoners in 1925 and began sending them five dollars a month "as a sign of remembrance and an act of practical solidarity". (Critics of the ILD, who later unfairly accused it of abandoning individuals once their cases no longer attracted newspaper headlines, simply ignored these activities.) Responsibility for such support was assigned to a prisoners' relief committee, which also helped prisoners' families who were often improverished by the loss of their principal wage earner. The ILD regularly provided such assistance on a nonpartisan basis (except for their exclusion of Trotskyists) and during the late 1920s, much of it went to imprisoned members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Although the ILD's membership was open to anyone associated with the working class, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) approved of the group's creation, assigned members to work with the organization, and openly exerted influence over general policies, at least until 1937. Cannon, a high-ranking party member and the head of an influential faction, surrounded himself in the national office with loyal supporters and personally dominated organizational policies through 1928. But when he embraced Trotskism in the fall of that year, he was expelled from the CPUSA and subsequently replaced as ILD national secretary by J. Louis Engdahl, a party member and former editor of the Daily Worker.

Despite this Communist influence, several non-Communists were active in the group's leadership and exerted some influence. Three of the first nine members of the national executive committee were not party members. Many non-Communists, such as Socialist Eugene V. Debs and feminist Alice Stone Blackwell, served on the national steering committee. ILD membership was also quite diverse, as local chapters responded to their members' concerns. However, the organization consistently followed the broad political positions established by the Communist party and shared with it a common Marxist idealogy and great respect for the Soviet Union. Until 1937, Communist members of the ILD often met in factions prior to chapter meetings in order to decide which policies to support. Thus the ILD understandably earned such labels as "mass organization", auxiliary organization", and "Communist front".

Soon after its inception, the ILD began to develop mass campaigns in support of several prominent American political prisoners. Valuable details of these important struggles are found in the extensive case files included in the ILD records. The best known of these prisoners were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, whose prosecution constituted the most famous cause célébre of the 1920s. The two Italian-American radicals had been convicted at a highly controversial trial in Massachusetts and sentenced to death for allegedly committing a murder during a payroll robbery. Although the ILD joined the enormous international protest movement over their conviction, the two were still executed in August 1927, amidst worldwide demonstrations.

The ILD also worked for years in behalf of a pardon for Tom Mooney, another hero of the American Left. A radical union organizer, Mooney (along with Warren K. Billings) had been convicted of bombing the 1916 Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco. The ILD strongly supported Mooney's bid for a pardon and set up its own campaign, which it continued for well over a decade. Determined to keep Mooney's name alive, the group twice took the prisoner's aged mother on lengthy speaking tours of the United States and once to western Europe and the Soviet Union. It even helped stage a demonstration at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Relations with other Mooney groups and the prisoner himself were not always smooth, but the ILD persevered with its campaign until Mooney was finally pardoned in 1939.

The group also worked in behalf of John and James McNamara, labor union officials convicted in 1911 for bombing the Los Angeles Times printing plant. In addition, members of the syndicalist IWW who had been jailed during World War I, especially the Centralia, Washington, prisoners, were often featured in ILD appeals during its first three years. Other early efforts involved supporting defendants accused of criminal syndicalism, immigration violations, labor violence, illegal strikes, and other such activities.

The ILD and Blacks

Despite the founding convention's resolution to protect the rights of national minorities, little was specifically done in behalf of black prisoners or on distinctly black issues prior to 1930. The ILD did not consciously avoid Afro-Americans, but since few belonged to labor unions or radical political groups, from whose ranks most ILD cases emanated, they infrequently crossed paths. Only a handful of blacks belonged to local chapters during the late 1920s, and their suggestions were often overlooked. An internal report in 1929 listing 300 cases handled by the organization in the previous year contained the names of only a half-dozen Afro-American prisoners.

With the arrival of a new decade, this situation quickly changed. As the result of sharp criticism issued at the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1928, the CPUSA reformulated its theories on American race relations and greatly increased its "Negro work". Influenced by its Communist members, the ILD acknowledged its neglect of racial persecutions and soon initiated a wide variety of activities designed to reach and assist Afro-Americans. In the first half of 1930 alone, the organization selected several black members for its national executive committee, began hiring Afro-American organizers, ordered chapters to initiate significant activities involving local blacks, and helped sponsor a national anti-lynching campaign.

The ILD also began to look more carefully at potential cases involving black defendants, especially in the South. As a result, the organization soon found itself receiving numerous pleas for help. During the decade that followed, the ILD would eventually provide assistance to countless numbers of Afro-Americans. Several of the most outrageous prosecutions were selected for national campaigns and received wide-ranging publicity. Aided by liberals, blacks, radicals, and Communists, the ILD successfully used these prominent cases to awaken millions of Americans to the pervasive racism that still existed in the southern legal system.

The first major ILD effort involving black defendants was the case of the Atlanta Six, which involved two black labor organizers and four white radicals arrested in Atlanta in 1930 for violating Georgia's notorious anti-insurrection law. The ILD used the arrests to publicize the repressive nature of Georgia law enforcement and helped the group eventually avoid trial. In 1931, the ILD came to the aid of Euel Lee, an elderly black field hand in eastern Maryland convicted of murdering his employer. ILD attorney Bernard Ades, who was assaulted by an angry white mob during one visit to the area, challenged the exclusion of blacks from local juries and succeeded in having the conviction overturned by an appeals court. But both Ades' legal counsel and an ILD mass campaign failed to prevent a second conviction and Lee's subsequent execution in 1933. In 1931, and again in 1933, the ILD provided legal assistance to members of the Sharecroppers Union of Alabama, who had been involved in several violent clashes with white law enforcement officials. The defendants received surprisingly light sentences, which they attributed to the courageous efforts of their ILD lawyers.

An even more important case eventually arose in Atlanta during the summer of 1932. There the ILD came to the support of Angelo Herndon, a young black Communist arrested after leading an integrated unemployment demonstration and charged with "attempting to incite insurrection" against the state. The ILD hired two local black attorneys, Benjamin J. Davis and John Geer, to defend Herndon, thereby violating racial etiquette and angering local officials. The two attorneys proceeded to challenge the exclusion of blacks from local juries and the anti-insurrection law's constitutionally, further upsetting city officials. But Herndon was convicted in early 1933 and sentenced to eighteen-to-twenty years in prison. The ILD twice appealed the verdict to the United States Supreme Court. Walter Gellhorn, a law professor at Columbia University, and Whitney North Seymour, a Wall Street attorney, directed the appeal proceedings. Through an energetic mass campaign, the ILD eventually built the Herndon case into a national cause célébre and attracted widespread interest from Afro-Americans as well as northern whites. In 1937, the high court voided the conviction and struck down most applications of the Georgia law, handing the ILD an important victory which seemed to vindicate its legal and political strategy.

In response to the growing volume and importance of cases arising in the South during the early years of the Great Depression, the ILD opened a southern regional office in Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the spring of 1931. But pleas for assistance were not restricted to Dixie. By the end of the year, the huge volume of inquiries concerning blacks that was being received from all over the country had overwhelmed the group's resources. Consequently, the ILD national board issued a clarifying memorandum to its members, announcing that the organization would concentrate primarily on cases that clearly resulted from "the class struggle and the anti-imperialist struggle". Individual cases not qualifying under this criteria might still be accepted if there were an important political dimension; otherwise they would have to be assigned a lower priority. These policies did not indicate indifference toward individual blacks but were necessary in order to conserve the group's limited resources. Moreover, the board clearly instructed chapters that "moral support must be given to Negroes in all cases where they are racially discriminated against" (italics in the original), even if legal assistance could not be provided. In 1932, the ILD further demonstrated its racial sensitivity by promoting William L. Patterson, a black attorney and Communist, to the position of national secretary to replace Engdahl, who had died during a trip to the Soviet Union.

The Scottsboro Case

All of these developments were important, but by far the most crucial step taken in making the ILD into a respected champion of black Americans was its participation in the famous Scottsboro case, which proved to be the most significant campaign ever carried out by the organization. In the spring of 1931, local authorities in northeast Alabama arrested nine young black men, the so-called "Scottsboro Boys", and accused them of raping two white women traveling on a freight train. All nine were hastily convicted and sentenced to death. When news of the proceedings reached the North, both the ILD and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sought to enter the case. When the ILD eventually won the confidence of the boys' parents, it gained control of the defense. The group promptly launched a vigorous mass campaign, arguing that the affair was a typical example of Jim-Crow justice in the South. What was needed was not just freedom for the nine but a complete reorganization of the Alabama legal system. According to the organization, such a major change could be obtained only through the creation of a broad, national movement of black and white workers and their allies.

During the months that followed, the ILD, aided by the CPUSA and other groups, made the affair into the most important civil rights case in the 1930s. The ILD records provide extensive documentation on the legal efforts and mass campaign waged in behalf of the Scottsboro Boys. As part of their crusade, the ILD and its allies published pamphlets explaining the facts in the case, raised money for legal and publicity efforts, and staged massive rallies and demonstrations around the world. Several of the boys' mothers toured the United States and even Western Europe, generating interest wherever they spoke.

To handle trial proceedings, the ILD retained a prominent southern white attorney, George W. Chamlee, and later a brilliant criminal lawyer from New York City, Samuel Leibowitz. Distinguished constitutional experts Walter Pollak and Osmund K. Fraenkel directed two successful appeals to the U. S. Supreme Court. Despite several temporary victories by the ILD, the legal proceedings seemed destined to continue forever. Critics blamed Alabama's dogged determination to convict and execute the nine men in part on antagonism toward the ILD's aggressive tactics and its Communist support. In response to such criticism and in hopes of broadening the mass campaign, the organization eventually turned over control of legal policy to an independent Scottsboro committee representing several prominent groups, including the NAACP and the ACLU. In 1937, defense attorneys reached a bizarre compromise with Alabama officials whereby four of the young men were freed but the five others convicted and given long prison sentences. Although it had been unable to free all nine of the Scottsboro Boys, the ILD had developed a remarkable defense campaign through which "Scottsboro' became synonymous with southern racism, repression, and injustice".

Even at the high point of the Scottsboro campaign, the ILD still emphasized that racism and discrimination were by no means limited to the South. Discriminatory activities in the North should, and did, receive careful attention as well. As a result, the group provided legal assistance and conducted localized mass campaigns in behalf of black defendants in virtually every metropolitan area and many smaller communities across the United States. The pages of Labor Defender (later retitled Equal Justice), the group's magazine, are replete with details concerning these local cases. Many Afro-Americans responded warmly to these campaigns and the militant tactics utilized in them. Increasingly, blacks unfavorably contrasted the gradualistic tactics of the NAACP, a bitter rival of the ILD, with the ILD's aggressive and confrontational tactics. This new militancy struck a responsive cord with Afro-Americans who felt that the times required a more assertive response to injustice. As one black educator commented, "There's too much rabbit in most of us and this Scottsboro case has taken a lot of rabbit out and made us fight".

Working on Other Fronts

So dramatic were these black campaigns that they sometimes overshadowed attention from other important ILD activities. Nonetheless, throughout the decade, the group continued to provide invaluable assistance to American industrial workers, especially during organizing drives and strikes. Such legal defense efforts took place in every region of the country and in virtually every industry. An important labor struggle, on which valuable material may be found in the ILD records, was the case of the Gallup, New Mexico, coal miners, who had been involved in a series of bitter incidents with management. At one such confrontation in 1935, a local sheriff was killed. Ten union members were indicted and stood trial for his murder. The ILD helped organize a special defense committee for the ten miners and sent in two investigators, who were promptly abducted and beaten. Refusing to be intimidated, the ILD conducted a national campaign that helped focus considerable attention on repression in New Mexico and eventually gained an acquittal for all but three of the defendants. In 1936 and 1937, the ILD's work with organized labor gained additional prominence, as it provided important legal assistance to the Congress of Industrial Organizations during its famous drive to organize industrial workers. The ILD also remained concerned with abuses involving immigration law and deportation proceedings, enhancing its efforts by cooperating with such specialists in the field as New York City attorney Carol King.

In 1937, as American liberals and leftists embraced the popular front against fascism, the ILD decided to broaden its leadership. Vito Marcantonio, a former U. S. congressman from East Harlem who would regain his seat in the 1938 elections, became president of the organization. Although Marcantonio received electoral assistance from Communists, he always maintained his independence and took an active role in personally supervising ILD activities. His selection indicated that the CPUSA was relinquishing some of its overt control over the organization. However, the choice of CPUSA member Anna Damon as national secretary to replace William L. Patterson, indicated that Communist influence, though somewhat diminished, would still remain strong within the organization.

In the years from 1937 through 1941, the ILD continued its work on issues affecting racial and political minorities, union members, and immigrants. Despite some friendly competition from the newly formed National Negro Congress, the organization remained active in its legal defense work for blacks. The case of John Williams, a black worker from Brooklyn who was accused of rape, captured particular attention. The ILD helped establish a defense committee for Williams, and ILD attorneys Samuel Neuberger and Samuel Shapiro twice convinced appeals courts to overturn his convictions. Eventually the prosecution dropped all charges. On the West Coast the ILD attempted to develop the "California Scottsboro case" of Festus Lewis Coleman, who was accused of rape, but they were not successful.

Under Marcantonio's leadership, the ILD began an important new project in 1939 - a drive against the continuing existence of debt peonage in the South. As part of this program the ILD helped form the Abolish Peonage Committee of America, the first national organization specifically established to combat this abuse. The ILD aided black farm hands in escaping from their rural plantations to the North, provided them with legal aid if extradition proceedings were instigated, and pressured the Department of Justice to seek indictments against abusive landlords. These activities helped publicize the presence of this archaic practice and mobilize public opinion against its continuation. Reflecting Marcantonio's congressional interests, the ILD opened a Washington bureau in 1938. Headed by Louis Coleman, the office advised chapters about pending legislation and lobbied in support of progressive legislation. The bureau strongly endorsed a federal anti-lynching bill, an anti-poll tax law, and various proposals to prohibit discrimination in federal employment.

The entry of the United States into the Second World War had a major impact upon the ILD. At first the organization was able to continue its existing programs, particularly stressing its opposition to employment discrimination in the war effort. But as the war progressed, the ILD began to encounter manpower problems. Moreover, the group gradually received less assistance from the Communist party. Eventually the CPUSA transformed itself into a political association and so vigorously supported the war effort that it abandoned virtually any criticism of American society. This behavior eventually provoked complaints from several black leaders, who feared that the ILD would also become inactive.

Yet the ILD refused to close its doors. Although wartime conditions necessitated a reduced level of activity, the organization continued to support anti-poll tax and anti-lynching legislation, endorsed the Fair Employment Practices Committee, condemned segregation in the Armed Forces, and urged the Justice Department to investigate violence against blacks in the South. The group's magazine, Equal Justice, devoted extensive coverage to violence and discrimination against Afro-Americans. The ILD also defended black servicemen who it felt were treated unjustly. The most prominent of such actions was the so-called "Army Scottsboro case", in which two black privates were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the alleged rape of a white woman on a Pacific island. Marcantonio called the incident "part of a pattern which has spread poisonously throughout every theater of the war", and the ILD joined the NAACP in protesting the convictions to the War Department. Eventually, Army officials greatly reduced the men's sentences. In 1944, the ILD pursued the "Florida Scottsboro case", in which three Gainesville, Florida, men were accused of raping a white woman.

At the war's end, ILD leaders became alarmed over an apparent increase in racial violence, and Marcantonio warned that southern reactionaries sought "to resubjugate the Negro soldier on his return to civilian life". The group attempted to revitalize its activities to meet this challenge, but by early 1946 its national officials had become disappointed at the ILD's continued weakness. One faction began to push for the termination of the ILD and the creation of a new civil rights group which might attract new members and inspire expanded interest. An internal debate over this proposal continued for several months. According to one anti-Communist source, Bella V. Dodd, a New York teachers' union leader and former member of the CPUSA, an ILD official told her that party leader Eugene Dennis had finally sided with those in favor of terminating the ILD, thus settling the dispute.

In any case, delegates attending the ILD's national convention in March 1946 supported this proposal and voted to terminate the ILD. Representatives of several organizations promptly issued a call for a meeting to form a new legal defense group. On April 27 and 28, 1947, just under 400 delegates met in Detroit and voted to establish the Civil Rights Congress (CRC). The ILD formally merged into the new organization, which assumed most of its predecessor's existing programs.

Even though it had only existed for twenty-one years, the ILD accomplished much during its lifetime. It had provided important legal assistance to American workers who, until the late 1930s, usually lacked a strong union to take the lead in their defense. The group's prisoner relief activities, which were continued intact by the CRC, supplied assistance to jailed political prisoners and their families. Although such private activities lacked public visibility, they provided vital aid to impoverished families and demonstrated the organization's sincerity. ILD mass campaigns in behalf of black defendants helped dramatize continuing racism within the southern and American criminal justice systems. Working with the Communist party in such efforts, the ILD helped expose many Afro-Americans for the first time to Marxist ideas and Communist activities. Furthermore, the ILD did not hesitate to select talented blacks for responsible positions. In the Angelo Herndon case, for example, the group broke with local custom and retained two local black attorneys to represent the defendant. The promotion of black Communist William L. Patterson to the top post of national secretary further symbolized the organization's commitment to working not only for but with Afro-Americans.

The mass struggles of the ILD, as well as those led by the CPUSA and labor unions, added an important new component to black protest during the 1930s. As a result, the moderate strategy of the NAACP seemed increasingly out-of-date to many Afro-Americans. As one leader of the National Negro Congress told the ILD in 1937, blacks owed the group "a special debt", not just for specific victories, "but especially for teaching us the technique of mass pressure to help us win our liberation". According to one study, by the end of the 1930s "it had become respectable to support a demonstration or a boycott in the struggle for Negro rights". The ILD's anti-peonage campaign of the late 1930s and early 1940s also played an important role in the eventual demise of this exploitative practice.

All of these activities and programs, as well as many others, made an important contribution to reforming American society, especially in the area of race relations. Perhaps the ILD's greatest accomplishment was to create a new public awareness of the enormous problems faced by blacks who ran afoul of the southern and American legal system. In any case, the fact that the group disbanded in 1964 should not obscure the courageous campaigns waged and the important victories won by the International Labor Defense during its twenty-one years of struggle.

Charles H. Martin, Professor of History, University of Texas at El Paso