In 1941, in an incident better known in the history of the left than in the history of the law, 29 Trotskyists found themselves indicted for conspiring to overthrow the government. These members of the tiny Socialist Workers Party, half of whom were also members of a radical Teamsters local unit in Minneapolis, were the first targets of the newly passed Smith Act, which made it illegal to advocate the overthrow of the government. In what became known as the Dunne case, 18 were ultimately found guilty, and sentenced to prison terms of between 12 and 16 months.
In Trotskyists on Trial, Donna Haverty-Stacke carefully reconstructs the history of this half-remembered case, arguing that it deserves more attention as a central moment in the construction of the Cold War national-security state. The book is based on exhaustive research, drawing on Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI files (often obtained through Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests), court records, the personal papers of key individuals, and the records of the FDR administration, the Teamsters, and the Socialist Workers Party.
The result is a clear and comprehensive account of the emergence and trajectory of the case. Haverty-Stacke begins by identifying the “multiple historical forces” (61) that produced the prosecution: the violence of labor conflict in 1930s Minneapolis, which led the Teamsters to arm for self-defense; tangled intra-union conflict between radical and anti-radical Teamsters, including Daniel Tobin, Teamster President, who telegrammed the White House to request the prosecution; and a growing national-security apparatus that was fearful that transportation strikes by the pacifist Trotskyists could disrupt the defense economy. Haverty-Stacke gently revises earlier accounts that emphasized Tobin's telegram as the primary, and faintly conspiratorial, cause of the prosecution (it was, after all, the calling in of a political favor to win a union struggle). Haverty-Stacke instead suggests that it was one of many autonomous, but mutually intersecting, causes.
A close account of the trial then takes up approximately a quarter of the narrative. Haverty-Stacke rightly emphasizes the ways that the trial foreshadowed the more famous Smith Act prosecution of the Communist Party leadership in the Dennis case 8 years later; both trials saw an endless parsing of radical literature and philosophy to assess whether or not there was an actual conspiracy to overthrow the state. Following the guilty verdict, and an unsuccessful appeal, Haverty-Stacke follows the Trotskyists into prison and then back into the postwar world, tracing their efforts to end FBI surveillance of their activities. In a clever twist, she uses those objectionably voluminous and voyeuristic surveillance files to glimpse the personal and political struggles of her actors in their later years, after they were no longer in the headlines. What emerges is an intriguingly quotidian history of divorce, misfortune, disillusionment, and also ongoing political commitment.
Although the book's close focus on the trajectory of the case is its greatest strength, this also makes it difficult to place the case in the longer arc of civil liberties and the national security state. Haverty-Stacke suggests in the introduction that Dunne was a “turning point” in First Amendment litigation and “had critical legal consequences” because it legitimized the Smith Act (6). Following her Trotskyist protagonists, Haverty-Stacke emphasizes the rise of repression in the wake of Dunne, seeing it as a moment when liberty was traded for security with long-term consequences (“since the age of FDR,” as the book's subtitle puts it). There is clearly something to this claim in both the specific and general sense. The prosecutors and judge in the later Dennis trial, for example, took guidance from the earlier Trotskyist case; the early Cold War was an obviously grim chapter in the history of free speech.
Still, Dunne’s importance as a critical juncture in the emergence of what came next is left rather underspecified. How significant was this precedent in shaping the likelihood or the form of the Cold War trials? And did Dunne produce a broader culture of legal or political legitimacy for Cold War repression of speech? These are difficult questions, and to answer them fully would require widening the lens beyond the details of the case, but given the lack of speech prosecutions between Dunne and Dennis, and the proliferation of security fears in the late 1940s, one wonders how significant the 1941 trial was to the Cold War persecution of leftists (and, flirting with the counterfactual, whether Dennis might have happened without Dunne). Similarly, although Haverty-Stacke, focused on federal repression of speech, looks forward to the Cold War throughout the book, one wonders how the case would look in light of early twentieth century prosecutions for criminal advocacy at the state level. In that context, Dunne might appear to be the culmination, not the emergence, of a repressive tendency.
More fundamentally, to see Dunne only as a moment of declension risks flattening much of the interesting ambiguity that Haverty-Stacke's careful research uncovered. Far from a clear legitimation of the Smith Act, the prosecution of the Trotskyists was controversial: members of the DOJ were somewhat reluctant to bring the prosecution because of their belief in free speech; the jury acquitted five of the defendants and counselled leniency in sentencing the remainder; civil libertarians, like the ACLU, protested the decision; and three Supreme Court justices tried, in vain, to hear an appeal of the case, all despite the radicalism and marginality of the defendants. (Infamously, in the wake of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, even the Communist Party supported the prosecution of the pacifist Trotskyists, a stance that would soon prove ironic.) From the perspective of World War I era civil liberties advocates, Dunne might have been more striking for what it revealed about the rising legitimacy of free speech claims as opposed to the new legitimacy of the security state.
And although it is true that this would have been cold comfort to the Trotskyists at the heart of the case, it is significant that after World War II they suffered more from illegal surveillance than from prosecutions for speech acts. This, too, could be seen as a product of the curious ways that a rising, if limited, respect for free speech clashed with a rising respect for the national security state. Formal speech prosecution was out; covert surveillance was in. This would not challenge Haverty-Stacke's central claim about the rise of political repression, but it would raise new questions about the shifting logic and modality of repression in the twentieth century.
In summary, although Trotskyists on Trial is an excellent account of the dynamics of this important and interesting trial, it is likely to leave readers with many questions about Dunne's place in the longer histories of civil liberties and the national security state. But perhaps those are problems for another book. Whoever ends up writing it will be deeply indebted to Haverty-Stacke's careful work, which will remain the go-to reference on the Dunne case for a long time.
