Picayune red-baiting?

“The Spartacist League and certain other Communist activities in Louisiana” is a document from 1967, issued by the Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities, a state-level version in Louisiana of the more notorious House Un-American Activities Committee at the federal level. It's freely available on the web.

Despite their small size, the Trotskyist Spartacist League (SL) and the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PLP or PL), were seen as a threat by the Louisiana authorities. The local police infiltrated the Spartacist League, and about a third of this document consists of testimonies by the informers. And yes, they do name names, revealing the identities, family backgrounds and current employment of all Spartacist supporters in Louisiana. For some reason, the Committee didn't force the fingered Spartacists to testify. The document further contains a long summary by Jack Rogers, the Committee's counsel. Finally, it contains copies of articles and leaflets published by the Spartacist League, and (curiously) also some anti-leftist material lampooning unruly students or radicals.

What's less clear is why small groups of this kind were deemed interesting by “the proper authorities”. There seems to have been two reasons. One was the anti-war movement, which was growing all over the United States. The other was the civil rights movement (Louisiana was a Southern, ex-Jim Crow state). Both the SL and the PLP were very active in these two movements. The SL had recruited one of Stokely Carmichael's bodyguards, a man who was also a member of Deacons for Defense and Justice, a Black armed self-defense group. (Carmichael was a prominent civil rights activist and advocate of Black Power.) The SL was also suspected of involvement in “race riots” in New York and Chicago. Of course, another reason to go after small groups is to make the larger groups – presumably the SWP, CP and SNCC – worried that *they* might be next…

On one point, the proceedings of the Committee contain an almost amusing contradiction. The informers (!) deny that the Spartacist League harbor concrete plans for violent action. The SL's belief in revolutionary violence is “theoretical at the present time”, the group concentrates on propaganda and recruitment, and has even told Carmichael's bodyguard to strike a less militant pose in public. One of the informers express surprise that the SL didn't talk more of violence. The Committee counsel Rogers, by contrast, claim that the Spartacists *are* violent at the present time, call them “traitors” and bemoan the fact that they can't be persecuted or outlawed. The Committee document even quotes U.S. legislation under which treason is a capital offense!

Both the SL and the PLP still exists. Ironically, “The Spartacist League and certain other Communist activities” is interesting since it shows that the SL wasn't as sectarian and “out there” during the late 1960's as it became later. Their Un-American activities strike me as pretty regular: work with anti-war groups and civil right groups, work within the SDS, attempts to form a united left front, approaches to “liberal clubs” on campus, etc. (It's not clear whether “liberal” is a political designation or simply refers to liberal arts!) Still, the constant intramural bickering on the far left was never far behind, as when the PLP unceremoniously expelled the SL from the “Movement for Democratic Change”.

The SL and their Maoist competitors somehow survived this picayune red-baiting, but David Duke's electoral successes and the fall out after Hurricane Katrina shows that much still needs to be done in the Pelican State. In a pro-American (as in pro-Union) fashion, of course.