On April 28, 1954, a six month federal government investigation of the Labor Youth League (LYL), the US Communist Party’s youth and student group, came to an end. The Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB), a quasi-judicial government agency founded under the Internal Security Act of 1950 (the McCarran Act) and amended in later legislation during what is called the McCarthy era, concluded its case against the LYL, which had been charged with being an agent of a foreign power—the Soviet Union.
Several other Communist-led organizations faced these same charges. The SACB was able to close down most education-related activities of the Communist Party, such as the Thomas Jefferson School of Social Sciences (1944-1956) in New York City, and the California Labor School (1944-1957) in San Francisco and Oakland by requiring them to register as an agent of a foreign power with the US government, which of course they would not do. The Communist schools disbanded, but some other left-led organizations, such as the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (surviving volunteers from the 1936-1939 anti-fascist struggle in Spain), and the Communist Party itself managed to beat back the SACB’s assault.
At the SACB hearings the leadership of the LYL was subject to intensive questioning. Its National Chairman, Leon Wofsy (later a distinguished bio-chemist at the University of California at Berkeley) took the stand for eleven days. Roosevelt Ward, Jr., Chairman of the LYL’s Harlem, New York, chapter, and Henry H. Wortis, LYL Chairman at the University of Wisconsin, also testified. The trial record comprised almost 5,000 pages. The LYL issued a 125-page pamphlet, LYL Takes the Stand (October 1954) presenting a small portion of the questions and testimony, including the following exchange between Wortis and the hearing officer: “In a war between the United States and the Soviet Union would you do all you could to help defeat the Soviet Union, even if the United States started the war?� Wortis replied that he would be “very let down that my government would instigate such an aggressive act,� adding that should such a war take place he had a very small chance of “surviving through [its] initial stages.�
In early August of that same year Harry P. Cain, the hearing Chairman, issued the SACB’s decision against the organization. The LYL then disbanded, although a youth affiliate of the Communist Party (under a
series of other names) continues to the present day.
Marvin E. Gettleman is Emeritus Professor of History at Brooklyn Polytechnic University. He is at work on a book entitled Training for the Class Struggle, a study of the US Communist Party’s pedagogical work.
A version of this article first appeared in H-Education. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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