The Editor’s Comment

Support Minneapolis Victims

From New International, Vol. VII No. 8 (Whole No. 57), September 1941, p. 200.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

TWENTY-NINE working class militants, some of them members of the Socialist Workers Party and others leaders of the Minneapolis Motor Transport Workers Union, CIO (Local 544), have been indicted on charges of “seditious conspiracy.” This case is of more than passing importance; it is more, even, than the usual attempt by local politicians and bosses to frame up local trade union militants. This case is of definite national importance. It is of national importance because it is part of the nation-wide drive against civil liberties and workers’ rights – and, what is more, the most flagrant and vicious instance of that drive. And it is of national importance because it is clearly a case of the Roosevelt Administration cooking up a charge against the militant leadership of the splendid Local 544 at a time when the local is involved in a deadly struggle against the choking, conservative leadership of Daniel Tobin and his AFL Teamsters Union from which Local 544 split when Tobin threatened to remove its militant leadership by a bureaucratic ukase.

The government is now repaying Tobin a little debt which accrued to him for his work in the Democratic campaign, besides also persecuting a section of the labor movement which is not merely its docile servant. But the indictment is also a part of the Roosevelt war program which requires complete control over the labor movement and meets the Administrations need to end all militant struggles of labor for an improvement of their lot. The New International calls upon all militant trade unionists, socialists and radicals to lend every possible support to the leaders of Local 544 and those members of the Socialist Workers Party under indictment.

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