The U.S. capitalist state has a long history of a “war on terror” against the working class and any dissenters, going as far back as 1798 in President George Washington’s second term. That year four bills known as the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed to quell anyone favoring the French Revolution. Any “alien” who was a “danger to peace and safety or subject to a foreign power” are subjected to imprisonment. Newspapers were shut down and their editors arrested for publishing “any false, scandalous or malicious writing.”
Two hundred and fifty years of black slavery were enforced by the government, North and South. The Fugitive Slave Act sent slaves who escaped to the North from Southern plantations back to slavery. Post-Civil War conditions were hardly better for ex-slaves who were terrorized by racist Ku Klux Klan vigilantes, segregated and denied basic rights by Southern state governments for another 100 years.
From the 18th century on, the U.S. military enacted genocidal murder on millions of indigenous people of the U.S., driving them off their lands and restricting them to concentration camp-like reservations, which continue today.
In 1886, Chicago cops killed protesters demonstrating for the 8-hour work day — following a general strike — and later hung four of its leaders. It was out of this strike that May Day was born, which PLP has been celebrating for the past 42 years.
From 1918 to 1921, Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer launched an anti-communist crusade, carried out by incoming FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Amid a wave of post-World War I strikes, communists were blamed for all social ills. Without warrants, Palmer thugs raided and smashed union offices and the headquarters of communist and socialist organizations. As many as 10,000 were arrested. In December, 1919, 249 resident aliens were seized and put on a ship deporting them to the Soviet Union (then two years old). The crusade’s hysteria was exemplified by the imprisonment of a Connecticut clothing salesman for saying he thought “Lenin was smart.”
Red-led Auto, Steel Workers Beat Back Bosses’ Attacks
Fifteen years later, vigilantes organized by General Motors attempted to smash the then growing communist-led auto sit-down strikes. The National Guard was ordered out to surround the plants in an attempt to starve out the workers. But 40,000 workers from four states descended on Flint, Michigan, surrounding GM’s struck plants and forced the company to recognize the United Auto Workers Union and agree to a 40-hour week.
May 30, 1937, saw the Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre, when police shot at a crowd of 1,500 strikers marching peacefully on the company’s South Chicago plant. Ten workers were killed, shot in the back, and 90 others wounded. The workers eventually won union recognition.
In June, 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act — commonly known as the Smith Act — which made it a crime to belong to an organization that advocated overthrow of the U.S. government. Over 200 members of the Communist Party were indicted under its provisions and its entire leadership was convicted and jailed for from five to eight years.
A Page from Hitler’s Book: Concentration Camps
In 1941, the Roosevelt Administration seized hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans and put them in concentration camps for the entire four years of World War II as “suspected spies.” They lost their homes, farms, and small businesses.
A decade later Congress passed the anti-communist Internal Security Act of 1950, the McCarran Act, mandating the fingerprinting and registration of all “subversives” in the U.S. and authorizing concentration camps “for emergency situations.” Six were constructed across the country.
That same year Congress enacted the Subversive Activities Control and Emergency Detention Acts which required “communist organizations” to register with the U.S. Attorney General. It allowed detention of  “dangerous, disloyal or subversive persons during wartime or in an “internal security emergency.” Such citizens could be barred from entering or leaving the country. The bill was used to revoke Paul Robeson’s (pro-communist artist) passport, preventing him from traveling outside the U.S. to expose its racist apartheid system.
During this period, Congress also passed two anti-communist, anti-labor laws. The Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin Laws barred communists from holding union office even if elected by the rank and file. They instituted injunction clauses to prevent workers from striking upon contract expirations. They also made it more difficult to organize non-union shops and proved a bonanza for the bosses.
Throughout this era, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) operated an all-out anti-communist witch-hunt, going from city to city to subpoena leftists and communists.
When reds were asked if they were members of the Communist Party and when the latter refused to answer, citing the 5th Amendment “protection” against self-incrimination, this led to firing as well as jailing for “contempt of Congress.” But here is where HUAC met its match with PL and ultimately its demise.
PL’ers Turn the Tables
on the Anti-Communist
Witch-hunters
After members of the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM, forerunner of the Progressive Labor Party) had broken the government ban on travel to Cuba, in 1963 they were called before HUAC in Washington, DC, and asked the big question. They not only did not hide behind the 5th Amendment but shot back that they “were proud to be communists.” HUAC was dumfounded. CP members had never replied in this fashion. PL’ers turned the hearings into a political attack on HUAC, exposing the Kennedy Administration’s imperialist invasion of Vietnam. Pictures depicting this counter-attack were flashed across the front pages of newspapers across the country.
After the 1964 Harlem Rebellion, a New York City Grand Jury was convened to try to prove that PLM had “incited a riot.” PL’ers refused to cooperate with the rich man’s Jury while mass pickets lined the streets outside the hearing rooms. Several PL members were cited for contempt for their non-cooperation and sentenced to continuous 30-day jail terms to force them to cooperate. They were held in the notorious Greenwhich Women’s House of Detention where they exposed the horrific conditions inside that jail while mass picket lines ringed the prison. The exposé led to the institution’s closing.
In 1964, HUAC came to Buffalo, where PL had a base among steel, auto and other basic industrial workers, as well as in the colleges, the Committee tried to “expose” them in order to get them fired. But PL turned the tables on HUAC. In the hearings, members exposed them as fascists while outside PL organized mass demonstrations on the streets, including a broad spectrum of anti-racist, anti-fascist workers and professors. This had never happened at any of HUAC’s previous anti-communist forays. HUAC was literally run out of town and gradually faded from sight.
From this base in Buffalo and with this counter-attack, PL showed that the bosses’ anti-communism can be challenged and defeated. It was out of such experiences that the Progressive Labor Party was born and to this day is the leading force against the terrorists in the U.S. ruling class, championing the fight for communism in the international working class.