International Labor Defense

The ILD defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the anti-lynching, movements for civil rights, and prominently participated in the defense and legal appeals in the cause célèbre of the Scottsboro Boys in the early 1930s.

In 1946 the ILD was merged with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties to form the Civil Rights Congress, which served as the new legal defense organization of the Communist Party USA.

In some cases, an employer or government has gone to court to achieve termination of strike actions, or to seek prosecution for alleged malefactors for physical violence or property damage resulting from such turmoil.

The use of the injunction by employers to prohibit specific actions and its enforcement by the courts occasionally resulted in groups of defendants being embroiled in the costly legal system for union activities.

The fledgling American Communist movement which emerged in the summer of 1919 quickly was subject to systemic legal attack as part of the First Red Scare.

[2] This effort was expanded and intensified on the night of January 2/3, 1920 in a mass dragnet by the Bureau of Investigation of the Justice Department, coordinated by the newly appointed J. Edgar Hoover, 24-year-old assistant to the Attorney General of the United States, and remembered in history as the Palmer Raids.

An estimated 10,000 arrests and detentions resulted from the latter operation, with hundreds held for possible deportation from the United States for alleged violation of immigration laws caused by their purported "anarchist" political activity.

[2] A number of prominent liberal and radical attorneys were employed by the group, including Swinburne Hale, Walter Nelles, Charles Recht, and Joseph R.

[2] In August 1922 another legal crisis arose for the American Communist movement when its 1922 National Convention at Bridgman, Michigan was raided by state and federal authorities, resulting in the arrest of dozens of leading party activists, headed by top trade union official William Z.

In the spring of 1922 "Big Bill" Haywood, former Wobbly leader turned bail-jumper and defector to Soviet Russia, made a proposal in Moscow to establish a new entity dedicated to the legal defense of political prisoners in the United States, given its level of activity.

[3] IRA was formally launched on an international basis in conjunction with the 4th World Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow from November 5 to December 5, 1922.

[4] In its initial phase, IRA conducted activities on behalf of jailed Communists only, rather than non-party labor activists and members of other political organizations.

[4] The Russian national section, MOPR, was responsible for providing some 98% of the funds gathered in 1923, of which more than 70% were spent on the defense and support of jailed revolutionaries in Germany and Bulgaria alone — two countries in which there were failed Communist uprisings in that year.

In sum:[4] The Comintern apparatus by 1926 had determined that agitation and propaganda, the means by which IRA made contact with and attempted to gain influence over the masses, would become the central work of the organization...

Having already set up a sound organizational structure, IRA now began to refine its methods of reaching the non-Communist masses, i.e., its weapons of agitation and propaganda.

James P. Cannon, a former Industrial Workers of the World activist who had become a Communist party leader, was particularly interested in such a new legal defense structure.

[5] This idea of a broad party-sponsored organization for the defense of so-called "class war prisoners" was further developed in Moscow in March 1925 during conversations between Cannon and William D. Haywood, an American IWW leader who had defected to Soviet Russia.

Cannon was sent on the road to build support for the fledgling ILD, making use of his extensive network of personal contacts with present and former members of the IWW (so-called "Wobblies").

Cannon and Haywood in Moscow had drawn up an initial list of 106 "class war prisoners" needing legal and financial support, mostly convicted Wobblies jailed under various state criminal syndicalism charges.

[7] the next month, the list had 128 names, including such high-profile cases as those of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, purported Preparedness Day bombers Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, and John B. McNamara, who had confessed to the Los Angeles Times Bombing.

By 1928 the opposing factional group headed by Jay Lovestone had gained a position of dominance over the party, and they gave increased scrutiny and criticism to ILD activities.

[8] In addition to participating in defense in sensational cases such as those of Sacco and Vanzetti and Tom Mooney, the ILD engaged attorneys in support of jailed strikers in various labor actions.

In the late 1920s, it initiated actions on behalf of striking anthracite coal miners in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Illinois, as well as coordinating legal defense and relief for jailed textile workers in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

[10] In 1928, ILD represented party members Fred Beal, Clarence Miller and five other defendants charged, and ultimately convicted, of conspiracy in the strike-related killing of a police chief in Gastonia, North Carolina.

Beal was later to charge that in its instructions to witnesses the party deliberately torpedoed the defense strategy of the ILD's Leon Josephson of sticking to the facts (which included the deaths of several strikers) and of not playing into the prosecution's attempt to place the defendants' revolutionary beliefs on trial.

[14] The ILD also worked to defend against various government attempts to pass criminal syndicalism legislation in the 1930s, which suppressed workers' right to organize and to strike.

The Party found that its peak of influence had passed after the 1940s, e.g., in 1954, in a case managed by the NAACP, the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.

Samuel A. Neuberger was an ILD lawyer[16] and represented Morris U. Cohen before the Rapp-Coudert Committee in 1941[17] and the US Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) in 1953.

Major cases include: Beginning in January 1926, the ILD published Labor Defender, as a monthly, profusely illustrated magazine with a low cover price of 10 cents.

[20] Labor Defender depicted a black-and-white world of heroic trade unionists and dastardly factory owners, of oppressed African Americans struggling for freedom against the Ku Klux Klan and the use of state terror to stifle and divide and destroy all opposition.