The other organizations that had briefly become popular on campus in the late 1940s – Young Progressives of America, American Veterans Committee, Labor Youth League – had all been discredited as either Communist Party USA or Communist Party USA influenced.
[4] In contrast to the low brow style of the CPUSA, the Shachtmanites attempted appeal to intellectuals and "elite culture".
Writers like Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti would frequent SYL and YSL meetings.
In one instance, while Shachtman was delivering a lecture on Dadaism a disgruntled Dadaist threw a bowl of potato salad at him, an event commemorated in Ginsberg's Howl.
The SYL recruited Michael Harrington and Bogdan Denitch within the YPSL, partially on the basis of their opposition to the Korean War, which the Socialist Party supported.
A left group within the YSL, consisting of about a quarter of its membership led by Tim Wohlforth rejected the merger and went into the Socialist Workers Party affiliate, the Young Socialist Alliance, where they would eventually form the germ of the Revolutionary Tendency and, from that, the Spartacist League.