[George Breitman joined the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1935 and has been a member of its National Committee since 1939. On April 30 and May 1 he testified in the lawsuit against U.S. government spying and harassment brought by the SWP and Young Socialist Alliance.
[In the first part of Breitman's testimony he went through the government's so-called Mandigo affidavit point by point to show the lies and inaccuracies in it. The Mandigo affidavit, named after the FBI agent who wrote it, was the government's attempt to document the supposed crimes of SWP and YSA leaders. What it catalogues are their public political activities and their advocacy of Marxist ideas.
[In the second part of his testimony Breitman dealt with the SWP's involvement in the Fourth International during World War II. The following are excerpts from that testimony.
[The questioning is being conducted by Margaret Winter, attorney for the socialists.]
Question. Mr. Breitman, were you present at the founding convention of the SWP in early 1938?
Answer. Yes.
Q. And you were a delegate to that convention?
A. I was a delegate. I was a member of the credentials committee and on some other commission.
Q. Have you written anything on the founding convention?
A. I prepared a book called The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party, which is going to be published this year. It contains documents, minutes, and reports of the Socialist Workers Party's first and second conventions, and meetings of the national committee in between.
Judge Griesa. When was the opening convention?
Breitman. It began the last day of 1937 and ended on January 3, 1938.
Q. Was the Fourth International in existence at the time of the founding convention of the SWP?
A. No, this convention was in January, 1938, and the Fourth International was not founded until September of that year. But there was a forerunner organization called the Movement for the Fourth International.
Q. Did the new SWP support the Movement for the Fourth International?
A. At this founding convention of the SWP, a report was adopted to affiliate with the Movement for the Fourth International, and to help work toward the creation of the Fourth International.
Q. What else was decided at the founding convention of the SWP-besides support for the Fourth International that was about to come into being?
A. Well, there were several resolutions on current questions of that period—one on the Soviet Union, another one on Spain. There were resolutions on trade union work and unemployed work.
There was the adoption of a constitution. There was a debate over the name of the new organization, and there was adoption of a declaration of principles.
Declaration of Principles
Q. I am handing you Plaintiffs' Exhibit 253 for identification. Will you state what that document is?
A. This is the pamphlet which was issued a few weeks after the convention, containing the declaration of principles adopted at the founding convention and the constitution of the organization that was adopted at the founding convention.
Q. Did the founding convention take any position on the relative merits of a multiparty political system as opposed to a one-party political system under socialism?
A. Yes, in the declaration of principles, it was very plainly stated that the party stands for freedom of speech, press, assembly, and the right of opposition parties within American society, after the establishment of a workers state
Griesa. Where are these statements?
Breitman. On page 8 there is a section called "The Workers State." The last paragraph in it says, "While the workers state will necessarily reserve to itself the indispensable right to take all requisite measures to deal with violence and armed attacks against the revolutionary regime, it will, at the same time, assure adequate civil rights to opposition individuals, groups and political parties and will guarantee the opportunity for the expression of opposition through the allotment of press, radio and assembly facilities in accordance with the real strength among the people of the opposition groups or parties."
Q. What role, if any, did Leon Trotsky personally play in the founding convention of the SWP?
A. Well, he was not in the United States, of course, and he was not permitted to visit the United States, even for health consultations. But he participated in the form of articles that he wrote, which were printed in the discussion bulletin preceding the convention, and in letters that he wrote to the leaders of the new party.
Fourth International
Q. You testified a little earlier that the founding congress of the Fourth International was in September, 1938, I believe?
A. Yes.
Q. Did the SWP participate in that founding congress?
A. Yes.
Q. Did the SWP send delegates to that congress?
A. It did.
Q. How many?
A. Well, there were three Americans who were delegates. Two were leaders of the Socialist Workers Party-James P. Cannon and Max Schachtman-who had both been founders of the so-called Trotskyist Tendency in the United States.
The third person was a man named Nathan Gould, who was the leader of the youth organization that was affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party. These three went to the founding congress as delegates.
Q. Was the fact of their participation at this founding congress publicized at the time by the SWP?
A. No.
Q. And why not?
Leaders Assassinated
A. Well, this was more or less an illegal congress because Stalin and the Soviet secret police had decided to kill as many leaders of this Fourth Internationalist movement as possible. In the year preceding the congress, in September, they did succeed in killing several people who were unquestionably international leaders of this movement. These included Trotsky's son, who was assassinated in a Paris hospital in February, 1938, and Rudolph Klement, the administrative secretary of the Fourth International, who was kidnapped and whose headless body was found in the Seine River a few days before the congress opened.
So there was considerable concern about the safety of people who were known to be going to the congress, and it was not publicized.
We knew about it inside the party because of the great difficulty we had in raising money to send these delegates to the congress. They were elected in April, and in June they were supposed to leave. But there wasn't enough money for two of them to go, so only one went in June Cannon. We had to carry on a big fund drive for about six weeks before money was raised to send Schachtman. And in the end we had to take a bank loan in order to be able to put him on a ship.
Q. At what time, if ever, did the SWP make public the fact that these three Americans had participated in the founding congress?
A. Well, in 1973 we published a book called Documents of the Fourth International, the Formative Years, 1933-1940.
This book reported who the delegates were and included minutes, as well as all of the resolutions that had been adopted by the congress.
We got those minutes only in 1972, and we published them in the first book thereafter. Reading those minutes it is clear who the three Americans were. They are identified by their own names.
Election of IEC
Q. Were any SWP members elected to leadership bodies at the Fourth International at the founding world congress?
A. Yes.
Q. Who were they?
A. There were three Americans elected to the International Executive Committee: Cannon, Schachtman, and the congress asked the SWP to select a third member. I should add that the International Executive Committee consisted of fifteen members, one of whom was Trotsky and three of whom were Americans.
Griesa. What did the Fourth International request?
Breitman. It requested that the SWP select the third person rather than have him or her elected directly by the congress.
Griesa. All right. Who was the third person?
Breitman. The third person was Carl Skoglund. He was not identified this way in the minutes where he was elected in November, 1938. It took me four years to find out his identity, but I think it is now quite well-established-that he was the third member.
Griesa. So the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International consisted of fifteen people, one of whom was Leon Trotsky?
Breitman. Right.
Griesa. Did he travel outside of Mexico at all?
Breitman. No. Once he reached Mexico he stayed there until his death.
Founding Congress
Q. What was decided at the founding congress of the Fourth International?
A. Well, the main decisions revolved around the adoption of program and the decision to actually found the Fourth International at that point.
The program, which has become known popularly as the Transitional Program, was written in its first draft by Trotsky in Mexico. After being discussed for several months before the congress, it was discussed at the congress and adopted there.
In addition, as I have said, they decided to set up the International at that point, and they elected a leadership to guide the organization until the next congress.
This was the International Executive Committee of fifteen that I have referred to.
And, in addition to that, they decided that in the event of war, the center of the Fourth International should be transferred to the western hemisphere.
What Is the
Socialist Lawsuit?
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) are putting the U.S. government on trial for illegal acts that have been committed against them.
The lawsuit, begun in July 1973, demands $40 million in damages for years of government spying and harassment, and an injunction to halt any further illegal government activity against the SWP and YSA.
An important part of the lawsuit is the socialists' challenge to the U.S. government's antidemocratic thoughtcontrol laws and presidential executive orders, which try to make just the advocacy of socialist ideas illegal.
On trial are the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and other U.S. government agencies that have interfered with the political rights of the socialists.
These agencies claim they have the legal right to spy on, harass, and deport anyone whose political views they disapprove of.
The lawsuit has forced the release of thousands of U.S. government documents describing burglaries, electronic surveillance, informers, interception of mail, blacklisting, bomb threats, physical violence, and so on.
The trial opened on April 2 in New York City and is expected to last into July.
Q. How do you know what decisions were made at this founding convention?
A. Well, we have the documents. There are some 150 pages of documents about this congress in this book that I referred to, Documents of the Fourth International.
We also have had an opportunity to study the archives of Leon Trotsky at Harvard. Trotsky was in the habit of retaining, saving, documents that were sent to him-political documents sent to him-from throughout the world. He received minutes of different national groups, of international groups, and so on, and he put them away.
Before he died, his archives were sold to Harvard University, and they were delivered shortly after his death.
Until last year we had access to, I forget how many, six or seven thousand different documents. But last year, in accordance with a stipulation they made and that Harvard accepted, they opened up another portion the final portion-of his archives to the public. There we found a great many additional documents about the internal life, development, and disputes of the Fourth International and its predecessor groups. International Center
Q. When war did break out in Europe, did the center of the Fourth International shift?
A. Yes. At the time that the war broke out, there was an American in Europe working with the International Executive Committee. That was Albert Goldman. When the war began, he left and returned to the United States. But before the war or before he returned, before he arrived in New York, there was a meeting in New York of six people, five of whom were members of the International Executive Committee. They decided that they should take action-did I say when this was, what date?
Q. You didn't give the precise date.
A. This was eleven days after the declaration of war, on September 12, 1939. This small body met and decided that with the approval of three other International Executive Committee members in the western hemisphere they would assume the funetions of the International Executive Committee here.
A week or nine days later, Goldman arrived and confirmed what had happened in Europe was that all of the members of the Fourth International had either been arrested, or conscripted, or driven underground declared illegal as an organization. The IEC that had existed there had ceased to function.
During this nine-day period, the three other members of the committee on this continent had been consulted and they approved of this decision.
So at this meeting, on the 21st of September, the decision was made final that this body would assume the functions of the International Executive Committee until further notice.
Q. Now, I think you said there were five IEC members who held the first meeting:
A. Yes.
Role of Americans
Q. How many of these were Americans?
A. Three of these were Americans: Cannon, Schachtman and Gould. Gould representing the International Youth Organization affiliated to the Fourth International. He was, I guess, what you would call a fraternal member or a sixteenth member.
Anyhow, he attended it. Those were the three North Americans who attended.
There were two other members of the IEC, one who hailed from the Caribbean and one who came from Brazil.
And the other significant action of this meeting was that they elected as administrative secretary of the IEC an SWP member named Sam Gordon.
Q. Were you present at that IEC meeting?
A. No.
Q. Do you base your knowledge of this meeting on the same-
A. Last year we obtained the minutes of these two meetings from Harvard.
Q. That you described previously?
A. Yes. The names in it are all pseudonyms, and I think we have tracked down the real names of most of the people involved but there are one or two that still elude us.
Q. Was there an office for the Fourth International in New York?
A. No.
Q. What was the role of Trotsky in these IEC meetings, if any?
A. Well, he was one of the three who was not in New York, and he sent his approval of the course that was proposed by the people in New York.
Q. That is, there were the five IEC members who met originally, and at the second meeting on September 21st you had the approval of three others, and he was one of the three?
A. Yes.
Griesa. So it was expanded to eight?
Breitman. It was expanded to eight, but it was understood that the other three would not be present at its meetings in New York.
Q. And those eight represented a majority of the fifteen-member IEC?
A. Yes.
Q. How long did this IEC function as a body?
A. Not very long. There was a factional dispute going on in the Socialist Workers Party at that time over the role of the Soviet Union in the war, and whether or not the
SWP and the Fourth International should defend the Soviet Union in this war.
The IEC became paralyzed and ceased to function after November because they were unable to get a clear-cut majority for either point of view. So this executive committee existed nominally until May, 1940, when an emergency conference of the Fourth International was held-in order to resolve the political dispute that was going on and to elect a new IEC which could function.
Emergency Conference
Q. Mr. Breitman, before the break you were talking about this center of the Fourth International when it shifted to New York.
The last thing you had talked about with respect to the center in New York was an emergency conference in 1940. Could you briefly describe what this conference did?
A. It adopted a manifesto about the war which had been written by Trotsky in its first draft. It elected a new International Executive Committee.
Judge Griesa. Who was it that did these things?
Breitman. An emergency conference of the Fourth International.
Griesa. That was held in 1940?
Breitman. Yes. It was attended by delegates from North America, South America, Australia, and some mandated delegates from Europe delegates who were mandated from Europe, rather.
Griesa. Where was it?
Breitman. This was in New York.
Q. Who were the Americans present at this conference, Mr. Breitman?
A. James P. Cannon, Sam Gordon, Albert Goldman, Felix Morrow were the delegates and there was a fifth person. Goldman was the attorney of the party and Morrow was then editor of the Militant.
The fifth person in attendance was Joseph Hansen, who was invited to attend with voice but no vote.
Q. Were Americans elected to the new IEC?
A. Yes. There were three Americans elected to the new IEC-Cannon, Goldman, I think, and Dobbs.
Q. How do you know these facts?
A. Excuse me, there were four-Cannon, Gordon, Goldman, and Dobbs.
Q. How do you know these facts?
A. Because last year when the final part of the Trotsky archives at Harvard were opened, I wrote for and obtained a copy of the minutes of this conference.
Q. After this 1940 emergency conference what did the International center in New
York do, if anything-the International center of the Fourth International?
A. Well, it tried to maintain or regain contact with the different sections or parties of the International throughout the world.
It published occasional documents, declarations and manifestos on the major issues occurring in the war.
Q. For what period of time did the International operate in New York?
A. This International center that emerged from the emergency conference operated from 1940 to 1945.
Q. Who participated in the work of the center?
A. Well, some leaders of the SWP, and some refugees from Europe, some delegates from Latin America.
Q. What kind of communication was there between the center and New York and Europe during the war?
A. It was very scanty and very limited, especially in the early years of the war.
As Hitler was driven back beginning in 1944, contact began to be made with all of France, and not just the part that was unoccupied-and with other countries that they had been unable to reach until then.
But up until around 1944 there was small contact, infrequent and irregular.
Disaffiliation
Q. Mr. Breitman: I believe you testified that you were present at the December, 1940, convention of the SWP.
A. I don't believe I did, but I was present.
Q. Were you a delegate?
A. Yes, I was a delegate.
Griesa. The date again?
Breitman. December, 1940. That was the Fourth National Convention of the Socialist Workers Party. It was called a special convention.
Q. Was that convention the one at which the SWP voted to disaffiliate from the Fourth International because of the Voorhis Act?
A. Yes.
Q. Were there any other major decisions at this convention besides the decision to disaffiliate?
A. The other decision was to suspend the declaration of, or to revoke-I forget the exact word-the declaration of principles that had been adopted at the founding convention in January, 1938.
Q. Why was that decision made?
A. Because the position that the declaration of principles had taken on a number of questions was no longer up to date. The party, in the meantime in this three-year period, had changed its position on the labor
George Breitman on the witness stand.
party question, and had decided to support a referendum on war, where previously it had been opposed to it. A number of other parts of the declaration of principles had been outmoded.
So it was decided to withdraw the declaration of principles and instruct the national committee to prepare a new draft.
Q. And did the SWP make public the major decisions of this convention?
A. Yes.
Q. I am handing you a copy of Socialist Appeal, dated December 28, 1940. Are those decisions published in this issue of 'Socialist Appeal'?
A. Yes, on the bottom of the page that is, on page 2 of this compilation-there is an article called "Special National Convention of SWP, Acts on International Relations."
And I think it contains the full resolution on both these questions that I have referred to in full.
Q. Is 'Socialist Appeal' the same newspaper as the Militant?
A. Yes. At that time the Militant was called Socialist Appeal. The name was kash changed again in 1941.
Q. Changed to what?
A. To the Militant, and has remained that.
Q. Did the December, 1940, disaffiliation have any effect on SWP members' participation in the International center of the Fourth International in New York?
A. No, I don't think so, not in a political sense. We continued to be in solidarity with the Fourth International, and to cooperate with them wherever possible.
In an organizational sense we no longer were part of the Fourth International and, therefore, that changed our relationship somewhat. But essentially and politically there was no change.
European Secretariat
Q. Did you ever attend any meetings of the Fourth International?
A. Yes.
Q. When?
A. From 1944 to 1946.
Q. Where were these meetings?
A. These meetings were in France.
Q. What kind of meetings were they?
A. They were meetings of a group called the European Secretariat of the Fourth International.
Q. What was the European Secretariat?
A. The European Secretariat was an executive committee set up after the national parties in Europe had either been driven underground or had disappeared—with an attempt to, or attempting to, reconstruct parties where they had been destroyed and to coordinate their work on a Europe-wide scale.
Q. Was this after the center shifted to New York?
A. Yes, this secretariat, I believe, was created in 1943, but it might have been the end of 1942.
Q. How did you happen to be in France in 1944?
A. Well, I can thank the government for that too. I was in France because I had been drafted into the Army and shipped there. I was drafted in 1943 and arrived in France in June, 1944.
Q. How did you happen to attend meetings of the European Secretariat?
A. Well, the Socialist Workers Party was very anxious to get in touch with cothinkers throughout the word. When I went overseas, they wanted me to try to regain contact with whoever was possible, and I did that. They invited me to attend meetings of the European Secretariat.
Q. Were these meetings held openly?
A. No, they were not held openly. Paris had just been liberated from the
Nazis.
Some of the members of the Secretariat had been either in concentration camps, from which they had escaped, or they had been tortured. There was, as a result of the conditions that existed there, an atmosphere of secrecy and avoidance of public notice.
Q. What was discussed at these meetings of the European Secretariat that you attended?
A. Much of it had to do with what was going on in France. But most of it dealt with political problems of that period when the war was drawing to an end-what the new circumstances were going to be after the war. Attempts were also made to establish contact with more and more sections throughout Europe as the Nazi armies fell back.
Pre-World Conference
Q. Did you attend any other Fourth International meetings besides those of the European Secretariat between the 1944 and 1946 period?
A. Yes. In 1946 I attended a pre-World
Conference of the Fourth International in Paris-March, 1946.
Q. Were you a delegate?
A. Yes, I was a delegate representing the Socialist Workers Party.
Q. Were there any other American delegates?
A. There were two other Americans there. I think only one of them was a delegate from the SWP.
Q. Who were they?
A. One was Sam Gordon and the other was a newspaperman named Sherry Mangan, who worked for Time or Fortune, one of those Luce publications. He had been there before the war, and had been seized by the Nazis when they occupied Paris. But then he Nazis when they occupied Paris. But then he had returned to the United States, where I first met him.
In fact, it was through him that I first made contact with the European Secretarist He ellahorated very doselv with the riat. He collaborated very closely with the Secretariat.
Q. In March, 1946, at the time of this pre- World Conference, had the center of the Fourth International shifted back to Europe yet?
A. Not yet.
Q. How did the shift occur?
A. Well, it occurred at this very conference. Prior to that there had been correspondence between the European Secretariat and the people in New York. An agreement had been reached that as soon as the war ended, and as soon thereafter as possible, the center should be returned to Europe. That was the major accomplishment of this conference which, in addition, had the task of preparing for another world congress which was eventually held in 1948.
Q. Could you briefly describe what was discussed at this pre-World Conference?
A. Yes. By this time the war had ended and the cold war was starting. There were resolutions adopted on a great many questions that the European sections in particular were concerned about.
Griesa. When was the World Congress? Are you talking about the World Congress or the pre-World Congress?
Breitman. The pre-World.
Q. Were delegates elected to the IEC at this pre-World Conference?
A. Members of the IEC were elected at this conference because now the center was being shifted back. A new leadership body had to do the work of preparing for the full World Congress later on.
Q. Were any Americans elected to the IEC?
A. Yes, Cannon was elected and Gordon was elected-Sam Gordon. I am not absolutely sure whether there was another, but I also was elected.
Q. Were you present at the session when you were elected to the IEC?
A. No. On the third day of the conference the police invaded the hall and arrested everybody. The Americans were taken to the American Embassy. The others were put in jail, and the last session of the conference was held in jail that night. I was not present.
If I had been, I think I would have declined the honor of being a member of the IEC-which was about what it would amount to, as an honor, if I was not able to attend their meetings. And I would have told them that my plans were to return to the United States as quickly as possible, and never to leave it again.
Q. Have you ever attended any other Fourth International conferences since the one you just described?
A. No.
Q. I have no further questions.