Joe Johnson — The Man Without a Country

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Joe Johnson passed away Aug. 5 in Chippewa Falls, Wis., at age 84. His long life was marked by resolute opposition to war, local and national leadership in the Socialist Workers Party, govern­ ment persecution, an exceed­ ingly frugal life style, and from middle age, devoted care to his mother during her final years.

I first met Joe when I trans­ ferred from the Chicago branch of the Socialist Workers Party to the Twin Cities in the fall of 1965. After a long dry spell dur­ ing the Fifties, the SWP was be­ ginning to grow once more. This was primarily the result of a youth radicalization expressed through developments such as the Student Nonviolent Coor­ dinating Committees involved in civil rights, the Free Speech Movement launched in Berke­ ley, and the “New Left” Students for a Democratic Society—who organized the first national pro­ test against the Vietnam War.

The party’s Young Socialist Alliance, founded in 1960, participated in and recruited from these move­ ments. The Twin Cities had done particularly well in campus recruiting, but many transferred elsewhere upon graduation and reinforcements were needed. At the request of the party’s national secretary Farrell Dobbs, three of us from the Windy City headed to the Land of Sky Blue Waters.

Joe Johnson was the branch organizer and a mem­ ber of the national committee. He didn’t reside at the party headquarters at 704 Hennepin in the heart of downtown Minneapolis but, except when assign­ ments took him elsewhere, he always seemed to be there day and night. When he wasn’t involved in a meeting, or tidying up the premises, he would be de­ vouring books and newspapers, acquiring a thorough knowledge of theory and program as well as being up on current events. That’s also where he usually dined, utilizing the small kitchen to cook simple but whole­ some dishes—which he was always willing to share.

The diverse composition of the branch then was cer­ tainly challenging to the organizer. There were still a number of strong-willed old-timers, including Ray Dunne, Harry DeBoer, and Jake Cooper—who had been involved in the historic 1934 Teamsters strikes and did hard time in the Sandstone prison after their conviction in the 1941 Minneapolis Smith Act trials. Their decades of valuable experience through ups and downs in the class struggle had to be meshed with the growing raw new levy of mainly campus youth.

With the help of Helen Scheer as part-time assistant organizer, Joe found ways to earn the respect and con­ fidence of both groups and steered just about every­ one into an appropriate assignment.

The party and YSA’s top priority then was the move­ ment against the rapidly escalating Vietnam War. SDS did not follow up on their early success with the April 1965 March on Washington, and independent campus 8 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 2015 and community antiwar groups took up the fight.

One of the most successful was the Minne­ sota Committee to End the War in Vietnam, launched by students, radical pacifists, and “Old Left” radicals. Weekly business meetings on the University of Minnesota campus were often attended by dozens and planned a variety of activities that ulti­ mately included mass marches. A fortnightly newslet­ ter with a circulation that reached more than 2000 was edited and largely written by YSA comrades and sympathizers. It was printed on an offset press at the party head­ quarters, and that’s where the big mailing job, aided by a donated Addressograph, was also done—al­ ways with Joe’s efficient help.

Joe encouraged the YSA comrades to take the lead in this area of work while he mainly played a supportive role. But one suggestion he made had a big impact—old-fashioned street corner rallies. We started al­ most literally outside the front door of the party headquarters at the busy intersection of Seventh & Hen­ nepin. Using a step ladder and bullhorn, a dozen or so antiwar activists took turns giving very short agita­ tional speeches for ending the war by bringing the troops home now.

Pausing passersby were asked to sign the antiwar committee mailing list. Joe didn’t speak but watched our back for any signs of trouble.

We got a mainly good response with only occasional heckling the first time out. But trouble came in the form of a squad of Minneapolis cops at a July 16, 1966, rally that had attracted a big crowd left over from a festival parade. The bulls in blue declared the rally to be an illegal assembly and that everybody involved was under arrest.

A Minnesota Supreme Court opinion later stated, “The circumstances of defendant Joseph D. Johnson’s arrest are equally uncertain. Chief of Police Calvin Hawkinson testified that he arrested Johnson when Johnson physically interfered with Hawkinson’s at­ tempt to subdue an unknown lady who attacked the police. He testified that ‘Johnson put his arms in be­ tween and tried to push us apart.’”

Even though the statute of limitations has long since passed, I won’t name the “unknown lady” who went on to a distinguished career as an expat political and cultural writer in Europe. She had the height of a WNBA player and didn’t take kindly to being grabbed on the arm by a cop. She sent him reeling with a shove Bill Russell might have used on Wilt Chamberlain. Be­ fore Joe was nabbed by the Chief of Police, he advised Ms. X to head for Dayton’s—a nearby big department store, where she quickly blended in with the crowd of shoppers and exited in the next block.

The law the cops used for their bust was an ordi­ nance passed in response to IWW Free Speech side­ walk rallies during the First World War. It required assemblies of more than 10 persons to display an American flag on a staff of specified dimensions. As a result of the antiwar movement’s revival of Wobbly tactics—at Joe’s suggestion--it was finally declared unconstitutional.

But Joe was somewhat preoccupied in those days (Above) Joe Johnson was active in the struggle against the Vietnam war. Here Martin Luther King speaks against the war at University of Minnesota’s campus in St. Paul, in April 1967.

(Left) Prison rebellions such as the one at Attica, N.Y., in 1971 stirred Joe Johnson to write his pamphlet, “The Prison Revolt.”

with a party-led defense campaign against even more serious government persecution that threatened him with deportation or prison.

As a teenager, Joe avoided being drafted to fight in the Korean War that he strongly opposed by migrat­ ing from Wisconsin to Toronto, Canada. He became active in a Steelworkers local on his job and came to respect cothinkers of the SWP he encountered there. When they learned of his precarious legal status, they counseled him to return to the States and turn himself in rather than having this threat hanging over him the rest of his life. Whether this was the best advice could be debated, but that’s what Joe did.

The authorities in the Twin Cities were glad to see Joe and promptly awarded him free room and board at a minimum security prison in Springfield, Mo., for a little over two years. He told me some interesting tales about his incarceration, including the chance to meet the famous Birdman of Alcatraz. When he was finally given a new suit and 20 bucks in cash and told to go some place else, Joe headed to the Twin Cities to resume his life as a socialist antiwar agitator.

But it turned out the government wasn’t yet through with Joe. They said Joe’s support of a resolution in the union he belonged to in Toronto favoring a Canadian labor party violated a section of the infamous Smith Act prohibiting political activity in a foreign country. The penalty was exile. He was expected to self-de­ port—remaining in jail until he did.

The main issues in this ultimately victorious cam­ paign were well stated in a pamphlet “They Have De­ clared Me A Man Without a Country”—unfortunately long out of print and not freely available in print or digital format.

In a letter to Socialist Viewpoint many years later, Joe described the logical fallacies of the government’s case, “One of the legal problems (among many) that the government had was that I was native born, as was my mother and father. And, I had already served twoplus years in prison as a citizen of the United States for a ‘crime’ only a citizen could commit—refusing to fight in the Korean War for political reasons.”

The SWP was familiar with other sections of the Smith Act. The party had been the first victim of its anti-Red persecution in a 1941 trial that sentenced 18 leaders—many also prominent union leaders—to prison for politically opposing the government’s drive to take America in to the Second World War. They also had some successful experience fighting deportations such as a decades-long delay of expelling Swedish im­ migrant Carl Skoglund—a chief strategist of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes—until he died at a ripe old age in his adopted country.

The party retained Doug Hall, a top-notch labor law­ yer, and later assistance from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee as well, for Joe’s legal defense. The SWP also rounded up an impressive list of allies in the labor and civil liberties movements to launch the Committee to Oppose the Deportation of Joe John­ son, and Joe was sent on a remarkable national public (continued on page 9, in “Energy East pipeline condemned by OEB”)

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On Aug. 25, over five years after the fact, a disciplinary tribunal found To­ website: http://socialistaction.ca protesting were arrested? That to me is just intolerable”, said Cavalluzzo.

Retired judge John Hamilton, who was asked by Blair to preside over the disciplinary tribunal, ruled that Blair