The constantly shifting loyalties of the organizations associated with the American Left leave a complex array of records. The Socialist Workers Party, one of the more stable of the leftist groups, collected the records of a few of the organizations with which it was associated, and in 1970 when it loaned its files to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin for microfilming, some of these records were included. Among them were records of the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation, records of the Fourth International, and records of various socialist youth movements. In 1977 additions to the SWP records were loaned to the Society, along with the originals of the records loaned for filming in 1970. The two groups of records were organized and microfilmed as a single unit. The 1970 microfilm of SWP records was then destroyed except for those rolls containing the records of the allied organizations mentioned above. It is these three rolls of 1970 microfilm that now constitute this separate collection.
The Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation is an organization formed by the merger, 1957-1958, of three groups descending from the Socialist Party of the 1930's. In 1936 the moderate wing of the Socialist Party withdrew, eventually calling itself the Social Democratic Federation. The following year the Socialist Party expelled its radical wing, which later became the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP itself was split in 1940 when Max Schachtman and others broke away to organize the Workers Party, which later became the Independent Socialist League. The Socialist Party was reunited in 1957 with its old moderate wing, the Social Democratic Federation, and in 1958 the Independent Socialist League joined the newly formed Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation.
The Fourth International was the worldwide organization of the Trotskyite movement. The Socialist Workers Party was in sympathy with the Fourth International but was not formally affiliated with it because of the Voorhis Act, which required registration of subversive groups. Furthermore, the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, under the influence of Pabloism, was in opposition to the Socialist Workers Party. When the International Secretariat was reorganized into the United Secretariat in the early 1960's and the Pabloites lost their dominant position; the Socialist Workers Party was then able to endorse the United Secretariat.
