Socialist Youth League (US)

The Socialist Youth League was the youth group affiliated with the Workers Party, a splinter Trotskyist party led by Max Shachtman. The parent group changed its name to the Independent Socialist League in 1950. In February 1954, the Socialist Youth League merged with the faction of the Young People's Socialist League and changed its name to Young Socialist League. The YSL merged with a later incarnation of the YPSL in August 1958, around the same time that the ISL was merging into that group's parent body the Socialist Party - Social Democratic Federation.

The SYL was established in 1946, just after World War II ended. During the war the Workers Party had concentrated mostly on colonizing basic industries and organizing wildcat strikes, but after the war ended this strategy foundered, as the expected post-war wave of labor radicalism failed to materialize. The groups press began to concentrate more on campus activism in the late 1940s. and 1950s. By the early 1950s the SYL represented one of the few viable left-wing groups on Americas campuses. 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. The SYL filled this void and became the most visible Leftists group on campus.

In contrast to the low brow style of the CPUSA, the Shachtmanites attempted appeal to intellectuals and "elite culture". The SYL catered to a Bohemian milieu, the beginnings of the Beat movement. 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.

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