Carlson, Grace Holmes

CARLSON, GRACE HOLMES (1906- 1992). A delegate to the founding convention of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) held in Chicago in 1938, Carlson rose to prominence within the SWP in her home state of Minnesota where she ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 1940. By 1942, Carlson had been elected to the party’s National Committee. In July 1941, she and twenty-eight other Trotskyists, many affiliated with Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544, were the first people indicted under the Smith Act for advocating the violent overthrow of the government. They were prosecuted because of their opposition to World War II and the efforts made by anti-communist rank-and-filers in Local 544, in concert with the FBI, to oust Trotskyists from the union. Carlson, the only woman among the eighteen defendants convicted in November 1941, served her sentence in Alderson federal prison from December 1943 until January 1945. She ran for the US Senate in Minnesota again in 1946 in a campaign that advocated socialism as the “only road to peace” and to true equality for women and African Americans. Although she lost this election too, Carlson was chosen in 1948 to be the SWP’s nominee for vice president of the United States, running with the party’s presidential candidate, Farrell Dobbs, in its first national political campaign. She was nominated again in 1952 but shocked her comrades when she announced in June that she was leaving the SWP and returning to the Catholic Church.

Carlson, born Grace Holmes, had been raised Catholic in an Irish-German working-class family in St. Paul. She graduated with a BA in English from the College of St. Catherine in 1929 and earned a PhD in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1933. During her time at the university, in the context of the Great Depression, Carlson first became interested in socialism. She began attending the Sunday Forums held by Trotskyists in Minneapolis and was impressed by their organizing prowess in the face of violent capitalist oppression during the 1934 Teamsters strikes. That summer she also married labor lawyer Gilbert Carlson. The two separated in the late 1930s when Grace left the Catholic Church and devoted herself full-time to the SWP.

When Carlson returned to the Church in 1952, she also reunited with Gilbert. Carlson began practicing her faith again but remained, in her mind, a Marxist committed to structural social and economic change. She began a new life as a professor of psychology at St. Mary’s Junior College (SMJC) in Minneapolis. There she supported women’s advancement through higher education along with anti-war, civil rights, and anti-nuclear causes. She taught at SMJC until 1979. After Gilbert died in 1985, Carlson moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to be closer to her sister, Dorothy.

Haverty-Stacke, Donna T. The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist,
Feminist. New York: New York University Press, 2020.

Haverty-Stacke, Donna. Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution Since the Age of FDR. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Raasch-Gilman, Elizabeth. “Sisterhood in the Revolution: The Holmes Sisters and the Socialist Workers Party.” Minnesota History (Fall 1999): 358-75.

Grace Carlson Papers. Inventory. Minnesota Historical Society. http://www2.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00215.xml