“The delegates had come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” So wrote Morris Hillquit when the Conference for Progressive Political Action finally gathered in Chicago for its postelection meeting on February 21, 1925:
If a regularly organized and permanent political party had achieved similar results in its debut, it would have left a deep imprint on the political history of the United States. It would have beaten the record of the best performance of any third party in the past . . . it would have elected some United States Senators and a sizable group of Congressmen and local officials, it would have given the party a solid foundation for growth and expansion. But it had been a one man campaign, and the “practical” labor politicians viewed its results solely from the point of view of concrete achievement. . . . The railway brotherhood chiefs frankly declared their intention to withdraw from the movement.1
Hillquit implored the delegates, “If five million votes were not enough, will you wait until we have swept the country? Did you start your trade unions on that practice? Did you wait until the workers in the different industries clamored to be organized?”2 Eugene Debs also addressed the gathering, with a final exhortation to the railway labor movement he once held in the palm of his hand to realize its potential to transform American politics. As Hillquit described the frustrated end of the thirty-year journey of his party’s beloved icon,
As he stood there, tall, gaunt, earnest, and ascetic, before the well-groomed and comfortably situated leaders of a new generation, he seemed like a ghost of reproach risen from their past and calling them back to the glorious days of struggle, suffering, and idealism. He was listened to with close attention. But the railroad men were not moved from their position.3
William Johnston made some effort to salvage what he could and begin anew, but any possibilities were dashed when he suffered a debilitating stroke in October.4 A few other ghostly remnants persisted on paper until 1928 at least, described by Hillquit as “a motley array of advocates of heterogeneous political nostrums with a sprinkling of dubious farmers’ organizations and liberal progressive groups without constituencies.”5 Immediately after the implosion of the CPPA, the Socialists held their own convention in Chicago on February 23, with forty-five delegates affectionately praised by Hillquit as “the diehards.”6 As for Fighting Bob, he was told before embarking on his crusade of 1924 that he did not have long to live unless he slowed down and, in fact, chose to run for that very reason, telling his son Philip, “I want to die as I have lived, with my boots on.”7 Thus did Robert Marion LaFollette Sr. pass away, at peace with himself and his conscience, on June 18, 1925, four days after his seventieth birthday.
At their lowest ebb, the Socialists could still count on one asset, diminished but nevertheless essential to any hope for the future—the leadership of the loyal opposition in the AFL. There was more than enough dissension in the AFL to prevent the ascent of Gompers’s heir apparent, Matthew Woll, a former leader of the Photo Engravers and arch-Wilsonian. Yet the potential insurgents, John L. Lewis and William Hutcheson, were not only too polarizing but also had alienated their potential allies in the Socialist bloc by remaining with the Republicans in 1924. Lewis put forward the secretary of his union, William Green, as the compromise candidate. A founder of the CPPA who would make friendly noises about a Labor Party as late as the beginning of the New Deal, Green represented a potential new direction for the AFL until he was overwhelmed by events a decade later that ultimately led to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Yet his progressive instincts would be severely hobbled, being surrounded in the AFL leadership by men like Matthew Woll and William English Walling.
The hope for the future was represented by the new institutional center of the Socialist loyal opposition, Brookwood Labor College. Established in 1921 on a pastoral campus in Katonah, New York, its founding president was Abraham Johannes Muste, an officer of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Dutch Reformed minister who worked with Norman Thomas in the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Other prominent members of the faculty included Muste’s Socialist co-founder of the AFT, Abraham Lefkowitz; J. B. S. Hardman, the education director of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers; and David Saposs, a protégé of John Commons who wrote the first scholarly survey of labor radicalism, Left Wing Unionism, in 1926. James Maurer, now the titular leader of the Socialist bloc in the AFL, was also an official supporter of Brookwood along with James Graham, a longtime SP stalwart who was now president of the Montana Federation of Labor.
Muste soon established a political arm of the operation, the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA), to facilitate movement toward reviving a Farmer-Labor Party over the next decade. Socialists such as Norman Thomas, James Maurer, James Oneal, and Frank Crosswaith served on its executive board. The model established by Brookwood also served to inspire the most devastated sections of the Socialist movement. In the Old Southwest, the once-thriving encampment circuit was now gone with the wind. But shortly before his death in 1925, Job Harriman transferred the assets of his Llano Colony in Louisiana to establish Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, which got off to a good start in the capable hands of Frank and Kate Richards O’Hare.8
If the Socialists were primarily tending to their gardens in the labor movement in these desperate years, it was fitting that this was done in the most dramatic and consequential fashion by A. Philip Randolph. In June 1925, Randolph gave his first speech to the Pullman Porters Athletic Association—at the invitation of Ashley Totten, a leader in the Association who was an avid reader of The Messenger—on the subject of organizing as a trade union.9 In response the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was founded on August 25, 1925, making its headquarters in the Harlem offices of The Messenger, which became their own after the demise of the magazine in 1928. The Pullman Company historically had hired black porters in what had long been cast in benevolent terms, but in a dehumanizing manner in that, among countless other manifestations of racism, every porter was called “George” in homage to George Pullman, a practice hearkening back to slavery. Thus did the initial wage demands issued by the Brotherhood conclude with this demand: “By no means least, that porters be treated like men.”10
Randolph’s lieutenants in organizing and defending the Brotherhood included Milton Webster, a longtime porter fired for militancy who then became a Republican ward heeler in black Chicago, and C. L. Dellums of Oakland, the Brotherhood officer who most shared Randolph’s Socialist convictions. The initial response of the Pullman Company was more outrage than alarm, though the company made clear that it had no tolerance for porters found carrying “Bolshevik cards.”11 That the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters inspired as much devotion in its struggle against Pullman as the American Railway Union had more than thirty years before was illustrated when an organizer named Bennie Smith went on a daring organizing trip to Randolph’s hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. After holding a secret meeting in the basement of a private home, Smith was arrested and charged with “preaching social equality in the South.” When Randolph ordered him to leave the area, Smith sent the following telegram:
Am fully mindful of grave seriousness of situation and personal danger. Conscientiously feel Brotherhood cause is so righteously important that a firm stand should be taken. Have fully decided to remain and meet consequences. This means that I’m willing to make supreme sacrifice. Have sacredly dedicated my all to the Brotherhood’s noble cause. Advise at once.12
Milton Webster replied by wiring the $40 train fare with the blunt message, “Get the hell out of Jacksonville, you can’t beat no case down there.” Smith went on to a proud and honorable career as leader of the Brotherhood in Detroit.
Growing into his role as the indispensable man of the Socialist Party in New York, Norman Thomas stood for mayor in 1925. Eugene Debs, who first met Thomas on a New York visit three years earlier, came to campaign for him. In the words of Thomas’s biographer W. A. Swanberg, “The fearless old warrior was not fully aware of the ‘new Socialism’ Thomas sought to build,” and indeed, neither man realized that this occasion would amount to the passing of the torch of titular leadership of the Socialist Party.13 Debs caused Thomas some embarrassment when he let loose the old fire at Carnegie Hall and thundered, “Not only the political parties but the press and the churches have become frank agents of capitalism. Just let Wall Street get us into a new war tomorrow and see how every preacher in the country will yell for blood!” Though Thomas certainly shared the sentiment, he doubted that the barely breathing party could afford to alienate the press and clergy.14
But the most poignant moment of this valedictory for Debs, in the city where he was adored as in no other, took place at Hunts Point Palace in the Bronx. August Claessens was forced to entertain the audience with typically hammy anecdotes for forty-five minutes until a drunk but glowing Debs arrived, who then took a half-hour to personally embrace most of the audience before beginning his speech. His talk was delivered so clumsily that Algernon Lee held it to be definitive proof that Debs actually hypnotized his crowds. This appearance was followed by a banquet for Debs on the night of his seventieth birthday, at which some of the bitterest enemies from the party splits over the war and Communism all came to pay their respects.15 In his race for mayor, despite the endorsement of “half-Socialist” Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, Norman Thomas won only a paltry 39,083 votes against the dashing Tammany rogue Jimmy Walker and Republican Frank Waterman of fountain-pen fame.
Almost immediately after the 1925 campaign, a great and far-reaching change began to unfold among the Jewish Socialists of New York. On a trip abroad in the second half of 1925, Abraham Cahan spent most of October in the British Mandate of Palestine, partly at the invitation of the Zionist Labor Movement or Histadrut in an attempt to build more amicable relations with the generally hostile Jewish labor movement in the United States.16 Cahan’s reports on his visit for The Forward were glowing:
Let everyone proclaim far and wide the Jewish achievements in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. . . . As if set up to enlarge immigration to Palestine, the Jewish tragedy has grown worse and the gates to America have been slammed shut before them. To date, the Jews who have to escape and migrate have no other destination than Palestine. . . . This psychological situation exists all over the world, so the criticism about what is happening in Palestine is almost considered sacrilege.17
A long debate unfolded in The Forward lasting until the spring of 1926. No riposte to Cahan’s enthusiasms was more unequivocal than that of Charney Vladeck, who remained with The Forward for the next decade despite being increasingly at odds in most political matters:
Zionists and Communists have one thing in common—both are extremist fanatics to the point of madness. Like all those whose ideology is based on belief, they consider any opponent a mortal enemy. Nevertheless, let me say that not only do I not believe in the practicality of Zionism, even if it were possible to realize Zionism it would be a catastrophe. When I observe what is taking place in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria I thank God that we do not have a state of our own. A Jewish kingdom led by Jewish politicians (leaders of states are always politicians and not idealists) within a large Arab population defended by British rifles. . . . Just as I am unwilling to accept the position of the Yiddishists that the sole basis for the continued protection of Jewish identity is the Yiddish language, or the position of the Orthodox that this basis consists of the Jewish religion, so am I unwilling to accept that the only basis for the continued existence of Jewish identity is a Jewish country.18
Harry Rogoff was the first of Cahan’s lieutenants to engage in the debate, pointing out that the Jewish anti-Zionists were now the minority in the international Socialist movement: the Labor Zionist party of David Ben-Gurion belonged to the same International as the Socialist Party, and most of its European leaders were praising the Labor Zionists. Rogoff argued plainly,
The war broke out, and everything changed . . . the troubles of the Jews in Eastern Europe increased incomparably, and then, precisely, the gates of America closed before them. The entire prewar situation was reversed. These were the circumstances that caused us to re-examine our attitude to Palestine.19
Jacob Panken responded to Rogoff by anticipating the tragic consequences of Zionist attitudes toward European Jewry twenty years later:
He forgets that most of Palestine belongs to the Arabs, and the number of the latter compared with the Jews is six to one . . . this movement gives precedence to the cause of 200,000 or even a million Jews over the kind of future in store for the 16 million Jews in the world. If there is a Jewish problem, it should be solved for the Jews all over the world, not only for the few who are already in Palestine or are going to be there.20
Cahan’s lieutenant Alexander Kahn revealed how far The Forward was drifting out of the Socialist mainstream, exulting, “The Zionist movement has ignited the flame of ardor and idealism in the American Jewish middle class.”21 But Morris Hillquit was given the last word:
Is it possible to consider the Jews, without a home and dispersed, as a “nation” in the same sense, say, as the Poles after the partition of Poland? Or is a re-established Jewish state, or a center of specific Jewish culture, something possible, or desirable? The decision on this question rests with each individual, it is a function of feelings of the heart, not a matter of principle. I, personally, am not a Zionist. I also have doubts about the present possibility of re-establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Nor am I convinced that the Jews, as a nation standing on their own, will be able to make any outstanding or significant contribution to world culture. Yet I am not an anti-Zionist either. . . . Clearly, a sharp line has to be drawn between legitimate demands for national equality and the absurd attitude that claims racial or national superiority. Zionism, like all other national movements, must safeguard itself against the danger of nationalistic decline. If it ever should develop in that direction it will lose any right to the sympathy of a Socialist.22
William Feigenbaum wrote to Hillquit with praise and gratitude for his stand. Employed at The Forward and looked on by Hillquit as a sort of protégé, Feigenbaum optimistically wrote, “It will go far in sobering up a number of our nationalist nuts.”23 But for a complex host of reasons, as the old Jewish Socialist flower slowly wilted on the vine over several decades, its memory would be distorted by the heavy-handed Zionist discourse that overtook American Jewry. Of course, larger historical forces mostly brought this about. But by the end of the decade, it became clear that The Forward had its own agenda that diverged from the Socialist movement, and would consciously use its power, including but not limited to continuing financial support, to frustrate the best interests of the Socialist Party. More literally than Lenin could have conceived, The Forward was supporting the Socialist Party as a rope supports one who is hanged.
There was no more unmistakable omen that an era was closing on the Lower East Side than the sudden death of Meyer London, hit by a streetcar on his way to spend a bright Sunday morning reading poetry in Stuyvesant Square, on June 6, 1926. Although he had forsworn any return to public office after his defeat in 1922 and had spent his last years in despair over the growing Communist influence in the Jewish labor movement he did so much to build, London’s death prompted a massive public outpouring of grief. The New York Times reported, “25,000 men, women, and children, some of whom stood in line for almost an hour, passed his coffin from the time the body arrived in the afternoon . . . many wept openly as they passed from the building . . . for six hours the East Side put aside its duties, pressing or trivial, to do honor to its dead prophet.”24 The New Leader editorialized,
It is no exaggeration to say that Meyer London was one of the finest type ever flowered by the proletariat. Reared among the working class, he never forgot his origin, his ideals, his fellows. He lived intensely, lived and served as all really great men live and serve a great cause. He never forgot the sufferings, the wrongs, the economic tyranny and the maladjustments of the social order in which he lived. The distress of the workers hurt him. He keenly felt our social and economic wrongs and instinctively recoiled from the suffering they imposed.25
American Jewry would not see his like again, as it was rapidly moving on from the Lower East Side into the middle class and beyond. The fiery antiwar populist would have baffled generations of Jews to come, who religiously identified with the rise of the United States as a superpower under the stern guidance of an entrenched Zionist establishment, indoctrinated with very different ideas about their identity than those of their immigrant fathers who sought to vicariously Americanize through the man from Terre Haute.
He, too, was not long for this world. In the summer of 1926 Debs and his wife sailed to Bermuda in an attempt to revive his health, only for him to catch pneumonia on the voyage home and return a final time to Chicago’s Lindlahr Sanitarium. The emotional agony that Debs’s passing represented for the whole Socialist movement was perhaps best illustrated by the letter of William Feigenbaum dated the day before he died:
For God’s sake get well! You have no business being ill, and we need you. We need you more than you imagine. We need to have you with us. Even if you can never make another speech in your life it is enough to know that you are with us. . . . Dear old Gene, if I believed in prayer I would be on my knees praying for your health. If I believed in God I would be begging him to spare you to us for many, many years to come.26
Eugene Victor Debs died at Lindlahr Sanitarium the evening of October 20, 1926. Morris Hillquit reported the death in a telegram to Friederich Adler, secretary of the Socialist International:
In the death of Eugene V. Debs the Socialist movement loses its deepest moral inspiration and finest spiritual guidance. His lofty idealism and warm love of mankind, his indomitable courage and flaming faith in our great cause, his purity of character and irresistible charm of personality, his life of service and sacrifice all combined to give him a unique place in the public life of America and in the liberating movements of labor and Socialism everywhere. In behalf of the Labor and Socialist International I shall lay a wreath on his grave and say a sad and loving farewell to one of the truest soldiers in the ranks.27
After Debs lay in state for two days at the Labor Temple of Terre Haute, the funeral was held the afternoon of October 23 on his beloved front porch. Norman Thomas gave the eulogy, while Kate, the distant wife of forty-one years, remained upstairs.28 But the events surrounding a planned memorial service in New York served as a poignant metaphor for how the American left would never be the same after Debs’s passing. After August Claessens put down a deposit to reserve Carnegie Hall for the service, it was announced in the press that the Communists secured Madison Square Garden for their own Debs memorial meeting. When Claessens rushed to plead with the manager of the Garden, he was told that the Workers Party had only put down a small deposit and that the Socialists could have the Garden if he returned first thing the next morning with a full $1,000 deposit. The Forward, which had already put up the Carnegie Hall deposit, gladly obliged, and Madison Square Garden had a capacity crowd of twenty thousand to pay final respects to the man who was American Socialism.29
It is strange and even paradoxical that Eugene V. Debs endures as he has in American historical memory. For a time, he was widely assigned the role of a utopian forerunner of New Deal liberalism, but this narrative belongs squarely to the New Deal/Cold War liberal heyday. The Debs of history ultimately transcends this role in two ways: first, not without irony, as a consistently honored apostle by even the most conservative segments of the American labor movement, and second, as the ultimate icon of antiwar protest in America. In both roles, it would be difficult to overstate his importance to the history of the United States in the First World War era specifically, but also generally as the symbol of the road not taken at the dawn of the American century—the century of horror, the century of mass destruction and genocide. To borrow a phrase from one who would likely be appalled by its invocation in this connection, when Debs fatefully spoke in Canton, Ohio, on June 16, 1918, no man may have ever more literally stood athwart history yelling “stop!”
For the SP, the veneration of Debs continued in death as it had in life, with a primer on his life giving the full Parson Weems treatment used in Workmen’s Circle Sunday Schools as late as the 1950s. The Communist memory of Debs was complicated by his unequivocal parting of ways with them by the time he left prison, despite his nominal support for the Communist-led International Labor Defense. In the words of Nick Salvatore, “They kept Debs in the wings and after his death found a way in which they could resuscitate him for their own purposes. Debs became a John the Baptist, the precursor to such party leaders as Foster” and, perhaps more literally, to James P. Cannon for the Trotskyists.30 But the world of 1930s radicalism would have frightened Debs, in its obsessions with the grisly events in Europe, with seizing power by nondemocratic methods, and its abstruse theoretical discourses that would have embarrassed International Socialist Review. It takes no great leap of imagination to see Debs feeling far more at home with that son of National Rip-Saw readers, Huey Long, than with the typical Union Square agitator.
This only makes all the more odd certain claims on Debs by Cold War liberalism and, for a time, the fringes of neoconservatism. And yet these claims cannot be dismissed out of hand. After all, Debs’s inheritance was an ancestral connection to revolutionary France, and it was this spirit that drew most of the eventual pro-war Socialists closely to him for the better part of his Socialist career. It would certainly be no more hypocritical to claim Debs for world-redemptive Americanism than, say, Thomas Jefferson or Martin Luther King. Yet in the end, it is appropriate that the most enduring legacy of Eugene V. Debs should be as the greatest martyr for the First Amendment in American history, at the critical moment when the United States crossed the rubicon from republic to empire, rather than as prophet of the cooperative commonwealth. For above all, Debs was an icon of dissent, specifically of that all too rare species, Middle American dissent. And though most future leaders of that dissent would have very different ideas from those of the man from Terre Haute, it was he who blazed the path on which they set forth.
Until the abrupt end of American Socialism as a serious, however small, political movement after 1948, the year that followed Debs’s passing was the lowest, most desperate ebb of the SP. After George Kirkpatrick, the vice presidential nominee of 1916, succeeded Bertha Hale White for a year as executive secretary, he was followed in 1926 by the disastrous tenure of William Henry. A coal miner from Terre Haute whose main qualifications for the job were party membership from its earliest years and a personal friendship with Debs, Henry had served fairly competently as the state party secretary in Indiana. But running the national office was another matter entirely, and his crude and semi-literate manners embarrassed the party leadership. More importantly, Henry was woefully inadequate to the task of rebuilding a formidable national organization.31
Though a few intrepid organizers such as August Claessens could be credited for keeping alive the bare-bones infrastructure of a nationally organized party, the disappearance and temporary reemergence of state organizations occurred so frequently throughout the 1920s that it was necessary to appoint regional organizers. There was little that could have been more frustrating to the Socialists at this low tide than to see the erasure by the mass media of the memory of the father of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, Charles Lindbergh Sr., when his son suddenly became the most admired man in the world after his successful transatlantic flight in July 1927. As Nathan Fine of the Rand School would write the following year, “In the tributes paid to the son the father is never mentioned, nor is his book, Why Is Your Country at War, and What Happens to You After the War, and Related Subjects.”32
The specter of apocalypse was even looming over what long seemed the most impenetrable fortress of American Socialism, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). What originally began in 1919 as an innocuous rank-and-file movement, initially inspired by the British Shop Stewards’ movement, was easy prey for the Communists.33 After the debacle leading up to the 1924 election, this restive insurgency in the ILGWU was the one remaining Communist foothold in the AFL.34 A promising precedent in the garment industry was set when Communist Ben Gold led the Fur Workers to a spectacular strike victory at the end of 1925.35 In the ILGWU around this time, a draconian attempt by old Socialist leaders Benjamin Schlesinger and Morris Sigman to extricate the Communists from the union backfired and instead brought them to the verge of taking over.
The Communist leaders in the ILGWU, Louis Hyman and Charles Zimmerman, were on the verge of successfully concluding a strike when they were suddenly ordered to prolong it by the party as a consequence of an internal party power struggle led by William Weinstone, in what would not be the last time he devastated both Socialist and Communist prospects in the labor movement.36 The ensuing disaster disillusioned the restive rank and filers with the Communist leadership they heretofore had graciously accepted, guided now by the bright young rising star of the ILGWU and irrepressible anti-Communist David Dubinsky. But the Socialists had little cause to celebrate. In a letter to Morris Hillquit, Norman Thomas saw the future foreshadowed by the struggle in the ILGWU all too clearly:
It is thoroughly unhealthy that the one issue on which a great many of our comrades tend to arouse themselves, the one that brings into their eyes the old light of battle is their hatred of Communism. A purely negative anti-Communist position will ultimately kill the Socialist cause body and soul.37
The first sign that the Socialist Party might still have a future was both spectacular and unexpected. In Reading, Pennsylvania, where James Maurer led a labor party–style organization that had remained largely undisturbed by the Wilson terror, there was a truly outstanding municipal victory. J. Henry Stump, a cigar maker and manager of the Socialist Printing Cooperative in Reading, was elected mayor, with Maurer and George Snyder elected to the City Council; the newly elected city controller and two members of the school board were also Socialists. Reading, located in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, which was considered generally conservative but also historically pacifist, has fascinated students of labor history as having “a unique position among industrial centers of its size and type in that it lacks their usual degree of ethnic and religious heterogeneity.”38 Curiously enough, the Socialist breakthrough in Reading was mainly prompted by a property tax revolt. As one Socialist campaign pamphlet read,
You are being compelled to pay more than your share of the taxes, because the politicians and wealthy people whom they serve have actually had their taxes reduced in many cases, and at most very, very slightly increased. And all at your expense—you who are buying homes and paying direct taxes, and you who are renting homes and paying the increased taxes in the form of higher rents.39
Reading also enjoyed, through the efforts of its formidable Socialist labor movement, a network of cooperative businesses that provided nothing less than a way of life. As described by a leading historian of Reading Socialism,
By 1920, the Reading comrades also owned and operated several economic enterprises. These included a publishing company, which published the weekly party paper, the Reading Labor Advocate, a small cigar factory which produced several brands of cigars, such as the “Karl Marx,” and a cooperative store. The party also owned the Labor Lyceum, a three-story building in downtown Reading, which housed the party headquarters, a cigar factory, and a hall which was used by both the party and some local unions.40
A decade later, as both his health and the SP were in precipitous decline, James Maurer still enthusiastically described the party’s accomplishments in Reading, beginning with the construction of a new city hall and a municipal machine shop:
Every penny we spent on the City Hall went for wages and materials, which explains why we made enemies of the contractors and profiteers. We demonstrated that they are not necessary when it comes to doing public work. When we took over the city’s affairs the street cleaning was done by contract. We abolished that system, doubling the wages of street cleaners, and yet reducing the cost to the city.41
Similarly deep-rooted cooperative movements also enabled a few other surviving outposts from the Socialist heyday, such as Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and Barre, Vermont, to elect Socialist mayors in the late 1920s.
On January 27, 1928, a dinner was held by The New Leader that foreshadowed differences that were to plague the Socialist Party in the decade ahead. A series of four speeches were given on the question of whether the Soviet Union could still be seen as socialist, with Morris Hillquit and Algernon Lee arguing in the negative and Norman Thomas and James Maurer in the affirmative. Though all were sharply critical in their attitudes toward American Communism, Thomas urged the Socialists to take “a sympathetic and interested attitude toward Soviet Russia . . . interesting things are being worked out there whether or not they are socialist or communist. A great effort is being made, which is comparatively successful, to create a society where the love of money is not the motivating force in human endeavor.”42 Morris Hillquit offered an impassioned rebuttal:
The Soviet government has been the greatest disaster and calamity that has occurred in the Socialist movement. Norman Thomas has expressed fears as to what might happen if the experiment fails. I say the experiment has already failed. There is no difference between the Soviet government and the Communist movement here. They are one and the same thing. . . . If the Soviet government ceased in Russia there would not be ten Communists left in the United States. . . . Let us dissociate ourselves from the Soviet government and thereby make clear that the Social Democrats have no connection with it, bear no relation to it. Demand recognition of Russia by all means. It will be a good thing to break down the Chinese wall.43
James Maurer, who had only recently returned from visiting Russia, gave a spirited reply:
If I were there, I’d probably be a Communist. They asked me about the Communists in this country and I told them they were a bunch of darn fools. I have seen the Communists in action here. They don’t build, they destroy. The Communists there are doing the best under the circumstances. This is a fight of workers, and I don’t care what kind of a fight the workers are in, I’m with the workers, first, last and all the time.44
On his visit Maurer met both Stalin and Trotsky at the height of their power struggle and claimed Stalin was amused by his deprecating description of the American Communists. He described the urban industrial workforce as highly enthusiastic about the regime, whereas the village and farm population was decidedly more disenchanted, though scoffing at any suggestion of a restoration of the old order; these were probably accurate impressions at the end of the 1920s.45
The Socialist Party apparently held on to the elusive hope into the early months of 1928 of once again being able to support some kind of Progressive coalition candidacy; only by the spring did it resolve to nominate its own ticket once it was clear there was no other choice.46 Norman Thomas knew he had been groomed for leadership during the past decade by Hillquit and the leadership circle in New York, but attempted to preempt his presidential nomination with a column in The New Leader endorsing James Maurer.47 Many old-timers no doubt continued to regret that Maurer had not been the nominee in 1916. But Maurer was getting on in years and once again held public office in Reading. Moreover, his outspoken praise for the Soviet experiment cannot have endeared him to the very people in New York pushing for Thomas’s nomination.48 When the 1928 convention opened in New York on April 13, among the other names considered were Joseph Sharts, who had rebuilt the Ohio organization after the departure of the left wing in 1919, and Freda Hogan, daughter of old Arkansas stalwart Dan Hogan and young trophy wife of Oscar Ameringer.49
Louis Waldman gave the speech entering Thomas into nomination: “He came to us at a time when it was dangerous to join the Socialist Party. He was one of the few intellectuals who instead of running away from us, came to us.”50 Thomas was nominated by acclamation, with Maurer gladly accepting the nomination to be his running mate. Two major issues divided the convention. At the insistence of Thomas, who hoped to recruit support from like-minded ministers, the party took no stand on the repeal of Prohibition, to the detriment of the party’s historic base in the brewery capital of Milwaukee. The other debate was over the recent endorsement of the League of Nations by the Socialist International. Hillquit led the argument in favor, though he likely shared the reservations of Thomas, who said he would support the League only if it became “positively an agent of peace and justice.” Victor Berger, who had opposed any new international affiliation by the SP early in the decade, led the opposing side with James Graham of Montana, declaring the League nothing more than a plot by Britain, France, Japan, and the United States to rule the world. The Hillquit position was adopted with the understanding that the party would not actively campaign on the question.51
Responding to the United States’ rise as a world power, an extended foreign policy platform called for cancellation of all war debts and of German reparation payments, withdrawal of U.S. troops from Nicaragua, independence for the Philippines, and home rule for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. It also urged “the speedy recognition of Russia, not as an expression of approval of the Bolshevik regime, but to help establish international stability and good will.”52 After several years of neglect, the Socialist Party entered the 1928 campaign qualified for the ballot in only four states. It was unthinkable to entrust the task of rebuilding to the incompetent executive secretary William Henry, so the National Executive Committee established a “Socialist Action Committee” with August Gerber, son of New York party warhorse Julius Gerber, at the helm. Through a yeoman effort to organize petition drives and state conventions, the SP ultimately got on the ballot in forty-one states.53
Thomas himself began a national campaign tour almost immediately after he was nominated, on which he was usually accompanied by either or both August Claessens and McAlister Coleman of The New Leader. At an early stop in Memphis, Tennessee, Claessens introduced Thomas with a yarn in homage to the Volunteer State’s most recent national media sensation:
Here was fought the great battle against Darwinism. Let me add a few words. . . . I maintain that this doctrine is a cruel, shameless and outrageous insult to animals. Did you ever hear of a cow starving in a luscious pasture of grass? No, you didn’t. But in times of economic depression you starve in the midst of plenty. . . . Did you ever hear of bees bringing in honey and handing it over to a honey trust? And getting paid with a mouthful of wax? No, sir! But you farmers do that every day. . . . Take the woodchuck. Skinny rat when he comes out of his hole in the spring. As the summer grows, the woodchuck cuts grass and gets fatter and fatter. By autumn he is so obese he can hardly run. The first frost nips his tail and he hurries to his hole, goes in and takes all the fat with him for his winter’s fuel and feed. Were the woodchuck a man, he would hand over the fat to the capitalists, vote the Republican ticket, go down into his hole and starve. Darwin was terribly wrong. We are no kin to the beasts.54
Claessens recalled hearing one old man say as they left the meeting, “Norman Thomas is a fine speaker, but that little bald-headed guy, what a shellacking he gave Darwin! Best I ever heard.” It was classic Claessens, and a poignant swan song to the spirit of the prewar movement. Nor had Claessens’s sense of merriment yet gotten the best of him. Later on in Spokane, Washington, he repeated a routine pitch for funds by asking the audience to throw money at him on the stage. Forgetting the prevalence of silver dollars in Western mining states, as Thomas recalled, “He did some mighty active dodging to avoid dollars aimed at his shiny bald head.”55
One incident in the summer of 1928, however, indicated that even the most promising strides toward rebuilding American Socialism would be met with fierce resistance. Matthew Woll continued to wield enormous influence in the AFL and saw Brookwood Labor College as a threat to be neutralized. Woll publicly accused Brookwood of fostering disloyalty to the AFL, sympathy with the Communists, and free love, prompting official condemnation of Brookwood by the AFL Executive Council. In the words of historian Bernard Johnpoll, “The charges were patently false. Except for a single teacher, the entire Brookwood faculty was hostile to the Communist Party, most of Brookwood’s support came from AFL unions, and far from sexual liberty, an air of Puritanism, reflecting the religious values of its president, permeated Brookwood’s campus.”56 Indeed, the Communist press took pleasure in the whole episode. The Daily Worker intoned, “We have always found that this institution has consistently functioned as a cloak for the destructive policy of the reactionary labor fakers.”57
A lengthy official response by Brookwood to the AFL was unbowed in answering these charges:
This Brookwood school which is supposed to be so hostile to the AFL practically mortgaged its financial future for an AFL union, the International Ladies Garment Workers in the strike of 1926, in permitting the American Fund for Public Service to use $100,000 which had been set aside to be paid to Brookwood over a series of years, as collateral for a loan for the garment strikers. . . . It is surely not necessary for people to agree in their social philosophy with AFL officials in order to be regarded as loyal members of that organization.58
One of many other letters of protest to William Green came from Harry Elmer Barnes, a protégé of Charles Beard who taught at Smith College: “The Brookwood College is the only reputable institution of higher learning maintained by American labor, and it would appear to me that the AFL would be furthering its interests by establishing a score of similar institutions instead of withdrawing its support from the one existing institution. It has been my privilege to visit Brookwood and to lecture there several times.”59
An impressive list of Norman Thomas’s colleagues in the progressive intelligentsia endorsed him, and would formally organize after the campaign into the League for Independent Political Action (LIPA) to complement the Brookwood-aligned CPLA. This list included Oswald Garrison Villard and Freda Kirchwey of The Nation, Thomas’s former colleagues at The World Tomorrow Devere Allen and Reinhold Niebuhr, Harold Fey of Christian Century, Paul Douglas of the University of Chicago, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Fola LaFollette, and W. E. B. DuBois.60 Though the 1920s were regarded both at the time and by history as an era of prosperity, as W. A. Swanberg notes, “There was never less than 10 percent of the labor force unemployed, more than 42 percent of the population got along on incomes under $1,500, and miners were regularly killed at their hazardous occupation without public outcry.”61
Acknowledging this reality to some degree and certainly the formidable LaFollette vote of 1924, the two major parties both nominated their most highly regarded progressive standard-bearers: the Republicans chose widely admired Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who might have had any party’s nomination for the asking in 1920, and the Democrats nominated New York governor Al Smith. The election was largely polarized over Prohibition and, despite the precipitous decline of the Ku Klux Klan after 1924, a vicious anti-Catholic backlash. Norman Thomas, as throughout his career, took the high road, appealing with little success to fellow Protestant ministers to condemn the anti-Catholic bigotry against Al Smith. But Thomas recognized that Hoover would have won despite that bigotry and praised both candidates as “about the best men in their parties.”62 Indeed, both the forgotten Iowa Progressive and the pro-labor “new Tammany” governor were in many ways more reflective of the Socialist legacy in American politics than Franklin Roosevelt.
In his first presidential campaign, Norman Thomas received 267,478 votes, just under 0.75 percent. He received his highest vote totals in Berks County, Pennsylvania, with 10 percent of the vote, and in Milwaukee County with over 6 percent, where Al Smith’s pledge to repeal Prohibition swung enough voters behind him and the Democrats that Victor Berger lost reelection to Congress by only 792 votes. As Daniel Hoan wrote to Thomas,
This is the home of the breweries. The brewery workers were originally more nearly 100 percent Socialist than any other unions. They have been thrown out of employment and naturally are deeply incensed at the Prohibition law. They were also incensed at remarks made against Smith in the Leader and by Victor that they deliberately and intentionally voted for Smith and many of them deliberately and intentionally voted the straight Democratic ticket.63
But even with the loss of their prized member of Congress through the years of drought, the Socialists took heart that the worst was behind them, and once again had a national party to speak of. James Maurer recalled,
Thomas and I separately made extensive tours of the country and though the results when measured by votes were meager, we found them encouraging because in many places the organization was re-established and many who had become inactive in the movement were brought back into the fold. We felt that we had done a good job in laying the foundation for future successes.64
A highly encouraging break came early in 1929 when William Henry finally left his post as executive secretary. Ostensibly, it was a consequence of the breakdown of his marriage, his wife Emma being the Indiana state secretary and an equally devoted party veteran.65 Henry was also accused of nativist and anti-Semitic associations; this accusation may or may not have stemmed from mere Midwestern resentment of the New York leadership, though it appears that at a minimum he expressed such sentiments in characteristically crude rhetoric.66 The new executive secretary was Clarence Senior, who led the Student League for Industrial Democracy at the University of Kansas before proving himself a talented organizer for both the party and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in Cleveland.
The appointment of Senior as executive secretary completed the changing of the guard that began with the passing of the torch from Debs to Thomas at Carnegie Hall in October 1925. Moreover, the infrastructure was emerging to recapture the potential of the first half of the decade for a Farmer-Labor Party with the arrival of both the LIPA and the CPLA. In the words of Norman Thomas’s first biographer and close friend, Harry Fleischman, “Even before his first nomination, Thomas had no illusions about ever being elected President on the Socialist ticket. He believed that the Socialist Party was unlikely ever to become a mass party itself, but was anxious to make it the spearhead of such a mass party.”67
Even in the battered ILGWU, a new day was dawning. In 1928, the young anti-Communist firebrand David Dubinsky became acting president for the ailing Benjamin Schlesinger; in that capacity he managed to secure loans from such eminent wealthy Jews as Julius Rosenwald and Felix Warburg, relationships that also led to contracts with America’s leading retailers.68 This came as the last Communist holdout in the ILGWU was lost to the dissension that for a time seemed to suggest the party’s implosion. After the sudden death of Charles Ruthenberg in 1927, his protégé Jay Lovestone took control and ruthlessly expelled Trotsky’s partisans led by James Cannon and Max Shachtman. But Lovestone and his inner circle were deeply loyal to Bukharin, and thus the ax inevitably fell on them when Stalin completed his consolidation of power in 1929. Lovestone, Bertram Wolfe, and Ben Gitlow were only able to lead two hundred members out of the Communist Party with them, but they included Charles Zimmerman and most other key supporters in the ILGWU.69
The Socialist Party suffered an irreparable loss with the sudden death on August 7, 1929, of the man who did more than any other to conceive and create it in the 1890s, Victor Berger. Like his fellow Socialist congressman Meyer London, with whom he never served in the same session, Berger died from injuries sustained after being hit by a streetcar. Norman Thomas eulogized him as follows in The New Leader:
He fitted no conventional pattern of robot or Babbitt or self-made man—not even the false conventional pattern of a typical radical. Victor Berger himself was a pithy and salty human being, full of humor, sometimes irascible, always at heart the soul of friendliness, the lover of his home and friends, the shrewd observer of men. . . . But this lovable, kindly man was also a fighter who never ran away from any conflicts for the cause in which he believed. He met the lies and misrepresentations of the war days, the outrageous persecution of the government, the hysteria of a House which denied the fundamental principle of democracy by refusing to seat a duly elected representative with unflinching courage and great resourcefulness.70
Norman Thomas was reluctant to run for mayor of New York in 1929, but duty called, and the election results confirmed that the Socialist Party was indeed enjoying a genuine revival. Thomas had the surprise backing of a nonpartisan “City Affairs Committee” led by John Haynes Holmes, Stephen Wise, and John Dewey that led an outspoken campaign against the blatant corruption of Jimmy Walker’s administration.71 One of the scandals exposed by this committee was of a gangster who did favors for Walker, but also, at times, for Sidney Hillman; this revelation likely embittered Hillman personally toward Thomas as he became an increasingly shadowy influence on the SP.72 Ramsay MacDonald even campaigned for Thomas on an American visit just before his ignominious break with the British Labour Party.73 Figures as unlikely as Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish praised Thomas as “an ideal leader to rally all the forces of reform, regardless of class, for a cleanup of the New York City government.”74
But Fiorello LaGuardia was running for the first time as the Republican nominee for mayor. Thomas denounced him as a political chameleon and opportunist, seconded by The Nation, which editorialized, “With all respect to him, he is not of the same stature as Norman Thomas.”75 A lingering shadow of the old Committee of 48 emerged as the Progressive LaGuardia Non-Partisan Committee chaired by J. A. H. Hopkins and William English Walling, but a split vote hardly mattered in the end, with LaGuardia winning barely 25 percent of the vote, while Thomas earned an astonishing 175,697 votes at 12 percent.76 As the new face of American Socialism was profiled in The New Yorker,
The quality of being reasonable, the ability to see an opposing viewpoint, will stand as the weakness and also the strength of Norman Thomas. His opposition to war extends to civil war, and so he will never lead the marching battalions of revolt. . . . Eugene Debs is dead. Norman Thomas is the nominal leader of a political party which Debs raised to great numerical strength and which then melted in the sun of American prosperity. He is the leader of an altered party.77
The stock market crash that heralded the Great Depression occurred two weeks before the mayoral election on October 24. Notwithstanding, the party now had a dynamic new leader, fresh young talent, a functioning national organization, and was even beginning to rebuild its base in the labor movement and among intellectuals. The Socialist Party of America was getting a second chance.