The revival of the Socialist Party from the doldrums of the 1920s was underway as the Great Depression became an unmistakable fact in 1930. But early that year, a crucial event took place that set in motion the decade-long demise of the party’s fortunes. After Matthew Woll gave an address at the Rand School in New York, the student body of Brookwood Labor College passed a resolution attacking the decision to invite him, pleading, “He has declared his position against independent political action, as he made clear at the Cleveland convention of the ILGWU.” The episode might have been forgotten had not the labor editor of The Forward, Louis Schaeffer, written a column attacking the students: “How surprised would these students be, who are infected with the semi-Communist poison of the Brookwood leaders, if I should tell them a secret, namely that a year and a half ago, those same leaders of Brookwood College were running after that same Woll asking that he come and lecture.”1
Whatever the original merits of inviting Woll, there could be no clearer indication that The Forward was preparing to break with the Socialists, years before the election of FDR, than for its labor editor not only to identify himself with Matthew Woll’s persuasion in the AFL but also to go further in partisan jeering by using a phrase like “semi-Communist poison.” In a letter to the editor, A. J. Muste protested the column:
He makes it appear that these young men are opposed to tolerance in the labor movement and to freedom of discussion on all points of view. The whole point of their resolution, however, was that the cause of tolerance and freedom of discussion was not being served by inviting Brother Woll at this time . . . when he was serving as acting President of the National Civic Federation which opposes old age pension legislation, and when but recently he has again come out vigorously against independent political action. If Brother Schaeffer would frankly discuss that point of the political implication of the invitation of Brother Woll and reveal his own purposes in connection with it, instead of distracting attention from that issue by lecturing these students on tolerance and freedom of expression and throwing a handful of mud at Brookwood, that would be a real contribution to labor thinking at this time.2
The most a sympathetic Charney Vladeck could do was prevail upon Schaeffer to print letters from Muste and the student body in his next Sunday column.3 The New Leader came to the defense of Brookwood and the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, but Abraham Cahan and The Forward had succeeded in their objective, the essential first condition of the wrecking of the Socialist Party: to drive a wedge between the party leadership and its labor movement allies. The United Hebrew Trades, now little more than a paper organization controlled by Cahan, denounced the CPLA as a dual union movement, leading Muste to indict the United Hebrew Trades as the driving force behind the AFL attacks on Brookwood and the CPLA.4
Returns from the 1930 election continued to encourage the Socialists. Norman Thomas won 22 percent of the vote in his race for Congress from the Flatbush and Bedford-Stuyvesant sections of Brooklyn, Jacob Panken nearly 26 percent from Lower Manhattan, Charney Vladeck nearly 17 percent on the Lower East Side, and Frank Crosswaith over 5 percent in Harlem. Outside New York, Andrew Bower polled over 13 percent in the Reading-based fourteenth district of Pennsylvania, and in Milwaukee, William Quick polled over 36 percent in the fourth district and James Sheehan over 40 percent in the fifth. The enduring Socialist delegation in the Wisconsin legislature grew from five to eleven, and in Reading, two Socialists were elected to the Pennsylvania legislature: Lilith Wilson, a former member of the NEC, and Darlington Hoopes, a son of dairy-farming Quakers converted to Socialism during the party’s heyday by a boarding school friend who subscribed to the Appeal to Reason.5
In addition, Floyd Olson, a one-time IWW member before joining the Non-Partisan League, running on the Farmer-Labor ticket was elected governor of Minnesota. The backdrop of new signs of life at the ballot box, of course, was the Great Depression, as David Shannon vividly describes:
By 1933, 25.2 percent of the civilian labor force was unemployed. These figures are only estimates, perhaps they should be higher. The numbers of those only partially unemployed or working at jobs that required significantly less skill than the workers had and paying significantly less than their skills would normally command will never be known. Nor will it ever be known how many people of the American working force were at one time or another out of work during the depression years. Even the shockingly high unemployment figures do not reflect the true worker displacement of those years. . . . The physical volume of American industrial production dropped nearly 50 percent from 1929 to 1932. Net income from agriculture declined from $7.7 billion in 1929, which was not a good year for farmers, to $2.8 billion in 1932. These statistics of economists are very useful, but they do not describe the suffering brought by the Great Depression. Literary artists can tell us something of that. Thomas Wolfe, in his prowling through the “great web and jungle” of New York City during the early depression, saw “a man whose life had subsided into a mass of shapeless and filthy rags, devoured by vermin, wretches huddled together for a little warmth in freezing cold squatting in doorless closets upon the foul seat of a public latrine within the very shadow of the cold shelter of palatial and stupendous monuments of wealth.” But no artist could report on more than an extremely small part of the American scene, no observer, no matter how sensitive, could see or appreciate the total impact of the Great Depression.6
And in the words of the New York Socialist campaign manifesto in 1930:
The wheels of industry have been slackened or stopped and over five million persons have been robbed of the opportunity to work and to earn a living for themselves and their families. The vast army of unemployed created by the acute industrial depression is augmented by hundreds of thousands of workers, who, at the age of sixty or even fifty, are permanently eliminated as “too old” from our strenuous, life-consuming, and merciless economic system. . . . Unemployment is a product of the capitalist system of private ownership and unregulated and irresponsible direction of industry. It would be eliminated in an economic system of planned production for social use. But even now, the tragic situation of millions of unemployed workers can be relieved.7
In 1931, most of the party’s energies were thrown into a national campaign for unemployment relief through social insurance. Norman Thomas personally visited in Washington such friendly senators as Burton Wheeler and Lynn Frazier, who together urged President Hoover to call a special session of Congress to consider a relief program.8 The League for Industrial Democracy was active on the ground among striking coal miners in West Virginia. Harry Fleischman, who became executive secretary of the Socialist Party in the 1940s, described coming into the party through this movement:
In the summer of 1931, I graduated from high school and into unemployment, and joined the Young People’s Socialist League. The first time I heard Norman Thomas was at an open air rally in New York to raise funds, food and clothing for the West Virginia miners. I was extremely moved by Thomas’ eloquence and personality. That same rally provided my introduction to Communist tactics. First they heckled and then they began fist fights to break up the meeting.9
By all appearances when the decade began, the 1930s should never have belonged to the Communist Party. After the series of events that culminated in the expulsion of Jay Lovestone, the Communists seemed fated to irrelevance after Stalin decreed the so-called third period. The party line characterizing the “third period” held that, as capitalism was entering its final death spiral, the principal enemies of Communists everywhere were the parties of Social Democracy, deemed “objective allies” of fascism and thus labeled as “social fascists.” Only William Z. Foster remained of the top leadership from the beginning of the open and legal party, and he would soon be overshadowed by Earl Browder, a Comintern favorite after serving several years in China. Most in the second-tier leadership at one time or another had passed through the Socialist Party, but few had ever risen even as far as the rank of a local organizer.
But the Communists still had the weapon whose destructive force was so effectively demonstrated in the Farmer-Labor Party drama of 1923 and 1924: what Lenin originally termed the “united front from below,” meaning, in practice, the rallying of the SP rank and file to their program, thereby sabotaging the SP. The first indication that this could happen with the massive influx of young people into the SP came at the New York City SP convention of 1930, when an organized “Militant” caucus had an unexpected show of strength. Although dueling convention resolutions on the Soviet Union both called for American recognition, opposed foreign intervention in Russia’s internal affairs, and condemned the ongoing Soviet suppression of political dissent, the Militants insisted that the party avow “a definitely friendly attitude towards Soviet Russia.”10 Historian Bernard Johnpoll hastens to emphasize, “This pro-Sovietism reflected the liberalism which pervaded the Militant wing of the party. Most liberals of the 1930s tended to be uncritically pro-Soviet—on the contrary, most non-Communist radicals, from Emma Goldman to Morris Hillquit, were highly critical of Stalin’s regime.”11
In 1931, a nationally organized Militant faction made its debut with a pamphlet titled A Militant Program for the Socialist Party of America: Socialism In Our Time written by McAlister Coleman; a respectable number of individuals with some age and distinction in the Socialist movement affixed their names to this pamphlet. The most prominent included Upton Sinclair, who had drifted back into the party in the 1920s; Harry Laidler at the LID; Thomas’s former colleagues from The World Tomorrow, Devere Allen and Reinhold Niebuhr; and Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) leaders Paul Blanshard, Mary Hillyer, and Maynard Krueger. Their fateful pamphlet proclaimed,
Believing as we do that the Socialist Party of America is the only political instrument for the emancipation of the working class of this country, we must be ready bodily to accept the challenge of these times and to plunge with new hope and fresh vision into the bitter conflict that is before us. That conflict is the class struggle. The moment this Marxian conception is abandoned, not only in theory but in practice as well, that moment Socialism loses its significance. . . . We see the menace of such an outcome in Germany so long as the Socialists of that country subordinate the revolution to the maintenance of the “democratic” republic and in so doing pursue a policy of “tolerating” capitalism. Their conduct is the more to be condemned because it is cloaked with lip service to Marxism. And in our own country we are deeply concerned by the presence in our ranks of apologists for this deadly sort of “gradualness,” compromise and political trading parading under the name of Marxism, when the times cry aloud for courageous decisions and bold actions. . . . Against such a departure from Marxian Socialism, this program is a protest.12
The Militants, in short, were premature Reform Communists. Like Alexander Dubcek in the 1960s, the “Euro-Communist” movement in the 1970s, and Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, they favored a reform of the Soviet system in which full civil liberties would be restored along with independent civic organizations and trade unions, but with the Communist Party retaining its monopoly of political power. As one of their major influences, Sidney Hook, would recall in the 1980s, “Some of the positions I developed then . . . were to reappear forty years later in European movements characterized as ‘Communism with a human face.’ ”13
In other words, they were true believers in the cynically peddled narrative of the Communists about the specter of fascism both abroad and at home. It was precisely because of this sincerity of belief that only a relative few ever joined or even seriously entered the orbit of the Communist Party; most had enough certitude in their doctrines to forcefully reject Communist discipline. It was also for this very reason that the vast majority of Militants within a decade became ardent New Deal liberals and anti-Communists. There would, in fact, be a direct organizational link from the Militant faction to the Union for Democratic Action, formed on the eve of U.S. entry into the Second World War and predecessor of Americans for Democratic Action, the essential activist outfit of Cold War liberalism. The origins of Cold War liberalism, therefore, can be identified in the violent rejection of historic Social Democracy, particularly its general record of pacifism, by the majority of Socialist Party youth in favor of Lenin’s phantasm of a “united front from below.”
This rejection may seem puzzling inasmuch as the Communist Party remained, throughout the first half of the decade, decidedly unattractive with its violently argued dogmas often backed up by violence. But to radicals who had not personally experienced the events that led to the founding of the Communist Party nor gone through the pain of watching the rise of the Soviet Union from an avowedly Socialist perspective, the Soviet Union had a distinctive allure in the early years of the Depression that could transcend political affiliation. The quintessential case was the aging Lincoln Steffens, who famously said of his visit to Russia, “I have seen the future and it works,” after a long romance with Mussolini as the exemplary man of action. Even Oswald Garrison Villard, the young Gold Democrat of 1896, argued that the Soviets’ “use of all the methods of repression to which Mussolini resorts so freely and so basely, but with this difference—the Bolshevists are working for the good of the masses of the working people.”14
Sidney Hook, who was briefly in the Communist orbit around this time, described the mood of the moment more than a half-century later:
The necessity for political faith created its own object, and the inanities of the Communist Party were overlooked. Some consoled themselves with the hope that things would change. Many more concluded that Marxist politics was an arcane subject to which only those who had mastered the Marxist dialectic had the key. These were the vast majority. . . . Whatever doubts they had about the details of politics they gladly surrendered, the better to enjoy the euphoria of their faith.15
At least one force deliberately cultivating the pro-Soviet tilt in progressive circles in this period can be identified. The Garland Fund, the endowment for radical causes responsible for launching The New Leader, had its board stacked with Communist allies by the late 1920s. The most consequential was Sidney Hillman, who began a business relationship with the Soviet regime as early as 1922, with the Soviets depositing millions into his Amalgamated Bank. Hillman espoused a corporatist ideology of “industrial democracy” that strikingly resembled the theory and practice that once united Gompers and Mussolini and may have had some impact on the development of Lenin’s New Economic Policy.16 Hillman never kept the American Communists at less than arm’s length, insisting he had only a strict business relationship with the Soviets. Yet Soviet investment may have been necessary to keep afloat the Amalgamated Bank, the one institution of the labor movement’s extensive experiment with the “new capitalism” of the 1920s to survive the Great Depression.17 Retaining the trust of Socialist old-timers in spite of this, Hillman became an indispensable ally to the bitterly anti-Soviet Abraham Cahan as a shared objective emerged—wrecking the Socialist Party on behalf of the New Deal.
The Militant program in many respects echoed that of the historic left wing and the founders of the Communist Party, with its disdain for the ballot box and reckless and arbitrary application of perceived European precedents to the American scene. James Oneal was the first to make this argument, commenting on the Militant manifesto in The New Leader, “They are dogmatic, impressionistic, and emotional in their unquestioning support of all that is taking place in Russia. It is in fact only pseudo-radicalism, only loosely linked with, and not at all based on, the working class itself.”18 The hot-tempered Oneal fell back on Marxist and working-class bona fides to express his disenchantment not only with the Militants but also with Norman Thomas and virtually all of the new blood in the SP. In this, Oneal predated by at least a few years virtually all the other grievances of the emerging “Old Guard.”
To the extent the Old Guard was becoming a unified force around The New Leader, its adherents were nowhere near contemplating the sort of break with the Socialists planned by the managers of The Forward who ruthlessly manipulated them. That the Old Guard staked out its position on orthodox Marxist grounds, to a degree never employed by leading Socialists against the left wing in the 1910s, was starkly illustrated by none other than Julius Gerber. The bête noir of the left wing in 1919, Gerber complained in 1931 that the Socialist Party “spent more time advocating civic virtue than the class struggle.”19 Bernard Johnpoll explains, “The adherents of the Old Guard were, if anything, more Marxist than the Militants,” describing the factional divide as between “aggressive social gospel progressivism” and “lethargic Marxism.”20
David Shannon largely affirms this view, distinguishing the Militants from those closer to Thomas whom he labels “Progressives.”21 What this taxonomy ignores, however, are the external forces on both sides that exacerbated tensions, thwarting the potential for the Socialist Party to take the lead in building a larger Labor or Farmer-Labor Party. A comparison to the events leading up to the 1924 election is instructive. As has been noted, the essential pattern for the events of the 1930s was set then, with the effort to build a new party frustrated and obstructed by the Communists and their fellow travelers, yet ably assisted by parochial opportunists among their opposite number—the Railroad Brotherhoods in 1924 and in the 1930s by the circle around Abraham Cahan. In 1924, the center held because the external events beyond their control ended up working in their favor, but the opposite proved to be the case in the 1930s.
Yet on all sides in the SP, as the 1932 election approached there was great wariness of any kind of campaign along the lines of 1924. In the fall of 1931, John Dewey issued an appeal on behalf of the League for Independent Political Action (LIPA) to Nebraska senator George Norris, widely regarded as LaFollette’s successor and known as a bitter adversary of Herbert Hoover, to run at the head of a new party in 1932. The harshly negative response from practically all Socialists was immediate. James Oneal, until now one of the most supportive of Labor Party prospects, resigned from the LIPA and urged all Socialists to do the same. Speaking for the Militants, Harry Laidler acidly protested, “A party which cannot be launched unless some U.S. Senator waves his magic wand is hardly worth launching and has no assurance of permanence or of helping in fundamental change.”22 A valid point to be sure, this nevertheless betrayed a cavalier attitude toward much of the discontent stirring at the peak of the Great Depression.
Perhaps more indicative of missed opportunities in 1932 was the candidacy of William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray—elected governor of Oklahoma in 1930 in a comeback that also included the return of Thomas Gore to the U.S. Senate—for the Democratic presidential nomination. Oscar Ameringer celebrated their return in his Oklahoma Leader, and such Sooner Socialist veterans as Luther Langston backed Murray’s presidential bid.23 Ex-Socialist Peter Mehrens of Omaha was even one of his national campaign managers.24 But at least one Socialist survivor in Oklahoma City recalled,
Those Oklahomans who call themselves “the real radicals” recall that as president of the constitutional convention Murray opposed most of the demands made by the organized farmers and workers. . . . During his four years in Washington, his eccentricities seem to have attracted more attention than his statesmanship. He was defeated for re-nomination when he returned from Washington and, in his campaign, preached preparedness for war.25
Murray had indeed been a down-the-line Wilsonian, from championing the Federal Reserve Act to being among the loudest pro-war agitators in Oklahoma. In sharp contrast on both counts was the blind senator, Thomas Gore, a far more genuine Populist standard-bearer of the old cause. If Gore’s age and disability should have precluded him from seeking the presidency, 1932 might have also been the optimal time for Huey Long, who briefly threw his hat into the Democratic ring, before his Louisiana power struggle and the woefully misguided hysteria about “American fascism.” In any event, though Murray put up a spirited fight at the Democratic convention, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was favored from the outset.
Morris Hillquit summed up the consensus Socialist view of all new party speculation, saying that the revival of Socialist Party fortunes was making a new party on the British Labour model superfluous.26 This was certainly short-sighted, but what this moment had in common with the Socialist heyday of the 1910s was that there was the least prospect for a Labor Party, allowing the widest possible berth for the Socialists to grow as a party themselves. Despite tensions between them, the LIPA continued to follow the lead of the Socialists into the 1932 election. Indeed, as late as the end of 1933, the SP was in greater command of efforts to build a new party than it had been leading up to 1924 or ever thereafter. Early in 1932, The Coming of a New Party was published by Paul Douglas, a leader of the LIPA and professor at the University of Chicago. The future stalwart liberal senator dedicated this book to Norman Thomas, “whose views on policies and tactics differ in some respects from those advanced in this work, but who is, to my mind, the best representative of the new spirit in American political life.”27
Yet Hillquit became the most polarizing figure among the Socialists. The casus belli for the Militants, allied with assorted Midwesterners who wanted to retake the center of party power from New York, came in the summer of 1931 when it became known that Hillquit was being retained as counsel by Standard Oil, in its effort to recoup losses from Soviet nationalization of its Russian oil fields. Hillquit had prospered in recent years as counsel in similar matters involving litigation with the Soviets, but this was the first time he appeared to directly challenge the nationalization of natural resources, a critical component of the Socialist Party program. Hillquit was attending a Socialist International conference in Vienna when the controversy first broke, and Norman Thomas took the lead attacking him and rallying the opposition. James Oneal tried frantically to keep the whole matter quiet by refusing to print Thomas’s articles in The New Leader while privately pleading with Hillquit not to take the case. As it turned out, Hillquit was already preparing to resign from the case when the controversy first erupted.28
But the factional lines of the 1930s were thus drawn. The depth of damage became apparent in January 1932, when a radicalized A. J. Muste appealed directly to the Militant faction, over the heads of the SP leadership, to seize the party on behalf of his original labor party program.29 Indeed, Muste, who was responding to attacks by the Militants against himself and the CPLA, was so embittered by the attacks on Brookwood initiated by The Forward that he would not reach out to sympathizers at The New Leader.
As the 1932 campaign approached, there were six distinct factions in the Socialist Party, in the following order from right to left: (1) the faction around The Forward frankly described as barely Socialist by Bernard Johnpoll; (2) the Old Guard led by Morris Hillquit, supported by The New Leader and a majority of old-timers outside New York; (3) a group just to the left of the Old Guard that recognized the treachery of Cahan’s circle, led by Charney Vladeck and William Feigenbaum (now at The New Leader), whose major coup was to recruit Daniel Hoan as its titular leader; (4) Norman Thomas and his most intimate circle of supporters, distinguished from the Hoan-Vladeck group only by a more charitable view of the Soviet Union, and supported by such outliers among old-timers as James Maurer and Oscar Ameringer; (5) the Militants, with a majority of SP youth and highly doctrinaire program roughly analogous to the historic left wing of the 1910s; and (6) those following A. J. Muste, who were generally avowed revolutionary socialists but with a decidedly less positive view of the Soviet Union than the Militants.30
None of these factions were mutually exclusive, however, and individuals very frequently had a foot in more than one. Apparently attempting to fortify the party center, Thomas and Vladeck promoted the candidacy of Daniel Hoan to replace Hillquit as the ceremonial national chairman, this figurehead position having passed from Debs to Victor Berger and from Berger to Hillquit upon each of their deaths. However strategically foolish to go after a ceremonial post in such a way that could only offend the most devoted leader the Socialists ever knew and his many friends, it was reasonable to diagnose the party’s growing internal problems as arising from a lack of steady leadership, and tragically, Hillquit had alienated much of the party over the Standard Oil affair.
When the 1932 Socialist convention opened in Milwaukee on May 21, the first indication of divisions in the party emerged with the resolution on the Soviet Union. This largest and most optimistic Socialist convention in well over a decade was attended by 223 delegates from thirty-eight states. Yet, against an Old Guard resolution that expounded the differences between socialism and communism, a resolution passed that reiterated the long-standing party view, introduced by Oscar Ameringer and Paul Blanshard of the SLID, by a vote of 117 to 64.31 In a repeat performance from four years earlier, after a rousing nominating speech by Louis Waldman, the presidential nomination went to Norman Thomas by acclamation, with James Maurer again serving as his running mate. There was some sentiment for the second spot to go to Meta Berger, widow of Victor Berger and a critical Militant ally in Milwaukee, but she declined, apparently for the sake of party unity.32
Daniel Hoan, just elected to his eighth two-year term as mayor of Milwaukee, had a most rare quality for the Socialist Party—he was a man of few convictions and appeared interested in the chairmanship only as a matter of prestige. James Maurer entered Hillquit into renomination for the chairmanship after making a desperate attempt to effect a compromise, but then William Quick of Milwaukee made the blunder of arguing in his nominating speech for Hoan that the national chairman “should be someone unmistakably recognized as American.”33 At that moment, Norman Thomas reportedly felt instant regret over the whole enterprise, as Hillquit rose to give an unusually emotional speech:
I apologize for having been born abroad, being a Jew and living in New York, a very unpopular place. I stand for the common, garden variety of Socialism. There are the militants, well meaning, immature, effervescent people who will settle down in time, but who for the moment are wild, untamed and dangerous. Then there are the Socialists who do not want Socialism to be a working class movement. They look to college men and the white collar elements. Lastly, there is the practical kind of Socialist, like the ones here in Milwaukee, who believe in building modern sewers and showing results right away.34
Many, including Thomas, felt Hillquit was cynically shaming the delegates for flirting with anti-Semitic prejudice.35 And it was to the apparent embarrassment of most Jewish Old Guardsmen when Joseph Sharts of Ohio stridently charged anti-Semitism.36 Either way, Hillquit was reelected national chairman by a vote of 105 to 80. Joseph Shaplen, the Forward-allied reporter on Socialist Party affairs for the New York Times, secured a front-page headline for his sensationalist report on the convention, as having been “rent asunder in one of the most bitter factional battles in the history of American Socialism.” Abraham Cahan proceeded to smite Charney Vladeck with a virtual excommunication for his role, despite continuing to employ him as his general manager.37
The New Leader was able to move on, however, setting the tone that prevailed as the Socialist Party set out on its most promising national campaign in twenty years. Two weeks after the convention, Thomas appealed to Hillquit to make a joint statement on party unity. Hillquit demurred with the assurance, “I am heartily in favor of harmony within our ranks and of united and effective action in the coming campaign and at all times thereafter. . . . These differences should, in my opinion, be ironed out, if possible, in a frank and honest discussion and in an effort to bring about a clear understanding on future policies and methods of practical work.”38 Hillquit was clearly shaken by the challenge to his authority in the party, like none even at the peak of IWW influence a generation earlier. But despite the terrible intraparty conflict that would erupt within two years, most Socialists were sincerely committed to increased unity, and Hillquit was determined to once again be the indispensable agent of unity.
The National Executive Committee elected by the 1932 convention, numbering ten throughout the decade, reflected a delicate factional balance. Three were squarely in the Militant camp—Leo Krzycki of Wisconsin, Powers Hapgood of Indiana, and Albert Sprague Coolidge of Massachusetts. Two were unambiguously of the Old Guard—Jasper McLevy of Connecticut and John Packard of California. The remaining five were in what remained for the time being the vital center—Norman Thomas, Daniel Hoan, James Graham of Montana, and the two Pennsylvania legislators, Darlington Hoopes and Lilith Wilson.
The new vitality of the party was exhibited by the impressive array of literature produced for the campaign. One such pamphlet, Bankers’ Rule Is Workers’ Ruin, called for the nationalization of the Federal Reserve System, with the power to fix interest rates returned to Congress as mandated by the Constitution. Boldly asserting its place at the head of any successor to the late Farmer-Labor Party movement, the Socialist Party proclaimed,
Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr., a pioneer in politics as his son was a pioneer in aviation, once spoke of Americans as slaves of the “money trust, source of all trusts.” He predicted that we should increasingly come under the rule of bankers. . . . Naturally, the money trust’s power grows. On July 1, 1932, five hundred corporations had one or more directors in common with at least two of New York’s eight largest banks. Bankers manage our railroads, public utilities, insurance companies, factories, department stores—and the wage earner, both as producer and consumer, pays an unseen tax to them. . . . “The plain truth,” said Congressman Lindbergh, “is that neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party is fit to manage the destinies of a great people. Both are controlled by men who have a vested interest in keeping alive present evils.”39
Though the Socialist platform of 1932 is best remembered for more nearly anticipating the New Deal than the Democratic platform adopted at that year’s convention that nominated FDR, it by no means repudiated the radicalism that defined Socialist platforms in the time of Debs. Reflecting changing times with a lengthy foreign policy section and elevating the call for African American equality to an immediate demand, it was still at sharp divergence with its ultimate New Deal/Cold War liberal legacy—retaining the historic call for the initiative and referendum at all levels of government and the abolition of the Supreme Court power of judicial review.40 The preamble of that momentous platform read,
We are facing a breakdown of the capitalist system. This situation the Socialist Party has long predicted. In the last campaign, it warned the people of the increasing insecurity in American life and urged a program of action which, if adopted, would have saved millions from their present tragic plight. Today, in every city in the United States, jobless men and women by the thousands are fighting the grim battle against want and starvation, while factories stand idle and food rots on the ground. Millions of wage-earners and salaried workers are hunting in vain for jobs, while other millions are only partly employed. Unemployment and poverty are inevitable products of the present system. Under capitalism the few run our industries. The many do the work. The wage-earners and farmers are compelled to give a large part of the product of their labor to the few. The many in the factories, mines, shops, offices, and on the farms claim but a paltry income and are able to buy back only a part of the goods that can be produced in such abundance by their own industries.41
Significant legacies of the 1924 election aided the 1932 campaign, including Farmer-Labor organizations in Illinois and West Virginia that acted as de facto SP affiliates. The powerful Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party agreed not to endorse either major-party candidate for president in exchange for Socialist backing for its entire slate.42 Only two labor bodies officially supported Thomas and Maurer by vote of their conventions—the Hosiery Workers led by Emil Rieve of Reading, the most important trade union ally of the Socialist Party for the next two years, and the Vermont Federation of Labor, anchored in the Quarry Workers Union of Barre.43 Other labor bodies whose top officials backed the Socialist ticket included the state federations of Wisconsin and Idaho and the American Federation of Teachers. Thomas spoke in thirty-eight states on a shoestring budget of just a little over $25,000 in his epic 1932 campaign, including a ten-day tour of New England spending all of $55.45.44
Of his speeches, Thomas’s wife Violet, faithfully at his side in sharp contrast to Debs’s wife, would complain to a campaign aide, “Norman is being demagogic about Hoover. I’ll have to say something to him about this. I don’t like him to be demagogic.”45 This may have been expressed nowhere with more ferocity than in Hoover’s home state of Iowa, at a farmers’ encampment in Sioux City. In Philadelphia, Thomas was scheduled to be joined by James Maurer at Rayburn Plaza. After the local Republican machine decreed that only an “educational meeting” was legal, once he properly shamed the Republicans, Thomas provoked roaring laughter from the crowd with his stress upon the “educational” nature of his talk.46 The optimistic tone of the campaign seemed vindicated with the largest crowds to come out for a Socialist standard-bearer since 1912, with over 10,000 in Los Angeles, Indianapolis, and Hartford, Connecticut; 14,000 in Milwaukee, and 20,000 at Madison Square Garden. W. A. Swanberg, a future biographer of Norman Thomas, recalled, “I heard Thomas at the University of Minnesota that fall. He bounded to the rostrum and spoke with a vigor, fluency, conviction, and charisma that lingers in my memory 44 years later.”47
Thomas enjoyed extraordinary popularity on college campuses that might have been downright baffling to Socialists of the party’s heyday. In a nationwide campus straw poll, Thomas carried campuses as varied as Columbia, City College of New York, and Howard University, ultimately polling 18 percent to 50 percent for Hoover, 31 percent for Roosevelt, and 1 percent for William Z. Foster.48 Oswald Garrison Villard organized the “Thomas and Maurer Committee of 100,000” to rally non-Socialist progressives to the ticket, a list that included Paul Douglas, John Dewey, W. E. B. DuBois, Kirby Page of The World Tomorrow, and Henry Hazlitt of The Freeman.49 Villard’s The Nation was joined in endorsing Thomas by The New Republic under its new editor Bruce Bliven.50 Another supporter was George Gershwin, who had recently collaborated with veteran Socialist Morrie Ryskind on the biting musical satire of the Hoover administration, Of Thee I Sing. Ryskind, whose Socialist activism dated back to defiant satire in the Columbia student paper during the Wilson terror, was at the pinnacle of his career after adapting the two hit stage plays of The Four Marx Brothers into their first two films.
The emboldened Socialists made a direct appeal to the supporters of Villard’s committee that there was no reason for them not to take the step of actually joining the Socialist Party. Among those named in this appeal were American Civil Liberties Union founders and close Thomas friends Roger Baldwin and Arthur Garfield Hays, Jane Addams, Charles Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes, Bruce Bliven, Lincoln Steffens, Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, and Rabbi Stephen Wise.51 The most direct response came from Harry Elmer Barnes, the frequent visiting professor at Brookwood widely admired for his groundbreaking study of the causes of the First World War and a syndicated columnist with Scripps-Howard:
It would be hard to prove Norman Thomas a more advanced person in his social and economic views than a realistic liberal like Amos Pinchot. For an American liberal to take on the socialistic label seems to me to add a handicap without any advantage. The present order can either be patched up and made to run with passable efficiency or it must be overthrown root and branch. Those of us who still believe that it can be reconditioned will do well to act under the aegis of liberalism. Those who hold that the present order must go should espouse communism. There is little in Norman Thomas’ program of social, economic and political reform which I do not personally approve. But I see nothing to be gained by branding it “Socialism.” Any robust liberal would accept it in general outline. Those who hope and wish to secure a satisfactory social order without completely smashing the existing system should raise as little heat and apprehension as possible.52
The Communist ticket, consisting of William Z. Foster, for the third and final time, with running-mate James Ford, then the leading African American party member, had its own curious intellectual cohort, the League of Professionals for Foster and Ford, to challenge the preeminence of the Thomas and Maurer Committee of 100,000. Novelist John Dos Passos, a member of this League, most memorably expressed the representative sentiment: “Joining the Socialist Party would have just about as much effect as drinking a bottle of near beer.” The League explained in its manifesto,
We have aligned ourselves with the frankly revolutionary Communist Party, the party of the workers. The Communist Party stands for a Socialism of deeds, not of words. The Communist Party is the only party which has stood in the forefront of the major struggle of the workers against capitalism and the capitalist state. The Communist Party proposes as the real solution of the present crisis the overthrow of the system which is responsible for all crises.53
Sidney Hook drafted the manifesto, and other members included Lincoln Steffens, Langston Hughes, Theodore Dreiser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Granville Hicks, Lewis Mumford, and Elliot Cohen, later the founding editor of Commentary magazine.54 Indeed, a large majority of the League later became prominent and often strident anti-Communists.
When a special mayoral election was called to coincide with the presidential election in New York to replace the impeached Jimmy Walker, Morris Hillquit was nominated in a fit of nostalgia for his campaign of 1917. Enjoying the support of a wide cross-section of the labor movement in New York, including the ILGWU, Amalgamated, other garment mainstays, Ironworkers, Jewelry Workers, and Teamsters, Hillquit declared after launching his campaign,55
Honesty and cleanliness in city government is a very important issue and so is economy in administration, but even more vital are the lives, health, and welfare of the city’s seven million inhabitants. Our campaign will be made largely on the issue of adequate relief of the 1,150,000 suffering victims of unemployment. This will be the overshadowing, all absorbing problem for the city in the next year.56
Running his third consecutive race for governor of New York, Louis Waldman was the hapless object of the most ominous expression yet of the intentions of The Forward toward the Socialist Party. Not so brazen as to openly oppose Norman Thomas’s candidacy, The Forward all but officially supported the candidacy of Democrat Herbert Lehman for governor. Hillquit confessed to one distraught Brooklyn Socialist, “I do not read the Jewish Daily Forward . . . . I have on several occasions heard complaints about the paper similar to yours and . . . I fully share your indignation and condemnation.”57 Part of the motive of Abraham Cahan and The Forward to begin serving Democratic Party interests can perhaps be gleaned from the parallel behavior of another nominal Thomas supporter in New York, Stephen Wise, who by 1932 was the leading spokesman of the Zionist movement in the United States.
In a conversation with Paul Blanshard, Wise claimed to be sympathetic to Waldman and did not want to make a statement against Lehman, yet had an article in Opinion magazine on Jewish candidates for high office that was practically a stump speech for Lehman.58 Support for Lehman’s candidacy thus appears to have been, at least in part, a Zionist imperative, probably as a means to get the movement’s foot in the door with the incoming Roosevelt administration. Having taken a pro-Zionist stance after Cahan’s visit to Palestine in 1925, The Forward would certainly have had this in mind when it supported Lehman and in all its subsequent activities in support of FDR. The consensus historians of American Jewry would later argue that The Forward met the Jewish masses where they were at the expense of Socialist dogma, but this claim is every bit as deliberately obfuscating as the pro-Communist “social history” of the New Deal and the CIO, with its faith-based notions about the inexorable will of the “people’s movement.”
With the Literary Digest poll predicting two million votes for the Thomas-Maurer ticket and with Socialist hopes of electing a handful of congressmen, as ever the high point of the campaign occurred at Madison Square Garden.59 The burying of the factional hatchet was symbolized by a joint rally for Thomas and Hillquit with Militants and Old Guardsmen sharing the stage.60 In concluding the final political campaign of his career, Morris Hillquit firmly took his stand:
The Socialists can justly claim that they have introduced the only serious and vital note in the campaign. Against Hoover’s alibis, we have presented to the people of the United States an unanswerable and crushing indictment of the national government for its partisan support of the big business interests and its callous and criminal neglect of the starving masses. To the nebulous platform and vague promises of Governor Roosevelt we oppose a clear, comprehensive and consistent program of economic rehabilitation and social regeneration. As against Colonel Lehman’s belated 19th century liberalism we advance the new social claims of our own time and generation, the urgent, vital demands of the people for today and tomorrow. . . . The fundamental differences between us and both old parties arise from the irreconcilable economic interests which we represent and the opposite views on government which we hold. To the Republican and Democratic politicians the people are there to serve the government. To us the government exists to serve the people. To them government is primarily an institution for the protection of property rights and the preservation of class privileges and business interests, a glorified policeman sternly maintaining “law and order” and wielding a heavy club over the dissatisfied and rebellious. . . . We place life above property, human happiness above business interests.61
In the end, the Socialist presidential ticket registered 884,885 votes, a fraction over 2 percent. It earned only around 4 percent of the vote in the four top states—Wisconsin, Oregon, New York, and Montana. Berks County, Pennsylvania, once again led among counties with nearly 22 percent. Yet there was considerable evidence that a proper count would have come closer to the two million votes predicted by Literary Digest and others. One piece of anecdotal evidence came from a Socialist poll watcher in Chicago who called out the throwing away of ballots marked for the Communists, prompting an embarrassed response, “When you Socialists have no watchers, we do the same to you.”62 David Shannon validates this view, arguing that one of the party’s greatest failings was only having poll watchers in its most formidable local machines, speculating that their presence might have made the difference in electing a number of congressmen in the 1910s.63
The highest performing congressional candidate in 1932 was Raymond Hofses, with nearly 27 percent in the Reading-based fourteenth district of Pennsylvania. In California, former Berkeley Mayor J. Stitt Wilson won over 22 percent in the seventh district, and Millen Dempster, the party’s hopeless gubernatorial candidate two years later, got just under 15 percent in the San Francisco-based fourth district. In the fourth and fifth districts of Wisconsin, respectively, Walter Polakowski earned over 23 percent and Herman Kent over 20 percent. In New York, Charney Vladeck received 14 percent in the Lower East Side-based eighth district, former legislator Samuel Orr over 11 percent in the Bronx-based twenty-third district, Harry Laidler just under 11 percent in the Bedford-Stuyvesant-based sixth district, Frank Crosswaith 7 percent in the Harlem-based twenty-first district, and the aging “Jewish Eugene V. Debs,” Abraham Shiplacoff, with nearly 6.5 percent in the Williamsburg-based ninth district. Finally, in the special mayoral election, Morris Hillquit earned 251,656 votes, the highest number of votes he ever received for any office by far, but far short of his 1917 percentage at only 12.6 percent.
The Communist Party ticket of William Z. Foster and James Ford, in this peak year of the Great Depression, achieved the all-time high of 103,307 votes. This same period saw a few Communist mayors and aldermen elected in tiny radical mining hamlets; the early 1930s, not the Popular Front era, was when the Communist Party peaked as an electoral party. Even in the depths of the third period, the Communists made clear they could make their influence felt in such episodes as the legendary mining war in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1931 and the ill-fated Bonus Army movement in the summer of 1932. There was also a reminder of the enduring Farmer-Labor imperative in 1932. The octogenarian William “Coin” Harvey, the most widely read pamphleteer for William Jennings Bryan in 1896, was on the ballot in ten states at the head of the quixotic Liberty Party. Though tallying only 53,425 votes, Harvey echoed the vote for Parley P. Christensen in 1920 with nearly 5 percent (twice the Thomas vote) in Washington, over 2.5 percent in Idaho (one of five states where the Socialists were not on the ballot), and twice the Socialist vote in South Dakota.
The 1932 election proved the high-water mark by far among the six consecutive campaigns of Norman Thomas as the Socialist standard-bearer; moreover, it would shape the historical legacy of the Socialist Party to a greater extent than any of Eugene Debs’s five campaigns. In addition to being widely credited with more nearly anticipating the New Deal than Roosevelt’s campaign, the large number of politicians, labor leaders, and others in Cold War liberal Washington who entered politics through Norman Thomas’s 1932 campaign proved an exceptionally enduring legacy. But it is a serious mistake to simply assume, as David Shannon does in his brief but comprehensive history of the Socialist Party, that “it was Roosevelt in a word” that killed the party.64 Through FDR’s first term at least, there was the same opening for the Socialists to provide opposition from the left that there was in the first Wilson administration when the party was able to consolidate its gains before being crushed by repression and internal dissension. But in the 1930s, internal dissension, shrewdly exacerbated from the outside on two fronts, doomed any possibility of heeding the lessons of the Socialist heyday.
Ten days after his inauguration, on March 14, 1933, Roosevelt received Norman Thomas and Morris Hillquit at the White House, having been an acquaintance of both as governor of New York. Both Thomas and Hillquit were pleased by the dramatic bank closure announcement that marked the inaugural, and Roosevelt gave a courteous and attentive hearing to their plea for a $12 billion bond issue for relief and public works and for the nationalization of the banks that had been closed.65 Thomas wrote a short time later that “without the New Deal, no one knows what stage of disintegration we should have reached,” adding the back-handed compliment for its “immensely bold attempt to stabilize capitalism.”66 But from the outset there was the fear that Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration (NRA) was the beginning of a fascist revolution, with its quasi-military program of economic regimentation typified by such programs as the Civilian Conservation Corps. As historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes, throughout 1933, the NRA “blue eagle” was far more ubiquitous and omnipresent in America than the swastika had yet become in Germany.67 In his survey of the 1930s Socialist Party, Frank Warren explains,
Whatever the degree of Thomas’ initial enthusiasm for the New Deal, his early attitude contained all the elements that would later develop into a full-scale critique. . . . He did not say that the New Deal was out-and-out fascism, as did the Communists, but he recognized the parallels between the economics of state capitalism and fascism, and he feared, with good reason, considering the administration of it, that the NRA had potential dangers in a fascist direction.68
Immediately after the 1932 campaign, the Socialist Party threw all of its energies into organizing the Continental Congress of Workers and Farmers on Economic Reconstruction. Emil Rieve served as chairman and Daniel Hoan as vice chairman for this conference, which took place in Washington, DC, on May 6–7, 1933. The organizing committee included A. Philip Randolph, David Dubinsky, James Maurer, Luther Langston, Henry Linville of the AFT, Fred Suitor of the Vermont AFL, H. H. Freedheim of the Idaho AFL, and James Sheehan of the Milwaukee AFL.69 The principal organizing secretary was Marx Lewis, who had remained in the nation’s capital after serving as chief of staff for both Meyer London and Victor Berger.70 Other notable organizers included future North Dakota congressman Usher Burdick, aging Non-Partisan League founder Arthur Townley, and SLID rising star Joseph Lash.71 William “Coin” Harvey also endorsed the Continental Congress and apparently folded his fledgling Liberty Party into the Socialist-led movement, promoting the Congress in a special issue of his Arkansas-based tabloid The Liberty Bell that included the writings of Thomas Edison on the evils of usury.72
The number of labor leaders and farmers’ representatives, from practically every corner of the country, who gathered in Washington that May would have been impressive even for the Socialists of the 1910s. The ever-enthusiastic Oscar Ameringer published special Continental Congress editions of his classics Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam and The Yankee Primer. As he wrote in the latter,
Now whether this depression, or rather this industrial cataclysm of the first magnitude, is the end or just the beginning of the end of the profit game I cannot tell. . . . Sooner or later, the American people will awaken to the terrible realization that they are all slaves to an ever diminishing number of their countrymen. . . . And once the fetters are cast from their eyes, they will see—and act. The means for the reconquering of their country are at hand. They still have the ballot. They are the overwhelming majority. They are the nation.73
Especially befitting the optimism about the future of the Socialist movement was this Indian summer in the life and work of Ameringer, “the Mark Twain of American Socialism.” After spending the past several years with Adolph Germer in the Illinois coal fields attempting to rally opposition to John L. Lewis in the United Mine Workers, Ameringer was back for good in his adopted home town of Oklahoma City, publishing a new national weekly, American Guardian. The “declaration” adopted by the Continental Congress was written in much the same spirit:
Since the first Declaration of Independence the American people have discovered and created the means for unheard-of wealth. Wide rivers have been tamed to provide electric power, huge mountains have been tunneled to give ore for the creation of new and marvelous machines, and the prairies have been made to yield rich crops. Man’s power to produce wealth has been increased a hundred fold, until now a life of security and abundance is possible for all. But today the nation starves in the midst of plenty. The gigantic machines stand idle, the crops lie in warehouses or rot in the fields. It is for us, workers and farmers of America, to build now a new economic system of justice and freedom. Only through our organized power can mankind be freed from the crushing and needless bonds of poverty and insecurity. Workers and farmers everywhere, unite! We have a world to win!74
Yet the most that could be said of the Continental Congress was that it served to consolidate Socialist influence in the AFL. Howard Y. Williams, the new director of the League for Independent Political Action, indicated that the LIPA intended to hold its own conference for the purpose of “the full discussion of political action as to whether or not we ought to use the Socialist Party or form a Labor or Farmer-Labor Party.”75 The Communist Party attempted to be seated at the Continental Congress, in one of the earliest indications of the passing of the extremism of the “third period.” As Marx Lewis observed, “It struck me as very modest in tone, but I do not think that we ought to be deceived by it. So far as demands are concerned, I do not see anything in them that are objectionable. It is they who are objectionable.”76
This “united front” question became increasingly urgent after the Nazi seizure of power, when a few united fronts from below cropped up, such as the American League Against War and Fascism and the Unemployed Councils led by the Militant David Lasser. In the summer of 1933, the National Executive Committee debated whether united action with the Communists could be considered on a single-issue campaign basis. Though a solid majority voted to forbid such actions, Norman Thomas opposed going on the record, arguing, “Our position is stronger than it was, so long as we make it apparent that we did try to cooperate, and that cooperation was made impossible not by us but by the Communists.”77 This dispute clearly presaged the eruption of factional strife the following year and Thomas’s position in it, but was not representative of the mood of the Socialist Party throughout 1933.
The LIPA finally issued its call several weeks after the Continental Congress for a conference for the express purpose of forming a Farmer-Labor Party, to be held September 2–3. Signers of the call included North Dakota senator Gerald Nye; Minnesota Farmer-Labor congressman Ernest Lundeen; Wisconsin congressman Thomas Amlie (of the new Wisconsin Progressive Party formed by the two sons of Fighting Bob, Robert Jr. and Philip); Fiorello LaGuardia, running for the second time as the Republican nominee for mayor of New York; and Oswald Garrison Villard. Labor leaders included Henry Linville and Abraham Lefkowitz of the AFT, Max Zaritsky of the Millinery Workers, J. B. S. Hardman of the Amalgamated, and A. F. Whitney of the Railway Labor Executives Association.78
In July, the NEC passed a resolution, stating, “Without closing its mind to what future events may make desirable, the NEC of the Socialist Party states its conviction that the present time is not opportune for the formation of any new independent Farmer-Labor Party on a national or local scale.” Executive Secretary Clarence Senior went so far as to appeal to all Socialists still affiliated with the LIPA to renounce the conference.79 Most followed suit, including the party’s most reliable labor ally Emil Rieve. Devere Allen gave the most characteristic statement on the Socialist Party’s behalf: “There is no room for a party between this Roosevelt liberalism and the distinctive program of the Socialist Party. . . . I have been moved by the indisputable rise of influence over the working masses, the trade unions, and other significant groups, by the Socialist Party itself.”80 It was understandable for the Socialists to think they could lead a future Labor Party under their own banner after the exhilarating Continental Congress. But at no other moment in the history of the Socialist Party did it have the opportunity to seize complete leadership of the movement for a Labor or Farmer-Labor Party, in pushing for a merger of the Continental Congress with the LIPA-led conference on its own terms.
The resistance to seizing the moment can largely be attributed to the growing influence of the quasi-revolutionary and doctrinaire Militants. Andrew Biemiller of Milwaukee even made a point of impressing upon fellow Militant Powers Hapgood not to attend the LIPA conference as a delegate for the Continental Congress.81 No doubt the divisions with both the LIPA and CPLA, fostered by extremists on both ends of the SP factional spectrum, greatly diminished the prospect for united action. Yet this was not the final word. David Saposs, the economist at Brookwood who was disenchanted with the revolutionist drift of A. J. Muste and his inner circle, published a pamphlet boldly laying out the way forward:
It is highly probable that those who demand a “pure and simple” revolutionary movement will center around the Communists and the CPLA, and that those who believe that diplomatic procedure is more practicable, will gravitate toward the Socialist Party and the Continental Congress. If the LIPA continues to pursue its original course of working among the left middle class elements, it too will undoubtedly join those counseling diplomatic procedure. And it must be borne in mind, as the experience of Germany has sadly taught us, that no mass Farmer-Labor Party is possible without the support of the left middle class. As for the Farmer-Labor Political Union, its role is still uncertain, depending on which of the two factions comes into the ascendancy.82
Morris Hillquit may have had the wisdom and gravitas to cut through the clouds of suspicion and rally his party to seize a more promising Labor Party opportunity than had ever come before. But in the summer of 1933 he was again recuperating from tuberculosis at Saranac Lake. Hillquit was scheduled to speak at a dinner with Norman Thomas, Daniel Hoan, and Theodore Debs in Chicago on October 29 on the topic, “The New Deal—Toward Fascism or Socialism?”, but he never had the opportunity to deliver a definitive statement on the New Deal.83 Morris Hillquit, the most devoted leader the American Socialist movement had ever known, died suddenly on October 8, 1933. Norman Thomas, then on a speaking tour, issued a statement by telegram:
Just read of Morris Hillquit’s death with deep sense of sorrow and loss. Socialists everywhere will miss his leadership, we in America most of all. To Socialism he freely gave gifts which employed for ends of personal advancement would have carried him far on the road to power. It is for us to carry on the struggle for the glorious end for which he gave himself so generously.84
Hillquit’s memoir, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life, was posthumously published the following year. The last chapter consisted of a speech he gave at the New York state SP convention in 1932, destined to serve as his final testament:
I am a Socialist because I cannot be anything else. I cannot accept the ugly world of capitalism, with its brutal struggles and needless suffering, its archaic and irrational economic structure, its cruel social contrasts, its moral callousness and spiritual degradation. If there were no organized Socialist movement or Socialist Party, if I were alone, all alone in the whole country and the whole world, I could not help opposing capitalism and pleading for a better, saner order, pleading for Socialism. . . . Having chosen and followed the unpopular course of a Socialist propagandist, I am entirely at peace with myself. I have nothing to regret, nothing to apologize for. . . . To me the Socialist movement with its enthusiasm and idealism, its comradeship and struggles, its hopes and disappointments, its victories and defeats, has been the best that life has had to offer.85
Hillquit’s absence became painfully evident almost immediately. Just days later, the ILGWU held a celebratory meeting at Madison Square Garden after a strike victory made possible in part by provisions of the National Recovery Act. At this meeting, Abraham Cahan boldly declared, “President Roosevelt has earned the gratitude of every thinking man in the country. He should be a Socialist, if anybody is entitled to membership in our party he is.”86 Many had to have increasingly doubted whether Cahan was still so entitled. This may have been the moment for Cahan to come out openly for the New Deal in any event, but with Hillquit gone, any challenge to him sorely lacked for leadership and direction. Then, in November, Fiorello LaGuardia, once affectionately called a “half-Socialist” congressman, was elected mayor as a nominal Republican closely aligned with the Farmer-Labor Party movement. With Socialist Charles Solomon earning only 3 percent of the vote, it was apparent that the Socialist era in New York was coming to an end.
There is probably no better metaphor for how the world that defined Morris Hillquit and his movement would vanish than his one published biography. Written in the 1970s by Norma Fain Pratt, the very subtitle, “A Political History of an American Jewish Socialist,” serves to seriously limit Hillquit’s legacy. Written in the era that produced such works of nostalgia as The Way We Were, its biases toward feminism and Zionism and its romance for the New Deal and CIO, if not also for the Popular Front, combined with all the biases against right-wing Socialists gleaned from the pseudo-scholarship of Ira Kipnis. Naturally, such an author would be baffled by Hillquit and his times and could not make more than a superficial attempt at understanding them. But that such a great divide ever emerged is a testimony to the violence that would be done to both American Socialism and its historical legacy.