For the Socialist Party, the most immediate consequence of the death of Morris Hillquit was a vacancy in the ceremonial but significant post of national chairman. Norman Thomas seemed the obvious candidate, but the Old Guard was still resentful over his role at the 1932 convention. For his part, Thomas declined to stand for the honor, in what many felt to be his single greatest mistake, thereby precluding his potential to succeed Hillquit as the party’s great compromiser. Some Old Guardsmen even approached Daniel Hoan, whom they lambasted two years earlier as a “sewer socialist,” but he was too bruised to want to enter the fray. Thus did the chairmanship go to the unlikely choice of Leo Krzycki, the leading representative of Milwaukee’s large Polish community during the Socialist heyday and now a vice president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.1
The ascent of Krzycki (pronounced kris-kee) was as ironic as it was revealing. The Old Guard was sold on Krzycki by Sidney Hillman, who put him forward knowing he was far to the left of either Thomas or Hoan and would thus exacerbate the tensions in the party. This became clear when President Roosevelt opened diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia at the end of 1933. The New Leader had long been outspoken for recognition, but Krzycki issued a press release unabashedly praising the Soviet system:
The next step that must follow government recognition is recognition by the American people of the Russian ideal—an economic order without private profit. In 15 years Russia has built herself up from a weak and poverty stricken nation to a strong and prosperous one by concentrating on one principle—the elimination of private profit. Because their electorate was uneducated and untrained in democratic methods, they had to exercise that control not only against the dispossessed aristocracy, but against those members of the working class who had not enough vision to understand what they were doing.2
Norman Thomas frantically wrote to Clarence Senior, “The average man in the street or in the factory is bound to think that this is not merely a justification for dictatorship in Russia but of the extraordinary terror which unquestionably has been directed against Russian radicals.” Some of the damage was ameliorated when Thomas joined Louis Waldman in issuing a less inflammatory statement in the form of a congratulatory message to FDR.3 But the incident exposed how vulnerable the party was to the forces seeking to wreck it—the Communist plants at its far left and the Forward machine at its far right—and the degree to which they could work in concert through a figure such as Sidney Hillman.
Yet an extraordinary municipal victory in November 1933 perpetuated the spirit of new beginnings for the SP. In 1931, Jasper McLevy, the perennial candidate for mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, since 1911, had come just three thousand votes shy of being elected. The son of Scottish immigrants and a lifelong resident of Bridgeport, he was a founding member of the Socialist Party as a young AFL roofer and eventually became president of his union, the Slate and Tile Roofers.4 After a series of bridge contracting scandals implicated both major parties, McLevy’s high name recognition propelled him to victory in 1933 in a three-way race with 49 percent of the vote. Twelve of sixteen members of the new Bridgeport Common Council were also Socialists. One historian of the local party described them as a perfect reflection of historic municipal socialism: “Like their leader, the majority of these office holders were skilled workers, who demonstrated little desire to bring about a workingman’s revolution.”5 The context of the Bridgeport victory was a nationwide revolt against urban political corruption, whose most significant manifestation was the election of Fiorello LaGuardia as mayor of New York. John Haynes Holmes was among those who urged the Socialists to get behind LaGuardia, one of many “half-Socialists” from the Indian summer of progressivism now in the vanguard of a new insurgent politics.
In the main, Socialists everywhere were taking exactly the wrong lessons from the fall of German Social Democracy to Hitler. This was illustrated nowhere more starkly than by the Austrian Social Democrats and the American Socialist response to events in Austria. A tragic bloodletting broke out when the Austrian Social Democrats, at the urging of the outlawed Communists, declared armed resistance against the government of Engelbert Dolfuss. A conservative of Catholic social sympathies, Dolfuss was pushed into cracking down on the Social Democrats by his ally Mussolini, then desperately trying to rally Europe to contain Hitler through the short-lived Stresa Front. The two mighty pillars of resistance to a Nazi takeover of Austria thus destroyed each other, compounded by the assassination of Dolfuss by a Nazi agent that June.
On February 16, 1934, a mass meeting was held by the Socialist Party and its union allies at Madison Square Garden to protest the crackdown against the Austrian Social Democrats. The Communist Party had a loyal cohort of about 5,000 in the 20,000-strong crowd. As Algernon Lee opened the meeting, a chorus of chanting and booing made him inaudible. A riot broke out as the Communists, many armed with knives, were thrown off balconies by enraged Socialists. Lee was followed at the podium by an equally inaudible David Dubinsky; as he appealed for order, Clarence Hathaway, editor of the Daily Worker, appeared at the podium. Several Socialists piled on to Hathaway, who claimed his “scalp was lacerated by the batterings of chairs wielded with social fascist fury.” As the five thousand disciplined Communists began to shout, “We want Hathaway,” the one man who could make himself heard over them, Frank Crosswaith, denounced the Communists in his rich Barbados baritone as “pigs who will always remain pigs because it is the nature of Communists to be pigs.”6 The New Leader solemnly declared, “New York learned at first hand how it was that Hitler came into power, through the deliberate and planned action by the gangs that call themselves the Communist Party.”7
This shocking episode was the final straw for most of the nominal Communists who had formed the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford and had fashioned the League’s journal, Partisan Review, into a new home of their own. The macabre spectacle led many radicals to deem both the Socialists and Communists politically and morally bankrupt. Most significant was A. J. Muste, who by 1934 publicly announced his intention to form a new American Workers Party (AWP), which would be committed to a nondogmatic revolutionary socialism; Muste was joined in this effort by Sidney Hook and his tempestuous colleague in the philosophy department of New York University, James Burnham.8 Theirs was a largely faithful rendition of the program of the historic Socialist left wing, illustrating the distance that not only the Communists but also the SP Militants, who took most of their cues from them, had strayed from it:
The Socialist Party is not a party of revolution but of reform and pacifism. . . . Though now as at other periods in its history the Party contains many sound and leftward moving workers, the powerful right wing elements in the party openly spurn and combat all revolutionary tendencies. The radical phrases of the centrist wing represented by the “Militant” leaders serve as a cover for an essentially reformist attitude. . . . The rise of fundamentally anti-Marxian nationalist tendencies and the abandonment of the principle of workers’ democracy in the Third International, constitute the twin source of their decline and impotence. No semblance of party democracy obtains in the International or its sections. . . . These parties, instead of concentrating their energies and attention primarily upon advancing the revolutionary movement and seeking the overthrow of the capitalist state in those countries, become little more than agitational groups dedicated to so-called “defense of the Soviet Union,” pacifist activities for disarmament and “against war and fascism,” etc.9
The founding of the AWP led to the purging of Muste and his supporters from the faculty of Brookwood Labor College, whose board was still controlled by such veteran Socialists as James Maurer, Emil Rieve, and Abraham Lefkowitz. Muste was replaced as director of the faculty by Tucker Smith, an SP loyalist from Manhattan and one of many who in March 1934 formed the new Revolutionary Policy Committee (RPC). Declaring that “the failure of Social Democracy to take power in Germany, where the Socialists had gained the support of large numbers of the working people, raises grave questions as to its theoretical soundness,” the RPC seemed far more menacing by the Socialists than the AWP.10
Most Socialists widely believed the RPC to be a stalking horse for either the Communists or the followers of Jay Lovestone, then known as the Communist Party Opposition. In truth, the RPC was the organizational form finally taken by what was already a distinct faction of the SP—the group to the left of the Militants that was decidedly less friendly to the Communists—at the very time most of its leaders had bolted to the new American Workers Party. Yet both the Communists and Lovestoneites had plants in the RPC. The Communists had J. B. Matthews, a Militant of long standing who would not long after parlay his activities into a successful career as an especially right-wing professional anti-Communist.11 Lovestone’s man in the RPC was a young acolyte named Irving Brown, who was winning valuable friends in the group such as Tucker Smith.12
It is testimony to the radicalized nature of the American public in the peak years of the Great Depression that the American Workers Party took a leading role organizing the militant labor actions that marked 1934. Most notable was its leadership in an auto workers strike in Toledo, Ohio, but the AWP was also active among unemployed groups throughout the Midwest. As Sidney Hook recalled, “They marched not under the red flag singing the ‘Internationale’ but under the rattlesnake flag of the American Revolution, bearing the words ‘Don’t Tread On Me,’ and singing ‘John Brown’s Body.’ ”13 The Toledo strike was followed by a successful Teamsters strike in Minneapolis, where the Trotskyists were influential. Then, in May, the rank-and-file longshoremen of San Francisco instigated what ultimately grew to a general strike, whose leadership was captured by the Communists with a devoted ally, Harry Bridges, elected chairman of the strike committee.14
A key premise underlying the dismissal of the non-Communist left from many histories of the United States in the 1930s is that it was the Communist Party, not the Socialist Party, that was at the forefront of the major popular movements of the period. It is true that events conspired against the Socialists to deprive them of their traditional leadership role of the radical labor movement. It is also true that there was a vast chasm between the Socialists’ debilitating factionalism in this decade and the iron discipline of the Communists. Yet the narrative of Communist preeminence does not stand up especially well to scrutiny, and there were major protest movements in which the Socialists took the major leadership role.
The most formidable revived organization in the old Socialist heartland was to be found in the northeast corner of Arkansas. In the small town of Tyronza, H. L. Mitchell built an impressive local at the onset of the Depression, with the assistance of Oscar Ameringer’s American Guardian and a small circle of Christian Socialists in Tennessee.15 When Norman Thomas campaigned there in 1932, he was stunned to see the widespread and desperate state of the region’s sharecroppers, virtually unchanged since their desperate conditions gave impetus to the rise of the Populist movement almost a half-century earlier. On a return visit to Tyronza in the spring of 1934, Thomas aided Mitchell in establishing the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), joined by Ernest McKinney, a local black preacher, and Howard Kester, a recent graduate of Vanderbilt Divinity School.16 They were especially outraged by the deleterious impact of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which mandated the destruction of crops that could feed the Depression’s untold desperate masses, denouncing the act as “subsidizing scarcity” and “prosperity through starvation.”17
In the first of many vain pleas for intervention to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, Thomas wrote, “My first and grave complaint is that the entire method of land tenure and operation is wrong, that some of the worst examples of landlordism in the world are to be found in the cotton industry, and that it is idle to talk about prosperity for cotton farmers as long as these conditions of virtual peonage continue.”18 The degree to which Thomas was swept up in the cause of the Southern tenant farmers was extraordinary—Harry Fleischman recalled that young Socialists would complain that if Thomas was speaking at a dinner meeting it meant “we’ll have sharecroppers again for dinner.”19 To the extent the sharecroppers’ crusade was a means of avoiding responsibility for preserving party peace, it supports Daniel Bell’s description of Norman Thomas as “the genuine moral man in the immoral society, but as a political man caught inextricably in the dilemmas of expediency, the relevant alternatives, and the lesser evil.”20 Yet the tenant farmers represented a large segment of the U.S. economy and labor movement before the war economy swept them into the industrial North.
The other large protest movement in which the SP and its allies took the leading role was the massive student ferment most evident at the City College of New York. At City College there was a volatile mixture of a highly radicalized student body and an arch-conservative president, Frederick Robinson, who imposed mandatory ROTC on the nonresidential campus and outlawed any Socialist and Communist organizational presence. Members of both parties and all other radicals thus had to colonize apolitical student groups. In one of the earliest signs that the Communists would set the tone for the Depression decade, as early as 1933 there were over 600 members of the Young Communist League (YCL) at City College to only 150 members of the YPSL.21
The chairman of the City College YPSL, Morris Milgram, recruited chapter secretary Judah Drob, who had been radicalized by a brutal crackdown on a YPSL protest of ROTC spring exercises in 1933.22 The son of a prominent Conservative rabbi in the Bronx, Drob credited his conversion to socialism to John T. Flynn, the great polemicist against the Depression-era financial elite in The New Republic. Virtually unheard of for a Jewish student radical in the 1930s, Drob remained a devout Jew, even faithfully observing the Sabbath, for the better part of his YPSL career.23 Indeed, the overwhelmingly Jewish radical movement of City College would have a greater role in defining and establishing the odd enduring legacy of American Jewish radicalism than the actual Jewish Socialists who elected Meyer London to Congress from the Lower East Side. In his vivid memoir of the era, Judah Drob reflected,
Was being Jewish in any way contributory to my decision to become an active Socialist? This is not an easy question, and I have no glib answer. . . . The great majority of Jews were not radicals. Jews may have been disproportionately represented in American radicalism only during the 1920s and the late 1930s when the movement was in severe decline, due more to their stiff-neckedness, remarked already in biblical times, than to any logic or realism. But the Jewish background was just as likely to produce a sense of isolation, nationalism, upward striving, distrust of outsiders, as it was to promote the socialist ideal I accepted of universal brotherhood and sisterhood, noncompetitive mutual aid, and defense of all oppressed individuals and groups. There is much that is unexplainable, or at least so far unexplained, about radical Jews, who conform to neither the world’s nor to their co-religionists’ attitudes.24
Some might argue that the Socialists, particularly the Old Guard, lost themselves in their attachment to the ballot box as mass protest movements were sweeping the country. But the fact that general strikes were breaking out in numerous American cities did not negate the importance of political action; indeed it underscored it. This was the case when the potential emerged for a mass-based Farmer-Labor Party in 1920 after the harrowing Wilson terror, which could have justly provoked a revolutionary response. Indeed, this was the case going all the way back to the Socialist movement’s roots in the Panic of 1893, the Pullman Strike, and Populism. In many ways those earlier moments represented greater promise than 1930s radicalism, but in no other period was so large a segment of the population ripe for the leadership of a new radical party.
In the spring of 1934, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the Wisconsin Progressive Party seized the initiative for forming a new national party in establishing the American Commonwealth Federation. It took its name from the growing movement in Western Canada largely formed by northward-migrating veterans of the Socialist heyday. Leaders of the American Commonwealth Federation included Minnesota congressman Ernest Lundeen, Wisconsin congressmen Thomas Amlie and George Schneider, and Paul Douglas and Howard Y. Williams from the LIPA. The Federation’s Washington office was directed by Nathan Fine, a former mainstay of the Rand School who wrote the classic Labor and Farmer Parties in the United States: 1828-1928.25 Floyd Olson wrote the pamphlet announcing the new movement, which read in part,
In a sense, the crisis which we face is a world rather than an American crisis, but we will have to deal with it in an American way. The economic order we know as capitalism is no longer capable of supplying the vital needs of our people. Efforts at reform, which, by their very nature, do not strike at fundamental defects, have proven futile. Wherever we look, whether in this and every other land, the harvest of capitalism is want, suffering, poverty, disease, crime, and even war. . . . But aside from any moral consideration, the capitalist order, as we commonly understand the term, has reached an impasse. As in Rome before the downfall of the Roman Empire, the evidence of decay can be seen on every hand. Only those are blind who do not want to see.26
The potential of a large and powerful bloc in American politics to become this new party was being most dramatically demonstrated by Huey Long, who emerged in the U.S. Senate as the leader of its progressive bloc. With the support of a bipartisan group that included George Norris, William Borah, Robert LaFollette Jr., and Burton Wheeler, Long denounced the NRA for containing “every fault of socialism without one of its virtues” and warned that the New Deal was exacerbating the Depression and that the country faced a revolution.27 Long was generally distrusted when not violently despised by most other radicals, but as American Socialism’s greatest historian James Weinstein argues, “Long was in fact a uniquely democratic politician who had nothing in common with the dictators except their popularity. As a consistent champion of working people and an implacable enemy of the corporate monopolies and Eastern banks, he commanded one of the largest mass followings in the country.”28
Several former Socialists were elected to office in alignment with the new movement, including Thomas Latimer and William Mahoney as the Farmer-Labor mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul, respectively. Homer Bone, Socialist candidate for mayor of Tacoma, Washington, in the 1910s and a Farmer-Labor member of the Washington legislature in the 1920s, was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, the only member of that body who was ever a member of the Socialist Party. Also elected to the Senate in 1934 was Rush Holt of West Virginia, son of the old Socialist mayor of Weston. In an attempt to begin a dialogue with the forces organizing for a new party, Paul Porter, a protégé and fellow Kansan of Clarence Senior who held the new national office position of labor and organization secretary, wrote “The Commonwealth Plan.” A founder of the Revolutionary Policy Committee, Porter confidently insisted,
In sharp contrast to the New Deal, which seeks to save Capitalism by promoting artificial scarcity, such as crop reduction and the closing of factories, the Commonwealth Plan will promote abundance in production. Even at the very beginning of Socialism the workers’ income can be greatly increased by the addition of the large sums now kept by the capitalists as profits, interest, and rent.29
That the Commonwealth Plan was put forward by a group associated with the Militants and RPC indicated that conscientious leadership could have brought them around to the Farmer-Labor Party movement. But the real issues before the Socialist Party were becoming confused. Historically, the Old Guard had been committed to a Farmer-Labor Party, but now it was imperative for the New Deal operatives around The Forward to steer them away from this objective. Early in 1934, Alexander Kahn established a paper organization, the League for Democratic Socialism, to serve this purpose. The League published an impressive theoretical volume, entitled Socialism, Fascism, Communism. A compendium of mostly European essays, it included the aging Karl Kautsky’s definitive essays on both the Nazi rise and the Soviet system, grounded in his authority as the last living direct disciple of Karl Marx. Also noteworthy was an essay by a Soviet economist writing under a pseudonym, which put forth the theory of the Stalinist state as a corporation with the Communist Party as board of directors (highly relevant in understanding contemporary China).30
But the real purpose of the volume was to give the stamp of orthodox Marxist approval to the opportunism of the clique around The Forward. This was apparent with the sole American contributor being Joseph Shaplen, Abraham Cahan’s man at the New York Times. Shaplen boldly asserted in the opening of his essay,
There is nothing new in the New Deal. It is all derived from Socialist conceptions. The old parties in America, insofar as they have shown any capacity for progress, have borrowed whatever advanced ideas they may have absorbed from the Socialist arsenal. If the New Deal is to be truly the beginning of a new progressive phase in the development of American civilization it will have to proceed more and more along the lines long advocated by Socialists. And yet, the Socialist movement itself seems to be almost entirely outside the events as they are now shaping themselves in America.31
This essay was written not only before the eruption of factional war at the approaching SP convention but also at the very time the labor movement and liberal intelligentsia were concluding that FDR’s immediate relief program, whatever its merits, had run its course and that a real promise for a Farmer-Labor Party was emerging. Only an implosion by the Socialist Party could halt this momentum, and those with an interest in doing just that knew it.
Having become biannual affairs in the second half of the 1920s, the Socialist national convention of 1934 opened in Detroit on May 31. The potential for a complete rout of the Old Guard was evident when a resolution calling for the destruction of the “bourgeois state” and its replacement by a “dictatorship of the revolutionary masses” was only narrowly defeated.32 But the drama of real consequence took place behind the scenes, as a special committee struggled to draft a new declaration of principles. The committee assigned the task of preparing a rough draft to Devere Allen, who was assured by committee colleagues Norman Thomas and Daniel Hoan that several amendments would immediately be offered from the floor.33 On the morning of June 3, the Declaration of Principles was read to the convention, with the following hastily conceived section destined to arouse the most controversy:
Capitalism is doomed. If it can be superseded by a majority vote, the Socialist Party will rejoice. If the crisis comes through the denial of majority rights after the electorate has given us a mandate we shall not hesitate to crush by our labor solidarity the reckless force of reaction and to consolidate the Socialist state. If the capitalist system should collapse in a general chaos and confusion, which cannot permit of orderly procedure, the Socialist Party, whether or not in such case it is a majority, will not shrink from the responsibility of organizing and maintaining a government under the workers’ rule.34
Thomas and Hoan’s amendments would have, among other things, specifically reiterated the party’s historic opposition to political violence. But the motion of Old Guardsman Charles Solomon to block all amendments was quickly granted by the Militant chairman, Andrew Biemiller.35 The two major Socialist factions were clearly spoiling for a fight that each believed it could win. Indeed, there is reason to believe this was a deliberately orchestrated maneuver on both ends: one distinct power that came with the ceremonial office of national chairman was to open the national convention and nominate the permanent chairman; thus Leo Krzycki could easily install Biemiller, his young Milwaukee Militant ally. Of the chaotic debate that followed, W. A. Swanberg puts it best: “The scene had its grotesquery—a party which claimed 23,000 members, not all of them in robust health, disputing as to whether and under what circumstances they should assume command of the nation’s resources and its 125 million inhabitants, ‘crush the reckless force of reaction’ and rescue the United States of America.”36
Louis Waldman immediately emerged as the most outspoken opponent of the proposed declaration, calling it “unreal” and “maniacal.”37 Devere Allen raised the specter of a new world war, assumed to be the most likely context of a crisis alluded to by the declaration; to which Algernon Lee replied, as one of the authors of the St. Louis Platform, that what the Militants were proposing was exactly the sort of insurrectionary program the St. Louis Platform had been specifically drafted to preclude.38 Leo Krzycki, Andrew Biemiller, and Powers Hapgood were among the others to speak for the declaration from the floor.39 Opponents from the floor included Charney Vladeck and 1916 vice presidential nominee George Kirkpatrick.40
Norman Thomas had the power to swing the convention either for or against the Declaration of Principles.41 There was reason to think he might come down on the side of the Old Guard, after his New Leader column just before the convention assailed both dictatorship and violence.42 Indeed, Thomas may have intended the draft declaration as a maneuver that, if followed by his amendments, would secure his status as the new great compromiser and earn him the gratitude of the Old Guard. But after the two-front putsch by the Forward machine and the Militants proved to be a step ahead of him, Thomas cut his losses and endorsed the declaration:
We have, thanks to Devere Allen, an answer that we are proud to stand on, to the kind of questions we shall be asked. And I rejoice in that statement. We have not superseded past statements, nor wiped out principles that everybody knows we hold. . . . Mass resistance will mean what we are able to make it mean, and I am proud to say that I would rather, a thousand times over, die in fighting that war of insanity and cruelty than to be conscripted or to hold my peace while the world goes straight to the pit of disaster.43
The Declaration of Principles was adopted by a vote of 99 to 47.44 Bernard Johnpoll correctly notes that Thomas still had misgivings about the declaration and defended it by pointedly insisting on the most nonrevolutionary interpretation. But Johnpoll is too glib in ascribing his support to an emotional need of Thomas to be adored by the party youth.45 To retain the support of the party’s increasingly youthful base after the failure to reach a consensus was no small thing, as illustrated by the election of a new National Executive Committee. Thomas, Daniel Hoan, Darlington Hoopes, and James Graham remained to represent the increasingly tenuous center, but Militants Albert Sprague Coolidge and Powers Hapgood were joined by Maynard Krueger, Franz Daniel of Pennsylvania, and Michael Shadid of Oklahoma. Old Guardsmen who might have been agents of compromise such as Louis Waldman, Jasper McLevy, and Lilith Wilson were defeated. Disastrously, the one representative of the Old Guard on the NEC in the fateful two years ahead was the irrepressible loose cannon James Oneal.
W. A. Swanberg gives a more compelling explanation for Thomas’s decision to endorse the Declaration of Principles, arguing it was born of his fear of becoming, like Eugene Debs, a figurehead for the power behind the throne.46 Thomas had always been reluctant to be groomed for this role, but knew he was in a far better position than Debs had ever been to assert himself as the real leader of the Socialist Party. Rather than stemming from Thomas’s evasion of the challenge of party leadership, the debacle there was the result of his being outmaneuvered.
True to form, Joseph Shaplen secured a front-page headline in the New York Times that may have been true enough—“Left Wing Seizes Socialist Party”—but whose main thrust was to suggest that the Old Guard was preparing to split the party, assisted by intemperate quotations from Louis Waldman in particular.47 Seizing the moment, Alexander Kahn refashioned his League for Democratic Socialism into the Committee for the Preservation of the Socialist Party. In the immediate aftermath of the Detroit convention, Old Guard leaders in New York such as Waldman and Algernon Lee were reluctant to line up behind The Forward, especially after Abraham Cahan included in his pronouncement on the controversy a denunciation of Socialist opposition to the First World War.48
Thus George Goebel, most recently distinguished as the most outspoken defender of prohibition at the 1932 convention, became chairman of the Committee for the Preservation of the Socialist Party.49 Even a superannuated James F. Carey was summoned, joined by others who could trace their Socialist commitments to the turn of the century such as Emma Henry of Indiana, Lena Morrow Lewis of California, and old Milwaukee warhorse Frederic Heath.50 The enduring Marxian sensibility of the Old Guard was evident in its resentment of Thomas and his followers, with Goebel echoing James Oneal in denouncing their opponents not as Militants but “holy rollers.”51 The Committee issued its manifesto by the late summer:
Whenever a faction arose to swerve us from those methods of education and propaganda, and to commit us to the adoption of direct action and insurrectionary methods, as in the case of the IWW and later the Communists, the Socialist Party remained true to its principles, its ideals, and its mission, preferring to part company with those to whom our Socialist position seemed untenable rather than depart from the course it had marked out for itself as an American political party. We considered it essential that there must be an agreement, not only as to where we are going, but on how we are going to get there. We could not at one and the same time declare that we place our faith in the democratic processes and convincing the masses of the soundness of our doctrines, and then proceed to achieve by force and violence the changes we advocate.52
The brazen duplicity by which old-timers outside New York were won over to the Committee was vividly illustrated by James Maurer. After he was quoted in The Forward as a leading opponent of the declaration, a distraught Norman Thomas wrote to his perennial running mate,
There isn’t a man in the Socialist movement that I honor and love more than you. I should be sorry to be on a different side than you on any question like the Declaration of Principles, but, of course, I respect your reasons. What nearly breaks my heart is to find your name used by a group, some of whom seem willing if necessary to split the party, and many of whom are willing to use the most unfair, unscrupulous and dictatorial tactics to carry their way. Did anybody translate for you Abe Cahan’s article in The Forward with its denunciation of the St. Louis Platform?53
Maurer explained, “My greatest objection to the Detroit announcements is that it plays up the antiwar program as a paramount issue, instead of as it should be played up, as a leading issue in the destruction of capitalism.”54 By the time he received Thomas’s letter, Maurer had already written to ask that his name be removed from the Committee for the Preservation of the Socialist Party, calling them on their purpose “to cause strife and ill feeling among our membership.”55
Thomas stubbornly defended the Declaration of Principles while reaching out to all potential agents of compromise. In a telegram to Friedrich Adler of the Socialist International, he insisted, “There is much wild talk about a party split if the declaration should be sustained on referendum. Probably not much would come of this talk, which is based on plain misrepresentation of what the declaration states, were it not for The Forward.”56 Samuel Friedman of The New Leader, whose exceptionally long Socialist career began in Denver in 1912 when at the age of fifteen he campaigned for Eugene Debs, floated his own compromise proposal, to which Thomas brusquely replied, “Your letter does credit to your love of the party but scarcely to your judgment as to the present conditions.”57 Charney Vladeck, in contrast, could see through the smoke and mirrors with exceptional clarity:
The idea of Krzycki having voted for this declaration is positively disgusting. Only two weeks before he was a delegate to a convention of an organization of which he is vice president. That labor union is becoming increasingly conservative, and in fact has been a demonstration for Roosevelt more than anything else. Our national chairman did not say a word of criticism of that policy, did not lift a finger to try to direct the convention along more radical lines. But as national chairman of the Socialist Party, he votes for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Vladeck bluntly warned Thomas:
Your voting for the declaration will be interpreted as complete agreement with its contents and an assumption on your part of the leadership of the left wing. . . . Our movement has no chance whatsoever with this Declaration of Principles. It simply isolates us from the American worker and middle class, and puts us into a position of antagonism toward labor, which is slowly but surely advancing toward a Labor Party. I contemplate with sadness the inevitable future which will see a strong progressive labor movement with the Socialists in opposition to it. Of course I am against a split, but this declaration gives a justified opportunity to all who are ready for a split both on the right and the left.58
A cold peace was reached at the New York state convention on July 1. Louis Waldman was reelected as state chairman and Charles Solomon was easily nominated for governor over Skidmore College professor Coleman Cheney. But Julius Gerber recognized that the appearance of a rout by the Old Guard would perpetuate party strife and proposed that Norman Thomas be nominated for the Senate. In a rare instance of magnanimity, James Oneal declined his nomination by some of the more bitter Old Guardsmen in favor of Thomas.59 But when Thomas, Vladeck, and Samuel Friedman introduced a resolution to amend the Declaration of Principles and for the NEC to issue a series of clarifying statements, they were voted down by an irate majority demanding total repeal.60
It was on the other end of the continent, however, that the pressures being brought to bear on the Socialist Party from the outside were unfolding most dramatically. In the summer of 1934, the veteran nominal Socialist Upton Sinclair won an upset victory in the Democratic primary for governor of California over the former Wilson enforcer George Creel, who was backed by FDR. Sinclair resigned from the Socialist Party for the second time a year earlier and had gained a mass following for his End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign, proposing in his published manifesto a transformation of the state economy with a striking resemblance to the pre-Marxian communism of Edward Bellamy.61 The business class of California, including staunchly Republican Hollywood moguls, whipped up a frenzy such as had rarely been seen against any Socialist or Populist of years past.62
The Socialist Party was unbowed in running its own candidate for governor, Unitarian minister Millen Dempster of San Francisco, and Norman Thomas wrote sternly to Sinclair, “With all your good intentions, you are doing an enormous injury to the Socialist cause. I rather suspect you may have occasion to regret this error in judgment almost as much as you regretted your support of Wilson in the ‘war to end war.’ ”63 There was certainly a case to be made for working to capture one of the major parties in some states in the tradition of the Non-Partisan League, but Upton Sinclair was exactly the wrong person to be making it. Most Socialists considered Sinclair a prima donna, and EPIC, which called for greater collectivization of the economy than the SP, reminded Socialists with long enough memories of such embarrassments as Edward Bellamy and the colonization movement of the 1890s Social Democracy.
Still, the California SP suffered massive losses. John Packard, the leading Old Guard supporter in California, was an early defector, along with an aging J. Stitt Wilson and future congressman Jerry Voorhis. Also prominent on the EPIC bandwagon were the aging transplants Kate Richards O’Hare and Walter Thomas Mills.64 These leaders of the long-gone encampment circuit, with a majority of their old followers, had been swept out of the old Socialist heartland and on to the Pacific Coast by the Dust Bowl; thus was the potential appeal of a New Deal-aligned politics to old Socialists shown to extend far beyond the offices of The Forward. The nostalgic impulse that led Mills and O’Hare to back Sinclair was also in evidence in Oklahoma, where a congratulatory note after Sinclair’s primary victory from Michael Shadid, titular leader of the resurrected state party, nearly led to his removal from the National Executive Committee, allowing the Old Guard to score points for party loyalty.65
Sinclair lost decisively to Republican Frank Merriam with less than 38 percent of the vote, while Millen Dempster earned a paltry 2,947 votes, only half as many as Communist Sam Darcy. Norman Thomas earned over 5 percent in his Senate candidacy in New York, and Charles Solomon received only 3 percent running for governor. Congressional candidates in party strongholds, however, did exceptionally well: Raymond Hofses improved on his stellar 1932 showing with over 32 percent in the Reading-based fourteenth district of Pennsylvania, whereas Arnold Freese earned over 17 percent in the Bridgeport-based fourth district of Connecticut, where five state legislators were elected. In Wisconsin, West Allis Mayor Marvin Baxter won over 20 percent in the fourth district and Otto Hauser over 24 percent in the fifth. In Oklahoma, old survivor Orville Enfield got over 6 percent of the vote in the seventh district, but in New York it was clear that the party’s historic base was rapidly collapsing. Only Charney Vladeck could break double digits, polling just under 12 percent in the eighth district on the Lower East Side. Indeed, high expectations of possibly electing Vladeck had been a tenuous point of unity among the fractious New York Socialists.66
On November 29, the NEC met in Boston. Several Old Guard supporters hoped to demonstrate a show of force, but it became clear at this meeting just how overwhelming were the forces arrayed against them within the party. The Old Guard cohort suffered a defeat on every matter they brought before the NEC save for one—to reprimand Michael Shadid for his expressions of support for Upton Sinclair.67 No development could have angered them more than a report submitted by Paul Porter, proposing an explicit invitation to unity be made to the American Workers Party, the Communist Opposition of Jay Lovestone, the small Trotskyist following of James Cannon, and even the remnant of the IWW; that is, to every radical group but the Communist Party. The NEC endorsed the letter by a straight factional vote of nine to one.68
Lovestone, who addressed the NEC meeting and left a favorable impression, had begun to signal his slow but sure movement toward the non-Communist left with a speech given that year at the national convention of the ILGWU, where his followers were being cultivated by David Dubinsky as allies of his leadership.69 Indeed, if anyone could have united the increasingly disparate elements of the Socialist movement behind a promising Farmer-Labor Party movement after the death of Hillquit, it was Dubinsky. But the young Socialist was still feeling his oats, and with barely more than a year behind him as president of his union he was in no position to challenge the agenda of Abraham Cahan. Cahan and his lieutenants had by now cemented their leadership of the broader Old Guard by consolidating control of The New Leader.
The once fiercely independent paper had clashed with The Forward in the past, but in another instance suggesting coordination with Sidney Hillman’s pro-Soviet allies, The Forward had been subsidizing The New Leader ever since its original sponsor, the Garland Fund, began objecting to the paper’s unshakable anti-Soviet orientation. Beginning in 1935, the business manager Cahan installed at The New Leader, exiled Menshevik leader Sol Levitas, exerted increasing control so that the editorial line was indistinguishable from The Forward. James Oneal remained as editor, bitterly resisting the change and vainly attempting to rally his SP allies to assert themselves with Cahan and his men on equal terms. Yet Oneal remained hopelessly intemperate and uncompromising, unable to sense Cahan’s real agenda that he was serving.70
For his part, however, Lovestone would not yet abandon illusions of ultimately prevailing within the Communist movement, and therefore he could not oblige the Socialist invitation for an “all-inclusive party.” Many of his followers, however, could and did. Ben Gitlow, close collaborator of John Reed in the drama that led to the founding of the Communist Party, was the most prominent, followed by Herbert Zam, who quickly rose as a leader of the Militants, and Louis Nelson, Lovestone’s other major ILGWU supporter after Charles Zimmerman.71 Yet no one could have been a more inflammatory reminder of 1919 to the Old Guard than Gitlow, as seen in the response of his former New York Assembly colleague Louis Waldman:
The declaration of the Communist faction headed by Ben Gitlow that its members have decided to apply for membership in the Socialist Party, at the invitation of Norman Thomas, in our judgment calls for an immediate statement of policy from every Socialist state organization anxious to preserve the Socialist Party from being turned into a Communist Party. . . . We are convinced that there is no room in the same political home for the Communists and those Socialists who believe in the solution of our economic and political problems by peaceful and democratic means.72
In response to Gitlow’s application for membership, the New York state organization refused to admit members of the overwhelmingly Militant YPSL into the regular party once they came of age. But the Militants extended and escalated the hostilities. By this time they were under the direct intellectual guidance of Haim Kantorovich, an American liaison for the Jewish Socialist Bund in Poland, who advocated a militant antifascist program in Europe based on unity with the Comintern largely on Socialist terms, roughly resembling the program of Lovestone and his European allies.73 One of the earliest demonstrations of growing Militant influence on the Socialist Party occurred at the Socialist International conference in 1933 when, over the objection of Jacob Panken in an impassioned minority report, the American party was one of the very few to endorse this program.74
In February 1935, founding editor Norman Thomas resigned his column at The New Leader, and SP centrists and Militants alike called for a new publication of national reach. Thomas was eager that the new paper be published outside New York so that it might play a constructive role fostering party peace, but the New York Militants would not hear of it.75 Thus was the new Socialist Call launched, edited by leading Militant Jack Altman.76 The paper got off to an auspicious start, with eight state parties and the YPSL endorsing it on the masthead. In a subscription drive at City College, Judah Drob secured a pledge from revered philosophy professor Morris Cohen, who expressed the hope that “it will be as good a newspaper as the old New York Call.”77 But the commitment of the Militant editors to mimic every dictatorial habit of their enemies became clear when they refused to run Thomas’s praise of books by Soviet dissidents.78 By June, young Militants were raiding and vandalizing the offices of The New Leader.79
As the New York faction fighting escalated, Thomas departed for Arkansas, where severe repression was raining down against the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Thomas and Reinhold Niebuhr, his old colleague at The World Tomorrow, arrived the second week in March following the arrest of local organizer Ward Rodgers on charges of “blasphemy, anarchy, and attempting to usurp the government of Arkansas.”80 Thomas spoke throughout the region to racially mixed audiences, who took to adapting the old hymn and singing, “Just to see Norman Thomas, I shall not be moved.” Naomi Mitchison, a British journalist covering the STFU, insisted to Thomas, “You are someone divine for them . . . I think all the radios in Arkansas must have been crowded round that afternoon you spoke.”81 Indeed, the heroics and accolades of this Yankee minister in such a violently repressive Southern backwater rivaled any episode in the career of Eugene Debs.
On March 15, Socialists Howard Kester and Jack Herling were preparing to introduce Thomas in Birdsong, Arkansas, when they were surrounded by an armed posse of local planters and escorted to the county line. The black chaplain of the STFU, A. B. Brookins, had his home attacked that evening and his church burned to the ground. Thomas and his party took refuge in the home of the attorney representing Ward Rodgers, C. T. Carpenter. When the house was surrounded, Carpenter kept the mob at bay with his pistol, as Thomas wired back to the League for Industrial Democracy office in New York, “Entire Population Terrorized.”82 The affair became a national sensation, and ameliorative measures from the federal government allowed the STFU to at least survive. President Roosevelt received Norman Thomas to discuss the situation, but Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, who would be mercilessly savaged many years later for his own Communist associations, attacked the “Communist and Socialist agitators in the South” as the source of “bitterness.”83
In the history of the Socialist Party, perhaps no single meeting of its National Executive Committee was more consequential than that held in Buffalo on March 23, 1935. After a report on the possibilities for a Farmer-Labor Party was tabled, Albert Sprague Coolidge moved to revoke the charter of the New York state party. The NEC issued a resolution aimed at mediating the growing hostilities in New York, reaffirming the “ineligibility of advocates of violence and communism” for party membership while instructing both the New York organization and the YPSL to take conciliatory actions. A further instruction was issued to The New Leader to cease acting as a factional organ and to make its editorial board “representative of the entire party membership in New York.”84 This last action was particularly pathetic, with The New Leader firmly in the grip of the unaccountable Forward managers, whose recent cutoff of their subsidy to the SP national office in Chicago had such a severe impact that Executive Secretary Clarence Senior usually did without lunch.85 In short, the meeting marked the precise moment at which the Socialist Party turned inward into its factional morass, thereby renouncing unparalleled opportunities to recapture the promise of its heyday.
The Socialists had squandered their best opportunity to form a Farmer-Labor Party on their own terms late in 1933, when they distanced themselves from the League for Independent Political Action just as the Socialist mass following, particularly in the labor movement, was peaking with the Continental Congress. Had it not been for the sudden death of Morris Hillquit, this might have proven only a minor stumble, but now the initiative was completely out of the hands of the SP. In the spring of 1935, the remnant of the LIPA merged with Floyd Olson’s American Commonwealth Federation to form the Farmer-Labor Political Federation, and a group of sympathetic congressmen called a July conference for the purpose of forming a new party.86 The official call was signed by five members of Congress—Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, Thomas Amlie and George Schneider of the Wisconsin Progressive Party, California Democrat Bryan Scott, and Vito Marcantonio, the nominal Republican who succeeded LaGuardia in Congress.87
Of the five, Amlie was most closely aligned with the SP, and North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye was also present when the conference opened in Chicago on July 5. Indeed, it was a rare instance where a firm foundation was in place for a new national party that did not require “some senator to wave his magic wand,” as Harry Laidler had derided the LIPA early in the decade. Adolph Germer led a large contingent of Socialist participants that included Nathan Fine, Maynard Krueger, Michael Shadid, Raymond Hofses, Andrew Biemiller, and Marshall Kirkpatrick, former Socialist mayor of Granite City, Illinois.88 But there was a significant Communist presence at the conference, including such notables from their earliest years as Alfred Wagenknecht and Duncan McDonald. A strong anti-Communist resolution by the conference resulted in a walkout, led by Lundeen and Marcantonio.89
The Communist Party returned to a new united front posture in 1935. The Seventh Congress of the Comintern that year articulated the concept of the “Popular Front” to be employed by Communist parties in Europe to support left-liberal governments among potential military allies against Hitler, namely France.90 The American Communists at first assumed that their task was once again to seize the leadership of a nascent Farmer-Labor Party; the metamorphosis into a militant embrace of FDR and the New Deal was a relatively slow process over the balance of the year.91 More than a few who had been historically aligned with the Socialist Party were beguiled by the American version of the Popular Front. The demoralized Upton Sinclair embraced it to the point of initially defending the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939.92 Another comparable figure at the Socialist periphery for a generation, W. E. B. DuBois, became an arch-defender of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes in his old age.
Despite their robust aversion to the Communists, the Farmer-Labor Party movement did not see them as their major threat. Rather, they saw it coming from Huey Long and the following of Father Charles Coughlin, whose broadcasts from his parish in Royal Oak, Michigan, reached millions. Though tied together in the public mind both at the time and in history, Long and Coughlin were as suspicious of each other as most old-line progressives were of them. Thomas Amlie denounced Long and Coughlin as “irresponsible demagogues,” and leading Farmer-Labor propagandists such as Howard Y. Williams and Alfred Bingham made no bones about labeling them fascist. Yet the Wisconsin-based magazine The Progressive, founded by the elder LaFollette in 1909, routinely carried letters in their defense, and Floyd Olson and the Minnesota party were decidedly friendlier to both Long and Coughlin.93 From the center-right of the Socialist Party, the most forthright statement on the hysteria about an “American fascism” came from Algernon Lee in The New Leader:
I do not believe that there is any specific danger of fascism in the United States. Long and Coughlin are just demagogues and unlikely to appeal to a majority, nor are the conditions present—meaning an armed people ready to act on their sense of grievance. In any case, under existing conditions in the U.S. an armed insurrection of ignorantly discontented masses would not have the least possibility of success. If fascism does come here it will be in the uniquely American form of usurpation of dictatorial powers by the government itself. . . . Roosevelt may be forced to start using other than “only democratic and humane methods” and set up a Presidential dictatorship. That, in my opinion, is a much more present danger than any fascism led by a Long or a Coughlin.94
Along with the less inflamed Farmer-Labor leaders, Norman Thomas, who indicated his openness to working with Long for the cause of the Southern tenant farmers, probably shared this view.95 But Thomas was increasingly dependent on the support of SP Militants who echoed the Communist conceit that any non-Socialist populist or progressive was a potential fascist. The local SP leader in Huey Long’s New Orleans, Richard Babb Whitten, frankly advocated unity between the Socialist and Communist parties, referring to “the Roosevelts, the Coughlins, and the Longs” in the same breath.96 Clarence Senior, present as an observer at the Chicago Farmer-Labor conference, concluded, “The third party conference here so far as I can see at the present displays very little hope of anything constructive with any substantial support. Marcantonio at a banquet last night made a speech which could scarcely be distinguished from Huey Long’s Share the Wealth program.”97 This same Vito Marcantonio was soon the most notoriously faithful ally of the Communist Party in Congress. Indeed, stalwarts of the Farmer-Labor movement who were later maligned as “isolationists” of the “far right,” such as Ernest Lundeen and Gerald Nye, tended to have few qualms about aligning with the Communists in these years.98
For his part, Father Coughlin, fated to a far more fearsome reputation as a rightist demagogue than any of his contemporaries, was actually engaged in a constructive dialogue with Norman Thomas throughout 1935. Coughlin was on record saying, “The kind of Socialism as predicated by Norman Thomas is not Socialism in its real sense and has more right than wrong in it.”99 On those who charged him with being a fascist, he assured Thomas,
Fascism endeavors to protect private ownership and control of money and credit. Herein I differ from the Fascist. If I understand it, Fascism hopes either to establish a dictatorship or else, if it remains democratic (which I do not believe it can) it hopes to do away with geographical representation in parliament and establish an economic representation. Thus we would have the Senator from the motor industry, the Senator from the textile industry, etc. As a matter of fact this very thing has been going on at Washington for a long time.100
Thomas replied that he was “pleased to observe your repudiation of fascism,” adding, “The list of things that should be socially owned that you have given is extraordinarily inadequate.”101 Thomas would not extend the same assumption of good intentions to Huey Long however, though even here he mostly followed the lead of the Militants, who were urging him to tour Louisiana to take his stand against the alleged fascist menace. Thomas considered this a fool’s errand, reminding Clarence Senior, “After all it is Roosevelt who is the one we have to fight the most.”102 Indeed, Thomas was at this time engaging a far more genuine fascist specter, the declaration of martial law by Indiana Governor Paul McNutt in response to a decidedly unmilitant strike in the Socialist holy place of Terre Haute.103 Many Socialists took heart at reports that Long was publicly upbraided by his aging Socialist relatives at a family reunion in Winn Parish that summer, but it could not be ignored that he would be the prohibitive favorite, at least of the rank and file, to head any new Farmer-Labor Party in 1936.104 All came to naught, however, when Long was assassinated early in September.
By the fall of 1935, hope for factional peace in New York was rapidly deteriorating. Ever since the Detroit convention, William Feigenbaum, the most committed of the remaining SP centrists at The New Leader, regularly wrote Thomas what W. A. Swanberg describes as “three and four page letters like distress rockets at sea.”105 Feigenbaum now prophetically despaired, “I am sadly convinced that as matters stand at this moment we are licked. The Communists have us beaten everywhere. Unless a miracle happens we will be annihilated next year and the Communists will take our place as the principal revolutionary party in America.”106 He was particularly alarmed by developments in the New York Teachers Union, where Socialist stalwarts were being muscled out by a formidable Communist caucus with the collusion of SP Militants, setting the pattern for most of the labor movement for the balance of the decade:
What is the result of all this? It is that despite the peace pact we are far from united, that we are suspicious of each other, that we do not trust each other, and that our party work is paralyzed and we are slipping further and further back. In contrast we have the Communists, monolithic, free of controversy, filled with an insane fanaticism, and going forward. They are theoretically in the wrong, practically crazy, morally beneath contempt. But they are winning the position that should be ours as the channel for the discontent of the masses. Further, they are creating the impression that they are the only revolutionary party, and by their antics—in the face of our paralysis—they are giving the revolutionary movement a black eye. Thus they are gaining influence at our expense and at the same time making it impossible for our sound and correct position to get the serious and favorable consideration it deserves. That, of course, is exactly what they have wanted all the time.107
Feigenbaum, along with fellow New Yorkers David Dubinsky and August Claessens, pleaded with Thomas to devote all his energies to reconciliation.108 That such centrists still spoke for most Jewish rank and filers in New York was demonstrated when pressure from The Forward kept Thomas from being scheduled to address the Workmen’s Circle convention in 1935, but the audience nevertheless demanded he come up from the floor to speak. He received a standing ovation from a packed Madison Square Garden.109
Superficially, the results of off-year elections in 1935 encouraged the Socialists. In addition to the Socialists winning every seat on the Bridgeport Common Council, J. Henry Stump returned a second time to the mayor’s office in Reading. The Socialist vote in Reading increased over the 1934 vote that had comfortably returned Darlington Hoopes and Lilith Wilson to the legislature, itself an increase over 1932.110 But the national faction fight was spilling over into Reading. Such Reading leaders as Raymond Hofses and Birch and Lilith Wilson were solid Old Guardsmen, backed in their state party by Emil and Sarah Limbach of Pittsburgh. But a vocal minority, based in the Reading YPSL, had a set of grievances pertaining to the distribution of power in the local party. This dispute had little to no basis in principle, but was eagerly exploited by the Militants and YPSL through the Socialist Call, causing such centrists as James Maurer and Darlington Hoopes to help consolidate a large Old Guard majority in Reading.111
The long process by which the Communist Party displaced the Socialist Party as the dominant force on the American left was not completed until about 1938, but a critical threshold was crossed in 1935: the Communists surpassed the Socialists in dues-paying membership. From the heretofore low average of 7,793 members in 1928, during the party’s early Depression revival, membership improved to 16,863 in 1932 and reached the interwar era peak of 20,951 in 1934. The eruption of fratricide after the Detroit convention led to a sharp decline to an average of 11,922 in 1936, which plummeted further still to 6,488 in 1937.112 Available numbers for the Communist Party are less reliable, but it is widely held that its card-carrying membership was still in the four figures as late as 1932, rose to around 25,000 in 1935, and peaked somewhere in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 in 1939.113 Yet in the fall of 1935, the seminal drama in the history of the American labor movement began to unfold, ultimately the most consequential factor determining the fate of both American Socialism and American Communism.
Perhaps the most striking fact about the labor upheavals of 1934 was that none were initiated by AFL unions. As the Great Depression was passing its peak, the national leadership of the AFL remained as ineffectual and out of touch as they had been throughout the prosperous 1920s. The events of 1934 pushed the AFL convention that year to approve the chartering of new industrial unions, most notably the United Auto Workers (UAW), but a lack of progress after a year had much of the labor movement restless. The unlikely figure who channeled this restlessness was the iron-fisted United Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis, described by one witness on the eve of his dramatic stand as overcome with an almost mystical inspiration to become the champion of industrial unionism.114 Lewis, who came on the executive council of the AFL believing he could become the new power behind the throne of his former lieutenant William Green, soon found himself vastly outnumbered by defenders of the status quo.115
On October 16, 1935, a minority report favoring a large-scale organizing campaign in basic industry was delivered at the AFL convention in Atlantic City. Backed by a coalition virtually identical to the historic Socialist bloc in the AFL—the Mineworkers, Brewery Workers, assorted garment unions, and a significant number of state and local bodies—it received only 38 percent of the vote from the floor. Three days later, a loud argument between Lewis and his former close ally William Hutcheson broke out on the floor, with Lewis finally delivering Hutcheson a blow to the jaw. Thus was born the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), formally launched on November 9 by a meeting of Lewis, David Dubinsky, Sidney Hillman, Max Zaritsky of the Cap Makers, Charles Howard of the Typorgraphical Union, and Harvey Fremming of the Oil Workers.116 Another year passed before the CIO unions were formally expelled by the AFL and became the Congress of Industrial Organizations.117
Completely obscured in history by the birth of the CIO was the defeat by only four delegate votes of a resolution to form a Labor Party at the AFL convention in Atlantic City.118 The extent of Communist inspiration behind the resolution was ominous, with its major champion being Frank Gorman, president of the United Textile Workers and considered by the Communists their most important trade union ally in this period.119 But the resolution also had the unqualified backing of Socialists at the convention, including the ILGWU leadership, Amalgamated Vice President Joseph Schlossberg, and the Milwaukee Central Labor Council.120 Indeed, it is worth noting not only that forming a Labor Party commanded far wider support in the AFL than the new CIO but also that those CIO supporters most adamantly for a Labor Party, Dubinsky and Zaritsky, were also the most opposed to seceding from the AFL. In contrast, on the eve of the 1936 election, John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman were most prepared to split with the AFL and most committed to the reelection of FDR.
One early hire of the CIO was Adolph Germer, who with much of the general public saw the nascent new federation as of a piece with the movement for a Labor Party.121 Lewis managed to win over many activists from his opposition within the union of the past decade, and Germer was joined by John Brophy and Powers Hapgood in plotting strategy with Lewis to unionize the unorganized industries. Hapgood, a leading SP Militant, earlier in the year remarked in wonder, “It’s amazing how many radicals think I ought to see Lewis, saying it’s much less of a compromise to make peace with him and stay in the labor movement than it is to get a government job and cease to be active in the class struggle.”122 Germer, impeccably anti-Communist ever since facing down the party’s founders as executive secretary of the SP in 1919, confided to Sol Levitas of The New Leader, “It is my opinion that the SP has missed the greatest opportunity in its history, and the result is that I have lost all interest in it.”123
But Brophy and Hapgood had been on much friendlier terms than Germer with the Communists during their fight with Lewis in the 1920s.124 Lewis himself was the first to extend an olive branch to the Communists in what historian Harvey Klehr proclaimed “the most extraordinary irony” in the history of a movement with no shortage of them.125 Sidney Hillman also encouraged the move, confident the Communists would serve his agenda. The most important early Communist hire was Lee Pressman as general counsel. Pressman came directly from the Agriculture Department, where he had been recruited into the Communist Party by Harold Ware, organizer of the party-led Soviet espionage ring in Washington. Hillman brought on another principal of the Ware group, John Abt, as general counsel of the Amalgamated.126
The coup de grace in the implosion of the Socialist Party was delivered by none other than the general secretary of the Communist Party USA himself, Earl Browder. Knowing the desperate financial straits of the SP national office, Browder proposed to debate Norman Thomas at Madison Square Garden with all proceeds going to the Socialists. The offer was made knowing it would exacerbate tensions with the Old Guard to the breaking point. That it worked exactly as planned became clear when Julius Gerber threatened Thomas with expulsion in New York if he went ahead with it, but the NEC overruled the argument that the debate was an “unauthorized united front.” Held on November 28, the Communists commanded a significant majority of the Garden capacity audience.127
If the logic of Thomas and his supporters in agreeing to the debate was sound, what they were not prepared for were the full ramifications of the Popular Front and the unfamiliar tone in which it was advocated. “Social fascism” was forgotten, as in the most unthreatening comradely tones Browder preached, “Why is the united front the central, all-dominating question today . . . because of the danger of fascism and war.”128 Thomas was booed for raising such points as Russia’s lucrative oil trade with Mussolini and asking, “Is Russia so weak that it cannot afford, 18 years after the revolution, to grant civil liberties to its citizens?”129 Browder also attempted to corner Thomas on the question of a Farmer-Labor Party and a joint presidential ticket of the two parties in the coming election, with Thomas rebuffing such appeals as late as the spring.130 Indeed, the Communists were now setting the tone for, if not in command of, the movement for a national Farmer-Labor Party.
The Old Guard sensed it might no longer have even a majority of the New York membership behind it and proceeded to desperate and draconian action. The city central committee summarily dissolved twelve branches squarely in the Militant camp. At a New York general membership meeting held shortly after the Browder debate, a vote narrowly rejecting what the Old Guard euphemistically called a “reorganization plan” was simply ignored by the chair as the meeting degenerated into a scene reminiscent of those leading to the split of 1919. On December 28, the New York Militants held a conference in Utica where, with party locals from Buffalo, Rochester, Schenectady, Syracuse, and Nassau and Westchester counties, they declared themselves the reorganized Socialist Party of New York State.131
On January 4, 1936, the NEC met to consider whether to revoke the existing charter of the New York party and recognize the Utica gathering. James Graham of Montana, one of two founding members of the Socialist Party on the NEC along with James Oneal, made a final proposal for mediation. Darlington Hoopes offered a compromise of terminating the existing charter and appointing a temporary state committee with an Old Guard majority to work out a final compromise to be approved by the national convention. The Hoopes proposal prevailed by a vote of eight to two, with Graham and Oneal opposed. Oneal immediately walked out, thereby indicating that the New York Old Guard was determined to carry on to the bitter end.132
In the early months of 1936, the strongest movement took place toward a united front with the Communists, nowhere more provocatively than in the student movement and at City College in particular, where YPSL leader Morris Milgram had been expelled for leading an “antiwar strike.” Around this time, the respective auxiliary fronts for the YPSL and YCL, the Student League for Industrial Democracy and the National Students League, merged on the national level into the American Student Union (ASU) based on their shared antiwar commitments. Judah Drob became chairman of the City College ASU, leading a campaign to fire the College’s dictatorial president, Frederick Robinson. Mayor LaGuardia appointed a commission to investigate conditions at City College that included Joseph Schlossberg and John Flynn of The New Republic. In their meetings with Drob, both Schlossberg and Flynn upbraided him on the futility of antiwar protest, explaining that the causes of war were strictly economic.133
But at the founding convention of the ASU in Columbus, Ohio, the full ramifications of the Popular Front became apparent. The keynote address was given by Reinhold Niebuhr, a Militant ideologue with pacifist roots, who shocked the delegates with an attack on the Socialist antiwar position and a call for “collective security against fascism.” From the beginning, the Young Communist League had an inside track in ultimate taking over of the ASU. As Judah Drob recalled, “What seems so clear in hindsight, that we no longer had agreement on policy that was the only possible justification for the formation of ASU, was completely overwhelmed by the momentum that had been built up.” The Communist determination to seize control of the ASU was perhaps best illustrated, as Drob reminisced, by the young female Communist clearly assigned to seduce him on the bus ride back to New York.134
Similar drama surrounded the arrival of Socialist cadres into the CIO. The majority of the student body and faculty of Brookwood Labor College dedicated themselves to the organizing drive of the CIO, the single largest factor leading to the demise of Brookwood in 1937.135 Roy Reuther was the most consequential Brookwood regular who went to work on the CIO auto drive in Detroit, where his brother Walter had been a leading local organizer of the SP before spending two years abroad with their youngest brother Victor, mostly spent working in a Soviet auto plant. Walter Reuther was an extreme Militant at this time, frankly advocating “a complete united front between the SP and the CP,” and possibly paying dues to the Communist Party throughout 1936.136 But Roy was sympathetic to Jay Lovestone, and Victor sympathized increasingly with Roy. The Reuther brothers represented in microcosm the political mayhem in the new UAW. The formidable Communist candidate for the UAW presidency, Wyndham Mortimer, was defeated in 1935 by Homer Martin, a Kansas City minister called “the leaping parson” in homage to his days as a college hop, skip, and jump champion.137
The final push necessary for the Old Guard to carry out its threats to secede from the Socialist Party came with the entry of the American Trotskyists into the party. James Cannon’s small following had recently merged with the American Workers Party, founded less than two years earlier by A. J. Muste and Sidney Hook. Both the merger with the AWP and the overtures to the Socialists were part of Trotsky’s “French Turn,” in which he advocated for the better part of the 1930s entering and capturing the parties of Social Democracy, a bitterly controversial policy in the early, desperate years of the American Trotskyists. Trotsky personally approved the attempt to enter the American SP from his Norwegian exile.138 The negotiators for the SP were young Militants all—Jack Altman, Paul Porter, Herbert Zam, and Gus Tyler.139 Their entry into the Socialist Party was only agreed to on the condition that they dissolve their party organization and all publications. The Trotskyists, as to be expected, were one step ahead of the SP. One of several who quietly joined the party in the preceding months as individuals was Albert Goldman in Chicago, who quickly seized control of a small publication of the Chicago party, Socialist Appeal, to serve as a factional organ inside the Socialist Party.140
The last stand of the New York Old Guard was in the April party primary for delegates to the national convention, called after the disastrous citywide meeting in December 1935 to settle control of the New York party once and for all. The Old Guard believed it had an advantage in appealing directly to the membership, but the decisive sentiment was expressed by War Resisters League founder Jessie Wallace Hughan, a frequent Socialist candidate in New York throughout the 1930s sharply critical of the Militants: “I, as one member of the rank and file, am declining to stand either for the right or the left, but I do stand unequivocally for Norman Thomas.”141 The Old Guard was handed a decisive defeat in the primary with only 44 percent of the vote, translating to thirty delegates for the Thomas slate and twelve for the Old Guard slate.142
The final weeks leading up to the national convention did not lack for desperate pleas for reconciliation, including a final proposed compromise by Samuel Friedman and Jessie Wallace Hughan.143 Nor was a Farmer-Labor candidacy that could save face ruled out as late as the spring, with the undeterred Howard Y. Williams promoting a potential national ticket of Gerald Nye and Thomas Amlie.144 Floyd Olson also encouraged speculation he would challenge Roosevelt and was approached by Louis Waldman and Algernon Lee, but Olson died of stomach cancer that August, having already endorsed the reelection of FDR. The irreconcilable nature of the split in the Socialist Party was best illustrated on May Day in New York. The SP held a united front march with the Communists at Union Square, while the ILGWU hosted a gathering for the Old Guard at the Polo Grounds. Norman Thomas, conveniently out of town, sent greetings to both, which were booed, though not overwhelmingly, at the latter.145
The SP national convention opened on May 24 in Cleveland. The ostensible cause of the two-year fratricide was undone to what should have been the satisfaction of the Old Guard: the Declaration of Principles was amended to remove the offending passages, and all united fronts with the Communist Party were unambiguously banned.146 It was far too late, however, to mollify the New York Old Guard, even though all of its regulars, including James Oneal, Louis Waldman, and Algernon Lee, were there to contest the seating of the primary-elected New York delegation. A riot nearly broke out when Waldman and Lee, both duly elected delegates from New York, pointedly refused to stand for the singing of “The Internationale,” at which point they led with Oneal the walkout that finally ended the prolonged faction fight.147 Norman Thomas was then nominated for president by acclamation, with the vice presidential nomination going to virtual unknown George Nelson, a dairy farmer from Polk County, Wisconsin who served in the State Assembly in the 1920s, a rare Socialist in that body from the rural north country.
Ominously, the initial favorite for the second spot was Leo Krzycki.148 But Krzycki resigned as national chairman of the party, joining Sidney Hillman and the Amalgamated in giving unqualified backing to FDR. A consistent Communist sympathizer, Krzycki later led the CP-front American Slav Congress during the Second World War; in this capacity he defended the Soviet-installed regime in Poland after the war and supported the Communist-backed presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948.149 As a sign both of the SP’s enduring commitment to a genuine Farmer-Labor Party but also of its increasingly desperate straits, the national convention gave its blessing to the Wisconsin party to enter a formal coalition with the Progressive Party of Wisconsin, led by Governor Philip LaFollette. In a letter to James Oneal, Frederic Heath described the scene that transpired against Krzycki’s most important lieutenant in Milwaukee, Andrew Biemiller, editor of the Milwaukee Leader:
It may interest you to learn that Andy Biemiller is at last found out. I had him spotted from the first. . . . He came here first, at the insistence of Comrades Hoan and Krzycki (Crazy). . . . From the first he became a sort of spy on all our activities. Not an executive committee meeting could be held but that he was present, helping to guide things with his colossal assurance—and probably making regular reports to Chicago.150
Biemiller, though clearly doing the bidding of Krzycki and other Communist allies in the SP, was more a careerist than an ideologue, and resigned from the SP shortly after being elected to the Wisconsin legislature. Left behind was the other leading pro-Communist in Milwaukee, Meta Berger, widow of Victor Berger, an unshakable convert ever since visiting the Soviet Union early in the decade. Berger blasted the decision to unite with the Progressives and relished the public campaign by Daniel Hoan to drive her out of the party.151
The formation of a new organization by the disaffected Old Guard, the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), was announced in New York on June 3, with the support of such New York centrists as August Claessens and Charney Vladeck.152 They were joined by the state organizations of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Maryland; the Finnish Federation and Workmen’s Circle; and through the New York party had control of the Rand School. Jasper McLevy was named honorary chairman, and the Socialist local of San Antonio, Texas, communicated its desire to affiliate.153 The New York party, known for two months in the summer of 1936 as the People’s Party of New York, initially voted down the proposal of Louis Waldman and James Oneal to endorse the reelection of Roosevelt.154 But within a month was announced the formation of the American Labor Party of New York (ALP), concocted by Abraham Cahan and FDR’s top troubleshooter James Farley as a means for historically Socialist voters in New York to cast their ballot on an independent line for FDR.
The ALP was formally affiliated with Labor’s Non-Partisan League, created by John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman to provide the major labor movement contribution to the reelection of the president. It was in the belief that after the election a genuine Labor Party could be formed out of the ALP and CIO that the very short-lived People’s Party was brought around to supporting FDR, as were such old Socialists in the CIO leadership as David Dubinsky and Emil Rieve, though not without misgivings.155 Waldman urged Hillman to appoint SDF members to run Labor’s Non-Partisan League in several states, but Hillman, after humiliating Joseph Schlossberg before the entire Amalgamated executive committee for his pleas to stick with either the Socialists or a genuine Labor Party, barely concealed his displeasure with the idea of perpetuating the ALP after the election.156 Waldman gave the major statement endorsing Roosevelt in a radio address late in August:
In the little more than three years that President Roosevelt has been in office he has done much to restore the faith of millions of people, here and the world over, in democracy as a means of bringing about vital social changes, in making progress through law. Assuming office in the midst of a grave social crisis, he required, and was accorded, extraordinary powers to meet it. . . . The example he set of how in a democracy resolute leadership can accomplish the things that the people need without resorting to a dictatorship, has given unified direction to the democratic countries of turning the tide of Fascism the world over.157
To be sure, many aging veterans of the Socialist heyday were drawn to FDR, if as much by despondence over the implosion of the SP as genuine admiration for the New Deal. But by no means did a majority of them feel at home in the Social Democratic Federation. The efforts of the SDF to reach out to old-timers across the country were generally frustrating, but there could have been no ruder shock than when a leading surviving founder of the SP, Seymour Stedman, joined the Communist Party.158 Indeed, there was a large and grim irony: having agonized for two years over the mere suggestion of the Socialist Party joining any united front with the Communists, the Old Guardsmen in the ALP had done just that, with the first Communists brought on to its executive board by James Farley and other Democratic operatives before the end of the year.159
Earl Browder ran the first of two campaigns as the Communist presidential nominee, but only after making clear to the Soviet foreign ministry that the party’s open support for FDR would cost him the election. The Soviets, in turn, made clear the imperative to prevent any genuine Farmer-Labor candidacy that could throw the election away from FDR.160 By the time Browder was nominated in late June, the Communists weakly opposed FDR as the candidate of “finance capital,” with Republican Alf Landon cast as the fearsome front man of the major fascist threat—William Randolph Hearst, a Republican since the late 1920s who loomed strangely large in Communist demonology. But with the American Popular Front now identified as the CIO and Labor’s Non-Partisan League, it was obvious that the Communists were behind Roosevelt. In a pamphlet on “the crisis in the Socialist Party,” William Z. Foster showed off his talent for rhetorical acrobatics in explaining,
The sectarian danger in the Socialist Party was greatly increased by that party’s recent absorption of the Trotskyite group. Just at the time when these counter-revolutionary elements were being proved to be terrorists and assassins. . . . Thomas arrives at the conclusion that it makes no difference whether Roosevelt or Landon is elected. But in reality the weight of his arguments favors Landon, and gives him direct support. . . . When Hearst, to elect Landon through a Red Scare, lyingly alleged that the Communists were supporting Roosevelt, Thomas at once rushed into print and seconded Hearst’s charge.161
The Communists consolidated control of the Farmer-Labor Party movement throughout the early months of 1936, with Frank Gorman of the Textile Workers giving barn-burning speeches to various Communist fronts.162 But at a conference called by what remained of the Farmer-Labor Political Federation on May 30, Paul Douglas and Alfred Bingham immediately walked out when Earl Browder appeared at the invitation of Floyd Olson, both acting to deliberately implode the movement on behalf of FDR.163 That sentiment among the labor and Socialist rank and file for a Labor Party remained strong was most vividly demonstrated at the national convention of the UAW in August, where John L. Lewis had to personally intervene to prevent the passage of a Labor Party resolution.164
With all other new party prospects having evaporated, on June 20, North Dakota Congressman and Non-Partisan League veteran William Lemke announced he was the presidential candidate of the quixotic Union Party launched by Father Coughlin.165 Most Midwestern progressives were resigned to supporting FDR at this point, though Ernest Lundeen endorsed Lemke before the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party officially endorsed Roosevelt.166 The Lemke candidacy was a disaster; unable to appear on the ballot in New York, California, and throughout the South, he was completely overshadowed by Coughlin, who might have given qualified support to an SP-backed Farmer-Labor Party, but now as the leader of a lonely crusade was thrust on to his self-destructive future course. The SP indulged in feverish rhetoric about Lemke as a potential fascist, a transparent reaction to his grip on the historically Socialist vote in the West, as the party secretary in South Dakota bitterly lamented.167 But far from being a potential fascist strongman, Lemke was extremely uncharismatic and promised to serve only one term.
Despite the massive swing of the labor movement to Roosevelt, Thomas could still count on endorsements from such labor leaders as A. Philip Randolph, Julius Hochman and Louis Nelson of the ILGWU, and Walter Reuther, now on the executive board of the UAW and standing that year as a Socialist for the Detroit city council.168 Other notables on the Independent Committee for Thomas and Nelson were Reinhold Niebuhr, Morris Cohen, Harold Fey of Christian Century, and Carl Raushenbush of the Union Theological Seminary.169 One opinion leader who took the opposite of the well-worn course, endorsing Thomas after backing FDR in 1932, was John Flynn, who praised Thomas for upholding “the right of the people to rule their own economic life.”170 Under trying circumstances, Thomas took a page from Gene Debs, casting his campaign squarely on the issue of Socialism:
It is our task to stand four square on our own program and to make it plain. What is that program? It is Socialism. It is the doctrine that since power-driven machinery has made this an age of collectivism we must make collectivism cooperate in order to end poverty in the midst of potential plenty. The Old Deal failed catastrophically, a return to it is unthinkable. The New Deal has already failed and is headed towards new catastrophe of war or new economic collapse.171
After a twenty-state tour in October, Thomas accurately predicted a massive landslide for FDR, adding, “It is foolish for the labor unions to waste more of their good money on the Roosevelt campaign.”172 In his final address at Madison Square Garden, Thomas continued to prophetically warn that Roosevelt intended to revive the economy through militarization: “There has indeed been talk of universal conscription of men and wealth in the next war but the threat of it will not of itself prevent new war and, in the event of war, conscription of wealth under a capitalist government will be lenient. But the farmer at his plow, the worker at his bench, and, of course, the soldier in the trenches, will be bound in absolute slavery to the war machine.”173
In the end, Thomas and Nelson polled a dismal 188,072 votes. Only in New York did Thomas even poll over 1 percent of the vote, and in no county more than 3.25 percent. Down-ballot results were just as depressing. Excluding SDF-aligned candidacies in Reading and Bridgeport, only in New York did any candidate for Congress earn more than 2 percent. William Lemke came just a hair under 2 percent of the national total with 892,378 votes, a majority of which would have likely otherwise gone to the Socialists. The national office made its best effort to spin the situation the morning after. A mass mailing declared, “Landon Rout! Lemke Collapse! CP Confusion! Socialist integrity challenged as in 1917—and vindicated!”174 But in reality there was no doubting the high cost of the last two years of confusion and fratricide. If Thomas and the SP always recognized that the most they could realistically aspire to was to be at the vanguard of a Farmer-Labor Party, now they simply needed to become a part of one to have any future at all.
The landslide victory of FDR, with the support of Labor’s Non-Partisan League, has led to the near-consensus that the New Deal successfully co-opted all radical opposition in 1936. But it would be more accurate to say that what it succeeded in was marginalizing it. It is true that the leaders of the CIO, whatever their political motives, had a practical motive to support FDR after the passage of the Wagner Act vastly improved the organizing environment for trade unionism. But Roosevelt only reluctantly signed the Wagner Act, less radical than the Norris-LaGuardia Act signed by Hoover, after it was pushed through by pro-labor forces in Congress, and many Socialists and others foresaw how it could be used as a mechanism of labor repression.175 Moreover, the real measure of radical sentiment was not the Thomas vote but the Lemke vote, understated at a minimum by being kept off the ballot in so many states. An insurgent Farmer-Labor Party, had the Socialists rallied to it and kept the Communists from sabotaging it, could have restored the status quo ante foolishly squandered after the LaFollette campaign in 1924.
But there was another new factor in 1936. Since 1920, the SP was consistently prevented from appearing on the ballot in a few states, but in 1936 they were kept off the ballot in an unprecedented thirteen states, and in only three were write-in votes counted. Over the course of the 1930s, no fewer than ten states increased the number of petition signatures required to appear on the ballot by a factor of anywhere from ten to fifty and/or moved the deadline for a candidate or new party to petition to appear on the ballot from the fall to the spring of an election year.176 What began as measures to suppress the emergence of a new party to challenge the New Deal from the left only accelerated in the decades ahead, so that minor parties have ever since been forced to routinely struggle for basic democratic rights. The United States was not immune from the trend toward monopolization of political power that ravaged Europe in the 1930s.
For all the ground lost to the Communists, the Socialist Party still could boast more than twice their national vote, with Earl Browder and James Ford polling an unimpressive 79,315 votes. Many would argue that this is no reasonable measurement and indeed a virtue—that in rallying to the New Deal the Communist Party served and influenced the never clearly defined “people’s movement.” In the postwar era, many ex-Socialist liberals argued that the SP should have adopted its own “Popular Front” strategy in alignment with the New Deal.177 Indeed, the logic of the Popular Front, so puzzling to old Socialists as the 1930s unfolded, has been the substance of the American left forever since. Typified by the politics, culture, and ultimate historical memory of the new CIO, the contempt for political action inherited from the IWW and historic left wing became the rationale for elevating protest over politics, a radical posture in service to the liberal faction of the power elite. The consequence has been the loss of the belief in actual democratic virtue that defined American Socialism.