In his first address to Congress after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, declared, “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill,” the impetus for the March on Washington several months earlier. Then, in his first State of the Union address, Johnson announced an “unconditional war on poverty in America.”1 After introducing the legislation constituting this war on poverty, he would dramatically frame his ambitious legislative agenda later that year in a commencement address at the University of Michigan:
We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society, resting on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But this is just the beginning . . . not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed.2
Never had an American president come so close to the spirit and even the substance of historic American Socialism. If the circumstances and available means of carrying out his program would have been problematic to many in the Socialist Party of generations past, that historic critique of the American political system was now entirely forgotten, and any talk of other means than the corporate liberal state considered superfluous at best. More significantly, the outlining of Johnson’s agenda neatly coincided with the rise of the Shachtmanite inner circle to the pinnacle of power in the labor movement, making them potential policy makers in the Johnson administration. From their base in the UAW, after Don Slaiman entered George Meany’s circle of advisors, a UAW Shachtmanite named Sam Fishman was elected president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, and Tom Kahn became a speechwriter for Meany. Norman Hill went to work in the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, and Max Shachtman’s wife Yetta became the secretary of Al Shanker, the incendiary young leader of the American Federation of Teachers in New York.3
After the AFL-CIO merger, A. Philip Randolph entered a long and bitter struggle with George Meany to end all segregationist practices in the trade union federation on par with their strict constitutional measures against Communism and organized crime.4 When several individual unions, most notably the UAW, prominently supported the March on Washington after the AFL-CIO refused to endorse it, Meany immediately regretted it. His penance was establishing a major patronage sinecure, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, with Bayard Rustin as executive director and Rachelle Horowitz as his secretary.5 This group in the top echelons of the AFL-CIO ultimately had a greater impact on American history and politics than Michael Harrington, but at the time nothing seemed more extraordinary than the ascent of Harrington as a consultant to the President’s Task Force in the War Against Poverty. Yet his major proposal, to create full employment through large-scale public works projects, co-authored with an assistant secretary of labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was hastily rejected by LBJ.6 In the words of Harrington’s biographer Maurice Isserman, “Johnson’s own ideas about how to combat poverty were a contradictory mixture of warm memories of the New Deal and a conviction that simply giving money to the poor was both morally and politically undesirable.”7
As the Civil Rights Act made its way through Congress, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was on the ground in Mississippi in its most daring campaign yet, registering black voters amid unsparing violence. Climaxing with the infamous murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer, this campaign of violence was the last stand of legal white supremacy in the South. When the allies of SNCC in Mississippi were prevented from participating in the delegate selection process for the 1964 Democratic convention, they formed a parallel organization, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, to contest the seating of the white party regulars. Meanwhile, a police shooting of a black teenager in Harlem led to an outbreak of rioting that presaged the massive urban unrest to come. Combined with the events in Mississippi and the peaking influence of Malcolm X before his assassination the following winter, a mood of black nationalist militancy made itself known that was deeply anathema to the abiding Socialist convictions of Rustin and Randolph.8 There was a potent mixture of alarm over both black militancy and the earliest indications of a white backlash. Alabama Governor George Wallace polled remarkably well as a primary candidate against LBJ, with one of his earliest indications of Northern support a well-received visit in the former Socialist bastion of Milwaukee.
But the eventual Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, a vocal opponent of the Civil Rights Act in the Senate, brought the greatest anxiety to the civil rights movement. His acceptance speech at the Republican convention, though it reiterated his criticisms of the Civil Rights Act, focused on a maximalist view of armed confrontation with Communism abroad, belying the libertarian reputation he later attained. Goldwater aroused determined support for LBJ from peace activists who might otherwise have been reticent because of his escalation of military operations in Vietnam. The rise of Goldwater and his supporters could not have been better scripted to satisfy the high drama of the SP “realignment” narrative. The youth group founded by William F. Buckley that was one of the major forces behind Goldwater, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), had its major coming-out party in 1962 with a “World Liberation from Communism” rally at Madison Square Garden. A counter-rally was co-sponsored by ADA and SDS, which countered such YAF slogans as “stamp out the ADA” with a roaring ovation for Michael Harrington as he called for a mass movement of militant confrontation with the new right along the lines laid out by Irwin Suall in The American Ultras.9
In 1960, there had been no love among the champions of realignment for John F. Kennedy, but in 1964 Lyndon Johnson earned more passionate support. Rallying to Johnson did not come naturally to many old Socialists. A. Philip Randolph, the most unyielding champion of the non-Communist new party movement just after the Second World War, confided to friends that he had cast write-ins for Norman Thomas ever since 1948 and that it was a struggle to come out actively for LBJ.10 The radicalized YPSL led by Joel Geier was adamantly opposed to the enthusiasm for Johnson, and thus the YPSL was summarily expelled as a body and reconstituted under the leadership of Penn Kemble.11 Bayard Rustin spoke for the Socialist Party and the larger aborning new left:
I am going to vote for Johnson not because he is perfect, but because he is for civil rights, Medicare and the poverty program, and because he is for progress. Barry Goldwater is a reactionary and a danger to world peace. I secondly want Johnson to know that the Negroes, liberals, intellectuals, students, and the labor movement are giving him his majority—for I want him to be more dependent on us. I don’t believe that Johnson is anything more than a shrewd politician—but that is a far cry from his opponent who is a war-happy reactionary who aids and abets racism.12
The climax of the civil rights movement came when the Democratic convention opened in Atlantic City on August 21, 1964. For months a potential explosion had been simmering over seating the Mississippi Freedom Democrats; this move was supported by much of the establishment press as both Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin made clear to LBJ the grave consequences of ignoring these delegates. After the convention’s credentials committee held dramatic hearings, it was announced that no future state delegation could be segregated—thereby single-handedly shattering the one-party regime in the South—but that only two at-large seats would be given to the Freedom Democrats that year. Rustin, King, and James Farmer urged the Freedom Democrats to accept the deal for the victory that it was, but the militants of SNCC angrily denounced it as betrayal, and thus the era of “black power” began.13 Yet in the meantime, Lyndon Johnson was elected to a term of his own in a historic landslide.
On December 6, 1964, in New York, nearly two thousand people paid $2.50 each to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Norman Thomas at the Hotel Astor. Congratulatory greetings came from President Johnson, George Meany, Vice President-elect Hubert Humphrey, and scores of members of Congress and world leaders; and earlier that year, Harry Fleischman had published his biography of Thomas to wide acclaim.14 Thomas was presented with a check for $17,500 to distribute among his causes as he saw fit.15 The extraordinary nature of this tribute to a professional dissenter is well captured by his most sensitive biographer, W. A. Swanberg:
But the true wonder of Thomas, with all his faults, was that he appealed to the good in mankind. His hearers knew he appealed to the good in them. It elevated them. The world seemed better when one’s intelligence and nobler impulses were importuned. . . . But the tide was against Thomas. The United States, in its twin drives of fighting Communism and winning affluence, had opted for the morals of the Communists and the sharpers. There seemed no drawing back from the turns made at the Bay of Pigs and Tonkin Gulf, any more than there was repentance in the advertising boardrooms or the labor unions. In a sense—and some of them must have realized it—the nineteen hundred people at the Astor were honoring the last great American idealist.16
That the Thomas sensibility was indeed becoming a thing of the past became clear as the escalation of the war in Vietnam was met by an equally dramatic escalation of the protest movement against that war in the United States. In February 1965, Bayard Rustin published in Commentary his essay, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement.” The article recapitulated the realignment doctrine in light of the rise in power and influence of his comrades and himself. But the black power activists of SNCC and their radicalized white comrades were now rejecting the key realignment premise of the centrality of the labor movement and class politics generally.17 Abstractly, Rustin had the better of the argument, but the choice between protest and politics was a false one. That, after a century of legal segregation, protest became necessary because of the failure of politics was a tragedy. If the young radicals of the new left saw this violence as something to celebrate, Rustin and the Shachtmanites had no one to blame but themselves, having implemented the model of political activism adapted from the Popular Front in creating the new left.
In moving on from protest to where the path of politics was once again open, there was no reason the larger new left, having achieved extraordinary victories with the civil rights movement, should not have simply built on that strength without apology in mobilizing opposition to the Vietnam War. For a time, it even appeared that this was in fact happening. Initially, the Socialist Party joined most of the historic peace movement in the coalition “Negotiations Now,” which advocated for a negotiated settlement between North and South Vietnam. Throughout the 1960s, most historic antiwar organizations, particularly the War Resisters League, remained deeply rooted in the tradition of the historic non-Communist left, as seen most clearly in the reading list distributed by the League.18 But Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was another matter entirely. As antiwar sentiment, especially opposition to the draft, reached a groundswell on the nation’s campuses, SDS expressly invited the Communist Party and other Marxist-Leninist groups to participate in its national demonstration planned for the spring of 1965.19
In contrast to the ambiguous events at Port Huron, this invitation was a direct transgression of the abiding anti-Communism of their organizational elders. At Port Huron, the LID was still being run by judicious survivors of the historic SP, and only because of the intervention of Mike Harrington were there significant repercussions at all. Now, however, the Shachtmanites fully controlled the LID, with Harrington as chairman, Tom Kahn as executive secretary, and the board stacked with such others as Bayard Rustin and Irving Howe, who wrote a withering attack on what he termed “new styles in leftism” that year in Dissent.20 By the time SDS had its national antiwar demonstration in Washington, Vietcong flags were a common sight, civil rights anthems were reprised in homage to Ho Chi Minh, and David McReynolds openly complained that the War Resisters League had been ambushed into supporting them.21 The editors of Studies on the Left, sensing that SDS was moving in their direction, invited Tom Hayden to become a contributing editor. His first contribution declared that “anti-Communism is the moral equivalent of rape.”22
An aging Norman Thomas went on a nationwide campus tour in support of the growing movement against the war in Vietnam, proclaiming his desire “not to burn the flag but to cleanse it” in a firm but gentle upbraiding of the growing militancy in SDS. Thomas was increasingly weak physically, but as powerful on the stump as ever. One of his largest and most enthusiastic crowds was at Berkeley, and at this campus that was virtually synonymous with the new left he shrewdly assessed the growing movement:
In the thirties the old left and, today, the new left among the students represent a significant revolt against what is now called the establishment and its mores, but there are significant differences. . . . Theirs is most definitely a revolt against what they regard as bourgeois values and they are more conscious of the infallibility of youth as against middle age. They are more inclined to find “the poor” as bearers of salvation rather than the working class, certainly as it expresses itself in the unions. . . . The new left is very amorphous in program, inclined to be nihilistic, anarchistic rather than Socialist. Freedom from dogmatism is a good thing but lack of program is not. I deeply regret the tendency of some rather conspicuous members of the new left to appear more interested in a Communist victory in Vietnam than in a constructive peace.23
After one final attempt at mediation by a superannuated Harry Laidler, the inevitable divorce between the LID and SDS came in the summer of 1965.24 Some kind of split was inevitable with the rise of frank partisanship of the Vietcong, but the circumstances were not. Arriving at an odd blend of black nationalist and Vietcong partisanship as a logical extension of earlier doctrines while stopping well short of becoming Communist ideologues, the founding core of SDS, typified by Tom Hayden, was highly analogous to the SP Militants of the 1930s, complete with the ultimate endpoint of anodyne left-liberalism. But by the time SDS broke with the LID, it was moving past its founders. For a time, Carl Oglesby, who led the all-important mobilization against the draft, spoke for the new mainstream. An explicit rebellion against the intellectualism of SDS’s roots led to identification with the 1960s counterculture (widely seen at the time as one and the same with the new left, but in reality a very different phenomenon) and to ties with the founders of the right-leaning modern libertarian movement. But there was also a growing contingent of Maoists, who within three years became the dominant force in SDS.
The enduring moderate majority of the new left continued to look to Michael Harrington for leadership. When Max Shachtman came out for the war at a small gathering, Harrington and Irving Howe confronted him, only to be denounced as “Gandhian pacifists.”25 In March 1966, Harrington collapsed as he was preparing to give a talk in San Diego. With his collapse attributed to a nervous breakdown, he entered four years of intensive psychotherapy, and for much of that time was almost completely disengaged from political activism. Harrington later attributed his personal crisis to a “conflict between his previous image of himself as selfless and marginal and the new realities of his life” as a minor political celebrity.26 Harrington’s distance from the antiwar movement and the scene generally was thus more a function of personal problems than political differences, yet his stated reason for his breakdown has political significance. Harrington’s admirers in these years generally did not appreciate that he remained a Shachtmanite ideologue. If a broad and anti-totalitarian new left was to ride sentiment against Vietnam to greater heights, it could not be led by an adherent of the vision of a new left that was enunciated by Irwin Suall in the early days of realignment.
The first major watershed in the trajectory of the Shachtmanites toward neoconservatism was the publication of an essay by Tom Kahn on “The Problem of the New Left” in the July 1966 issue of the still liberal Commentary. It was reprinted as a pamphlet by the League for Industrial Democracy, which was now the effective successor, for operational purposes, of the Independent Socialist League within and beyond the Socialist Party:
The abandonment of the traditional pro-labor perspective confronts a radical movement with a major problem. If not the labor movement, then what social force can be expected to lead the way in transforming society, and how are the students to relate to that force? . . . The class origins of the new left lie at the root of two characteristics of the movement: its anti-materialism and its anti-intellectualism. . . . Should today’s new left disintegrate, as a consequence of sectarian or defeatist policies, debris from wrecked hopes would scatter far, and the cynical disillusionment which would follow would darken, not illuminate, the prospects for a Great Society.27
As Vietnam increasingly took up the attention of both the Johnson administration and the public, the early champions of realignment made their major push to refocus on their domestic agenda with the “Freedom Budget,” a proposal “to provide full employment . . . to develop a system of guaranteed annual incomes . . . to provide decent medical care and adequate educational opportunities to all Americans . . . to unite sustained full employment with sustained full production and high economic growth.”28 Developed by Bayard Rustin and labor economist Leon Keyserling, the Freedom Budget was announced by A. Philip Randolph at an October 1966 press conference, calling for its implementation with funding of $100 billion over ten years (roughly the amount, in inflation-adjusted dollars, spent on Medicare and Medicaid in 2012 alone).29 The Socialist answer to the sputtering domestic agenda of LBJ, the Freedom Budget was endorsed by most unions, the ADA, and numerous religious social action groups.
The experience of the Shachtmanite-led SP in national politics in this period was in some ways analogous to that of the Communist Party at the height of the Popular Front. The brief heyday that saw more than a dozen CP-friendly congressmen was matched by the large number of domestic policy operatives in the Great Society, who achieved about the same level of policy success; only to see their advances completely undone once the political winds changed. Yet liberalism also was changing. ADA turned decisively against the Vietnam War, forcing the resignation of one long-time chairman, a 1930s Socialist veteran named John Roche. This is critical to understanding why most Cold War liberals did not in the end become neoconservatives. To dull the memory of their Depression decade radicalism, they imbibed heavily of the philosophical realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, himself highly critical of the war in his final years, taking his philosophy seriously enough to apply it to Vietnam. The Shachtmanites and other post-1930s radicals, by contrast, had not shared that experience and were therefore more predisposed to applying their revolutionary zeal against liberalism’s perceived failure of nerve.
The widespread radicalization of American liberalism proceeded apace in 1967 with a series of revelations about direct CIA involvement in the Cold War ideological apparatus. It began with an expose in the new left magazine Ramparts of the CIA direction of the National Student Association. Then, the New York Times reported on the extensive CIA activities through the Kaplan Fund, which had funded much of Norman Thomas’s international troubleshooting since the beginning of the Cold War. As Thomas wrote in a public statement,
I’m not ashamed of what we did. What we did was good work, and no one ever tried to tell us what to do. I am ashamed we swallowed this CIA business, though. If I had a choice I would never have accepted CIA support. This would have let them crush the project at any minute or made us persona non grata in the countries we were working with.30
The scandal made Thomas and his legacy increasingly suspect on the new left. Christopher Lasch published his widely praised work The Agony of the American Left around this time, capturing both the best of the critique of the new left associated with Studies on the Left (in embracing the legacy of the historic Socialist Party as opposed to that of its critics) and the worst of it, with a lengthy polemic against the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a worthy target to be sure but drifting perilously close to an apologia for American Communism.31 For all his overwrought zeal, Tom Kahn had diagnosed this malady with expert precision in “The Problem of the New Left”:
What actually operates here is a kind of reverse McCarthyism which refuses to differentiate between libertarian and rightist opposition to Communism. The new left, precisely by adopting as a cardinal tenet the thesis that the “Communist question” is irrelevant, raises the Communist question to a standard by which it will judge others. In actual practice, the standard works to the advantage of the pro-Communist and indifferentist, neither of whom has reason to raise the question.32
Before the end of 1967, Norman Thomas was forced to close his Lower Manhattan office of nearly four decades due to declining health. Yet this may have been the moment when Thomas and his example were needed more than ever, and not only in connection to the ongoing struggle against the Vietnam War. The world event in 1967 of greatest consequence to the remnant of American Socialism was the Israeli war that June. In its immediate aftermath the party’s resolution still emphasized international mediation to resolve all outstanding issues in the Middle East conflict.33 Even Bayard Rustin, an outspoken apologist for Israel in his final years, assured one correspondent, “You are probably right to draw parallels between the Zionist and black power movements.”34 But in a few short years, the Shachtmanites would play a critical role in elevating Israel and Zionism to a central place on the altar of American nationalism.
On Labor Day weekend in 1967, several thousand gathered in Chicago for the National Conference for New Politics, proposing to run a third-party ticket in 1968 of Martin Luther King for president and the widely known pediatrician and new left partisan Benjamin Spock for vice president. King had become an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War by the early months of 1967, increasingly aligning himself with the supporters of SDS with a proposed “Poor People’s Campaign.” The principal sponsor of the conference was Martin Peretz, publisher of the popular Ramparts. Many Socialists were hopeful about the New Politics conference, particularly in Milwaukee where a hardy remnant had not abandoned dreams of reviving past glory.35 But the gathering quickly proved a disaster. A self-proclaimed “black caucus,” many of whose principals soon gained national notoriety as the Black Panther Party, dominated the proceedings, with several activists at the periphery openly chanting “Kill whitey!”36 Horrified by the black caucus’s condemnation of Israel in the most lurid if not anti-Semitic terms, Peretz would go on to zealously man the barricades for Zionism to great notoriety as owner of The New Republic.
Paul Feldman, a loyal Shachtmanite going back to the ISL who succeeded Mike Harrington as editor of New America, was thus provoked to unsparing opposition to the new left in a private memorandum for his comrades:
When corporations provided most of the money for the recent Newark “black power” convention, business was not acting out of any social idealism. Buying off potential rioters was only a secondary consideration. It recognized that a movement whose primary objective was to take over ghetto candy stores and other small businesses from whites, was no threat to corporate interests or profits but provided a convenient tool to split the Negro-liberal-labor coalition which was a threat. Also symptomatic of this movement’s petit-bourgeois quality was its anti-Semitism. . . . Their anti-Semitism also reflects status frustration.37
Feldman would publish a more muted pamphlet on the New Politics conference, taking a radical posture that less than two years later would be unthinkable:
The conference was a dismal failure but it was also tragic. . . . No matter what their reservation on this point or that, Socialists from every section would be inside such a movement with both shoulders if it came into being, and even deadheads of organized labor like Meany would have felt the pull of such a new force. . . . We must also admit that fundamental aspects of our analysis need rethinking. . . . This does not mean giving up our fundamental insistence on social revolution. In fact, this desire is shared with us by the new radicals and implied in their rejection of present frauds.38
Despite the New Politics fiasco, opposition to the war in Vietnam was reaching a great enough critical mass that the sort of radical political action the conference envisioned was still a serious possibility. This became apparent at the end of 1967 when the drive to register enough voters to put a new Peace and Freedom Party on the ballot in California met with success. After this warning shot, a young ADA operative named Allard Lowenstein seized the initiative to form a more broadly appealing political option. With the blessing of the ailing Norman Thomas, who considered him a protégé, Lowenstein launched the Dump Johnson movement, whose aim was to draft a candidate to oppose LBJ in the Democratic primary.39 The candidate who ultimately came forward was Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy. First elected to the House in 1948, with an abiding grounding in Catholic social doctrine, he represented the finest political traditions of the state that had produced Charles Lindbergh Sr., Thomas Van Lear, and Ernest Lundeen.
His campaign should have been the ideal vehicle for a broad movement of the democratic left, rooted in the civil rights and antiwar movements, to bring about the original vision of realignment. Among active Socialists, Julius Bernstein, leader of the Boston local since early in the party’s twilight, rallied to McCarthy with his following of Harvard undergraduates. But they were the exception that proved the rule and were reprimanded by the national leadership, who asserted in Leninist prose that “the mass social forces of the American left—the labor and major Negro organizations” were solidly behind LBJ.40 The Shachtmanite core largely avoided the Democratic primary drama of 1968; most of their energies were taken up with the explosive teachers’ strike in Brooklyn led by Shachtmanite fellow traveler Al Shanker.
With the Tet offensive in early 1968 destroying any prospect of an American victory in Vietnam, voices against the war grew louder. War supporters were not only driven out of the leadership of ADA but also resigned from the organization altogether; among them John Roche, Senator Paul Douglas, and Leon Keyserling. Yet Walter Reuther, still in the process of coming out against the war, blocked the ADA from throwing its full weight behind the McCarthy campaign. After McCarthy won a shocking 42 percent of the New Hampshire primary vote against Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy entered the race, attracting the support of such fence-sitters on the war as Reuther.41 The one-time aide to Joe McCarthy and bitter foe of the civil rights movement as his brother’s attorney general reinvented himself as the man who would unite the white working class and black poor behind a new liberal dispensation. Surprising endorsers included Tom Hayden, SNCC leader (and future congressman) John Lewis, and Cesar Chavez, president of the United Farm Workers. Not least was Mike Harrington, who would play an indispensable role in perpetuating the Kennedy myth beyond the 1960s. After Kennedy was assassinated on the night he won the California primary, Harrington embraced a weeping Tom Hayden at his funeral.42
The dissension that led to the final crackup of the Socialist Party had been stirring ever since the break with SDS, but until the spring and summer of 1968 it was not obvious that a moderate, anti-totalitarian movement of the new left would not endure. The intentions of the Shachtmanites only began to be revealed at the SP national convention in July. Describing the coming showdown at the Democratic convention between Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, the majority resolution written by Irwin Suall and Seymour Kopilow retreated into vague sloganeering:
Socialists, as loyal supporters of the labor, Negro, and peace movements, have been poignantly aware that the continued fragmentation of the democratic left forces precludes a new direction for America at home and abroad and opens the possibility of a resurgence of the right. At such a time of crisis, the first strategic priority for Democratic Socialists continues to be to work to bring together idealistic middle-class elements who have contributed so much to a meaningful debate on American foreign policy, and the labor and civil rights movements who remain the major bulwark of democratic progress.43
A vigorous dissent recognized the realities of a nation in turmoil and the radical possibilities and imperatives these conditions presented. Its sponsors included not only such left-wingers as David McReynolds, Bill Briggs, and Harry Siitonen, but also such relative centrists as Frank Zeidler, Darlington Hoopes, Max Wohl of Cleveland, and two former members of the national office staff, Betty Elkin and George Woywood. Their statement read in part:
We have foisted on us by the convention majority document, that, in order to paper over the differences within the majority, simply does not tell the truth about this year’s election. Their resolution is absolutely neutral as between Humphrey and McCarthy, criticizing them equally and symmetrically. This would be appropriate for Socialists who were in principle opposed to support of any old party candidate. But as a statement from people who work inside the Democratic Party, it is merely preparation for an SP endorsement of Hubert Humphrey.44
A long wave of resignations from the SP began immediately. Hal Draper, who remained after the expulsion of his young followers, wrote with his wife that the SP was “now under a leadership bent on reducing the organization to a sect buried in the right wing of the Democratic Party swamp. Such a sect has no future for socialism. As Independent Socialists we will continue to build alternatives to capitalist politics such as the Peace and Freedom Movement.”45 Virgil Vogel resigned after New America refused to publish his letter to the editor, announcing he would once again vote for the Socialist Labor Party. As he wrote to his sympathizers, “Harrington has raised the specter of German CP policy 35 years ago when, despite the Hitler threat, they fought the Social Democrats. Their policy was of course stupid, but the analogy is not fitting, because Humphrey is not a Social Democrat and Nixon is not a Nazi.”46
When Humphrey emerged as the Democratic nominee at their Chicago convention in late August, massive antiwar protests took place in a park outside the hall and were met by a merciless police crackdown. The crackup of the hopeful new left from earlier in the decade was most poignantly illustrated when Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, and five others were arrested and charged in an ill-conceived conspiracy trial for their role in the demonstrations, while Dellinger’s old pacifist comrade Bayard Rustin was inside the convention as a floor manager for Humphrey. Rustin did not renounce his pacifist convictions during Vietnam and was affiliated with the War Resisters League until his death. But based on his hysterical belief that Richard Nixon threatened a repeal of the new civil rights laws akin to the end of Reconstruction, Rustin declared the election of Humphrey “a moral test for American democracy . . . the threat of an American apartheid must repel you.”47 His support for Humphrey, however, may have sprung less from genuine fear than familial attachment to the Shachtmanites, particularly to his lover Tom Kahn. As a sect, the Shachtmanites were emotionally attached to the Humphrey of 1960, the liberal standard-bearer when realignment was first articulated.
The attempts to form an antiwar new party at the eleventh hour were considerable but ultimately went nowhere. On the ballot in only a handful of states, the Peace and Freedom Party was split between nominating Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and comedian Dick Gregory, one of the more moderate black leaders at the ill-fated New Politics conference. Among those drawn to Gregory was Dwight Macdonald, aging but radical as ever.48 Macdonald gave a well-received address on “the relevance of anarchism” at the first SDS convention in 1960 and was still hosting fundraisers for them at the height of the group’s notoriety during the Columbia student strike in 1968.49 Most of his collaborators for a generation were appalled by his support for SDS, but Macdonald saved most of his recriminations for Michael Harrington and his fellow Shachtmanites. After they misled him into signing an open letter in support of Al Shanker, Macdonald attacked the “esoteric old left sect” in the New York Review of Books.50
The myopia of this esoteric old left sect was perhaps best illustrated in a terse note from Julius Bernstein to new SP executive secretary Penn Kemble: “We had a few calls today from strangers asking—as a result of seeing the film clips of what went on in the streets of Chicago—who are the Socialist Party candidates this year ‘since I won’t vote for Humphrey and I can’t vote for Nixon.’ If any of the realignment types are intending to raise the issue of a Humphrey endorsement at the next national meeting, they’d better forget it.”51 Tom Kahn was the loyal soldier in the fall campaign, hired as an assistant to Walter Reuther in his capacity as an advisor to Humphrey. Kahn was particularly proud of a UAW pamphlet he authored blasting the record of George Wallace, whose third-party candidacy was attracting extensive white working-class support.52 In the end, with Wallace earning over 13 percent of the popular vote and forty-six electoral votes, Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon.
A couple of weeks after the election, Norman Thomas celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday in his sickbed surrounded by two of his five children and a few select close friends, including Harry Fleischman and Mike Harrington. Only with the greatest reluctance had he cast his final presidential ballot for Humphrey over Nixon, but his joy in his final days came from the election of his promising protégé Allard Lowenstein to Congress from Long Island, in what proved to be only a single term.53 He was relieved that death was coming fairly soon after he became incapacitated, but Thomas was haunted to the end by the crisis of personal faith that originally propelled him into the Socialist movement, expressing envy of Martin Luther King after his assassination with the lament, “I’ve never been to the mountaintop.”54 Norman Thomas died on December 19, 1968. In an editorial accompanying its eight-column obituary, the New York Times wrote,
Whether it was the plight of the sharecroppers in the South, or work relief for the unemployed, or free speech in Mayor Hague’s Jersey City, or the noxious conduct of Senator Joseph McCarthy, or the evil of the Vietnam War, Mr. Thomas spoke rousingly to America’s moral sensibilities. His ardent views, often unpopular at the time, became a standard of decency in a remarkable number of instances. An undoctrinaire Socialist, who put freedom ahead of any dogma, he lived to see much of his social philosophy become part of the fabric of American life.55
It would be utterly unheard of in future generations for a frequent minor-party presidential candidate who averaged 0.675 percent of the vote in six elections (and only 0.27 percent in the latter four) to be widely acclaimed by so many of the nation’s elite. This praise was, to a large extent, a function of Cold War imperatives. The noble dissenter who through faith in democracy yet made his impact felt in American politics, especially one labeled a Socialist, was a uniquely powerful weapon in the ideological Cold War. This fact can certainly distort Thomas’s record; even at the height of the Cold War he had powerful enemies on issues ranging from disarmament to the Middle East. Nor can his status be ascribed totally to cynicism, since many of those responsible for it were, after all, his youthful supporters in the 1930s. Indeed, in casting him as “America’s conscience,” many Cold War liberals placed him in much the same figurehead role that they had earlier as Socialist Party Militants, with more than a touch of cynicism in both cases.
No single item from Norman Thomas’s final year carries more pathos than his letter to Penn Kemble in September 1968 declaring, “After the debacle in Chicago, I look forward to even greater efforts by Socialists to end this obscene war.”56 Under the control of the Shachtmanites, the remnant of the Socialist Party was dropping all pretense of being anything other than a sect—one devoted, in a warped extrapolation of Trotskyism, to the American military-industrial complex and allied leadership of the AFL-CIO in the name of leading a “global democratic revolution.” One could hardly imagine any greater insult and injury to the legacy of Norman Thomas, and indeed, of American Socialism itself. This strengthened the impression of Thomas as a “safe socialist” and committed Cold Warrior by much of the new left at the time of his death, which would only fade along with the memory of Thomas itself.
It was probably inevitable that Norman Thomas would not endure in American historical memory as well as Eugene Debs. But in a bitter irony, the very reasons that Thomas would be increasingly forgotten as the decades wore on are the very reasons his like is so sorely missed in twenty-first-century America. It is not merely democratic socialism that became irrelevant after the fall of Communism, but the basic standards of civil liberty and a free society by which America distinguished itself against Communism. In its militarized posture against the generally fictitious phantom of “Islamofascism,” the United States today is distinguished far less by political freedom than by materialist decadence and libertinism. This posture has been characterized by suppressions of civil liberties in some cases approaching those of the Soviet bloc, the refusal to prosecute criminal financial institutions deemed “too big to fail,” and a state of siege against Muslim Americans that at the height of the Cold War could have been a children’s parable about what America is not. In such a time and place, any humble yet forceful advocate for peace and social justice such as Norman Thomas would be violently despised.
The new left effectively ceased to be in 1969 after the dramatic implosion of SDS at its Chicago convention that summer, torn apart by two different Maoist factions and an aspiring terrorist band that became known as the Weather Underground. Present at that convention, James Weinstein was overwhelmed by the thought of Louis Boudin, in that same city a half-century earlier to the month, denouncing the “party of lunatics” that was American Communism at its birth.57 But the Shachtmanite leaders of the Socialist Party were in no mood to extend an olive branch to this mass of disillusioned radicals. In the spring of 1969, they dropped the last veil of ambiguity as to which side they were on in the crackup of American liberalism, announcing that Hubert Humphrey would be honored by the League for Industrial Democracy at its annual conference; the luncheon where Humphrey spoke was disrupted by antiwar protesters.58 Mike Harrington and Irving Howe both boycotted the luncheon, with Howe angrily writing to Tom Kahn:
Let me begin with something that may seem strange to you. We are really against the war. It’s not just a matter, with us, of covering our left flank, or responding to campus sentiments, or cursing the war because it interferes with domestic needs, and breaks up potential domestic alliances. We think it is a reactionary war. Exactly what you and some of your close friends think on this isn’t after all these years clear to me. Are you really for the war but think it expedient not to say so? Are you against the war but think it inexpedient to say so?59
The opposition coalition that formed at the 1968 SP convention was now organized as the Debs Caucus. The formation of a formal faction was initiated by Bill Briggs and Ann Rosenhaft in Los Angeles, with David McReynolds its best known figure in the antiwar movement. In New York, Seymour Steinsapir led a group of Debs Caucus supporters out of the SP and, in apparent homage to Norman Thomas, formed a new organization called the Union for Democratic Socialism.60 This group included a young member of the national office staff named Bruce Ballin who resigned to work for the Jewish Peace Fellowship, still led by Thomas’s loyal rabbinical friend Isidor Hoffman and actively supporting and advising draft resisters. Other early supporters included Erich Fromm, Virgil Vogel, Harry Siitonen, Maurice Goldbloom, Abraham Bassford of Brooklyn, and Max Wohl of Cleveland.61 The Milwaukee organization led by Frank Zeidler was also on board, but as late as the end of 1969 still regarded Mike Harrington as representing its views, pleading with the national office to send him there to speak.62
In 1970, the Milwaukee party launched a new national paper, Socialist Tribune, to counterbalance the rigidly Shachtmanite New America and to align with the antiwar movement. The youthful editor of the Socialist Tribune was Bill Munger, who made a vain but earnest effort to unite the Debs Caucus with Harrington and his embryonic faction. The Debs Caucus also found itself with a peculiar link to the historic left wing of the Socialist heyday. In 1971, when the tiny Proletarian Party finally passed out of existence, it still held title to the name and modest stock of the Charles Kerr Company, the publisher of International Socialist Review before the First World War, which was then taken over by Virgil Vogel and Burton Rosen a generation after they founded the Libertarian Socialist League. They revived the Kerr Company, reprinting many old classics and books by new left veterans (including a memoir by H. L. Mitchell), closely aligning it with the IWW remnant that was itself experiencing a significant infusion of life from young new left radicals.63
The major statement of the Debs Caucus was authored by Robert Tucker, a Philadelphia old-timer and Quaker pacifist who in the early 1960s wrote the major SP pamphlet on socialized medicine:
The realignment strategy has to do with getting hold of power, and socialism has to do with the redistribution of power. Furthermore, “going where labor is” turned out to mean, in practice, toning down everything. Thus in 1970 the official position of the SP on withdrawal from Vietnam is to the right of the Wall Street Journal. Thus at the riotous Democratic Party convention in 1968, Debs Caucus Socialists were on the streets with the demonstrators, but Realignment Socialists were in the convention, with Bayard Rustin acting in effect as black floor manager for Hubert Humphrey.64
Tucker boldly proclaimed of the Debs Caucus, “That this is now the only organization standing four-square in the tradition of historic American radicalism and not an ideological sect is certainly a claim that can be readily defended.”65
But by the end of the 1960s the penultimate change in the character of the Socialist Party was underway. In 1968, Irwin Suall stepped down as executive secretary of the SP after more than a decade to become the new director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Presumably, with the specter of opposition to Israel (if not also overt anti-Semitism) taking root in the new left and particularly the black power movement, the ADL was eager for someone with Suall’s expertise in radical movements.66 Yet as soon as he was in his new position, Suall dispatched an ADL junior staffer named Carl Gershman into the SP; by the end of 1969 Gershman was the vice chairman of the YPSL under Penn Kemble’s successor, Josh Muravchik.67 It was then that YPSL formed a new front group, the Youth Committee for Peace in the Middle East, an Israeli propaganda outfit to combat potential opposition to Israel on America’s radicalized campuses. In an article for the newsletter of the Zionist Organization of America, Gershman argued, “American isolationism is probably the most serious problem facing Israel today, more serious than the Arab or Soviet threat.”68
The extent to which this arrangement was orchestrated by Israeli foreign agents, perhaps conceived before the ADL even offered its directorship to Suall, is not known. But to be sure, the principle established by James Weinstein regarding the evidence of a Justice Department hand in splitting the Socialist Party in 1919 is applicable here: “It must be assumed that in varying degrees these agents followed the custom of their profession.” There can be very little doubt that the Shachtmanites understood exactly what Gershman’s purpose was and that it was critically important that they prove useful to him. In the academic year of 1968–69, when he first entered the SP, Gershman took a graduate fellowship at Harvard, and the national office communicated to the Harvard YPSL not to recruit him into their organization. The Shachtmanites had good reason to fear that Gershman might find the Harvard YPSL more useful to him. These Jewish college boys who campaigned for Gene McCarthy were true-believing Zionists, some of whom even thought they might move to Israel after they graduated, whereas the Shachtmanites were only now coming to the cause opportunistically. Indeed, by 1970 the Harvard YPSL broke away from the national organization to increase its organizing prospects on campus free of the baggage of the national organization.69
The final crackup began at the 1970 national convention. Michael Harrington, who became the ceremonial national chairman after the death of Norman Thomas, co-authored a resolution on Vietnam with Penn Kemble that deliberately papered over growing irreconcilable differences within the party: calling for a “cease-fire and speedy disengagement,” but with endless qualifications that made it meaningless. David McReynolds immediately resigned, writing frankly of the SP, “It would have been more decent had it been allowed to die a natural death.” The Shachtmanites soon began circulating a statement that effectively endorsed the stated Vietnam policy of the Nixon administration, which Harrington was compelled to attack while calling for a unilateral American withdrawal.70 The Debs Caucus stalwart Harry Siitonen eventually wrote to Harrington lamenting,
It does little good to say “we told you so,” but all this might have been prevented as late as the 1970 convention, if the antiwar wing of the Realignment Caucus had taken its stand then and had not agreed to caucus discipline on the key issue of Vietnam. You yourself were the leading spokesman on the convention floor for the so-called “compromise” on Vietnam, which allowed the ultra-rights to seal their grip of control on the party.71
Harrington’s biographer Maurice Isserman takes this view even further, arguing, “In his response to the central issue of the 1960s, Michael let pass the chance of a lifetime to make a democratic socialist perspective relevant to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who supported the antiwar movement.”72 But this claim seriously misunderstands both Harrington and the antiwar movement. The reason that opposition to the Vietnam War by America’s youth was a mass movement was the draft. The party that once authored the St. Louis Platform seemed stunningly oblivious in the 1960s to the simple heart of the matter—that conscription is slavery. Though he effectively burned his bridges to his long-time comrades after the 1970 convention, Michael Harrington would always remain a Shachtmanite at heart. Harrington ultimately constructed a narrative of the 1960s that served him well for the balance of his life, rooted in the original vision of realignment at the turbulent decade’s hopeful beginning. But this narrative was based on wishful thinking and duplicity about the nature of 1960s radicalism and, indeed, of historic American Socialism.
By 1970, Max Shachtman rarely ventured outside his home in Floral Park, but was visited regularly by his disciples. The most frequent visitors were Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz, who were often joined by Bayard Rustin, Norman Hill, and Paul Feldman. Shachtman was no longer the general commanding his followers, merely giving approval and moral support to what his loyal cadre did on their own initiative.73 Apparently genuinely mystified by much of what was happening, Shachtman expressed bewilderment that anyone should view “not only me but also the party leadership to be supporters of reactionary anti-Communism and principled supporters of American foreign policy even at its worst.”74 Spending much of his final years reliving the past, he began writing a history of the Comintern and even had a reunion with the equally debilitated and isolated James Cannon.75 Shachtman sincerely came to view the postwar labor movement as a progressive vanguard, as did his “children” Kahn and Horowitz. But Shachtman would not live, as they would, to see its betrayal by most of their comrades.
Indeed, the Shachtmanites’ behavior became more sectarian in direct correlation with their movement into the right wing of the Democratic Party and away from the broader new left and the early realignment period. An eight-page resolution on Vietnam written by Tom Milstein in 1971 contained a passage that would have given chills to any veteran of the non-Communist left of the 1930s and 1940s who read it:
The antiwar movement split the coalition, and the antiwar movement is responsible for most of the disruption and violence in recent American politics. Middle class liberals took advantage of their leadership position within the coalition to assert a veto right over foreign policy which the majority of their fellow coalition members supported. In this irresponsible behavior they carried on a tradition they established in the period prior to World War II, when their pacifism and isolationism led them to deny support to FDR in his effort to prepare the nation for collective resistance to fascism. FDR was forced to turn to Southern Dixiecrats for support for his utterly legitimate anti-fascist policy, but had to sacrifice the New Deal in the bargain. Did FDR split the New Deal coalition, or did the responsibility properly lie at the doorstep of those middle-class liberals and intellectuals who pronounced so morally their unwillingness to “fight for king and country,” who invented fantasies about “munitions makers” manipulating the country into war (the catch phrase today is “military industrial complex”), and who were so convinced of the purity of their purpose that they could justify to themselves cooperation with Stalinist and pro-fascist elements?76
This sectarian mindset was also evident in how the character of the SP was now typically described in its literature, with New America often described not as the paper of the SP but as “a social democratic newspaper in the tradition of Norman Thomas and A. Philip Randolph.”77 And then there were their allies in combating the radical left. An odd Trotskyist faction of SDS known as the Labor Committees had attracted the interest of the YPSL ever since it took the side of Al Shanker in the 1968 strike. Led by an exile from the Socialist Workers Party named Lyndon LaRouche, this faction was praised as “one of the very few groups which has genuine contacts amongst militant ghetto groups, both black and Puerto Rican as well as on several campuses, and which continually attacks not only the extremist elements but also those ‘innocents’ who peddle the CP line.”78 But LaRouche, who appears to have been schizophrenic, became infamous for employing severe mind-control techniques on his followers, and before long morphed from Trotskyism to a wildly conspiratorial doctrine of nominally progressive authoritarianism. The Shachtmanites also took part in such theatrics staged by the followers of the notorious Rev. Sun Myung Moon as a “rally against North Vietnamese imperialism.”79
A new theoretical concept allowed the Shachtmanites to make sense of the enemy that destroyed their glorious vision of realignment: “the new class.” The theory was an adaptation of James Burnham’s views by the new left sociologist David Bazelon, arguing that “corporate capitalism has created a New Class of non-property owning managers, bureaucrats, and intellectuals whose life conditions are determined by their position within or in relations to the corporate order.” As explained by the scholar Gary Dorrien,
What was called “liberalism” in America was largely a rationalization of the interests of New Class managers, lawyers, bureaucrats, social workers, consultants, and academics. Liberalism rationalized the creation of an ever-expanding welfare state, providing meaningful employment and ego gratification for the hordes of newly educated consumers.80
To a remarkable extent, both major factions of American politics in the post–Cold War era had their origins in the debate over this theory. It was in 1970 that Norman Podhoretz placed Commentary magazine squarely in the camp of the Shachtmanites and die-hard Cold War liberal hawks, attacking the new class as the greatest threat to American interests and announcing that all his political positions would henceforth begin with the question, “Is it good for the Jews?”81 In National Review, William F. Buckley declared to Commentary, “Come on in, the water’s fine,” effectively proposing the political marriage that took another decade to fully consummate.82 Among those who linked the Shachtmanites to Podhoretz was a peripheral Harvard YPSL supporter named Elliott Abrams who would marry his stepdaughter.83
In contrast, Michael Harrington celebrated the rise of the new class as a “conscience constituency.” In the words of Gary Dorrien, Harrington felt “the new generation’s experiences of the civil rights and antiwar movements predisposed them to an egalitarian, anti-imperialist politics” and that the new class was “presented with an opportunity to use their education to build a good society.”84 From the rise of the “community organizing” model of social uplift to the emergence of a new “enlightened” white man’s burden after the fall of European colonialism to eradicate poverty, genocide, and general social backwardness among the great unwashed, Harrington’s frankly elitist valorization of the new class laid the foundation for the new liberalism that would emerge from the collapse of the new left. This can explain perhaps the greatest irony of postwar American history: how the generation that came of age protesting the Vietnam War left as its legacy the Iraq War and the larger crusade against “Islamofascism.”
The Shachtmanite plan to completely consolidate their control of the Socialist Party—a merger with the Democratic Socialist Federation (DSF)—had been in the works since the end of 1969. In November 1970, the SP and DSF jointly sponsored a “Rally for Israel” that featured an Israeli embassy official, Amos Eiran, along with Bayard Rustin, Carl Gershman, and DSF chairman James Glaser.85 Never more than a paper organization, the DSF nonetheless attracted such Jewish labor leaders as Charles Zimmerman and Emanuel Muravchik.
The early date that unity negotiations began suggests that the transformation of the SP into an Israeli propaganda agency was to a great extent preconceived.86 Zimmerman, one of relatively few avowedly Zionist Jewish labor leaders in the 1940s and 1950s, was the major patron of the League for Industrial Democracy after the break with SDS, welcoming it to the ILGWU building after Norman Thomas was forced to close the historic LID offices.87 William Stern, the leader of the Workmen’s Circle who in the 1950s supported the Jewish Newsletter, now set the tone for his organization as an ardent Zionist and virtual co-leader with James Glaser of the DSF.88 Yet the oddest characterization of the DSF in the propaganda around the merger was that it was “identified with the tradition of Morris Hillquit,” who was consistently at odds with the parochialism and opportunism of the Forward machine.
Emboldened by their reinforcements from the DSF, the Shachtmanites began cracking down on their enemies in the SP. Joan Suall, now executive secretary, attacked a rank-and-file member for submitting a review of a book by David McReynolds to New America.89 Suall also sent a warning to Bill Munger, who was energetically building the Debs Caucus as “a party within a party” through the Socialist Tribune. After asking, “Does the Wisconsin state organization consider itself a rival organization to the Socialist Party,” Munger replied frankly, “I have the feeling the national office doesn’t care we exist. When we need service we are ignored.”90
Michael Harrington belatedly began organizing a faction of his own as the breakup of the Socialist Party fast approached. But his few sympathizers at this late stage were such fellow Shachtmanites of another era as Irving Howe, Bogdan Denitch, and Carl Shier of Chicago, the only one of the original UAW Shachtmanites who had not advanced into George Meany’s inner circle. Still others, such as Boston stalwart Julius Bernstein, were entirely shaped by the influences of the early twilight of the SP.91 The maverick Harvard YPSL reentered the fray once given the private assurance that Harrington had every intention of splitting from the party, bringing a scattered group of sympathizers on mostly elite campuses into Harrington’s camp.92 That this group remained substantially closer to the Shachtmanites than the Debs Caucus was perhaps best illustrated by the founder of the Harvard YPSL, Steve Kelman, who followed up in Commentary on Tom Kahn’s treatment of the new left in 1969.93 Kelman later published a book-length account of the Harvard student strike, which the YPSL took credit for preventing from reaching the same proportions as Columbia.
As the 1972 elections approached, the increasingly confident Shachtmanites sensed a major opportunity for advancement. Their initial sympathies remained with Hubert Humphrey, but were won over to Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson after an advisor to Jackson named Ben Wattenberg arranged a secretive meeting with a YPSL delegation led by Josh Muravchik. The journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak devoted a column to reports of this meeting, arguing that Jackson’s “support from a young Socialist group suggests he is scarcely the reactionary he is currently portrayed as being.”94 The reality was that Jackson’s Senate office was the locus of a circle of the most hawkish Pentagon policy hands, who even in the Johnson years frantically opposed any modest moves toward mutual disarmament with the Soviets. They included two of the original architects of the Cold War defense posture under Harry Truman, Paul Nitze and Albert Wohlstetter, and two young protégés of Wohlstetter named Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.95
But the liberal and antiwar favorite who quickly emerged in the 1972 Democratic primaries was South Dakota senator George McGovern. At almost any other time in the past, McGovern would have been seen as an ideal standard-bearer for the principles of historic American Socialism. A native of Mitchell, South Dakota, McGovern had written his doctoral dissertation in history on the 1914 Ludlow massacre. He had one of the best pro-labor voting records as tabulated by the AFL-CIO, and was calling for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Asia and a partial withdrawal in Europe. After securing the nomination, McGovern’s running mate was Sargent Shriver, a one-time youth leader of the America First Committee who led the War on Poverty commission of the Johnson administration that Michael Harrington advised. Of the ways in which McGovern was fated to be caricatured, the writer Bill Kauffman reflected thirty-five years after the campaign,
No Democrat could have defeated Nixon in 1972. The incumbent’s popularity was buoyed by a fairly strong economy, détente with the USSR, the opening to China, and rumors of peace in Vietnam. But still, imagine George McGovern running not as an ultraliberal caricature but rather as the small-town Midwestern Methodist, a war hero too modest to boast of his bravery, a liberal with a sympathetic understanding of conservative rural America. . . . As for acid, amnesty, and abortion, McGovern’s positions now seem positively temperate: he favored decriminalizing marijuana, he argued against “the intrusion of the federal government” into abortion law, which should be left to the states, and . . . could not favor amnesty as long as the war was in progress.96
For all the likelihood of his losing to Nixon, the nomination of McGovern represented, to a great extent indeed, the culmination of the realignment of the two major parties. Yet even Mike Harrington, who now cast himself as the champion of the original realignment program against its betrayal by the Shachtmanites, only endorsed McGovern after first backing Edmund Muskie, Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 who was the consensus candidate until actual voting began.97
After Harrington failed in an attempt to table the move until after the election, the unification of the Socialist Party and the Democratic Socialist Federation was made official in March 1972; the merged party was formally known for the next nine months as the Socialist Party-Democratic Socialist Federation (SP-DSF). Of this marriage of the Shachtmanites with the fossilized remnant of the old Forward machine, Irwin Suall preposterously declared, “Prospects for growth are better today than at any time since the 1936 split in the Socialist movement.”98 The Debs Caucus, as far as the Shachtmanites were concerned, were nonpersons. As for Harrington, he was no longer even the ceremonial national chairman, but one of three co-chairmen along with Bayard Rustin and Charles Zimmerman.
Harrington was sternly upbraided after announcing his endorsement of McGovern, but simply noted that Rustin had already endorsed Hubert Humphrey, who had entered the race in a late effort to stop McGovern.99 The Democratic convention that nominated McGovern was a chaotic affair, dominated by a macabre array of wild-eyed radicals before McGovern finally gave his acceptance speech just before 3 A.M. An irreconcilable stand was assured when George Meany, whom the Shachtmanites increasingly revered, made clear his displeasure with McGovern. Though the SP ultimately passed a resolution stating its “preference” for McGovern over Nixon, New America was characterized throughout the fall campaign by such headlines as “McGovern Underestimates the Communists” and “Jewish Voters Disaffected from Democratic Ticket.”100
Resignations from the party continued to pour in. David Selden, the president of the American Federation of Teachers soon to be deposed by Al Shanker, insisted, “George McGovern is the closest thing to a Socialist to run for President since Norman Thomas. Instead of trying to ape the inane official AFL-CIO policy, New America should fulfill its Socialist function by calling for a restructuring of the labor movement to make it more representative of the principles of progressive unionism.”101 Of SP rank and filers who had hung on this long, Joe Friedman of West Hempstead, New York no doubt spoke for many:
References to isolationism, anti-labor elements, middle class and suburban intellectuals, etc. are obvious, not subtle, implications of attacks on the McGovern campaign. There is no manifestation in New America of the analysis presented by Irving Howe when he says of McGovern that he has attempted to bring together those who “combine a desire for social reform, a vague but strongly felt populism, a wish for a more moderate or modest foreign policy, and a sense that the United States is in trouble to an extent requiring extraordinary measures.”102
Several Debs Caucus members, particularly in California and including Frank Zeidler, supported the Peace and Freedom Party campaign that year, which got Benjamin Spock on the ballot in ten states but ultimately earned fewer votes than the Socialist Workers Party. Many, however, supported McGovern, including David McReynolds and Bill Munger.103
On October 22, Michael Harrington resigned his chairmanship of the Socialist Party, lamenting, “The historic party of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas is today doing the work of Richard Nixon.”104 The complete letter of resignation was published in The Nation just after the election:
In September the party’s national committee stated a preference for McGovern over Nixon that was so reluctant and backhanded—attacking McGovern’s foreign policy as “neo-isolationist and conservative” and his domestic proposals as “casual, vague and sometimes contradictory”—that it committed the party to the anti-Nixon struggle only in the most formal sense. Its press meanwhile continued to be largely devoted to an attack upon the forces around McGovern rather than to an attack upon Nixon. . . . And even this shamefaced position was attacked by some of the most prestigious leaders of the party majority who refuse any support whatsoever to McGovern and look with enthusiasm upon a Nixon victory.105
The Shachtmanites replied forcefully in a formal press release:
Joan Suall, national secretary of the SP-DSF, said that “Harrington’s misinterpretation of the SP-DSF’s position as anti-McGovern will in fact be likely to hurt the Democratic candidate in the eyes of liberals and democratic radicals and makes Harrington’s motivations in doing so difficult to understand.” Paul Feldman, editor of the party’s publication, New America, said he believed that “Harrington’s action is similar to that of others who enthusiastically supported George McGovern before the Democratic Convention and are now looking for scapegoats to explain the poor showing up to now of the candidate they helped to nominate.” In response to Harrington’s criticism of the SP-DSF for its relationship to the AFL-CIO, Mrs. Suall said “the organization was proud of its support to the mainstream of American labor and its advocacy of unity within the labor movement, for it sees this as an essential basis for socio-economic progress in the USA.” “In the political dispute between the affluent middle class New Politics movement and organized labor, the party,” Mr. Feldman said, “firmly believes that in expressing solidarity with labor it was acting in the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, the noted trade union and Socialist leader.”106
Shachtman himself encouraged this line of attack, declaring of McGovern, “His foreign policy is a monstrosity, not just as bad as Henry Wallace in 1948 but much worse.”107 This pronouncement by the former confidant of Leon Trotsky—that a more principled and authentically American non-interventionism was “much worse” than crude Soviet propaganda—revealed the essence of what drove Shachtman and his disciples.108 The emergence of a major-party nominee who reflected the spirit and substance of historic American Socialism as vividly as George McGovern brought forth all the bile and venom that Trotsky spewed at the historic Socialist Party during his American sojourn in early 1917. Attacks on the “isolationism” of McGovern were but an echo of Trotsky’s contempt for “vulgar speeches about the advantages of peace” and “the spirit of the Bryan campaign.” Attacks on the “new class” were but an echo of Trotsky’s pathological hatred of the “Babbitt of Babbitts,” Morris Hillquit, “the ideal Socialist leader for successful dentists.” Fifty-five years after he left New York to become the founder of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky was having his revenge on the American Socialism that had so revolted and offended him.
Max Shachtman died suddenly on November 4, 1972, the Saturday before the election. After Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide, the Shachtmanites proceeded to their next move. Penn Kemble, who for the last few years had run an AFL-CIO youth auxiliary he helped found, secured generous AFL-CIO funding to establish a new advocacy group for the grizzled supporters of Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson. The Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a Shachtmanite front group organized in classic Leninist style, was built up by Kemble with the assistance of Ben Wattenberg and Midge Decter, the wife of Norman Podhoretz.109 Many advisors to both Humphrey and Jackson joined the new group, and some grew close to the Shachtmanite core, including Max Kampelman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, John Roche, James T. Farrell, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Leon Keyserling, and Norman Podhoretz.110 In December, the Socialist Party announced it would henceforth be known as Social Democrats USA. The Wisconsin Socialists passed a resolution that they interpreted this to mean the Socialist Party had ceased to exist and that they would thus proceed with a Debs Caucus-based re-founding.111
Within a decade, the Shachtmanites would be the cruel victims of their own success, but in historical terms one must marvel at what they had achieved. Not only had they captured the Socialist Party of America, thus achieving the long-desired “French Turn.” Not only had they in so doing reached the commanding heights of the American labor movement. Not only had this brought them to the threshold of national power, with prospects of dominating a future presidential administration. They had done all this with the sponsorship, indeed out of the very offices of their oldest and bitterest enemies—the garment-union–based Jewish Socialist old guard, symbolized by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Trotsky and his confederates of January 14, 1917 would never have dreamed.