The Socialist Parties of Wisconsin, Illinois, and California, and the New York-based Union for Democratic Socialism, sponsored a “Conference on Democratic Socialism” held May 26–27, 1973, in Milwaukee. Forty-five delegates representing no fewer than 152 dues-paying members of the Socialist Party as of 1972 came from California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia.1 The conference participants were divided between those who wanted to immediately reconstitute the Socialist Party and those who favored a more cautious approach, as indicated by the use of the name Union for Democratic Socialism in New York and New Jersey. Yet the advocates of a new socialist party premised their stand on the belief that it would be a mere stepping-stone to merging with the Peace and Freedom Party, now known nationally as the People’s Party, and such other closely aligned fragments of the new left as the New American Movement. In California, Harry Siitonen helped organize a new coalition—the San Francisco Socialist Coalition—from these three groups along exactly these lines for independent electoral action.2
Were it not for the assumption that this coalition would be replicated nationally, it is unlikely that the Socialist Party USA (SPUSA) would have ever been formed. Some younger members were wary of retaining the name “Socialist Party” because of its association with the Shachtmanites, but Frank Zeidler, elected national chairman of the new party after the conference resolved to form it, gave an impassioned speech for retaining the name. A generally sympathetic Samuel Friedman was present as an observer to plead that they continue as an opposition within Social Democrats USA, but Zeidler noted that a few members of the Wisconsin party actually attempted to be seated as duly elected delegates at the convention that officially inaugurated SDUSA and were refused their seats. The national office of the Socialist Party USA was to be located in Milwaukee, with the Socialist Tribune and its editor Bill Munger continuing in their roles.3 Zeidler upheld the Wisconsin party as the “bridge between east and west” with its proposed middle path for political action. But Milwaukee stalwarts hoping to reach a comradely accord with Michael Harrington and DSOC were rudely rebuffed.4
Attending the conference, in addition to the voting delegates, were five observers from the People’s Party and three from NAM. Chuck Avery, national secretary of the People’s Party, held out the prospect of future unity, assuring the convention that the People’s Party was a “non-centralist, non-totalitarian democratic socialist group,” that he was an admirer of Norman Thomas, and that the People’s Party needed “the older elements of the movement as represented by the delegates participating in this conference, for the sake of their historical knowledge and tradition.”5 The convention issued a forthright declaration of principles:
Democratic social ownership is not totalitarian Communist nationalization. We oppose any government which is oriented toward the power of a bureaucratic ruling class, at the expense of the welfare and even human dignity of its people. Nor do we propose simple government ownership with political democracy, for under such a system, people participate only at election time in decisions that control their lives. We propose, rather, a society of free, continuing, democratic participation—through political parties in the determination of basic economic, social, and political policy of nations, through shop councils, consumer cooperatives, neighborhood associations, and all other organs of community in the decisions of daily life, through decentralized agencies for the management of each industry by those most affected by it, through the encouragement of the maximum expression of individual creativity. Socialists propose a society in which democratic participation in economic and political life will set us free to undertake to eliminate war, racial antagonism, hunger, disease, poverty, oppression, and environmental despoliation. Socialists work for a world of peace and freedom, for a world in which the exploitation and enslavement of people is unknown, for a world in which the development of the human personality is the basis for the fruitful development of humankind. Socialists appeal to the solidarity of all people in the struggle for these great aims.6
Almost as soon as SPUSA got off the ground, however, most of the assumptions behind the re-founding began to fall apart. Particularly among moderate members typified by the Milwaukee organization, there was even a futile hope that it would be able to affiliate with the Socialist International.7 Yet many founders of SPUSA did not share this hope, with Harry Siitonen attacking the Socialist Party of Portugal during the upheavals of that country’s transition to democracy:
It is the political stalking horse of the bourgeois military leaders of Portugal, replacing the CP in that role, and is an enemy, as well as the CP is, of the autonomous revolutionary movement of the rank-and-file workers of Portugal. Like the Stalinists, the SP of Portugal is a strikebreaking agency, and it is out to dissolve any revolutionary gains the Portuguese working class has so heroically carved out for itself, to enhance its own power elitist ambitions.8
Another illustration of how unsettling a changing world was to older stalwarts of the Debs Caucus came when Bruce Ballin of the Jewish Peace Fellowship proposed a stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inspired by the legacy of Judah Magnes—Virgil Vogel replied, “Some of the Mid-East stuff you sent me could be endorsed by at least one virulent Jew-hater I know.”9 Both the extremely abrasive Vogel and Siitonen were unnerved to find that the energetic young blood in SPUSA such as Ballin and Bill Munger were more old-fashioned social democrats than revolutionary libertarian socialists of their type. But rather than confront this difference honestly, Vogel wrote a letter to Munger accusing him of having “used the Tribune and its mailing lists, and I suspect also its funds, to build a personal political machine,” complete with the flourish, “For the good of the party, I call on you to resign at once.”10
When SPUSA gathered for its first nominating convention in the fall of 1975, it was not certain that it would even nominate a presidential ticket. The idea behind holding presidential nominating conventions a full year before the election was to ease the challenge of getting on the ballot in the face of increasingly complex legal barriers to ballot access. Yet not only would the chronically cash-poor party fail to ever get on the ballot in more than a small handful of states, but this practice would also serve in future elections to preclude it from ever entering the sort of coalition candidacy, to say nothing of a larger new party, that was taken for granted when the SPUSA was launched. Frank Zeidler was nominated for president in 1976 with apparent hopes he would also be nominated by the People’s Party. His running mate was J. Quinn Brisben, a local AFT official and long-time loyalist in Chicago. In his nominating speech Zeidler drew a stark picture of where the United States was headed in the aftermath of Vietnam and the upheavals of the 1960s:
The major parties of the United States have moved toward an undemocratic society under the influence of Governor Reagan. The tone of his campaign has influenced the tone of the major parties. Governor Reagan is the advocate of a nation armed to the teeth which has no other function than to be a military power on behalf of the large corporations and multinational conglomerates which already dominate this nation. . . . The dreadful consequences of the alienation of our national wealth have already begun to appear. Long ago for example, Wisconsin corporations had been bought up by conglomerates owned elsewhere, some being foreign owned. Now our land and property and farms are being bought up. The more subtle control of the nation’s banks, stocks, and bonds, as well as ownership of U.S. securities is now evident. At the same time, inflation has reached an all-time high and unemployment is around eight or nine percent. What the nation needs is someone who will tell the people the economic facts of life and who will call for the swift actions needed to stop the reducing of this nation to a colony and its people to a lower caste in our economic system.11
Long-time Socialists who served on Zeidler’s campaign committee included Darlington Hoopes, Bill Briggs, H. L. Mitchell, David McReynolds, Bob Bloom, and Max Wohl. As one campaign mailer declared, “It’s too late for anything but fundamental answers, and almost too late for them . . . we Socialists may not win this election, but it’s high time we started organizing and recreating a political threat from the left.”12
There remained significant hope for a new and formidable third party of the left during the 1976 campaign. The Vermont affiliate of the People’s Party, the Liberty Union Party, had averaged between 5 percent and 7 percent of the vote in forty-three local and statewide races in 1974. A significant number of unions in the state had endorsed the fledgling party, and in 1976 Brooklyn native Bernie Sanders, a one-time YPSL follower of Hal Draper at the University of Chicago, earned more than eleven thousand votes for governor.13 But the Liberty Union Party was already drifting apart from the fractious People’s Party and even declined to nominate its presidential ticket in 1976. Margaret Wright, a black welfare rights activist in Los Angeles, was on the ballot in only six states. Though the People’s Party had such other whimsically named affiliates as the Michigan Human Rights Party and the Washington Bicentennial Party, its only three substantial affiliates were Peace and Freedom in California, Liberty Union in Vermont, and the New York Working People’s Party. This last was dominated by a Leninist sect known as the International Workers Party, a recent splinter group from the infamous Lyndon LaRouche, with allies in both Wright and People’s Party elder statesman Benjamin Spock.14
Harry Siitonen resigned from SPUSA during the 1976 campaign, declaring himself disillusioned in favor of the rejuvenated IWW. He resented “an element in the SP that does not support the campaign itself, but only as a means of horse trading with the People’s Party to get a common slate. It is doubtful whether the People’s Party is even interested enough in us to considers this—they consider us too anti-Communist!” Siitonen also lamented “a fair-sized, although not majority element sympathetic to playing footsie with people like the CP.”15 In an earlier letter to Virgil Vogel, he specifically named the embattled national secretary of SPUSA, Abraham Bassford, as well as David McReynolds.16 Largely out of deep regret for his role in bringing the Shachtmanites into the Socialist Party, McReynolds would long chase after nominally disillusioned Communists, such as those who eventually took over NAM, as the key to reviving the democratic left. This delusion was a distinct manifestation of the trauma he shared with other once-close comrades of the Shachtmanites. Bayard Rustin remained a comrade to the end, whereas Mike Harrington acted out his trauma through his uneven leadership of DSOC and DSA. But McReynolds, the devoted antiwar leader, was the most traumatized of all, in thrall to the worst serial abusers of the American left: the Communist Party and other heirs of the Popular Front.
The most prominent third-party candidate in 1976 was Eugene McCarthy, at the beginning of his long unsung campaign against the corrosive dominance of the two-party system. Distinguished by such campaign planks as the elimination of the vice presidency and the replacement of the White House Rose Garden with a cabbage patch, McCarthy insisted on running as an independent candidate rather than form a new party. Though some credit McCarthy for establishing the very concept and legality of an independent presidential candidacy in 1976, his refusal to commit himself to the formation of a new national party was catastrophic to both his own goals and the struggle to form such a party in the 1970s. On the ballot in only twenty-nine states, McCarthy came in third that year with over 740,000 votes, followed by the new Libertarian Party with over 170,000 votes. On the ballot in only seven states with write-ins recorded in another two, Frank Zeidler received 6,013 votes, two-thirds coming from Wisconsin, and less than the Socialist Labor Party in its final presidential campaign of an eighty-four-year streak. The People’s Party polled 49,013 votes, fewer than the Communist Party and barely half as many as the Socialist Workers Party.
Yet at the 1977 convention of the Socialist Party USA, there seemed to still be progress toward a broad and unified democratic socialist party. Fraternal greetings came not only from the People’s Party, New York Working People’s Party, and NAM, but also from the New Democratic Party of Canada, the Jewish Labor Bund, and, curiously, from Mike Harrington on behalf of DSOC.17 But each of the component parts of the new party envisioned at the founding of SPUSA was falling apart. The three largest locals of NAM defected to Maoist sects, accelerating their embrace of Euro-Communism and ultimate merger with DSOC.18 When the sect controlling the New York Working People’s Party verged on taking over the People’s Party, the founders simply imploded it. The New York party, led by a philosophy professor-turned self-styled “revolutionary psychotherapist” named Fred Newman, organized nationally as the New Alliance Party in 1979, a bizarre phenomenon that was nevertheless a significant factor in virtually all third-party activity on the left for the next twenty-five years. The Liberty Union Party survived in Vermont, but it too was rent asunder by Leninists, with its highest vote getter, Bernie Sanders, resigning before the end of 1977.19
SPUSA itself was not immune from such shenanigans. Its new national secretary, Tom Spiro, announced the formation of a “Revolutionary Marxist Tendency” that openly advocated the party’s transformation into a Leninist party. It was able to force a showdown at the next national convention, which it lost, and was soon forgotten.20 Several founders of SPUSA, including Bill Munger and Max Wohl, defected to DSOC around this time, though a few old-timers such as H. L. Mitchell retained dual membership. In December 1975, fire struck the SPUSA national office in Milwaukee, destroying a priceless archive spanning the entire lifetime of the historic Socialist Party. The party relocated to another office in Milwaukee for a few years, and then briefly to Chicago until moving by the early 1980s into the War Resisters League offices in New York, where the Socialist Party USA has remained ever since. By this time also, the Socialist Tribune had been reduced to an infrequent newsletter, The Socialist.21
There was serious potential to form a new and formidable third party of the left in the 1970s. Had it been led from the beginning by such established politicians as Eugene McCarthy, it might have even grown to achieve the strength of the New Democrats in Canada. But it was not to be, and the fragments that earnestly strove to build such a party all spectacularly imploded after the 1976 election. A critical factor in this failure, of course, was the age-old revolutionary socialist conceit of so many involved. If one takes as a point of comparison the emergence of the laissez-faire Libertarian Party, it could also be argued that the zeitgeist of the 1970s was a factor. But the most fundamental reason why such a party did not emerge was that opposition to the two-party system contradicted the core doctrines of the new left, deeply rooted in the vision of realignment first articulated by the Shachtmanites in 1960. The broad-based radicalism of the movement against the Vietnam War ultimately had very different goals and concerns from those of the doctrinaire new left originating in the early years of SDS. This difference would be thrown into stark relief when a formidable third party of the left finally emerged a generation later.
Yet in the meantime, survivors of the People’s Party joined a small group of liberals disaffected by Jimmy Carter to organize the Citizens Party in 1979. Their presidential candidate was environmentalist author Barry Commoner. Joe Schwartz, a DSOC youth leader who attended the Citizens Party nominating convention, observed that as an organization of white middle-class activists “the convention looked much like a DSOC convention,” adding that it would have a shot at achieving its short-term goals were it not for the odd centrist candidacy of John Anderson.22 Several youthful activists who went on to distinguished movement liberal careers were active in the Commoner campaign, including historian Michael Kazin and Bob Master, later a founder of the New York Working Families Party.23 Lee Hubert, the observer for SPUSA, described the new party as “generally a social democratic party but on non-economic issues much more radical than most social democratic parties.”24 But in a sobering indication that the lessons of the 1960s were not being learned, the amorphous following of self-styled “new Communist” Arthur Kinoy formed a hard-left faction that charged the Citizens Party with racism when black members of the faction were not elected to high party posts, and staged a walkout.25
David McReynolds was nominated for president by the Socialist Party USA in 1980, with the vice presidential nomination going to Diane Drufenbrock, a Franciscan nun in Wisconsin. Interestingly, with the Citizens Party in many ways representing the future of the American radical left, a more distinguished core from the 1960s antiwar movement came out for the SPUSA campaign. Among those who endorsed McReynolds were the poet Allen Ginsberg, historian Paul Buhle, Rabbi Everett Gendler of the Jewish Peace Fellowship, and, just two years before his death, Dwight Macdonald.26 In a guest column for The Progressive, McReynolds boldly defended his quixotic campaign:
If even I, as the Presidential candidate, concede I cannot win, why go through the genuine agony of running? . . . First, we want to legitimize the discussion of socialism. . . . In plain, simple terms, we believe democratic socialism is as American as apple pie, and that it has roots in our history that go back before the John Birch Society and before Lenin. We propose to talk about socialism—democratic, decentralized, genuine social ownership of the basic means of production—socialism. Capitalism is a deepening socio-economic disaster which cannot provide full employment, cannot house all of us decently, cannot assure us of adequate medical care, cannot reverse urban decay. . . . Second, we want to focus attention on the danger of nuclear war. The Socialist Party has a far more radical policy on the matter of arms than the Citizens Party. We call, clearly, concretely, for the unconditional dismantling of all nuclear weapons—and we want America to begin doing this now, whether or not it secures Chinese and Soviet agreement to join the process.27
In California, the Peace and Freedom Party carried on after the collapse of the People’s Party, and 1980 marked the first of several elections in which the SPUSA would chaotically compete with a variety of Leninist parties for the Peace and Freedom ballot line, never once getting the prize. In 1980, the showdown was with the Communist Party, with Gus Hall running the third of four token presidential campaigns. Hall’s running mate was Angela Davis, a widely known former Black Panther. In her speech to the Peace and Freedom convention, Davis called for the legal banning of parties of the right. David McReynolds eloquently denounced Davis, assuring his audience that such a law could not be written without also threatening the left.28 The Peace and Freedom Party would not give its ballot line to a national candidate in 1980 or in most elections thereafter. On the ballot in nine states with write-ins recorded in another three, McReynolds and Drufenbrock earned 6,775 votes. In the year that the Libertarian Party was the first minor party on the ballot in every state in the union since the Socialist Party in 1916, the Citizens Party was only on in thirty states, earning a disappointing 233,052 votes.
On April 6, 1981, Bernie Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont by a margin of just ten votes. An avowedly socialist independent since resigning from the Liberty Union Party, Sanders was propelled into office by a revolt against the city’s inventory tax and the support of a handful of unions, most notably the local police union.29 When Socialist Francois Mitterand was elected president of France just one month later, a popular button read, “As goes Burlington so goes France.”30 A Citizens Party candidate, Terry Bouricious, was also elected to the Burlington Board of Aldermen, along with two more the following year. There was much cause for excitement and optimism in the Citizens Party, buoyed by the endorsement of Petra Kelly, the leader of the rising German Green Party, who declared on the eve of first entering the West German Bundestag that she considered the Citizens Party the de facto American Green Party.31 (An actual Green Party was just beginning to be organized in numerous scattered locals. Its leading theorist was Burlington resident Murray Bookchin, who vainly urged Bernie Sanders to implement his proposed system of “neighborhood planning assemblies.”)32
Among those increasingly disenchanted with SPUSA by the beginning of the 1980s and drawn by the allure of the Citizens Party was Virgil Vogel, alarmed by the growing Communist-sympathizing tendencies in the party. Vogel was active in the Citizens Party campaign of Sidney Lens, a leading new left author who began as a 1930s Trotskyist schismatic, for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 1980.33 Vogel was also distraught by militant support for abortion rights in SPUSA and had at least one ally in the Citizens Party agitating for a strong pro-life stance.34 But Vogel’s plight was much like that of the 1930s Old Guardsmen, who brought down their wrath on the Socialist Party for the mere suggestion of a united front with the Communists only to find themselves in one in the American Labor Party. Not only was it soon apparent that the Citizens Party would be squarely in the militant feminist zeitgeist, but also that veterans of the Henry Wallace campaign were its most prominent spokesmen.
With momentum appearing to be on the side of the Citizens Party, the national secretary of SPUSA, Rick Kissell, sent out an informal survey in early 1983 to see if sentiment favored running its own presidential ticket in 1984 or seeking a coalition with the Citizens Party.35 The latter course was agreed to at the 1983 national convention, but this was based on high expectations for the Citizens Party, with former attorney general Ramsey Clark believed to be its likely nominee in 1984.36 Yet the unraveling of the Citizens Party first became apparent when Barry Commoner came out for the Democratic primary campaign of Jesse Jackson and was joined by the followers of Arthur Kinoy.37 The Citizens Party’s elected officials in Burlington also abandoned the party once its implosion was imminent.38 Bernie Sanders remained an independent, but never took part in a national challenge to the two-party system; as an independent he was elected in Vermont to the U.S. House in 1990 and to the Senate in 2006. Inconsistent in continuing to identify as a socialist, Sanders followed a trajectory that was essentially the same as the Citizens Party activists who became mainstream progressives.
In the end, the Citizens Party presidential nominee was Sonia Johnson, a minor celebrity after being excommunicated by the Mormon Church as a campaigner for the Equal Rights Amendment—a cause highly emblematic of the identity politics now prioritized by the left that proved a perfect foil for demagoguery by the right. She was endorsed by the Peace and Freedom Party in California and the Consumer Party of Pennsylvania (a formidable third party in Philadelphia founded by an ex-Communist named Max Weiner), but the SPUSA never formally endorsed Johnson after she pointedly refused to affirm democratic socialism.39 The third-party picture on the left was further complicated by the first presidential campaign of the New Alliance Party, on the ballot in thirty-three states against only eighteen for Sonia Johnson. With one foot already in the grave, the Citizens Party polled a pathetic 72,161 votes.
After the collapse of the Citizens Party, the hope for a nationally organized third party of the left, essential to the founding and long-term outlook of the Socialist Party USA, was dead and buried. That SPUSA would not stand apart from the new orthodoxies of the organized radical left became apparent when the 1985 national convention explicitly defined the party as “feminist socialist.” In practice, this meant that no less than 50 percent of the nationally elected leadership had to be female and that each female delegate vote would count as one and one-half for every male delegate vote.40 A few oases of substantive political action survived. In Iowa City, Iowa, in 1988, SPUSA member Karen Kubby prevailed in a nonpartisan city council election against a controversial local real estate developer.41 There was a formidable campaign to elect another Iowa City Socialist to the state legislature two years later, but the party organization disappeared soon after.42 In Wisconsin, a ballot-qualified Labor-Farm Party was left after the final statewide campaign of old Socialist stalwart William Osborne Hart. In Madison, a few Labor-Farm candidates were elected to the Common Council in alliance with the independent “red mayor” Paul Soglin.43 The SPUSA nominees for president and vice president in 1988 were Willa Kenoyer, a feminist publisher in Michigan who had been a top campaign advisor to Sonia Johnson, and Ron Ehrenreich, a social worker in Syracuse, New York. On the ballot in seven states with write-ins recorded in another four, they received 3,878 votes.
Eugene McCarthy was nominated by the Consumer Party of Pennsylvania and, on the ballot in three additional states, earned 30,905 votes. The New Alliance Party pulled off the stunning feat of being on the ballot in all fifty states, earning 217,221 votes—about half as many as the Libertarian Party’s Ron Paul. In anticipation of the 1991 SPUSA national convention, Frank Zeidler prepared a pamphlet celebrating “Ninety Years of Democratic Socialism” that gave a very brief sketch of the history of the Socialist Party, concluding with this confident assurance: “The basic concept of socialism as found in the 1820s still remains and illuminates a dark world. That concept is of a world of commonwealths cooperating with each other for the betterment of all peoples.”44 The myopia of most who remained in SPUSA was best illustrated by the palpable excitement of David McReynolds that the Communist Party USA, as the Soviet Union lay dying, would be successfully taken over by a reformist faction.45 It ultimately was not, though the Communist Party lingered into the post–Cold War era, in many ways resembling the Socialist Party as it morphed into Social Democrats USA: a pathetic shadow of its former self, dogmatically identifying with the labor/progressive wing of the Democratic Party from Leninist assumptions to be sure.
The Chicago stalwart J. Quinn Brisben was the SPUSA nominee for president in 1992. The vice presidential nomination initially went to William Edwards, an African American retired maritime union official in San Francisco, but after his untimely death he was replaced by Barbara Garson, a playwright who had achieved some distinction in the 1960s antiwar movement.46 On the ballot in only four states with write-in votes recorded in another nine, the 1992 SPUSA ticket turned in the worst performance since the re-founding, with a paltry 3,071 votes. This was the year Ross Perot presented the most fearsome challenge to the two-party system since before the Second World War, earning 19 percent of the national popular vote for president. To a Socialist of the historic party’s long-gone heyday, Perot would have been recognizable as a populist in the mold of William Randolph Hearst.
Although Perot ran a personality-centered campaign bearing all the marks of a manic-depressive episode, his platform nonetheless echoed Frank Zeidler in 1976, warning of the de-industrialization and general corrosion of the American economy for the benefit of the military-industrial complex. The years immediately following were marked by a “radical right” upsurge that bore a striking resemblance to the Old Southwest movement of the Socialist heyday, complete with armed militias and a fringe faction seeking to establish an independent Republic of Texas. The parallels pervade James Green’s excellent history of the Old Southwest Socialists, written in the 1970s and thus predating the 1990s radical right, much as Daniel Bell’s Marxian Socialism in the United States missed a very similar mark by several years.
After the amorphous “new Communist” followers of Arthur Kinoy became the dominant ultra-left force in Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, after its breakup in 1992 this cadre formed a new umbrella group, the Independent Progressive Politics Network (IPPN), which the minuscule Socialist Party USA joined. It remained little more than a paper organization, providing only the barest appearance of movement toward broad-based unity for the emotional satisfaction of those participating.47 But also maintaining ties to IPPN was the Green Party, which had just begun to organize nationally. In 1996, it nominated Ralph Nader, a self-styled “consumer advocate” who had been a household name in the 1970s, as its presidential candidate. Though not on the ballot in enough states to theoretically be elected, Nader polled an impressive 685,297 votes. The SPUSA nominee that year was Mary Cal Hollis, a long-time party activist from Colorado, with Eric Chester, a 1970s People’s Party survivor and avowed revolutionary socialist, as her running mate. On the ballot in five states with write-ins recorded in another seven, they received 4,765 votes.
It is reasonable to ask exactly what, by the 1990s, the Socialist Party USA even was anymore. After its embrace of extreme feminism and fashionable identity politics, it had clearly become a sect, if an amorphous and permeable one. The assumption that it would only be part of building a larger new party, which had been central to the rationale for even founding it, was completely forgotten. The entire substance of its appeal was the historical gravitas of its name. But the appeal of the memory of the Socialist Party to the radical left after the 1960s was based on an extremely misleading picture of the historic party in its heyday as more or less synonymous with its left wing, symbolized by the IWW. This was the image most historians presented beginning in the 1970s, yet the available evidence shows that the left wing of the 1910s never represented more than 10 percent of the national party membership.48 Ironically, the embrace of the legacy of the historic left wing began with the “old guard” of SPUSA, namely Virgil Vogel and Harry Siitonen, who were driven out of the party by the end of the 1970s for remaining serious anarcho-syndicalists. A less sophisticated revolutionary socialism, often based on Communist romance and at times being simply mindless, characterized the SPUSA ever after.
An aging David McReynolds was once again honored with the SPUSA presidential nomination in 2000, with Mary Cal Hollis as his running mate. On the ballot in seven states with write-in votes recorded in another eight, they earned 5,612 votes. But the major third-party story in 2000 was the candidacy of Ralph Nader, on the ballot in forty-five states as the Green Party nominee. Nader benefited from the collapse of Ross Perot’s Reform Party under Pat Buchanan, both of whom were courted by the UAW, Teamsters, and Steelworkers in protest of the Democratic embrace of free trade.49 Borrowing a trick from Eugene Debs, Nader funded the campaign by charging admission to speeches attracting tens of thousands, especially young people drawn by musicians who endorsed the campaign.50 Nader earned nearly three million votes in 2000, with some polls on the eve of the election suggesting he could receive twice that number.
David McReynolds paid tribute to Nader and the Green Party in his election night remarks, hopefully remarking, “As we find ourselves deep in the season of autumn, it is appropriate to remember, as we watch the leaves, how green can turn to red.”51 Of graying veterans of the historic SP active in the Green Party, most notable was Bob Auerbach, one-time Libertarian Socialist League comrade of Virgil Vogel. By 2002, the Greens claimed more than one hundred elected officeholders, including several California mayors and dozens of aldermen in large college towns, and in 2003 they came painfully close to electing the mayor of San Francisco. This was easily the most impressive record of local electoral success for a nationally organized minor party since the Socialist Party in its heyday, and may well be seen as the fulfillment of the concluding words of David Shannon’s history of the Socialist Party:
The ideals of social democracy will remain part of the American tradition as long as American soil produces rebels, and there may develop some day, under the impact of fundamental social change, another social democratic political movement of significance. But should there again be a vigorous political organization with democratic and socialist principles in the United States, it is most unlikely that the party of Debs, Hillquit, and Thomas will provide its impetus.52
But Ralph Nader was a very different type of iconoclast from what characterized the American Socialist tradition. Awkward and curmudgeonly, a loner and a pessimist by nature, he made his name championing the regulatory state against the panacea of corporate power in the era when Michael Harrington popularly defined what it meant to be a socialist. He was more Lincoln Steffens than Eugene Debs, more Upton Sinclair than Norman Thomas.
Whatever their respective failings, Debs and Thomas could never be accused of entering politics for their personal gratification, rather than out of dedication to building the Socialist movement. Nader, however, was extremely vulnerable to this charge. He also became an intense hate object of liberal Democrats after he was credited with throwing the 2000 election to George W. Bush, with no parallel since the Prohibition Party’s John P. St. John was burned in effigy by Republicans in 1884. Yet there was a deeper pathology at work among Nader’s liberal critics, rooted in the era of DSOC and NAM. Writing in The Nation during the 2000 campaign, Eric Alterman opined, “Nader and company are building a nonblack, non-Latino, non-Asian, nonfeminist, nonenvironmentalist, nongay, non-working people’s left—now that really would be quite an achievement.”53 Evidently believing that history began around 1970, Alterman had apparently never heard of the Socialist Party of America.
Against the backdrop of the dramatic rise of the Green Party, the abrasive revolutionary socialist Eric Chester appeared to be the favorite to win the SPUSA presidential nomination in 2004, possibly leading to a neat cleavage between democratic socialists in the Green Party and revolutionary socialists in SPUSA. But in a surprise, the nomination went to a wily seventy-eight-year old named Walter F. Brown. A youth organizer on the West Coast for Norman Thomas in 1948, Brown served as a Democrat in the Oregon legislature from 1975 to 1987, yet maintained his ties and loyalties to SPUSA. His running mate was Mary Alice Herbert, an activist with the Vermont Liberty Union Party. When it became known that Brown had expressed pro-life views in the past, there was a concerted effort to rescind his nomination. Though this ultimately failed, it left Brown without discernible support from the party organization, such as it was, exposing the contempt for electoral politics of most of the membership. Indeed, the circumstances of Walt Brown’s campaign illustrated that SPUSA had wandered every bit as far from historic American Socialism as the other two groups born of the 1972 breakup of the Socialist Party.54
The Green Party debated whether it should even field a presidential candidate in 2004. An intense, if largely manufactured hysteria about defeating George W. Bush at all costs was palpable in 2004, manifestly less about the wars and civil liberties suppressions—however skillfully sentiment against these things was manipulated—than who would appoint the next new justices to the Supreme Court, reflecting the modern liberal obsession with abortion. The initially most militant advocate of fielding a candidate, David Cobb, suddenly advocated a “nuanced” strategy of running while effectively campaigning for the Democrats—a jarring echo of Earl Browder in 1936. When Ralph Nader announced his candidacy, insisting on running as an independent and that he would only accept the “endorsement” of the Green Party, he played right into the hands of the Democratic plants who delivered the nomination to Cobb. The Democratic Party also aggressively intervened wherever it could, to an unprecedented degree, to arbitrarily keep Nader off the ballot.
Yet there were a few curious tributes to historic American Socialism at the 2004 Green convention. In unmistakable protest of the farce playing out, one delegate cast a vote on the first ballot for Eugene V. Debs.55 Held in Milwaukee, the convention was treated to an address by a ninety-one-year old Frank Zeidler—by then, apart from a dwindling handful, probably half of whom had become Scoop Jackson Democrats, the last living link to American Socialism as a serious political movement and not merely a chimera of historical memory. With the apparent collapse of the Green Party, it appeared that Walt Brown and SPUSA had a tremendous opportunity. Among those upset by both Nader and Cobb who rallied to Brown was Darcy Richardson, a top advisor to Gene McCarthy in his later campaigns and prolific historian of American third parties. Richardson secured ballot access for Brown in Florida and took him around the state, which gave him his best vote, in the last week of the campaign. In Wisconsin, where whatever wasting organization was left in Milwaukee could trace its origins all the way back to the Greenback-Labor Party, Brown only got on the ballot thanks to a veteran of third parties of the right named Steve Hauser. Both Hauser and Richardson had voted for Pat Buchanan in 2000.
On the ballot in only thirty-four states, Ralph Nader polled a disappointing 463,655 votes, whereas the noncampaign of the Green Party, on the ballot in only twenty-eight states, received 119,859 votes. Walt Brown, on the ballot in eight states with write-ins recorded in another eight, polled 10,822 votes, the best showing ever since the re-founding. But SPUSA was indifferent to any opportunity to fill the void left by the Greens. Most party activity was dominated by a “direct action tendency” whose manifesto bore such slogans as “from protest to resistance” and “property is theft—abolition now!”56 This prompted an incredulous SPUSA sympathizer named Melvin Little to conclude, “One school of extreme Trotskyism turned into ugly neoconservatism, the other school of extreme Trotskyism looks more like the silly shenanigans of the Spartacist League. Max Shachtman or Eric Chester? Who needs either one of them.”57 David McReynolds was even preparing to resign from the party in anticipation of Eric Chester getting the presidential nomination in 2008.58
But Chester wound up narrowly defeated by Brian Moore, who had managed the Nader campaign in Florida in 2004. With running mate Stewart Alexander, a black activist in the California Peace and Freedom Party, they were on the ballot in eight states, with write-ins recorded in another nine, earning 6,528 votes. The high point was an appearance on The Colbert Report after the stock market crash, with Stephen Colbert asking in characteristic feint, “Is Barack Obama the socialist candidate for President? Here to answer is the Socialist candidate for President, Brian Moore.”59 Moore responded awkwardly to the humor of the show and could hardly be taken seriously by the ironical yet optimistic audience whose sensibility Colbert personified. It was the perfect metaphor for how, when the long-term viability of capitalism was once again coming into question, what remained of the self-identified American left could give only the most tired rote answers. It also vividly illustrated the arrival of the first generation of progressives for whom the inheritance of the American left was completely foreign.