Draper, Hal
Christopher Phelps
DRAPER, HAL (1914–1990). A revolutionary democratic socialist who helped stimulate both the student Left of the Great Depression and the New Left of the 1960s, Hal Draper was a crisp writer who argued for “socialism from below,” a world created without the condescension of saviors from on high. Unlike others of his generation—including his brother, historian Theodore Draper—Draper was never attracted to the Communist Party or Cold War liberalism.
Born and schooled in Brooklyn, Draper joined the Young People’s Socialist League, the Socialist Party youth group, in 1934, soon becoming its national organizer. In the mid-thirties, he helped lead the Student Strike against War, where he met his future wife, Anne Kracik, a Trotskyist. When James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman brought the Trotskyists into the Socialist Party in 1936, Draper was won to their perspective, and he helped them establish the Socialist Workers Party in 1938.
When the Trotskyist movement split in 1940, Draper, persuaded that the Soviet bureaucracy had become a new class, neither bourgeois nor proletarian, left the Socialist Workers Party with Shachtman to establish the Workers Party. During the war and afterward, the Drapers worked in shipyards in the Los Angeles area and led wildcat strikes to force reluctant union officials, management, and the government to address demands deferred during wartime.
When Draper returned to New York, he edited several publications of the Workers Party and its successor, the Independent Socialist League: New International from 1947 to 1949 and Labor Action from 1949 to 1958. Labor Action was a tabloid he produced almost single-handedly, writing much of
its copy himself. When the Independent Socialist League—which had opposed both Cold War camps, Stalinist and capitalist—dissolved into the Socialist Party in 1958, Draper opposed Shachtman’s political abdication of the Third Camp and increased willingness to work inside the Democratic Party. In 1964, along with other Socialist Party dissidents, he created the Independent Socialist Clubs, which became the International Socialists in 1969.
In 1960 Draper became a librarian at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was among the few adult supporters of the free speech movement in its early days. His pamphlet The Mind of Clark Kerr (1964) had a great impact upon student radicals. Draper urged the New Left not to neglect the labor movement, and from 1961 to 1973 he served on the editorial board of New Politics, where his oft-reprinted essay on socialism from below, “The Two Souls of Socialism” (1966), was first published. Anne Draper (1917–1973) organized support for California farmworkers’ struggles and built trade union opposition to the Vietnam War until her death from cancer, most likely caused by exposure to asbestos while working in the shipyards in the 1940s.
With the waning of the Left in the 1970s, Hal Draper turned to independent scholarship. A self-taught reader of German, he translated all of Heinrich Heine’s poetry into English (Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982). His many studies of Marx—the four-volume Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 1972–1991), the three-volume Marx-Engels Cyclopedia (Schocken, 1986), and The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin (1987)—were lucid and witty. Draper held that Marx believed the emancipation of the working class would come about only through the revolutionary activity of workers themselves, not reliance upon some self-constituted elite, whether conspiratorial cabals, Utopian dreamers, or reformist politicians.
Further reading
Draper, Hal. Berkeley: The New Student Revolt. New York: Grove Press, 1965.
Draper, Hal. “The Two Souls of Socialism.” New Politics 5 (Winter 1966).
Draper, Hal. “The Student Movement of the Thirties.” In As We Saw the Thirties, edited by Rita
James Simon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967.
Haberkern, Ernie. “In Memoriam: Hal Draper.” Against the Current, n.s., 5 (March–April 1990).