Laidler, Harry W.

LAIDLER, HARRY W. (1884–1970). Prolific author, founder and a leader of the League for Industrial Democracy for decades, Harry W. Laidler epitomized the gradual and scientific strategy of socialization through economic planning. Born into a comfortable Brooklyn family with liberal and socialist connections, Laidler graduated from Wesleyan University and took advanced degrees at Brooklyn Law School and Columbia University. He joined the Socialist Party in 1903 while attending the American Socialist College in Kansas, and took part in the founding of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) two years later. Named to the ISS executive to represent undergraduates, he became organizational secretary in 1910, and editor of its new Intercollegiate Socialist magazine in 1913 (and edited its successor, Socialist Review, from 1919 to 1921). Under Laidler’s leadership, the ISS engaged in a wide range of activities and converted many intellectuals—including Paul Douglas, later a U.S. senator; poet Babette Deutsch; and W. E. B. Du Bois—to socialist ideals. The ISS lost many members to pro-war sympathies and others to Bolshevik sympathies, between 1917 and 1921. With its change of name to the League for Industrial Democracy in 1921, Laidler became executive secretary, a position he would hold until 1957.

During the 1920s and, especially, the 1930s, Laidler successfully promoted the League for Industrial Democracy as American socialism’s premier educational apparatus. A speaker’ bureau, a considerable list of pamphlets, and Laidler’s own works purveyed a rational socialist alternative to planless capitalism. In line with this effort, Laidler was president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1930–1932 and 1948–1949, and chair of its board of directors, 1932–1934. Politically, Laidler was meanwhile quite active in socialist support for Robert La Follette in 1924, and helped manage Norman Thomas’s 1928 and 1932 presidential campaigns. His own electoral efforts—he was the Socialist Party’s New York gubernatorial candidate in 1936 and senatorial candidate in 1938—climaxed in his election as American Labor Party nominee from Brooklyn to the New York City Council, where he served in 1940–1941. He had become inactive in a splintered Socialist Party in 1938, although he retained his basic convictions.

Laidler would be remembered best, however, as durable functionary, pamphleteer, and scholarly author. His works included Boycotts and the Labor Struggle (1913), The History of Socialist Thought (1927), Social-Economic Movements (1944), and a nearly one-thousand page survey, The History of Socialism (1968).

Karnoustos, Carmela Ascolese. “Harry W. Laidler and the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.” Ph.D diss., New York University, 1974.

Harry Laidler.The Road Ahead: A Primer of Capitalism and Socialism. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1932. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/roadaheadprimero00laidrich/mode/2up