Parlor Socialists

PARLOR SOCIALISTS. From about 1905 until the start of World War I, the press and public labeled as “parlor socialists” young men with old money who supported the ending of capitalism and creation of a collectivist society. After graduating college, these individuals gravitated to social settlement houses in the New York and Chicago slums, voted for municipal ownership, and became inspired by revolutionaries in Russia, Fabian Socialists in Great Britain, and Eugene Debs in the United States. By 1906 a number of these young reformers joined the five-year-old Socialist Party and several of them with the most visible wealth were dubbed “millionaire socialists.”

New York City’s Greenwich Village became their playground. Some set up cooperative living quarters at the “A Club” at 3 Fifth Avenue just off Washington Square. They met at the “X-Club” to discuss socialism with muckrakers, novelists, university professors, and assorted reformers. Some helped create and finance the Intercollegiate Socialist Society to “awaken an interest in Socialism among the educated men and women of the country.” Many were midwives to the birth of the Rand School of Social Science.

The parlor socialists were a politically heterogeneous group. While William La Monte and English Walling supported syndicalism, Robert Hunter, A. M. Simons, and John Spargo advocated a labor party. Leroy Scott and Ernest Poole spoke mainly through their proletarian novels. Some never officially joined the Socialist Party, or like Joseph Patterson of Chicago, retained membership only briefly. But by 1910, the group had become so newsworthy that former president Theodore Roosevelt thundered in Outlook magazine: “parlor socialists and the like … deserve scant consideration at the hands of honest and clean-living men and women.”

After 1910, Walling, Hunter, Spargo, Simons, La Monte, Scott, Poole, J. G. Phelps Stokes, Howard Brubaker, Robert Brueres, and others withdrew from active participation in the Socialist Party. A new generation, exposed to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society on college campuses, gravitated to Greenwich Village. Joining with the Industrial Workers of the World, these newcomers, most notably Harvard-educated John Reed, in 1913 staged a pageant at Madison Square Garden depicting the Paterson, New Jersey, silk workers’ strike. Mabel Dodge’s parlor at 23 Fifth Avenue became the new center for sociable socialists, Wobblies, and others. Max Eastman revamped the Masses magazine, which acted as a mouthpiece for the artistic Left. The reorganized and relocated Liberal Club offered another outpost for unorthodox ideas. More eclectic radicals than party loyalists, few of the new generation became active in the Socialist Party, but all had unconventional beliefs and lifestyles that the public branded as parlor socialist.

The European war and the Bolshevik Revolution changed everything. Many of the parlor socialists who had been inactive since 1910 created the Social Democratic League, which supported the war and opposed the Socialist Party’s pacifist stance. Reed, Eastman, and others who opposed the war became targets of the government’s attempt to silence dissent. The Greenwich Village playgrounds and parlors closed, casualties of the political wartime turn to the right and the different social agenda of postwar New York City’s bohemia.

Jones, Ellis O. “The Parlor Socialists.” International Socialist Review 8 (October 1908).

Reynolds, Robert D., Jr. “The Millionaire Socialists: J. G. Phelps Stokes and His Circle of Friends.” Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1974.