Young People's Socialist League

YOUNG PEOPLE’S SOCIALIST LEAGUE. Long known as YPSL—pronounced “yipsel”—the Young People’s Socialist League represented youth and, often, an organized Left within the Socialist Party (SP). Unlike the Young Communist League, it could never be viewed as merely a youth expression of the adult movement, but was seen rather as a radical youth movement in which the SP played a generally supportive, avuncular role.

The youth movement, restricted in the nineteenth-century socialist organizations to fraternal and cultural auxiliaries, grew up in the early years of the SP through a number of individual groups (some with names such as the Athenian Literary Society, or the Social Science Study Club) created by SP locals to attract young people mainly through recreational programs. The Young Socialist League of Chicago, perhaps the best known, occupied a floor of the Chicago Daily Socialist building and claimed three hundred members. By the 1912 apex of the party, the convention officially gave its stamp of approval to such experiments and promised to aid them. Following the logic of the nineteenth-century ethnic movement, the Women’s Department was given initial responsibility for building a socialist youth bloc.

By 1915 a coherent national organization had been established, with an age limit established at fifteen to thirty years. YPSL national secretary William F. Kruse claimed a membership of five thousand in 147 cities, the Young Socialists’ Magazine as having a circulation of ten thousand, and a special YPSL number of the American Socialist as running to ninety thousand. With the coming of World War I, YPSL fell under government repression, Kruse received a twenty-year sentence and other leaders varying amounts for opposition to American involvement in the war. In 1919, their membership reported at ten thousand, Yipsels voted in convention to join the Communist movement—itself on the verge of debilitating internal division. The first golden age of the movement had come to an end.

By the early 1920s, YPSL had successfully reorganized under the leadership of former Harvard student Albert Weisbord. While Weisbord himself defected to the Communist movement in 1924, the Yipsels carried on a vigorous campaign in Robert La Follette’s 1924 Progressive Party presidential bid. The decline of the SP thereafter deprived YPSL of finances and momentum. In 1929 it began to revive in force. The organization reappeared as a national movement in 1932, as part of the dynamic Norman Thomas presidential campaign. By the following year, it began publication of the Challenge and embarked on an ambitious series of campaigns around the labor and unemployed movements.

With an exceptionally strong following in Greater New York of several thousand and ardent branches in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and elsewhere, the movement became a major player in SP affairs. Indeed, the often aging, foreign-born, and geographically scattered adult movement depended on YPSL (along with its campus sister organization, the Student League for Industrial Democracy) for serious, organized political competition to the Communist Party. This circumstance gave the political favorites of Yipsels—the leftish “Militants” around Norman Thomas rather than the “Old Guard” around the Rand School, the New Leader, and the garment trades—an important factional advantage. It also heightened the internal conflict in the SP, resulting in the 1936 departure of the Old Guard with its major institutions. YPSL overwhelmingly opposed any support of potential imperialist wars, even those against the likes of Hitler, and it shunned electoral alliances with the Democrats. Naturally, then, Yipsels early suspended their cooperation with their Young Communist opposite numbers in the student movement when the Communist Party entered its Popular Front mode.

From an SP viewpoint, YPSL had only avoided the frying pan for the fire. Drawn to the Trotskyists, who had joined the Socialists in 1936 intent upon building internal caucuses and “capturing” members, YPSL came to be looked upon, in large part, as a now-disloyal element. Denied credentials to the 1937 convention—in some cases expelled from “reorganized” Socialist locals—the several hundred Trotskyist-minded Yipsels formed the “YPSL (Fourth International),” which itself dissipated with the war and further splits in the Trotskyist movement. In any case, the overwhelming popularity of Franklin Roosevelt, the growing antifascist sentiment, and the growing influence of the Communist Party limited the appeal of any socialist youth movement uncompromised on liberal capitalism and the war. A second golden age, brief but furious, had nearly closed on the movement.

Many young socialists, organized and unorganized, simply gave their full attention to the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the labor movement generally. YPSL served, in the long run, as a school for labor leadership—without, however, itself taking much benefit from this estimable contribution. Meanwhile, the remnants of YPSL remained a mainstay of the now-floundering, but determined, SP. Working mainly with pacifist and church groups to oppose U.S. involvement in world war, it helped organize the Youth Committee against War, and the youth section of the Keep America Out of War Congress, in which Norman Thomas was a leading figure. Briefly, despite the renewed threats of government repression, the movement caught fire. The invasion of Pearl Harbor dampened such energies and the national mobilization effectively dispersed YPSL personnel.

Maintaining a tenuous existence for another decade, YPSL suffered one final prominent defection in 1953 when its foremost spokesman, Michael Harrington, led a noteworthy group into the Young Socialist League (YSL) of the Independent Socialist League (formerly the Workers Party, whose predecessors had drawn another generation of Yipsels into Trotskyism sixteen years earlier). The YSL, a lively discussion circle on several campuses of the 1950s, returned en bloc to the SP alongside the bulk of the Independent Socialist League for the 1958 merger. With figures such as Harrington, Bayard Rustin, David McReynolds, and Bogdan Denitch, the reconstituted YPSL took on new life.

Although hardly numerous, Yipsels of the late 1950s and early 1960s essentially provided leadership—sometimes openly and sometimes less than openly—to the emerging “movement,” from civil rights to the Student Peace Union. Here and there, they could also be found to be the leading personnel of the campus Young Democrats, or of the youth wing of the Americans for Democratic Action. Despite such widespread influence, YPSL never regained a wide membership, perhaps because its style of maneuver did little to encourage mass enrollment.

The birth of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962, out of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, placed YPSL in the awkward position of loyal youth wing to the Old Left—similar, in a certain generational respect, to the Communists’ and orthodox Trotskyists’ own youth movements. SDS, and many local movements under a variety of names, rapidly outstripped YPSL, whose leaders increasingly made a reputation for their hard-line Cold War positions. While SDS urged “immediate withdrawal” from Vietnam, YPSL launched its major late-1960s campaign as “Negotiations Now,” a move seen by most student activists as backhanded support for further U.S. occupation. It attracted comparatively little following.

YPSL virtually ceased activity in 1972, with the departure of Michael Harrington and his followers from the SP to the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). Remaining a part of the rightward-leaning Social Democrats, USA, YPSL officially disbanded in 1977. Meanwhile DSOC, and its successor, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), included among their leadership rolls many former YPSL luminaries. DSA Youth, lineal successor of YPSL, maintained limited activities in an era of campus apathy and was buoyed in the mid-1990s when the Organizing Institute, an arm of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, began recruiting undergraduates for summer campaigns.

Peterson, Patti. “The Young Socialist Movement in America from 1905–1940: A Study of the Young People’s Socialist League.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974.

Ross, Jack. The Socialist Party: a Complete History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Potomac Books, 2015.